yootskah

I think your work is definitely thought provoking and interesting. However, I think you made a little too much effort to be "thought provoking" when it came to your discussions of climate research.

Your pithy style works well for a lot of the "correlations" you note and dive into. Climate research is a very mature and widely expansive field of knowledge and it was a mistake to try and treat it similarly.

Here is an article written about the controversy.

• edit - More links.

Here is Nature's take.

Union of Concerned Scientists

Even business friendly Bloomberg.

Care to elaborate on why you supported SOPA? This is definitely a relevant issue to many people here.

But shouldn't an idea based on foundations more substantial that "gut" feelings be able to be expressed mathematically?

Not to say a good model should be everything, but why would increased rigor be a bad thing?

I too have wondered how most people seem to justify military action in absolute terms or at the very least with blanket caveats that absolve that which seems to me to be the height of moral ambiguity.

It's not just Israel and Palestine, look at the US standards on airstrikes. IIRC, during Iraq (and perhaps it continues still) the defined acceptable number civilian casualties in taking out a priority target was 30. Just take a minute and think about that. Consider the implications of waging a military campaign against, not an organized sociopolitical construct like a nation-state, but what is essentially an ideology predicated on societal disenfranchisement with such a standard.

But take, for a moment, the raw calculus of the thing. There exists a target, whom we feel confident represents a threat to either: our military abroad, our interests abroad, our civilians at home, all of the above, that circumstances do not offer a reasonable opportunity of non-violent neutralization. Let's say that the threat posed by this individual ranges from the equivalent deaths of 10 lives to 100000 lives (just roughly figuring local paramilitary/terrorism coordinator to Osama bin Laden). So the idea is that, by and large, we will be saving more lives than we will be ending/ruining by bombing the building we think they are in.

That, in an abstract way, makes some kind of sense, right? We reluctantly kill some so that more may live in a sort of "sealing the hatches on a sinking ship" kind of way.

But here is where the rub comes in for me: what if that building is in Brooklyn? What if that building is in Berlin? Or Tokyo? Or Tel Aviv? If the US government discovered a terrorist cell operating in a suburban neighborhood on Long Island would it be cool to simply send an F-18 overhead and drop a guided bomb knowing full well it would wipe out all the families next door?

No, it would not. We would never do that.

So the moral calculus of the governments of the USA and Tel Aviv weighs the lives of the people in Sadr City and Gaza as less important than that of their own people. Not worthless, of course (which is certainly an improvement over centuries past, but anyway), but they are certainly willing to knowingly, and intentionally, kill innocent people; including women and children in order to promote the health of their citizens and their manifestation of their geopolitical ideal.

Someone tell me how that is different in a purely moral sense than what Hamas or Al Qaeda is doing? How is one side "good" and the other "evil"? All I can see is "us" and "them".