Funny, the perpetrators were kind of proclaiming loudly and to everybody who wanted to hear it that it was because America is not submitting (in the military sense) to muslims. I guess you're better informed than they are - I am sorry.

Not really.

America is interventionist because without doing that America would lose the ability to do international trade over the high seas. Either because nobody else would police the world, or -worse- because someone else would. We have to create the future - or others will do it for us.

We are going into an energy shortage, and we are seeing the beginnings of the end of middle eastern oil (production hasn't risen for ~7 years now, aside from a few random movements). What happened was a result of their governments being forced to no longer increase spending (delayed by a few years of ridiculous lending - you'd think in a culture that places the death penalty on lending money the government would not be trillions in debt - you'd be wrong).

Give it 2-10 more years and the oil production will be in freefall across most of the middle east. What do you think will happen ?

The middle east doesn't export oil because America is holding a gun to their heads, they export it for the money. They're about to lose the vast majority of their money, and it will happen in less than a decade. Of course it will all be the fault of America and Israel, but fact of the matter is that without oil, middle eastern states -aside from Israel and Lebanon- aren't capable of providing enough water for their population, not to mention food.

The cause behind a lot of middle eastern problems used to be religion, it is however rapidly changing to energy shortage.

Killing you in the most cruel manner possible the day you go on a pension would provide the exact same benefits, yet it sounds like a much better solution.

As you say:

Exactly. You can call me cold and heartless if you wish but I say you need to get executed. Tortured first of course. It is in our collective best interest !

(here's hoping some sarcasm can make you see the light)

Heh, the joke of this is that the vast majority of the people on this planet are in favor of censorship. "The west" is between 800 million and a billion people. The Chinese want censorship, Indians (a democracy) want censorship, muslims want censorship. Those 3 groups together are close to 2/3rds of our planet's people.

If the internet was governed democratically, as in 1 head = 1 vote, there would be no freedom on it. These countries have already proven that they'd rather cooperate on censorship, enforcing eachother's firewalls, rather than stand for freedom.

If the "bad" US loses control, expect the internet to become a nightmare.

That's true, however recent business history has shown that benefits of big risky projects accumulate, resulting in exponential advantage. Look at google/facebook, or at least that's the theory. And there's plenty of "smaller" non-IT examples of this too.

Which means either you run risky little-chance-for-success-huge-payoff projects, or you get eaten by a tiny upstart.

I'm going to play devil's advocate here : The way to debate this with republicans is simple : global warming is being used to massively expand government and regulation. It effectively regulates one of the few things nothing and nobody can do without : energy. I don't think anyone really denies that that is happening.

Which is also why this responsibility thing is so huge with them : they don't feel responsible for global warming. Their grandfather's grandfather had nothing to do with it, other than having kids (ie. you). It's 15-20 generations back that it got started, long before accurate family records even began, and once started it was (and is) just a feedback loop that will complete with or without humans (look at the models in the IPCC reports, and ignore your "you averaged highdimensional non-linear models to arrive at a conclusion ?" impulse, which any statistician should have. And btw, that is not the only alarm that goes off in my head looking at those studies. I agree that those models are the best currently possible way to predict climate. Agreed. How does that fact make them valid ? Our best may simply not be good enough).

In no reasonable sense of the word is anyone, nor humans "as a whole" responsible for global warming and there is zero moral justification to force people to take global warming into account. Were some humans part of the initial cause of global warming ? Yes, very likely. All the pain the entirety of the west put itself through in the last 15 years, btw, have been worse than useless.

Ok, but maybe we can justify it by pointing out the success we've had by all that interference and government expansion, right ? Otherwise all the people hurt because of this goal, from people starving due to bio-ethanol idiocy to the masses of people fired from no-longer-profitable factories in the west were hurt merely to make intellectuals feel good about themselves, with no measurable advantage. The only measure of importance in the models is worldwide co2 concentration, which has worsened due to government interference (e.g. because factories in the US by large run on nuclear and oil, whereas the chinese factories replacing them run on coal, producing about 20x more co2 for the same amount of energy).

So have we improvided global co2 production ? Nope, we've actually worsened it.

And of course, like all failing political goals, total failure can only be responded to in one way : we must do it again ! More ! Harder ! Which of course, to these sceptics, and to anyone observing the situation proves that the only goal of politicians is not to do do anything about global warming, but to amass more power and hurt more people, make everyone more dependent.

The result, of course, will be a complete crash followed by wars. But of course, we won't know that for sure until it really happens, and then everyone can say "I didn't know". You just did what was popular, right ? How can popular thinking be wrong ?

We're on the titanic, slaughtering working people to satisfy the almighty atheismo on the front deck, them screaming and we celebrating, celebrating how he has delivered us from icebergs ... say, what's that in the distance ?

I think that is because actually teaching someone a subject like mathematics only works if you love the subject yourself, and vastly exceed the ability of your students, at least at the start of the year. That's just not true for most teachers.

You comment is only the truth if you define "those lands" as Israel. If you take "those lands" to mean Palestine or Gaza, then it's just a lie, and wrong. Hamas will not settle for "just" Palestine. I love how you made this comment in a way that it sounds bad, and it's perfectly true if Hamas is indeed only trying to conquer Israel, which would be totally unacceptable.

Then you're an irrational fool. 30% * 300% = 90% return, 90% * 30% ~ 30% return. Although I will agree the second option is easier on the nerves. Also I would argue the rewards curve for a lot of projects follows a power law, so the 300% is going to be much higher.

Most large business are doing the "large amounts of long bets" thing. Google, Apple, Microsoft, ... I am sure they're not alone. Frankly if you want to do something new and make a profit at it you want to be going for the long shot. It's sort of logical. When you're young and can fall back on state support like in Europe and US in the worst case, why wouldn't you go for the extreme long shot ? Of course, for us 30 year olds with families that arrangement feels like it was coming from a slavemaster in the 18th century.

If enough people go for it, it makes all other tactics sure to fail. I think that there is ample evidence that's exactly what's happening.

Yes, but have you factored in exactly how much difference that Obamacare provision makes ? At the risk of introducing some actual facts into the discussion, here's the actual rule :

Any employer with 50 or more full-time employees has to provide health insurance to all employees or pay a fine.
Full time = 30 hours per week or more, calculated monthly.

So suppose you're a business, right now not providing health insurance, who would suffer from this (meaning > 50 employees). Well, let's calculate, shall we ? Minimum cost = $50, or up to $200 in some states. That's 2500$ - 10000$ per month recurring cost with zero gain for the business owner, or between one and eight extra employees.

Presumably, given that we are in a recession and getting new customers is too hard that means that the business owner has one of two choices : cheat the system, and not get to 50 full-time employees, or fire between one and eight employees, eat the cost (assuming they have enough profit to cover that cost, of course, if they are using the business to pay off loans etc, then there is no margin at all), or go bankrupt and effectively fire everyone without giving them their last 2 paychecks.

So now you will start getting European practices. Similar rules exist in Europe, and of course they effectively mean every temp agency has at most X people working for them, but there sure are a lot of temp agencies that share the exact same address and "buy administration services" from the same management company. Welcome to Europe ! Ditto for hours claimed. Can you work overtime ? You can't declare it as hours worked, but I'll buy you anything you like from amazon for $50 (or just get you a gift certificate).

Brings back memories.

Even inside Israel they won't go after them. Inside Israel, there's of course the problem of the people on the street who are being targetted by rockets. Shouting too hard that they deserve getting killed by those rockets, of course, is not likely to be appreciated.

Wouldn't be any different in any western country.

Where do you get the idea that Palestinians want a two state solution ? They HAVE a two state solution in Gaza, and yet they still attack. So this is clearly not what they want.

Of course, if you look at the stated aims of the Palestinian state, here on wikipedia one of their stated aims is to kill every last Jew walking this earth. Various reasons are given, from outright conspiracy theories, to stating (with a direct and correct quote from islamic holy texts I might add) that allah not just wants every Jew eliminated, but will actively help accomplish that.

If you assume that hamas is indeed religious, there is no solution to this conflict short of the elimination of either side.

Have you read a few articles on the internet or a paper ? How can you possibly make a claim like this. Half the democratic blogs are rife with comments about attacking Jews in America (thankfully the editors themselves are attacking Israel, and staying away from open racism, but they don't seem to be doing anything about racist comments), and the conservative blogs are full of "but palestinian children died" comments. Not that there isn't a significant amount of racist anti-Palestinian comments too, but the Jews are by far the most villified here.

If you're interpreting that as "the West loves Israel", you need your head examined.

No they don't. The entire islamic world has larger levels of anti-Semitism than Germany had in the 1930s (not that other kinds of racism are far behind), and the issue is simple : the more attention hamas captures, the more this anti-Semitism will play in politics in other muslim countries.

The more attention hamas grabs, using any and all means, including their favorite tactic of getting their neighbours' children killed, the more successful they're likely to become.

Their stated purpose is to bring back traditional islamic values, and they explicitly mention including eternal war (one translation "jihad") with, well, with everyone else. Another stated purpose of Hamas is to kill every Jew in the world.