Your passive cooling system might utilize the heat from the rods to circulate water in a closed loop. You might need a very large reservoir of water - or something like a massive radiator - to dissipate the heat. And I've no idea how to translate the heat into circulation with the fewest moving parts.
But in this case, if they'd kept one of the reactors running, to generate the power to run the cooling to keep the whole complex stable, wouldn't they be far ahead of the game? Still, even when you shut them "off," they aren't really off, so there should be a way to capture some of the continuing heat to run pumps to cool the reactors.
Don't have the link right now, but read a news item yesterday asserting that TEPCO had specifically claimed, several years ago, that each of their plants was fully capable of surviving a tsunami. So maybe it's true that they didn't really expect a tsunami. Maybe they just said they had fully anticipated tsunami damage, and were prepared for it, while they told themselves it would never happen, and their public statements were just so much PR.
Linuxconf was like the worst examples of GUI front ends. It severely hobbled your options, and in many cases just broke stuff. Meanwhile it got in the way of learning what the full configuration options really were, and where the files where, which were often simpler to edit directly than through Linuxconf's clunky menus.
Yup. Linuxconf broke stuff left and right. Fixing the breakage was more work than just manually configuring stuff to begin with. It hid necessary configuration options, and mangled others. It was unbelievable any distro ever packaged it. Yet there was a time where Red Hat docs even presumed it was the best route to take. Part of the reason I ditched Red Hat for many years.
The trick is often to start from the more "out" artist. Pandora's associations tend to return towards the norm. So if you start with a mainstream musical act you'll get inundated with those more mediocre, but similar. If you start from the outer fringe, you'll still get a fair sampling of mainstream stuff, but a more interesting sampling. For instance, if you want to hear some great blues guitar, and like the British shadings of that, you'll do much better asking for Peter Green than Clapton. You'll still get plenty of Clapton, but it'll be the better, bluesier Clapton. Similarly, a Captain Beefheart station will give you a better selection of Zappa than a Frank Zappa station.
Personally, I find it obnoxious that starting with nearly any artist in mainstream rock brings up Lynyrd Skynyrd - but it only takes turning thumbs down on them twice to ban them from your particular station. There are also oddities, like that starting from "David Crosby," while it plays lots of good stuff (somewhat contradicting my rule of starting from outside the mainstream), it's all men. And if you start from "Joni Mitchell" it's all women. This totally misses that David and Joni were (hopefully still are) close friends who deeply influenced each other's compositions and were part of the same moment and movement. Dumb. But you can always add secondary artists to your channel to fix these holes in Pandora's algorithms.
Doesn't the "It's an independent distribution center, it's not us" argument go like this?
* When we ship by UPS, despite UPS having a physical presence in each state, that's them, not us. Note this doesn't change if the merchandise sits in a UPS warehouse while in transit, either.
* When we arrange for a wholesaler to drop ship (directly ship to the customer) the customer's purchase from us, that's the wholesaler, not us, who has a presence in the customer's state, not us.
* So the general rule is: Sales are attributable to the location of the sales office, not to the location of wholesalers, shippers, or warehousers, when they are separate firms from us.
Seems like a decent argument, just if the center in Texas is no more owned by Amazon than UPS is. Of that, I've no idea. The story reads like it's Amazon's decision to remove the center, which would make it theirs. Maybe that's wrong, maybe they just won't give it their business any more. That would be equivalent to choosing FedEx - there should be no sales tax consequences.
They didn't even talk about region-specific areas like memory.
And you don't even talk about the abundant evidence that memory is not region-specific. Karl Pribram's observation that memory appears to be stored like information in a holograph, such that a memory can be recovered despite damage to any specific brain region, still has much support. There are specific regions which appear to modulate getting data into and out of memory, but that is no more the same thing in a brain than it is in a computing device - that is, that your hard drive controller is in a specific location in your hardware does not in a useful way specify the location of the hard drive, where the memory itself is stored. That hard drive can be any place cables can reach. The brain is intensively cabled. This can quite plausibly support some sort of "holographic" - that is, broadly distributed - storage. At a minimum we should admit that the method and location of human memory storage is almost totally unknown; memories can neither be transcribed from nor written into the brain by any mechanism proved by experiment.
Now, since the article was talking about field effects (or so it seems from the abstract), and since holographic storage would likely be modulated through some sort of field effect, a tie to memory is a well-informed speculation here, and should be looked into.
every year they use a different set of reporting stations to "show" that it's the hottest year
Since you present no evidence, and state neither who "they" are or what the "different sets of reporting stations" are or what publications you found from "them" that list these different sets of reporting stations I can tentatively conclude that you are either paranoid or a liar. I have a friend with a Doctorate in Psychology I ran this by, and she agreed.
When you state that "every year" they "'show' that it's the hottest year," that flies against the fact that the climate scientists I follow don't make the claim each year that it's the hottest year. So again, if you aren't going to document strong claims like this, don't make them.
something to the effect of 'since there are no rich fortune-tellers, we have to assume that they are all fakes.'
That's just brilliant. If there is someone who has precognition working well enough to become quite rich from it, do you think they'll be announcing that publicly, or just quietly getting rich?
The general rule of thumb: Those who announce publicly that they've got such an ability working well for them probably don't - they're trying to make money not from the ability itself (which they don't have) but from the gullible who'll pay to be in their proximity. If they are some who have the ability, they're likely to keep it well hidden. Do you know where every one of the rich people in your neighborhood got their wealth? Really? For some of them, did it involve what looks to be really good luck? Now, can you rule out precognition as a factor in obtaining that luck?
Improving the odds by a few percent can be enough to beat the house, and will have more long-term survival value than making it blindingly obvious you've got precognition. You don't want to be branded a cheat or a witch. What this study is showing is evidence that evolution has provided us a way to improve the odds, particularly the reproductive odds (which are valued by evolution) by a few percent. There are, by the way, prior studies of a different design also showing that erotic images provoke precognition - carried out at the University of Amsterdam by Dick Bierman.
I was watching and listening to FCC-regulated media in the 50s and 60s, and all-in-all it was pretty fucking good. Radio was far better than now (under ownership limitations that prevented anything like Clear Channel). The network newscasts were far more informative and fact-laden (back when networks still owned themselves and viewed quality of news as a public duty). Subversive humorists like the Smothers Brothers had a far larger audience than Jon Stewart today. We had Star Trek in its first run - with a moral sensibility which was a continuation from older shows like Have Gun - Will Travel, which Roddenberry had also written scripts for - arguably a far better and more serious sensibility than can be found in any TV dramas today. Even a few of the sitcoms were good - which is all you can say for TV today, that a few of the sitcoms are still clever and watchable.
Government regulation of the Net takes liberty from large corporations. Yes, it grants that liberty to individuals and to smaller corporations. In doing so it is redistributionist: it redistributes liberty from the larger, more powerful corporate groups who otherwise can easily take it for themselves - and who generally will, when allowed to - to the smaller folks, like some of us.
The truth is, no corporation can guarantee your liberty. Guarantee of liberty only happens two ways: through custom, and through government. When it is old custom involved, that's true conservatism; when it's new custom emerging, and it's a custom of liberty, that's revolution. True revolution is even rarer than true conservatism. Both are generally masks for groups trying in large part to remove liberty from others, not to distribute it more broadly, but to keep it for themselves, as power.
Corporations find their profits limited by the liberties of the people. Recognizing that those liberties are rooted in custom and government, corporations hire shills to oppose both - two birds with one stone: to urge a change in customs, and a diminishment of government. Net neutrality thus is the perfect enemy of the shills who wish to control the currents which bend our customs towards a future of total large-corporate control. If the Net remains neutral, its currents undermine control by particular established corporations. Yet the Net can only remain neutral if government guarantees that liberty. So government, if it does guarantee Net liberty, is undermining the primary goals of the right-wing shills. They are entirely accurate in putting forth the idea that it is their direct enemy, and the enemy of those whose liberty they truly most care about: their corporate sponsors.
If you've looked at Daily Kos in recent months, you'd know that most people posting there totally agree with the premise that Obama, while perhaps still not worse than W., is worse than any other president over the last century - including Nixon, who on many important matters (e.g. health care, full employment) was well to Obama's left, and who was no worse in getting bogged down in an unwinnable war for the sake of "honor"... or something.
Personally, I'd say our only hope is that something forces Obama to resign, and that President Biden, liberated from Obama's bad policy judgment and idealization of "bipartisanship," runs the country like a real Democrat - or at least like a man who's still got his balls attached. Then again, given Biden's recent cluelessness about WikiLeaks, this could be a thin hope.
Funny how you leave out the biggest piece of this: Enron. The deregulation allowed Enron to manipulate power supplies and prices. So your "scenario in a nut-shell" is using a nut that selectively includes in its narrative only the government as a player, despite that private industry was as much or more at the center of the story as government practices, that the private industry was in large extent crooked, and that deregulation on the government's side was essential to the run-away crookedness on the private industries' side which resulted in, for example, brownouts when totally operational power plants were turned off in order to raise the spot-market prices from the electrical generators which were still on line - putting billions into Enron's pockets, as well as into the pockets of several of it peers.
Everyone like to bash Fox News (and justifiably so), but refuses to admit that CNN, (MS)NBC, CBS, ABC, NPR, the NY Times, the Washington Post (and most others) do the same thing for the other side.
You're aware that only from the Fox POV are CNN, (MS)NBC, CBS, ABC, NPR, the NY Times, Washington Post on "the other side." Most of us on the continuum of the liberal-progressive-radical left see them as being 2/3rd Fox Lite establishment apologists, and 1/3 real reporting at best, with even that careful to avoid going outside of centrist consensus.
The only exceptions to that list are Rachel and Keith on MSNBC, but neither of them represents the farther reaches of the left. Neither is Noam Chomsky, by a long shot. Neither represents the far end of the spectrum the way Glenn and Bill do on Fox.
This was a trial balloon. By law enforcement freaks. To see if they can get away with the "We're just trying to maintain the capabilities we've always had" argument. Most American politics is about seeing who can establish the "common sense" received "wisdom" - however ultimately nonsensical it is. That people within the administration play these games too - every political player does - does not mean that Obama is committed to their path. If we push back well enough against this, and keep it from working as "common sense" that the feds should be able to tap everything as if it were an old copper wire, we'll be fine.
Gitmo is sad, a true broken promise. But it's still there because the proponents of it sold as "common sense" that if we brought the prisoners to America, and gave them Constitutional protections (see, the proponents only "believe in the Constitution" when it's convenient), then somehow they'd escape from their prisons and blow us all up. This is absolute idiocy. But a majority of people, including Harry Reid, bought it. Obama's not that stupid, and he's a reasonably good teacher, but he can't make the American public suddenly smart - not this public, not today. It takes years of education.
And that's why I support the FEMA re-education camps!
On further thought, follow the logic through. Mr. WikiLeaks exposed the names and locations of our sources of information about the Taliban, knowing (if he even thought about the fate of these human beings) many of them will be killed for exposing Taliban secrets. Therefore, his moral judgment is that it's okay to enable the killing of people who expose secrets. And he's someone who exposes secrets.
We should, if we are following a moral code like his own, help keep the US government continuously informed of this man's location. It is not, apparently, for us to decide if it's okay for him to be killed, since he has apparently decided that the killing of informants is not worth preventing. In the territory of the Third Reich, we should presume he would have similarly exposed Jews, without concerning himself with their fate. If not, perhaps Jewish lives are more sacred to him than Afghan lives?
The documents contain identities of Afghans who are providing information to us about the Taliban. The Taliban have issued a press release promising to extract the names from the documents and kill our sources.
There can be no question that WikiLeaks has done evil here - and not against American or NATO forces, but against Afghan civilians who merely wish to remain free of Taliban dictatorship.
Unnatural - What the hell gives them the right to decide what is natural or unnatural?
You appear unfamiliar with our language. In common speech "natural" is contrasted with "artificial," where the latter refers to what happens due to action by humans, and the former to what would happen independently of human contributions. Examples: A natural river versus a canal. A natural cave versus one blasted out by dynamite. A natural mountain versus one built on originally flat ground by heaping up refuse. If you find these sorts of distinctions in our language too complex, we understand. Perhaps it is natural!
Damage - To apply the word damage means that something is out of norms.
You should be aware that norms are always relative. Sure, you can choose a different relative frame in which one man's meat is another man's poison. On the other hand, boiling off the surface of the Earth might be meat for no man, yet quite yummy to some other species yet to arrive here. Since we presumably are all human beings here (possibly even all men), it's natural for us to discuss climate from our own frame of reference. What's normal for planets may include periods of boiling surfaces. We can point to Venus. What's normal for us, what counts as damage for us, that's relative, but then who is to say we must only discuss things which are frameless absolutes?
Adapt or die! Every other animal or plant on this planet has to do this so why do we think we are special?
You're "we" is overly familiar. I don't consider you special at all. Adaptation means not engaging in behaviors which lessen the survival odds of your kin. I don't think you're up for that.
... if the official dioxin-exposure limits are set unreasonably low, perhaps for political reasons
Let's play this out. Who exactly are the interests who will receive political benefits from setting dioxin-exposure limits low? How would those benefits be received? Is there some industry that competes with those using dioxins that doesn't use them? Does that industry have enough riches to support politicians who favor it? More riches than the dioxin-using industries?
Me thinks there's much whining by businesses that anything done to protect public health and the environment is being done for "political reasons." Well, yes, but those are related to human health. We voters elect politicians in part to protect us from threats like this. It's their job.
Now, is the political reason that the more politicians scare us the more likely we are to elect them? Is this like the war on drugs? The Cold War? But if that were the case all politicians would be jumping over each other to proclaim how scary, say, global warming is. Or how scary our out-of-date, obsolete nuclear arsenals are. Or how scary the threat of an asteroid strike is. Yet elected politicians shy away from all of these, preferring to calm people about the real threats, and concentrate instead on non-threats like gay marriage, or the separation of church and state, or the scientists who give us rational warnings about the real threats.
The power of gold as currency is as faith-based as the power of communion wafers as the Body of God. Yes, you can use gold in electronics - but the market for that does not justify its current valuation. Yes, you can use gold in jewelry - but being bright and shiny is an aesthetic thing, not a bedrock value.
Gold as currency is no different than paper or certain digits as currency: They are only currency if some government declares them to be. The prior advantage of gold a century ago was that nearly every government declared it of value, so it was safe from the prospect of any one government (say, the Confederacy) being delegitimated.
Gold-as-gold has no current currency value. Governments don't back it. It's a collectible, subject to speculation, and some people make good money on collectibles. But you can't go to the grocer with your gold, you can't pay taxes with your gold, you can't buy a car with your gold. It has the same intrinsic value for these things as vintage action figures.
In Zimbabwe, where the government has lost legitimacy and inflation is rabid, you might be able to trade gold, if you can carry it without it being robbed from you; but you surely can spend dollars, or euros, or South African currency - all of which are of far more survival value than gold. Unless you believe every single government on Earth will lose legitimacy, you should want to collect the currencies of those which you bet will stand. Gold is the currency of none. It's a speculative bubble in a shiny collectible.
I know some highly creative people who, raising children in NYC, never let them explore the city without parental accompaniment until the kids reach 16. I know other highly creative people who grew up in NYC in the 60s and 70s roaming at will from the time they were 5 or 6. But too many parents today are afraid their kids will end up stolen from the streets and show up on the milk cartons - as statistically unlikely as that is.
That said, the over-protected kids are growing up creative. But those are the ones whose parents already were, so the overprotection at least didn't isolate them from good influences in that direction.
Pot smoking among school kids went down by the early '80s. I'd cite statistics, but those are all suspect, being produced to support claims for the effectiveness of government programs (in a word, "creative"). Still, there can be no doubt by any serious cultural critic that creativity in Western Civilization peaked in the '60s, along with peak use of creativity-enhancing drugs. Because that creativity was perceived as - and may have been - politically dangerous, it and the drug use which enhances it have been discouraged since.
Price knows what it is to be a huge fad. Not in a bad way, either. There's serious quality in his art. And having it dressed up all trendy was part of the art. But trends end.
Too much of the press is trying too hard to pretend everything Internet is still cool. When every single square TV show tries to establish its cool with the hep cats by inviting you to tweet, at some point the true vanguard - if there is such a population any more (if you think you're it, you're probably not) - can see that the Internet brand has faded.
Me, I'll keep listening to Prince and keep visiting/. But am I cool for having these in my life? It's not that something can't be cool just because it's broadly popular; the Beatles were cool even at No. 1. But it needs to be fresh to be cool. The Beatles stayed fresh, then broke up before it was too late. Other coolest rock stars conveniently died. The Stones are no longer cool. Prince is no longer cool. The Internet is a huge mass of mostly luke-warm. It's on Main Street, it is Main Street. And it's no exile.
Slashdot Mirror
Your passive cooling system might utilize the heat from the rods to circulate water in a closed loop. You might need a very large reservoir of water - or something like a massive radiator - to dissipate the heat. And I've no idea how to translate the heat into circulation with the fewest moving parts.
But in this case, if they'd kept one of the reactors running, to generate the power to run the cooling to keep the whole complex stable, wouldn't they be far ahead of the game? Still, even when you shut them "off," they aren't really off, so there should be a way to capture some of the continuing heat to run pumps to cool the reactors.
Don't have the link right now, but read a news item yesterday asserting that TEPCO had specifically claimed, several years ago, that each of their plants was fully capable of surviving a tsunami. So maybe it's true that they didn't really expect a tsunami. Maybe they just said they had fully anticipated tsunami damage, and were prepared for it, while they told themselves it would never happen, and their public statements were just so much PR.
Linuxconf was like the worst examples of GUI front ends. It severely hobbled your options, and in many cases just broke stuff. Meanwhile it got in the way of learning what the full configuration options really were, and where the files where, which were often simpler to edit directly than through Linuxconf's clunky menus.
Yup. Linuxconf broke stuff left and right. Fixing the breakage was more work than just manually configuring stuff to begin with. It hid necessary configuration options, and mangled others. It was unbelievable any distro ever packaged it. Yet there was a time where Red Hat docs even presumed it was the best route to take. Part of the reason I ditched Red Hat for many years.
The trick is often to start from the more "out" artist. Pandora's associations tend to return towards the norm. So if you start with a mainstream musical act you'll get inundated with those more mediocre, but similar. If you start from the outer fringe, you'll still get a fair sampling of mainstream stuff, but a more interesting sampling. For instance, if you want to hear some great blues guitar, and like the British shadings of that, you'll do much better asking for Peter Green than Clapton. You'll still get plenty of Clapton, but it'll be the better, bluesier Clapton. Similarly, a Captain Beefheart station will give you a better selection of Zappa than a Frank Zappa station.
Personally, I find it obnoxious that starting with nearly any artist in mainstream rock brings up Lynyrd Skynyrd - but it only takes turning thumbs down on them twice to ban them from your particular station. There are also oddities, like that starting from "David Crosby," while it plays lots of good stuff (somewhat contradicting my rule of starting from outside the mainstream), it's all men. And if you start from "Joni Mitchell" it's all women. This totally misses that David and Joni were (hopefully still are) close friends who deeply influenced each other's compositions and were part of the same moment and movement. Dumb. But you can always add secondary artists to your channel to fix these holes in Pandora's algorithms.
Doesn't the "It's an independent distribution center, it's not us" argument go like this?
* When we ship by UPS, despite UPS having a physical presence in each state, that's them, not us. Note this doesn't change if the merchandise sits in a UPS warehouse while in transit, either.
* When we arrange for a wholesaler to drop ship (directly ship to the customer) the customer's purchase from us, that's the wholesaler, not us, who has a presence in the customer's state, not us.
* So the general rule is: Sales are attributable to the location of the sales office, not to the location of wholesalers, shippers, or warehousers, when they are separate firms from us.
Seems like a decent argument, just if the center in Texas is no more owned by Amazon than UPS is. Of that, I've no idea. The story reads like it's Amazon's decision to remove the center, which would make it theirs. Maybe that's wrong, maybe they just won't give it their business any more. That would be equivalent to choosing FedEx - there should be no sales tax consequences.
And you don't even talk about the abundant evidence that memory is not region-specific. Karl Pribram's observation that memory appears to be stored like information in a holograph, such that a memory can be recovered despite damage to any specific brain region, still has much support. There are specific regions which appear to modulate getting data into and out of memory, but that is no more the same thing in a brain than it is in a computing device - that is, that your hard drive controller is in a specific location in your hardware does not in a useful way specify the location of the hard drive, where the memory itself is stored. That hard drive can be any place cables can reach. The brain is intensively cabled. This can quite plausibly support some sort of "holographic" - that is, broadly distributed - storage. At a minimum we should admit that the method and location of human memory storage is almost totally unknown; memories can neither be transcribed from nor written into the brain by any mechanism proved by experiment.
Now, since the article was talking about field effects (or so it seems from the abstract), and since holographic storage would likely be modulated through some sort of field effect, a tie to memory is a well-informed speculation here, and should be looked into.
Since you present no evidence, and state neither who "they" are or what the "different sets of reporting stations" are or what publications you found from "them" that list these different sets of reporting stations I can tentatively conclude that you are either paranoid or a liar. I have a friend with a Doctorate in Psychology I ran this by, and she agreed.
When you state that "every year" they "'show' that it's the hottest year," that flies against the fact that the climate scientists I follow don't make the claim each year that it's the hottest year. So again, if you aren't going to document strong claims like this, don't make them.
That's just brilliant. If there is someone who has precognition working well enough to become quite rich from it, do you think they'll be announcing that publicly, or just quietly getting rich?
The general rule of thumb: Those who announce publicly that they've got such an ability working well for them probably don't - they're trying to make money not from the ability itself (which they don't have) but from the gullible who'll pay to be in their proximity. If they are some who have the ability, they're likely to keep it well hidden. Do you know where every one of the rich people in your neighborhood got their wealth? Really? For some of them, did it involve what looks to be really good luck? Now, can you rule out precognition as a factor in obtaining that luck?
Improving the odds by a few percent can be enough to beat the house, and will have more long-term survival value than making it blindingly obvious you've got precognition. You don't want to be branded a cheat or a witch. What this study is showing is evidence that evolution has provided us a way to improve the odds, particularly the reproductive odds (which are valued by evolution) by a few percent. There are, by the way, prior studies of a different design also showing that erotic images provoke precognition - carried out at the University of Amsterdam by Dick Bierman.
Here's a toast to Mr. Allen's health, which may depend on there being no significant Russian or Sicilian investors in any of the following firms:
* AOL
* Apple
* eBay
* Facebook
* Google
* Netflix
* Office Depot
* OfficeMax
* Staples
* Yahoo
* YouTube
Note that I do not mean to imply any judgment regarding Russian or Sicilian business practices in saying this.
I was watching and listening to FCC-regulated media in the 50s and 60s, and all-in-all it was pretty fucking good. Radio was far better than now (under ownership limitations that prevented anything like Clear Channel). The network newscasts were far more informative and fact-laden (back when networks still owned themselves and viewed quality of news as a public duty). Subversive humorists like the Smothers Brothers had a far larger audience than Jon Stewart today. We had Star Trek in its first run - with a moral sensibility which was a continuation from older shows like Have Gun - Will Travel, which Roddenberry had also written scripts for - arguably a far better and more serious sensibility than can be found in any TV dramas today. Even a few of the sitcoms were good - which is all you can say for TV today, that a few of the sitcoms are still clever and watchable.
Government regulation of the Net takes liberty from large corporations. Yes, it grants that liberty to individuals and to smaller corporations. In doing so it is redistributionist: it redistributes liberty from the larger, more powerful corporate groups who otherwise can easily take it for themselves - and who generally will, when allowed to - to the smaller folks, like some of us.
The truth is, no corporation can guarantee your liberty. Guarantee of liberty only happens two ways: through custom, and through government. When it is old custom involved, that's true conservatism; when it's new custom emerging, and it's a custom of liberty, that's revolution. True revolution is even rarer than true conservatism. Both are generally masks for groups trying in large part to remove liberty from others, not to distribute it more broadly, but to keep it for themselves, as power.
Corporations find their profits limited by the liberties of the people. Recognizing that those liberties are rooted in custom and government, corporations hire shills to oppose both - two birds with one stone: to urge a change in customs, and a diminishment of government. Net neutrality thus is the perfect enemy of the shills who wish to control the currents which bend our customs towards a future of total large-corporate control. If the Net remains neutral, its currents undermine control by particular established corporations. Yet the Net can only remain neutral if government guarantees that liberty. So government, if it does guarantee Net liberty, is undermining the primary goals of the right-wing shills. They are entirely accurate in putting forth the idea that it is their direct enemy, and the enemy of those whose liberty they truly most care about: their corporate sponsors.
If you've looked at Daily Kos in recent months, you'd know that most people posting there totally agree with the premise that Obama, while perhaps still not worse than W., is worse than any other president over the last century - including Nixon, who on many important matters (e.g. health care, full employment) was well to Obama's left, and who was no worse in getting bogged down in an unwinnable war for the sake of "honor" ... or something.
Personally, I'd say our only hope is that something forces Obama to resign, and that President Biden, liberated from Obama's bad policy judgment and idealization of "bipartisanship," runs the country like a real Democrat - or at least like a man who's still got his balls attached. Then again, given Biden's recent cluelessness about WikiLeaks, this could be a thin hope.
Funny how you leave out the biggest piece of this: Enron. The deregulation allowed Enron to manipulate power supplies and prices. So your "scenario in a nut-shell" is using a nut that selectively includes in its narrative only the government as a player, despite that private industry was as much or more at the center of the story as government practices, that the private industry was in large extent crooked, and that deregulation on the government's side was essential to the run-away crookedness on the private industries' side which resulted in, for example, brownouts when totally operational power plants were turned off in order to raise the spot-market prices from the electrical generators which were still on line - putting billions into Enron's pockets, as well as into the pockets of several of it peers.
You're aware that only from the Fox POV are CNN, (MS)NBC, CBS, ABC, NPR, the NY Times, Washington Post on "the other side." Most of us on the continuum of the liberal-progressive-radical left see them as being 2/3rd Fox Lite establishment apologists, and 1/3 real reporting at best, with even that careful to avoid going outside of centrist consensus.
The only exceptions to that list are Rachel and Keith on MSNBC, but neither of them represents the farther reaches of the left. Neither is Noam Chomsky, by a long shot. Neither represents the far end of the spectrum the way Glenn and Bill do on Fox.
This was a trial balloon. By law enforcement freaks. To see if they can get away with the "We're just trying to maintain the capabilities we've always had" argument. Most American politics is about seeing who can establish the "common sense" received "wisdom" - however ultimately nonsensical it is. That people within the administration play these games too - every political player does - does not mean that Obama is committed to their path. If we push back well enough against this, and keep it from working as "common sense" that the feds should be able to tap everything as if it were an old copper wire, we'll be fine.
Gitmo is sad, a true broken promise. But it's still there because the proponents of it sold as "common sense" that if we brought the prisoners to America, and gave them Constitutional protections (see, the proponents only "believe in the Constitution" when it's convenient), then somehow they'd escape from their prisons and blow us all up. This is absolute idiocy. But a majority of people, including Harry Reid, bought it. Obama's not that stupid, and he's a reasonably good teacher, but he can't make the American public suddenly smart - not this public, not today. It takes years of education.
And that's why I support the FEMA re-education camps!
"... and represented former vice president Al Gore in the disputed 2004 U.S. election results."
On further thought, follow the logic through. Mr. WikiLeaks exposed the names and locations of our sources of information about the Taliban, knowing (if he even thought about the fate of these human beings) many of them will be killed for exposing Taliban secrets. Therefore, his moral judgment is that it's okay to enable the killing of people who expose secrets. And he's someone who exposes secrets.
We should, if we are following a moral code like his own, help keep the US government continuously informed of this man's location. It is not, apparently, for us to decide if it's okay for him to be killed, since he has apparently decided that the killing of informants is not worth preventing. In the territory of the Third Reich, we should presume he would have similarly exposed Jews, without concerning himself with their fate. If not, perhaps Jewish lives are more sacred to him than Afghan lives?
The documents contain identities of Afghans who are providing information to us about the Taliban. The Taliban have issued a press release promising to extract the names from the documents and kill our sources.
There can be no question that WikiLeaks has done evil here - and not against American or NATO forces, but against Afghan civilians who merely wish to remain free of Taliban dictatorship.
You appear unfamiliar with our language. In common speech "natural" is contrasted with "artificial," where the latter refers to what happens due to action by humans, and the former to what would happen independently of human contributions. Examples: A natural river versus a canal. A natural cave versus one blasted out by dynamite. A natural mountain versus one built on originally flat ground by heaping up refuse. If you find these sorts of distinctions in our language too complex, we understand. Perhaps it is natural!
You should be aware that norms are always relative. Sure, you can choose a different relative frame in which one man's meat is another man's poison. On the other hand, boiling off the surface of the Earth might be meat for no man, yet quite yummy to some other species yet to arrive here. Since we presumably are all human beings here (possibly even all men), it's natural for us to discuss climate from our own frame of reference. What's normal for planets may include periods of boiling surfaces. We can point to Venus. What's normal for us, what counts as damage for us, that's relative, but then who is to say we must only discuss things which are frameless absolutes?
You're "we" is overly familiar. I don't consider you special at all. Adaptation means not engaging in behaviors which lessen the survival odds of your kin. I don't think you're up for that.
Let's play this out. Who exactly are the interests who will receive political benefits from setting dioxin-exposure limits low? How would those benefits be received? Is there some industry that competes with those using dioxins that doesn't use them? Does that industry have enough riches to support politicians who favor it? More riches than the dioxin-using industries?
Me thinks there's much whining by businesses that anything done to protect public health and the environment is being done for "political reasons." Well, yes, but those are related to human health. We voters elect politicians in part to protect us from threats like this. It's their job.
Now, is the political reason that the more politicians scare us the more likely we are to elect them? Is this like the war on drugs? The Cold War? But if that were the case all politicians would be jumping over each other to proclaim how scary, say, global warming is. Or how scary our out-of-date, obsolete nuclear arsenals are. Or how scary the threat of an asteroid strike is. Yet elected politicians shy away from all of these, preferring to calm people about the real threats, and concentrate instead on non-threats like gay marriage, or the separation of church and state, or the scientists who give us rational warnings about the real threats.
The power of gold as currency is as faith-based as the power of communion wafers as the Body of God. Yes, you can use gold in electronics - but the market for that does not justify its current valuation. Yes, you can use gold in jewelry - but being bright and shiny is an aesthetic thing, not a bedrock value.
Gold as currency is no different than paper or certain digits as currency: They are only currency if some government declares them to be. The prior advantage of gold a century ago was that nearly every government declared it of value, so it was safe from the prospect of any one government (say, the Confederacy) being delegitimated.
Gold-as-gold has no current currency value. Governments don't back it. It's a collectible, subject to speculation, and some people make good money on collectibles. But you can't go to the grocer with your gold, you can't pay taxes with your gold, you can't buy a car with your gold. It has the same intrinsic value for these things as vintage action figures.
In Zimbabwe, where the government has lost legitimacy and inflation is rabid, you might be able to trade gold, if you can carry it without it being robbed from you; but you surely can spend dollars, or euros, or South African currency - all of which are of far more survival value than gold. Unless you believe every single government on Earth will lose legitimacy, you should want to collect the currencies of those which you bet will stand. Gold is the currency of none. It's a speculative bubble in a shiny collectible.
I know some highly creative people who, raising children in NYC, never let them explore the city without parental accompaniment until the kids reach 16. I know other highly creative people who grew up in NYC in the 60s and 70s roaming at will from the time they were 5 or 6. But too many parents today are afraid their kids will end up stolen from the streets and show up on the milk cartons - as statistically unlikely as that is.
That said, the over-protected kids are growing up creative. But those are the ones whose parents already were, so the overprotection at least didn't isolate them from good influences in that direction.
Pot smoking among school kids went down by the early '80s. I'd cite statistics, but those are all suspect, being produced to support claims for the effectiveness of government programs (in a word, "creative"). Still, there can be no doubt by any serious cultural critic that creativity in Western Civilization peaked in the '60s, along with peak use of creativity-enhancing drugs. Because that creativity was perceived as - and may have been - politically dangerous, it and the drug use which enhances it have been discouraged since.
Price knows what it is to be a huge fad. Not in a bad way, either. There's serious quality in his art. And having it dressed up all trendy was part of the art. But trends end.
Too much of the press is trying too hard to pretend everything Internet is still cool. When every single square TV show tries to establish its cool with the hep cats by inviting you to tweet, at some point the true vanguard - if there is such a population any more (if you think you're it, you're probably not) - can see that the Internet brand has faded.
Me, I'll keep listening to Prince and keep visiting /. But am I cool for having these in my life? It's not that something can't be cool just because it's broadly popular; the Beatles were cool even at No. 1. But it needs to be fresh to be cool. The Beatles stayed fresh, then broke up before it was too late. Other coolest rock stars conveniently died. The Stones are no longer cool. Prince is no longer cool. The Internet is a huge mass of mostly luke-warm. It's on Main Street, it is Main Street. And it's no exile.