overtone

I think the attackers of 9/11 were Saudi Arabian mostly (some UAR and Lebanon, no Afghans or anyone from Afghanistan), and so was their financing, and so was their organization and much of their training (some Pakistani contribution there, not only the Pakistani insurgent base in Afghanistan but also almost certainly piloting help and general Western orientation in Pakistan, also a good part of the operation dates back to the AQ base in Sudan). The new Pakistani installed government of Afghanistan even - let alone the old tribal governments or the country itself - had little or nothing to do with it. It's possible they were not even informed in advance - there was apparently some serious objection to the rich foreigner (OBL's behavior) already, which was reinforced by 9/11. For the second time: It isn't huge quantities of light, sweet, cheaply drilled, market making crude - as in Iraq. Iraq's reserves were and are capable of controlling the market - keeping them out of the wrong (none US dominated) hands is critical to Exxon, Chevron, etc. Irrelevant. The rulers of Iraq and Afghanistan were just as tyrannical and violent when the US supported their installation as they were when the US invaded to take them out. There are and have been for decades dozens of countries run by violent tyranny for many modern decades on this planet, and only a couple ever needed fear invasion from the US - a few of the safe ones are right in the neighborhood of Iraq and Afghanistan, such as the other 'stans, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, the North African cadre, and so forth. Several of them had more to do with 9/11 than Iraq or Afghanistan, several of them were - and are - under quite comparably brutal and oppressive tyranny. Here are three examples of how honest people talk - taken from the first page of the thousands and thousands of links Google supplies when prompted by "Invasion of Normandy". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasion_of_Normandy http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/events/wwii-eur/normandy/normandy.htm http://www.google.com.au/search?q=invasion+of+normandy&hl=en&lr=&tbo=u&as_qdr=all&tbm=isch&source=univ&sa=X&ei=XkweUc-vNOeCyAHR3IDACw&ved=0CD4QsAQ&biw=1112&bih=877 That wasn't even Germany - that was France. But an invasion is an invasion, when adults describe what their military is doing. The delicacy of your choice of targets for W's army is noted - with violent fascism all over the planet, much of it opposable without bloodshed, you must find an oil reserve and pipeline nexus to unleash the liberators on. And so you invent - see above - threats and attacks on the neighbors, to justify the launching of war. And you credit all the good consequence - such as the limited and halting steps toward democracy, the product of Iraqis violently defying the US attempts to replace Saddam with another strongman government - to the liberating US military; and you describe all the evils attendant - such as the oppression of Iraq's women by the newly theocratic State, and the slaughter of ethnic cleansing unleashed under US auspices - as, - - - - well actually you don't describe them. For some reason. That entire list is of consequences of preventable US behavior, including direct responses to the military assault you find so liberating. But regardless, the point is agreed: the Iraq War was preventable, on the US side: political refusal to be shanghaied by State lies and jingoistic warmongering / calls to self-sacrificing liberation of the downtrodden Iraqi is possible for a country like the US. Not always easy, but possible. After all, the opposition to fascism is much the most efficient and effective when it starts at home, say by preventing the keys to the world's most powerful army from falling into the hands of fascists.

The "international community" had been "intervening" with considerable effect for decades, in both countries. Afghanistan had attacked nobody, even after being attacked by several countries itself. Iraq was itself threatened, attacked, robbed and abused and subjected to "international intervention", before and while threatening or attacking its neighbors. At the time of the US invasion being referred to as the "Iraq War", Iraq was attacking nobody, and not credibly threatening with violence any of the nations that invaded it or any of their allies. It was instead being partly blockaded and persistently bombed from the air, over a period of several years. None of their neighbors - most of which matched them in theocratic and fascistic "antics" - were assaulted. No country on this planet has been invaded like that because of its theocratic or fascistic "antics". Bullshit. Iraq's oil reserves are (were) not only huge, but sweet and cheaply drilled - they by themselves could set the crude oil market planetwide, undermine the cartel prices and destroy the preferred currency of the current dominant players, as Exxon and Chevron and France and Russia and the US well knew. Australia can't do anything like that even now, let along then. Afghanistan sits in the crossroads of the best - market setting - pipeline access to the entire Caspian Basin, India, SE Asia in general. Irrelevant. Their genocidal ways had been meeting with consistent support and tolerance from the governments who invaded them, for decades. They had been installed into power, given the means and opportunity for genocidal ways, by those very States. An American who wanted to help curb Iraq's genocidal ways had several options better recommended by sense than opening the country to ethnic civil war with modern weapons - such as support for a Kurdish state, with control over its own territory and oil reserves.

Slavery was not mentioned, for a reason: slaves were quite often POWs, almost always members of different cultures being attacked from outside so to speak, did have the means and opportunity to fight back when originally captured, were not in general societally or legally disarmed groups prior to their abuse within their society. . So they do not figure into the discussion here. And the eventual employment of concentration camps and oppressions for extermination is not the issue either - as noted above, the yellows in WWII US were unlikely to have been any more clairvoyant than the Jews in WWII Germany. They didn't know what the outcome would be. So the question remains: we have post Great Depression examples of scantly armed groups being abused by their better armed and government supported neighbors, right here in the US. Prevention of such abuse is the common justification of widespread and lightly regulated gun ownership withn the US. Does it work, on this evidence? Do we agree that more heavily arming the reds, yellows, and blacks of the Treaty abuses, Pearl Harbor aftermaths, and Jim Crow establishments, would have been of benefit to the country or its people?

If you don't know why night time temps are a critical issue, you have no basis for labaling anything "rubbish". I'd be surprised if the study itself didn't explain the focus, in the introduction or discussion or even the abstract, but the matter is so common in discussions of the incoming effects of global warming that maybe they took for granted some familiarity in their readership. Meanwhile, a discussion of whether a higher general temp regime would be good or bad for plants, people, etc, is not really relevant. The problem is the speed of the change - we'd be at least as badly affected by a cooling of this magnitude at this rate, and nobody is arguing that we are at some utopian ideal temperature for some reason. I can easily imagine that we might be better off somehow if we had been a bit warmer and less glaciated and better CO2 blanketed over the past few million years, or if the continents had been better distributed over the surface, or if the mountain ranges had been somewhat differently arranged. That does not mean that moving the continent of Antartica into the Pacific Ocean, flattening certain stretches of the Andes and Himalayas, or doubling the CO2 content of the atmosphere, in a couple of centuries, would not cause serious problems.

Fewer than twenty, and only that many because you asked for a perfect fit. The general sentiment, qualified by such assertions as "not all black people are niggers"? Fewer than five. Just find a school in a white neighborhood that voted 2/1 for Mitt Romney, and has a median income at or below the national median. Consider the implications of the fact that Mitt Romney actually won the majority of the votes from married white men with children, in the last Presidential election. What would you expect from the children of those men?

Is this a joke? Is somebody claiming that racial bias is not an important, structural, fundamentally society-defining factor in American life?

In which case it would be three billion years mixed in and well adapted to the competition from RNA/DNA based evolutionary product worldwide: as likely to be found today in, say, the dark cold water anoxic, high UV cold dry or wet , hot deep rock dark chemically extreme, and other such, that we have had long term access to since biology became a science - no need for, or obvious benefit from, a relatively short and recent isolation in a fairly common type of habitat to have "preserved" it. Not saying it's impossible, that something about Vostok cannot possibly have released a lurking shadow world into more visible prominence, just that Vostok was part of the outer world for so long, and isolated so recently in microbiological terms, that one would expect to find strange and unique products of the biological world as it existed after nearly three billion years of evolution - the world surrounding us now, in microbiological terms. The micro equivalent of kangaroos and platypods and black swans, not silicon based acellular radio-frequency communicating balloon beasties, seems likely. As far as how to find life completely new and different, life's signature is repeated establishments of wildly improbable and localized pockets of complexity, statistically inexplicable defiance of the 2nd Law. That should be visible to the alert in the material world, with indications from even crude observation - the oxygen content of the Earth's atomosphere, for example, can be detected from outer space.

But the difficulty here, however minor, has not been faced: you are using the example of how easily (in your view) the specifically unarmed Jews (and Rom, Reds, etc) were dispossessed, rounded up, and slaughtered by the German government. But there are several less problematic and more familiar examples of reasonably comparable abuse much closer to home, less corrupted and obscured by foreign political circumstances and the aftermaths of war, economic collapse, etc. I mentioned three: the recent (post WWII) segregation and oppression of the blacks under Jim Crow laws in several States of the US; the dispossession, roundup, and concentration camp deportation of yellows in the US during WWII; the dispossession, roundup, and reservation deportation of reds in the US prior to WWI and their subsequent abuse into modern times. These oppressions of the blacks and yellows (if not the reds) were at least as easily accomplished as the Holocaust, employing recognizably similar techniques against people similarly short of weaponry for self defense. And the question asked was not one of "rights", but assessment of circumstances: would we as a country and people, including the blacks and yellows and reds among us, be better off if all else equal the blacks and yellows in particular had been more heavily armed ? - especially: had put up more of a fight, more violent resistance, as people so often wonder at the Jews of Germany not doing either (historical ignorance playing a major role in this wonderment, of course, but the question remains).

Almost certainly, no place on Antarctica has been isolated long enough to have captured and preserved life forms so fundamentally and radically different from those found on the rest of the planet. The predominance of RNA/DNA cell based life on this planet includes it having wiped out the competition (if any), treating it as food etc, billions of years ago. One would look for local or defined area reversals of entropy, coherences maintained improbably for a long time, and then verify reproduction or spread (one could imagine an entity that simply grew, rather than reproducing, might count as being alive, eh?). My nomination for where to look for currently unrecognized or unknown and radically different life forms on earth would be in large scale structures, places where we have missed the forest for the trees, the reef for the fish, the mountain for the rocks. I would expect it to be very primitive in its overall organization, far less sophisticated than a bacterium, as it has had little time (measured in generations, adaptive turnover opportunities, etc) to evolve.

And by the same argument, with similar graphs, malaria is not a problem for black people, and icebergs were not a problem for the Titanic - for while. The planet is probably in a natural cycle of cooling, not warming. We came out of the last Ice Age eight thousand years ago, and by ordinary accounts we're due to be heading into the next one.

You might as well argue that malaria is not harmful to black people – you can find all kinds of graphs showing how increased incidence of those two diseases accompanies – even leads- large increases in the populations of black people, consistently all over the planet. Actually, your argument is even worse: the threat of global warming is largely a future threat, and even if the effects of the current warming were beneficial to rice in the short run, the longer term risks of major disasters such as widespread delta salination from rising sea levels remain. Those are the main issue, here - we are worried about what we can see coming, recognize as ever more likely possiblities. That is false. The global warming people mention the increases in ice cover in some places near and on Antarctica all the time – they are the ones measuring the ice cover, talking about it, publishing the data, taking it seriously. That’s the only reason you ever heard about it.

The inculcation of morality through storytelling is the normal, human way, is all. And many religious and quasi-religious works - the Bible, the Mabinogian, the Bhagavid Ghita, the Book of the Dun Cow, the Odyssey, the Navajo shamanic tales - exemplify that role. And it is not simple - that stories teach lessons directly via superficial overt content is a bit of Sunday Truth not in evidence the rest of the week. Most of the great stories work on multiple levels, accept the growth and maturing of the (as was standard for ten thousand years) listener, have resonances and effects in their telling much deeper than a synopsis of their plots would indicate. For example, the Bible does not "teach morality" in the manner of a collection of Jack Chick tracts. It is a collection of stories.

That's may be your opinion, but not what I said. You have had several opportunities to speak to the question, and clarify the matter. Do you favor private weaponry possession as a defense against State oppression ? If so, would the century and a half of abusive treatment of blacks by the various State supported terrorists in the old Confederacy count as a situation that would have been improved by more heavily arming those blacks and increasing private sores of weaponry in general, or do we have a situation where the armed citizenry was an agent of State oppression - where the private weaponry was part of the problem? Likewise with the reds, browns, women, and recently Muslims - but since th OP opened with WWII, we can compare directly the yellows in America: Clearly the Jews in Germany did not know what was waiting for them at the end of the line - and we doubt Japanese ancestry provides clairvoyance either. If anyone in the US had cause to take up arms against a suddenly tyrannical government, it was the American yellows after Pearl Harbor. So we can ask: if they had just had better weapons, and more of them, like their neighbors who were cooperating with the State, would the situation have turned out better?

So you think that maybe more heavily arming the yellow, black, red, brown, female, Muslim, and non-mob Chicago resident population of the US would not have helped much, if at all, these past 75 years or so? We should obviously wait until the clairvoyants detect a future Holocaust, and then hand out the weapons. Pleased to hear they took out the floor shackles, temperature applications, hoods and body suits, specialty electronic gear, interrogation dogs, and waterboarding setups, from Gitmo. And now that several years have passed, I hear that no one there is technically a "child" any more. But the original setup was not interrupted by the gun owning citizens of America; I even seem to recall that faction was active in support of the operation right alone with Homeland Security, etc. So for those opposed to the approach of tyranny, gun possession by citizens seems to be something less than a reliable ally.

The notion that higher levels of intelligence/analytical ability (confounded, usually) even, much less education, entitle one to rule, prevent innovation by others, and lay out morality for all of society, is a very dubious notion. I doubt a majority of humanists would subscribe to it, put bluntly like that. The presumption that claims of intelligence and education, true or false, are taken or intended to legitimize the seizure of power over lesser folk, is a culturally derived presumption. In the US it is peculiarly strong in what are called "bluecollar", "redneck", "inner city", "backwoods", etc, subcultures. Most humanists I have put the question to agree in general with theistic conservative William Buckley, when he asserted that he would rather be governed by the first 400 people listed in the New York City telephone book than by the faculty members of Harvard University.

Seems to me that more people prefer the idea of their spouse's virginity at marriage than the fact of it. That would be one of the tricky parts of a study - separating the people who thought they married a virgin, but didn't, from those who thought and actually did. And the other confounding group, those who thought they were marrying the sexually experienced, who weren't (a much smaller group, but possibly one more balanced by gender ). It's possible that the best satistied spouses are men who think they are marrying virgins, who aren't; and women who think they are marrying the sexually experienced (much in demand, preferred by others) who aren't. If either of these were so, we would need to clarify exactly what we mean by "prefer", in the original question.

The question "why" has at least two approaches to an answer: mechanical and evolutionary. The sources above referred to this, which IMHO deserves emphasis in the thread. To repeat: A possible evolutionarily significant property of skin wrinkling - better grip on wet objects after long immersion of the hands (and feet, notice) in warm water. http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/347439/description/Pruney_digits_help_people_get_a_grip . Those of use following the aqautic ape argument noticed this.

If it were a mutation, some genetic lineages would lack it. How about a normally functioning set of a few dozen genes acting in concert, that set the body up to respond to various circumstances in various ways - producing, in real life, a steady small proportion of homosexual people, reliably, in each human generation?

That's what we have had in the US for centuries. Staying with WWII and its aftermath: It did not stop the KKK, or the Chicago mob. It did not prevent the Iraq War launch, or the creation of Homeland Security and the Guantanamo type of prison complex. It did not gain suffrage for women, or prevent the roundup and concentration of Japanese people in WWII. The various oppressions by violence in those matters involved the cooperation of the gun owners of America, against the less heavily armed. Would things have gone better if, say, the yellow Americans had had better weaponry and more willingness to use it against the abusive State, in WWII California? It may have had a role in the partial freeing of black people from various oppressions, and red people from some of hte reservation abuses. Is that what you are arguing? That Muslims and women and brown race immigrants, three comparatively lightly armed groups currently vulnerable to various oppressions and hostilities, more heavily arm themselves? In considering this, a review of a dubious earlier point: Not within Germany, or Italy, or even Fascist Spain and such places: the scenes of heroic and significant resistance played out mostly among people conquered by foreigners, not oppressed by their neighbors and their own local government.

And give it to whom? Saddam was no more crazy than the average bigman in control of a huge reservoir of oil, or gold, or rubber, or diamonds, or coltan, or bananas, or whatever. The thugs running the show in the countries of Pipelinistan generally are an unattractive lot, but the US seems OK with that, even seems to prefer it - the comparative sanity of the Iranian rulers, for example, does not lead to US approval. As with Vietnam, the great majority of that particular whining is found in the objections to it, the revisions of history now being floated to obscure the actual launching of the Iraq invasion, and not elsewhere. As with Vietnam, the bulk of the people who were trying hard to keep the US out of Iraq had much better grounds. And their far more accurate accounts of what happened are still not getting much air. The first and most basic task in preventing one's country from taking that skid road is to not hand overt political power to men like Richard Cheney.

There are always going to be lots of unarmed people. If the bad people with clout - such as the KKK or the Chicago mob (to pick US examples closer to hand than the Third Reich) - control the media, they will be able to define a poorly armed group within the society (women, for example, or Musllims) and organize an oppression of it for their own benefit. The German T Party of 1933 took over with cameras and radios - it doesn't do any good to arm people if the bad guys control the targeting. There will always be targets. It was the gun owners of America who were sold on the Iraq War, Homeland Security, Gitmo, and the rest of the more recent Third Reich parallels. Are you advocating preferentially arming their political enemies, to balance the clout?

You do register the difference - the one the opposite of the other? And the distinction was right at the center, right at the main point of the argument in the post (510). So people who claim I said "a or b" and "a and b" both are either 1) not following the argument and/or 2) dishonest, deliberately misrepresenting my post and its argument. So are people who reword stuff in ways that change its meaning in ways directly at issue, and present it as other people's quotes (as iggy said). You see my dilemma - which are you? How much slack do I cut, in a discussion thread, for what has become entirely illegitimate personal attack at a grade school level? Look at this shit: Wrong as always, when making assertions about me instead of the issue at hand. Not just wrong,btw, but entirely wrongheaded. And entirely unforced error - you went way out of your way to say something stupid by way of insult. That's several such assertions now, taking over your posts and obscuring any argument you have. Why not just stop making them? But I do apologize for forgetting your reasonable posts earlier, before you got distracted by my unsympathetic take on Paranoia and lost your ability to handle this stuff. You do have several adult posts on this thread, just not addressed to me. So charity toward others - not you - should intervene. And I pledge it will: we have established the difficutly of such things as mandatory insurance, effective curbing of gun ownership via licensing, and the kind. We also have, by example not just foreigners, a picture of the debate as jammed by genuinely existing extremist positions, framed by Fox and Media into "you and him fight" setups obscuring an actual and reasonable variety of middle grounds. We have on the table: magazine size restrictions, background checks, special rules pertaining to weaponry with special capabilities (assault rifles, handguns, maybe plastic or otherwise concealable getups, hollow point and explosive ammo, etc etc) and so forth.

Everyone I know of got their moral being or compass from a basic human nature admitted into a context of stories - tales, myths, legends, gossip, accounts and recountings - from the adults and society around them. Clearly a religion can be a rich source of stories.

Post 510 contains the phrase "license or insurance" as a negative reference (as the contradiction to "license and insurance") in a description of car and driver regulation (car and driver regulation being inextricably confused to begin with, here). So I didn't use "both", but used one and its negation. (The negation of "a and b" is "not a or b", if you follow). The question becomes: is your later reference to that instead of the "license and insurance" in all the relevant posts deliberately dishonest, or derived from an inability to follow the argument in 510? Given your behavior, I can't tell. Both possibilities are supported by your subsequent posting. Sure, you apparently missed it - To repeat: The point is simply that imposing mandatory insurance on the exercise of a Constitutional right presents considerable difficulty - and is unprecedented, AFAIK. Your link explained nothing. It consisted of the assertion that the US government could found a "compelling interest" sufficient to override multiple Constitutional rights on the fact that guns sometimes caused damage. Whether that somehow could be done is hard to say, but it certainly isn't obvious - compare imposing mandatory liability insurance on freedom from arbitrary search and seizure, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, etc. The damages caused by stuff protected from discovery under the warrant for search requirement have run to many billions and many deaths over the years, but no one has even suggested imposing an insurance requirement on the exercise of that right. They - your sources, btw - apparently thought otherwise. The distinction is normally carefully preserved and legally consequential, in matters such as this - one gets a permit to install furnaces and wiring, for example, separately from a license to install boilers and wiring. Or to keep the discussion on topic, there is no such thing in the US as a license to own a car, and requiring a license to own a gun would not be something modeled after the the car regulations - would instead be unprecedented and of serious Constitutional import. First and only - establishes the precedent: you can. You just have to bear down a bit. Quit doing things like this, say: as if the relevance to the thread were the open possibilities, and not the strikedown of the possession ban, in the first place.

It wasn't that easy - it was a serious logistics and engineering problem, it was a major diversion of resources during wartime, and it took the cooperation of a large fraction of the German public for several years to set up - a cooperation only obtained by way of the first truly modern propaganda effort, the world's most effective media marketing campaign to date. If you want to know how that worked, review how the "rightwing authoritarian military/industrial" faction (we are no longer allowed to use its name) in the US brought us Gitmo, Bagram, Abu Ghraib, Homeland Security, and the Iraq War. Of course we could have resisted by armed force, with our guns, but - - - .