He's fucked up his whole life.

Cheated contractors, investors, the IRS. Sexually assaulted women, then bragged about it. He runs a false charity that only works to benefit Trump himself. He openly espouses Putin's policies on topics of Russian interest, even when it conflicts with American interest. He condones and encourages violence. Threatens to use the power of the office to imprison his perceived enemies. Threatens to jail journalists and comedians who disagree with him. Can't even UNDERSTAND why nuclear weapons are not to be used except in cases of existential threat.

He IS a fuckup.

Republicans nominated him.

Republican politicians backed him (some less enthusiastically than others, but it's hard to tell what was political expediency and what was genuine angst).

If they're going to impeach him, there's plenty of material already. He could see jail before he sees the Oval Office.

Two problems.

1) Republicans would be embarrassed to admit they'd backed a candidate that spent more of his first four years in jail than in the office. It would blow up the party and they're too self-centred to do that.

2) Even if they DID impeach him, Mike Pence is only slightly better. Republicans will still have a 100% lock on the Supreme Court in 4 years, they can shut down more polling stations, kick everyone they don't like off the voting rolls for flimsy excuses (it happened in North Carolina this election in spite of a court order).

It would take an overwhelming majority of Americans voting against Republicans in four years to tip the scales. If they have another four years, they're only going to push things further. Watch California get reduced to fewer electoral votes than Arkansas.

The US is bordering on failed state/despotism. The Republicans in congress and the senate are the only ones who could stand in the way, but if they stand in the way, they give up their own power.

Do you really think they're going to do that? Really?

Fingerprinting is a nice analogy, Buttle. How can we be sure that all that pollution, CO2 levels, nitric oxide levels and cow farts are A) our fault, and B) actually causing changes in climate?

We cant be sure unless we predict, and then wait a few decades and keep measuring, can we? So we have to say, along with the man falling from the skyscraper, everything OK so far!

So the hysteria about nuclear weapons was a bit silly, beacause we would not all die in an all-out nuclear war. Because people high on hillsides on the far side of New Zealand with food and water and seeds and medical supplies for a couple of years would make it fine. They would not freeze, it now turns out.

Then maybe climate change will be OK too.

Well, it's not an exact comparison. You see, for us to say climate change is being oversold like nuclear winter, we would have to use the analogy that every year nuclear powers were setting off X number of nuclear weapons and slowly bringing about nuclear winter.

Because that is what we are doing with climate change; we are slowly actually bringing it about, where nuclear winter never happened because we never launched nukes.

I was reading Chomsky the other day on the train. Rogue States. Hadn't read that one in nearly a decade.

Anyway, something made me laugh. Remember all the ruckus about Trump's statements regarding the use of nuclear weapons?

Well, compare it to a 1995 USSTRATCOM document called "Essentials of Post–Cold War Deterrence". Chomsky had some fabulous quotes from it. Go ahead, google it, read the abstract. And then tell me again why Trump's statements are supposed to be crazy. It's not crazy. It's official fucking policy. Just like ignoring ICJ rulings or UN resolutions.

A rogue nation indeed...

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That is clearly not true. It may be one of the less toxic human made functioning, profitable herbicides, but that's not what you said by far.

Roundup is not a pesticide, it's an herbicide. Conflating it with pesticides is ridiculous and incredibly misleading. Roundup is used to control weeds and remove genetic 'contamination' of specific crops. EDIT: Many of those crops are genetically modified to act as pesticides without spraying chemicals, which is a good reason to want to limit cross contamination in either direction.

Other alternatives are no chemicals at all, or only ecologically safe (usually natural) chemicals. I don't use chemicals on my farm, I weed, I spray horticulture oil, I spread ashes, I grow twice what I can eat so some loss to insects won't matter, and I remove insects, slugs, and snails by hand. It takes more work, but the statement that the only alternative to Roundup is worse chemicals or agriculture collapse is completely and obviously false and indicates a total ignorance of the issue you speak about.

"Modern Agriculture" today means hydroponics, aeroponics, and aquaponics, none of which can benefit a whit from Roundup. You mean to say "Industrial Agriculture". The collapse of industrial agriculture might not be a bad thing, as it's incredibly destructive and produces a sub par product. More people farming on smaller farms puts more people to work, makes better product, and makes the people who work on the land feel responsible for it's upkeep, not consider it a resource to be exploited as efficiently as possible.

Mentioning Monsanto's involvement in the project is not the same as saying "neither Einstein or Openheimer or others were behind the Manhattan project, it was Monsanto all along that plotted to destroy Japanese cities with nuclear weapons". They clearly implied that Monsanto joined the project as a way to 'cozy up to' the political elite, and it worked.

Where did you hear this ridiculous hypothesis about their motive? Do you see and hear things that other people don't see and hear? It's clear that the motive in all cases was profit, either directly, or future profits secured by 'making friends' in government by cooperating with them or by forcing farmers into untenable contracts and positions where, in some cases, farmers that don't use Monsanto crops were sued because Monsanto said the pollen that pollinated the crops came from a neighbors Monsanto crops, so the seed belongs to Monsanto. Monsanto does not set out to cause damage and harm, they simply don't care if it happens as a side effect of their profit making methods, which they will protect with any means possible.

Just wow, a more deliberately misleading description of the video would be hard to create.

This propaganda ignores much more than that. Roundup is one of the absolutely least toxic to human chemicals that agriculture can use. The alternatives are chemicals a lot more harmful than roundup or abandoning the use of pesticides. Worse chemicals or the collapse of modern agriculture don't look appealing as alternatives so the ignorant roundup fear mongers protest too much in my opinion.

And then there's things like claiming neither Einstein or Openheimer or others were behind the Manhattan project, it was Monsanto all along that plotted to destroy Japanese cities with nuclear weapons. You know, on account of them being evil and wanting to see millions of people dead because it gives their corporate heads joy. Just like it wanted to invent pesticides as a means of convincing the public to poison each other for giggles, and getting the state department to experiment on people. None of this had any other motive than the thrill of inflicting cruelty on people, and none of it would have happened but for Monsanto's hard drive to push for these things to be done...

Just wow, a more deliberately misleading video would be hard to create.

you have people living in artificial environments that use tons of power because they want to, because they like it, not because they REQUIRE it. native americans lived in southwest USA for a thousand years just fine without the need of AC or diverting rivers.

go read up on the absurd agricultural subsidies tied to the colorado river- that isnt a problem created because farmers need to produce food to feed the world, its a problem created because politicians want money making businesses to tax, and because people are willing to spend money to eat what they like instead of what there is, a lot of money is made.

same with trawling- nothing to do with feeding all those people, everything to do with money. trawling has been going on for over a hundred years, well before the world population was even a 3rd of what it is currently- fishermen trawl because they want to be efficient because that makes them more money, not because they are concerned about how they are going to feed undernourished people.

the problem isnt getting people to eat insects. the problem is getting the developed world to stop eating so much, especially so much meat. there is an obesity epidemic around the world, over 3000 tons of food are discarded every day, and you want to tell me the problem is not enough food?

and lets not be disingenuous about nuclear waste, nuclear technology was invented as a weapon, not an energy source. you're telling me that if tomorrow a terrible plague wiped out 90% of the earths population, that nuclear armed states would give up their nuclear weapons? bs.

the video is on point. the environmental crisis is caused by greed, not because there are too many people on the planet. and if you feel so strongly that there are too many people on the planet, I assume you are relieved when your family members die? Unless you are willing to volunteer yourself and your family to die for the greater good, overpopulation is a facile bogey man to mask what you really want to say- lets get rid of all those "other" people so *I* dont have to change my own lifestyle.

I seriously doubt most nuclear physicists in Iran thinks that they're in a fight with anything. They're probably just doing research.

Despite what western media might want to portray, Iran has not been developing nuclear weapons.

Cool, I wasn't necessarily disagreeing with @kir_mokum, he just didn't actually make any points.

I agree that nuclear weapons are not really an issue when it comes to building power plants. Personally, I think it's hypocritical in the extreme for the people with the nuclear weapons to tell others they can't have them. I'd much rather no-one had them.

"Germany has literally tons of the stuff just laying around"
Depends on what you mean by "lying around". No, it's not out in the open, but it is just "lying around" in the sense that they have shitloads of it (in one site alone they have nearly 126000 barrels) and they're not doing anything with it. Waste disposal *is* a serious issue with current nuclear technology.

As for deaths, I suppose what gets people about nuclear disasters is that other disasters tend to be more short term. From a media POV: if some people die in a coal mine, that's sad, but they were miners and it's over pretty quick, but dying kids from Chernobyl make great TV!

I tend to agree that it's probably safer in the long run.

Sorry to jump the thread here; not sure if dubious is the word either, but pretty amateur and more fear mongering with no supporting data.

First, the suggestion that no more reactors should be built because people use them to aid in production of nuclear weapons. Well kids, that ship has already sailed: In June 2014, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute reported that nine nations (United States, Russia, United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea) possessed approx. 16,300 nuclear weapons in total. So someone builds one or 10 more? Yeah, that will matter. Someone needs to read up on the concept of deterrence.

When talking about waste: "Germany has literally tons of the stuff just laying around" - well, that's just horseshit.

Regarding accidents and number of deaths due to nuclear reactors: "devastating disasters every 30 years" - devastating? Come on, people died, but compared to other sources of energy, according to the WHO, it is by far the safest. Consider:

Energy Source Mortality Rates; Deaths/yr/TWh

Coal - world average, 161
Coal - China, 278
Coal - USA, 15
Oil - 36
Natural Gas - 4
Biofuel/Biomass - 12
Peat - 12
Solar/rooftop - 0.44-0.83
Wind - 0.15
Hydro - world, 0.10
Hydro - world*, 1.4
Nuclear - 0.04

* Includes the 170,000 deaths from the failure of the Banquao Reservoir Dam in China in 1975

So, if not dubious, certainly cheap and pedantic.

German media reports that the USAF's budget plan for Q3/15 includes funds for the integration of the B61-12 nuclear bomb into German Tornado fighter-bombers.

How Germany can lobby for an abolition of nuclear weapons while our government allows the US to modernise its nuclear arsenal on German soil is beyond me, to be quite honest. Especially since an overwhelming majority of our parliament voted in favour of a resolution to pressure the US to remove its nukes from Germany territory five years ago.

Uh... WTF? Have you seriously never heard of the Dresden and Hamburg firebombings? In the Hamburg case the U.S. actually set up a fake German village as a test run just to see how many houses they could burn down. The fact that entire mock village was destroyed was seen as a massive success, not a reason to go back and figure out a more humane way to do it.

As far as Japan goes, even today a large part of Japan's economy depends upon small to mid-sized businesses that often double as people's homes. The government didn't "place" them there, these were people's day-jobs. Just like in the U.S., factories that once produced consumer goods were forced to make military materials to support the war effort.

The U.S. used firebombs for two reasons: first, firebombing meant precision bombing wasn't needed so the planes could fly at a high altitude out of shot of anti-aircraft fire and second, they knew damn well they'd be roasting Japanese people alive. Nobody cared. The war had gone on for so long that the U.S. was willing to do anything to end it quickly, particularly when they saw Russian swooping in to consolidate Eastern Europe. After Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, the bitter island fighting in the Pacific, the kamikaze attacks, and the stories of escaped or freed POWs, it's pretty safe to say the American military wasn't looking at the Japanese people as humans anymore, just enemies to be defeated by any means necessary--including nuclear weapons.

Absolutely. It's a mistake to make assumptions about what AI will be like. The doomsayers too often attribute human qualities to it. It's like speculating about alien intelligence. It will come in bits an pieces as we understand it more. My own guess is that, not weighed down by long obsolete genetic imperatives and human psychological pathologies, it will most likely be (in its higher form) an extraordinarily capable problem solver and prognosticator. It will lack the human flaws that typically motivate the killer AIs of science fiction. Of course, it will probably have it's own unique flaws. I do think it's wise to be wary of software that has developed beyond our capability to understand it (much as we don't understand the workings of our own consciousness).

Probably my primary concern about robotic weapons comes from a DARPA proposal I read about some time in the past. What they wanted was an autonomous, bird sized UAV. It would contain surveillance equipment and sensors, and be able to share the data it collects through a mesh network established with it's fellows and the commanders as well as receive orders. It would be intelligent enough to find a suitable strategic vantage point and hide itself. From there it would simply observe. With a large enough swarm of these, perhaps many thousands, you could send them into a city at night. They would each also potentially carry a small warhead allowing them to launch themselves at and destroy threats. Once these robots were entrenched, which might only take an hour or two, whoever controls them would effectively rule the city. Even if they were cut off from their command structure, they might still retain enough intelligence to recognize a particular individual, someone in a forbidden area, someone holding a weapon, or someone not brodcasting the right IFF signal, or any number of things. There might be no defense against such a thing (though there probably will be).

To me, that concept is terrifying. It's not huge hulking terminator-like war machines that could be the greatest threat, just flying, self-guiding, intelligent hand grenades. All someone would need is the capability to manufacture them. No raising an army, no speeches or threats, just a factory and a design. It's also not too far fetched to believe this capability might be available in just a matter of a few decades. They'll be easier to build than nuclear weapons, and oh so convenient and easy to deploy.

Um.... anyways, I dunno where I was going with that. Just lots of random pontificating, but because it's technology, it's silly to try to stop it with legislation. It will happen, as ChaosEngine rightly points out, the best course of action is to be on top of it and to understand it.