
Re: Anybody know?
ÉlRon?
Hubbard? Another dodgy organisation.
4662 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Jul 2009
R V Jones wrote 'Most Secret War', which to me is by far the best description of the scientific and technological arms race that took place in the first half of the Second World War. It's not just an outline of technical events, but also a record of the battles the scientists fought with British politicians, bureaucrats and high-ranking military officers. On top of that, the combat risks that some of those people took, even those usually dismissed as boffins or back-room boys, are stomach-churning. I cannot recommend the book highly enough.
According to official figures, US GDP per capita is double that of Europe.
Some of that GDP comes from the artifically inflated cost of internal trade, such as the high prices American clinics and hospitals have to pay for pharmaceuticals patented and manufactured by American corporations, or the excessively convoluted requirements made for the maintenance of defence materiel by Lockheed and Boeing, such as the F-35 fighters or the Minuteman-3 ICBMs.
I think the FBI does strange manpower management things like assigning investigators to successive investigations as they come up, rather than sticking each investigator into a stasis chamber until the only case they are allowed to work on is reopened. No doubt that chappie with the interest in Government Efficiency will have something to say about this bizarre state of affairs.
The EU is collapsing.
People have been saying that for 30 years.
Whenever I hear it now, I visualise either a brash young person who doesn't realise they have little or no personal experience of history or an older Farage-a-like scrunching up his face (yes, it's always a him) and wishing upon a star: "Please let me be right this time. Please let me be right!"
They'll have to mine the ruins of our cities, extracting iron from the crumbling pre-stressed concrete and aluminium from the cars crushed under the fallen tower blocks. They won't have the coal or oil we needed to kickstart and maintain an Industrial Age, but they might be able to suss out gasification and take it a bit more slowly.
There were (and maybe still are) plans to flag nuclear waste sites with warning signs that would survive for ten thousand years. Obviously this couldn't use any existing language but required some sort of hopefully universal symbolism. We'd need to leave behind the equivalent of the Voyager Golden Record to warn our descendants / bonobos / dolphins / giant fire-ant hive minds not to emit too much CO2 or create too many plastic nanoparticles. "Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
It convinces otherwise reasonable humans to do terrible things by feeding them false information.
You mean, like a religion? But humanity has long since learned how to deal with.... oh.
It also provides some humans with cover to do the terrible things they wanted to do.
OK, then, definitely like a religion.
How does that make J.D a nazi?
Because JD now seems to be quite happy to be the right-hand man of America's Hitler. It's not like Trump has changed since then; if anything, he's got worse. It's more like JD no longer cares, or at best is putting his personal ambition ahead of any democratic principle. Personally, I think he expects Trump to kick the bucket while in office, so JD will get to become president. If that does happen and Vance steps back from Trump's policies, undoing the anti-democratic damage, then I'll concede that I was wrong about him.
slowed down by factors of 10 or 1000, they might make audible sounds
Back in the dim and distant past, I attended a college whose primary computing resource was a Pr1me minicomputer. As new computing students we were shown around the machine room during Freshers Week, and I can remember standing alongside this big, open wardrobe-sized frame filled with connected IC boards and daughter cards, the air warm around it. If you listened carefully you could hear a high hum with rapid but detectable changes in pitch. The sysadmin showing us around said he could always tell when a class in the nearby terminal room logged on and when their lecturer told them to submit their compilation batch jobs.
That is a vile calumny! The Greatest President Ever has never spilled the beans* at one of his rallies, nor would it matter if he did because the thousands upon thousands of faithful attendees are good upright law-abiding American patriots and can be trusted never to spread state secrets further, just like they can be trusted never to leave a packed rally until The Donald has finished speaking.
*He reserves this display of personal power and privilege for the Mar-A-Lago wedding parties that he gatecrashes.
There's psychological studies that suggest that people who swear a lot tend to be more honest.
Anecdotally, I think the reverse may also be true.
When I first started full-time work I used to work for a team leader who never swore at all. In the five years that I knew him I never heard him use any intensifier stronger than 'blooming'.
He was a bully. He loved to throw his metaphorical weight around (and from his build you can bet that he'd done so physically at school), but he was careful not to cross the line to where someone would either thump him or report him. It was all just little things, just enough that you'd notice but not so much that you could call him out on them without the risk of appearing unreasonable. Some of us managed to find ways to stand up to him without causing him to lose face, and the realisation that we were on to him would be just enough to spoil his enjoyment so that he'd go look for an easier target. With the advantage of hindsight we should have handled it quite differently, I think, but back then I was young and much less certain of myself than I am now.
When our department head retired, seventeen of us signed a letter saying that our manager was not fit to succeed him. If there'd been such a thing as HR back then (and if we'd had any confidence in them) I'm sure we would have got together and done something sooner, but the thought of the bastard widening his scope for harm was too much. He didn't get the job, but nothing formal was done about the complaint so we made sure the existence of the letter became known to him (though not the list of signatories). He was much more subdued after that, and finally left when his attempt to present a reorganisation plan got zero support from anyone in his team. His leaving-do was remarkable for its sparse attendance, so much so that his associates from other departments who did turn up commented on it -- some of them quite loudly, I was told!
About forty years ago I had a friend who worked at GCHQ, around the time that the Thatcher government was having a stab at unionised workers there going on strike by claiming that some of them should have their security clearances revoked simply for being left-wing. It sparked a wider conversation about security and modernisation, and my friend mentioned a gay co-worker who was so flagrantly camp that at his annual interview the security people ignored the old 1950s rules about the risk that homosexuals could be blackmailed by the Russians because this bloke was completely unembarrassable. The joke went that if a Soviet honeytrap had caught him in flagrante delicto, he'd joyfully have passed the incriminating photos around the office himself!
Really? That's your excuse? You extrapolate from a simple referential word to a malign intent regarding an unrelated incident? All to cover for your desire to change the subject to "What about the Far Left?", as though some anarcho-communists have engaged in a national programme of setting light to the homes of corporatist shareholders and tearing down the walls of Anglican churches in order to have bricks to throw at cars and cops.
Perhaps I should interpret your phrase "the overall picture" to include every riotous incident since the English Civil War.
Pathetic.
You have a very short memory it appears
Your example comes from a fortnight before this last weekend's riot while you yourself quoted the OP's phrase "this weekend". Can you not read? Sadly a lot of other people who can't read chose to agree with you. Perhaps you were all drunk. Or blinded by a political motivation. How would you explain your blatant error?