bascule

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=36699 2008 was the coolest year since 2000. NASA attributes this primarily to large areas of the Pacific Ocean being cooler than the long-term average due to a La Niña episode that began in 2007.

Yes, clearly I'm on a slippery slope criticizing people for criticizing Obama for decisions he hasn't even made yet. If I'm doing it on inauguration day then clearly I'll be doing it for the next 4 years, right? The guy just got inaugurated today (well, yesterday now). Can we withhold the criticism until he's actually done something objectionable? He doesn't have any points. There isn't anything substantive to criticize at this point, but people are doing it anyway. Perhaps I should criticize the next Republican president for taking away our civil liberties, cutting taxes on the upper class, opposing scientific research into stem cells and global warming, and getting us involved in yet another war? Would that be silly?

Well that's all and good, but apparently he's focusing on gun control too. I obsess over a loss of justice and a national leadership bound by the rule of law.

Originally posted at: http://change.gov/agenda/urbanpolicy/ This statement, posted in mid-November, was pulled shortly after it started to gain publicity among various pro-gun organizations. For all of Obama's tech savvy, he seems to have forgotten that if you post something online then change it, it doesn't go away. Well guess what, IT'S BACK! As of TODAY! http://www.whitehouse.gov/agenda/urban_policy/ (they conveniently added an underscore for obfuscation) What the crap is this Obama? As far as I'm concerned, the Tiahrt Amendment protects law abiding gun owners against unreasonable search and seizure. What is repealing it going to accomplish? This feels pretty Dubyaesque to me... There are seriously much, much bigger fish to fry (like the financial crisis) than handing over the purchase records of all gun owners, including those who have committed no crimes, to local law enforcement. Is there any reason why they should have that information without probable cause? Ugh...

Again, par for the course, except his predecessor massively and unprecedentedly increased spending when the country wasn't in the midst of two wars and a financial crisis. The Bush administration effectively shat all over the country and left it completely f-ed up. Already I've heard nonstop whining from conservatives about how much they suspect Obama will spend. Where were you people for the last 8 years? Did you have your heads buried in the sand, only to pull them out so you can bitch when a Democrat gets elected? (nothing personal directed at you, of course, MrSkeptic)

Compared to Bush? Or compared to a wet paper bag? What are you listening to? Or smoking? The biggest hawk in recent history just left office. He started two wars and bankrupted the country. So uhh, WHAT??? Hey, the last administration did that too! Par for the course! Actually, there was a lot of talk about increasing government efficiency. Never heard that out of Bush, until Democrats took office... Now Democrats have the majority, and despite that Obama is looking for ways to more efficiently spend federal money. He's not being motivated by partisan politics. It's AMAZING! Actually, $45 million are coming from private funds. The $49 million in federal funds behind it actually came from a budget written by the Bush administration! [source] BY THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION! Yeah, they did an awful lot of that. More than any other administration in history. By FAR. I predict a lot of much ado about nothing whining by the same angsty conservatives who were wrong about everything for the past eight years. The worst president in US history just left office. People have reason to celebrate. Can you really blame them? I guess you can, considering your post was all sour grapes. Whatever, sucks to be you.

On the contrary, Obama is doing what's politically expedient as opposed to what's right. I can't blame him, but at the same time to me that's the low road. Justice is not being served, and that sets a very bad precedent.

I think you're missing the bigger picture that our leaders are not above the law and should be held accountable for their crimes

The laws are a little different surrounding the outing of CIA operatives... http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/05/29/mcclellans-biggest-revela_n_104082.html

Yes, I think somebody (SCOTUS?) should have the power to overturn pardons which are related to crimes committed by members of a President's administration or the President himself, at the very least. Bush was sleazy in different ways. Commuting Scooter Libby's sentence was some pretty atrocious cronyism... I don't think anyone Clinton pardoned was tangentially involved in crimes Clinton may have committed. In Bush's case, capital offenses... namely treason.

I am surprised how few pardons there were (especially compared to Clinton) but perhaps Bush figured his reputation was already in the gutter and there was no need to sully it further. Just a guess...

Bush commuted his sentence shortly after his trial. Why would he pardon him now? I think the damage (to justice) has already been done and the affair remains safely off the radar of most Americans. Pardoning him now would not only accomplish nothing, but would drag the whole affair back into the public spotlight.

Yes, Dennett argues that language developed socially and the evolutionary advantages it conferred ensured a period of rapid genetic fixing (through the Baldwin effect) This was going on around the same time our cerebral cortices were ballooning in size

You might want to read about transistor-transistor logic

Orly? Well here: Honestly, I'm not entirely sure. I am sure that your position is too absolute to be of any value other than unlimited self sacrifice to the benefit of the enemy. However, I value humanity as well. More than likely I'll fall back to the reality of war and the horrors I seem perfectly ok with, since we're not debating whether or not dead babies are acceptable collateral damage. Waterboarding does seem preferable to many of the vietnam images I've absorbed. ...I guess I didn't feel my comments, or yours, were implicitly limited to non-US citizens. So it's okay to torture non-US citizens, but US citizens are off limits? That seems kind of silly to me. I can assure you, statistically, you are in a lot more danger from US citizens than you are from non-US ones. Why are you so afraid of foreigners and feel it's okay to torture them? So terrorists are prisoners of war? It's okay to torture prisoners of war? Don't the Geneva Conventions have something to say about that? And even if they're not prisoners of war, does that make it okay to torture them?

Actually, my position got codified into the US Constitution. You might want to check the Eighth Amendment. What happens when the person you're torturing is *gasp* innocent? Whoops...

I completely disagree... language is the basis of conscious thought. I would contend that every neocortical column communicates to the others using an independent language of sorts, but the languages at particular levels of our neocortical hierarchy the languages end up looking similar. I would disagree. I'm a believer in Dennett's concept of a "Joyceian Machine", a way for the brain to abstractly rerepresent concepts to itself in a way that multiple different parts of our brain can operate on simultaneously. Natural language is the basis of the "Joyceian Machine's" operation. Regarding the OP, the relationship between thought, language, and science is that science can use the (mostly) unambiguous language of mathematics to express ideas in a way with one definitive interpretation.

There's no way to answer his question. He may as well ask how many pirates we need to throw into a bonfire to stop global warming. The question itself is ludicrous and cannot be answered. In reality there is not a direct relationship between number of Americans saved from terrorist attacks to amount we have to torture a given "terrorist" any more than there's a relationship between the number of pirates and global warming. Pretending there is one is simply absurd. Furthermore, torture is not a reliable technique for extracting information. Victims of torture will say what they think their torturers want to hear in order to get the torture to stop. Yes, I'm going to keep up my vain attempt to point out how flawed his mental model of the world is. Do you think the US should torture kidnappers to reveal the whereabouts of their hostages? What's acceptable? Should we waterboard them? How about bamboo under their fingernails? Hacking off fingers, toes, limbs without anesthesia?

Where? In the magical fantasy land in your head? Can you demonstrate how torture has saved one American life, let alone thousands?

So what you're saying is it's okay if we torture people? Like, torture them to the point a senior Bush administration official concludes we tortured them? What if we torture them and it turns out that they don't know anything? Was it worth torturing them to potentially save a million lives? How many potentially saved lives are worth torturing people for, especially in the event the information turns out to be fruitless? Do people we torture tell the truth, or do they tell us what they think we want to hear so we stop torturing them? Is torture an effective interrogation method? Is it okay to torture people when we don't know if they have the information we need to stop a terrorist attack?

Mooey, clearly you have a vested interest in the situation, and I don't mean to step on any toes here. However, you are giving a lot of conflicting invective here... Source? Citation? Something definitive which ties these attacks to Hamas? I don't disagree that the 2 months of continuous bombardment were partly within the ceasefire period. I'm just concerned about the previous four months, where the ceasefire was, for all intents and purposes, working. Furthermore, you're trying to attribute attacks within the preceding 4 months to Hamas. What's your evidence? After giving me so much grief for Israel's white phosphorus attacks, you owe me that much. Israel was certainly provoked. Does that justify the situation? Both sides have been provoking each other for decades. Israel invaded Gaza because Gaza was firing rockets at them because Israel engaged in surgical strikes against Gaza because Hamas was digging tunnels to invade Israel etc. etc. etc. Is an invasion really the best way to resolve this situation? Are a thousand dead Palestinians, including hundreds of dead children, justified by Hamas's attacks? It's a vicious cycle, and unless one side breaks it it's just going to continue.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/13/AR2009011303372.html?hpid=topnews I'm surprised how much rigamaroll we've gone through to get here. After years of mincing definitions about what constitutes torture and what does not, we have something conclusive. A senior Bush administration official, Susan J. Crawford, responsible for reviewing practices at Guantanamo, has officially concluded that Mohammed al-Qahtani was tortured, due to a "combination of the interrogation techniques, their duration and the impact on Qahtani's health" So where do we go from here? I'd like to see a new administration which places human rights above getting answers out of an interrogation, and a comprehensive anti-torture stance. Of course, as our president-elect is still a president-elect, that remains to be seen...

I wasn't saying it was a declared end to the ceasefire, however... Except none of the attacks were by Hamas. So no, they didn't. You can claim that Hamas was responsible... I could also claim Israel used white phosphorus on civilians. Right now the evidence for either is circumstantial. My point was that until the IDS incursion (which was, undoubtably, provoked by Hamas) that Hamas did not attack Israel, which lasted for four months. My point here is that the attacks from Lebanon are fallout from their invasion in Gaza. However, to answer your question (which I already did), I would approve of an immediate, temporary ceasefire followed by Israel's withdrawal from Gaza.

I have a project in the works, but it's nowhere near ready for performance benchmarks

I think I answered that extensively when I responded to your previous (lengthy) post. But to summarize: I don't know.