This is kind of like the Cuban Missile Crisis in reverse.
Sure, other than being nothing like that at all. You might recall that the missles the Soviets were setting up in Cuba were offensive in nature, and being placed by a country that had spent decades invading to occupy and permanently annex and enslave other countries through brual totalitarian rule that had killed tens of millions of peoplep already. No so much the same, and saying "in reverse" doesn't help that.
Run that notion past the people in Eastern Europe, how about. They very, very much don't want to once again become slaves to the Russians. They're rather fond of those that helped put an end to that last time around. The folks in Poland aren't being invaded, here. They want NATO bases in place.
threatening someone's military in any way could be construed as an (pre-emptive) act of war
And... setting up the ability to defensively shoot down Iranian long range missiles is threatening Russian's military... how, exactly?
None of the presidents have acted like anything changed since the wall came down;
Right, because very little has. And Putin takes frequent opportunities to try to keep it that way.
none of them have treated them as equal partners on the world stage;
True. Because they're not. Not equal in their contributions to peacekeeping efforts. Not equal in efforts to rein in places like North Korea. Not equal in stabilizing trade. Not equal in their handling of organized crime. Etc.
none of them have acted like they are potential friends;
Other than constant overtures that are rebuffed at every turn by the same handful of people that are still running Russia.
none have given them have given any respect -- and by "respect" I mean the common decency of acknowledging that they have a right to an opinion.
What does that even mean? Do you mean that we don't let them talk at the UN? Or do you mean the opinions that the Russian government projects and selects by doing things like killing off their own journalists by shooting them in the street when their fine, rational opinions are challenged by their own citizens?
Hell, that they might be useful allies.
Where our interests tangibly overlap, we cooperate on all sorts of things.
The Russian experience and insight with Islamic countries could have proved useful over the last 10 years.
Yes, they handled Afghanistan really well, and of course Chechnya is a shining model of how to get along with crazy Islamists.
Yes, I see that you completely mis-understand the situation, or that you're a typically disingenuous troll. Yup, easy to see what you did there. Why is another question.
'People desperate to take or keep power' don't blow themselves up or shoot at police. Nor do they launch suicidal first strikes... unless you can give examples that show otherwise.
Most every suicide attack in the middle east is about getting and keeping power. When the Taliban straps explosives onto a mentally disabled, drugged young woman, covers her back up with her burka, and sends her into a vegetable market or out in front of a police station to slaughter people, it's entirely about power. About influencing it, projecting it, and destabilizing opposing power. When a young man driving a car full of explosives blows himself up in front of a foreign embassy or hotel, it's about getting and keeping power: he wants his particular slice of culture to be dominant over another slice of culture. To the extent that his slice of culture is informed by medieval-minded religious wackadoo-ness, blowing himself up isn't seen as self-destruction, but as participation in the culture, and as a shortcut to glory and reward. He wants power for him and his cultural niche, and blowing himself up is part of that plan. It's completely irrational, but it's hardly rare, at this point.
One of the ways society identifies shit people, and their fanbois, is by the way they never apologise or show any signs of remorse.
And one of the ways we spot the cloying, invertibrate culture rot that empowers the entitlement-desiring, politically correct twits that think Tweeting Their Outrage is something they should be paid to do is... hearing how they expect apologies when there is nothing to apologize for.
A server is used to facilitate a bomb threat. A judge agrees that a warrant in the interests of checking the machine out for clues as to who considers threatening people's deaths in the name of their lefty movement is appropriate takes a few minutes and... issues the warrant. The investigators execute the warrant, do their homework, and return the server. And you think they should apologize. Man, I've got to get one of those "Stop Global Whining" bumper stickers.
You're completely mischaracterizing the prevailing complaints about Al Gore. It's not that he's boring. Quite the opposite, really. On this topic, he's a shrill, shouting, drama queen using pictures of hurricanes coming out of factory cooling towers and talking about the imminent end of civilization even as he carefully constructs complicated financial vehicles and organizations rigged to profit hugely off of the sale of meaningless carbon credits and the like.
Boring? No. Grating, patronizing, hypocritical, and eye-rollingly pedantic about all the wrong stuff, even as he flies around in private aircraft, lives in an energy hog of a mansion, owns multiple gas guzzlers, and uses his wealth to buy a few phony carbon credits so that someone else can do the actual work? Yes.
So, you're going to scold the GP for making an (accurate) observation about indoctrination on this topic in schools, and then you go on to - in a single sentence - talk about how your agenda is being stymied by the War Business, and that name calling is bad. You're funny.
So, what you're saying is that you can't tell the difference between wondering if someone exhibiting a specific behavior is worth giving a second glance under certain circumstances, and actually saying they are terrorists. If you really think that the FBI considers nervous people and photographers, etc., to actually be terrorists, then why aren't you ranting and screaming about the fact that the FBI is aware of millions of terrorsts and doing nothing about them? Oh, I see, you're BS-ing, and deliberately mis-characterizing reality in order to forward the delusional scenario that helps you to maintain your personal posture as Imaginary Brave Guy Who Earns Street Cred With Other Cool People. Just for your reference, it's not working. Nobody rational is going to change what they think based on your disingenuous theatrics.
I'm referring to the sorts of people involved. The implication above (that witless patsies can't be involved in real mass murders) is simply incorrect.
That's convenient, then. Because they FBI encounters these guys while they are out shopping around for support, supplies, financing, and moral support for what they want to do. They encounter people who have come out saying they want to kill people, they've picked a target, etc. In a recent case, the clown had already cased his targets, shot all sorts of photographs, formed a plan, picked a likely date, etc. We have hours of recordings of agents telling him it's a really bad idea, and him insisting that he wants to do it, and will. That's not the FBI creating a crime.
Because universally these cases turn out to be witless patsies.
Yup, just like the witless patsies that used home-brew explosives they couldn't have made themselves (and which they got from a somewhat mysterious-to-them third party more or less insdistinguishable from the informants the FBI allows them to encounter) to kill hundreds of people in London and Madrid. Just like the witless patsy who - if he hadn't been sweating so much - would have killed hundreds of people over and in Detroit. Those sorts of witless patsies, right? The kind that actually slaughter lots of people in scenarios just like the ones you're pretending don't amount to anything?
The FBI aided the _first_ WTC bomb plot.
The FBI aided Olklahoma City.
So, you're hoping that by making up pure BS, you're doing something constructive?
America is not supposed the land of pissed pants
Who's scared? I'm glad to see people who think that having a bridge blown up for May Day in support of the Occupy call for "Global Disruption" are also dumb enough to be savvy when their bomb-shopping takes them to an informant, and allows them to demonstrate their willingness and desire to kill people. Leeches? Let's start with the entitlement minded faux-anarchist adolescent twits who think they're being cool by lining up a little death and destruction to impress their prospective girlfriends back at the sit-in at Occupy Cleveland.
So, how do you think you're helping to make your point or persuade anyone of anything when you're just BS-ing on the face of it? I mean, really - what do you think that's actually accomplishing?
we will be drunk and clumsy. and in those situations, whether or not a gun is in easy reach radically changes the outcome of the situation
Yeah, just like with kitchen knives and car keys, right?
Meat cleavers don't kill people, people with meat cleavers do. Right? The presence and purpose of a kitchen knife clearly has moral weight, don't you think? The knife is meant to render things apart. To cut holes in things, to chop things, to remove meat from bones, and such. What moral value are you assigning to that destructive device, while being so capricious about guns? I've never shot anybody, though I've used guns thousands of times. I have, though, ended a very violent situation by brandishing a gun, and thus saving myself and another from certain damage and quite possible death. I've used guns to kill a venomous snake likely to injure or kill a domestic animal. I've used guns untold times to put dinner on the table.
flimsy easily dismantled logic
You're operating on completely muddled premises, plenty of ignorance, and a heaping dose of disingenous cherry picking.
the purpose and presence of the tool matters
No, what you do with it matters. If you think you're the type who can't trust yourself around a shotgun, a chain saw, large kitchen knives, a gallon of gasoline, or behind someone standing at the edge of a train station platform, then you should remove those temptations and tools from your own weak presence. Simple as that. If you know you can't stop yourself from hurting someone with a tool when you get drunk, then your sober awareness that you have the item around is again you acting. Deliberately. The tool doesn't cause you to use it, ever.
They were clearly wrong to make a diagnosis of monkey pox.
They didn't make a diagnosis of monkeypox. They reacted to a hospital employee's considered opinion that it might be monkeypox, and did the standard thing you do to see whether or not it is. It wasn't. They didn't diagnoise it as such.
What would you be saying if a planeload of people who did have monkeypox were busy spreading it around all of their familiy members, coworkers, fellow students, bus passengers and everyone else because the very sort of conjecture you think was lame at the hospital was lame in the opposite direction at the CDC? You'd be saying, what.. "It's a shame that now hundreds of thousands of people are scared by an actual very contagious disease that is actually spreading from the passengers on that plane, but at least we didn't scare only the passengers on the plane when we heard a report of a person covered with pussy sores flying out of Uganda.
Even a first year med student should have been able to do better than this.
What would they do better? Conclude that pussy sores on a person leaving a tropical area known for monkeypox are just nothing to worry about? Because that's all they had to go on until they could see the person in person. In a big metal tube that person had just been sharing for hours with a couple hundred other people.
An intelligent response would have been to first verify the symptoms
Which you would have done how... by preventing people from leaving the plane until you could check her out, right? Right. That's what they actually did.
Hell, they could have called the passenger herself to ask about her symptoms.
So, you're will to risk a big outbreak of a very nasty tropical disease by gambling that the passenger in question will answer her cell phone once they touch down, but before anyone else is allowed to leave the plane, and that if it sounds like the pox in question, that in the five minutes or so you have left before they deplane, you're then going to scramble the authorities to contain the problem?
consequences which would be unlikely to occur in most other countries
So, most other countries, finding out that a passenger on an inbound flight from Uganda is exhibiting signs of what could be the highly contagious monkeypox... just shrug their shoulders? You know that's not true.
by the time you hit the age of 18 then it is unlikely you will live a long and free life here
Citation, please. Or at least some non-rabid babbling, if you can muster it.
One way to avoid a premature death is to make sure that you don't die of a horrible tropical disease you've picked up from someone spreading it around in an aircraft on their way back from Uganda. But thanks for the really insightful perspective.
No. Let's not. We have enough trouble running a productive economy as-is, without further drowning in an even larger entitlement nightmare and crushing, productivity-killing tax and regulatory environment. Once the Germans finally get eveyone else in the EU straightened out - at an inconceivable cost to every German - maybe we can revisit this. But by the time all that dust is settled, any viable-looking European economy won't be operated much like it is now. Because the way it's set up now has proven to be unsustainable. Being born owed things, and asserting that someone else always pays for everything is: death. And dying is exactly what's happening to the European economy.
And one of the reasons for that is the embrace of electoral systems and results that prevent any sort of working mandate, and which grant un-earned power to groups representing only a few percent of the voters. No, I don't want advice from people who run things that way, thanks.
What is par for the course? The dismantling of companies like Virgin by evil US investors?
The meme I'm referring to is that nice popular one, where venture investors don't build anything, don't see the money they risk ever put to good use, and that nothing good comes from them pushing small or dying companies into a healthy, viable condition. That's pure BS, on the face of it. But that image, that meme, is trotted around as if it were true - all because people who don't have money to invest and who don't understand how it works resent and villify those who do. The GP played that card in this scenario specifically to keep that false meme alive, to hope that it will keep rattling around in discussions as if it were an accurate portrayal of reality. Why? People have different reasons for wanting to lie about other people. Hard to say. Regardless of his motivation, it's worth calling him on it, and pointing out that it's false.
Slashdot Mirror
This is kind of like the Cuban Missile Crisis in reverse.
Sure, other than being nothing like that at all. You might recall that the missles the Soviets were setting up in Cuba were offensive in nature, and being placed by a country that had spent decades invading to occupy and permanently annex and enslave other countries through brual totalitarian rule that had killed tens of millions of peoplep already. No so much the same, and saying "in reverse" doesn't help that.
the entire world doesn't like us already
Run that notion past the people in Eastern Europe, how about. They very, very much don't want to once again become slaves to the Russians. They're rather fond of those that helped put an end to that last time around. The folks in Poland aren't being invaded, here. They want NATO bases in place.
threatening someone's military in any way could be construed as an (pre-emptive) act of war
And ... setting up the ability to defensively shoot down Iranian long range missiles is threatening Russian's military ... how, exactly?
None of the presidents have acted like anything changed since the wall came down;
Right, because very little has. And Putin takes frequent opportunities to try to keep it that way.
none of them have treated them as equal partners on the world stage;
True. Because they're not. Not equal in their contributions to peacekeeping efforts. Not equal in efforts to rein in places like North Korea. Not equal in stabilizing trade. Not equal in their handling of organized crime. Etc.
none of them have acted like they are potential friends;
Other than constant overtures that are rebuffed at every turn by the same handful of people that are still running Russia.
none have given them have given any respect -- and by "respect" I mean the common decency of acknowledging that they have a right to an opinion.
What does that even mean? Do you mean that we don't let them talk at the UN? Or do you mean the opinions that the Russian government projects and selects by doing things like killing off their own journalists by shooting them in the street when their fine, rational opinions are challenged by their own citizens?
Hell, that they might be useful allies.
Where our interests tangibly overlap, we cooperate on all sorts of things.
The Russian experience and insight with Islamic countries could have proved useful over the last 10 years.
Yes, they handled Afghanistan really well, and of course Chechnya is a shining model of how to get along with crazy Islamists.
See what I did there?
Yes, I see that you completely mis-understand the situation, or that you're a typically disingenuous troll. Yup, easy to see what you did there. Why is another question.
'People desperate to take or keep power' don't blow themselves up or shoot at police. Nor do they launch suicidal first strikes... unless you can give examples that show otherwise.
Most every suicide attack in the middle east is about getting and keeping power. When the Taliban straps explosives onto a mentally disabled, drugged young woman, covers her back up with her burka, and sends her into a vegetable market or out in front of a police station to slaughter people, it's entirely about power. About influencing it, projecting it, and destabilizing opposing power. When a young man driving a car full of explosives blows himself up in front of a foreign embassy or hotel, it's about getting and keeping power: he wants his particular slice of culture to be dominant over another slice of culture. To the extent that his slice of culture is informed by medieval-minded religious wackadoo-ness, blowing himself up isn't seen as self-destruction, but as participation in the culture, and as a shortcut to glory and reward. He wants power for him and his cultural niche, and blowing himself up is part of that plan. It's completely irrational, but it's hardly rare, at this point.
One of the ways society identifies shit people, and their fanbois, is by the way they never apologise or show any signs of remorse.
And one of the ways we spot the cloying, invertibrate culture rot that empowers the entitlement-desiring, politically correct twits that think Tweeting Their Outrage is something they should be paid to do is ... hearing how they expect apologies when there is nothing to apologize for.
... issues the warrant. The investigators execute the warrant, do their homework, and return the server. And you think they should apologize. Man, I've got to get one of those "Stop Global Whining" bumper stickers.
A server is used to facilitate a bomb threat. A judge agrees that a warrant in the interests of checking the machine out for clues as to who considers threatening people's deaths in the name of their lefty movement is appropriate takes a few minutes and
You're completely mischaracterizing the prevailing complaints about Al Gore. It's not that he's boring. Quite the opposite, really. On this topic, he's a shrill, shouting, drama queen using pictures of hurricanes coming out of factory cooling towers and talking about the imminent end of civilization even as he carefully constructs complicated financial vehicles and organizations rigged to profit hugely off of the sale of meaningless carbon credits and the like.
Boring? No. Grating, patronizing, hypocritical, and eye-rollingly pedantic about all the wrong stuff, even as he flies around in private aircraft, lives in an energy hog of a mansion, owns multiple gas guzzlers, and uses his wealth to buy a few phony carbon credits so that someone else can do the actual work? Yes.
So, you're going to scold the GP for making an (accurate) observation about indoctrination on this topic in schools, and then you go on to - in a single sentence - talk about how your agenda is being stymied by the War Business, and that name calling is bad. You're funny.
So, what you're saying is that you can't tell the difference between wondering if someone exhibiting a specific behavior is worth giving a second glance under certain circumstances, and actually saying they are terrorists. If you really think that the FBI considers nervous people and photographers, etc., to actually be terrorists, then why aren't you ranting and screaming about the fact that the FBI is aware of millions of terrorsts and doing nothing about them? Oh, I see, you're BS-ing, and deliberately mis-characterizing reality in order to forward the delusional scenario that helps you to maintain your personal posture as Imaginary Brave Guy Who Earns Street Cred With Other Cool People. Just for your reference, it's not working. Nobody rational is going to change what they think based on your disingenuous theatrics.
I'm referring to the sorts of people involved. The implication above (that witless patsies can't be involved in real mass murders) is simply incorrect.
we pay the FBI to stop crime not create it
That's convenient, then. Because they FBI encounters these guys while they are out shopping around for support, supplies, financing, and moral support for what they want to do. They encounter people who have come out saying they want to kill people, they've picked a target, etc. In a recent case, the clown had already cased his targets, shot all sorts of photographs, formed a plan, picked a likely date, etc. We have hours of recordings of agents telling him it's a really bad idea, and him insisting that he wants to do it, and will. That's not the FBI creating a crime.
Because universally these cases turn out to be witless patsies.
Yup, just like the witless patsies that used home-brew explosives they couldn't have made themselves (and which they got from a somewhat mysterious-to-them third party more or less insdistinguishable from the informants the FBI allows them to encounter) to kill hundreds of people in London and Madrid. Just like the witless patsy who - if he hadn't been sweating so much - would have killed hundreds of people over and in Detroit. Those sorts of witless patsies, right? The kind that actually slaughter lots of people in scenarios just like the ones you're pretending don't amount to anything?
The FBI aided the _first_ WTC bomb plot.
The FBI aided Olklahoma City.
So, you're hoping that by making up pure BS, you're doing something constructive?
America is not supposed the land of pissed pants
Who's scared? I'm glad to see people who think that having a bridge blown up for May Day in support of the Occupy call for "Global Disruption" are also dumb enough to be savvy when their bomb-shopping takes them to an informant, and allows them to demonstrate their willingness and desire to kill people. Leeches? Let's start with the entitlement minded faux-anarchist adolescent twits who think they're being cool by lining up a little death and destruction to impress their prospective girlfriends back at the sit-in at Occupy Cleveland.
So, how do you think you're helping to make your point or persuade anyone of anything when you're just BS-ing on the face of it? I mean, really - what do you think that's actually accomplishing?
He had the steganography tools with him, as well. These guys are a very odd mix of somewhat clever and adolescently stupid in the extreme.
It was anti-semantic people like you that were responsible for the destruction of the first one. Please stop.
Ok, so all they have to do is check 200 people. Say, one every 30 seconds?
we will be drunk and clumsy. and in those situations, whether or not a gun is in easy reach radically changes the outcome of the situation
Yeah, just like with kitchen knives and car keys, right?
Meat cleavers don't kill people, people with meat cleavers do. Right? The presence and purpose of a kitchen knife clearly has moral weight, don't you think? The knife is meant to render things apart. To cut holes in things, to chop things, to remove meat from bones, and such. What moral value are you assigning to that destructive device, while being so capricious about guns? I've never shot anybody, though I've used guns thousands of times. I have, though, ended a very violent situation by brandishing a gun, and thus saving myself and another from certain damage and quite possible death. I've used guns to kill a venomous snake likely to injure or kill a domestic animal. I've used guns untold times to put dinner on the table.
flimsy easily dismantled logic
You're operating on completely muddled premises, plenty of ignorance, and a heaping dose of disingenous cherry picking.
the purpose and presence of the tool matters
No, what you do with it matters. If you think you're the type who can't trust yourself around a shotgun, a chain saw, large kitchen knives, a gallon of gasoline, or behind someone standing at the edge of a train station platform, then you should remove those temptations and tools from your own weak presence. Simple as that. If you know you can't stop yourself from hurting someone with a tool when you get drunk, then your sober awareness that you have the item around is again you acting. Deliberately. The tool doesn't cause you to use it, ever.
it is not technically a Nobel itself
I think it's safe to say that many of the actual Nobel prizes of late should also not be thought of as genuine.
They were clearly wrong to make a diagnosis of monkey pox.
They didn't make a diagnosis of monkeypox. They reacted to a hospital employee's considered opinion that it might be monkeypox, and did the standard thing you do to see whether or not it is. It wasn't. They didn't diagnoise it as such.
.. "It's a shame that now hundreds of thousands of people are scared by an actual very contagious disease that is actually spreading from the passengers on that plane, but at least we didn't scare only the passengers on the plane when we heard a report of a person covered with pussy sores flying out of Uganda.
What would you be saying if a planeload of people who did have monkeypox were busy spreading it around all of their familiy members, coworkers, fellow students, bus passengers and everyone else because the very sort of conjecture you think was lame at the hospital was lame in the opposite direction at the CDC? You'd be saying, what
Even a first year med student should have been able to do better than this.
What would they do better? Conclude that pussy sores on a person leaving a tropical area known for monkeypox are just nothing to worry about? Because that's all they had to go on until they could see the person in person. In a big metal tube that person had just been sharing for hours with a couple hundred other people.
An intelligent response would have been to first verify the symptoms
Which you would have done how ... by preventing people from leaving the plane until you could check her out, right? Right. That's what they actually did.
Hell, they could have called the passenger herself to ask about her symptoms.
So, you're will to risk a big outbreak of a very nasty tropical disease by gambling that the passenger in question will answer her cell phone once they touch down, but before anyone else is allowed to leave the plane, and that if it sounds like the pox in question, that in the five minutes or so you have left before they deplane, you're then going to scramble the authorities to contain the problem?
consequences which would be unlikely to occur in most other countries
So, most other countries, finding out that a passenger on an inbound flight from Uganda is exhibiting signs of what could be the highly contagious monkeypox ... just shrug their shoulders? You know that's not true.
I'm only just now using devices ready for usb 3.0, and here comes another one.
by the time you hit the age of 18 then it is unlikely you will live a long and free life here
Citation, please. Or at least some non-rabid babbling, if you can muster it.
One way to avoid a premature death is to make sure that you don't die of a horrible tropical disease you've picked up from someone spreading it around in an aircraft on their way back from Uganda. But thanks for the really insightful perspective.
Friendly clue from Europe:
Yes! Let's be more like Europe!
No. Let's not. We have enough trouble running a productive economy as-is, without further drowning in an even larger entitlement nightmare and crushing, productivity-killing tax and regulatory environment. Once the Germans finally get eveyone else in the EU straightened out - at an inconceivable cost to every German - maybe we can revisit this. But by the time all that dust is settled, any viable-looking European economy won't be operated much like it is now. Because the way it's set up now has proven to be unsustainable. Being born owed things, and asserting that someone else always pays for everything is: death. And dying is exactly what's happening to the European economy.
And one of the reasons for that is the embrace of electoral systems and results that prevent any sort of working mandate, and which grant un-earned power to groups representing only a few percent of the voters. No, I don't want advice from people who run things that way, thanks.
What is par for the course? The dismantling of companies like Virgin by evil US investors?
The meme I'm referring to is that nice popular one, where venture investors don't build anything, don't see the money they risk ever put to good use, and that nothing good comes from them pushing small or dying companies into a healthy, viable condition. That's pure BS, on the face of it. But that image, that meme, is trotted around as if it were true - all because people who don't have money to invest and who don't understand how it works resent and villify those who do. The GP played that card in this scenario specifically to keep that false meme alive, to hope that it will keep rattling around in discussions as if it were an accurate portrayal of reality. Why? People have different reasons for wanting to lie about other people. Hard to say. Regardless of his motivation, it's worth calling him on it, and pointing out that it's false.