overtone

Government spent more than it taxed - now it has to tax more than it spends, to pay its bills. What the rich perceive as unfair is beside the point. Nothing belongs to anyone who hasn't paid their bills. The wealthy can keep whatever is left over after they've paid for their government, the wars they started and made money from, the handouts they received.

Somebody taking revenge on people blamed for causing gratuitous pain, treating one badly, etc, by destroying what they care about and killing the ones they love, is not beyond all comprehension surely? We live in culture and country in which the mentally ill, the outsiders, and similar people, are often lonely and abused; and in which revenge, even self-destructive backlash, has a place and a role. We cannot change that by force. And we are an armed people, which we can only change by force at a very heavy cost. So this shit is going to happen, as it has in the past, as long as its motivational roots are fertilized. There is no way to coercively control and block flipped out and self-anointed revengers from lashing back, violently, without seriously coercing and similarly abusing (say: disarming) the legitimately motivated in our culture. We have to live with this stuff, as long as it takes to change the actual culture - same as the Saudis have to live with the nastier side of their misogyny, same as India has to live with the personal reactions to its caste system, until the changes have grown into the society from the childhood up.

He's one of the bad guys, has been for thirty years now. Not really. Preventing tax increases or regulatory oversight from being imposed on the wealthy and corporate elite is not a matter of economic theory - some phrase length echoes of Straussian bs or long debunked "supply side" hypotheticals might come up in political speeches, find their way to a bumper sticker somewhere or go into heavy canard rotation via the Murdoch Media, but actual economic theory? That would get in the way.

No. That is of course irrelevant – one forms militias in response to needs as they arise, by definition. By Constitutional guarantee, US citizens cannot be deprived of the capability of forming such a militia, at need – the primary necessity being of course suitable weapons. Hence the resistance to government confiscation of more powerful weaponry, better suited to actual militias. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were some way to preserve that situation in some glass bubble, and live in it like a snow globe forever? After Katrina, a mercenary paramilitary force (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academi) hired by “the government” moved into New Orleans coercing, imposing their idea of order, and when defied beating and shooting people. The population they were abusing was a racial minority that had been, for over a century, deliberately and coercively deprived of weapons, prevented in a variety of ways from arming themselves by local government and government supported thuggery, in defiance of the Constitution. The mercenaries would not have been able to treat them like that, otherwise. And the people who did the depriving, the racial bigots and thugs who set up that vulnerability, were and are well aware of the nature of that situation – which they do not want to suffer, themselves. When US redneck types assert that an unarmed people is subject to slavery at any time, they have a reality and experience based notion of exactly what that means. Just saying.

No' date=' it isn’t. There is precedent, 1929 – 34, and it is exactly what one would assume – the last time we had a crash like this, which was also the last time we had banking and financial system uncurbed by New Deal regulations. Coincidence? This directly undermines the earlier claims of exploding US debt. It also fails to correct for productivity and other structural changes – there is no simple “the value” of a dollar. Consider how much more information, arithmetical calculation, accounting and printing and bookwork of all kinds one can buy for a dollar now.

Looks like Pacific Northwest or Alaskan red, from my acquaintances.

As soon as the topic of who works hard and who doesn't comes up, we have left the realm of sensible economic discussion and are traveling in the realms of propaganda and political bs. Consumer spending depends on income level - the poor spend all their income, the very rich spend little of theirs. You can tax the income of most very rich people at a marginal rate (if you don't know what "marginal rate" means, you don't understand the basic issue) of 90% without affecting their consumer spending at all. Tax a low income at that rate, and every nickel is subtracted from their purchases of basic consumer goods. That's why Obama's payroll tax reduction worked as a stimulus, and the Bush era reduction of high bracket income tax rates worked as a drag.

We have centuries of experience on five continents and fifty national economies with the consequences of taxing, or not taxing, the rich. We had forty years of experience in the the US with tax rates on the rich double what they are now, and more. The experience was one of great prosperity and economic progress unprecedented on this planet. We are now experiencing the consequences of haveing drastically reduced the taxes on the very wealthy. One reason you have no idea what theory etc would be "backing the Democrats" is that you don't know what the Democrats have been proposing.

Good Lord. Look: It was a commando raid - American helicopters, searchlights, gunshots, people talking in English, dead people lying around, radar images, cops called, ambulances called, doctors, hospitals, OBL's house trashed and guards at the gates. It was a residential neighborhood. You couldn't keep that a secret from anyone within a half a mile, anyone who did business with the household, and anyone in their five hundred person extended families, let alone the Pakistani military and the local cops. Recall the OP: It makes not a whit of difference whether OBL was whisked away in some indeterminate state, does it. In point, probably more consternation and "scattering" (!?) would be generated by the possibility he was alive - and quite likely, that possibility was a serious concern of AQ higher ups upon first hearing of the raid, say ten minutes or so after it started. The Tea Party folks among them probably think he's alive to this day, being held by or at the behest of the Americans in some "interrogation" cell somewhere. Maybe Israel. Obama is a secret Jew, you know? Every pack of rightwing fanatics has its Tea Party faction.

He is. He is just more honest about who he considers to be a person' date=' a child, than you are. That kind of integrity is convincing. Your lack of it is obvious. That's a hindsight fallacy. All pregnancies carry significant risk of death in the stages before we know they are the "perfectly safe" kind. Furthermore, your assumption of "modern medicine" is an assumption of abortion or the equivalent if the mother's life is at risk, standard modern medical response to a variety of unfortunate turns of event common in pregnancy. Without that safety factor even the significant risk now present at the outset of any pregnancy, the risk calculated at the time of the common abortion decision, would be even higher. And my point was larger: all pregnancies carry the certainty of trauma, on a level that would justify lethal force in self defense in any similar circumstances involving an actual person perpetrating it. The fact that this appears to not have even occurred to the prolife crowd is another point of evidence of their actual beliefs.

This is just the most recent of the crises brought about by the takeover of the Republican Party by the "authoritarian corporate right" ( we are not even allowed to use the formerly standard term for that ideology). It has nothing to do with the Democratic Party per se, or reality based economic debate. There aren't "two sides" to this - there's one faction, with power, and its agenda. The basic economic issues involved were settled sixty years ago with the solid multi-generational worldwide success of Keynesian economic policy, and tested repeatedly in real life by various trials of alternative theory in places like Haiti, Peru, and Russia. The emergence of "supply side economics" in the US was a political event (it's silly bs as economic "theory") and can only be dealt with in the political arena - as the pedestal placement fo Reagan shows, it is not vulnerable to factual or even economic analysis. The Repuiblican Congressmen currently in office were elected to transfer as much of the wealth and power of the US as possible to the ruling corporate elite, and protect it there. They have no ideology, other than that.

The book publishing business has been invaded by Romneys of late, and changed considerably in the past decade - it is now largely owned and controlled by people with little feel for books and readers, and allegiance to models of corporate profit and return on investment that fit poorly the public and writers involved. In the opinion of many established and respected writers (Ursula K Le Guin, say) these guys do not know what they are doing. (Example: the JK Rowling phenomenon blindsided them). This, and the advent of digital capabilities, changes the scene for anyone outside the textbook, Christian, and rightwing political genres. DIY publishing is no longer a strictly vanity scene for new authors. If you are paying someone to "publish" your book, though, get proofreading and real editing and marketing and distribution for your money. Printing and binding can be purchased much cheaper than "publishing", if you are the one doing all the work of a traditional publisher anyway.

I'm not competent to critique the analysis there, but my own reading leaves the impression that early evolutionary phylogenetic trees in general - especially any involving the archaea in particular - are not taken for given by most people. The common approach seems one of uncertainty and recognition of uncertainty. Is there a consensus out there, an assumed one, that this undermines to anyone's great surprise?

Unless it does, as many posts here and in the general public debate clearly indicate is the basic motive behind a large and politically significant fraction of the gun control advocates. There's a history here, and it is one of increasing encroachment of a distant and arbitrary and unaccountable authority into the personal lives of people who resent it, a lot. Much of this governmental encroachment justified by specious argument, backed by shallowly informed people who haven't thought the situation through, and pivoting on emotionally overwhelming and reason-suspending events, btw. That is exactly what a Constitutional provision is supposed to prevent, to protect the individual from. And the people clinging to the 2nd Amendment, which is not really all that vague, are motivated in part by years of personal experience in arenas that lack such protections, such as driving and swimming and drugs and high school behavioral control and the like.

The way so many Americans talk as if nobody knows anything unless the American government officially announces it to the world is kind of strange. People know when they are being bombed and rocketed, when squadrons of Special Ops forces have launched military raids on them, when they are being attacked in that fashion. Their neighbors know, too. The only people not informed of OBL's assassination would have been the Americans - just like the only people who didn't know about the intensified bombing of Iraq in the months leading up to the official "decision" to invade were the Americans, or the only people who don't know about the Israeli operations against the Palestinians are the Americans.

Sometimes, once a student has a rudimentary physical intuition of some approach or basis for these mathematical theorems, they can find applications and comparisons easily on their own. They know where to look. If that is so of you, maybe something like this site would be of help: http://mathinsight.org/stokes_theorem_idea

I doubt the leadership of AQ and related organizations had to wait around for the US to announce OBL's killing. Their sources in the Pakistani police, government, and military, were on the ground, for starters. From whom do you imagine the US would have been keeping such an event secret?

Fred Singer has done no legitimate science for many years now, instead making his living as a hired gun ("think tank" emissary) for corporate lobbyists doing battle with the EPA and the like. Over the years he has undertaken running interference for the tobacco industry, the asbestos industry, various mining concerns, and now the coal and petroleum industries. In this he is typical of public anthro global warming "skeptics". There isn't a legitimate scientist left in that lot, AFAIK. http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=S._Fred_Singer The most telling detail for me is Singer's organization of a petition campaign he sold to fellow scientists as a means to pressure the EPA into backing off its asbestos removal recommendations in the light of prudence and care, which he then marketed as a list of real scientists urging skepticism of anthro global warming (the wording was vague enough to allow this). I thought at the time that would be the last we heard from Professor Singer in public - but clearly I underestimated the shamelessness of those people. The man is not honest. Neither are the people who promote him and spread his essays etc.

There's a complication, or subtlety, in there: many insects that are drawn to darkness, and avoid lighted areas, are trapped by point sources of light as well. The current most likely explanation derives from a property of the image processing common to most organic visual systems including apparently those of most flying insects, which is that areas immediately abutting bright image areas appear very dark. It's a sort of optical illusion, or optical feature, or property of common image processing - human eyes work like that as well. By this hypothesis some of the insects apparently circling lights are not so much holding an angle on the light as aiming straight for what they perceive as the region of maximum darkness, immediately adjacent to it. You can see this in the flight paths of some insects as they first approach a light - they do not spiral widely around it from a distance, but fly apparently almost directly toward it until quite close, at which point (and not before) things start to go haywire for them. My guess is that would describe the ant behavior better than the constant angle spiral - that they head for the immediate neighborhood of the candle when it has been moved, rather than walking off at some angle to it initially.

Part of the formal training of machinists in the US is the pronunciation of numbers, critical in machining to avoid ambiguity. The word "and" is used only to locate the decimal point - 1101.01 is read "one thousand one hundred one and one hundredth", and no other way. (n.b. among machinists, 1101.0011 is read "one thousand one hundred one and eleven tenths). btw: Water ice is not the only solid less dense than the corresponding liquid - among the elements alone, gallium, germanium, and bismuth expand when solidifying. Several compounds do that as well.

Or, short version, authoritarians exist. Many of them want to use nuclear power to advance their agenda, as well. GMO technology. Islamic terrorism. With sufficint research, I suspect one could find an example of some authoritarian using bunny rabbits to advance their agenda (I'd chekc Australian politics a generation ago). The ease with which nuclear power can be bent to the service of central authority is one of the many arguments against adopting it as a major response to CO2 boost hazard. Others would be the high cost, the high risks (even the cost creates risk - no mone left over for other approaches if the nukes prove a bad idea), the irrevocability of creating all that dangerous waste, the reliance on finite and irreplaceable resources, the sudden and catastrophic manner in which nukes fail, and so forth.

This isn't really a topic on its own - it was posted to provide context for the Benghazi thread; especially, an opportunity for the posters who find the diplomatic handling of the Benghazi event uniquely significant and accusatory to explain why, by comparing and contrasting the diplomatic handling of better known and less immediately infalmmatory events of the recent past.

The "chord" it strikes is a lie - a serious and fundamental deception. Example: Churchill was referring to advocates of free trade and lower tariffs and less economic regulation as liberal. That is not the "chord" struck in the US today, and people who claim the moral authority of the man who led the fight against Hitler for their advocacy of free trade as the mature, grownup approach are either lying or badly misinformed. What actual political stances Churchill considered mature and intelligent, as well as what he and everyone admired as having heart, is central to the meaning of that quote. And so his terms need translation. Actual political positions are not involved. As it is used now in the US, it is often (usually) meant in a political position sense (as a reference to a political stance) almost the opposite of what Churchill meant. The invocation of Churchillian character and authority to support the opposite of what Churchill said and stood for is at least objectionable, no? At least a bit deceptive? Or Churchill. But it has been less than a century since Churchill, and not nearly the revolution in culture - we are surprised to find even these few cases. Then we note that the propaganda operations launched against some of the terms in Churchill's political vocabulary are new - Shakespeare's vocabulary, which does require frequent footnoting for the modern reader, changed in more natural circumstances and over longer spans of time. The only "spectrum" involved has not moved. Reality has not changed. The actual political stances and arguments and positions have not inverted through some kind of opposite-day mirror, dragging their vocabulary with them. We still need terms for the collection of political viewpoints and arguments and analyses we used to call "liberal", the economic advocacy we used to call "left-wing" - - - - and the union of corporate with political and military power we used to call "fascism", btw. How are we to discuss socialized medicine if we must refer to Romney's program in Massachusetts (now adopted federally by Obama's administration) as "socialist"? If huge and unaccounted government gifts to private banks are now "socialist"? It takes a while to invent new words, and the necessity of discarding - or translating - the last few centuries of political thought and discourse is no small burden. Thing is: the propaganda usage is not merely wrong, but destructive of meaning - there is no new meaning involved, but a destruction of meaning itself. For example: In this new US usage, the word "leftwing" no longer refer to position on a left/right economic spectrum at all. It refers to whatever the Murdoch press and the fascist radio decide to apply it to - gun control, private bank bailouts, abortion on demand, nothing is too ridiculous or far-fetched, anything at all. It is even used interchangeably with "liberal", and there has been an attempt (still in progress) to make both of them interchangeable with "fascist". A reasonable translation confined to the new usage, without reference to the meaning of the term as standard for two centures of political discourse in English , might be "bad", or in the sense of TH White's ants in "The Once and Future King", "not-done". And this eventually poisons the media well, perhaps irrevocably. We can no longer discuss, in the public media arena, the major political issues and events of the day, if we have no terms of discourse. The easiest person to read on this matter is Orwell.