Ted Rall for June 04, 2010

Great Cartoon.

Bleak.

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of good is for evil men to do nothing”

Wait, I think I got that wrong…ah yes: ”The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

Ah, yeah, thanks Mr Burke. Lemme remedy that then. *Presses red button (and punches in codes & turns key in synchronisation with 2nd bloke etc)

(with apologies for the oft misquoted paraphrasing of Burke’s original lines who no-one really understood anyway)

Thousands of civil servants…

The oil is now showing up in Florida. Soon it will be showing up on Georgia beaches.

Thousands of spamers …

Read it and sweat… http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/inatl/longterm/coldwar/shatter021099b.htm And he received virtually nothing for his actions. Brave (and smart) man.

Stanley Kubrick made my generation stop worrying about the bomb.

Go Ted!

^And love it.

A great argument for putting BP into receivership.

Thank god BP doesn’t have its hands on nukes.

I like how it says “USA” on the clearest label of any of the nukes. As if the “USA” is the nuke power to worry about the most. Not saying America is infallible, but, y’know….please.

Why not excoriate the North Koreas, Venezuelas, and Irans of the world for seeking to run with the Big Boys? That would be a more rational viewpoint. Or would the Leftists who read Rall not understand his point if one of the nukes was clearly labelled “Iran”?

Brutish Plutonium…

motive – thanks for posting this. I teach ancient Greek culture, so my time line reaches a good three thousand years in the past. As a class exercise I pick a point in the middle of the blackboard and I draw a line to the left all the way to the end, and I label the end point 2000 BC. Then I fill in the line with important events in the last 3000 years. Then I draw a line to the right all the way to end of the board, and I label the end point 5000 AD. And then I ask the students to imagine what might happen in the next 3000 years. I always ask, When do you think the nuclear war will occur? The students are often quite shocked by the question. Of course I don’t mean that there certainly will be a nuclear war (how would I know?), but when you think about what has happened in the last 3000 years, it’s easy to imagine that sometime in the next 3000 years somebody is going to make the big mistake. Or if not nuclear, something just as bad or worse.

Yes, the Russkies, where BP does a lot of biz in the Ukraine, have capped spills 6 or 7 times using nuclear bombs the size of which decimated Hiroshima, and that option has been put on the table, again, in fact. Why the Obama admin. didn’t take Sweden’s troller offer, I’ll never know. We’ll get a flotilla of lawyers to soak up that crude here in Georgia.

It’s been talked about several times over the past 24-hour news cycle. And the general consensus is that it’s just as crazy as it sounds. Imagine radioactive tar balls being blown around by a hurricane!

The Russian (Soviet-era) spills were all on land, for starters, and involved gas leaks, not oil, for seconds. The administration has categorically nixed this idea.

^ Problem solved.

Not to mention a tidal wave of radioactive water sweeping over the Gulf Coast. I don’t think so.

^^Assuming its not already dead from the spill.

We need to worry more about who actually HAS FUNCTIONAL nukes, and DELIVERY SYTEMS, more than those who MIGHT be working on getting them.

”^^Assuming its not already dead from the spill.”

lonecat: “I draw a line to the left all the way to the end, and I label the end point 2000 BC. Then I fill in the line with important events in the last 3000 years.”

Have you been using the same course materials for 1000 years? It might be time for an update. ;-)

With the heat, won’t the oil on the surface catch fire?

fritz: “Have you been using the same course materials for 1000 years? It might be time for an update.”

Gosh, I start 3000 years ago and work up to about 1500 years ago (more or less the Greek Bronze Age down to Euripides). I could get really modern and include Plato, but I don’t want to be too rash about these things. Anything after Plato could be just a fad. Let’s wait till it proves that it has some enduring value.

Time for a new planet…

Baslim - fair enough. And I didn’t know about the methane. So there WILL be a tidal wave, it’ll just be much slower and due to global warming… On the other hand, there’s the novel Mother of Storms by John Barnes. Well researched and it will scare the bejeezus out of you…

lonecat, fritzoid is wondering the same thing I was. We are confused over your math…Plato did not live around 500 AD. He said the comment about the 1000 year old text books because it sounds like you are missing 1000 years somewhere. 2000 BC was 4000 years ago…

Also, where is scoot when he would be so much fun on this comic…

To give lonecat all due slack, he does teach Humanities, not Math…

I think the pivotal era for any timeline is circa 1601 CE: History divides between everything anticipating “Hamlet” and everything responding to “Hamlet”.

The time line is out of joint….

The time is out of joint; O cursed spite, That ever I was born to set it right! – Hamlet, Act I, Scene v.

^ and ^^ and ^^^ etc.

Hey, haven’t you ever heard of rounding off?

Like is this the first time anyone has made a little slip?

Oops.

But the point remains. If you learn to think over long periods in the past, you can try to use that to think about long periods in the future.

That’s why I read Robert Graves.

Just messin’ with you, lonecat. I agree with you in principle…

Sure he that made us with such large discouse, Looking before and after, gave us not That capability and godlike reason To fust in us unus’d.

I look at where I was 20 years ago - how great a change! - , and imagine where I might be 20 years from now.. I look at the state of Mankind’s knowledge 200 years ago - we hadn’t split the atom, we had no conception of DNA, we had no conception of neurochemistry, we didn’t even have the internal combustion engine! - and I imagine where we might be 200 years from today. I won’t live to see it, but the future will come, and it will be what it will be.

If it be now, ‘tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all.

(Absent anything but truly GLOBAL thermonuclear war, there will still be a “future” to exist; an exchange of H-Bombs between the Arabs and the Israelis on the Plains of Meggiddo isn;t goiing to be “the end of the world.”)

Just partially uninhabitable….

Like New Jersey!

The Garden State?

Give us this day our daily spammer!

Flag day.

The admins have been on the job on a Sunday.

Just flagged chuimsa, and visited several places they commented! They don’t learn, do they?

AVOID ‘jordan1’ (the multiurl redirection is broken; ‘502 Bad Gateway’)

Take the ‘Boulder Pledge’ – don’t do ANY business with spammers, EVER!

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