"but that doesn't mean the proper approach is to sit around and pretend there is no problem."
Well given the choice between doing nothing and what the Bush and Blair administrations have done, I would have opted for doing nothing. It would have done less damage.
They could have done some things that would have been a lot more effective though:
A- Just installed armored cockpit doors in airliners. The 9/11 attack mode would have been completely eliminated at a tiny cost and without the staggering chaos, economic devestation, and evisceration of civil liberties you see in the TSA and airports today. Sure maybe terrorists could still have taken down an airliner but it would be very hard to use one as a weapon again with armored doors. So simple, so cheap, to simple, to cheap.
B. They should have invaded Afghanistan with a real army of U.S. troops and not fought it with Afghan warlords of dubious motives. They should have made a lot better effort to contain and whack hard the Taliban and Al Qaeda there. The world would have totally supported it and it would have sent the right message to heap serious retribution on the Taliban and Al Qaeda as vengence for 9/11.
C. They should have taken a completely different strategy on Pakistan instead of looking the other way as they harbor the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and doing very little when it became clear they were the worlds number 1 proliferater of nuclear weapons. If there is a center for Islamic extremism its in the middle of two supposed allies, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Since they are allies the U.S. has done next to nothing about the heart of the problem.
D. They should have completely stayed out of Iraq. Invading Iraq destroyed support for the U.S. in the world, and drained resources in to a quagmire that had nothing to do with 9/11. Saddam was a Baathist, a secular Socialist, and Muslim only when he found it convenient. Iraq was the most secular of Arab nations and Saddam routinely and ruthlessly suppressed Islamic fundamentalism, he was more ally against Islamic fundamentalism, especially in Iran, than supporter of it. Iraqs where mustaches because Saddam persecuted people for wearing beards as a way to frustrate devout Muslims.
E. They should have never started persecuting, arbitrarily arresting or torturing Mulsim prisoners in Gitmo, Iraq and elsehere. They should have never used Rendition to snatch people for torture. This whole process is just a recruiting poster for Muslim extremist. They can point and say see what they are doing to your Muslim brothers. It would have been harder but the U.S should have maintained the moral high ground here, only prosecuted the people they could make a case against, and tried them with real due process and fair trials, not kangaroo courts like Gitmo's. Sure it would have been hard but it would have prevented rampant abuse of people who have been falsely accused and would have kept due process in tact, instead of shredding it in favor of giving arbitrary powers to the executive to arrest and detain anyone he feels like, whenever he feels like and abuse them without restraint. It would have again not demolished U.S. standing in the eyes of the rest of the world.
"...he's merely another power-hungry despot who uses religious fanaticism to depose...."
Sounds a lot like another world leader I can think of:)
"Without the topmost leadership, Al Qaeda would be much easier to deal with"
The French said the same thing about the leadership of the Muslim insurgency in Algeria that tied them up in knots for years before they gave up and left. They created org charts of all the leaders and they made great ceremony out of crossing them off everytime they killed or captured one. They did in fact catch a lot of them but it had no effect on the insurgency. If an insurgency has popular support the ranks are always filled by new "talented leaders and planners".
Its open to debate if Al Qaeda is in fact a popular insurgency. Their fondness for and willingness to kill fellow Muslims in particular has pushed them out of the main stream of even radical Muslims. They have staged some spectacular terrorist attacks but those required a small number of fanatical followers not a real movement. They have failed miserably at one of their prime goals, toppling governments in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Algeria. al-Zawihiri tried for example as a member of the ring that assassinated Sadat but they never gain popular support so their coup's always fizzle. Its an interesting and little known fact but al-Zawihiri was release by the Egyptians, after being held for years for the Sadat assassination, and was sent to Pakistan to fight the CIA backed war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan along with hundreds of other jailed militants from across the Middle East.
Al Qaeda is also a brand name being dramatically inflated by the neoconservatives in the Bush administration. If you understand the philosphy of their mentor, Leo Strauss, their objective is to create myths of good and evil they can use to unite disaffected Westerners behind an easily understood cause of good versus evil. They also server to distract the public as they reinstate a very regimented, very religious society. In this the neoconservatives have a lot in common with Islamic fundamentalists, who also want to restore a very regimented, very religious society. Only different is the choice of religion. The neocons and the Islamic fundamentalists are in fact using each other to gain their ends which may be one reason the U.S. seems to be in no hurry to catch Bin Laden and Co. The necons need Bin Laden, al-Zarqawi and al-Zawahri in the wild to demonize and terrify Americans to make Americans easier to control and manipulate. al-Zarqawi in particular is a convenient demon on whom to blame every bombing in Iraq. The neocons desperately need to make it look like Al Qaeda is to blame for the mess in Iraq when in reality much of it is a a homegrown Sunni insurgency, but anonymous Iraq Sunni's don't make for a powerful good versus evil myth and al-Zarqawi does.
The neocons needed a new boogie man when the Soviet Union collapsed. Saddam filled the bill but badly and now he is in jail so is a write off. At this point Al Qaeda fills the mortal enemy role. Al Qaeda is a great adversary because its unlikely to ever go away like the Soviet Union or Saddam did.
Al Qaeda likes the neocons because they have given Al Qaeda vast prestige by constantly building them up as a vast global terror network in "60 countries" when in fact they were early on probably a small organization with some sympathetic extremists around the globe. The U.S. helped make Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda also like the neocons because their heavy handed tactics, persecuting innocent Muslims, snatching Muslims around the world for torture with Rendition, torturing prisoner in Gitmo and Iraq, and of course invading Iraq in general is driving recruits to Al Qaeda and its affiliates in droves.
A good primer on the reality of the neocons and their fondness and similarity to Al Qaeda can be found in the BBC documentary The Power of Nightmares. The necons have a long running histroy, dating back the Reagan years of pick an adversary and building them up in to an evil monster on the virge of destroying the American way of life.
- In the Reagan years they created a shadow intelligence office called Team B featuring none other than Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle. Team B took the same data the CIA had which said the Soviet Union wasn't that much of a threat, and was crumbling from within, and instead found the Soviet Union to be a massive and imminent danger, engaging in a massive arms build up, and leading a "global terror network". Sound familiar. Whenever they could find no evidence of a weapons build up the neocons devised a perfect solution. If they can't find evidence of it that must mean that it is so nefarious and well concealed that it is even more dangerous than programs they could see. William Casey was a big subscriber of the Soviet Union leading a global terror network. People of the CIA tried to point out to him it was untrue, because in fact it was black propaganda the CIA itself had started.
- The Power of Nightmares contends they used similar tactics of demonization to create a myth of evil around Bill Clinton. That is a bit of a stretch though there certainly was a concerted campaign on someone's part to destroy him. There was never any evidence produced to support all the conspiracies they tried to pin on him which makes it sound a lot like a Team B style operation based on fantasy. It was a campaign that was VERY successful since it regained control of the Congress and then the White House for the Republicans and the neocons.
"which forced communism to slowly collapse under its own contradictions."
Last I heard China's Communist party was alive and doing very well. Though I guess it could be argued that since they've abandoned state ownership for private ownership mostly for the benefit of the ranking members of the party and their families that they should probably be referred to more as China's Fascist party these days. It is still a one party state and the economy is still very heavily state controlled, despite the facade they built to sucker Western businessmen in to giving them all their capital, IP and markets.
Cisco is a Chinese company now, Chambers has said it a number of times. They take much of their direction on where their R&D and manufacturing investments go from the Communist, or actually now Fascist, party of China. Now that they've gone from state ownership to private ownership by the now filthy rich members of the party hierarchy, Communist isn't really descriptive, Fascist is.
Face it, China's manufacturing expertise is for quantity, low price and maximum profit, not quality and durability.
If this does happen I wouldn't be surprised if the Chinese might chip in. I imagine China would LOVE to gain control of Nokia and the global cell phone market, especially since their cell phone market is the biggest in the world now. They also have a central bank with something around a hundred billion dollars they don't know what to do with which is why CNOOC a sham front company was trying to buy Unocal with backing from all those U.S. trade deficit dollars. I think they are shopping for an Australian oil company now that fell through.
People might freak if China tried to buy Nokia but if their best friends at Cisco were the front for it that would work great.
"to make decent nozzles in the hands of many many more people."...including terrorists and rogue states. It must be stopped.....think of the children.
I'm thinking Carmack is heading for a cell next to Jose Padilla if he keeps telling people how easy it is to make a delivery vehicle for weapons of mass destruction. I mean Al Qaeda could be reading Carmack's article right now and warming up the machine tools to build a rocket to lob chemical and biological weapons at American cities. The carnage.....where is the Fox News coverage of the imminent danger.
You've been watching to much DOD footage. They showed that to you precisely so you would think they had cleaned up war.
"The whole point of developing smart bombs is to try to minimize civilian casualties"
Smart bombs were developed because they allow you to take out targets like bridges and bunkers with fewer aircraft placed at risk and a higher probability of success. Bombing bridges with dumb bombs was nearly impossible. Reduction in civilian causalties was at best a pleasant side effect but had nothing to do with the rationale for developing them. Stop kidding yourself and trying to kid me. The U.S. still uses B-52's to carpet bomb when it suits them.
Smart weapons probably wouldn't have changed the dynamic behind fire bombing Japanese cities. The objective was to totally destroy the cities and kill all the civilians in them in an attempt to break the enemies will.
"Now imagine if that bomb had been a nuke, or a tac nuke."
Wont have to much longer. The Bush is doing their best to start development, deployment and use of a new generation of tactical nukes. They wont be used on bridges probably but will be on bunkers and cave complexes unless someone stops them. If their is a bunker in the middle of a city they want to take out bad enough, you will almost certainly see detonation of tactical nukes in cities in the future, by the U.S. In Iraq they blew up underground bunkers on vague suspicion Saddam was in them, he wasn't and they mostly just killed civilians in the apartments and houses over where they thought he was. Imagine when they use tacitcal nukes for this role in the future.
"Civilian casualties are not something Americans like. It's political suicide for politicians -- hence the focus on smart bombs."
There was still an abundance of civilian casualties during the invasion of Iraq. Yes they are a political problem. The U.S. solved this problem by preventing any counting of them or anyone showing any video of them. One of Al Jazeera's main offenses during the invasion, for which their headquarters was bombed, and journalists killed was they showed uncensored video of some of the dead women and children.
I could make an argument that smart bombs made things more dangerous not less. They've kidded the upper end of the command chain, and the American public, that they can fight clean, surgical wars with impunity. The end result is a much higher willingness to wage wars. Even with smart weapons they are still brutal, ugly affairs and civilians still get killed. GI'S still panic and hose down cars because full of women and children because they are jumpy about car bombs, or tanks still flatten houses in places like Fallujah. Those are old fashioned ways to kill civilians, no smart weapons in sight.
Dude I really could care less as you replay the same arguments you and everyone else have replayed a million times in attempt to rationalize these bombings. I personally don't care that the U.S. nuked a couple of cities, like I said it was no different that firebombing cities just more efficient(discounting that it cost billions to build those two bombs). It ended the war, yippee. Arguing about it 60 years later ain't gonna change it.
About the only thing I object to is people like yourself trying to rationalize it, justify it, and claim that it was somehow really an A-OK thing to do and that it wasn't indiscriminate killing of civilians which it was, just like Nanking. It was intentional and indiscriminate killing of civilians, deal with it, call a spade a spade here.
You stroking your personal and national conscious doesn't change anything. When Saddam gassed Iranians and Kurds I'm sure he used some pretty similar rationalizations, so did the Germans gassing Jews. Once you start playing calculus on whether its OK or not to kill civilians, how and how many you've already blown past the basic problem there.
I'd have slightly less of a problem with the U.S. and the U.K. killing millions of civilians if they weren't all holier than thou today when terrorists do the same thing. They start spouting B.S. that they would NEVER kill innocent civilians, and that people who kill innocent civilians are subhuman animals. Its just propaganda that flies in the face of historical reality. When the U.S. and the U.K. find it in their national interest to kill civilians they always will, always have, and have on a truly monumental scale.
Your argument is full of holes. The fact is scientists, and people of a scientific bent, do care about what is true for at least two reasons:
- Their theories and conclusions can be analyzed and tested by others and if they are wrong and can be proven wrong its an embarrassment to the scientist
- The most important one is that when you move theoretical to applied science truth matters. If you are working from bogus theories and principals, just because they made you feel good, when you get to applied science nothing works. If you want to build things that work based on science you need actual truth in science.
If you opt for what makes you feel good in science instead of what is true you are a bad scientist and your work is useless garbage. You may as well not bother because you are doing more harm than good. When you find truth your work has value and people build on it to find more truths and apply it to build things that work.
Make things that work is a perfectly good motivation for science, scientists and engineers and it has zip to do with God or Jesus.
Now contrast the scientific search for truth with the religious search for truth. Religious scholars propose theories and principles in their search for truth too. The only catch is they often intentionally delve in to areas where it is inherently impossible for them to prove the truth of their principles and more importantly for anytone to disprove them. This is why the search for religious truth attracts conmen and people with weak minds. They can propose things that are insane and no one can prove otherwise. It is truly a waste of time because one conman's religious theory can be completely contradicted by another and another and another and there is no way to establish the truth of any of them. Its way easier than science which is why there are so many weak minded people in the religion game.
There are problems with today's liberalism, contempt for religiosity, and moral relativism but you are totally off base in proposing it has anything to do with the relative truth in science and religion. The problems lie in psychology and sociology which is in a gray area between science and religion. Most science is based on the search of certainty and it can achieve it in many area which is what attracts people who like to discover truths. It does bump in to things which are at present unknowable so science bumps in to religion and and there things are messy. People who want some certainty in their truth shun religion because seeking truth in relgion is a waste of time. It's inherently impossible to find truth there.
I read the essay, it was interesting in a way, and it was informative that it was common style of writing and might have been about contemporary events around the year 90. But it was also tedious and ripe with speculation like all interpretations of Revelation. Not sure I would call it reasonable interpretation either. It was massive guess work too.
If it really was entirely about Roman persecution of Christains in their early years it makes all the current obsession with it even more insane. Unfortunately we get to live with the interpretations of modern Scofield bible variety which is leading people with mental problems to obsess about the end of life as we know it and the second coming.
Conclusion, revelation is written in such a way that you can read pretty much anything in to you want.
"Naturally, reading the article would have led you to that knowledge.;)"
I read the article and I saw the greenhouse reference, I'm just skeptical that you would engineer plants to solve the problem. IR filters or some form of heat exchanger seemed like better solutions. Keeping something cool really shouldn't be that much of a problem on Mars except in the height of summer at the warmest part of the planet. I think most of the water tends to be near the poles so I suspect you are going to be in cold parts of the planet at least early on, and wanting all the heat you can get out of the greenhouses to heat the habitat, melt water or heat the greenhouse over night.
"The fact that the other side is a dictatorship and that the population didn't have a say in governmental matters doesn't mean you surrender the right to defend yourself."
No you defend yourself against the army and the navy, and you selectively bomb munitions factories, with the realization there are going to be limited civilian causalities. But, when you start wholesale and intentional slaughter of citizens you put yourself down to the same detestable level as your enemy. The carnage of the rape of Nanking was matched by a couple nights of firebombing in Japan and Germany.
Like I said and you will never get, eye for an eye is not something a nation engages in unless it wants to be reduced to the same level as its enemy which the U.S. was.
You are never going to be able to make a rational case that because the Japanese and German military committed atrocities that it makes it okie dokie for their opponents to do the same.
"The nuclear bomb ended the war. It stoppped the killing."
I guess you didn't understand my post. About all I was saying was after the U.S. had been carpet bombing German and Japanese cities for years nuking a couple cities really was no big deal. But, yts a simple fact that once the U.S. had the bomb the war was over. They could have sent a message to the Japanese to send observers to point A and see what happens at point B, set off a bomb in an empty area and it would have ended the war. Fact is America wanted to:
- dish out some vengence on the Japanese - totally terrorize them - test drive their weapon on some cities to see what it would do - send a message to the rest of the world that the U.S. now dominated the world. It was one quick step from a formerly isolationist nation to a world dominating superpower.
I'm guessing you are just a troll but I'll waste some more time on you because you are either good at or just a complete ass.
"Illegal searches w/o probable cause..been going on for years,"
Thank you for proving my point. You said originally our rights aren't being trampled then you said in fact they are with illegal searches. Just because a puppet court full of puppet judges says its OK proves exactly zip. Courts are no better than the people on them and the people on them are no better than the politicians that appoint them. The Germans has courts too that rubber stamped everything they dud.
The 10th amendment is very explicit about our right to privacy and what is required to execute a search to invade it. It needs to be targeted, with probable cause and a warrant.
"If you don't like something go out and VOTE (how many of you did that?)"
That is the biggest red herring here. My vote changed nothing last time:
A. The Republicans have mobilized vast numbers of clueless bible thumpers to their side, and terrorized vast numbers of more clueless people beyond that in to thinking they are in mortal danger and that the neocons are doing a good job in protecting them when they aren't. The only thing neocons are good at are fabricating and exaggerating dangers they can use to justify seizing more power. My vote is meaningless as long as people with a clue are outnumbered by people with no clue like yourself.
B. We are stuck with a two party system, an entrenched system designed to crush third parties or any real choice. The two parties are equally bad, different but both really bad.
There is no real choice when I vote so it really is a waste of time which is why so many people don't bother. You know you have a problem when a rich, spoiled Yale Skull and Bonesman is running against a rich, spoiled Yale Skull and Bonesman.
"Having BEEN in NYC on 9/11 and having friends and relatives at the Pentagon by no means am I ever going to allow that to happen again."
And what does that mean. You will opt for a repressive police state to insure it doesn't happen again. Or maybe you are OK with arresting every Muslim in America and putting them in concentration camps just to be safe? Thats how we dealt with Japanese Americans in World War II. As an added bonus their neighbors got to steal all their property.
The fundamentalists want dumb red necks like youself to persecute Muslims in America because its their best avenue for getting new recruits and in driving Muslims away from the corruptions of the West.
I hate to break it to you but stopping another 9/11 was as simple as armored doors in cockpits, incredibly inexpensive, no civil rights eviscerated.
The complication is a new attack mode is impossible to stop, short of removing the motivations for people to become suicide bombers. Israel has been trying to stop suicide bombers for decades, its a tiny place with repressive military and intelligence presence and serious antiterrorism measures, not like the joke measures the U.S. is instituting, and they have had zero success at it.
Its amazing the things you can justify using this eye for an eye shtick. It usually ends up with everyone being blinded.
The fact that the Japanese army and its militaristic leadership committed atrocities doesn't damn to hell every citizen of Japan. Most of them didn't really have anything to say about it, they didn't even get to vote on it. Even the people who did support everything the Japanese military did were for the most part propagandized and brain washed to the point they couldn't differentiate the rightness and wrongness. Anyone who did stand up against it most assuredly would have just got whacked.
Its about like me saying you should be held personally responsible because the Bush administration launched the war in Iraq and American soldiers tortured prisoners in Abu Graib. Well if you voted for him both before and after you are responsible but all of us who voted against him aren't.
I personally would prefer to not be incinerated or brought up on war crimes charges because a government and a military over which I have no control commits war crimes.
"but I really don't care as I'm not going to do something to bring him down on me."
Forgot to add I'd laugh my ass off if you were communicating with someone who is doing something that the man doesn't like, and who is a target of an investigation. If you are you fall under guilt by association and you wouldn't even know it.
For example you may remember the programmer who was a citizen of Canada, who was snatched by the Feds, questioned and then deported to Syria where he was jailed and tortured for over a year. His crime as I recall, someone in his family asked him to sign as a reference on a lease of this other guy, who had been targeted in a terrorism investigation. His second mistake was he flew through New York on his way from Europe home to Canada.
You see you don't have to be guilty of anything in this wonderful world we live in. You can be targeted for just communicating with someone under suspicion, or you can be falsely accused by someone being pressured through interrogation and threats. For example in the UK now its a crime to withhold information about a terrorism investigation. Three people in the UK are being charged for just this in the wake of the London bombing. If they are falsely accused the only way they can escape this charge is to make up false information to give to the authorities and the easiest thing to do is falsely accuse someone else.
"Nobody is at this time limiting your rights, your privacy or your liberty"
WTF are you talking about. If you are taking a subway in some major American cities today you can now be stopped and searched for no reason and with no warrent. If they catch you with a couple of joints I'm curious if you are going to jail and if they can make the charges stick since it is a blatantly illegal search. There is no probable cause and there is no warrant for these searches. They are about as illegal as they get when they start applying them to people commuting to work everyday.
In the UK the police drew guns and started shouting at a Brazilian electrician because he was dark skinned and wearing a heavy coat in summer. He paniced which is not a surprise when people start yelling at you and drawing guns. They tackled him pumped him full of lead, though he had no weapon, purely on the vague suspcion he might have a bomb. The Brits responded with, oops, sorry.
Its something of a fact of life you are surrendering your privacy to get on an airplane but last time I did it they hand frisked, intrusively, a 70 year old man in front of me. The look on his face was sickening and it was worse because they were intimately searching him in front of everyone with a little table being the only thing blocking the worst of it. At this point I'm thinking, how has America fallen this far. He didn't fit the "Terrorist Profile" either and it was probably the first time in his life he'd been frisked. The lady at the metal detector said he looked "nervous" which is apparently why he was one step away from strip search. He was nervous but only because he was deathly afraid of the security shakedown and amazingly he had reason to be.
There is a fair chance you will soon see millimeter wave scanners in airports which will in effect let total strangers see you naked everytime you go to an airport. If they work there then there is a fair chance they will eventually appear in mass transit.
"If I want to keep something private, I sure don't send it via the Internet, snail mail still works good in that respect"
You are totally delusional at this point if you think the Fed's wont open your mail if you or whomever you are communicating with is the target of an investigation.
" The fact that the Patriot Act got pretty much unanimous reapproval in the House and Sentate says it not a bad deal on the whole."
No it says the political climate is such that politicians will vote for almost any piece of security legislation, no matter how bad. If they don't their opponents will pummel them in the next election for being soft on terrorists and it will work. The quality of the legislation has nothing to do with it. The National Intelligence reform act passed by a wide margin and it instituted the first step towards nation ID cards which Americans would have never tolerated 5 years ago. It eliminated most of the safeguards against intelligence agencies spying on Americans which were instituted because J. Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon were massively abusing those powers to spy on, blackmail and general destroy their political opponents.
" I really don't care as I'm not going to do something to bring him down on me."
Thats the spirit. I'm sure thats how most American's rationalize it. These news powers are currently only being used to hammer Muslims, most of whom appear to be innocent. You aren't Muslim, you don't fit the "Terrorist Profile" so why should you care. Germans didn't care either as long as it was only they Jews that were being persecuted because they weren't Jewish.
"Is privacy no longer a concern to people now that we have terrorists to worry about?"
The stock response is if you aren't doing anything illegal why would you care about privacy. This is only to catch bad people doing bad things. You aren't a bad person doing bad things are you? At this point you can see why only activists will fight it. Your average citizen isn't going to complain because that just makes you ripe for further attention by the authorities. The man in the suit might come knocking and ask, "Why are you wanting to use encryption and hide your activities from us Mr. Garstka."
American's don't really have much of a sensitivity, at present, as to why police states are bad. They aren't likely to start caring until its to late. At the moment its really only Muslim's that are taking the brunt of it and most Americans aren't Muslim. For example two men in Detroit were convicted on terrorism charges by the DOJ. The two main exhibits:
- A homemade video of their trip to Disneyland which the government insisted was really a surveillance tape to plan for a terrorist attack, and just cleverly made to look like a tourist video.
- A conman up on fraud charges was offered a reduced sentence if he testified against them. Predictably he took the offer. Unfortunately for the DOJ he started talking to cell mates and admitted he lied to get his charges dropped and the case was overturned, but not until two Muslim men and their families had been put through living hell for having video taped their Disney vacation.
This instance is covered in the fascinating BBC documentary The Power of Nightmares. If you want a primer on why your right to privacy is being eviscerated by the powers that be, its a good starting point. It also highlights some fascinating similarities between the neoconservatives currently running America and Britain and Islamic fundamentalism. In many respects they need each other and are using each other to attain their goals, the end of western liberalism and liberties. They both want a return to regimented societies dominated by their respective religion's concept of law and order.
And then after 2-3 years of investigation they will discover it was Karl Rove, reporters and Sancho will go to jail instead, and Karl will have another good laugh....The End
"About 10,000 people per day were dying per day in the Pacific theatre, mostly civilians in Japanese-occupied countries."
I'd be curious as to the exact breakdown of those civilian deaths. There were massive civilian casualties in the Pacific theatre in 1945 but a lot of them if not the majority of them were due to U.S. fire bombing of Japanese cities. On March 9th estimates are 100,000 died in one night of fire bombing in Tokyo.
To paint it as though Japan was the only one slaughtering civilians on a large scale like you just did isn't particularly honest.
Using 20/20 hindsight I can see a relativistic rationale for using the bomb because it really wasn't in the end much worse than firebombing raids in terms of casualties. Once you started fire bombing cities in both Germany and Japan the nuclear bombs were just an improvement in efficiency not in actual destruction. The one thing the nukes had to offer is the Japanese could see that the U.S. could probably dramatically accelerate the carnage with nukes in a way they couldn't with thousand plane raids with conventional bombs.
The U.S. and U.K. had abandoned any moral high ground about slaughtering civilians long before the day they bombed Hiroshima.
You have to figure the U.S. could easily have used the bombs on real military targets that weren't in the middle of cities and accomplished the same goal without slaughtering civilians, but at this point they were used to slaughtering civilians so you can see why they didn't bother finding a truly military target.
If you have a long historical view, which most people don't, you do have to gag everytime you hear Bush or Blair start ranting about terrorists killing innocent civilians. "Terrorists" have killed maybe a couple tens of thousands of innocent civilians over the last 65 years, the U.S. and U.K have killed millions. At this point people can start ranting about how that was different but in reality it really wasn't. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was designed precisely to terrorize the Japanese in to capitulation. Those targets had military targets within them but it is a simple fact that their intent was to kill civilians in large numbers to enhance the terror, or they would have picked military targets not in the middle of cities.
" We can't change the past, but we can try to avoid the same situations and circumstances."
My biggest fear on this front is that the neocons in the Bush administration either learned to well or not well enough what nuclear weapons mean in tactical and strategic situations.
The biggest problem with nukes are they are a weapon no one in their right mind will ever use so vast sums have been squandered on them and they are really useless. Sure they prevented a direct confrontation between the superpowers but there have been so many proxy wars between them that they really haven't stopped much in the way of wars.
The neocons are actively working to solve this problem by developing new low yield tactical nukes that they apparently fully intend to use for cave and bunker busting, unless someone like Congress stops them. If they get their way they are going to build them and then they are going to test them at which point the nuclear test ban treaty is out the window and every country outside the U.S. will start abandoning non proliferation because the U.S. will at that point be returning to a proliferation track.
The worst danger of these tactical nukes is they are being built to use, not to sit on the shelf as deterrents. They are low yield and the claim at least is they will only be used on cave complexes and deep underground bunkers. But once they let that genie out of the bottle, and step on the slippery slope we could easily see what was planned for nukes in the 50's, tactical use on the battlefield. Then its anyones guess if this will lead to escalations either small or massive. First the U.S. uses one on a cave complex in Afghanistan then maybe Russia uses one in Chechnya and we are back to a very dangerous world.
"A generation now are being raised where full scale war between first world countries is a thing of the past"
Not sure I would go that far. The people at the time thought World War I would be the war to end all wars and they were wrong.
Nuclear weapons are proliferating at such a high rate its nearly inevitable they are going to end up in the hands of someone who will be willing to use them due to desperation or psychosis.
After the psychotic neocons and their new tactical nukes, Pakistan is the country most likely in my book to use them. That country is extraordinarily unstable and you mix in nukes it is extraordinarily dangerous. There is a military dictator attempting to enforce stability, but he has been targeted by several assassination attempts. He has next to no control over his own secret service, the ISI, and they were instrumental in installing and keeping the Taliban in power in Afghanistan and may well be harboring the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Pakistan. And there is a huge fundamentalist Islamic movement that may well gain power someday. Pakistan was also shopping nukes to the highest bidder until very recently. The ring was supposedly broken up but the ringleader A.Q. Khan went unpunished by Pakistan.
We have not yet a seen a case where a country with nukes has undergone a violent coup. The Soviet Union and Russia came close once but the people controlling the nukes mostly kept their cool during that one.
There are VAST tar sand and oil shale reserves available. They will just be expensive and dirty to tap. You pretty much have to heat it get it out of the rock/sand. If oil prices keep rising and stay high those reserves will be economical to tap. Pilot projects are already starting up. Last time anyone started tapping tar sands and oil shale during the 70's oil prices dropped and everyone gave up on it. Oil certainly wont be cheap when you have to resort to tapping these reserves.
Oil isn't really the central problem in CO2 emissions, its burning coal and there are vast reserves available there too as long as you don't mind rearranging the landscape to harvest it and can put up with the lead, mercury and CO2 pollution from burning it
Well I guess that is a good explanation but reinventing biology to solve this seems a bit strange. I would think you could:
You could probably build infrared filters to block the heat. This has been done in greenhouse on Earth though not sure how hard it is or would be to do on Mars and you need a way to regulate the filtering since you really need some of the heat there.
Not sure I would go to Mars without a couple nuclear power plants so there would be plenty of power for air conditioning and heating.
The extremeophile thing is more interesting in trying to engineer moss and lichen's that can survive outside on Mars presumably near ice, to start terraforming.
"The biggest difficulty is getting enough water."
You mean inside a greenhouse. I would assume the base/colony would be near a known ice lake like the one recently discovered in a crater by Mars Express.
I think if you are engineering life for Mars you need to be developing cold tolerance, more than heat tolerance which is what this experiment seems to be doing. The concept is the same but you have to wonder why they they made their choice of extremeophiles. The averge surface temperature on Mars is around -55C. The hottest you see is 27C which is a very warm summer day. Developing tolerance for 4-100C doesn't quite fit.
You wonder why they aren't working with extremeophiles from the Arctic, Antarctic and high mountains instead of ocean vents.
This is known as an ad hominem attack. Rather than form a cogent argument against the message, you tilt off in to a vicious attack against the person. Its most often resorted to by people who can't form a cogent argument for the topic at hand.
Slashdot Mirror
"but that doesn't mean the proper approach is to sit around and pretend there is no problem."
Well given the choice between doing nothing and what the Bush and Blair administrations have done, I would have opted for doing nothing. It would have done less damage.
They could have done some things that would have been a lot more effective though:
A- Just installed armored cockpit doors in airliners. The 9/11 attack mode would have been completely eliminated at a tiny cost and without the staggering chaos, economic devestation, and evisceration of civil liberties you see in the TSA and airports today. Sure maybe terrorists could still have taken down an airliner but it would be very hard to use one as a weapon again with armored doors. So simple, so cheap, to simple, to cheap.
B. They should have invaded Afghanistan with a real army of U.S. troops and not fought it with Afghan warlords of dubious motives. They should have made a lot better effort to contain and whack hard the Taliban and Al Qaeda there. The world would have totally supported it and it would have sent the right message to heap serious retribution on the Taliban and Al Qaeda as vengence for 9/11.
C. They should have taken a completely different strategy on Pakistan instead of looking the other way as they harbor the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and doing very little when it became clear they were the worlds number 1 proliferater of nuclear weapons. If there is a center for Islamic extremism its in the middle of two supposed allies, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Since they are allies the U.S. has done next to nothing about the heart of the problem.
D. They should have completely stayed out of Iraq. Invading Iraq destroyed support for the U.S. in the world, and drained resources in to a quagmire that had nothing to do with 9/11. Saddam was a Baathist, a secular Socialist, and Muslim only when he found it convenient. Iraq was the most secular of Arab nations and Saddam routinely and ruthlessly suppressed Islamic fundamentalism, he was more ally against Islamic fundamentalism, especially in Iran, than supporter of it. Iraqs where mustaches because Saddam persecuted people for wearing beards as a way to frustrate devout Muslims.
E. They should have never started persecuting, arbitrarily arresting or torturing Mulsim prisoners in Gitmo, Iraq and elsehere. They should have never used Rendition to snatch people for torture. This whole process is just a recruiting poster for Muslim extremist. They can point and say see what they are doing to your Muslim brothers. It would have been harder but the U.S should have maintained the moral high ground here, only prosecuted the people they could make a case against, and tried them with real due process and fair trials, not kangaroo courts like Gitmo's. Sure it would have been hard but it would have prevented rampant abuse of people who have been falsely accused and would have kept due process in tact, instead of shredding it in favor of giving arbitrary powers to the executive to arrest and detain anyone he feels like, whenever he feels like and abuse them without restraint. It would have again not demolished U.S. standing in the eyes of the rest of the world.
"...he's merely another power-hungry despot who uses religious fanaticism to depose...."
:)
Sounds a lot like another world leader I can think of
"Without the topmost leadership, Al Qaeda would be much easier to deal with"
The French said the same thing about the leadership of the Muslim insurgency in Algeria that tied them up in knots for years before they gave up and left. They created org charts of all the leaders and they made great ceremony out of crossing them off everytime they killed or captured one. They did in fact catch a lot of them but it had no effect on the insurgency. If an insurgency has popular support the ranks are always filled by new "talented leaders and planners".
Its open to debate if Al Qaeda is in fact a popular insurgency. Their fondness for and willingness to kill fellow Muslims in particular has pushed them out of the main stream of even radical Muslims. They have staged some spectacular terrorist attacks but those required a small number of fanatical followers not a real movement. They have failed miserably at one of their prime goals, toppling governments in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Algeria. al-Zawihiri tried for example as a member of the ring that assassinated Sadat but they never gain popular support so their coup's always fizzle. Its an interesting and little known fact but al-Zawihiri was release by the Egyptians, after being held for years for the Sadat assassination, and was sent to Pakistan to fight the CIA backed war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan along with hundreds of other jailed militants from across the Middle East.
Al Qaeda is also a brand name being dramatically inflated by the neoconservatives in the Bush administration. If you understand the philosphy of their mentor, Leo Strauss, their objective is to create myths of good and evil they can use to unite disaffected Westerners behind an easily understood cause of good versus evil. They also server to distract the public as they reinstate a very regimented, very religious society. In this the neoconservatives have a lot in common with Islamic fundamentalists, who also want to restore a very regimented, very religious society. Only different is the choice of religion. The neocons and the Islamic fundamentalists are in fact using each other to gain their ends which may be one reason the U.S. seems to be in no hurry to catch Bin Laden and Co. The necons need Bin Laden, al-Zarqawi and al-Zawahri in the wild to demonize and terrify Americans to make Americans easier to control and manipulate. al-Zarqawi in particular is a convenient demon on whom to blame every bombing in Iraq. The neocons desperately need to make it look like Al Qaeda is to blame for the mess in Iraq when in reality much of it is a a homegrown Sunni insurgency, but anonymous Iraq Sunni's don't make for a powerful good versus evil myth and al-Zarqawi does.
The neocons needed a new boogie man when the Soviet Union collapsed. Saddam filled the bill but badly and now he is in jail so is a write off. At this point Al Qaeda fills the mortal enemy role. Al Qaeda is a great adversary because its unlikely to ever go away like the Soviet Union or Saddam did.
Al Qaeda likes the neocons because they have given Al Qaeda vast prestige by constantly building them up as a vast global terror network in "60 countries" when in fact they were early on probably a small organization with some sympathetic extremists around the globe. The U.S. helped make Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda also like the neocons because their heavy handed tactics, persecuting innocent Muslims, snatching Muslims around the world for torture with Rendition, torturing prisoner in Gitmo and Iraq, and of course invading Iraq in general is driving recruits to Al Qaeda and its affiliates in droves.
A good primer on the reality of the neocons and their fondness and similarity to Al Qaeda can be found in the BBC documentary The Power of Nightmares. The necons have a long running histroy, dating back the Reagan years of pick an adversary and building them up in to an evil monster on the virge of destroying the American way of life.
- In the Reagan years they created a shadow intelligence office called Team B featuring none other than Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle. Team B took the same data the CIA had which said the Soviet Union wasn't that much of a threat, and was crumbling from within, and instead found the Soviet Union to be a massive and imminent danger, engaging in a massive arms build up, and leading a "global terror network". Sound familiar. Whenever they could find no evidence of a weapons build up the neocons devised a perfect solution. If they can't find evidence of it that must mean that it is so nefarious and well concealed that it is even more dangerous than programs they could see. William Casey was a big subscriber of the Soviet Union leading a global terror network. People of the CIA tried to point out to him it was untrue, because in fact it was black propaganda the CIA itself had started.
- The Power of Nightmares contends they used similar tactics of demonization to create a myth of evil around Bill Clinton. That is a bit of a stretch though there certainly was a concerted campaign on someone's part to destroy him. There was never any evidence produced to support all the conspiracies they tried to pin on him which makes it sound a lot like a Team B style operation based on fantasy. It was a campaign that was VERY successful since it regained control of the Congress and then the White House for the Republicans and the neocons.
- In more
"which forced communism to slowly collapse under its own contradictions."
Last I heard China's Communist party was alive and doing very well. Though I guess it could be argued that since they've abandoned state ownership for private ownership mostly for the benefit of the ranking members of the party and their families that they should probably be referred to more as China's Fascist party these days. It is still a one party state and the economy is still very heavily state controlled, despite the facade they built to sucker Western businessmen in to giving them all their capital, IP and markets.
Cisco is a Chinese company now, Chambers has said it a number of times. They take much of their direction on where their R&D and manufacturing investments go from the Communist, or actually now Fascist, party of China. Now that they've gone from state ownership to private ownership by the now filthy rich members of the party hierarchy, Communist isn't really descriptive, Fascist is.
Face it, China's manufacturing expertise is for quantity, low price and maximum profit, not quality and durability.
If this does happen I wouldn't be surprised if the Chinese might chip in. I imagine China would LOVE to gain control of Nokia and the global cell phone market, especially since their cell phone market is the biggest in the world now. They also have a central bank with something around a hundred billion dollars they don't know what to do with which is why CNOOC a sham front company was trying to buy Unocal with backing from all those U.S. trade deficit dollars. I think they are shopping for an Australian oil company now that fell through.
People might freak if China tried to buy Nokia but if their best friends at Cisco were the front for it that would work great.
"to make decent nozzles in the hands of many many more people." ...including terrorists and rogue states. It must be stopped.....think of the children.
I'm thinking Carmack is heading for a cell next to Jose Padilla if he keeps telling people how easy it is to make a delivery vehicle for weapons of mass destruction. I mean Al Qaeda could be reading Carmack's article right now and warming up the machine tools to build a rocket to lob chemical and biological weapons at American cities. The carnage.....where is the Fox News coverage of the imminent danger.
You've been watching to much DOD footage. They showed that to you precisely so you would think they had cleaned up war.
"The whole point of developing smart bombs is to try to minimize civilian casualties"
Smart bombs were developed because they allow you to take out targets like bridges and bunkers with fewer aircraft placed at risk and a higher probability of success. Bombing bridges with dumb bombs was nearly impossible. Reduction in civilian causalties was at best a pleasant side effect but had nothing to do with the rationale for developing them. Stop kidding yourself and trying to kid me. The U.S. still uses B-52's to carpet bomb when it suits them.
Smart weapons probably wouldn't have changed the dynamic behind fire bombing Japanese cities. The objective was to totally destroy the cities and kill all the civilians in them in an attempt to break the enemies will.
"Now imagine if that bomb had been a nuke, or a tac nuke."
Wont have to much longer. The Bush is doing their best to start development, deployment and use of a new generation of tactical nukes. They wont be used on bridges probably but will be on bunkers and cave complexes unless someone stops them. If their is a bunker in the middle of a city they want to take out bad enough, you will almost certainly see detonation of tactical nukes in cities in the future, by the U.S. In Iraq they blew up underground bunkers on vague suspicion Saddam was in them, he wasn't and they mostly just killed civilians in the apartments and houses over where they thought he was. Imagine when they use tacitcal nukes for this role in the future.
"Civilian casualties are not something Americans like. It's political suicide for politicians -- hence the focus on smart bombs."
There was still an abundance of civilian casualties during the invasion of Iraq. Yes they are a political problem. The U.S. solved this problem by preventing any counting of them or anyone showing any video of them. One of Al Jazeera's main offenses during the invasion, for which their headquarters was bombed, and journalists killed was they showed uncensored video of some of the dead women and children.
I could make an argument that smart bombs made things more dangerous not less. They've kidded the upper end of the command chain, and the American public, that they can fight clean, surgical wars with impunity. The end result is a much higher willingness to wage wars. Even with smart weapons they are still brutal, ugly affairs and civilians still get killed. GI'S still panic and hose down cars because full of women and children because they are jumpy about car bombs, or tanks still flatten houses in places like Fallujah. Those are old fashioned ways to kill civilians, no smart weapons in sight.
Dude I really could care less as you replay the same arguments you and everyone else have replayed a million times in attempt to rationalize these bombings. I personally don't care that the U.S. nuked a couple of cities, like I said it was no different that firebombing cities just more efficient(discounting that it cost billions to build those two bombs). It ended the war, yippee. Arguing about it 60 years later ain't gonna change it.
About the only thing I object to is people like yourself trying to rationalize it, justify it, and claim that it was somehow really an A-OK thing to do and that it wasn't indiscriminate killing of civilians which it was, just like Nanking. It was intentional and indiscriminate killing of civilians, deal with it, call a spade a spade here.
You stroking your personal and national conscious doesn't change anything. When Saddam gassed Iranians and Kurds I'm sure he used some pretty similar rationalizations, so did the Germans gassing Jews. Once you start playing calculus on whether its OK or not to kill civilians, how and how many you've already blown past the basic problem there.
I'd have slightly less of a problem with the U.S. and the U.K. killing millions of civilians if they weren't all holier than thou today when terrorists do the same thing. They start spouting B.S. that they would NEVER kill innocent civilians, and that people who kill innocent civilians are subhuman animals. Its just propaganda that flies in the face of historical reality. When the U.S. and the U.K. find it in their national interest to kill civilians they always will, always have, and have on a truly monumental scale.
"Why should I care what is true?"
Your argument is full of holes. The fact is scientists, and people of a scientific bent, do care about what is true for at least two reasons:
- Their theories and conclusions can be analyzed and tested by others and if they are wrong and can be proven wrong its an embarrassment to the scientist
- The most important one is that when you move theoretical to applied science truth matters. If you are working from bogus theories and principals, just because they made you feel good, when you get to applied science nothing works. If you want to build things that work based on science you need actual truth in science.
If you opt for what makes you feel good in science instead of what is true you are a bad scientist and your work is useless garbage. You may as well not bother because you are doing more harm than good. When you find truth your work has value and people build on it to find more truths and apply it to build things that work.
Make things that work is a perfectly good motivation for science, scientists and engineers and it has zip to do with God or Jesus.
Now contrast the scientific search for truth with the religious search for truth. Religious scholars propose theories and principles in their search for truth too. The only catch is they often intentionally delve in to areas where it is inherently impossible for them to prove the truth of their principles and more importantly for anytone to disprove them. This is why the search for religious truth attracts conmen and people with weak minds. They can propose things that are insane and no one can prove otherwise. It is truly a waste of time because one conman's religious theory can be completely contradicted by another and another and another and there is no way to establish the truth of any of them. Its way easier than science which is why there are so many weak minded people in the religion game.
There are problems with today's liberalism, contempt for religiosity, and moral relativism but you are totally off base in proposing it has anything to do with the relative truth in science and religion. The problems lie in psychology and sociology which is in a gray area between science and religion. Most science is based on the search of certainty and it can achieve it in many area which is what attracts people who like to discover truths. It does bump in to things which are at present unknowable so science bumps in to religion and and there things are messy. People who want some certainty in their truth shun religion because seeking truth in relgion is a waste of time. It's inherently impossible to find truth there.
I read the essay, it was interesting in a way, and it was informative that it was common style of writing and might have been about contemporary events around the year 90. But it was also tedious and ripe with speculation like all interpretations of Revelation. Not sure I would call it reasonable interpretation either. It was massive guess work too.
If it really was entirely about Roman persecution of Christains in their early years it makes all the current obsession with it even more insane. Unfortunately we get to live with the interpretations of modern Scofield bible variety which is leading people with mental problems to obsess about the end of life as we know it and the second coming.
Conclusion, revelation is written in such a way that you can read pretty much anything in to you want.
"Naturally, reading the article would have led you to that knowledge. ;)"
I read the article and I saw the greenhouse reference, I'm just skeptical that you would engineer plants to solve the problem. IR filters or some form of heat exchanger seemed like better solutions. Keeping something cool really shouldn't be that much of a problem on Mars except in the height of summer at the warmest part of the planet. I think most of the water tends to be near the poles so I suspect you are going to be in cold parts of the planet at least early on, and wanting all the heat you can get out of the greenhouses to heat the habitat, melt water or heat the greenhouse over night.
"The fact that the other side is a dictatorship and that the population didn't have a say in governmental matters doesn't mean you surrender the right to defend yourself."
No you defend yourself against the army and the navy, and you selectively bomb munitions factories, with the realization there are going to be limited civilian causalities. But, when you start wholesale and intentional slaughter of citizens you put yourself down to the same detestable level as your enemy. The carnage of the rape of Nanking was matched by a couple nights of firebombing in Japan and Germany.
Like I said and you will never get, eye for an eye is not something a nation engages in unless it wants to be reduced to the same level as its enemy which the U.S. was.
You are never going to be able to make a rational case that because the Japanese and German military committed atrocities that it makes it okie dokie for their opponents to do the same.
"The nuclear bomb ended the war. It stoppped the killing."
I guess you didn't understand my post. About all I was saying was after the U.S. had been carpet bombing German and Japanese cities for years nuking a couple cities really was no big deal. But, yts a simple fact that once the U.S. had the bomb the war was over. They could have sent a message to the Japanese to send observers to point A and see what happens at point B, set off a bomb in an empty area and it would have ended the war. Fact is America wanted to:
- dish out some vengence on the Japanese
- totally terrorize them
- test drive their weapon on some cities to see what it would do
- send a message to the rest of the world that the U.S. now dominated the world. It was one quick step from a formerly isolationist nation to a world dominating superpower.
I'm guessing you are just a troll but I'll waste some more time on you because you are either good at or just a complete ass.
"Illegal searches w/o probable cause..been going on for years,"
Thank you for proving my point. You said originally our rights aren't being trampled then you said in fact they are with illegal searches. Just because a puppet court full of puppet judges says its OK proves exactly zip. Courts are no better than the people on them and the people on them are no better than the politicians that appoint them. The Germans has courts too that rubber stamped everything they dud.
The 10th amendment is very explicit about our right to privacy and what is required to execute a search to invade it. It needs to be targeted, with probable cause and a warrant.
"If you don't like something go out and VOTE (how many of you did that?)"
That is the biggest red herring here. My vote changed nothing last time:
A. The Republicans have mobilized vast numbers of clueless bible thumpers to their side, and terrorized vast numbers of more clueless people beyond that in to thinking they are in mortal danger and that the neocons are doing a good job in protecting them when they aren't. The only thing neocons are good at are fabricating and exaggerating dangers they can use to justify seizing more power. My vote is meaningless as long as people with a clue are outnumbered by people with no clue like yourself.
B. We are stuck with a two party system, an entrenched system designed to crush third parties or any real choice. The two parties are equally bad, different but both really bad.
There is no real choice when I vote so it really is a waste of time which is why so many people don't bother. You know you have a problem when a rich, spoiled Yale Skull and Bonesman is running against a rich, spoiled Yale Skull and Bonesman.
"Having BEEN in NYC on 9/11 and having friends and relatives at the Pentagon by no means am I ever going to allow that to happen again."
And what does that mean. You will opt for a repressive police state to insure it doesn't happen again. Or maybe you are OK with arresting every Muslim in America and putting them in concentration camps just to be safe? Thats how we dealt with Japanese Americans in World War II. As an added bonus their neighbors got to steal all their property.
The fundamentalists want dumb red necks like youself to persecute Muslims in America because its their best avenue for getting new recruits and in driving Muslims away from the corruptions of the West.
I hate to break it to you but stopping another 9/11 was as simple as armored doors in cockpits, incredibly inexpensive, no civil rights eviscerated.
The complication is a new attack mode is impossible to stop, short of removing the motivations for people to become suicide bombers. Israel has been trying to stop suicide bombers for decades, its a tiny place with repressive military and intelligence presence and serious antiterrorism measures, not like the joke measures the U.S. is instituting, and they have had zero success at it.
Its amazing the things you can justify using this eye for an eye shtick. It usually ends up with everyone being blinded.
The fact that the Japanese army and its militaristic leadership committed atrocities doesn't damn to hell every citizen of Japan. Most of them didn't really have anything to say about it, they didn't even get to vote on it. Even the people who did support everything the Japanese military did were for the most part propagandized and brain washed to the point they couldn't differentiate the rightness and wrongness. Anyone who did stand up against it most assuredly would have just got whacked.
Its about like me saying you should be held personally responsible because the Bush administration launched the war in Iraq and American soldiers tortured prisoners in Abu Graib. Well if you voted for him both before and after you are responsible but all of us who voted against him aren't.
I personally would prefer to not be incinerated or brought up on war crimes charges because a government and a military over which I have no control commits war crimes.
"but I really don't care as I'm not going to do something to bring him down on me."
Forgot to add I'd laugh my ass off if you were communicating with someone who is doing something that the man doesn't like, and who is a target of an investigation. If you are you fall under guilt by association and you wouldn't even know it.
For example you may remember the programmer who was a citizen of Canada, who was snatched by the Feds, questioned and then deported to Syria where he was jailed and tortured for over a year. His crime as I recall, someone in his family asked him to sign as a reference on a lease of this other guy, who had been targeted in a terrorism investigation. His second mistake was he flew through New York on his way from Europe home to Canada.
You see you don't have to be guilty of anything in this wonderful world we live in. You can be targeted for just communicating with someone under suspicion, or you can be falsely accused by someone being pressured through interrogation and threats. For example in the UK now its a crime to withhold information about a terrorism investigation. Three people in the UK are being charged for just this in the wake of the London bombing. If they are falsely accused the only way they can escape this charge is to make up false information to give to the authorities and the easiest thing to do is falsely accuse someone else.
"Nobody is at this time limiting your rights, your privacy or your liberty"
WTF are you talking about. If you are taking a subway in some major American cities today you can now be stopped and searched for no reason and with no warrent. If they catch you with a couple of joints I'm curious if you are going to jail and if they can make the charges stick since it is a blatantly illegal search. There is no probable cause and there is no warrant for these searches. They are about as illegal as they get when they start applying them to people commuting to work everyday.
In the UK the police drew guns and started shouting at a Brazilian electrician because he was dark skinned and wearing a heavy coat in summer. He paniced which is not a surprise when people start yelling at you and drawing guns. They tackled him pumped him full of lead, though he had no weapon, purely on the vague suspcion he might have a bomb. The Brits responded with, oops, sorry.
Its something of a fact of life you are surrendering your privacy to get on an airplane but last time I did it they hand frisked, intrusively, a 70 year old man in front of me. The look on his face was sickening and it was worse because they were intimately searching him in front of everyone with a little table being the only thing blocking the worst of it. At this point I'm thinking, how has America fallen this far. He didn't fit the "Terrorist Profile" either and it was probably the first time in his life he'd been frisked. The lady at the metal detector said he looked "nervous" which is apparently why he was one step away from strip search. He was nervous but only because he was deathly afraid of the security shakedown and amazingly he had reason to be.
There is a fair chance you will soon see millimeter wave scanners in airports which will in effect let total strangers see you naked everytime you go to an airport. If they work there then there is a fair chance they will eventually appear in mass transit.
"If I want to keep something private, I sure don't send it via the Internet, snail mail still works good in that respect"
You are totally delusional at this point if you think the Fed's wont open your mail if you or whomever you are communicating with is the target of an investigation.
" The fact that the Patriot Act got pretty much unanimous reapproval in the House and Sentate says it not a bad deal on the whole."
No it says the political climate is such that politicians will vote for almost any piece of security legislation, no matter how bad. If they don't their opponents will pummel them in the next election for being soft on terrorists and it will work. The quality of the legislation has nothing to do with it. The National Intelligence reform act passed by a wide margin and it instituted the first step towards nation ID cards which Americans would have never tolerated 5 years ago. It eliminated most of the safeguards against intelligence agencies spying on Americans which were instituted because J. Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon were massively abusing those powers to spy on, blackmail and general destroy their political opponents.
" I really don't care as I'm not going to do something to bring him down on me."
Thats the spirit. I'm sure thats how most American's rationalize it. These news powers are currently only being used to hammer Muslims, most of whom appear to be innocent. You aren't Muslim, you don't fit the "Terrorist Profile" so why should you care. Germans didn't care either as long as it was only they Jews that were being persecuted because they weren't Jewish.
"Is privacy no longer a concern to people now that we have terrorists to worry about?"
The stock response is if you aren't doing anything illegal why would you care about privacy. This is only to catch bad people doing bad things. You aren't a bad person doing bad things are you? At this point you can see why only activists will fight it. Your average citizen isn't going to complain because that just makes you ripe for further attention by the authorities. The man in the suit might come knocking and ask, "Why are you wanting to use encryption and hide your activities from us Mr. Garstka."
American's don't really have much of a sensitivity, at present, as to why police states are bad. They aren't likely to start caring until its to late. At the moment its really only Muslim's that are taking the brunt of it and most Americans aren't Muslim. For example two men in Detroit were convicted on terrorism charges by the DOJ. The two main exhibits:
- A homemade video of their trip to Disneyland which the government insisted was really a surveillance tape to plan for a terrorist attack, and just cleverly made to look like a tourist video.
- A conman up on fraud charges was offered a reduced sentence if he testified against them. Predictably he took the offer. Unfortunately for the DOJ he started talking to cell mates and admitted he lied to get his charges dropped and the case was overturned, but not until two Muslim men and their families had been put through living hell for having video taped their Disney vacation.
This instance is covered in the fascinating BBC documentary The Power of Nightmares. If you want a primer on why your right to privacy is being eviscerated by the powers that be, its a good starting point. It also highlights some fascinating similarities between the neoconservatives currently running America and Britain and Islamic fundamentalism. In many respects they need each other and are using each other to attain their goals, the end of western liberalism and liberties. They both want a return to regimented societies dominated by their respective religion's concept of law and order.
And then after 2-3 years of investigation they will discover it was Karl Rove, reporters and Sancho will go to jail instead, and Karl will have another good laugh....The End
"About 10,000 people per day were dying per day in the Pacific theatre, mostly civilians in Japanese-occupied countries."
I'd be curious as to the exact breakdown of those civilian deaths. There were massive civilian casualties in the Pacific theatre in 1945 but a lot of them if not the majority of them were due to U.S. fire bombing of Japanese cities. On March 9th estimates are 100,000 died in one night of fire bombing in Tokyo.
To paint it as though Japan was the only one slaughtering civilians on a large scale like you just did isn't particularly honest.
Using 20/20 hindsight I can see a relativistic rationale for using the bomb because it really wasn't in the end much worse than firebombing raids in terms of casualties. Once you started fire bombing cities in both Germany and Japan the nuclear bombs were just an improvement in efficiency not in actual destruction. The one thing the nukes had to offer is the Japanese could see that the U.S. could probably dramatically accelerate the carnage with nukes in a way they couldn't with thousand plane raids with conventional bombs.
The U.S. and U.K. had abandoned any moral high ground about slaughtering civilians long before the day they bombed Hiroshima.
You have to figure the U.S. could easily have used the bombs on real military targets that weren't in the middle of cities and accomplished the same goal without slaughtering civilians, but at this point they were used to slaughtering civilians so you can see why they didn't bother finding a truly military target.
If you have a long historical view, which most people don't, you do have to gag everytime you hear Bush or Blair start ranting about terrorists killing innocent civilians. "Terrorists" have killed maybe a couple tens of thousands of innocent civilians over the last 65 years, the U.S. and U.K have killed millions. At this point people can start ranting about how that was different but in reality it really wasn't. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was designed precisely to terrorize the Japanese in to capitulation. Those targets had military targets within them but it is a simple fact that their intent was to kill civilians in large numbers to enhance the terror, or they would have picked military targets not in the middle of cities.
" We can't change the past, but we can try to avoid the same situations and circumstances."
My biggest fear on this front is that the neocons in the Bush administration either learned to well or not well enough what nuclear weapons mean in tactical and strategic situations.
The biggest problem with nukes are they are a weapon no one in their right mind will ever use so vast sums have been squandered on them and they are really useless. Sure they prevented a direct confrontation between the superpowers but there have been so many proxy wars between them that they really haven't stopped much in the way of wars.
The neocons are actively working to solve this problem by developing new low yield tactical nukes that they apparently fully intend to use for cave and bunker busting, unless someone like Congress stops them. If they get their way they are going to build them and then they are going to test them at which point the nuclear test ban treaty is out the window and every country outside the U.S. will start abandoning non proliferation because the U.S. will at that point be returning to a proliferation track.
The worst danger of these tactical nukes is they are being built to use, not to sit on the shelf as deterrents. They are low yield and the claim at least is they will only be used on cave complexes and deep underground bunkers. But once they let that genie out of the bottle, and step on the slippery slope we could easily see what was planned for nukes in the 50's, tactical use on the battlefield. Then its anyones guess if this will lead to escalations either small or massive. First the U.S. uses one on a cave complex in Afghanistan then maybe Russia uses one in Chechnya and we are back to a very dangerous world.
"A generation now are being raised where full scale war between first world countries is a thing of the past"
Not sure I would go that far. The people at the time thought World War I would be the war to end all wars and they were wrong.
Nuclear weapons are proliferating at such a high rate its nearly inevitable they are going to end up in the hands of someone who will be willing to use them due to desperation or psychosis.
After the psychotic neocons and their new tactical nukes, Pakistan is the country most likely in my book to use them. That country is extraordinarily unstable and you mix in nukes it is extraordinarily dangerous. There is a military dictator attempting to enforce stability, but he has been targeted by several assassination attempts. He has next to no control over his own secret service, the ISI, and they were instrumental in installing and keeping the Taliban in power in Afghanistan and may well be harboring the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Pakistan. And there is a huge fundamentalist Islamic movement that may well gain power someday. Pakistan was also shopping nukes to the highest bidder until very recently. The ring was supposedly broken up but the ringleader A.Q. Khan went unpunished by Pakistan.
We have not yet a seen a case where a country with nukes has undergone a violent coup. The Soviet Union and Russia came close once but the people controlling the nukes mostly kept their cool during that one.
There are VAST tar sand and oil shale reserves available. They will just be expensive and dirty to tap. You pretty much have to heat it get it out of the rock/sand. If oil prices keep rising and stay high those reserves will be economical to tap. Pilot projects are already starting up. Last time anyone started tapping tar sands and oil shale during the 70's oil prices dropped and everyone gave up on it. Oil certainly wont be cheap when you have to resort to tapping these reserves.
Oil isn't really the central problem in CO2 emissions, its burning coal and there are vast reserves available there too as long as you don't mind rearranging the landscape to harvest it and can put up with the lead, mercury and CO2 pollution from burning it
Well I guess that is a good explanation but reinventing biology to solve this seems a bit strange. I would think you could:
You could probably build infrared filters to block the heat. This has been done in greenhouse on Earth though not sure how hard it is or would be to do on Mars and you need a way to regulate the filtering since you really need some of the heat there.
Not sure I would go to Mars without a couple nuclear power plants so there would be plenty of power for air conditioning and heating.
The extremeophile thing is more interesting in trying to engineer moss and lichen's that can survive outside on Mars presumably near ice, to start terraforming.
"The biggest difficulty is getting enough water."
You mean inside a greenhouse. I would assume the base/colony would be near a known ice lake like the one recently discovered in a crater by Mars Express.
I think if you are engineering life for Mars you need to be developing cold tolerance, more than heat tolerance which is what this experiment seems to be doing. The concept is the same but you have to wonder why they they made their choice of extremeophiles. The averge surface temperature on Mars is around -55C. The hottest you see is 27C which is a very warm summer day. Developing tolerance for 4-100C doesn't quite fit.
You wonder why they aren't working with extremeophiles from the Arctic, Antarctic and high mountains instead of ocean vents.
That was sarcasm friend. Revelations is pretty much devoid of reason so I don't think you can produce a "reasonable interpretation".
This is known as an ad hominem attack. Rather than form a cogent argument against the message, you tilt off in to a vicious attack against the person. Its most often resorted to by people who can't form a cogent argument for the topic at hand.