>Dark matter is one of the few remaining possibilities for the imbalance
No it isn't.
Dark matter accounts for the hidden mass of the universe, it doesn't account for why there is matter in the first place. If dark matter interacted with anti-matter more strongly than regular matter, you would get more annihilation reactions, not fewer, because dark matter has mass and therefore gravity and attracts matter and anti-matter alike.
>The ONLY reason the emails were even discovered was because of the Benghazi witch hunt. And as we found out, it was all because the Pentagon didn't have any "military assets" (as they put it) close enough to respond. NOTHING to do with Clinton.
That's bullshit and either reveals a gross ignorance about assets in theatre or an intentional distortion.
Charlie Company, 1 Battalion, 10th SFG could have flown from Zagreb to Benghazi in 3 hours. Instead they were routed to Italy.
US could have sent fighter bombers in from air bases in Italy. Embassy security forces had laser designators to use for laser guided munitions.
The only reason neither happened is because Obama was unavailable and either could not or would not grant the permission needed for military forces to cross an international border. Because he was at a fund raiser.
That a $100,000 or $200,000 spending by Russia on limited ad buys on Facebook and Youtube somehow swayed people to vote against Hillary, who spent $1.2 billion on her campaign...(and lets ignore for a moment that the Facebook ads supported Hillary). I'm a bit...skeptical.
How about, instead, the Democrats and the left face up to the fact that Hillary was an extremely unappealing and disengaged candidate who assumed her victory was a foregone conclusion and thus failed to campaign in rust belt states like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.
That's the difference between a general artificial intelligence and an "expert system". Chess engines - which are glorified expert systems - don't get better by themselves, they have to be tuned by programmers. An AGI will be able to get better, all by itself.
A lot of jobs are going to go away without AGI. Expert systems can do a lot of the jobs that people do today with less error and a whole lot less variable cost (and a robot is a capital asset with liquidation value, while an employee is just an expense). It won't be a total job apocalypse - it will be a garden variety economic disruption similar to the ones we've had before.
If and when AGI gets here, it will be a job apocalypse (as well as every other kind of apocalypse, eventually - best case scenario is we went up as well treated pets).
Says Germany's official tally for net new refugees in 2016 was 890,000. The article was written in September of 2016. It's now September of 2017. I would say a million+ refugees is probably a fairly safe extrapolation.
>Second, nobody in Germany ever claimed that they were "vital to the economy". You just made that up out of whole cloth.
See, this is why normal people fucking hate the left. You are all liars. IMF has made that argument, Merkel and her henchmen have made that argument. Multiple times. Of course it's bullshit, just like your claim that no one is making it. That's what you guys do, get caught in a lie, move to another lie.
>Third, 86% of the population of Syria is literate. I haven't seen any study of how the refugee population differs from the population at large in this respect, so the most reasonable assumption is that approximately 86% of the refugees are also literate.
LOL. So you believe those official government statistics published by Syria on literacy rates, eh? Here you go:
>I get that you need to demonise the Left so that you can safely hate them and not listen to their arguments. Really, I understand. But don't spread your bullshit here.
Blah blah blah, anonymous coward ends with: "I don't have the energy to lie any more, so I'll just do an ad hominem attack to close..".
While I agree with you that hubris plays a big role, it's also bigger than that.
It's the blatant dishonesty combined with the hubris. The left basically says we are going to lie to you because we don't trust you to make the "correct" decision if you are fully informed. To wit, in Germany, they claim importing over a million Syrian refugees is vital to the economy, despite the fact that most of them are illiterate in their own language (much less German), and the vast majority are simply unemployable and so will be huge net drains on the economy. So the economic argument is bullshit, but clearly they are serving some other purpose which the left is not being honest about. Same thing with the Affordable Care Act. Remember how it was going to lower prices for most Americans? Remember how it was going to increase access to care? Compare the promises with the actual outcome. The left is pathologically unable to tell the truth about their agenda or their tactics, because the vast majority of people would recoil in horror if they were honest. So they cloak it in terms like fairness, affordable, economic vitality, humanitarianism, etc, while the real goal is enervating the populace and taking ever more control over everyone's lives.
>Except you know, actual literal precedents [wikipedia.org].
Sure, Amelia (which was a TS and not a hurricane) hit Houston in 1978. It killed 33 people. The Houston MSA had a population of 2.8 million in 1978 vs 6.7 million today. Harvey killed 70 people. So, death toll scaled a little less than linearly with population expansion.
>And Flooding [wikipedia.org] in general is not unprecedented, so...maybe you should think about what you claim is unprecedented.
Flooding of that scale is quite rare. Unprecedented may be borderline hyperbole, but not by much.
>and that military presence was needed to bring in supplies, which took somebody with the guts to think about the people to do(mostly because FEMA under Brown was dithering).
FEMA under Brown wasn't dithering. Federal guidelines for hurricane response is that states and cities are on their own for at least 72 hours. New Orleans wasn't even in the main path of the hurricane, Mississippi was and was more devastated in the immediate aftermath. Additionally, the Interstate 10 bridges were down over Lake Pontchartrain to the north and over the bayou to the west, and pre-positioned elements further north in Arkansas were wrecked as well. That's the challenge with pre-positioning resources and supplies. Too close, and they get affected by the storm as well, too far away, and it takes time to deploy them to the disaster site(s). Blaming Katrina on Brown or Harvey on Trump is just moronic. But people who tend to politicize everything tend to be morons, so, there you go.
>I'd be careful [fivethirtyeight.com] about that too, the deaths attributed [usnews.com] to Katrina include people who had heart attacks due to the stress, suicides and quite a few drug overdoses.
The mortality rate for people over 70 was pretty damn high for Katrina. That's what happens when your respirator loses electricity for 2 weeks.
>Oh yeah? Well then where the fuck is Jesus? We've been waiting for a long time.
I think, assuming he was a real person, his bones are rotting in the ground somewhere.
>Ah yes, the call of idiots everywhere. Look, it's very simple. You don't fucking build on a flood plain. And guess what? That's what much of Texas is, so you shouldn't build there.
Much of Texas is on a flood plain, eh? If so, then by that rational then so is the midwest, the south, and the Atlantic states all the way up to Rhode Island. Furthermore, California is an earthquake zone, Wyoming is a massive caldera zone, so really, we should just abandon 90-95% of the United States in the event that something bad will happen, somewhere, eventually.
>And I am seriously pissed off that Trump has removed the protections Obama put in place to prevent tax money being spent on rebuilding in places which are just going to get wiped out again. That is going to literally kill people.
Spoiler alert: you die in the end. Your parents die. Your children die. Me and mine too.
>Yes, yes it did. The homes that wound up completely underwater instead of only partly underwater were the result of bad zoning. They should not have let people build homes on land that low-lying.
That's completely moronic. We aren't talking about an area that has endemic flooding every 10 years. We're talking about a biblical flood. If that same flood had hit any other coastal region in the United States, the damage would have been just as bad or worse, zoning be damed.
>Further, if you really had proper zoning, you wouldn't be allowed to build anything in most of the region. Or, for that matter, most of Texas.
LOL, ok, I'm arguing with an idiot.
>It could have been so much better, as well. So what? It wasn't.
Ok. Where were you when Sandy killed 117 people? Were you condemning the zoning in the North East? All the houses built in the low lying areas?
Additionally, how do you conflate this into an anti-Trump screed? FEMA guidelines are that you are pretty much on your own for first 36-72 hours after landfall of a major hurricane. Hurricane Harvey response was a textbook cooperation between Federal and local authorities and citizen involvement.
>Houston is a city that has grown without planning, without human reason.
Even if Houston had sane zoning laws, there literally is no precedent for 53 inches of rain in 2 days, which is the average amount of rain that Houston gets in 365 days. The local and extended area response was still a hell of a lot better than what happened in New Orleans after Katrina (where there were mass rapes, lots of people firing on rescue boats and helicopters, and it took a large military presence to get things back under control).
>The "freedom" that Texans value so highly and brag about so much for certain members of Texas society is a guarantee that when something really bad happens, a lot more people will suffer than if they'd had, you know, zoning laws.
While I'm all for shitting on Houston's lack of zoning for many different reasons, this did not contribute anything to the problem with Harvey. Harvey killed 70 people (so far), while Katrina killed closed to 2,000.
Events like Hurricane Harvey overwhelm local infrastructure and authorities abilities to manage the situation.
Under normal circumstances, emergency dispatchers in the Houston MSA may be dealing with a few dozen emergency calls at a time. Harvey exploded that by a couple of orders of magnitude.
>Now the stool has three legs of decline, and two of them are inside jobs.
Except the population decline was universal across the former Roman Empire - not just the ERE under control of Constantinople, and only started in earnest after the Arab conquests. Sure, Italy was devastated by the Gothic wars and the later Langobard invasion, but Spain under the Goths? Carthage under the Vandals? Egypt under the ERE? Gaul under the Franks? They were all prospering after the end of the barbarian invasions and the re-stabilization of Mediterranean trade.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"Some historians such as Josiah C. Russell (1958) have suggested a total European population loss of 50 to 60 per cent between 541 and 700"
Some of those deaths were from recurring plagues, but a lot of them were also due to the disruption by Arab invasion of the areas that formerly fed much of Roman Europe (i.e., Carthage, Egypt), and the follow-on raiding from Muslim pirates that destroyed undefended or poorly defended settlements along the Mediterranean coasts. Are you really contesting the ecological health of, say Tunisia in 800 vs. Carthage in 570 and the impact of the cessation of Mediterranean food trade on European populations?
>They didn't. This is not an understatement. They started to disappear. Very slowly. Islam discriminated against Christians by making them pay taxes and making muslims tax free.
It actually is an understatement.
Islamic conquests were usually preceded by years of Islamic raiding, by which the Muslims would raid settlements with cavalry, disrupting food production and causing famine over successive years in order to weaken the state(s) under attack.
Initial Muslim conquests usually had relatively benign treatment of the local population once conquered and once they acquiesced the Jizya. Prior to that, non-Muslims were fail game for murder and/or being captured and sold into slavery. This is what happened all across the Mediterranean once Islam reached the Med. This was the period during which coastal settlements all along the Mediterranean were burned to the ground, and you see the re-emergence of populations protected by hill forts.
Additionally, Muslim conquerors initially weren't too bad on the local Christian population, but they tended to treat churches, priests, and nuns a *tad* bit more harshly.
Lastly, Muslims came from somewhat nomadic, herding stock. They were completely unsuited to administer Roman and post-Roman agricultural areas, and had no problem letting their sheep and goat flocks overgraze Christian cropland, which resulted in ecological destruction of these areas over time and the inability of those areas to support the populations they had previously. Consider, Carthage used to support all of Rome and much of Italy. Today, Tunisia is a net food importer.
Look, in a historic context, Islam of the 7th century wasn't any worse than it's contemporaries. In some modest ways, it was actually more liberal and more advanced (ironically, in the area of women's rights). But the archeological evidence is pretty clear - Europe (including Western Europe under the "barbarians") and North Africa and the Levant were flourishing right up until the breakout of Islam. After that, the end of large scale construction, burn back of settlements (so much so that there is a carbon sediment layer in many areas between 700 and 950), and the general decline in literacy and writings (exacerbated by the cutoff of papyrus from Egypt).
>Oh, like in the Crusades when sacking Christians armies would often wipe out every inhabitant-whether Jewish, Muslim, or Christian-of a conquered city?
I know you are playing the moral equivalence game here, so it might be worthwhile for me to point out some salient facts:
1) I am not Christian, so I do not excuse any specific or general barbarity on the part of the Crusades by Christians.
2) Muslim conquests of the Levant and North Africa starting in the 7th Century triggered a three century long archeology dark age (also, a similar dark age throughout the Mediterranean). Populations collapsed from their Roman and post-Roman levels. The ecologies of the North Africa and Levant regions were destroyed, and to this day have yet to recover. Numerous Roman settlements were sacked and the inhabitants slaughtered, never to return. That's why you can go to Algeria or Libya or Syria and find intact Roman ruins today.
3) Christianity didn't have the concept of Holy War until exposed to Islamic Jihad. The Crusades were basically a Christian reaction to the Muslim Jihad which had been attacking Christian lands for a solid 350 years before the first Crusade kicked off, during which millions were killed, and millions more sold into slavery. The time frame of these Christian sites "disappearing" was during the initial Muslim conquest, when Christians and Christianity had done nothing to Islam or Muslims except not converting when it was demanded by Mohammed and his acolytes. So they got murdered by him and his followers, their books and buildings burned,
and their children sold into slavery.
4) Despite all the supposed raping, plundering, and massacres at the hands of the Crusaders, they had almost no demographic impact on the region. Contrast that with the demographic impact of the initial Muslim conquests, and you come up with two different tales. Islam didn't fall into a dark age because the Crusades destroyed their cities, murdered their people, and destroyed their culture.
Slashdot Mirror
>Dark matter is one of the few remaining possibilities for the imbalance
No it isn't.
Dark matter accounts for the hidden mass of the universe, it doesn't account for why there is matter in the first place. If dark matter interacted with anti-matter more strongly than regular matter, you would get more annihilation reactions, not fewer, because dark matter has mass and therefore gravity and attracts matter and anti-matter alike.
Got tired of idiots telling me what to do, so I became that guy.
>The ONLY reason the emails were even discovered was because of the Benghazi witch hunt. And as we found out, it was all because the Pentagon didn't have any "military assets" (as they put it) close enough to respond. NOTHING to do with Clinton. That's bullshit and either reveals a gross ignorance about assets in theatre or an intentional distortion.
Charlie Company, 1 Battalion, 10th SFG could have flown from Zagreb to Benghazi in 3 hours. Instead they were routed to Italy.
US could have sent fighter bombers in from air bases in Italy. Embassy security forces had laser designators to use for laser guided munitions.
The only reason neither happened is because Obama was unavailable and either could not or would not grant the permission needed for military forces to cross an international border. Because he was at a fund raiser.
That a $100,000 or $200,000 spending by Russia on limited ad buys on Facebook and Youtube somehow swayed people to vote against Hillary, who spent $1.2 billion on her campaign...(and lets ignore for a moment that the Facebook ads supported Hillary). I'm a bit...skeptical.
How about, instead, the Democrats and the left face up to the fact that Hillary was an extremely unappealing and disengaged candidate who assumed her victory was a foregone conclusion and thus failed to campaign in rust belt states like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.
That's the difference between a general artificial intelligence and an "expert system". Chess engines - which are glorified expert systems - don't get better by themselves, they have to be tuned by programmers. An AGI will be able to get better, all by itself.
A lot of jobs are going to go away without AGI. Expert systems can do a lot of the jobs that people do today with less error and a whole lot less variable cost (and a robot is a capital asset with liquidation value, while an employee is just an expense). It won't be a total job apocalypse - it will be a garden variety economic disruption similar to the ones we've had before.
If and when AGI gets here, it will be a job apocalypse (as well as every other kind of apocalypse, eventually - best case scenario is we went up as well treated pets).
>First off, Germany doesn't have "over a million" Syrian refugees. At best estimates, it has between 600,000 and 700,000. This article:
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
Says Germany's official tally for net new refugees in 2016 was 890,000. The article was written in September of 2016. It's now September of 2017. I would say a million+ refugees is probably a fairly safe extrapolation.
>Second, nobody in Germany ever claimed that they were "vital to the economy". You just made that up out of whole cloth.
https://www.theguardian.com/bu...
See, this is why normal people fucking hate the left. You are all liars. IMF has made that argument, Merkel and her henchmen have made that argument. Multiple times. Of course it's bullshit, just like your claim that no one is making it. That's what you guys do, get caught in a lie, move to another lie.
>Third, 86% of the population of Syria is literate. I haven't seen any study of how the refugee population differs from the population at large in this respect, so the most reasonable assumption is that approximately 86% of the refugees are also literate.
LOL. So you believe those official government statistics published by Syria on literacy rates, eh? Here you go:
http://www.zeit.de/2015/47/integration-fluechtlinge-schule-bildung-herausforderung
>I get that you need to demonise the Left so that you can safely hate them and not listen to their arguments. Really, I understand. But don't spread your bullshit here.
Blah blah blah, anonymous coward ends with: "I don't have the energy to lie any more, so I'll just do an ad hominem attack to close..".
>You're also lying your ass off about the motives of liberals.
That's funny, because I didn't mention liberals or their motives at all.
I said the left, which maybe you conflate to be the same thing as liberals, but they aren't. Not at all.
The government hates competition. Try setting up your own Ponzi scheme like Social Security and see what happens.
While I agree with you that hubris plays a big role, it's also bigger than that.
It's the blatant dishonesty combined with the hubris. The left basically says we are going to lie to you because we don't trust you to make the "correct" decision if you are fully informed. To wit, in Germany, they claim importing over a million Syrian refugees is vital to the economy, despite the fact that most of them are illiterate in their own language (much less German), and the vast majority are simply unemployable and so will be huge net drains on the economy. So the economic argument is bullshit, but clearly they are serving some other purpose which the left is not being honest about. Same thing with the Affordable Care Act. Remember how it was going to lower prices for most Americans? Remember how it was going to increase access to care? Compare the promises with the actual outcome. The left is pathologically unable to tell the truth about their agenda or their tactics, because the vast majority of people would recoil in horror if they were honest. So they cloak it in terms like fairness, affordable, economic vitality, humanitarianism, etc, while the real goal is enervating the populace and taking ever more control over everyone's lives.
Proof that paid Russian trolls posted millions of posts?
Proof that it had any impact on the election?
You can usually tell what a leftist is guilty of by what they accuse their opponents of doing. AFAIK, there is no right wing counterpart to Shareblue.
LOL. I would mod you up, but you are already at 5.
So, some people conflate "trolling" with "saying something that makes me react negatively".
If you post something inflammatory, but happen to believe it and aren't posting merely to inflame, that's trolling.
If you post something inflammatory, don't care one way or another, and doing it just for a reaction, then that's trolling.
But, most people just think if you make them upset or feel bad, you are trolling.
Social justice, for many people, is either a pejorative or the excuse others use to beat other people over the head.
Social justice, as promulgated by the left, is just another form of tyranny.
>Except you know, actual literal precedents [wikipedia.org].
Sure, Amelia (which was a TS and not a hurricane) hit Houston in 1978. It killed 33 people. The Houston MSA had a population of 2.8 million in 1978 vs 6.7 million today. Harvey killed 70 people. So, death toll scaled a little less than linearly with population expansion.
>And Flooding [wikipedia.org] in general is not unprecedented, so...maybe you should think about what you claim is unprecedented.
Flooding of that scale is quite rare. Unprecedented may be borderline hyperbole, but not by much.
>and that military presence was needed to bring in supplies, which took somebody with the guts to think about the people to do(mostly because FEMA under Brown was dithering).
FEMA under Brown wasn't dithering. Federal guidelines for hurricane response is that states and cities are on their own for at least 72 hours. New Orleans wasn't even in the main path of the hurricane, Mississippi was and was more devastated in the immediate aftermath. Additionally, the Interstate 10 bridges were down over Lake Pontchartrain to the north and over the bayou to the west, and pre-positioned elements further north in Arkansas were wrecked as well. That's the challenge with pre-positioning resources and supplies. Too close, and they get affected by the storm as well, too far away, and it takes time to deploy them to the disaster site(s). Blaming Katrina on Brown or Harvey on Trump is just moronic. But people who tend to politicize everything tend to be morons, so, there you go.
>I'd be careful [fivethirtyeight.com] about that too, the deaths attributed [usnews.com] to Katrina include people who had heart attacks due to the stress, suicides and quite a few drug overdoses.
The mortality rate for people over 70 was pretty damn high for Katrina. That's what happens when your respirator loses electricity for 2 weeks.
Huh?
>Oh yeah? Well then where the fuck is Jesus? We've been waiting for a long time.
I think, assuming he was a real person, his bones are rotting in the ground somewhere.
>Ah yes, the call of idiots everywhere. Look, it's very simple. You don't fucking build on a flood plain. And guess what? That's what much of Texas is, so you shouldn't build there.
Much of Texas is on a flood plain, eh? If so, then by that rational then so is the midwest, the south, and the Atlantic states all the way up to Rhode Island. Furthermore, California is an earthquake zone, Wyoming is a massive caldera zone, so really, we should just abandon 90-95% of the United States in the event that something bad will happen, somewhere, eventually.
>And I am seriously pissed off that Trump has removed the protections Obama put in place to prevent tax money being spent on rebuilding in places which are just going to get wiped out again. That is going to literally kill people.
Spoiler alert: you die in the end. Your parents die. Your children die. Me and mine too.
>Yes, yes it did. The homes that wound up completely underwater instead of only partly underwater were the result of bad zoning. They should not have let people build homes on land that low-lying.
That's completely moronic. We aren't talking about an area that has endemic flooding every 10 years. We're talking about a biblical flood. If that same flood had hit any other coastal region in the United States, the damage would have been just as bad or worse, zoning be damed.
>Further, if you really had proper zoning, you wouldn't be allowed to build anything in most of the region. Or, for that matter, most of Texas.
LOL, ok, I'm arguing with an idiot.
>It could have been so much better, as well. So what? It wasn't.
Ok. Where were you when Sandy killed 117 people? Were you condemning the zoning in the North East? All the houses built in the low lying areas?
Additionally, how do you conflate this into an anti-Trump screed? FEMA guidelines are that you are pretty much on your own for first 36-72 hours after landfall of a major hurricane. Hurricane Harvey response was a textbook cooperation between Federal and local authorities and citizen involvement.
What makes you think those things weren't done?
>Houston is a city that has grown without planning, without human reason.
Even if Houston had sane zoning laws, there literally is no precedent for 53 inches of rain in 2 days, which is the average amount of rain that Houston gets in 365 days. The local and extended area response was still a hell of a lot better than what happened in New Orleans after Katrina (where there were mass rapes, lots of people firing on rescue boats and helicopters, and it took a large military presence to get things back under control).
>The "freedom" that Texans value so highly and brag about so much for certain members of Texas society is a guarantee that when something really bad happens, a lot more people will suffer than if they'd had, you know, zoning laws. While I'm all for shitting on Houston's lack of zoning for many different reasons, this did not contribute anything to the problem with Harvey. Harvey killed 70 people (so far), while Katrina killed closed to 2,000.
It could have been so much worse.
Events like Hurricane Harvey overwhelm local infrastructure and authorities abilities to manage the situation. Under normal circumstances, emergency dispatchers in the Houston MSA may be dealing with a few dozen emergency calls at a time. Harvey exploded that by a couple of orders of magnitude.
>Now the stool has three legs of decline, and two of them are inside jobs.
Except the population decline was universal across the former Roman Empire - not just the ERE under control of Constantinople, and only started in earnest after the Arab conquests. Sure, Italy was devastated by the Gothic wars and the later Langobard invasion, but Spain under the Goths? Carthage under the Vandals? Egypt under the ERE? Gaul under the Franks? They were all prospering after the end of the barbarian invasions and the re-stabilization of Mediterranean trade.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"Some historians such as Josiah C. Russell (1958) have suggested a total European population loss of 50 to 60 per cent between 541 and 700"
Some of those deaths were from recurring plagues, but a lot of them were also due to the disruption by Arab invasion of the areas that formerly fed much of Roman Europe (i.e., Carthage, Egypt), and the follow-on raiding from Muslim pirates that destroyed undefended or poorly defended settlements along the Mediterranean coasts. Are you really contesting the ecological health of, say Tunisia in 800 vs. Carthage in 570 and the impact of the cessation of Mediterranean food trade on European populations?
>They didn't. This is not an understatement. They started to disappear. Very slowly. Islam discriminated against Christians by making them pay taxes and making muslims tax free. It actually is an understatement.
Islamic conquests were usually preceded by years of Islamic raiding, by which the Muslims would raid settlements with cavalry, disrupting food production and causing famine over successive years in order to weaken the state(s) under attack.
Initial Muslim conquests usually had relatively benign treatment of the local population once conquered and once they acquiesced the Jizya. Prior to that, non-Muslims were fail game for murder and/or being captured and sold into slavery. This is what happened all across the Mediterranean once Islam reached the Med. This was the period during which coastal settlements all along the Mediterranean were burned to the ground, and you see the re-emergence of populations protected by hill forts.
Additionally, Muslim conquerors initially weren't too bad on the local Christian population, but they tended to treat churches, priests, and nuns a *tad* bit more harshly.
Lastly, Muslims came from somewhat nomadic, herding stock. They were completely unsuited to administer Roman and post-Roman agricultural areas, and had no problem letting their sheep and goat flocks overgraze Christian cropland, which resulted in ecological destruction of these areas over time and the inability of those areas to support the populations they had previously. Consider, Carthage used to support all of Rome and much of Italy. Today, Tunisia is a net food importer.
Look, in a historic context, Islam of the 7th century wasn't any worse than it's contemporaries. In some modest ways, it was actually more liberal and more advanced (ironically, in the area of women's rights). But the archeological evidence is pretty clear - Europe (including Western Europe under the "barbarians") and North Africa and the Levant were flourishing right up until the breakout of Islam. After that, the end of large scale construction, burn back of settlements (so much so that there is a carbon sediment layer in many areas between 700 and 950), and the general decline in literacy and writings (exacerbated by the cutoff of papyrus from Egypt).
>Oh, like in the Crusades when sacking Christians armies would often wipe out every inhabitant-whether Jewish, Muslim, or Christian-of a conquered city?
I know you are playing the moral equivalence game here, so it might be worthwhile for me to point out some salient facts:
1) I am not Christian, so I do not excuse any specific or general barbarity on the part of the Crusades by Christians.
2) Muslim conquests of the Levant and North Africa starting in the 7th Century triggered a three century long archeology dark age (also, a similar dark age throughout the Mediterranean). Populations collapsed from their Roman and post-Roman levels. The ecologies of the North Africa and Levant regions were destroyed, and to this day have yet to recover. Numerous Roman settlements were sacked and the inhabitants slaughtered, never to return. That's why you can go to Algeria or Libya or Syria and find intact Roman ruins today.
3) Christianity didn't have the concept of Holy War until exposed to Islamic Jihad. The Crusades were basically a Christian reaction to the Muslim Jihad which had been attacking Christian lands for a solid 350 years before the first Crusade kicked off, during which millions were killed, and millions more sold into slavery. The time frame of these Christian sites "disappearing" was during the initial Muslim conquest, when Christians and Christianity had done nothing to Islam or Muslims except not converting when it was demanded by Mohammed and his acolytes. So they got murdered by him and his followers, their books and buildings burned, and their children sold into slavery.
4) Despite all the supposed raping, plundering, and massacres at the hands of the Crusaders, they had almost no demographic impact on the region. Contrast that with the demographic impact of the initial Muslim conquests, and you come up with two different tales. Islam didn't fall into a dark age because the Crusades destroyed their cities, murdered their people, and destroyed their culture.
"...Christian sites in the Sinai Desert began to disappear."
That tends to happen when the inhabitants are brutally murdered and the structures burned, as was usually the case.