@ghark

Paragraph 1:

1. The difference between collateral damage and terrorism is easy to assess. Intentions, methods, and actions of the bombers of 9/11 and the allied forces are different. Does that make civilian casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan less tragic? No. Do we have to understand the ripple effect of those lost innocent lives? Yes. If an allied soldier killed my family I probably would not care why they did it - accident or not - and I would probably want to seek revenge. Thus the viscious cycle that armed conflict perpetuates.


However, to call allied soldiers terrorist is completely out of line.

2. I'm not defining terrorist as a muslim with a beard.

As George Carlin said, "You have to be realistic about terrorism. Certain groups of people, certain groups, Muslim fundamentalists, Christian fundamentalists, Jewish fundamentalists, and just plain guys from Montana, are going to continue to make life in this country very interesting for a long, long time."

What George is pointing out, and I believe Sam to agree with, is that people with bad ideas are bad no matter where they are from.


Or from wikipedia: "Terrorism is the systematic use of terror, especially as a means of coercion."

Paragraph 2 - Harris Fear Mongering, Generalizing:

1. How is Harris fear mongering? He is stating simple facts about the reality of a nuclear attack on US soil. He did not inflate those numbers or misrepresent them.

2.You can say things like "blatant generalizations" but you are not giving any real concrete examples.

Paragraph 3 - Hedges:

1. Aside from some debates I have seen Hedges in I have very little knowledge of his work. I can't comment on it because I have not read it.

Paragraph 4 - Self Gratification?


1. I fail to see how Harris mention of a possible nuclear attack on the United States, or anywhere, is an example of self gratification. I do not think this statistic brings Sam any pleasure at all.

Nuclear Attack a Ticking Time Bomb

Now for the Rip.


You admit you didn't listen to the video in its entirety which means you didn't give Sam a chance to fully develop his ideas. I don't know exactly what you expect from him or any other speaker, but they can only get so many words out of their mouth at one time and they cannot cover every objection. From what I have read and heard from Sam in the past I know him to be a fairly reasonable person - so I give him some leeway.

It reminds me of a fellow student in one of my literature classes in college. He opened his mouth and said," Well, I did not have a chance to read the story, but from what I'm hearing in the discussion I think..."


The Professor stopped him right there. He had no right to spend my time giving me his opinion of something he did not take the time to understand - and frankly neither do you.

@dag @Fletch @LarsaruS

I think you're all forgetting that Hitler was a master of propaganda, and those statements affirming Christianity were just that. Hitler used a facade of piousness to cement his power with a predominantly Christian populace. Feel free to disagree, but then you have to deal with statements which he made to party loyalists, like these:

"National Socialism and religion cannot exist together....
"The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity. Bolshevism is Christianity's illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jew. The deliberate lie in the matter of religion was introduced into the world by Christianity....
"Let it not be said that Christianity brought man the life of the soul, for that evolution was in the natural order of things." (p 6 & 7)

Night of July 11-12th 1941

"Christianity is a rebellion against natural law, a protest against nature. Taken to its logical extreme, Christianity would mean the systematic cultivation of the human failure." (p 43)

October 10th 1941

"The reason why the ancient world was so pure, light and serene was that it knew nothing of the two great scourges: the pox and Christianity."

19th October, 1941, night

Doesn't seem like such a warrior for christ now, does he? The cult of personality that fletch is talking about just makes my point. When man tries to get rid of God, he just replaces God with himself. Human beings have the natural desire to worship, whether it is something like money, or power, or celebrity, or themselves, everyone who doesn't know the true God has at least one idol in their life they pay homage too.

To say there is no connection between atheism and communism is absurd. Atheism was at the roots of it, and that according to the communists themselves:

"Atheism is the natural and inseparable part of Communism"

"Our program necessarily includes the propaganda of atheism"

Lenin

“With disdain I will throw my gauntlet full in the fact of the world and see the collapse of this pygmy giant. Then will I wander god-like and victorious through the ruins of the world. And giving my words an active force, I will feel equal to the Creator.”

Karl Marx

“The first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion”

Karl Marx

So you see there is a connection between atheism and the atheistic regimes that committed uncounted atrocities. Fletch, you're even denial about the definition of atheism, which is the denial of any deity according to the dictionary. A famous quote says that "without God everything is permissable". And that is the logical connection, that a man unrestrained by any thought of ultimate accountability can justify any kind of moral action to himself. Consider this quote from Joel Marks, the professor of philosophy at the University of New Haven

“This philosopher has been laboring under an unexamined assumption, namely that there is such a thing as right and wrong. I now believe there isn’t…The long and short of it is that I became convinced that atheism implies amorality; and since I am an atheist, I must therefore embrace amorality…I experienced my shocking epiphany that religious fundamentalists are correct; without God there is no morality. But they are incorrect, I still believe, about there being a God. Hence, I believe, there is no morality.

Even though words like “sinful” and “evil” come naturally to the tongue as say a description of child molesting. They do not describe any actual properties of anything. There are no literal sins in the world because there is no literal God…nothing is literally right or wrong because there is no Morality"

Please note, I am not saying atheists cannot be moral; I am simply saying that an amoral viewpoint can be a causal factor in committing atrocities, just as much as any zealout. Psychopaths suppress what they know is right and wrong, and dictators ordain it.

It goes back to my original point. It is human nature that is the problem, the corruption of which I attribute to sin. A moral person will be moral in every circumstance, whereas an immoral person will be immoral in every circumstance. You cannot chop it up to specific beliefs of methodologies..they only diagnose the symptom and not the cause.

>> ^Kreegath:

Disregarding that the takedowns of those videos might be an overreaction, the person making this video comes off as almost absurdly overly sensitive about having his stuff taken down.


You might want to look up the backstory first. This person has been harassed in a large variety of ways because of his anti-religion (especially anti-islam) stance on YT, the most recent wave of attacks coming from Dawahfilms mentioned. Also, the takedown of his videos "might be an overreaction"? They're not even an overreaction, they are a systematic (and long-lasting) attempt at censorship of criticism of religion. That a company based in the so-called "free world" bends itself over backwards for religious extremists is something worth being "sensitive" about.

>> ^criticalthud:

>> ^bcglorf:
>> ^criticalthud:
just out of curiosity, in the midst of global warming doubters promoting the theory that the earth is warming through solar/cosmic/natural means... has there been much consideration into the idea that the earth is currently in a cooling phase -- enormously offset by what we're doing to it?
second,
one large concern i have with global warming is "system adaption" - that being that it generally takes the ecosystem a bit of time to adjust to whatever is happening to it (ie: glaciers don't melt immediately). Meaning that the damage we caused 10 years ago is being felt now. Meaning also that even if we were to cease mucking about right now, we could expect continued and possibly even escalating ecosystem problems in the years to come.
so, is it time to panic? dunno. could be.

Which is why it's so important to understand things better. Rapidly cutting CO2 emissions before we have the replacement technology in place would be costly, not just financially but world history shows big financial impacts generally spill over into violent impacts. Battery technology is getting very close to making electric cars that are superior in every way to their gas guzzling brethren. I truly do believe that the enormous CO2 contribution made by burning gasoline is rapidly on it's way out for purely economic rather than environmental reasons. Another reason I don't feel the need for panic.
As I stated above, I am NOT being a skeptic in declaring that H2O dominates the greenhouse effect. It is the uncontested scientific fact.
I am NOT being a skeptic in declaring that H2O's role in climate models and forcing/feedbacks is very poorly understood. It is an uncontested scientific fact, some models even disagree on whether to assign it as a positive or negative feedback.
Think about those two for a good long while before thinking everything Al Gore said should trump peer reviewed science.

you seem to mistake me as someone who is arguing with you. i'm really only interested in insights.
I'm certainly not a climatologist. I work with spines. But in answer to your proposition that it would be chaotic if we cut back, I think the strength of the human species is in their ability to adapt, and as far as i'm concerned, the ballooning world population combined with a worldwide contracture in resources makes this inevitable (not to mention the growing climate change issue) - but it's up to us on how painful we want it to be.
Our entire economic system and our culture of consumerism needs to be revised. We are mindless automatons, with little awareness to our impact on the earth as a species. Our daily lives are almost entirely self-centered.
Secondly, as to "the" question of human contribution, I would offer the microcosm of the forest fire, in which carbon is suddenly released into the atmosphere. The overall effect is, clearly, very warming, almost suffocating. On a grander scale, the species is continually burning and releasing carbon into the atmoshphere all over the planet. How that would fail to warm the planet escapes me. but, like i said, it's not my field. peace out.


Sorry if my tone comes off as combative, it's not really my intent so please don't take my vehemence on issues personally. Maybe I'm just getting older but I'm of the mindset that the fastest way to know where I'm right and wrong is to be forward and assertive with how I understand things and allow the opportunity to be corrected where I'm wrong.

My thoughts on the human contribution are tempered by a few things. From the very top, that CO2's contribution is small compared to H2O(I count this an uncontested fact). Annual CO2 emissions are small(5%) compared to natural CO2 emissions(I again count this an uncontested fact). The experts do insist that the human CO2 emissions are building up and still driving the natural CO2 levels significantly higher each year. We don't understand the natural CO2 emission and absorption processes very well, so poorly in fact our margins of error on them are larger than the human contribution. There is evidence that CO2 levels are rising in the last 100 years, and there is a correlation there to human emissions. What we don't have strong evidence for yet is what impact that has on climate. We DO know it is warming effect, but the magnitude of it is still poorly understood. As I've outlined above the understanding of temperature trends over the last 2k years is still a work in progress with large margins of error(even systematic ones that are being worked out). The computer models we have by definition are no more reliable than that data, which places us without a strong correlation or confidence in what magnitude of change the CO2 will have when all other variables are considered.

As a side point, if you look at the IPCC or listen to certain climatologists, you may hear it sounding like they disagree and believe my last statement is disproven. What they have studied is the impact CO2 increases should have overall with the assumption of all other variables being equal. It's a useful figure to have, and the confidence in it is better than my last statement described. That is because I was talking about something different, I stated that CO2's impact, with all other variables being considered NOT equal, is still poorly known and has very low confidence levels. In the real world the impact of one climate variable impacts the role of all the others, and often significantly. The IPCC and a select few climatologists talk about CO2 projections that ignore that interaction as a base assumption and somewhere along the line between them and the public or them and Al Gore, that base assumption gets dropped off. That base assumption is central and vital, and it's why as our climate models improve we will see predictions for CO2 that fall outside the error margins of the IPCC models with that assumption. That doesn't invalidate the IPCC's work, it is an advancement of it and improvement upon it. Remembering the base assumptions is vital for the public to maintain faith in the integrity and reliability of scientific research. People need to know WHY the predictions they were told by the IPCC a few years back have changed so much and yet the IPCC insists they weren't wrong. The truth is simply that they were misunderstood.

As yet another rabbit warren, there is an even smaller set of people within the climate community who actively encourage that misunderstanding. They do it firmly believing that the impact of CO2 with all else ignored is still indicative of CO2 with all else considered. Which is even a reasonable and normal expectation. The trouble is it falsely communicates the level confidence and margin of error of current known facts. I can't abide that kind of thinking, it's what is supposed to differentiate scientists from priests and politicians, they are supposed to refuse to make that kind of compromise when presenting what they do and do not know is demonstrably true.

>> ^ChaosEngine:

>> ^bcglorf:

I'm not entirely a layman. I'm basing my opinion on searches through peer reviewed journals, ones like this. If you go and take a look, you'll find it is a pretty much bullet-proof decimation of the statistical methods used in the infamous hockey stick graph. It's not a run and gun hit job by hacks funded by big oil either. Mann's team that generated the original hockey stick graph already came to the same conclusion(with gentler wording) in their own most recent work.
Read Mann's article for yourself, he's one of the most vehement of those claiming the science is 'settled'. His most recent paper's calculations with different statistical methods though show that the earth was just as warm(or warmer) twice before in just the last 2k years.
The science that is settled is that the planet has been warming for the last long while. The science is settled that the planet has been warming over just the last 100 years that we've had instrumental record. The science is settled that mankind is inputting measurable and even significant levels of CO2 into the atmosphere. The science is settled that CO2 contributes to the greenhouse effect. The science is settled that CO2's overall contribution to the greenhouse effect is less between 5-15%, while water vapor accounts for 60-90%. Science is well agreed that the role of water vapor in long term climate change is very poorly understood.
I challenge anyone to dispute the above assessment of the current state of scientific understanding, as my searching of peer-reviewed journals shows the experts in each relevant field agreeing with the above statements. Putting those together doesn't exactly add up to 'time to panic'. The only smoking gun that every was considered was the hockey stick graph that appeared to show that the last 100 years of warming was abnormal and unusual. The evidence for it is being thrown out though, and the newly recalculated data, even by the original team, suddenly looks a lot less worrying and much more normal.

That's probably the first rebuttal to climate change I've ever read that doesn't spout nonsense and lies. Kudos to you.
Out of interest, you say you're "not entirely a layman". May I ask if that means you have studied climatology or simply that you read the papers?
As for water vapour, it's not really a "forcing agent", it's reactive. It's better explained here.


My background is computer science but that requires a strong math background as well. When doing any manner of computer simulation of a complex and unknown system, the purely theoretical models are rarely sane. The reason being you can't model the bare physics of a complex system, so you have to essentially estimate(fake) the macro effects and properties. You get good computer models by comparing the results to real data and iterating back and forth until your model starts doing a better job of reflecting reality. The big red flag for me with climate models is the really limited real world data available to compare models to. I don't models aren't worthwhile, scientists are building them because they are useful. The trouble is what they are useful for. By definition, the models have to be treated as less reliable than the raw data we calibrate them against and run our sanity checks against. Neither does it matter how many different models we run, all that gets is closer to the same reliability as the real world measures that we have.

That ties into the article I linked, where the climate guys trying to rebuild temperature data to calibrate computer models from where themselves not strong enough in statistics to notice very significant flaws in the methods they were using. Flaws that systematically produced the results they initially deemed significant. Without a strong grounding there, I have to assess we are still left with a long road to go before really saying we understand this.

As for water vapor being reactive, I would very much disagree. Any climate scientist trying to tell you that is trying to simplify things for you to the point they are no longer being accurate. Ice caps melting, oceans rising, and cloud cover doubling is going to drive climate. It is going to force climate more strongly than anything else. The big unknown is just what parameters water vapor works under, it's simply not well understood yet. Computer models don't even know what sign to assign it as a forcing agent for pitysake. Most likely because it can act as both positive and negative based on environmental factors which are dependent on temperature among other things. When it comes to what kind of forcing H2O does the honest answer is that it's role is so complicated we just simply do not know. What we DO know is that currently, it contributes to 60-90% of the overall greenhouse effect. That tells me it's role in forcing is a much more worthy area of focus and study than CO2 and it's a crying shame so many more dollars are spent on CO2 than H2O when what we really need is to understand the whole system in order know what is really going on.

Ok here's some of my ideas. The first thought of course is that there needs to be a revolution. But what would that achieve - the people that have the money and the power would still be there to influence the new Government. So the only way to achieve real change (not ObamaChange) is to get rid of the people making this mess and also stop the mechanisms that allow it to happen. So serious thought needs to go into listing all the major ways by which corruption is occurring and may occur (legal and non-legal) and then even more serious thought needs to go into better alternatives or proposals. This list of changes then needs to be put forward and if the changes are not made by the existing Govt., then the people need to demand that the Govt. steps down and be replaced by one that will make the changes. Until people are willing to put their lives on the line for this, things will just continue to escalate downwards.

In my opinion the first change that needs to happen is with the media. All of these millions and billions of dollars that get raised/spent to fund campaigns have one major purpose - to buy time with the media outlets to spread a message. Staggering sums of money are being given to mainstream media outlets by the GOP/Dems to spread there propaganda, how on earth can we expect those same media outlets to provide honest coverage of events when they are taking hundreds of millions of dollars from people that don't want honest coverage. So no matter what happens in terms of election funding, the first and most important step is to break this connection between political parties and media channels so there can be honest rather than 'balanced' reporting.

So of course, the next major change that needs to happen is to switch to a publicly funded election system.

Then other issues/resolutions should include at the very least:
Lobbyist influence : An outright ban on lobbyists making donations
Lack of accountability : There needs to be a direct link between what people vote for and what is delivered, i.e. the platform that a candidate runs on cannot be changed or watered down once they take office.
Corrupting influence of power : There needs to be a better way of restricting the time groups or individuals can stay in power/office.
Environmental degradation : Environmental laws need to be improved and updated with assistance from experts, scientists and community members.

Also, one issue that is close to my heart, but others may find silly is the issue of advertising. Advertising has allowed for the widespread popularity and adoption of fast food. The fast food industry needs to be looked at in a similar way as the smoking industry, and the costs of advertising for a fast food business need to matched by the public health cost that the business will have on the population at large. So in other words, advertising for Mickey D's, Wendy's and other chains that sell rubbish needs to become prohibitively expensive, because the damage they are causing to the people in the way of obesity, diabetes etc is of epic proportions. This approach should really be applied to most aspects of industry, so for example the oil and gas industry provide an energy dense product, which by comparison to other forms of energy is quite efficient - however if the cost to the environment is taken into account, it becomes less attractive, so I think more thought needs to go into sustainability in policy making.

Anyway, that's just a couple of examples, my main point is that a systematic look at corruption in the system needs to be completed and documented and then the well thought out and logical changes need to be implemented. I mean, protesting individual issues is good, and sometimes it even works, e.g. with the SOPA 'win' and the Keystone XL 'win', but in the long term it's just not enough to have anything but a delaying effect.

>> ^cosmovitelli:

@bcglorf @VoodooV
Agreed, I think the late Mr Hitchens has a piece on the 'isms - state religions he calls them.
@shinyblurry 'We had an obligation and a duty to defend the world (and ourselves) from the tryanny of the Nazi regime'
Come on! It took 3 years to decide what side to join and the British were made to pay for EVERY BULLET at triple price. Thats how the US inherited the global empire.
Don't delude yourself that ANY WAR of aggression was EVER fought for ANYTHING other than ECONOMICS.


Absolutely, the Americans were completely selfish in their involvement in WW2, just like every single other nation. I think you are mistaken in suggesting that somehow negates the morality of removing the Nazi regime. Just because the allies were motivated by self-interest doesn't change the fact that their self interest included the ending of one of history's most grotesque and systematic genocides.

Being selfish is just being selfish, for some people that means feeding their neighbour's cat because they like having it come around, for others it means shooting their neighbour's cat because they don't. Both selfish acts, but one is generally good and decent and one is grotesque. Far too many of America's critics want to ignore the alternative in the conflict, and/or think pointing out selfish motive sufficient evidence of malice. Both are critically flawed arguments, but they are repeated endlessly to stir up the masses.

Do you believe in atheists? Distrust is central to anti-atheist prejudice.
by Gervais, Will M.; Shariff, Azim F.; Norenzayan, Ara
Recent polls indicate that atheists are among the least liked people in areas with religious majorities (i.e., in most of the world). The sociofunctional approach to prejudice, combined with a cultural evolutionary theory of religion's effects on cooperation, suggest that anti-atheist prejudice is particularly motivated by distrust. Consistent with this theoretical framework, a broad sample of American adults revealed that distrust characterized anti-atheist prejudice but not anti-gay prejudice (Study 1). In subsequent studies, distrust of atheists generalized even to participants from more liberal, secular populations. A description of a criminally untrustworthy individual was seen as comparably representative of atheists and rapists but not representative of Christians, Muslims, Jewish people, feminists, or homosexuals (Studies 2–4). In addition, results were consistent with the hypothesis that the relationship between belief in God and atheist distrust was fully mediated by the belief that people behave better if they feel that God is watching them (Study 4). In implicit measures, participants strongly associated atheists with distrust, and belief in God was more strongly associated with implicit distrust of atheists than with implicit dislike of atheists (Study 5). Finally, atheists were systematically socially excluded only in high-trust domains; belief in God, but not authoritarianism, predicted this discriminatory decision-making against atheists in high trust domains (Study 6). These 6 studies are the first to systematically explore the social psychological underpinnings of anti-atheist prejudice, and converge to indicate the centrality of distrust in this phenomenon. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)

@hpqp: you may be right... and i may be way off base

i guess in my mind 'child abuse' is systematic, and this could have been just a one-off

as i said, i routinely got worse than this... but that was going on forty years ago

we all see things differently through an often-distorted lens of our own memories and experiences... and to me, something just doesn't ring true here - of course you can disagree... your opinion is just as valid as mine

let me give you an example of where i'm coming from though: my folks were very much a couple of 'spare the rod, blabla' parents - when i was naughty (which was often), i'd be physically punished

just before my 16th birthday, my parents filed for divorce - on separate occassions each of my parents brought me with them to their respective lawyer's office, where i was asked to give a statement regarding the other parent's abuse of me -- i asked each of them 'what does it matter?' and their responses were that it would help that parent's bargaining position and eventual financial settlement - each parent offered me incentives to speak out on solely their behalf

i refused, and petitioned the court for my own emancipation at age 16, which was granted

sooo... for me, it's not whether or not that what happened to hillary adams is 'child abuse' (this can be so subjective, especially when it's a single instance captured on video)

rather, i'm suspicious of the motivation and manner of her coming forward now - she's obviously a canny individual (the hidden video camera is our first indication of that), and add to that the facts i mentioned in my first post

it just strikes a chord with me, remembering how dirty i felt while my parents tried to involve me in their revenging themselves on each other

>> ^rougy:

>> ^bcglorf:
Can someone explain the Greek riots to me? I've only followed far enough to have picked up that they are in opposition to the austerity measures being enacted by government? What I've heard sounds like the government spent so much on social services that it went bankrupt, and the protesters are angry that the government is now attempting to cut back it's social services.
I'm not of strong opinion on this like I am in many other situations, but the balance of what I've heard sounds like the anti-austerity protests are so much whining that everyone wants their free money and maybe if we shoot the messenger the economy will recover.

The brunt of it is that Greece is in trouble, and the majority of people who will have to pay for it, or endure "austerity" as the fatcats like to say, had nothing, zero, to do with the trouble.
I've been trying to find out what went wrong there, but I see a lot of smoke and few specifics.
Naturally, any time the blame can be laid on social programs, then that narrative will be most promoted among America's mainstream media.
Frankly I think it was a combination of things, and some of it may have been related to the same CDO swindle that bankrupted Iceland.
But I'm sure you'll agree that if Greece went nuclear, all of their problems would be solved...just like Japan's....

EDIT:
Two words: Goldman Sachs.
Goldman was criticized for its involvement in the 2010 European sovereign debt crisis. Goldman Sachs is reported to have systematically helped the Greek government mask the true facts concerning its national debt between the years 1998 and 2009.[76] In September 2009, Goldman Sachs, among others, created a special credit default swap (CDS) index to cover of high risk of Greece's national debt.[77] The interest-rates of Greek national bonds have soared to a very high level, leading the Greek economy very close to bankruptcy in March and May 2010 and again in June 2011.
(Wikipedia)


Thanks Rougy, that's the kind of starting point I was looking for. I was hoping getting the opinions of few folks on here who'd already researched the matter was a faster place to start than wading through the sea of information out there blindly.

Still sounds as though Sachs role in this was to help the Greek government irresponsibly spend itself into oblivion. I'm still curious, and will have to dig, what that money was spent on. I know even in my country(Canada) our social services are scaled well back from Greece's, and ours are already at the breaking point of what our tax revenues can bear. Added into that is our taxes are generally higher than those in Greece and it seems that Sachs helped them postpone the inevitable, and made it worse. None the less, it also sounds like the population were the recipients or targets of the majority of the money and are now more angry at the slowing of the spending than at the debt load.

Again I'll have to look at it further. As one poster tried to call me out, I am not strongly convicted and convinced my opinion on this is correct or accurate, I have merely expressed without hedging or hiding what I hold to based on what I admit as my limited information and am asking to be proven wrong to speed my process of correcting my opinion should it be based on wrong assumptions. Rougy's pointed a big path I wasn't aware of. Anyone else have some more? Particularly around where Greece's government revenues come from and were they are spent? My perception that most of it is going right back to public services is pretty central to my opinion and I'd love to know if I'm wrong on it.

>> ^bcglorf:

Can someone explain the Greek riots to me? I've only followed far enough to have picked up that they are in opposition to the austerity measures being enacted by government? What I've heard sounds like the government spent so much on social services that it went bankrupt, and the protesters are angry that the government is now attempting to cut back it's social services.
I'm not of strong opinion on this like I am in many other situations, but the balance of what I've heard sounds like the anti-austerity protests are so much whining that everyone wants their free money and maybe if we shoot the messenger the economy will recover.


The brunt of it is that Greece is in trouble, and the majority of people who will have to pay for it, or endure "austerity" as the fatcats like to say, had nothing, zero, to do with the trouble.

I've been trying to find out what went wrong there, but I see a lot of smoke and few specifics.

Naturally, any time the blame can be laid on social programs, then that narrative will be most promoted among America's mainstream media.

Frankly I think it was a combination of things, and some of it may have been related to the same CDO swindle that bankrupted Iceland.

But I'm sure you'll agree that if Greece went nuclear, all of their problems would be solved...just like Japan's....



EDIT:

Two words: Goldman Sachs.

Goldman was criticized for its involvement in the 2010 European sovereign debt crisis. Goldman Sachs is reported to have systematically helped the Greek government mask the true facts concerning its national debt between the years 1998 and 2009.[76] In September 2009, Goldman Sachs, among others, created a special credit default swap (CDS) index to cover of high risk of Greece's national debt.[77] The interest-rates of Greek national bonds have soared to a very high level, leading the Greek economy very close to bankruptcy in March and May 2010 and again in June 2011.

(Wikipedia)

I disagree with the assertion that Obama has "made war against the core values of liberalism", or that there has been an "even more craven attempt...to cater to [corporate interests]" (more craven than what, Bush?)

However, I agree with him about the Faustian bargain with corporations, and about him subsequently being crumpled up and discarded by them. But of late Obama appears to have decided to fight back, not that his critics on the left or right would ever acknowledge such a thing.

But regardless of that, I also agree that "all the pillars of the liberal establishment that once provided ... a mechanism by which grievances and injustices in this country could be addressed have shut, tight." The courts have been perverted by decades of intentional sabotage, Congress has been bought, and hamstrung by its own procedures, the unions have been systematically attacked and weakened, churches have been taken over by charlatans and hatemongers, and schools have either been defunded, or made dependent on the largesse of the monied class.

It's way past time for people to make a stand against the onslaught of this corporate kleptocracy. I just hope it's not too late.

My point was that there are millions of people in the US who are far, far less fortunate than you are. (You have a car to live in?! Jesus-Luxury-Christ!) It's fantastic that you worked hard for your education, obviously you are a very intelligent and right-headed individual. But downplaying the debt that so many take on for education to make it look as though it's bad judgement or individual choice, rather than situational circumstance or systematic exploitation, suggests you are out of touch with the reality of the situation.

I heard another explanation that suggested they might take shortcuts through alternate dimensions. Personally I think there is a quite large likelyhood there is some sort of systematic error.

Either way its a very exciting time for Science. Seems like every other week some discovery makes excited to be alive this century.