overtone

The protests and demonstrations agains American soldiers being quartered in the school went to three separate buildings that day: the City Hall, the Ba'ath Party headquarters building, and the school building at issue. Here's a picture of the school, where soldiers fired from the roof into the crowd: http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2024179,00.html Two days later there was a shooting at the Ba'ath Party headquarters building as well - not the school: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Battle_of_Fallujah And here's from the Wiki account, already linked and read by you, of the 3rd Cavalry choosing not to occupy the school building, but to stay in the Ba'ath Party Headquarters building only instead: "The 3rd Cavalry was significantly smaller in number and chose not to occupy the same schoolhouse where the shooting had occurred two days earlier. On the same day soldiers shot three protesters in front of U.S. Forward Operating Base "Laurie," established in the former Ba'ath party headquarters,[8] and next to the Mayor's office. - - - - - - During the summer, the US Army decided to close down its last remaining base inside the city (the Ba'ath party headquarters; FOB Laurie)" Sure you do - if he was at fault. I read no motives into anything. You did. And your motive reading required you to deny factual accounts, and declare them to be "biased", because they contradicted your preselected motives. So did the people who advocated, mandated, and set up the torture facilities and practices at Abu Ghraib, and Bagram, and Gitmo, and Diego Garcia, and a half dozen others. So did the people who voted those perps back into office after being informed of what they'd been up to. Because it doesn't matter. Almost certainly Sunni Baathists from the military had gone home to Fallujah - they lived there, their families lived there, the war was over, most of them had never liked Saddam anyway (they were religious, he was secular and oppressive). One would assume that. That may have explained the calm, the lack of looting and violence, in Fallujah. No, one would not be silly like that. The collapse of Fallujah from a calm and civilian run city without a significant military presence into the major center of Sunni insurgency in Iraq and the source of what has become ISIL is still traced directly from the 82nd Airborne's encampment in that city. None of that agrees with the facts, except maybe - maybe - your hypothesis of deluded and bigoted thinking among poorly prepared and badly commanded Americans. The crowd was not in front of the Ba'ath Headquarters, there was no evidence of firing from the crowd (it was checked carefully, because war crimes were an issue), and the American forces should not have fired into an unarmed crowd regardless. Dude, it ain't just one thing. The torture prison complex that included Abu Ghraib was pretty bad, I grant you, but in isolation it could be overcome - just apologize for the temporary insanity, plead special circumstances, prosecute the central figures responsible, promise never to do that again, and we'd be good. But that is just the tip of the iceberg here - You guys ran your string of betrayals and atrocities and incompetence and bigotry and dumbass violence all the way out with W. All the way. You trashed your country. The only people still supporting your team without being on it are the ones who still can't believe your team really exists, and really is doing what it's been doing, even when it's right in front of them dressed up as a candidate for President. Seriously - the biggest challenge in reining your team in and sitting them in the time out corner for a generation is convincing regular TV watching Americans that you guys actually did what you did, and will do it some more. But it's important to keep trying, because if nobody stops you we'll be seeing another Iraq War launched on our credit cards against the terrorists wherever they may be this time - and that's kind of scary. Paris? Syria? Special ID cards for Muslims in the US? Universal phone and computer taps? You guys are capable of almost anything.

So: Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, for sure. Maybe W, depending on what the interrogation discovers about what he knew and how much he understood about what was happening. Who else? I mean, the invasion of Iraq was clearly and distinctly evil, right, and it led to this Paris terrorism and much else in the realm of horribleness, and its perps are still walking around influencing policy and working their evil schemes, so - - -

What I actually posted - you have made visible and nonfactual alterations to my account ("peaceful", "parents", and "reopen their school", were not in my account, which was factual) - was the description of a Marine Corps historian which was otherwise seriously biased in favor of the US (he counted only 70 civilian casualties in all of the Fallujah conflict) , three accounts from two separate sources that agree with each other, and so forth. It is the standard version accepted by everyone and agreeing with the physical facts of the case. There is no other version in agreement with the physical evidence. So what you are calling "lies fabricated by terrorists" are to begin with alterations fabricated by you, and continuing are simply factual accounts agreed with by everyone who has investigated the matter. Let's take a look at some of the rest of your posting: Not a single "left leaner" here or anywhere I know of has ever suggested the US used an experimental dirty bomb anywhere in Iraq. In the first place the US has no such weaponry - we have no need, what with tactical nukes and the like in our arsenal, we have the real thing. In the second we were occupying the place - we would have been dirty bombing ourselves. So you claiming a "left leaner" might "suggest" that is nonsense, and your fantasy world of "left leaners" has thrown up yet another bizarre symptom. On the other hand, no reasonable person thinks Saddam had anything nuclear "going on" in Fallujah. Wrong place, far too easily discovered, the evidence would still be there, a desperate search by the Americans for any evidence at all they could use to back up their silly claims of nuke danger would hardly have missed the central battle region of the insurgency, and so forth. So the standard accusation - from the critics of W's Folly you choose to call "left leaners" without knowing their politics - is that the US was using white phosphorus and other toxics in combination with depleted uranium ammunition, and Fallujah got a heavy dose. That is the actual accusation visible in the article, so you had no need to invent nonsense about accusations of dirty bombs even for yourself. It also fits the physical facts - the US did in fact use WP munitions on cities in Iraq with many civilians in them, as was admitted even by the liars on your team after much denial when photographs and the like came out, and the US did in fact use depleted uranium munitions in Iraq, including use by the forces attacking Fallujah, which has never been denied (although it's amount has been lowballed). So the "left leaners" are once again dealing in physical facts, saying things based in reality, while you are dealing in fabrication and saying things based in fantasy. Once again your fantasy world alters my posting to fit your notion of "left leaning". No accusations of child molesting by the 82nd in Fallujah came from me (I only mention child molesting in the context of Abu Ghraib, where multiple investigators have mentioned the abuse of children and other family members by US "interrogators" and US counterinsurgency operatives). As far as the looting in Fallujah, it was minimal prior to the 82nd - my term was "little". Nothing like Baghdad's free-for-all. That agrees with all accounts. If you read your Wiki article carefully, for example, you will discover that its clever and biased and obviously corrupted wording does not go so far as to claim Fallujah itself was subjected to much looting, or was the scene of much violence prior to the 82nd making camp in the city proper. It does try to suggest that, to the gullible, by juxtaposing accounts of heavy prior looting in nearby places with accounts of fighting in Fallujah subsequent, and wording things so that a person could easily come away with the impression of a violent and looted Fallujah itself prior to the soldiers's arrival, but these Wiki accounts are public - it's not easy to get an outright lie on a topic like this into them. Continuing with your interesting post: After typing the alteration of "opening the school" you seem to have fooled yourself that I posted it, and now expand on your fantasy of my posting to include "take kids to school" and so forth. That's a symptom. I don't have to alter your posts like that to find grounds for reply. You have also made another error of fact: the accounts I posted - all of the several - have the unarmed civilians "marching past" not the school but another building occupied by the 82nd, the Baathist Party headquarters. Notice that they did not stop there, or "besiege" the soldiers in that building, but continued on to the school building. That is consistent with political protest, and inconsistent with your imagined besieging of frightened and violently threatened soldiers. Notice also that at this time of the year it was still pretty much daylight - the curfew was an early one - and that in Iraq it is customary to do business and conduct life in the cooler hours of the evening in general. So you are once again setting up a fantasy, and denying physical reality as well as historical event. You don't need the cite - lots of people are familiar with the New American Century plans of that unbelievably fuckwitted administration your team stuck our country with. The grandiose stupidity of W&Cheney setting out to conquer the Middle East and rid it of anyone who admitted to having a violent dislike of the US is common knowledge, although one doesn't often find it admitted so casually by the wingnut crowd. It's kind of embarrassing, as well as evil, and those guys are only comfortable with the evil. Just to point to the most obvious problem: Iraq, Syria, and Iran did not harbor "terrorists who wanted to hurt us" until after W's Folly, Lebanon is not a place a sane person would want to destroy in search of their scattered and generally harmless terrorist populations, Libya and Somalia are very large and decentralized tribal places in which rooting out all the "terrorists" would be a project involving decades of ugly tyranny, the largest populations of "terrorists who want to hurt us" were in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Yemen, Egypt, and similar countries we would have been fools to invade militarily, and so forth. And "us" appears to include Israel, which is a foreign country (no other reason to include Lebanon in the hit list). So the plan was to invade all the wrong countries, not just Iraq, and kill millions, not just hundreds of thousands. Beautiful. And you voted for that crowd - twice. It's not the terrorist lies that are making you look bad. Other people can see those lies, and allow for them. The terrorists look bad in Paris, for example. Your problem is that they can also see yours - and you can't, apparently.

It isn't, actually, easier to steal money than work for it. And other crime is even harder work - the last analysis I saw of retail drug sales in LA was something like $3.50@hr and a 1/12 chance of getting killed in any given year. http://blog.masslive.com/localbuzz_impact/2008/07/sv0707a.pdf

1) I'm an American. It's my responsibility to do my best to deal with the consequences of my government's behavior. That's my accountability. I'm doing that, by - for starters - doing what I can to get a leash on your team, curb its plans, prevent it from making things even worse than it already has. 2) It's not equal to yours, because I'm not equally to blame. I voted against every politician I could that was responsible for all that horrible stuff you guys did, I sent money to opposition folks, I wrote letters, ran my mouth, took a lot of shit from your team for years. And I'm damned if I'm going to listen to you try pass off what you guys did on everybody who was working so hard to stop you from doing it, without pointing out the obvious: it wasn't their fault. You and your "team" did very bad things. You caused this mess we're in. You got us into this. You were told, in advance, by people who knew better, that you should not do those things, that horrible consequences would follow. The people who tried to stop you, and are now trying to handle the disaster you created, are not to blame. They did their best to stop you, and failed. Now they are trying to help you clean up your mess. The first order of business is to prevent your team from making things worse. Fallujah was one of the friendliest, most pro-American cities in Iraq, immediately after the invasion. It had an elected, pro-American mayor. It had an educated professional class, decent schools, women on the streets without headscarves. There was essentially no military presence in it, almost no looting, little violence, competent civilian authority. https://articlesfactsstats.wordpress.com/the-iraq-war-fallujah-before-and-after/ Within three months of the 82nd Airborne setting up camp in that oasis of calm the current Sunni jihadist terrorism campaign had begun in Fallujah, leading within less than a year to a full scale insurgency dedicated to driving the Americans and any other Westerners out of their country at any cost. The current incarnation of that is called ISIL. At least in part, a large part, ISIL originated as a reaction to the experiences of the Iraqi people with the 82nd Airborne in Fallujah. Although the 3rd Cavalry and 3rd Infantry blew on the spark, apparently. So take a look at ISIL: that's what happened the last time your team set out to help people by bringing in the US military. Or look at this: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/toxic-legacy-of-us-assault-on-fallujah-worse-than-hiroshima-2034065.html The line from that to the Paris attacks is direct - they appear to be consequences of the US invasion of Iraq, and the mistreatment of Fallujah in particular.

They're going to volunteer. They've been looking for a way to play nice with the US, in the coming negotiations, without giving up key economic advances - oil prices are tanking again, the IMF is flexing its muscles in Europe, etc. And they already have Julian Assange - maybe they can get Trump to upgrade the facilities, cover some of the costs. http://blogs.reuters.com/breakingviews/2014/09/11/ecuador-economic-miracle-meets-maturity/

Not necessarily. Some of the increase in temperature can lead to an increase in air pressure, not volume. As far as the volume of the atmosphere overall, notice that most of the heat trapped by an influx of extra CO2 is trapped at fairly low altitude initially - that's where most of the extra CO2 is. The very highest levels of the atmosphere are often cooled by this extra interruption of radiant heat transfer from the surface - and shrink in volume. In the long run this will balance, and the planet will eventually be emitting into space as much solar energy as it is absorbing. But for the time being the newly CO2-insulated surface is absorbing more than it is emitting. Hence global warming.

Imagine my surprise. But you replied with opinions about it and questions already handled therein. Maybe you should read it first - just a suggestion. Read the pdf by the Marine Corps historian? The Tea Party denial of physical reality as "bias" is becoming their best known characteristic. The real world is a difficult place for the people who voted for W&Cheney, true, but this is getting ridiculous. They came to protest the occupation of their school and the mistreatment of their children. That's why they marched down the street, past the Baath building troop station, to the school where their children were supposed to be in class and they had been promised no soldiers would quartered. That's in the long account you didn't read - the part that mentioned the Third Amendment to the US Constitution, among the freedoms that the 82nd Airborne claimed to be bringing. People don't generally "besiege" armed and fortified and famously violent soldiers by marching and gathering in the street in front of them, without weapons. Any idea why? Any, like, mild curiosity about those contractors, the angry crowd in the middle of the formerly peaceful city, what led to one of the most pro-American and non-violent cities in all of Iraq turning into the roots of Daesh within a few weeks of having the 82nd Airborne in their neighborhood? You have your timeline confused. AQ, and then ISIL, created that guy, not the other way around. The 82nd Airborne in Fallujah, and a couple of other US operations (setting up Abu Ghraib and associated "interrogation" procedures, disbanding all civilian authority without undertaking security, kicking in people's doors and putting guns in their faces from day one, etc) largely created ISIL - including that guy, most of his recruits, etc. Of course the sectarian hostility of centuries was there to explode - but it had been for decades, in every country in the area including Iraq, without exploding. The US policy was to deny its existence - the administrators and governors W&Cheney sent to oversee Iraq after the invasion said it didn't exist, and acted accordingly. One thing I remember - and others may too, thinking back: I remember the people who voted for Ronald Reagan making fun of Jimmy Carter for being careful to distinguish between Sunni and Shia muslims, denigrating his careful and diplomatic language, laughing at his consideration for the sectarian realities of the region, despising his supposed "weakness". "Now", the nightmare, is largely the fault of you and your team. You won't even admit what you've done. But you want other Americans to allow you to keep doing it, using the American flag and the American military.

All of them - recent past included - have been consistent.

Fallujah is actually worth a glance back, as that was the origin of the Sunni insurgency in Iraq that does as well as anything for the beginning of the journey whose most recent step was the Paris terrorism. http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0414/p01s03-woiq.html https://iwpr.net/global-voices/baghdadis-aid-fallujah-refugees http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2004-04-15/news/0404150142_1_fallujah-marines-foreign-fighters http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/a-conversation-with-an-isis-suicide-bomber-logistician-a-1043485.html "SPIEGEL: How did you select the men who were to blow themselves up? Abu Abdullah: I didn't select them. That was the duty of the military planners, who were above me in the hierarchy. The men were brought to me, most came from Fallujah. - - - - " http://www.hqmc.marines.mil/Portals/61/Docs/Al-AnbarAwakeningVolII[1].pdf A very long account from the optimistic viewpoint of late 2009 (when the American government seemed to have regained sense and sanity). The first three or four paragraphs are enough - notice the extreme pro-American bias, btw, in the admitted "facts" (the assault on Fallujah killed far more than 70 civilians, not even counting the refugee deaths from various hardships and causes), but the situation is clear regardless. I know. And that is why you and your team have to be prevented, if at all possible, from "helping" any more people with Muslim troubles. Reread: "On the evening of April 28, 2003, several hundred residents defied the US curfew and marched down the streets of Fallujah, past the soldiers positioned in the former Ba'ath party headquarters, to protest the military presence inside the local school. US soldiers fired upon the crowd, killing as many as 17 and wounding more than 70 of the protesters." That, and Abu Ghraib, was the beginning of ISIL. It was also pretty much the beginning of the spiral into chaos and ethnic cleansing and indiscriminate military assault by the US, which generated an enormous flood of refugees from Iraq - many of whom, being Sunni, found refuge and relative safety in Sunni-predominant Syria. Something in the neighborhood of one million of them. From that vantage they witnessed the American style of governance and helping people in Iraq, among their relatives in Fallujah and the Anbar province, Bagdad, etc. Many of them became "radicalized", as the term is today, by their experiences. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraqis_in_Syria Do you have any idea, the faintest clue, why those originally pro-American civilian people were marching down to the local schoolhouse, unarmed and in family groups, to protest the soldiers quartered there? Hint: the Third Amendment to the US Constitution. The school year in Iraq. (secular schooling, btw, on the Western model, not the Islamic stuff that started up in the ruins the Americans left). That's odd. There is quite a bit of parallel between ISIL and the current Republican Party in the US. David Brooks has a column on this in the New York Times yesterday - he only mentions ISIL, but he describes them by reference to a famous book by a guy named Eric Hoffer: "The True Believer". http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/08/opinion/how-isis-makes-radicals.html?_r=0 And obviously he is drawing parallels with the Tea Party (which the esteemed Brooks seems to regard as a fringe or extremist group within a large body of Republican moderates, who are temporarily invisible for some reason but will appear any moment now and set the ship to rights). More quotes from Hoffer: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Eric_Hoffer

Lizards - crocodiles and Komodo dragons and possibly others - act so as to intentionally deceive prey. So lizard level intelligence is enough. Whether or not they know they are lying, what exactly self-knowledge of lying comprises, is one of those questions.

You're the guy with the team, not me. You're the guy who keeps trying to divide people into "teams" you can label, and then accuses other people of being "divisive" because they don't like what you and your "team" are planning to do. Again. Having learned nothing at all from the consequences of your last little adventures in teamwork. I don't care who you associate with. I'm talking about this team you have, that you voted for, that you are talking about setting out to "help" in France, in Syria, in Iraq, etc, all to defeat militarily a pack of whackos your team's incompetence set loose on a little corner of the world in the first place, and set loose by doing exactly what you are talking about doing again - setting out to "help", by bringing war. The 82nd Airborne was the major military force that radicalized the Sunni in Fallujah - turned an initially pro-American and peaceful, non violent, civilian city into the ruined and bombed out epicenter of the anti-American Islamic revolt against the American presence in Iraq. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallujah_during_the_Iraq_War You don't like ISIS? The 82nd Airborne's treatment of the Iraqi people is among the three or four factors most and most directly responsible for creating ISIS.

It means you are on the wrong one. Your team is what the rest of us have to prevent from doing wrong, somehow. We have to find a way to stop your team from "helping" France, Syria, Iraq, and so forth. How can we do this?

The rules for my team include no torture prisons, no opening my mail or tapping my phone calls without a warrant, no secret deals and organized corruption of by government with money, no starting wars except to protect the US from an immediate and mortal danger, no killing by the police except to save a life in immediate danger, no lying in major media without accountability, and rich people paying taxes just like everyone else has to. Once we have a team, we can maybe do something about the Paris attacks that would actually help somebody. We don't have that team yet. Nothing the US does as a country against ISIL from its current state of intellectual disrepair and political degradation is going to help anyone except by accident.

I am. If there is an unprotected class, there are no protected ones. Except the very wealthy, of course.

Bt GMOs produce their own Bt. They make it themselves. It's in their leaves and stuff. That's what the GM is. A thousand acres of Bt GMO soybeans is a thousand acres in which every single plant has Bt in it - in all parts of it, often. Then the next year, another thousand. It's always there, bug or no bug. It's like adding antibiotics to cattle feed - always there, whether the cow is sick or not, even found in the cowshit and groundwater and so forth. Is the picture clear? Meanwhile, Bt varieties are often kind of expensive to buy and spray. They have been used for a long time in spot applications against local infestations, especially by organic farmers and others who can handle the cost, because they are effective and benign and often can be tailored to not injure pollinators etc. In such applications any resistance can be kept temporary and localized - it still takes a few years to develop, see, and the exposure is not chronic and landscape scale, so resistance is rarely created and can be allowed to die out whenever it is created. It will die out because it's surrounded by a landscape without the selection pressure, and the exposure is intermittent. Darwinian evolution 101. My response was to your post in which you claimed combination spraying of herbicides was universal and greatly reduced resistance. I pointed out that it only slows resistance if all or most factors in the combination are effective. That's supported in a couple of the links in the OP, of course. My post was in response to your claim that resistance was unlikely because combination spraying of herbicide slowed its development. My point was that combinations are no more effective or less likely to provoke resistance than singles if only a single factor works anyway - i.e. resistance has developed. And as linked in the OP, that is our situation. I'm a bit baffled here, as to what you are trying to say. The glyphosate resistant GMOs are invented to allow - require - the increased use of glyphosate. That's what they're for. That's the whole point of them. The increased use of glyphosate is predicated on the resistance built into the GMOs. Farmers wanted to use more glyphosate, but couldn't because it would damage their crops. These crops are not damaged by it, so more can be used. It can be used in place of plowing and tilling, even. That's the big advantage. That's what the GMO is for. There is no advantage to that GMO at all unless one plans to use more glyphosate than before. And glyphosate use is way up, as you noted in 2). Without the GMO, less use of glyphosate, less selection pressure for resistance. With the GMO, universal and prophylactic and landscape scale use of glyphosate, more selection pressure for resistance. (and more residue in food etc). Which brings us to one of the harms done by destroying the effectiveness of glyphosate - the alternatives are almost all more toxic, more dangerous, etc. There's a window in which the more dangerous stuff is less employed, and then when the weeds return the more toxic stuff is all you've got. And remember, the GMO farmer isn't plowing and tilling as much any more - they're set up to control weeds with herbicide. That was one of the major advantages. And so I posted some links there showing that as glyphosate is destroyed by this overuse ( as predicted in standard Darwinian theory, just like any other antibiotic overused), not only are the more poisonous chemicals now being used in place of plowing and tilling, but Monsanto et al have by lucky coincidence developed GMOs resistant to a couple of these nastier chemicals (can't be foresight - their public claims were that resistance would be long delayed if it ever happened). So now 2-4D, say, is set up to be used on the landscape scale with resistant GMOs, same as the glyphosate was. But 2-4D and its adjuvants etc are not nearly as nice. And so we see the future as we are run up the ladder, each step losing the more benign chemical and increasingly reliant on the more toxic, with no alternative. Why yes. Hold that thought. What? That is my point. It is not missing, but always and universally and with great frustration present in every single post I have ever made on this topic. I am always talking about GMOs in actual use, not theory, in the context of current practices etc. For example: the decrease in yield common to most GMOs (all currently marketed GMOs) is always specified by me to be in comparison with comparable agricultural practice, levels of sophistication, etc. Obviously if one chooses to compare GMO yield to yield from inferior seed, inadequate fertilizer, no modern methods of pest and weed control, poor harvest and storage practices, etc etc etc (as is almost universal, in third world countries), the GMOs with their modern fertilizer and improved seed varieties and so forth will show increased yields over past practices. The link above, Brazil's 2015 soybean harvest, corrects for that illusion by comparing fields of modern seeds and modern methods, some GM and some not. And like all such corrected and accurate comparisons, it shows a yield hit of a few percent (typically around 5). The surprise there was that there was also a profit hit - normally the current GMOs show increased profits for at least three or four years after introduction (until resistance etc). It's possible the honeymoon period is over in Brazil, or maybe the conventional plantings benefitted from some factor invisible in the report. Not just each "technology", but each GMO separately and each kind of GM. And each new one. They are all different. The Chinese, for example, have deployed Bt expression trees for pulpwood harvest. What could possibly go wrong?

The increased use is due to the GMOs - sometimes incorporated into the crops by the GM, sometimes predicated on GMs incorporated into the crop. It's not either/or, it's both/and. I made no such claim anywhere. It does matter how and how intensively the selective pressure is applied. For example: Incorporating a particular Bt into each and every plant over hundreds of square miles of monoculture every year for years on end is how one would breed resistance on purpose, right? That's textbook selection pressure. And once you've done that, your nice safe benign Bt spray option, that you used to be able to handle infestations with at low medical or environmental risk and manage to minimize selection pressure for resistance, is destroyed. Your antibiotic has gone the way of DDT and Penicillin. Public cost, Monsanto profit. Which works if - and only if - you aren't spraying the combination on pests already resistant to all but one of the ingredients, and blanketing the aforementioned hundreds of square miles of genetically similar monoculture with it. Because if you are, you are just going to be breeding superpests you can't kill with anything. (And that is exactly what's being launched in the US midwest, with the advent of GMOs carrying resistance to 2-4D as well as glyphosate, to allow combination spraying in regions beset by glyphosate resistant weeds). That would surprise me, too. Why do you post stupid shit like that? Am I supposed to believe that about my own posting and thinking, or are you trying to fool somebody else? My post referred to Monsanto controlling Brazil's seed - not food - market. That is not a "different issue" from GMOs. It's central to several of their problems and downside potentials.

They qualify as "experts in history", fully as relevantly accomplished as the "experts in science" described in the post I was responding to. David Brooks, for example, has a prestigious University degree in "History", and a lifetime of directly relevant and world renowned accomplishment in exactly what is sought here - including, specifically, a life's work including well-informed personally acquainted analysis of the last twenty five years of history of American political and military involvement with Islamic insurgency and violence in the Middle East. You want credentials? There are few with better. And that has been the case with several of the scientific threads guided by experts, as well. This is an issue of reason and perception - expertise has proven to be unreliable, to put it gently, in warding off this difficulty. Wait for the paint to dry, so we can walk out of the corner. Start the process of rapprochement with our natural ally in the region - Iran. Meanwhile, a large scale program to generate domestic electricity from solar radiation might get us some breathing room - divert, say, 2/3 of the military budget to it, on self defense grounds. No. Was Paris some kind of unexpected shock, to anyone?

I'm sure we could round up adequate "experts in history" to match some of the performances of the "experts in science" we've seen here. Actually, learning from such examples as we've had here we could take a fair crack at filling in for them ourselves. Let's see: "It is the consensus of historians that military assault is justified". {defended by the often repeated professional expert's observation that war is merely politics carried on by other means. (From von Clausewitz: "We see, therefore, that war is not merely an act of policy but a true political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse carried on with other means. What remains peculiar to war is simply the peculiar nature of its means.").} Or we could take advantage of the expert historians on the ground, degreed historians with professional careers in historical analysis, right there in the action, like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Brooks_(journalist) who babbled this out of his keyboard, in June of 2014: Alternatively, we could try listening to people who make sense when talking about the matter at hand - maybe like Sean MacStiofain, first chief of staff of the provisional IRA at the onset of the Troubles:

No, you weren't. Your country's doings in the Middle East are your business as an adult citizen of a democracy, and you weren't minding it very well at all. You were taken by surprise. You still have very little idea of what your agents and governments and such were and are doing there. Uh, yeah, it kind of is. At least, they were were closely and directly and very influentially involved, and the situations were of their creating for the most part. At some point, the failure of those using bombs and bullets to get anything actually done in this arena has got to register in the awareness of the American citizenry, or we are screwed.

What will it take to persuade you that you shouldn't send in the US Army until - at a minimum - you know what you are doing? That going half way around the world to kill people by the thousands and wreck their countries for generations needs more justification than that they happen to live in the same general area as some other people who are behaving badly, and you can't tell the difference or think of any other way to respond? So how has that idea been working out for those models of effective strategizing? The fate of the Nazis, the situations created by the KKK, the incoming fate of ISIL, etc - that your idea of success? We probably should have, in WWII, and concentrated on actual military targets. The firebombing of Dresden, for example, by aftermath estimates, actually boosted German military production. The Nazis ignored that effect, when they bombed London, and the assessment afterwards is that they might have won WWII if they had been wiser. Bombing London was one of the very earliest demonstrations of the contrary effect of bombing civilians - it strengthens one's enemies, in general. And that's in full scale total war, when there are good reasons to bomb - against terrorism, which is an arena of much different circumstances, bombing (and large scale military action in general) is frankly stupid. (The perp has been suckered, nine times out of ten - certainly the US was, allowing bin Laden to draw them into an economy and reputation destroying morass.) It's never even come close to looking like it was working, and the problems it creates are legion - beginning with blowback, and extending to future loss of moral authority (a surprisingly useful strength, if you have it - we are going to miss it badly, I think, in the years to come). You have a couple of others. Among them: stay home, weed your garden, and don't get any more innocent blood on your hands than you already have. Or as Hippocrates put it (and he felt the need to make it an emphasized rule, a formal oath, in the face of human nature and its biases): First, do no harm.

Try introspection. How do we talk you out of your reason-destroying fear, your willingness to treat people like rabid animals, your continual resort to violence against people who have never done you any harm and live on the other side of the world, simply on the basis that you in your ignorance can't tell one from another and some might be threats to you in the future? How do we persuade you to behave with courage and dignity and honor in the face of the threat of terrorism, and cease shaming and degrading your country and your neighbors and your fellow citizens? We have gained peace with some people we have mistreated and invaded and abused as we did the Iraqis - the Vietnamese. How about using our methods there - in the first place, leaving, and not coming back until invited - in the Middle East.

Or it might have something to do with decades of tyranny under Saddam, a US installed and Western allied tyrant, and oppression of the neighboring and co-religionist Iran, a country that had managed to throw off its Western installed tyrant, and decades of suffering under Western imposed sanctions with the Western installed Saddam as pretext, followed by high-handed attempted imposition of strongman rule and an unleashing of sectarian ethnic cleansing on people made vulnerable by Western violence. And it might have had something to do with the situation of the Palestinians, under Western imposed oppression for decades with no relief in sight - the apparent future of Muslims ruled by the US. Yes, they are. And no thanks to the people who fought against every single improvement and step of progress he did manage to achieve. Not only are things much better now, but every single scrap of credit for that is due to Obama and his Congressional allies. His opposition did nothing - absolutely not one single thing - of any benefit to the United States or its citizens, for the entire time. And now they are hot after yet more war, yet more military killing of bad guys on the other side of the world, yet more of the stuff that didn't work the first time, or the second, or the third, or the fourth. And these the screwups and ideologues and nastyboys and religious whackos who dug this pit and threw this country into it. The French, now, we are going to kill to protect. How about we wait until the French ask for this favor. Let's take the French advice, this time - we sure wish we had before, right?

"Our?" If you mean the country's, overall, especially the Federal government's, yes. Pee in the pants, incoherent, useless, flailing. With lots of screaming and shouting and waving of flags for accompaniment. The kind of reaction you see when a non-swimmer falls out of a boat. The only possible description of the Patriot Act, the long lines of the shoeless at every airport for years now, the hoopla around "Mission Accomplished", all because you and yours didn't have the simple courage to face terrorism as a possibility without going spla and killing hundreds of thousands of innocent people halfway around the planet. Really? You now live in a United States in which almost every stricture in the Bill of Rights has been and can be at government (or even corporate) will violated with impunity by your consent, torture prisons and assassination programs have been set up and run openly under your flag with your agreement, your government can snoop into your neighbor's mail and phone calls because you allowed it to, the poor are taxed more heavily than the rich while your government falls ever deeper into debt because that's what you said you wanted, your government and military have brought all the horrors and miseries of full scale war to people who never did you any harm while you cheered, your voting districts have been gerrymandered and your vote counting rigged to take advantage of your known gullibility to fearmongering and lies, and thousands of children die every year because your chosen government acting on your expressed preferences refuses to provide modern medical care and other social services to ordinary citizens of your country. What values do you have left? Business? Charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence were, all, your business. You sent the army, instead. Because you were in a panic after 9/11, willing to do anything out of fear.

Because you learned from disaster, from collapse, from the cowardice and panic of the reaction to 9/11, from the torture prisons and the surveillance State that cowardice motivated, from the incompetence and venality and strutting clueless arrogance of the Iraq War http://www.historycommons.org/timeline.jsp?military_analysts_tmln_general_events=military_analysts_tmln__mission_accomplished_&timeline=military_analysts_tmln, from the flailing Federal confusion and drowned, stinking corpses of Katrina, from the rise and spread of Islamic jihad everywhere the boots of American fascism left their prints in Middle Eastern sand; from the betrayal of your country and degradation of everything you value. But you didn't.