Going to war with Iraq was the right thing to do, still is.
Going to war with Iraq was the most pigheaded, bone-headed, misguided, most utterly wrong thing to do, still is. That is from any objective direction you could possibly measure, the Iraq war was a predictable fiasco. Only someone living in a delusional bubble would believe otherwise.
I hope you do realize that Iraq and Al Queda did have a relationship. Ansar Al Islam did Saddam's dirty work for him in the northern no fly zone and Iraqi help and training for Al Queda has been documented in documentary finds in Baghdad.
This is plainly retarded. Ansar Al Islam, like other Islamist groups saw Saddam as a mortal enemy. The group did not even existprior to September 2001. Their predecessor, The Islamic Movement of Iraqi Kurdistan, undertook jihad against Baghdad in May 1987! Osama himself offered to the Saudis to bring his Afghani mujahedeen and fight Saddam in the 1991 war. At no point in time there were ever any cooperation between secular, socialist dictatorship of Ba'ath (whom Osama fondly called "infidel communists" and "apostates") and far-out radical religious fanatics of Ansar Al Islam or Al-Queda. Osama frquently and consistently incited his followers to fight Saddam and Saddam in turn brutally put down any and all Al-Queda operatives he could find. The only reason Ansar Al Islam was where it was is because Saddam could not get to them to kill them all as they were in the Northern "no fly" zone, part of the "autonomous" Kurdistan.
and Iraqi help and training for Al Queda has been documented in documentary finds in Baghdad.
Complete and utter bullshit. No such credible documentation exists, not to mention that reams of "documents" were wholesale falsified and sold by Iraqi crooks after the war to gullible Westerners who saw what they wanted to see and were willing to pay for it.
They may or may not (I'm leaning towards may not) have provided some background support for 9/11 but the idea that there was no relationship at all has been pretty thoroughly debunked.
Debunked? By whom? Where are the documents? Link me to documentation which overturns the long standing mutual hatreds of Al-Queda and Saddam in order to do what?! Send some Saudis who never even been to Iraq to do 9/11? To what end?! Saddam had absolutely nothing to gain from any of this and a lot to lose. That is a raving lunacy.
As far as respect goes, you really should read up on what kind of respect the islamists demand. It's the respect of the 2nd class inhabitant exhibits to his masters. It's called dhimmitude and no, I won't give that.
Right, the demonization of all of your enemies is the first step to be able to callously murder them all. Al-Queda manual, page 1. Osama must be pleased that you were following the instructions. Newsflash: Most Islamic societies are composed of a vast majority of moderates who only want to have peace and bread on the table. And then there is a tiny minority of radical maniacs who speak of "master-slave" relationships and "missions from God". Al-Queda and similar in their corner and Neo-cons and various Christian fundamentalist nutjobs in yours. You need each other desperately to be able to hijack the world towards the bloodbaths you so desire to make you feel powerful and important. Both of you wanting to enslave the rest of the populace to your wacko ideologies and perfectly willing to level entire countries to do so.
If you knowingly would, shame on you.
No it is shame on your for such shallow, unthinking spewing of demonizing propaganda.
Wrong. The U.N. was formed by an agreement of some sovereign nations as a way to provide a forum for working things out without immediate resort to war, and for various lesser humanitarian purposes. It has nothing to do with making "international law."
That process of "working things out" results in a set of rules to follow by the parties involved, with others acting as guarantors. That set of rules is called a "law". If someone breaks them, it is up to the others to correct the errant behaviour. Same as any society.
Wrong. Nothing in the United Nations is binding or overrides national constitutions or sovereignty except when and where the UN is willing and able to mount an armed force to exercise its joint will, which is little different than the enforcement of national wlil in the wars waged by sovereign nations, wars that the U.N. was formed to forestall.
Those very rules, resultant from the "working things out" part have the effect of overriding each party's internal wishes and ways. That enforcement of which is cooperative in nature, unlike individual "national wills". World-wide sanctions are for example possible under the auspices of UN while they are completely out of the question to be instituted by a nation. UN's resolutions are binding on all member countries, although some would like to pretend it isn't so. It is up to the UN's discretion as to how to react to such defiance.
Furthermore, much less democratic organizations of far more questionable aims, such as WTO and WIPO also have explicit override of the national laws of members, so your impotent rage at the extra-national agents is somewhat misdirected.
Scrutiny, yes. Control, no. And it didn't take the U.N. for the actions of nations to be subject to the scrutiny of other nations.
Control, yes. Should the UN for example declare global embargo on the US (unlikely case but a good demonstration) US activities would be then forcibly controlled. There is no need for a military action. Simple refusal of all trade would suffice to utterly destroy the US's economy, although of course it would have significant economic impact on the rest of the world. But this is simply to illustrate the point of a possible control method.
The U.N. is a clusterfuck in progress. It will never be anything better than that.
That is your opinion, because you desperately wish so, hoping for Pax Americana, where instead of international concensus, American military power rules unchallenged, unanswerable and brutal over the whole globe. Forgetting of course that USA is utterly dependant on the rest of the globe for nearly everything these days.
it would be easy and efficient to nuke the small island while the U.N. is in plenary session with all members in attendance, without damaging anything of real value.
Followed by a global nuclear retaliation, erasing the USA from the face of the planet, or prehaps more poignantly, a total embargo on all of its imports and exports, inducing 80% unemployment from lack of energy and raw materials and starving most of its massive overpopulation to death before massive structural changes rolling back the "standard of life" by many decades could be effected.
Last time I checked all of those were ultimately recyclable products. Ores used to make wiring, cars, coins, or what have you are all recyclable. Wood is a renewable resource. Even plastics (one of the items you used in your doomsday scenario) are recyclable.
Most of which require orders of magnitude more energy to re-process then to prodcue in the first place, not to mention the fact that they also require massive efforts at separating the materials from each other, for example, insulation from wires, plastic, ceramic and rare metals from common ones in a car engine etc. That is why recycling technologies are at this point in time so highly inefficient for vast majority of materials.
If you really believe that then I find it pretty hypocritical to begrudge the United States for investing so heavily in our military. Nation-states do what they must do to survive after all. Of course I don't believe that is likely to happen
That scenario does not represent a "win", so no, it makes no sense. The proper course of action would be to invest in sustainable ways of life and into reshaping the society to cope with them. Imperial armies are a delaying tactic, ultimately a futile and self-defeating one.
Repeat after me: Technology advances and provides solutions to problems.
It is not happening. Technology, even if some miraculous portable limitless souce of energy existed, of the kind you are thinking of, requires infrastructure to produce and deploy, which in turn requires more materials and energy to build, both already in short supply. In short you are expecting manna to fall from Heaven, and save the show just in the nick of time, so that America can preserve and grow its urban-sprawls, dotted with frying pits and Wall-Marts.
I could start by pointing out that I opposed the war and resent it being thrown in my face anytime I point out that not everything about the United States is evil.
You will get it thrown in your face, regardless of your vote, every time you declare your belief in America's omnipotency.
I could also point out that two thirds of Iraq welcomed us and are currently working with us.
Bullshit. Shias hate your guts just as badly as the Sunnis, the only difference being that you are their ticket to Iran-sponsored Islamic Theocracy to be created on the soon to be ripped out of Iraq southern provinces. So they are holding their fire (sort of, the "allies" only need to buldoze some prisons and kill some policemen here and there) until they get what they want. Kurds welcomed you, since you made an independent country of Kurdistan possible. So you spent $200 billion on war, crookery and graft and killed 100,000 people so that a civil war can work out to Kurd's advantage. Maybe.
I could go further and point out the fact that a whole ton of the problems in the Middle East stem from historical European Imperialism and the European knack for drawing borders with no regard to religious, cultural or tribal differences.
No argument here. European Imperialism is just as ugly as the American one. The differece? European Imperialism is being spoken of in the past tense.
And what would your solution to Iraq be? Bashing the United States for going into Iraq in the first place does not solve the current problem. The UN can't fix it either -- they cut and ran like a whipped dog when this happened. What's your solution? I'd love to hear it.
There is no good "solution". Just like there is no "solution" to fixing a man into whose head you put a few shotgun rounds. The damage is irreversible. Only after many decades of violence, terror and political upheavals run their course, perhaps some stability will emerge there. Iraq is simply dead. Never to come back to life again. American hubris killed it.
And your realistic scenario is the Western abandonment of our way of life without a fight or a whimper in a World where plastic doesn't exist. Have I missed anything?
Do not science and religion both seek truth, but by different methods?
Yes, science by methodical, slow, step-by-step march of mutually-cross-referencing and verifiable discoveries and religion by wholesale invention of grand, make-belief boloney pulled out of collective rears of various priesthoods, usually, for some strange reason, also having the effect of bringing power and riches to those priests. Subsequently, the religion either requires supression of science or constant "re-interpretations", like say, "day = epoch" or "world-wide flood = an overflowing lake", etc and so on, stretching their incredulity far beyond any breaking point.
"In the beginning (time) God, (the agent) created the heavens (space) and the earth (matter-energy)"
Do give me a break! earth = matter-energy?!! No, earth = earth as in Terra Firma, flat one, "sun affixed in heavens" circling around it, or whatever nonsense whomever scribbled this fable was under the delusion of at the moment in ancient Sumer. As time goes on and ridiculosuness of the religious "teachings" becomes increasingly apparent, so is the increasingly desperate effort to "re-interpret" them in ever more fantastic and far-fetched ways.
Unfortunately, the Christians have also gone down this road even though the Bible teaches just the opposite. It is not that we by any kind of effort can approach or work toward the goal of reaching or understanding God, but that God came down here in human form to reach us and bring us into a relationship with Himself based on love.
Err, Christians, Jews, Moslems (all part of Judeo-Christian branch of dogmas) and I am sure a whole band of all sorts of other religions, including all of those "spirit" based voodoos, where the "gods" not only do come down from the otherworlds, but they permanently inhabit various objects. I hate to break it to you, but all of these are equally and directly contradicting science in various places. But it is the Judeo-Christian dogmas which are particularly militant against science, because unlike other, more mellow and forgiving religions, Judeo-Christians cannot stand someone contradiciting their useful for quite un-divine tasks of power mongering and religious warfare ideologies. It is the very existance of "detailed" Holy Books dealing explicitely with practical aspects of life which produce this effect. Other religions remain purposefully vague, and that is how they get away from a head-on conflict with science.
Some scientists have gone so far as to state that the entire Universe may just be a thought or simulation in a super mind. The Bible also suggest this. The movie "The Matrix" played very creatively with that idea.
Which would render all science, life, religion and everything else moot. This is nothing but mental masturbation. The final step in this "reasoning" is that nothing outside of your mind exists, no God, no Universe, nothing. It is all an illusion you dreamt up. Internet and Slashdot included. Both this and the other "matrix theory" you mentioned are equally futile and bordering on insanity.
In my mind, the truth of science and the truth revealed in the Bible are complementary, not contradictory. Since we don't have perfect knowlege of either science or all of what is revealed in the Bible, it is foolish to throw rocks into each other's houses. Both the discoveries of science and the texts of the Bible are subject to interpretation and it these interpretations that are often at odds.
Problem: the "biblical truth" is unverifiable and wholly dependant on interpretation, unlike science which has to yeld empirical results. There is no test available to us to determine the validity of the biblical "truth". Also, at this particular juncture the fact-free "interpetation" of "Intelligent Design" (as in no-evolution, man created out of ash, etc -- not just juggling of quantum probabilities over millenia, which is most likely unverifiable and still falls within the framework of evolution) conflicts wi
Really? Getting the Western World off fossil fuels doesn't begin to solve the problem? How much energy do you really think Nigeria uses vs one small European country (say Greece)? I won't even waste time comparing them to the United States or China.
No it does not because not only is the plutonium problem (i.e. growing stockpiles of it) difficult but electrical energy alone is not going to solve the problem. Besides, all of the other countries combined, all of whom will need cheap energy lest they forever be kept in the dark ages, with all the resultant terrorism, religious fanaticism and the rest, represent a significant amount of global population, in fact larger then either the US or the EU. Indonesia alone has 240 million people in it.
You seem to completely ignore the fact there are a lot of other countries with the exact same mode of living (Canada comes to mind)
And who have the same problems as the US, although Canada at least has a very good ratio of natural resources (including oil) to population.
and a lot of other ones that are trying to attain something like our way of life (China, India).
And who cannot achieve it, ever, because the Western "standard" is so brain-deadly wasteful and dependant on wholesale pillaging of resources that if China and India (2 billion people in there) alone attained that "standard", the whole of natural resources of the planet would have to be doubled just for them, never you mind the resulting pollution. It isn't going to happen. Or more precisely, it is not going to happen in the "american", utterly egoistical and pillaging way. And yes, Canada and many Western countries are right up there with their unsustainable "ways of life". So this is not only about oil, but about rare ores, wood and other materials which do not exist in amounts anywhere near sufficient to allow China or India to become as piggish as the west. The Chinise realize that and the cold resource war is already on the way, with China buying up mines and processing everywhere, including US's backyard, Canada. But that of course won't be anywhere near enough and the "cold" war is very likely to turn "hot" over ores alone. Repeat after me: there is not enough resources on the planet to sustain the current Western "way of life" without permanently enslaving majority of the world's population.
How the hell does a discussion about nuclear fission as an energy source go back into Iraq? WTF is your problem? Do you hate us so much that you can't have a rational discussion with one single American on the internet?
What?! You brought this topic into the discussion by claiming that, quote, "I suppose that's the biggest difference between Americans and most of the rest of the World. We feel like we can do anything if we put our minds to it." -- I merely provided the most obvious and contemporary counterpoint that came to mind.
Really? Hope for the future is "self-centered fantasy"? Hope that the human race will overcome the energy problem without giving up our way of life is fantasy? I call it optimism. And I pity you for not having any.
I'll take "realism" over unfouded optimism any time. Sometimes life will pleasently suprise me if all the lucky coincidences come together. But one has to prepare for the realistic scenarios, not for what we would like happening.
Go ahead. Root for the downfall of the United States if that cheers you up. I'm rooting for the future of the human race.
It would appear that the downfall of the insane consumerism of the USA (and others) is the precondition for the "future of the human race". One or the other. Take your pick.
That by the way does not mean the downfall of the USA itself but only signifcant changes in its selfish behaviour (although I find it telling how you conflated the two).
it goes on to state that the cost of fuel is minor when talking about nuclear power and that with future breeder reactor technology you can use U-238 as a fuel source.
Ahem. Breeder reactors. That is a kind of a reactor which yelds plutonium as a by-product. A type of a reactor which both US and even USSR did not want other countries to have because unlike Uranium, which requires slow and lengthy process to make a workable nuke, plutonium is what made all those thousands upon thousands if US and Soviet warheads possible. So as I said, yes you can have long-term energy from this but only for the top industrialized countries. That does not even begin to solve the problem unless you expect a brutal and murderous put-down of the entire rest of the world by these few or allow Nigeria to have a lot of nukes. A scenario which I already described.
I suppose that's the biggest difference between Americans and most of the rest of the World. We feel like we can do anything if we put our minds to it. You are already thinking about giving up.
Like, say, "bringing democracy to Iraq" at the point of the gun? Believing yourself omnipotent does not make you so. And there is another name for such an attitude: Hubris. The thing that goes before the fall.
Those of us who think of all these consequences are not "giving up". We simply see reality rather then a rosy-colored, self-centered fantasy many people subscribe to, like for example the "hot fusion is 5 years away" crowd who have been saying so for the last 40 years.
First off, I'd like to say that we've strayed far off the original theme of this thread of the UN wanting to run the Internet. But that's what makes/. an interesting place. Geeks and nerds are human and like to discuss human issues not always invoving only geeky subjects.
We are going to get downmodded "Offtopic" any minute now....
I don't think that faith and science are in competition, but are complementary.
I am afraid you are wrong on that account. Religions dwell in the unexplored and unknown places, which our reasoning mind is unable to explain. Historically, every time science made an advance, filling some of these areas, religion was expelled from them, sometimes resisting violently, as Giordano Bruno and others could testify to. Now there are few places left for religion where it can exist, without engaging science head on, and inevietably losing, as science is the Queen of all that is empirical and logical. The latest, rather pitiful attempts at counter-attack of militant religion, attempts to banish and subjegate science to religion, to cripple and chain it, are only taking place in the least educated, most bigotted places in the world: Middle East Islamic maddrasses and... Bible Belt home-schoolin'.
When you get on an airplane, you have faith that the airplane is airworthy and that the mechanics and all the others involved with it have done their jobs faithfully.
I would rather describe it as performing the risk analysis and then deciding that odds are good.
I happen to assume or believe that a supremely intelligent, conscious and wise mind put it all together and is pleased to allow us to explore His handiwork and the laws that control this universe.
That is all fine and dandy as long as this assumption does not directly contradict the results of the process of scientific discovery, as is the case with the "Intelligent Design".
Belief in a God who loves order and harmony is what prompted early scientists or actively explore His creation.
Err, no. It was the need to eat and keep warm, which resulted in discovery of simple tools, and clothing and fire. And on it went from there. Unless by "early" you mean gentlemen in ruffled collars...
You and every human on this planet is incurably religious, whether you like it or not. Religion is the one thing in kind, not just in degree that separates us from the animals. You may not worship a "god" in the traditional sense, but whatever or whoever is more important to you than anything else is your "god". For many in our culture the pursuit of posessions and power are the objects of their "worship". For some it is science and technology. For many it is self and pleasure. For some it is confidently asserting that there is "no God", such as militant atheists. If you are honest with yourself, you too can determine who or what is your "god".
Well if you redefine "religion" to be so broad as to include nearly every pursuit people engage into... Hmm, I think this has possibilities: I am sure somebody can now quote you and claim that his efforts to experimentally double the number of positions in the Kamasutra is really a quest for God....
Seriously, though, here is the thing:
The underlying assumption or faith of evolution is that everything in our world came about by probalistic impersonal processes and that no conscious thought went into anything.
The only place you could hide God in the modern scientific universe is the sub-atomic quantum phenomena. That is, as some extra-universe, or perhaps embedded in the universe itself, entity influencing the roll of subatomic dice. One then could argue that the process of evolution (which is, we should by now agree, quite solidly, scientifically established) could be then influenced by such slow, over millenia tinkering. That sort of "Intelligent Design" which does not contrad
Maybe people won't associate with Hamas if supporting Hamas via affiliation or donation brings with it some cost, like maybe getting your ass thrown in jail or deported. But that's not something that you seem to want to do. I've got my Hamas discouragement idea, what's yours.
Well, yours isn't new. As a matter of fact, that strategy has increased the size of Hamas substantially and made it more willing to accept ever-more violent radicals, who it shunned before. Care to try again?
You should realize that the fundamentalists and the radicals thrive on US/Israeli hostility and collective-punishment methods. That's what they want. That tactic marginalizes any potential moderates and charity workers and gives control and power to the most violent radicals.
Sort of like in the US: "You asshole! The Islamofascists just attacked us!!! How dare you opose our attack on Iraq!! You Terrorirst Lover, you!" Good luck trying to get a word edgewise about how Iraq has nothing to do with Al-Qeida and is in fact its mortal enemy. You know how that one worked out, don't you?
So sane people would try to do a carrot-stick approach. Instead of punishing and demonizing a very popular organization (and thus making it more popular and radical) you try to get the moderates within to become powerful. You ignore the militants and start talking to the most moderate man in Hamas you can find. You do some of what he asks. Try to make sure everyone knows that the man can get US/Israel to do stuff, because he is wise and not bloodthirsty like the maniacs. More people flock to him and away from the maniacs, more serious you get. Next thing you know, you have the militans over the barrell because they cannot function without social support of their community. And if the moderates can get food, medicines, work and, most importantly, meaningful concessions from the other side, something which the militants only foul up, it doesn't take a genius where that goes. The key word is respect. In order to get the militants suffocated you need to make sure that the moderates, the negotiators can be seen as demonstrably getting your (and other dignitaries') respect. That is what makes them powerful. All of this is rather basic stuff, yet somehow people have really hard time grasping this.
I love how you can pull out all the stops to defend anybody but the United States whom you will pull out all the stops to criticize and be afraid of
Pull all the stops? Lemme see: Iran nukes: 1 in maybe 2 years, maybe a dozen in a decade or so. US: many thousands of active warheads, ready to fire missiles, based on land, sea, under the sea. Iran's global reach: comical. US: extreme. Iran's economic might: miniscule. US: world's largest economy. Iran's military: abysmally equipped with obsolete equipment. Navy nearly non-existant. US: state of the art air and sea capabilities. Etc and so on. There is absolutely no contest here of who should be scared of who.
Every theory that I have read said that we will soon (or perhaps already have) hit peak oil. At this point oil becomes more and more expensive to obtain and refine -- eventually (hopefully) to the point that it spurs interest and R&D money in other technologies.
That is true, unfortunately, due to wee little lack of foresight, there are no alternative techologies for much of what has been done cheaply with oil, not even remotely possible ones. Ergo: problems.
The cost of a fusion reactor is unknown at this point because nobody has yet produced a viable one. Could the cost of a fission reactor have been reliably projected in the 20s and 30s?
That is a false comparison. In the 20s and 30s noone had an understanding of the intricacies involved in fission reactors. We do have quite a bit of that today about hot fusion: immense difficulties and immense costs.
Ignoring the fact that with capital investment fission alone could provide nearly all of our energy needs (and ignoring the fact that using new technology it is projected that we have ample resources to use fission power for anywhere from 10,000 to 5,000,000,000 years) I still think that fusion will become a reality
Err, actually no. The fission stuff is far more problematic then you were led to believe. Uranium is also a scarce and depletable resource. It would also require for developing countries, say, ahem, Iran, to build whole networks of fission reactors with all the fun consequences of that (in polution dangers and uranium consumptions and what not). The actual, practical estimates, are in a few hundreds of years to complete depletion of uranium, assuming that only the top western countries build the reactors for themselves and no economic growth occurs. Not too good.
That will change if the fusion problem is solved -- or if people get over the fears of nuclear fission.
As I said, both fission and hot fusion are impractical from the cost, sustainability and/or geopolitical perspective. Cold fusion is your only hope for this scenario. Alternatively, we will get to see a lot of solar power plants. One way or the other it will no longer be cheap. Hence the lifestyle changes. Your electric SUV will cost 1/4 of your monthly income to fully charge once from the grid (or something of the kind). Or you will have to have a few acres of solar or wind power of your own. The costs of transport of cheap food from the other end of the country will make the food no longer cheap. And so on.
There's also the fact that we will not run out of oil -- it will just become expensive enough to no longer be a viable energy source.
Quite true, but it will also make that Ziploc bag cost more then its contents.
That's your opinion and your entitled to it. But it's American culture and it's not going to change. The difference between you and me is that I would like to see the rest of the World brought up to an American standard of living. You seem to want us dragged down to theirs. That's just a little bit bitter and selfish if you ask me.
That is incorrect. Both the American and the World's "standards" have to change dramatically. Both will have to become sustainable and humanitarian. It is not "dragging the US down", it is saving the US (and most of the rest of the world) from utter destruction.
It's a fact of history that people get displaced by other people with bigger and better guns. Europeans love to throw the Native American thing in our face, but they never quite remember to mention the Aztec's, the Africans, the Australian Aborigines, the Chinese, the Vietnamese or the Algerians. While you might have a case for American economic or cultural imperialism, the European history of military imperialism and genocide is far more extensive and disgusting then anything the United States has ever done. We've assimilated cultures in the manner of the Romans -- Europe has exterminated them. Which one is worse?
Err, I was not attempting to deny any of this. You missed the point. You were attempting to create an excuse for the Israelis, and I simply pointed out that others have "excuses" equally, if not more, valid. The idea being that what you proposed is really no "excuse" for Israeli behaviour.
I didn't know suicide bombers were the only types of terrorists. How refreshing! Care to explain the Iranian support of Hamas?
Hamas is a mishmash of charities, politcal movement, Islamic extemists, Palestinian freedom fighters and outright terrorists all mixed together. Not so long ago, Israel itself was supporting Hamas in an effort to destabilise PLO.
Are you telling me that you aren't scared shitless by their nuclear ambitions?
No I am not scared, never you mind "shitless". So far Iran has not produced any weapons and there are good reasons to believe that Iran indeed wants a civilian program as a primary goal of its program. Also all indications are that Iranians are in purely defensive mode, spurred on by US's fun adventures in the Iraqi sand. Add to this the fact that real dictatorial maniacs, such as Musharrif, already have nukes along with missiles to carry them and... it changes very little. Unless Iran starts to produce massive quantities of these weapons to the point that it is unable to guarantee their wherebouts. Then I will start to worry.
You do not understand human history one bit or have any faith in our future. First off, there is simply no way that the Western World would accept a massive drop in the standard of living as long as it remains the most powerful military block in the World.
Err, these tanks and jets and nukes are not that useful at squeezing oil from dry rocks.
Second off, you completely ignored my point about technology providing a solution to the problem.
The era of cheap hydrocarbon based energy may end in our lifetimes. But I think it shows a depressing lack of faith in the human race to assume that we won't solve the fusion problem or come up with another source of energy.
Actually I do have faith that we will solve that problem but I do have very little faith in the Western, corporatist, unchecked "free markets" which are very ill equipped to tackle this. The solution, no matter which alternative energy source you consider (unless cold fusion becomes reality - extremely long shot) involves drastic changes in living arrangements in the industrialzed countries, primarilly USA, where dependence on cheap hydrocarbon has shaped the infrastructure to the point of making it unuseable otherwise. The solution will involve a different lifestyle, not a "third world" nor uncomfortable one, but still markedly different and far more frugal then tod
The concept of MAD was enough to deter the likes of Stalin..
And the US (although barely)...
and even Hitler on a more limited scale (read up about why chemical weapons were never used in WW2 -- Hitler feared overwhelming retaliation)
Err, no. He did not use them because he knew from WW1 experience that they are next to useless and counter-productive, something Saddam found out in a jiffy when he tried. Chemical weapons are simply a joke in a military application and are only useful to create a nuissance on the battlefield, followed by the winner having trouble enjoying the conquered territory due to haphazard contamination.
The only thing that will end the jungle law will be when everybody has an American'ish standard of living -- i.e. your neighbor doesn't have anything that you want.
Really? You mean rich people do not murder each other over even bigger riches?
The actual answer is that it will not stop until people evolve into something better. American "standard of living" based on ravenous, needless consumption of vast piles of useless crap is neither necessary nor desirable, not to mention unsustainable.
Funny how you should mention Israeli unilateralism while overlooking the minor little fact that it was your beloved UN that divided up the region in the first place -- and the fact that none of this would have happened if the Arab states hadn't launched the six day war.
There is nothing funny about that. The plan was stupid and ill conceived from the get go, and yes, initially the UN was to blame for this clusterfuck. No realistic provisions were made for the Palestinians to be relocated/compensated for their property, the assumption being that they will, just like sheep, simply "change owners" from the Arab states being at that time in charge of the area to a Jewish one. No one has asked their opinion on the subject, never you mind negotiating consent of the Arab neighbours. If anything, this is an example of how UN activity should not look like. But then again, back then the UN was a different creature, one dominated completely by the US, UK and USSR.
I could also point out how the Arabs purposefully kept the Palestinians in refugee camps instead of absorbing the displaced population in the same way that the Israelis did.
Which would be a rather convenient thing from the point of view of Israel. It would expand, creating successive waves of refugees, until Eretz Isreal became a reality, each time expecting the Arab countries to absorb new waves of displaced, peniless Palestinians (and then their own citizens as the expansion continued), no?
Just as many Jews were displaced by the partition as were Palestinians.
Whoa! That is some new statistics. Do tell, last time I heard, according to the 1922 census, the Jewish population was 84,000, while the Arabs numbered 643,000. Do explain to me again how that "just as many" thing works.
And maybe when your people have a 3,000 year long history of being oppressed and 16,000,000 of them met their fates in the ovens you will be able to understand why a lot of Israeli's have a wall mentality.
16 million? Whoa. Some more new statistics. Last time I heard the high end estimates for Holocaust (which for some reason some poeple insist on using, I wonder why) were around 6 million. I see there is some sort of Holocaust inflation in progress, now we are at 16 million, or is it your personal number? I do not want to make light of the subject but this is somewhat suspicious to me. Also, there are many ethic groups in that "opressed" category, including the Roma which also suffered similar fate in WWII. Russian peasants would claim to have been opressed by various tyrants for millenia. They too ended up in the Nazi gas chambers and in front of Nazi guns, to the tune of 20 million dead, which is higher then that of Jews. How about Native Americans, I hear they had a bit of a depopulation problem via the White Man's rifle, no
No, not at all! There is a basic difference between experimental, observational science and evolution based on unprovable underlying assumptions. Of course one can do experiments in fusion etc and they work the SAME each and every time with the same parameters.
Evolutionary assumptions are easilly provable. Just like with fusion, we have the underlying mathematical model of the process and we can both observationally and experimentally prove that model's accuracy both in the lab and from fossil record, as I already explained. Research of evolution is an experimental, observational science. Furthermore, just like fusion is an integral component of larger body of physics, with all the physical models fitting together in that field, so is evolution which is a part of larger body of biology, with all of its experimentally determined components fitting together and cross-confirming each other.
What makes the speed of light what it is or the force of gravity its measured strength? How did all the laws by which evolution supposedly takes place came to be exactly as they are? To me all that originated in a mind.
If your question is about what made the Universe and most fundamental laws of it, from which all the other phenomena and their laws originate, then science is incapable of answering that question, since at the point of the singularity of the Big Bang all the laws of physics simply break and we have no means of determining the state which occured before. Furthermore, and this is an important omission always made by proponents of supernatural religious "answers", is that the question itself may simply be wrong. We can formulate in our language questions which can be asked but which have no meaning in our system of knowledge. For example: How kind is color blue? How fast is the number 3? And so on. The question: "What/who made the Universe?" might just belong to that very category.
Living things embody incredible amounts of INFORMATION in the digital codes of DNA.
So does a piece of rock with all of its complex chemical and physical structure, crystals, cracks, faults and what not. Information is an abstract term which we use to describe certain characteristics of physical systems, which are capable of storing impressions of states of other systems, our minds or computers or DNA or rocks being examples.
What came first, the DNA that carries the software information needed to make protein or the hardware protein that makes the DNA?
DNA (or more precisely in evolutionary terms, RNA) of course. It is not made of proteins. DNA stands for DeoxyriboNucleic Acid and it has 4 components, called Nucleotides (Adenine, Guanine, Cytosine, Thymine), which are themselves rather simple organic compounds of Nitrogen, Carbon, Oxygen and Hydrogen. Proteins are constructed using DNA. As I already explained, both DNA and RNA can self-replicate given a compatible chemical stew to be immersed into. Even incomplete, tiny fragments of DNA can replicate, a process which is used, for example, in forensic science to obtain large volumes of fragments of decayed DNA for analysis from tiny samples from the crime scene.
Does it not all come from a MIND?
See above. This "question" (which presumes the answer) might be simply incorrectly formulated, due to your inability to grasp other, unimaginable by you possibilities. A rather good hint that this question is not valid is the followup: "And what made the MIND? Another, bigger MIND? And what made... " you get the idea.
There is lots of disagreement as to the nature of this mind and that is the realm of religion. No man is without religion. God cannot be proved or disproved by any experiment or measurement.
As I just explained, the existance of any "minds" is not only nowhere near a foregone conclusion but even the question itself is not established to be valid. And yes, I am without a religion, at least without any that involve "gods" of any sort. As to "proving" or "disprovi
When two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen are combined chemically, it makes water EVERY SINGLE TIME. That is verifiable science, a repeatable experiment that can be done anywhere and by anyone and the outcome will ALWAYS be the same. What experiment has ever been done to show that a fish can evolve into a bird or whatever?
So by your definition, it is impossible to determine that the Sun's energy comes from thermonuclear ractions, neither it is possible to determine the aging process of stars, formation of galaxies and any other phenomena which we are not immediately capable of replicating, on a 1 to 1 scale, I take it. That is a curious, and I dare say, prepostrously limiting interpretation of the scientific method as it implies that even if we know all the component elements of a process, have all the required knowledge to predict their interaction, according to you, we are stil forbidden, by some holy decree I assume, from proceeding with the fusion of these concepts in order to establish a working model, even if that model yelds practical, empirically verifiable predictions. That is how most of science works I am afraid. No one has ever seen an electron, a proton, a neutron, never you mind any more elementary particles. Heisenberg uncertainty principle states that we cannot observe these particles, due to elemental physical laws. And yet, it did not stop us from obtaining nuclear fission and fusion as well as developing solid state physics, thanks to which you can now type your thoughts on the contraption full of semiconductors carrying those thoughts over to the Internet.
Similarly with evolution. We know sufficiently the component processes involved, on the molecular level, we have the mathematical theory of their interaction, mathematically provable, as well as we have geological and fossil records to combine these with, as well as modern day experiments in real time evolution which occurs, everyday, in very rapidly evolving organisms such as bacteria and virii. Yes, you read it right. Contrary to your claim, evolution experiments are rather easy and you can do them yourself, should you have the right equipment and samples. That is how new types of diseases appear magically every so often, that is how existing diseases become "immune" to antibiotics and other drugs. If you are into bigger organisms, you can, with patience, get a new species of a fruit fly, if you are willing to create sufficient conditions, for sufficient numbers and generations of flies in the lab.
Can we breed a new kind of fish instead of a bacteria or a fruit-fly? I am sure, given enough time. Can we make a fish walk as a result of this process? No, just like we are unable to make a new full-size Sun. We can only make tiny ones, lasting a few microseconds, because we do not have the required technology and resources, or in case of evolution, required time. But that in no way invalidates the process. We have all the pieces and the model and it yelds, empirically verifiable predictions, predictions which we tested successfully many many times. It is no longer a "theory". It is a scientific fact.
What experiment has ever been done to create even a simple living cell from non-living matter?
What will you define as "living matter?". Some people created brand new RNA strains which can self replicate in certain chemical conditions. Is this "life?". How about an artificial virus, we nearly have those (it is a long and complex task but nearly complete in academia -- assuming the military does not already have one). Or are you holding out for complete cells, with millions of genes to their DNA sequence? Where do you draw the line?
No transitional life forms have ever been found because there are none.
That is simply not true. Massive amounts of "transitional" fossils have been found, of all types.
Even in ordinary weather forecasting, to say nothing of long term global warming, many assumptions (faith) are input into the computer models and so th
What indications can you come up with that shows humanity moving in the direction of lasting peace?
Progress of human understanding of things, occuring despite of our animalistic overrides. That progress, while providing ever more destructive techologies, will also, at some point, provide tools to escape those primeval instincts. The real question is if we get to be lucky enough to survive as a species until then.
You also assume evolution is true, rather than being only a key tenet in the religion of science.
That is a telling statement. While one can argue that the scientific method is a form of philosophy, if one is to accept any aspect of science, then evolution as a process is as factual as the Sun rising every morning. Only someone influenced by religious belief to the point of denying reality would propose otherwise. That is what makes the "Intelligent Design" so unpallatable to us, the adherents of the repeatably empirical.
Of course, I am saying this assuming that you do not subscribe to some wild "everything is an illusion" worldview, which would render all discussion pointless.
Ultimately it is always the one who has the biggest stick who succeeds at doing that. The only way that will ever change is if someone from outside of our planet comes with a bigger stick than all mankind put together can wield.
You missed a possibility: we evolve into something better. At least some of us. That is what I hope happens.
How about a very BIG island, already a very international place -- Antarctica! It's a really cool place, well isolated and there is NO parking problem!
Too expensive to supply and maintain and the climate is just a tad too harsh. You do not want the plucky dimplomats to actually freeze their butts to death. Just to make sure that they dont confuse going there with vacation time.
Care to point out the clause in the US constitution that allows it to be overridden by UN resolutions?
No such thing is needed. If the US was the only country on the planet or it has managed forcibly to terrorize the whole world into submission, only then you would be right. In absence of that, any national constitution is precisely that, a national document, applicable only within the borders of the country in question. If the US constitution stated "We own the Universe, all foreigners are our slaves", you would be claiming that it is so, because it appears that you think that the US Constitution applies to the whole Universe. Clearly all the others on this globe would object.
Care to explain to me why my elected officials should listen to the UN before they listen to my own concerns?
Only in the matters of international discourse. Clearly, any actions of the US which have effects outside of its borders are of concern to foreign nations. The US has an ability to appoint diplomats to the UN just like any other country (and as a matter of fact has a privileged position there, due to permanent Security Council seat and veto). This is also a two-way street. Likewise, if some other country or group of thereof is doing something which affects the US negatively, the natural expectation would be for the US to use the UN to negotiate an end to such activity and those countries would have to also abide by the UN decision, regardless of what their constitutions say. Otherwise we get a jungle law of "who has the longest dick wins". Which will inevitably result in a catastrophic global military conflict, preceeded by global economic conflict. Or have we learned nothing from history?
And we have reasons to think the rest of the World only wants to use the UN to drag us down economically. For lack of a better example it's like Civ2. You can play as a pacifist state but the minute you are the biggest economic power in the game all of the other nations team up against you. A sizable chunk of the World still hated our guts even under Clinton -- who was quite possibly the most well traveled and international President we've ever had.
Actually, this is a rather sad testimony to a view of US-centric narcissism, so popular in the US. The US has shamelessly exploited most of these poor nations, robbing them of natural resources and supporting various dictators and military huntas to make sure US corporations were pillaging unimpeded. Needless to say, the global attitude towards the US is somewhat colored by these actions. The US, with its 5% of global population, consumed around 40% of world's resources in 1999. Every man, woman and child in the US consumed 25 tons of raw materials that year. Compare this to the bottom 3 billion people who sustain themselves on $2 a day. So now you are afraid of the world. There is nothing to be done about that other then two possibilities, you will either accept the UN framework, labour to reform it and make it democratic and egalitarian and then work within it to equalize the living standards of these people (which will probably mean massive efforts to reduce birth rate all over the globe) or be prepared to nuke, or use biological waepons to murder most of the people on the planet to sustain your "way of life" and expect a retaliation in kind. No other choices remain.
But I guess the point I was trying to make wasn't about small nations being afraid of us. It was about Americans being afraid of being outvoted by 1.2 billion Chinese. Or perhaps (dare I say it) Israel being outvoted by a billion Muslims.
Then what is truly needed, as part of the UN reform, that a UN Constitution is made, one which would guarantee rights of countries in such scenarios, rights which could not taken away by a simple majority. You, know, that old stuff about branches of govenance, separation of powers, unalienable rights I read about in some document starting with "We the People...". Except applied to nations.
You know, Libya did recently give up a clandestine nuclear weapons program.
Please don't make laugh. Lybia's "program" constituted of a small pile of rusting, non-functional parts, a set of incomplete, incorrect plans and other assorted junk, all of which amounted to nothing but a butt of jokes in the nuclear proliferation inspection circles. No one informed has ever took Lybian "program" seriously and its "giving up" was nothing but a pure PR effort on the part of Quaddafi. You can't "give up" that what you didn't have in the first place (although if you are clever, you can fool some gullible people to score political points).
As for Hamas, if you want to run a nursery, run a nursery. Don't organizationally affiliate with a group of nuts who make human bombs. You're giving them cover and providing nice conduits for funneling support to the armed wing.
I agree, but you and I can muse all we want here, and yet the realities on the ground in the occupied territories are such that this is precisely what happens. Unless you figure out a way to convince Palestinian populace to force Hamas to separate these things, everybody is out of luck. And no, brute force tactics, shooting missiles into apartment buildings, buldozing whole blocks of houses, preventing participation in elections and arresting anyone who sends money to a Hamas orphanage are not effective ways to go about it. If anything, they have the exactly opposite effect.
You claim that, according to my reasoning, if telephones were run the way the internet is, then there would be no way of calling foreign countries
No, I claim that foreign countries would not stand for it and subsequently either a communication blackout would have occured, or, far more likely, an ITU like structure would have to be developed. This is precisely what is happening now to the Internet.
Besides, there is ALREADY an international group in charge.
There is not. The "I" in ICANN stands for "Internet" not "International" and ICANN is fully US controlled.
One other thing - the authorization was written into 1441. Go read it. I like to use information that I have verified, rather than attacking someone because they might sound like a personality that I despise.
No it was not. I read it very carefully. It warns of "serious consequences" to be determined by the UN (at its next security council meeting on the subject, which never took place). In contrast to 1991's resolution 678 which specifically states "all necessary means" which is the standard dimplomatic way of declaring war. Similarly in 1990, the series of resolutions started with 660 for the initial nebulous warning (such as "serious consequences" which is equivalent to that of 1441) via 661, 662, 664, 665, 666, 667, 669, 670, 674 and 677 and finally 678 where an actual authorization is given to use "all necessary means".
What is this international law of which you speak?
The intenational law is the product of the agreements between all the nations. UN is a result of one such agreement and the forum where such laws are made. They are binding on all the nations and override the national constitutions in regards to international affairs. If some dictator were to make up a "constitution" whereby he granted himself the role of the self-appointed cop of the planet, the intenational law would, in the view of all the nations of the planet (other then his) override such silly "constitution".
The last time I checked our Constitution vested the legislative power of the United States in our Congress.
It is, as long as the results your actions do not leave your borders. As soon as they do, they become subject to international scrutiny.
About the small states fear of being dominated by the big states?
Precisely. Most of the states of the world are small and have a fraction of the economic and military power of the US. They all feel being dominated/controlled/manipulated by the US. Even large states have reasons to believe US is attempting to dominate them. Iraq war is just the latest example of US attitude towards states which cannot repel its aggression. That is why these small states of the world are increasingly looking to the UN to try to keep the militarily big state of the US in check.
All that historical influence aside, the UN doesn't do itself any favors by appointing abusive powers to chair human rights commissions, ignoring genocide, or getting involved in oil for food scandals.
True, the politics and compromises within the UN leave a lot to be desired. As are its anti-corruption measures. It is a work in progress and everyone acknowledges that serious reforms are needed.
And speaking as a native New Yorker allow me to personally bitch about the few million bucks in unpaid parking tickets owed to the City and of New York and the general arrogance displayed by many UN diplomats and staff towards their host city.
The results of diplomatic immunity and belligerence of some low-level "diplomats" within UN is a valid reason for concern by New Yorkers. My personal belief (which I picked up from one of the posters on Slashdot) is that the best policy would be, as a part of UN reform, to move UN HQ to a truly neutral place, such as a small island, preferrably of very unhospitable climate. I am saying this in all seriousness, as someone who believes in the mission of UN, because that isolation and harshness of environment would eliminate all sorts of career crooks and seekers of diplomatic comforts who manouver their diseased hides into the halls of important institutions such as UN only to be able to shop at the 5th Avenue and double-park in front of some local whorehouse. We do not need that sort of "diplomatic" crowd in the UN.
The charges were sending money and prohibited computers to Hamas, Libya, and Syria.
Which the Lybians and Syrians used to... what precisely? Control their uber-sophisticated, Doomsday Machine involving sharks and a moon canon with those PCs? These "laws" are purposefuly made just for this purpose, to "convict" people of things such as having family and friends in Syria. As to Hamas, something you would never know from the US media, it is a vast organization, only a small part of which is involved in combat in the Palestinian anti-occupation efforts. It is unfortunate for them (read: stupid) that these para-military types have decided to attack Israeli civilians and use abhorrent tactics such as suicide bombs. It is also unfortunate that due to the disastrous policies of both Israel and the US the climate in the occupied territories became more and more conductive to Hamas becoming increasingly religiously fundamentalist. So now you have an organization involving large-scale charitable work, very popular political movement, Islamic extremists, freedom fighters and terrorists all mixed together under one banner: Hamas. How do you know which of these the computers went to? I am sure that the US prosecutors took the dimmest view possible. On the other hand, one has to wonder what use would a suicide bomber or a haphazard, home-made mortar launching extremist have for a computer.
Somehow, I don't think the whole Hamas thing was an ICANN operation.
I did not say it was, I merely pointed out how ICANN reacted to the arrests.
I guess the difference between you and most Americans is that we don't think we need the UN's permission to wipe our ass.
Make up your mind. Either stop pretending that US is doing UN's "dirty work", as the parent poster was insinuating, followed by whining about "being stabbed in the back" and similar boloney and admit that US is an arrogant, spoiled brat with no regard for international law whatsoever -- or acknowledge that the UN has authority which the US ignored and thus US is misbehaving in regards to international law and should correct its ways. One or the other. In the first case the US should be treated as a rouge nation, and in the other as an errant one. Your choice.
And then you wonder why EU and others are getting uneasy about US controlling some of the world's communication infrastructure. Sigh.
We assign IP addresses and domain names in Russia? That's funny. I was under the impression that responsibility was delegated to regional IP and domain name registries. Ya, know, like these guys?
On the surface it looks true, but all of these "regional" assignments are fed back to ICANN-controlled root servers. ICANN has an ability to override any of these "regional" agencies, just as it did with the Iraqi TLD.
They built their own networks and connected them to our root DNS.
They did so because there was no other viable choice. If they were to start their own DNS sever structure, the problem would be that noone there would be able to find anything here and vice versa. Then, immediately, you would need an ITU-like linkage. As the initial links were purely academic, noone has foreseen any of this.
If every country setup their own internet, then there would need to be routing agreements in order for a canadian to access a french URL, for example. See the story about Level 3. If the EU wants their own EUNet, they would simply have to buy some servers, setup a list, and (if they wanted to) negotiate an agreement with the US internet.
This is precisely what they want. They already have their own Internets, complete with routers, servers, fiber and users. And they can set up their own DNS servers in a jiffy. The problem is that if they do it without taking their TLDs back to their own countries, as you suggested, and away from ICANN, they are effectively held hostage by ICANN. What they want is for each country to have its own TLD, DNS and what not, as you suggested, and then to get an ITU-like deal for the "routing agreements". That is all. But the US resists. The US wants to control all domains, including the national TLDs of EU countries. And something is simply fishy about that.
Up to now, the US has behaved well with regard to the DNS system. We don't fool around with North Korea's IP blocks, etc. even if we don't like them.
Actually ICANN did screw around with the Iraqi TLD. First, the dude who was running it was arrested for "supporting terrorism" (based on his involvement in some charities and having a big mouth). When that occured, ICANN took charge of the TLD and effectively shut it down. It then refused to give it up, even to the supposedly elected Iraqi government. It took some serious arm twisting to get it to do so and even now uncertainty is not completely resolved.
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Going to war with Iraq was the most pigheaded, bone-headed, misguided, most utterly wrong thing to do, still is. That is from any objective direction you could possibly measure, the Iraq war was a predictable fiasco. Only someone living in a delusional bubble would believe otherwise.
This is plainly retarded. Ansar Al Islam, like other Islamist groups saw Saddam as a mortal enemy. The group did not even exist prior to September 2001. Their predecessor, The Islamic Movement of Iraqi Kurdistan, undertook jihad against Baghdad in May 1987! Osama himself offered to the Saudis to bring his Afghani mujahedeen and fight Saddam in the 1991 war. At no point in time there were ever any cooperation between secular, socialist dictatorship of Ba'ath (whom Osama fondly called "infidel communists" and "apostates") and far-out radical religious fanatics of Ansar Al Islam or Al-Queda. Osama frquently and consistently incited his followers to fight Saddam and Saddam in turn brutally put down any and all Al-Queda operatives he could find. The only reason Ansar Al Islam was where it was is because Saddam could not get to them to kill them all as they were in the Northern "no fly" zone, part of the "autonomous" Kurdistan.
and Iraqi help and training for Al Queda has been documented in documentary finds in Baghdad.
Complete and utter bullshit. No such credible documentation exists, not to mention that reams of "documents" were wholesale falsified and sold by Iraqi crooks after the war to gullible Westerners who saw what they wanted to see and were willing to pay for it.
They may or may not (I'm leaning towards may not) have provided some background support for 9/11 but the idea that there was no relationship at all has been pretty thoroughly debunked.
Debunked? By whom? Where are the documents? Link me to documentation which overturns the long standing mutual hatreds of Al-Queda and Saddam in order to do what?! Send some Saudis who never even been to Iraq to do 9/11? To what end?! Saddam had absolutely nothing to gain from any of this and a lot to lose. That is a raving lunacy.
As far as respect goes, you really should read up on what kind of respect the islamists demand. It's the respect of the 2nd class inhabitant exhibits to his masters. It's called dhimmitude and no, I won't give that.
Right, the demonization of all of your enemies is the first step to be able to callously murder them all. Al-Queda manual, page 1. Osama must be pleased that you were following the instructions. Newsflash: Most Islamic societies are composed of a vast majority of moderates who only want to have peace and bread on the table. And then there is a tiny minority of radical maniacs who speak of "master-slave" relationships and "missions from God". Al-Queda and similar in their corner and Neo-cons and various Christian fundamentalist nutjobs in yours. You need each other desperately to be able to hijack the world towards the bloodbaths you so desire to make you feel powerful and important. Both of you wanting to enslave the rest of the populace to your wacko ideologies and perfectly willing to level entire countries to do so.
If you knowingly would, shame on you.
No it is shame on your for such shallow, unthinking spewing of demonizing propaganda.
That process of "working things out" results in a set of rules to follow by the parties involved, with others acting as guarantors. That set of rules is called a "law". If someone breaks them, it is up to the others to correct the errant behaviour. Same as any society.
Wrong. Nothing in the United Nations is binding or overrides national constitutions or sovereignty except when and where the UN is willing and able to mount an armed force to exercise its joint will, which is little different than the enforcement of national wlil in the wars waged by sovereign nations, wars that the U.N. was formed to forestall.
Those very rules, resultant from the "working things out" part have the effect of overriding each party's internal wishes and ways. That enforcement of which is cooperative in nature, unlike individual "national wills". World-wide sanctions are for example possible under the auspices of UN while they are completely out of the question to be instituted by a nation. UN's resolutions are binding on all member countries, although some would like to pretend it isn't so. It is up to the UN's discretion as to how to react to such defiance.
Furthermore, much less democratic organizations of far more questionable aims, such as WTO and WIPO also have explicit override of the national laws of members, so your impotent rage at the extra-national agents is somewhat misdirected.
Scrutiny, yes. Control, no. And it didn't take the U.N. for the actions of nations to be subject to the scrutiny of other nations.
Control, yes. Should the UN for example declare global embargo on the US (unlikely case but a good demonstration) US activities would be then forcibly controlled. There is no need for a military action. Simple refusal of all trade would suffice to utterly destroy the US's economy, although of course it would have significant economic impact on the rest of the world. But this is simply to illustrate the point of a possible control method.
The U.N. is a clusterfuck in progress. It will never be anything better than that.
That is your opinion, because you desperately wish so, hoping for Pax Americana, where instead of international concensus, American military power rules unchallenged, unanswerable and brutal over the whole globe. Forgetting of course that USA is utterly dependant on the rest of the globe for nearly everything these days.
it would be easy and efficient to nuke the small island while the U.N. is in plenary session with all members in attendance, without damaging anything of real value.
Followed by a global nuclear retaliation, erasing the USA from the face of the planet, or prehaps more poignantly, a total embargo on all of its imports and exports, inducing 80% unemployment from lack of energy and raw materials and starving most of its massive overpopulation to death before massive structural changes rolling back the "standard of life" by many decades could be effected.
Most of which require orders of magnitude more energy to re-process then to prodcue in the first place, not to mention the fact that they also require massive efforts at separating the materials from each other, for example, insulation from wires, plastic, ceramic and rare metals from common ones in a car engine etc. That is why recycling technologies are at this point in time so highly inefficient for vast majority of materials.
If you really believe that then I find it pretty hypocritical to begrudge the United States for investing so heavily in our military. Nation-states do what they must do to survive after all. Of course I don't believe that is likely to happen
That scenario does not represent a "win", so no, it makes no sense. The proper course of action would be to invest in sustainable ways of life and into reshaping the society to cope with them. Imperial armies are a delaying tactic, ultimately a futile and self-defeating one.
Repeat after me: Technology advances and provides solutions to problems.
It is not happening. Technology, even if some miraculous portable limitless souce of energy existed, of the kind you are thinking of, requires infrastructure to produce and deploy, which in turn requires more materials and energy to build, both already in short supply. In short you are expecting manna to fall from Heaven, and save the show just in the nick of time, so that America can preserve and grow its urban-sprawls, dotted with frying pits and Wall-Marts.
I could start by pointing out that I opposed the war and resent it being thrown in my face anytime I point out that not everything about the United States is evil.
You will get it thrown in your face, regardless of your vote, every time you declare your belief in America's omnipotency.
I could also point out that two thirds of Iraq welcomed us and are currently working with us.
Bullshit. Shias hate your guts just as badly as the Sunnis, the only difference being that you are their ticket to Iran-sponsored Islamic Theocracy to be created on the soon to be ripped out of Iraq southern provinces. So they are holding their fire (sort of, the "allies" only need to buldoze some prisons and kill some policemen here and there) until they get what they want. Kurds welcomed you, since you made an independent country of Kurdistan possible. So you spent $200 billion on war, crookery and graft and killed 100,000 people so that a civil war can work out to Kurd's advantage. Maybe.
I could go further and point out the fact that a whole ton of the problems in the Middle East stem from historical European Imperialism and the European knack for drawing borders with no regard to religious, cultural or tribal differences.
No argument here. European Imperialism is just as ugly as the American one. The differece? European Imperialism is being spoken of in the past tense.
And what would your solution to Iraq be? Bashing the United States for going into Iraq in the first place does not solve the current problem. The UN can't fix it either -- they cut and ran like a whipped dog when this happened. What's your solution? I'd love to hear it.
There is no good "solution". Just like there is no "solution" to fixing a man into whose head you put a few shotgun rounds. The damage is irreversible. Only after many decades of violence, terror and political upheavals run their course, perhaps some stability will emerge there. Iraq is simply dead. Never to come back to life again. American hubris killed it.
And your realistic scenario is the Western abandonment of our way of life without a fight or a whimper in a World where plastic doesn't exist. Have I missed anything?
Yes, science by methodical, slow, step-by-step march of mutually-cross-referencing and verifiable discoveries and religion by wholesale invention of grand, make-belief boloney pulled out of collective rears of various priesthoods, usually, for some strange reason, also having the effect of bringing power and riches to those priests. Subsequently, the religion either requires supression of science or constant "re-interpretations", like say, "day = epoch" or "world-wide flood = an overflowing lake", etc and so on, stretching their incredulity far beyond any breaking point.
"In the beginning (time) God, (the agent) created the heavens (space) and the earth (matter-energy)"
Do give me a break! earth = matter-energy?!! No, earth = earth as in Terra Firma, flat one, "sun affixed in heavens" circling around it, or whatever nonsense whomever scribbled this fable was under the delusion of at the moment in ancient Sumer. As time goes on and ridiculosuness of the religious "teachings" becomes increasingly apparent, so is the increasingly desperate effort to "re-interpret" them in ever more fantastic and far-fetched ways.
Unfortunately, the Christians have also gone down this road even though the Bible teaches just the opposite. It is not that we by any kind of effort can approach or work toward the goal of reaching or understanding God, but that God came down here in human form to reach us and bring us into a relationship with Himself based on love.
Err, Christians, Jews, Moslems (all part of Judeo-Christian branch of dogmas) and I am sure a whole band of all sorts of other religions, including all of those "spirit" based voodoos, where the "gods" not only do come down from the otherworlds, but they permanently inhabit various objects. I hate to break it to you, but all of these are equally and directly contradicting science in various places. But it is the Judeo-Christian dogmas which are particularly militant against science, because unlike other, more mellow and forgiving religions, Judeo-Christians cannot stand someone contradiciting their useful for quite un-divine tasks of power mongering and religious warfare ideologies. It is the very existance of "detailed" Holy Books dealing explicitely with practical aspects of life which produce this effect. Other religions remain purposefully vague, and that is how they get away from a head-on conflict with science.
Some scientists have gone so far as to state that the entire Universe may just be a thought or simulation in a super mind. The Bible also suggest this. The movie "The Matrix" played very creatively with that idea.
Which would render all science, life, religion and everything else moot. This is nothing but mental masturbation. The final step in this "reasoning" is that nothing outside of your mind exists, no God, no Universe, nothing. It is all an illusion you dreamt up. Internet and Slashdot included. Both this and the other "matrix theory" you mentioned are equally futile and bordering on insanity.
In my mind, the truth of science and the truth revealed in the Bible are complementary, not contradictory. Since we don't have perfect knowlege of either science or all of what is revealed in the Bible, it is foolish to throw rocks into each other's houses. Both the discoveries of science and the texts of the Bible are subject to interpretation and it these interpretations that are often at odds.
Problem: the "biblical truth" is unverifiable and wholly dependant on interpretation, unlike science which has to yeld empirical results. There is no test available to us to determine the validity of the biblical "truth". Also, at this particular juncture the fact-free "interpetation" of "Intelligent Design" (as in no-evolution, man created out of ash, etc -- not just juggling of quantum probabilities over millenia, which is most likely unverifiable and still falls within the framework of evolution) conflicts wi
No it does not because not only is the plutonium problem (i.e. growing stockpiles of it) difficult but electrical energy alone is not going to solve the problem. Besides, all of the other countries combined, all of whom will need cheap energy lest they forever be kept in the dark ages, with all the resultant terrorism, religious fanaticism and the rest, represent a significant amount of global population, in fact larger then either the US or the EU. Indonesia alone has 240 million people in it.
You seem to completely ignore the fact there are a lot of other countries with the exact same mode of living (Canada comes to mind)
And who have the same problems as the US, although Canada at least has a very good ratio of natural resources (including oil) to population.
and a lot of other ones that are trying to attain something like our way of life (China, India).
And who cannot achieve it, ever, because the Western "standard" is so brain-deadly wasteful and dependant on wholesale pillaging of resources that if China and India (2 billion people in there) alone attained that "standard", the whole of natural resources of the planet would have to be doubled just for them, never you mind the resulting pollution. It isn't going to happen. Or more precisely, it is not going to happen in the "american", utterly egoistical and pillaging way. And yes, Canada and many Western countries are right up there with their unsustainable "ways of life". So this is not only about oil, but about rare ores, wood and other materials which do not exist in amounts anywhere near sufficient to allow China or India to become as piggish as the west. The Chinise realize that and the cold resource war is already on the way, with China buying up mines and processing everywhere, including US's backyard, Canada. But that of course won't be anywhere near enough and the "cold" war is very likely to turn "hot" over ores alone. Repeat after me: there is not enough resources on the planet to sustain the current Western "way of life" without permanently enslaving majority of the world's population.
How the hell does a discussion about nuclear fission as an energy source go back into Iraq? WTF is your problem? Do you hate us so much that you can't have a rational discussion with one single American on the internet?
What?! You brought this topic into the discussion by claiming that, quote, "I suppose that's the biggest difference between Americans and most of the rest of the World. We feel like we can do anything if we put our minds to it." -- I merely provided the most obvious and contemporary counterpoint that came to mind.
Really? Hope for the future is "self-centered fantasy"? Hope that the human race will overcome the energy problem without giving up our way of life is fantasy? I call it optimism. And I pity you for not having any.
I'll take "realism" over unfouded optimism any time. Sometimes life will pleasently suprise me if all the lucky coincidences come together. But one has to prepare for the realistic scenarios, not for what we would like happening.
Go ahead. Root for the downfall of the United States if that cheers you up. I'm rooting for the future of the human race.
It would appear that the downfall of the insane consumerism of the USA (and others) is the precondition for the "future of the human race". One or the other. Take your pick.
That by the way does not mean the downfall of the USA itself but only signifcant changes in its selfish behaviour (although I find it telling how you conflated the two).
Ahem. Breeder reactors. That is a kind of a reactor which yelds plutonium as a by-product. A type of a reactor which both US and even USSR did not want other countries to have because unlike Uranium, which requires slow and lengthy process to make a workable nuke, plutonium is what made all those thousands upon thousands if US and Soviet warheads possible. So as I said, yes you can have long-term energy from this but only for the top industrialized countries. That does not even begin to solve the problem unless you expect a brutal and murderous put-down of the entire rest of the world by these few or allow Nigeria to have a lot of nukes. A scenario which I already described.
I suppose that's the biggest difference between Americans and most of the rest of the World. We feel like we can do anything if we put our minds to it. You are already thinking about giving up.
Like, say, "bringing democracy to Iraq" at the point of the gun? Believing yourself omnipotent does not make you so. And there is another name for such an attitude: Hubris. The thing that goes before the fall.
Those of us who think of all these consequences are not "giving up". We simply see reality rather then a rosy-colored, self-centered fantasy many people subscribe to, like for example the "hot fusion is 5 years away" crowd who have been saying so for the last 40 years.
We are going to get downmodded "Offtopic" any minute now ....
I don't think that faith and science are in competition, but are complementary.
I am afraid you are wrong on that account. Religions dwell in the unexplored and unknown places, which our reasoning mind is unable to explain. Historically, every time science made an advance, filling some of these areas, religion was expelled from them, sometimes resisting violently, as Giordano Bruno and others could testify to. Now there are few places left for religion where it can exist, without engaging science head on, and inevietably losing, as science is the Queen of all that is empirical and logical. The latest, rather pitiful attempts at counter-attack of militant religion, attempts to banish and subjegate science to religion, to cripple and chain it, are only taking place in the least educated, most bigotted places in the world: Middle East Islamic maddrasses and ... Bible Belt home-schoolin'.
When you get on an airplane, you have faith that the airplane is airworthy and that the mechanics and all the others involved with it have done their jobs faithfully.
I would rather describe it as performing the risk analysis and then deciding that odds are good.
I happen to assume or believe that a supremely intelligent, conscious and wise mind put it all together and is pleased to allow us to explore His handiwork and the laws that control this universe.
That is all fine and dandy as long as this assumption does not directly contradict the results of the process of scientific discovery, as is the case with the "Intelligent Design".
Belief in a God who loves order and harmony is what prompted early scientists or actively explore His creation.
Err, no. It was the need to eat and keep warm, which resulted in discovery of simple tools, and clothing and fire. And on it went from there. Unless by "early" you mean gentlemen in ruffled collars ...
You and every human on this planet is incurably religious, whether you like it or not. Religion is the one thing in kind, not just in degree that separates us from the animals. You may not worship a "god" in the traditional sense, but whatever or whoever is more important to you than anything else is your "god". For many in our culture the pursuit of posessions and power are the objects of their "worship". For some it is science and technology. For many it is self and pleasure. For some it is confidently asserting that there is "no God", such as militant atheists. If you are honest with yourself, you too can determine who or what is your "god".
Well if you redefine "religion" to be so broad as to include nearly every pursuit people engage into ... Hmm, I think this has possibilities: I am sure somebody can now quote you and claim that his efforts to experimentally double the number of positions in the Kamasutra is really a quest for God ....
Seriously, though, here is the thing:
The underlying assumption or faith of evolution is that everything in our world came about by probalistic impersonal processes and that no conscious thought went into anything.
The only place you could hide God in the modern scientific universe is the sub-atomic quantum phenomena. That is, as some extra-universe, or perhaps embedded in the universe itself, entity influencing the roll of subatomic dice. One then could argue that the process of evolution (which is, we should by now agree, quite solidly, scientifically established) could be then influenced by such slow, over millenia tinkering. That sort of "Intelligent Design" which does not contrad
Well, yours isn't new. As a matter of fact, that strategy has increased the size of Hamas substantially and made it more willing to accept ever-more violent radicals, who it shunned before. Care to try again?
You should realize that the fundamentalists and the radicals thrive on US/Israeli hostility and collective-punishment methods. That's what they want. That tactic marginalizes any potential moderates and charity workers and gives control and power to the most violent radicals.
Sort of like in the US: "You asshole! The Islamofascists just attacked us!!! How dare you opose our attack on Iraq!! You Terrorirst Lover, you!" Good luck trying to get a word edgewise about how Iraq has nothing to do with Al-Qeida and is in fact its mortal enemy. You know how that one worked out, don't you?
So sane people would try to do a carrot-stick approach. Instead of punishing and demonizing a very popular organization (and thus making it more popular and radical) you try to get the moderates within to become powerful. You ignore the militants and start talking to the most moderate man in Hamas you can find. You do some of what he asks. Try to make sure everyone knows that the man can get US/Israel to do stuff, because he is wise and not bloodthirsty like the maniacs. More people flock to him and away from the maniacs, more serious you get. Next thing you know, you have the militans over the barrell because they cannot function without social support of their community. And if the moderates can get food, medicines, work and, most importantly, meaningful concessions from the other side, something which the militants only foul up, it doesn't take a genius where that goes. The key word is respect. In order to get the militants suffocated you need to make sure that the moderates, the negotiators can be seen as demonstrably getting your (and other dignitaries') respect. That is what makes them powerful. All of this is rather basic stuff, yet somehow people have really hard time grasping this.
Pull all the stops? Lemme see: Iran nukes: 1 in maybe 2 years, maybe a dozen in a decade or so. US: many thousands of active warheads, ready to fire missiles, based on land, sea, under the sea. Iran's global reach: comical. US: extreme. Iran's economic might: miniscule. US: world's largest economy. Iran's military: abysmally equipped with obsolete equipment. Navy nearly non-existant. US: state of the art air and sea capabilities. Etc and so on. There is absolutely no contest here of who should be scared of who.
Every theory that I have read said that we will soon (or perhaps already have) hit peak oil. At this point oil becomes more and more expensive to obtain and refine -- eventually (hopefully) to the point that it spurs interest and R&D money in other technologies.
That is true, unfortunately, due to wee little lack of foresight, there are no alternative techologies for much of what has been done cheaply with oil, not even remotely possible ones. Ergo: problems.
The cost of a fusion reactor is unknown at this point because nobody has yet produced a viable one. Could the cost of a fission reactor have been reliably projected in the 20s and 30s?
That is a false comparison. In the 20s and 30s noone had an understanding of the intricacies involved in fission reactors. We do have quite a bit of that today about hot fusion: immense difficulties and immense costs.
Ignoring the fact that with capital investment fission alone could provide nearly all of our energy needs (and ignoring the fact that using new technology it is projected that we have ample resources to use fission power for anywhere from 10,000 to 5,000,000,000 years) I still think that fusion will become a reality
Err, actually no. The fission stuff is far more problematic then you were led to believe. Uranium is also a scarce and depletable resource. It would also require for developing countries, say, ahem, Iran, to build whole networks of fission reactors with all the fun consequences of that (in polution dangers and uranium consumptions and what not). The actual, practical estimates, are in a few hundreds of years to complete depletion of uranium, assuming that only the top western countries build the reactors for themselves and no economic growth occurs. Not too good.
That will change if the fusion problem is solved -- or if people get over the fears of nuclear fission.
As I said, both fission and hot fusion are impractical from the cost, sustainability and/or geopolitical perspective. Cold fusion is your only hope for this scenario. Alternatively, we will get to see a lot of solar power plants. One way or the other it will no longer be cheap. Hence the lifestyle changes. Your electric SUV will cost 1/4 of your monthly income to fully charge once from the grid (or something of the kind). Or you will have to have a few acres of solar or wind power of your own. The costs of transport of cheap food from the other end of the country will make the food no longer cheap. And so on.
There's also the fact that we will not run out of oil -- it will just become expensive enough to no longer be a viable energy source.
Quite true, but it will also make that Ziploc bag cost more then its contents.
That is incorrect. Both the American and the World's "standards" have to change dramatically. Both will have to become sustainable and humanitarian. It is not "dragging the US down", it is saving the US (and most of the rest of the world) from utter destruction.
It's a fact of history that people get displaced by other people with bigger and better guns. Europeans love to throw the Native American thing in our face, but they never quite remember to mention the Aztec's, the Africans, the Australian Aborigines, the Chinese, the Vietnamese or the Algerians. While you might have a case for American economic or cultural imperialism, the European history of military imperialism and genocide is far more extensive and disgusting then anything the United States has ever done. We've assimilated cultures in the manner of the Romans -- Europe has exterminated them. Which one is worse?
Err, I was not attempting to deny any of this. You missed the point. You were attempting to create an excuse for the Israelis, and I simply pointed out that others have "excuses" equally, if not more, valid. The idea being that what you proposed is really no "excuse" for Israeli behaviour.
I didn't know suicide bombers were the only types of terrorists. How refreshing! Care to explain the Iranian support of Hamas?
Hamas is a mishmash of charities, politcal movement, Islamic extemists, Palestinian freedom fighters and outright terrorists all mixed together. Not so long ago, Israel itself was supporting Hamas in an effort to destabilise PLO.
Are you telling me that you aren't scared shitless by their nuclear ambitions?
No I am not scared, never you mind "shitless". So far Iran has not produced any weapons and there are good reasons to believe that Iran indeed wants a civilian program as a primary goal of its program. Also all indications are that Iranians are in purely defensive mode, spurred on by US's fun adventures in the Iraqi sand. Add to this the fact that real dictatorial maniacs, such as Musharrif, already have nukes along with missiles to carry them and ... it changes very little. Unless Iran starts to produce massive quantities of these weapons to the point that it is unable to guarantee their wherebouts. Then I will start to worry.
You do not understand human history one bit or have any faith in our future. First off, there is simply no way that the Western World would accept a massive drop in the standard of living as long as it remains the most powerful military block in the World.
Err, these tanks and jets and nukes are not that useful at squeezing oil from dry rocks.
Second off, you completely ignored my point about technology providing a solution to the problem. The era of cheap hydrocarbon based energy may end in our lifetimes. But I think it shows a depressing lack of faith in the human race to assume that we won't solve the fusion problem or come up with another source of energy.
Actually I do have faith that we will solve that problem but I do have very little faith in the Western, corporatist, unchecked "free markets" which are very ill equipped to tackle this. The solution, no matter which alternative energy source you consider (unless cold fusion becomes reality - extremely long shot) involves drastic changes in living arrangements in the industrialzed countries, primarilly USA, where dependence on cheap hydrocarbon has shaped the infrastructure to the point of making it unuseable otherwise. The solution will involve a different lifestyle, not a "third world" nor uncomfortable one, but still markedly different and far more frugal then tod
And the US (although barely)...
and even Hitler on a more limited scale (read up about why chemical weapons were never used in WW2 -- Hitler feared overwhelming retaliation)
Err, no. He did not use them because he knew from WW1 experience that they are next to useless and counter-productive, something Saddam found out in a jiffy when he tried. Chemical weapons are simply a joke in a military application and are only useful to create a nuissance on the battlefield, followed by the winner having trouble enjoying the conquered territory due to haphazard contamination.
The only thing that will end the jungle law will be when everybody has an American'ish standard of living -- i.e. your neighbor doesn't have anything that you want.
Really? You mean rich people do not murder each other over even bigger riches?
The actual answer is that it will not stop until people evolve into something better. American "standard of living" based on ravenous, needless consumption of vast piles of useless crap is neither necessary nor desirable, not to mention unsustainable.
Funny how you should mention Israeli unilateralism while overlooking the minor little fact that it was your beloved UN that divided up the region in the first place -- and the fact that none of this would have happened if the Arab states hadn't launched the six day war.
There is nothing funny about that. The plan was stupid and ill conceived from the get go, and yes, initially the UN was to blame for this clusterfuck. No realistic provisions were made for the Palestinians to be relocated/compensated for their property, the assumption being that they will, just like sheep, simply "change owners" from the Arab states being at that time in charge of the area to a Jewish one. No one has asked their opinion on the subject, never you mind negotiating consent of the Arab neighbours. If anything, this is an example of how UN activity should not look like. But then again, back then the UN was a different creature, one dominated completely by the US, UK and USSR.
I could also point out how the Arabs purposefully kept the Palestinians in refugee camps instead of absorbing the displaced population in the same way that the Israelis did.
Which would be a rather convenient thing from the point of view of Israel. It would expand, creating successive waves of refugees, until Eretz Isreal became a reality, each time expecting the Arab countries to absorb new waves of displaced, peniless Palestinians (and then their own citizens as the expansion continued), no?
Just as many Jews were displaced by the partition as were Palestinians.
Whoa! That is some new statistics. Do tell, last time I heard, according to the 1922 census, the Jewish population was 84,000, while the Arabs numbered 643,000. Do explain to me again how that "just as many" thing works.
And maybe when your people have a 3,000 year long history of being oppressed and 16,000,000 of them met their fates in the ovens you will be able to understand why a lot of Israeli's have a wall mentality.
16 million? Whoa. Some more new statistics. Last time I heard the high end estimates for Holocaust (which for some reason some poeple insist on using, I wonder why) were around 6 million. I see there is some sort of Holocaust inflation in progress, now we are at 16 million, or is it your personal number? I do not want to make light of the subject but this is somewhat suspicious to me. Also, there are many ethic groups in that "opressed" category, including the Roma which also suffered similar fate in WWII. Russian peasants would claim to have been opressed by various tyrants for millenia. They too ended up in the Nazi gas chambers and in front of Nazi guns, to the tune of 20 million dead, which is higher then that of Jews. How about Native Americans, I hear they had a bit of a depopulation problem via the White Man's rifle, no
Evolutionary assumptions are easilly provable. Just like with fusion, we have the underlying mathematical model of the process and we can both observationally and experimentally prove that model's accuracy both in the lab and from fossil record, as I already explained. Research of evolution is an experimental, observational science. Furthermore, just like fusion is an integral component of larger body of physics, with all the physical models fitting together in that field, so is evolution which is a part of larger body of biology, with all of its experimentally determined components fitting together and cross-confirming each other.
What makes the speed of light what it is or the force of gravity its measured strength? How did all the laws by which evolution supposedly takes place came to be exactly as they are? To me all that originated in a mind.
If your question is about what made the Universe and most fundamental laws of it, from which all the other phenomena and their laws originate, then science is incapable of answering that question, since at the point of the singularity of the Big Bang all the laws of physics simply break and we have no means of determining the state which occured before. Furthermore, and this is an important omission always made by proponents of supernatural religious "answers", is that the question itself may simply be wrong. We can formulate in our language questions which can be asked but which have no meaning in our system of knowledge. For example: How kind is color blue? How fast is the number 3? And so on. The question: "What/who made the Universe?" might just belong to that very category.
Living things embody incredible amounts of INFORMATION in the digital codes of DNA.
So does a piece of rock with all of its complex chemical and physical structure, crystals, cracks, faults and what not. Information is an abstract term which we use to describe certain characteristics of physical systems, which are capable of storing impressions of states of other systems, our minds or computers or DNA or rocks being examples.
What came first, the DNA that carries the software information needed to make protein or the hardware protein that makes the DNA?
DNA (or more precisely in evolutionary terms, RNA) of course. It is not made of proteins. DNA stands for DeoxyriboNucleic Acid and it has 4 components, called Nucleotides (Adenine, Guanine, Cytosine, Thymine), which are themselves rather simple organic compounds of Nitrogen, Carbon, Oxygen and Hydrogen. Proteins are constructed using DNA. As I already explained, both DNA and RNA can self-replicate given a compatible chemical stew to be immersed into. Even incomplete, tiny fragments of DNA can replicate, a process which is used, for example, in forensic science to obtain large volumes of fragments of decayed DNA for analysis from tiny samples from the crime scene.
Does it not all come from a MIND?
See above. This "question" (which presumes the answer) might be simply incorrectly formulated, due to your inability to grasp other, unimaginable by you possibilities. A rather good hint that this question is not valid is the followup: "And what made the MIND? Another, bigger MIND? And what made... " you get the idea.
There is lots of disagreement as to the nature of this mind and that is the realm of religion. No man is without religion. God cannot be proved or disproved by any experiment or measurement.
As I just explained, the existance of any "minds" is not only nowhere near a foregone conclusion but even the question itself is not established to be valid. And yes, I am without a religion, at least without any that involve "gods" of any sort. As to "proving" or "disprovi
So by your definition, it is impossible to determine that the Sun's energy comes from thermonuclear ractions, neither it is possible to determine the aging process of stars, formation of galaxies and any other phenomena which we are not immediately capable of replicating, on a 1 to 1 scale, I take it. That is a curious, and I dare say, prepostrously limiting interpretation of the scientific method as it implies that even if we know all the component elements of a process, have all the required knowledge to predict their interaction, according to you, we are stil forbidden, by some holy decree I assume, from proceeding with the fusion of these concepts in order to establish a working model, even if that model yelds practical, empirically verifiable predictions. That is how most of science works I am afraid. No one has ever seen an electron, a proton, a neutron, never you mind any more elementary particles. Heisenberg uncertainty principle states that we cannot observe these particles, due to elemental physical laws. And yet, it did not stop us from obtaining nuclear fission and fusion as well as developing solid state physics, thanks to which you can now type your thoughts on the contraption full of semiconductors carrying those thoughts over to the Internet.
Similarly with evolution. We know sufficiently the component processes involved, on the molecular level, we have the mathematical theory of their interaction, mathematically provable, as well as we have geological and fossil records to combine these with, as well as modern day experiments in real time evolution which occurs, everyday, in very rapidly evolving organisms such as bacteria and virii. Yes, you read it right. Contrary to your claim, evolution experiments are rather easy and you can do them yourself, should you have the right equipment and samples. That is how new types of diseases appear magically every so often, that is how existing diseases become "immune" to antibiotics and other drugs. If you are into bigger organisms, you can, with patience, get a new species of a fruit fly, if you are willing to create sufficient conditions, for sufficient numbers and generations of flies in the lab.
Can we breed a new kind of fish instead of a bacteria or a fruit-fly? I am sure, given enough time. Can we make a fish walk as a result of this process? No, just like we are unable to make a new full-size Sun. We can only make tiny ones, lasting a few microseconds, because we do not have the required technology and resources, or in case of evolution, required time. But that in no way invalidates the process. We have all the pieces and the model and it yelds, empirically verifiable predictions, predictions which we tested successfully many many times. It is no longer a "theory". It is a scientific fact.
What experiment has ever been done to create even a simple living cell from non-living matter?
What will you define as "living matter?". Some people created brand new RNA strains which can self replicate in certain chemical conditions. Is this "life?". How about an artificial virus, we nearly have those (it is a long and complex task but nearly complete in academia -- assuming the military does not already have one). Or are you holding out for complete cells, with millions of genes to their DNA sequence? Where do you draw the line?
No transitional life forms have ever been found because there are none.
That is simply not true. Massive amounts of "transitional" fossils have been found, of all types.
Even in ordinary weather forecasting, to say nothing of long term global warming, many assumptions (faith) are input into the computer models and so th
Progress of human understanding of things, occuring despite of our animalistic overrides. That progress, while providing ever more destructive techologies, will also, at some point, provide tools to escape those primeval instincts. The real question is if we get to be lucky enough to survive as a species until then.
You also assume evolution is true, rather than being only a key tenet in the religion of science.
That is a telling statement. While one can argue that the scientific method is a form of philosophy, if one is to accept any aspect of science, then evolution as a process is as factual as the Sun rising every morning. Only someone influenced by religious belief to the point of denying reality would propose otherwise. That is what makes the "Intelligent Design" so unpallatable to us, the adherents of the repeatably empirical.
Of course, I am saying this assuming that you do not subscribe to some wild "everything is an illusion" worldview, which would render all discussion pointless.
You missed a possibility: we evolve into something better. At least some of us. That is what I hope happens.
Too expensive to supply and maintain and the climate is just a tad too harsh. You do not want the plucky dimplomats to actually freeze their butts to death. Just to make sure that they dont confuse going there with vacation time.
No such thing is needed. If the US was the only country on the planet or it has managed forcibly to terrorize the whole world into submission, only then you would be right. In absence of that, any national constitution is precisely that, a national document, applicable only within the borders of the country in question. If the US constitution stated "We own the Universe, all foreigners are our slaves", you would be claiming that it is so, because it appears that you think that the US Constitution applies to the whole Universe. Clearly all the others on this globe would object.
Care to explain to me why my elected officials should listen to the UN before they listen to my own concerns?
Only in the matters of international discourse. Clearly, any actions of the US which have effects outside of its borders are of concern to foreign nations. The US has an ability to appoint diplomats to the UN just like any other country (and as a matter of fact has a privileged position there, due to permanent Security Council seat and veto). This is also a two-way street. Likewise, if some other country or group of thereof is doing something which affects the US negatively, the natural expectation would be for the US to use the UN to negotiate an end to such activity and those countries would have to also abide by the UN decision, regardless of what their constitutions say. Otherwise we get a jungle law of "who has the longest dick wins". Which will inevitably result in a catastrophic global military conflict, preceeded by global economic conflict. Or have we learned nothing from history?
And we have reasons to think the rest of the World only wants to use the UN to drag us down economically. For lack of a better example it's like Civ2. You can play as a pacifist state but the minute you are the biggest economic power in the game all of the other nations team up against you. A sizable chunk of the World still hated our guts even under Clinton -- who was quite possibly the most well traveled and international President we've ever had.
Actually, this is a rather sad testimony to a view of US-centric narcissism, so popular in the US. The US has shamelessly exploited most of these poor nations, robbing them of natural resources and supporting various dictators and military huntas to make sure US corporations were pillaging unimpeded. Needless to say, the global attitude towards the US is somewhat colored by these actions. The US, with its 5% of global population, consumed around 40% of world's resources in 1999. Every man, woman and child in the US consumed 25 tons of raw materials that year. Compare this to the bottom 3 billion people who sustain themselves on $2 a day. So now you are afraid of the world. There is nothing to be done about that other then two possibilities, you will either accept the UN framework, labour to reform it and make it democratic and egalitarian and then work within it to equalize the living standards of these people (which will probably mean massive efforts to reduce birth rate all over the globe) or be prepared to nuke, or use biological waepons to murder most of the people on the planet to sustain your "way of life" and expect a retaliation in kind. No other choices remain.
But I guess the point I was trying to make wasn't about small nations being afraid of us. It was about Americans being afraid of being outvoted by 1.2 billion Chinese. Or perhaps (dare I say it) Israel being outvoted by a billion Muslims.
Then what is truly needed, as part of the UN reform, that a UN Constitution is made, one which would guarantee rights of countries in such scenarios, rights which could not taken away by a simple majority. You, know, that old stuff about branches of govenance, separation of powers, unalienable rights I read about in some document starting with "We the People...". Except applied to nations.
That's another
Please don't make laugh. Lybia's "program" constituted of a small pile of rusting, non-functional parts, a set of incomplete, incorrect plans and other assorted junk, all of which amounted to nothing but a butt of jokes in the nuclear proliferation inspection circles. No one informed has ever took Lybian "program" seriously and its "giving up" was nothing but a pure PR effort on the part of Quaddafi. You can't "give up" that what you didn't have in the first place (although if you are clever, you can fool some gullible people to score political points).
As for Hamas, if you want to run a nursery, run a nursery. Don't organizationally affiliate with a group of nuts who make human bombs. You're giving them cover and providing nice conduits for funneling support to the armed wing.
I agree, but you and I can muse all we want here, and yet the realities on the ground in the occupied territories are such that this is precisely what happens. Unless you figure out a way to convince Palestinian populace to force Hamas to separate these things, everybody is out of luck. And no, brute force tactics, shooting missiles into apartment buildings, buldozing whole blocks of houses, preventing participation in elections and arresting anyone who sends money to a Hamas orphanage are not effective ways to go about it. If anything, they have the exactly opposite effect.
No, I claim that foreign countries would not stand for it and subsequently either a communication blackout would have occured, or, far more likely, an ITU like structure would have to be developed. This is precisely what is happening now to the Internet.
Besides, there is ALREADY an international group in charge.
There is not. The "I" in ICANN stands for "Internet" not "International" and ICANN is fully US controlled.
One other thing - the authorization was written into 1441. Go read it. I like to use information that I have verified, rather than attacking someone because they might sound like a personality that I despise.
No it was not. I read it very carefully. It warns of "serious consequences" to be determined by the UN (at its next security council meeting on the subject, which never took place). In contrast to 1991's resolution 678 which specifically states "all necessary means" which is the standard dimplomatic way of declaring war. Similarly in 1990, the series of resolutions started with 660 for the initial nebulous warning (such as "serious consequences" which is equivalent to that of 1441) via 661, 662, 664, 665, 666, 667, 669, 670, 674 and 677 and finally 678 where an actual authorization is given to use "all necessary means".
The intenational law is the product of the agreements between all the nations. UN is a result of one such agreement and the forum where such laws are made. They are binding on all the nations and override the national constitutions in regards to international affairs. If some dictator were to make up a "constitution" whereby he granted himself the role of the self-appointed cop of the planet, the intenational law would, in the view of all the nations of the planet (other then his) override such silly "constitution".
The last time I checked our Constitution vested the legislative power of the United States in our Congress.
It is, as long as the results your actions do not leave your borders. As soon as they do, they become subject to international scrutiny.
About the small states fear of being dominated by the big states?
Precisely. Most of the states of the world are small and have a fraction of the economic and military power of the US. They all feel being dominated/controlled/manipulated by the US. Even large states have reasons to believe US is attempting to dominate them. Iraq war is just the latest example of US attitude towards states which cannot repel its aggression. That is why these small states of the world are increasingly looking to the UN to try to keep the militarily big state of the US in check.
All that historical influence aside, the UN doesn't do itself any favors by appointing abusive powers to chair human rights commissions, ignoring genocide, or getting involved in oil for food scandals.
True, the politics and compromises within the UN leave a lot to be desired. As are its anti-corruption measures. It is a work in progress and everyone acknowledges that serious reforms are needed.
And speaking as a native New Yorker allow me to personally bitch about the few million bucks in unpaid parking tickets owed to the City and of New York and the general arrogance displayed by many UN diplomats and staff towards their host city.
The results of diplomatic immunity and belligerence of some low-level "diplomats" within UN is a valid reason for concern by New Yorkers. My personal belief (which I picked up from one of the posters on Slashdot) is that the best policy would be, as a part of UN reform, to move UN HQ to a truly neutral place, such as a small island, preferrably of very unhospitable climate. I am saying this in all seriousness, as someone who believes in the mission of UN, because that isolation and harshness of environment would eliminate all sorts of career crooks and seekers of diplomatic comforts who manouver their diseased hides into the halls of important institutions such as UN only to be able to shop at the 5th Avenue and double-park in front of some local whorehouse. We do not need that sort of "diplomatic" crowd in the UN.
Which the Lybians and Syrians used to ... what precisely? Control their uber-sophisticated, Doomsday Machine involving sharks and a moon canon with those PCs? These "laws" are purposefuly made just for this purpose, to "convict" people of things such as having family and friends in Syria. As to Hamas, something you would never know from the US media, it is a vast organization, only a small part of which is involved in combat in the Palestinian anti-occupation efforts. It is unfortunate for them (read: stupid) that these para-military types have decided to attack Israeli civilians and use abhorrent tactics such as suicide bombs. It is also unfortunate that due to the disastrous policies of both Israel and the US the climate in the occupied territories became more and more conductive to Hamas becoming increasingly religiously fundamentalist. So now you have an organization involving large-scale charitable work, very popular political movement, Islamic extremists, freedom fighters and terrorists all mixed together under one banner: Hamas. How do you know which of these the computers went to? I am sure that the US prosecutors took the dimmest view possible. On the other hand, one has to wonder what use would a suicide bomber or a haphazard, home-made mortar launching extremist have for a computer.
Somehow, I don't think the whole Hamas thing was an ICANN operation.
I did not say it was, I merely pointed out how ICANN reacted to the arrests.
Make up your mind. Either stop pretending that US is doing UN's "dirty work", as the parent poster was insinuating, followed by whining about "being stabbed in the back" and similar boloney and admit that US is an arrogant, spoiled brat with no regard for international law whatsoever -- or acknowledge that the UN has authority which the US ignored and thus US is misbehaving in regards to international law and should correct its ways. One or the other. In the first case the US should be treated as a rouge nation, and in the other as an errant one. Your choice.
And then you wonder why EU and others are getting uneasy about US controlling some of the world's communication infrastructure. Sigh.
We assign IP addresses and domain names in Russia? That's funny. I was under the impression that responsibility was delegated to regional IP and domain name registries. Ya, know, like these guys?
On the surface it looks true, but all of these "regional" assignments are fed back to ICANN-controlled root servers. ICANN has an ability to override any of these "regional" agencies, just as it did with the Iraqi TLD.
They did so because there was no other viable choice. If they were to start their own DNS sever structure, the problem would be that noone there would be able to find anything here and vice versa. Then, immediately, you would need an ITU-like linkage. As the initial links were purely academic, noone has foreseen any of this.
If every country setup their own internet, then there would need to be routing agreements in order for a canadian to access a french URL, for example. See the story about Level 3. If the EU wants their own EUNet, they would simply have to buy some servers, setup a list, and (if they wanted to) negotiate an agreement with the US internet.
This is precisely what they want. They already have their own Internets, complete with routers, servers, fiber and users. And they can set up their own DNS servers in a jiffy. The problem is that if they do it without taking their TLDs back to their own countries, as you suggested, and away from ICANN, they are effectively held hostage by ICANN. What they want is for each country to have its own TLD, DNS and what not, as you suggested, and then to get an ITU-like deal for the "routing agreements". That is all. But the US resists. The US wants to control all domains, including the national TLDs of EU countries. And something is simply fishy about that.
Actually ICANN did screw around with the Iraqi TLD. First, the dude who was running it was arrested for "supporting terrorism" (based on his involvement in some charities and having a big mouth). When that occured, ICANN took charge of the TLD and effectively shut it down. It then refused to give it up, even to the supposedly elected Iraqi government. It took some serious arm twisting to get it to do so and even now uncertainty is not completely resolved.