Sooo... The lights go out, so we light candles so we can see... but we can't see well enough to avoid knocking over our candles, starting fires... which we're unable to call in because our cell phones don't work... because the lights went out... which forces us to turn to ham radio operators to call for help! Outdated technology sure knows how to look out for it's own.
Seriously, don't light candles in a blackout. If anybody still had reasonable candles, it might not be a problem, but all anybody has are ridiculous scented things in decorative holders. You give yourself a few degenerative nerve diseases from all the lead in the cheapo wicks, and then burn your house down when you get hypnotized by the flame and drop your book on it. Just buy a fucking Maglite, people.
Look, it's all right there. First, the proletariat siezes the means of prodution, then the Monopoly Man steals the black team's flag and steps on chunky Irish Luke Skywalker's nuts. I'm sure I don't need to explain.
Nuclear is "pertaining to an atomic nucleus". If you want to be anal you shouldn't really even use that, it's like when they used to call them atom bombs. Technically the bomb involves both atoms and their nuclei, but the energy comes from either a fission or a fusion reaction. You should call them fission weapons or fusion weapons. These are isomer decay weapons. Nuclear's a good name for all three, since in practice, the effects are basically the same. There's an unexpectedly big boom for the size of the bomb, there's tiny things piercing your delicate DNA, you don't wanna go there without a suit afterwards. The rest of us like to use language to convey information like that.
Putting aside the crazy chemical conspiracy bit, chemical weapons couldn't kill everyone in a city, even if dropped from a plane with ridiculously well trained pilots and in perfect weather. The main reason the US agreed to stop producing new chemical and biologicals is because they were largely useless as weapons, as you say. It was a trial run for negotiating a good nuke treaty.
Look, WWI used chemicals, but WWII didn't. Why is that? You think the Fuhrer was just so much nicer than the Kaiser? (Hitler did have bad experiences with chemicals, but I'm being retorical here, we know the blindness thing was irrelevant) WWI and early II just proved that the weapons weren't worth the effort. You'd kill more people shooting out of the cockpit with a rifle than you would with a gas. Without a focused area like a building or a tunnel, chemicals disperse too fast to do much of anything. Even trenches were dissapointingly bad at concentrating chlorine or whatever.
Nerve gas is more deadly, so you have a better chance at something, but still, look at Tokyo. Sarin in a subway, and only 12 dead. Even with a cargo jet full of the stuff, you're not going to kill a whole city. The famous "gassing his own people" thing wasn't even militarially worth much. Psychologically it was impressive, but tons and tons of gas were used on a spread of a few hundred thousand people, and the death toll is in the thousands.
I agree with the first guy. WMD is a stupid term. They're three completely different classses of weapons with orders of magnitude between their destructive capabilities. Biological weapons alone have ridiculous differences between them, especially if you classify Botox(TM) as a bioweapon.
I'm honestly not that worried about bioweapons though. The only useful kind is like anthrax, something in the league of chemicals. Everything else is either too deadly to spread beyond a small group, or too spreadable to either keep it away from your side or to take responsibility. Even if you don't care about your side like a terrorist, is there any satisfaction in knowing that you invented SARS if you know that telling anybody would either make it immediately much easier to cure or cause them to laugh you off?
Anyway, yes, the US signed a treaty not to invent new kinds of bioweapons and chemicals, but not to dismantle the stocks of VX and Ebolapox that they had laying around already. Still, the standard position is that that treaty was with the CCCP and as such null and void since the CCCP is gone. The Secretary of the Army patented a rifle-mounted delivery system a few months ago in violation of it, so I think it's dead.
No, Simpsons. It's from the one where Homer goes into space. He spills the chips, starts eating them to the Blue Danube, crashes into the ant farm, Kent Brockman cuts to the camera on the shuttle, there's ants in the camera, so he welcomes our new giant space-ant masters.
Power on! Fuck ConEd anyway! Fucking fucktards! I hope Bloomberg calls them incompetent idiots like every other goddamn mayor in history.
Right now, I kind of doubt that the system was under all that much strain. Compared to other weeks, this week was cool, like 80s-low 90s. I'm sure there were a buttload of ACs runnning, but normally when you have this kind of power failure it's because of a SERIOUSLY overstrained system, like in '77 you have serial killers and a deadly heat wave, so EVERYBODY was inside with the AC on.
My bet is that this'll turn out to be a fuckup somewhere in upstate NY. Some plant that got shut down badly, started putting out unstable current, something like that. The reason it spread has to be the 40s anachronism that is Niagra-Mohawk, whatever the cause. That's a problem for why you say, but the system is miraculously stable outside of a emergency situation. The thing is, it's delivering power from a hundred thousand tiny deregulated plants all over the place, which I bet it's still assuming are heavily regulated and completely coordinated with each other. It's not necissarially deregulation's fault, but I'm betting no matter what the root cause, deregulation had some impact on the scope or duration of the whole thing.
Once again, fuck ConEd. Fuck them up their stupid asses.
Yeah, well "minor" as in massive looting and arson instead of blackouts in Canada. The 65 outage probably cost about a tenth of the 77 one, if you put it all together.
For an engineering company, that place has some serious problems with death-pipe boobytraps in their drainage system.
"Are you sure we really need that forhead-height pipe embedded in the ceiling?" "Oh, yeah, see, if somebody dumps, like, a newspaper or something down there, it'll get all caught up on that." "Could we have it spray cold steam like those other ones?" "No, that would break up the clog."
I know, what the hell's with the headlines on this story? They cloned human stem cells using rabbit cell-goo, they didn't make "rabbit-human" hybrids.
To clone human stem cells: 1) Find woman to let you jam a needle into her ovary 2) Stick random human cell nucleus in egg you sucked out 3) ??? 4) Stem Cells!!
To clone human stem cells in China: 1) Look for woman to let you jam a needle into her ovary 2) Get kicked in the nads 3) Buy rabbits 4) Jam a needle in rabbit ovary 5) Stick random human cell nucleus in egg you sucked out 6) ??? 7) Stem Cells!! 8) Claim to have created rabbit-babies 9) Wait for science-illiterate newsmen to promote your stock symbol on TV 10) Profit!!
What a bunch of fuckholes. Seriously, when the best scientific information in your article's coming from the Vatican, I think you're in trouble.
In 1999, electricity cost the state $7.4 billion, in 2000, $32 billion, and in 2001 it will be $65 billion, according to George Brown of the PUC (LA Times, April 9).(from here)
McVeigh had a target. The FBI. It's not a great target, but it's a target. Just because somebody's goal is stupid doesn't mean they didn't have one. That "HE WAS EVILL TRYING TO KILL PEOPLE!11!!!" logic just makes it harder to fix anything. It's easier to deal with being a victim if you pretend it was random and there was nothing anyone could do, so we buy into the fantasy even when there's a nicely defined, if wrong, justification for it sitting right there.
This is why the 9-11 investigation isn't getting anywhere. Everybody's deathly afraid of trying to figure out what the hell the terrorists were thinking because everybody knows that the moment you start down that road you'll be gang-raped by hoards of idiots who are terrified about the possibility that moral framework they're been handed without explaination might not be the right one after all. It's scary to have someone tell you that both you and Mohammed Atta have equal reason to believe you're in the right, namely, "somebody told me so."
They had something to go back to. Some bits of the revolutionary army did do something a lot like the CIAs army has. They just had a nice frontier full of injuns to keep them out of the way of the rest of us. VC had a nice Soviet-backed dictatorship (as opposed to Afghanistan's illiterate hick-led anarchy) to keep them under control. Afghanistan had heroin and Osama. And for once, growing drugs wasn't the easiest money-making opportunity around.
He is making a generalization, since the Arabs that came up to fight in Afghanistan are pretty key in how things turned out, but he's still right about the important precondition to everything. The Arabs (Osama, mainly, but not just him) just took the role that the mafia usually does in places where you have a dissolved military. They still needed the big pool of displaced young men the CIA created.
Blaming Perry for Perl Harbor is pretty stupid. I guess you could argue that without the trade (or exploitation, whichever you prefer) he brought and the ionization of the public against the Shogun that he inspired (nobody likes the warlord that lets in the puffy foreigner looking for child labor) that Japan wouldn't have been capable of a WWII-level war effort, but that's a strech.
A better idea would be to blame Teddy Roosevelt for royally screwing the poor bastards when they called him in to negotiate an end to their war with Russia. The war that they were winning until Roosevelt came in and gave Russia all the resource-rich mainland that they went looking for again when the Nazis came knocking. Or you could blame the racist Californians for blocking any Japanese immigrants and whipping up some nice popular hatred for Americans in Japan. Or the way the feds backed up California by randomly cutting off desperately-needed oil and raw material shipments (which TR's negotiating skills, perhaps intentionally, made necessary)every once and awhile.
Also, the Germans would still be speaking German no matter what Moscow did. Maybe with more "comrade"s, but still German. I always love "we'd be speaking..." 'cause it's almost never true. Besides the Romans, not too many people try and teach you stuff after conquering you. I guess that's one good thing about using POWs as slaves, you can get away with teaching hovel-dwelling Frenchmen enough not to take $1 a day from Nike without undermining your economy.
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Sooo... The lights go out, so we light candles so we can see... but we can't see well enough to avoid knocking over our candles, starting fires... which we're unable to call in because our cell phones don't work... because the lights went out... which forces us to turn to ham radio operators to call for help! Outdated technology sure knows how to look out for it's own.
Seriously, don't light candles in a blackout. If anybody still had reasonable candles, it might not be a problem, but all anybody has are ridiculous scented things in decorative holders. You give yourself a few degenerative nerve diseases from all the lead in the cheapo wicks, and then burn your house down when you get hypnotized by the flame and drop your book on it. Just buy a fucking Maglite, people.
Well, not really. The little orphan children they keep in the basement to route your calls don't work so well in the dark.
A brief history of the Soviet Union.
Look, it's all right there. First, the proletariat siezes the means of prodution, then the Monopoly Man steals the black team's flag and steps on chunky Irish Luke Skywalker's nuts. I'm sure I don't need to explain.
OK, smart guy, do you have some sort of non-magnetic tram system we can use to get the nuclear power plant to mars?
Only 25%? That ain't fucking bad, the US is at 12, and isn't run directly by mob bosses.
Yes, even now, Richard Stallman is an entire bag of Oreos... for freedom!
Later today he'll be taking a dump to reinforce the 4th ammendment.
God. I wouldn't want your childhood.
You, sir, are a clever, clever man.
Nuclear is "pertaining to an atomic nucleus". If you want to be anal you shouldn't really even use that, it's like when they used to call them atom bombs. Technically the bomb involves both atoms and their nuclei, but the energy comes from either a fission or a fusion reaction. You should call them fission weapons or fusion weapons. These are isomer decay weapons. Nuclear's a good name for all three, since in practice, the effects are basically the same. There's an unexpectedly big boom for the size of the bomb, there's tiny things piercing your delicate DNA, you don't wanna go there without a suit afterwards. The rest of us like to use language to convey information like that.
Putting aside the crazy chemical conspiracy bit, chemical weapons couldn't kill everyone in a city, even if dropped from a plane with ridiculously well trained pilots and in perfect weather. The main reason the US agreed to stop producing new chemical and biologicals is because they were largely useless as weapons, as you say. It was a trial run for negotiating a good nuke treaty.
Look, WWI used chemicals, but WWII didn't. Why is that? You think the Fuhrer was just so much nicer than the Kaiser? (Hitler did have bad experiences with chemicals, but I'm being retorical here, we know the blindness thing was irrelevant) WWI and early II just proved that the weapons weren't worth the effort. You'd kill more people shooting out of the cockpit with a rifle than you would with a gas. Without a focused area like a building or a tunnel, chemicals disperse too fast to do much of anything. Even trenches were dissapointingly bad at concentrating chlorine or whatever.
Nerve gas is more deadly, so you have a better chance at something, but still, look at Tokyo. Sarin in a subway, and only 12 dead. Even with a cargo jet full of the stuff, you're not going to kill a whole city. The famous "gassing his own people" thing wasn't even militarially worth much. Psychologically it was impressive, but tons and tons of gas were used on a spread of a few hundred thousand people, and the death toll is in the thousands.
I agree with the first guy. WMD is a stupid term. They're three completely different classses of weapons with orders of magnitude between their destructive capabilities. Biological weapons alone have ridiculous differences between them, especially if you classify Botox(TM) as a bioweapon.
I'm honestly not that worried about bioweapons though. The only useful kind is like anthrax, something in the league of chemicals. Everything else is either too deadly to spread beyond a small group, or too spreadable to either keep it away from your side or to take responsibility. Even if you don't care about your side like a terrorist, is there any satisfaction in knowing that you invented SARS if you know that telling anybody would either make it immediately much easier to cure or cause them to laugh you off?
Anyway, yes, the US signed a treaty not to invent new kinds of bioweapons and chemicals, but not to dismantle the stocks of VX and Ebolapox that they had laying around already. Still, the standard position is that that treaty was with the CCCP and as such null and void since the CCCP is gone. The Secretary of the Army patented a rifle-mounted delivery system a few months ago in violation of it, so I think it's dead.
Well, they did contaminate our precious bodily fluids. That'd make anybody a little crazy.
No, Simpsons. It's from the one where Homer goes into space. He spills the chips, starts eating them to the Blue Danube, crashes into the ant farm, Kent Brockman cuts to the camera on the shuttle, there's ants in the camera, so he welcomes our new giant space-ant masters.
Power on! Fuck ConEd anyway! Fucking fucktards! I hope Bloomberg calls them incompetent idiots like every other goddamn mayor in history.
Right now, I kind of doubt that the system was under all that much strain. Compared to other weeks, this week was cool, like 80s-low 90s. I'm sure there were a buttload of ACs runnning, but normally when you have this kind of power failure it's because of a SERIOUSLY overstrained system, like in '77 you have serial killers and a deadly heat wave, so EVERYBODY was inside with the AC on.
My bet is that this'll turn out to be a fuckup somewhere in upstate NY. Some plant that got shut down badly, started putting out unstable current, something like that. The reason it spread has to be the 40s anachronism that is Niagra-Mohawk, whatever the cause. That's a problem for why you say, but the system is miraculously stable outside of a emergency situation. The thing is, it's delivering power from a hundred thousand tiny deregulated plants all over the place, which I bet it's still assuming are heavily regulated and completely coordinated with each other. It's not necissarially deregulation's fault, but I'm betting no matter what the root cause, deregulation had some impact on the scope or duration of the whole thing.
Once again, fuck ConEd. Fuck them up their stupid asses.
Yeah, well "minor" as in massive looting and arson instead of blackouts in Canada. The 65 outage probably cost about a tenth of the 77 one, if you put it all together.
Also quote from the trailer:
"Split!"
For an engineering company, that place has some serious problems with death-pipe boobytraps in their drainage system.
"Are you sure we really need that forhead-height pipe embedded in the ceiling?"
"Oh, yeah, see, if somebody dumps, like, a newspaper or something down there, it'll get all caught up on that."
"Could we have it spray cold steam like those other ones?"
"No, that would break up the clog."
Yah, I was dissapointed when I found out that doesn't really work. The flaming pigeons probably were too.
See, that I would pay for. Fucking people.
I know, what the hell's with the headlines on this story? They cloned human stem cells using rabbit cell-goo, they didn't make "rabbit-human" hybrids.
To clone human stem cells:
1) Find woman to let you jam a needle into her ovary
2) Stick random human cell nucleus in egg you sucked out
3) ???
4) Stem Cells!!
To clone human stem cells in China:
1) Look for woman to let you jam a needle into her ovary
2) Get kicked in the nads
3) Buy rabbits
4) Jam a needle in rabbit ovary
5) Stick random human cell nucleus in egg you sucked out
6) ???
7) Stem Cells!!
8) Claim to have created rabbit-babies
9) Wait for science-illiterate newsmen to promote your stock symbol on TV
10) Profit!!
What a bunch of fuckholes. Seriously, when the best scientific information in your article's coming from the Vatican, I think you're in trouble.
'Yeah, but are the alternatives any better?'
Why yes, yes they are. All of them. Even Ross Perot and his little vegan hippie clone.
In 1999, electricity cost the state $7.4 billion, in 2000, $32 billion, and in 2001 it will be $65 billion, according to George Brown of the PUC (LA Times, April 9). (from here)
Seems reasonable to me.
McVeigh had a target. The FBI. It's not a great target, but it's a target. Just because somebody's goal is stupid doesn't mean they didn't have one. That "HE WAS EVILL TRYING TO KILL PEOPLE!11!!!" logic just makes it harder to fix anything. It's easier to deal with being a victim if you pretend it was random and there was nothing anyone could do, so we buy into the fantasy even when there's a nicely defined, if wrong, justification for it sitting right there.
This is why the 9-11 investigation isn't getting anywhere. Everybody's deathly afraid of trying to figure out what the hell the terrorists were thinking because everybody knows that the moment you start down that road you'll be gang-raped by hoards of idiots who are terrified about the possibility that moral framework they're been handed without explaination might not be the right one after all. It's scary to have someone tell you that both you and Mohammed Atta have equal reason to believe you're in the right, namely, "somebody told me so."
They had something to go back to. Some bits of the revolutionary army did do something a lot like the CIAs army has. They just had a nice frontier full of injuns to keep them out of the way of the rest of us. VC had a nice Soviet-backed dictatorship (as opposed to Afghanistan's illiterate hick-led anarchy) to keep them under control. Afghanistan had heroin and Osama. And for once, growing drugs wasn't the easiest money-making opportunity around.
He is making a generalization, since the Arabs that came up to fight in Afghanistan are pretty key in how things turned out, but he's still right about the important precondition to everything. The Arabs (Osama, mainly, but not just him) just took the role that the mafia usually does in places where you have a dissolved military. They still needed the big pool of displaced young men the CIA created.
Bullshit. Nation that doesn't want to feed its own army will feed foreign one.
Hey, it's Warhawk Charlie Chan!
Blaming Perry for Perl Harbor is pretty stupid. I guess you could argue that without the trade (or exploitation, whichever you prefer) he brought and the ionization of the public against the Shogun that he inspired (nobody likes the warlord that lets in the puffy foreigner looking for child labor) that Japan wouldn't have been capable of a WWII-level war effort, but that's a strech.
A better idea would be to blame Teddy Roosevelt for royally screwing the poor bastards when they called him in to negotiate an end to their war with Russia. The war that they were winning until Roosevelt came in and gave Russia all the resource-rich mainland that they went looking for again when the Nazis came knocking. Or you could blame the racist Californians for blocking any Japanese immigrants and whipping up some nice popular hatred for Americans in Japan. Or the way the feds backed up California by randomly cutting off desperately-needed oil and raw material shipments (which TR's negotiating skills, perhaps intentionally, made necessary)every once and awhile.
Also, the Germans would still be speaking German no matter what Moscow did. Maybe with more "comrade"s, but still German. I always love "we'd be speaking..." 'cause it's almost never true. Besides the Romans, not too many people try and teach you stuff after conquering you. I guess that's one good thing about using POWs as slaves, you can get away with teaching hovel-dwelling Frenchmen enough not to take $1 a day from Nike without undermining your economy.
No, no, he's right, that's why you always put the wings on upside-down.