Wow... that was really interesting. A clear and almost perfect expression of the behavior described in the prior post. Literally, stop telling me facts and information, I'll believe what I want and you can't change my mind. Hey, whether you believe in a God or not my friend, you are clearly in the grip of magical thinking.
Friend I have to say you are clearly no expert on this topic. First of all, it would be the easiest thing in the world to cite sources until your eyes bleed, all you have to do is the simplest of Google searches to find endless research papers written on thousands of different topics all relating to changing global climate and biochemistry. Here, just try this search: "impact of increased greenhouse gases on environment". Just remember to "hide personal results", or you'll just keep getting the same stupid stuff as usual (I in fact stopped using mine because I'm interested in both or more sides of any conversation.)
As for how little we know... that's just a plain and simple falsification. We have ocean cores, we have ice cores, we have thermal analysis of rock stratum, we have samples of air, and pollen, and biota going back hundreds of millions of years from a vast assortment of fossils (we've even recently reconstituted organic dinosaur tissues from mineral fossils, recovering both DNA and cellular matrix.) We know more about earth's climate than you can possible imagine. We know about its chemistry, the impact of ice ages and past CO2 events, and mass extinctions, plant species and the complex interaction between atmospheric chemistry, plants and the animals that ate them. The tremendous bulk of our evidence (those ice and ocean floor cores), provides us with information about the atmosphere, ocean, and climates over the last 5 million years. Over the past 300 years we have accurate weather records. Over the past 50 years we have satellites and intensive global research on climate and atmospheric chemistry. Over the last 200 years we have good solar records. The fact is, we have literally mountains of data and the models though not complete are good (notice I didn't say they were great.) Recent study suggests there are feed-backs we have not accounted for. The recent rise in greenhouse gas should have precipitated more warming than we're actually seeing. This is probably good. The system is more dynamic and able to rebound than we suspected. That doesn't mean the basic premises are wrong or that we should just carry on burning down the planet. The point I'm trying to make is that science isn't exact... it's a quantum thing... but you simply can't escape the basic physics of this. Thermodynamics ultimately doesn't care what your core beliefs are.
The key here is that a scientist is not an "A" authority, as in someone with magically invoked leadership or infallibility for social, religious or political reasons. A scientist is an "a" authority as in, has studied the topic to the point of being one of the world's leading experts in the field. In this sense it make perfect sense to give this person's (the "a" authority) opinion greater weight than let's say Billy-Bob down at the Pump-N-Dump. If you want a beer that doesn't make you pee smell funny, Billy-Bob is your man, climate change, I go to a different expert.
The problem with all of this is a disruption from sanity that began in the late 70s. During the late 70s the President of that day said we'd have to get more conscious about how we used energy and how our use impacted the world. To that end he changed the speed limit to 55, added solar power to the White House and began a program to make the United States the world largest and most affluent provider of solar power. He was confronting American peak oil and wanted to wean the U.S. off of cheap middle-eastern oil. Most importantly, he was deeply concerned, as were we all with ensuring the world we gave to our children was as fit to live in as the one our parents gave to us.
That man was defeated by a very clever and expensive Wallstreet campaign to discredit environmental accountability. It was portrayed as weak, as unpatriotic, as anti-business, as simply Unamerican. In fact since then, huge inflows of finance from vested fossil fuel interests have ensured that the public is buried in false controversy and disinformation all designed to perpetuate their control of the nation's energy policy and their exploding bank accounts.
When we say there is scientific consensus on the topic of global climate change, we aren't speaking of one person, or group, or even discipline. We are speaking of tens of thousands of scientists working in hundreds of different disciplines from ocean chemistry to meteorology to high altitude atmospheric biodynamics. When so many people from so many different disciplines create a picture that is consistent from so many different perspectives it makes it bloody hard to ignore without simply stating the obvious "Don't confuse me with facts, my mind is made up."
People believe what they want. Personally, I used to believe we were on the precipice of environmental disaster, but recent evidence suggests perhaps we have more time than originally suspected. My beliefs/concerns/opinions change according to the FACTS as they arrive. That is the mark of a healthy mind, not being governed by a fixed ideology or belief system. The global system is tremendously complex and its still beyond us to make a perfect model of it. That doesn't mean that it will forgive our abuse indefinitely. It means we have time perhaps to make wise choices and meaningful changes that enhance human life and help those in poorer places share some of the benefits of expanding technology. To ignore the obvious is to temp fate and bring needless suffering. Just as some religions need to responsibly address their positions on issues like contraception, Americans have to confront their core beliefs. We are no longer cowboys, and shooting from the hip just leaves a lot of collateral damage. As much as we all want to be Duke Wayne, perhaps its time for us to all be a little more Jimmy Stewart.
There are two primary uses for the LARGE American pickup truck. 1. Is to perform useful labor, agriculture, marine, mechanical, large factory, etc. 2. To distract the general populace from the fact a man has too much money and not enough schwanzstucker, or in very rare cases that woman is missing one altogether.
Truth is every piece of information tells us time and again that eye witness is one of the poorest forms of evidence (worst of all because people trust it literally blindly.) By the same token, juries are not only fallible but prone to pressure, prejudice, and a raft of problems associated with poor understanding of the law and sad but common social predilections.
A whole new area of science is quick becoming available, and will utilize reading brain waves directly and imaging memories. The P300 brain wave has already been used to determine whether or not a person has knowledge of a crime scene. Soon it will be impossible to lie about one's felonious behavior. Of course this opens up a whole new can of worms around self incrimination and under what circumstances the government should be able to get into your head. I would certainly make certain this option though not required be available for those who want to go the extra mile to prove their innocence (there are countless good reasons why someone might not want to have a prosecutor scrounging about in their head that has nothing to do with a specific crime one is being charged with, so folks shouldn't be forced to get brain scanned.)
We have sacrificed far too many innocent souls in the public lynchings that so many high profile court cases have become. As long as a would be Governor begins his career in prosecution the get that all important "Hard on Crime" badge, and the only way to win that game is to kill'em all and let God sort out the innocent, we need to do a far better job of determining guilt. And for the love of Pete, if someone on death row is asking to be tested for DNA, give it to the poor bugger. We've already spent millions on his trial, let's make sure we're executing the right guy. Those states whose lead prosecuting attorneys have blocked DNA testing where such testing might prove innocence in capital cases should be barred from practice and sent someplace they can do no harm.
The questions are sincere, and the answers you've provided are the neat, sanitized for your convenient answers that government spin doctors have been spouting for the last 70 years. Do you honestly think for a second that if we'd taken the Japanese officials to an uninhabited off shore island near japan and with a single device turn it into a 4 mile submarine crater, that they wouldn't have been sufficiently terrified by the spectacle? That they couldn't have connected the dots and that they wouldn't have surrendered by noon the same day? No. We needed to make this a passion play. A very loud and public display of ultimate power. We needed to inform the Soviets we were now the one and only superpower on the planet, and if they gave us any grief we could send them to eternity by the millions all on the same day. Hell, in the same 10 minutes.
Is there any even vaguely SANE explanation for putting soldiers at close range to nuclear blasts, exposing them to both immediate blast effects and long term illness from fallout exposure? I'm sorry but its clear to me that the men in charge had many priorities, but responsibility to human life both ours and theirs doesn't seem to be among them. I personally am sad and dismayed by what appears to me to be a consistent lack of ethical behavior on the part of America's military leadership, and the problems have been evident for a very long time.
I too support the brave young men and women who risk life and limb defending American, which I why I revile all the more, the greedy, selfish pigs who waste them on lies and political misadventure. If you support our troops, then you will punish the men in power who use them poorly. You will ensure that they are not sent to places half way around the world in harms way on 2,3,4 even 5 tours of duty. You will make absolutely certain they get the physical and mental care required to reenter society successfully and rapidly. You will ensure that employers who hire them are amply rewarded. Finally you will make certain that their widow(er)s and children will be taken care of befitting the heroic sacrifice they have given.
Actually there is strong correlation between the availability of abortion and the reduction of violent crime in the United State over the last 40 years (and I mean like scary close tracking.) I'm not suggesting causation here... just something to think about.
In a world with 7,000,000,000 people, I'm not at all certain everyone should have the right to procreate. That said, I have neither the wisdom, nor the comprehension to determine a way of fairly choosing who should and who shouldn't, and I'm deeply concerned about those with the hubris to claim that they do.
There are equally qualified historical references that strongly suggest that the military had spent a billion dollars (back when that meant something) and they were damned if they weren't going to see their new toy go BOOM!!! Moreover, we were already looking down the barrel of what we saw as Soviet competition/expansion, and we needed to scare the Schist out of them. There were a lot of politically expedient reasons to drop the bomb, on a friggin Catholic Church (near ground zero), but don't for a minute suggest it was to save American lives or hasten the end of WWII. That simply doesn't wash. In fact, in the early days of nukes there was talk of turning China and Russia into matching blue glass ashtrays, and the Army Corp of Engineers had grand plans for using nukes to build huge new canals all over the planet.
By the way, if the First bomb was necessary? Why the Second one? Why did we test the effects on nukes on our own soldiers? Why did we hide the fact that fall-out from nuke testing had seriously impacted people in eastern Nevada and south-western Utah? Why have we never talked about the mishandling of radioactive wastes from bombs or their transport through heavily populated towns and cities? The entire fiasco that has been the arms race from poison mine tailings killing innocent native Americans, to lack of a sane plan to decommission our weapons is incredibly well documented.
The whole MADD thing was mad from the start and has continued being mad to this very day. Vaporizing, incinerating and irradiating people was, is and forever will be an unconscionable act.
I'd call manufacturing mines that look like toys and dropping them enmasses on innocent children is tantamount to targeting children and their families. Moreover, the U.S., Soviet Union and China have typically been the worlds largest manufacturers of these particular weapons. Sure children die. Hell, we're born dying. It just seems a little trite to ignore the fact that we are supposedly interesting in human rights in our borders and wipe our collective behinds on the rest of the world. It make the holier than thou freedom and democracy conversation sound a bit more than a little hollow.
We have enemies. We need to defend ourselves. It just seems to me the measure of a civilization is the way in which it deals with its enemies. We are not the same folks who helped rebuild Japan and Germany. Who we are today is something sadder and far less ethical.
When the tax code is subject to the very same corporate pressure, influence, bribery that all other law in this land is subject to, the question arises what is fair vs what it legal. When Wallmart uses billions of your/my tax dollars to subsidize the benefits for their working impoverished, they are robbing society (i.e. you and me.) As the parent says, when corporations don't pay for their use and support of the nations infrastructure, they rob society and shirk their responsibility as stakeholders in the health and sustainability of this nation.
At issue is the concept that when done properly, a government provides a healthy and productive environment in which human endeavor may proceed. When private or corporate citizens look to profit at the expense of society, then they may be practicing good business, but they are also practicing horrible citizenry. It is high time we taught ethics, responsibility and accountability in our law, business and schools of science.
A government is composed of its citizens. If you find it untrustworthy, evil or irresponsible, you may have some soul searching to do.
Its not the size. Since 1980, the United States has been moving steadily towards becoming a fascist state and the transformation is nearly complete. Banks and Corporations love it, every one else is getting slaughtered. If you want to fix the problem, separate corporation and state.
Formalize the separation between Church and State.
Add a new separation between Business and State
Provide free education through Masters Degree, and for every year after your AA, you have to work as a teacher for 1 year, all your living expenses will be covered and you'll receive a small stipend OR you will serve in the National Guard OR you will work to rebuild the nations infrastructure... pick
Less than 3% of the nations educational budget should go to administrators... figure out how to divvy that up guys. Education is not an industry, its a birthright
People will pass a basic test to vote. Those that don't vote will pay a small tax. Those that do vote will receive a small credit. People want to act like idiots, we'll put the dots close together for a couple generations until they get the hint.
We provide contraception, we teach reproductive health and we explain to young people actions have consequences, some that last a lifetime. We stop being squeamish about telling people the friggin truth and we get desperately honest with one another on a social scale.
We put checks and balances back in, and we pull the fascist imbeciles out.
We stop prosecuting whistle blowers and make them national heroes instead.
We subsidize elections and media donates precisely the same amount of air time to each candidate. Anyone can run for anything, and a non-partisan organization provides extensive information on each candidate for public consumption. This organization is composed of volunteers from diverse backgrounds and beliefs and changes governing members on a frequent and short term basis.
Freedom of the press and protection from ideological control by any single group, corporate interest, or ideological body will be strictly enforced by law.
Put a choke hold on the banks, muzzle them, screw the lid on so tight they pop, follow up by doing the same to the insurance companies.
Split health care into for profit and not for profit. Ensure that not for profit health care is excellent, and accessible to everyone. People who are injured in the commission of felonies and misdemeanor pay 10 times the going rate and if unable to pay must perform public service until the debt is paid.
Lemme see, did I miss anything? I'm sure I did. Well this is a good start. I figure this might make a dent in the national stupid that pervades our society today.
Provided it was made primarily of thing bacteria like to eat. Something, made of tungsten, and silicon, and germanium, might march on the planet and bacteria might resist being assimilated but they certainly wouldn't be munching on the stuff.
That would be the CIA, but don't ask, its not part of their charter. If you want all the information on everybody, go to the NSA, of course then they have to shoot you, I'm sure you understand.
Nobody said that. In particular with privately owned companies, the intent in that case to do good or harm is purely in the hands of the owner. Look at SAP, privately held and their turnover rate is under 1%. Why is that you say? Because the owner goes out of his way to hire the best people and treat them so good that nobody in their right mind walks away. That's private enterprise.
Now let's look at corporate enterprise. There the measure is singular and all must bow before the almighty profit margin. If you have to kill your employees to profit, they die. If you have to jerk your customers to make the next quarter, they jerk. Worst of all, as of late, if the stockholders have to eat crap and die so the board get's its next big fat bonus... well, recent history speaks far more eloquently about this than I possibly can.
We have corporations writing laws, and politicians who retire and go to work for the corporations that bribed them to bribe the next generation of politicians. The system is full out busted and all I see is foxes... we're fresh out of chickens.
So on the killing people front... I'd like to raise my hand and say... oh, I don't know... the Tobacco Industry? Pretty much an excuse for getting folks addicted and dead or sick. Ever see the movie "The Insider"? About how the industry worked diligently to make cigarettes the perfect drug delivery system, and if by the way they also make cigarettes more addictive and a hundred times more carcinogenic in the process, too bad, they were just being good business men.
Don't get me wrong, I find the differences between corporations and governments in this growingly fascist society equally repugnant and equally culpable for the dirty deeds that have been committed against all of us, and its all the same unbridled greed, lust for power and control and pervasive need to prove alpha supremacy by comparing codpieces that has lead us all to the brink of disaster.
Doom and gloom environmentalists have it (have had it) all wrong. The systems that govern life and climate of larger and far more complex than they imagined, than they could have imagined. So add more energy to the system, and it squirts out the side in a funny place nobody's expecting. This is not the first or the last explosive CO2 episode in Earth's natural history. Check out marble and limestone. That's when the a frozen earth achieved so much CO2 in its atmosphere that the world melted, it rained for thousands of years and the oceans became a carbonated beverage. Calcium was eaten away by the acid oceans and when the ph of the oceans dropped, limestone was precipitated. By the way, between the ice and the carbonation, life as we know it almost vanished from the planet.
This is a nonlinear process and you have no idea where the thresholds or breakpoints are. You're flying an airplane, and experimenting by removing rivets to see how many you can pull before the plane crashes. We've already pulled out more than we thought we could. That doesn't make the ones who said the plane will never crash the smart ones. It just means we may have a little more time to clean up after ourselves than we thought. Then again, perhap irreversible changes are quietly moving beneath our feet at this very moment, and this whole conversation is moot. None of this is an excuse for continuing to pull the rivets out of the plane. That's just stubborn ignorance and has bad news writ large all over it.
That the new race of superhumans that came from eating this mana from the gods is about embark on a long voyage to a distant new world they can see with their naked super eyes, and leave you sad organic nibbles to what's left of the earth.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow... that was really interesting. A clear and almost perfect expression of the behavior described in the prior post. Literally, stop telling me facts and information, I'll believe what I want and you can't change my mind. Hey, whether you believe in a God or not my friend, you are clearly in the grip of magical thinking.
Friend I have to say you are clearly no expert on this topic. First of all, it would be the easiest thing in the world to cite sources until your eyes bleed, all you have to do is the simplest of Google searches to find endless research papers written on thousands of different topics all relating to changing global climate and biochemistry. Here, just try this search: "impact of increased greenhouse gases on environment". Just remember to "hide personal results", or you'll just keep getting the same stupid stuff as usual (I in fact stopped using mine because I'm interested in both or more sides of any conversation.)
As for how little we know... that's just a plain and simple falsification. We have ocean cores, we have ice cores, we have thermal analysis of rock stratum, we have samples of air, and pollen, and biota going back hundreds of millions of years from a vast assortment of fossils (we've even recently reconstituted organic dinosaur tissues from mineral fossils, recovering both DNA and cellular matrix.) We know more about earth's climate than you can possible imagine. We know about its chemistry, the impact of ice ages and past CO2 events, and mass extinctions, plant species and the complex interaction between atmospheric chemistry, plants and the animals that ate them. The tremendous bulk of our evidence (those ice and ocean floor cores), provides us with information about the atmosphere, ocean, and climates over the last 5 million years. Over the past 300 years we have accurate weather records. Over the past 50 years we have satellites and intensive global research on climate and atmospheric chemistry. Over the last 200 years we have good solar records. The fact is, we have literally mountains of data and the models though not complete are good (notice I didn't say they were great.) Recent study suggests there are feed-backs we have not accounted for. The recent rise in greenhouse gas should have precipitated more warming than we're actually seeing. This is probably good. The system is more dynamic and able to rebound than we suspected. That doesn't mean the basic premises are wrong or that we should just carry on burning down the planet. The point I'm trying to make is that science isn't exact... it's a quantum thing... but you simply can't escape the basic physics of this. Thermodynamics ultimately doesn't care what your core beliefs are.
The key here is that a scientist is not an "A" authority, as in someone with magically invoked leadership or infallibility for social, religious or political reasons. A scientist is an "a" authority as in, has studied the topic to the point of being one of the world's leading experts in the field. In this sense it make perfect sense to give this person's (the "a" authority) opinion greater weight than let's say Billy-Bob down at the Pump-N-Dump. If you want a beer that doesn't make you pee smell funny, Billy-Bob is your man, climate change, I go to a different expert.
The problem with all of this is a disruption from sanity that began in the late 70s. During the late 70s the President of that day said we'd have to get more conscious about how we used energy and how our use impacted the world. To that end he changed the speed limit to 55, added solar power to the White House and began a program to make the United States the world largest and most affluent provider of solar power. He was confronting American peak oil and wanted to wean the U.S. off of cheap middle-eastern oil. Most importantly, he was deeply concerned, as were we all with ensuring the world we gave to our children was as fit to live in as the one our parents gave to us.
That man was defeated by a very clever and expensive Wallstreet campaign to discredit environmental accountability. It was portrayed as weak, as unpatriotic, as anti-business, as simply Unamerican. In fact since then, huge inflows of finance from vested fossil fuel interests have ensured that the public is buried in false controversy and disinformation all designed to perpetuate their control of the nation's energy policy and their exploding bank accounts.
When we say there is scientific consensus on the topic of global climate change, we aren't speaking of one person, or group, or even discipline. We are speaking of tens of thousands of scientists working in hundreds of different disciplines from ocean chemistry to meteorology to high altitude atmospheric biodynamics. When so many people from so many different disciplines create a picture that is consistent from so many different perspectives it makes it bloody hard to ignore without simply stating the obvious "Don't confuse me with facts, my mind is made up."
People believe what they want. Personally, I used to believe we were on the precipice of environmental disaster, but recent evidence suggests perhaps we have more time than originally suspected. My beliefs/concerns/opinions change according to the FACTS as they arrive. That is the mark of a healthy mind, not being governed by a fixed ideology or belief system. The global system is tremendously complex and its still beyond us to make a perfect model of it. That doesn't mean that it will forgive our abuse indefinitely. It means we have time perhaps to make wise choices and meaningful changes that enhance human life and help those in poorer places share some of the benefits of expanding technology. To ignore the obvious is to temp fate and bring needless suffering. Just as some religions need to responsibly address their positions on issues like contraception, Americans have to confront their core beliefs. We are no longer cowboys, and shooting from the hip just leaves a lot of collateral damage. As much as we all want to be Duke Wayne, perhaps its time for us to all be a little more Jimmy Stewart.
There are two primary uses for the LARGE American pickup truck. 1. Is to perform useful labor, agriculture, marine, mechanical, large factory, etc. 2. To distract the general populace from the fact a man has too much money and not enough schwanzstucker, or in very rare cases that woman is missing one altogether.
Truth is every piece of information tells us time and again that eye witness is one of the poorest forms of evidence (worst of all because people trust it literally blindly.) By the same token, juries are not only fallible but prone to pressure, prejudice, and a raft of problems associated with poor understanding of the law and sad but common social predilections.
A whole new area of science is quick becoming available, and will utilize reading brain waves directly and imaging memories. The P300 brain wave has already been used to determine whether or not a person has knowledge of a crime scene. Soon it will be impossible to lie about one's felonious behavior. Of course this opens up a whole new can of worms around self incrimination and under what circumstances the government should be able to get into your head. I would certainly make certain this option though not required be available for those who want to go the extra mile to prove their innocence (there are countless good reasons why someone might not want to have a prosecutor scrounging about in their head that has nothing to do with a specific crime one is being charged with, so folks shouldn't be forced to get brain scanned.)
We have sacrificed far too many innocent souls in the public lynchings that so many high profile court cases have become. As long as a would be Governor begins his career in prosecution the get that all important "Hard on Crime" badge, and the only way to win that game is to kill'em all and let God sort out the innocent, we need to do a far better job of determining guilt. And for the love of Pete, if someone on death row is asking to be tested for DNA, give it to the poor bugger. We've already spent millions on his trial, let's make sure we're executing the right guy. Those states whose lead prosecuting attorneys have blocked DNA testing where such testing might prove innocence in capital cases should be barred from practice and sent someplace they can do no harm.
The questions are sincere, and the answers you've provided are the neat, sanitized for your convenient answers that government spin doctors have been spouting for the last 70 years. Do you honestly think for a second that if we'd taken the Japanese officials to an uninhabited off shore island near japan and with a single device turn it into a 4 mile submarine crater, that they wouldn't have been sufficiently terrified by the spectacle? That they couldn't have connected the dots and that they wouldn't have surrendered by noon the same day? No. We needed to make this a passion play. A very loud and public display of ultimate power. We needed to inform the Soviets we were now the one and only superpower on the planet, and if they gave us any grief we could send them to eternity by the millions all on the same day. Hell, in the same 10 minutes.
Is there any even vaguely SANE explanation for putting soldiers at close range to nuclear blasts, exposing them to both immediate blast effects and long term illness from fallout exposure? I'm sorry but its clear to me that the men in charge had many priorities, but responsibility to human life both ours and theirs doesn't seem to be among them. I personally am sad and dismayed by what appears to me to be a consistent lack of ethical behavior on the part of America's military leadership, and the problems have been evident for a very long time.
Do we need to start limiting which species get to post here???
I too support the brave young men and women who risk life and limb defending American, which I why I revile all the more, the greedy, selfish pigs who waste them on lies and political misadventure. If you support our troops, then you will punish the men in power who use them poorly. You will ensure that they are not sent to places half way around the world in harms way on 2,3,4 even 5 tours of duty. You will make absolutely certain they get the physical and mental care required to reenter society successfully and rapidly. You will ensure that employers who hire them are amply rewarded. Finally you will make certain that their widow(er)s and children will be taken care of befitting the heroic sacrifice they have given.
Actually there is strong correlation between the availability of abortion and the reduction of violent crime in the United State over the last 40 years (and I mean like scary close tracking.) I'm not suggesting causation here... just something to think about.
In a world with 7,000,000,000 people, I'm not at all certain everyone should have the right to procreate. That said, I have neither the wisdom, nor the comprehension to determine a way of fairly choosing who should and who shouldn't, and I'm deeply concerned about those with the hubris to claim that they do.
There are equally qualified historical references that strongly suggest that the military had spent a billion dollars (back when that meant something) and they were damned if they weren't going to see their new toy go BOOM!!! Moreover, we were already looking down the barrel of what we saw as Soviet competition/expansion, and we needed to scare the Schist out of them. There were a lot of politically expedient reasons to drop the bomb, on a friggin Catholic Church (near ground zero), but don't for a minute suggest it was to save American lives or hasten the end of WWII. That simply doesn't wash. In fact, in the early days of nukes there was talk of turning China and Russia into matching blue glass ashtrays, and the Army Corp of Engineers had grand plans for using nukes to build huge new canals all over the planet.
By the way, if the First bomb was necessary? Why the Second one? Why did we test the effects on nukes on our own soldiers? Why did we hide the fact that fall-out from nuke testing had seriously impacted people in eastern Nevada and south-western Utah? Why have we never talked about the mishandling of radioactive wastes from bombs or their transport through heavily populated towns and cities? The entire fiasco that has been the arms race from poison mine tailings killing innocent native Americans, to lack of a sane plan to decommission our weapons is incredibly well documented.
The whole MADD thing was mad from the start and has continued being mad to this very day. Vaporizing, incinerating and irradiating people was, is and forever will be an unconscionable act.
I dunno... try this: America is among the 20% of world nations that refuse to limit the use of mines and perhaps this: U.S. laid/dropped about a 1,000,000 mines during the first gulf war alone.
I'd call manufacturing mines that look like toys and dropping them enmasses on innocent children is tantamount to targeting children and their families. Moreover, the U.S., Soviet Union and China have typically been the worlds largest manufacturers of these particular weapons. Sure children die. Hell, we're born dying. It just seems a little trite to ignore the fact that we are supposedly interesting in human rights in our borders and wipe our collective behinds on the rest of the world. It make the holier than thou freedom and democracy conversation sound a bit more than a little hollow.
We have enemies. We need to defend ourselves. It just seems to me the measure of a civilization is the way in which it deals with its enemies. We are not the same folks who helped rebuild Japan and Germany. Who we are today is something sadder and far less ethical.
When the tax code is subject to the very same corporate pressure, influence, bribery that all other law in this land is subject to, the question arises what is fair vs what it legal. When Wallmart uses billions of your/my tax dollars to subsidize the benefits for their working impoverished, they are robbing society (i.e. you and me.) As the parent says, when corporations don't pay for their use and support of the nations infrastructure, they rob society and shirk their responsibility as stakeholders in the health and sustainability of this nation.
At issue is the concept that when done properly, a government provides a healthy and productive environment in which human endeavor may proceed. When private or corporate citizens look to profit at the expense of society, then they may be practicing good business, but they are also practicing horrible citizenry. It is high time we taught ethics, responsibility and accountability in our law, business and schools of science.
A government is composed of its citizens. If you find it untrustworthy, evil or irresponsible, you may have some soul searching to do.
Its not the size. Since 1980, the United States has been moving steadily towards becoming a fascist state and the transformation is nearly complete. Banks and Corporations love it, every one else is getting slaughtered. If you want to fix the problem, separate corporation and state.
You want to see some changes?
Reinstated Glass-Steagall
Formalize the separation between Church and State.
Add a new separation between Business and State
Provide free education through Masters Degree, and for every year after your AA, you have to work as a teacher for 1 year, all your living expenses will be covered and you'll receive a small stipend OR you will serve in the National Guard OR you will work to rebuild the nations infrastructure... pick
Less than 3% of the nations educational budget should go to administrators... figure out how to divvy that up guys. Education is not an industry, its a birthright
People will pass a basic test to vote. Those that don't vote will pay a small tax. Those that do vote will receive a small credit. People want to act like idiots, we'll put the dots close together for a couple generations until they get the hint.
We provide contraception, we teach reproductive health and we explain to young people actions have consequences, some that last a lifetime. We stop being squeamish about telling people the friggin truth and we get desperately honest with one another on a social scale.
We put checks and balances back in, and we pull the fascist imbeciles out.
We stop prosecuting whistle blowers and make them national heroes instead.
We subsidize elections and media donates precisely the same amount of air time to each candidate. Anyone can run for anything, and a non-partisan organization provides extensive information on each candidate for public consumption. This organization is composed of volunteers from diverse backgrounds and beliefs and changes governing members on a frequent and short term basis.
Freedom of the press and protection from ideological control by any single group, corporate interest, or ideological body will be strictly enforced by law.
Put a choke hold on the banks, muzzle them, screw the lid on so tight they pop, follow up by doing the same to the insurance companies.
Split health care into for profit and not for profit. Ensure that not for profit health care is excellent, and accessible to everyone. People who are injured in the commission of felonies and misdemeanor pay 10 times the going rate and if unable to pay must perform public service until the debt is paid.
Lemme see, did I miss anything? I'm sure I did. Well this is a good start. I figure this might make a dent in the national stupid that pervades our society today.
And now their wholly owned subsidiary "Cyberdyne" will fix everything right up!!!
You uncovered his ulterior motive!!! He wants to combine Titanic and Avatar and he wants to film it in space!!!
Provided it was made primarily of thing bacteria like to eat. Something, made of tungsten, and silicon, and germanium, might march on the planet and bacteria might resist being assimilated but they certainly wouldn't be munching on the stuff.
Who will FBI the FBI ?
That would be the CIA, but don't ask, its not part of their charter. If you want all the information on everybody, go to the NSA, of course then they have to shoot you, I'm sure you understand.
Nobody said that. In particular with privately owned companies, the intent in that case to do good or harm is purely in the hands of the owner. Look at SAP, privately held and their turnover rate is under 1%. Why is that you say? Because the owner goes out of his way to hire the best people and treat them so good that nobody in their right mind walks away. That's private enterprise.
Now let's look at corporate enterprise. There the measure is singular and all must bow before the almighty profit margin. If you have to kill your employees to profit, they die. If you have to jerk your customers to make the next quarter, they jerk. Worst of all, as of late, if the stockholders have to eat crap and die so the board get's its next big fat bonus... well, recent history speaks far more eloquently about this than I possibly can.
We have corporations writing laws, and politicians who retire and go to work for the corporations that bribed them to bribe the next generation of politicians. The system is full out busted and all I see is foxes... we're fresh out of chickens.
So on the killing people front... I'd like to raise my hand and say... oh, I don't know... the Tobacco Industry? Pretty much an excuse for getting folks addicted and dead or sick. Ever see the movie "The Insider"? About how the industry worked diligently to make cigarettes the perfect drug delivery system, and if by the way they also make cigarettes more addictive and a hundred times more carcinogenic in the process, too bad, they were just being good business men.
Don't get me wrong, I find the differences between corporations and governments in this growingly fascist society equally repugnant and equally culpable for the dirty deeds that have been committed against all of us, and its all the same unbridled greed, lust for power and control and pervasive need to prove alpha supremacy by comparing codpieces that has lead us all to the brink of disaster.
Doom and gloom environmentalists have it (have had it) all wrong. The systems that govern life and climate of larger and far more complex than they imagined, than they could have imagined. So add more energy to the system, and it squirts out the side in a funny place nobody's expecting. This is not the first or the last explosive CO2 episode in Earth's natural history. Check out marble and limestone. That's when the a frozen earth achieved so much CO2 in its atmosphere that the world melted, it rained for thousands of years and the oceans became a carbonated beverage. Calcium was eaten away by the acid oceans and when the ph of the oceans dropped, limestone was precipitated. By the way, between the ice and the carbonation, life as we know it almost vanished from the planet.
This is a nonlinear process and you have no idea where the thresholds or breakpoints are. You're flying an airplane, and experimenting by removing rivets to see how many you can pull before the plane crashes. We've already pulled out more than we thought we could. That doesn't make the ones who said the plane will never crash the smart ones. It just means we may have a little more time to clean up after ourselves than we thought. Then again, perhap irreversible changes are quietly moving beneath our feet at this very moment, and this whole conversation is moot. None of this is an excuse for continuing to pull the rivets out of the plane. That's just stubborn ignorance and has bad news writ large all over it.
And so the myth that Steve jobs is still alive begins!...is that you Steve? Knock once for "yes" and twice for "God wants an iPad!".
Try this as a test... a sample mad cow
The paternity suits would be a bitch... but I haven't had an orgasm yet!!! Where's my Minority Report!!!
Try s sip, you might like it!!!
That the new race of superhumans that came from eating this mana from the gods is about embark on a long voyage to a distant new world they can see with their naked super eyes, and leave you sad organic nibbles to what's left of the earth.