Do we need to bomb Iraq back to the stone age in order to defend Alaska? Do we need to bomb Afghanistan back to the stone age in order to defend Alaska? Do we need to invade Libya in order to defend Alaska? Do we need to have soldiers in over 1000 military bases in countries around the world, most of who don't want us there, to defend Alaska, Hawaii, and the continental US from invasion?
No. That's what I mean by WASTE. The military, to fulfill its actual, Constitutionally mandated role of protecting the borders of the US against actual enemies, needs less than 10% of the toys they have WASTED taxpayer money on since WW2.
Except that people (presumably Americans) get *paid* to make (from mining the ore to writing the software) those Tomahawks. That money goes into the economy.
Except that the "pay", labor, is an infinitesimal fraction of the "cost" of those Tomahawks. And the material resources placed into them are destroyed, rarely recovered. Just as the lives that they take are unrecoverable, and the things that they are used to destroy - which usually amounts to a village, house, or the water supply for the immediate region - then cost even MORE material resources to restore.
Wasted resources. Bombing someone = wasted resources. Fired bullets = wasted resources. Crashed planes, fuel, all the rest = wasted resources we're not going to get back.
Military spending is almost ALL wasted resources. You think 3500 Tomahawk missiles, a cost ot $2.6 Billion, is anything but wasted resources? And that's JUST the Tomahawks, not all the bombs and missiles (most of which cost significantly more).
The big part is that a lot of the "savings" on a Hybrid assume you are driving it like a Hybrid should be.
Rather like all cars. They advertise a certain fuel efficiency, driven properly. Most people gun the accelerator off every stop, try to do 80 in a 55 zone down the freeway, and do other things that reduce their fuel efficiency. Meanwhile, you get people who do things like this that can squeeze a lot more than the "normal" fuel efficiency out of even a standard vehicle.
The biggest thing with Hybrids is that they are designed to invert the normal efficiency ideas. Usually, you get a lot more efficiency driving a steady rate on the freeway. It's one reason they list dual "city/highway" mileage targets on the sales brochures. With a hybrid, that's not the case, because a lot of the efficiency gains have to do with recapturing energy from stop-and-start driving.
From TFS: "His argument is that in order to sell people on hybrid cars, automakers have emphasized the energy efficiency of hybrids in ideal conditions and failed to tell people that in most ordinary driving conditions they will not come close to meeting the numbers given."
We could easily rewrite as follows: "His argument is that in order to sell people on compact cars, automakers have emphasized the energy efficiency of compacts in ideal conditions and failed to tell people that in most ordinary driving conditions they will not come close to meeting the numbers given."
TL:DR version: if you drive a Hybrid like a fucking sports car, you'll get sports car fuel efficiency. If you drive a Hybrid long distances on the highway, guess what, you'll get the raw gas mileage of the gas engine only minus whatever it's wasting on air conditioning and electrical generation.
Think about the profits possible to the first company that builds an interstellar ship... it will likely be the culmination of thousands of other advancements along the way, the kind that the private sector is very good at making
What profits? It's going to go into space and never come back. Exploration of near space wasn't "profitable" at the time. Not a dime of "profit" was made by any company in going to the moon.
All the "Profits" from space exploration have been from companies being subsidized far beyond 100% of cost on the R&D that went into developing what space travel we have now.
Was it worth it? Hell Fucking Yes. But if it had been left to "companies" and "private enterprise", none of it would ever have happened. The private sector takes all the things that were necessary to land on the moon, and says "where's the ROI on that? Fuck this, let's put the money into developing another muscle car or a pill to make men have 6-hour erections and multiple orgasms."
NASA is responsible for an incredible number of things you know and take for granted today. None of which would exist without NASA, because the "private sector" would never have come close to putting in the money to do the R&D.
2011 military budget, actually $683 Billion. I took off personnel ($154 billion) and rounded down to the nearest $100 billion since SOME maintenance of bases, equipment, and so on would be necessary. The rest? Oh yeah, first we WASTE money bombing someone back to the stone age, then we WASTE more money putting a military base in their country and WASTE more money sending "foreign aid" to rebuild the place we just WASTED money bombing the shit out of.
Welfare, medicare, SS, Education $2.7 Trillion - but unlike the military that actually cycles right back into the economy. Money spent on welfare goes straight to food and housing for actual humans. Money spent on medicare goes to the medical care of actual humans. Social Security goes into food and housing for elderly humans.
Education goes into raising the next generation of humans to be (hopefully) functioning members of society - though in your case it appears not to have worked. Oh and yeah, it pays mostly for the money to pay the teachers to teach the kids (though I personally would say fuck high school/ college sports, especially the basketball and football programs that are the government wasting a fucking ton of money subsidizing the hell out of the NBA and NFL by running their minor leagues for them).
As for the Wall Street bailouts, I agree. Put all that money to NASA instead and we'd be far better off than if it were in bankers' pockets.
doing things like changing it so they get a million points
Cool, they figured out how the code handles scoring!
changing it so their character looks like a penis
So sweet - they not only identified how the sprites are stored, they created their own sprite and inserted it correctly into the game's code!
changing it so that there are a million things on screen
And then they get to watch what happens as the computer tries to render it - plus they actually changed the engine to do this.
I spent hours with a teenager who was working under me for his work experience (two weeks in a "real" job while they are still at school) explaining how to program and the most interesting thing was that they couldn't see how, e.g., 3D, sound, joysticks, etc. could be thought of in the same way as the numbers they manipulated in a basic dice game. Once they realised that everything from networking to 3D to AI to physics was just a matter of manipulating numbers, the "magic trick" of their console games was revealed and they wanted to replicate them.
This was why we used to have "Beginner's Languages" like BASIC. Sure, it was kludgy, and there were things that were hard to do. But it gave a strong framework for understanding how basic tenets of programming - loops, jumps, switch cases, comparisons - worked. Coding an ASCII slot machine in BASIC may sound stupid to some geek who's been coding for 20 years, but it is essential for learners to start with the basics and work their way on up from there - kind of like having training wheels on a bicycle.
The private sector STILL can't get a man into space. If it had been left to the private sector "from day one", the US would never have had anyone try, because the private sector never would have put forth the R&D money to get anything done.
Scaling back NASA is a result of small-minded fools from the right wing who scream "cut cut cut everything we like yeah military!!!" They want to kill PBS, they want to kill NASA, they call numerous things "government waste", but they never want to admit that the biggest waste of government money is sending the US military everywhere to be the world's policeman, wasting $500 billion a year to invade countries, set up military bases, and bomb the fuck out of places where nobody wants us.
PBS gets $422 million currently. That is 0.084 PERCENT of what we waste on the military. NASA's annual budget is only $19 billion in 2011. And for that you get all this stuff that you fucking take for granted.
We should say fuck the military, stop buying them new toys, and spend the money on NASA instead. We'd be to Mars in 5 years if we budgeted it.
Wait, so Ahmadamnutjob saying he wants to wipe out the Jews, talking about "end times" of Islam vs The World in some crazed holy war, sending Iranian military to poke and prod US ships in the gulf... is all a "US Plot"?
You probably need a new tinfoil hat, yours is leaking:P
But what would happen if something like the Occupy movement really started to gain ground and actually started shutting down cities and firebombing corporate HQ's?
Why would they have to shut down cities or firebomb corporate HQ's?
The treatment of "Occupiers" in public parks (or pseudo, "it's a park on private property that is required to be available to the public 24/7 by terms of agreement with the city" bullshit) was a good indication of how it goes down.
Step 2 has been SOPA.
Last time we had a movement like OWS, they were the Hoovervilles and the Bonus Army, and just like today, the Republican response (courtesy of Herbert Hoover) was to send in troops to beat them up.
The majority of Iranians may "dislike" their current theocratic regime, when it stops them from doing perfectly normal, human, inconsequential things like choosing a certain haircut, or women wanting to wear makeup, or a thousand other things. But they are willing to put up with it because these are "religious authorities" telling them so. And they are willing to go along when these same religious authorities tell them that anyone not of their sect of Islam, much less anyone not Muslim, is a "lesser being" than they are, less than human even. And they would be willing to go along, at moment's notice, if there were a "war against the infidels" declared for some reason.
And even after an "Arab Spring" revolution, what would pop up? So far, we're seeing mostly Muslim Brotherhood takeovers. Human rights in those countries post-Arab Spring are getting WORSE, not better, especially for those of the minority Islamic sects or of the underground non-Muslim groups (Copts in Egypt, orthodox / catholics in Syria, and so on).
Saying "most of Iran don't like their current government" doesn't mean much when what they would replace it with really isn't any better.
Did I say it was easy? No, but the reforms that happened - and not all of them happened all at once, nor cleanly - wound up massively cleaning up the Christian religious problems. Throwing out a ton of corruption, and leading up to the rise of secularization and separation of church/state that the US, Canada, and most of Europe now take more or less for granted (Ireland/England being two notable exceptions).
Apparently you have not been listening. The majority of Iranians are just as pissed off about this as you, and wish their government would stop it.
And yet, every time there's a chance to show it and tell their government "knock it the fuck off", they... go to rallies calling the US the Great Satan, Israel the "little Satan", and calling for Islamic theocracy.
However, their government has more guns and the standard of living hasn't descended to levels in Egypt or Syria yet. It'll get there soon, and then they'll the latest to join the Arab Spring. The Iranian people aren't the problem.
It's actually quite funny. Of the Iranians that I've known, the two gay guys (who left to escape persecution) wish the rest of their country would grow the fuck up. The other two, a husband and wife, want to turn the US into Iran and actually want Koranic law to be an "option" alongside US law, such that the dad could force his daughter to abide by Muslim religious law and face punishments - as in, legal punishments - for disobeying his orders when she told him not to date a non-Muslim guy.
Turns out there's a funny thing in Muslim shari'a: a Muslim man can marry as many non-Muslim women as he wants, because the kids are "his property" and required to be Muslim. But a Muslim women marrying a Christian, or an Atheist, a Buddhist, or (omg noez) a Jew?
Something to think about. The plural of anecdote isn't data, but there may be quite a bit of "overstating" involved in claiming whether or not the majority of Iranian citizens support the theocracy they live in, or if they don't, how STRONG their dislike is (e.g. is it "fuck this we want it overthrown" or more of a "get a grip guys I can hold my wife's hand in public and she can have makeup/girlie night with her friends without offending Das Pedoprophet").
with a President who, just like a Republican candidate, has to pretend to be a religious fruitcake to keep power.
You haven't been paying much attention to Ahmadamnutjob or his Republican counterparts lately, have you? It's obvious they actually believe their religious fruitcakery. There's no pretending involved.
Especially that Santorum guy. Wow. He's basically Ahmadamnutjob in a sweater vest.
What Iran is doing progressively is building justification for some sort of military action against them. And morally... they're slowly justifying some sort of strike as well. In effect, they're slowly raising the guillotine blade that when it falls... will at best strike off the head of their nation. At worst, there will be collateral damage.
You fail to think of it from the perspective of the Mullahs.
What they are trying to do is get the US to react. To attack Iran, so that they can rally "the Muslim world" into a WW3-type "Islam vs The World" war that they believe to be inevitable and that they believe they will win.
These are the same assholes who have said, quite publicly and numerous times on record, that if they had access to a nuke they would have absolutely NO problem nuking Tel Aviv, and wouldn't give a crap how many Arabs they killed in Lebanon, Syria, the Palestinian territories, Jordan, and Egypt because their immediate goal of wiping out "the Jews" would be achieved, and there would still be over a billion Muslims in the world.
The "fine line" being straddled right now in international diplomacy is, how the fuck do you separate Iran from the rest of the Muslims such that when war happens, it doesn't devolve into a religious WW3?
It's kind of an "in one ear, out the other" thing. Like when you get down into Muslim theology, the concepts of dar al-harb vs dar al-islam, the fact that Mohammed - a rapist, a pedo, not to mention a liar who repeatedly broke treaties - is the idea of the "perfect man" whose example Muslim leaders are expected to follow.
Nobody wants to believe it when they hear what comes out of the mouths of Iranian leaders, or Palestinian leaders, or Muslim Brotherhood leadership in countries like Syria or Lebanon or Egypt, because it means some pretty awful things. Kind of like how the world didn't want to think that the Nazis were REALLY that bad when Chamberlain was negotiating with them (how'd that turn out again?).
Personally, I'm not one to believe that all Muslims are bloodthirsty, nor hate-filled. But there are enough of a minority that are to do some really nasty things in the world, and it's a religion in desperate need of something akin to the Protestant Reformation that Christianity went through to inject some much-needed sense and throw out a lot of the nastier stuff.
As opposed to the mass destruction of jobs that the unions have caused in places like Detroit?
And how precisely did that happen? Ah yes, the robber barons bought off a set of governors - like that Koch Sucking asshole Scott Walker - to create "right to work" states, moved factories there, said "fuck you workers", then moved jobs offshore later on.
Indeed. The trifecta of "at-will employment", "right to work", and destruction of worker protection laws have been the means by which Republicans have pretty much destroyed the middle class in states where they've held control.
A good state to look at is Texas. The "Texas Unmiracle" is one of the greatest examples of the Greed Over People party's MO. Texas Republican politicians will lie to your face, especially with Rick Perry running for President, claiming they have a "great success story" in their state - actually, it's a complete shambles.
And that's before we get to what their creationist kook governor and corrupt as hell legislature did to make their education system dead last in the nation, too.
Don't forget that it becomes trivial to play games in class, pass notes, and generally goof off.
Kids should know how to use a calculator, but they should also know how to do long division with pencil and paper.
You have to understand the theory before you move on to the "well we have a tool that can do this." Otherwise, you get pretty much what we have today - "Garbage in, Gospel Out."
Or to put it another way: Charles Babbage famously noted, "On two occasions I have been asked,—"Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?"... I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." Sadly, as the SOPA debate has proven, legislators today are actually DUMBER than legislators of that era.
Slashdot Mirror
Do we need to bomb Iraq back to the stone age in order to defend Alaska?
Do we need to bomb Afghanistan back to the stone age in order to defend Alaska?
Do we need to invade Libya in order to defend Alaska?
Do we need to have soldiers in over 1000 military bases in countries around the world, most of who don't want us there, to defend Alaska, Hawaii, and the continental US from invasion?
No. That's what I mean by WASTE. The military, to fulfill its actual, Constitutionally mandated role of protecting the borders of the US against actual enemies, needs less than 10% of the toys they have WASTED taxpayer money on since WW2.
Except that people (presumably Americans) get *paid* to make (from mining the ore to writing the software) those Tomahawks. That money goes into the economy.
Except that the "pay", labor, is an infinitesimal fraction of the "cost" of those Tomahawks. And the material resources placed into them are destroyed, rarely recovered. Just as the lives that they take are unrecoverable, and the things that they are used to destroy - which usually amounts to a village, house, or the water supply for the immediate region - then cost even MORE material resources to restore.
It's waste. Pure and simple.
Wasted resources.
Bombing someone = wasted resources.
Fired bullets = wasted resources.
Crashed planes, fuel, all the rest = wasted resources we're not going to get back.
Military spending is almost ALL wasted resources. You think 3500 Tomahawk missiles, a cost ot $2.6 Billion, is anything but wasted resources? And that's JUST the Tomahawks, not all the bombs and missiles (most of which cost significantly more).
The big part is that a lot of the "savings" on a Hybrid assume you are driving it like a Hybrid should be.
Rather like all cars. They advertise a certain fuel efficiency, driven properly. Most people gun the accelerator off every stop, try to do 80 in a 55 zone down the freeway, and do other things that reduce their fuel efficiency. Meanwhile, you get people who do things like this that can squeeze a lot more than the "normal" fuel efficiency out of even a standard vehicle.
The biggest thing with Hybrids is that they are designed to invert the normal efficiency ideas. Usually, you get a lot more efficiency driving a steady rate on the freeway. It's one reason they list dual "city/highway" mileage targets on the sales brochures. With a hybrid, that's not the case, because a lot of the efficiency gains have to do with recapturing energy from stop-and-start driving.
From TFS: "His argument is that in order to sell people on hybrid cars, automakers have emphasized the energy efficiency of hybrids in ideal conditions and failed to tell people that in most ordinary driving conditions they will not come close to meeting the numbers given."
We could easily rewrite as follows:
"His argument is that in order to sell people on compact cars, automakers have emphasized the energy efficiency of compacts in ideal conditions and failed to tell people that in most ordinary driving conditions they will not come close to meeting the numbers given."
TL:DR version: if you drive a Hybrid like a fucking sports car, you'll get sports car fuel efficiency. If you drive a Hybrid long distances on the highway, guess what, you'll get the raw gas mileage of the gas engine only minus whatever it's wasting on air conditioning and electrical generation.
Think about the profits possible to the first company that builds an interstellar ship...
it will likely be the culmination of thousands of other advancements along the way, the kind that the private sector is very good at making
What profits? It's going to go into space and never come back.
Exploration of near space wasn't "profitable" at the time. Not a dime of "profit" was made by any company in going to the moon.
All the "Profits" from space exploration have been from companies being subsidized far beyond 100% of cost on the R&D that went into developing what space travel we have now.
Was it worth it? Hell Fucking Yes. But if it had been left to "companies" and "private enterprise", none of it would ever have happened. The private sector takes all the things that were necessary to land on the moon, and says "where's the ROI on that? Fuck this, let's put the money into developing another muscle car or a pill to make men have 6-hour erections and multiple orgasms."
NASA is responsible for an incredible number of things you know and take for granted today. None of which would exist without NASA, because the "private sector" would never have come close to putting in the money to do the R&D.
2011 military budget, actually $683 Billion. I took off personnel ($154 billion) and rounded down to the nearest $100 billion since SOME maintenance of bases, equipment, and so on would be necessary. The rest? Oh yeah, first we WASTE money bombing someone back to the stone age, then we WASTE more money putting a military base in their country and WASTE more money sending "foreign aid" to rebuild the place we just WASTED money bombing the shit out of.
Welfare, medicare, SS, Education $2.7 Trillion - but unlike the military that actually cycles right back into the economy. Money spent on welfare goes straight to food and housing for actual humans. Money spent on medicare goes to the medical care of actual humans. Social Security goes into food and housing for elderly humans.
Education goes into raising the next generation of humans to be (hopefully) functioning members of society - though in your case it appears not to have worked. Oh and yeah, it pays mostly for the money to pay the teachers to teach the kids (though I personally would say fuck high school/ college sports, especially the basketball and football programs that are the government wasting a fucking ton of money subsidizing the hell out of the NBA and NFL by running their minor leagues for them).
As for the Wall Street bailouts, I agree. Put all that money to NASA instead and we'd be far better off than if it were in bankers' pockets.
doing things like changing it so they get a million points
Cool, they figured out how the code handles scoring!
changing it so their character looks like a penis
So sweet - they not only identified how the sprites are stored, they created their own sprite and inserted it correctly into the game's code!
changing it so that there are a million things on screen
And then they get to watch what happens as the computer tries to render it - plus they actually changed the engine to do this.
I spent hours with a teenager who was working under me for his work experience (two weeks in a "real" job while they are still at school) explaining how to program and the most interesting thing was that they couldn't see how, e.g., 3D, sound, joysticks, etc. could be thought of in the same way as the numbers they manipulated in a basic dice game. Once they realised that everything from networking to 3D to AI to physics was just a matter of manipulating numbers, the "magic trick" of their console games was revealed and they wanted to replicate them.
This was why we used to have "Beginner's Languages" like BASIC. Sure, it was kludgy, and there were things that were hard to do. But it gave a strong framework for understanding how basic tenets of programming - loops, jumps, switch cases, comparisons - worked. Coding an ASCII slot machine in BASIC may sound stupid to some geek who's been coding for 20 years, but it is essential for learners to start with the basics and work their way on up from there - kind of like having training wheels on a bicycle.
Bullshit.
The private sector STILL can't get a man into space. If it had been left to the private sector "from day one", the US would never have had anyone try, because the private sector never would have put forth the R&D money to get anything done.
Scaling back NASA is a result of small-minded fools from the right wing who scream "cut cut cut everything we like yeah military!!!" They want to kill PBS, they want to kill NASA, they call numerous things "government waste", but they never want to admit that the biggest waste of government money is sending the US military everywhere to be the world's policeman, wasting $500 billion a year to invade countries, set up military bases, and bomb the fuck out of places where nobody wants us.
PBS gets $422 million currently. That is 0.084 PERCENT of what we waste on the military.
NASA's annual budget is only $19 billion in 2011. And for that you get all this stuff that you fucking take for granted.
We should say fuck the military, stop buying them new toys, and spend the money on NASA instead. We'd be to Mars in 5 years if we budgeted it.
Wait, so Ahmadamnutjob saying he wants to wipe out the Jews, talking about "end times" of Islam vs The World in some crazed holy war, sending Iranian military to poke and prod US ships in the gulf... is all a "US Plot"?
You probably need a new tinfoil hat, yours is leaking :P
But what would happen if something like the Occupy movement really started to gain ground and actually started shutting down cities and firebombing corporate HQ's?
Why would they have to shut down cities or firebomb corporate HQ's?
The treatment of "Occupiers" in public parks (or pseudo, "it's a park on private property that is required to be available to the public 24/7 by terms of agreement with the city" bullshit) was a good indication of how it goes down.
Step 2 has been SOPA.
Last time we had a movement like OWS, they were the Hoovervilles and the Bonus Army, and just like today, the Republican response (courtesy of Herbert Hoover) was to send in troops to beat them up.
I think that becomes the problem, though.
The majority of Iranians may "dislike" their current theocratic regime, when it stops them from doing perfectly normal, human, inconsequential things like choosing a certain haircut, or women wanting to wear makeup, or a thousand other things. But they are willing to put up with it because these are "religious authorities" telling them so. And they are willing to go along when these same religious authorities tell them that anyone not of their sect of Islam, much less anyone not Muslim, is a "lesser being" than they are, less than human even. And they would be willing to go along, at moment's notice, if there were a "war against the infidels" declared for some reason.
And even after an "Arab Spring" revolution, what would pop up? So far, we're seeing mostly Muslim Brotherhood takeovers. Human rights in those countries post-Arab Spring are getting WORSE, not better, especially for those of the minority Islamic sects or of the underground non-Muslim groups (Copts in Egypt, orthodox / catholics in Syria, and so on).
Saying "most of Iran don't like their current government" doesn't mean much when what they would replace it with really isn't any better.
Did I say it was easy? No, but the reforms that happened - and not all of them happened all at once, nor cleanly - wound up massively cleaning up the Christian religious problems. Throwing out a ton of corruption, and leading up to the rise of secularization and separation of church/state that the US, Canada, and most of Europe now take more or less for granted (Ireland/England being two notable exceptions).
for disobeying his orders when she told him not to date a non-Muslim guy.
Curse my editing. Should have read "when she told him she wanted to date a non-Muslim guy."
Apparently you have not been listening. The majority of Iranians are just as pissed off about this as you, and wish their government would stop it.
And yet, every time there's a chance to show it and tell their government "knock it the fuck off", they... go to rallies calling the US the Great Satan, Israel the "little Satan", and calling for Islamic theocracy.
However, their government has more guns and the standard of living hasn't descended to levels in Egypt or Syria yet. It'll get there soon, and then they'll the latest to join the Arab Spring. The Iranian people aren't the problem.
It's actually quite funny. Of the Iranians that I've known, the two gay guys (who left to escape persecution) wish the rest of their country would grow the fuck up. The other two, a husband and wife, want to turn the US into Iran and actually want Koranic law to be an "option" alongside US law, such that the dad could force his daughter to abide by Muslim religious law and face punishments - as in, legal punishments - for disobeying his orders when she told him not to date a non-Muslim guy.
Turns out there's a funny thing in Muslim shari'a: a Muslim man can marry as many non-Muslim women as he wants, because the kids are "his property" and required to be Muslim. But a Muslim women marrying a Christian, or an Atheist, a Buddhist, or (omg noez) a Jew?
Something to think about. The plural of anecdote isn't data, but there may be quite a bit of "overstating" involved in claiming whether or not the majority of Iranian citizens support the theocracy they live in, or if they don't, how STRONG their dislike is (e.g. is it "fuck this we want it overthrown" or more of a "get a grip guys I can hold my wife's hand in public and she can have makeup/girlie night with her friends without offending Das Pedoprophet").
You may be right, but that doesn't make the analysis of how the leadership of Iran operates any less valid, does it?
with a President who, just like a Republican candidate, has to pretend to be a religious fruitcake to keep power.
You haven't been paying much attention to Ahmadamnutjob or his Republican counterparts lately, have you? It's obvious they actually believe their religious fruitcakery. There's no pretending involved.
Especially that Santorum guy. Wow. He's basically Ahmadamnutjob in a sweater vest.
What Iran is doing progressively is building justification for some sort of military action against them. And morally... they're slowly justifying some sort of strike as well. In effect, they're slowly raising the guillotine blade that when it falls... will at best strike off the head of their nation. At worst, there will be collateral damage.
You fail to think of it from the perspective of the Mullahs.
What they are trying to do is get the US to react. To attack Iran, so that they can rally "the Muslim world" into a WW3-type "Islam vs The World" war that they believe to be inevitable and that they believe they will win.
These are the same assholes who have said, quite publicly and numerous times on record, that if they had access to a nuke they would have absolutely NO problem nuking Tel Aviv, and wouldn't give a crap how many Arabs they killed in Lebanon, Syria, the Palestinian territories, Jordan, and Egypt because their immediate goal of wiping out "the Jews" would be achieved, and there would still be over a billion Muslims in the world.
The "fine line" being straddled right now in international diplomacy is, how the fuck do you separate Iran from the rest of the Muslims such that when war happens, it doesn't devolve into a religious WW3?
"It is God's Will."
Aww crap. So the old codger finally kicked the bucket? Did he really leave the world to the meek?
It's kind of an "in one ear, out the other" thing. Like when you get down into Muslim theology, the concepts of dar al-harb vs dar al-islam, the fact that Mohammed - a rapist, a pedo, not to mention a liar who repeatedly broke treaties - is the idea of the "perfect man" whose example Muslim leaders are expected to follow.
Nobody wants to believe it when they hear what comes out of the mouths of Iranian leaders, or Palestinian leaders, or Muslim Brotherhood leadership in countries like Syria or Lebanon or Egypt, because it means some pretty awful things. Kind of like how the world didn't want to think that the Nazis were REALLY that bad when Chamberlain was negotiating with them (how'd that turn out again?).
Personally, I'm not one to believe that all Muslims are bloodthirsty, nor hate-filled. But there are enough of a minority that are to do some really nasty things in the world, and it's a religion in desperate need of something akin to the Protestant Reformation that Christianity went through to inject some much-needed sense and throw out a lot of the nastier stuff.
Perhaps you are too young to remember, but Bill Clinton signed NAFTA.
Funny. Reagan started NAFTA, the negotiations and ceremonial signings were done under George HW Bush, Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and Mexican President Carlos Salinas. By the time Clinton came into office, it was "ok ok, the Senate ratified it, put the stamp on it and be done."
But keep sitting in your delusional right-wing world.
You hired him to kill jobs and fuck the middle class? Man, you are one sociopathic motherfucker.
You won't get it. Unless you somehow live in the Men's Concentration Camps until the time of the great battery famine.
As opposed to the mass destruction of jobs that the unions have caused in places like Detroit?
And how precisely did that happen? Ah yes, the robber barons bought off a set of governors - like that Koch Sucking asshole Scott Walker - to create "right to work" states, moved factories there, said "fuck you workers", then moved jobs offshore later on.
Indeed. The trifecta of "at-will employment", "right to work", and destruction of worker protection laws have been the means by which Republicans have pretty much destroyed the middle class in states where they've held control.
A good state to look at is Texas. The "Texas Unmiracle" is one of the greatest examples of the Greed Over People party's MO. Texas Republican politicians will lie to your face, especially with Rick Perry running for President, claiming they have a "great success story" in their state - actually, it's a complete shambles.
And that's before we get to what their creationist kook governor and corrupt as hell legislature did to make their education system dead last in the nation, too.
Don't forget that it becomes trivial to play games in class, pass notes, and generally goof off.
Kids should know how to use a calculator, but they should also know how to do long division with pencil and paper.
You have to understand the theory before you move on to the "well we have a tool that can do this." Otherwise, you get pretty much what we have today - "Garbage in, Gospel Out."
Or to put it another way: Charles Babbage famously noted, "On two occasions I have been asked,—"Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" ... I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." Sadly, as the SOPA debate has proven, legislators today are actually DUMBER than legislators of that era.