Also living in the Pacific Northdamp (not so wet anymore here), I can say for certain that our weather has changed. The last 5+ years we've gotten 1/2 or less of our average rainfall, and the last 2 years we've barely had a winter. Yesterday it was in the upper 70's, even low 80's here, and it's been in the upper 60's to lower 70's most of this winter, and a large portion of last winter. Those are our normal summer temperatures, and it's mid Feb?!

When I moved here near 20 years ago, we were in a 'normal' pattern which meant raining about 1/2 the days between November and March, and temps in the 40's including some freezing. It's easy to notice when the river that's usually full of fish in Sept/Oct is now a knee high creek until Feb.

Ah ... life in the Pacific NorthWET!

Again, assuming that all cops act this way. Untrue.

It's their daily grind that wears down the humanity. Lot of nutcases and truly dangerous people live in NYC, the progressive paradise. Cops have to deal with them everyday and don't assume you would be any different under the same circumstances.

You can only turn the other cheek so many times. If someone smacked you in the face, even lightly, then again, and again and again, eventually your pacifism would evaporate and you would strike out with everything in you.

Not really worth another post, but this Cathay Pacific 747 Cargo Plane on RW25L was every bit as good, or even a bit better:

Jews have the old testament.
Christians have the old testament and new testament.
Muslims have the old testament, new testament, and yet a newer testament.

All 3 share the old testament.
The 'violence promoting' scriptures are found in the old testament - which all 3 have in common.

Reza is right.
If people want peace, the religious of them simply ignore the violent edicts of their religions.
If they want to be violent, the religious of them legitimize it with excuses from their religions.

He's also right about the national hypocrisy. Al-Qaeda at the time of 9/11 was a pet organization of members of the Saudi royal family.
But instead of going after the Saudis (who also today finance ISIS), we go after 2 countries that are unrelated to the attack.

Look at today's irony. Assad in Syria (who we wanted deposed because he was friendlier to Russia than the U.S., and allowed Russian bases on Syrian soil [in the middle east]) is now fighting ISIS, while we ally with the Saudis who are supporting ISIS.

We also didn't mind supporting the Mujahedin (Jihadi fighters) in Afghanistan when they were fighting our enemy. We had no problem throwing Afghanistan into the dark ages when it suited us.

Ultimately, extremist Islam is a foil, meant to rouse western people's emotions. As national policy, we don't _actually_ do anything to stop it, we just use it as an excuse to do whatever else is of national interest.
Who would be the boogey man if extremist Islam was gone? We need a boogey man if we want to keep excusing and paying for a large military. People simply don't have the foresight and patience to maintain a strong military without someone scaring them into support. Particularly now, when we don't have the manufacturing capacity to quickly build a large military.

However, Reza is ignoring Turkey's and the Pacific islander's Muslim problems. Indonesia and the Philippines have extremist Muslim organizations doing attacks home (Philippines also has Christian terrorists). Turkey is a large source of Muslim fighters pouring into Syria.



The various related religions also have historical developmental differences.

Jews were for a long time in such minorities that they did not have the political capability of waging any campaign of violence. They were either too small, or too busy being occupied by European powers (Rome, etc).

Christians did have a long period of majority, starting around 400ad when Rome decided that a good way to control/pacify any dissent within the empire was to make the empire 1 religion and make Rome the head of that religion. They elected Christianity as the state religion, forced everyone in the Roman empire to convert, and you had a continent's worth of Christians.
This included north Africa and Middle East - and is when Jews (by now called Palestinians) were forced to convert from Judaism to Christianity (**and few hundred years later forced to convert from Christianity to Islam).

Although, Christians had the benefit of the Inquisition(s) to temper their enthusiasm for Christianity. A large part of the population was killed for consorting with the devil. Once it got so bad that everyone knew someone who had been convicted and killed - and everyone was sure that those killed were innocent, it cast a large doubt on Christianity as whole. People questioned if the devil even exists, or if it's all a sham. The distrust and resentment paved the way for the eventual birth of Deism and Empiricism. A time when the scientific method and physical observation started to take over.

Islam is still a young religion. They still have to experience their religion becoming all powerful, and the inquisitions that inevitably come from absolute power. The one good thing about Islamic extremism is that it makes the people living under those conditions more likely to suffer. Once the suffering becomes so pervasive that everyone is suffering, the people will start to dislike/distrust their religion, and the extremism will resolve itself from the inside out - like it did with Christianity.

The bigger problem would be if things are 'too tolerable', and the religion grows more extreme (no one is inclined to say 'no'). The biggest problem would be if the religious leaders 'solve' the balance issue, and manage to stabilize the oppression at a level that is as extreme as it can be while still being permanently sustainable. Then the religious leaders can live the life of power without the threat of deposition.

-scheherazade

*quality *kids *doublepromote As a native of the Pacific NorthWET and a hopeless romantic, I found this to be infinitely delightful! Thank you for the feels @rbar

"Not only does the action of Governments not deter men from crimes; on the contrary, it increases crime by always disturbing and lowering the moral standard of society." Leo Tolstoy

It's officially known as a report on the "Measurement of the Duration of a Trendless Subsample in a Global Climate Time Series." In lay-speak, it's a study of just how long the current pause in global warming has lasted. And the results are profound:

According to Canadian Ross McKitrick, a professor of environmental economics who wrote the paper for the Open Journal of Statistics, "I make the duration out to be 19 years at the surface and 16 to 26 years in the lower troposphere depending on the data set used."

In still plainer English, McKitrick has crunched the numbers from all the major weather organizations in the world and has found that there has been no overall warming at the Earth's surface since 1995 - that's 19 years in all.

During the past two decades, there have been hotter years and colder years, but on the whole the world's temperatures have not been rising. Despite a 13 per cent rise in carbon dioxide levels over the period, the average global temperature is the same today as it was almost 20 years ago.

In the lower atmosphere, there has been no warming for somewhere between 16 and 26 years, depending on which weather organization's records are used.

Not a single one of the world's major meteorological organizations - including the ones the United Nations relies on for its hysterical, the-skies-are-on-fire predictions of environmental apocalypse - shows atmospheric warming for at least the last 16 years. And some show no warming for the past quarter century.

This might be less significant if some of the major temperature records showed warming and some did not. But they all show no warming.

Even the records maintained by devoted eco-alarmists, such as the United Kingdom's Hadley Centre, show no appreciable warming since the mid-1990s.

Despite continued cymbal-crashing propaganda from environmentalists and politicians who insist humankind is approaching a critical climate-change tipping point, there is no real evidence this is true.

There are no more hurricanes than usual, no more typhoons or tornadoes, floods or droughts. What there is, is more media coverage more often.

Forty years ago when a tropical storm wiped out villages on a South Pacific Island there might have been pictures in the newspaper days or weeks later, then nothing more. Now there is live television coverage hours after the fact and for weeks afterwards.

That creates the impression storms are worse than they used to be, even though statistically they are not.

While the UN's official climate-scare mouthpiece, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has acknowledged the lack of warming over the past two decades, it has done so very quietly. What's more, it has not permitted the facts to get in the way of its continued insistence that the world is going to hell in a hand basket soon unless modern economies are crippled and more decision-making power is turned over to the UN and to national bureaucrats and environmental activists.

Later this month in New York, the UN will hold a climate summit including many of the world's leaders. So frantic are UN bureaucrats to keep the climate scare alive they have begun a worldwide search for what they themselves call a climate-change "Malala."

That's a reference to Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani schoolgirl who was shot in the head by the Taliban after demanding an education. Her wounding sparked a renewed, worldwide concern for women's rights.

The new climate spokeswoman must be a female under 30, come from a poor country and have been the victim of a natural disaster.

If the facts surrounding climate-disaster predictions weren't falling apart, the UN wouldn't such need a sympathetic new face of fear.

This video has been nominated as a duplicate of this video by Zawash. If this nomination is seconded with *isdupe, the video will be killed and its votes transferred to the original.

*dupeof=http://videosift.com/video/Del-Toro-casts-Portals-Glados-in-Pacific-Rim-Trailer

Cameras might be a good idea, but how many people will sit around watching the thousands of normal interactions between POs and civilians?

I agree that busting down doors for marijuana and shooting dogs is a terrible thing and should stop. Meth labs...might be a different story.

I read a book about a cop in the Rampart area of LA...they had runs involving shots fired every week. Under those circumstances you develop a different mindset.

In the book Hell in the Pacific the author talks about how they used to just bayonet the Japanese instead of shooting them..it saved bullets. I for one cannot imagine bayoneting a person, but under those circumstances, otherwise normal people did terrible things.

Anyway, you can't just tase a person because they refuse to provide identification. That is hyperbole.

Yep, this is a big issue in the current Trans Pacific Partnership trade talks between NZ and the US (among others). The NZ drug buying agency Pharmac gets really good bulk prices. The pharmaceutical industry, of course, hates this and the USA are pushing to have this abolished. Luckily that would be political suicide in NZ.

You'll be glad to hear that such attempts actually happened with other micronations, and multiple times.

My favourite was the tiny Pacific island of Minerva (my only grief: they didn't call it 'Aynrandia'), which libertarians with too much money built up by pouring a few boatful of sand on top of the underlying reefs.
But being libertarians, the had no taxes. Having no taxes, they had no security forces. And having no security forces, a patrol boat from Tonga arrived, reclaimed the place, and told them in no uncertain terms to fuck off. The end.

There were other attempts, none as comical, but all of them equally doomed.

First time I've ever seen THAT ... even here in the Pacific NorthWET!