>>So, how many million tons did we fall short of achieving an easy victory?
It's not a matter of how many tons were dropped, but rather having the USAF on standby to bomb the hell out of the Ho Chi Minh trail anytime anything larger than a cow walked down one of the paths. Didn't require the expenditure of any American lives, and would have stopped the NV army from affecting a conquest of the south. This was more or less the agreement we had with SV, and we reneged on it.
You know that when Cambodia fell, they were pleading with the USAF to bomb Pol Pot's army that had encircled their capital, right? But because of the cowards we had in leadership positions then, we allowed their government to fall, millions to be genocided, and an entire country reduced to the Stone Age, quite ironically because we did NOT bomb them.
Even though the ground war had become untenable politically, there was no reason the air support needed to be pulled as well, except we had brainless doves running our government by then.
>>According to my extremely uninformed calculations, bringing up one kid in a wealthy country automaticly fucks atleast three other third-world babies in their proverbial colons (meaning they'll be making clothes, food, electronics etc. for a salary that you can indirectly afford).
How is that fucking them? If Mr. Rich Kid in America wasn't born, would that 1) Improve or 2) Make worse the situation for Mr. Poor Kid born in Pakistan? Think about it for a second, and then get back to me.
>>Also, if every couple has more than two babies, and all of them lead healthy lives, the eventual overpopulation is un-a-fucking-voidable by very simple math.
No. The replacement rate is around 2.1, give or take. So it is possible for couples to average more than two babies, but still result in the human population going extinct.
>>It's very interesting that you suggest you may have no white ancestry.
I didn't say anything about my ancestry (I have a lot of different ethnicities, in fact), I just found it amusing that a guy automatically assumes that someone named Shaka is white.
So? Giving birth isn't the same as infecting people with Cholera or something.
>>What's your point?
The point is that the two-child household is a very very recent development in the history of humanity, so it's very odd to hear having lots of kids described as disgusting. And very interesting to see how many people support the changed norms for family size.
Not that I really disagree (my wife and I plan on >It worked for them and they were not aware of over-population and resource depletion. We are. Having 10 kids is disgusting.
The current threat to the modern world is under-population, not over-population. You should get your memes checked out the next time you're in the shop.
>>None of my great-grandparents had more than four children.
I don't know how old you are, but if that's around 1900, they're par for the course. Go back another generation or two and six kids were the average. And so forth.
As I said, we haven't had a 2-kid average until very recently (1980, in fact).
>>No, even back then 19 kids was not normal. More like 6-12 at the most.
I've got a family tree from the 1800s framed up in my guest room. Yeah, 6-12 was the average, but some had more. The average woman had 5 to 7 kids in the 1800s. A family of 19 wouldn't have been called "disgusting" - as the GGP did - back in the day.
>>Even so, back then, half the kids died before they reached 1 year of age.
Do you know that your great-grandparents, or their parents, probably had that many kids, right? That the 2 child household is a very recent development?
>>I think it was really more the introductory paragraph that claimed that relativity was some sort of liberal invention that affects people's ability to think. That's got to be one of the stupidest allegations I've ever heard.
Indeed. I've been trying to puzzle it out, since it's so bizarre. (I didn't even know relativity was controversial in the slightest.)
Even if I put myself in the mindset of a fundie, though, I can't agree with this guy. Let's see: 1) Science (from a Xian point of view) is the study of God's creation, to better understand Creation and all that. There's a reason why the Vatican has an observatory. 2) Relativity is the best fit for our understanding of the universe. It's more accurate than Newtonian physics, but there's still some issues, like compatibility with QM, that need to be resolved.
His take on it is: 3) Relativity leads to moral relativity. 4) I don't like moral relativity. 5) Therefore God could not have possibly created the universe that way.
Conclusion: In other words, he's setting himself above God, which is blasphemy or heresy or whatever.
I.e., even from a Christian point of view, his argument holds no water, and is probably anti-Christian. As a supporter of Ayn Rand, his egoism might be excused if he was an atheist, I guess, but as a Christian he has no defense for trying to say that his Will is greater than God's.
>>The report makes very clear, these 'requests' were just plain harrassment.
No. It makes very clear that Jones felt harrassed. This is very different from the requests being filed just to harass him - if you read what the people requesting them wanted, they *never* got a response from CRU. Ever. So they filed one request every month.
The board of inquiries said that he should have responded to the FOIA requests instead of finding legally dodgy ways of dodging them.
The bulk of the list is a combination of "I don't understand relativity therefore it is wrong," "relativity is incompatible with my religion therefore it is wrong," "I think this effect (which may be due to a non-relativistic cause) in not in the theory of relativity therefore relativity is wrong" and "scientists can't reconcile quantum mechanics and relativity therefore relativity is wrong." The whole "relativity leads to moral relativism" idea is also a laugh.
Yeah, the list is so horribly bad, it makes my brain hurt. I apologize if this wasn't clear from my above post - Andy Schlafly is quite possibly the stupidest person on the planet. Most people who don't know something don't take it upon themselves to write encyclopedia articles about it. They know they're ignorant, and let someone else do it for them.
It is true that the discovery that the foundations of our universe are relative did lead to relativism in philosophy and art (study the history of philosophy some time, it's quite interesting what influences people). However, this cannot possibly be a knock against the scientific merits of relativism - no matter how much Andy Schlafly wants reality to be some way.
>>That's the problem with the conservative movement in the US, anyone who is not a white Christian young earth creationist who believes that non-white socialists are the cause of every problem and international corporations are the solution need not apply.
This is certainly true on Conservopedia, where the official policy is that nobody can contradict Andy or edit his edits (except for spelling and grammar edits).
What you're describing are the fundies in America, and fundies are the antithesis of logic. However, they don't make up a majority of the conservative movement, though they are the loudest and get the most airtime, so to speak. You'll hear about the debates over standards in Texas, but not from all the other states with more rational conservative governors or legislatures.
>>Thanks but you don't need to cherry pick passages for me I've read all three of them.
Cherry pick? The quote was a page long.
And it backed up precisely what I said - that Phil Jones and his crew were exonerated on the charges of lying, but taken to task for their culture of secrecy. Pretty much all the investigations found that, too. There's really no defense for them, except ignorance.
Oh, don't get me wrong, I think Andy Schlafly is quite possibly the stupidest person in the world. Reading through the talk page on that caused my brain to bleed.
The City of Fresno built a park downtown, and installed power outlets for people to plug their laptops into, etc.
Turns out these shady-looking guys started meeting there every day. Some people started noticing, and then noticed they had their ankle bracelets plugged into the outlets. Who were they? A bunch of child molesters.
The city turned off the outlets soon after that.
But where did these guys go, then? They needed to charge their anklets, after all.
The very helpful Fresno PD threw a long extension cable out of a third-story window. So they now hang out next to the police building, plugging in. Looks pretty ghetto, but at least the po-po can keep an eye on them.
The inquiries were summarized as exonerating Jones from the (rightfully false) charges of lying. Did you even read what the panels actually said, or did you just read the Slashdot article summaries?
From your own first reference: "37. CRU's refusal to release the raw data gave some the impression that it was deliberately keeping its work private so that its studies could not "be replicated and critiqued".50 The Peabody Energy Company said of CRU that "they appeared to be particularly concerned that putting their information in the public domain would expose their work to criticism".51 Even an effort to conduct a simple quality check was said to be thwarted by CRU's unwillingness to share the data it had used.52 In contrast, NASA has been able to make all its raw data available as well as its programmes.53
38. We recognise that some of the e-mails suggest a blunt refusal to share data, even unrestricted data, with others. We acknowledge that Professor Jones must have found it frustrating to handle requests for data that he knew--or perceived--were motivated by a desire simply to seek to undermine his work. But Professor Jones's failure to handle helpfully requests for data in a field as important and controversial as climate science was bound to be viewed with suspicion. He was obviously frustrated by other workers in the field trying to "undermine" his work, but his actions were inevitably counterproductive. Professor Jones told us that the published e-mails represented only "one tenth of 1%" of his output, which amounts to one million e-mails, and that we were only seeing the end of a protracted series of e-mail exchanges. We consider that further suspicion could have been allayed by releasing all the e-mails. In addition, we consider that had the available raw data been available online from an early stage, these kinds of unfortunate e-mail exchanges would not have occurred. In our view, CRU should have been more open with its raw data and followed the more open approach of NASA to making data available.
39. We are not in a position to set out any further the extent, if any, to which CRU should have made the data available in the interests of transparency, and we hope that the Independent Climate Change Email Review will reach specific conclusions on this point. However, transparency and accountability are of are increasing importance to the public, so we recommend that the Government reviews the rules for the accessibility of data sets collected and analysed with UK public money."
Read what they actually say. They excoriate him for hiding his data and methods. Well, excoriate in the British sense, meaning they were at least polite about it. But they used a bold font to convey the words as a very-stern talking-to.
The other panels likewise found Phil Jones' culture of secrecy to be bad.
>>100% of reputable research supports the conclusion that mans efforts at living the good life have effected the climate
The scientific consensus is that excessive CO2 production is causing global warming. It doesn't say anything about living the good life - that's a step beyond the science, but one which green nutcases and pocket Hitlers like to jump to. It's quite possible to run American society at half the CO2 production without compromising our way of life at all, or with significant expense.
While this fact makes the pocket Hitlers sad (they cry lonesome emo tears when they realize they won't be able to mock people for driving SUVs any more), for sane people this is something to celebrate.
Just because the AG tried to issue a supoena without probable cause does not mean the information is not already available. The same is true for many of the FOI requests Mann gets from the likes of McIntryre, etc. Much of the requested information is already available either in his published work or in previous replies to FOI requests. The intent with these tatics not to shead light on the subject rather it is to create the impression that Mann is hiding something while at the same time bogging down his reseach with a mountain of legal paperwork.
Not necessarily. The climategate scandal was really about climatologists hiding their data and methods from critical review. This is not how science should be conducted, and certainly not in a science whose entire basis rests on certain sets of data and methods used to analyze them. Instead Phil emailed his colleagues on tricks for ducking out of having to respond to FOIA requests - the emails are all there in the climategate archives. Including emails to people like Gavin (of RC.org fame) who apparently didn't seem at all perturbed by the attempts to hide data, only reversing his stance when climategate broke and posting (other) data sets on RC.org.
The various Mc's have found modest errors before, and have been cited in the literature for it. But when they request the same data that Jones or Mann gets so they can run the numbers themselves, they get rebuffed.
Or to put it in Phil Jones' words: "Why should I give you the data when you might use it to prove me wrong?"
Bad, bad science, and he was rightfully slapped down for it.
>>I wonder how many people will actually pay $60 though.
Not me. I don't play enough to warrant $60/year... I have a bunch of short duration cards, and just pop one of those off when I get a new 360-exclusive that I want to play online with friends.
Not paying for Plus, either, and I buy about 3x as many PS3 games than 360 games, due to the above reason.
I just don't see Gold being worth any money at all, to be perfectly frank. The digital downloads I buy should be enough to support their infrastructure, ala what Sony does.
Slashdot Mirror
>>So, how many million tons did we fall short of achieving an easy victory?
It's not a matter of how many tons were dropped, but rather having the USAF on standby to bomb the hell out of the Ho Chi Minh trail anytime anything larger than a cow walked down one of the paths. Didn't require the expenditure of any American lives, and would have stopped the NV army from affecting a conquest of the south. This was more or less the agreement we had with SV, and we reneged on it.
You know that when Cambodia fell, they were pleading with the USAF to bomb Pol Pot's army that had encircled their capital, right? But because of the cowards we had in leadership positions then, we allowed their government to fall, millions to be genocided, and an entire country reduced to the Stone Age, quite ironically because we did NOT bomb them.
Even though the ground war had become untenable politically, there was no reason the air support needed to be pulled as well, except we had brainless doves running our government by then.
>>According to my extremely uninformed calculations, bringing up one kid in a wealthy country automaticly fucks atleast three other third-world babies in their proverbial colons (meaning they'll be making clothes, food, electronics etc. for a salary that you can indirectly afford).
How is that fucking them? If Mr. Rich Kid in America wasn't born, would that 1) Improve or 2) Make worse the situation for Mr. Poor Kid born in Pakistan? Think about it for a second, and then get back to me.
>>Also, if every couple has more than two babies, and all of them lead healthy lives, the eventual overpopulation is un-a-fucking-voidable by very simple math.
No. The replacement rate is around 2.1, give or take. So it is possible for couples to average more than two babies, but still result in the human population going extinct.
By very simple math.
>>It's very interesting that you suggest you may have no white ancestry.
I didn't say anything about my ancestry (I have a lot of different ethnicities, in fact), I just found it amusing that a guy automatically assumes that someone named Shaka is white.
In related news, kids on Indian reservations are no longer allowed to play on team "Cowboys".
>>We also didn't bathe at one point.
So? Giving birth isn't the same as infecting people with Cholera or something.
>>What's your point?
The point is that the two-child household is a very very recent development in the history of humanity, so it's very odd to hear having lots of kids described as disgusting. And very interesting to see how many people support the changed norms for family size.
Not that I really disagree (my wife and I plan on >It worked for them and they were not aware of over-population and resource depletion. We are. Having 10 kids is disgusting.
The current threat to the modern world is under-population, not over-population. You should get your memes checked out the next time you're in the shop.
>>I think it's perfectly fair to call 19 children obscene.
Benjamin Franklin was, what, 15th kid out of 17?
I don't think any particular note was taken of the size of his family... perfectly normal for those times.
The birth rate in nearly all developed countries is below the replacement rate. We do have a population crisis, but it goes the other way.
Damn hippies.
>>What was once normal is now disgusting. Times change. Celebrating some morons who are collecting children is fucked up and insane.
That's exactly my point. Norms change. And you being disgusted at lots of children is case in point.
I don't believe any of my great-great-grandmothers were sold into a marriage. Are you confusing 100-200 years ago with 1000-2000 years ago?
>>None of my great-grandparents had more than four children.
I don't know how old you are, but if that's around 1900, they're par for the course. Go back another generation or two and six kids were the average. And so forth.
As I said, we haven't had a 2-kid average until very recently (1980, in fact).
>>Do you know that your great-grandparents, and their parents, enforced Jim Crow?
It's very interesting you assume I'm white.
So... you're with the guy who shot up the Discovery Channel offices, eh?
The infant mortality rate was between 10%-20% during the 1800s, and I doubt 33% were retarded as well.
>>No, even back then 19 kids was not normal. More like 6-12 at the most.
I've got a family tree from the 1800s framed up in my guest room. Yeah, 6-12 was the average, but some had more. The average woman had 5 to 7 kids in the 1800s. A family of 19 wouldn't have been called "disgusting" - as the GGP did - back in the day.
>>Even so, back then, half the kids died before they reached 1 year of age.
A 50% infant mortality rate? I don't think so.
http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/haines.demography
>>Imagine if Iraq or Afghanistan had common internet access, something tells me we wouldn't invade
If they shared space with us here on Slashdot, and posted like the average Slashdot poster, then I think your premise would be wrong.
>>19 Kids and Counting, etc is disgusting.
Do you know that your great-grandparents, or their parents, probably had that many kids, right? That the 2 child household is a very recent development?
>>I think it was really more the introductory paragraph that claimed that relativity was some sort of liberal invention that affects people's ability to think. That's got to be one of the stupidest allegations I've ever heard.
Indeed. I've been trying to puzzle it out, since it's so bizarre. (I didn't even know relativity was controversial in the slightest.)
Even if I put myself in the mindset of a fundie, though, I can't agree with this guy. Let's see:
1) Science (from a Xian point of view) is the study of God's creation, to better understand Creation and all that. There's a reason why the Vatican has an observatory.
2) Relativity is the best fit for our understanding of the universe. It's more accurate than Newtonian physics, but there's still some issues, like compatibility with QM, that need to be resolved.
His take on it is:
3) Relativity leads to moral relativity.
4) I don't like moral relativity.
5) Therefore God could not have possibly created the universe that way.
Conclusion:
In other words, he's setting himself above God, which is blasphemy or heresy or whatever.
I.e., even from a Christian point of view, his argument holds no water, and is probably anti-Christian. As a supporter of Ayn Rand, his egoism might be excused if he was an atheist, I guess, but as a Christian he has no defense for trying to say that his Will is greater than God's.
>>The report makes very clear, these 'requests' were just plain harrassment.
No. It makes very clear that Jones felt harrassed. This is very different from the requests being filed just to harass him - if you read what the people requesting them wanted, they *never* got a response from CRU. Ever. So they filed one request every month.
The board of inquiries said that he should have responded to the FOIA requests instead of finding legally dodgy ways of dodging them.
Yeah, the list is so horribly bad, it makes my brain hurt. I apologize if this wasn't clear from my above post - Andy Schlafly is quite possibly the stupidest person on the planet. Most people who don't know something don't take it upon themselves to write encyclopedia articles about it. They know they're ignorant, and let someone else do it for them.
It is true that the discovery that the foundations of our universe are relative did lead to relativism in philosophy and art (study the history of philosophy some time, it's quite interesting what influences people). However, this cannot possibly be a knock against the scientific merits of relativism - no matter how much Andy Schlafly wants reality to be some way.
>>That's the problem with the conservative movement in the US, anyone who is not a white Christian young earth creationist who believes that non-white socialists are the cause of every problem and international corporations are the solution need not apply.
This is certainly true on Conservopedia, where the official policy is that nobody can contradict Andy or edit his edits (except for spelling and grammar edits).
What you're describing are the fundies in America, and fundies are the antithesis of logic. However, they don't make up a majority of the conservative movement, though they are the loudest and get the most airtime, so to speak. You'll hear about the debates over standards in Texas, but not from all the other states with more rational conservative governors or legislatures.
>>Thanks but you don't need to cherry pick passages for me I've read all three of them.
Cherry pick? The quote was a page long.
And it backed up precisely what I said - that Phil Jones and his crew were exonerated on the charges of lying, but taken to task for their culture of secrecy. Pretty much all the investigations found that, too. There's really no defense for them, except ignorance.
Oh, don't get me wrong, I think Andy Schlafly is quite possibly the stupidest person in the world. Reading through the talk page on that caused my brain to bleed.
I just like being contrary. =)
The City of Fresno built a park downtown, and installed power outlets for people to plug their laptops into, etc.
Turns out these shady-looking guys started meeting there every day. Some people started noticing, and then noticed they had their ankle bracelets plugged into the outlets. Who were they? A bunch of child molesters.
The city turned off the outlets soon after that.
But where did these guys go, then? They needed to charge their anklets, after all.
The very helpful Fresno PD threw a long extension cable out of a third-story window. So they now hang out next to the police building, plugging in. Looks pretty ghetto, but at least the po-po can keep an eye on them.
The inquiries were summarized as exonerating Jones from the (rightfully false) charges of lying. Did you even read what the panels actually said, or did you just read the Slashdot article summaries?
From your own first reference:
"37. CRU's refusal to release the raw data gave some the impression that it was deliberately
keeping its work private so that its studies could not "be replicated and critiqued".50 The
Peabody Energy Company said of CRU that "they appeared to be particularly concerned
that putting their information in the public domain would expose their work to
criticism".51 Even an effort to conduct a simple quality check was said to be thwarted by
CRU's unwillingness to share the data it had used.52 In contrast, NASA has been able to
make all its raw data available as well as its programmes.53
38. We recognise that some of the e-mails suggest a blunt refusal to share data, even
unrestricted data, with others. We acknowledge that Professor Jones must have found it
frustrating to handle requests for data that he knew--or perceived--were motivated by
a desire simply to seek to undermine his work. But Professor Jones's failure to handle
helpfully requests for data in a field as important and controversial as climate science
was bound to be viewed with suspicion. He was obviously frustrated by other workers
in the field trying to "undermine" his work, but his actions were inevitably
counterproductive. Professor Jones told us that the published e-mails represented only
"one tenth of 1%" of his output, which amounts to one million e-mails, and that we
were only seeing the end of a protracted series of e-mail exchanges. We consider that
further suspicion could have been allayed by releasing all the e-mails. In addition, we
consider that had the available raw data been available online from an early stage, these
kinds of unfortunate e-mail exchanges would not have occurred. In our view, CRU
should have been more open with its raw data and followed the more open approach of
NASA to making data available.
39. We are not in a position to set out any further the extent, if any, to which CRU
should have made the data available in the interests of transparency, and we hope that
the Independent Climate Change Email Review will reach specific conclusions on this
point. However, transparency and accountability are of are increasing importance to
the public, so we recommend that the Government reviews the rules for the accessibility
of data sets collected and analysed with UK public money."
Read what they actually say. They excoriate him for hiding his data and methods. Well, excoriate in the British sense, meaning they were at least polite about it. But they used a bold font to convey the words as a very-stern talking-to.
The other panels likewise found Phil Jones' culture of secrecy to be bad.
>>100% of reputable research supports the conclusion that mans efforts at living the good life have effected the climate
The scientific consensus is that excessive CO2 production is causing global warming. It doesn't say anything about living the good life - that's a step beyond the science, but one which green nutcases and pocket Hitlers like to jump to. It's quite possible to run American society at half the CO2 production without compromising our way of life at all, or with significant expense.
While this fact makes the pocket Hitlers sad (they cry lonesome emo tears when they realize they won't be able to mock people for driving SUVs any more), for sane people this is something to celebrate.
>>but who knows when a little nero from VA might get it in his head that the bible says I'm wrong.
Wait, is he a Nero or is he a Christian? And what does the Bible have to say about AGW, anyway?
It doesn't matter anyway. The idiot AG got (rightfully) denied his chance to go on a fishing expedition through Mann's files.
Not necessarily. The climategate scandal was really about climatologists hiding their data and methods from critical review. This is not how science should be conducted, and certainly not in a science whose entire basis rests on certain sets of data and methods used to analyze them. Instead Phil emailed his colleagues on tricks for ducking out of having to respond to FOIA requests - the emails are all there in the climategate archives. Including emails to people like Gavin (of RC.org fame) who apparently didn't seem at all perturbed by the attempts to hide data, only reversing his stance when climategate broke and posting (other) data sets on RC.org.
The various Mc's have found modest errors before, and have been cited in the literature for it. But when they request the same data that Jones or Mann gets so they can run the numbers themselves, they get rebuffed.
Or to put it in Phil Jones' words: "Why should I give you the data when you might use it to prove me wrong?"
Bad, bad science, and he was rightfully slapped down for it.
>>I wonder how many people will actually pay $60 though.
Not me. I don't play enough to warrant $60/year... I have a bunch of short duration cards, and just pop one of those off when I get a new 360-exclusive that I want to play online with friends.
Not paying for Plus, either, and I buy about 3x as many PS3 games than 360 games, due to the above reason.
I just don't see Gold being worth any money at all, to be perfectly frank. The digital downloads I buy should be enough to support their infrastructure, ala what Sony does.