I think, with the USA having figured out a way to use nuclear devices which have 'shaped charges,' to send most the energy downwards, and relabeling them 'tactical nuclear devices' which are not WMDs, and therefore do not break START II, the MAD doctrine has broken down.

its SDI not STI.

The USA already did enact it. The name says it. It was only strategic. It was always a technical impossibility. And it was effective.

You can read the old stuff about it here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_bunker_buster

What the Trump administration did in last year's budget was transfer the authority for manufacturing these things to a new group, avoiding legal obstacles. I forget the name of the specific organization now in charge of the conversion.

The 2016 flight test is in public domain.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L14GMtf8Vwk

The opposite is also a problem. They feel safe because there hasn't been a nuclear war, so they are more likely to act aggressively and ignore the threat of MAD because it never happened.

What the USA military is now apparently doing is converting the B-12 bombs, with about 15-Kt yield, into 'nuclear bunker busters.' Because they are converting rather than building new ones, the USA claims this does not break the START treaty. They should have about a hundred ready at the end of this year, which Trump may use against North Korea, again claiming it does not abrogate existing treaties because the DoD says, by converting them into nuclear bunker busters, they are 'tactical nuclear devices' rather than WMDs.

Yeah, but who wants to live in fear in perpetually? — Wallows

Well that is the frequently expressed, longer range problem with MAD. People don't stay afraid, and the growing apathy, or rather, oblivious disregard, becomes an ever greater danger in itself.

I have to say I never considered just what this laser was. — Brett

Well yes. Exactly. Lol.

I agree with you in principle, but social attitudes by those owning guns in the USA appear to make it unlikely. Jim Jeffries says it well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rR9IaXH1M0

the vase is good corroboration that there was some story, thank you, although its puzzling there appears to be another giant creature belonging to the opponents. I haven;t read that one of Euripides.

However it does not dilute my point. Even if it was not added later, the horse thing was not important to Homer or the Greeks, and I still believe the thing was a fabrication. in particular, because we know there were no stone walls on the back of Troy, only the front. The most there could have been was a wooden barricade, and no remnants of that were found either. You won't find much written about it, it's something you might have to see for yourself.

What did they do to earn 82 million? — Benkei

It's almost all from their private businesses which they never sold off. Currently Kushner and Ivanka are on vacation in England.

it was part of the myth for maybe a 1000 years before Virgil was born. I do not call that "entirely an invention". — Sculptor

thats what I thought too, but when I looked it up, I found only six lines about it. Out of 3,000 lines it is unlikely so little would be written about the now famous ruse which reportedly ended the war, and so its far more likely they were inserted later where they could find a spot for it. They didnt teach me that at school either, I had to figure it out for myself.

And now for the notable problem: if you have been besieged for 10 years and found the camp mysteriously empty with a wooden effigy of a horse on wheels, you would not go through the effort of wheeling it into your city. You'd just burn the entire camp as fast as possible in case they came back. But no, they wanted what they are meant to have thought must be their enemy's idol as a trophy?? Even though they knew it wasn't?

Well that's just perfect for the Romans. Oh those Ilians were so stupid, snicker snicker.

But for the Greeks, somehow it just does not jibe with two dozen chapters on armored warriors bludgeoning each other with blunt bronze swords in front of the city gates, when they could just have walked around to the back of the city where there were no city walls.

Obviously what the FBI classifies as cause does not satisfy you. You really should tell the FBI how wrong they are.

But wait! the graph I shared DOES show motive. Well. You better not look at it anyway.

Please go ahead then. There's no point looking at them first either.

thats what I told you. Would you like to tell me my graphs on motives are wrong too?

I already shared the graph on that. I've been through this with people like you before. You wont be able to fault the graph, so you will say my data is wrong. So let me say it for you. Whatever I say must be wrong because you wont agree with it. There. I hope you feel better.

Actually, this is more about freedom of movement than speech. — Brett

What we have now, Brett, is INS computers scanning the social media accounts in the last five years for the word 'Trump', for all the 350,000 people that want to enter the USA for a vacation each week, and denying their entry if they find anything bad said about him.

That is the end of free speech as we know it.

Is that elitism? — Brett

I don't know, Brett, i grew up thinking the Usenet was social media, and was excited to have even that, because when I was a teenager, the highlight of the year was to get three sentences into Punch Magazine.

this forum is social media.

its not so much inspiration. It's disgust.

People overseas should be able to say Trump's an idiot and not be concerned they lose a tourist visa application. It's a vast over-reach of authority by the nationalists, in my opinion. Carlson can say what he likes. Similarly, if people overseas want to say Carlson's a jerk, or America is a pit of evil because of what Carlson says, they should not be penalized for it. That's my opinion.

To me, it's just as revolting as CIA black sites overseas using 'extended interrogation techniques' because they wouldn't be able to do it if they were located in the USA.

Ah, I think you almost have it there, but it's retaliation against non-PC views which is my concern.

That would be provocation.

Once they start circling the wagons, the worst thing to do is gallop around them shouting war whoops.

So while concerns about left-wing political correctness are certainly overblown, right wing censorship certainly is not. — Maw

Mostly I'd agree, but one does have the the left wing trying to censor Fox. Last week Tucker Carlson called for war on Mexico, ok maybe this is new to most people, but Trump did say he'd support it in 2015, which most people wrote off as a joke. So now the left again wants Carlson fired. War with Mexico may appear lunacy to the more educated, but one can't stop them talking about it either.

It's the opposite. Concerns about PC have been leveraged by the far right IF those digesting social media accounts do so in McCarthyist spirit. So my ernest friend, you've missed the point by a mile or two. — Izat So

Well that depends on from where you are looking at the problem. Maybe from your view PC is overblown by the far right. But for people outside the USA looking in, it's the other way around. Can you imagine there are now 14 million people applying for tourist visas in the next year who have to go over their social media accounts and delete anything that might jeopardize their application? Do you have any idea how difficult it is to get a visa to the USA already? It's rejected for any reason without appeal or even explanation in most cases.

But to Izat's point, the concern over political correctness is largely overblown
— Maw

By far. — Izat So

I don't think that's true in the USA. Today the administration announced that all visa applications, including those simply for tourism, will have to include all the applicant's social media accounts for the prior five years.

Meanwhile the US Navy is hanging a tarp over the name of one of its destroyers because the President does not like John McCain.

It's difficult to say concerns about PC are overblown any more.

Yes; but, even given the opacity of determining intent, the conclusion still obtains. — Wallows

One could go in that direction, but it would be more fruitful to consider the diagnosed schizophrenic as being in the ideal position to play language games with his listeners. After all, they don't have much else to do.

Now, quantifying into possible world where Ralph, still believes that his neighbor is a spy, then his de dicto "trait/quality/property/attribute" of being schizophrenic (perhaps untreated) will dictate his de re beliefs about his neighbor being a spy. Hence, there is some element of rigidity for all possible worlds where Ralph professes these delusional beliefs. — Wallows

Russell's criticism still applies. Just because he says his neighbor is a spy does not mean he actually believes his neighbor is a spy, even if he is schizophrenic. Ralph could be asserting that because he knows his listener thinks he is schizophrenic, so he states it to satisfy the audience.

If this subject professes a de re belief that his or her neighbor is a spy, then isn't that bound to the abstract property of de dicto epistemic concerns about the subject? — Wallows

When I worked in a psychiatric hospital, we had one person diagnosed as schizophrenic who would cite a list of all the spies he had seen during the night every morning. Of course at first I thought he was totally insane, but after a while, I realized he was actually telling me about the other other patients secretly watching each other and judging each other's behaviors, leading to him calling them nazi or communist spies.

That is, while what he was stating about them was obviously delusional on the surface, it was derived from factual observation that one could interpret properly, given sufficient experience with his way of describing events. I dont know how that fits in with your 'de dicto' concerns.

I think the fallacies with objectivism should be taught, especially in the USA, but there are other problems. I returned to community college to do some courses in literature. The first complete book I studied as a child was Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, well actually a play, when I was 10 years old. It was not considered unusual at the time.

In 2005, I learned in community college I would have to study for three years before I could read Shakespeare again, and I was first required to read Harry Potter for four months with people who could hardly utter more than four words in a row without immense effort. That is the reality of the USA now, and the diminishing number of people here who remember more educated days are slowly dieing off.

Fuck anyone who wants to take away guns or limit their access — mnoone

the total amount of deaths from guns since 9/11 passed half a million in May 2017. This was from September 2016, at which time guns had killed a thousand Americans for every single American citizen killed by a terrorist. So you might thing what you say is funny, but its not funny to about a thousand times more people than you, actually.

have to believe this will come to an end before Nov 2020. Basically I think it ought to be clear to everyone that Trump’s occupancy of the office is no longer tenable. — Wayfarer

Im sorry this is a rare occasion I have to disagree. Currently Trump is deliberately repressing the stock market in the hope that removal of some of the strictures will cause a boom to coincide with his election, its an old trick.

It may not work. but if the Democrats are doing too well, he will just drop a bunch of the 'tactical nuclear devices' he is manufacturing, by converting old nuclear bombs into nuclear bunker busters, on N Korea. that will start a war again and he will win as a wartime president instead.

One may believe that the corruption he has caused is irreversible, but unless he is successful in declaring a permanent state of military dictatorship, which seems unlikely, the general disgust is likely to cause a reversal in USA policies again in 2024, especially when the winds start dropping nuclear radiation from his bombs on the USA, if he does use them.

Of course you may also have the last word, as i say, no point arguing, you wont change your mind because of anything I say, it's not like I havent tried several dozen times before. Nothing I say would make any difference. When you yourself are victimized by poverty or disease, you will find reason to reconsider your view.

Another problem is that accidents with guns, which are rising dramatically, such that involuntary homicide will be more frequent than murder in 2022.

I don't seen much point in arguing the point, because its main proponent, Rand, also believes that the only point of a concept is to conquer others. So its rather futile arguing at all. But it is not the prevailing view of wisdom. Thats all I have to say. Have a nice day.

I agree. here are two statistics i drew from FBI and CDC data.



and

No. People with ambition and determination rarely elevate their nations unless forced to, because elevating others involves their own loss. Then the nation falls behind others and the leadership is usually deposed by revolution. I am not stating anything new. It's been a frequent observation for 150 years now, in fact much longer than that, Buddha stated much the same in 300BC.

So, do you disagree it's people that kill people? — Shamshir

the problem has four elements. First, if you are to focus on killing alone, then it is very clear from FBI statistics that the majority of homicides in the USA are not from strangers involved in home invasion. Family and 'friends,' living in the same domicile kill each other far more frequently, by a factor of 2:1, and most frequently husbands shoot their wives. And this is not idle speculation, or drawn from anti-gun lobby group data. I put two years into analyzing all the reliable data I could find, here:

https://www.yofiel.com/guns/916-report

The second element is the ease with which people can kill each other when guns are available. The same report shows that death is far more likely if guns are available, and that guns are the preferred method of attack in the USA by an order of magnitude.

The third element is that 2nd amendment advocates have proliferated an enormous amount of propaganda purely aimed at increasing gun sales. It's been claimed that there are now more people selling guns in the USA than all the people who work in Mcdonalds, Starbucks, and all supermarkets combined, although I haven't seen ratification of it, it is not an unfair statement that too many people in the USA are very vocal about their vested self interest.

The reason I wrote the first report was after asking some gun owners if they would shoot children who broke into their back yard to steal apples off an apple tree. I was so astonished by the results, I asked 500 gun owners. 90% said they would. At the time no one believed me but now people rarely doubt it. that is to say, attitudes to guns have got markedly worse in the last decades to the extent where even Americans are starting to notice it. I wrote a report on that in 2018 which I sent to John Oliver, and he did a show on the NRA the following week, you can see it here:

https://www.yofiel.com/guns/nra

the fourth element is the sparcity of reliable data. The anti-gun lobby in the USA is almost as fanatical as the pro-gun lobby, frequently making wild emotive claims of the same order. If there were more sanity, similar data on violent gun injuries, which have been increasing at a far greater rate in the USA, would be available, but the NRA was successful in sponsoring a bill to stop further government research into firearm injuries.

As a result, there is not much data on the actual cost of gun violence. I attempted to calculate it, and it figured out to be about $400 per gun in the USA. So I proposed a per-firearm 'gun violence tax' which would reduce if gun violence went down, offset by a gun tax credit for all Americans equal to the amount of income from the gun violence tax. That would create a unified interest to reduce the cost of violence, and hence result in sensible legislature, rather than the piecemeal hodge podge now existent in the USA. Moreover, as most people who own guns own more than one, the tax credit is more than the cost of owning one gun, which would actually make it cheaper for someone who doesnt own a gun to buy one. That would incentivize the gun industry to stop selling assault weapons, which is now its man source of revenue here, and causing the problem in my opinion. Currenlty the firearm industry is trying to sell guns to people who already have one, so they are marketing more lethal ones. Instead they would try to make guns safer. Then with reduction in gun violence, everyone would benefit from the tax credit. A number of politicians contacted me about making a gun violence tax, but none were interested in returning its income to everyone as a tax credit, so I gave up on the gun tax solution.

I tried proposing a government buy-back program to convert assault weapons into low-velocity sports toys, but my proposal was not liked by the low-income neighborhood where I was living at the time. They shot my cat with an air gun, shot guns across my yard from a violent person's front yard to a tree on the other side, and tried to beat me up several times, to 'teach me how stupid I am.' the police couldnt do anything about it. So I moved out of that city and didn't tell anyone where I now live. My house is still there, but I am too frightened to go back to it, and probably they have ransacked it too by now.

So that's what happens if you try to stop gun violence in the USA.

What I tried to tell you, which you don't seem particularly inclined to hear, was that Pan, who was the God of everything, was not worshipped because Pan didn't care much about human beings, he just did his won thing. So what you actually did, despite trying to tell me I am wrong, was agree with me. There was no such thing as pantheism in ancient Greece, as you say.

the romans did have a thing called the pantheon. It was not a place for pantheists, however, it was simply a temple for all gods. The romans didnt care at all who people worshipped as long as they got taxes, and by the time of the middle empire, there were so many gods they gave up trying to make temples for them all and just built the pantheon for everybody to use as they wanted.

I read the both in the original languages. The romans liked what you call 'low cunning.' They admired it. Thats my point. Virgil tried to be ironic about it occasionally, but the romans really did not have a sense of irony either. So mostly he wrote what they liked, bombastic guts spilling and glorification of violence. There was almost no mention of the Trojan Horse in Homer, in fact it is arguable whether the original version of the story contained it at all. It was almost entirely an invention by Virgil.

I dont see what you think I got backwards about the greeks. What I do observe is that the majority of the world is entirely sucked in to Hollywood's version. Some time ago there was even a version that made the whole Trojan War an act of vengeance by abused women. That's what sells now so thats what it makes. Homer's point was that Agamemnon was a power-hungry, war-crazed megalamaniac who didnt care about women at all. It's true he abused women, but it wasnt anything against women in particular, he abused anyone he could in his desire for power. Sacrificing his daughter for success in war, and supporting a competition for Helen's marriage against her own wishes were just symptomatic.

That's Hollywood's misconception, not historical fact. After all Hollywood was founded to glorify war, and has done so ever since, with ever better special effects.

The Greeks defended themselves if they had to, but after Alexander the Great, there was not another attempt to conquer other nations. That together with Troy was enough for them. But Hollywood doesn't like that. What Hollywood likes is Virgil's reinterpretation of the Iliad, making the Trojan Horse a clever trick rather than an ignoble deception, and ending the story with Troy's successful demolition rather than the horrible fates of the victors. Mostly now Hollywood tells Virgiil's Aeniad, with Greek names, glorifying war rather than imparting wisdom as to its folly. hat was Rome's preference, and it fits with the USA's own history or violence and aggression, so that's the story Hollywood tells.

The Greeks favored independence, and it was very difficult for them to gather themselves to fight the Persian retaliations of the two Xerxes. But the Greeks believed in their independence and fought viciously to defend it. Now, Hollywood loves to describe the Persian invasions as unjust attempts at conquest, rather than the retaliation it actually was.

The Greeks favored free trade and economic competition instead, to which war was a terrible impedance. The Greek view was that violent aggression was exciting but foolish, and they taught that view to new generations with Homer, Euripides, Sophocles, and Aeschylus.

I also realized something from this on a personal level: if I mind evil so much, how am I not actually 'overly benevolent' - a 'moral saint?' Because just like most people, I have done some things right and some things wrong. — jasonm

Maybe it helps to consider the difference between morality and law. Law defines what is right and wrong; moriality defines what is good and bad. There are many times when things are right, but bad, or wrong, but good, the latter of which is one of the favorite subjects of Hollywood.