Don't Get Me Started
Should Fracking be Regulated at the State Level? There should be regulations at a worldwide level. There are basic health and resource management concerns which should be enforced everywhere, and should not be escapable by the greedy.
A recently published study found that glyphosate “may serve as one of the drivers for antibiotic resistance,” and that it may contribute to “the proliferation of plant and animal pathogens.”
Countable
Many in the scientific community say that we don’t know enough about the ecological and health effects of glyphosate, and that more research is necessary.
What do you think?
Should the U.S. ban glyphosate? Increase funding to scientific research into its impacts? Why or why not?
Roundup is not the problem. Being afraid of things we don’t understand is the problem. Roundup is one of the safest herbicides we have, but the word safe applied to things that are designed to kill something, even plants, is deceiving. Compared to other treatments, glyphosate (Roundup) requires fewer, lighter treatments, completely the opposite of what most people think. I wrote at length about Monsanto and Roundup in this post a few years back. Monsanto isn’t evil and neither is Roundup. What is evil is the targeting that environmentalists do in association with their delusions about clean food.
I also find myself repeating this more and more often these days. One study does not a science make. One study is possibly a anomaly. Two studies begins to look like real data. Three studies and you might be onto something. Get back to me when there is as much evidence that Roundup causes cancer as there is evidence (or a lack of evidence) that it is cancer causing. The entire paragraph that the sentence is in on the Countable.com site is fallacious; as in begging the question, the real begging the question not the popular refrain begging the question, which is the opposite of fallacious. But confusing fallacy names aside, there can’t be any of the scary things mentioned associated with the herbicide, because there is no data linking it to the scary things other than popular belief trying to find causes for things that may not even be happening.
Learn and understand, not fear and react. That should be a modern mantra.
Countable.com comment expanded.
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| Countable |
If “money is speech” then requiring that there be no political contributions on the part of anybody is revoking their first amendment rights. Unconstitutional, just on the face of the proposal. But the problem really is that money may be speech, but political contributions are bribes, and the contributors know this just as well as the politicians do. Political operations should be funded by the government, directly. As a function of ensuring the best government we can get. Financial contributions accepted by a candidate or representative should be seen as the corruption that it is.
Now, this was specifically offered as a solution to yet another of the Orange Hate-Monkey’s rage-tweets about the witch hunt that was out to get him being biased against him. About investigators working for the justice department being free to voice their opinions through donations to political campaigns. In that light, this is just more smoke. it doesn’t help the problem in question and only obscures it more. I expect better service than this, Countable.
The latest whiz-bang idea from Donald Trump is this idiocy he calls the Space Force. Even his Vice President, a strangely quiet man lost in the shadow of Trump’s vast vanity, has gotten in on the deal. Yesterday he was promoting the idea publicly. Today on the Texas Standard I hear that Maddog Mattis is gungho to get right on this stupid idea and make it a reality. That’s weird, because I thought even Maddog was against it. When a guy nicknamed Maddog doesn’t want to do your idea, you should know it’s probably even crazier and dumber than you might have thought.
Let me spell out just how dumb this idea is, from the perspective of decades of Science Fiction reading. The Earth sits at the bottom of a pretty deep gravity well. It’s face would be more visibly pockmarked than it is were it not for the wind and water action on the surface, not to mention the verdant tree growth, masquing the damage inflicted on the Earth from simple rocks that it has encountered in it’s annual journey around the sun. There are tons of rocks out there in space. Tons of them. Asteroids that could extinguish all life on this planet, in an instant. If we want to destroy any spot on the globe, that potential is out there right now. It is just waiting for anyone, anyone, to go out there, strap a rocket motor to the thing, push it this way or that and hey, presto! you’ve vaporized the target of your choice on the surface of the earth, and probably several hundred square kilometers around it.
The stupidity of believing we could continue our warlike ways into space was spelled out quite well in Robert A. Heinlein’s libertarian exploration novel, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. In that book we accompany the main character as he plots revolution against the Earth that sent him to a penal colony on the Moon. In order to avoid any major spoilers, I will simply observe that lobbing rocks at the Earth figures heavily in the plot of that novel. A Space Force is akin to the stupidity of placing the exiles from the Earth at the top of the Earth’s gravity well and daring them to get back at us. I expect a lunar penal colony will be the next great idea that Trumpists will come up with, that’s how dumb the idea of a Space Force is. The world of Starship Troopers is waiting for us down that route through time, and I don’t recommend that future, either.
What life on this planet needs to understand is that we are at war with the rest of the universe, because the universe wants to kill us. Everywhere outside of the blanket of atmosphere that covers the Earth, death awaits. Gasping, freezing, boiling, death. We don’t need a Space Force because we don’t need to militarize space. Everything about going to space is a weapon. The rocket engines are weapons, the ships are weapons, that lug nut you forgot to tighten properly is a weapon after it comes loose, hurtling through space at thousands of miles an hour just waiting to intersect some habitat somewhere and destroy it. We cannot be at war with other people in space, because killing each other is far, far too easy to do out there. A moment of carelessness and everyone dies. Not exactly the place for the murderous or the stupid. Our only hope for the future is demilitarization, and it’s a pretty faint hope at that.
The demilitarization of space is the opposite of a Space Force. This is all aside from the fact that a Space Force is probably just another boondoggle like Reagan’s Star Wars. A boondoggle that will go nowhere and cost billions. It’s a stupid idea endorsed by stupid people. Or as Stonekettle Station put it, the money goes in the black hole and never comes out.
Splitting this so-called space force off from the Air Force (and presumably pulling the space-related components out of the other services as well), what does that give us that we don’t have now — and not just give us, but give us to such a degree that it justifies the cost and significantly increased complexity? What are the distinct requirements, the technology, skillsets, logistics, communications, training, facilities, targets, strategies, tactics, objectives, and missions that will define this space force? And how are those distinctly different from the current Air Force, distinct enough to warrant an entirely separate service with its enormous associated cost?
Why both an Air Force and a Space Force, instead of a single Aerospace Force?
Like everything else with Trump: what are the details?
Stonekettle Station on Facebook
Apparently I was being too subtle in the article above. Let me be more blunt. If you think that militarizing space is a good idea, if you think that Donald Trump isn’t proposing this project just to the line the pockets of his donors, then you are a member of group I refer to as stupid people. You are the kind of person that watches Iron Sky and masturbates to the images of swastikas on the screen.
Just FYI, if you watch Iron Sky and find you can’t laugh at it, then you have no sense of humor. You take yourself too seriously. You take your country too seriously (if you are an American) It is a European film made specifically to poke fun at Americans. Watch it again and again until you find the humor in it. That is my suggestion to anyone who finds they can’t laugh at themselves. If you undertake this effort maybe, just maybe, you will cease to be a member of the group I labeled stupid people.
We can’t realistically militarize space. Believing otherwise is to fall for storytelling tropes. If we don’t get past this self-hatred, we are done for as a species.
Featured image screencapped from empireonline.com. De-Orangification completed here.
I’ve been using Countable for awhile now. Every now and then the notifications and articles go completely wrong on some subliminal level. Like this one, apparently asking me if the Feds found fraud in Hospice care,
[T]he report shows that sometimes, patient needs have been ignored.
For instance, it found that hospices provide significantly fewer services on the weekends than during the week. Patients’ pain levels don’t diminish over the weekend, raising concerns of inadequate pain management.
This can put patients at serious risk, because when they elect hospice care, they are waiving their right for Medicare payment for curative treatment. In some of the cases the report documents, patients were not even aware that they were being enrolled in hospice.
Countable, Feds Find Fraud and Flaws in Hospice Care
Not providing as much care on the weekends is a red flag for regulators in health industries. This is exactly the kinds of things that regulators (if they existed) would be empowered to investigate. It’s a good thing for these fraudulent operations that Republicans are against hospice existing in the first place. Their religious base doesn’t believe they’ll ever die or that bad things happen to good people. So they won’t be anxious to do anything more than shut all hospice down the way they want to shut Planned Parenthood down. But hospice is as essential as Planned Parenthood is, and we need there to be oversight of these facilities.
We also need people to recognize that end of life does occur, but let’s stick to problems we can solve. Starting with getting oversight in place so that the fraud is stopped.
NATO’s mandate should be expanded to counteract the information warfare tactics that it’s historic enemies have now taken up. This should include subverting the populations of enemy countries with access to unfiltered internet information and funding for the poor in those countries.
We are the most successful nation in the history of the world. It’s time we started acting like it.
As an aside, I wasn’t aware that agreeing or disagreeing was possible for established historical facts. I mean, either it was on this date, or it wasn’t. If it wasn’t on this date, then what does that say about the reliability of the news source in question? That they can’t even get established facts correct? (Truman Library Record)
Comment on Countable website. Recycled for the question “Should the US stay in NATO?” At least that one was really a question.
“Article 1, Section 2 of the United States Constitution mandates that the U.S. House of Representatives be reapportioned every ten years after conducting a national census of all residents. In addition to the reapportionment of the U.S. Congress, Census data are used to draw legislative district boundaries. Census data also are used to determine funding allocations for the distribution of an estimated $675 billion of federal funds each year.”
Countable
The key phrase here is “national census of all residents”. All RESIDENTS not citizens. If you wanted to quibble about the difference I would stand on the reality of the fact that residents of an area are the citizens of that area. There is no other way to define citizenship and have it be meaningful. Pretending that there are those among us who are not full members of society is the first step towards creating an underclass which can be used in the same fashion that slaves were used. This move towards solidifying an underclass, forcing people to either declare citizenship during the census or go into hiding, is nothing less than an attempt to create a modern slavery system. This move must be stopped.
There should be no question about citizenship because residency presumes citizenship.
Comment on the Federal Register, Proposed Information Collection; Comment Request; 2020 Census
President Trump arrives today at the annual NATO summit in Brussels fixated on the fact that most members are falling short of defense spending targets, going so far as to declare that the current state of affairs “just doesn’t work” for the U.S.
Countable, By the Numbers: NATO Defense Spending
I don’t support anything the Orange Hate-Monkey (OHM) does, even when what he does happens to coincide with the things I think should be done. They should be done, just by someone else.
Someone else.
NATO? I was never a fan of NATO until Vladimir Putin and his OHM puppet decided they wanted to destroy it. Now, I’m thinking I love it. I think NATO should go cyber and cripple the online infrastructure of Russia until they get rid of Putin and hand back Crimea. I think we can do that much more cheaply than building tanks and planes and training soldiers, the things that NATO currently does.
Which is why Putin has adopted this information warfare strategy himself. Because it does less damage to the customers he hopes to milk after he destroys the US alliance against Russia. So we Americans and our allies should conduct information warfare on him instead of letting ourselves be trolled like the OHM is doing now. This strategy worked for the Moon race, why wouldn’t it work now?
