True... but some of us aren't worrying, we're just hoping.
Massive changes in society tend to come from massive impacts on said society. With Katrina still in the public "consciousness", perhaps this will reinforce our national guilt a bit.
Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
Which is why we have a proliferation of lawyers.
Apologies for the misuse of the word proliferation. Weirdly enough, if one takes the word apart, it's pro life ration, which also sums up the current status quo quote well.
Oil is a commodity and commodities are the freest market in the world, largely devoid of government control. Their costs tend to based on what the market will bear, not what the government mandates.
Isn't a lot of that deficit from the bailouts and wars started under the Bush admin?
I suspect that we'll be having our own revolution, pretty soon, and it'll likely make all former historical revolutions look like, well, a tea party;-(
That is the sort of thinking that has brought the US to the point where it is. "We're better than everyone else!"... except we're not.
I would suggest reading Richard Shenkman's book "Just How Stupid Are We" as a starting point. As the GP says, one could literally go on for pages. Shenkman does.
Maybe the repercussions aren't as bad, but a scientist who actively opposes religion in this country where the money still says "In God We Trust" and after every speech the President has to say "God Bless America" still has some balls.
Richard Dawkins has big brass cojones. It's rather amazing he's still alive, given how nutty some people get when their cherished superstitions get stepped on.
When was the last time you heard about a scientist killing another scientist over opposing theories? I'm sure it's probably happened, but if so it certainly doesn't make the news...
Money is power, and where there's power, there'll be abuse.
Religious organizations in the US have, for the most part, immunity from taxation. I see very few denominational churches that aren't run out of very well constructed, expensive buildings.
First off, my last comment was a joke, and quite clearly marked as such (";-)"). That my post was modded flamebait, and quickly, tells me that someone is abusing the moderation system. This isn't the first time I've seen the symptoms, although it is the first time it has happened to me specifically.
Then let me speak up. The standing assumption is that "solar output" only varies by approx. 0.1%, and therefore has almost no effect on global warming and cooling. IOW, they say that the sun has no effect on how warm or cool the earth is. Yeah, right. That is so pathetically wrong, I can barely comprehend the lack of understanding of how the earth is heated that could result in such a ludicrous contention (with apologies for so badly paraphrasing Babbage).
We have extremely good data on solar radiance variation nowadays; it is not an "assumption". People who think that climate scientists don't take our direct measurements of solar variation into account have very little understanding of the science involved. Who are the "they" you are talking about?
so-called "climate scientists"
Oh, please. Your lack of education about the subject is showing.
assume that measured solar irradiance is in one-to-one correspondence with energy transport from sun to earth.
No, they don't.
What about poorly or incorrectly measured wavelengths of solar output?
Which what? Unless you would prefer we invalidate of our current understanding of EM radiation, we have to accept that what we know about energy transport in that realm holds. Since our understanding of the subject also underlies our technology - including the computer you are typing on, the lights you read by, solar cell technology, lasers, etc, it's an incredible stretch to assume that we are that wrong.
What about magnetic coupling from sun to earth? What about other forms of radiation, particles/solar wind streaming from the sun to earth?
The magnetic field interactions between the sun and earth are fairly well known and have already been shown to have a much, much smaller effect on the temperature of the atmosphere than direct radiance does.
If there are other forms of radiation coming from the sun that we can't detect, it's foolish to speculate about their effects.
What about the effect of CMEs hitting or not hitting the earth?
Since we've been observing the effects of CME impacts for nearly a half a century...
I may be _very_ wrong, but in the little reading I've done I've seen no mention of such effects.
Then do some more reading, and get a decent educational background in the hard sciences. I did more than twenty years ago and as an avid amateur astronomer I follow the field rather closely.
One thing that bothers me is it seems (not all, but) a bunch of these "experts" have studied these questions just a deeply as I have, which is to say, hardly at all.
Which "experts" would you be referring to? The tens of thousands of them who have devoted years to decades of their lives studying the subject?
and they all start screaming of the coming Ice Age like back in the '70's
A few papers and a lot of media attention from ignorant journalists? You really do need to do some more reading - this particular part of the subject has been addressed literally thousands of times in the last five years just right here on this website, and given your low UID, you have certainly had the opportunity to read the rebuttals.
Look; I don't know you, and I don't mean to be insulting, but it's obvious to me that you don't have the faintest clue what you are talking about. I've been following this subject for nearly a quarter of a century, I have a good background in physics, chemistry, and mathematics, and I read as many of the papers published in the field as I can find t
It's nonsense even as an analogy to global warming science. We have reliable climate data going far enough back ("climategate" wasn't) that we aren't observing short term trends.
Y'know, it's odd how "another" anonymous coward replied here, and was quickly moderated informative. Could be a conspiracy...;-)
However, were it not for religion, those who practice inhumanity would simply choose some other handy rationale for justifying inhumanity.
They do. But a majority of the hatred that some members of the human species hold for other members of their own species traces back to superstitious nonsense. That's the elephant in the living room that few acknowledge, because it shows the hypocritical gaps in their thinking.
Explain to me why religions always splinter (Always, cite one that hasn't). Good grief, there are literally tens of thousands of splinter christian churches in the US alone, and all of them have some fundamental doctrinal difference with the other ones, often of ridiculous points of belief that rely on data so damned old that nobody really knows what happened.
Those splinters that survive always seem to have money. Stained glass windows, brick buildings, fancy advertising physical and not so, and real wood pulpits and seats, aren't cheap. I've done carpentry work in churches. Some of them pay pretty decent - for contractors, but they always want someone cheap, even when they had the money to build something nice in the first place (how many run down churches does one see in areas where the attendees
I am bidding on a contract to replace the flooring in the local Christian Science church this summer - the flooring in there is badly fucked up because they didn't get the roof fixed three years ago when it started leaking, and the leaks and resultant water damage, and their lack of attention with it, warped the flooring beyond repair.
Fuck it, I'm not even going to finish this post. I don't want to do this anymore with slashdot. I have better things to do with my time.
What higher form of human ambition can there be than the desire to have control over the reality POV of millions of people? Even the most powerful politicians or richest of the rich can rarely claim that sort of control. But "spiritual leaders" can[1].
While I do agree with you that religion likely isn't the primary cause of most wars, it likely has been the instigator of most human-caused human suffering. But that's somewhat offtopic.
In any case, I'd like to see your "top #" list of what you consider to be the causes of warfare, say, in the last five hundred years - limiting it helps in this topic. I'm not a historian, but I do read, and from my reading I'd say that amongst those top five are resources(lack of), ethnic politics(Hitler good example), and religious-based ethnic persecution (Ireland, the Middle East), the last two somewhat interchangeable; religion has also been used as an 'excuse' for warfare that really has other reasons (there are many examples I'm sure you are aware of) - that is, the people in control (ab)use it to convince the mass population that war is necessary.
I have a friend in Canada who has been a tenured military historian for more than three decades, we often have similar discussions. In his viewpoint the ultimate causes of most wars are incredibly complex and difficult to pin down with any certainty, but religion nearly always plays at least a part - the example he often cites is the Middle East, but there are hundreds, if not thousands, of more minor examples.
I could say a lot more about this but this is enough here. I would love to discuss military history with you somewhere other than here, however, as it is one of my favorite topics:) Respond back and if you wish I'd be willing to find a way to exchange contact info - I prefer not to post personal contact info here, in the past it has led to way too much garbage email which I have little time for nowadays.
--
This is to the general conversation here:
I am an atheist and have always been*, but I have no problem with people having their own individual spiritual beliefs, as long as they don't try to impose them on me thru legal, economic or military means. Debate is fine, indeed it is welcome!
Personally I find any sort of superstitious belief silly and irrational, but like the vast majority of atheists I don't try and impose my own lack of belief on others - although I/(we?) will defend myself if someone attempts to impose theirs on me. To the people who say - correctly - that it's impossible to disprove the existence of any superstitious entity, I will counter by saying that belief without irrefutable, reproducible proof is fundamentally irrational, even on the individual level, and certainly should not be considered as valid in policy making. (God Bless America? Assuming he exists, state your reasons for thinking he would considering the stupid things we do, and your proof of the results of his previous blessings... etc...)
--
* (although I did attend church as a child, that was because it was expected(demanded, really) of me, and at times I did enjoy the singing and some sermons. I don't deny that there are believers out there who really do a lot of good for other people (Some of them are those I count as close friends, and we have our back and forths, friendly, as it is), although I feel that the damage that fanatics - often of the same "church" - do tends to drown them out, which is horrible, and something I rarely see addressed as much as it should be. )
[1] One needs only look at the examples of some of the worst American evangelists to find just one modern set of data points, and while they were also motivated by money, religion was the vehicle they used to gain that control. From a global historical perspective they are really just pikers, however, who had a medium (excuse the pun) that assisted them in getting their message out.;-(
I was a major fan of the tv series when it was on, but lived in a farm town, there were maybe three, four fans in the whole town, if that. Needless to say the word wasn't in common usage there;-)
I started hearing it from "outsiders" in college...
What I find really frakking funny about "frak" is that there are people who have never even seen the show using it as an expletive. I first remember hearing it outside the context of BSG sometime in the late 80s; then it seemed to die out for a while but it's back and seems even more common now.
Nothing currently in service, no. If we deploy an aircraft that can travel at those speeds - and it has the range to be useful - then someone will deploy a system capable of shooting it down.
Anyway, I was referring to sub-orbital craft. We can already deliver reconnaissance systems and warheads anywhere we need to quickly.
Slashdot Mirror
True... but some of us aren't worrying, we're just hoping.
Massive changes in society tend to come from massive impacts on said society. With Katrina still in the public "consciousness", perhaps this will reinforce our national guilt a bit.
SB
Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
Which is why we have a proliferation of lawyers.
Apologies for the misuse of the word proliferation. Weirdly enough, if one takes the word apart, it's pro life ration, which also sums up the current status quo quote well.
SB
Oil is a commodity and commodities are the freest market in the world, largely devoid of government control. Their costs tend to based on what the market will bear, not what the government mandates.
*cough* Alcohol, cigarettes, pharmaceuticals, opium, intellectual property... oh, wait, nevermind.
SB
Standard Oil became a monopoly with out the Government's collusion.
Only slightly inaccurate. Pardon my subtle sarcasm.
SB
Thanks.
SB
Isn't a lot of that deficit from the bailouts and wars started under the Bush admin?
I suspect that we'll be having our own revolution, pretty soon, and it'll likely make all former historical revolutions look like, well, a tea party ;-(
SB
Prostitution is already federally taxable IIRC. We need a new tax agency to apply that tax to the government.
SB
Theoretically, a can of shaving cream is always a business expense; unless one has an employer who doesn't care if you show up unshaved. ;-)
(I kid, but I wouldn't put it past the asshats at the IRS)
SB
That is the sort of thinking that has brought the US to the point where it is. "We're better than everyone else!" ... except we're not.
I would suggest reading Richard Shenkman's book "Just How Stupid Are We" as a starting point. As the GP says, one could literally go on for pages. Shenkman does.
SB
I live in a state with service taxes on my business (customers, really) and 'use' taxes. Would the Fair Tax trump those?
SB
I did that last night, wonderful spaghetti bake, it was, burp.
Eating the symbolic flesh of one's god is traditional ;-)
SB
Maybe the repercussions aren't as bad, but a scientist who actively opposes religion in this country where the money still says "In God We Trust" and after every speech the President has to say "God Bless America" still has some balls.
Richard Dawkins has big brass cojones. It's rather amazing he's still alive, given how nutty some people get when their cherished superstitions get stepped on.
When was the last time you heard about a scientist killing another scientist over opposing theories? I'm sure it's probably happened, but if so it certainly doesn't make the news...
SB
Money is power, and where there's power, there'll be abuse.
Religious organizations in the US have, for the most part, immunity from taxation. I see very few denominational churches that aren't run out of very well constructed, expensive buildings.
Good points tho.
SB
Very well said, thank you.
SB
First off, my last comment was a joke, and quite clearly marked as such (";-)"). That my post was modded flamebait, and quickly, tells me that someone is abusing the moderation system. This isn't the first time I've seen the symptoms, although it is the first time it has happened to me specifically.
Then let me speak up. The standing assumption is that "solar output" only varies by approx. 0.1%, and therefore has almost no effect on global warming and cooling. IOW, they say that the sun has no effect on how warm or cool the earth is. Yeah, right. That is so pathetically wrong, I can barely comprehend the lack of understanding of how the earth is heated that could result in such a ludicrous contention (with apologies for so badly paraphrasing Babbage).
We have extremely good data on solar radiance variation nowadays; it is not an "assumption". People who think that climate scientists don't take our direct measurements of solar variation into account have very little understanding of the science involved. Who are the "they" you are talking about?
so-called "climate scientists"
Oh, please. Your lack of education about the subject is showing.
assume that measured solar irradiance is in one-to-one correspondence with energy transport from sun to earth.
No, they don't.
What about poorly or incorrectly measured wavelengths of solar output?
Which what? Unless you would prefer we invalidate of our current understanding of EM radiation, we have to accept that what we know about energy transport in that realm holds. Since our understanding of the subject also underlies our technology - including the computer you are typing on, the lights you read by, solar cell technology, lasers, etc, it's an incredible stretch to assume that we are that wrong.
What about magnetic coupling from sun to earth? What about other forms of radiation, particles/solar wind streaming from the sun to earth?
The magnetic field interactions between the sun and earth are fairly well known and have already been shown to have a much, much smaller effect on the temperature of the atmosphere than direct radiance does.
If there are other forms of radiation coming from the sun that we can't detect, it's foolish to speculate about their effects.
What about the effect of CMEs hitting or not hitting the earth?
Since we've been observing the effects of CME impacts for nearly a half a century...
I may be _very_ wrong, but in the little reading I've done I've seen no mention of such effects.
Then do some more reading, and get a decent educational background in the hard sciences. I did more than twenty years ago and as an avid amateur astronomer I follow the field rather closely.
One thing that bothers me is it seems (not all, but) a bunch of these "experts" have studied these questions just a deeply as I have, which is to say, hardly at all.
Which "experts" would you be referring to? The tens of thousands of them who have devoted years to decades of their lives studying the subject?
and they all start screaming of the coming Ice Age like back in the '70's
A few papers and a lot of media attention from ignorant journalists? You really do need to do some more reading - this particular part of the subject has been addressed literally thousands of times in the last five years just right here on this website, and given your low UID, you have certainly had the opportunity to read the rebuttals.
Look; I don't know you, and I don't mean to be insulting, but it's obvious to me that you don't have the faintest clue what you are talking about. I've been following this subject for nearly a quarter of a century, I have a good background in physics, chemistry, and mathematics, and I read as many of the papers published in the field as I can find t
It's nonsense even as an analogy to global warming science. We have reliable climate data going far enough back ("climategate" wasn't) that we aren't observing short term trends.
Y'know, it's odd how "another" anonymous coward replied here, and was quickly moderated informative. Could be a conspiracy... ;-)
SB
However, were it not for religion, those who practice inhumanity would simply choose some other handy rationale for justifying inhumanity.
They do. But a majority of the hatred that some members of the human species hold for other members of their own species traces back to superstitious nonsense. That's the elephant in the living room that few acknowledge, because it shows the hypocritical gaps in their thinking.
Explain to me why religions always splinter (Always, cite one that hasn't). Good grief, there are literally tens of thousands of splinter christian churches in the US alone, and all of them have some fundamental doctrinal difference with the other ones, often of ridiculous points of belief that rely on data so damned old that nobody really knows what happened.
Those splinters that survive always seem to have money. Stained glass windows, brick buildings, fancy advertising physical and not so, and real wood pulpits and seats, aren't cheap. I've done carpentry work in churches. Some of them pay pretty decent - for contractors, but they always want someone cheap, even when they had the money to build something nice in the first place (how many run down churches does one see in areas where the attendees
I am bidding on a contract to replace the flooring in the local Christian Science church this summer - the flooring in there is badly fucked up because they didn't get the roof fixed three years ago when it started leaking, and the leaks and resultant water damage, and their lack of attention with it, warped the flooring beyond repair.
Fuck it, I'm not even going to finish this post. I don't want to do this anymore with slashdot. I have better things to do with my time.
SB
What higher form of human ambition can there be than the desire to have control over the reality POV of millions of people? Even the most powerful politicians or richest of the rich can rarely claim that sort of control. But "spiritual leaders" can[1].
While I do agree with you that religion likely isn't the primary cause of most wars, it likely has been the instigator of most human-caused human suffering. But that's somewhat offtopic.
In any case, I'd like to see your "top #" list of what you consider to be the causes of warfare, say, in the last five hundred years - limiting it helps in this topic. I'm not a historian, but I do read, and from my reading I'd say that amongst those top five are resources(lack of), ethnic politics(Hitler good example), and religious-based ethnic persecution (Ireland, the Middle East), the last two somewhat interchangeable; religion has also been used as an 'excuse' for warfare that really has other reasons (there are many examples I'm sure you are aware of) - that is, the people in control (ab)use it to convince the mass population that war is necessary.
I have a friend in Canada who has been a tenured military historian for more than three decades, we often have similar discussions. In his viewpoint the ultimate causes of most wars are incredibly complex and difficult to pin down with any certainty, but religion nearly always plays at least a part - the example he often cites is the Middle East, but there are hundreds, if not thousands, of more minor examples.
I could say a lot more about this but this is enough here. I would love to discuss military history with you somewhere other than here, however, as it is one of my favorite topics :) Respond back and if you wish I'd be willing to find a way to exchange contact info - I prefer not to post personal contact info here, in the past it has led to way too much garbage email which I have little time for nowadays.
--
This is to the general conversation here:
I am an atheist and have always been*, but I have no problem with people having their own individual spiritual beliefs, as long as they don't try to impose them on me thru legal, economic or military means. Debate is fine, indeed it is welcome!
Personally I find any sort of superstitious belief silly and irrational, but like the vast majority of atheists I don't try and impose my own lack of belief on others - although I/(we?) will defend myself if someone attempts to impose theirs on me. To the people who say - correctly - that it's impossible to disprove the existence of any superstitious entity, I will counter by saying that belief without irrefutable, reproducible proof is fundamentally irrational, even on the individual level, and certainly should not be considered as valid in policy making. (God Bless America? Assuming he exists, state your reasons for thinking he would considering the stupid things we do, and your proof of the results of his previous blessings... etc...)
--
* (although I did attend church as a child, that was because it was expected(demanded, really) of me, and at times I did enjoy the singing and some sermons. I don't deny that there are believers out there who really do a lot of good for other people (Some of them are those I count as close friends, and we have our back and forths, friendly, as it is), although I feel that the damage that fanatics - often of the same "church" - do tends to drown them out, which is horrible, and something I rarely see addressed as much as it should be. )
[1] One needs only look at the examples of some of the worst American evangelists to find just one modern set of data points, and while they were also motivated by money, religion was the vehicle they used to gain that control. From a global historical perspective they are really just pikers, however, who had a medium (excuse the pun) that assisted them in getting their message out. ;-(
Needless to say, the IPCC's predictions are entirely dependant on the assumption that you could correct cesium clocks by checking the solar cycle.
That is utter nonsense.
SB
I was a major fan of the tv series when it was on, but lived in a farm town, there were maybe three, four fans in the whole town, if that. Needless to say the word wasn't in common usage there ;-)
I started hearing it from "outsiders" in college...
Nostalgia :-)
SB
wet it for use in hand-to- hand-combat;
Indeed, you could even put someone's eyes out with it, then subject them to the Death of a Thousand Painful Welts ;-)
SB
Not much. That was my point. ;-)
SB
So what we really need is a group opposed to stupidity on TV to gain some political power. That would solve 99.9% of the whole problem.
I should change my sig to TANFJ. It's implied...
SB
What I find really frakking funny about "frak" is that there are people who have never even seen the show using it as an expletive. I first remember hearing it outside the context of BSG sometime in the late 80s; then it seemed to die out for a while but it's back and seems even more common now.
Languages change, indeed...
SB
Nothing currently in service, no. If we deploy an aircraft that can travel at those speeds - and it has the range to be useful - then someone will deploy a system capable of shooting it down.
Anyway, I was referring to sub-orbital craft. We can already deliver reconnaissance systems and warheads anywhere we need to quickly.
SB