filkertom | Chemistry 101

*Shakes head*
You know, this level of idiocy shouldn't surprise me, but still. I really don't think any of the people in our upper echelons of government are mentally capable of doing their jobs.

More to the point... they're not philosophically capable of doing their jobs. There's a constant undercurrent of Government Is Bad (mostly because Regulation Is Bad and Profit In The Private Sector Is Good), and so many of them really believe that Government Is Bad that, given the chance, they undermine it.

Our "government" is opposed to its own job.

Word.

If you hire someone who is passionately dedicated to proving that the job cannot be done, that person will fail. On purpose.

Would you hire a babysitter who went around arguing that children should be starved to the point where they can be easily drowned in the bathtub? A chef who believes that anyone "too lazy" to make their own food should be fed feces? In the "red states", evidently, they would. And call the results a heckuva job.

They don't have to make sense. They don't even have to care about making sense.
1) The people who vote for this administration and believe in it are basically stupid. If you want to be nice about it, they are anti-intellectual.
2) People who shout and scream that the Bush administration is acting in the manner typified by this picture are labelled intellectuals and thus are not listened to by the segment of the electorate that put this administration in office.
3) The people who actually bankroll this administration need for the majority to be stupid enough to keep spending all their money and working for too little money to keep the bankrollers swimming in profits.
4) The administration needs to keep the bankrollers happy so that they, the corrupt government "servants," can continue rolling in slush money and exercising/abusing their voter-granted power.

The only solution to this is to make being an intellectual "sexy" again, and make being educated the It thing to be. Educated people think, argue, and don't tend to vote for idiocy like this twice unless they have tied their own interests to an engine like this. (IE Karl Rove, a cunning and intelligent man who knows he's in the eye of a BS hurricane and loves it)

One of the top pathetic moments I experienced during campaign 2004 was when Theresa Kerry came to my University town and made a canned speech to the effect that, really, science was a good thing.

apparently, she'd been going to a good many places where people need convincing on that point.

This does not surprise me. The questions that come to mind from this include:

1) Did she simply not have another speech to use?
2) Did her handlers feel that this would be a speech that would play well with a University town crowd? or
3) Did her handlers feel that this University town was yet another place that needed to hear that we shouldn't be afraid of science?

The people who vote for this administration and believe in it are basically stupid. If you want to be nice about it, they are anti-intellectual.

I think that it's dangerous to make this assumption. I don't know how much you've made a point of going out and talking to people that voted for the current administration (and still support it) but at least some of them are not stupid; they simply have _different priorities_, and perhaps most tellingly they _believe different people than you do_.

I will grant you that I believe that some of these priorities are toxic. Some of the folks on the opposite side of the aisle honestly believe that our society will fall apart if gay marriage is legalized. I think they're wrong, but they are sincere, and I claim that they are not stupid in part because they have a different definition of what our society should be like than I do.

On a more sinister note, some people are in favor of the direction we're heading because (they believe that) it benefits them. They're not stupid either: opportunistic, maybe, evil, maybe, but not stupid. (cf. Karl Rove in your own post)

Another thing that it comes down to is that I _trust_ a different set of people to give me reliable information and interpretations than most of the hard-core Bush supporters do. I basically discount everything that Ann Coulter says as crap; they do the same with Michael Moore. I think I'm right and they're wrong, but they think so, too. :)

As a final note, assuming that people that disagree with you are stupid is generally not a good tactical move. If nothing else, unless you're an excellent actor, it will put you at a significant disadvantage when dealing with them, because they'll be able to infer your contempt and will treat you accordingly. Try understanding them first; you're more likely to get somewhere useful.

The only solution to this is to make being an intellectual "sexy" again

Is there a point in history at which you believe that being "intellectual" was ever sexy on a society-wide level? In any society? How much are our heroes admired for their intelligence, and how much for their courage and/or stubbornness?

I do not say that these people are stupid as an assumption. I've grown up amongst them, I've heard their rationales, and for a time of my life even thought like them. I thought that Ronald Reagan, for instance, was spot on when he said that the best way to encourage the economy was to give tax cuts to those who were already the most successful. I listened to "trickle down" economics and believed it. I believed that buying American made products was the only thing that made sense.

What has changed is my perspective, perhaps, but it's an important change. My perspective now is, "What makes rational sense?" No one, and I mean NO ONE, has ever presented me with a rational explanation for why gay marriage is supposedly wrong or what harm it will cause this country. I have heard some flimsy rhetoric about protecting the institution as it exists (then outlaw divorce), that marriage is about stability of families (then make gay families more stable by letting them legally marry) or about how marriage is supposed to be about encouraging procreation (then let gay parents marry, share the rights and responsibilities, and adopt if they don't have surrogates or sperm donors available). This is the main point behind labeling something or someone stupid: they are not just ignorant, they are intentionally anti-reason. Rational, reasonable discourse and disagreement, I can accept. Blind obedience or a political position based on nothing more than some article of faith taken without evidence? No.

Regarding Ann Coulter and Michael Moore, the answer on that? Don't believe either of them. They're both fearmongerers with their own agendas that have nothing to do with the good of the citizenry as a whole. They do what they do to be famous. Quiet debate doesn't get good ratings. As for a question of trust? Trust no pundit; each one is a marionette, and someone lurks in the shadows pulling the strings. Follow the money and you'll discern the agenda. Objective truth, if such a thing exists in any human endeavor, is out there to be seen.

I mentioned Rove and his type as supporting this position because it benefits them personally, and mentioned that they aren't stupid at all. They're outside of the subject set under evaluation. When you have a patient with a tapeworm in his gut, you don't concern yourself with the health or POV of the tapeworm.

The argument can be made that we only remember those intellectuals who were simply stubborn enough to not give up. I was thinking of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment as two periods where intelligence was socially "sexy," but it's arguable.

We get the government we ask for.

Throughout the history of American democracy, when something goes wrong, the public collectively shouts "The government oughta do something!" And government officials understand that if they dont' make a show of it, they won't get elected.

The problem is that we have a situation where the Administration can save more lives by spending on highway safety than on foiling terror plots with airport security. But, the system requires they do something they can point at and say that they're on top of things. Even if they were entirely competent, they'd have to make a show. And they have to do it right now, or else they look unresponsive. That means things are unplanned.

The liquids folks bring onto plains are basically innocuous - mostly potable fluids and toiletries. And those are perfectly safe to dump together. There are no powerful acids or really noxious things in the mix. When the people involved had maybe a couple of hours to devise a plan and get it rolling, it isn't all that nonsensical.

It only fails when put up against real malice - when some wiseass decides to make life even more difficult for everyone by dropping in some chlorine bleach and a well-chosen household cleanser to release a cloud of toxic gas at a gate.

We get the government we ask for.

What you mean WE, paleface? We got what THEY asked for.

That's the kind of partisan logic that got us into this mess in the first place, and so I eschew it.

From a psuedo-pop psychology standpoint, what they're doing makes a twisted sort of sense.

By inconveniencing everyone who flies, it makes the War on Terr'rrr something directly relateable to them. People have no choice but to deal with the difficulties and therefore are forced to accept ownership of the issue.

It's not WWII-ish 'buy bonds' or scrap metal drives, but it does give everyone a common ground of sacrifice (even if it is just an inconvenience) that makes them feel part of the solution - even if that solution is not working. You can't even complain about it because "it might happen again", although being struck by lightning would be far more probable, and you'd be accused of not being in touch with the Reality of the Terr'rrrists Coming To Kill Us In Our Beds (Red Scare II, coming soon to a nation near you).

The liquids folks bring onto plains are basically innocuous - mostly potable fluids and toiletries. And those are perfectly safe to dump together. There are no powerful acids or really noxious things in the mix.

That's the point, though. Either one believes that the precautions really are necessary-- in which case, one believes that there *might just be* dangerous or noxious things in the mix, and therefore they shouldn't be mixing them-- or one believes that the liquids people carry are innocuous, in which case the precautions are unnecessary. What's being pointed out is that the implementation of the policy is inconsistent with believing it's actually a necessary policy.

I, too, think the precautions are unnecessary and being done just for show, so they can look like they're doing something. (Other arguments for that include the point about a liquid attack being a known danger since the 90s, and also the point that baby bottles and medicines are being allowed on, which couldn't be that difficult to fake.)

I think all the photo really illustrates is that the people on the front lines, the minimum-wage TSA employees actually doing the implementing, they aren't buying it, either.

While your thinking is probably spot on, I wouldn't get too worked up over the picture.

A picture of some woman pouring out her coffee into a trash can could be on the other side of the airport from the TSA checkpoint. Its unattributable.

Saw an item on the local news showing how the TSA is handling the disposal of liquids and they actually are being smart about it.

It's a logical extension of the mindset that says "we have to DO SOMETHING about this, never mind WHAT" to the notion that "if they're doing something that is an extremely intrusive pain in the ass that everyone complains about, it HAS to be stopping terrorism". (Maybe it just wouldn't be fair to suffer so much inconvenience without it doing anything, so God will protect them in return for their suffering?)

Second try...

For your amusement, from someone who does know something about chemistry:

David Farber - On the implausibility of the explosives plot. (http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/200608/msg00087.html)

Thanks, that was an interesting (and enlightening) read.

I was considering this. Sure, blowing up a plane inflight (or 10!) would be a mighty powerful act. But its a very hard thing to do. The cabin is probably the worst place to use explosives to try and bring the plane down. The skin is at its thinnest, which would blow out taking most of the blast. Little of the major structure is close enough to PROBABLY damage it with any guarentee of downing the plane.

My thought is don't destroy the plane, poof and its gone over the water. Destroy the people. Leave the plane and pilots intact to bring in a plane full of corpses.. imagine that image on CNN.

It would be much easier to smuggle chemicals aboard that could gas or burn the pax.

The most vulnerable point on the plane has nothing to do with the airframe - there are soft, squishy people in that cockpit, and the plane goes down without them. Cockpit doors are reinforced against small-arms fire, but a good explosive against that door probably still spells doom for the plane....

Though, of course, you are correct. Turning the thing into a flying coffin would probably be extremely effective.

Yeah. The British manage to foil a terror plot. (With the help of Muslims! They're not "Islamofascists", you racist chimpy fuck.) This part is great, so far.

So what comes next? Regulations imposing fear and inconvenience on probably close to a million people. And Bush and his cronies basically doing the terrorists' job for them.

But of course, the goals of Bush and the terrorists are ultimately the same - to intimidate and cow the American people into a course of action desirable for each of them.

I'd kind of like to see a bunch of people pour in bottles of chlorox ... followed by a bunch of people with ammonia...

Even then, I don't think the TSA would get the idea that this is a Bad Thing.

I want protection FROM the TSA, not by them.

I have a better idea. Instead of trying to ban everything, the government should not only allow people to bring weapons on flights, they should encourage it. How many terrorists are going to try anything if they know there might be some Dirty Harry type just ready to say, "Go ahead, punk -- make my day!"?

Ahh yes! The "Texas Gunslinger" theory! Or more geeky - "An armed society is a polite society."

That idea has its good and bad points IMHO. Personally - as far as guns are concerned I think it's a bad idea. (0)

If we're talking doing this on a flight then I could see allowing personal blades but having firearms in gun lockers at the back of the plane that make an extremely loud noise when opened and are keyed to the passenger ticket or something.

The personal knives would stop any "box cutter" takeovers. The locker would allow anybody that was going to take action against the hijackers to get their weapon.

Now, just typing this up I find that it's an extremely complicated solution that has a much much simpler one - issue small cans of pepper spray to the passengers as they board and lock the cockpit. What's the worst that could happen? Some hijackers decide to spray anyone they can to subdue the plane but in the fight almost everyone gets sprayed and the plane lands prematurely with a bunch of passengers in a ton of pain but otherwise safe and alive. (Barring the few pepper allergy cases.)

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(0) I'd like to see something akin to MZB's Darkover where anything that is a range weapon is illegal but anything else is fair game. It would make any conflict much more personal and the more personal those conflicts the harder it is for people to deny responsibility or shift blame.

So here's one rare occasion where the explosive is in liquid form... But what about all those other bombings where the explosive was a solid?

The fact that travelers are allowed to bring solids on board with them, represents a potential security breach.

Of course, that'll force the terrorists to use gasous explosives, so we can't allow passengers to bring gasses with them either.

Clearly, the only safe way to let people fly, is stark naked, after a supervised period of fasting and a deep colonic. Anything else lets the bad guys sneak one past us...

did you see the leno bit last night?

i haven't read this latest bit of insanity of our vaunted and vacillant (mis)government, nor its very veracity-lacking vernacular and vacuous verbage. until we can give our valediction to violence, our valetudinarian values make a comback from coma, i have all but given up on our elected officials. and so i propose something on a lighter note. this showed up in my friends list tonight, and i tagged you in my response. thought it might be interesting...

random bookage
1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next 4 sentences along with these instructions.
5. Don’t you dare dig for that "cool" or "intellectual" book in your closet! I know you were thinking about it! Just pick up whatever is closest.
6. Tag six people.

tag, you're it!

When I first heard of the arrests, the code red over here, and the near-immediate unified slamming of the Lamont victory, I was sure the Bush administration had something to do with the timing. Now whether or not the rest of the US news media will pick it up remains to be seen.

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/14320452/

Chemistry 101

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they're not stupid.

Re: they're not stupid.

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If liquids are bad, why are solids safe?

Re: If liquids are bad, why are solids safe?

way off topic (pardon my rabbit trail)

I had a feeling this was the case