i just took a hot shower. it seems to have warmed up the whole apartment. let's see how long it lasts.

of course, it warmed me up too!

but the heat went up a few tenths of a degree and turned itself off. that's measurable.

if i'm understanding what's happening properly, the air should suck that extra heat and moisture up and out. eventually...

yeah. heat's back on, and that cold, dry air is back. hour, tops.

i can't really complain about the air upstairs today. it's almost 30 outside, with the humidex. and, yes, we have a humidex, which is weird this time of year, even if not coming out of a brutal winter. so, it's reasonable to have the air on.

but maybe not so high. it's more than a bit odd to have it be 25 degrees outside and have my heaters (set to 21) on. not a bit, but half-blast. that's independent corroboration, really. what it demonstrates is that the air conditioning is making the basement colder than room temperature. otherwise, the heat wouldn't be kicking in. but what's worthwhile is that that's an objective standard - lower than 21 is lower than normal, and justification to push back.

it's partly because it's early in the year, though. i remember the thermostat reading 26 when i moved in. it'll warm up over the summer. for now, i've just got the windows open.
see, even if it does warm up, though, that doesn't mean i'm going to want to keep the windows closed. it's not just the temperature, it's also the air quality. air conditioning makes the air so unnaturally dry. i really prefer that hot, moist natural summer air. a natural breeze is infinitely superior to a machine vortex (on a different floor at that).

but i'm a little worried about how that's actually going to work. it's going to rain sometimes. i'm in a basement (also note - i haven't seen any ants since the first week i moved in, but an open window is an invitation), so i'm going to have to close it sometimes. if i keep the window open and let the breeze run through, is that going to put the air upstairs on higher power? i mean, that it's working at all down here suggests it's sucking up air through the floor. is it just going to turn itself up higher to suck more? if it does, it could just make it worse in the end, especially in rain situations.

on that note, my best tactic may be to try and crash it. that happens, right? it overheats, or something? if i just blare all the heat i can muster, i could conceivably overdrive it...

i'm not really considering that right now, it's just an idea. a last resort. i get that the guy upstairs would be in considerable discomfort if i were to crash his air (he's a big guy). right now, it's just a combination of unusual factors. i'm going to assume things will right themselves as the basement slowly warms up.

there's probably some kind of equilibrium point, where very small amounts of heat will warm it up a little bit, a little more may actually make it colder in here, and large amounts will overpower. i'd probably have to get that information empirically.

well, ok. in total this makes some sense. but i also think he all but states "listen, i watch the news like you do".

i don't think people are likely to revolt like this over nationality. states like to use things like language to control populations, but only the most malleable and brainwashed take this seriously in much of any way. they didn't really talk imf protests here; that strikes me as a more realistic reason for larger protests, should they happen. for right now, the coverage on rt makes it pretty blatantly obvious who is in charge, here. 99 times out of 100, a news report that describes a protest as having something to do with language or religion or "cultural identity" is statist propaganda; real people on the ground don't care about that nonsense and mostly don't even know what "cultural identity" even *means*.

you're also running into the same double standard that appeared in crimea, but in reverse. if we are to accept the existence of ukrainian self-defense units, why not crimean ones? if we are to accuse russian soldiers of posing, how can we deny reports of german soldiers in the west? and if we are to argue for western influence in the coup a few months ago, how can we be so naive as to deny russian influence in donetsk?

this isn't good guys v. bad guys. it's two equivalent ruling classes fighting over who gets to exploit the area.

so, of course it's the russians, legitimate concern about imf packages (and statist nonsense about language and religion that nobody actually cares about) aside.

but i wanted to say something about the demands. we've learned something from crimea, namely that the russians are moving to a lower level of transparency than they've had over the last few decades. so, we need to start thinking in cold war terms again (and fuck the useful idiots in the media that would have you think otherwise). an old tactic to eventually carry out an unpopular task is to show that there is no other option through exhaustion of seeming options. but, this itself seems like a stall.

i've stated here repeatedly that i see no reason to think russia wants to split the country. rather, i'd think nato would want to split the country - as the media narrative seems to imply. russia has successively exerted significant influence on kiev since independence. the clampdown on control was part of the reason that the parliament was stormed. even so, this isn't actually a revolution, it's just a shift in which ruling faction is ascendant. and it's entirely reversible with minimal effort. the russian goal is not partition, it's to retake control of kiev and pick up where it left off. yet, it needs a backup plan, and it needs to give it some time.

so, they've gone back to a tactic they used throughout the cold war - begin with a less unpopular position that is related to but not identical to the (unpopular) one they want, push it hard through media, watch it build support, demonstrate it's impossible and the only possible answer is the previously unpopular position, make arguments for compromise and hopefully eventually put in place the truly desired option. it's right out of machiavelli. and it's not just the russians that do this.

maybe future tactics won't be so obvious, but the key here is to stop taking the russians at face value. they've recently proved (or re-proved) that they're being sneaky and that their public statements are no more trustworthy than the ones coming from western states.

the way you actually ought to think of language is not as something inherent to self-determining peoples, or some other equally silly liberal nonsense, but as a kind of mark of ownership. you'll see states use it like this. it's basically the russian argument in this mess. they're claiming that the russian speakers are their property and they have the right to protect it.

there's been a lot of talk of all kinds of nwo silliness, like inserting computer chips in people to take ownership of them. but, it's really largely unnecessary - it's just an evolution of the nation-state. why bother inserting a chip when they can teach a language and religion to children? it can't really be cheaper, and it's probably more likely to spur resistance. the id chip already exists, and it's your so-called "culture" - your language, your religion, your customs. these already turn people obedient and pliable. it's been how the state has used language and religion for centuries...

so, i can't help but snicker when i hear it from christians, especially, who don't seem to have the slightest clue that they're actually opposing what really amounts to a change in technology from one means of state control to another.

ok, they're not going back as far in time as i thought. i'm familiar enough with this.

i've pointed out before that chavez is easy for a canadian to understand because the story actually has a lot of parallels with trudeau - he was somebody who was attacked as a far leftist by his opponents, to the point where some of his supporters began to believe it, but was in actuality simply an establishment liberal that actually believed in liberalism for liberalism's sake, rather than as a means to an end.

the idea that he was this ideological leftist is actually simply republican propaganda - although he certainly took advantage of it as best he could.

the russians have extremely good reasons to involve themselves in the baltics, but the dominant issue here - more pressing than the economic issues, more pressing than the crimean base - is simply not being discussed.

http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/12/05/us_shoots_down_russia_s_push_to_scrap_missile_shield

this is a topic i don't know a lot about (my concept of history is euro-centric), and i'm happy to take the time to learn.

but i just want to point out that authoritarian dictators can be and have been popularly elected repeatedly. it doesn't resolve the (really not-so) confusing alliances, but it clarifies the language.

well, see this is where this guy gets confusing. i don't need to hear the propaganda.

but, here's this thing: these security groups aren't marines. in fact, they're most certainly not marines! this isn't about bringing americans in, it's about kiev being unable to trust it's own police force to stay loyal to it.

this is unexpected.

his legacy is catastrophic. we know he's a liar from how he cooked the books in his time at queen's park, but we don't yet know the depth of his dishonesty from his time spent in ottawa. it's a virtual certainty that whomever takes over is going to find all kinds of accounting fraud. with a record as crooked as his, how he managed to get the job in the first place is really befuddling.

it's going to be a shitstorm, that seems clear. makes me wonder if somebody put something in his toothpaste.....

humans are idiots.

it's not afraid of the leaf. the wind (combined with his snorting) has confused it into thinking it's a moving animal. to a dog, a moving animal is food. because dogs kill living creatures by crushing them in their jaws, then eat them.

yet, the leaf isn't reacting. no chase is about to happen. so, the dog is really confused that the leaf isn't expressing any kind of fear, and doesn't really know how to go about killing it.

but, idiot humans would rather anthropomorphize scooby-doo in than deal with the homicidal nature of their pets.

the dog would have reacted very similarly to a dead mouse.

well, of course they banned them. it's a racist policy in disguise. the monitors would quickly figure that out, and there would be an official international reaction to something everybody already knows.

generally, the result of these sorts of complaints are changes to canadian laws. the government we've had in power since '06 has no interest in disobeying american dictates, but that hasn't always been true. even so, our sovereignty only goes so far as it contradicts the will of our hegemonic masters. wait for it...

i was able to reconstruct and authoritatively back up my archival material a lot easier than i thought i would be able to. the only thing i've lost of any consequence is a couple of backing files for 'ignorance is bliss'. i can live with that.

now that i'm a little more focused as to what i'm looking for, i'm going to do one more data recovery scan through the other two physical disks to see if i can salvage anything. i'm not overly confident.

as for the script? i did this once before and concluded the data was garbled, but if i can reconstruct the directory structure and file names of the script, and get a bit lucky in pulling out a few text fragments, i should be able to rebuild the script with minimal effort - even if it takes a few days to write it all out and do some virtual testing. well, shit, it could be a month before the bus pirate gets here, anyways.

i'm going to move some things around with the expectation of getting used to living with three discs for the time being. i'm not sure i could even buy a 250 gb sata II drive new anywhere (and second hand hard drives are a dumb idea). so i'm going to end up upgrading.

when i do, i'll move the music files to the new drive. they're both the most important and need the most space. that'll leave me with two 250s i can boot into 32 and 64 bit, respectively, and one to use for various types of backup.

for right now, though, i don't have the appetite to set up a 64 bit system. but i might end up at least nliting it, depending on how much time i end up waiting for, and how successfully i can salvage the other laptop.

as the problem with the other laptop is the hard drive (there's a pattern here; i'm tempted to go to ssd, i'll have to check prices), what i'll have to do is work off an external. then again, it hasn't actually died yet. in the long run, that's another component i'll have to replace, but it's not a priority.

so, i'm chugging away at this. i can't provide an eta for getting back to what i was doing, but i can at least report having a few ideas.

there is absolutely electricity in the air. this isn't pushing towards contradicting thermodynamics. there's two important questions:

1) is there enough to use? (almost certainly not)
2) what kind of effect might such a thing have on something like farming?

free energy sounds great, and i'm usually all for experimenting, but this is something i'd say should be avoided. it could literally be the process of sucking all the life out of the earth....

....to play angry birds.

now, as for pulling all the magnetic energy and radio signals we throw around back down...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJTl2oqaWPs

i've read a little research over the last few years about how mammals actually have a genetic memory of electro-reception (magnetic reception). you hear about it a bit in herd migration, sometimes. and supposedly birds are really good at it. but it's nothing like sharks, for example.

if we had a sixth sense in our genetic history and lost it, it's because we couldn't use it. i think the basic answer is that terrestrial creatures have less use for it than water or air based creatures.

but, we now live in a world with radio waves and wifi and cell signals bouncing everywhere. even if we're not the beneficiaries, it's interesting to ask questions about how this might drive evolution in the future.

i think it would be awesome to be able to sense fields....and the repressed physicist in me jumps at the possibilities in better understanding the universe...

if only lamarck was right, huh? alas...

i mean, who needs wearables when you've got a wifi receptor (and perhaps transmitter!) in your brain?

conversely, this is maybe an area of future research in genetic engineering:

http://www.actahort.org/books/29/29_34.htm

just to clarify, what that suggests is that sucking down the electricity out of the earth *might* lead to a reduction of crop yields.

that's where quantifying it becomes useful. but, millions of cell phones can't be negligible. i don't think we should be thinking of this as renewable and infinite, like the sun.

yeah. just from a brief googling of this, it seems like it has to do with the difference in polarity between the earth and the atmosphere. if one were to start sucking out the electricity, they'd be draining the charge from the earth, which could in theory actually fuck the whole field up. i'm getting the impression that this isn't entirely predictable, but would also require large amounts of sucking. kind of a doomsday scenario, but maybe reason to be careful with this.

i mean, you have to work in the size of the earth and it's rotation and what not. but what happens at the moment that charge pulled out equals charge created? how likely is it?

"The earth can be considered as a big battery, and thunderstorms pump back electrons that the earth gives off. It is estimated that without that replenishment of electrons, the earth would lose all of its charge within an hour."

great.

cmd files may technically be programs, but people interact with them like text. they're more like modern-day scripts, really.

in trying to salvage old files off my working drives (to replace the files on the trashed one), i've noticed that i'm often able to pull text files up that have been deleted for up to five years but i can't pull off cmd files that were deleted last month. it doesn't seem to be dependent on size. i'm led to conclude that ntfs is filing cmd files as programs and they're getting easily corrupted as binary.

but they're not really programs. they're certainly not binary they're text...

i realize that there may be some security issues with treating scripts as text files. but how serious an obstacle is this nowadays really? i mean, if you can launch notepad remotely, you're pretty much in control, are you not? even so, wouldn't it make more sense to block at the kernel than the file system? even backup drives crash. rather, this strikes me as an ancient windows artifact from the early 90s or the late 80s when cmd files really were programs and that should be updated for modern usage. i can't be the first person that's run into this.

i don't know enough about other file systems to comment.

interesting.

i'm sure there are parallels in arab history, but the history i know is in france. jay points out what i was thinking when watching this.

there are a handful of dominant frankish kings - clovis, charlemagne - that managed to unite a large area through warfare and conquest. these empires were then split up amongst the king's sons as a strategy to present conflict over the empire. the hope was that if each son had it's own kingdom, they wouldn't fight over the big crown. of course, that rarely worked out in france, but it was eventually more "successful" in germany where dozens of states were set up - until the prussians showed up, and the horrors of german nationalism appeared.

i'm not drawing silly comparisons. but the whole thing is really astounding.

yeah. the americans want to be an exporter, not pull themselves to sufficiency. that's propaganda. everybody makes more money if the saudis and americans ship oil to each other.

the americans have their own export interests in reducing supply.

yeah. the spindle motor was broken

i'm a dumb chimp with any kind of tool. taking a pair of vice grips to it pretty much destroyed the platter.

but i couldn't fix that in a freezer, anyways. and the idea that i was going to pay $600 or more for recovery is flat out laughable.

this is precisely why i can't hold a job :)

it took no more than fifteen seconds for me to irreversibly damage the drive. and i'd be no less patient with your face, or a power plant.

or care more than i do about the drive.

so be happy i realize that.

that's going to cost me several months.

there was no answer....

i was hoping i could get the drive spinning by unjamming it, but it was clear within seconds that the motor was burnt. the drive was burning up. zero movement.

to replace the motor would mean removing the platters. i neither have the tools nor the co-ordination to carry out something like that. so, removing the platters means trashing the drive. simple as that.

i panicked and twisted hard with the vice grips, hoping a harsh tug would pull it free (but knowing the motor was burnt). i'm clumsy; it shot out of my hands, and pushed the heads deep into the platters, as well as taking a chunk out of the top platter itself.

which was foreseeable the second i grabbed the vice grips. i mean, i knew. but i also knew it was dead.

my only hope at the point was to just tear it apart trying to get the motor to spin. nope. dead.

i know it wasn't electrical because i swapped the boards out. plus, the heat indicates the electricity was getting there.

lost: install scripts going back 5 years, the musical work i'd done over the last six months.

the motor in this unit is actually connected directly to the board. it would have been a (de)soldering job.

the musical work was mostly compiling and remastering. i have the final files, and the source files. what i lost was the intermediate work, which is unfortunate but not catastrophic.

i could theoretically reconstruct the script from my old pc, which has a more stripped down version of it. i don't know if i'll bother.

now that the drive is officially kaput, i'm going to start the process of reconstructing what i had compiled - which was a total of three isos i had put aside to burn at a later date.

right now, i should try to sleep.

it's not firewire, but hdmi. *grumbles*. screwed...

...except...

....i could in theory work out the crux of what i was working on by installing the pod drivers direct through usb.

and on that note, i've wanted to set up my other (half broken) laptop as a real-time sound processing device for a while. guitars, mostly, of course - but drums, too. see, the hard drive comes up and down. i was going to wait until i could replace it....

i also wanted to dual-boot it. that's something to keep me occupied as i'm waiting...

i'm just finding the idea of blowing this time reading to be depressing. i jumped through hoops to set this up. i'm pissed off that i'm dealing with broken hardware, and depressed that it's my own stupidity at the root of it.

the problem with the hard disk, btw, is physical. and the way the heads are aligned in the model is really tricky. i don't want to open this up, but i'm going to have to. however, i'm also only going to touch it under the precise circumstance that the arm is unaligned. anything else, and i'm screwing it back up and throwing it in the freezer, because it's pretty much hopelessly broken.

i didn't realize that my bus pirate was being shipped from asia. i'm pretty sure that the website was registered to chicago. i would have picked somewhere closer, if i realized that.

as far as i can tell, it's sitting in a boat off the coast of singapore, waiting to be filled up with mail.
and it could be there for weeks...

so, i'm considering converting the laptop, which is what i'll have to do if the bus pirate doesn't work anyways. i'm going to do some reading and decide in a few days.

i don't see any rational reason that this couldn't handle a firewire device. i just really don't like the idea of mixing with a laptop sound card. ugh...

but, at least if i get the tracks down, i can remix it later.

that other pandora's box...

it's about time. but, these groups are american-backed. it wasn't that easy.

crushing defeat for sovereignty? hardly.

liberals: 42%
sovereigntists: 55%

the charter split the vote, and while many analysts will express confusion, this was fully predictable. this happens over and over again in canada - the centre shifts it's policy to appeal to the right, and merely loses support on both sides. ask paul martin. ask dalton mcguinty. right-wing voters tend to interpret these shifts as validation for their right-wing cause, rather than as a reason to support the centre. the more the centre appeases the right, the stronger the right ends up.

the appeasement needs to stop.

i want to say "fuck the adq/caq"; i want to say "the results demonstrate that this kind of bullshit is not to be tolerated", but what the results actually suggest is that marois' validation of racist bullshit emboldened the right to take a stand.

and, of course, the principled aspects of the left abandoned the centre, moving to the more principled qs instead.

the result is the liberals split the vote.

completely predictable....

in the long run, a sovereign quebec needs a spectrum, and one is beginning to develop with the pq in the centre and the qs and caq to it's left and right, respectively.

hopefully, what happens over the next few years is that the right moderates and the centre recalibrates.

but i fear that, by giving these voices a podium, marois has opened up a pandora's box. quebec is viewed throughout most of the country as an insular, xenophobic society. it's been argued forcefully for many years that this is an exaggeration - and perhaps a little bit racist itself. would a policy be less popular in calgary, if not in toronto? would borden's "white canada" still resonate if campaigned upon? it's hard to say.

what is clear, though, is that the liberals must close this box before what was unleashed gets out of hand.

that's their mandate, and they'd better follow through on it, or face an emboldened monster the next time around.

so, i've seen some videos about rabbit-squirrel hybrids. i have an interest in this.

something i noticed living in ottawa was that the urban rabbit population was increasing. of course, wild rabbit populations are known to increase and decrease wildly due to predation, but it's hard to see what kind of predation would exist in downtown ottawa. coyotes (and incresaingly coywolves, actually) are known to exist in the suburbs, but there are many serious barriers to moving right into downtown. who knows, though. these animals are shy and good at being evasive. yet, even if there were a few wild coyotes, i couldn't imagine them acting as a check on the rabbit population.

rabbits and squirrels would occupy similar niches in an urban setting. they're also mildly related (i'll get to this in a second). so, we have a situation where i believe hybridization would be more likely than competition, if it is indeed possible.

now, the only way to know if it's possible is to check. i haven't been able to find anything useful with a quick google search and would suspect that such a targeted breeding program would be considered useless. nothing could be gained except a more hardy nuisance species. well, that's exactly the possible evolutionary advantage, though. about the only realistic proof of such an idea would be to find a specimen and test it. it also falls under the category of questions that cannot be effectively disproven, not even with tests.

one of the arguments against this will no doubt be to point out that they exist in different orders, but this is a bad argument. it's circular. species are indeed partially defined by their inability to mate outside their boundaries, but we're learning that the methods used by naturalists (number of teeth, or bone structure) are not remotely conclusive regarding the question of genetic compatibility. all kinds of animals that have been defined as different species are in fact genetically similar enough to mate. rather than argue that they're in different orders (because they look different) and therefore cannot mate, we need to carry out experiments to determine if their differences in physical appearance actually provide enough of a genetic difference to justify putting them in different orders. this process of updating linnaeus to a genetic basis is an ongoing process that in many ways is still in it's infancy.

the tree of life has many pending revisions.

it's currently understood that lagomorphs and rodents are cladistically closely related. that is to say that rabbits and squirrels, while in different orders based on physical traits, are considered to share a relatively recent ancestor. certainly, rabbits and rodents are more closely related to each other than they are to other animals. of all the other mammals, rodents provide the most likely cross-order hybrid potential to rabbits. we simply cannot know until we experiment, or until we find a specimen in the wild.

one clue, though, is chromosome count - and this is actually quite promising. rabbits are at 44, while rodents are at 40. this provides an intermediate point of 42. while it would be most likely if they had a shared number of chromosomes (cat hybrids are possible due to a shared 38 chromosomes across the different subspecies), the second best is an even split. an example of this kind of intermediate argument comes in whale/dolphin hybrids, where everything gets split - chromosomes, teeth number and other features.

i'm not wiling to say it's possible until i see a specimen, but if such a thing were presented i would definitely want to present it as evidence of my alternate theory of evolution. i'm certainly not willing to write it off offhand. the shared common ancestor is too recent, regardless of what the aristotlians classified them as.

i want to clarify the can't disprove thing, because i over-simplified. what i meant was that just taking a few rabbits and trying to cross them with squirrels and seeing it fail isn't rigourous enough to disprove the possibility.

now, if the precise genetic incompatibility could be isolated, and if it could then be proven that this incompatibility is constant throughout one or both genomes, then that's conclusive. then you could say that they're incompatible due to whatever genetic component that is characteristic of all rabbits and/or all squirrels.

otherwise, there's the lingering doubt that this population of rabbits or that population of squirrels has some kind of mutation beyond the shared ancestor that prevents mating. and, in full generalization, it couldn't be anything other than a mutation that would prevent mating - because they share a common ancestor.

so, you need to get into a lot of details before you can rule this out. what you'd want to do is find the most archaic representations of both species to test. and what that even means is difficult to determine without mapping out all the mutations in the first place.

i'm not an expert on rodent or rabbit dna, so maybe that work is further along than i realize. but my oversimplification stands, until the genomes of both species - and the mutations that led to them as distinct species - are fully understood in concrete, quantifiable terms.

it's not as simple as just taking random variables. it's the exception to the rule, the negation of the probability, that is what is being sought, here, to disprove the claim.

it's not just theology that runs into the unicorn problem. it's an issue within science itself.

there's even the bizarre possibility of rabbits back mutating to a more primal state. i mean, fins have become legs have become fins, and there's some suggestion that this has to do with turning things off and on.

if rabbits and squirrels live within close quarters, could rabbits even return to a "genetic memory" in order to breed with squirrels? i'm being teleological. but the epigenetics just might....

regardless, all it would take would be a handful of viable individuals to conceivably create the material to allow for a back-crossing, at which point all linneaen hell then breaks loose.

mind-boggling.

it's the root of a simple equation, x^2 - x - 1 = 0. that is, x^2 - x = 1. this can be solved using the quadratic equation. it can also be expressed as a limit. sure, it's sort of neat that the pattern is easily and intuitively grasped, but there's an underlying theory that makes this connection rather unremarkable.

there's nothing mysterious or divine about this. it's just the root of an equation.

well, if somebody released you from a trap (that you may have been stuck in for days) wouldn't you react by feeling a bond of friendship? running off wouldn't be my first reaction. nor do bobcats get a prey response from humans (thankfully), unlike some of the larger cats (doing this with a tiger or a lion or a jaguar or a cougar probably would have gotten these guys eaten).

so, i think what the bobcat saw was some new friends and wasn't particularly keen about leaving them behind, before the truck scared the fuck out of it (caves aren't supposed to roar. da fuck? i'm getting out of here!). it was roaring, but that's a bobcat being a bobcat. it's a shame they didn't give it a bit more time before scaring it off...

everything has been pointing to a decision by the egyptian ruling class to carry out a cull of it's excess youth population.

marxist historians have been pointing to high unemployment as a function of a "baby boom" as the root cause of the instability. there's probably a great deal of truth to this idea of overpopulation being at the core of this. but, this kind of thing - while cheap and easy - is not a long term solution. humans are a special type of animal in the sense that we can be taught not to overbreed.

unfortunately, this does nothing to reverse the perception of islam as the primary enemy. it's still islam that is at the core of the overbreeding, and it's not likely that you're going to get through this argument without a social revolution.

now, i know that egypt is largely thought of as a mostly secular society, but the recent conflict has demonstrated that this is somewhat of a charade and that, underneath the gloss of official government-endorsed enlightenment, lies much continued backwardsness.

regardless of what perspective is chosen, the problems in the region continually reduce to the role that islam continues to play, culturally. the answer to this problem is not military, and the other religions don't provide for more enlightened thinking. rather, it's dawkins that has the proper perspective - namely that local, secularist groups need to be strongly supported by the west in their aims to modernize society and change a number of cultural norms, such as high breeding rates.

otherwise, these problems will only exacerbate as the climate warms and these culls will be more than a lazy strategy by an ignorant and authoritarian state, but necessary to maintain civilization throughout the rest of the world.

not alarmist. reality.

i still don't think this region is particularly strategic, but i suppose it's a good dry run for poland.

then again, i don't know why i'm expecting smart tactics from the russians. i'll admit i'm impressed with the professionalism of the crimean succession, but bad tactics is precisely the reason they're in this mess.

if they waste too much time and effort slowly breaking up ukraine, they're going to forfeit any opportunity they may have in destabilizing nato nations on their periphery.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUYEgMu1ZMY

they ought to be focusing on the missile shield. once surrounded, ukraine would be easy to dismantle.

people's republic of donetsk?

you know, i can't afford to pay for a cell phone.

memo to the children of the middle east: it must be nice to have that kind of wealth.

so, the russians are not to be outdone in their psyops.

the situation has become ridiculous. laugh. it's absurd...

the americans have been using this trojan horse method forever. do you know how many countries have banned the red cross? that's not paranoia. it goes way back...

another organization with a lot of question marks around it is amnesty international.

i do need to point out, though, that cuba's not likely to take capitalist money without a huff.

predictable.

i should have known better than to click this looking for a substantive argument against dawkins.

besides mentioning him briefly, and completely mischaracterizing his views, this article says nothing about dawkins at all.

it's just a troll for ad revenue.

http://www.salon.com/2014/04/05/richard_dawkins_is_so_wrong_it_hurts_what_the_science_vs_religion_debate_ignores/

but i'm waiting for an iso to build on an ancient pc, so i'm going to bite.

the crux of modern atheism is simply the elimination of religion from policy discussions. this absolutely requires a tactic of pushing for cultural change. however, it doesn't call for the active repression of religion. if the culture were to change, as it must to remove it from influence, the question of repression becomes a sort of canard - or at least it does from a liberal perspective, as i can assure you is the perspective of both dawkins and hitchens (i am not familiar with the other guy).

that requires a public discourse on some level, because religion is embedded in the cultural makeup of most existing societies. that is to say that it is not possible to minimize the policy effects of religion without challenging it publicly, because that is what the debate is. far from being intolerant, that is actually what is called democracy.

religious people like to try and use this sort of trump card of personal belief, but it is bluntly incoherent to claim that public policy is beyond criticism because it is personal. this doesn't make the least bit of sense, and atheists are not going to allow this trump card any time soon so the religious really just might as well drop it.

in a sort of abstract sense, religion has the option of avoiding this discourse by removing itself from the public arena. yet, this is neither something that could be accomplished by any centralized religious authority nor something that religion could ultimately even survive, as it is, by nature, a deeply cultural thing. religion cannot disentangle itself from politics - or at least not without the cultural change that atheists are pushing for.

so, it's a position that is incoherent because it's rooted within a contradiction. religious people want to argue that a cultural, collectivist phenomenon is beyond criticism because it is a personal belief. that circular logic cannot be squared.

but, it exposes a weakness in their position. instead of providing arguments, they pull out this trump card - they are beyond question.

this is of course anathema to any sort of critical thinking, be it scientific or not. so, it gets under the skin of people that use evidence and logic for their epistemological basis.

that's not to say that i think that science and religion are in absolute conflict. i don't. and neither does dawkins or did hitchens. rather, i think that science has the ability to reformulate most religious questions and provide naturalistic explanations for them, and that religious people should not push back against this. further, religion has the potential to continue to provide these questions, even if they're often worded badly.

what cannot be justified is when religion rejects science because it contradicts it. that is something that should be called out from the highest places with the loudest speakers and used as an example as to why faith-based reasoning is fallacious.

...and it's not because it's personal. it's because it's not personal. it's because it's public.

consider the evolution of morality, as one example. until recently, morality was the scope of the religious. i've even heard the argument - and made it a few times myself - that religion maintains a place in the world because of it's ability to teach morals. maybe there's no evidence god exists, but that doesn't mean that we shalt kill.

recently, though, we've been able to understand morality as something that develops with complex societies. we now have a naturalistic explanation using natural selection (and modified ideas for group evolution) that allows us to understand why we make these rules. with this greater understanding of morality, the religious model is becoming obsolete.

this has public policy ramifications. a society that understands morality as a naturalistic development where the altruistic are more likely to pass on their genes will not construct the same laws or have the same social order as one that thinks that rules have been enacted by god. and, perhaps we have come to an arbitrary difference that is defined by political preference, but that is all the more reason that it is a public debate to determine the kind of society we want to live in.

so, these pleas ought to fall on deaf ears.

also, islamic thinking in the middle ages was directly descended from greek thinking. i believe it was empodkles that came up with the four elements, not that persian dude. and i think it was anaximander that came up with the first crude theory of evolution, although it was borrowed from the babylonians (who thought we evolved from fish).

it's also beyond ridiculous to suggest that the western intellectual tradition did not merge science and philosophy. from aristotle through to newton, we see a confluence rather than a division.

yet, what one *can* see in the west is that philosophy has moved beyond god as unnecessary, because it has reasoned it's way past it. god has famously been declared dead.

it's unfortunate that so much of the rest of the world has yet to receive the memo.

well, i got the ram updated in my old pc from 640mb to 1gb, which cost me $12. 1 gb is the max the board can take (this thing is ooooold). i haven't re-installed my sleek image yet, but it's definitely faster just browsing through the desktop. i have a usb 2.0 card (yes, the ports are 1.1, it's that old) coming for $10. i'll eventually have to replace the hard drive (mechanical parts, *will* eventually die), but this old clunker is otherwise absolutely maxed out.

the guy that sold it to me jerked out, though. he said he'd sell the 256 sticks for $4 each or give me 5 for $12. well, it's no brainer. i was expecting at least one of them wouldn't work, and sure enough one of them doesn't. but, within the 5 sticks are 2 64s. so, i got 2 working 256s, a broken 256 and two working 64s. well, i would have paid $6 a stick (that's still stupidly cheap), but if you're going to sell them at $4 a piece (and having one that doesn't work is a reasonable chance one takes when buying 15 year old ram from kijiji), why bother basically giving me two 64s for free? why not just tell me you only had 3 in the first place?

i'm going to hope he made an honest error on that, cause it doesn't otherwise make sense to me.

...not like i have any use for two sticks of 64-mb sdram.

....but, people tend to interpret their economic position in relative rather than absolute terms. i don't want to reduce this to behaviouralism v homo economicus yet again, but, yeah...

if you're used to being hungry, and food goes from being plentiful to being rationed then you might not react as badly as somebody that is used to having easy access to food and has seen shortages of specific items. the rich may riot over a shortage of toilet paper, while the poor learn how to live with a shortage of milk.

so, we've had a lot of distractions here, but who is delusional enough to think israel wants peace?

you don't have to distract me. i've been tuning it out. waste of time...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azoAj_oqOGA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LICOSiWqG4k
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlZ9tn8t7KU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8HYBnSR74w

indeed. southern europe is being crucified on a cross of euros.

my understanding is that it has something to do with the province's debt/credit ratings. paying it out all at once in the trough of the last recession hit them pretty badly. of course, that's selective accounting. they could just as easily look at the decrease in corporate taxes and blame it on that. but, it was instead decided that it wasn't structurally sound to make a habit of paying out that kind of sum on a yearly basis, and the process was changed to pay it out monthly or wait until the following fiscal year.

so, where's the interest on the money? well, if the state is holding it, it should pay interest, should it not? but, in a way, that's exactly the point.

100nni
Why are these guys wearing our bundeswehr uniforms?

noprofitmaximierung
Why do the Ukrainian Nazis wear NATO uniforms? /watch?v=I5N5qnD7trg

Pickleman
Have any of you people ever been to a military surplus store? That is all surplus apparall, German jackets are very common at them, along with all nato member nations.

http://www.keepshooting.com/german-flecktarn-field-shirt.html

deathtokoalas
it's funny, that's what the russians say about the crimean self-defense forces.

there have been some rumours about special ops from poland and lithuania streaming over the western border. they're probably not entirely false.

Jan-Niklas Runge
There's a bit of a difference between thousands of troops in the same uniform out of nowhere and some dude with a German jacket.

deathtokoalas
well, that one dude is arguably evidence of a greater movement of people that has been talked about (where'd all these guns in kiev come from, anyways?). there's even been some rumours of an actual nato unit being stationed in lvov, that is to say a nato invasion of western ukraine. don't misunderstand me: this is sketchy info. i have no meaningful evidence to back it up. but these rumours of nato soldiers in the ukrainian uprising do exist and have existed the whole time, and if you understand the geopolitics underlying the actions of the major powers (if not the actions of the ukrainian people), it becomes too plausible to write off off-hand. it's far from crazy. so, the extent of the truth of these rumours is difficult to ascertain due to shitty western media coverage, but that there is some truth is hard to reasonably reject. whether he realizes it or not ostrovosky seems to have finally provided some evidence for it...

Pickleman
the only thing its evidence of is where they buy their clothes. there is nothing  suspicious about this. seriously look at my posts, clothes like this is very accessible to anyone, and again, does not evidence anything other then that they buy their clothers from military surplus stores

deathtokoalas
sounds exactly like a russian propagandist....

Pickleman
are you a troll?

deathtokoalas
i dunno. are you cia?

Pickleman
I am both a member of the Soviet Union and the USA. I am also the son of Idi Amin

instead of trying to blindly invalidate me with baseless claims that contradict even your own statements, how about you look at what i have posted. There is nothing strange about what they are wearing. I know this because military surplus stores always sell these types of apparall, the field jackets and blouses and such are all very popular, especially in eastern europe

Essentially nothing they had was military exclusive apparall, me and you could go buy all that stuff on the internet or at a store and that would not mean we are internationally backed. alot of the stuff they are wearing are out dated, and none of it has actual bullet proof properties, they are essentially casual military apparal for various weather conditions

deathtokoalas
all i'm pointing out is that that's precisely what the russians said when they were confronted with explaining why there were people that looked like russian troops walking through crimea. that's a matter of the historical record. you can look it up, if you'd like.

i mean, it could be that they're both telling the truth. it could also be that they're both lying. it's interesting how similar the responses are, though, isn't it?

Pickleman
Russians was not simply wearing jackets with flags on them, they were actually doong the opposite.

Russian special forces occupied Key isntalations and governement fascilities, while covert operations at night were carried out to sabotage Crimeas Telecomunications and intenernet access, essentially cutting Crimea off entirely from Ukraine.

http://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2014/02/28/Telecom-services-sabotaged-in-Ukraines-Crimea-region/7611393621345

These were not people who were in Ukraine, every in Crimea knew that when they looked up over the Russian border and saw this

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=287_1393605865

Thats a little bit more incriminating than simply wearing a 15 dollar jacket from the military store, and to act as if they are equivelent is illogical

deathtokoalas
well, i think a bit more than that happened in ukraine over the last few weeks.

how's the coffee at the pentagon?

wait. are you senior enough to be allowed in the pentagon?

Pickleman
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem

deathtokoalas
that's actually not an ad hominem. it's more of a red herring. but it's justified, because you're clearly on the payroll.

so, it seems like they're shipping them out to military bases for retraining.

i think it's good news, in general, that they're gone. yet, what this means for the composition of the ukrainian army is another question.

you know, i don't know how they're managing to derp out of environmental causes. if there's strong evidence that it runs in a family, yet specific genes have all but been ruled out, is this not an argument for environment?

i don't want to argue against this directly. it makes sense in terms of it's core findings. i just have a hard time drawing a connection between mismatched androgen levels and orientation. it makes a little sense if the topic is transsexuality, but how does this propose to explain the gay butch or the lipstick lesbian? it seems starkly incomplete, at best - and borderline ridiculous at worst. i mean, confusing orientation with gender is a basic error. gay people exist across the gender spectrum...

try as you may, you won't find any conclusive science on the topic. my perspective is that this push for a genetic cause is ideologically driven. i think it's worthwhile to explore it as rigorously as possible - in order to rule it out! but i'm incredibly skeptical...

i just can't make sense of the idea that this could be innate. forget the evidence, it just strikes me as wholly irrational. the only way i can make sense of anybody even beginning to think this is if they're beginning with a creationist perspective. "born this way" only makes any sense at all if it means "god made me like this". now, supposing it were true, imagine a christian trying to argue against gay rights, based on that premise. it's not really possible. it would require rejecting the perfection of creation.

i don't think it's thought through, though. i mean, you're also asking that christian to reject the bible. a more likely result is eugenics policies. this is why i push back against this. the idea that we're genetic defects is actually a powerful argument in the hands of the far right.

http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/668167

i'm not going to go so far as to argue it's necessarily a conscious choice. i think it very well can be. what's to stop a straight person from waking up and deciding to be gay? and who is to question their sincerity?

i'm more likely to lean towards subtle psychological causes. i think we're born bisexual and end up one way or the other based on extremely complicated psychological development, much of it at a subconscious level. freud is more useful here than mendel.

i mean, it's not hard to find some gay dudes that would laugh at the idea that they're low in testosterone...

i'm a little less hostile to the idea of genetics + environment, which is closer to the consensus than a lot of popular media will suggest. again, i don't know why there's this push in liberal media for the hard-wired argument. it's a creationist argument...a liberal argument is that people have the right to live the lives that they want to....

in general, though, i realize that the nurture v nature thing is mostly put aside as too restrictive. a little bit of both. that's the view for pretty much everything. and these dichotomies of all types are mostly rejected. complex phenomena generally have complex (and multiple) causes.

but i just can't fathom how anybody could honestly argue that genetics overpower environment in this case, because we're talking about *behaviour*. we're not robots. i see no reason why we couldn't choose to be gay, even if the genes are not there - and i see no reason why we couldn't choose to not be gay, even if the genes are there. so, even if they are there i can't think of them as absolute, defining things. in the case that such a genetic cause is eventually shown (and again i doubt one ever will be), that's still at best an incomplete answer that could only be applied in limited circumstances. in the end, there's a choice, whether some people like it or not.

i think an overlooked question is how much of it is sexual in the first place. i'm going to use my aunt as an example. she's been married twice in her life - first to a male, and then to a female. i haven't really prodded, but my perception is that the second marriage wasn't really about sex at all but about companionship. she seems to have grown into somebody that would prefer the company of another woman over the company of a male.

i can relate to that. i find myself more physically attracted to men, but more emotionally attracted to women. my emotional needs overpower my physical ones. so, how does that make sense in terms of androgens or genes? it's entirely a psychological issue.

there's far too much evidence that orientation is malleable with circumstance, experience and age to take this wiring idea seriously. at best, it's about "genetic predisposition", whatever that means, in context.

yeah. east ukraine is small potatoes. if the russians are going to flex, it's going to be further west.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/01/transnistria-putin-west-europe-dniester-river-moldova

well, the truth is that something like 30% of them actually are anti-semites. they happen to be right on this point, but you can see it in their body language and it's very disturbing to be around them. 30% of the nazi program was textbook socialism.

it sounds to me like netanyahu is using it to raise campaign funds.

deathtokoalas
i think she may be exaggerating the importance and reverberation of the civil disobedience, but this is otherwise worth watching.

Jovan Mitrić
So why USA didn't topple The Saudi Government already? Oh, that's right, oil!

9/11 Nuclear Demolition
Wouldn't that be a reason to invade Saudia Arabia? ;)

Jovan Mitrić
Why, the oil flows just fine.

9/11 Nuclear Demolition
and it flows just fine from Iran, Chile, Venezuela and Libya as well, but it's not about the 'oil' but rather who is in charge of profiting from the oil and therefore who controls it, no? Saudi Arabia (and therefore Israel) have the US by the balls and the cartel works just fine this way. Iran, Chile, Venezuela (and formerly Iraq but look what happened to them) don't sell through the cartels the way that oligarchs want them to, etc so. The oil still 'flows' from Iraq like it has the past 100 years. Only difference is cui bono?

John Doe
...which was the reason to invade Iraq.

Not so much to gain access to Iraqi oil but to make sure the Saudi oil keeps flowing which in turn keeps oil prices stable.

shirehorse91
Your comment makes no sense. Oil is the reason that countries are invaded and oil is the reason that countries aren't invaded.

Jovan Mitrić
Countries with oil that are friendly with USA are not invaded while "rogue" countries with oil are invaded.

deathtokoalas
SAUDI ARABIA WAS INVADED BY THE UNITED STATES IN 1991 AND REMAINS UNDER AMERICAN MILITARY OCCUPATION. THE SAUDI ROYAL FAMILY IS A FIEFDOM OF THE AMERICAN EMPIRE. THEIR ACTIONS REFLECT AMERICAN POLICY IN THE REGION.

the reason they're not toppled is that they're obedient puppets that do what they're told.

should they become a problem, the american occupation will carry out it's raison d'etre and bomb the place to bits. that hasn't happened yet, and if that shocks you it's america that you don't understand properly.

9/11 Nuclear Demolition
thank you.

Jim Jones
Nope there are too many crazy Islamists there and if we bomb them that will free all the crazies onto the world!

deathtokoalas
oil is small beans compared to weapons. america is primarily a weapons manufacturer. it only requires oil insofar as it fuels the arms trade. the entire structure of american foreign policy (and domestic policy) exists to maximize profit from arms sales. it's the war economy, stupid. as such, america seeks disorder and chaos and abhors anything that threatens a future of structural peace.

letting those "crazies" out, who are mostly american allies and puppets anyways, is exactly what they want.

the saudis will eventually be bombed. understand this. right now, it's far more profitable to sell them weapons, and then help generate conflicts that generate further contracts.

Batman
no bud its not the muslims who are crazy its not them who are illegally invading nations and killing innocent people its zionist israel and its muppet usa who are doing that and by the way isis is mossad its zionist jews impersonating muslims they are the real terrorists

deathtokoalas
this is of course just a lot of nonsense. but it's easier to dredge up medieval scapegoating than it is to look at facts and evidence.

this doesn't happen unless the ruling party is admitting defeat.

i don't like the new liberal party, though. i'm hoping the vote splits enough to keep them in minority long enough that mulcair gets replaced by somebody further to his left.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/inside-dimitri-soudas-s-last-days-atop-the-conservative-party-1.2593195

deathtokoalas
or maybe we all need to pull our heads out of our asses and learn how to independently research candidates. if our populace was educated, this wouldn't matter.

step 1: turn your tv off. just turn it off. smash it with a sledgehammer. just get rid of it.

VoxynOfCeadus
Everyone you get to vote for is a winner of the contributions war. Pay attention all you want to who you vote for, it doesn't change the fact that one of them will win and the only reason you get to vote for them is because they got enough contributions to pay for their spot. So naive. Turn off the tv, burn the newspaper, don't use the internet. Who are you going to vote for? The people on the ballots. How did they get on the ballots? They paid to be on the ballots with contributions. John Doe could be the most brilliant person to ever live with plans to lead the country to utopia. But if he's not friends with the corporations and other major lobbyists, he will never be on the ballot. You don't get to vote on that.

deathtokoalas
you need to use the internet. it's not like those other types of media.

you're exaggerating. but, if you weren't, you could write candidates in. the situation you're describing is a consequence of voter ignorance and will not be solved by limiting campaign contributions. not only is it a non-problem, the non-solution will not be effective.

the only solution is a more engaged populace.

VoxynOfCeadus
It will level the playing field and allow for a more engaged populace. It will make this rigged system become so obvious that they have to give us real options. As it is, there are no options for real candidates.

deathtokoalas
these rulings are more about eliminating "market restrictions" in corporations competing with each other. we don't need a "level playing field". that's fascistic thinking, that reduces people to automatons that can be programmed by media.

"it's not fair! only the big corporations get to brainwash people!"

no. a free society is one where people act independently of media, not one where your preferred media brainwashing is dominant.

in canada, we have actually banned corporate donations entirely and it hasn't made any difference. people still vote for the petro-state. if anything, it's made things worse by facilitating the flow of money through back room channels. where we used to have two of three parties that supported nationalization of the oil industry, we now have three parties invested in the petrostate. the reason is people care more about low oil prices than they do about climate change. it's rooted in engagement...

you don't understand.

that cop was doing his job. you're just not clear on what his job is. these kinds of intimidation tactics are designed to control the herd into submission to authority by setting an example of brutality. it's a mafia tactic.

people need to see this, but they also need to understand that it's not a bad apple and it's not an accident. it's entirely by design, created by a system that sees the populace as a type of domesticated animal that needs to be controlled by brute force.

now, shut up and go buy something.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkJJXUI_Oq4

up until recently, canada's relations with cuba (especially during the trudeau and chretien years, but even under mulroney) haven't been well-characterized as being an american cheerleader. canada was actually trying to act as an intermediate, and no doubt did in ways we don't really know about. there was of course a lot of opposition to this from segments of the canadian right. there was a minor fiasco up here when castro flew in to act as a pallbearer for trudeau's funeral, with the then recently more aggressive canadian right using it as an opportunity to attack the then ruling liberals as being soft on communist dictators. relations between trudeau and reagan were famously strained due to this sort of thinking, not just with castro but with communism in general. there's a trudeau biography (i can't remember the name of it) that explains that reagan was convinced that trudeau was a communist sympathizer and didn't want to share intelligence with him. it's a sort of open secret that reagan pushed trudeau out of office for exactly this reason.

certainly, canada buckled to a lot of pressure. but, there was an active policy of internationalism and multipolarity in canadian foreign policy throughout the last quarter of the last century, to the point that it felt like it was a part of the canadian national identity. this certainly extended to cuba.

but things have changed here a whole over the last decade. it's not just the change of political leadership, but also the increasing power of canadian resource companies - both in africa and central america.

it's also widely understood in canada that our government is stuck supporting the drug war due to american pressure, not due to ideological agreement. chretien considered legalization of marijuana to be a legacy project. it's understood that it didn't happen because the americans wouldn't allow it. and it's an open secret that bush (or the reaganite bush advisers) pushed him out for similar reasons.

that's not to distract from the point. it's just not a fair characterization of canada between 1965 and 2005 to suggest that they were out to isolate cuba and support the drug war.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1GSLoP76a4

you mentioned you didn't get a browser. that's what would kill this.

i still run a pIII-500 with 640 mb of ram and a 17 gb hd (it was sold with windows 98 on it, in 1999) as a multimedia pc in my living room. all this thing has to do is

1) connect to an external drive with mp3s and send that signal out to a stereo.
2) connect to youtube so i can watch something as i eat.

it's running a stripped down n-lite version of xp with all the services off. the boot-up is slow, but if i was just to pop around the desktop like you are here it would be every bit as fast as that. anything beyond 500 mhz is far from a crappy machine. windows has historically just been awful with memory management.

a linux install on my or your machine would take better advantage of the hardware and i have little doubt that 8 would be just as snappy on my 500, if it would install without giving me an error. it can run word fine. it can play local videos without a hassle. etc. really, just about anything you'd need it for...

...except browsing with more than one tab, but that has more to do with bad design from browsers and web page admins that just throw memory out the window and expect people to run silly specs to compensate for it...

so, we've heard a lot about wolf-coyote hybrids, and how a new species is developing. this is interesting to me because i think it's an overlooked mechanism that describes rapid evolutionary change, as it is driven by habitat change, as it is driven by climate change - in a way that is substantial enough to resolve the gould-dawkins debate. if you don't know what i'm talking about it, don't worry about it. just realize that hybridization is more common than your grade 10 science teacher would have you know.

maybe you heard something about polar bears and grizzly bears, too.

it turns out that the felines in the area also hybridizing. see, there's an underlying theory hidden here that hasn't been written...

http://www.nrri.umn.edu/lynx/information/hybrid.html

one of the things that i like about this re-understanding of the evolution of species is that it suggests that when related species that had been speciated through allopatric means recombine they often react not by competing for similar resources but by co-operating, sharing resources and ultimately combining into new species.

i'm not a naturalist. i'm not tied to "natural behaviour", or see how understanding "how nature works" ought to provide any useful insight into building societies. however, that has interesting ramifications for those that do think in those terms.

"He's afraid of invasion eventually,'' Chretien said. "We discussed that, and I don't think the Americans have the intention of invading Cuba more than they have the intention of invading Canada.''

chretien has this strange way with words, that allows him to carefully state things that would otherwise be off limits. that's a shared interest, now, isn't it? but stated dismissively, to seem like it's crazy talk....when it of course isn't.

i've previously described him as an autistic yoda. enigmatic words of wisdom...

one deals with an existential threat by managing it. it's a subtle difference. regardless, if the american position is to "play ball" with whomever ends up in power, then it would have to apply equally to the results of saudi interests. it doesn't work out to a serious rift, either way.

i think what we saw a few months ago was the saudis throwing a temper tantrum for not getting what they wanted. the sanctions have not been eased. the united states has not asserted a more independent policy. the saudis have not been sent a message. the policy has not been altered. the differences do not constitute a rift; the saudis are merely being unreasonably demanding, and making a fuss about it.

the saudis do not need to blackmail the americans to stop them from being critical of their human rights abuses. rather, one would need to blackmail the americans in order for them to begin to talk like that! one only expects the americans to use that language to accomplish some military aim. rather, the united states has nothing to lose and everything to gain from an autocratic government in the region, and would recreate the status quo if it were to collapse.

it's been imperial british policy to install dictators in strategic areas for a very long time.

thought provoking. if valid, there's some boots on the ground...

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/374553/putin-ukraine-europe-and-right-andrew-stuttaford
http://voiceofrussia.com/news/2014_03_31/Le-Pens-National-Front-to-run-at-least-11-French-towns-1659/

this might be the most awesome thing ever. i am not speaking lightly.

it's like 1% of the cost of the tools that recovery rip-offs use. it's actually cheaper to buy this little thing than it would be to hack together a homemade solution, and it's actually multipurpose - not only is it 1% of a pro device, it actually even pays for itself. it's even cheaper than a recovery evaluation would be...

but the assembled nature of it cuts out all the uncertainty of stringing together cannibalized cables to power sources. things get fried that way, but it's a last resort. not any more. it cuts out the need to use legacy hardware. should work direct from a laptop.

it's going to come with a learning curve, sure. but it could put the fucking vampires out of business. given what this could sell for, to manufacturer it like this and sell it for $30 is just shockingly decent.

http://www.seeedstudio.com/depot/Bus-Pirate-v36-universal-serial-interface-p-609.html

The Obama administration is underestimating Putin's ambitions

washington post, mar 31, 2014.

"this file was inadvertently published"

yeah. thanks, bezos.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/editors-note/2013/06/25/f45b75b4-d2fb-11e2-8cbe-1bcbee06f8f8_story.html

then again, the russians may be able to work with this guy.

http://en.interfax.com.ua/news/general/198414.html
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/ukraine/poroshenko.htm

mmhmm.

well, that's the value of democracy in a bourgeois state - it sets up a fall guy. when the situation gets out of hand, the fall guy takes the fall and a new one is put in the old place. then, people are told their will was upheld and much nonsense is blathered about how democracy was victorious. egypt? sure. how about every four years in the united states?

the russians have been planning around these pipelines through ukraine for a while. it was a huge issue a few years ago. now, not so much. the question is how much can be rerouted to the pipes that surround ukraine and how fast. but, obviously that's not the ideal from the russian standpoint.

i need to reiterate that a russian-backed candidate could very well win the next election - if it is a free election. let us not fool ourselves into thinking that ukraine is suddenly a bastion of free and fair elections, after an illegal seizure of power. the ukrainian media is mostly state owned. this a former soviet state. there's been talk of faked elections in the past.

i haven't seen any polling that attempts to measure the reaction of the conservatives palling around with extremists, but i still think it's highly unlikely to be positive. timoshenko is not a popular candidate and does not have a serious chance in a free election. that would be a clear sign the vote is rigged. rather, this klitschko character seems to be taking the vote *away* from timoshenko's party - or at least he was before he pulled out, as i see he just did. recent polling has poroshenko out in front, but none of it takes into account the most updated field, or the recently announced party of regions candidate (who is under house arrest for his role in pro-russia protests. yeah. free and fair, huh?). it doesn't seem to me like he would need to pick up an overwhelming amount of momentum in order to split the field of pro-eu candidates. if timoshenko doesn't pull out, that could actually be the difference.

that has to be the preferred russian action. at the least, i wouldn't expect to see them do anything rash until after the election.

more concerning to the russians has to be that missile shield, which they have made their displeasure of abundantly clear. i think it's more likely to see russian-instigated instability in poland or latvia than an actually invasion of kharkov...

how much effort would it take to organize a resistance to ICE?

has google figured out that truth != consensus? i admit i kind of miss my silly + number, but i would get over it quickly if they got rid of the whole idea of upvoting altogether.

this particular group is not signatory to any treaty at all. in fact, much of british columbia never signed any kind of treaty with any kind of european power. this puts them in a very different legal category that is presented here in a way that is somewhat confusing. the government cannot break a treaty that was never signed in the first place. further, it logically stands to reason that if no treaty was ever signed then the federal government ought to have no rights over the land at all. of course, this doesn't align with the logic of colonialism. however, the supreme court has ruled that areas that never signed a treaty have full aboriginal title, which is legally a type of land ownership that falls down somewhere higher than fee simple but still exists under crown control. this is a sort of legal compromise that aims to allow for a sort of "virtual sovereignty" in day-to-day matters without reversing the colonial land grab. that is to say that the supreme court has fabricated this legal fiction of the crown granting aboriginal title as a special fief that grants the owner more rights than fee simple but not full sovereignty.

what that means is that the harper government has a mechanism where it can legally appropriate land for specific purposes, so long as it "consults" with the inhabitants (which legally means "provide sufficient warning", rather than "carry out a significant conversation"). all of this stems from supreme court decisions designed to make the colonial appropriation process seem more liberal and friendly on the surface, while actually helping it along under the surface. none of it is by treaty. that is to say that none of it is consensual.

i would rather think there is a strong argument under international law that canada is carrying out a sort of colonization, accompanied by a military occupation of the region. except by the use of sheer force, it is difficult to ascertain how canada ought to have any rights over the area at all.

to put it simply, by what logic does the canadian government claim it has a right to build a pipeline through an area that never ceded it's sovereignty to it except the logic of sheer force overpowering legal and democratic legitimacy?

deathtokoalas
listen, it's not hard to see where ostrovsky's sympathies lie, but who else is sending back images from the ground? what i've seen from vice is neither in line with the russian media nor the western media. it's just reporting what is happening. the russians aren't talking, and that's what they get for not co-operating with media. what's shocking is that there isn't a single "normal" news outlet doing anything remotely resembling this kind of coverage.

what he's showing here is that the russians are storming a ukrainian base. because that's what they're doing. now, if you want to talk about what that means, how justified it is, how brutal it is in actuality (casualties seem to be virtually nil) etc, then these are more subtle questions - and the analysis is needed, certainly. but, first we have to establish the facts on the ground, and the conventional media on both sides has been utterly useless in doing this.

he should win an award. not due to any kind of above the standard journalism, but in contrast to the horrible journalism seen everywhere else.

Vlad K
"the russians aren't talking, and that's what they get for not co-operating with media." It is a laughable statement. Hundreds of journalists work in Crimea, and none of them was injured, as opposite to Kiev. Russian media have tons of interview with locals, Ukrainian officers, including those few of them who chose to serve junta. This propaganda is only for people who don't speak Russian.

deathtokoalas
i obviously meant that they're not speaking to the western media. i apologize, but my russian is currently a bit rusty.

regardless, i've been watching rt and they've been highly coy about the whole thing. the initial line from the russians was that crimea was part of ukraine and they would uphold the international boundaries. now, i happen to actually think that the russians handled this extremely well. i'm not interested in a discussion about saving russian speakers from nazis. people speak of the russians interchangeably with the soviets, while forgetting that the americans are the lineal descendant of the british empire (perhaps future historians will understand the american revolution as a civil war within the british empire that transferred control from london to washington. the roman empire spent more than half it's history centered in modern day istanbul. the real center of islam was baghdad. there are other parallels.). forget about the cold war. remember the crimean war? the english have been trying to cut off russian access to the mediterranean for centuries. the larger context of events over the last fifteen years has seen russia lose deep sea ports in yugoslavia, libya and possibly syria. to lose the black sea fleet would be inconceivable. THEN we would see a fullscale invasion of ukraine.

so, to take the base without any discernible casualties is actually quite impressive. i would not expect the americans to be as restrained, should a "revolution" in canada threaten their control of norad, or something.

but the communications - at least in english - have been incredibly controlled. not that i would expect otherwise. it's just as bad from cnn.

but there are lots of other media sources with budgets and audiences that could be out there reporting - in english, for an english audience.

Vlad K
The military role of Black Sea is not as important as it was before. Moreover, many Russians question the necessity of Black Sea fleet itself. After all, Black Sea is a puddle, and it can be covered by air forces in defense actions. it will be useless in any serious confrontations with NATO because it can be blocked easily at Bosporus. So, It is really hard to believe for the West that two millions Russians and their wellbeing is a serious issue for Russians in Russian Federation?  Why it is so difficult for western mass media to show social surveys related to Crimean crisis and give Russian point of view among others on this crisis. I always hear "Putin" "Pro-Putin" and never "Russians" in western media. The answer is you don't give a shit what people really think until they resist your politics.

deathtokoalas
i don't agree that the crimean fleet is less important than it was. it's not really about direct conflict, it's more about the ability to project power - what was once called "shipping interests" and is now more about controlling resources and networking bases together. ships remain much larger than planes; they can even carry planes. and it's not a coincidence that nato (and aligned forces) has targeted countries with russian naval bases. this is all explained in the project for the new american century document. a better question is why it took russia 15 years and the near loss of it's prized possession to actually react.

the whole bosporus thing is an aspect of it. the london straits convention did succeed in cutting off the russians for a long time, but this led to quite a bit of fighting (including both russian and western interference in the greek civil war) that carried on even after the montreux convention. trying to modify the terms of that convention would indeed be an act of war and would no doubt result in further russian aggression. nato wouldn't dare do this. well, not so long as the russians have access to the black sea, anyways.

i don't think that any government in the world cares about self-determination. i'm not interested in the propaganda from any source. but, the russians don't have a good track record in being trustworthy when it comes to polling or surveying. they probably didn't have to bullshit it in the first place, but 97%? c'mon. you couldn't get 97% of people in a given area to agree with docile statements about kittens. you'd might as well be telling me to trust colin powell...

ian setzer
Don't listen to him, he is a propagandist sent by the russian federation, here is a link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_brigades

deathtokoalas
it's not hard to believe. but i feel compelled to point out that it has been recently disclosed by the snowden leaks that the americans do exactly the same thing.

i remember first reading about this in relation to chinese attempts to control dissidents, although they take it to much further extremes. that model seems to have been adopted by other intelligence agencies.

sergei the bad
Not 97%. 83 percent came to a referendum. Those who were against just stayed home.

Антон Березин
83% choose theire future in Crimea. In Kiev only 1% choose future fore everyone in Ukraine...

Efrim Begotten
Based on the guys videos and what he likes, it's hard to say. For me the saddest part about  the Crimean affair is that the western world basically won't risk intervening. After all, we've let Syria burn for years now.

deathtokoalas
the western world is intervening in syria, it's just doing so in a way that most westerners would not approve of. the question a few months ago was not about intervention, it was about escalation. did the west want to escalate it's support for saudi fighters from weapons smuggling to air bombardment and possible invasion? if it weren't for western intervention, there would not be a conflict in the region.

thousands and thousands and thousands of people in syria have died in a fight between russia and america over a naval base. foreign-backed religious extremists roam the countryside, bombing towns to pillage the population while carrying out a genocide against shia and other non-sunnis they consider "polytheists". crimea switched from one authoritarian state to another, with no casualties, and with the majority support of it's citizenry (97% or not). this is the difference between a very controlled russian invasion designed to create order and an off-the-wall american one designed to preserve disorder. it's not a comparable situation, and suggestions that it is should make people angry.

was looking at a blu-ray writer for better storage. the price of media is still ridiculous. but finding one for under $30 is no longer infeasible (if still requiring a little luck). not a priority, though...

there may be a new format out in the next two years. that should help bring the blu-ray prices way down.