Other than blowing up an entire planet to torture a prisoner/deter other planets, the Empire was pretty moderate.
The "no objective evidence" thing honestly makes me wonder if Kristol has a fanon where the movies reflect unreliable pro-Rebel propaganda. But it's probably just all the cognitive dissonance showing itself - they weren't shown to be evil because they never raised taxes.
Kinda with BK on this one. Pretty sure that if I had my own planet-spaceship-thing that could destroy other planets with laser beams I'd use it. I mean mostly on uninhabited planets but if you could create a big space explosion AND take out the Senate, why not.
Oh my fucking god. He then linked to a 2002 Weekly Standard post saying "It would be reasonable to suspect that Alderaan is a front for Rebel activity or at least home to many more spies and insurgents like Leia.... The Empire is not committing random acts of terror. It is engaged in a fight for the survival of its regime against a violent group of rebels who are committed to its destruction."
The Empire didn't seem particularly meritocratic, though. Wasn't the entire officer class filled with incompetent upper-class Brits?
This is definitely the most horrible and consequential statement Bill Kristol has ever made. This time he has gone too far.
4: So, metaphoring the metaphor, he'd be totally cool if we nuked Iraq and Syria to get rid of ISIS.
Also the rebels were comitted to unprincipled ethnic "diversity." A space lobster might well make a fine Admiral, and I would never suggest otherwise, but it's an affront to both the dignity of space lobsters AND the equal rights of British accent guys when we are forced, by the discriminatory Rebel policy, to suspect that Akbar reached his position of power not through the contents of his Admiralship, but because of the bright red color of his shell-skin.
I saw this somewhere else, maybe RT on twitter. I just assumed it was a spoof account. Neocons vs. paleocons, how many years from tragedy to farce?
OK, here's a serious question that I assume one of you nerds knows the answer to and/or there is extensive, Talmudic commentary on the Internet and legions of books Inhave no idea about: How was the Rebellion financed and where did it get its war materiel? An X-wing fighter, for example, can't be cheap to purchase or maintain, and they weren't just using knock-offs or stolen Imperial spacecraft. Was there some kind of extra-Empire foreign power sponsoring the whole thing?
People say it's affirmative action when it's the top jobs, but the rebels still send only Bothans in to die to get the Death Star plans.
He should have linked to this on "why the jedi had to die". Blame episodes 1-3 on them. ;)
http://mashable.com/2015/10/21/the-force-awakens-jedi/#Uq14Ep1z_5qi
Actually, I like this essay...
because of the bright red color of his shell-skin.
The recruiting and promotion books, like Akbar himself, have been cooked.
No objective evidence Empire was "evil."
Aside I guess from being ruled by people with superpowers that are literally fueled by their devotion to the "dark side".
14: Racist assumption that "dark side" is evil.
I suppose the Empire does get some credit for having Peter Cushing in a top leadership position.
10: I'm far from a Star Wars nerd, but presumably they taxed rebel controlled territories? If Farc can do it, the Rwbel Aöliance can.
10: I'm far from a Star Wars nerd, but presumably they taxed rebel controlled territories? If Farc can do it, the Rwbel Aöliance can.
10: http://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/20820/how-was-the-rebellion-financed
I'm surrounded by a single asshole.
So, per 19, the Space Lobsters were the Universe's defense contractors, and defected for some reason, and thus were by far the most important contributors to the Rebellion's materiel and hence victory. I guess that sort of makes sense maybe. Also their planet was apparently called "Mons Calamari" which is hilarious. The survival of our military rebellion depends on the calamari not being eaten! No we didn't come up with this name right after lunch at the commissary on the studio lot!
I want a, "fund the Rwbel Aöliance" bumper sticker! This should happen.
I thought he was talking about the current Fox tv series. Are y'all sure?
The answer to the question in 10 is obvious: drug dealing. Sure, they say that they were forced to kill Jabba the Hutt and his henchcreatures as a by product of rescuing Han. Pure propaganda; they were actually getting rid of their chief competitor in the intergalactic elicit drug trade.
Elicit drugs are favored by mystics and psychopomps the galaxy over.
25: That's initially how I read it too. I couldn't make sense of it.
Either way, it makes more sense than the leader of Israel trying let Hitler off the hook.
29 -- I love it how the Germans have responded with "uh, no, seriously, it was definitely us." Say what you will about Angela Merkel but it's nice to see an objectively sane political culture once in a while.
Which also happened this week and is on topic to some degree.
Does anyone have a sense for how his comments are playing amongst the Israel right?
They're probably over the whole concern-with-Hitler thing. That was seventy years ago now.
I'm sure it's just a matter of a couple of years before people are making a cookie to look like his mustache or something.
What people don't seem to get is that just as Netanyahu speaks for all the Jews, he also owns complete unconditional rights to the Holocaust to use for any purpose he sees fit.
I'm glad the essay linked in 12 brings up the really obvious point that drove me nuts through the entire prequel trilogy: how did they not think, even for like ten seconds, about what the word "balance" means?
Were they really such dimwitted religious cultists that they just heard the word "balance" and went "balance is good! I can't wait!"? That would be consistent with what we see of them in the prequels, so maybe.
Kristol actually seems about right, here. I was never really into Star Wars, so maybe I'm mistaken, but the only really evil thing they did was destroy a whole (enemy) planet, which seems about on par to me morally as using nuclear weapons. They don't enslave anyone, or anything, do they?
I don't see any argument that the Empire is evil that would not also clearly determine the USA as evil - which, fine by me, what's important is we're consistent here. BK accordingly thinks both the USA and the Empire are fine.
They don't enslave anyone, or anything, do they?
Do droids count?
It's amazing how evergreen this topic is. "The Empire were the real good guys. The rebels were the villains!" was already a thing in 1980, and probably earlier.
40: Yes, it's just so endlessly fascinating.
40 Wasn't that a scene in Clerks?
The only thing I remember from Clerks is the accidental necrophilia and that New Jersey is full of assholes.
a cookie to look like his mustache or something
This reference I do not get. Hamentaschen? Schillerlocken?
38.2: I was just in a discussion at the other place on how prizing consistency is the characteristic liberal vice.
43: If I recall correctly, the Clerks guy allowed that the Empire was evil. It was the innocent building contractors working on the unfinished Death Star that he was concerned with.
38: They weren't an enemy planet. They were a planet whose leaders were suspected of knowing where an enemy base was, and might be reasonably assumed to rebel in the future. As if the Union burnt down cities in Maryland or Kentucky early in the Civil War.
I bet Emperor Palpatine was glad he dissolved the Imperial Senate before the Death Star got destroyed. I mean, can you imagine what the committee hearings investigating that would have been like?
They would both forgive the empire for Alderaan, the Jawa massacre, and the murders of the Lars family, but a paleocon might object to Vader commandeering the Cloud City company town. A neocon never would.
I think everybody was O.K. with the murder of the Lars family. Moisture Farming? That's not even a possible thing. That was just their word for pissing on the produce before they shipped it to market as "pre-washed."
So, Netanyahu is basically an amoral political creature, right? Does anyone have any idea what he hoped to achieve through his history lecture? Is he just trying to demagogue it up for the domestic market? What good would that do anybody? Is the current violence benefiting him somehow?
Is he just trying to demagogue it up for the domestic market?
Because the domestic market was ready and waiting for somebody to point out that Hitler was really just too ready to take the advice of others.
53: I was never sure he was an amoral political creature. It was always possible that he was a straight up hate-driven loon. Now I'm thinking that is more likely.
It's so nonsensical and devoid of any sensible political calculation that it has to be his actual unvarnished opinion.
"Hitler polls so poorly that there's no where but up to go."
How is it devoid of sensible political calculation? It's part 52,234 of Operation Make Jews Hate Muslims.
But literally all of the first 52,233 parts made more sense. And that's a not a very high bar to fail to clear.
Besides, everybody knows that if Hitler wasn't responsible for the Holocaust, gun control is a good idea.
1. Christ, what an asshole.
2. NERDS!
53: It's pretty clear that for him and a pretty large chunk of the Israeli government (and frankly a fairly sizable portion of the population though less openly) the long term goal is genocide. Occasionally when he says stuff this ludicrous he gets embarrassed but plenty of the time he doesn't, so as a general policy of slowly shifting the range of acceptable things to say it works reasonably well.
The point of making a Palestinian responsible for the Holocaust is that ethnic cleansing (up to and including genocide) is always best marketed as tit for tat. 'They did it to us first, so we have to do it to them, so they can't do it to us again'. He is laying the ideological groundwork for eventual mass murder.
Or such is my terrified supposition - I don't see any other explanation.
Every other bit of his rhetoric supports that, so I have no trouble taking that to be the explanation. It'll be interesting to see what happens when they actually start in on it - I'm not sure what any Israeli politician could effectively do to get them off that track by now barring open-revolution level changes. The settlements/second class citizen laws/etc. are way too established to be abandoned, and are only expanding. The Palestinian land by now is small enough and shrinking fast enough and economically restricted enough by Israel that it's only a matter of time before they literally are just concentration camps.
I am a little puzzled by the argument "they can't have been evil, they were liberal! "
BTW Netanyahu is a nut but it is not really plausible that he is contemplating mass murder of civilians or that the IDF would follow orders to perpetrate it. Be serious.
Yes after all it's not like there's any history of genocidal rhetoric coming from other government officials or anything. And it's not like IDF members have ever been told to kill civilians and done it or anything. It's just silly Bibi running his mouth.
OK, how many massacres do you expect the IDF to carry out in the next decade? As in, killing lets say 50 unarmed civilians or more at once. I'm betting zero. What's your prediction?
Your last link doesn't support your argument by the way, it seems to lead to a description of an incident in which IDF fired at but didn't hit some civilians leaving a house.
Well, I said ethnic cleansing (up to..), which generally happens stepwise and looks kinda inadvertent and not fully under central control and aren't both sides sort of doing it and it isn't really clear what's happening is it... until it's too late. And I take the distinction to be that the primary objective of ethnic cleansing is to expel people, with killing them as second best/instrumental. And I find it entirely plausible that Likud is running scenarios along those lines - do you really not?
What seriously? The entire Breaking the Silence website has only that? Give me a break. And given the number of massacres of fifty or more civilians that have happened over the last five years I'd say there's a pretty good chance of more.
That third link is the truly impressive one, by the way, even if it's by someone who isn't, say, currently the Justice Minister:
In light of these four points, Israel must do the following:
a) The IDF [Israeli army] shall designate certain open areas on the Sinai border, adjacent to the sea, in which the civilian population will be concentrated, far from the built-up areas that are used for launches and tunneling. In these areas, tent encampments will be established, until relevant emigration destinations are determined.
The supply of electricity and water to the formerly populated areas will be disconnected.
b) The formerly populated areas will be shelled with maximum fire power. The entire civilian and military infrastructure of Hamas, its means of communication and of logistics, will be destroyed entirely, down to their foundations.
c) The IDF will divide the Gaza Strip laterally and crosswise, significantly expand the corridors, occupy commanding positions, and exterminate nests of resistance, in the event that any should remain.
d) Israel will start searching for emigration destinations and quotas for the refugees from Gaza. Those who wish to emigrate will be given a generous economic support package, and will arrive at the receiving countries with considerable economic capabilities.
e) Those who insist on staying, if they can be proven to have no affiliation with Hamas, will be required to publicly sign a declaration of loyalty to Israel, and receive a blue ID card similar to that of the Arabs of East Jerusalem.
I'm basically sympathetic with Ajay's point and no I do not think actual genocide is coming, but didn't the IDF kill like over 2000 people in Gaza Operation Protective Edge alone? That kinda seems like a massacre by most definitions, particularly given the issues with proportionality.
Just to double check: the Breaking the Silence website that includes this testimony gave you no reason to think the IDF might kill unarmed civilians:
The rules of engagement are pretty identical: Anything inside [the Gaza Strip] is a threat, the area has to be 'sterilized,' empty of people - and if we don't see someone waving a white flag, screaming "I give up" or something - then he is a threat and there is authorization to open fire. In the event that we arrest and restrain him, then one strips him to make sure there is no explosive device on him.
To get authorization to open fire, does he need to be armed, or with binoculars?
I think he just needs to be there.
When you say open fire, what does that mean?
Shooting to kill. This is combat in an urban area, we're in a war zone. The saying was: 'There's no such thing there as a person who is uninvolved.' In that situation, anyone there is involved. Everything is dangerous; there were no special intelligence warnings such as some person, or some white vehicle arriving... No vehicle is supposed to be there - if there is one, we shoot at it. Anything that's not 'sterile' is suspect. There was an intelligence warning about animals. If a suspicious animal comes near, shoot it. In practice, we didn't do that. We had arguments about whether or not to do it. But that was just a general instruction; in practice you learn to recognize the animals because they are the only ones wandering around.
And of those killed Wiki gives a range of 50-75% civilians, so I think that gets you to the criteria in 68 already, no?
On the day the fellow from our company was killed, the commanders came up to us and told us what happened. Then they decided to fire an 'honor barrage' and fire three shells. They said, "This is in memory of ****." That felt very out of line to me, very problematic.
A barrage of what?
A barrage of shells. They fired the way it's done in funerals, but with shellfire and at houses. Not into the air. They just chose [a house] - the tank commander said, "Just pick the farthest one, so it does the most damage." Revenge of sorts. So we fired at one of the houses. Really you just see a block of houses in front of you, so the distance doesn't really matter.
It was during our first Sabbath. Earlier that day one of the companies was hit by a few anti-tank missiles. The unit went to raid the area from which they were fired, so the guys who stayed behind automatically cared less about civilians. I remember telling myself that right now, the citizens of Gaza, I really don't give a fuck about them. They don't deserve anything - and if they deserve something it's either to be badly wounded or killed. That's what was going through my mind during those moments. There was this one time when an old [Palestinian] man approached the house and everyone remembered hearing about that booby-trapped old man (earlier in his testimony the testifier described being briefed about an elderly Palestinian man armed with grenades who tried to attack a different force). This happened right around noon, between noon and 2:00 PM. So this old man came over, and the guy manning the post - I don't know what was going through his head - he saw this civilian, and he fired at him, and he didn't get a good hit. The civilian was laying there, writhing in pain. We all remembered that story going around, so none of the paramedics wanted to go treat him. It was clear to everyone that one of two things was going to happen: Either we let him die slowly, or we put him out of his misery. Eventually, we put him out of his misery, and a D9 (armored bulldozer) came over and dropped a mound of rubble on him and that was the end of it. In order to avoid having to deal with the question of whether he was booby-trapped or not - because that really didn't interest anyone at that moment - the D9 came over, dropped a pile of rubble on his body and that was it. Everyone knew that under that pile there was the guy's corpse. What came up during the investigation when the company commander asked the soldier, was that the soldier spotted a man in his late 60s, early 70s approaching the house. They were stationed in a tall house, with a good vantage point. The soldier spotted that guy going in his direction, toward his post. So he shot in the direction of his feet at the beginning. And he said the old man kept getting closer to the house so he shot a bullet beneath his left ribs. Kidney, liver, I don't know what's in there. A spot you don't want to be hit by a bullet. That old man took the bullet, lay down on the ground, then a friend of that soldier came over and also shot the man, while he was already down. For the hell of it, he shot two more bullets at his legs. Meanwhile there was a talk with the commander, and because this was happening amidst a battalion offensive, it really didn't interest anyone. "We have casualties up front, don't bother us, do what you need to do."
We entered a neighborhood with orchards, which is the scariest. There were lots of stories going around about being surprised by tunnels or explosive devices in these orchards. When you go in you fire at lots of suspicious places. You shoot at bushes, at trees, at all sorts of houses you suddenly run into, at more trees. You fire a blast and don't think twice about it. When we first entered [the Gaza Strip] there was this ethos about Hamas - we were certain that the moment we went in our tanks would all be up in flames. But after 48 hours during which no one shoots at you and they're like ghosts, unseen, their presence unfelt - except once in a while the sound of one shot fired over the course of an entire day - you come to realize the situation is under control. And that's when my difficulty there started, because the formal rules of engagement - I don't know if for all soldiers - were, "Anything still there is as good as dead. Anything you see moving in the neighborhoods you're in is not supposed to be there. The [Palestinian] civilians know they are not supposed to be there. Therefore whoever you see there, you kill."
Who gave that order?
The commander. "Anything you see in the neighborhoods you're in, anything within a reasonable distance, say between zero and 200 meters - is dead on the spot. No authorization needed." We asked him: "I see someone walking in the street, do I shoot him?" He said yes. "Why do I shoot him?" "Because he isn't supposed to be there. Nobody, no sane civilian who isn't a terrorist, has any business being within 200 meters of a tank. And if he places himself in such a situation, he is apparently up to something." Every place you took over, anything you 'sterilized,' anything within a range of zero to 200 meters, 300 meters -that's supposed to be a 'sterilized' area, from our perspective.
Did the commander discuss what happens if you run into civilians or uninvolved people?
There are none. The working assumption states - and I want to stress that this is a quote of sorts: that anyone located in an IDF area, in areas the IDF took over - is not [considered] a civilian. That is the working assumption. We entered Gaza with that in mind, and with an insane amount of firepower. I don't know if it was proportionate or not. I don't claim to be a battalion commander or a general. But it reached a point where a single tank - and remember, there were 11 of those just where I was - fires between 20 and 30 shells per day. The two-way radio was crazy when we entered. There was one reservist tank company that positioned itself up on a hill and started firing. They fired lots - that company's formal numbers stood at something like 150 shells per day. They fired, fired, fired. They started pounding things down two hours ahead [of the entrance].
I mean, would you like me to go on? It's a pretty massive database after all, and those were all from 2014.
Genocide doesn't always or even usually look like the Wannsee Conference, ethnic cleansing almost never does. The point (or at least the effect) of racist rhetoric and dehumanizing restrictions and, crucially, *historical myths* is to whip up your own side, military and civilian, to the point where pretty much anything can happen without anybody's fingerprints being on an actual order.
The IDF's record of atrocities in the Occupied Territories is well documented. And it's a matter of policy now to indiscriminately target civilians (it has a name but I forgot). But I don't think they will carry out genocide on the West Bank and find that hard to imagine. That will be to the settlers while the IDF stands around doing nothing, except maybe protecting those settlers. That's unfortunately not at all hard to imagine. That's where this is heading.
Like with a lot of stuff the Nazis did genocide with so much flair that I think people forget how easy it is for a society to get to that point and how prosaic a lot of it looks. Sure it's hard to imagine Auschwitz-on-the-West-Bank. But it's not too hard for me to imagine the IDF forcibly entering Gaza, firing on/killing able bodied looking men on the "hey they're probably combatants" principle* and relocating the rest of the population to an even more confined area without adequate water or food, or even relocating them by means of a forced march. And that's just as much a way of doing it - and a more common one I think.
This list of genocides on Wikipedia makes for lengthy depressing reading and one thing that's clear is how easy it can be to get there (especially starting from where Israel is now which, from the perspective of those genocides could be as close as one triggering moment away) and how prosaic it can look.
*very very not hard to imagine.
All those BTS stories are bad but, no, none of them support your belief that the IDF would, on orders, carry out the mass killing of those they knew to be unarmed civilians.
And no backfilling. You said "he is laying the groundwork for eventual mass murder". So own that.
Barry's point about the settlers is a bit more plausible but still, really? The occasional lone wolf terrorist attack, sure, but mass murder on an organised scale?
80: you probably want to try that "oh you don't really understand genocide " line to someone who has seen fewer mass graves of genocide victims this year than me, BTW.
81.2 A settler riot/rampage? That doesn't sound at all implausible to me at this point.
Yeah I did, and I do. You may remember that there were other links up there, about senior government officials openly talking in genocidal ways right? Those are probably relevant to the claim that, you know, they were doing that.
And don't give me that stupid moral superiority line either, it's neither relevant to anything I said nor impressive.
True, 82 was unnecessary (and hardie-ish) and I withdraw it.
But I stick to my main point:there is a difference between the kind of criminal stuff currently happening and genocidal mass murder, and I don't believe the IDF will cross it any time soon. You disagree. Time will tell.
Now can we please talk about Bill Kristol or Star Wars again?
I assume the rhetoric and lack of investigations make it increasingly easy for no-one to be sure the dead were unarmed civilians, so no-one insists on investigations, and then eventually the Quiripi Palestinians are all gone. Hunh.
Right, the problem is that Israel has the leisure to do effective genocide/cleansing slowly, bullet by bullet or building by building, without actually having to murder or deport en masse. I was tempted to declare that is in fact what's going on, but I'm not sure I know enough to declare definitively (settlers keep encroaching but I didn't find data that the Palestinian population has actually declined over time, as opposed to just getting more helpless and dependent).
The thing that makes me think genocide is a plausible outcome is that all Israel would really need to do to cross that line is to, following some probably-settler-related violence in the West bank, decide to 'mow the lawn' shorter than last time* while insisting that rather than just ambiguously 'leaving the area' the "civilians" (read: children, old people, maybe women) need to relocate to a holding area for their safety** which has too little in the way of resources to safely support that population***. Then after the army has gone in and leveled everything a bunch of settlers close off the remaining livable places to the Palestinians forcing them to stay where they were moved**** with increasing lack of resources/development. (And maybe repeat it again with parts of the Gaza strip but, honestly, I've pretty much just described how a lot of previous genocides worked already so...)
*"anyone in the area is a target" is really one tiny step away from meeting the criteria already, and the step is just doing it more over larger areas.
**which would just be a more coordinated version of last time's "don't be here ok?" - and probably something they could easily sell under "we think there may have been accidental civilian deaths so we're making sure to clear the area this time"
***And, well, Gaza would kind of be an obvious place...
****Which, basically, is the entire history of the state of Israel already.
Also 85 is gracious and probably more mature than I am.
Might not the greatest usefulness of the Palestinians be in their eventual genocide? With a few Klemperer's left over to bear witness? I'm just trying to take the long-term view here.
The IDF is basically playing a cat and mouse game with the Palestinians at this point, right? Might as well get it over with, end the suffering.
Full scale genocide in the West Bank strikes me as extremely unlikely in the forseeable future. Gaza, on the other hand, seems quite plausible. It's such a small area, and they're already having a war there every 5 years. All you need to do is a really heavy bombing of plausibly military targets and almost everyone is dead.
Just maintaining the current situation is probably enough. Bombs would be overkill. (I mean, probably also something that will happen sooner or later, but...)
I bet Emperor Palpatine was glad he dissolved the Imperial Senate before the Death Star got destroyed. I mean, can you imagine what the committee hearings investigating that would have been like?
"Secretary Vader, why did you say that you had provided all the emails to the committee when there were 15 emails that some other guy had that you didn't have?"
"I find your lack of faith disturbing."
<choke><gasp>
I won't be surprised if in the next few years IS gains a pretty significant following in the WB. That'll be bad.
I'm embarrassed to admit how long it took me to realize that WB meant "West Bank" rather than the television channel.
Especially since that television channel hasn't existed in years.
HELLO MY BABY, HELLO MY PROP'TY, HELLO MY SLAVE-HELD GAL, IF YOU REFUSE ME, THEN I'LL DEFUSE THE, BOMB 'NEATH YOUR FAMILY'S HOME ...
Well if you meet with these historians, I'll tell you what to say: Tell them that the fascists never really went away -- they're out there blowing houses up and peddling racist lies, and we'll never rest again until every fascist dies.
So the various sources say that the X-wings were shielded, unlike TIE fighters, but I've never noticed X-wings successfully taking hits. Or do the pilots say things like, "My shields are getting low" or something, and it's just never stuck with me?
I remember Luke getting hit in one. R2 fixed it. Also, they did talk about the shields when they were shooting down the trenches and such.
You would think the Empire could have spared enough shield technology to at least put one around that womp rat-sized exhaust port on the Death Star.
Would you want to be the one tell the giant monster in the garbage compactor that his only sex toy was now closed?
That's probably how the monster got in there in the first place. You leave a door open like that, you are going to attract vermin.
Boxing headgear should be heavy, football shouldn't.
Football TBI can be fixed by having all the athletes compete from within human-powered exoskeletons. This would also improve the game.
You're welcome.
108: your inability to appreciate the superiority in every respect of football played by people wearing fully-powered exoskeletons betrays a lack of commitment to Halfordismo. A human-powered exoskeleton is just a silly suit. Powered exoskeletons would remove the natural advantage accruing at present to the larger, stronger or faster players, because everyone would have an exo of identical capability. Football would become a game of reflexes and skill (and colossal violence).
You would think the Empire could have spared enough shield technology to at least put one around that womp rat-sized exhaust port on the Death Star.
Building immensely large and powerful naval capital ships with critical and obvious weaknesses is a long and honoured tradition, though, especially in navies officered by upper-class Brits.
("THERE SEEMS TO BE SOMETHING WRONG WITH OUR BLOODY DEATH STARS TODAY.")
Off topic: High quality photography of cows.
Question: As implied by the caption of #2 and #29, do the Dutch really keep their cows inside all winter? That's nuts. Also, all those cows and not one single picture of Nebraska or Texas, the two most cow-prone states.
re: 111
I can't speak for the Dutch, but my wife was surprised to see cows outside everywhere, in the UK. We lived near a public grazing meadow/flood meadow, so they weren't just outside, we used to walk through herds of them to get to the pub.
That is definitely not the norm in the Czech Republic, were cows are inside most of the time.
Don't their mothers worry about too much screen time?
Nebraska has 6 million cows. I don't think it would even occurred to anybody to put them inside for the winter and I'm pretty sure the weather is far colder than in Holland.
The pigs are inside. Maybe Holland has pigs wandering around outside all year.
re: 114
Different breeds of cow, presumably? You can leave highland cows outside in weather you wouldn't want to leave other less hardy breeds, for example.
Nebraska cattle don't look any hairier than regular European cattle. Certainly not anything like a highland cow.
Although I guess most of the beef cattle are Angus (at least in part), which is presumably from Scotland.
Maybe there's a Czech version of Wagyu beef in which the cows are fed on a diet of Staropramen and dumplings while living in stuffy centrally-heated byres.
I think the reality is more of a 'battery-farming cows because not as much as land, and we give exactly no shits about animal welfare' thing.
Chew the red cud if you want to see the truth.
One notable exception aside the Death Star was practically invincible, so I don't know if it's fair to criticize the Empire too much for their engineering. Some jackass in a basement discovers a new critical vulnerability in Windows/OSX/whatever like every two weeks or something, and the Death Star was the size of a moon. I would have liked to see more dialogue in the movie along the lines of "but what are they doing zooming around in that little trench anyway?" and "why did the chief engineer suddenly pee himself after looking at the blueprints for the station?"
Hah. I just listened to a rerun of the 99% Invisible podcast about the Citicorp Center and how they figured out it was likely to fall down in a not particularly surprising windstorm, which is pretty much exactly that story.
And with bonus fascinating gender dynamics.
Women are invulnerable to falling buildings?
When women point out that "it looks like your building might fall down in a brisk wind, maybe", you get the superstar engineer who designed it giving speeches about the male student, whose name no one knows and who no one can find, who warned him.
123: that was a fascinating episode. And I thought it was hard being a female engineer now.
The version of the story the superstar engineer told
According to LeMessurier, in 1978 he got a phone call from an undergraduate architecture student making a bold claim about LeMessurier's building. He told LeMessurier that Citicorp Center could blow over in the wind.
The student (who has since been lost to history) was studying Citicorp Center as part of his thesis and had found that the building was particularly vulnerable to quartering winds (winds that strike the building at its corners). Normally, buildings are strongest at their corners, and it's the perpendicular winds (winds that strike the building at its face) that cause the greatest strain. But this was not a normal building.
LeMessurier had accounted for the perpendicular winds, but not the quartering winds. He checked the math, and found that the student was right. He compared what velocity winds the building could withstand with weather data, and found that a storm strong enough to topple Citicorp Center hits New York City every 55 years.
But that's only if the tuned mass damper, which keeps the building stable, is running. LeMessurier realized that a major storm could cause a blackout and render the tuned mass damper inoperable. Without the tuned mass damper, LeMessurier calculated that a storm powerful enough to take out the building hits New York every sixteen years.
That's a very common gender dynamic, but I would have been more fascinated to learn that women couldn't be hurt by falling buildings.
The only student anyone can find who did a thesis on the Citicorp Center and contacted LeMessurier's firm about it:
The BBC aired a special on the Citicorp Center crisis, and one of its viewers was Diane Hartley. It turns out that she was the student in LeMessurier's story. She never spoke with LeMessurier; rather, she spoke with one of his junior staffers.
Hartley didn't know that her inquiry about how the building deals with quartering winds lead to any action on LeMessurier's part. It was only after seeing the documentary that she began to learn about the impact that her undergraduate thesis had on the fate of Manhattan.
127: What really got me about the story is the staffer who Hartley talked to, who doesn't remember the conversation at all. Really? The whole Citicorp thing had to have been the most adrenaline-filled experience anyone at the engineering firm ever had. Even if there was a mysterious other, male, student who also raised the issue, you'd completely forget an inquiry about the structural integrity of your building that was, in fact, at risk of falling down and taking a big chunk of the skyline with it?
What really gets me is is how many giant buildings haven't had an undergraduate white a thesis about them and how stable are they.
But maybe you have to living in denial about that if you live in Manhattan.
Without any more info than in these comments, sounds like Hartley mashed "some student called in to report a problem" into "I talked to some young guy on the phone about it" and came up with a direct conversation with the student. Weird that the staffer doesn't remember it.
But I've found the story fascinating since it broke in the NYer in '95 (without the Hartley part of the story), partially because the Citicorp Center was a very familiar place as a little kid -- there was a bakery in the lower levels with good croissants we used to stop at.
Fascinating to think that it probably would have come down in Sandy if it hadn't been fixed -- that's the biggest windstorm combined with a blackout since it was built.
Lee DeCarolis, architect, also claims to be the New Jersey Institute of Technology student who brought the issue up with the engineer. Interview with him (from 7:30 onwards):
http://ec.libsyn.com/p/e/c/7/ec7e932889b07152/citicorp_revisited.mp3?d13a76d516d9dec20c3d276ce028ed5089ab1ce3dae902ea1d06cc8231d0cd5f0b87&c_id=7512416
He actually spoke to LeMessurier, unlike Hartley (who says she only spoke to a staffer).
133: Hartley's the student. LeMessurier is the engineer who told the story, and I think you're right -- he remembered "My male staffer told me about an inquiry from a student" as an inquiry from a male student. What gets me is the throwing up their hands "How could we possibly find the hero of the story?" when her advisor is pretty sure that no one else in NJ was writing a thesis on Citicorp in the relevant time period. There's a limited number of colleges in NJ -- call them all. Unless you don't really want to give her credit.
135: Never heard that bit -- I should listen to it when I'm not at work.
More to 135: Weird. There's pretty much nothing in text on line connecting DeCarolis to the story -- the interview you linked, and the guy who did the interview mentioning it on FB. I can't listen to the interview at work -- does he say anything about why he didn't come forward when the story broke?
135: It's a different podcast. It was referred to in the comments to the 99PI one. He was an architecture student doing a structural report on the building.
Right. From googling trying to find a text version of his story, it seems to be only in the 2014 podcast. I'm wondering if the podcast has an interesting story about why he came forward late?
138: he didn't know about the story when it broke in the New Yorker. He only read about it in a book much later on, and assumed it must have been him because he had had two long conversations with LeMessurier himself at the time, during which he relayed his professor's concerns about the building's stability and safety. He doesn't reckon any student could have spotted the problem by themselves from outside - structural analysis just isn't the kind of thing that lone undergraduates can do. He believes that LeMessurier was sparked to do something about it after talking to him.
he didn't know about the story when it broke in the New Yorker.
He works as an architect in the NY area?
I suspect that if anything LeMessurier remembered having these two phonecalls about the Citicorp building with this rude student from New Jersey who kept on asking him about stability and safety, and if his staffer passed on Hartley's queries then he retconned them after the fact as coming from the same student.
(DeCarolis being the student in question explains one thing: that LeMessurier remembered the conversation as being with just "a student from New Jersey" rather than "a student from Princeton". Really, would any Princeton student mention which state they were in, but not which university they were at?)
Yes, here we are: http://archinect.com/decarolis
I mean, I guess anything's possible, but that's seriously, seriously, peculiar. Along the lines of "Sure, I'm an election law specialist in Florida. No, I don't remember anything interesting happening in 2000."
And of course, it remains bizarre that LeMessurier didn't identify him. The universe of possible engineering/architecture students in NJ in the relevant time period is pretty small.
Speaking of hurricanes holy shit but is Mexico about to get hammered.
146: he knew about the problem with the building, but he didn't know that it had happened because of a phone call from a student. He only found that out when he read the detailed account in this book
http://www.amazon.com/Einsteins-Refrigerator-Other-Stories-Flip/dp/0740714198
he knew about the problem with the building, but he didn't know that it had happened because of a phone call from a student.
Okay, I've been incredulous, but now I flat don't believe it. He was interested enough in the building to have had several long conversations with LeMessurier as a student about its stability. The story that it was, in fact, unstable broke in 1995 in a story in the New Yorker where the central narrative was about the student inquiry. He's a professional architect. And he heard something about the problem with the building, but was never interested enough to read any version of the story complete enough to mention the student aspect of it?
Somehow never heard about it at all, I could imagine as a freak event. Heard about it peripherally, but was never interested enough to read anything at all about it when the story broke? I do not believe that. Does he mention any contemporary corroboration of his having contacted LeMessurier?
Really, would any Princeton student mention which state they were in, but not which university they were at?)
Yes. I had one prospective grad student introduce himself to me as being a student at a small liberal arts school in New Jersey.
151: Is that a quote from "Goodbye Columbus"?
No, it's how Harvard students avoid 'dropping the H-Bomb'.
Didn't that term become less common after they made a porn magazine with that title?
OTOH Hartley denies she ever talked to LeMessurier at all, and LeMessurier specifically says he talked to a male architecture student on the phone about stability.
And Hartley didn't think she was the student either, remember - she missed the New Yorker story as well, even though she is a qualified architect who wrote her thesis on the Citicorp Center. She only heard about it by chance from the BBC documentary the next year.
it was only when her supervisor said "that student? I reckon that was you" later on that she started to think it might have been.
As I say, I reckon LeMessurier conflated two things into one in his memory: the phone conversations with DeCarolis, and the enquiry from Hartley.
LeMessurier is pretty non-vague about the call; he was called out of a meeting in June 1978 to answer it, the student passed on his professor's concerns "But I said, 'Listen, I want you to tell your teacher that he doesn't know what the hell he's talking about, because he doesn't know the problem that had to be solved.' I promised to call back after my meeting and explain the whole thing."
Now, that student might not be DeCarolis, if DeCarolis is lying, but that's a lot of corroborative detail for LeMessurier to misremember. Unless LeMessurier is lying as well?
147: Checking it out
With sustained winds of 200 mph, that means gusts 250-300? Tornado level, not counting the usual tornadoes generated by a hurricane.
There are bigger ones coming.
Biggest ever. Been expecting this, but not this soon. I think there was another monster in western Pacific a few months ago.
Right, but she knew the story within a year of when it broke, which is kind of different from almost two decades later -- I'm not saying that everyone reads the New Yorker, but that it's a really famous story that it'd be implausible for someone in the industry to be unfamiliar with long-term. And she has contemporaneous corroboration from her advisor that she contacted LeMessurier's firm.
DeCarolis, unless he has something contemporaneous, has no evidence he was involved, and a really psychologically implausible story about having vaguely heard about it, but not knowing the story about the student, which was central to the story as reported. I haven't listened to the podcast, but that really sounds like gloryhounding after the only possible corroborator is dead.
159 to 156. To 158, that's all compatible with his having spoken to his staffer and misremembered it as having spoken directly to the student.
880 millibars in the eye? That's not a hurricane, that's a hole in the world. The record is only 870mb.
Cyclone Olivia in 2010 apparently has the record for non-tornado windspeed - 253 mph.
Remove the millibar from your own eye before you worry about your neighbor's eye.
They said it's roughly the same as typhoon Haiyan in 2013 that killed ~7000 people in the Philippines.
Revival of the old-time liberal blogosphere -- Ogged to DeLong to Drum?
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2015/10/grand-moff-tarkin-not-such-bad-guy-after-all
159: Maybe, at the time, the ingenuous DeCarolis wrongly thought all skyscrapers would topple over, and he made lots of phone calls, a very embarrassing period in his academic development. That's why this story of a skyscraper that could have toppled over didn't really stand years later when he heard about it third-hand. It was only even later, when he saw photos that jogged his memory, and he was like, "Oh, that building. The one that actually looks like it should fall over. I got one right!"
245 mph gusts
"like a 15-20 mile wide EF4-EF5 tornado" (but lasting longer)
Record water temperatures at the coast, still 12 hours (?) away.
300-400k people in catastrophic range, including Puerta Vallarta
First a thousand year flood in South Carolina, now the biggest hurricane ever seen in the western hemisphere. Climate change is going to be a blast for extreme weather fans.
There's always a silver lining in even the most terrifying cloud.
Anyone else read "Heavy Weather"? I can really picture bob in that bunker under Oklahoma.
171: Yes. The weather stuff was mostly annoying; but I did like his take on software/computing technology reuse. But your image works.
Just think how much more energy we'll be able to generate from wind power.
300-400k people in catastrophic range, including Puerta Vallarta
Cripes, that's what I was afraid of. Passing NW of Guadalajara, hopefully.
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Ben Domenech said something funny! He tweeted, "This hearing is actually going better than I expected," to which Amanda Carpenter replied, "how low ewere your expectations," resulting in, "Expected Jar Jar, got Ewoks."
Topical, too.
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174. Hopefully. The most recent thing I saw made it marginal. It'll be a bit breezy there.
Drum is definitely on the blame-baby-Hitler side.
Yes. I had one prospective grad student introduce himself to me as being a student at a small liberal arts school in New Jersey.
Hey, St. Peter's College is a cool place. Let him in.
Patricia now down to category one and weakening fast. No reported deaths yet.
Ok, so who's the first right winger to say that those climate scientists were making a big deal about things again and nothing terrible happened. We can handle bigger storms from your so-called climate change if this is it.
152, 153: I looked this up and actually I was right. Brenda Patimkin says that -- and it turns out that she goes to Radcliffe. Apparently this was already "a thing" back in the 1950s when the book was written -- the narrator, Neil Klugman is annoyed.
I genuinely do feel a little bad about going back to responding to 66/etc. again, but it was impossible not to when I saw this article just now because it's just too direct and creepy not to.
People of Aida Refugee camp we are the occupation army. You throw stones and we will hit you with gas until you all die. The children, the youth, the old people, you will all die, we won't leave any of you alive. And we have arrested one of you, he is with us now. We took him from his home and we will slaughter and kill him while you are watch if you keep throwing stones. Go home or we will gas you until you die.