The decline and eventual fall of the USA as world superpower?

[Aaron]

I think that you'll see a major terrorist attack on the USA that will precipitate greater involvement in the Middle East, which will eventually lead to conflict with Russia and China. It will most likely be prolonged and detracted, until one side or the other begins to lose and decides a nuclear deterrent is necessary. Neither side will back down and nukes will be launched, the devastation will send the majority of the world back into the dark ages, with society only existing in isolated places. In another twenty or thirty years one of the countries unaligned will make a play for one of the devastated countries and it will all start over.

 

I'm not very optimistic about the future. Even if we don't destroy ourselves through war, we'll still have to face global warming which will decimate the world food supply, causing increased conflict between countries, just so their people can eat. America is pretty much doomed in all outlooks. If we don't starve, then the conservative right wing will move towards an attempted takeover of the country. The secular corporate interests will fight this, but I have a feeling that the people's support will be on the conservative side. In that scenario millions will probably die from tactical nukes and chemical weapons used against the "rebel terrorists".

 

I really don't see any peaceful resolution to the world state of affairs and almost all signs lead to the USA's demise as a major force. We'll see in twenty years if I'm wrong.

 

Aaron

[Formless Tao]

I think that you'll see a major terrorist attack on the USA that will precipitate greater involvement in the Middle East, which will eventually lead to conflict with Russia and China. It will most likely be prolonged and detracted, until one side or the other begins to lose and decides a nuclear deterrent is necessary. Neither side will back down and nukes will be launched, the devastation will send the majority of the world back into the dark ages, with society only existing in isolated places. In another twenty or thirty years one of the countries unaligned will make a play for one of the devastated countries and it will all start over. I'm not very optimistic about the future. Even if we don't destroy ourselves through war, we'll still have to face global warming which will decimate the world food supply, causing increased conflict between countries, just so their people can eat. America is pretty much doomed in all outlooks. If we don't starve, then the conservative right wing will move towards an attempted takeover of the country. The secular corporate interests will fight this, but I have a feeling that the people's support will be on the conservative side. In that scenario millions will probably die from tactical nukes and chemical weapons used against the "rebel terrorists". I really don't see any peaceful resolution to the world state of affairs and almost all signs lead to the USA's demise as a major force. We'll see in twenty years if I'm wrong. Aaron

 

Very interesting Aaron. Thanks

[Thunder_Gooch]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STdg7xfSkqQ

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/29/us/nsa-examines-social-networks-of-us-citizens.html

Edited September 29, 2013 by More_Pie_Guy

[voidisyinyang]

https://soundcloud.com/media-roots/abby-martin-on-coast-to-coast

 

Abby Martin on coasttocoastam on the mind-controlled masses

Edited September 29, 2013 by pythagoreanfulllotus

[Formless Tao]

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2013/09/30/obama-government-shutdown-netanyahu-congress/2895829/

 

 

[ralis]

[voidisyinyang]

 

published sept this year - new doc

[voidisyinyang]

 

Dang! That part 1 was brilliant.

 

The "cell phone calls"? Impossible!

 

The lady said "It's a frame!"

Edited October 2, 2013 by pythagoreanfulllotus

[joeblast]

, we'll still have to face global warming which will decimate the world food supply, causing increased conflict between countries, just so their people can eat.

 

 

(no, I'm not interested in discussing religion)

[voidisyinyang]

Scientists: Climate Change Not Sweet For Sugar Maples

http://www.wgbh.org/articles/Scientists-Climate-Change-Not-Sweet-For-Sugar-Maples-1186

 

what's funny is all the brainwashed corporate-state elite denial - Mother Nature doesn't care!

 

Mother Nature will take revenge.

[KenBrace]

So much talk about global warming. If you've ever looked at the charts and really examined the evidence you would see that the earth's climate fluctuates regularly. 50-100 years from now they'll be claiming that an earth devastating ice age is on it's way. Don't fall for this stuff.

[ralis]

So much talk about global warming. If you've ever looked at the charts and really examined the evidence you would see that the earth's climate fluctuates regularly. 50-100 years from now they'll be claiming that an earth devastating ice age is on it's way. Don't fall for this stuff.

 

The majority of climate scientists (around 97%) would disagree with your sentiment. Statements such as yours are not based in fact and prove nothing. CO2 is the driver of global warming and that is a fact.

Edited October 3, 2013 by ralis

[ralis]

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/10/02/climate-change-sceptics-more-likely-to-be-conspiracy-theorists/

 

Climate change sceptics more likely to be conspiracy theorists

 

Research confirms previous findings which caused fury among sceptics of human-caused climate change

Do you think the Apollo moon landings might have been faked or that Britain’s Royal family maybe, just maybe, conspired to assassinate Princess Diana because they didn’t like her very much?

How about that other conspiracy theory, where there really is this secret New World Order group with designs on global domination.

 

Maybe you’re up for that other chestnut that has the US government knowing beforehand about the September 11 attacks but letting them happen anyway so as to have a good excuse to bomb Afghanistan?

If you answered yes to any of these conspiracy theories then a new study published today has found that you probably also think the science of human-caused climate change is some sort of hoax and you might think too that there’s no good evidence for vaccinating children.

The study, titled “The Role of Conspiracist Ideation and Worldviews in Predicting Rejection of Science” and published in the journal PLOS ONE, also finds another strong predictor for the dismissal of the science of human-caused climate change.

That is, if you’re a conservative who believes the world runs best when businesses operate in a “free market” with little government interference, then the chances are you don’t think human-caused climate change represents a significant risk to human civilisation.

The new study is led by Professor Stephan Lewandowsky, chair of cognitive psychology at the University of Bristol, and follows his previous study which caused the metaphorical head of the climate science denial blogosphere to explode.

That study was carried out while Professor Lewandowsky was at the University of Western Australia and was published last year in the journal Psychological Science. While it carried the more provocative title NASA Faked the Moon Landing—Therefore, (Climate) Science Is a Hoax: An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science the conclusions were near identical.

 

Sceptics rejected Professor Lewandowsky’s initial findings largely because he had used questionnaires posted on climate blogs to gather the data.

Participants were self selecting, which sceptics argued could have skewed the findings. As if to confirm that paper’s findings, some sceptics even came up with conspiracy-type complaints about the research (this prompted another science paper from Lewandowsky that’s currently the subject of an ongoing complaint from some sceptics).

None of those accusations can be used to criticise this new study, Professor Lewandowsky says, because the questionnaire was carried out by a third-party professional survey company using a sample that was representative of the US population. By email, he said:

There are some other more subtle differences, and despite all that, the results are pretty much identical: Free-market worldviews are strongly associated with rejection of climate science and conspiratorial thinking is associated with the rejection of all scientific propositions tested, albeit to varying extent.

This is a pervasive pattern now that has been shown multiple times in the literature by a number of different authors. I am now fairly convinced that wherever there is science denial, there is also a conspiracy theory waiting to be aired.

In the new study, which surveyed the views of 1000 people in the US, Professor Lewandowsky and his co-authors write that people’s worldview “constituted an overpowering barrier to acceptance of climate science”. Professor Lewandowsky told me:

I cannot be sure of the causality, but there are multiple lines of evidence that suggest that the involvement of worldview, such as free-market principles, arises because people of that worldview feel threatened not by climate change or by lung cancer, but by the regulatory implications if those risks are being addressed by society. Addressing lung cancer means to control tobacco, and addressing climate change means to control fossil-fuel emissions. It’s the need to control those products and their industries that is threatening people with strong free-market leanings.

Many “think-tanks” and organisations around the world which reject or underplay the risks of human-caused climate change do also advocate “free market” principles. Many have accepted funding from fossil fuel interests and rich conservative philanthropists.

In Australia, that would be the Institute of Public Affairs. In the UK, you have the Institute of Economic Affairs. In the US, there are multiple free market advocacy organisations who reject the need to act on human emissions of greenhouse gases, such as the Cato Institute and the Heartland Institute.

But the research is careful to point out the findings don’t mean that conservatives are, by extension, more likely to exhibit “conspiracist ideation” which the study categorises as a style of thinking rather than a distinct personality trait.

But the study says the two groups do share a habit of engaging in what’s known as “motivated reasoning” – the tendency to accept without criticism any evidence that suits your belief while you ignore or reject the evidence that challenges what you think.

For example, climate science sceptics might laser-in on the fact that in September, the amount of floating sea ice in the Arctic “recovered” from the previous year’s record low. Yet the same group ignores how 2013 still delivered the sixth lowest level on the satellite record and perhaps the sixth lowest in more than a thousand years.

Don’t mention the 275,000,000,000 tonnes of ice every year that’s “very likely” been melting from the world’s glaciers between 1993 and 2009.

This “motivated reasoning” might also cause some to view the latest United Nations climate report as yet more evidence that climate science is an elaborate cloaking device for lefty socialists to take over the world while they melt the world’s ice with a top secret invisible ray gun.

Edited October 3, 2013 by ralis

[KenBrace]

The majority of climate scientists (around 97%) would disagree with your sentiment. Statements such as yours are not based in fact and prove nothing. CO2 is the driver of global warming and that is a fact.

 

With this logic you shouldn't be practicing qigong, because I don't know of any scientists that would agree with your idea of chi energy. The fact that the majority of scientists would disagree with me means nothing. At one time 100% of scientists believed the world was flat. People put too much trust in the science of their time. Most scientists today believe the universe got here without a God, life came from non-life, we evolved from primordial soup, and the earth is billions of years old. I disagree with all of that. The only reason so many people believe these ideas is simply because they are brainwashed their whole lives and completely drowned in it. The same goes for the knowledge the Chinese discovered thousands of years ago. It is treated like non-sense simply because primitive, western science hasn't discovered it yet.

 

Fluctuations in solar activity is the main cause for the regular ups and downs of global temperature. The idea of increased CO2 causing major global warming makes some people a lot of money and is probably why it is so wide-spread and exaggerated.

[voidisyinyang]

With this logic you shouldn't be practicing qigong, because I don't know of any scientists that would agree with your idea of chi energy. The fact that the majority of scientists would disagree with me means nothing. At one time 100% of scientists believed the world was flat. People put too much trust in the science of their time. Most scientists today believe the universe got here without a God, life came from non-life, we evolved from primordial soup, and the earth is billions of years old. I disagree with all of that. The only reason so many people believe these ideas is simply because they are brainwashed their whole lives and completely drowned in it. The same goes for the knowledge the Chinese discovered thousands of years ago. It is treated like non-sense simply because primitive, western science hasn't discovered it yet.

 

Fluctuations in solar activity is the main cause for the regular ups and downs of global temperature. The idea of increased CO2 causing major global warming makes some people a lot of money and is probably why it is so wide-spread and exaggerated.

 

qigong is the opposite of modern humanity spewing out carbon dioxide.

 

Nice try though.

[ralis]

With this logic you shouldn't be practicing qigong, because I don't know of any scientists that would agree with your idea of chi energy. The fact that the majority of scientists would disagree with me means nothing. At one time 100% of scientists believed the world was flat. People put too much trust in the science of their time. Most scientists today believe the universe got here without a God, life came from non-life, we evolved from primordial soup, and the earth is billions of years old. I disagree with all of that. The only reason so many people believe these ideas is simply because they are brainwashed their whole lives and completely drowned in it. The same goes for the knowledge the Chinese discovered thousands of years ago. It is treated like non-sense simply because primitive, western science hasn't discovered it yet.

 

Fluctuations in solar activity is the main cause for the regular ups and downs of global temperature. The idea of increased CO2 causing major global warming makes some people a lot of money and is probably why it is so wide-spread and exaggerated.

 

We are talking about rigorous scientific investigation which you seem to have a problem with. Judging from your post, you have been listening to the denier propaganda. Solar activity? No evidence whatsoever. Solar activity has been accounted for and has no bearing whatsoever on human caused AGW.

 

BTW, qigong and science are not mutually exclusive. Go take some science classes and in a few years, you may be able to understand basic science.

Edited October 3, 2013 by ralis

[KenBrace]

qigong is the opposite of modern humanity spewing out carbon dioxide. Nice try though.

My point was that the fact that most scientists disagree with me means nothing because beliefs in the past that most of the world agreed on have now been shown false. The idea that you can't heal, increase longevity, etc. with an invisible energy called chi is just a modern example. Edited October 3, 2013 by KenBrace

[ralis]

.

 

My point was that the fact that most scientists disagree with me means nothing because beliefs in the past that most of the world agreed on have now been shown false. The idea that you can't heal, increase longevity, etc. with an invisible energy called chi is just a modern example.

 

Why not stay on point? If you are in the least bit curious, then Dr. Michael Mann's excellent work on AGW is a place to start. However, judging from your insistence that belief and scientific research are equivalent, then anyone can make any absurd claim and call it science. E.g. intelligent design which is religious mythology is not science and can never be equated as such.

 

http://www.meteo.psu.edu/holocene/public_html/Mann/index.php

Edited October 3, 2013 by ralis

[KenBrace]

 

We are talking about rigorous scientific investigation which you seem to have a problem with. Judging from your post, you have been listening to the denier propaganda. Solar activity? No evidence whatsoever. Solar activity has been accounted for and has no bearing whatsoever on human caused AGW.

 

BTW, qigong and science are not mutually exclusive. Go take some science classes and in a few years, you may be able to understand basic science.

Go to medical school and you won't hear a single thing about energy healing. Walk up to pretty much any scientist and tell him that there is an invisible, life-force energy that can be developed through meditation and exercises and used to heal, kill, increase wellness, etc. He/she would think you were crazy.

Edited October 3, 2013 by KenBrace

[ralis]

Go to medical school and you won't hear a single thing bout energy healing. Walk up to pretty much any scientist and tell him that there is an invisible, life-force energy that can be developed through meditation and exercises and used to heal, kill, increase wellness, etc. He/she would think you were crazy.

 

You are really dragging this off topic!

[KenBrace]

Why not stay on point? If you are in the least bit curious, then Dr. Michael Mann's excellent work on AGW is a place to start. However, judging from your insistence that belief and scientific research are equivalent, then anyone can make any absurd claim and call it science. E.g. intelligent design which is religious mythology is not science and can never be equated as such.

 

http://www.meteo.psu.edu/holocene/public_html/Mann/index.php

 

No it's creation science.

[ralis]

No it's creation science.

 

Are you a fundamentalist? Creationism is a code word for injecting mythology into high school curriculum's. Why not include all creation myths from every religion. Not just Christian fundamentalism.

[KenBrace]

You are really dragging this off topic!

My point is that the "everyone else believes it so you shouldn't argue" idea is ridiculous. People like to ignore the minority and make themselves feel confident by going with the crowd and having "everyone else" to back them up. A lot of the time when people have the majority behind them, they use it to sort of "intimidate" the minorities' argument.You're right, I am getting off topic and I honestly don't really feel like discussing this any further. Believe what you like, just don't put too much faith in modern science and what everyone else is telling you.

 

Are you a fundamentalist? Creationism is a code word for injecting mythology into high school curriculum's. Why not include all creation myths from every religion. Not just Christian fundamentalism.

Creation science isn't exclusive to Christianity. Also if you did some basic research you would find that "creationism is a code word for injecting mythology into science" isn't true. There is a lot of legit science to it, but most people don't know that because everyone ignores it. A lot of atheistic scientists are closed-minded. They don't like evidence that supports creation and do their best to ignore/suppress/hide it.

[Thunder_Gooch]

Go to medical school and you won't hear a single thing about energy healing. Walk up to pretty much any scientist and tell him that there is an invisible, life-force energy that can be developed through meditation and exercises and used to heal, kill, increase wellness, etc. He/she would think you were crazy.

To be fair to a scientist 99.999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999% of all people who believe in chi are the worst sort of newage ***hats you can imagine.

 

 

 

It's hard to take any thing of this nature seriously with these ***hats representing the culture.

 

 

 

 

Edited October 3, 2013 by More_Pie_Guy

[ralis]

My point is that the "everyone else believes it so you shouldn't argue" idea is ridiculous. People like to ignore the minority and make themselves feel confident by going with the crowd and having "everyone else" to back them up. A lot of the time when people have the majority behind them, they use it to sort of "intimidate" the minorities' argument. You're right, I am getting off topic and I honestly don't really feel like discussing this any further. Believe what you like, just don't put too much faith in modern science and what everyone else is telling you.

 

Creation science isn't exclusive to Christianity. Also if you did some basic research you would find that "creationism is a code word for injecting mythology into science" isn't true. There is a lot of legit science to it, but most people don't know that because everyone ignores it. A lot of atheistic scientists are closed-minded. They don't like evidence that supports creation and do their best to ignore/suppress/hide it.

 

The earth is 4.5 billion years old and that is a fact. So far your arguments are not based on anything but conjecture.

 

What is the so called legit science to creationism?

Edited October 3, 2013 by ralis