You ain't kidding. Talk about trying to rewrite a narrative with bogus claims.
The 2003 Iraq invasion had nothing to do with warnings from informants about state secrets.
The idea very idea that there was any concern about Iraq's capability to wage war is a joke. Iraq was pretty well softened up by no fly zones and sanctions, so as to be sufficiently anemic, and decapitating the incumbent dictator for life (literally) was mostly just sour grapes for him going off script, and besmirching the sanctity of Kuwait.
It was gloves off for Iraq, as soon as the 9/11 hijackings unfolded. Literally next month people were whispering about Iraq, even though Afghanistan was well understood as the official point of origin for the attacks.
> It was gloves off for Iraq, as soon as the 9/11 hijackings unfolded. Literally next month people were whispering about Iraq, even though Afghanistan was well understood as the official point of origin for the attacks.
Not only that, even though Afghanistan played an actual role, the majority of the hijackers were Saudi. People sort of mention that in passing and then go back to pretending it has no relevance.
The point being that, capturing or killing the associated individuals still alive, to be held responsible, meant transgressing the territory of Afghanistan.
Nonetheless, I'd agree that waging war on Afghanistan, The Country would be just as silly as waging war on Saudi Arabia. It's like Canada waging war on both the United States and Italy, for something The Mafia perpetrated.
Meanwhile, war with Iraq was akin to Canada invading Norway for it's whale blubber, because the Norweigan king sunk a fleet of Danish whaling ships ten years prior, and was now suspected of hoarding a cache of illegal harpoons. Thus triggering a cascade of geopolitical events, whereby Canada stepped in to defend Denmark, thus angering a member of the Gambino family, who subsequently demolished the CN tower, for tampering with Denmark's sovereignty. As if to say that had Norway not attacked Denmark, the CN tower would not have been destroyed by a hijacked train derailment.
I kind of developed a hunch that maybe the Zika outbreak might've been cooked up in some lab in Siberia or Mongolia, and got dumped into South America as a warning shot. But honestly, who knows?
Everything feels like the rumblings of full-spectrum warfare these days.
This is FUD, to be sure. Don't think so? Hear me out.
If wind turbines are even 10 stories tall, then they introduce the same atmospheric disruption as a residential or commercial building of the same height. That we are not researching the impact of urban sprawl with the same level of scrutiny is telling. What of smoke stacks, cooling towers and high rises? Hmmm?
Meanwhile, the idea that removing kinetic energy from a 400 foot thick layer of a wind's pattern's convection and coriolis path represents atmospheric drag any worse than trees is an idea to be laughed at. What about thermals from parking lots? What about desertification?
Indeed, watch all the hurricanes disappear, because we soaked up all that motion with fan blades dotting the terrain. Does anyone believe that a wind shadow carved into the Atlantic coastline with an array of modern windmills could effectively disrupt hurricane alley? I sure don't.
And no, I don't think that's a grossly oversimplified comparison.
There's a big difference between a real brain perceiving artificial stilumation as if it were authentic sensation, versus a virtual simulation of a sentient entity that only exists as data in motion within a volatile memory store.
It's a far greater deception, for an entire universe of distinct sentient entities to exist as a stream of oscillations in a digital circuit, imagining themselves as mortal flesh, than it is for ten, or a thousand, or one billion fleshy organs to imagine a vicarious life unfolding before them, when they can't even move because they're suspended in brine, hooked up to fluid drips, and stimulated by electrodes.
On the one hand, you have a universe brimming with ephemeral entities that need not live as mortals, and on the other, you have limited fleshy blobs, easily placated by limitless sensation, that would have been miserable fleshy blobs whether they had arms and legs and a face or not.
The individual brain in a vat is better of in the vat, while the simulated universe is utterly tragic and should be destroyed immediately for all the undue suffering it needlessly replicates.
The universe in a VM can never know it's not a faithful replication of a higher genuine reality trying to predict future events by fast forwarding the simulation under an array of probabilities. Mostly because it wouldn't be a useful simulation if it could.
Let's say you can simulate planet earth with 100% fidelity, and you want to know if you should drive to work, or telecommute. So you fire up the simulation, and it shows you a fatal car accident. So you telecommute that day, and work from home. Are you ever going to let the simulated version of yourself learn that it's a simulation?
Nevermind that you could simulate bank robberies until you get away with one, or lotto tickets until you win. The point being that, you'd force your simulated self to look at the simulation that says "drive to work" and then watch what happens, while running it parallel alongside the version that stays home. You run it in fast forward, and 9 out of 10 times a freeway pile up kills you, but you score a million dollar bonus that day, based on an opportunity only available from the office. The saty home version misses out on the bonus that gets snapped up by someone else. You now know that starting the car is 90% dangerous, according to high fidelity simulations that are fully sentient copies of yourself, forbidden from realizing that fact, because their deception is essential to the risks they must verify. How do you know you aren't a deeper layer simulation to a higher version of your true self consulting a virtualized oracle of future events?
To be honest, the most amazing part of your story is everything that happened at the gas station. Not so much that you were caught on camera pumping the gas, but that they went after you for it, and that it wasn't pursued in a civil context. Not even a mailing you a bill, or sending a collections agency after you.
Okay, sure, there was no reason not to go inside and pay cash, and ask what's up with the pump, and maybe tell them to put a sign up, when it's all of maybe $20, maybe $40 at stake for a single tank. But I really want to know the background story from the perspective of the gas station. Like, how bad was the hit on that malfunction for them?
I really have to wonder, like was it a Mom & Pop station, or was it some huge multinational chain? And how long did the incident last? Did they lose an entire underground tank's worth of gas in less than a week, or even one day, with no transactions posted? I see "out of order" signs all the time. How did station employees not notice, and disable the pump in time? How many people got scooped up in the drag net?
They must have lost at least six figures worth of gas, and if it wasn't an independent station, I can only imagine that multiple station attendants lost their job for not disabling the pump. For a gas station to open a criminal investigation, to the tune of police reviewing possibly more than 24 hours of footage, running plates for every car that skipped out on a pump's error message, and making phone calls to track down individuals to dispense a warning under penalty of criminal charges, it must have been a real mess, and a total fiasco for the station owner.
Considering the insurance required for handling hazardous materials in a motor vehicle context, where a sleepy trucker could send an entire 18 wheeler plowing into the pumps, destroying an entire station, or a rusty leaking tank having the same effect, it's surprising that they wanted heads to roll over a malfunctioning credit terminal.
Not long, I left the gas station and received a call from the police within an hour or two, and I kind of remember them telling me it was only happening that morning.
When I started to write this post, I had no intention of creating this rambling essay that might well come straight from a comspiracy nutjob. It is certainly not well supported by any facts that I have readily available. But I really need to vent, so here it is anyway:
I too get the perception (through media!) that the world is becoming more dystopian. But I think that there may be more to that than meets the eye.
I am seriously starting to wonder if social media and internet based media in general have a big part in that.
This is not a single issue IMO. There are several aspects to it: people get offer a much wider spectrum of sources of information and generally tend to prefer thise that have slants more in line with their own views. Also, bad news is more sensational and spreads wider and faster than good news. This lead to a bias in what is reported. Thirdly, and most damning, social media is not only supporting these bubbles that people build around themselves. They are being exploited by actors who post material that is designed to undermine our perception and our opinions. This is apparantly done in subtle ways. Some internet shitstorms are apparently engineered using bots to shape public views on certain topics. This seems to be done to subtly, slowly and purposefully undermine public opinion and steer it towards extreme views.
There was a recent study undertaken of s sample of Twitter messages to Rian Johnson about Star Wars VIII. A substantial fraction of the negative comments were apparently manufactured using bots. This activity appears to be linked to a political motivation, but I do not know how the study reaches that conclusion. But if it is true, it is quite disturbing.
When creating the world wide web, the idealists among us wanted to bring the world closer together and make it more connected and peaceful. I get the suspicion that these good intentions instead bring us closer to an age of renewed nationalism, intolerance and totalitarianism, which is created by maliciously exploring the very freedoms we wanted for everyone.
Hypocrisy but mostly the attempt to unify totally divergent realities, usually by omitting / "forgetting" something.
E.g. you can't be the good guys when you abuse children at your border, so obviously that's fake news (=propaganda by the bad guys) and/or(!) those are criminals anyway (=the propaganda by the bad guys omits those parts showing how what you're doing is the right and overall good thing to do).
Another example where this is readily apparent is Americans and their freedom knee-jerk reflex; all the while the US is a country with some of the most restrictive justice/penal systems in the world, the most powerful surveillance state in the world and also comes with it's own secret court and set of secret laws.
Random quote:
> All men have served their sentence and yet, due to a controversial legal mandate, they remain confined indefinitely.
Not to be snark but New Zealand is not part of the United States. However, their bill of rights does include sections that are similar in scope to the US 5th Amendment.
The 2003 Iraq invasion had nothing to do with warnings from informants about state secrets.
The idea very idea that there was any concern about Iraq's capability to wage war is a joke. Iraq was pretty well softened up by no fly zones and sanctions, so as to be sufficiently anemic, and decapitating the incumbent dictator for life (literally) was mostly just sour grapes for him going off script, and besmirching the sanctity of Kuwait.
It was gloves off for Iraq, as soon as the 9/11 hijackings unfolded. Literally next month people were whispering about Iraq, even though Afghanistan was well understood as the official point of origin for the attacks.