Posts tagged society
Boulder radical leftists back Hamas terrorism by Jann Scott Editorial
Jul 27th
The Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center views the United States as an imperialist nation who are out to suppress Muslims, the homeless in Boulder and the rest of the world. In accordance radical leftists in Boulder often back terrorists like Hamas or Alcaida. Osama bin Ladin loved the American left because they had so much in common. RNPJ rhetoric is the same as radical Islam.
Messages to the world by Osma bin Ladin review by Simon Kovar of the Liberal
“It is true that bin Laden’s statements define his jihad as reactive: that is, as a legitimate response to Western aggression against Muslims, and one that will cease once its causes have been removed. But let us be clear about what he perceives those causes to be. They include the “Crusader-Jewish” presence in all the lands of Islam. By this he is not referring solely to the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Afghanistan, or to Israel’s incursions beyond its 1967 borders. He is referring to the entirety of Israel-Palestine, and (a tricky one for the EU) to Moorish Spain. Bin Laden goes further: “In our religion, it is not permissible for any non-Muslim to stay in our country” (emphasis added). Lawrence et al. might view giving bin Laden what he wants as a “rational” response to the threat of terrorism, but moral honesty requires that we call this solution what it is: ethnic cleansing as a mode of appeasement.
History, of course, teaches us that such fantasies can never be satisfied. And here we come to a second problem with Lawrence’s analysis, one he himself alludes to in his introduction but does not resolve. While “rationality” might tell us that bin Laden’s foe is “American imperialism”, bin Laden himself has an intriguing habit of telling us that his real concern is actually something else: what he calls “global unbelief”. The unbelievers are the Jews, the Christians, and more generally, the liberal, “permissive” societies of the West, epitomized by the US, although bin Laden is explicit in identifying the Jews as the root evil. There can be no permanent peace with the Jews, he states, and scripture demands their annihilation before the Day of Judgement may arrive. American society – its economy, media and politics – is subordinated to the Jews. More generally: “Every Muslim, from the moment they realize the distinction in their hearts, hates Americans, hates Jews, and hates Christians”.
I know there are a lot of you vulnerable new lefties in Boulder, but if you think for your self and not follow the new business startup new atheist crowd down this path, you won’t regret it later. Israel is exactly who they say they are. A modern peace loving country who are trying to live their lives in their little corner of the world. Of course the united states would back them. The Arab nations and Palestine Hamas are unfortunately mostly backward third world countries steeped in hatred, antisemitism and tribal fighting. It is Hamas who are monsters. Before them it was the Palestinian Liberation Army. Remember these are the people who murdered the entire Isreali 1972 Olympic team in Munich.
I covered for International Times in London. I covered the PLO, Yassir Arafat and watched Muslim Jihadists try to Kill Jews and Americans over the past 40 years. Right . I don’t get it. Why are radical Islamist trying to kill all Jews and Christians.
We are not trying to kill them. Hamas tries to penetrate Israels Iron dome. They attack Israel. Then Israel retaliates in a thunderous response. Wouldn’t you?
America ?? Do not mistake Barrack Obama or Hillary Clinton ( when she gets there) Any attacks or attempted attack on American soil by radical Muslims will be met with a terrifying response from the USA. Look what happened after 911. Look what is happening now. Look at our NSA, FBI and CIA. Look at all of our special forces. Look at our financing of intelligence gathering world wide. It is 10 x what it was pre 911.
I would also not rule out our use of nuclear weapons in the Middle East. Really? yes. If one of the radical Arab nations gets their hands on a nuke and uses it against Israel or us you can expect nuclear retaliation from Israel and the United States backed by Russia china, India and Pakistan.
I would not rule out a widening Middle Eastern war and African war where the nuclear powers would invade, conquer and occupy all of the Arab nations for good. if one nuclear weapon goes off there, watch and see. Islam will become a religion of the past; or at least the uncivilized kind will be outlawed.
Jann Scott
Jann Scott is the voice of reason, culture and careful thought in
Boulder Colorado
CU study: We’re not so different than the Ancients
Feb 12th
rules of development, says CU-Boulder researcher
Recently derived equations that describe development patterns in modern urban areas appear to work equally well to describe ancient cities settled thousands of years ago, according to a new study led by a researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder.
“This study suggests that there is a level at which every human society is actually very similar,” said Scott Ortman, assistant professor of anthropology at CU-Boulder and lead author of the study published in the journal PLOS ONE. “This awareness helps break down the barriers between the past and present and allows us to view contemporary cities as lying on a continuum of all human settlements in time and place.”
Over the last several years, Ortman’s colleagues at the Santa Fe Institute (SFI), including Professor Luis Bettencourt, a co-author of the study, have developed mathematical models that describe how modern cities change as their populations grow. For example, scientists know that as a population increases, its settlement area becomes denser, while infrastructure needs per capita decrease and economic production per capita rises.
Ortman noticed that the variables used in these equations, such as cost of moving around, the size of the settled area, the population, and the benefits of people interacting, did not depend on any particular modern technology.
“I realized that if these models are adequate for explaining what’s going on in contemporary cities, they should apply to any settlements in any society,” he said. “So if these models are on the right track, they should apply to ancient societies too.”
To test his idea, Ortman used data that had been collected in the 1960s about 1,500 settlements in central Mexico that spanned from 1,150 years B.C. through the Aztec period, which ended about 500 years ago. The data included the number of dwellings the archaeologists were able to identify, the total settled area and the density of pottery fragments scattered on the surface. Taken together, these artifacts give an indication of the total population numbers and settlement density of the ancient sites.
“We started analyzing the data in the ways we were thinking about with modern cities, and it showed that the models worked,” Ortman said.
The discovery that ancient and modern settlements may develop in similar and predictable ways has implications both for archaeologists and people studying today’s urban areas. For example, it’s common for archaeologists to assume that population density is constant, no matter how large the settlement area, when estimating the population of ancient cities. The new equations could offer a way for archaeologists to get a more accurate head count, by incorporating the idea that population density tends to grow as total area increases.
In the future, the equations may also guide archaeologists in getting an idea of what they’re likely to find within a given settlement based on its size, such as the miles of roads and pathways. The equations could also guide expectations about the number of different activities that took place in a settlement and the division of labor.
“There should be a relationship between the population of settlements and the productivity of labor,” Ortman said. “So, for example, we would expect larger social networks to be able to produce more public monuments per capita than smaller settlements.”
The findings of the new study may also be useful to studies of modern societies. Because ancient settlements were typically less complex than today’s cities, they offer a simple “model system” for testing the equations devised to explain modern cities.
“The archaeological record actually provides surprisingly clear tests of these models, and in some cases it’s actually much harder to collect comparable data from contemporary cities,” Ortman said.
Other co-authors of the study include Andrew Cabaniss of Santa Fe Institute and the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and Jennie Sturm of the University of New Mexico.
The study is available at http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0087902.
-CU-
Solar eruption could be like an attack on the Earth
Dec 9th
points up need for society to prepare
A massive ejection of material from the sun initially traveling at over 7 million miles per hour that narrowly missed Earth last year is an event solar scientists hope will open the eyes of policymakers regarding the impacts and mitigation of severe space weather, says a University of Colorado Boulder professor.
The coronal mass ejection, or CME, event was likely more powerful than the famous Carrington storm of 1859, when the sun blasted Earth’s atmosphere hard enough twice to light up the sky from the North Pole to Central America and allowed New Englanders to read their newspapers at night by aurora light, said CU-Boulder Professor Daniel Baker. Had it hit Earth, the July 2012 event likely would have created a technological disaster by short-circuiting satellites, power grids, ground communication equipment and even threatening the health of astronauts and aircraft crews, he said.
CMEs are part of solar storms and can send billions of tons of solar particles in the form of gas bubbles and magnetic fields off the sun’s surface and into space. The storm events essentially peel Earth’s magnetic field like an onion, allowing energetic solar wind particles to stream down the field lines to hit the atmosphere over the poles.
Fortunately, the 2012 solar explosion occurred on the far side of the rotating sun just a week after that area was pointed toward Earth, said Baker, a solar scientist and the director of CU-Boulder’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics. But NASA’s STEREO-A, satellite that was flying ahead of the Earth as the planet orbited the sun, captured the event, including the intensity of the solar wind, the interplanetary magnetic field and a rain of solar energetic particles into space.
“My space weather colleagues believe that until we have an event that slams Earth and causes complete mayhem, policymakers are not going to pay attention,” he said. “The message we are trying to convey is that we made direct measurements of the 2012 event and saw the full consequences without going through a direct hit on our planet.”
Baker will give a presentation on the subject at the 46th Annual Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union held in San Francisco Dec. 9 to Dec. 13.
While typical coronal mass ejections from the sun take two or three days to reach Earth, the 2012 event traveled from the sun’s surface to Earth in just 18 hours. “The speed of this event was as fast or faster than anything that has been seen in the modern space age,” said Baker. The event not only had the most powerful CME ever recorded, but it would have triggered one of the strongest geomagnetic storms and the highest density of particle fluctuation ever seen in a typical solar cycle, which last roughly 11 years.
“We have proposed that the 2012 event be adopted as the best estimate of the worst case space weather scenario,” said Baker, who chaired a 2008 National Research Council committee that produced a report titled Severe Space Weather Events – Understanding Societal and Economic Impacts. “We argue that this extreme event should be immediately employed by the space weather community to model severe space weather effects on technological systems such as the electrical power grid.
“I liken it to war games — since we have the information about the event, let’s play it through our various models and see what happens,” Baker said. “If we do this, we would be a significant step closer to providing policymakers with real-world, concrete kinds of information that can be used to explore what would happen to various technologies on Earth and in orbit rather than waiting to be clobbered by a direct hit.”
Even though it occurred about 150 years ago, the Carrington storm was memorable from a natural beauty standpoint as well as its technological impacts, he said. The event disrupted telegraph communications — the Internet of the Victorian Age — around the world, sparking fires at telegraph offices that caused several deaths, he said.
A 1989 geomagnetic storm caused by a CME from a solar storm in March 1989 resulted in the collapse of Hydro-Quebec’s electricity transmission system, causing 6 million people to lose power for at least nine hours, said Baker. The auroras from the event could be seen as far south as Texas and Florida.
“The Carrington storm and the 2012 event show that extreme space weather events can happen even during a modest solar cycle like the one presently underway,” said Baker. “Rather than wait and pick up the pieces, we ought to take lessons from these events to prepare ourselves for inevitable future solar storms.”
CU media release.