StrangeSox

QUOTE (bmags @ Oct 13, 2011 -> 03:52 PM) It still blows me away from the book just how quickly disease destroyed a whole culture of people. It's just incomprehensible. Dozens of cultures, as much as 90% of the Western Hemisphere population and a good percentage (40% was the estimate, I think) of the world population.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Oct 13, 2011 -> 03:48 PM) Some of it is far fetched, but their use of distances related to the length of the earth, and angles relating to star locations is pretty solid. More rigorous surveys of the pyramids (by Petrie, IIRCCole) discount anything based on the "pyramid inch" since it didn't exist. I can link you to a hundreds-of-pages-long thread on another forum covering this in excruciating detail (thanks, aspie scientists who like to argue with creationists!) You also need to play around an awful lot with significant digits and measurement precision that just isn't possible.

The political realities of not destroying a country and his personal anti-slavery convictions are two separate things. Going back to the Lincoln-Douglas debates at least, his parsing of the Declaration's preamble meant that all men were equal. (I learned this in the Lincoln Memorial last week!)

QUOTE (bmags @ Oct 13, 2011 -> 03:22 PM) The biggest lie here was addressed by strangesox...that native americans were just dumb hunter gatherers that came up against the european intellectual machine. The biggest problem there is that the standard narratives, be they from the Manifest Destiny, rah-rah settlers end or from the noble savage, perfectly in tune with the environment until evil Europeans came is that Indians are rarely, if ever, granted actual agency and identity. They're merely pawns in the Europeans' games, not actors in their own right.

QUOTE (CrimsonWeltall @ Oct 13, 2011 -> 03:30 PM) It's easy to make the Egyptians "know" things when you fudge numbers and invent your own units like "pyramid inches", that there's no evidence the Egyptians used. Oh man not pyramidology.... Ancient engineering and scientific discoveries are pretty amazing, though. The complexities of ancient American societies and their advanced knowledge is discussed in 1491 pretty heavily.

QUOTE (bmags @ Oct 13, 2011 -> 02:56 PM) I disagree. I think this is the push to whitewash the fact that the civil war was about slavery, first and foremost. Lincoln spoke before even officially becoming president that he wasn't goign to free slaves. The south seceded anyways. BUt not all slave states seceded. So he was forced to do a political balancing act to keep them in. IF there's ever been a man to not entirely judge by all of his words it was Abe Lincoln circa 60-65. Regardless of whether Lincoln stated he just wanted to keep the union together, it just so happens that by the end of the conflict, the president nominated by the anti-slavery party 5 years later resided over a country where slavery was now illegal, and whose party was now re-writing the constitution to give rights to those former slaves. So while he may not have been perfect from a civil rights perspective, he just so happened to be the leader during a dramatic transformation from a slave society, to a non one. I don't get how that stands up to the scrutiny of just looking at the documents and speeches of the time. It was primarily about protecting the legality of owning slaves. http://www.civil-war.net/pages/texas_declaration.asp http://sunsite.utk.edu/civil-war/reasons.html http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_scarsec.asp

QUOTE (CrimsonWeltall @ Oct 13, 2011 -> 02:22 PM) The circumference of the Earth was already well known. Isabella overruled her advisors (who knew Columbus was wrong) to finance the trip. Yeah, the Greeks were able to come up with some reasonable estimations a millennium before Columbus, and over in ancient India in the 5th century AD IIRC they were within a couple of percent and also realized that the Earth rotated about an axis.

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Baseball revenues soared after the '94 strike? Didn't take the steroids era to draw people back into the game?

I'm going to copy a friend's review of 1491 since its written better than I could and covers my thoughts pretty well:

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Oct 13, 2011 -> 09:21 AM) And there I agree to an extent... no doubt about it, the media loves to blow these things up beyond their actual impact. Let's not pretend that the FBI doesn't love this either.

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Oct 13, 2011 -> 09:17 AM) I just completely disagree with your characterization. There clearly was a plot that this guy himself suggested. Was the plot completely formed and ready? Not in this case, no. So what? Well, again, with this case I don't have a problem with what the FBI did, I have a problem with the media portrayal of "DANGEROUS IRANIAN TERROR PLOT FOILED!!!"

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Oct 13, 2011 -> 07:17 AM) What happened in this case, and others similarly, is someone actively went looking for help or info on how to hatch a plot... a federal informant pokes at them a bit to see how serious they are... if they really are, THEN the FBI acts as a "helper" might, with the suspect still doing the pushing of the issue, until a point where they have the suspect dead to rights. Do you really not see the very large different between those scenarios? No, because this: is what has happened numerous times. At no point is there an actual, real plot capable inflicting harm on anyone. I'm not saying they're setting people up; my problem with this is portraying the arrest as the FBI actually "foiling" a plot. Without the FBI's help, there is no plot. A google search of "FBI foils own plot" turns up plenty of examples of this exact scenario happening: http://politics.salon.com/2010/11/28/fbi_8/

WSJ increases circulation numbers by buying itself http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/oct/1...andrew-langhoff

Does anyone here think Cain actually has staying power?

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Oct 12, 2011 -> 03:22 PM) Too bad exactly this didn't happen with the Tea Party. Instead they were mocked as idiots and racists, and now people are crying that the same thing is being done to the Occupy movement. Funny how that works. ...that's exactly what this article was about?

That is what's happened numerous times. You've got a guy or a group that's radical and would *like* to do something, but have no real plan, no organization, no support, no real ability to follow through on anything. The FBI provides support start-to-finish. At no point is anyone or anything actually in danger. Maybe I'm not saying it very clearly because I don't see these situations as clear entrapment, but the reality is that these FBI busts are never foiling actual, organized, supplied plots with any real chance of occurring, let alone succeeding.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Oct 12, 2011 -> 02:39 PM) No doubt that eventually, one day, some players would be in a better financial position because of it. But ultimately you know they're just going to be in the same exact position as current owners now. "What do you mean I have to earn less money than the players?! I paid for the damn franchise! I risked my money! Lock out!" Not if they developed an employee-owned model or simply took a more egalitarian view. But that's certainly a possibility.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Oct 12, 2011 -> 01:58 PM) Oh i'm sure there's a clause about lock-outs. But they're not scab players when there is no NBA player union. They're just straight up NBA players, drafted and signed by NBA franchises. The NBA players union hasn't decertified. I'm not sure if they would have to in order to form their own league.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Oct 12, 2011 -> 01:57 PM) You guys are ignoring the money involved, not whether TV networks would be interested. At the end of the day, creating an entire new league (which btw, will be set up by SUPERSTAR players for their own benefit...who i'm sure will be 100% in favor of sharing the revenue equally, the % of their own money used to start the league be damned) and all the money and energy and time invested in doing that, to ultimately make less money than the current deal. Why would they do that unless they just want to become investor/owners and probably do the same s*** the current owners are pulling? It's a great idea in theory, and a terrible idea in reality. But they would control their own product, which is a very valuable thing. There would be significant difficulties and getting it set up and in determining salaries. It would mean making less money, at least for a while. But that doesn't mean their only option is to take whatever the owners offer.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Oct 12, 2011 -> 01:47 PM) "Some rogue terrorist in the mountains of Afghanistan wants to hijack multiple commercial jets on the same day and run them into the World Trade Center? HA! What kind of weed are you smoking? That could NEVER happen!" Many of these foiled "plots" have been FBI concoctions from the start where they create a plan to recruit suspected radicals to supposedly carry out these complicated attacks, but drive the operation the entire time. The people they get are entirely reliant on FBI support and don't have any real capacity to carry out an attack. I'm not saying its entrapment or anything quite like that, but I stopped trusting these FBI "busts" years ago. If they ran the program from start to finish, then they didn't actually prevent an attack. It'd be different if the infiltrated an actual plot and stopped it, but they don't.

QUOTE (LittleHurt05 @ Oct 12, 2011 -> 01:38 PM) Who pays those paychecks? Would these rich players own the teams in the league? Someone has to pay them, right? It could be an employee-owned operation. It'd be messy, and they'd need to work out pay levels. It might even be completely unworkable in that respect. But the money for the paychecks would come from TV/radio deals, ticket sales, merchandise. The same place it comes from in the NBA.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Oct 12, 2011 -> 01:15 PM) And i'm guessing the TNT and ESPN's who already have the billion dollar deals with the NBA aren't going to get out of those contracts very easily. It's not like the contract says "we now have the rights to air the NBA, but only if the NBA has superstar players." The NBA will field teams full of scrubs and existing TV contracts will have to be played out. Is ESPN going to invest another billion to air a new start up league? I would be shocked if their contracts didn't contain clauses relating to work stoppages and scab players.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Oct 12, 2011 -> 01:13 PM) What major, national network is going to get into a bidding war for a "league" that has no definitive presence and a "league" that could simply vanish as the players go back to work for the NBA? I'm not suggesting that no one would purchase the right to televise the game(s), but i'm sure it would be on a game by game type basis with very little money in play. Compared to the money the players would get from NBA TV rights it would probably make sense to just take the NBA's deal. OTOH it gives them a paycheck and leverage against the owners.

Sure, and scientists question that every day. It's just that something approaching 99% of them who actually study this stuff all have a basic agreement that the globe is warming, that we're the primary driver of the accelerated warming and that these changes will have global environmental and economic impacts, leading to floods, droughts, large-scale extinctions, rising sea levels, more violent weather, etc. We can continue to figure out the best ways to address these problems in a realistic scenario that doesn't plunge the developed world into a unprecedented depression, but the flip side of that is that the cost of inaction is likely even greater than the most ambitious plans.