Excellent rant! Personally I don't care to have those sort of images in my head, kinda like - once you've seen one uncensored holocaust documentary you've seen them all. And you're spot on with the propaganda claim, the new warlord in Iraq would like nothing better than the west to start bombing the shit out of Iraqi cities because the obvious result would be a flood of eager new recruits. As someone commented recently "it's the oldest recruiting method known to man".
I do think some think some images should be illegal and actively censored, pre-pubescent kiddy porn, snuff films, stuff that is abhorrent to a sane person and constitutes a grave criminal act. Such images are in fact a very deep invasion of the victim's, and their family's, privacy. The beheading video is different in that it is an "act of war" specifically designed provoke a knee-jerk military response, the executioner was almost certainly chosen for his UK accent and would have been told - "Cut his head off, or lose your's".
At the end of the day all one can really say about this kind of military censorship is that "The first casualty of war is truth". Old Ben was a politician preaching to the colonial choir, the quote is an obvious attempt to boost the morale of those who would do the real fighting. Probably the bravest thing he did was fly a kite in a thunderstorm, that feat took real scientific balls!
It's the same argument that Rupert Murdoch keeps peddling against public broadcasters such as the BBC and ABC, fortunately UK and Oz governments of all colours haven't bought it and probably never will.
I thought the same thing but a brief skim of their donor list indicates otherwise, an easy to find annual report is also not something commonly available for the myriad of FF front groups.
Having said that, the last line of the summary is oddly misleading, the phrase "but an environmental group claims" should read "but federal wildlife officers claim". It was the Feds who observed "a streamer every 2min", which by simple linear extrapolation is ~25k/yr, they became alarmed and requested the construction halt. Notice they have not called for a halt to operations. I think a closer look is certainly warranted and Federal Wildlife people would appear to be the appropriate group to be doing the looking. Where the environmental group actually fit into the story I'm not sure, if they were the ones who called in the feds, then good on 'em for not turning a blind eye to a politically inconvenient truth.
Disclaimer: Self confessed "greenie" long before greenpeace and science parted ways in the 80's.
Same is true in Oz, overall an Aussie family of 4 pays about 1/10th of the price they would pay in the US for health cover and yet the US has statistically inferior health outcomes.
The US health system is a (sad) laughing stock of the western world, and is by far the most expensive for individuals. But at the end of the day the irrational fear of "socialism" amongst average americans has given them the inefficient private system they demanded.
Newsflash, the vast majority of investments and purchases made by individuals are driven by emotion and circumstance, logic is way down the list when it comes to real life decisions, what most claim to be logic is actually rationalisation of emotions. If what TFA claims is true then these people are merely rationalising a high risk investment with a secondary social motive, so even if they lose their money they can be satisfied that some nebulous "social good" came out of it. They are trying to set things up so they cannot fail to get some sort of "reward". Thing is we don't consciously think those things, we "feel" them when making a decision to hand over the money, or not.
They're making wild assumptions about the genders of the backers and trying to drawn conclusions about that
No, they have a hypothesis that may one day be tested on the entire population in question, they formed their hypothesis on the basis of laboratory tests, Extrapolation is a perfectly valid method of making a prediction (and quite possibly the only useful method), corporations and political organisations all over the planet spend gazillions on the results of such "focus group" tests.
Of course nature is what it is and "the future" always reserves the right to to ignore our most confident predictions. In other words science is in the business of disproving its best answers by replacing them with better ones, it can never prove anything no matter how high you stack the data. If nobody has bothered with the question before then obviously the answer these people have is currently the best answer anyone has.
I was a teenager in the 70's, the social and behavioural sciences have come along way since Feynman pointed out their fundamental problem, the findings from the "Stanford prison experiments" during the same decade is an important, uncomfortable, and sadly underrated example of an early "law of human behaviour".
We already have storage on the grid in the form of hydro, the notion we need to create a lot more storage for renewables is little more than propaganda from the FF industry. So called 'base load" provides a flat supply curve, consumers create a "roller coaster" demand curve with distinct peaks and troughs. When the demand is at it's peak they need to run gas turbines to make up for the slack, when demand is low they use the excess to pump water uphill. In some specific scenarios renewables are better suited to meeting the demand curve of a modern city than coal, for example solar on a hot day is at peak output precisely when the air conditioners are at peak demand.
equipping all of their officers with riot shields/assault rifles, body armor, & armored vehicles they've ceased to be "peace officers".
Indeed, one of the first acts in the Irish/UK peace process in N Ireland was a military order for all UK soldiers to remove their helmets while on street patrol as a gesture of trust. The simple act of removing a helmet requires a hell of a lot more courage than shooting into a crowd with rubber bullets from atop of armored vehicles. Sure, the macho swat stuff must remain an option for serious incidents, but calling in a swat team with riot gear and snipers for a routine suburban drug bust is the hallmark of a coward.
As an Aussie I have to say 30C is not too bad, as long as it's not too humid. However mormons knocking on my door with suit and tie in 40C+ heat without a bead of sweat on them, is downright spooky.
To be honest, I was expecting something a smaller, affordable Midwest town or something
Rural people have much more need for a car than city people. Back in the early 80's I lived here, the town has been a ghost town since the mill closed down in the mid-80's, it's not even marked on google maps anymore. Sure I could walk out the front door and be at work, but as the AC/DC song goes, "it's a long way to the shop, if you wanna sausage roll"
With properly configured IM systems the employer doesn't see it unless the employee shows the content to them.
Don't kid yourself, it is their equipment, everything on it belongs to them. My employer monitors everything that happens on my desktop, email, IM, RDC, the lot. They have been doing so for the last 13yrs I have worked for them. I really couldn't care less, I have never known them to use it against any of their 180,000 employees although I'm sure browsing stats would be used if they had to cut back on staff for some reason. Stuff we want to keep for future reference is CC'd to the project's mailing list by the sender. Without email and vpn's I doubt I would be working from home 3 days a week, but I also doubt our PHB's are stupid enough to dump all that juicy email onto their competitors network.
IM has been around for a couple of decades now, if it was a superior replacement for corporate email then it would already be dead and buried. It seems to me that people who think email can be replaced by facebook simply don't have the work experience to know what the hell they are talking about.
His skepticism of this supposed new diagnostic method is spot on. This is pseudo-science used to rationalize drugging people that don't fit the model, employ vast numbers of highly paid specialists and sink wealth into "health care."
This is just Chomsky style conspiratorial nonsense. What model? Who came up with the plan to employ these specialist, and to what end?
Western family structures have not been as diverse as they are now for a very long time. You are as much an enabler of modern society as you are a victim of it. Human nature is what it is, you cannot escape it at best you can be aware of it. A major theme in human nature with an unbroken trail leading back to a time before we were anatomically human is that every generation believes they are special and have all the answers, they don't really change their tune until their own kids start disagreeing with that stance. This is the way "nature intended", if nothing else it ensures a stable society and explains why the vast majority of our leaders have always been "elders" with adult children.
Having said all that, I do think the GP fraternity has a lot of explaining to do and ignorance to heal among themselves wrt the over prescribing of such drugs.
A friend of mine once took his kid to the doctor with "measles" only to be told they were mosquito bites, way back in 1980 my wife and I took our first born to casualty because he was "throwing up blood", felt relived but a tad foolish when the doctor asked; did you give him blackcurrant juice? Now for the sake of argument, let's say a significant portion of cases are "socially founded in the parent", who the fuck is supplying the parent with ritalin on the basis of the parent's ammature diagnosis?
Concerned parents, the one's who take a keen interest in their child's well being, go to GP's for help when something seems wrong, but when it comes to behavioural problems in either adults or children (Australian) GP's are far too often more interested in signing a script than signing a referral for a proper diagnosis.
Yes, there are plenty of quack GP's who hand out these drugs like candy, However I don't agree with your first post that the stereotypical detached parent and video games are to blame for behavioural quirks. My granddaughter has mild autism, her religious grandmother on the other side doesn't "believe" in psychology and thinks she is just being "naughty" or "silly". She is not on drugs but has occupational therapy to help with her language skills, which the grandmother has deemed a "waste of time and money". Thing is the grandmother never babysits because she can't stop a 5yo fiddling with her china ornaments, I'm an old man and have no problem babysitting her and her two younger sisters. The reason why I can do this and the grandmother can't is that I listen to my daughter and use some of the psychological "tricks" she has learned from the therapist, very simple stuff such as - if you can't get her attention simply touch her on the arm while saying her name.
A large part of her therapy is in the form of video games that attempt to teach her about metaphors and other language quirks most of us never even notice, this drives the grandmother in to further confused rants. I have to say it's very satisfying to see my daughter calmly destroy her hysterical arguments with just a hint of sarcasm (although she gets that talent from her mum). The good news is that most of the specialist she has seen agree that a couple of years of occupational therapy at this age will allow her to overcome her difficulty with language. As far as her other cognitive skills are concerned she is in the top 10th percentile for all of them, raising her language skills out of the bottom 10th percentile will help her communicate that intelligence and creativity to others.
Having said that I know of at least 5 adults whose lives have been destroyed by doctors who have prescribed Zoloft to regular but moderate drinkers, one was a mentally stable 60yr old man who ended up in jail for 2yrs because he crashed his car into a row of rubbish bins and decided it was a good idea to blame his wife and physically attack the cops who turned up to investigate the ruckus. My ex wife also became an obnoxious lying hypocrite while on these pills, the changes don't happen overnight so I didn't connect it with the pills until I saw the same thing happening in other friends and relatives over the next decade or so. The change in personality is gradual, after the divorce she spent 2yrs fighting suicidal impulses before throwing the Zoloft away. Like the 60yo man she is back to her normal personality now, she's still the proverbial "swan" (peddling like crazy below the surface) and still suffers from the anxiety disorder her violent and insetuous father bestowed apon her as a child. She now says her panic attacks are preferable to no stress at all because without stress you have no physical signal to tell you which way your moral compass is pointing, which rapidly turns into having no family, no home, and no hope.
This is not to say that Zoloft doesn't work when administered correctly, in fact I have seen it work "as advertised" in several people. However it seems to me that far too many GP's (in Australia) do not have the faintest clue how to administer such drugs. They do not understand the nature and purpose of stress any better than the patient they are treating, they see someone suffering panic attacks, they don't try and figure out why, they just give them a pill, they fail to warn about serious psychological side-effects, they fail to involve family members in monitoring the patients personality and are totally oblivious to the developing sociopathic symptoms of incorrect use when the patient returns for another rubber stamp script.
The "life lesson" in this story is that if you have head problems go to a proper head doctor, ie a qualified psychologist or psychiatrist, taking head pills from a GP who doesn't first refer you to such a specialist will only bring misery and despair to you and your family.
It could probably even be selectively bred to eliminate that aspect
That's been available for a very long time, it's what they used in this experiment and is grown commercially to make hemp clothing. Getting permission to grow those species is unreasonably difficult in many countries for no other reason than it looks like the smokeable stuff. Historically hemp is as important as cotton, George Washington once decreed every land holder set aside a portion of land for growing hemp to supply the colonial navy with rope. It's said that the invention of nylon spurred the original US government propaganda and the prohibition drive, hemp was a direct competitor in many markets and the nylon makers had powerful friends in congress. The propaganda avoided the word "hemp" and used the Mexican name "Marijuana" in a cynical attempt to appeal to the racist dogma of the day that branded Mexicans as lazy and untrustworthy.
All you need to know is that a greek giant is buried under the mound so obviously the giant was larger than an average greek but smaller than the mound. His exact height in barley grains will have to remain a "known unknown" until they dig him up.
AFAIK you cannot be convicted on circumstantial evidence alone, you can however be put to death on the unreliable recollections of an eye witness or two, especially if you're black and someone like Rick Perry needs a boost in the polls.
Slashdot Mirror
Excellent rant! Personally I don't care to have those sort of images in my head, kinda like - once you've seen one uncensored holocaust documentary you've seen them all. And you're spot on with the propaganda claim, the new warlord in Iraq would like nothing better than the west to start bombing the shit out of Iraqi cities because the obvious result would be a flood of eager new recruits. As someone commented recently "it's the oldest recruiting method known to man".
I do think some think some images should be illegal and actively censored, pre-pubescent kiddy porn, snuff films, stuff that is abhorrent to a sane person and constitutes a grave criminal act. Such images are in fact a very deep invasion of the victim's, and their family's, privacy. The beheading video is different in that it is an "act of war" specifically designed provoke a knee-jerk military response, the executioner was almost certainly chosen for his UK accent and would have been told - "Cut his head off, or lose your's".
At the end of the day all one can really say about this kind of military censorship is that "The first casualty of war is truth". Old Ben was a politician preaching to the colonial choir, the quote is an obvious attempt to boost the morale of those who would do the real fighting. Probably the bravest thing he did was fly a kite in a thunderstorm, that feat took real scientific balls!
It's the same argument that Rupert Murdoch keeps peddling against public broadcasters such as the BBC and ABC, fortunately UK and Oz governments of all colours haven't bought it and probably never will.
You do know that you can point out problems and still support something, right?
I suspect oil/coal shills here.
I thought the same thing but a brief skim of their donor list indicates otherwise, an easy to find annual report is also not something commonly available for the myriad of FF front groups.
Having said that, the last line of the summary is oddly misleading, the phrase "but an environmental group claims" should read "but federal wildlife officers claim". It was the Feds who observed "a streamer every 2min", which by simple linear extrapolation is ~25k/yr, they became alarmed and requested the construction halt. Notice they have not called for a halt to operations. I think a closer look is certainly warranted and Federal Wildlife people would appear to be the appropriate group to be doing the looking. Where the environmental group actually fit into the story I'm not sure, if they were the ones who called in the feds, then good on 'em for not turning a blind eye to a politically inconvenient truth.
Disclaimer: Self confessed "greenie" long before greenpeace and science parted ways in the 80's.
Probably fell off a passing whale that was on its way to talk to Vega.
Same is true in Oz, overall an Aussie family of 4 pays about 1/10th of the price they would pay in the US for health cover and yet the US has statistically inferior health outcomes.
The US health system is a (sad) laughing stock of the western world, and is by far the most expensive for individuals. But at the end of the day the irrational fear of "socialism" amongst average americans has given them the inefficient private system they demanded.
Newsflash, the vast majority of investments and purchases made by individuals are driven by emotion and circumstance, logic is way down the list when it comes to real life decisions, what most claim to be logic is actually rationalisation of emotions. If what TFA claims is true then these people are merely rationalising a high risk investment with a secondary social motive, so even if they lose their money they can be satisfied that some nebulous "social good" came out of it. They are trying to set things up so they cannot fail to get some sort of "reward". Thing is we don't consciously think those things, we "feel" them when making a decision to hand over the money, or not.
They're making wild assumptions about the genders of the backers and trying to drawn conclusions about that
No, they have a hypothesis that may one day be tested on the entire population in question, they formed their hypothesis on the basis of laboratory tests, Extrapolation is a perfectly valid method of making a prediction (and quite possibly the only useful method), corporations and political organisations all over the planet spend gazillions on the results of such "focus group" tests.
Of course nature is what it is and "the future" always reserves the right to to ignore our most confident predictions. In other words science is in the business of disproving its best answers by replacing them with better ones, it can never prove anything no matter how high you stack the data. If nobody has bothered with the question before then obviously the answer these people have is currently the best answer anyone has.
I was a teenager in the 70's, the social and behavioural sciences have come along way since Feynman pointed out their fundamental problem, the findings from the "Stanford prison experiments" during the same decade is an important, uncomfortable, and sadly underrated example of an early "law of human behaviour".
Whatever it is, it's not sexist if a woman does it.
The plants are "talking to each other" in the same way a human and a flu virus "talk to each other".
We already have storage on the grid in the form of hydro, the notion we need to create a lot more storage for renewables is little more than propaganda from the FF industry. So called 'base load" provides a flat supply curve, consumers create a "roller coaster" demand curve with distinct peaks and troughs. When the demand is at it's peak they need to run gas turbines to make up for the slack, when demand is low they use the excess to pump water uphill. In some specific scenarios renewables are better suited to meeting the demand curve of a modern city than coal, for example solar on a hot day is at peak output precisely when the air conditioners are at peak demand.
equipping all of their officers with riot shields/assault rifles, body armor, & armored vehicles they've ceased to be "peace officers".
Indeed, one of the first acts in the Irish/UK peace process in N Ireland was a military order for all UK soldiers to remove their helmets while on street patrol as a gesture of trust. The simple act of removing a helmet requires a hell of a lot more courage than shooting into a crowd with rubber bullets from atop of armored vehicles. Sure, the macho swat stuff must remain an option for serious incidents, but calling in a swat team with riot gear and snipers for a routine suburban drug bust is the hallmark of a coward.
As an Aussie I have to say 30C is not too bad, as long as it's not too humid. However mormons knocking on my door with suit and tie in 40C+ heat without a bead of sweat on them, is downright spooky.
"arithmatic" - Smelly maths?
To be honest, I was expecting something a smaller, affordable Midwest town or something
Rural people have much more need for a car than city people. Back in the early 80's I lived here, the town has been a ghost town since the mill closed down in the mid-80's, it's not even marked on google maps anymore. Sure I could walk out the front door and be at work, but as the AC/DC song goes, "it's a long way to the shop, if you wanna sausage roll"
With properly configured IM systems the employer doesn't see it unless the employee shows the content to them.
Don't kid yourself, it is their equipment, everything on it belongs to them. My employer monitors everything that happens on my desktop, email, IM, RDC, the lot. They have been doing so for the last 13yrs I have worked for them. I really couldn't care less, I have never known them to use it against any of their 180,000 employees although I'm sure browsing stats would be used if they had to cut back on staff for some reason. Stuff we want to keep for future reference is CC'd to the project's mailing list by the sender. Without email and vpn's I doubt I would be working from home 3 days a week, but I also doubt our PHB's are stupid enough to dump all that juicy email onto their competitors network.
IM has been around for a couple of decades now, if it was a superior replacement for corporate email then it would already be dead and buried. It seems to me that people who think email can be replaced by facebook simply don't have the work experience to know what the hell they are talking about.
No, a fat woman is sitting on his neck.
His skepticism of this supposed new diagnostic method is spot on. This is pseudo-science used to rationalize drugging people that don't fit the model, employ vast numbers of highly paid specialists and sink wealth into "health care."
This is just Chomsky style conspiratorial nonsense. What model? Who came up with the plan to employ these specialist, and to what end?
Western family structures have not been as diverse as they are now for a very long time. You are as much an enabler of modern society as you are a victim of it. Human nature is what it is, you cannot escape it at best you can be aware of it. A major theme in human nature with an unbroken trail leading back to a time before we were anatomically human is that every generation believes they are special and have all the answers, they don't really change their tune until their own kids start disagreeing with that stance. This is the way "nature intended", if nothing else it ensures a stable society and explains why the vast majority of our leaders have always been "elders" with adult children.
Having said all that, I do think the GP fraternity has a lot of explaining to do and ignorance to heal among themselves wrt the over prescribing of such drugs.
We have an excuse for our bad behaviour!.
What's your excuse for that post, "delusions of grandeur"?
A friend of mine once took his kid to the doctor with "measles" only to be told they were mosquito bites, way back in 1980 my wife and I took our first born to casualty because he was "throwing up blood", felt relived but a tad foolish when the doctor asked; did you give him blackcurrant juice? Now for the sake of argument, let's say a significant portion of cases are "socially founded in the parent", who the fuck is supplying the parent with ritalin on the basis of the parent's ammature diagnosis?
Concerned parents, the one's who take a keen interest in their child's well being, go to GP's for help when something seems wrong, but when it comes to behavioural problems in either adults or children (Australian) GP's are far too often more interested in signing a script than signing a referral for a proper diagnosis.
Yes, there are plenty of quack GP's who hand out these drugs like candy, However I don't agree with your first post that the stereotypical detached parent and video games are to blame for behavioural quirks. My granddaughter has mild autism, her religious grandmother on the other side doesn't "believe" in psychology and thinks she is just being "naughty" or "silly". She is not on drugs but has occupational therapy to help with her language skills, which the grandmother has deemed a "waste of time and money". Thing is the grandmother never babysits because she can't stop a 5yo fiddling with her china ornaments, I'm an old man and have no problem babysitting her and her two younger sisters. The reason why I can do this and the grandmother can't is that I listen to my daughter and use some of the psychological "tricks" she has learned from the therapist, very simple stuff such as - if you can't get her attention simply touch her on the arm while saying her name.
A large part of her therapy is in the form of video games that attempt to teach her about metaphors and other language quirks most of us never even notice, this drives the grandmother in to further confused rants. I have to say it's very satisfying to see my daughter calmly destroy her hysterical arguments with just a hint of sarcasm (although she gets that talent from her mum). The good news is that most of the specialist she has seen agree that a couple of years of occupational therapy at this age will allow her to overcome her difficulty with language. As far as her other cognitive skills are concerned she is in the top 10th percentile for all of them, raising her language skills out of the bottom 10th percentile will help her communicate that intelligence and creativity to others.
Having said that I know of at least 5 adults whose lives have been destroyed by doctors who have prescribed Zoloft to regular but moderate drinkers, one was a mentally stable 60yr old man who ended up in jail for 2yrs because he crashed his car into a row of rubbish bins and decided it was a good idea to blame his wife and physically attack the cops who turned up to investigate the ruckus. My ex wife also became an obnoxious lying hypocrite while on these pills, the changes don't happen overnight so I didn't connect it with the pills until I saw the same thing happening in other friends and relatives over the next decade or so. The change in personality is gradual, after the divorce she spent 2yrs fighting suicidal impulses before throwing the Zoloft away. Like the 60yo man she is back to her normal personality now, she's still the proverbial "swan" (peddling like crazy below the surface) and still suffers from the anxiety disorder her violent and insetuous father bestowed apon her as a child. She now says her panic attacks are preferable to no stress at all because without stress you have no physical signal to tell you which way your moral compass is pointing, which rapidly turns into having no family, no home, and no hope.
This is not to say that Zoloft doesn't work when administered correctly, in fact I have seen it work "as advertised" in several people. However it seems to me that far too many GP's (in Australia) do not have the faintest clue how to administer such drugs. They do not understand the nature and purpose of stress any better than the patient they are treating, they see someone suffering panic attacks, they don't try and figure out why, they just give them a pill, they fail to warn about serious psychological side-effects, they fail to involve family members in monitoring the patients personality and are totally oblivious to the developing sociopathic symptoms of incorrect use when the patient returns for another rubber stamp script.
The "life lesson" in this story is that if you have head problems go to a proper head doctor, ie a qualified psychologist or psychiatrist, taking head pills from a GP who doesn't first refer you to such a specialist will only bring misery and despair to you and your family.
It could probably even be selectively bred to eliminate that aspect
That's been available for a very long time, it's what they used in this experiment and is grown commercially to make hemp clothing. Getting permission to grow those species is unreasonably difficult in many countries for no other reason than it looks like the smokeable stuff. Historically hemp is as important as cotton, George Washington once decreed every land holder set aside a portion of land for growing hemp to supply the colonial navy with rope. It's said that the invention of nylon spurred the original US government propaganda and the prohibition drive, hemp was a direct competitor in many markets and the nylon makers had powerful friends in congress. The propaganda avoided the word "hemp" and used the Mexican name "Marijuana" in a cynical attempt to appeal to the racist dogma of the day that branded Mexicans as lazy and untrustworthy.
All you need to know is that a greek giant is buried under the mound so obviously the giant was larger than an average greek but smaller than the mound. His exact height in barley grains will have to remain a "known unknown" until they dig him up.
The body was buried in limestone, it shows some forethought since limerock is hard to dig but will significantly speed up decomposition.
AFAIK you cannot be convicted on circumstantial evidence alone, you can however be put to death on the unreliable recollections of an eye witness or two, especially if you're black and someone like Rick Perry needs a boost in the polls.