Actully, I think that African lions would be unlikely to survive in North America. Even mountain lions and wolves, who are native, are having a hard time of it. And a large part of the reason is people.
Elephants are also unlikely to survive, but they might have a better chance than in Africa. (I don't know about S.E. Asia.) The thing is, if you have a tractor, then an elephant is unlikely to seem like a reasonable option. If you don't, then you're unlikely to be able to afford to feed it. And wild elephants need a LOT of space. Which make protecting them against poachers difficult.
I think Neanderthls used spears. Humans don't seem to have done that often. Fire was used (and yeah, it was destructive and wasteful...but less dangerous to the hunter).
OTOH, if you go to more modern times (but before firearms), the approach was apparently to have a sharpened blade, something like a machete, and then sneak up on the elephant and cut his achilies tendon. But you need to have a very sharp blade, and be quite stealthy. Then you run off and hide until the prey is left along. THEN you use your spears. But you need to be quite careful about your sneaking, because if the elephant notices your approach it's likely to trample you. And elephants can trample very well.
I can see a lot of benefit in elephants, but somebody had better consider how much they eat, and that the bulls tend to be a bit unpleasant when they go into must.
Mastodons make more sense, but I don't think we can do that this year. And if warming continues, then they'll stop making more sense. (They make more sense because they can live in areas that are unpleasantly cold for most people, and where most of our crops won't grow...trees excepted. I don't know if even the mamoths could live out on the tundra.)
But also please note that elephants, and presumably mamoths, have a very long reproductive cycle. I think it's around 20 years, but I guess it could be a bit quicker. So you need to expect a VERY slow population growth, even without predation. And there WILL be predation. (Elephants are currently threatened with extinction because of predation by humans.)
So perhaps what is needed is a "micro-mamoth". Something with a thick coat of hair, that's shaped about like an elephant, but which is about the size of a bison. And has a quicker reproductive cycle. But we can't build that yet.
Maybe it depends on whether it's a male or a female sabertooth. That seems to matter with goats.
OTOH, I expect ANY sabertooh meat would be quite stringy, and probably only be decent in a stew.
Still, that doesn't really matter. If you kill off the mamoths, what are the sabertooths supposed to eat? If the answer it you, then you'll kill them off even if they don't taste good.
Don't dragons turn to stone when they die, or is that only trolls? If so, they shouldn't yield much methane when they die. And the internal temperature makes the emission of methane while they are alive unlikely. They are, of course, responsible for massive deforestation.
As from a massive wedding, that is really minor. All the animals (including people) that were contributing to it's carbon footprint would have been alive anyway. Of course there's the travel mileage on horseback, but that's less than a single passenger jet would offer.
More likely they'll fold and an new group with the same members will open in Europe, or Scandanavia, or... well, basically anywhere. So the US will lose prestige, and the US will lose friends, and... well, if there are any gains, I don't see them.
Since what is being argued is an interpretation of the law, you need a lot of money, a good set of lawyers, a lot of patience, and a willingness to take risks to argue with the government interpretation, even when it's blatantly foolish. (I don't *know* that this interpretation isn't reasonable. Maybe it is. But it also may well just be another instance of government overreach.)
Yes, it did agree to allow Russian missles. After the US cut off all trade it desperately needed assistance, and Russia was willing to offer it. But first the US cut off all commercial ties and tried to blocade them to anyone else (maily via diplomatic channels rather than military, but that's how Iran was blocaded, so it's a fair usage).
There is also considerable evidence that both sides tampered with the vote. We don't know on what scale it was done. Currently one of the favorite approaches appears to be deciding that qualified voters can't vote. This has been made easier by the expiration of the voting rights act, but it was happening even before that.
Now it's true that you can't tie most of the actions to people in power. If anyone takes the fall it's usually someone at a very low level, but many of the occasions are quite implausible as spontaneous actions, and I haven't heard of massive numbers of people being arrested for manipulating the vote. And sometimes it may not be illegal. (Is it illegal to organize to call college students, and tell them that they must vote from their home district, even if that's not where they are registered?) But illegal or not, it's still tampering with the vote. And if it's even a misdemeanor, then organizing to do it is a felony. But I haven't heard of anyone getting charged, much less convicted.
Electronic gizmos offer an entirely new level of voter fraud. One that most people can't detect. Many instances of that have also been reported. Since it's a low observational kind of thing, I think that means that it's quite widespread. Funny thing, most of the voting machines don't have a decently observable audit trail. (One exception is the "mark a paper ballot and put it in the slot, we'll run it through an optical scanner" approach. I don't have total trust in those counts either, but at least there's a reasonable audit trail.)
When their actions stop having excessive malign effects, then I'll think more positively about them. As it is, usually they don't exactly lie, so much as weasel word things that they hope you won't notice. And since I'm not a lawyer, I don't read things like that for fun, so I judge them by their actions evaluated over a period of years. If they don't like that, then I'm happier if they stay away.
FWIW, the 9/11 "truthers" haven't gone silent because they believe they have been proven wrong. Most of it's that people have lost interest. And the report of the Warren Commission was clearly an attempt to create a plausible story. There were many arguments in it that while plausible, had other equally reasonable interpretations.
People are uncomfortable with uncertainty, so they tend to insist that a decision be made based on the available evidence. This is reasonable if you need to act on the decision, but is otherwise foolish. But this discomfort with uncertainty is the only reason that people accept storied like "What happened on 9/11." Or "Who shot JFK?" Different stories have different degrees of plausibility. I'm a bit uncomfortable with the official "9/11" story mainly because of the way legislation suddenly appeared the next day. There are, however, other reasons why this could have happened that don't require government involvement with the plot. AFAICT, they weren't involved with it, but they *did* know about it ahead of time. But I'm uncertain, and I can accept that, as I don't intend to do anything based on that...except be skeptical of any government story, and there are many more reasons that just that particular story for that particular attitude, so the uncertainty doesn't change anything.
Demanding certainty in the face of ambiguous evidence is not good logic.
It didn't start under Bush. Nixon inherited it from Johnson. And Johnson got it from Kennedy. But it has been getting stronger and less amenable to critical reform. I think that Obama has been even less amenable to critical reform than was Bush Jr....and that takes work.
Please note that while Eisenhower set the groundwork for Kennedy, he didn't appear to realize what he was doing until near the end of his reign. (The departure speech warning about the dangers of the military-industrial complex indicates that at some point he became aware of it.) This is probably because he was used to being a General, and in command, so he expected things to work that way. Truman was much less authoritarian, though his "The buck stops here." does imply an acceptance of ultimate responsibility...which means he needs to prevent things from happening that he disapproves of.
There's a generally smooth growth in centralized power for the period between Kennedy and Bush II, but there are a few sharp upwards ratchets, that are somehow never relaxed. Expect then next president to be even more imperial, though with a lot less reason.... But perhaps that's the reason. After all, the French monarchs got increasingly more despotic towards the end. And so did the Roman Caesars. The power of the country decreased, but the power of the monarch increased, until the collapse.
Well, given the MS history, yes, I'd say that pretty much sums up their practices. Doesn't matter what they say, if they get involved in any way, start taking extra precautions, and watch your back.
Considering that the official definition of "Child Porn" includes cartoons, and has been in the past used to arrest people for the possession of cartoons of "apparently underage" (don't remember the rest, sorry), I'm not willing to accept ANYTHING they say about the child porn problem.
Enforce the laws that already exist against violence and abuse. Do that and the entire problem goes away. (And if people want to see provocative cartoons, so what. It doesn't hurt anybody, and if you don't like it, just don't watch it.)
FWIW, given the prevalence of anime, I'd say that there's a huge market for cartoon child porn, given a strict enough definition of porn. And so what! It just doesn't matter. Enforce the laws against violence and abuse, and the problem goes away.
P.S.: Before this became an issue, it was, or appeared to be, much less of a problem. Most parents had explicit photographs of their children. And I just don't see that as a problem.
And often that's the only justification for classifying them.
Ordinary people put evidence like that through a shedder, but the psychos running our government don't even want to destory the records that incriminate them, so they create legal protections for hiding them.
I do frequently use it that way, but that is considered improper usage. (I also left out the forms of the first person singular, which are also not gendered.)
First, that's really picking at small nits, but to respond anyways:
I didn't claim they had to say that, I claimed that they might need to believe that. I don't follow them closely enough to know whether that it true or not, and explicitly disavowed knowledge of whether that was a prerequisite.
OTOH, do you really doubt that Hitler believed in evolution? It's true that he wasn't sensible, in my definition of the term, but there are many places where he gives signs of believing in the "Nature, red in tooth and claw" version of evolution.
Not everyone who "believes" in evolution actually understands it.
Also, FWIW, the reason that it was objected to the school texts claiming that Hitler believed in evolution had nothing to do with whether it was a true or false statement (and I actually think that it's indeterminate at this time), but rather that it was only put in as a piece of propaganda. There's no rule that says propaganda must be false, it merely needs to lead one to draw false conclusions (or even true conclusions that are so out of context that they result in improper decisions).
The thing is, if geography is skipped, does a foreign language make any sense?
Actually, I would argue that it does, or can. But, OTOH, if you haven't learned basic geography, you probably won't be the kind of person who will benefit from a foreign language. (It's not the rote memorization that helps, it's the learning to think with a different grammar. And a different division of the world. E.g. in French every noun must be either masculine for feminine. In German, little girls are neuter, and rivers are masculing. Gender is partially divorced from sex. And, or course, in English gender is nearly absent. But there's no way of talking about a single person without specifying it...and it IS equivalent to sex. (Except that for some people, all dogs are masculine, and all cats are feminine.) ---- But you won't notice things like that if you're the kind of person who doesn't grasp enough geography to know that Europe isn't within the US.
Considering what Texas has been doing to the schoolbooks recently, books from 1950 might be considered an improvement.
Matter of fact (though this is high school, not grade school) the 1950 is when they still used variations of Euclid's geometry to teach geometry with rather than set theory. I'm not a real fan of the way modern education has been changing.
Mind you, I can imagine many ways in which an underfunded school system is bad. (I live in an area with one.) But not being able to follow the latest fad in school books doesn't impress me as one of them.
I'm rather certain, from internal logic, that you don't have a citation for that. And I'm rather dubious about accepting that kind of information from an "Anonymous Coward".
If you have some actual evidence, then I'll consider it. Otherwise I'm going to consider you a bare-faced liar.
What you miss is that the Republicans and the Democrats are only pretend enemies. They are actually allies. So their "enemy" getting the power they asked for isn't something that bothers them.
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Actully, I think that African lions would be unlikely to survive in North America. Even mountain lions and wolves, who are native, are having a hard time of it. And a large part of the reason is people.
Elephants are also unlikely to survive, but they might have a better chance than in Africa. (I don't know about S.E. Asia.) The thing is, if you have a tractor, then an elephant is unlikely to seem like a reasonable option. If you don't, then you're unlikely to be able to afford to feed it. And wild elephants need a LOT of space. Which make protecting them against poachers difficult.
I think Neanderthls used spears. Humans don't seem to have done that often. Fire was used (and yeah, it was destructive and wasteful...but less dangerous to the hunter).
OTOH, if you go to more modern times (but before firearms), the approach was apparently to have a sharpened blade, something like a machete, and then sneak up on the elephant and cut his achilies tendon. But you need to have a very sharp blade, and be quite stealthy. Then you run off and hide until the prey is left along. THEN you use your spears. But you need to be quite careful about your sneaking, because if the elephant notices your approach it's likely to trample you. And elephants can trample very well.
I can see a lot of benefit in elephants, but somebody had better consider how much they eat, and that the bulls tend to be a bit unpleasant when they go into must.
Mastodons make more sense, but I don't think we can do that this year. And if warming continues, then they'll stop making more sense. (They make more sense because they can live in areas that are unpleasantly cold for most people, and where most of our crops won't grow...trees excepted. I don't know if even the mamoths could live out on the tundra.)
But also please note that elephants, and presumably mamoths, have a very long reproductive cycle. I think it's around 20 years, but I guess it could be a bit quicker. So you need to expect a VERY slow population growth, even without predation. And there WILL be predation. (Elephants are currently threatened with extinction because of predation by humans.)
So perhaps what is needed is a "micro-mamoth". Something with a thick coat of hair, that's shaped about like an elephant, but which is about the size of a bison. And has a quicker reproductive cycle. But we can't build that yet.
Maybe it depends on whether it's a male or a female sabertooth. That seems to matter with goats.
OTOH, I expect ANY sabertooh meat would be quite stringy, and probably only be decent in a stew.
Still, that doesn't really matter. If you kill off the mamoths, what are the sabertooths supposed to eat? If the answer it you, then you'll kill them off even if they don't taste good.
Don't dragons turn to stone when they die, or is that only trolls? If so, they shouldn't yield much methane when they die. And the internal temperature makes the emission of methane while they are alive unlikely. They are, of course, responsible for massive deforestation.
As from a massive wedding, that is really minor. All the animals (including people) that were contributing to it's carbon footprint would have been alive anyway. Of course there's the travel mileage on horseback, but that's less than a single passenger jet would offer.
You forgot Henry Kissinger.
FWIW, giving that war monger the Peace Prize was much worse than Obama. I'm not sure what Gore did to deserve it, but AFAIK he never instigated a war.
More likely they'll fold and an new group with the same members will open in Europe, or Scandanavia, or ... well, basically anywhere. So the US will lose prestige, and the US will lose friends, and ... well, if there are any gains, I don't see them.
Since what is being argued is an interpretation of the law, you need a lot of money, a good set of lawyers, a lot of patience, and a willingness to take risks to argue with the government interpretation, even when it's blatantly foolish. (I don't *know* that this interpretation isn't reasonable. Maybe it is. But it also may well just be another instance of government overreach.)
Yes, it did agree to allow Russian missles. After the US cut off all trade it desperately needed assistance, and Russia was willing to offer it. But first the US cut off all commercial ties and tried to blocade them to anyone else (maily via diplomatic channels rather than military, but that's how Iran was blocaded, so it's a fair usage).
Probably when Teddy Rooseveldt ran as a Bull Moose. Of course, he did lose that time.
There is also considerable evidence that both sides tampered with the vote. We don't know on what scale it was done. Currently one of the favorite approaches appears to be deciding that qualified voters can't vote. This has been made easier by the expiration of the voting rights act, but it was happening even before that.
Now it's true that you can't tie most of the actions to people in power. If anyone takes the fall it's usually someone at a very low level, but many of the occasions are quite implausible as spontaneous actions, and I haven't heard of massive numbers of people being arrested for manipulating the vote. And sometimes it may not be illegal. (Is it illegal to organize to call college students, and tell them that they must vote from their home district, even if that's not where they are registered?) But illegal or not, it's still tampering with the vote. And if it's even a misdemeanor, then organizing to do it is a felony. But I haven't heard of anyone getting charged, much less convicted.
Electronic gizmos offer an entirely new level of voter fraud. One that most people can't detect. Many instances of that have also been reported. Since it's a low observational kind of thing, I think that means that it's quite widespread. Funny thing, most of the voting machines don't have a decently observable audit trail. (One exception is the "mark a paper ballot and put it in the slot, we'll run it through an optical scanner" approach. I don't have total trust in those counts either, but at least there's a reasonable audit trail.)
When their actions stop having excessive malign effects, then I'll think more positively about them. As it is, usually they don't exactly lie, so much as weasel word things that they hope you won't notice. And since I'm not a lawyer, I don't read things like that for fun, so I judge them by their actions evaluated over a period of years. If they don't like that, then I'm happier if they stay away.
Only because he was stupid enough to take on the Army.
FWIW, the 9/11 "truthers" haven't gone silent because they believe they have been proven wrong. Most of it's that people have lost interest. And the report of the Warren Commission was clearly an attempt to create a plausible story. There were many arguments in it that while plausible, had other equally reasonable interpretations.
People are uncomfortable with uncertainty, so they tend to insist that a decision be made based on the available evidence. This is reasonable if you need to act on the decision, but is otherwise foolish. But this discomfort with uncertainty is the only reason that people accept storied like "What happened on 9/11." Or "Who shot JFK?" Different stories have different degrees of plausibility. I'm a bit uncomfortable with the official "9/11" story mainly because of the way legislation suddenly appeared the next day. There are, however, other reasons why this could have happened that don't require government involvement with the plot. AFAICT, they weren't involved with it, but they *did* know about it ahead of time. But I'm uncertain, and I can accept that, as I don't intend to do anything based on that...except be skeptical of any government story, and there are many more reasons that just that particular story for that particular attitude, so the uncertainty doesn't change anything.
Demanding certainty in the face of ambiguous evidence is not good logic.
It didn't start under Bush. Nixon inherited it from Johnson. And Johnson got it from Kennedy. But it has been getting stronger and less amenable to critical reform. I think that Obama has been even less amenable to critical reform than was Bush Jr....and that takes work.
Please note that while Eisenhower set the groundwork for Kennedy, he didn't appear to realize what he was doing until near the end of his reign. (The departure speech warning about the dangers of the military-industrial complex indicates that at some point he became aware of it.) This is probably because he was used to being a General, and in command, so he expected things to work that way. Truman was much less authoritarian, though his "The buck stops here." does imply an acceptance of ultimate responsibility...which means he needs to prevent things from happening that he disapproves of.
There's a generally smooth growth in centralized power for the period between Kennedy and Bush II, but there are a few sharp upwards ratchets, that are somehow never relaxed. Expect then next president to be even more imperial, though with a lot less reason. ... But perhaps that's the reason. After all, the French monarchs got increasingly more despotic towards the end. And so did the Roman Caesars. The power of the country decreased, but the power of the monarch increased, until the collapse.
Well, given the MS history, yes, I'd say that pretty much sums up their practices. Doesn't matter what they say, if they get involved in any way, start taking extra precautions, and watch your back.
Perhaps they are devotees of Hermes?
Considering that the official definition of "Child Porn" includes cartoons, and has been in the past used to arrest people for the possession of cartoons of "apparently underage" (don't remember the rest, sorry), I'm not willing to accept ANYTHING they say about the child porn problem.
Enforce the laws that already exist against violence and abuse. Do that and the entire problem goes away. (And if people want to see provocative cartoons, so what. It doesn't hurt anybody, and if you don't like it, just don't watch it.)
FWIW, given the prevalence of anime, I'd say that there's a huge market for cartoon child porn, given a strict enough definition of porn. And so what! It just doesn't matter. Enforce the laws against violence and abuse, and the problem goes away.
P.S.: Before this became an issue, it was, or appeared to be, much less of a problem. Most parents had explicit photographs of their children. And I just don't see that as a problem.
And often that's the only justification for classifying them.
Ordinary people put evidence like that through a shedder, but the psychos running our government don't even want to destory the records that incriminate them, so they create legal protections for hiding them.
Thank you for the link.
I do frequently use it that way, but that is considered improper usage. (I also left out the forms of the first person singular, which are also not gendered.)
First, that's really picking at small nits, but to respond anyways:
I didn't claim they had to say that, I claimed that they might need to believe that. I don't follow them closely enough to know whether that it true or not, and explicitly disavowed knowledge of whether that was a prerequisite.
OTOH, do you really doubt that Hitler believed in evolution? It's true that he wasn't sensible, in my definition of the term, but there are many places where he gives signs of believing in the "Nature, red in tooth and claw" version of evolution.
Not everyone who "believes" in evolution actually understands it.
Also, FWIW, the reason that it was objected to the school texts claiming that Hitler believed in evolution had nothing to do with whether it was a true or false statement (and I actually think that it's indeterminate at this time), but rather that it was only put in as a piece of propaganda. There's no rule that says propaganda must be false, it merely needs to lead one to draw false conclusions (or even true conclusions that are so out of context that they result in improper decisions).
The thing is, if geography is skipped, does a foreign language make any sense?
Actually, I would argue that it does, or can. But, OTOH, if you haven't learned basic geography, you probably won't be the kind of person who will benefit from a foreign language. (It's not the rote memorization that helps, it's the learning to think with a different grammar. And a different division of the world. E.g. in French every noun must be either masculine for feminine. In German, little girls are neuter, and rivers are masculing. Gender is partially divorced from sex. And, or course, in English gender is nearly absent. But there's no way of talking about a single person without specifying it...and it IS equivalent to sex. (Except that for some people, all dogs are masculine, and all cats are feminine.) ---- But you won't notice things like that if you're the kind of person who doesn't grasp enough geography to know that Europe isn't within the US.
Considering what Texas has been doing to the schoolbooks recently, books from 1950 might be considered an improvement.
Matter of fact (though this is high school, not grade school) the 1950 is when they still used variations of Euclid's geometry to teach geometry with rather than set theory. I'm not a real fan of the way modern education has been changing.
Mind you, I can imagine many ways in which an underfunded school system is bad. (I live in an area with one.) But not being able to follow the latest fad in school books doesn't impress me as one of them.
I'm rather certain, from internal logic, that you don't have a citation for that. And I'm rather dubious about accepting that kind of information from an "Anonymous Coward".
If you have some actual evidence, then I'll consider it. Otherwise I'm going to consider you a bare-faced liar.
What you miss is that the Republicans and the Democrats are only pretend enemies. They are actually allies. So their "enemy" getting the power they asked for isn't something that bothers them.