We could be there 50 years and still have no hope of stabilizing the situation (maybe if we just installed another dictator like Saddam). Stabilizing is not something we can impose but is something they'll have to work out internally.

I'm sorry, but I agree with that. If you on the UK want us to dam up our rivers and build roads out to geothermal areas and tap into our resources, and raise our local power prices in the process, all for the benefit of the UK, our government better damn well profit as much as possible from it and reduce our taxes / improve our services in exchange for that.

Unfortunately, xB and xD do not agree.

Readily replaceable intakes?

Seriously, fuck the fish.

You could find fans for a plan like that...

Better negotiate the contract during a Sjálfstæðisflokkurinn / Framsóknarflokkurinn (conservative) government. Samfylkingin would approve it under the condition that the Icelandic government's share of the sales are so high that you would barely save any money on the imported power, and Vinstri Grænir would outright reject it no matter what you offered. But Sjálfstæðisflokkurinn and Framsóknarflokkurinn would let you dam up whatever rivers you want and take gigawatts of power in exchange for a handful of shiny trinkets and a couple magic beans.

The middle class has been fading ever since Reagan was President. It's a product of supply side economics and the emphasis on the wealthy and the demonization of unions. The rich keep getting richer leaving less money available for the rest of us.

Exactly. And tools and organization are the two most useful skills... for efficiently killing things.

Paying somebody else to do it turns out to be a very efficient strategy for killing.

I totally didn't know that! That's awesome!

Here's one I found with four components: http://solomonsmusic.net/FM_Cr...

I am curious how that tiny antenna can produce enough energy to drive even a crystal earpiece. Most crystal radios need huge antennae, don't they? And from the writeup it looks like the FM decoding more or less happens by accident as a side effect of signal interference.

If this really works, I reckon it should be possible to build a miniaturised FM crystal set into a pair of headphones. I wonder if you could do stereo?

Saddam would have eventually fallen apart, or one of his erratic sons would have. And then you would have potentially worse scenarios. You might even have had a full-on Iranian invasion to support the Shiite majority, causing a union of those two countries. Now that would be worse than ISIS.

Even if Saddam didn't end up out of power, he may have been holding things together, but even brutal dictators like him can't do that forever. Something was going to give.

There is no outcome in the Middle East that is going to go well. Even if the West packed up and left, they'd just start killing each other until the strongest one won. And I'm not sure anyone would like that scenario. Particularly if they decided to start by putting the Israelis under enough pressure that they go "Never again" on the Arabs and start nuking people.

The current start of the ME is bad, but it is nowhere near as bad as it could get.

Other "end of the world" cults have been engaged by military forces and they died just the same.

Their ideology will result in needless death when it comes to taking them down, but letting them continue what they are doing is only adding to the number who will end up dying once someone has to deal with them. Don't be confused. The price they demand will be paid one way or another. You're not going to be able to go in there and arrest them peaceably. It's too late for that, and if we let it go long enough, they will make their war, even if we won't give it to them.

Ah... You apparently believe that climate scientists are "cooking" the numbers for nefarious reasons. The reasons and methods for the adjustments are all out in the open although it takes some scientific knowledge to understand them. Here is an explanation from Berkeley Earth about their data set and filtering. Everything they do there is out in the open.

So I await your scientifically based reasons not to accept the current adjusted temperature data sets.

We already sort of do that. All they need to do is either tell everyone that they have bombs in them, or go collecting them in pickup trucks with machine guns. At that point, they'll re-paint them with ISIS logos and "provide" them to themselves or their population.

These guys aren't stupid, they control the ground, and they've been turning our own shit back on us for years. You need to give the regular people some hope that ISIS isn't going to rule them forever and then you may have some uptake. Maybe.

Not likely. It isn't like simply making that stuff available makes a user out of you.

These guys are brainwashed into killing people with rusty, dull knives, they can certainly be brainwashed into not buying some smack.

What will actually happen is that the "targets" will collect the drugs and then sell them back to the West to make more money to kill more people.

These guys are already high on something completely different.

Then again, they're something approaching scientists of one form or another. They have more attachment to truth than to politics.