Thanks to the lovely Tangerine for letting us use her as our new unit symbol. 
People, Karzai's remarks about the U.S. colluding with the Taliban should not be taken at face value. The fact is, he's trying to unite portions of his country and delegitimize the Taliban as being foreign puppets. If this offends you, then please think a little deeper at the game that's being played here. I don't mind being demonized if that's what will win the war. I do mind losing the war. Despite what you hear the pundits say, we are winning, and this is another step in that direction.
Woohoo, I finally found some good, local, Panshjir emeralds! Time to set these puppies and find some rich white folks to sell them to 
I'm just going to start posting workouts from Crossfit. I won't actually do them. Just post them.
I'm thinking about writing an alternative history story. In it, George Lucas casts Heath Ledger to play Anakin Skywalker in the prequels. This would have been a logical choice, as Ledger had just made a name for himself after A Knight's Tale and The Patriot. This also would have changed the plot for Episode I to accommodate Anakin being around 19-20 (the same age as Luke when he set off on his hero's journey). The resulting movie is so good that Lucas relinquishes directorial control of the subsequent movies to Ridley Scott, who blows the next second film out of the water, and to Joss Whedon who handles the third film in his typical form, since he gets to kill off some beloved characters. The three prequels are such hits that Star Wars fans have serious debates between which are better, the prequels or the originals, much like Star Trek fans do. George Lucas gives control of LucasFilm to 20th Century Fox, and dies in peace.
Heath Ledger and Natalie Portman actually get together during the filming, and stay together. She convinces him not to do "Brokeback Mountain". He still plays the Joker and becomes the second person to play both a Skywalker and the Joker. He does not kill himself, because he's married to Natalie Portman, which rocks. "The Dark Knight Rises" sucks less because he comes back at the end of it, and Batman doesn't fake his death with a nuclear bomb.
Upon coming to the U.S., four of the 9/11 hijackers become such huge Star Wars geeks that they instead go to Hollywood to try to become extras in the movies. They are cast as Sand People, giving them purpose in life. They report the 9/11 plot to the authorities, and prevent the destruction of the WTC. A CIA drone kills Bin Laden before he can murder Masood. The U.S. sends in Special Operations Teams with air support to help the Northern Alliance oust the Taliban from Afghanistan. Masood becomes the first president of the free Afghanistan and the limited U.S. presence returns home for Christmas, 2003.
The sudden regime toppling in Afghanistan scares Saddam Hussein into allowing U.N. weapons inspectors unlimited access to all his facilities, and bowing to pressure from the Iraqi people he allows sections of his government to be run by Shiites, which effectively reduce him to a figurehead. Iran sees this as their opportunity and attempt to renew hostilities with Iraq, but the new Afghan government to their East promises to allow U.S. airstrikes against Iran if they start a conflict. Two years later, Saddam leaves power and a new democratically elected (still corrupt, but hey, it's Iraq) president comes to power.
Due to the lack of fighting two wars, the U.S. government heads off the housing bubble before it becomes a major problem, which prevents the banks from collapsing. The government requires American corporations to invest a certain position of their production capital in the U.S., which leads to a new boom of production jobs. iPods are produced in the United States in a majority-automated factory in Mississippi, which still provides thousands of jobs.
The budget surplus, combined with the renewed fervor in space brought about by Star Wars (which renews interest in Star Trek, as well), prompts the government to invest in the space program once again. Coupling with private space industry, the government helps fund the first mission to land humans on an asteroid, followed in 2009 by the completion of the first manned mission to Mars. The governments of the U.S., China, Russia, Great Britain, and India compromise on the petition to build a Death Star and agree to build a permanent starship that is self-propelled and capable of sustained interplanetary flight, and use asteroid-mined resources as fuel. The keel is laid in low orbit of the U.S.S. Enterprise in 2012, with plans to lay the keel of the U.S.S. Millenium Falcon in 2015. This opens an entirely new industry to support the highly lucrative space exploration and resource exploitation.
Twilight is written, but never makes it to press. Stephanie Meyer instead just writes Star Wars fan fiction.
Basically what I'm saying is it all went wrong when George Lucas fucked up the prequels.
Heath Ledger and Natalie Portman actually get together during the filming, and stay together. She convinces him not to do "Brokeback Mountain". He still plays the Joker and becomes the second person to play both a Skywalker and the Joker. He does not kill himself, because he's married to Natalie Portman, which rocks. "The Dark Knight Rises" sucks less because he comes back at the end of it, and Batman doesn't fake his death with a nuclear bomb.
Upon coming to the U.S., four of the 9/11 hijackers become such huge Star Wars geeks that they instead go to Hollywood to try to become extras in the movies. They are cast as Sand People, giving them purpose in life. They report the 9/11 plot to the authorities, and prevent the destruction of the WTC. A CIA drone kills Bin Laden before he can murder Masood. The U.S. sends in Special Operations Teams with air support to help the Northern Alliance oust the Taliban from Afghanistan. Masood becomes the first president of the free Afghanistan and the limited U.S. presence returns home for Christmas, 2003.
The sudden regime toppling in Afghanistan scares Saddam Hussein into allowing U.N. weapons inspectors unlimited access to all his facilities, and bowing to pressure from the Iraqi people he allows sections of his government to be run by Shiites, which effectively reduce him to a figurehead. Iran sees this as their opportunity and attempt to renew hostilities with Iraq, but the new Afghan government to their East promises to allow U.S. airstrikes against Iran if they start a conflict. Two years later, Saddam leaves power and a new democratically elected (still corrupt, but hey, it's Iraq) president comes to power.
Due to the lack of fighting two wars, the U.S. government heads off the housing bubble before it becomes a major problem, which prevents the banks from collapsing. The government requires American corporations to invest a certain position of their production capital in the U.S., which leads to a new boom of production jobs. iPods are produced in the United States in a majority-automated factory in Mississippi, which still provides thousands of jobs.
The budget surplus, combined with the renewed fervor in space brought about by Star Wars (which renews interest in Star Trek, as well), prompts the government to invest in the space program once again. Coupling with private space industry, the government helps fund the first mission to land humans on an asteroid, followed in 2009 by the completion of the first manned mission to Mars. The governments of the U.S., China, Russia, Great Britain, and India compromise on the petition to build a Death Star and agree to build a permanent starship that is self-propelled and capable of sustained interplanetary flight, and use asteroid-mined resources as fuel. The keel is laid in low orbit of the U.S.S. Enterprise in 2012, with plans to lay the keel of the U.S.S. Millenium Falcon in 2015. This opens an entirely new industry to support the highly lucrative space exploration and resource exploitation.
Twilight is written, but never makes it to press. Stephanie Meyer instead just writes Star Wars fan fiction.
Basically what I'm saying is it all went wrong when George Lucas fucked up the prequels.
I just had a long argument about gay rights with a friend on Facebook. Unfortunately he deleted my posts and unfriended me. I still think that's a victory, but not the good kind.
Recently I got the following as a reply to an online discussion about what forms of religion or belief pre-homo sapiens practiced.
"Well, a lot of Christians have a lot of theories on this. However, the one I subscribe to because it most closely aligns with both the Bible and the science I've seen are that macro evolution never happened. Also, the Bible does have massive time skips (Gen. 1-12 covers more time than possibly the rest of the Bible combined). Even so, I've studied scientist with both views, well respected in biology, archeology, and geology. Through a lot of study, the most logical explanation I've seen is that the world is anywhere from 6,000-10,000 years old. I believe Adam was formed out of the dust on the sixth day just like the Bible says, thus God would be the God he served. Of all the fossil records regarding the "missing links" in human evolution, every single one has been eventually proven to be either an ape or a human (or in some cases like the Nebraska man, a pig fossil). Lucy, for example, was held up as the first step towards human evolution...and then after researching it found out it was really just a chimp fossil much younger than they thought. There was one that was held up for about a quarter of a century as the missing link until they figured out it was just a human skeleton that suffered from arthritis that had misshapen his bone structure. Then there have been a few that they realized were intentionally faked. One instance was (I want to say a German scientist, I'd have to look this one up) a paleontologist that flat out lied and knowingly attached a chimp jawbone to a human skull. There's also countless fossils of animals that would supposedly never would've live together that wind up fossilized next to or even touching each other. In the 90s they found a carnivorous dinosaur with an amphibian from supposedly millions of years earlier in it's jaw like it was eating it. There's a famous fossil of a tree that spans sedimentary levels supposedly millions of years apart. You couldn't fossilize a whole tree like that unless the levels formed fairly quickly or else the tree would die and rot after the first level killed it's roots, yet the tree has fossilized trees at the top. There's also one of a trilobite, an early aquatic creature like a horseshoe crab, in what looks like a fossilized human shoe print. I have whole books on the subject, but even many pro-evolution biologist and paleontologist say there's a lot of holes in evolutionary theory that need answers. Though, even if evolution were conclusively proved one day, it wouldn't mean Christianity would be disproved. C.S. Lewis for example was a theistic evolutionist that believed God controlled the evolutionary process and added the soul once human evolution was complete. I disagree with this, but it does show that faith in the Christian God isn't contingent on the correctness or incorrectness of the theory of evolution."
I didn't know that people like this were real.
"Well, a lot of Christians have a lot of theories on this. However, the one I subscribe to because it most closely aligns with both the Bible and the science I've seen are that macro evolution never happened. Also, the Bible does have massive time skips (Gen. 1-12 covers more time than possibly the rest of the Bible combined). Even so, I've studied scientist with both views, well respected in biology, archeology, and geology. Through a lot of study, the most logical explanation I've seen is that the world is anywhere from 6,000-10,000 years old. I believe Adam was formed out of the dust on the sixth day just like the Bible says, thus God would be the God he served. Of all the fossil records regarding the "missing links" in human evolution, every single one has been eventually proven to be either an ape or a human (or in some cases like the Nebraska man, a pig fossil). Lucy, for example, was held up as the first step towards human evolution...and then after researching it found out it was really just a chimp fossil much younger than they thought. There was one that was held up for about a quarter of a century as the missing link until they figured out it was just a human skeleton that suffered from arthritis that had misshapen his bone structure. Then there have been a few that they realized were intentionally faked. One instance was (I want to say a German scientist, I'd have to look this one up) a paleontologist that flat out lied and knowingly attached a chimp jawbone to a human skull. There's also countless fossils of animals that would supposedly never would've live together that wind up fossilized next to or even touching each other. In the 90s they found a carnivorous dinosaur with an amphibian from supposedly millions of years earlier in it's jaw like it was eating it. There's a famous fossil of a tree that spans sedimentary levels supposedly millions of years apart. You couldn't fossilize a whole tree like that unless the levels formed fairly quickly or else the tree would die and rot after the first level killed it's roots, yet the tree has fossilized trees at the top. There's also one of a trilobite, an early aquatic creature like a horseshoe crab, in what looks like a fossilized human shoe print. I have whole books on the subject, but even many pro-evolution biologist and paleontologist say there's a lot of holes in evolutionary theory that need answers. Though, even if evolution were conclusively proved one day, it wouldn't mean Christianity would be disproved. C.S. Lewis for example was a theistic evolutionist that believed God controlled the evolutionary process and added the soul once human evolution was complete. I disagree with this, but it does show that faith in the Christian God isn't contingent on the correctness or incorrectness of the theory of evolution."
I didn't know that people like this were real.
I’ve often marveled at how political and economic experts try so hard to continue minor “course corrections” that just serve to ignore the major problems. There are two factors that are unarguably the most important factors in the future (and present) of global economics, which have widespread effects on our entire system to produce and acquire goods and services. Those two factors are automation and population.
These are simply facts that are not open for debate. Automation has made the number of people necessary to produce a certain product fewer and fewer. The continued growth of the population has made human labor a more abundant resource, which according to the law of supply and demand means that the value of human labor is going to continue to decrease. What this leaves us with is a bit of a conundrum: more is produced more efficiently with fewer people having the ability to gain access to it.
This means that the old adage of “the harder you work, the more successful you’ll be” cannot be true. There will always be someone who can do your work cheaper than you, and even if not there will eventually be an automated solution that you cannnot compete with. Sure, there are still plenty of fields that require imagination and creativity that cannot be automated or mass-produced, but in the realm of manufacturing and basic services there is no sustainability of our current system.
The falsehoods that the population has been plied with are almost disgraceful in this respect. We are consistently told that we are a service-based economy, or an “economy of ideas”. That’s fine and dandy for a population of a few thousand. But when you have a population of a few hundred million, or a globalized economy of ten billion, then it is sadly laughable to even suggest that even a noticeable fraction of those people will be able to make a living for themselves through their “ideas”. Simply put, in the meritocratic system there must be labor jobs that are able to provide the income necessary to meet the basic needs of the workforce, and be able to afford the products that they are working to produce. That’s where the system is broken down.
As I see no future in which the population dramatically decreases (aside from nuclear Armageddon or terrible natural disaster) and our technology is not going to become less capable or less efficient, there seems to be a collision course between our ideals of “hard work = life success” and the reality of “we don’t really need everyone to work hard”. This is horrifying to most of us, because our innate sense of fairness is threatened. I have heard on more than one occasion that if someone isn’t willing to work then they deserve to starve. But should that be the case if there is abundant food, no work to be done, and if working would even perhaps be counter-productive? I think not.
What is needed is a rational discussion regarding the possibilities to plan our future access to resources. We cannot afford to let our passions guide us in this, and we cannot continue to ignore these facts. Unfortunately, what I expect instead is a torrent of hyperbole, from calling any attempt to address these issues as “communism” or “fascism” (which I’ve always been fascinated by the contradiction thereof).
These are simply facts that are not open for debate. Automation has made the number of people necessary to produce a certain product fewer and fewer. The continued growth of the population has made human labor a more abundant resource, which according to the law of supply and demand means that the value of human labor is going to continue to decrease. What this leaves us with is a bit of a conundrum: more is produced more efficiently with fewer people having the ability to gain access to it.
This means that the old adage of “the harder you work, the more successful you’ll be” cannot be true. There will always be someone who can do your work cheaper than you, and even if not there will eventually be an automated solution that you cannnot compete with. Sure, there are still plenty of fields that require imagination and creativity that cannot be automated or mass-produced, but in the realm of manufacturing and basic services there is no sustainability of our current system.
The falsehoods that the population has been plied with are almost disgraceful in this respect. We are consistently told that we are a service-based economy, or an “economy of ideas”. That’s fine and dandy for a population of a few thousand. But when you have a population of a few hundred million, or a globalized economy of ten billion, then it is sadly laughable to even suggest that even a noticeable fraction of those people will be able to make a living for themselves through their “ideas”. Simply put, in the meritocratic system there must be labor jobs that are able to provide the income necessary to meet the basic needs of the workforce, and be able to afford the products that they are working to produce. That’s where the system is broken down.
As I see no future in which the population dramatically decreases (aside from nuclear Armageddon or terrible natural disaster) and our technology is not going to become less capable or less efficient, there seems to be a collision course between our ideals of “hard work = life success” and the reality of “we don’t really need everyone to work hard”. This is horrifying to most of us, because our innate sense of fairness is threatened. I have heard on more than one occasion that if someone isn’t willing to work then they deserve to starve. But should that be the case if there is abundant food, no work to be done, and if working would even perhaps be counter-productive? I think not.
What is needed is a rational discussion regarding the possibilities to plan our future access to resources. We cannot afford to let our passions guide us in this, and we cannot continue to ignore these facts. Unfortunately, what I expect instead is a torrent of hyperbole, from calling any attempt to address these issues as “communism” or “fascism” (which I’ve always been fascinated by the contradiction thereof).
The recent fervor over Hobby Lobby reminded me of this. One time I was checking out at Hobby Lobby and the cashier commented on how much easier it would be if they had bar code scanners. I asked why they didn't have them and she said that Hobby Lobby's owners believe that bar codes are the mark of the Beast and refuse to allow the use of them. So that's the type of people we're dealing with here...
