Comment Re:Life on Mars? (Score 1) 265
Yeah. But they are really good at spectacular failure, and undermining long-term success prospects through want for cooperation...
Yeah. But they are really good at spectacular failure, and undermining long-term success prospects through want for cooperation...
Earth is already a permanent space colony.
Yeah.
And just LOOK at how THAT turned out!
Nope. Ongoing, current bacteriological process.
"Ever" - rhetorical device. Not a statement of actual infinite temporal determination.
sounds like a republican capitalist paradise. we should import a couple of the Dubai leaders to put the US poor to work. finally.
Grim emphasis on the "final".
Oil a'int fossil in origin. The Russians know that, and have capitalized magnificently on technologies that exploit this. This is actually the REAL story behind the Donetsk basin.
False scarcity is a wealth creator and a method of social control. UAE will be destroyed not by petrochemical scarcity, but by its comparative plenitude.
No one will EVER live in a permanent space colony. Sorry.
This fantasy was promoted in an age where achieving terrestrial dominance through orbital trajectory of warheads was under intense and competitive development. It did its job.
Rockwell rode on the tail-end of this era, for the final boondoggle of the US Shuttle Program, in the 1970's. You won't see anything like that again.
There is still an instrument for guiding one's evaluation of claims and conundrums: Cui Bono?
In matters of human affairs, it is generally less erring than application of Occam's razor.
"Someone" is interested in getting you to think that the biggest potential for catastrophe, in your daily life and for your way of living, is impending Muslim ideological violence. They wish you to believe an absurdity.
What group or party benefits from this? Why have they chosen this from other possible alternatives? What other possible real threats and risks are diverted from attention by this condition?
Those are the basic questions for the truly inquisitive, not those merely questioning from a habit of personality.
Someone sounds jealous...
Someone is well-informed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMh-vlQwrmU
"Dew-picked and flown from Iraq, cleansed in finest-quality spring water, lightly killed, and then sealed in a succulent Swiss quintuple smooth treble cream milk chocolate envelope, and lovingly frosted with glucose."
OK. To de-escalate, and in the interest of trying an educational dialogue, I will attempt to clarify what appears to be an assumption in the posting to which I responded.
You mention "taqiyya" as a point of doctrine, or an approved mode for action, by those who profess a "witnessing" of Islam ("tashud").
This is in most was incorrect. Certainly, it is misleading, as a generalization. Al-Taqiyya is usually translated as "dissimulation". There are numerous arguments about the permissibility of this specific shading of deceit or "lying" in the history of Islamic discourse. The most common, and widely known usage was for Shi'ite partisans of 'Ali and his descendants, immediately in the time of their political schism. This was during the lifetimes of the original 3 Imams. The purpose thereof was defensive - used to deflect persecution or compulsion by "Sunni" adherents.
It is important to note this: In the first few centuries, Shi'a were a political distinction for legitimate leadership of the 'Ummah or community. Doctrinally there was not a separate school of theology or jurisprudence. Thusly, the term "Sunni" as a contrasting group is often a more modern anachronism when applied to the period - up to about the time of Jaffar Al-Siddiq, or so... "Shi'a" of that time - and indeed probably today - consider themselves to be following in the "Sunnah" of the prophet.
All of this aside, dissimulation is a means to defensively avoid harm and persecution, without giving up or rejecting articles of belief. This is true of Shi'a or of Sunni jurisprudence. There is no corresponding school of thinking that has authorized Al-Taqiyya for means of "deception" versus "dissimulation" in pursuing acts of war or other hostility.
There is in fact another term "Al-Makr" for "deception" that relates to concealment of intention. There are a number of debates about the use of this term in the Q'ran, as applied to God. Most of that discussion is quasi-theological for political ends and beyond the scope of discussion here. Let us only say that the message of the book is roughly "Those who try to trick God, have in the end only tricked themselves - for God is master over all things, including their trickery." Parse as you will.
Let us conclude that Al-Makr, as a doctrine to promote the faith, is haram.
To suggest that the existence of Al-Taqiyya provides a doctrinal basis under which one may make generalized assumptions about the threatening character of any Muslim believer is ignorant or provocative, at the least.
I'm SUING the manufacturers of BOX CUTTERS for the complicit CONSPIRACY they participated in on 9/11/2001!
-- Mayor 9u11iani.
About as great a job as they are doing emulating a company that makes cell phones and tablets.
Let's not make a big deal out of this. 640kg of reactor-grade plutonium is only enough for a bit over 100 fission bombs / fusion bomb first stages, merely enough to make the recipient roughly tied for being the world's sixth most armed nuclear power.
Nothing to see here.
Clearly, you have never built a fission device, if you think you could get that many of them out of 640kg of even weapons grade Plutonium. You need to probably go back and read "The Curve of Binding Energy" and recalculate the neutron numbers to determine critical mass, assuming a pareto optimal design, because you are more than a bit high with "100"...
You could build a lot of dirty bombs with something like that, but you are likely better off just robbing a radiomedicine unit at a large research hospital to get the materials, or stealing a truck out of a fast food restaurant in Mexico City...
I call BS on EMACS...
...and Emacs traces its roots back to something like 1972.
You can't "And Constantly Swapping" unless it's running on a machine with virtual memory and swapping implemented.
The moon is made of green cheese. -- John Heywood