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The BBC gives a little more background –
” Islamic State has become synonymous with viciousness – beheadings, crucifixions, stonings, massacres, burying victims alive and religious and ethnic cleansing.
While such savagery might seem senseless to the vast majority of civilised human beings, for IS it is a rational choice. It is a conscious decision to terrorise enemies and impress and co-opt new recruits.”
How does one deal with the grotesquery and horror that is going on in Syria/Iraq? The ISIL show executions are delivered to social media with frightful regularity. Mass executions, beheadings, and now people being burnt alive – where does this end?
This sort of behaviour is a lose/lose scenario for everyone involved. The banality of such cruelty will not go unpunished, but in doing so the seeds for the next ISIL will be sown.
Can we be satisfied with calling this cruel face of religious extremism therefore justifying dealing with ISIL with extreme prejudice? I mean, why the hell not? How can we *not* rally against people who burn people alive and stone people, and behead people, and…
The ISIL problem is just too damn big.
Focusing just one one aspect of the ISIL be it the religious, or the political or the economics of the situation just isn’t enough. Yet tackling all aspects of those questions is a dissertation level job at least and that simply won’t do either. I went for a walk on this one and came back with this:
We, in the world, need a powerful international body to settle disputes and mitigate the internecine conflicts that crop up the world over. The irrelevance the United Nations of today is a major factor that contributes to the hepped-up, uni-polar gunboat diplomacy that has become the new normal in this age of American Exceptionalism.
Rules are just words on a page if the most powerful nation on earth refuses to follow them. The International Court of Justice, the UN, hell even the Geneva Conventions are supposed to be venerated and respected world institutions that would allow nations to mediate their disputes before they have to shed innocent blood to resolve their disputes. The fact that they are not respected by the US essentially neuters these institutions/ideas and sets the stage for the slow-brew of anarchy we are currently experiencing.
We’re doing the unilateral thing for awhile now, and we should reflect to see what it has brought us. Security? Peace? Justice? I’d have to say no on all three counts.
We do not have security we have a security state – a state of affairs (in Canada at least) that borders on making certain thoughts illegal and therefore punishable by law. The US is much farther down the Orwellian rabbit hole with the unaccountable NSA and Homeland Security merrily shredding the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
We do not have peace, we have, and will continue to have, a series of escalating conflicts over the remainder of the world’s resources whether it be oil, water or living space. People with big sticks will make the rules in their favour, this will make the majority that are disenfranchised rebel against the system – the bullies will clamp down with terror and death – the disenfranchised will die, and their resolve will double and rebellion will continue – repression will increase… We have no peace, we have a hegemonic cycle that provides a cheap gilded imitation of peace, but in reality is just a mask for imperial ambitions and avarice.
Justice? Justice across the world right now is a labyrinthine maze of deciept. The nations that have had strong traditions of law and justice are being corrupted by powerful interests that see Law as unjust impediment on the act of making money. Nations that should be setting the gold standard for legal accountability and ethical practice instead wallow in the ruins of a once tenable system. The robber-barons, the arch capitalists – they set the rules now, warping justice to fit their perverted aspirations to the detriment of the common people. We have the glitzy version of justice, just enough to hide the venal rot it is composed of.
This unipolar hell that is our legacy at the moment needs to be dismantled, because the only thing that replaces empire – is another empire. Let me assure you that we do not want to be on the business end of another empires stick. We might see the benefit of a strong international body when we no longer have the capacity to project power and our future is in the hands of others.
I wish I’d been able to get video, because she was dreaming and her little paws were twitching
This guy is an elected official, and he’s serious.
You’d think we would have given up on common sense by now…
Our resident health care professional takes issue with some of the statements made in the video. As with most things on the internet, the best policy is trust, but verify. Please take note of Bleatmop’s objections and corrections to what is being put forward as fact:
“At rest your hemoglobin is 99% saturated with oxygen.” False.
At rest, a healthy newborn runs a SPO2 of 99 – 100%. This rapidly declines with age to when you become an adult 92% or above is considered normal. The older you get, the worse your lungs work, to where many elderly naturally SPO2 at 88%. Therefore it is perfectly possible that hyperventilating can increase the oxygen level in your blood.
Furthermore, a SP02 does not equal the partial pressure of oxygen in your blood. While true that SPO2 from 1-99% does usually correlate to a specific PaO2, a SP02 of 100% can mean a PaO2 of 1% more to the amount it takes to create a hyperbaric accident, which is somewhere around double the normal amount of O2 in the blood. Therefore, while you cannot hypersaturate your hemoglobin, you can increase the total amount of O2 in your blood (note, blood does not equal red blood cells), making you be able to hold your breath longer.
What does this mean? Well, hyperventilating can actually increase the total oxygen in your blood beyond that what it takes to saturate your hemoglobin to 100%. The author is right in why hyperventilating causes drowning, as the PaCO2 does mediate your breathing response. However he did not prove that “more oxygen” isn’t why you are able to hold your breath longer. In fact he actually proved that more oxygen (in combination with less carbon dioxide) is why you can actually hold your breath until you pass out
Watch dudes flail and fail as they are caught treating women like objects instead of people.
I’m at the point in life where I’m not really all about saving the planet anymore. Oh sure, I recycle, carpool when I can all of those little personal things one can do to be more “earth friendly” but until we reform our current ‘limitless growth paradigm’, we are well and truly screwed. Hence the reason why my Eco-consciousness is changing from saving the planet to hoping that the shit doesn’t hit the fan during my lifetime.
“At the rate things are going, the Earth in the coming decades could cease to be a “safe operating space” for human beings. That is the conclusion of a new paper published Thursday in the journal Science by 18 researchers trying to gauge the breaking points in the natural world.
The paper contends that we have already crossed four “planetary boundaries.” They are the extinction rate; deforestation; the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere; and the flow of nitrogen and phosphorous (used on land as fertilizer) into the ocean.”
Well that is all rainbows and unicorns, no? It gets worse…
“What the science has shown is that human activities — economic growth, technology, consumption — are destabilizing the global environment,” said Will Steffen, who holds appointments at the Australian National University and the Stockholm Resilience Center and is the lead author of the paper.
“The researchers focused on nine separate planetary boundaries first identified by scientists in a 2009 paper. These boundaries set theoretical limits on changes to the environment, and include ozone depletion, freshwater use, ocean acidification, atmospheric aerosol pollution and the introduction of exotic chemicals and modified organisms.”
Well, four down five to go. We can do this, right?
bleatmop
Mystro
The Arbourist
Dead Wild Roses 
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