Didn't take long for that to get modded down. Cognitive dissonance too much for you?:)
Oh, and the U.S. Military is the biggest user of fossil fuels in the nation, and the biggest polluter too. Maybe if this bureaucrat thinks climate change is such a big threat he can start by not wasting 395,000 barrels of oil per day on the useless wars he's prosecuting in the name of "national security."
Of course the outcome will be the same. Plenty of new justifications for eliminating freedoms, just different ones and different excuses (e.g., stealing more of your property by taxing you for your "carbon footprint"). And it'll be a bunch of Blue State contractors cleaning up on this (e.g., "green energy" producers).
When anyone who isn't a climate change "expert" voices skepticism on climate change, all the believers pile on, outraged, about how the person isn't qualified to be making such statements, how they're abusing their position/authority to sound like they know what they're talking about, &c.. (Remember Bjorn Lomburg?) So I'm sure we'll see the global-warmers express similar outrage about this, right?
And... "national security threat"? This is the same government agency that thinks that bearded malcontents hiding out in desert caves is a "national security threat." This is the same agency that spent decades fighting the "national security threat" posed by tiny little countries like Vietnam and Cuba going communist. I seem to remember an awful lot of progressives dismissing the lunacy of the War on Terror and the Cold War. So I'm sure they'll dismiss and mock this latest attempt by the U.S. military to imagine or invent new threats, right?
In technical parlance, it's probably an "administrative rule" and if it's being put forth by a public entity as a binding policy, it's just as susceptible to a lawsuit as an actual law.
Act like a loudmouth ter'ist on Internet message boards until the FBI comes along and tries to entice you into doing it for real. Act reluctant until they offer you a quarter million dollars. Then take the cash... and then back out.
If the "terrorists" threaten to retaliate for taking their cash without going through with the deed... you can always turn them into the FBI.:)
...are you going to take the five minutes to code in support for this thirteen-year-old technology? Or do you think âoebugs like thisâ(TM) are acceptable on a purportedly professional-looking website?
I should've read the article before I posted. The actual quote in the article is even more outrageous:
Nevertheless, environmentalists sounded the alarm on SPICE as soon as they caught wind of it last year. Quite aside from geoengineering's potential for unintended consequences â" such as accidentally shifting rainfall patterns and triggering droughts â" there is a moral hazard to such work, argues Pat Mooney, executive director of the ETC Group, an environmental organization based in Ottawa, Canada. With climate negotiations stalled around the world, the very presence of such an experiment may make politicians think that there's a way to wriggle out of emissions caps. âoeIt will be an easy way for governments to sidestep their obligations,â Mooney says.
Can you imagine what this guy would say if scientists discovered a way to eliminate crime? "But that would allow governments to sidestep their obligation to imprison and execute criminals!" "Eliminating crime without punishing people creates a 'moral hazard'!"
Geoengineering: could lessen the effects of climate change or undermine the political will to fight it.
In other words, this research will provide a solution to climate change that doesn't involve passing new laws and taxes, regulating people's lives, stealing their property, and so on. This line of inquiry is dangerous because it undermines what "climate change" advocates are really up to.
So what exactly is the story here? People are surprised that they can't get the same farm yields when not using chemicals that were specifically introduced to produce such higher farm yields?
In other news, I'm surprised I can't light a darkened room without actually using a light source.
Recent discoveries of planets similar to Earth in size and proximity to the planets' respective suns have sparked scientific and public excitement about the possibility of also finding Earth-like life on those worlds.
But Princeton University researchers have found that the expectation that life---from bacteria to sentient beings---has or will develop on other planets as on Earth might be based more on optimism than scientific evidence.
Wow, this sounds like just what scientists were saying about the likelihood of discovering extrasolar planets themselves... before a bunch were discovered. And then I remember a flurry of stories full of similar nay-saying, but just about the idea of discovering Earth-sized planets. Until they discovered some of those, too.
This is nothing new, and nothing unique to Stanford. Here's a page from history:
Three decades later at the University of Chicago, William Rainey Harper, former Chautauqua wizard, began a revolution that would change the face of American university education....
Harper, following the blueprint suggested by Andrew Carnegie in his powerful "Gospel of Wealth" essays, said the United States should work toward a unified scheme of education, organized vertically from kindergarten through university, horizontally through voluntary association of colleges, all supplemented by university extension courses available to everyone. Harper wrote in 1902:
The field of education is at the present time in an extremely disorganized condition. But the forces are already in existence [to change that]. Order will be secured and a great new system established, which may be designated "The American System." The important steps to be taken in working out such a system are coordination, specialization and association.
Harper and his backers regarded education purely as a commodity. Thorstein Veblen describes Harperâ(TM)s revolution this way:
The underlying business-like presumption accordingly appears to be that learning is a merchantable commodity, to be produced on a piece-rate plan, rated, bought and sold by standard units, measured, counted, and reduced to staple equivalence by impersonal, mechanical tests.
Harper believed modern business enterprise represented the highest and best type of human productive activity.
(That page is a chapter in a much larger book about the modern education system, by the way, which is well worth a read in its entirety.)
When it's being used as an excuse to pre-emptively give a government agency more power, yes. Isn't it bad enough that, typically, they wait for a crisis to happen before exploiting it? Now you're all ready to give them more power merely because of theorized or imagined crises?
Get out of the way so private enterprises with more motivation and ambition can take over? What is NASA nowadays other than a jobs project for bureaucrats, a conduit to funnel millions of dollars into "private" defense contractors, and a massive barrier to real space exploration and advancement?
Although there has not yet been a high-profile case of such an attack
In other words, a literal "solution in search of a problem." And an excuse to give an already corrupt and counterproductive government agency more power.
Thank you, NASA, for spending the past thirty-odd years engaging in such banal, unambitious projects and thus setting the bar so low that an endeavor like this is now regarded as some sort of "laughable" pie-in-the-sky effort.
A couple years ago we had a bill up in New Hampshire to expand the State's "administrative subpoena" power from just telephone records to ISP records. (The law currently allows the Attorney General's Office, without a warrant, to subpoena records of when calls were made, who made them, and to whom. This bill would have allowed IP records to be added to that list.)
At the hearing, Comcast's lobbyist was the main speaker in favor of this bill.
If not our government, will anyone fund these immense projects or will physics slowly grind to a halt due to fiscal constraints?
Or, they can try to find some other way to do this research that doesn't involve such immense construction. But without establishing this alarmist false dichotomy, Mr. Weinberg won't be able to scare us into giving him more money.
Slashdot Mirror
Didn't take long for that to get modded down. Cognitive dissonance too much for you? :)
Oh, and the U.S. Military is the biggest user of fossil fuels in the nation, and the biggest polluter too. Maybe if this bureaucrat thinks climate change is such a big threat he can start by not wasting 395,000 barrels of oil per day on the useless wars he's prosecuting in the name of "national security."
Of course the outcome will be the same. Plenty of new justifications for eliminating freedoms, just different ones and different excuses (e.g., stealing more of your property by taxing you for your "carbon footprint"). And it'll be a bunch of Blue State contractors cleaning up on this (e.g., "green energy" producers).
When anyone who isn't a climate change "expert" voices skepticism on climate change, all the believers pile on, outraged, about how the person isn't qualified to be making such statements, how they're abusing their position/authority to sound like they know what they're talking about, &c.. (Remember Bjorn Lomburg?) So I'm sure we'll see the global-warmers express similar outrage about this, right?
And... "national security threat"? This is the same government agency that thinks that bearded malcontents hiding out in desert caves is a "national security threat." This is the same agency that spent decades fighting the "national security threat" posed by tiny little countries like Vietnam and Cuba going communist. I seem to remember an awful lot of progressives dismissing the lunacy of the War on Terror and the Cold War. So I'm sure they'll dismiss and mock this latest attempt by the U.S. military to imagine or invent new threats, right?
Right?
In technical parlance, it's probably an "administrative rule" and if it's being put forth by a public entity as a binding policy, it's just as susceptible to a lawsuit as an actual law.
Lots of grounds for a nice, expensive lawsuit here. Didn't another state just overturn a law like this?
Or maybe it's the climate change adherents' "bastions" that are crumbling.
Which has what to do with the U.S. Government?
Heh, now there's an idea.
Act like a loudmouth ter'ist on Internet message boards until the FBI comes along and tries to entice you into doing it for real. Act reluctant until they offer you a quarter million dollars. Then take the cash... and then back out.
If the "terrorists" threaten to retaliate for taking their cash without going through with the deed... you can always turn them into the FBI. :)
...are you going to take the five minutes to code in support for this thirteen-year-old technology? Or do you think âoebugs like thisâ(TM) are acceptable on a purportedly professional-looking website?
Fortunately not all states' laws are the same. New Hampshire has one of the strongest public employee freedom of expression statutes in the country.
I should've read the article before I posted. The actual quote in the article is even more outrageous:
Can you imagine what this guy would say if scientists discovered a way to eliminate crime? "But that would allow governments to sidestep their obligation to imprison and execute criminals!" "Eliminating crime without punishing people creates a 'moral hazard'!"
In other words, this research will provide a solution to climate change that doesn't involve passing new laws and taxes, regulating people's lives, stealing their property, and so on. This line of inquiry is dangerous because it undermines what "climate change" advocates are really up to.
So what exactly is the story here? People are surprised that they can't get the same farm yields when not using chemicals that were specifically introduced to produce such higher farm yields?
In other news, I'm surprised I can't light a darkened room without actually using a light source.
...and then find it newsworthy when they try to make the candle as bright as the sun, and can't.
Wow, this sounds like just what scientists were saying about the likelihood of discovering extrasolar planets themselves... before a bunch were discovered. And then I remember a flurry of stories full of similar nay-saying, but just about the idea of discovering Earth-sized planets. Until they discovered some of those, too.
This is nothing new, and nothing unique to Stanford. Here's a page from history:
(That page is a chapter in a much larger book about the modern education system, by the way, which is well worth a read in its entirety.)
When it's being used as an excuse to pre-emptively give a government agency more power, yes. Isn't it bad enough that, typically, they wait for a crisis to happen before exploiting it? Now you're all ready to give them more power merely because of theorized or imagined crises?
NASA, like all bureaucracies, has grown to serve only one purpose: Provide safe, secure jobs to bureaucrats.
Get out of the way so private enterprises with more motivation and ambition can take over? What is NASA nowadays other than a jobs project for bureaucrats, a conduit to funnel millions of dollars into "private" defense contractors, and a massive barrier to real space exploration and advancement?
In other words, a literal "solution in search of a problem." And an excuse to give an already corrupt and counterproductive government agency more power.
Thank you, NASA, for spending the past thirty-odd years engaging in such banal, unambitious projects and thus setting the bar so low that an endeavor like this is now regarded as some sort of "laughable" pie-in-the-sky effort.
A couple years ago we had a bill up in New Hampshire to expand the State's "administrative subpoena" power from just telephone records to ISP records. (The law currently allows the Attorney General's Office, without a warrant, to subpoena records of when calls were made, who made them, and to whom. This bill would have allowed IP records to be added to that list.)
At the hearing, Comcast's lobbyist was the main speaker in favor of this bill.
DHS?
Or, they can try to find some other way to do this research that doesn't involve such immense construction. But without establishing this alarmist false dichotomy, Mr. Weinberg won't be able to scare us into giving him more money.
Hopefully those "choice words" are only the beginning, and turn into an expensive lawsuit against the U.S. Government.