Africa to collapse in 5 years?
Charlie Bell wrote: No it's no - the UN and African Union have peace-keeping operations in Darfur. They're underfunded and undereffective, but that's not tacit approval. OTOH, I had already read that Africa would collapse due to the AIDS pandemic, and it seems that it's happening right now. Congo/Zaire, Guinea, Uganda, Sudan, Somalia, ZImbabwe... It seems that civil wars are getting worse then when they funded by the CIA and the KGB. Alberto Monteiro ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
RE: Israel to collapse in 25 years?
-Original Message- From: brin-l-boun...@mccmedia.com [mailto:brin-l-boun...@mccmedia.com] On Behalf Of Doug Pensinger Sent: Saturday, January 03, 2009 6:56 PM To: Killer Bs (David Brin et al) Discussion Subject: Re: Israel to collapse in 25 years? Dan M wrote: So, can anyone argue me out of this pessimistic viewpoint? I honestly hope so, even though I'll argue hard for this pointit's one argument I'd love to lose. Well, note that there has never been the kind of tacit support for Israel from moderate Arab states such as Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia as there is in this particular conflict. The Sunnis are probably more fearful of Shia/Iranian ascendancy than they are of a stable Jewish state. The last statement you made is certainly true. The first statement was true when you made it, but it is no longer true. The Arab countries have condemned Israel's incursion into Gaza. Israel needs to, at the very least, minimize the rocket attacks for their actions to be considered successful. There are still 40 rockets/day launched towards Israel since Hamas ended the cease fire. I do not see a quick and easy conclusions to the ground incursion. I don't know if it will happen, but if the current incursion takes control of the Gaza/Egypt border and allows wounded Palestinians (that Hamas is not allowing to cross) to get to the emergency facilities that have been set up there, they might gain a little popular support. Of course the idea is to weaken Hamas enough so that more moderate factions can take charge. I'm sure that there are more than a few members of Fatah that aren't too unhappy with the idea. I agree with this, but the politics on the ground indicate that Fatah had to use the threat of violence to stop popular demonstrations on the West bank in support of Hamas. On the whole, it appears that the groups that are seen to successfully oppose Israel gain among the Palestinians while those that try to find peace lose, and are considered collaborators. Given the education system, this makes sensebecause this is a reasonable position for those who accept the lies taught in the Palestinian schools about the Jews as truths. The real trick is whether Israel can either weaken Hamas so it can be defeated by Al Fatah, or if it can establish effective control of the smuggling of rockets into Gaza in order to stop the attacks. Recent news is not sanguine with respect to the former. Several Al Fatah members have been executed in Gaza for collaborating with Israel. Others are under house arrest. There is no indication that Al Fatah is gaining in the Gaza, and some evidence that it might be falling back in the West Bank. The second point requires the Israeli army to inflict devastating damage on Hamas's leadership and fighters while minimizing civilian casualties. Unlike normal warfare, Hamas gains when the people it governs are hurt and killed. Thus, they are highly motivated to make sure that civilians (especially children) are killed by Israel. Given the rabbit warren nature of Gaza cities, it will be very hard for Israel to kill Hamas and not have a significant incident of civilian deaths. We are now seeing massive demonstrations in Europe, mostly ethnic based. This puts tremendous pressure on the European governments to support a cease fire that will leave Hamas intact, and able to resume rocket attacks on Israel at will (e.g. wait a couple of weeks or months and then restart the attacks). If these demonstrations increase, my feel is that there is minimal European public support for Israel, and that the general tendency is to support quick solutions that, in succession, will gradually weaken Israel over the next years. For, if rocket attacks become the new norm, I feel that they will increase in sophistication and damage as better Iranian arms are smuggled into Gaza. In any case, what the nut case running Iran would like to see is world war 3, and I'm not even sure that he would mind if Iran itself was cauterized as a result. That's a major fear of mine too. I recall how, in the Iran-Iraq war, Iran sent human wave attacks against Iraq, with hundreds of thousands of minimally armed civilians sent to overwhelm the much better armed Iraqis by sheer numbers. IIRC, children were included in these attacks. If the Grand Ayatollah who really runs the country sees the final battle at the end of time at hand, he might feel called to start it by attacking the Zionistic entity which is controlling the world through its evil actions. Dan M. Dan M. ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Experts
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2009/jan/04/financial-crisis-anxiety [...] In times like these, everyone should have a book by their bedside to reach for at three in the morning. If the Bible doesn't work for you, Philip Tetlock's nicely oxymoronic volume Expert Political Judgment might be an alternative. Tetlock's book is based on two decades of research into 284 people who made their living commenting or offering advice on political and economic trends. He asked them simply to do what they apparently did best: predict what would happen in the world next in answer to specific questions. Would oil prices rise or fall, would there be a boom or a bust, would we go to war? And so on. When the study concluded, in 2003, Tetlock's experts had made 82,361 forecasts and the results were correlated with the facts as they had turned out. The experts were less accurate in their forecasts than a control group of chimpanzees choosing entirely randomly would have been. Even specialists in particular narrow fields were not significantly more successful than reasonably informed laymen. We reach the point of diminishing marginal predictive returns for knowledge disconcertingly quickly, Tetlock suggested. In this age of academic hyperspecialisation, there is no reason for supposing that contributors to top journals - distinguished political scientists, area study specialists, economists and so on - are any better than attentive readers of the New York Times in 'reading' emerging situations. Further, the more certain the forecaster was, the more likely his judgment would be awry, scientific proof that the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of a passionate intensity. Alchemists Maru -- William T Goodall Mail : w...@wtgab.demon.co.uk Web : http://www.wtgab.demon.co.uk Blog : http://radio.weblogs.com/0111221/ “Babies are born every day without an iPod. We will get there.” - Adam Sohn, the head of public relations for Microsoft’s Zune division. ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
RE: Experts
-Original Message- From: brin-l-boun...@mccmedia.com [mailto:brin-l-boun...@mccmedia.com] On Behalf Of William T Goodall Sent: Sunday, January 04, 2009 6:35 AM To: Brin-L Subject: Experts http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2009/jan/04/financial-crisis-anxiety [...] In times like these, everyone should have a book by their bedside to reach for at three in the morning. If the Bible doesn't work for you, Philip Tetlock's nicely oxymoronic volume Expert Political Judgment might be an alternative. Tetlock's book is based on two decades of research into 284 people who made their living commenting or offering advice on political and economic trends. He asked them simply to do what they apparently did best: predict what would happen in the world next in answer to specific questions. Would oil prices rise or fall, would there be a boom or a bust, would we go to war? And so on. When the study concluded, in 2003, Tetlock's experts had made 82,361 forecasts and the results were correlated with the facts as they had turned out. I don't differ with Tetlock's essential findings: the pronouncements of most professional pundits in the areas of economics or geopolitics are less than worthless. I've seen separate documentation that, if you use a broker, you will, on average, do slightly worse than simply investing in a broad based index fund. However, having said that, I think that the implications of his work might lead one to overstate the case; to state that there is no worth in studying or trying to understand finance or geopolitics. The former has been argued extensively here, so let me go to the latter. We know, for example, that the Bush White house had total disdain for the experts in nation building. After the successful defeat of the Iraq army, the provisional authority dismissed the experts in the field, and went there own way, relying on totally unproven techniques. The results were a disaster. In 2006, the US put its COIN expert in charge of the Iraq war. Since then, the US has done much better. Thus, we have a case were the experts were clearly in the right. Thus, we seem to have a good example of taking expertise with a grain of salt, instead of totally disdaining them. Dan M. ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Irregulars question about Culture
I decided to resubscribe to the Culture mailing list (after Comcast took over my Roadrunner account I was automatically unsubscribed) partially because things are now slowing down from my busiest year ever and I will probably have free time. I followed the FAQ directions to send a message with subscribe culture in the body to listmana...@busstop.org. It seemed to go through, but I have received no culture email in a day, and my test message failed. Does anyone have any suggestions as to what I did wrong? Dan M. ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Scouted: U.S. to collapse in next two years?
On Jan 2, 2009, at 8:35 PM, dsummersmi...@comcast.net wrote: From the Wall Street Journal: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123051100709638419.html As if Things Weren't Bad Enough, Russian Professor Predicts End of U.S. In Moscow, Igor Panarin's Forecasts Are All the Rage; America 'Disintegrates' in 2010 I read this a few weeks ago and got a good chuckle out of it. It shows than Americans aren't the only ones who can be clueless about how things work in other countries. :-) Dan M. Well, one element of it is almost certainly true -- the USA that we'll be living in in 2010 will not be the USA as we know it. If we continue with business as usual, the mostly-completed process of running the country into the ground will very likely reach a point of no return before then. I'm betting there will be some outside-the-box thinking during this next administration that will change course to some degree -- the big question is whether it will be enough of a course change soon enough to avoid the hard landing. Listen, when you get home tonight, you're gonna be confronted by the instinct to drink a lot. Trust that instinct. Manage the pain. Don't try to be a hero. -- Toby Ziegler ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Irregulars question about Culture
At 07:26 PM Sunday 1/4/2009, Dan M wrote: I decided to resubscribe to the Culture mailing list (after Comcast took over my Roadrunner account I was automatically unsubscribed) partially because things are now slowing down from my busiest year ever and I will probably have free time. I followed the FAQ directions to send a message with subscribe culture in the body to listmana...@busstop.org. It seemed to go through, but I have received no culture email in a day, and my test message failed. Does anyone have any suggestions as to what I did wrong? Dan M. Nope. Every now and then I subscribe to that list and then sometime later seem to have been dropped. I certainly hope the Minds in the future work better than the one which hosts that list . . . ;) IIRC Charlie Bell has something to do with that list, and is on this list? Hello? Help? . . . ronn! :) ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
RE: Scouted: U.S. to collapse in next two years?
-Original Message- From: brin-l-boun...@mccmedia.com [mailto:brin-l-boun...@mccmedia.com] On Behalf Of Bruce Bostwick Sent: Sunday, January 04, 2009 7:49 PM To: Killer Bs (David Brin et al) Discussion Subject: Re: Scouted: U.S. to collapse in next two years? On Jan 2, 2009, at 8:35 PM, dsummersmi...@comcast.net wrote: From the Wall Street Journal: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123051100709638419.html As if Things Weren't Bad Enough, Russian Professor Predicts End of U.S. In Moscow, Igor Panarin's Forecasts Are All the Rage; America 'Disintegrates' in 2010 I read this a few weeks ago and got a good chuckle out of it. It shows than Americans aren't the only ones who can be clueless about how things work in other countries. :-) Dan M. Well, one element of it is almost certainly true -- the USA that we'll be living in in 2010 will not be the USA as we know it. If we continue with business as usual, the mostly-completed process of running the country into the ground will very likely reach a point of no return before then Ah, I'd really like some hard data to support that hyperbola. As messed up as Bush was, by most measure, the US is far better off than most countries. Take, for example, one I worry about the most: foreign debt as a percentage of GDP. It is now, by my rough calculations for 2008, at about 45% of GDP. While I think this is bad, it's much better than Great Britain, where it stands at 380%. If you are over 40, you should remember how Japan was going to blow the US out of the water in the '80s. China is the new champonly they are finding their growth is sliding from 10% per year down to a far lower level that folks are guessing at. We know industrial output is down from last year, so they have as much trouble with the trade imbalance as we do. The US is far less densely populated than any other developed country, its air and water suppliers are far less polluted than 40 years ago, and racism has fallen to the point where we've been able to elect a black president. And yet, you sing we're on the eve of destruction? Dan M. ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Irregulars question about Culture
IIRC Charlie Bell has something to do with that list, and is on this list? Hello? Help? Yea, Charlie's the guy to talk to. I could be wrong but I don't think that there has been any list traffic for over a day, so you haven't missed anything. Doug ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Scouted: U.S. to collapse in next two years?
Surely Canada Australia are both far less densely populated than the United States? Regards, Wayne Eddy The US is far less densely populated than any other developed country, its air and water suppliers are far less polluted than 40 years ago, and racism has fallen to the point where we've been able to elect a black president. And yet, you sing we're on the eve of destruction? Dan M. ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Irregulars question about Culture
On 05/01/2009, at 12:26 PM, Dan M wrote: I followed the FAQ directions to send a message with subscribe culture in the body to listmana...@busstop.org. No, you didn't follow the directions at all, or you followed fossilised ones you found on the interwebs instead of going to www.culturelist.org : try making the subject subscribe culture, and sending it to m...@culturelist.org We haven't been on busstop for about 4 years-ish - certainly since a while before my Big Lap began. Charlie. ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Scouted: U.S. to collapse in next two years?
On 05/01/2009, at 6:22 PM, Wayne Eddy wrote: Surely Canada Australia are both far less densely populated than the United States? He said developed country. The former of those you mentioned is a developed southern border, and the latter, a developed coastline... Charlie. (Pedantic for humour value) ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Irregulars question about Culture
At 01:37 AM Monday 1/5/2009, Charlie Bell wrote: On 05/01/2009, at 12:26 PM, Dan M wrote: I followed the FAQ directions to send a message with subscribe culture in the body to listmana...@busstop.org. No, you didn't follow the directions at all, or you followed fossilised ones you found on the interwebs instead of going to www.culturelist.org : try making the subject subscribe culture, and sending it to m...@culturelist.org We haven't been on busstop for about 4 years-ish - certainly since a while before my Big Lap began. Charlie. Is it supposed to respond in some way? . . . ronn! :) ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Irregulars question about Culture
On 05/01/2009, at 6:46 PM, Ronn! Blankenship wrote: Is it supposed to respond in some way? Yeah. Mail me offlist if you're having issues. C. ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
