I lived under Giuliani for the time he was mayor in NYC and he did some good things. Mostly, he has VERY good at making it seem like he accomplished something grand when in fact it was inevitable or, more likely, a sham.
He never in a million years would’ve gotten re-elected as mayor if he said and did all the crazy things he continues to do on the campaign trail. I’m not sure if he really means it or is just pandering to the masses. Either way, its completely reprehensible.
Is there something not true in the ad? Oh, yeah I forgot, you of brillant minds belive 911 was an inside job.
Let’s go back to talking about playing with interns, we didn’t have this problem then…
jeebus
Oh, yeah I forgot, you of brillant minds belive 911 was an inside job.
No, it wasn’t it Saddam Hussein?
/snark
slide2112
no, no, no, we didn’t have any problems with that guy either…
The Almighty Bob
Your current one does seem to have been the pick of the litter since… oh, FDR at least? My American history before that is light on the non-entity Presidents: there’s so much history, a general grounding only hits the high spots. (“,)
Haelfix
Neil I agree, the solution to the Energy crisis ultimately will come from a series of contributions on both the demand and supply side of the picture.
Of course you can take the drastic solution on either side. I mean if we execute or sterilize everyone in China and India, basically there would be no ‘energy’ problem, b/c thats where the population growth and demand growth is and will be in the future. Most western countries have negative population growth and very moderate or linear demand growth (basically, as GDP goes up it passes a critical point and flattens out to something more linear as one would expect).
Its hard to solve that though, especially since we don’t have much say over third world economies. Ergo the need and desire to provide some sort of clean energy generation that would hopefully be cheap and affordable for them
Mister Cloud
Wow, is Hilary so deep into trouble now you have to help her? 🙂
You poor thing, having to wonder so much. Let me help a little and direct you to our carefully hidden and opaquely written “about” page, which may help put an end to those painful wonderings.
slide2112 wrote: Oh, yeah I forgot, you of brillant minds belive 911 was an inside job.
Do you really think this would be a popular view on this blog? The “9/11 was an inside job” people use the classic crackpot style of argument (especially when it comes to the scientific questions about what kinds of effects we’d expect to see from a jet crashing into a building), something that science-geek types usually have a lot of experience recognizing. Y’know, it’s quite possible to accept that Islamic terrorists pose a threat without thinking they are the Greatest Threat Facing Civilization Today (TM) — unless they get their hands on a nuclear weapon or assume control of a nuclear-armed state like Pakistan, there’s basically no way they can manage to kill even a small fraction of the people killed every year by common diseases, not to mention the types of natural disasters which are likely to increase drastically if global warming isn’t curtailed.
Mister Cloud
Thank you Mark. I just had to say that i find this Sean’s post extremely politically limited or just “politically motivated”.
Mister Cloud wrote: Wow, is Hilary so deep into trouble now you have to help her?
Actually, I imagine Sean is pretty happy with how things are going right now…
slide2112
Jesse M. in #34 makes Rudy’s and Bush’s point exactly. It’s too late once they get it, you have to stop them before!
It’s not clean, it’s not pretty, it ain’t nice, it ain’t academic. Alot of our best will die in the process. It is really messed up. But we gotta do it.
The Almighty Bob
#37: slide, please tell me your geopolitical sense is that weak. First off: whenever a foreign army comes stomping in in their size 12s to kill the bad guys, they’d better be damn sure they know who the bad guys are. it worked in World War 1 and 2 because the bad guys were other foreigners, the locals didn’t want them around, and the Allies tended to leave moderatley fast once they ran out of Germans. It doesn’t usually work when the bad guys are local boys, because they’ll always have support – and in fact, the invader can often increase their support more than decrease it.
Case study: Northern Ireland.
Do you know who the IRA’s best recruiter was? The British Army.
Before 1968, the IRA was an irrelevant leftover. Six months afterBloody Sunday, they were well-organised and well-supplied enough to bomb 22 targets in a single night. It wasn’t direct cause and effect, but it’s a decent illustration.
Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. The IRA continued their ‘struggle’ for 30 years. Are you be willing to have soldiers’ bodies coming home from Baghdad in 2038?
slide2112 wrote: Jesse M. in #34 makes Rudy’s and Bush’s point exactly. It’s too late once they get it, you have to stop them before!
If your primary purpose is to stop terrorists from getting nuclear weapons, the best way to do this is by focusing on nuclear arms control and preventing nuclear proliferation, something which the Bush administration has never really made a central issue in the “war on terror” (some arms reductions treaties have actually been watered down because of Bush’s desire to build nifty new types of nukes), and which is generally better served by diplomacy than by saber-rattling.
slide2112
I suspect Almighty Bob doesn’t understand the meaning of geopolitical, clearly he does not know WW2. Forget about the first world war. I am dumbstruck, I don’t know where to begin.
Jesse M. How quaint. I’m sure we can agree that diplomacy does not always work. The subject of Rudy’s ad is a case in point.
Let us hold a high standard here. The subject at hand is ugly enough.
slide2112, it seems to me that Almighty Bob understands geopolitics, WW2, and NI quite well. Once you have figured out “where to begin”, please let us know.
It is also very well-known that the current administration completely balls’d up the prevention of nuclear proliferation. Just look at the mess in North Korea: it is a direct consequence of the totally incompetent diplomatic efforts of the US a couple of years ago.
The Almighty Bob
I’ve studied geopolitics. In a university, even.
It wasn’t a precise use of the word, I will admit, but it was a long enough post without writing “is your understanding of sociology, psychology, group dynamics, and politics (as they apply to international relations and terrorism) so feeble as to not be able to grasp the concept of ‘if they don’t like what you’re doing, they may attempt to stop you’?”
Okay, okay, there’s still US bases in Germany, Italy, the UK… There was no long term occupation of any country: Germany became independant in 1949, Japan in 1952, Italy in 1946. You think you’ll be out of a stable Iraq by 2010? World War I, there were occupied territories: Alsace, Lorraine, and the Ruhr valley were occupied by the French. Alsace and Lorraine had been taken by Germany in the Franco-Prussian War: Alsace had been swapped backwards and forwards quite a bit previously, and Lorraine was a piecemeal mix of French and German ex-duchies. The Ruhr valley was taken in 1923 when Germany didn’t pay reparations. Of course, the first step in Hitler’s conquering movements was his re-occupation of the Ruhr valley. Germany also lost its colonies, but that was just a change of bosses.
Are there any other aspersions you wish to cast?
The Almighty Bob
Thanks, PK.
On the non-proliferation front, in 1995 Iran made a deal with Russia whereby Russia would provide nuclear fuel for two reactors and take back the spent fuel rods, thus ensuring no opportunity for the construction of atomic bombs from the plutonium (it would have been enorrmously easy to audit, too). Guess who sunk that deal?
Result: Iran is now looking to enrich its own fuel, which means they don’t need the reactor to make plutonium for bombs anymore: they now have the technology to make plain ol’ weapons-usable U-235. They also will no longer accept Russia’s providing all their fuel – they’ve seen they can’t trust continuity of supply.
Well played, whoever scuppered that plan.
Count Iblis
Almighty Bob, also now that Iran has almost build up their nuclear infrastructure, they won’t dismantle it just because some Western countries feel threatened.
If a country wants to mine their own uranium, enrich it in their own centrifuges for use in their own nuclear powerplants, then who are we to demand that they stop doing that just because they could in theory, at some future time, kick out the IAEA inspectors and make nuclear weapons.
If we have certain doubts about the Iranian nuclear program without firm evidence, we should talk to Iran in a very polite manner and certainly not demand that they suspend their program and impose sanctions.
The Almighty Bob
If you read back through the history, Iran has unfailingly met the NNPT requirements and, with some scuffles, allowed the IAEA do its job. They’re enormously distrustful of the procedures, which is understandable when you see how often they’ve been used to bludgeon them.
None of this is arguing that Iran should have nuclear weapons, and I’m shaky on nuclear power generally, but they clearly have the right to nuclear power under international law.
slide2112 wrote: Jesse M. How quaint. I’m sure we can agree that diplomacy does not always work. The subject of Rudy’s ad is a case in point.
The subject of Rudy’s ad is for the most part shots of various crowds of what I imagine are random Islamic extremists, along with known terrorists like Bin Laden, not states that actually have the means to build nuclear weapons. Do you agree that the primary focus should be on preventing terrorists from obtaining nuclear weapons, or do you think that non-nuclear terrorist attacks like Sept. 11 are themselves threats to civilization on the scale of climate change? Rudy’s ad does include a shot of the Iranian president Ahmadinejad, calling him a “madman”, but he isn’t really crazy any more than the soviet leaders or Saddam were, and diplomatic solutions such as UN inspectors (who in retrospect we know were doing just fine at preventing Saddam from building nuclear weapons) and perhaps allowing Iran to have nuclear power plants with imported fuel, would likely work fine. And if there was strong evidence that Iran was unrepentantly developing nuclear weapons, I think there’d be a lot of other countries that would join a coalition to intervene with attacks on the facilities where they were being developed, the lone-gun approach is counterproductive in all sorts of way. Of course, on the subject of evidence, part of the problem with the Bush administration was that they didn’t evaluate the evidence fairly and instead saw what they wanted to see, few other countries went along with the US because they listened to their intelligence agencies. I don’t see Rudy being any less likely to jump the gun in this way.
The Almighty Bob
If there was evidence that Iran was developing nuclear weapons, what would be the justification to attack them? Why treat them differently from Pakistan, or even North Korea?
If Iran develops a bomb, it’s because they learned the lesson of the Iraq invasion; if you don’t have nuclear weapons, get them; it’s the only way to keep the Great Satan out.
There was the biggest hint that no WMDs existed in Iraq from day one of the pre-invasion PR; how would Saddam have reacted if he knew there was an invasion coming, and he had, say, a 10K device? He would have strapped the thing on a Scud, pointed it at Jerusalem, and sent it on its way once the first American boot hit Iraqi soil. Similar with any nerve gas left over, or any anthrax. No matter how evil you think Bush is, he was supported by Israel sympathisers, and Bush would never do anything to annoy his power base. 🙂
The Almighty Bob: If there was evidence that Iran was developing nuclear weapons, what would be the justification to attack them? Why treat them differently from Pakistan, or even North Korea?
Well, Iran was a signer of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, so I’d think that in the UN that would provide some kind of legal justification. Whether it would actually happen would depend on how different countries saw the danger from a nuclear-armed Iran, but it’s hard to imagine that Israel wouldn’t take some kind of action, and France has also suggested it’d be likely to attack in these circumstances. Not saying this would be the right thing to do, just that it’s plausible it’d happen. Even if Iran got nuclear weapons, I’m sure the chances of Iran actually using them or giving them to terrorists would be pretty low, since it would be suicide for the country…however much of a “madman” Ahmadinejad is, he isn’t an all-powerful dictator, his actions would have to be agreed on by others like the “Supreme Leader of Iran” Ali Khamenei.
Count Iblis
An attack against Iran would be suicidal. We bomb their nuclear facilities, then what? Of course, the Iranians will retalliate with their missiles. And of course, the Iranians won’t stop firing their missiles just because we are done bombing the targets we wanted to hit. 🙂
What targets will Iran hit? Many major oil installations in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwayt, Bahrein, Oman, Qatar and Dubai are within Iranian missile range. Iran can just demand that these countries stop selling oil to the West or have their oil installations destroyed.
Can we do anything to stop Iran firing their missiles? Israel was not very successful in stopping Hezbollah firing their missiles, so I think we’ll end up in situation with skyrocketing oil prices which will ultimately force us to having to negotiate a humiliating cease fire with Iran: We agree not to attack Iran anymore and Iran stops firing missiles at oil installations in return.
The Almighty Bob
That would be the extreme; guys like Red Adair make a living getting oil wells back in production after disasters. Iran would run out of missiles eventually, and the oilfire specialists took only 9 months to get 117 wells back online after Gulf War Mk. I.
One of the first consequences of such an attack or threat (in the best power-politics fashion) is that the North Slope would be opened to oil exploration so fast the Sierra Club’s heads would spin.
I lived under Giuliani for the time he was mayor in NYC and he did some good things. Mostly, he has VERY good at making it seem like he accomplished something grand when in fact it was inevitable or, more likely, a sham.
He never in a million years would’ve gotten re-elected as mayor if he said and did all the crazy things he continues to do on the campaign trail. I’m not sure if he really means it or is just pandering to the masses. Either way, its completely reprehensible.
http://www.theonion.com/content/news/giuliani_to_run_for_president_of_9
Nuff said.
Is there something not true in the ad? Oh, yeah I forgot, you of brillant minds belive 911 was an inside job.
Let’s go back to talking about playing with interns, we didn’t have this problem then…
Oh, yeah I forgot, you of brillant minds belive 911 was an inside job.
No, it wasn’t it Saddam Hussein?
/snark
no, no, no, we didn’t have any problems with that guy either…
Your current one does seem to have been the pick of the litter since… oh, FDR at least? My American history before that is light on the non-entity Presidents: there’s so much history, a general grounding only hits the high spots. (“,)
Neil I agree, the solution to the Energy crisis ultimately will come from a series of contributions on both the demand and supply side of the picture.
Of course you can take the drastic solution on either side. I mean if we execute or sterilize everyone in China and India, basically there would be no ‘energy’ problem, b/c thats where the population growth and demand growth is and will be in the future. Most western countries have negative population growth and very moderate or linear demand growth (basically, as GDP goes up it passes a critical point and flattens out to something more linear as one would expect).
Its hard to solve that though, especially since we don’t have much say over third world economies. Ergo the need and desire to provide some sort of clean energy generation that would hopefully be cheap and affordable for them
Wow, is Hilary so deep into trouble now you have to help her? 🙂
I always wondered if this is really science blog.
You poor thing, having to wonder so much. Let me help a little and direct you to our carefully hidden and opaquely written “about” page, which may help put an end to those painful wonderings.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/about/
slide2112 wrote:
Oh, yeah I forgot, you of brillant minds belive 911 was an inside job.
Do you really think this would be a popular view on this blog? The “9/11 was an inside job” people use the classic crackpot style of argument (especially when it comes to the scientific questions about what kinds of effects we’d expect to see from a jet crashing into a building), something that science-geek types usually have a lot of experience recognizing. Y’know, it’s quite possible to accept that Islamic terrorists pose a threat without thinking they are the Greatest Threat Facing Civilization Today (TM) — unless they get their hands on a nuclear weapon or assume control of a nuclear-armed state like Pakistan, there’s basically no way they can manage to kill even a small fraction of the people killed every year by common diseases, not to mention the types of natural disasters which are likely to increase drastically if global warming isn’t curtailed.
Thank you Mark. I just had to say that i find this Sean’s post extremely politically limited or just “politically motivated”.
Mister Cloud wrote:
Wow, is Hilary so deep into trouble now you have to help her?
Actually, I imagine Sean is pretty happy with how things are going right now…
Jesse M. in #34 makes Rudy’s and Bush’s point exactly. It’s too late once they get it, you have to stop them before!
It’s not clean, it’s not pretty, it ain’t nice, it ain’t academic. Alot of our best will die in the process. It is really messed up. But we gotta do it.
#37: slide, please tell me your geopolitical sense is that weak. First off: whenever a foreign army comes stomping in in their size 12s to kill the bad guys, they’d better be damn sure they know who the bad guys are. it worked in World War 1 and 2 because the bad guys were other foreigners, the locals didn’t want them around, and the Allies tended to leave moderatley fast once they ran out of Germans. It doesn’t usually work when the bad guys are local boys, because they’ll always have support – and in fact, the invader can often increase their support more than decrease it.
Case study: Northern Ireland.
Do you know who the IRA’s best recruiter was? The British Army.
Before 1968, the IRA was an irrelevant leftover. Six months afterBloody Sunday, they were well-organised and well-supplied enough to bomb 22 targets in a single night. It wasn’t direct cause and effect, but it’s a decent illustration.
Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. The IRA continued their ‘struggle’ for 30 years. Are you be willing to have soldiers’ bodies coming home from Baghdad in 2038?
slide2112 wrote:
Jesse M. in #34 makes Rudy’s and Bush’s point exactly. It’s too late once they get it, you have to stop them before!
If your primary purpose is to stop terrorists from getting nuclear weapons, the best way to do this is by focusing on nuclear arms control and preventing nuclear proliferation, something which the Bush administration has never really made a central issue in the “war on terror” (some arms reductions treaties have actually been watered down because of Bush’s desire to build nifty new types of nukes), and which is generally better served by diplomacy than by saber-rattling.
I suspect Almighty Bob doesn’t understand the meaning of geopolitical, clearly he does not know WW2. Forget about the first world war. I am dumbstruck, I don’t know where to begin.
Jesse M. How quaint. I’m sure we can agree that diplomacy does not always work. The subject of Rudy’s ad is a case in point.
Let us hold a high standard here. The subject at hand is ugly enough.
slide2112, it seems to me that Almighty Bob understands geopolitics, WW2, and NI quite well. Once you have figured out “where to begin”, please let us know.
It is also very well-known that the current administration completely balls’d up the prevention of nuclear proliferation. Just look at the mess in North Korea: it is a direct consequence of the totally incompetent diplomatic efforts of the US a couple of years ago.
I’ve studied geopolitics. In a university, even.
It wasn’t a precise use of the word, I will admit, but it was a long enough post without writing “is your understanding of sociology, psychology, group dynamics, and politics (as they apply to international relations and terrorism) so feeble as to not be able to grasp the concept of ‘if they don’t like what you’re doing, they may attempt to stop you’?”
Okay, okay, there’s still US bases in Germany, Italy, the UK… There was no long term occupation of any country: Germany became independant in 1949, Japan in 1952, Italy in 1946. You think you’ll be out of a stable Iraq by 2010? World War I, there were occupied territories: Alsace, Lorraine, and the Ruhr valley were occupied by the French. Alsace and Lorraine had been taken by Germany in the Franco-Prussian War: Alsace had been swapped backwards and forwards quite a bit previously, and Lorraine was a piecemeal mix of French and German ex-duchies. The Ruhr valley was taken in 1923 when Germany didn’t pay reparations. Of course, the first step in Hitler’s conquering movements was his re-occupation of the Ruhr valley. Germany also lost its colonies, but that was just a change of bosses.
Are there any other aspersions you wish to cast?
Thanks, PK.
On the non-proliferation front, in 1995 Iran made a deal with Russia whereby Russia would provide nuclear fuel for two reactors and take back the spent fuel rods, thus ensuring no opportunity for the construction of atomic bombs from the plutonium (it would have been enorrmously easy to audit, too). Guess who sunk that deal?
Result: Iran is now looking to enrich its own fuel, which means they don’t need the reactor to make plutonium for bombs anymore: they now have the technology to make plain ol’ weapons-usable U-235. They also will no longer accept Russia’s providing all their fuel – they’ve seen they can’t trust continuity of supply.
Well played, whoever scuppered that plan.
Almighty Bob, also now that Iran has almost build up their nuclear infrastructure, they won’t dismantle it just because some Western countries feel threatened.
If a country wants to mine their own uranium, enrich it in their own centrifuges for use in their own nuclear powerplants, then who are we to demand that they stop doing that just because they could in theory, at some future time, kick out the IAEA inspectors and make nuclear weapons.
If we have certain doubts about the Iranian nuclear program without firm evidence, we should talk to Iran in a very polite manner and certainly not demand that they suspend their program and impose sanctions.
If you read back through the history, Iran has unfailingly met the NNPT requirements and, with some scuffles, allowed the IAEA do its job. They’re enormously distrustful of the procedures, which is understandable when you see how often they’ve been used to bludgeon them.
None of this is arguing that Iran should have nuclear weapons, and I’m shaky on nuclear power generally, but they clearly have the right to nuclear power under international law.
slide2112 wrote:
Jesse M. How quaint. I’m sure we can agree that diplomacy does not always work. The subject of Rudy’s ad is a case in point.
The subject of Rudy’s ad is for the most part shots of various crowds of what I imagine are random Islamic extremists, along with known terrorists like Bin Laden, not states that actually have the means to build nuclear weapons. Do you agree that the primary focus should be on preventing terrorists from obtaining nuclear weapons, or do you think that non-nuclear terrorist attacks like Sept. 11 are themselves threats to civilization on the scale of climate change? Rudy’s ad does include a shot of the Iranian president Ahmadinejad, calling him a “madman”, but he isn’t really crazy any more than the soviet leaders or Saddam were, and diplomatic solutions such as UN inspectors (who in retrospect we know were doing just fine at preventing Saddam from building nuclear weapons) and perhaps allowing Iran to have nuclear power plants with imported fuel, would likely work fine. And if there was strong evidence that Iran was unrepentantly developing nuclear weapons, I think there’d be a lot of other countries that would join a coalition to intervene with attacks on the facilities where they were being developed, the lone-gun approach is counterproductive in all sorts of way. Of course, on the subject of evidence, part of the problem with the Bush administration was that they didn’t evaluate the evidence fairly and instead saw what they wanted to see, few other countries went along with the US because they listened to their intelligence agencies. I don’t see Rudy being any less likely to jump the gun in this way.
If there was evidence that Iran was developing nuclear weapons, what would be the justification to attack them? Why treat them differently from Pakistan, or even North Korea?
If Iran develops a bomb, it’s because they learned the lesson of the Iraq invasion; if you don’t have nuclear weapons, get them; it’s the only way to keep the Great Satan out.
There was the biggest hint that no WMDs existed in Iraq from day one of the pre-invasion PR; how would Saddam have reacted if he knew there was an invasion coming, and he had, say, a 10K device? He would have strapped the thing on a Scud, pointed it at Jerusalem, and sent it on its way once the first American boot hit Iraqi soil. Similar with any nerve gas left over, or any anthrax. No matter how evil you think Bush is, he was supported by Israel sympathisers, and Bush would never do anything to annoy his power base. 🙂
The Almighty Bob:
If there was evidence that Iran was developing nuclear weapons, what would be the justification to attack them? Why treat them differently from Pakistan, or even North Korea?
Well, Iran was a signer of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, so I’d think that in the UN that would provide some kind of legal justification. Whether it would actually happen would depend on how different countries saw the danger from a nuclear-armed Iran, but it’s hard to imagine that Israel wouldn’t take some kind of action, and France has also suggested it’d be likely to attack in these circumstances. Not saying this would be the right thing to do, just that it’s plausible it’d happen. Even if Iran got nuclear weapons, I’m sure the chances of Iran actually using them or giving them to terrorists would be pretty low, since it would be suicide for the country…however much of a “madman” Ahmadinejad is, he isn’t an all-powerful dictator, his actions would have to be agreed on by others like the “Supreme Leader of Iran” Ali Khamenei.
An attack against Iran would be suicidal. We bomb their nuclear facilities, then what? Of course, the Iranians will retalliate with their missiles. And of course, the Iranians won’t stop firing their missiles just because we are done bombing the targets we wanted to hit. 🙂
What targets will Iran hit? Many major oil installations in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwayt, Bahrein, Oman, Qatar and Dubai are within Iranian missile range. Iran can just demand that these countries stop selling oil to the West or have their oil installations destroyed.
Can we do anything to stop Iran firing their missiles? Israel was not very successful in stopping Hezbollah firing their missiles, so I think we’ll end up in situation with skyrocketing oil prices which will ultimately force us to having to negotiate a humiliating cease fire with Iran: We agree not to attack Iran anymore and Iran stops firing missiles at oil installations in return.
That would be the extreme; guys like Red Adair make a living getting oil wells back in production after disasters. Iran would run out of missiles eventually, and the oilfire specialists took only 9 months to get 117 wells back online after Gulf War Mk. I.
One of the first consequences of such an attack or threat (in the best power-politics fashion) is that the North Slope would be opened to oil exploration so fast the Sierra Club’s heads would spin.
Jesse? North Korea’s an NNPT signatory.