Okay - but if this method is so foolproof, why not allow drinks on board, as long as the passenger sips a bit?
Because this whole issue is just a few days old, and assessing the risks and training thousands of agents to appropriately make those judgements/policies work is completely out of the question on such short notice. In the meantime, you've got a plot that was literally about to be executed (on 8/16) and quite a few people involved still at large. Don't you think it's reasonable to let this hash out for a little while, and start thinking about the technology and personnel training that needs to be in place before re-allowing containers of liquid back in the passenger compartments?
It's easy to say "anything's worth it to save the risk of one life" - but that's actually not true. If people were willing to give up things in order to avoid the risk, you can do that already by not getting on a plane.
I completely agree, and it's certainly a personal value judgement. And it would really bug me to have to check my camera gear. To the point of probably FedEx-ing it ahead to my destination, rather than checking the hardware as luggage.
However, we're mere days since this thing erupted, and a day away from the date the charming fellows were planning to actually execute their attack. I think it's a little early to be shouting "the terrorists have won" because of changed carry-on rules that are this fresh and lacking the benefit of some more practical use.
I think I'm less commenting on the frustration/boredom (believe me, I get it) than I am on the reflexive "this is just because the government wants us all to hate our lives" comments that are so prevalent here.
The rest think terrorists are just craaaaazy and do things for no reason.
No, they definitely had their reasons for killing a couple hundred Spaniards. They had been pounding the table, angry at having their jihaddi paradise and franchise training center (Taliban-run Afghanistan) taken away from them. Insisting that the west's interests in not seeing yet another similar arrangement come to power was not somehow reasonable, and having already promised to make European civilians pay for acting in a way contrary to Al Queda's interests, they had to deliver or lose even more face. Madrid was a good target because the guys who performed the act had ease of movement in that country and good connections that weren't being as aggressively tracked as they were in Italy, or Germany, or the UK. Has it occurred to you that cause and effect are in play, but that the idealogy of the people using terror to win more jihaddi hearts and minds are, in fact, also a little crazy?
OK, fine sentiment. Now, do you have any obligation (to your family, for example) to take into account people who expressly say that their objective is the restoration of a multi-contintent Islamic caliphate, and who recruit young suicide bombers from suburbia to make their point through mass murder?
We're not talking about kids from Afghanistan, we're talking about kids raised in, say, suburban London. Should your kids care that those kids are being taught that your daughters should be thought of as property? Or that democracy is "un-Islamic?" Or that sharia law should govern things like your marriage? Because those kids do live in western cities, and are getting that sort of poison poured in their ears.
Pretending that there is no objectively better world view than that which is being crammed into the brains of yet another generation of vulnerable, wound-up young men by the retrograde, mysoginistic theocracy that's running their social life (even in the middle of Amsterdam or Detroit) is a huge disservice to your kids. Lack of perfection in the execution of our every move as a culture and an economy does not make it unwise to deal with a demonstrably toxic culture that actually celebrates the death of people just like you and your kids. It is your freedoms that they hate, because that's not how they want their kids to grow up (literate, thinking, voting, and less inclined to attribute everything to Allah at every turn). The ongoing prosperity of our culture, despite it standing for everything that those mullahs say is the devil's work, makes it very difficult to maintain the status quo - and that means striking at, and making a show of trying to tear down that which they fear continues to attract the younger people in their own society. Should your family operate in the world as if none of that was brewing, and doing so in a part of the world flush with cash because they have a bottomless market for the one exportable asset they have (oil)? If you think we can't and shouldn't do two things at once, or that since there are such things as burglars or rapists living in western countries that we shouldn't sweat Iran saying that Israel should be "wiped off the map" or Zawahiri reminding us that it might still take a few years before they can return Spain to its prior status as a Islamic caliphate... you're just putting your head in the sand.
It doesn't matter if that crap sounds crazy, it's the very stuff that's being used to motivate and recruit kids that actually are building bombs, buying thousands of disposable cell phones, and all sorts of other subtle little things that are exactly the sort of precursors that led up to 9/11. And while you're worrying about your family duty, you're forgetting about the thousands of families that were permanently damaged by the acts of the people you're not so worried about. Actions? Injustices? Injustice is the nature of the people we're talking about - and the last time they had a country of their own to run, it was used as a financial and logistical operating base for the attacks that killed 3000 people and wrecked many times that many lives.
If you're uncomfortable with taking action against the more hardcore nutcase jihaddis because there are identifiable defective people living within our own society, then how can you justify any action outside your own family? Why worry about the people setting up a violent crack-dealing ring a few doors down - that's not your family, right? Or, if that's close enough to worry about, what about the taxes you pay to your state to take care of the crack dealer that's 10 miles away? 100 miles? It's a global economy, and living in a village doesn't work any more.
and at what point is the government tormenting women and children and keeping students from reading books make you feel wrong about what they are doing???
Please cite an example of the TSA "tormenting women and children." And, just for fun, since you brought up that demographic, keep in mind the idealogy of the people that are driving the jihadist mindset that makes all of this an issue. Remember how that framework most recently expressed itself when it had free reign? That would have been Afghanistan, as ruled by the Taliban. You know: the kind folks that actually tormented women and children. By prohibiting mothers from teaching their daughters to read, on pain of death. By executing women for having been raped. By dragging women out into what used to be a soccer field at lunchtime and shooting them in the head in front of a crowd for... daring to try to work to feed their families. That is tormenting women and children.
Making sure that someone carrying a bottle of something onto a plane when a group of people working on explosives specifically in that format, including at least one pregnant woman and another with an infant were about to use such to take down a bunch of planes...? That's "torment"? By what measure?
by making the public worrie about death by terorists and telling them they can't bring anything on the plain or take pictures of buildings "western culture" is already lost..
So, specifically, what would you do? If your notion of western culture doesn't include preventing people from taking weapons on airplanes, are you saying that we shouldn't bother with any precautions? Live free or die, right? So, no speed limits, no worries about just-released long-time felons buying handguns, and anyone that wants to run a mai-order anthrax lab should (since they are doing so here in our freedom-loving western culture) be free to do so, right? Right? Or are there some precautions you're willing to take? Say, traffic lights? Or does "Don't Tread On Me" include defying any attempt to control when and how you stop your car at intersections?
Don't be absurd. Are you suggesting that since car travel can't be made perfectly safe while driving over 1kph, that we should just waive any traffic controls whatsoever? Might as well let people drive 300kph jet cars through town, since driving 60kph isn't perfectly safe, right?
Doesn't stop you from having a 2-part bottle. The top 1/3 would be regular formula and the bottom 2/3 would be dangerous liquid. Maybe seperated by a thin layer of hardened wax.
Which is exactly why they're banning containers of liquids, and looking very closely at those that need to be let on board for other reasons. A proper x-ray/mri-type inspection of a milk container will show the double-container trick. It takes time to gear up for and train for that sort of thing.
Somebody who pitches a hissy fit over the term "redneck".
You're missing the point. I don't care if someone calls someone else (or me) a "redneck." I'm trying to understand why the comment to which I responded seemed to imply that "especially" rednecks prepare to defend themselves while hauling freight across the country. It's a non-sequitor, so I'm looking for a little clarity on that somewhat loaded comment, that's all.
Why can't man's best friend, the K-9, sniff out these liquid explosives instead of buying a $250,000 "puffer"?
First, because they aren't explosives until they've been combined from more stable parts into the more volatile explosive compounds. So, you're training a dog to detect things that might become part of an explosive at some later time. Not implausible, just a lot more complex. You'd probably need multiple dogs trained for each family of components and pass each load of luggage with multiple dogs, multiple times.
Even then, don't forget that part of what the "puffer" does is stir up the surface of the object(s) being checked. Puffs of air hitting a bag would also make it easier for Fido to do his work, for all the same reasons is makes a mechanical sensor more effective.
Do you honestly think they would blanche at sipping a little bit of the crap to get past security? It's unlikely to kill them (or even cause vomiting) instantly after all. And acting a bit strange about having to do it isn't unusual either.
At least think a little bit before you post. I'll buy you nice dinner if you can post a video of yourself drinking acetone or high-strength peroxide and keeping a smiling, straight face. What will really happen is that you'll immediately be either violently frothing at the mouth as the peroxide reacts with all that organic material, or you'll be aspirating acetone funes and coughing like crazy.
When you're on the road alone all the time, you carry protection, especially if you're a redneck.
Ah. So, truckers from New Hampshire or Oregon or New Jersey don't feel the need to protect themselves? What, they're too metrosexual to own a firearm? Out of curiosity, how exactly to you define "redneck?" Someone dumber than you are? Someone not afraid to get their hands dirty? Someone with a southern accent? Someone who makes six figures driving millions of dollars worth of expensive prototype electronics to a trade show in Vegas?
The answer: live out your life because living in fear of tomorrow is worse than dying today.
That's a false choice. Undertaking precautions when stuff three hundred people into a giant flying metal tube that will hurtle over dense population centers is not "living in fear." It's being rational, especially when you're dealing with people who are willing to (want to!) die while killing you. So, you take precautions, and keep working on the deployable tech that will help to mitigate the risks. You make it sound like everyone must either quake in their shoes all day, or simply give up and resign themselves to regularly losing hundreds of people to the Islamist PR machine. There's a middle ground, there, and it involves not being so skittish about paying attention to who's getting on the plane, and with what.
People need to realise that the chance of being killed by terrorists is minimal and nothing to worry about (you don't worry about crossing the road do you?).
I guess we'd have to do some homework, but it's a pretty good bet that nearly 3,000 people did not also die while crossing the street in New York on 9/11.
Likewise, it's a pretty good bet that there are very rarely days when 200 Spaniards die while crossing the street in Madrid. Or when hundreds burn alive in Bali nightclubs from standard-issue accidents.
Do you really think that if we just stopped bothering with security and were just "friendly" to everyone instead that there would be no attacks against western culture?
Malhmold is not the only person who thinks the goals were larger than humiliating Hezbolla.
What are you talking about? The Israelis never said they want to humiliate them. They said they want to crush them, disarm them, and remove them from the south of the country they're infesting with the militants and arms that are supplied by Iran through Syria (and which are so routinely shot at Israel).
The UN's years-old resolution for the disarming of Hezbollah is completely toothless and has achieved nothing. The Lebanese police and military have been not allowed to enter or influence events in the south of their own country because the foreign-backed militants there are too powerful. Dedicated to the destruction of a neighboring country, and completely unworried about the UN doing anything about them, is it any wonder that the Israelis decided that the latest cross-border attack killing a group of their soldiers and dragging two more back into Lebanon was the last straw? It's not about humiliating them (especially since they have no shame) - it's about stopping them. Permanently.
If anyone needs humiliating, it's their proxy sponsor, Iran.
But seriously, MS does not care much who uses the software and for what, as long as they pay through the roof for it. MSN and Yahoo have no problem helping the Chinese put dissidents in jail, either.
Whereas the folks at Ubuntu are discouraging the Iranian government from using their software... how? I can't seem to find any press releast or PR bit that suggests that totalitarian, fascist theocracies shouldn't further their oppression by using their distro.
Then you quickly run into the homunculus argument and that's slippery. At what point does complexity give rise to "mind"?
See, the beauty of my armchair bio-sophistry, here, is that I don't have to be able to point at a particular degree of complexity or set of environmental/developmental circumstances and say, "Riiiiight... THERE! That's where/when mind happens." All I have to do is say that a single strand of DNA cannot handle it, as it sits. Which was my point, really. Just because complexity IS required (obviously), doesn't mean I have to nail down the particulars for my sentiment to be essentially correct. Of course, it's Friday afternoon, and my DNA's expression of alcohol-ready metabolism may be playing a role, here.
Funny how we can talk of "mind" as opposed to "brain" and nobody raises an eyebrow. The idea of consciousness is not that far removed from the idea that DNA is selecting host animals.
It's a question of degree of complexity. There simply isn't enough processing horsepower in a single cell to provide the framework for what we comfortably refer to as a mind. So, I would actually would "raise an eyebrow" is someone attributed cognition and volition to a strand of DNA, but have no trouble assigning "mind" capabilities to very complex brains. DNA doesn't select host animals, it either succeeds or doesn't in the host into which it's placed. That's a world of difference.
... in the sense that these are not the dogs' own cells. This is much more like the dog being a petri dish for a parasitic cell that's being physically passed along, almost like bacteria. The cells just set up shop in the new dog's tissues.
Slightly annoying, in TFA, is the notion that "DNA will try anything to reproduce itself." That might want to read more like "just about everything happens to DNA as it's cloned, and sometimes the mutations work better, and sometimes they fail." There's nothing worse than anthropomorphizing your description of cellular mechanics.
Why wait until the suspects have already been arrested and are in custody to issue the terror alert? Was there less danger when they were at large? Or was this just an opportunity to spread a little election-year fear and trepidation?
Because they were watching all of the people in this group very closely (for months), and to announce measures to counter a very specific threat before they were ready to scoop all of these people up would have immediately tipped them off. The idea was to follow all of this up the food chain as far as possible into Pakistan while still being ready to stop these guys the moment it looked that they were actually getting ready to deploy.
There was less danger while they were at large, because they didn't know they were being watched, and weren't ready to walk on a plane. They were apprehended because they did start to gear up for walking onto a plane.
Spread election-year trepidation? Hardly. If you're than cynical, why not wonder why they didn't let a couple thousand people die? That would have done even more, right? Right... that's BS, of course. MI5 swooped in as soon is was clear they were about to start climbing on planes for smuggling rehersal flights. The bad guys set the timetable unless other events shift the priorities. The NSA had these guys talking to their overseas handlers, and MI5 was listening in on their meetings and local calls, and they knew it was time. Zawahiri's latest tirade also signalled that the AQ PR machine was starting to warm up, so it all sort of falls together, and it's time to do something. And they did, and good thing, too.
I travel frequently. I check bags and carry things on with me. I've never had a problem in either scenario, luggage-contents-wise. I did make the mistake of buying a one-way return ticket from an open-ended trip with a debit card, though. That means I always get the Super Duper Inspection Line at the airport when flying towards DC. But then, I'm a large guy with long hair, so they always like to look me over anyway!
Yes, I'd rather keep my laptop and camera gear within arm's reach. Luckily I don't have to carry any liquid, since the flight attendants are always willing to serve up water for free.
How do you define yourself, anyway? Religious zealot, generalized red state idiot, or what, exactly?
At least I don't define myself as "coward," but that's your own problem.
Religious zealot? Nope - I find religion to be a dangerous, and childish anachronism. Red state? Nope, I live in a state that wouldn't vote "red" even if John Kerry were back on the "blue" ballot. What, exactly? Umm... someone, in the context of my earlier, sardonic comment, finds Al Gore to be an annoying, condescending, scolding blowhard who cannot shed his many absurd tantrums and rhetorical excesses long enough or well enough to permit anyone to evaluate his newest money-making venture (scary movies) objectively.
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Okay - but if this method is so foolproof, why not allow drinks on board, as long as the passenger sips a bit?
Because this whole issue is just a few days old, and assessing the risks and training thousands of agents to appropriately make those judgements/policies work is completely out of the question on such short notice. In the meantime, you've got a plot that was literally about to be executed (on 8/16) and quite a few people involved still at large. Don't you think it's reasonable to let this hash out for a little while, and start thinking about the technology and personnel training that needs to be in place before re-allowing containers of liquid back in the passenger compartments?
It's easy to say "anything's worth it to save the risk of one life" - but that's actually not true. If people were willing to give up things in order to avoid the risk, you can do that already by not getting on a plane.
I completely agree, and it's certainly a personal value judgement. And it would really bug me to have to check my camera gear. To the point of probably FedEx-ing it ahead to my destination, rather than checking the hardware as luggage.
However, we're mere days since this thing erupted, and a day away from the date the charming fellows were planning to actually execute their attack. I think it's a little early to be shouting "the terrorists have won" because of changed carry-on rules that are this fresh and lacking the benefit of some more practical use.
I think I'm less commenting on the frustration/boredom (believe me, I get it) than I am on the reflexive "this is just because the government wants us all to hate our lives" comments that are so prevalent here.
The rest think terrorists are just craaaaazy and do things for no reason.
No, they definitely had their reasons for killing a couple hundred Spaniards. They had been pounding the table, angry at having their jihaddi paradise and franchise training center (Taliban-run Afghanistan) taken away from them. Insisting that the west's interests in not seeing yet another similar arrangement come to power was not somehow reasonable, and having already promised to make European civilians pay for acting in a way contrary to Al Queda's interests, they had to deliver or lose even more face. Madrid was a good target because the guys who performed the act had ease of movement in that country and good connections that weren't being as aggressively tracked as they were in Italy, or Germany, or the UK. Has it occurred to you that cause and effect are in play, but that the idealogy of the people using terror to win more jihaddi hearts and minds are, in fact, also a little crazy?
OK, fine sentiment. Now, do you have any obligation (to your family, for example) to take into account people who expressly say that their objective is the restoration of a multi-contintent Islamic caliphate, and who recruit young suicide bombers from suburbia to make their point through mass murder?
We're not talking about kids from Afghanistan, we're talking about kids raised in, say, suburban London. Should your kids care that those kids are being taught that your daughters should be thought of as property? Or that democracy is "un-Islamic?" Or that sharia law should govern things like your marriage? Because those kids do live in western cities, and are getting that sort of poison poured in their ears.
Pretending that there is no objectively better world view than that which is being crammed into the brains of yet another generation of vulnerable, wound-up young men by the retrograde, mysoginistic theocracy that's running their social life (even in the middle of Amsterdam or Detroit) is a huge disservice to your kids. Lack of perfection in the execution of our every move as a culture and an economy does not make it unwise to deal with a demonstrably toxic culture that actually celebrates the death of people just like you and your kids. It is your freedoms that they hate, because that's not how they want their kids to grow up (literate, thinking, voting, and less inclined to attribute everything to Allah at every turn). The ongoing prosperity of our culture, despite it standing for everything that those mullahs say is the devil's work, makes it very difficult to maintain the status quo - and that means striking at, and making a show of trying to tear down that which they fear continues to attract the younger people in their own society. Should your family operate in the world as if none of that was brewing, and doing so in a part of the world flush with cash because they have a bottomless market for the one exportable asset they have (oil)? If you think we can't and shouldn't do two things at once, or that since there are such things as burglars or rapists living in western countries that we shouldn't sweat Iran saying that Israel should be "wiped off the map" or Zawahiri reminding us that it might still take a few years before they can return Spain to its prior status as a Islamic caliphate... you're just putting your head in the sand.
It doesn't matter if that crap sounds crazy, it's the very stuff that's being used to motivate and recruit kids that actually are building bombs, buying thousands of disposable cell phones, and all sorts of other subtle little things that are exactly the sort of precursors that led up to 9/11. And while you're worrying about your family duty, you're forgetting about the thousands of families that were permanently damaged by the acts of the people you're not so worried about. Actions? Injustices? Injustice is the nature of the people we're talking about - and the last time they had a country of their own to run, it was used as a financial and logistical operating base for the attacks that killed 3000 people and wrecked many times that many lives.
If you're uncomfortable with taking action against the more hardcore nutcase jihaddis because there are identifiable defective people living within our own society, then how can you justify any action outside your own family? Why worry about the people setting up a violent crack-dealing ring a few doors down - that's not your family, right? Or, if that's close enough to worry about, what about the taxes you pay to your state to take care of the crack dealer that's 10 miles away? 100 miles? It's a global economy, and living in a village doesn't work any more.
Seems to have worked for Canada and a host of other Western countries.
You mean Canada?
Or do you only count successful attacks?
Or perhaps you mean places like Spain? The families of a couple hundred commuters there would probably disagree with your thoughts on that.
and at what point is the government tormenting women and children and keeping students from reading books make you feel wrong about what they are doing???
Please cite an example of the TSA "tormenting women and children." And, just for fun, since you brought up that demographic, keep in mind the idealogy of the people that are driving the jihadist mindset that makes all of this an issue. Remember how that framework most recently expressed itself when it had free reign? That would have been Afghanistan, as ruled by the Taliban. You know: the kind folks that actually tormented women and children. By prohibiting mothers from teaching their daughters to read, on pain of death. By executing women for having been raped. By dragging women out into what used to be a soccer field at lunchtime and shooting them in the head in front of a crowd for... daring to try to work to feed their families. That is tormenting women and children.
Making sure that someone carrying a bottle of something onto a plane when a group of people working on explosives specifically in that format, including at least one pregnant woman and another with an infant were about to use such to take down a bunch of planes...? That's "torment"? By what measure?
by making the public worrie about death by terorists and telling them they can't bring anything on the plain or take pictures of buildings "western culture" is already lost..
So, specifically, what would you do? If your notion of western culture doesn't include preventing people from taking weapons on airplanes, are you saying that we shouldn't bother with any precautions? Live free or die, right? So, no speed limits, no worries about just-released long-time felons buying handguns, and anyone that wants to run a mai-order anthrax lab should (since they are doing so here in our freedom-loving western culture) be free to do so, right? Right? Or are there some precautions you're willing to take? Say, traffic lights? Or does "Don't Tread On Me" include defying any attempt to control when and how you stop your car at intersections?
Don't be absurd. Are you suggesting that since car travel can't be made perfectly safe while driving over 1kph, that we should just waive any traffic controls whatsoever? Might as well let people drive 300kph jet cars through town, since driving 60kph isn't perfectly safe, right?
Use reason, here.
Doesn't stop you from having a 2-part bottle. The top 1/3 would be regular formula and the bottom 2/3 would be dangerous liquid. Maybe seperated by a thin layer of hardened wax.
Which is exactly why they're banning containers of liquids, and looking very closely at those that need to be let on board for other reasons. A proper x-ray/mri-type inspection of a milk container will show the double-container trick. It takes time to gear up for and train for that sort of thing.
Somebody who pitches a hissy fit over the term "redneck".
You're missing the point. I don't care if someone calls someone else (or me) a "redneck." I'm trying to understand why the comment to which I responded seemed to imply that "especially" rednecks prepare to defend themselves while hauling freight across the country. It's a non-sequitor, so I'm looking for a little clarity on that somewhat loaded comment, that's all.
Why can't man's best friend, the K-9, sniff out these liquid explosives instead of buying a $250,000 "puffer"?
First, because they aren't explosives until they've been combined from more stable parts into the more volatile explosive compounds. So, you're training a dog to detect things that might become part of an explosive at some later time. Not implausible, just a lot more complex. You'd probably need multiple dogs trained for each family of components and pass each load of luggage with multiple dogs, multiple times.
Even then, don't forget that part of what the "puffer" does is stir up the surface of the object(s) being checked. Puffs of air hitting a bag would also make it easier for Fido to do his work, for all the same reasons is makes a mechanical sensor more effective.
Do you honestly think they would blanche at sipping a little bit of the crap to get past security? It's unlikely to kill them (or even cause vomiting) instantly after all. And acting a bit strange about having to do it isn't unusual either.
At least think a little bit before you post. I'll buy you nice dinner if you can post a video of yourself drinking acetone or high-strength peroxide and keeping a smiling, straight face. What will really happen is that you'll immediately be either violently frothing at the mouth as the peroxide reacts with all that organic material, or you'll be aspirating acetone funes and coughing like crazy.
You're just plain wrong on this, sorry.
When you're on the road alone all the time, you carry protection, especially if you're a redneck.
Ah. So, truckers from New Hampshire or Oregon or New Jersey don't feel the need to protect themselves? What, they're too metrosexual to own a firearm? Out of curiosity, how exactly to you define "redneck?" Someone dumber than you are? Someone not afraid to get their hands dirty? Someone with a southern accent? Someone who makes six figures driving millions of dollars worth of expensive prototype electronics to a trade show in Vegas?
The answer: live out your life because living in fear of tomorrow is worse than dying today.
That's a false choice. Undertaking precautions when stuff three hundred people into a giant flying metal tube that will hurtle over dense population centers is not "living in fear." It's being rational, especially when you're dealing with people who are willing to (want to!) die while killing you. So, you take precautions, and keep working on the deployable tech that will help to mitigate the risks. You make it sound like everyone must either quake in their shoes all day, or simply give up and resign themselves to regularly losing hundreds of people to the Islamist PR machine. There's a middle ground, there, and it involves not being so skittish about paying attention to who's getting on the plane, and with what.
People need to realise that the chance of being killed by terrorists is minimal and nothing to worry about (you don't worry about crossing the road do you?).
I guess we'd have to do some homework, but it's a pretty good bet that nearly 3,000 people did not also die while crossing the street in New York on 9/11.
Likewise, it's a pretty good bet that there are very rarely days when 200 Spaniards die while crossing the street in Madrid. Or when hundreds burn alive in Bali nightclubs from standard-issue accidents.
Do you really think that if we just stopped bothering with security and were just "friendly" to everyone instead that there would be no attacks against western culture?
Malhmold is not the only person who thinks the goals were larger than humiliating Hezbolla.
What are you talking about? The Israelis never said they want to humiliate them. They said they want to crush them, disarm them, and remove them from the south of the country they're infesting with the militants and arms that are supplied by Iran through Syria (and which are so routinely shot at Israel).
The UN's years-old resolution for the disarming of Hezbollah is completely toothless and has achieved nothing. The Lebanese police and military have been not allowed to enter or influence events in the south of their own country because the foreign-backed militants there are too powerful. Dedicated to the destruction of a neighboring country, and completely unworried about the UN doing anything about them, is it any wonder that the Israelis decided that the latest cross-border attack killing a group of their soldiers and dragging two more back into Lebanon was the last straw? It's not about humiliating them (especially since they have no shame) - it's about stopping them. Permanently.
If anyone needs humiliating, it's their proxy sponsor, Iran.
But seriously, MS does not care much who uses the software and for what, as long as they pay through the roof for it. MSN and Yahoo have no problem helping the Chinese put dissidents in jail, either.
Whereas the folks at Ubuntu are discouraging the Iranian government from using their software... how? I can't seem to find any press releast or PR bit that suggests that totalitarian, fascist theocracies shouldn't further their oppression by using their distro.
Then you quickly run into the homunculus argument and that's slippery. At what point does complexity give rise to "mind"?
See, the beauty of my armchair bio-sophistry, here, is that I don't have to be able to point at a particular degree of complexity or set of environmental/developmental circumstances and say, "Riiiiight... THERE! That's where/when mind happens." All I have to do is say that a single strand of DNA cannot handle it, as it sits. Which was my point, really. Just because complexity IS required (obviously), doesn't mean I have to nail down the particulars for my sentiment to be essentially correct. Of course, it's Friday afternoon, and my DNA's expression of alcohol-ready metabolism may be playing a role, here.
So not true. DNA likes it when you do that.
Huh. I just tried to reproduce your DNA joke, but it mutated.
Or having your leg chewed off by a wolverine.
I've had all four of my legs chewed off by wolverines, you insensitive clod!
OK, so maybe a few things are worse than assigning a personality to a strand of DNA. I'll buy that.
Funny how we can talk of "mind" as opposed to "brain" and nobody raises an eyebrow. The idea of consciousness is not that far removed from the idea that DNA is selecting host animals.
It's a question of degree of complexity. There simply isn't enough processing horsepower in a single cell to provide the framework for what we comfortably refer to as a mind. So, I would actually would "raise an eyebrow" is someone attributed cognition and volition to a strand of DNA, but have no trouble assigning "mind" capabilities to very complex brains. DNA doesn't select host animals, it either succeeds or doesn't in the host into which it's placed. That's a world of difference.
... in the sense that these are not the dogs' own cells. This is much more like the dog being a petri dish for a parasitic cell that's being physically passed along, almost like bacteria. The cells just set up shop in the new dog's tissues.
Slightly annoying, in TFA, is the notion that "DNA will try anything to reproduce itself." That might want to read more like "just about everything happens to DNA as it's cloned, and sometimes the mutations work better, and sometimes they fail." There's nothing worse than anthropomorphizing your description of cellular mechanics.
Why wait until the suspects have already been arrested and are in custody to issue the terror alert? Was there less danger when they were at large? Or was this just an opportunity to spread a little election-year fear and trepidation?
Because they were watching all of the people in this group very closely (for months), and to announce measures to counter a very specific threat before they were ready to scoop all of these people up would have immediately tipped them off. The idea was to follow all of this up the food chain as far as possible into Pakistan while still being ready to stop these guys the moment it looked that they were actually getting ready to deploy.
There was less danger while they were at large, because they didn't know they were being watched, and weren't ready to walk on a plane. They were apprehended because they did start to gear up for walking onto a plane.
Spread election-year trepidation? Hardly. If you're than cynical, why not wonder why they didn't let a couple thousand people die? That would have done even more, right? Right... that's BS, of course. MI5 swooped in as soon is was clear they were about to start climbing on planes for smuggling rehersal flights. The bad guys set the timetable unless other events shift the priorities. The NSA had these guys talking to their overseas handlers, and MI5 was listening in on their meetings and local calls, and they knew it was time. Zawahiri's latest tirade also signalled that the AQ PR machine was starting to warm up, so it all sort of falls together, and it's time to do something. And they did, and good thing, too.
You haven't flown recently, have you?
I travel frequently. I check bags and carry things on with me. I've never had a problem in either scenario, luggage-contents-wise. I did make the mistake of buying a one-way return ticket from an open-ended trip with a debit card, though. That means I always get the Super Duper Inspection Line at the airport when flying towards DC. But then, I'm a large guy with long hair, so they always like to look me over anyway!
Yes, I'd rather keep my laptop and camera gear within arm's reach. Luckily I don't have to carry any liquid, since the flight attendants are always willing to serve up water for free.
How do you define yourself, anyway? Religious zealot, generalized red state idiot, or what, exactly?
At least I don't define myself as "coward," but that's your own problem.
Religious zealot? Nope - I find religion to be a dangerous, and childish anachronism. Red state? Nope, I live in a state that wouldn't vote "red" even if John Kerry were back on the "blue" ballot. What, exactly? Umm... someone, in the context of my earlier, sardonic comment, finds Al Gore to be an annoying, condescending, scolding blowhard who cannot shed his many absurd tantrums and rhetorical excesses long enough or well enough to permit anyone to evaluate his newest money-making venture (scary movies) objectively.