The Franco-Prussian war led to Paris being taken over by communards for two months in 1871.

World War I led to Russia being taken over by communists, in addition to other worrying developments for the powers that be (Hungary established a Soviet Republic until it was invaded and defeated, naval and Spartacus uprisings in Germany, Nivelle mutinies in France, Bienno rosso in the early 1920s in Italy).

World war II led to a communist bloc eastward "from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic" as Churchill put it. It also more-or-less led to China and North Korea becoming communist. People tend to forget communist influence among the working class in Western Europe - the PCF was the largest political party in France into the mid 1950s, and the PCI came close to winning elections in Italy into the mid 1970s, the "right" included an Italian Socialist Party with a hammer and sickle in its banner. And then of course the decolonization movements from everywhere from Cuba to Indochina to Northern Ireland to Algeria and the rest of Africa.

The feudal, and later capitalist, powers in Europe deciding to go to war with one another has always strengthened the left. Liberal opinion is now war-tired and so forth primarily due to this. As the above poster said, bombing the Serbs and the like did not creep into this supposed war-weariness. Yeltsin bombing his own parliament was hailed by liberals and social democrats, and of course the right, as a triumph of democracy.

The only wisdom that has been obtained by the ruling powers, is that Mario Monti and Lucas Papademos probably both realize that if they tried to set their countries to war against one another, their populations might take up the words of that old song and shoot the generals on their own side. The ruling powers realize war might possibly put their head on the chopping block, and that's the main reason they've become peaceniks, at least amongst other Europeans in the club.

This is completely inane and ahistorical. First off, Germany invaded Russia (and Holland, and France, and Belgium, and so on), as everyone knows. Every move publicly and privately had Stalin trying to avoid war with Germany. You could say that Russia was trying to foment rebellion in Germany, like the naval mutinies at the end of World War I, or the Spartacus uprising at the end of World War I etc. Especially during the Third Period - but a year after the Enabling Act in Germany (1933) this policy was quite over. And the idea of a Russia invasion of Germany was ludicrous - not only due to going against Germany, but how the rest of Europe would have probably sided with Germany prior to Hitler marching into Poland.

As far as the officer corps - during the Russian Civil War (where the US intervened and attacked the nascent USSR) and after, the communists had to make due with any experienced officer who didn't join the whites. By the late 1930s, it had more of a chance to use loyal, trained officers.

You can call loyal officers "lapdogs", but that is exactly what was desired. Stalin didn't want his officers putting bombs under his table like German officers did to Hitler. As it was, Stalin was not thorough enough in purging bad officers and appointing loyal officers, as lieutenant generals like Vlasov switched sides and began fighting for the Germans. You say Russia did not have "professional military leaders running the show". To a great extent this is true. More importantly it was known back then - to Stalin, to Molotov, to the Politburo and Central Committee. They were quite aware they did not have a large pool of loyal, experienced, professional officers. But they also knew they could not conjure these types of people up with magic wands.

That Russia shelled its own troops to start the Winter War is an old canard. The Winter War was a good thing for Russia - it was a disaster, but it was an impetus to changes in the army that would not have been made if the Winter War had not happened. The army that fell apart in the Winter War was much better prepared by the time Operation Barbarossa happened.

You go on and on for many paragraphs...there are errors in those as well but I'll stop here.

You say you "don't have to look for food". Migratory people look for food, but this doesn't necessarily mean blindly looking. There may be an area in a northern region with many wild berries. South of this area are regions with other foods. A band goes north, gathers one quarter of the wild berries in an area, and kills a few wild deer. Then it heads south. A year later it does the same thing heads back to that place up north and gathers some berries and kills some deer. This area has enough food to feed the band for a month every year, then they move on to some other area. They're not blindly looking for food, they're just migrating from one food rich area to another. Actually, you're right in that the search for food was a little more blind prior to 50000 years ago, but from 50000 to 10000 years ago, it was more in the manner I am saying.

Not security against a bad year. What is safer than having a few dozen good food spots, and carrying some water and food in case there's a problem? If a food spot is wiped out, you either go on to the next one, or go back and pig out on what's left on the last good food spot. Staying in one spot is less safe for famine, a lot less safe, especially with primitive crops.

You don't buy it's less work? It's beside the point, but remaining hunter-gatherers which exist today work less hours than people at Foxconn making iPhones. But it was more work to cultivate pre-domesticated crops from one place and try to live off of that, than to wander from one good food spot to another, living rather easily. They did not even have pack animals pulling plows with modern crops and all of the things you imagine now. Read the literature.

You are right that there are a lot of holes in what people know. There are huge gaps in what is known, and a lot of it is guess work. I didn't say it's impossible to go from hunting and gathering to early farming, I said it was very, very difficult, with no immediate obvious payoff. Obviously, people did do this, the question is, why? Why go from a more leisurely life, to a life with centuries and millenia of toil, with an increased risk of famine, for no foreseeable gains for millenia? This question has not been answered. Early farmers DIDN'T see all the gains that would come up in middle and late agriculture.

I've answered this in more detail in the rest of the thread. You say "Farming produced a surplus (can't be that inferior then)". Um, yes, it can be that inferior and it was. You are thinking of a modern world with modern domesticated animals and crops, but the first farmers had no modern domestication and crops. It was extremely inferior. Not impossible - just extremely inferior. Therein lies the mystery. Also, early farming did not produce surpluses of the type it does nowadays, people would be lucky that a larger sedentary population wouldn't have a bad harvest, which was very common back then, and all starve.

I've already answered this several times in this thread in more detail (although after you posted this) - you ignore my qualifier short-term. You say it is no mystery in the long term, but you go from the A of hunting and gathering to the Z of a full-developed, domesticated agricultural society thousands of years later.

You are completely wrong in doubting that farming was not more work than hunting and gathering, the first farmers had to work much, much, much harder for much, much less of a result than hunter gatherers. You jump from A to Z with considering steps B, C, D etc.

People keep seeming to keep missing this point. My post used the qualifier short-term and talked about the mystery. You point to hunter gatherers from 15000 years ago, and then to agricultural communities of 7000 years ago with domesticated crops and animals. You say "What's more smart - to go hunt wild game, or to find and raise domesticated animals and plants you can eat without having to expend yourself?" and you also talk about a time machine. Yes, a time machine bringing you from 15000 to 7000 years ago might make sense, but what happened between those 8000 years? That is what made no sense. The first farmers had to expend themselves far, far, far, far more than hunter gatherers. You talk about domesticated animals and plants, but there WERE no domesticated animals and plants. THAT is the mystery that has puzzled anthropologists. You say it is no mystery over the long term, but you missed where I said short-term. It may not be a mystery over the long-term, it certainly is a mystery why it happened in the short-term back then.

I say that considering things in the short-term back then - and I stress that idea of "short term" which I mentioned - going from hunting and gathering to agriculture makes no sense - it is a mystery. Yes, in a long, long, long-term view, going from A to Z might make sense, but it made no sense from back then in the short term. One must also keep in mind that my example of teosinte grass cultivation took place in Mesoamerica, so explanations of this must encompass things like that happening as well.

You say "Why the heck would the agricultural revolution be a mystery?" This makes me assume you are about to explain the answer to the mystery which has puzzled anthropologists for over a century. But you don't, you say "it seems inevitable". This is not really a satisfactory explanation of all the issues involved that satisfies me.

The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins has written some interesting things about early society. One thing he notes, is that there was an "original affluent society" of sorts - hunter gatherers from 40,000 years ago often worked less hours a week than, say, a worker in a Foxconn factory making iPhones, or even say a network administrator being paged at 3 AM because the network is down. From the hunter gatherers of then, to the few surviving bands in South America, Africa and Asia today, the hunter gatherers often have to work less hours per week to provide for themselves than the people with their hands on the most sophisticated technology we have available today. One may ask why the wheel should be invented in the first place.

Another interesting thing Sahlins points out is this. Occupy Wall Street and the like protests against "the 1%", which in many cases are heirs of the type portrayed in the documentary "Born Rich" or the like. People, like say, the UK's royal family, where it has been so many generations since anyone worked, that those ancestors are lost in memory. In other words, there are people who do no work, and are living (and often living quite a high life) off of the wealth they take from the work time of those who do work. This would not be possible without surplus. If I am a hunter gatherer, and all of the work I do is to feed myself, my children, and perhaps the very elderly in my band, there is no surplus left over. But once the agricultural revolution happened, there was inevitably surplus, and thus the possibility of a class of priests, kings and such who did not need to work. Sahlins point is the agricultural revolution was not needed for this surplus to exist. Hunter-gatherers CAN work 80 hours, and support idlers who do not work. But hunter-gatherers simply don't do this - everyone able bodied works. And as many anthropologists etc. have pointed out - the agricultural revolution is a mystery, because the techniques of hunting/gathering had advanced sufficiently by 10000 years ago that they were far superior, in the short-term back then, then farming. Farming back then was a much worst way of getting food than hunting/gathering. It took many, many years to breed say teosinte grasses into maize/corn, domesticate animals and that sort of thing.

Why should the wheel be created. I am watching the TV debates and hearing about "job creators", which I guess are rich people. Then I watch birds flying around and realize they don't need anyone or anything to create jobs for them, they are self-sufficient. It's the majority of humans who in are social structure are dependent on these wealthy "job creators" to create jobs so that they can survive. A bizarre concept which early hunter-gatherers didn't have to worry about either - they were as free as birds in being self-sufficient and not dependent on these technology-empowered "job creators". No wonder the wheel wasn't invented for so many years.

With the unemployment rate in states like Michigan over 9%, with all this talk about how the US has to cut spending, how it can't afford it's social security commitments - why is the US spending a ton of money to pay Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Martin Marietta etc. billions of dollars to develop a whole new line of bombers (and aircraft carriers, and so on)? If China is such a threat, why is the US opening factories there left and right, it's hard to buy a smartphone (or anything else) not made in China?

Big weapons systems are always suspicious. There was talk in the 1980s about how the US needed to spend billions and trillions on Star Wars SDI military satellite stuff - just before Russia imploded. Going after Al Qaeda takes a lot of man power and is hard to make a buck off of. Building a new class of aircraft carriers, which is happening, building a new type of bomber - the blood money flows freely for this. What's the threat anyhow? China is going to invade the US? There's a laugh. Right before 9/11, the US Air Force was playing chicken with Chinese pilots on the Chinese border, killed one of them, landed in Chinese territory, and then the US media began howling that Chinese engineers were investigating the "top secret" plane. With such incredible hubris, it's no surprise a 9/11 happened.

Of course, the US "pivoting to the Pacific", as if it hadn't done that already trying to push heroin on China during the opium wars over a century and a half ago, is going to obviously have China build up their military more, starting an arms race, just what the military-industrial complex in this country that Eisenhower warned about wants.

The way this was done is a little silly, Megaupload has operated in the open for years, and Kim has been a very public figure. Then the New Zealand government swoops in on them for the US government which says it is a criminal conspiracy and wants to extradite everyone associated with Megaupload to the US for criminal conspiracy charges. Seems like overkill to me, and the timing is very suspicious with the SOPA/PIPA going-ons. Look how MF Global ripped off people to the tune of $1 billion, can you imagine Jon Corzine or any of the banksters cuffed and called part of a criminal conspiracy? Investors will be lucky if they get their money back, never mind jail time for the high mucky-mucks.

I have heard that there are e-mails from one or two of the Megaupload people which sound incriminating, but extraditing anyone remotely associated with Megaupload to the US, as a so-called member of an international criminal conspiracy, is overkill and absurd. It's why the US government loves conspiracy charges - you can go to jail for a long time for crimes someone else committed, however loosely associated they may be with you. The news is showing the mansions, the helicopters, the expensive cars - it is talking about incriminating e-mails. Did everyone arrested live that large, did they all do incriminating things? I think not, but with the MAFIAA gunning for their heads the government will use the conspiracy charge to spread the doings of one or two to anyone remotely associated with Megaupload.

The Slashdot community is for the most part logically and scientifically oriented. We believe in the scientific method, and an understanding of the universe built on an accumulation of experiments built on logical and testable explanations for empirical data, observable phenomena and so forth. And in many fields of endeavor, there can be general agreement about things. For example, it's accepted almost by consensus that the nearest know star is the Sun, and that the next nearest known stars are the three in the Alpha Centauri system. Aside from a handful of cranks like Gene "Time Cube" Ray, virtually everyone accepts this. If somehow we found a star nearer than the Centauri ones, which was too faint to notice before, or right next to a much brighter star and unnoticed or whatnot, if the measurements were good and clear enough, I'm sure soon again everyone would be in agreement that this new star was the next closest one to the earth. It is far away, affects little here, and there's no reason for people to argue over it.

On the other hand, ExxonMobil is the most profitable company in the country. It made $30 billion in profits last year, off of $354 billion in revenues. It is #2 on the Fortune 500 after Wal-Mart (which had more revenues, but about half the profits in 2011). Chevron and ConocoPhillips are #3 and #4 on the list.

If hybrid cars were effective, that would dent the revenues of these three companies whose revenues were collectively three quarters of a trillion dollars. Does anyone think that this fact might possibly, conceivably hurt the objectivity of an article, released in a very partisan political magazine like the American Spectator?

Honestly, it doesn't even warrant attention, other than debunking. These types of articles belong in actually objective magazines like Consumer Reports or something, which could tell you which hybrids were good or weren't. Just from anecdotal evidence, people I know with hybrids have been telling me they are spending less at the pump. Which is exactly what worries magazines like American Spectator, which work to protect monopoly capitalism over actual economic growth in capitalism. We see these forces at battle all the time - the RIAA and MPAA want to go from a world where friends lent records to one another to one where that is impossible. The oil companies want us stuck on oil reserves until they run out and junky old gas-burning cars - and this also hurts industry, which would be helped by cheaper energy. AT&T and Verizon are more concerned with preserving their monopolies than having a growing wired and wireless network. Karl Marx said capitalism starts out as a progressive force, economically and socially, but eventually tends to get more and more mucked up in defensively protecting trusts and monopoly instead of smashing shibboleths to allow growth and scientific advancement. I'd say there's plenty of evidence around nowadays that he was right about that.

If you want a parallel universe, go to Freedom House's web page and look at their maps of China. In their world, all of southwestern China is an independent country called Tibet. That would kind of be like me drawing a map of the USA like this, and still be expected to be taken seriously as a moderate and rational voice when issuing reports on attacks on freedom in the USA, like SOPA. Thanks, I'll stick with Amnesty International, or something a little more neutral.

This is good to see. Minor victories like this are something to be cherished. I see people here talking about the enormity of the MAFIAA and how they own Congress, but things like this are the first step in pushing things back in the right direction. I'm well aware of the enormity of the MAFIAA forces, and how this victory is minor, but it shows that when we get together to protect our industry, and do the right thing, we can win. The MAFIAA *wants* us to think it is completely hopeless, that there is nothing we can do.

There are a lot of rotten MAFIAA things, but when they talk about artists needing to be paid (although aside from the like of Metallica, most artists talk about how they hate the MAFIAA too, and how it rips them off...Louis CK's recent experiment comes to mind - he didn't bite the hand that had fed him that hard in his comments on the whole matter, but he did a little bit) I have to laugh. One of the most galling to me is the Copyright Term Extension Act when they decided to extend the copyright of works of corporate authorship to 120 years (and life of author plus 50 years for other things). Something written on January 1st, 1923 will be in copyright for another 8 years. This is stuff written back when Lenin was still leading Russia, but we have to wait 8 years for copyright to expire. Even worse - some opponents said they'd compromise - any company like Disney could renew whatever they wanted, but let stuff not put up for renewal not go under copyright. But the MAFIAA had even that quashed.

Most businesses I've seen, a list of things to do is drawn up in the beginning of the year and set as a goal. Achieving those goals goes into consideration for how one did in a year, bonus, next year's budget etc. The list is usually unrealistic due to pressure from above (or other executives whose title may be the same level as the CTO/CIO, but who are for all intents and purposes, at a higher level due to being so-called "profit centers"). The code base being built on is usually old and broken, the equipment it runs on not the best, the team so-so with a few bright people, and a lot of dumb managers. Things not counted in the schedule are long-time experienced employees getting fed up and leaving, equipment breakdowns, bugs and emergencies that have to be dealt with, or business units who change what they want all year long from the original specification. Plus other things - a third party product is bought, and is very difficult to integrate in the existing system, with more time than initially planned for. By October not many things on the year-end checklist are done and the CTO starts having meetings and banging on the table that he needs checks on the lists to show the CEO what his team has done this year. So people stop writing good, long-term code and start writing crap, so they can check off the list for the end of the year. Things slow down by the end of December, that a few things on the list won't get done becomes accepted, people go on Christmas vacation. That's why bugs go in in October/November.

This is not correct...I am a Computer Science major, and will be spending my time dissecting the innards of computer servers, not animals. Yet, for my science requirement, I had to do two biology classes - and I've had to dissect both a pig and a frog in one of the labs. This is not long in the past, it was earlier this year, here in the USA. In addition, our labs are rather rushed - the first half is a mini-lecture, and then we have to rush to dissect the animal in the last half, so there's very little I learned that I don't see every Thanksgiving when carving a turkey up.

Insofar as an essential part of my training, I would have been far better served learning what an expressed sequence tag, or some other type of bioinformatics, as opposed to cutting up an animal. All I really learned is when I cut an animal open, I do it a little too hard with the knive and mess up the specimen a little since the lab is rushed. How does this help my knowledge of science? I might not ever even use bioinformatics but at least it is something I might wind up using. Instead I'm cutting up pigs and memorizing dozens of different of fungi species.

It really makes little sense to me to have dissection in high school or college Bio 1xx classes. There are plenty of 200 level, 300 level and grad school classes that can start people who will be majoring (or even minoring) in Biology to do that. This story about it being essential to me sounds like a sales pitchman's banter.