Iraq definitely had chemical weapons. That's what they gassed the Shiites and Kurds with. Not to mention the Iranians.

Of course, that program by 2003 was probably not operational, but they certainly still had some around.

The major question is whether it was worth going to war over what they still had. Probably not. Gassing people is bad stuff, but if Saddam had done that to anyone other than the Iranians (or their own people), Saddam knew that it wouldn't hurt US troops much, and it would make *everyone* hate his guts.

The real reason we went to war with Iraq was simple... there was a sense that something had to be done or Saddam would have walked away scot free from the Gulf War, and his sons would eventually be in power now like Kim Jong Un is now in NK. By 2003 everyone was starting to be itchy to get the sanctions lifted, and the no fly zone was expensive, and really wasn't going to last forever. A little fake contriteness, no more stupid shit like invading Kuwait, and he could get back to work on some nukes and become invulnerable like NK is.

Make no mistake, a war in the ME was inevitable, and another one is probably still inevitable even if we had not screwed up and cut and run from Iraq. There's just too many people out there who hate each other who are living on top of too much oil.

There's people out there that decry that wars would be fought over oil. All I can say to that is, what else do you fight a war over? Democracy? Give me a break. Other than fighting back against an invasion, it's about the only rational reason to fight a war. If you run out of resources, your country and your society goes to shit. Agreed that we should get off of oil, but the rest of the world is as addicted as the US is, and even if we went to 100% domestic production, we can't let Europe or China lose access due to instability or we go down with them.

WMD was a bullshit reason to fight a war over, no question. The war was still coming anyway. In fact, it is still coming. Unless we can get most of these people out there out of the 13th Century, this is going to stay ugly until the oil runs out or we figure out how to get off oil without trashing our economy. And make no mistake, the only real chance of WWIII is if someone trashes the global economy. If that happens, there will be blood.

Actually, I thought about it, and you're actually right, and I am somewhat ashamed about that particular statement. Contrary to your belief, I know quite a bit of economic history, but I can totally see why you might think I didn't. That's what happens when my brain gets detached from my fingers.

However, the point is still that you have marriage for a state objective of maintaining order. That is why the state even cares. Those who do not breed do not produce children. Maintaining a stable family unit, whether that be an extended family or a nuclear one, or something different, is useful to a state because it creates order for relatively low cost. Today, we attempt to replace that with programs, but they are not as well developed as order generated by clan or family relationships.

State sponsored marriage is not about love, for the state it is about the exploitation of love to maintain order. And well that it is, because I don't want the state telling me what "love" is. Now that we're expecting the state to legitimize "love", we're walking down a path we might not realize we are going down.

This is an important distinction to make.

Jennifer Lawrence is not at fault for her stuff being stolen. She's not a slut and she didn't deserve it. No one deserved to get her nude selfies. She has every right to get naked and nasty for her man and transmit that over the Interwebs.

However, at the same time, it was an action that was not without risk. We should feel sympathy for her for falling prey to that risk, but what we should not do is become outraged that it is possible for it to happen.

A lot of people are outraged that things like this can happen and want to nuke any possibility that it could ever possibly happen. This is where the line has to be drawn, both for this and for crimes like rape. We cannot have a risk-free society.

You need to protect yourself. There are hackers and crazy animals who are rapists out there. The people who will respond to your reasoned arguments about why you should be able to put your relationship porn on the Internet, or why you should have every right to walk down the street in spandex and pasties are the very people you didn't need to worry much about in the first place. By now, they know the arguments and are complying with the reasoning.

What I see happening is blaming all males or male hormones or the Patriarchy for women being unsafe to walk down the streets half-naked, when it isn't "males" at all, but rather people with psychological problems. I see people blaming Apple or hackers or society in general for the fact that a high value target got her nudes found and distributed, when it is actually people who get off on cracking sites and trading personal details like baseball cards on TOR who are the issue. They are the panty-sniffers of the Internet.

Victims of crimes like this are not at fault for getting raped, but when they don't protect themselves, we don't all suddenly become accountable as a society for a problem that we can't completely eradicate without turning ourselves into a thought-controlled police state.

I'd say that an atheist has a belief system that has nothing to do with going to church, but that there may be some sort of comparable action or ritual that might cause a similar effect.

If they maintain that action, they may have a higher chance of staying together. If you separate the religious element from the action of going to church, you still have a regularly scheduled social activity where a number of people are assembled to do some sort of coordinated action. Atheists can certainly have things like that, although it is probably not something as common as going to church.

It also might be that the two studies in question don't correlate well together. There are studies all the time that seem to contradict one another in various details. So... YMMV.

The government has a good reason for paying off breeding couples to get a legal arrangement. Think about it carefully. There may be discrimination, but it is far from nonsensical from a state perspective.

Yup. I don't really think it needs much more explanation than this.

If you expect to have to meet the scrutiny of others, you're going to have to at least consider what they might think before you do it. Oftentimes, the value of that isn't from their actual input, but from the questions you ask yourself when you try and predict what your friends and family might say. That sort of internal inquiry tends to encourage you to consider your relationship from different perspectives.

If you avoid all that by eloping, you are saving yourself money and stress, but sometimes a little stress now saves a whole shitload of stress later.

The odds of winning the lottery may be sixty million to one against, but some people still do win on occasion.

With arranged marriages, there is a different dynamic working which affects how those two people interact. I think it is more accurate to say that an arranged marriage isn't between two people, it is a marriage of two families. The two principals in such a marriage are not really in that relationship by themselves and those expectations will join, and keep joined, two people who might not have gotten together initially if they relied on their own criteria and hormones.

If you take away the structure of the arranged marriage, which is uncommon in the US for anyone other than recent immigrants, it is likely that being familiar with the other person previously improves your chances considerably.

Marriage isn't necessarily like an overripe fruit which, once it goes bad, it is done. Relationships can be worked on, and when they are, you can overcome bad situations.

I won't suggest that all relationships can be repaired, nor should they be. Still, if you spend the time finding a good match, as opposed to going straight for the fat wallet or a nice pair of tits, you have a shot at picking someone who isn't necessarily perfect, but someone you have a fighting chance of having enough in common to mend a relationship, if you try.

Point being, there is a tendency to be dismissive of Christians (or whoever), who stick it out longer than others might due to community influence. Without effort put into working on the relationship, that may well just generate misery, but if the couple has a solid basis for a relationship, it can cause the couple to actually work on something when they might otherwise have decided to simply give up.

Marriage is one of those things where people are inclined to turn it into something disposable, where in reality, many of those people simply shouldn't have gotten married at all. The problem isn't with the ability to get divorced quickly or easily, the problem is with the people who think they should get married, but who really shouldn't have even left their number for the other person after the drunk sex.

The government has a good reason to favor certain lifestyles. Up until the last century, it was a lifestyle that had one person at home, raising the kids, and the other one out making money for them. And those were the same people who caused the children to come into existence.

The government doesn't give a shit if you love your partner, they just want to make sure that those who can breed are encouraged to control their spawn and provide for them.

The divorce rate and the whole "who can get married" debate is everyone missing the point about why you get married and why the government even gets involved. It's about the government providing convenience and some breaks in return for control.

No. While there is often speculative work on new theories, that speculation usually has a firm jumping off point from existing principles.

Note that while relativity is more accurate than classical mechanics, relativity still approximates to classical mechanics within certain limits. When you consider how revolutionary relativity is considered to be, but how well it aligns with what went before, you start to realize just how strange it would be to find something completely different than what you'd expect as a result of new research.

If the nickel reaction being talked about here was merely a novel means of triggering a difficult, but well understood reaction in which nickel atoms could pick up some neutrons while giving off energy, then this would be not so difficult to stomach. The problem is that there is no known reaction that does this, and the physics seems to rule it out. If this is real, it may require the invention of completely novel science in a way that even the Theory of Relativity itself didn't even require.

Hoaxes tend to be discussed when there is a long desired end result (that has attracted a lot of financial interest in the past), and then new science seems to spring out of nowhere to explain someone's invention that does just that. No one considered radioactivity to be a hoax, for instance, because even though no one knew what it was or had even really noticed it before the invention of film, no one had spent billions on trying to construct a nuclear reactor before it was discovered. The discovery of radioactivity drove the reactor, not vice versa.

What if I can convince malware that my bare metal is actually a VM? Then will the malware authors work as hard as they can to have their stuff NOT install on my machine?

The other countries don't care... the US hacking their people's computers means that they don't have to. All that needs to happen is the US and EU governments hack computers of the citizens of the other, and then swap the information. Sure, there's still some protections if that evidence was used in court, but there's zero protection if that intel isn't used for a court case, but instead to inform an investigation which then, magically, is able to know exactly where to look to get the information they need to get search warrants and other constitutional case-building evidence.

If they're Type III, they do the assimilating.

And yes, they think we are very tasty indeed. That's why their swarms are on their way and will be arriving in about 38,000 years.

A bunch of Type IIs would be sufficient for this, but certainly a Type III would be easier to find.