Miscellaneous And Off Topic Subjects

[Jeff Buchanan]

Terrain, Stan, Terrain.

[UMStan White]

My best friend worked for Burns Security guarding the ROTC building because the members of ROTC couldn't do it! :-) (well, he did check the locks on the ROTC building at night while a guard for Burns Security.) It was a very tumultuous time and it had to be harder to be a member of ROTC than a member of the anti-war movement. Don't get me wrong--I have tremendous respect for you for the choices you made.

[entropy]

"I'd expect if he uses force, it will be over whelming.. he will want to say Russia did what the US couldn't in 14 yrs."

You forget how badly Russia fared in Afghanistan--a major clue that we would fail as well.

I guess I assumed Syria has a different terrain than Afghanistan... so he wouldn't have those same issues. Doesn't mean he wouldn't fail, but just the problems Russia had in Afghanistan would not exist in Syria.

[entropy]

baby boomers... the start of our cultural decay. Discuss.

[iam416]

And frankly I'm pretty disgusted that, like Hack said, we encouraged a civil war to break out in Syria, we caused Iraq's society to fall part, and the House now votes to block refugees from both conflicts from entering America.

I think that was me that said that. Though, at this stage in the game I pretty much blame the current government for the Syria mess. There has been a number of decision tree points that, IMO, they fucked up. That doesn't excuse Iraq or, for that matter, the Treaty of Versailles. But 7 years in, I focus my blame on the current President (and that's why I think it takes a lot of chutzpah for him to chastise others for not caring about these people).

But anywho, it's a fucking mess.

[hack]

Far out of my comfort zone, but what they've been doing for the past 15 years here is rolling over when that invasion starts, and then popping up to begin the war of attrition and wait for us to lose hearts and minds. They're not gonna stand there waiting to be plowed down. They're not even going to try to hold the territory, right?

[Mike]

Far out of my comfort zone, but what they've been doing for the past 15 years here is rolling over when that invasion starts, and then popping up to begin the war of attrition and wait for us to lose hearts and minds. They're not gonna stand there waiting to be plowed down. They're not even going to try to hold the territory, right?

100% correct. The biggest obstacle to acheiving our goals militarily is that we are not at war with another military. We, the US and Western allies, like to approach ME policy as if we're dealing with seperate countries. We aren't. The ME is a vast desert shithole filled with areas that are predominantly Sunni, Shia, Kurdish, Pashtun, etc. The people who inhabit those areas identify as such and not by the imaginary lines drawn in the sand by the West.

The playbook is out on how to "beat" the Americans as Hack summed up. Eventually we'll have to have it out with them. And by "them" I mean the ME as a whole in a real war, not this watered down bullshit of the past 14 years. W. Bush once said "we'll make no distinction between the terrorists and those who harbor them". I beleive that directive was ignored before he finished the sentence.

[Da Geezer]

Goodness, you sit out a couple of hours and you miss a lot.

btw.. I don't know the answer, but does the US have a quota in total? by country? Some of the details are unknown to me though I know my own company has sponsored citizenship in the past. If someone has insight, please share.

This kind of goes with my belief in unlimited legal immigration. To answer precisely, I believe there is a quota for H1B visas that are given to, for example, foreign PhD graduates in the hard sciences, math or any other area where the US does not produce enough graduates on it's own. Last I heard it is about 70,000 yearly. As for other immigration, it is no longer by country, or at least the limits have been changed. The law for years was by country, trying to replicate the ethnic makeup of the US within the immigration system. That's a pretty hard job.

Certainly I am the oddball in believing in unlimited legal immigration. Laws can change with circumstances. But my basic belief is that the most valuable asset in the world is the human mind.

[Da Geezer]

Pantheism is the worship of the earth. One of its tenants is that man is a curse on the earth and it is best for the planet if he is eliminated. Today, pantheism is seen in the belief of human-caused (I can't spell anthropromorphic) global warming.


That makes no sense. I'm not gonna off myself! How about a more balanced approach, like, let's conserve our resources and consider the knock-on effects so we can have them around for a good long while to support ourselves? Not so crazy, IMO. Don't need to run to the extremes on either side.

I can't get it right it seems. If you worship the earth and believe that man is a curse on the earth, then you tend to see evidence of that in Global Warming. Specifically, man-caused global warming. The belief that man is ruining the earth is the predicate for believing in man made global warming. BTW, in the mid 70's it was the scores of atmospheric nuclear tests, again by man, that caused global cooling. (as an aside, it kind of makes you wonder why we don't blow up a few islands, block the sun, and at least lower the temp, just kidding)

Nobody is asking you to "off yourself" Hack.

Yet

[Da Geezer]

Stan my man:

Geezer, were you a member of SDS at the time of the Port Huron Statement?

Guilty. And your read on Tom Hayden is exactly right! I chuckled out loud when you said that.

SDS started as allied with the Auto Workers, but that was too tame and a few of years later we became more allied with the Civil Rights movement. So the first PHD was with the UAW and the second was with SNCC.

I too marched in a lot of protests, and those were halcyon days! I was a hippie, I suppose, mainly because hippy chicks didn't wear a bra.

I posted the 1962 PHD because Tom Hayden (you know,the guy that had Janie Fonda for a wife) wrote the thing. Notice the difference between that and the Black Lives Matter crowd of today. Or any of the other spoiled marshmallows of today. Also note that, once we progressives had accomplished our goal of taking over the universities (like for the last 15 years) we immediately abandoned free speech.

Frankly, it is a bitch to know what went on, and not be able to anything to stop it.

Oh, and what I said is that capitalism as an economic system and Christianity as religious system, taken together, have produced both material progress and liberty than any other combination. This was in the context of saying that an empiricist would stick with what worked. I view the Catholic Church of the crusades as simply another dictatorship. Certainly there was no capitalism present. I guess you would say the economic system was feudal. Anyway, there were good reasons for the Reformation, many of them political. I'd go so far as to say that the Catholic Church at the time of Luther, Calvin and Knox was mostly a political institution.

[hack]

Don't get me wrong -- I'm not contesting your description of that system of beliefs. I'm just saying it sounds stupid. Global warming is a real thing and I think the science shows it. (Science doesn't have to be perfect in order to tell us useful things.) And I'm as misanthropic as the next guy, or so I like to think. But ultimately I think environmentalism has to be a practical appeal and not a romantic one. We are here like any other species and should be using the resources we have here. Other species do too. We are merely the top of the food chain. But we need to live in balance with it. History says that species have to live in balance or they become extinct.

[Dr. Strangelove]

[ame]https://twitter.com/trevortimm/status/667513852150476800[/ame]

[Da Geezer]

Strange: One attacker was Syrian, The guy who planned it was on a Syrian/Belgian passports. Anonymous is hacking something, and hacking usually means encryption.

Hack: If it exists at all, human-caused global warming presents choices. Is it worth one trillion dollars a year, for say 84 years to lower the temperature by one degree Centigrade by 2100? Would that money be better spent on drilling wells in impoverished countries? You speak of balance, so lets talk about a cost-benefit analysis. Al Gore said we would be finished if we didn't completely change the way we live by 2015. Wrong. Uhrlich said in 1968 that we would have 46 million Americans in 2000, and we did change our behavior. Wrong! Silent Spring comes out about the same time and, with absolutely no evidence, we ban DDT. Now we make a lot of it to ship to Chile, they grow grapes, ship them back to the US and we buy them. Wrong! 2 million people per year die from malaria but we can't clean out the mosquitos because folks overreacted to thinner bird shells.

I've just seen this rodeo too many times in my lifetime. Global warming is in a special case though. Because it is so ubiquitous.

You can make an argument for almost anything on the basis of global warming. We spend massive subsidies to encourage ethanol, and now we are burning our food supply to make a product that is more harmful to the environment than gasoline. But you did turn Iowa into a blue state.

You see these wind farms here in West Michigan taking land, killing eagles, and producing electricity at around 20 times the cost of natural gas, and 50 times the cost of coal. Al Gore is a billionaire. Why steal my money to make a product that has no market without a subsidy.

The Julian Simon bet, and the algebraic reduction upon which it based, shows that, time and again over the history of man, man came up with substitutes for a product if it was in demand. We are swimming in oil, but we still ban its export. Obama decides to destroy coal, Congress objects, but the EPA does it anyway. Now Bernie Sanders says that our most pressing national defense problem is climate change. That is after Paris.

And so they change it to "climate change". I will predict that climate change will happen before 2025! I think it was Stan who said he was an English major. Of course there will be climate change, either warmer or colder. The only other option is that it stays the same.

Global warming is about saying "I'm smarter than you, and dammit, I have to make decisions for you for your own good." It is classic progressive thought. It is the same kind of thing I did when I wore the "1" button. And if you question it, you should be prosecuted under RICO, because it is "settled science". About all I can say is that 30 years from now, when you are an old fart, think back to this discussion. There will be some form of disruptive technology that will make all our hand wringing now look foolish. Fusion reactors? I don't know what it will be, but I do it will happen.

[Da Geezer]

The playbook is out on how to "beat" the Americans as Hack summed up. Eventually we'll have to have it out with them. And by "them" I mean the ME as a whole in a real war, not this watered down bullshit of the past 14 years. W. Bush once said "we'll make no distinction between the terrorists and those who harbor them". I believe that directive was ignored before he finished the sentence.

100% correct Mike. One problem is that we didn't do it in 1979, when Iran took the hostages.

[Jeff Buchanan]

........ One problem is that we didn't do it in 1979, when Iran took the hostages.

Whole different ballgame with Iran.

My perception is that the Mullahs leading that country, Shia BTW, have stepped away from terror tactics as a way of asserting themselves. After Ahmadinejad's actions led to loss of support from Iran's Supreme Leader and after politicians and the Mullahs realized they needed to become a part of the world of civilized nations (as a result of sanctions and civil unrest caused by them), things changed there.

Prior to the overthrow of the Shah (The Pahlavis), Iran was a Monarchy ripe for a fall at the hands of Islamic Fundamentalists. But that whole thing had a different tenor to it. I don't think that episode of ME history has any relationship to what is going on there now with ISIS.