Aardvark

Certainly, to recap. The NOAA provides a Tsunami warning service in the PACIFIC OCEAN. The Tsunami to hit Indonesia and Sri Lanki amongst others, happened in the INDIAN OCEAN. Once you understand the difference between the Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean you wil realise that the NOAA had no responsibility, either legal, moral, ethical, implied or explict. One minute with a world atlas will help clear it up for you.

Could be interesting, but what would the actual debate be? The premise that the USA was loved in 1990 and this caused the fall of the Berlin wall and averted war?

Extracting shale oil is more costly than simply putting down an oil well, but the cost is steadily falling as the technology has been developed. With an oil price consistently above $25(US) it is generally considered worth putting in the substantial investment needed for large scale extraction. The technical challenges are not insummountable, it's simply a matter of confidence in a sufficently high prce. What you say is true, but if the price of oil and gas rises then alternatives will be found. A lot of the use of oil and gas is non essential and wasteful. If higher prices stop supermarkets giving out millions of non biodegradable plastic bags and stop idiots burning vast quantities of petrol by driving everywhere then i will be the first to celebrate. I'm in rough agreement with your 10 year timespan for changing over the economy. And that seems reasonable considering that oil is not going to simply run out. It will become more expensive as the world depends more on sources that are harder to extract and companies and industries will naturally look for alternatives and ways to reduce their costs. Considering the wastage in our societies there seems plenty of slack to enable us to make greatly improved efficencies and move into alternatives. We don't need to be melodramatic about it, we aren't going to wake up one morning and find that the chemical industry is closed because oil is too expensive. Rather, some old plants will close and newer ones will adapt or be built . It will take place over a long enough time frame for it to occur in a natural investment cycle without too much disruption. As far as i am concerned, the sooner the better. The worlds dependence on cheap oil is like a herion addiction. Breaking that addiction may cause some withdrawal symptoms but it will be worth it. Society will survive, life will continue. Maybe some fat lazy gits will have to start using bikes rather than UTEs to drive around town. Fundamentally we are in agreement about what is going to happen, cheap oil is ending and people are going to have to adapt. However i think there is so much slack and waste in our economies that the transition will not be as hard as you seem to think. When lard arses in gas guzzling UTEs realise that it isn't a constitional right to waste vast quantities of oil the savings in over consumption will be high. Some people will have to make adjustments they don't like. I imagine the squealing will be very loud from the fat, lazy selfish hypocrites. To me, those squealings will sound like music.

Even if you were an untrustworthy, dodgy Italian communist journalist, it seems unlikely the USA would deliberately gun you down just as Italy starts national celebrations on your return home from captivity. It looks like a case of a bad accident. Something that the USA sometimes seems to have a bit of a bad habit about. Shooting your supposed allies isn't a great way to conduct foriegn policy. I'm guessing some heads are going to roll (metaphorically) in the US military for this.

The NOAA has never offered any service concerning Tsunami warnings in the Indian Ocean. No service, no offer, no obligation. That comes across as cheap emotional blackmail. There was no country responsible for issuing Tsunami warnings in the Indian Ocean. Taking your example, it is as if a Tsunami were to hit Florida and the USA were to blame an Switzerland for not providing any warning.

The NOAA is a US government department. It recieves no foreign funds. It has no obligations to report or make any warnings for events in the Indian Ocean. It does have some reciprocal arrangements for sharing warnings and information in the Pacific ocean.

The Berlin war coming down had nothing to do with the USA being respected or liked. It had to do with the puppet regime in East Germany having its support cut off from Moscow as the USSR collasped. You're talking about the Reagan administration here. The administration that racheted up the arms race, confronted communism in an agressive manner, brought cruise missiles to Europe against strong opposition. The administration that bombed Libya and increased military aid to Israel. From my reading of your posts every act the US administration ever took was always, without exception, wrong. If this is a misinterpretation then i apologise. I certainly look forward to the day the US administration actually does something you do approve of. Careful you don't die of shock

Exactly. To criticise a restored environment on the grounds that it is an 'artefact' and has less 'moral' value for some reason because humans have been involved is simply meaningless semantics. Yes, any restored environment is likely to be less ecologically complex and complete than a pristine environment, but it is still an improvement on a blighted and damaged environment. To suggest that human involvement somehow makes the ecosystem less valid is to impose artifical, subjective and completely immeasurable moral values. It also is demeaning to nature. Nature adapts and survives many things, including human activity. To state that an environment is no longer natural simply because of some intervention by the human species is both arrogant and wrong. It sounds like this 'Eric Katz' is simply playing word games, not actually contributing anything useful to conservation.

Sri Lanka doesn't give any funds to the NOAA. The NOAA isn't set up to provide Sri Lanka with any warnings of anything.

I know you don't like America much, but blaming it for the Tsunami seems a bit unfair even for you.

Who is Eric Katz and why should anyone care what he thinks? He sounds like a puffed up idiot.

Even if every allegation was true, so what? Since when did NOAA have any duty of care to any of these countries? And since when did Thailand have any duty of care to Sri Lanka? What a contemptable lot of ********. Trying to make money out of such an event is sick.

All cultures and societies have incest taboos. When cultures such as Ancient Egypt are mentioned as exceptions even those cultures had strong taboos in this regard, it being only the single example of the ruling Pharoah who was made an exception for religious reasons. Everyone else would have seen incest as something to seriously avoid. For some reason people occassionally raise the question of whether the incest taboo is biological or cultural, which is odd as it is a clear matter of hard fact that incest is genetically harmful. It seems to be a hangover from cultural relativists who get upset at seeing biology knock down their concepts and so try tilting at the wind mills once again.

The Amish suffer a relatively high rate of minor birth defects such as polydactyly (extra fingers and toes) and congential heart disease.

Because your deep understanding of the human psyche is so utterly insightful. To be able to arrive to such a profound understanding of human motivation leaves me humbled to be in your virtual presence. After all what could possibly be more motivating than the prosperity of the state? What a brilliant insight.

Death threats are a good way to get a prompt response.

Your understanding of human motivation leaves me astounded.

New technologies will be the answer, as you point out hydrogen fuel is not an energy source, it's a container for energy. That is why i posisted hydrogen technology with cold fusion, there are plenty of technologies which can already produce electricty without using hydrocarbons and those technologies could be improved. Even using the old fashioned technology of nuclear power could provide hydrogen fuel for cars so ending dependency on oil and being environmentally cleaner. At the end of the day, we don't need oil. It is convienent and cheap. when it becomes inconvienent and expensive we shall simply move on to other forms of energy. The problems you point out of higher oil prices will simply be the market signals needed to cause this change.