costard

Ok. This from Proceedings of the National Institute for Science 2006. Quite fuzzy, an indicated increase in average global temperature of 1 degree Celsius over the past 120 years and within about 1 degree Celsius of the maximum reached in the past million years. Further in the article links data from the University of East Anglia so maybe I shouldn't be using this... anyway. Ok, here is the graph of surface temperatures for the Western Equatorial Pacific Ocean for the past 1.35 million years. It is noted that there is some doubt as to the relative positioning of the modern data and the core sample data - let's take it as read that the graph is "accurate" (if it isn't I don't see how the counter-argument is helped at all). Note the spike at about the 450 thousand years ago mark. According to this graph, for a period of about 2000 years, the temperature of the Western Pacific Ocean was higher than it is now. My understanding is that there was no human industry extant at this time. We are being asked to back an innovative approach to economic management around the globe - or to at least step aside and let it happen. The ***** ******* political ****-******* that would have me believe that they are capable of putting it into practice haven't even come close to repairing the damage done to the model we have. No ****ing way is this going to work. No hope at all.

noxnoctum - morale is affected significantly by flamethrowers - a deliberate design feature. I tend not to use them in assault because they tire too quickly. Good for ambush where there is short LOS - as you found - in trenches / foxholes in woods, at night, in built up areas. For flame assaults, go for the halftracks or flame tanks.

In this particular case the specimen was hacked out with an oxy-acetylene torch. You could get a much neater cut if necessary, and slot a piece cut to size back in. Not a 100 percent effective repair, but usefully quick. You can see that there would probably have been spalling of the back surface of the armour plate - some fairly large pieces of high energy steel bouncing around the interior of the tank in question. These tend to damage the more delicate instrumentation and have a demoralising effect on the crew.

I'd hardly call the Merkin nation a society. More like a fossilised aggregation, a coprolith, if you will. Boo, the idea is to blow the rodent away with the .45, not your toe, leaving little to contribute to your diet beyond a smudge of red and a bit of tail. Little point roasting that over an open flame.

Well, yes and no. "To each according to his ability" might well be the creed of the capitalist, and you might expect that to apply to funding a climate repair system too, but if the people doing the paying are being asked to give up their access to opportunity and wealth, you can expect the wailing and gnashing of teeth to be loud. A student of human nature would point out that no-one except the gulled are going to do any such thing as pour money into the coffers of a new religious movement - the basic idea of the environmental movement is that once the third world reaches parity with the first in terms of wealth and opportunity, it will choose to remain there. Of course the easiest way to achieve that parity is to redistribute the wealth of the world in a fair and equitable fashion. Ok - let's move away from speculative fantasy to some analysis: who's google-fu is up to this request ? - I need to see a set of graphs showing average global temperatures over several time scales - past to present: a million years, one hundred thousand, ten thousand, one thousand and one hundred. The longer time scale might well be too short for the purists, but if I can't establish that the current movement in average temperature is unprecedented over the last million years I'm prepared to lend some credence to the idea that the current movement in temperature is due to the burning of fossil fuels and the waste heat generated by inefficient energy conversion.

Pah, you disingenuous southerner. I hope your hole closes up. Worldwide starvation, war, disease etc from overpopulation is just as much of a threat as from high interest rates and depression. Better?

belated congrats Pinetree. If any of your friends ask what they can do to help, ask for meals ready made (lasagne, pies, casseroles, anything that you can just reheat). This saves time like nothing else and you'll need that time - for sleep. Cheers

Peanut brittle, a piece of string tied to your toe, a torch and a .45

The problem (now) isn't one of determining the fact of global warming - it's about determination of relative threat. I contend that the threat of a stagnating world economy with self limiting processes (the human population will continue to grow until it no longer can, for example) is somewhat less than the introduction of a world-wide bureaucracy intent on introducing untested political and taxation systems. When you take a look at the talent available to develop the systems and implement them, you'd have to argue that they've either been completely out of the loop for the last decade or have been so much a part of it that they are entirely incompetent and not trustworthy to walk your dog. In either case, there is no justification for confidence. Given the unlikelihood of a world economy able to return a rising (or even stable) standard of living to the majority of the world populace for the next ten years or so, I really don't think there is the hope of the political will - or ability - to deliver the required structural changes. Most developed economies have passed their manufacturing base off to slave economies and have quite deliberately ignored the plight of their own citizens: I cannot see that this voting citizenry is likely to support further economic pain in support of a solution that might, just might, work. Instead, I foresee that the continuing devolution of political and economic systems will lead us to a sharper correction, one where no concern whatsoever will be paid to the generation of greenhouse gases.

Get a digital set and tune to ABC FM. No ads. Sometimes you have to listen to challenging music, but it's all part of the experience.

Hooray, common sense gets a go! If you have to determine the sex of someone wearing a burkha, it doesn't look good if men are doing the inspection. And, Afghan women are introduced to the idea that the way they have to lead their lives isn't necessarily the way other women lead their lives.

Occam's razor strikes again. Nice one. diesel, read "Galileo's revenge: junk science in the courtroom." by Peter W Huber. It has a look at some decisions made in court on the basis of stunningly bad science.

I used smoke once in the Marines campaign. 155mm. The spotting rounds took out the platoon I wanted to move, so it wasn't really that useful. I learned not to have the smoke mission too close to my guys.

Honesty and discipline were part of the values structure that the mythology of the western democracies of the late twenitieth century operated on. For the underlying mythology, they were values that informed the behaviour of most of the populace - the law abiding populace, if you will. SO, I suspect that a reading of history deeper than that purveyed as easy propaganda will lead me to the conclusion that anyone who mattered broke as many laws as they could possibly get away with, but I contend that the richer societies didn't disintegrate and remained relatively wealthy because most of the rest of the populace were law abiding. By the same token, I believe that the global banking industry is now in the unenviable position of knowing that, because none of them have exercised trust or trustworthy behaviour, they now don't believe they can trust anyone. Which means that contracts are just pieces of paper. And the law and the wealth structure of the globe can go hang, because military might is the only mechanism of power.

I'm in the quagmire. The West's deployment to Afghanistan has never made sense to me for the reasons promulgated by the political and military leaders. Even now we get the line "If we pull out now, then the radical Islamists will be that much more dangerous because they'll be on a morale kick." Pure horse****. If, however, the reasons stated are along the lines of: - we need to be keeping our military active in dangerous country so that we maintain a cadre of experienced personnel - we need to be expending ordnance and using hardware to keep our defense industries in profits and their employees in work - the circumstances surrounding 9/11 are such that we can pretty much do whatever we want with the full blessing of the populace - Afghanistan, being a non-country, will not be able to call in any alliances to make the global play difficult then I can see that there is an argument for us to be sending our military in. The argument is not in any way defensible, morally, economically or socially (I can't even see it making sense militarily), but there again, that's just the way the (western) world operates. I don't require that an argument be justifiable according to my own values, I merely require it to have some sort of relationship with the real world and not be a fantasy: it then becomes worth examination in terms of abstracts, like the worth of a human life. No, not confused. In denial. [rant]The recent history of liberal western democracies is that their populations have been allowed unprecedented freedoms, in expression, movement, association, etc. [These are now being wound back for reasons I cannot fathom, but that doesn't mean they aren't good reasons.] Mostly, people living in regimes not involved in this brave social experiment have seen the lives of western people as preferable to their own. Frankly, I don't blame them. The systems that evolved to enable the functioning of a late twentieth-century western democracy require a degree of discipline in observation and analysis, and a degree of honesty in description and self-regard. The decadence and associated decay of the West over the past two decades is mostly about a discarding of these values - honesty and discipline. The systems can't function without those values being displayed in the behaviour of the populace and the structure fails. While it's going down, all sorts of human scavenger are making sure that they get something out of it.[/rant]

So the argument remains valid - one of the few resources the Afghan nation has available to it is its populace. And we're in there to control the supply of those ClassA drugs? (probably;)) True. And it was also uncalled for. Plase accept my apology, diesel. Your argument is at worst disingenuous. Probably true. On another hand (how many do you have Tero?), I don't believe that the wealth available to western populations has increased over the last twenty years. No such suggestion - but it would seem that it is envisioned that a prosperous, happy Afghanistan will not be safe haven for the type of person that perpetrates something like 9/11. ..fixed that for ya...

A successful truce was negotiated and the Tamils took their eye off the ball over two years of peace. Then the Sri Lankan military staged a couple of bombings (having spent those two years building their capacity and intelligence) and immediately launched an all out offensive. I'm waiting to see the military take over completely - and I suspect that is why the Sri Lankan market has done so poorly in the last couple of months, because everyone else is waiting for the same thing.

Yes well. The obviously hypocritical message that we do send in conducting an armed conflict in Afghanistan is "You may not use military force to promulgate your values in a foreign nation." diesel, I don't see you choosing to live a life of poverty and squalor under a corrupt, misogynist regime, nor do I see you making any reference to the wealth the participation of women in western society has delivered to the society as a whole. And if a country cannot develop the opportunities available to its populace in any other fashion than the control of natural resources than the only way forward is for the promotion of military conflict to gain control of those resources. Your argument is disingenuous at best. The best argument for the education and provision of equal opportunity for women in a society describes the benefit delivered to children by an educated mother: the child learns quicker, develops further and begins a contribution toward society at an earlier age. If you believe that education, intellectual and behavioural, doesn't provide for the greater generation of wealth of a society, you haven't read much history - certainly not the history of the last three centuries. The fact, and it is a fact, is that given the choice, people choose to be wealthy as rather than be poor.

Are you pretending to be a moose? They eat straggling water cress with abandon and gusto. So I hear.

The hypocritical message would be "Women are equal to men in our society, except, of course, where they aren't. But you have to treat them as though they are." Having active female soldiery in place in [Western Armies in] Afghanistan would certainly be noted by the local populace and sends the message that we actually practise what we preach. Of course, the prejudices of the local culture aren't going to disappear overnight - it was something like a hundred years between granting the vote to condoning active combat service of wmen in Western Armies and there are still instances of cultural regression (e.g. the Beefeater row last week). If Afghanistan is to have a hope of making it as a first world economy - in fact, if any nation is to achieve that level of wealth - it cannot afford to waste half its resource through systematic denial of opportunity. And if [we] are in Afghanistan for some reason other than to promote and foster the values we say we hold to, then we really shouldn't be there and should not expect people to go there to fight for any reason other than financial gain, or their own set of values.

Well, Afghanistan could sure do with some trees to soak up all the carbon they're going to generate once they become a first world nation. Then the countryside will look a bit like Vietnam. A job for the greenies perhaps?

Sure, but this isn't the strange bit, the strange bit is that the pollie is prepared to say so out loud. And apologise? What sort of politician does that? (apologise for something real, that is: our own head sook is doing wonders for the "s" word). Things must be really grim in Japan.

Shouldn't we throw a stack of guns over the fence to help them with the working out?

I saw this on the BBC site yesterday. Note the apology by the minister. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8361726.stm So, why were the oil industry executives looking at the data ahead of the market? Why did the minister feel that it was important that his constituents know that this was the case? How did the oil companies manage to swing the authority over a sovereign government, that of the world's second largest economy?

Not half as unwell as that there gnome.