"Economic growth does not imply depleting natural resources"
This is true to an extent but the obvious counterargument is to look at China where growth is depleting global natural resources at an alarming rate. I read yesterday that Australia just authorized a massive new open pit zinc mine, that requires a massive diversion of a very large, very flood prone tropical river, simply to satiate China's insatiable appetite for Zinc. The prices for Zinc are up 6 fold almost entirely due to growth in China. The mining company claims they can keep the mine from flooding by building a giant 40 foot wall around it, many who live in the ridge thoroughly expect it to be flooded and a massive plume of toxic waste to be washed in to the ocean.
The problem big capital has at the moment is that markets in the U.S., Japan and Western Europe are mature, slow growth, incomes are stagnant and markets saturated. The solution, grow new markets in China, India, Eastern Europe so they can continue to grow their revenue and prop up their stock prices. They aren't focused on growth due to improved efficiency, they just want new consumers buying more of their products.
To get that the plan is to go to places like India and China, position more jobs there, put more money in the pockets of workers there, and then turn them in to good little advertising controlled consumer bots. The end result is they adopt a Western life style complete with cars, commuting, TV's, cell phones etc. The unfortunate problem is the modern Western life style is horribly wasteful. The world could tolerate it as long as a fairly small percentage of the world's population was living it. but not when its adopted by billions of people.
The West needs to make some sacrifices and reign in its wasteful life style, for example rejigger our communities so people aren't spending 2+ hours a day driving to jobs far from their homes. At the same time we need to refrain from inflicting the same messed up life style on hundreds of millions of new people in Asia, and instead push a more sustainable life style before we further entrench our wasteful one. This however runs counter to everything big capital wants. They want a billion consumers in Asia living like Americans and Europeans do so they can maintain the growth that Capitalism demands of them.
I don't mean to sound like an anti Capitalism flamer, it is a wonderful system for incentivizing people to do things and take risks. In most respects it works better than other systems we've tried, but I really can't see our planet surviving long term with it as our dominant economic system. It is an economic system designed to ravage the planet in the name of profit, and a system devoid of rational decision making. Everytime the the "right" path runs counter to the most profitable path Capitalism is going to take the profitable path and lead to one long term calamity after another.
"Surely if the forests had sequestered all that CO2 and lowered the global temperature"
Not being a geologist I might be wrong on this but I think your entire point here falls because forests and jungles sequestered only some of the CO2. Much of it was sequestered by microorganism in the oceans. I think most of the coal came from land based plants, while most of the oil deposits came from plankton and the like in the oceans. Earth has been quite successful at self correcting climate over millions of yeas but humans have proved to have a very high capacity for disrupting natural cycles in short periods of time.
"there have been 5 mass extinctions over the past 439 million years"
Not sure what the point is your making. Its unlikely these mass extinctions were due to CO2 issues. All indications are they were due to geological or astronomical events.
The key issue with human intevention in our climate is this is probably the first time mass extinctions have been caused by a life form and not random physical events. Anyone who wants to deny humans have this kind of power has no grip on reality. Humans have already wiped out a large number of species with little effort, and pushed many others to inevitable extinction unless we preserver them in zoos.
I'm not saying the devastation of our planet is entirely a product of CO2 and climate change. We are doing as much or more damage by clear cutting forests and jungles, destroying habitat, and hunting and fishing one species after another to extinction or at least population crashes. Maybe we can sustain a population of 6 or 8 billion on this planet but proably not 10 or 12 billion, and the quality of life for even 6 billion isn't good or sustainable.
"Well doesn't that imply that we are due for another ice age ?"
I really don't think I see the point you are making when you talk about historical climate cycles during era when man had little impact on the climate to now when we are obviously having massive impact. Again the key point here is instead of climate changes over the course of thousands of years, or due to cataclysmic events, all the evidence indicates we are having dramatic and intentional impact on the climate in the space of a hundred years, it coincides with the dawn of the industrial age, massive expansion in burning of fossil fuels, and massive population explosion.
"The more realistic question is how we will handle contracting populations that seem increasingly inevitable."
Global population trends indicate no such inevitability. The only places seeing contracting populations are the small pockets in highly developed countries like Japan and Italy. Maybe China will force contraction through oppressive population control, that remains to be seen. In the 3rd world population is still exploding unchecked, there is no end in sight, and that will probably continue unless epidemic or starvation stops it. No doubt global population will contract but it will probably be at the point when we have already exhausted the planets resources.
"Can't say I'm in favor of either one but pretending humans are uniquely culpable is clearly hubris."
I think you completely missed or chose to ignore the point I made on this. Previous mass extinctions and climate change, as nearly as we can tell, were due to random geological or astronomical events. Humans are to the best of my knowledge the first species with the potential to inflict both cataclysms on the planet with intention.
Dude you are the clearly the one drinking the hubris Koolaid not me with statements like this:
"I would counter that the arrival of man is the only thing that makes the rest of it even remotely worthwhile and interesting"
You seem to think human civilization is the only thing that makes life matter and that is something with which I disagree. As I said previously we unfortunately developed intellect without developing the wisdom to use it in a sustainable way. Me I wish human kind was still living the relatively hard but sustainable life style of native Americans before Europeans exterminated most of them in the name of greed and religion.
"I think imagining we can take out the entire planet is a bit of hubris in itself."
I don't think I said the planet was going to be destroyed. I was more pointing out that in the space of a few hundred years we will probably manage to wipe out millions of years of evolution my mass extinctions of one species after another, and dramatically alter the global climate, something previously only done my asteroid impacts and super volcanoes. No doubt some species will survive and given a hundred million years the earth will produce some new life forms to try again, since life is remarkably robust at many levels.
Maybe some humans will survive, assuming we don't trigger a run away greenhouse effect or engineer a super virus, but we really don't deserve to survive because we are the most dangerous and misguided species ever to grace this planet.
"They're bigger, stronger, and faster than even just two generations ago."
That is mostly due to better chemistry, primarily the use of steroids, not genetics. The benefits of steroids aren't propagated through reproduction. Better diet has also led to both taller, healthier, athletic people and overweight, unhealthy people. Abundant cheap, subsidized, high fructose corn syrup alone is creating millions of overweight diabetic Americans.
I doubt you will ever see dramatic genetic changes over the space of two generations especially when mating choices are fairly random in modern society. Slavery did produce dramatic physical improvement in the gene pool in American blacks but it was over the course of a number of generations, with brutal breeding constraints enforced by slave owners coupled with selectively in the harvesting of slaves from Africa by slavers.
An interesting paradox that will work against this proposed genetic "upper class" is the fact that there is a pronounced trend for highly educated, affluent, beautiful people to reproduce in relatively low numbers while the uneducated and poverty stricken are usually reproducing at a dramatically higher rate in this world. Now maybe the "upper class" can preserve well protected islands of affluence where they dominate and survive, but they could just as easily be swept under when someday the underclass figure out that the world order is concentrating the world's wealth and well being in the hands of a tiny often undeserving minority while the rest of the world lives in grinding misery. Maybe the "upper class" can hold power though economic, political, technological and military means but I wouldn't count on it.
To be honest I really don't expect the human race to survive in tact another thousand years, let alone a hundred thousand years. A few basic factors working against us:
- Our inability to control our population growth, religions in particular pour fuel on this fire by trying to maximize the growth of their flock by obstructing birth control - Our dominant economic system, capitalism, simply isn't sustainable because its predicated on maximizing growth which is devastating our finite habitat and again its concentrating ever more wealth in ever fewer hands and that probably isn't sustainable, before there is revolt. - Our technological advances are dramatically outstripping our wisdom in applying and controlling them. Biological manipulation and weapons alone are a grave threat to survival of our species, along with nuclear proliferation.
Another factor that works against the creation of a genetic upper class is that people raised in affluence and without adversity often end up being complete losers. People who succeed in the face of adversity and serious obstacles are much stronger people than those raised with a silver spoon in their mouths. You need to look no further than America's two biggest dynasties the Kennedy's and the Bush's to see the deficiencies that develop in generations raised on a silver spoon.
A thousand years out I imagine we will have rendered most species on the planet extinct including our own, through cataclysmic climate change and decimation of land and oceans alike in a vain attempt to feed billions more people. It took millions of years to sequester carbon dioxide in the ground and cool our climate, and we are going to unleash it all in the space of a couple hundred years and the results will be cataclysmic. It took hundreds of millions of years for earth to develop its diversity and abundance of life forms and again in hundreds of years we will have decimated all of them.
I wouldn't mind if the human race took itself out, but its unfortunate its going to take out the rest of the planet thanks to our rampant hubris and avarice.
"Gas prices are driven because of the spot market on oil"
Well true to an extent. It is also a commodity subject to extreme price manipulation because there are relatively few suppliers of both oil and refined products from oil, and they do cooperate to manipulate prices, OPEC is a cartel afterall which does regulate production to manipulate oil prices.
In the movie Syriana there is an interesting point that one wonders why we do have oil commodity markets and why they are based in London and New York. The answer is the U.S. and Britain have historically used every political, military and economic tool at their disposal to try to control the oil market.
One wonders if the system would be more stable if oil providers sold their own oil through contracts to customers directly and cut the price speculators out of the loop. There are a LOT of people who gamble on commodity markets, they provide no real economic value other than liquidity, and they frequently reap large profit in short periods by exploiting turmoil. It is money that goes out of prdocuer's and consumer's pockets and in to theirs for really no reason. They don't produce anything, all they do is buy low and sell high.
Also when Reagan deregulated refining in the 80's there was surplus refining capacity in the U.S., it was a bit inefficient but it helped assure there wasn't a shortage of refining capacity. Once deregulation happened a lot of consolidation occurred and a lot of refineries disappeared. Now refining capacity operates on a razor's edge and it is relatively easy to get price spikes when refining capacity goes off line. Refineries go offline due to maintenance, accidents and weather events like Katrina. It is also VERY easy for big oil companies to intentionally take refineries off line for "maintenance" if they want to spike gasoline prices and improve profit margins.
The interesting thing about gas prices in recent months is their is a HIGH probability oil companies are intentionally driving down prices in the run up to the November elections. Having oil friendly Republican control government has been a windfall for big oil companies and they have a big incentive to keep them in power. High gas prices were fueling antipathy towards Republicans on top of all the rest of their incompetence and corruption. It is a pretty cynical manipulation of the electorate that the Republicans and their friends in big oil will probably drive down gas prices every week until the election and then they will spike back up at the first excuse immediately thereafter.
Fascism is also a fusion of government with corporate interests and those of wealthy and influential party members. German industrialists, especially the Thyssen family, one of Germany's richest, helped put the Nazi's in power because they thought it would be good for business, and that they would smack down labor unions. George W.'s grandfather Prescott Bush was a U.S. banker and broker for the Thyssen family, at Union Bank, during the same period they were bankrolling Hitler's rise to power. Union Bank's assets were seized for trading with the enemy when America entered World War II to the great embarrassment of the Bush family.
Fascists use the power of government to enrich themselves and their business interests. They usually mouth their love for "free markets" at the same time they pull strings to have their party and government intervene in the "free market" to make them winners and their not so well connected competitors losers. If you want to get ahead in such a system you strive to advance your standing in the party, and the party rewards you with lucrative business, and by punishing your competitors who are not in favor with the party.
Fascism is a decidedly anti labor political system, and very anti trade union, which is why it was often viewed as a bulwark against the spread of Communism and worker centric Socialism.
Everyone is reluctant to use the term since World War II but the U.S., U.K. and especially China are decidedly Fascist leaning governments these days. China abandoned any pretense of Socialism or Communism when all the leading party members deduced they could get rich using their control of the government and economy if they just it coupled with a huge infusion of western capital so they did a 180 and blessed private ownership of capital, stock markets and profiteering. They almost overnight became a Fascist regime when they did.
The origin of Islamofascism as a word in our lexicon is nothing more than a PR gimmick. After using the words "terrorist" and "terrorism" in every other sentence for five years the electorate has grown weary of them and they no longer register. No one knows what winning the "War on Terror" means. So the Bush administration is attempting to link the current "war on terrorism" with the glory days of World War II by linking today's enemy with yesteryears boogie man, in an effort to better paint the war as one of good versus evil. In fact it is really just a marketing campaign much like you would use to sell soap. The Baathist governments in Syria and Saddam's Iraq were quite Fascist in character. Al Qaeda has no resemblance to the term. The quagmires the Bush administration is in in Iraq and Afghanistan are no win situations but at least until they midterm election is over they want to pretend like they are noble causes like World War II was. Resorting to the use of the word Fascist in this particular struggle shows how rhetorically bankrupt they are.
Another possibility is its becoming increasingly common for an increasingly large number of people to brand the Bush administration and the Republican parties as Fascists and it is a term that does have a degree of fit. By repeatedly referring to their "enemy" as fascists it creates the illusion the Bush administration must not be. If they are fighting "Islamofascists" how could they be Fascists too. Well its easy they still are, and maybe we need to coin a term that matches and does fit, JudeoChristianFascists".
If you haven't seen it the Wachowski brothers film "V for Vendetta" which is out on pay per view now is a stinging jab at the rise of Fascism in Britain and the U.S. and the mechanisms that are being used to foist it on the ignorant masses.
"War is for one thing only--the destruction of your enemy."
This is probably true in a "total" war, but very few wars are "total" anymore, and your approach is extraordinarily counterproductive when fighting insurgencies which most wars are these days.
If we take your approach, when your enemy is the entire population of a country or a region, for example an insurgency with widespread popular support fighting an occupying military, like we have in Iraq or with Hezbollah in Lebanon, your solution quickly translates in to the final one, extermination of an entire population. How do you "destroy" an enemy completely interwoven with a civilian population without killing the entire civilian population.
Recently in Lebanon when Israel was faced with an invisible enemy exploiting massive tunnel networks so they were hard to "destroy" the Israelis instead turned to bombing apartment buildings and homes full of innocent civilians and dropping old, defective cluster bombs that will keep on "winning" that war for a long time to come everytime a kid picks one up. Its true in that case Hezbollah was targeting civilians too, but that is largely forgotten due to the scale of the devastation Israel inflicted in Lebanon.
I guess I'd have to agree that ruthless annihalation of your enemy is one way to win a war, though I should think countries that do it that way would often have trouble living with themselves the day after, or could easily find themselves branded as war criminals by the rest of the world.
All in all I think, in this day and age when every side of a war can get their story out, especially stories about intentional killing of innocent civilians that you are probably better off winning the PR war first by being discriminating in your use of force. Insurgencies like Hezbollah and the Taliban have deduced they can't win wars toe to toe with major military powers but they can win the hearts and minds war by suckering those superior military powers in to to doing stupid things like killing civilians as they seek to "destroy" their enemy, or by torturing and humiliating civilians in occupied territories as both Israel and the U.S. have done.
There are a few smart U.S. officers in Iraq, very few, who train their soldiers that everytime they do wrong to an Iraqi civilian, or use excessive force, they are helping the insurgents win. This is Counterinsurgency 101, you do not use excessive force if you want to win. Unfortunately most of the U.S. and Israeli military apparently ditched this class, so they have no clue how to fight an insurgency which is why they are so terrible at it and are losing.
This whole topic of high tech non lethal weapons is a conundrum. It is good to develop non lethal methods for dealing with situations where lethal force might otherwise be used. On the other hand if you make the non lethal weapon clean and convenient it WILL be overused and it soon becomes a vicious means for repression. Rather than letting protesters or even rioters vent and just control them with riot police, instead the temptation is to suppress every form of protest by flipping a switch and reducate the targets by making them writhe in agony, but without long term injury, so they will think twice before speaking out in public about something they think is wrong. You could see how many people might construe some of these weapons as a form of mass torture and certainly as a tool for repression and suppression of free speech.
It does really boggle the mind how far America has slipped in to a very dark hole, often referred to as Fascism, that the U.S. military would be proposing the use of these devices on Americans. There is law on the books that dates to the Civil War which BANS the U.S. military from operating in America against Americans though it is being cast aside by the Bush administration like so many other laws they've found inconvenient as they build their police state. Or I guess they DOD can just turn them over to the Guard or local police and let them flip the switch the next time there is an antiwar or antiglobalization protest.
Definitely in this instance its probably a case of systems that are somewhat overly complex and not fool proof coupled with the fact that people who run polling station qualify as fools especially when it comes to electronics and changing from familiar systems to new ones. Little old ladies and civil servants can grok paper ballets and punch cards, not computers.
I rather doubt there are many intentional and nefarious attempts to rig a primary. It isn't worth the risk to alter the outcome between one of your parties candidates and another. Joe Lieberman maybe should have considered it....
On the other hand, the general election in November is probably the most pivotal election to watch EVER in U.S. history to insure if it is above board. A ruthless party with an absolute stranglehold on power is in relatively deep trouble with voters and they have massive incentive to insure they don't lose their grip on the House and Senate.
If they have, in fact, built in back doors to alter electronic voting this is the election they are most likely to use them, and they probably will pull out all the old fashioned non electronic tools too, the ones they used so well in Florida in 2000.
The Bush administration is in a panic to prevent any real Congressional oversight of the war in Iraq, the fabrications used to justify it, and the illegal measures they've taken in torturing people and spying on American's without FISA oversight among other things.
I read on the Christian Science Monitor yesterday that people working at the CIA are rushing to taking out liability insurance offered by an FBI coop that helps cover legal costs and judgments against them if they are brought in to court over illegal activities they have been engaged in under the Bush administration, illegal spying on Americans and torturing or rendition of prisoners. Many are worried the government will cut them to the wind rather than pay to defend them.
The Bush administration is desperately trying right now to rush through legislation that would inoculate them for all the illegal things they've done in the last five years and declare them, retroactively, to be legal before the election. You can't really retroactively change law, either what you did was legal or it wasn't, but that isn't stopping them. They are very aware that a Democratic congress backed by recent Supreme court rulings will make them very vulnerable to criminal prosecution, and even to war crimes charges.
At the moment it is obvious the Republican's are hammering the American people with a rhetorical barrage to scare them back in to voting for the Republicans in November. They are also planning a very well funded campaign of vicious personal attack ads against Democratic candidates. It could well work because most Americans have proved vulnerable to fear mongering and voting the way vicious attack ads tell them.
If those measures don't work and the Republicans are still faced with losing either or both houses of Congress election day, someone may well take off the gloves and try to rig enough Congressional races to insure the Republicans hold power. If we have another election where results don't match exit polls, or exit polls are altered to match the official results, there are significant irregulaires, there is a chance, just a chance mind you, that you are no longer living in a Republic, but one more like Mexico was most of the 20th century where the ruling PRI party rigged election after election to insure their grip on power went unchallenged.
You have to commend the Wachowski brothers for putting out "V for Vendetta" in the current climate because it is a biting stab at the rise of Fascism in the U.S. and Britain and the mechanisms that are being used to implement it. If you haven't seen it and you care about where Britain and the U.S. have been heading it is a must see.
"and it keeps going down thanks to genetic engineering"
That might be part of it, but its also due to the fact the U.S. massively subsidizes agriculture, especially corn and soy, which has always kept food prices in the U.S. down on the surface though we pay for it indirectly through our taxes. The unfortunate down side of subsidizing corn is its led to the massive use of high fructose corn syrup in our food, because its cheap and mass produced. There is a strong suspicion this is causing the current epidemics of diabetes and obesity in this country. It wasn't a great idea to make an anti-nutritious substance dirt cheap. There is hope because the midwest lobby that garners hand outs for corn farmers, now have the government subsidizing corn for ethanol production, in spite of the fact using corn is a horrible way to make ethanol. As a result corn prices are spiking, either leading to inflation in food prices, or a reduction in our dependence on corn syrup as food. Brazil saw a similar spike in food prices when it converted vast agricultural areas to sugar cane to make ethanol, though at least sugar cane is good for making ethanol.
Now back on topic, all in all this story is a non story as most have pointed out. The fact is the lion's share of India and China are still dirt poor and uneducated which is why the per capita numbers are so out of whack. India's boom is concentrated around Hyderabad and Mumbai. You get out in to the rural areas and IT is non existent. There is a flourishing Maoist rebel movement spreading through India's rural areas, call the Naxalites feeding on the fact the rural poor are increasingly fed up with the disparities in economic well being. As a few parts of India prosper most do not, and its unlikely that prosperity is going to spread in to the rural areas, so the per capita IT spending isn't likely to either.
China is a pretty similar situation. The bulk of its economic and IT growth is in the coastal regions especially Guangdong and Hong Kong in the SouthEast and around Shanghai further to the north. Interior China is also still very rural, dirt poor and not really participating in their economic boom. The young and poor from the interior immigrate to Guangdong and work in the sweatshop environment there as long as they can stand it, and then often take the money and go home. There is also a small boom going on in the North in Manchuria, China's equivalent of the U.S. rust belt. Much of it fueled by Japanese money especially in Dalian which is becoming a new high tech hub. There is irony that after Manchuria was a Japanese occupied puppet state through World War II, and Imperial Japan's industrial base, that the Japanese are reoccupying it peacefully using yen instead of bullets. There would be irony if a Maoist insurgency gains steam in China, home of Mao and the remnant of his communist party. The Communist party there has completely abandoned even the pretense of being a people's party or a worker's party in favor of Fascism and wealth for the ruling the elite while most of the country is still in rural poverty or urban sweatshops.
Nixon, Nixon's CIA and J. Edgar Hoover's FBI WERE spying on the entire country then. They were spying on anti war protesters, journalists, political dissidents and political opponents. J. Edgar was famous for spying on Martin Lither King, and the only laws he broke laws were in peaceful and public acts of civil disobedience.
Nixon wasn't exactly run out of the White House over spying, since Watergate and attempting to rig his reelection was an even juicier reason. But the FISA act the Bush administration was violating here was instituted in 1978 directly as a result of massive spying abuse during the Nixon era, though it was rampant under Johnson, Kennedy and Eisenhower too.
FISA was an act largely created by Democrats and has always been unpopular with right wing Republicans ever since. It wasn't surprising the Bush administration, using 9/11 as an excuse, decided to unilaterally overturn it. The Bush administration came in with an agenda to turn back the clock on all these liberal Democrat reforms they viewed as weakening the Executive Branch and threatening national security. One suspects they want to turn the clock back to about 1950's McCarthyism which was the last time the Republicans had the same kind of power they have today.
David Gergen, who served in the Nixon administration, and several others since, recently said he doubted Nixon would have had any chance of getting a nomination in today's Republican party, he was far to liberal by the standards of today's party. He really wasn't very liberal, other than his rapproachment with China, its more a comment on how far right today's Republican party has moved. It has moved so far right Fascism is not such a far off description. It has moved so far right many American's who were tricked in to voting them in to power are realizing they made a mistake and may or may not make the same mistake again, it depends on whether Rove can dream up another round of deception to sucker a nation that is unfortunately not very bright on average.
"The events of recent weeks in Britian have shown that a civilized country can fight terrorism without resorting to breaking the law."
I wouldn't champion the Brits for their respect for their citizens rights. They've passed laws that are much harsher than any in the U.S. Not sure they outlaw spying on their citizens in the first place. The law broken by the NSA has only been in place since the 1970's in the U.S. The U.S. was rampantly spying on its citizens before then.
The most recent was called the Prevention of Terrorism Act and was passed in an illadvised frenzy after the subway bombings, kind of like the Patriot Act.
In a previous "terrorism" investigation British law enforcement murdered an innocent Brazilian electrician claiming he was a terrorist which is pretty much the ultimate form of "breaking the law". He apparently just had the misfortune to be living near a place under investigation, looking Arab, and being an illegal immigrant who was afraid of the police. The police officials lied through their teeth about the whole thing after they murdered him.
Some examples of recent British antiterrorism law that really read more like "police state":
- The British government can lock up anyone incommunicado for 28 days without charges being filed.
- The British can slap a control order on you without convicting you of anything. Control orders can impose curfews, limit who you associate with, limit religious freedom, prevent you from having a cell phone, using the Internet, or where you work, they are basically a form of preemptive probation they can slap on anyone they merely suspect of being a potential terrorists whether they are or not.
- You can be arrested for expressing opinions or selling books in support of "terrorists". The government also gets to decide who is and who isn't a terrorist so they get to decide what causes their citizens can and can't support, for example championing the cause of Palestinians is very chancy in Britain now.
- An earlier law passed in the wake of 9/11 allowed the Brits to hold a resident alien suspected of terrorism indefinitely without trial.
The Brits were an originator of habeas corpus, due process, in the Magna Carta 790 years ago only to throw it away in the last 5.
Quite predictably, using the liquid explosives busts as an excuse, the Bush administration has been campaigning they need the same laws the Brits have to make us safe, though the British laws would be completely unconstitutional in the U.S.
I'd really wait to see how successful the supposed liquid explosive investigation proves to be when its all said and done. Its a lot easier for the government to use the media megaphone to trumpet their success in breaking up a terrorist ring than it is to actually prove there was one, or for it to be as real a threat as its been made out to be. The practicality of bringing down an airliner with small quantities of liquids mixed on board is unproven. You can cause an explosion, which Al Qaeda did in their previous attempt dubbed "Bojinka", but its not clear it would be enough to bring down an airliner. In their dry run a decade ago they killed one passenger but didn't damage the airplane to any serious degree. I wager that in this case like so many before it the overreaction will do more damage than the plot would have. The Brits are making airline travel so painful many people are having second thoughts about it, which translates in to real and lasting economic damage.
Reference the "terrorism" plot the U.S. broke up in Michigan where a couple Arab looking guys were buying cell phones in quantity to resell in Texas for a small profit. U.S. law enforcement inflated it in to a terrorist plot to blow up a bridge in Michigan. It was insane, it wasn't good law enforcement or good counter terrorism. They made life living hell for a few guys for NO REASON. In the U.S. we are approaching an election where the ruling
It was illegal by the definition of the UN charter and the Geneva conventions to which the U.S. is a principal signatory. Now you can argue that those treaties and the U.N. are meaningless but the U.S. does still seem to like to exploit those treaties and the U.N. to its own advantage when it suits the U.S.
Aggressive warfare is illegal, and the U.S. invasion of Iraq was aggressive by any modern definition since Iraq hasn't attacked another country since Kuwait and there had already been a punitive response to that. Yes Iraq was engaged in a perpetual skirmish with the American and British forces over the no fly zone but it was pretty clear the U.S. and British were shooting as much as they were being shot at there.
Preemptive war is in fact a deceptive term for aggressive war. Any nation which bestows upon itself the power to unilaterally practice preemption is engaging in illegal warfare. Any nation which can fabricate a case against any another nation and use that fabrication to topple its government is a rogue state.
The whole foundation of the war in Iraq was that it was building a new and large stockpile of WMD's when in fact it really wasn't. There were small technical violations but there wasn't really any such program. Its become clear the Bush administration either wittingly or unwittingly fabricated their whole case for the war. Since it appears much of their case was fabricated if not an outright lie that pushes them further in to the realm of illegal war. They fabricated a case to justify invading a country for no particular reason other than they wanted to change its government, and they didn't get a U.N. resolution to authorize it, since key countries in the security council didn't buy their fabrications.
Then you tack on torturing prisoners, and murdering prisoners and civilians, which has obviously occurred on a fairly widespread scale. The Bush administration propaganda spins it as isolated and a few bad apples. The obvious fact is it is government policy to allow torture and abuse since the Dick Cheney lobbied Congree for the right to torture and then the White House defied a recent congressional law against torture with a signing statement that they reserve the right to torture, and they've recently sought to immunize all those who are ordering and executing it from prosecution using similar executive orders.
It is a simple fact of life that since the Geneva conventions, since the U.S. is still a signatory to those conventions, and since the U.S. trots them out to demand humane treatment of its POW's, that the U.S. has tilted in to both illegal and immoral by officially sanctioning the trampling of those conventions in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Gitmo and in Rendition. You can argue that the Geneva conventions don't apply to Al Qaeda, but they most certainly do apply in Iraq since it had a sovereign government which was toppled by an aggressive war so it falls under the Geneva conventions on occupied countries.
"Do you really believe there's any rational people out there who WANT war?"
I think you just proved yourself pretty naive with that whopper, or cynical for trying to get/. to believe it.
Though I guess it depends on how you define "rational", I guess you could say anyone who likes war is not rational, but you would end up with a large percentage of the worlds political leaders in that category.
War profiteers LOVE war and have throughout history, the Rothschild family were famous for war profiteering on the Napoleonic wars and made their fortune there. If you are providing everything from weapons to beans you can make a lot of money off war, and there are plenty of people in the world who are glad to make a buck off people getting killed. There was a huge line of war profiteers lining up at the Republican trough to cash in the war in Iraq, before, during and after including Bechtel(construction), Halliburton(oil services), KBR(Halliburton subsidiary and DOD's contractor for nearly everything), Blackwater(Mercenaries). Yes the U.S. now has large companies who basically rent out mercenaries to conflict zone, the more conflicts the better. Soldiers of fortune used to be borderline illegal, now it is profitable business. Blackwater and a few other big mercenary companies make a lot of money off conflict so yes they do WANT war. Of course Lockheed, Boeing, Northrop, General Dynamics, etc make a lot more money when there is war and danger than when their is peace. When there is no conflict defense budgets get cut and it cuts in to their bottomline as it did in the 90's. 9/11 was a godsend for a lot of war profiteers. Peace was breaking out in the 90's and defense spending was crashing. We now spend more on defense than we did during the cold war, and its mostly on weapons of no value against shadowy extremists or insurgencies.
Then there are chicken hawks. These are people who managed to avoid military service themselves and never experienced the horrors of war. They then rise to powerful positions and they view war as a means for obtaining power, money and resources. They feign concern for the mostly poor and uneducated people they kill both in their own military and the civilians in their war zones but they really don't care. You will note that their children almost never serve in the military or fight in the wars they make, almost no sons or daughters of our congress or executive branch serve in the military, John McCain being a rare exception. Chicken hawks just weigh the dead and wounded in a calculus of power, and as long as it doesn't cost them their power and money, they don't really care about the carnage. Condi Rice called the devastation of Lebanon by Israel as an "opportunity".
The people in the Bush administration and its neocon camp followers(or is that camp leaders) obviously did WANT war in Iraq, they wrote about it, they lobbied for it since the end of the first gulf war, and finally exploited 9/11 and lied to finally get it. You have to really want a war to go to the lengths they went to. Now I would agree they are not rational people, but they are in charge of the worlds biggest military so if they are irrational the world is in a lot of trouble. They didn't really want it to be as bloody and expensive as it has been but when you start wars you can't usually pre-plan how much carnage their will be.
They are far along on lining up some form of war with Iran, with the war in Lebanon being the opening act, This takes balls considering how disastrous their war in Iraq has been and how bogged down they are there and indicates they really, really like war.
"I know a lot of poeple have misgivings about premptive policies and interventionalist"
I wonder why when the wars in Vietnam and Iraq have devastated the U.S. economically and politically and physically devastated the target countries to no good end. It is all well and good to have a strong defensi
I saw this article on AlterNet today. There is a San Antonio, born again bible thumper, John Hagee, who is currently leading a national crusade to invade Iran because they think it will trigger the second coming of Christ, oh and the EU is the Antichrist. From the article:
"Thanks to the viral marketing made possible by the hundreds of evangelical leaders who have signed on to his new organization, his warmongering has rippled through megachurches across America for months. Hagee calls pastors "the spiritual generals of America," an appropriate phrase given his reliance on them to rally their troops behind his message."
So in this case these sermons ARE a virus, Oh where were you when we needed you Symantec.
This would be funny except the Republican party is right there with them. Ken Mehlman, the Republican party chairman addressed their convention and George W. sent this nut case a letter cheering him which he read at this Apocalypse Now Convention. There is a reason the U.S. so unconditionally backs Israel lately, the born again lunatics in power now think that the Jews have to control the holy land for the imminent second coming of Christ to happen and if places like Iran destroy Israel it will prevent the second coming of Christ. I've actually seen serious pieces on CNN about this.
If only this anti virus scanner had kicked in when this nutcase wrote his book(its sold 800,000 copies) and deleted it, it might have saved America from tilting in to complete lunacy.
"Hypothetically, if we've spent $700 million to upgrade a facility in the past, this is no reason to spend much more to maintain that facility in the future when cheaper alternatives exist now."
We've spent way more than $700 million on it, its probably in the tens if not hundreds of billions by now. I don't really think there is a "cheaper alternative", they are just parking it in an office base on an air force base. It is cheaper but they are throwing away a vast quantity of protection in the process so there is no comparing the two alternatives in terms of capability.
My original post was highlighting the apparent conflict in the rhetoric coming from our fearless leaders. When 9/11 happened they kept saying it "changed everything", the world is a very dangerous place, there is an axis of evil, and a clear and present danger of "mushroom clouds". Then they take this action which suggests the world is vastly safer than its been in 50 years.
I hate to break it to you but they've moved NORAD from a very secure place to a place a terrorist in control of a fully fueled low flying jetliner could probably destroy it.
The U.S.S.R may not be around but there are more countries with nukes and long range missiles than there ever have been and there are more all the time, many in states that are very shaky. Pakistan is one assassination away from having a Muslim extremist government with nukes.
"Present threats - including those that you describe - do not have that capability."
Actually Russia still has that capability, its somewhat smaller than it was but its still there. One wonders why people pretend its not still there when it is. Russia is making such a killing on their oil and gas reserves I imagine its unlikely they will bother with a nuclear war, but hey a coup and a wacko get the keys, or relations continue to sour, anything could happen.
Relations with Russia are in fact not very good. The U.S. has been treating Russia like dirt since the U.S.S.R collapsed. Gary Kasparov, chess grand master and now Democracy advocates, makes the interesting observation that Putin may be cheering on the chaos in the Middle East because everything that inflates oil and gas prices is a windfall for Russia.
All in all you have to wonder about the wisdom of replacing America's penultimate bunker and command and control facility with an extremely vulnerable office building that could easily be attacked with conventional weapons, a truck bomb or chemical or biological weapons. Cheyenne Mountain was, if nothing else, good for PR and intimidation value.
One question would be where the ABM system is controlled from. If its NORAD, and your worried the ABM system might work, then you take out NORAD first and then open the door for the ICBM's from North Korea.
All in all it just seems like a silly move to make especially after you've just sunk $700 million in to Cheyenne Mountain.
The deep end is where the action and the reality is today. Our democracy is definitely swimming in some of the deepest water its been in and on the verge of drowning. Congress really has ceased to function, and abdicated its power to a totalitarian executive, and you simply can't deny it. Meanwhile you are splashing around over in the kiddy pool pretending there is no problem, and worse trying to con everyone else in to thinking there is no problem, you portray it as just a little "excess" that will right itself without anyone even worrying about it. You could be so wrong. Some real work will be required to repair our tattered constitution and I don't think the American people have it in them anymore.
America used to be a beacon to the world and the place millions of the world's best and brightest wanted to come. Now our government is one of the most despised and reviled there is in the world. It is simply an embarrassment to see how far our government has fallen in the eyes of the world. When Bush starts lecturing Putin about "Democracy and Freedom" Putin now laughs in his face, because thats not what we have anymore. The current American government would almost be a laughing stock were it not so dangerous.
Tom Friedman had an interesting comment on "Meet the Press", the world used to look to America for naive optimism and hope. Bush, Cheney and Rice have replaced that with darkness and fear. Their road to power is through fear.
My fearless leader.....Dick Cheney....keeps telling me how we are in imminent danger of some rogue state, North Korea, Iraq, Iran or terrorist group, lobbing a nuke at us. On the one hand we have the whole "mushroom cloud" syndrome, and now the Pentagon tells me our penultimate bunker isn't really needed any more to defend our command and control center from a "mushroom cloud". Cheyenne Mountain actually wasn't worth much during the cold war when our main adversary had multi megaton nukes. It actually might stand up to the kiloton class nukes rogue states and terrorist groups are most likely to get. So we move command and control to a place where it will be relatively easy to destroy and decapitate one of the most critical command and control centers we have. And we do it AFTER we spend $700 million in a failed attempt to upgrade the one we are closing down. You really have to wonder if the people in charge really are completely incompetent to manage their own affairs let alone those of a superpower.
"If that were the case, then you'd be cooling your heels in a cell somewhere, wouldn't you?"
You can have a totalitarian state without arresting every dissenter. The very best totalitarian state will just marginalize and ignore dissent unless it reaches a level that it actually poses a threat to the power that be. We haven't seen any serious dissent even remotely threatening the power structure since about 1969. It is a convenient way to lull people into thinking they are free, if you let them rant, especially when their rants aren't actually changing anything. If dissent actually starts threatening the state that is another matter. I should point out there are thousands of people who HAVE been arrested, held without charge or access to a lawyer, and often spirited away to secret prisons to be tortured, a few are even American citizens. Most are Muslim and not American so we don't care though we don't even really know exactly who has been arrested by our new police state.
"There are things that this country has done in overreaction to 9/11 which will eventually be reverse"
You say that with such certainty..... How do you KNOW the excesses will be reversed, that is an unknowable thing. I can say with certainty that they will either be reversed, hold where they are or get worse. For them to get worse with certainly will take one more 9/11 scale event for example. The Nazi's rode the Reichstag fire a LONG way on their road to totalitarianism and no one even got killed there.
A problem with America is its exceptionalism. Americans operate under this inexplicable certainty that their elections will never be stolen, and their government will never tilt in to totalitarianism. This unfortunately makes it much easier to steal elections and to tilt in to totalitarianism.
American government would be a lot healthier if Americans were to constantly and completely distrust it. It really never has been and certainly is not now trustworthy, it is probably the least trustworthy its been since the last time the Republican were really in power and gave us McCarthyism, Nixon also did his fair share to prove it can't be trusted, Reagan too with his Iran-Contra thing. George W. makes them look like amateurs though. His use and abuse of signing statements and state secret privilege rivals the Enabling Act Adolph Hitler used to cement his totalitarian state. There are two reasons George W. has vetoed one bill in 6 years. First his party completely control power so most bills are dictated to the Republicans in Congress by Dick Cheney. But in every instance where bills don't conform to White House mandate, for example if Congress compromises to get sufficient votes to pass it, the White House signs the bill and then right after the signing ceremony quietly issues a signing statement in which the Executive Branch says it may not implement or could outright defy the law, the will of Congress and the will of the people. The Boston Globe wrote one of the first good exposes on this massive abuse of power. An ABA panel, including some serious conservatives recently issued a http://www.abanet.org/op/signingstatements/aba_fin al_signing_statements_recommendation-report_7-24-0 6.pdf >scathing report on what a massive abuse of power it is.
For all practical purposes we are already living under the rule of a leader who issues dictates. Our Congress, and our courts, have already largely abdicated their Constitutional powers to the executive. We just need another Supreme Court appointment and its time to turn out the lights. This White House has for all practical purposes declared the few laws Congress has passed and are passing are merely suggestions and the Executive branch can ignore them at will. They are frequently using State Secret Privilege to dismantle legal chal
"The CIA is shocked by this opposing voice, since they have not heard within-group opposition lately."
Actually the CIA has historically been populated by a large number of well educated independent thinkers. People currently and formerly at the CIA have been mounting some of the most vocal opposition to the lies and outrageous excesses of the DOD and the White House. Something very hard to do when you have a security clearance hanging over your head that is designed to prevent you from getting truth out. In spite of that people in the CIA have been active leakers as they try to do just that. I get the impression Tenent was about the only person at the CIA who believed, or was willing to lie, that Saddam had WMD's. CIA had/has rogue elements in its operations areas who were/are really scary people but the analysts are a great national resource being destroyed by the Republicans. They strive hard to give correct answers with the available information, while the Bush administration wants the answers they want to hear.
The problem at the CIA is the same problem you have everywhere else in the Bush executive branch,... DOD, State, Homeland security etc. Its the political appointees at the top who are incompetent, pushing torture, propagating false information and propaganda to support political objectives of the Bush administration. Porter Goss was sent in to the CIA specifically to break some heads, stop the leaks coming out of the CIA which was embarrassing the Bush administration. It was his job to force the people at the CIA in to the Bush party line or fire them. He however didn't submit to his new master Negroponte, Director of Intelligence, so he was pushed out to and they have a good robot to replace him in Hayden. I wager Hayden will do whatever his master tell him to do and one of his masters is the DOD further destroying CIA's independence. I could be wrong but I suspect one of the most dangerous people in America today is Negroponte. He is a sinister actor, who ran the illegal wars in Central America under the Reagan administration. He has no reservations about defying Congress or breaking the law. He is also a Yale graduate, went there with George W's unclue. Yale turns out more dangerous elitists than any institution around included George W and Dick Cheney though Cheney flunked out.
I think Google has a real winner in Google Video. I watch the Charlie Rose show on it everyday now and love the convenience. Charlie Rose was #1 TV show on Google Video last I looked which is amazing since I was thinking most of the world was to dumb to want to watch and intelligent, insightful talk show.
I'm more than willing to live with the new ads from HP next to the window to fund it, as long as they aren't animated.
A downside is the video quality in Flash 7 isn't the greatest and I imagine ON2 in Flash 8 would be better but that would screw all of us poor Linux users since Adobe didn't see fit to put out a Flash 8 player for Linux. Hopefully Google Video wont upgrade until Adobe gets off their duff.
I think this whole new story is a case of a writer trying to grab headlines and hits by declaring Google a failure, and my god it worked. Gmail is a winner, Google Video is a winner and Google Earth is a winner as far as I'm concerned and that is a pretty good track record.
I imagine they justify it as building their brand and capturing more users to their "portal" if you can call it that, and they are certainly using it to push Google Talk, which with VoIP though IM is kind of the next big battlefield in communications.
In some respects they are like Microsoft in that they have a big revenue stream though their search ads, so they can throw money to monopoli...errr.. win market share in other areas by giving stuff away for free. Hopefully they don't turn evil later and start charging for gmail, turn off POP, or bombard people with ads.
The last update of Yahoo IM on Windows is a monster, that has grown way beyond IM, but it ends up being the most obnoxious IM ever. They have constantly changing ads sitting underneath the chat window where its almost impossible to not look at them, and many of the ads are broken causing scripting error popups. I'm SO00OO glad I use simple little Kopete for IM.
"Gmail is a silo: you visit the site, and you check and write email, and then you leave."
Gmail supports POP so you never have to even visit the site, you can use the mail program of your choice on your machine. Gmail is a homerun winner as far as I'm concerned because Google gave me a free email address, one that doesn't change when I change ISP's, one that I don't have to log on to a web site and look at ads to use, and I store my mail on my machine once I've read it. Not sure about their revenue model for it but Gmail is a hands down winner as far as I'm concerned.
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"Economic growth does not imply depleting natural resources"
This is true to an extent but the obvious counterargument is to look at China where growth is depleting global natural resources at an alarming rate. I read yesterday that Australia just authorized a massive new open pit zinc mine, that requires a massive diversion of a very large, very flood prone tropical river, simply to satiate China's insatiable appetite for Zinc. The prices for Zinc are up 6 fold almost entirely due to growth in China. The mining company claims they can keep the mine from flooding by building a giant 40 foot wall around it, many who live in the ridge thoroughly expect it to be flooded and a massive plume of toxic waste to be washed in to the ocean.
The problem big capital has at the moment is that markets in the U.S., Japan and Western Europe are mature, slow growth, incomes are stagnant and markets saturated. The solution, grow new markets in China, India, Eastern Europe so they can continue to grow their revenue and prop up their stock prices. They aren't focused on growth due to improved efficiency, they just want new consumers buying more of their products.
To get that the plan is to go to places like India and China, position more jobs there, put more money in the pockets of workers there, and then turn them in to good little advertising controlled consumer bots. The end result is they adopt a Western life style complete with cars, commuting, TV's, cell phones etc. The unfortunate problem is the modern Western life style is horribly wasteful. The world could tolerate it as long as a fairly small percentage of the world's population was living it. but not when its adopted by billions of people.
The West needs to make some sacrifices and reign in its wasteful life style, for example rejigger our communities so people aren't spending 2+ hours a day driving to jobs far from their homes. At the same time we need to refrain from inflicting the same messed up life style on hundreds of millions of new people in Asia, and instead push a more sustainable life style before we further entrench our wasteful one. This however runs counter to everything big capital wants. They want a billion consumers in Asia living like Americans and Europeans do so they can maintain the growth that Capitalism demands of them.
I don't mean to sound like an anti Capitalism flamer, it is a wonderful system for incentivizing people to do things and take risks. In most respects it works better than other systems we've tried, but I really can't see our planet surviving long term with it as our dominant economic system. It is an economic system designed to ravage the planet in the name of profit, and a system devoid of rational decision making. Everytime the the "right" path runs counter to the most profitable path Capitalism is going to take the profitable path and lead to one long term calamity after another.
"Surely if the forests had sequestered all that CO2 and lowered the global temperature"
Not being a geologist I might be wrong on this but I think your entire point here falls because forests and jungles sequestered only some of the CO2. Much of it was sequestered by microorganism in the oceans. I think most of the coal came from land based plants, while most of the oil deposits came from plankton and the like in the oceans. Earth has been quite successful at self correcting climate over millions of yeas but humans have proved to have a very high capacity for disrupting natural cycles in short periods of time.
"there have been 5 mass extinctions over the past 439 million years"
Not sure what the point is your making. Its unlikely these mass extinctions were due to CO2 issues. All indications are they were due to geological or astronomical events.
The key issue with human intevention in our climate is this is probably the first time mass extinctions have been caused by a life form and not random physical events. Anyone who wants to deny humans have this kind of power has no grip on reality. Humans have already wiped out a large number of species with little effort, and pushed many others to inevitable extinction unless we preserver them in zoos.
I'm not saying the devastation of our planet is entirely a product of CO2 and climate change. We are doing as much or more damage by clear cutting forests and jungles, destroying habitat, and hunting and fishing one species after another to extinction or at least population crashes. Maybe we can sustain a population of 6 or 8 billion on this planet but proably not 10 or 12 billion, and the quality of life for even 6 billion isn't good or sustainable.
"Well doesn't that imply that we are due for another ice age ?"
I really don't think I see the point you are making when you talk about historical climate cycles during era when man had little impact on the climate to now when we are obviously having massive impact. Again the key point here is instead of climate changes over the course of thousands of years, or due to cataclysmic events, all the evidence indicates we are having dramatic and intentional impact on the climate in the space of a hundred years, it coincides with the dawn of the industrial age, massive expansion in burning of fossil fuels, and massive population explosion.
"The more realistic question is how we will handle contracting populations that seem increasingly inevitable."
Global population trends indicate no such inevitability. The only places seeing contracting populations are the small pockets in highly developed countries like Japan and Italy. Maybe China will force contraction through oppressive population control, that remains to be seen. In the 3rd world population is still exploding unchecked, there is no end in sight, and that will probably continue unless epidemic or starvation stops it. No doubt global population will contract but it will probably be at the point when we have already exhausted the planets resources.
"Can't say I'm in favor of either one but pretending humans are uniquely culpable is clearly hubris."
I think you completely missed or chose to ignore the point I made on this. Previous mass extinctions and climate change, as nearly as we can tell, were due to random geological or astronomical events. Humans are to the best of my knowledge the first species with the potential to inflict both cataclysms on the planet with intention.
Dude you are the clearly the one drinking the hubris Koolaid not me with statements like this:
"I would counter that the arrival of man is the only thing that makes the rest of it even remotely worthwhile and interesting"
You seem to think human civilization is the only thing that makes life matter and that is something with which I disagree. As I said previously we unfortunately developed intellect without developing the wisdom to use it in a sustainable way. Me I wish human kind was still living the relatively hard but sustainable life style of native Americans before Europeans exterminated most of them in the name of greed and religion.
"I think imagining we can take out the entire planet is a bit of hubris in itself."
I don't think I said the planet was going to be destroyed. I was more pointing out that in the space of a few hundred years we will probably manage to wipe out millions of years of evolution my mass extinctions of one species after another, and dramatically alter the global climate, something previously only done my asteroid impacts and super volcanoes. No doubt some species will survive and given a hundred million years the earth will produce some new life forms to try again, since life is remarkably robust at many levels.
Maybe some humans will survive, assuming we don't trigger a run away greenhouse effect or engineer a super virus, but we really don't deserve to survive because we are the most dangerous and misguided species ever to grace this planet.
"They're bigger, stronger, and faster than even just two generations ago."
That is mostly due to better chemistry, primarily the use of steroids, not genetics. The benefits of steroids aren't propagated through reproduction. Better diet has also led to both taller, healthier, athletic people and overweight, unhealthy people. Abundant cheap, subsidized, high fructose corn syrup alone is creating millions of overweight diabetic Americans.
I doubt you will ever see dramatic genetic changes over the space of two generations especially when mating choices are fairly random in modern society. Slavery did produce dramatic physical improvement in the gene pool in American blacks but it was over the course of a number of generations, with brutal breeding constraints enforced by slave owners coupled with selectively in the harvesting of slaves from Africa by slavers.
An interesting paradox that will work against this proposed genetic "upper class" is the fact that there is a pronounced trend for highly educated, affluent, beautiful people to reproduce in relatively low numbers while the uneducated and poverty stricken are usually reproducing at a dramatically higher rate in this world. Now maybe the "upper class" can preserve well protected islands of affluence where they dominate and survive, but they could just as easily be swept under when someday the underclass figure out that the world order is concentrating the world's wealth and well being in the hands of a tiny often undeserving minority while the rest of the world lives in grinding misery. Maybe the "upper class" can hold power though economic, political, technological and military means but I wouldn't count on it.
To be honest I really don't expect the human race to survive in tact another thousand years, let alone a hundred thousand years. A few basic factors working against us:
- Our inability to control our population growth, religions in particular pour fuel on this fire by trying to maximize the growth of their flock by obstructing birth control
- Our dominant economic system, capitalism, simply isn't sustainable because its predicated on maximizing growth which is devastating our finite habitat and again its concentrating ever more wealth in ever fewer hands and that probably isn't sustainable, before there is revolt.
- Our technological advances are dramatically outstripping our wisdom in applying and controlling them. Biological manipulation and weapons alone are a grave threat to survival of our species, along with nuclear proliferation.
Another factor that works against the creation of a genetic upper class is that people raised in affluence and without adversity often end up being complete losers. People who succeed in the face of adversity and serious obstacles are much stronger people than those raised with a silver spoon in their mouths. You need to look no further than America's two biggest dynasties the Kennedy's and the Bush's to see the deficiencies that develop in generations raised on a silver spoon.
A thousand years out I imagine we will have rendered most species on the planet extinct including our own, through cataclysmic climate change and decimation of land and oceans alike in a vain attempt to feed billions more people. It took millions of years to sequester carbon dioxide in the ground and cool our climate, and we are going to unleash it all in the space of a couple hundred years and the results will be cataclysmic. It took hundreds of millions of years for earth to develop its diversity and abundance of life forms and again in hundreds of years we will have decimated all of them.
I wouldn't mind if the human race took itself out, but its unfortunate its going to take out the rest of the planet thanks to our rampant hubris and avarice.
"Gas prices are driven because of the spot market on oil"
Well true to an extent. It is also a commodity subject to extreme price manipulation because there are relatively few suppliers of both oil and refined products from oil, and they do cooperate to manipulate prices, OPEC is a cartel afterall which does regulate production to manipulate oil prices.
In the movie Syriana there is an interesting point that one wonders why we do have oil commodity markets and why they are based in London and New York. The answer is the U.S. and Britain have historically used every political, military and economic tool at their disposal to try to control the oil market.
One wonders if the system would be more stable if oil providers sold their own oil through contracts to customers directly and cut the price speculators out of the loop. There are a LOT of people who gamble on commodity markets, they provide no real economic value other than liquidity, and they frequently reap large profit in short periods by exploiting turmoil. It is money that goes out of prdocuer's and consumer's pockets and in to theirs for really no reason. They don't produce anything, all they do is buy low and sell high.
Also when Reagan deregulated refining in the 80's there was surplus refining capacity in the U.S., it was a bit inefficient but it helped assure there wasn't a shortage of refining capacity. Once deregulation happened a lot of consolidation occurred and a lot of refineries disappeared. Now refining capacity operates on a razor's edge and it is relatively easy to get price spikes when refining capacity goes off line. Refineries go offline due to maintenance, accidents and weather events like Katrina. It is also VERY easy for big oil companies to intentionally take refineries off line for "maintenance" if they want to spike gasoline prices and improve profit margins.
The interesting thing about gas prices in recent months is their is a HIGH probability oil companies are intentionally driving down prices in the run up to the November elections. Having oil friendly Republican control government has been a windfall for big oil companies and they have a big incentive to keep them in power. High gas prices were fueling antipathy towards Republicans on top of all the rest of their incompetence and corruption. It is a pretty cynical manipulation of the electorate that the Republicans and their friends in big oil will probably drive down gas prices every week until the election and then they will spike back up at the first excuse immediately thereafter.
Fascism is also a fusion of government with corporate interests and those of wealthy and influential party members. German industrialists, especially the Thyssen family, one of Germany's richest, helped put the Nazi's in power because they thought it would be good for business, and that they would smack down labor unions. George W.'s grandfather Prescott Bush was a U.S. banker and broker for the Thyssen family, at Union Bank, during the same period they were bankrolling Hitler's rise to power. Union Bank's assets were seized for trading with the enemy when America entered World War II to the great embarrassment of the Bush family.
Fascists use the power of government to enrich themselves and their business interests. They usually mouth their love for "free markets" at the same time they pull strings to have their party and government intervene in the "free market" to make them winners and their not so well connected competitors losers. If you want to get ahead in such a system you strive to advance your standing in the party, and the party rewards you with lucrative business, and by punishing your competitors who are not in favor with the party.
Fascism is a decidedly anti labor political system, and very anti trade union, which is why it was often viewed as a bulwark against the spread of Communism and worker centric Socialism.
Everyone is reluctant to use the term since World War II but the U.S., U.K. and especially China are decidedly Fascist leaning governments these days. China abandoned any pretense of Socialism or Communism when all the leading party members deduced they could get rich using their control of the government and economy if they just it coupled with a huge infusion of western capital so they did a 180 and blessed private ownership of capital, stock markets and profiteering. They almost overnight became a Fascist regime when they did.
The origin of Islamofascism as a word in our lexicon is nothing more than a PR gimmick. After using the words "terrorist" and "terrorism" in every other sentence for five years the electorate has grown weary of them and they no longer register. No one knows what winning the "War on Terror" means. So the Bush administration is attempting to link the current "war on terrorism" with the glory days of World War II by linking today's enemy with yesteryears boogie man, in an effort to better paint the war as one of good versus evil. In fact it is really just a marketing campaign much like you would use to sell soap. The Baathist governments in Syria and Saddam's Iraq were quite Fascist in character. Al Qaeda has no resemblance to the term. The quagmires the Bush administration is in in Iraq and Afghanistan are no win situations but at least until they midterm election is over they want to pretend like they are noble causes like World War II was. Resorting to the use of the word Fascist in this particular struggle shows how rhetorically bankrupt they are.
Another possibility is its becoming increasingly common for an increasingly large number of people to brand the Bush administration and the Republican parties as Fascists and it is a term that does have a degree of fit. By repeatedly referring to their "enemy" as fascists it creates the illusion the Bush administration must not be. If they are fighting "Islamofascists" how could they be Fascists too. Well its easy they still are, and maybe we need to coin a term that matches and does fit, JudeoChristianFascists".
If you haven't seen it the Wachowski brothers film "V for Vendetta" which is out on pay per view now is a stinging jab at the rise of Fascism in Britain and the U.S. and the mechanisms that are being used to foist it on the ignorant masses.
"War is for one thing only--the destruction of your enemy."
This is probably true in a "total" war, but very few wars are "total" anymore, and your approach is extraordinarily counterproductive when fighting insurgencies which most wars are these days.
If we take your approach, when your enemy is the entire population of a country or a region, for example an insurgency with widespread popular support fighting an occupying military, like we have in Iraq or with Hezbollah in Lebanon, your solution quickly translates in to the final one, extermination of an entire population. How do you "destroy" an enemy completely interwoven with a civilian population without killing the entire civilian population.
Recently in Lebanon when Israel was faced with an invisible enemy exploiting massive tunnel networks so they were hard to "destroy" the Israelis instead turned to bombing apartment buildings and homes full of innocent civilians and dropping old, defective cluster bombs that will keep on "winning" that war for a long time to come everytime a kid picks one up. Its true in that case Hezbollah was targeting civilians too, but that is largely forgotten due to the scale of the devastation Israel inflicted in Lebanon.
I guess I'd have to agree that ruthless annihalation of your enemy is one way to win a war, though I should think countries that do it that way would often have trouble living with themselves the day after, or could easily find themselves branded as war criminals by the rest of the world.
All in all I think, in this day and age when every side of a war can get their story out, especially stories about intentional killing of innocent civilians that you are probably better off winning the PR war first by being discriminating in your use of force. Insurgencies like Hezbollah and the Taliban have deduced they can't win wars toe to toe with major military powers but they can win the hearts and minds war by suckering those superior military powers in to to doing stupid things like killing civilians as they seek to "destroy" their enemy, or by torturing and humiliating civilians in occupied territories as both Israel and the U.S. have done.
There are a few smart U.S. officers in Iraq, very few, who train their soldiers that everytime they do wrong to an Iraqi civilian, or use excessive force, they are helping the insurgents win. This is Counterinsurgency 101, you do not use excessive force if you want to win. Unfortunately most of the U.S. and Israeli military apparently ditched this class, so they have no clue how to fight an insurgency which is why they are so terrible at it and are losing.
This whole topic of high tech non lethal weapons is a conundrum. It is good to develop non lethal methods for dealing with situations where lethal force might otherwise be used. On the other hand if you make the non lethal weapon clean and convenient it WILL be overused and it soon becomes a vicious means for repression. Rather than letting protesters or even rioters vent and just control them with riot police, instead the temptation is to suppress every form of protest by flipping a switch and reducate the targets by making them writhe in agony, but without long term injury, so they will think twice before speaking out in public about something they think is wrong. You could see how many people might construe some of these weapons as a form of mass torture and certainly as a tool for repression and suppression of free speech.
It does really boggle the mind how far America has slipped in to a very dark hole, often referred to as Fascism, that the U.S. military would be proposing the use of these devices on Americans. There is law on the books that dates to the Civil War which BANS the U.S. military from operating in America against Americans though it is being cast aside by the Bush administration like so many other laws they've found inconvenient as they build their police state. Or I guess they DOD can just turn them over to the Guard or local police and let them flip the switch the next time there is an antiwar or antiglobalization protest.
Definitely in this instance its probably a case of systems that are somewhat overly complex and not fool proof coupled with the fact that people who run polling station qualify as fools especially when it comes to electronics and changing from familiar systems to new ones. Little old ladies and civil servants can grok paper ballets and punch cards, not computers.
I rather doubt there are many intentional and nefarious attempts to rig a primary. It isn't worth the risk to alter the outcome between one of your parties candidates and another. Joe Lieberman maybe should have considered it....
On the other hand, the general election in November is probably the most pivotal election to watch EVER in U.S. history to insure if it is above board. A ruthless party with an absolute stranglehold on power is in relatively deep trouble with voters and they have massive incentive to insure they don't lose their grip on the House and Senate.
If they have, in fact, built in back doors to alter electronic voting this is the election they are most likely to use them, and they probably will pull out all the old fashioned non electronic tools too, the ones they used so well in Florida in 2000.
The Bush administration is in a panic to prevent any real Congressional oversight of the war in Iraq, the fabrications used to justify it, and the illegal measures they've taken in torturing people and spying on American's without FISA oversight among other things.
I read on the Christian Science Monitor yesterday that people working at the CIA are rushing to taking out liability insurance offered by an FBI coop that helps cover legal costs and judgments against them if they are brought in to court over illegal activities they have been engaged in under the Bush administration, illegal spying on Americans and torturing or rendition of prisoners. Many are worried the government will cut them to the wind rather than pay to defend them.
The Bush administration is desperately trying right now to rush through legislation that would inoculate them for all the illegal things they've done in the last five years and declare them, retroactively, to be legal before the election. You can't really retroactively change law, either what you did was legal or it wasn't, but that isn't stopping them. They are very aware that a Democratic congress backed by recent Supreme court rulings will make them very vulnerable to criminal prosecution, and even to war crimes charges.
At the moment it is obvious the Republican's are hammering the American people with a rhetorical barrage to scare them back in to voting for the Republicans in November. They are also planning a very well funded campaign of vicious personal attack ads against Democratic candidates. It could well work because most Americans have proved vulnerable to fear mongering and voting the way vicious attack ads tell them.
If those measures don't work and the Republicans are still faced with losing either or both houses of Congress election day, someone may well take off the gloves and try to rig enough Congressional races to insure the Republicans hold power. If we have another election where results don't match exit polls, or exit polls are altered to match the official results, there are significant irregulaires, there is a chance, just a chance mind you, that you are no longer living in a Republic, but one more like Mexico was most of the 20th century where the ruling PRI party rigged election after election to insure their grip on power went unchallenged.
You have to commend the Wachowski brothers for putting out "V for Vendetta" in the current climate because it is a biting stab at the rise of Fascism in the U.S. and Britain and the mechanisms that are being used to implement it. If you haven't seen it and you care about where Britain and the U.S. have been heading it is a must see.
"and it keeps going down thanks to genetic engineering"
That might be part of it, but its also due to the fact the U.S. massively subsidizes agriculture, especially corn and soy, which has always kept food prices in the U.S. down on the surface though we pay for it indirectly through our taxes. The unfortunate down side of subsidizing corn is its led to the massive use of high fructose corn syrup in our food, because its cheap and mass produced. There is a strong suspicion this is causing the current epidemics of diabetes and obesity in this country. It wasn't a great idea to make an anti-nutritious substance dirt cheap. There is hope because the midwest lobby that garners hand outs for corn farmers, now have the government subsidizing corn for ethanol production, in spite of the fact using corn is a horrible way to make ethanol. As a result corn prices are spiking, either leading to inflation in food prices, or a reduction in our dependence on corn syrup as food. Brazil saw a similar spike in food prices when it converted vast agricultural areas to sugar cane to make ethanol, though at least sugar cane is good for making ethanol.
Now back on topic, all in all this story is a non story as most have pointed out. The fact is the lion's share of India and China are still dirt poor and uneducated which is why the per capita numbers are so out of whack. India's boom is concentrated around Hyderabad and Mumbai. You get out in to the rural areas and IT is non existent. There is a flourishing Maoist rebel movement spreading through India's rural areas, call the Naxalites feeding on the fact the rural poor are increasingly fed up with the disparities in economic well being. As a few parts of India prosper most do not, and its unlikely that prosperity is going to spread in to the rural areas, so the per capita IT spending isn't likely to either.
China is a pretty similar situation. The bulk of its economic and IT growth is in the coastal regions especially Guangdong and Hong Kong in the SouthEast and around Shanghai further to the north. Interior China is also still very rural, dirt poor and not really participating in their economic boom. The young and poor from the interior immigrate to Guangdong and work in the sweatshop environment there as long as they can stand it, and then often take the money and go home. There is also a small boom going on in the North in Manchuria, China's equivalent of the U.S. rust belt. Much of it fueled by Japanese money especially in Dalian which is becoming a new high tech hub. There is irony that after Manchuria was a Japanese occupied puppet state through World War II, and Imperial Japan's industrial base, that the Japanese are reoccupying it peacefully using yen instead of bullets. There would be irony if a Maoist insurgency gains steam in China, home of Mao and the remnant of his communist party. The Communist party there has completely abandoned even the pretense of being a people's party or a worker's party in favor of Fascism and wealth for the ruling the elite while most of the country is still in rural poverty or urban sweatshops.
Nixon, Nixon's CIA and J. Edgar Hoover's FBI WERE spying on the entire country then. They were spying on anti war protesters, journalists, political dissidents and political opponents. J. Edgar was famous for spying on Martin Lither King, and the only laws he broke laws were in peaceful and public acts of civil disobedience.
Nixon wasn't exactly run out of the White House over spying, since Watergate and attempting to rig his reelection was an even juicier reason. But the FISA act the Bush administration was violating here was instituted in 1978 directly as a result of massive spying abuse during the Nixon era, though it was rampant under Johnson, Kennedy and Eisenhower too.
FISA was an act largely created by Democrats and has always been unpopular with right wing Republicans ever since. It wasn't surprising the Bush administration, using 9/11 as an excuse, decided to unilaterally overturn it. The Bush administration came in with an agenda to turn back the clock on all these liberal Democrat reforms they viewed as weakening the Executive Branch and threatening national security. One suspects they want to turn the clock back to about 1950's McCarthyism which was the last time the Republicans had the same kind of power they have today.
David Gergen, who served in the Nixon administration, and several others since, recently said he doubted Nixon would have had any chance of getting a nomination in today's Republican party, he was far to liberal by the standards of today's party. He really wasn't very liberal, other than his rapproachment with China, its more a comment on how far right today's Republican party has moved. It has moved so far right Fascism is not such a far off description. It has moved so far right many American's who were tricked in to voting them in to power are realizing they made a mistake and may or may not make the same mistake again, it depends on whether Rove can dream up another round of deception to sucker a nation that is unfortunately not very bright on average.
"The events of recent weeks in Britian have shown that a civilized country can fight terrorism without resorting to breaking the law."
I wouldn't champion the Brits for their respect for their citizens rights. They've passed laws that are much harsher than any in the U.S. Not sure they outlaw spying on their citizens in the first place. The law broken by the NSA has only been in place since the 1970's in the U.S. The U.S. was rampantly spying on its citizens before then.
The most recent was called the Prevention of Terrorism Act and was passed in an illadvised frenzy after the subway bombings, kind of like the Patriot Act.
In a previous "terrorism" investigation British law enforcement murdered an innocent Brazilian electrician claiming he was a terrorist which is pretty much the ultimate form of "breaking the law". He apparently just had the misfortune to be living near a place under investigation, looking Arab, and being an illegal immigrant who was afraid of the police. The police officials lied through their teeth about the whole thing after they murdered him.
Some examples of recent British antiterrorism law that really read more like "police state":
- The British government can lock up anyone incommunicado for 28 days without charges being filed.
- The British can slap a control order on you without convicting you of anything. Control orders can impose curfews, limit who you associate with, limit religious freedom, prevent you from having a cell phone, using the Internet, or where you work, they are basically a form of preemptive probation they can slap on anyone they merely suspect of being a potential terrorists whether they are or not.
- You can be arrested for expressing opinions or selling books in support of "terrorists". The government also gets to decide who is and who isn't a terrorist so they get to decide what causes their citizens can and can't support, for example championing the cause of Palestinians is very chancy in Britain now.
- An earlier law passed in the wake of 9/11 allowed the Brits to hold a resident alien suspected of terrorism indefinitely without trial.
The Brits were an originator of habeas corpus, due process, in the Magna Carta 790 years ago only to throw it away in the last 5.
Quite predictably, using the liquid explosives busts as an excuse, the Bush administration has been campaigning they need the same laws the Brits have to make us safe, though the British laws would be completely unconstitutional in the U.S.
I'd really wait to see how successful the supposed liquid explosive investigation proves to be when its all said and done. Its a lot easier for the government to use the media megaphone to trumpet their success in breaking up a terrorist ring than it is to actually prove there was one, or for it to be as real a threat as its been made out to be. The practicality of bringing down an airliner with small quantities of liquids mixed on board is unproven. You can cause an explosion, which Al Qaeda did in their previous attempt dubbed "Bojinka", but its not clear it would be enough to bring down an airliner. In their dry run a decade ago they killed one passenger but didn't damage the airplane to any serious degree. I wager that in this case like so many before it the overreaction will do more damage than the plot would have. The Brits are making airline travel so painful many people are having second thoughts about it, which translates in to real and lasting economic damage.
Reference the "terrorism" plot the U.S. broke up in Michigan where a couple Arab looking guys were buying cell phones in quantity to resell in Texas for a small profit. U.S. law enforcement inflated it in to a terrorist plot to blow up a bridge in Michigan. It was insane, it wasn't good law enforcement or good counter terrorism. They made life living hell for a few guys for NO REASON. In the U.S. we are approaching an election where the ruling
"If the war in Iraq was truly illegal"
It was illegal by the definition of the UN charter and the Geneva conventions to which the U.S. is a principal signatory. Now you can argue that those treaties and the U.N. are meaningless but the U.S. does still seem to like to exploit those treaties and the U.N. to its own advantage when it suits the U.S.
Aggressive warfare is illegal, and the U.S. invasion of Iraq was aggressive by any modern definition since Iraq hasn't attacked another country since Kuwait and there had already been a punitive response to that. Yes Iraq was engaged in a perpetual skirmish with the American and British forces over the no fly zone but it was pretty clear the U.S. and British were shooting as much as they were being shot at there.
Preemptive war is in fact a deceptive term for aggressive war. Any nation which bestows upon itself the power to unilaterally practice preemption is engaging in illegal warfare. Any nation which can fabricate a case against any another nation and use that fabrication to topple its government is a rogue state.
The whole foundation of the war in Iraq was that it was building a new and large stockpile of WMD's when in fact it really wasn't. There were small technical violations but there wasn't really any such program. Its become clear the Bush administration either wittingly or unwittingly fabricated their whole case for the war. Since it appears much of their case was fabricated if not an outright lie that pushes them further in to the realm of illegal war. They fabricated a case to justify invading a country for no particular reason other than they wanted to change its government, and they didn't get a U.N. resolution to authorize it, since key countries in the security council didn't buy their fabrications.
Then you tack on torturing prisoners, and murdering prisoners and civilians, which has obviously occurred on a fairly widespread scale. The Bush administration propaganda spins it as isolated and a few bad apples. The obvious fact is it is government policy to allow torture and abuse since the Dick Cheney lobbied Congree for the right to torture and then the White House defied a recent congressional law against torture with a signing statement that they reserve the right to torture, and they've recently sought to immunize all those who are ordering and executing it from prosecution using similar executive orders.
It is a simple fact of life that since the Geneva conventions, since the U.S. is still a signatory to those conventions, and since the U.S. trots them out to demand humane treatment of its POW's, that the U.S. has tilted in to both illegal and immoral by officially sanctioning the trampling of those conventions in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Gitmo and in Rendition. You can argue that the Geneva conventions don't apply to Al Qaeda, but they most certainly do apply in Iraq since it had a sovereign government which was toppled by an aggressive war so it falls under the Geneva conventions on occupied countries.
"Do you really believe there's any rational people out there who WANT war?"
/. to believe it.
I think you just proved yourself pretty naive with that whopper, or cynical for trying to get
Though I guess it depends on how you define "rational", I guess you could say anyone who likes war is not rational, but you would end up with a large percentage of the worlds political leaders in that category.
War profiteers LOVE war and have throughout history, the Rothschild family were famous for war profiteering on the Napoleonic wars and made their fortune there. If you are providing everything from weapons to beans you can make a lot of money off war, and there are plenty of people in the world who are glad to make a buck off people getting killed. There was a huge line of war profiteers lining up at the Republican trough to cash in the war in Iraq, before, during and after including Bechtel(construction), Halliburton(oil services), KBR(Halliburton subsidiary and DOD's contractor for nearly everything), Blackwater(Mercenaries). Yes the U.S. now has large companies who basically rent out mercenaries to conflict zone, the more conflicts the better. Soldiers of fortune used to be borderline illegal, now it is profitable business. Blackwater and a few other big mercenary companies make a lot of money off conflict so yes they do WANT war. Of course Lockheed, Boeing, Northrop, General Dynamics, etc make a lot more money when there is war and danger than when their is peace. When there is no conflict defense budgets get cut and it cuts in to their bottomline as it did in the 90's. 9/11 was a godsend for a lot of war profiteers. Peace was breaking out in the 90's and defense spending was crashing. We now spend more on defense than we did during the cold war, and its mostly on weapons of no value against shadowy extremists or insurgencies.
Then there are chicken hawks. These are people who managed to avoid military service themselves and never experienced the horrors of war. They then rise to powerful positions and they view war as a means for obtaining power, money and resources. They feign concern for the mostly poor and uneducated people they kill both in their own military and the civilians in their war zones but they really don't care. You will note that their children almost never serve in the military or fight in the wars they make, almost no sons or daughters of our congress or executive branch serve in the military, John McCain being a rare exception. Chicken hawks just weigh the dead and wounded in a calculus of power, and as long as it doesn't cost them their power and money, they don't really care about the carnage. Condi Rice called the devastation of Lebanon by Israel as an "opportunity".
The people in the Bush administration and its neocon camp followers(or is that camp leaders) obviously did WANT war in Iraq, they wrote about it, they lobbied for it since the end of the first gulf war, and finally exploited 9/11 and lied to finally get it. You have to really want a war to go to the lengths they went to. Now I would agree they are not rational people, but they are in charge of the worlds biggest military so if they are irrational the world is in a lot of trouble. They didn't really want it to be as bloody and expensive as it has been but when you start wars you can't usually pre-plan how much carnage their will be.
They are far along on lining up some form of war with Iran, with the war in Lebanon being the opening act, This takes balls considering how disastrous their war in Iraq has been and how bogged down they are there and indicates they really, really like war.
"I know a lot of poeple have misgivings about premptive policies and interventionalist"
I wonder why when the wars in Vietnam and Iraq have devastated the U.S. economically and politically and physically devastated the target countries to no good end. It is all well and good to have a strong defensi
Amen :)
I saw this article on AlterNet today. There is a San Antonio, born again bible thumper, John Hagee, who is currently leading a national crusade to invade Iran because they think it will trigger the second coming of Christ, oh and the EU is the Antichrist. From the article:
"Thanks to the viral marketing made possible by the hundreds of evangelical leaders who have signed on to his new organization, his warmongering has rippled through megachurches across America for months. Hagee calls pastors "the spiritual generals of America," an appropriate phrase given his reliance on them to rally their troops behind his message."
So in this case these sermons ARE a virus, Oh where were you when we needed you Symantec.
This would be funny except the Republican party is right there with them. Ken Mehlman, the Republican party chairman addressed their convention and George W. sent this nut case a letter cheering him which he read at this Apocalypse Now Convention. There is a reason the U.S. so unconditionally backs Israel lately, the born again lunatics in power now think that the Jews have to control the holy land for the imminent second coming of Christ to happen and if places like Iran destroy Israel it will prevent the second coming of Christ. I've actually seen serious pieces on CNN about this.
If only this anti virus scanner had kicked in when this nutcase wrote his book(its sold 800,000 copies) and deleted it, it might have saved America from tilting in to complete lunacy.
"Hypothetically, if we've spent $700 million to upgrade a facility in the past, this is no reason to spend much more to maintain that facility in the future when cheaper alternatives exist now."
We've spent way more than $700 million on it, its probably in the tens if not hundreds of billions by now. I don't really think there is a "cheaper alternative", they are just parking it in an office base on an air force base. It is cheaper but they are throwing away a vast quantity of protection in the process so there is no comparing the two alternatives in terms of capability.
My original post was highlighting the apparent conflict in the rhetoric coming from our fearless leaders. When 9/11 happened they kept saying it "changed everything", the world is a very dangerous place, there is an axis of evil, and a clear and present danger of "mushroom clouds". Then they take this action which suggests the world is vastly safer than its been in 50 years.
I hate to break it to you but they've moved NORAD from a very secure place to a place a terrorist in control of a fully fueled low flying jetliner could probably destroy it.
The U.S.S.R may not be around but there are more countries with nukes and long range missiles than there ever have been and there are more all the time, many in states that are very shaky. Pakistan is one assassination away from having a Muslim extremist government with nukes.
"Present threats - including those that you describe - do not have that capability."
Actually Russia still has that capability, its somewhat smaller than it was but its still there. One wonders why people pretend its not still there when it is. Russia is making such a killing on their oil and gas reserves I imagine its unlikely they will bother with a nuclear war, but hey a coup and a wacko get the keys, or relations continue to sour, anything could happen.
Relations with Russia are in fact not very good. The U.S. has been treating Russia like dirt since the U.S.S.R collapsed. Gary Kasparov, chess grand master and now Democracy advocates, makes the interesting observation that Putin may be cheering on the chaos in the Middle East because everything that inflates oil and gas prices is a windfall for Russia.
All in all you have to wonder about the wisdom of replacing America's penultimate bunker and command and control facility with an extremely vulnerable office building that could easily be attacked with conventional weapons, a truck bomb or chemical or biological weapons. Cheyenne Mountain was, if nothing else, good for PR and intimidation value.
One question would be where the ABM system is controlled from. If its NORAD, and your worried the ABM system might work, then you take out NORAD first and then open the door for the ICBM's from North Korea.
All in all it just seems like a silly move to make especially after you've just sunk $700 million in to Cheyenne Mountain.
The deep end is where the action and the reality is today. Our democracy is definitely swimming in some of the deepest water its been in and on the verge of drowning. Congress really has ceased to function, and abdicated its power to a totalitarian executive, and you simply can't deny it. Meanwhile you are splashing around over in the kiddy pool pretending there is no problem, and worse trying to con everyone else in to thinking there is no problem, you portray it as just a little "excess" that will right itself without anyone even worrying about it. You could be so wrong. Some real work will be required to repair our tattered constitution and I don't think the American people have it in them anymore.
America used to be a beacon to the world and the place millions of the world's best and brightest wanted to come. Now our government is one of the most despised and reviled there is in the world. It is simply an embarrassment to see how far our government has fallen in the eyes of the world. When Bush starts lecturing Putin about "Democracy and Freedom" Putin now laughs in his face, because thats not what we have anymore. The current American government would almost be a laughing stock were it not so dangerous.
Tom Friedman had an interesting comment on "Meet the Press", the world used to look to America for naive optimism and hope. Bush, Cheney and Rice have replaced that with darkness and fear. Their road to power is through fear.
My fearless leader.....Dick Cheney....keeps telling me how we are in imminent danger of some rogue state, North Korea, Iraq, Iran or terrorist group, lobbing a nuke at us. On the one hand we have the whole "mushroom cloud" syndrome, and now the Pentagon tells me our penultimate bunker isn't really needed any more to defend our command and control center from a "mushroom cloud". Cheyenne Mountain actually wasn't worth much during the cold war when our main adversary had multi megaton nukes. It actually might stand up to the kiloton class nukes rogue states and terrorist groups are most likely to get. So we move command and control to a place where it will be relatively easy to destroy and decapitate one of the most critical command and control centers we have. And we do it AFTER we spend $700 million in a failed attempt to upgrade the one we are closing down. You really have to wonder if the people in charge really are completely incompetent to manage their own affairs let alone those of a superpower.
"If that were the case, then you'd be cooling your heels in a cell somewhere, wouldn't you?"
You can have a totalitarian state without arresting every dissenter. The very best totalitarian state will just marginalize and ignore dissent unless it reaches a level that it actually poses a threat to the power that be. We haven't seen any serious dissent even remotely threatening the power structure since about 1969. It is a convenient way to lull people into thinking they are free, if you let them rant, especially when their rants aren't actually changing anything. If dissent actually starts threatening the state that is another matter. I should point out there are thousands of people who HAVE been arrested, held without charge or access to a lawyer, and often spirited away to secret prisons to be tortured, a few are even American citizens. Most are Muslim and not American so we don't care though we don't even really know exactly who has been arrested by our new police state.
"There are things that this country has done in overreaction to 9/11 which will eventually be reverse"
You say that with such certainty..... How do you KNOW the excesses will be reversed, that is an unknowable thing. I can say with certainty that they will either be reversed, hold where they are or get worse. For them to get worse with certainly will take one more 9/11 scale event for example. The Nazi's rode the Reichstag fire a LONG way on their road to totalitarianism and no one even got killed there.
A problem with America is its exceptionalism. Americans operate under this inexplicable certainty that their elections will never be stolen, and their government will never tilt in to totalitarianism. This unfortunately makes it much easier to steal elections and to tilt in to totalitarianism.
American government would be a lot healthier if Americans were to constantly and completely distrust it. It really never has been and certainly is not now trustworthy, it is probably the least trustworthy its been since the last time the Republican were really in power and gave us McCarthyism, Nixon also did his fair share to prove it can't be trusted, Reagan too with his Iran-Contra thing. George W. makes them look like amateurs though. His use and abuse of signing statements and state secret privilege rivals the Enabling Act Adolph Hitler used to cement his totalitarian state. There are two reasons George W. has vetoed one bill in 6 years. First his party completely control power so most bills are dictated to the Republicans in Congress by Dick Cheney. But in every instance where bills don't conform to White House mandate, for example if Congress compromises to get sufficient votes to pass it, the White House signs the bill and then right after the signing ceremony quietly issues a signing statement in which the Executive Branch says it may not implement or could outright defy the law, the will of Congress and the will of the people. The Boston Globe wrote one of the first good exposes on this massive abuse of power. An ABA panel, including some serious conservatives recently issued a http://www.abanet.org/op/signingstatements/aba_fin al_signing_statements_recommendation-report_7-24-0 6.pdf
>scathing report on what a massive abuse of power it is.
For all practical purposes we are already living under the rule of a leader who issues dictates. Our Congress, and our courts, have already largely abdicated their Constitutional powers to the executive. We just need another Supreme Court appointment and its time to turn out the lights. This White House has for all practical purposes declared the few laws Congress has passed and are passing are merely suggestions and the Executive branch can ignore them at will. They are frequently using State Secret Privilege to dismantle legal chal
"The CIA is shocked by this opposing voice, since they have not heard within-group opposition lately."
... DOD, State, Homeland security etc. Its the political appointees at the top who are incompetent, pushing torture, propagating false information and propaganda to support political objectives of the Bush administration. Porter Goss was sent in to the CIA specifically to break some heads, stop the leaks coming out of the CIA which was embarrassing the Bush administration. It was his job to force the people at the CIA in to the Bush party line or fire them. He however didn't submit to his new master Negroponte, Director of Intelligence, so he was pushed out to and they have a good robot to replace him in Hayden. I wager Hayden will do whatever his master tell him to do and one of his masters is the DOD further destroying CIA's independence. I could be wrong but I suspect one of the most dangerous people in America today is Negroponte. He is a sinister actor, who ran the illegal wars in Central America under the Reagan administration. He has no reservations about defying Congress or breaking the law. He is also a Yale graduate, went there with George W's unclue. Yale turns out more dangerous elitists than any institution around included George W and Dick Cheney though Cheney flunked out.
Actually the CIA has historically been populated by a large number of well educated independent thinkers. People currently and formerly at the CIA have been mounting some of the most vocal opposition to the lies and outrageous excesses of the DOD and the White House. Something very hard to do when you have a security clearance hanging over your head that is designed to prevent you from getting truth out. In spite of that people in the CIA have been active leakers as they try to do just that. I get the impression Tenent was about the only person at the CIA who believed, or was willing to lie, that Saddam had WMD's. CIA had/has rogue elements in its operations areas who were/are really scary people but the analysts are a great national resource being destroyed by the Republicans. They strive hard to give correct answers with the available information, while the Bush administration wants the answers they want to hear.
The problem at the CIA is the same problem you have everywhere else in the Bush executive branch,
"It may cross my mind that I'm using Google when I give out my email address, but that's about it."
Everytime you email someone you distribute a little bit of Google's mindshare.
I think Google has a real winner in Google Video. I watch the Charlie Rose show on it everyday now and love the convenience. Charlie Rose was #1 TV show on Google Video last I looked which is amazing since I was thinking most of the world was to dumb to want to watch and intelligent, insightful talk show.
I'm more than willing to live with the new ads from HP next to the window to fund it, as long as they aren't animated.
A downside is the video quality in Flash 7 isn't the greatest and I imagine ON2 in Flash 8 would be better but that would screw all of us poor Linux users since Adobe didn't see fit to put out a Flash 8 player for Linux. Hopefully Google Video wont upgrade until Adobe gets off their duff.
I think this whole new story is a case of a writer trying to grab headlines and hits by declaring Google a failure, and my god it worked. Gmail is a winner, Google Video is a winner and Google Earth is a winner as far as I'm concerned and that is a pretty good track record.
I imagine they justify it as building their brand and capturing more users to their "portal" if you can call it that, and they are certainly using it to push Google Talk, which with VoIP though IM is kind of the next big battlefield in communications.
In some respects they are like Microsoft in that they have a big revenue stream though their search ads, so they can throw money to monopoli...errr.. win market share in other areas by giving stuff away for free. Hopefully they don't turn evil later and start charging for gmail, turn off POP, or bombard people with ads.
The last update of Yahoo IM on Windows is a monster, that has grown way beyond IM, but it ends up being the most obnoxious IM ever. They have constantly changing ads sitting underneath the chat window where its almost impossible to not look at them, and many of the ads are broken causing scripting error popups. I'm SO00OO glad I use simple little Kopete for IM.
"Gmail is a silo: you visit the site, and you check and write email, and then you leave."
Gmail supports POP so you never have to even visit the site, you can use the mail program of your choice on your machine. Gmail is a homerun winner as far as I'm concerned because Google gave me a free email address, one that doesn't change when I change ISP's, one that I don't have to log on to a web site and look at ads to use, and I store my mail on my machine once I've read it. Not sure about their revenue model for it but Gmail is a hands down winner as far as I'm concerned.