"Full disclosure: most of my ancestry comes from the Totonacs. This was one of many tribes enslaved by the Aztecs and all too glad to help the Spanish overthrow the evil overlords."
This is one of the reasons I like/. somebody always gets up and says "hey their my relatives!".
Traditionally people have concentrated on the fact that a handfull of Spanish soldiers overpowered a native civilization of millions. Sure the Spanish were ruthlessly violent and were assisted by smallpox, horses, etc. I doubt it would have been possible without the help of their native allies. I belive Cortés was spectacularly sucessfull because he manipulated the existing local politics and had a large serving of dumb luck.
I think the lack of artifacts contributes to this lobsided account. More often than not, Cortés and his soldiers have been used by commentators to paint a picture of European superiority and/or moral degradation depending on your outlook. I also don't think it is peculiar to Aztecs, the influence of local politics was regularly ignored by colonial Europeans when relating their stories. The winners write history, it stays intact mainly because local accounts are quickly destroyed by the rightoeus, the locals at best are left with verbal accounts.
But rather than drifting off into symantics and definitions I will (yet again) come back to my original point, ie: your suggestion (and the govt actions), to censor the Sunni's can't help but backfire on the US who publiclly pay loud and frequent lip service to free speech. Evil cannot be conquered with evil, hypocricy no matter how "well intended" will be seen for what it is by Arabs and many others, ie: the means does not justify the ends, actions speak louder than words, lead by example, etc, etc, etc.
PS: I have my own dictionary and a respectable vocabulary, if you feel compeled to respond, please stick to the point. If you respond by drifting off on a tangent again, I can only assume you are either...
A. Not listening/comprehending.
B. Trolling me.
C. Don't have a response.
I agree, a "lasting peace in the middle east" can only come about if the west respects the people more than their resources but that is just one side of the story. This brings me back to my original point, censorship. Would you feel respected if your "liberator" controlled the press for propaganda purposes or are the Arabs somehow different to everyone else?
I used to regularly spend 72 hours awake while working on scallop trawlers, others on the boat did the same, the first mate usually got pissed on the way home! The catch was 36 hrs working straight through, the other half was steaming, taking 2hr shifts on watch, Even though we had bunks for the trip, nobody I know can sleep with their arse leaving the bunk every few seconds. A bigger problem is when you eventually get in the car to head home you start hallucinating, it's like a mild acid trip. When my head hit the pillow I would not come up for air for 20hrs.
That was ~25yrs ago and I was very fit, attempting the same thing now would require a medi-vac chopper on standby. I have to hand to the skipper of the boat, he could keep up with any of the deckhands and we were half his age.
"As far as I can tell it didn't cause much suprise at all in the Arab press."
The "Arabs" already see the US as hypocritical, to them this is just more proof of it. The aim should not be to "defeat the Sunni's" as that just encourages further battle and "final solutions". The real aim should be to win a lasting peace in the middle east, hypocracy and corruption IS the problem on all sides, adding to it is not a solution.
I am assuming you are from the US and thus at least have a chance to vote on who gets to create the +/- news stories. I just ask you to do your patriotic duty and put your humanity before your nationality when casting it. If you don't know what I am talking about then look into why President Johnson accused CBS and Morley Safer of "shitting on the flag" and where the chant "the whole world is watching" originated. War is ugly and it is always "the good guys" on both sides (civilans) that get slaughtered. If you want good news then vote for it or stick to the entertainment pages and don't vote.
Soldiers do not cause wars, simarly, teenage gangs don't cause race riots. The thugs and wannabe nazi's throwing rocks and attacking families was the riot not it's cause. Overt racists do exist in this country but from where I stand they are in the minority, my guess would be 5-15%, so you have to ask, why did an everyday assult end up as semi-coordinated racial riots involving thousands.
The "trigger" happened a week before the actual violence with some middle eastern thugs assulting some white lifesaver's, ie: mindless teenage gangster stuff. Alan Jones spent the next week telling people to "take back the beach", the prick was proud of himself, probably still is.
IANAL but I think if the new terroists laws were applied to Jones he would be found guilty of incitement, sedition or both. I doubt that will happen though, for years politicains (including the current PM) have payed homage to his breakfast show.
There is a vast difference between justice for the lifesavers and zenophobic revenge on innocent citizens. Alan Jones and his ilk disgust me and his political clout scares me far more than the ignorant morons that do his bidding. If our politicians had any guts or integrity they would prosecute him as a terrorist leader.
OTOH: These are the same politicians that were recently locking up children in the desert or on some remote island jail for years at a time simply because they don't know what forms to ask for.
We like the US have our own detention centers, but we lock up people up for years because they risked life and limb to land on our shores without the right paperwork. Oddly, few of these people are white or literate. Whatever colour, if you have the right papers and are literate you can fly in, overstay your visa and backpack around for years. When they catch you, they immediately fly you back to where you came from.
Recently the govt was shamed into releasing women and children into society while the years of paperwork gets sorted out. Many of the men and male youths are not released and eventually end up insane before we bribe some country to take them off our hands.
Huh, just occured to me it's Australia day today, no wonder I'm so cynical after all that flag waving and self praise on the TV today.
"Of course, there are some very pretty algoriths I consider art (Donald Knuth's books come to mind)"
You touched on my own bias when mentioning Knuth and I don't doubt Graham's elegance in code, even the critic heaped praise on Graham's book on Lisp, but still his philosophising leaves me unimpressed. Maybe it's the "curse of the geek", ie: He knows what he wants to say but doesn't know how to say it.
Having spent many years on both sides of the average wage I can sympathise with the rebate pain, ie: we take money you don't have and give it back to you next year. A rebate is fine only if you have a cash buffer that can handle it, the majority of people don't. I'd advise buying a cheap car that runs on LPG, it has saved me a fourtune over the last 10yrs. However I don't live in the US and oil has been heavily taxed in Australia for several decades (there is a rebate of some sort for fuel use in primary production). With modern systems there is no reason anyone should have to wait past their next pay check to get a rebate.
The way to watch for cheats with the "coloured" heating fuel (mentioned by GP)is to observe heating oil consumption from billing histories and make an example by prosecuting a few habitual cheats for tax evasion. I doubt differential transport/heating taxes would be that big a problem since people normaly adapt quickly to a new reality, but as I said I'm not from the US.
A baby cries when you take away it's dummy but soon gets over it.
I am old enough to remember the last oil crisis. Here in Australia they did the same as the EU countries and put hefty taxes on oil, pepole griped and carried on about it but by the time the election comes around people have other things on their mind. The economy takes a one time hit and keeps on going. The timing and power situation is ripe for GWB to whack a tax on now. Unfortunately that would require leadership and foresight and as you pointed out the US economy is looking pale (ironically due to the oil wars).
Outrage at oil taxes in Australia is now mainly limited to right wing talk back radio. The same ignorant dickheads who stirred up the racist thugs to the point of rioting in Sydney recently.
I think it is an excellent idea/mistake to put it under hardware. It looks like Sweden has found the political will to at least set a deadline. I know Sweden only by their reputation for precision and independece so I am assuming it is now a matter of national pride to be the first modern economy to shake off oil dependence.
In other words, if the political argument has been won in Sweden, it really does boil down to a question of hardware.
Nice factual pick-up, but the whole point of the article is that the "hacker and painter" analogy does not withstand scrutiny. This does not mean that the artist and engineer cannot or should not reside in the same person. The analogy holds for Graham because (as the author points out) he is a hacker and a painter.
I have to agree with the author that Graham's writing is an attempt to merge different facets of himself into a consistent world view that he then extrapolates to all hackers. His introspective essays completely fail to shed any light on the overlap of art, science and philosophy when compared to the likes of Hoffsteader.
Graham's essays are however very good at stroking the egos of computer geeks who would like to belive their own programs are works of art as opposed to cumbersome mathematical transformations.
Perhaps I misunderstood or perhaps you did not realise the implications of what you said.
As I see it the quote implies that because climatoligists cannot predict tomorrows weather it follows that their longer term climate forcasts are suspect. This in turn implies an assumption on your part that weather == climate.
"Yes, and the best climatoagists can't be sure whether it's going to rain tommorow or not, so I'm not sure I would take their predictions over several years as a sure thing..."
You have no idea what climate means do you? Kinda sad since there have been a gazillon posts that pointing out climate != weather. What you have said above is like saying we have no idea what the annual road toll will be for 2006 because we can't figure out who will get killed in traffic accidents tommorow!
It's called "goal orientated research" and was formulated by Edison, some say the modern idea of a "lab" was his greatest invention but quite a few alchemists are still turning in their grave.
"relatively little progress in fundamental ideas over the past decades"
Let's use your example of Einstien, his insights were so remarkable that 100yrs later every physicist dreams of finding a flaw in his work, so it's certainly not from lack of effort or applied brain power. Could it be that "fundamental ideas" don't change very often because they are, ummmm, fundamental?
"Below average I suspect. If you've never managed to reach the stage where your reading is pipelined then you won't be impacted much by grammatical errors."
Sorry, "pipelining" is for speed not comprehension. Of course if the information is properly formatted and familiar you will comprehend faster. Taco is describing, as best he can, the format he wants to enable him to comprehend a story fast, spelling and grammar is not a serious issue in his desired format but redundant info, personal intro's and rally rousing are and is probably the way I would look at it from his shoes.
As a reader you do not have the same right to dictate format (except by not reading it), you can't expect people to stop posting in bad English, Pig Latin or even Klingon just because you don't like/understand their format. Good writers get their point across fast and waste less of your time, that's the only benifit! Most people can still comprehend well at a resonable speed with significant "noise in the signal", if you can't you have a serious and unusual learning problem.
Obviously given enough noise nobody (including the editors) will understand a word of it, most will simply ignore it. There is no reason to be obssesive or rude, especially when it is informal writing or not the authors native language. Obssesively correcting mistakes is annoying and distracting, modding them up makes them more so. OT allows them to vanish from the discussion but still remain for the majority of people who sincerly want to improve their own skills. The editors have stated they know summaries are often have poor g/s but are interested in the topic at hand and feel the summary should (when possible) be gleaned from the submitters own words.
Me? I have excellent comprehension (top 5% according to those ridiculous state sponsered tests in the early seventies), I'm a slow reader, my grammar and spelling are both far from perfect. The technical aspects of my written word are much better now than in the early seventies. This is because life experience is what drives the form and function of communication. Everyone starts out with a miriad of mistakes such as the backward 'S' and graduates to less obvious mistakes like a missing full stop Communication is an art not a science!
Well said, the Iranian president is a mouthpiece for the mullah's to test reactions. Paraphrasing Douglas Adams, "The function of president is not to wield power but to draw attention away from it".
Books are a fantastic source of background info, things that matter and are happening now often get scant attention in the press and books take time to publish. There IS a wealth of quality background info on the net that will help you choose books, you will need to choose since nobody can read all or even a significant portion of the books. I find it enlightening to compare news sites via google news, you can see the difference in bias, not so much by what an article says but by what it doesn't say. I am also sure there are many things nobody says until some insider writes their memiours 30yrs later.
I think the point you are trying to make is "learn some backgound before repeating political FUD", what particular bits of the backgound each of us thinks is important will colour our perceptions of what is happening now. People who are advocating Genocide as a solution (on either side) are without exception scared little zenophobes who have a phycological need to see "them" as evil and "us" as good. Thankfully they (currently) do not speak for either authority or the majority.
"which means we have ~100,000,000 suicide bombers"
So it follows that given the average human lifespan of (say) 25,000 days we sould expect to see an average of 4000 exploding backpacks per day. Give me a fucking break, please!
1. You are in debt to the tune of ~$10 TRILLION and the USD has been stadily falling for a few years now, everyone is keenly aware of your situation, that plus the military muscle it paid for is probably saving your arse from bankruptcy as we speak! Your economy and the present Administration runs on oil and you don't have much left in your own backyard, work it out for yourself starting from China's point of view.
2. Do you really think double digit inflation would do anything other than soften your landing?
3. What if China switched to Euro's and/or gold? Do you think they would broadcast this or just quietly sell off the US bonds in one of their "five year plans".
I am not suggesting the USD will "plunge" the day Iran opens it's oil exchange, simply that it may loose it's universal appeal and thus it's power. I think this has already started to happen as evidenced by the 30% hike in the spot gold price over the last year.
The US is not worried about or threatened by the possiblity of Iranian Nukes, it's worried about loosing control of the oil trade.
Is it a coincidence that March 2006 is also when Iran is due to open the world's fourth oil exchange, trading exclusively in EURO's? Do the other world powers (Russia, China, EU) see this as a chance to open up competition and free themselves from a US dominated oil trade?
The US quickly looses it's enthusiasim for capitalisim when it works against them. Last year they told China that it's (USD based) money is no good when it comes to buying US based oil companies. China (with the help of Russia) is simply using Iran to secure their own oil supplies and at present it seems to be working.
I don't subscribe to grand conspiracy theories but I do agree that the western media feeds it's readers the story the US wants them to hear. It's much more like "group think" than overt censorship, either method results in a similar level of ignorance amongst the general population.
Slashdot Mirror
"Full disclosure: most of my ancestry comes from the Totonacs. This was one of many tribes enslaved by the Aztecs and all too glad to help the Spanish overthrow the evil overlords."
/. somebody always gets up and says "hey their my relatives!".
This is one of the reasons I like
Traditionally people have concentrated on the fact that a handfull of Spanish soldiers overpowered a native civilization of millions. Sure the Spanish were ruthlessly violent and were assisted by smallpox, horses, etc. I doubt it would have been possible without the help of their native allies. I belive Cortés was spectacularly sucessfull because he manipulated the existing local politics and had a large serving of dumb luck.
I think the lack of artifacts contributes to this lobsided account. More often than not, Cortés and his soldiers have been used by commentators to paint a picture of European superiority and/or moral degradation depending on your outlook. I also don't think it is peculiar to Aztecs, the influence of local politics was regularly ignored by colonial Europeans when relating their stories. The winners write history, it stays intact mainly because local accounts are quickly destroyed by the rightoeus, the locals at best are left with verbal accounts.
"Just because someone received .... doesn't mean they're smart."
No, but there is an extremely high probability he is not stupid.
OT: The fixation on foam is odd, I would have thought the story most concerning NASA's chief at the moment would be Hansen and the policy police.
...uhu, so you saying theft is honourable?
But rather than drifting off into symantics and definitions I will (yet again) come back to my original point, ie: your suggestion (and the govt actions), to censor the Sunni's can't help but backfire on the US who publiclly pay loud and frequent lip service to free speech. Evil cannot be conquered with evil, hypocricy no matter how "well intended" will be seen for what it is by Arabs and many others, ie: the means does not justify the ends, actions speak louder than words, lead by example, etc, etc, etc.
PS: I have my own dictionary and a respectable vocabulary, if you feel compeled to respond, please stick to the point. If you respond by drifting off on a tangent again, I can only assume you are either...
A. Not listening/comprehending.
B. Trolling me.
C. Don't have a response.
"You can respect or not respect someone you are stealing from it really doesn't matter."
We obviously have a different definition of respect, also the word "liberator" was in quotes for a reason.
I agree, a "lasting peace in the middle east" can only come about if the west respects the people more than their resources but that is just one side of the story. This brings me back to my original point, censorship. Would you feel respected if your "liberator" controlled the press for propaganda purposes or are the Arabs somehow different to everyone else?
"...the goal of the Theory of Everything, to have a model that explains and can predict everything."
Pysicists in the 20th centry thought if you smash things together hard enough it is possible to deduce a TOE, Godel did not agree.
I used to regularly spend 72 hours awake while working on scallop trawlers, others on the boat did the same, the first mate usually got pissed on the way home! The catch was 36 hrs working straight through, the other half was steaming, taking 2hr shifts on watch, Even though we had bunks for the trip, nobody I know can sleep with their arse leaving the bunk every few seconds. A bigger problem is when you eventually get in the car to head home you start hallucinating, it's like a mild acid trip. When my head hit the pillow I would not come up for air for 20hrs.
That was ~25yrs ago and I was very fit, attempting the same thing now would require a medi-vac chopper on standby. I have to hand to the skipper of the boat, he could keep up with any of the deckhands and we were half his age.
"As far as I can tell it didn't cause much suprise at all in the Arab press."
The "Arabs" already see the US as hypocritical, to them this is just more proof of it. The aim should not be to "defeat the Sunni's" as that just encourages further battle and "final solutions". The real aim should be to win a lasting peace in the middle east, hypocracy and corruption IS the problem on all sides, adding to it is not a solution.
I am assuming you are from the US and thus at least have a chance to vote on who gets to create the +/- news stories. I just ask you to do your patriotic duty and put your humanity before your nationality when casting it. If you don't know what I am talking about then look into why President Johnson accused CBS and Morley Safer of "shitting on the flag" and where the chant "the whole world is watching" originated. War is ugly and it is always "the good guys" on both sides (civilans) that get slaughtered. If you want good news then vote for it or stick to the entertainment pages and don't vote.
Soldiers do not cause wars, simarly, teenage gangs don't cause race riots. The thugs and wannabe nazi's throwing rocks and attacking families was the riot not it's cause. Overt racists do exist in this country but from where I stand they are in the minority, my guess would be 5-15%, so you have to ask, why did an everyday assult end up as semi-coordinated racial riots involving thousands.
The "trigger" happened a week before the actual violence with some middle eastern thugs assulting some white lifesaver's, ie: mindless teenage gangster stuff. Alan Jones spent the next week telling people to "take back the beach", the prick was proud of himself, probably still is.
IANAL but I think if the new terroists laws were applied to Jones he would be found guilty of incitement, sedition or both. I doubt that will happen though, for years politicains (including the current PM) have payed homage to his breakfast show.
There is a vast difference between justice for the lifesavers and zenophobic revenge on innocent citizens. Alan Jones and his ilk disgust me and his political clout scares me far more than the ignorant morons that do his bidding. If our politicians had any guts or integrity they would prosecute him as a terrorist leader.
OTOH: These are the same politicians that were recently locking up children in the desert or on some remote island jail for years at a time simply because they don't know what forms to ask for.
We like the US have our own detention centers, but we lock up people up for years because they risked life and limb to land on our shores without the right paperwork. Oddly, few of these people are white or literate. Whatever colour, if you have the right papers and are literate you can fly in, overstay your visa and backpack around for years. When they catch you, they immediately fly you back to where you came from.
Recently the govt was shamed into releasing women and children into society while the years of paperwork gets sorted out. Many of the men and male youths are not released and eventually end up insane before we bribe some country to take them off our hands.
Huh, just occured to me it's Australia day today, no wonder I'm so cynical after all that flag waving and self praise on the TV today.
"Of course, there are some very pretty algoriths I consider art (Donald Knuth's books come to mind)"
You touched on my own bias when mentioning Knuth and I don't doubt Graham's elegance in code, even the critic heaped praise on Graham's book on Lisp, but still his philosophising leaves me unimpressed. Maybe it's the "curse of the geek", ie: He knows what he wants to say but doesn't know how to say it.
Having spent many years on both sides of the average wage I can sympathise with the rebate pain, ie: we take money you don't have and give it back to you next year. A rebate is fine only if you have a cash buffer that can handle it, the majority of people don't. I'd advise buying a cheap car that runs on LPG, it has saved me a fourtune over the last 10yrs. However I don't live in the US and oil has been heavily taxed in Australia for several decades (there is a rebate of some sort for fuel use in primary production). With modern systems there is no reason anyone should have to wait past their next pay check to get a rebate.
The way to watch for cheats with the "coloured" heating fuel (mentioned by GP)is to observe heating oil consumption from billing histories and make an example by prosecuting a few habitual cheats for tax evasion. I doubt differential transport/heating taxes would be that big a problem since people normaly adapt quickly to a new reality, but as I said I'm not from the US.
A baby cries when you take away it's dummy but soon gets over it.
I am old enough to remember the last oil crisis. Here in Australia they did the same as the EU countries and put hefty taxes on oil, pepole griped and carried on about it but by the time the election comes around people have other things on their mind. The economy takes a one time hit and keeps on going. The timing and power situation is ripe for GWB to whack a tax on now. Unfortunately that would require leadership and foresight and as you pointed out the US economy is looking pale (ironically due to the oil wars).
Outrage at oil taxes in Australia is now mainly limited to right wing talk back radio. The same ignorant dickheads who stirred up the racist thugs to the point of rioting in Sydney recently.
I think it is an excellent idea/mistake to put it under hardware. It looks like Sweden has found the political will to at least set a deadline. I know Sweden only by their reputation for precision and independece so I am assuming it is now a matter of national pride to be the first modern economy to shake off oil dependence.
In other words, if the political argument has been won in Sweden, it really does boil down to a question of hardware.
Nice factual pick-up, but the whole point of the article is that the "hacker and painter" analogy does not withstand scrutiny. This does not mean that the artist and engineer cannot or should not reside in the same person. The analogy holds for Graham because (as the author points out) he is a hacker and a painter.
I have to agree with the author that Graham's writing is an attempt to merge different facets of himself into a consistent world view that he then extrapolates to all hackers. His introspective essays completely fail to shed any light on the overlap of art, science and philosophy when compared to the likes of Hoffsteader.
Graham's essays are however very good at stroking the egos of computer geeks who would like to belive their own programs are works of art as opposed to cumbersome mathematical transformations.
Perhaps I misunderstood or perhaps you did not realise the implications of what you said.
As I see it the quote implies that because climatoligists cannot predict tomorrows weather it follows that their longer term climate forcasts are suspect. This in turn implies an assumption on your part that weather == climate.
"Yes, and the best climatoagists can't be sure whether it's going to rain tommorow or not, so I'm not sure I would take their predictions over several years as a sure thing..."
You have no idea what climate means do you? Kinda sad since there have been a gazillon posts that pointing out climate != weather. What you have said above is like saying we have no idea what the annual road toll will be for 2006 because we can't figure out who will get killed in traffic accidents tommorow!
"...executing a program, which means that it will never do anything it has not been programmed to do by a human being."
You've obviously never heard of Turing, Godel or answered a support call.
"Management by committee?"
It's called "goal orientated research" and was formulated by Edison, some say the modern idea of a "lab" was his greatest invention but quite a few alchemists are still turning in their grave.
"relatively little progress in fundamental ideas over the past decades"
Let's use your example of Einstien, his insights were so remarkable that 100yrs later every physicist dreams of finding a flaw in his work, so it's certainly not from lack of effort or applied brain power. Could it be that "fundamental ideas" don't change very often because they are, ummmm, fundamental?
"Below average I suspect. If you've never managed to reach the stage where your reading is pipelined then you won't be impacted much by grammatical errors."
Sorry, "pipelining" is for speed not comprehension. Of course if the information is properly formatted and familiar you will comprehend faster. Taco is describing, as best he can, the format he wants to enable him to comprehend a story fast, spelling and grammar is not a serious issue in his desired format but redundant info, personal intro's and rally rousing are and is probably the way I would look at it from his shoes.
As a reader you do not have the same right to dictate format (except by not reading it), you can't expect people to stop posting in bad English, Pig Latin or even Klingon just because you don't like/understand their format. Good writers get their point across fast and waste less of your time, that's the only benifit! Most people can still comprehend well at a resonable speed with significant "noise in the signal", if you can't you have a serious and unusual learning problem.
Obviously given enough noise nobody (including the editors) will understand a word of it, most will simply ignore it. There is no reason to be obssesive or rude, especially when it is informal writing or not the authors native language. Obssesively correcting mistakes is annoying and distracting, modding them up makes them more so. OT allows them to vanish from the discussion but still remain for the majority of people who sincerly want to improve their own skills. The editors have stated they know summaries are often have poor g/s but are interested in the topic at hand and feel the summary should (when possible) be gleaned from the submitters own words.
Me? I have excellent comprehension (top 5% according to those ridiculous state sponsered tests in the early seventies), I'm a slow reader, my grammar and spelling are both far from perfect. The technical aspects of my written word are much better now than in the early seventies. This is because life experience is what drives the form and function of communication. Everyone starts out with a miriad of mistakes such as the backward 'S' and graduates to less obvious mistakes like a missing full stop Communication is an art not a science!
Well said, the Iranian president is a mouthpiece for the mullah's to test reactions. Paraphrasing Douglas Adams, "The function of president is not to wield power but to draw attention away from it".
Books are a fantastic source of background info, things that matter and are happening now often get scant attention in the press and books take time to publish. There IS a wealth of quality background info on the net that will help you choose books, you will need to choose since nobody can read all or even a significant portion of the books. I find it enlightening to compare news sites via google news, you can see the difference in bias, not so much by what an article says but by what it doesn't say. I am also sure there are many things nobody says until some insider writes their memiours 30yrs later.
I think the point you are trying to make is "learn some backgound before repeating political FUD", what particular bits of the backgound each of us thinks is important will colour our perceptions of what is happening now. People who are advocating Genocide as a solution (on either side) are without exception scared little zenophobes who have a phycological need to see "them" as evil and "us" as good. Thankfully they (currently) do not speak for either authority or the majority.
"which means we have ~100,000,000 suicide bombers"
So it follows that given the average human lifespan of (say) 25,000 days we sould expect to see an average of 4000 exploding backpacks per day. Give me a fucking break, please!
Finding genocide repulsive is flamebait?
1. You are in debt to the tune of ~$10 TRILLION and the USD has been stadily falling for a few years now, everyone is keenly aware of your situation, that plus the military muscle it paid for is probably saving your arse from bankruptcy as we speak! Your economy and the present Administration runs on oil and you don't have much left in your own backyard, work it out for yourself starting from China's point of view.
2. Do you really think double digit inflation would do anything other than soften your landing?
3. What if China switched to Euro's and/or gold? Do you think they would broadcast this or just quietly sell off the US bonds in one of their "five year plans".
I am not suggesting the USD will "plunge" the day Iran opens it's oil exchange, simply that it may loose it's universal appeal and thus it's power. I think this has already started to happen as evidenced by the 30% hike in the spot gold price over the last year.
The US is not worried about or threatened by the possiblity of Iranian Nukes, it's worried about loosing control of the oil trade.
Is it a coincidence that March 2006 is also when Iran is due to open the world's fourth oil exchange, trading exclusively in EURO's? Do the other world powers (Russia, China, EU) see this as a chance to open up competition and free themselves from a US dominated oil trade?
The US quickly looses it's enthusiasim for capitalisim when it works against them. Last year they told China that it's (USD based) money is no good when it comes to buying US based oil companies. China (with the help of Russia) is simply using Iran to secure their own oil supplies and at present it seems to be working.
I don't subscribe to grand conspiracy theories but I do agree that the western media feeds it's readers the story the US wants them to hear. It's much more like "group think" than overt censorship, either method results in a similar level of ignorance amongst the general population.