^Actually many oil geologists believe we've now used more than half the ultimately recoverable conventional oil reserves. Peak oil. http://www.videosift.com/video/Peak-Oil-Gas-Prices-Supply-Depletion-Energy-Crisis

HAHAHAHA! Holes in the ozone, don't make me laugh. Ooops...too late.
The hole in the ozone has always existed. Ozone is depleted by the sun's rays and when the north or south pole is exposed to constant sun light, a hole is formed.

Don't subsidize -- just tax oil so much that any viable alternative will pay for itself at the market price of energy, and consumption will be decreased. It's inevitable that conventional mining will become as expensive as mining trash, as conventional resources are depleted.

Saddam was not a terrorist, to say he is a terrorist is a logically fallacy, that would make Bush a terrorist as well for invading two sovergien nations. Also does that make the US a terrorist nation to be the only country in the world to use nuclear weapons offensively? Imagine that! Any day those guys could nuke someone! The horror! We must invade now!

The case for WMDs in Iraq was built because of the Bush Administration desire to go to war in Iraq riding off the 9/11 attacks, since it was not possible to rationally argue for it in anyway the WMD case was built relying mostly on the information of a single informant code named 'Curveball':

Curveball was the pseudonym given by the Central Intelligence Agency to Rafid Ahmed Alwan an Iraqi citizen who defected from Iraq in 1999, claiming that he had worked as a chemical engineer at a plant that manufactured mobile biological weapon laboratories as part of an Iraqi weapons of mass destruction program. Alwan's allegations were subsequently shown to be false by the Iraq Survey Group's final report published in 2004. Despite warnings from the German Federal Intelligence Service regarding the authenticity of the claims, the US Government utilized them to build a rationale for military action in the lead up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, including in the 2003 State of the Union address, where President Bush said "we know that Iraq, in the late 1990s, had several mobile biological weapons labs", and Colin Powell's presentation to the UN Security Council, which contained a computer generated image of a mobile biological weapons laboratory. On November 4, 2007, 60 Minutes revealed Curveball's real identity. Former CIA official Tyler Drumheller summed up Curveball as "a guy trying to get his green card essentially, in Germany, and playing the system for what it was worth.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curveball_(informant)

This all lead up to Colin Powell's presentation at the UN, utterly destroying any shred of credibility of both Powell and the CIA. The case for war was cherry picked. After the war various study groups were formed to solidify the case for WMDs, the admission that no WMDs were found or any found were from depleted 1990 Gulf War stocks was much to damaging for the Administration which argued that Iraq had nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, so various counter study groups were formed since there was political motivation to build a legitimated case for war in Iraq:

On January 23, 2004, the head of the ISG, David Kay, resigned his position, stating that he believed WMD stockpiles would not be found in Iraq. "I don't think they existed," commented Kay. "What everyone was talking about is stockpiles produced after the end of the last Gulf War and I don't think there was a large-scale production program in the nineties."

In a briefing to the Senate Armed Services Committee, Kay criticized the pre-war WMD intelligence and the agencies that produced it, saying "It turns out that we were all wrong, probably in my judgment, and that is most disturbing."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_Survey_Group

This of course all makes sense, the administration couldn't come from the invasion say it was catastrophically mistaken in gathering intelligence pre-invasion, so various counter arguments were created everything ranging from Iraq had to be invaded because it had skilled labor in the WMD industry, to that knowledge could seep into Syria and Iran (which it of course did due to the Iraqi dispora).

However all this was damage control, and the administration skillfully changed the narrative now to freedom and democracy in Iraq as well as "We're fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them over here".

The worsening of the war also diverted public attention, but it is telling that most of the media avoided exploring this topic like it was the black plague, the usual patriotic attacks along the line of "Our troops are dying and questioning their sacrifice even if no WMDs are found, is unpatriotic." Never mind that they wouldn't need to die considering international pressure during UN discussions around January 2003 would lead to eventual opening up of Iraq to serious inspections, but war was on the agenda months before, when US was preparing to go to war with Afghanistan, it was already preparing for war in Iraq.

I can attest to this personally since I was in Kuwait at the time, the build up of man power and arms was well underway even before December/January. The administration decided to act unilaterally, the UN and coalition thing were just smoke and mirrors to create some sort of legitimacy to what was basically an unprovoked invasion.

But the facts are clear The Iraq Survey group under Charles Duelfer said Iraq's nuclear capability had decayed and not grown since the 1991 war. This was reported in October 2004, "Report concludes no WMD in Iraq", of course as I said the narrative was being actively changed by then the Administration said that the report showed "intent" so it was good we attacked then when we did. Which is about as logically as saying the US has intent to nuke someone else because it happens to possess nuclear weapons and has done it before thus we should invade and disarm it.

No problem. It's one of my many interests. Thank goodness I work at a job that I can surf the internet for personal research when it isn't busy.

One of the great benefits of sites like Videosift is that we get to combine our efforts together and bring all kinds of interesting things to each other's attention. With a little individual time and effort for sharing, we all benefit as a group and as individuals.


>> ^calvados:
^Curio: Very cool, thank you for all that!

I wouldn't breathe that stuff. That depleted uranium will make you, y'know, cough.

Look, I've keep my mouth shut the whole time, but I think I will open it now.

^ those segments are not balanced. If you want to call this one unbalanced, fine, but if you say those are fare and balanced you must be joking, my babies.

If there was a conspiracy why bother with the planes? Think about how risky that is. What a huge chance of failure it has. Why not just blow up the buildings from the inside and say the terrorists did it, instead of fly planes into the buildings, then blowing them up from the inside "secretly" and then saying the terrorists did it. What if one of the planes missed? Being off a millimeter with a plane that size would send you an immediate mile off course. Think about all the people that would have to be involved. Every one of them would have to be psychopaths to let something like that happen. I’ll admit that Washington is a greedy bunch, but there isn't enough money in the world to keep all those people quiet.

Steve Jones may be a physicist but that doesn't mean he knows crap about structural design. But you know who does: I do. His postulations are beautiful garbage and his blathering exemplify his ignorance on buildings. I guess he was relived of duty after he said this and that, but, really, in the real world, you only get fired if you're an asshole. You can do a horrible job, say things that disagree with everything your institution stands for, but you'll only get the boot if you're a jerk. Ask anyone who's held a real job. He didn't get fired because of what he said about 911, he got put on relief because they already wanted to get ride of him and his bantering was the excuse.

Where were the engines? Inside the building. Why weren’t the wings there? Because a plane's wings are full of jet fuel and a 600 mile per hour impact would makes them EXPLODE. Why did the windows blow out: look up I.M Pei and get a lesson on air pressure. Passports planted: I'll buy it. What better way to direct attention. No video of the pentagon crash has come to light: that's fishy too, but, on the other hand, what would be the point? If you're going to crash a plane into the towers to incite public upheaval, why bother sending one to the pentagon, or why bother sending a missile instead of a real plane. I mean think of it: send planes, but then stop one of them, kill everyone on it, destroy the plane, then send a missile in its place? They hid the video because it was a knee jerk reaction and they didn't know what to do. They were scared. And they won’t release it now because it would prove nothing; let those people die in peace. Why would make it all so convoluted? Why leave so many loose threads? If they were going to fake something, it wouldn't be this easy to accumulate even this faux evidence.

The only public official who has said 9/11 was purposeful was the former president of Italy who has a serious history of mental illness and has his own conspiracy theory about being schizophrenic.

I think they did want to go back to the middle east. And 9/11 was the perfect excuse. Can't the manipulation of our wounded hearts, after a great national tragedy, be conspiracy enough? Of course it's about the oil, it about the whole region. It's about Israel and our former beef with all those "axis of evil" nations. It’s about Bush’s xenophobia. I think we would have ended up back there with or without 9/11, but, please, let those people who died on that die day with the dignity they deserve. It was a tragic day.

A few months after 9/11, I looked at an al Qaeda website and they claimed that 9/11 was revenge for every child who's stomach was born outside of it's body due to the use of depleted uranium in the gulf war. I don't think slaughtering thousands of innocents was just by no means, but what I'm saying is that they had their reasons and when you're living in the sand and you've got nothing else, a suicide mission seems pretty damn good. A 9/11 conspiracy theory even lessens what those mindless thugs died for.

Farhad:

Does it fire the same depleted uranium rounds?

you encounter any of this stuff while you were in ?

http://blog.videosift.com/video/Hazards-of-Depleted-Uranium-Contamination-Training-DU-Video

So then you open the door to deconstruct any other freedoms because the document is "just old." First you avoided the idea of guaranteed freedoms and talked about feelings of safety without guns, or in essence needing overwatch in specific areas of life. Now you say that because the constitution is old, it's contents no longer have merit. This is just plain wrong. The US Supreme Court has defined the 2nd amendment as protecting "from infringement by the federal and state governments the right of the individual to keep and to bear a weapon which is part of the ordinary military equipment or which use could contribute to the common defense."

That is not very ambiguous. Ordinary military equipment does not include weapons of mass destruction by the way. Yes, grenade launchers are legal in the US. Yes, an AR-15 which is quite close to the weapons issued to US troops is legal. Civilian versions are no different than any other semi-automatic rifle. One round for each pull of the trigger. What does that matter? Your argument basically follows that since the constitution is old, and guns kill, it's perfectly acceptable to forcibly disarm the population of an entire country without even having actual data to backup claims that it will reduce crime. I just can't agree with that. Look for reports on the results of gun bans and see if you can find a conclusive scientific study that proves a notable increase or decrease in public saftey. What you end up with is spikes in burglaries, assaults, and home invasions. This can't positively be linked to gun bans either since crime was usually on the rise before the bans and no one can seem to agree on the how of it. Crime in the UK doubled in the years following the 1997 ban and is now only in recent years beginning to decrease. Crime continued to rise independent of the gun ban. Your own country saw a drastic rise in home invasions and assaults following the final removal of all guns. Was it related? It's very difficult to tell with many outside factors involved.

Having a decrease in shooting deaths, but an increase in stabbing deaths solves nothing. You take away a gun? No problem, get a knife. Take away knives? No problem... plenty of big rocks and sticks laying around. The idea that passing legislation to ban a weapon will make an area safer is not taking human nature into account. Someone determined to commit a crime will do so with or without the help of a gun. If there was notable scientific data to prove that gun bans created a safer society with actually less violent crime, then that might at least make it appear more justified for a country like Australia that didn't have a guaranteed right to bear arms in the first place. That data just doesn't exist. In fact, in 1996, John Lott from the University of Chicago Law School published 15 years of FBI analysis on over 3,000 countries to find a correlation, if any, between violent crime and the prevalence of concealed weapons on law-abiding citizens. The results showed a major decrease in countries where citizens were more likely to be armed.

The point I've been trying to make over and over again is that none of that even matters anyway. Removing something with good intentions doesn't make it the right decision. This goes beyond just rights to firearms. When you make it acceptable for the government to alter your fundamental rights, for whatever reason, that is like opening Pandora's box. What prevents the same logic that bans a previously guaranteed right from applying to anything else that is deemed a threat? Dramatizing everything by calling people gun nuts, or thinking in terms of extremes, like having shootouts over a fender bender with depleted uranium rounds, is just trivializing an important issue.

In regards to your example of the 3rd amendment, it still has merit today. There are still scenerios where National Guard troops could be deployed within the borders of the United States (although this is increasingly rare). Disaster relief comes to mind as a recent example. This amendment prevents the government from tossing you to the curb to use your home or forcing you to shelter a soldier. Is it likely to be used anytime soon? Probably not, but every citizen is still constitutionally guaranteed the freedom to have a say in soldiers using their property. You seem to view this issue as something almost inconsequential. As if it's just common sense that all guns should be banned regardless of prior laws and in total disregard to individual freedoms because it would secure you peace of mind. I personally consider this to be ignorant of the future consequences involved with allowing the government that kind of control. There is no possible way to enact a complete ban of all personally owned firearms in this country without violating the law.

'What a magnificent creature...
..let's do the right thing and stick it in a cage.'

oh great, now we can feel good about ourselves!

not to mention that this is already a depleted fishery. I pray that this thing isn't a reproductive female. just think about how many larvae it could release with each clutch of eggs!
If the Boston aquarium takes it, they are nothing more than a circus.

Learn About Depleted Uranium From
The US Army's Expert on Depleted Uranium (DU)
Doug Rokke, a Vietnam and Gulf War I Veteran and the Army's expert on depleted uranium

http://www.mindfully.org/Nucs/2003/Rokke-Depleted-Uranium-DU21apr03.htm

ANTHRAX VACCINE

"When the anthrax vaccine got into the theater*, we had a direct order not to record dose, batch, who got what, what the adverse effects and everything was. This stuff wasn't temperature-regulated. And people were getting sick right away. I administered thousands of anthrax vaccines, and got three myself." - Major Dr. Doug Rokke, Army medical officer - retired

"Dude... really?"

Yes... really!. If you want to stop redlining and other prejudicial insurance practices, a customer service rep is the person least likely to help you. Customer service reps are basically hired punching bags, whose main function is depleting your outrage and insulating upper management from your complaints.

MGR: "Also, it's funny how fast the topic changed from a guy playing with kids to the effects of war. Gotta love it."

Uh, you changed the topic on the very first comment of this video with your sarcasm. Ever since then, whenever someone calls you on the current topic du jour, you change the topic again. Now we are on to the oil thing again. And how many times have you brought that up in other war threads? You need to understand that most people do not care that "[You] do not agree with the war any more than anyone else". Although some of your comments make that debatable, I think we can concede you are sincere. In this thread no one impeached you for that. But it has nothing to do with cancer rates, deplorable living conditions, depleted uranium or whether Iraqis hate the United States.

Murderous dictator aside, they were a fairly wealthy nation (with huge oil reserves). Even those that did have a rough time of it had much better services than now. You can't compare how they lived to the standard of living you were used to in the US. There were a number of statitcs quoted to you, articles to read. If you aren't wrong then say they aren't accurate and find your own statistics to back up your position.
-sigh-

Twiddles is right, its not just the bunker busters (which are also built using depleted uranium- makes for a bigger bang apparently), but all sorts of other smaller arms use DU as well. Frankly, you should be educating yourself on this MGR, if only out of concern for your own safety, chances are you were exposed to some of it during your service... and who the fuck knows what else, if history and experience have taught us anything is that in the quest to kill and maim efficiently the US army has been very adept at exposing both the enemy and its own soldiers to a plethora of nasty things... I mean, crap, how many older veterans do I know that are just now exhibiting symptoms of agent orange exposure? Or those of that in between generation that have Gulf War syndrome due to exposure to an as yet undisclosed substance? Too freaking many is the answer... too freakin' many.

And Twiddles is also right in that the assumption that Iraq was shit before we rolled in is completely ridiculous... things may have been relatively crappy in 2003 (see stats below), but you have to realize that our campaign against the stability of that country has been ongoing since the first Gulf War, and it has had a direct effect on the population, and undoubtedly accounts for much of the resentment of the Iraqi population towards their American 'liberators'. If it helps you to understand this, I'll shoot some statistics your way, these are all, by the way, directly from Phebe Marr's The Modern History of Iraq, in which she details the impact of US sanctions on Iraq:

"Oil production dropped 85% between 1990 and 1991 and began to increase again only after sanctions relief in 1997... Iraq's per capita income, which had stood at just over $2,000 in 1989 before the Gulf War, had fallen to $609 by 1992... Before the war, good imports were estimated to be about 70% of Iraq's consumption. These were now drastically reduced. Famine was avoided by an effective rationing system, but calorie intake fell from an average of 3,000 calories a day to about 2,250, most of these provided through a ration 'basket' provided by the government.... By 1995 the UN secretary general noted that living conditions had become precarious for an estimated 4 million people. The Food and Agriculture Organization claimed that child mortality had risen fivefold.... The damage to the education system was also severe... one report claimed that of the 250 primary schools in the center and south of the country, over 80% were in poor or critical condition. Credible figures show that the literacy rate, which reached 67% in 1980, fell to about 57% in 2001..." And I could go on, there is lots more where that came from, and I recommend this book to anyone with an interest in Iraq.

But my point is We did that. One can argue that it was punishment on an evil dictator for daring to invade poor helpless Kuwait, and our continued sanctions on that country were meant to cripple him militarily as well as economically, in the hope that his people would rise up and overthrow him. However, that obviously did not happen, for a number of reasons, the primary one being that he was insanely good at keeping the population repressed and too afraid to step out of line. In the end, we may have removed him from being a regional power but we encouraged him to turn on his own people and increase his stranglehold upon them.

I was against the sanctions back in the 90s and I still think that they were one of the worst crimes against humanity that our nation has ever managed to get away with. I think it is of ultimate importance that our generation, (MGR- I'm not that much older than you), recognize now what we did, that we, as a country, completely fucked up another country (and arguably an entire region), so that when we are in charge, we do not repeat these same mistakes again and again.