What activist has been subjected to that treatment that you know of?

Well, to be honest, if you look at energy sources, they're all non-renewable, if you are looking at the extreme long term. At some point, there is the heat death of the universe. Sooner than that, the sun is going to bloat up into a red giant and engulf the Earth, rendering the energy argument moot for our current habitat.

In the sense that it will be a constant source that we'll have for the next billion or two years, energy sources that rely on current solar radiation are renewable. Not infinite, but renewable.

I suppose you could say oil and coal are renewable as well, actually. It just so happens that calling their renewal rate "glacial" is actually a literal understatement.

You're probably right about the whole carbon emission thing, but renewable resource use actually has a much broader meaning and value. Even if coal and oil wasn't affecting global warming, we'd still want renewables for the simple reason that naturally occurring coal, oil, and gas will eventually be depleted, and well before then we need more forms of energy generation to support growing demand. Bearing that in mind allows you to maintain common cause with people who might still be less than convinced about the threat of warming, but understand the value of energy generation.

Which is a valid concern. Some genes may lend themselves to easy understanding of what they do, and thus correcting a specific issue will be fairly straightforward.

However, "fixing" some genes may have unintended consequences. I'm sure most African-descended people in the US could care less about malaria resistance, and would prefer to not have to deal with sickle cell, but it may not be as simple for those people still in Africa. And that's just the obvious case. There may be some genes that are terminal for humans, but are needed to live at the same time.

What's more, we may first find out about that problem when we try it out on someone, if we don't take the appropriate care.

I'm not going to assume that we could never figure it all out. It's basically like debugging a nasty piece of software. It will take a long time, but not an infinite amount of time. The question is what we're willing to do before we know everything there is to know about our genome. And then, what are we willing to do to ourselves or other people when we are able to.

If you develop some notion of human "perfection" and everyone tries to apply it to themselves, we could end up with a species that is maladapted in some way that we didn't think of, or didn't want to accept could happen.

Er. Isn't that exactly what he did?

He went to Hong Kong and then Russia. Presumably, now they have those secrets.

And even if they didn't get the secrets handed to them on a silver platter with a bow on top, they can read The Guardian as well as anyone else can, right? Giving the secrets to everyone is not actually any better than giving it just to a couple specific enemies.

So yeah, his plan was to reveal secrets and he did that. He had a reason for doing so, of course. I suppose it is up to you whether that means he's a traitor or not. By some definitions, he totally is. By others, he isn't. Both sides have merit to their arguments.

I'm seeing a pattern recognition issue here.

Germany may have been beaten into submission, but most of their stance is due to their ability to maintain a less militaristic demeanor because they know they aren't going to be attacked.

The warmongers may have caused the wars, but they were able to play on regular Germans' pride and fear. Right now, the Germans have nothing to fear militarily so there is no fear goading them into electing militarists. Instead, the US is dealing with the policy issues of having to maintain a large military.

As soon as Germany needs to stand alone again, the same issues will crop up. So, no. I don't think we're necessarily better off with a powerful German military, mostly because its not going to remain as non-threatening as the current Bundeswehr is today. It won't be able to succeed with the additional functions it will need to assume if it doesn't change its size and doctrine.

There is some idea that by default, our allies stand with us as soon as they sign whatever treaty.

The reality is that shifting governments may very well throw allies under the bus by doing things like accepting someone like Snowden, or alternately tapping phone communications.

It sounds like an overreaction and a really bad idea. It may well be, but threat and counter-threat happens all the time between allies, despite common ground against certain threats.

As we have seen played out in the news recently, the leaders of allied countries may hate each other's guts. This is not uncommon, although it is usually kept on the down-low.

Some leaders may actually hate the allied country entirely, but realize that they have to have common cause with them to promote their interests or protect themselves.

It does matter. One assumes it is the intelligence services, because seems most likely, but it could have been a member of the President's staff, or the President himself who ordered it.

Think about it this way. On one hand, it seems like a threat that the intelligence services might make, but if you think about it, shutting off intel to Germany would almost certainly entail a vice-versa. I don't know that the intelligence agencies necessarily think capturing Snowden is worth disrupting their mutual arrangements. That's what could lead one to believe that it was at least at the level of political appointee cluelessness which was responsible for this. It could be an appointee at the intel services, or it could be one of the advisors who are not in the agencies, but who have involvement.

What I don't think happened is a career intel officer considering such a threat to be a good idea.

No one cares enough to go to the trouble of a constitutional amendment to do so. Amendments need either overwhelming government (state and federal) support, or overwhelming popular support. No one care (or understands) the Electoral college enough to do so. They mostly fixed the original plan of letting the electors vote for who they wanted by making faithless elector laws.

Of course, the goal of the Electoral College was not democracy, it was to make sure the people could *not* directly elect the executive. It is unclear to me whether that was a good or bad idea. Either way, it never panned out because it was intentionally non-populist.

I get that they have shitty terms of semi-employment. However, I'm not sure I understand who is being forced to work for them.

It sucks to be a coal miner, so I decided that I really have no interest in being one and consequently, I am not. Presumably, Uber drivers in a place like Germany would have options for better employment terms? So, why do they work for Uber?

You don't have to, but once they get in power, they get cutlasses and a plank. So, you may want to consider it.

At this point, those gamertards are probably in their late 30's. Seriously, it's starting to be a long time now.

It very much reads like they have no intention of doing another one. Which is actually fine, but why play coy? It's not like they ended the series in any sort of final way. People like the series and wanted to play again.

Something makes me wonder if Gabe developed a personal issue with the series and just doesn't want to do another one. That or they have something big up their sleeve and want HL3 to be the flagship title for that thing, whatever it is.

Yes, but social media is a recruiting tool, as opposed to the means by which terrorist groups show that they are taken seriously.

I can put up any crazy stuff I want on Facebook, and no one will care. There are all sorts of wierdo groups that have blogs and social media content, but get no attention.

However, if I get on the broadcast news, I'm going to get attention. Indeed, people like to point at such social media after a newsworthy event as a "warning signs" that something was going to happen, and they wonder why no one took action.

To me, it makes perfect sense. No one looks at these sites until they generate news. They're invisible except maybe to friends and family who have gotten used to the quirks of the author.

Yes, we should remove channels for recruitment, but the mainstream attention is what is generating the widespread interest. We need to face the fact that reporting heavily on things tends to create awareness, and terrorism is more powerful when people become highly aware of it. The possibility of death in this way overcomes the probability of it because we tend to take anything on the news to be something that "must" be dangerous, when it's actually just novel.

Fact is, I strongly suspect that many of the issues we have with school shootings, terrorism, or other extreme misbehavior are actually the product of heavy exposure of those situations. They garner attention for the perpetrators, and they also bring such solutions to mind when someone is disaffected. We can't ignore that heavy media exposure can have an effect on the incidence of what it is reporting on. I do believe that the tail is wagging the dog much more often than we give credit to.
 

"It is time that equality bore its scythe above all heads. It is time to horrify all the conspirators. So legislators, place Terror on the order of the day! Let us be in revolution, because everywhere counter-revolution is being woven by our enemies. The blade of the law should hover over all the guilty."

Some French people have been pleased to call the tactics that they agree with "terror".

Terrorism is very simply producing terror in a population as a tactic for political gain. What the "jihadis" are doing is terrorism. They aren't killing warriors sent to fight them or even politicians, they're killing aid workers and journalists. Women and children. On purpose and via staged video releases.

This has nothing to do with agreement, and everything to do with intent. You can create terror without intending it, but when your goal is terror, it is terrorism. It is certainly valid to compare the numbers of lives lost on both sides and count the expense in lives of even non-terrorist actions, but it is wrong to take that comparison and ignore the intent of terrorists to generate civilian casualties as a primary goal, as opposed to military action which produces civilian casualties as a side effect.

It may be that they determined that they were too high profile now and they dropped everything and ran.

It's about the smartest thing they could do under the circumstances, given that at a certain point, enough heat would be on them that they'd get caught. If I were them, as soon as Silk Road went tits up, I'd have started planning my departure from the market. Becoming the heir apparent to Silk Road also means they become the next target too.

It is quite likely their hope now is that it all cools off and they get away with what they've taken in. As soon as someone bigger appears, the law is going to start looking for today's bigger name.

Of course... the "vendors" on Evolution are not exactly nice people. They're hackers and drug and arms dealers. The late proprietors of this service had better hope that the vendors aren't aware of who they are, or they're going to end up with a pair of cement shoes.

Yeah I like the CK2 add-ons. I've bought one or two, but only after I played 100 hours on the stock game, so I definitely don't think I bought an unfinished game. I think that a few bucks here or there for some actual game mechanics is worth it. Never really wanted the fluffy stuff like more shield designs or portraits, but the music in the game is pretty decent, was considering picking up more to mix it up a bit, although I probably won't unless I can find the tracks somewhere to hear if it is worth it.