How dare the Iranian gov't of the 1950s try and nationalize the oil under their land that rightfully belonged to British Petroleum! Those evil people weren't respecting the rule of law, the same way Chinese people refused to respect the British right to sell them opium!
Furthermore, we all know the great democracies of the USA and Britain never stole any land or resources from any other people (remember how the Cherokee left Georgia because they new the African slave volunteers needed a new home?), which of course grants them the right to intervene in other, inferior democracies.
Thank god we have people like you to clarify our rights.
"Modern Perl" is, as I understand it, basically Perl 5 (preferably 5.10+) using more modern syntax and best of breed CPAN modules. I believe the book "Best Perl Practices" started the ball rolling, and the Moose object system is really excellent.
The blog modernperlbooks.com goes into a lot more detail into what constitutes "Modern Perl".
For Windows you might want to checkout "Strawberry Perl" which at least makes getting Perl and a big chunk of CPAN a lot easier.
I strongly second this, and mention frameworks like Catalyst and Mojo. I'd also mention PSGI/Plack middleware as a having a lot to offer. The Padre IDE is not too bad either.
The U.S. has been an aggressive, expansionist power since its inception. That's what the Monroe Doctrine, Manifest Destiny, the Mexican War, annexation of Hawaii, the Spanish American war, interventions in Haiti, etc. were all about. All this precedes the Russian revolution by many years. Even if there had been no Soviet Union, if the military intervention by the US, UK, France, etc. of 1918 had succeeded, there would have been anti-colonial and socialist movements all over the world, and the UK, US, etc. would have had their "hamfisted" interventions. Containment just means containment of popular struggles by backing corrupt, authoritarian regimes. To some extent the USSR aided those movements (Vietnam) but also hindered them (Algeria).
Now that the USSR is gone the US is still in "containment" mode with anybody that threatens its perceived economic or political interests. So your analysis of the reasons for "containment" seem completely inverted. If anything, the USSR and its nuclear arsenal helped to contain the worst aggression of the colonial powers and the rising USA (e.g. the US didn't nuke China and Vietnam).
I think it's fairly obvious that plants don't promote semi-feudalism; but anyone with a casual knowlegde of plantation agriculture in the Americas knows that such forms of agriculture are both quite profitable and also cause rural underdevelopment and slave-like conditions. The U.S. is full of "individual rights" and you stil find plenty of slave-like conditions among the migrant workers cutting cane in Florida.
Just think, if it weren't for capitalism and intellectual property rights, there'd be no Homer, no Sophocles, no Aristotle, no Confucius, no Buddha, no Leonardo, no Jesus,....
Oddly, it appears that humans are good at making culture without payment and property rights.
In the ancient world, books were scrolls, which avoided the complexity and expense of bookbinding. With flexible e-paper, I suspect the scroll will return to its rightful place as the preferred format for printed matter, since you'll only need one large scroll to display anything every printed.
Every war of aggression is masked as defense -- just look at the Nazis. Israel clearly started wars in 1956, 1967, and the various invasions of Lebanon. I carried out widespread ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948, which continue to this day.
As to why Arab governments don't buy land for displaced Palestinians, a better question is why don't they buy land for Palestinians in Israel? Oh, that's right, Arabs can't buy land in the state of Israel, only Jews can. Funny how the right-wing types are all pro-free market, except for when they're not.
Anyone who understands the basics of history and demographics knows that Israel has no long-term future. Israeli Jews have a lower birthrate than Israeli Arabs, as well as the surrounding countries. The 2006 Lebanon war showed that Israel's infantry is now less effective than Hezbollah's militia. Flooding the region with U.S. dollars and weapons just delays the inevitable. It would have been more practical to turn Long Island into a Jewish homeland after 1945. Instead we're stuck with a political class that will support Israel no matter what the cost to the U.S. taxpayer or no matter how many dead Arabs. What a waste.
something like "how will ramming NATO up Russia's ass affect the ISS?". Oh, right, that might suggest that U.S. policy is not based on pure, moral high-mindedness.
You conveniently forget that the Taliban were a byproduct of Carter and Reagan's policies of supporting Islamic fundamentalists as a counterweight to the USSR, and recruiting Saudia Arabia and Pakistan to organize the dirty work. To act like U.S. policy today is guided by disinterested humanitarianism is an obvious distortion of reality.
Why don't you look at Catalyst? It's a Perl-based framework loosely based on Rails, only with a lot more choice (e.g. CPAN).
Or look at CGI::Application for a simple, object-oriented framework that doesn't get in the way.
Iran has gas, India needs gas, and there was a pipeline deal from Iran to India through Pakistan, which pretty muched got nixed because of U.S. pressure.
Russia has historically strong ties with India and still sells it a lot of weaponry. With the rise of a the Shanghai Cooperation Organization as an emerging military alliance between Russia, China, various Central Asian countries, and now Iran, India has to choose whether to ally with her neighbors or the U.S. The stakes are pretty high geopolitically.
Like the previous deals on nuclear power, this is an attempt to bribe India away from getting too friendly with China and Iran, and buying U.S. arms instead of Russian. Science has nothing to do with it.
Philosophy is indispensible to a deep understanding of science and logic. You are merely being pragmatic without acknowledging the philosophy behind pragmatism.
Self-appointed anonymous individuals -- whistleblowers to the rest of us -- are an absolutely critical source of information for the public in the face of secretive bureacracies. The Pentagon Papers which showed the clear pattern of government lying over Vietnam, or the Watergate leaks on the abuse of presidential power, are two obviously important examples of why leaking secrets are vital to political liberty and democracy. It's foolishly naive to believe that what appointed officials think should be the last word on state secrets.
Many Army leaders had similar views. Author Norman Cousins writes of Gen. Douglas MacArthur:
"[H]e saw no military justification for the dropping of the bomb. The war might have ended weeks earlier, he said, if the United States had agreed, as it later did anyway, to the retention of the institution of the emperor."[6]
Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, the supreme commander of the Allied Forces in Europe, was also against the bomb. Eisenhower biographer Stephen Ambrose writes:
"There was one additional matter on which Eisenhower gave Truman advice that was ignored. It concerned the use of the atomic bomb. Eisenhower first heard of the bomb during the Potsdam Conference; from that moment on, until his death, it occupied, along with the Russians, a central position in his thinking....
"When [Secretary of War] Stimson said the United States proposed to use the bomb against Japan, Eisenhower voiced '... grave misgivings....' Three days later, on July 20, Eisenhower flew to Berlin, where he met with Truman and his principal advisors. Again Eisenhower recommended against using the bomb, and again was ignored."[7]
These are a few of the many quotes in Alperovitz from military leaders who thought the bomb's use on Japan unnecessary and/or immoral.
I grew up in the U.S., briefly flirted with libertarianism as a teenager, and gradually moved left and became a Marxist, which I think provides a much better explanantion of today's world than the market fetishism of libertarianism and neoliberalism can.
As far as the connection between being a nerd and being a libertarian goes, I think that's mostly a U.S. phenomenon. Certainly before WWII, it was very common for engineers and scientists to be socialists and communists. With the Cold War that changed, and in the U.S. with the endless propaganda about freedom and markets, it's not surprising that libertariansm and the fetishization of markets should capture the imagination of aspiring technocrats.
I've met many scientists and engineers from places like India and Latin America who are very sympathetic to Marxism and socialist ideas. As far as I can see libertarianism as a meaningful political trend is mostly confined to the United States.
This is a good example of why the free market fundamentalists are so often wrong. Most soaps are anti-bacterial because of marketing hype which causes consumers to prefer buying them, when the long term consequences are clear. It's clearly in the public interest to ban or tax or otherwise de-insentivize the purchase of such soaps, but that would violate the holy precepts of the free market.
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How dare the Iranian gov't of the 1950s try and nationalize the oil under their land that rightfully belonged to British Petroleum! Those evil people weren't respecting the rule of law, the same way Chinese people refused to respect the British right to sell them opium!
Furthermore, we all know the great democracies of the USA and Britain never stole any land or resources from any other people (remember how the Cherokee left Georgia because they new the African slave volunteers needed a new home?), which of course grants them the right to intervene in other, inferior democracies.
Thank god we have people like you to clarify our rights.
There's a good video of a talk by public school teacher on this subject which is worth watching.
"Modern Perl" is, as I understand it, basically Perl 5 (preferably 5.10+) using more modern syntax and best of breed CPAN modules. I believe the book "Best Perl Practices" started the ball rolling, and the Moose object system is really excellent.
The blog modernperlbooks.com goes into a lot more detail into what constitutes "Modern Perl".
For Windows you might want to checkout "Strawberry Perl" which at least makes getting Perl and a big chunk of CPAN a lot easier.
I strongly second this, and mention frameworks like Catalyst and Mojo. I'd also mention PSGI/Plack middleware as a having a lot to offer. The Padre IDE is not too bad either.
Because my tax dollars are paying for those military murders, not the insurgents'.
Now that the USSR is gone the US is still in "containment" mode with anybody that threatens its perceived economic or political interests. So your analysis of the reasons for "containment" seem completely inverted. If anything, the USSR and its nuclear arsenal helped to contain the worst aggression of the colonial powers and the rising USA (e.g. the US didn't nuke China and Vietnam).
I think it's fairly obvious that plants don't promote semi-feudalism; but anyone with a casual knowlegde of plantation agriculture in the Americas knows that such forms of agriculture are both quite profitable and also cause rural underdevelopment and slave-like conditions. The U.S. is full of "individual rights" and you stil find plenty of slave-like conditions among the migrant workers cutting cane in Florida.
Here's an article from the Nation that questions some of Vassiliev's conclusions on the Hiss case
Just think, if it weren't for capitalism and intellectual property rights, there'd be no Homer, no Sophocles, no Aristotle, no Confucius, no Buddha, no Leonardo, no Jesus, ....
Oddly, it appears that humans are good at making culture without payment and property rights.
In the ancient world, books were scrolls, which avoided the complexity and expense of bookbinding. With flexible e-paper, I suspect the scroll will return to its rightful place as the preferred format for printed matter, since you'll only need one large scroll to display anything every printed.
Every war of aggression is masked as defense -- just look at the Nazis. Israel clearly started wars in 1956, 1967, and the various invasions of Lebanon. I carried out widespread ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948, which continue to this day.
As to why Arab governments don't buy land for displaced Palestinians, a better question is why don't they buy land for Palestinians in Israel? Oh, that's right, Arabs can't buy land in the state of Israel, only Jews can. Funny how the right-wing types are all pro-free market, except for when they're not.
Anyone who understands the basics of history and demographics knows that Israel has no long-term future. Israeli Jews have a lower birthrate than Israeli Arabs, as well as the surrounding countries. The 2006 Lebanon war showed that Israel's infantry is now less effective than Hezbollah's militia. Flooding the region with U.S. dollars and weapons just delays the inevitable. It would have been more practical to turn Long Island into a Jewish homeland after 1945. Instead we're stuck with a political class that will support Israel no matter what the cost to the U.S. taxpayer or no matter how many dead Arabs. What a waste.
something like "how will ramming NATO up Russia's ass affect the ISS?". Oh, right, that might suggest that U.S. policy is not based on pure, moral high-mindedness.
You conveniently forget that the Taliban were a byproduct of Carter and Reagan's policies of supporting Islamic fundamentalists as a counterweight to the USSR, and recruiting Saudia Arabia and Pakistan to organize the dirty work. To act like U.S. policy today is guided by disinterested humanitarianism is an obvious distortion of reality.
Why don't you look at Catalyst? It's a Perl-based framework loosely based on Rails, only with a lot more choice (e.g. CPAN). Or look at CGI::Application for a simple, object-oriented framework that doesn't get in the way.
Iran has gas, India needs gas, and there was a pipeline deal from Iran to India through Pakistan, which pretty muched got nixed because of U.S. pressure.
Russia has historically strong ties with India and still sells it a lot of weaponry. With the rise of a the Shanghai Cooperation Organization as an emerging military alliance between Russia, China, various Central Asian countries, and now Iran, India has to choose whether to ally with her neighbors or the U.S. The stakes are pretty high geopolitically.
Like the previous deals on nuclear power, this is an attempt to bribe India away from getting too friendly with China and Iran, and buying U.S. arms instead of Russian. Science has nothing to do with it.
Philosophy is indispensible to a deep understanding of science and logic. You are merely being pragmatic without acknowledging the philosophy behind pragmatism.
So in other words, we send them paper and they send us usable goods. And this makes the U.S. some kind of victim?
Self-appointed anonymous individuals -- whistleblowers to the rest of us -- are an absolutely critical source of information for the public in the face of secretive bureacracies. The Pentagon Papers which showed the clear pattern of government lying over Vietnam, or the Watergate leaks on the abuse of presidential power, are two obviously important examples of why leaking secrets are vital to political liberty and democracy. It's foolishly naive to believe that what appointed officials think should be the last word on state secrets.
Interesting that so many prominent American military leaders at the time didn't agree with your views on the atomic bombs:
From http://www.antiwar.com/henderson/?articleid=9443
Many Army leaders had similar views. Author Norman Cousins writes of Gen. Douglas MacArthur:
"[H]e saw no military justification for the dropping of the bomb. The war might have ended weeks earlier, he said, if the United States had agreed, as it later did anyway, to the retention of the institution of the emperor."[6]
Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, the supreme commander of the Allied Forces in Europe, was also against the bomb. Eisenhower biographer Stephen Ambrose writes:
"There was one additional matter on which Eisenhower gave Truman advice that was ignored. It concerned the use of the atomic bomb. Eisenhower first heard of the bomb during the Potsdam Conference; from that moment on, until his death, it occupied, along with the Russians, a central position in his thinking. ...
"When [Secretary of War] Stimson said the United States proposed to use the bomb against Japan, Eisenhower voiced '... grave misgivings....' Three days later, on July 20, Eisenhower flew to Berlin, where he met with Truman and his principal advisors. Again Eisenhower recommended against using the bomb, and again was ignored."[7]
These are a few of the many quotes in Alperovitz from military leaders who thought the bomb's use on Japan unnecessary and/or immoral.
Peak oil?
What, because being banned from Wikipedia edits is the best criteria for judging someone's scientific credentials?
... had been hit by a small asteroid instead of planes. We'd be halfway to Mars by now.
I grew up in the U.S., briefly flirted with libertarianism as a teenager, and gradually moved left and became a Marxist, which I think provides a much better explanantion of today's world than the market fetishism of libertarianism and neoliberalism can.
As far as the connection between being a nerd and being a libertarian goes, I think that's mostly a U.S. phenomenon. Certainly before WWII, it was very common for engineers and scientists to be socialists and communists. With the Cold War that changed, and in the U.S. with the endless propaganda about freedom and markets, it's not surprising that libertariansm and the fetishization of markets should capture the imagination of aspiring technocrats.
I've met many scientists and engineers from places like India and Latin America who are very sympathetic to Marxism and socialist ideas. As far as I can see libertarianism as a meaningful political trend is mostly confined to the United States.
This is a good example of why the free market fundamentalists are so often wrong. Most soaps are anti-bacterial because of marketing hype which causes consumers to prefer buying them, when the long term consequences are clear. It's clearly in the public interest to ban or tax or otherwise de-insentivize the purchase of such soaps, but that would violate the holy precepts of the free market.