Katrina

[Self_Destructo]

What was I telling you? Read the whole thing.

http://english.epochtimes.com/news/5-9-11/32195.html

The Reds are coming if they are not taken seriously.

[Sabarai]

The Reds are coming if they are not taken seriously.

The Reds are broke

[Z-Man]

Sab: Not the Chinese; but the notion they'll try to bring down the US with a nuclear war is nonsense nevertheless. Attacking a nuclear power with nuclear weapons has been madness in the cold war, and it still is. They can bring the US to its knees with less damage to themselves with economic power. Remember the HUGE deficit the US has in external trade; they import far more than they export, a large portion of that from China. So in effect, the US have a giant pile of debt with China. If they want, the Chinese can bring the Dollar crashing down. They don't do so yet; right now, the exports to the US help their economy grow.
An escaped dissident is not a reliable source as to what the government there is up to. A defected general, perhaps.

And in the good tradition of discrediting a quoted source:
http://english.epochtimes.com/news/5-9-12/32216.html
(It's not that bad, but terribly, terribly irrelevant.)

[Self_Destructo]

Well, I dunno. But who else would tell you? They won't. I think he was sincere in what he said too.

[Lucifer]

Well, I dunno. But who else would tell you? They won't. I think he was sincere in what he said too.

Common sense applies here.

The Chinese want to retake Taiwan, but they can't without the US getting involved. It could get mean and nasty quick if that were to happen, and if the US got involved, China's economical advantage would be offset somewhat by Europe and the rest of Asia's willingness to help the US to keep Taiwan free and make some money in the process by replacing China's economic involvement with their own. (Not to mention making an economic puppet out of the US by Europe would be a Good Move in general for them) Anyway, I digress. In order to avoid the economic consequences, China could instead invoke Mutually Assured Destruction. First, invade Taiwn. Second, inform the US that if they interfere, China will wage nuclear war on them, thus invoking Mutually Assured Destruction on the US.

Nukes are used as a deterrent. That's how the COld War went. First one side said "If you do this we'll be forced to respond with nukes". Then the other side said "Well, if you nuke us, we'll nuke you". Then both sides built up as many nukes as possible to try to show that they would win the ensuing nuclear exchange. And through it all, you couldn't wipe your ass in either country without the other threatening to nuke you if you don't use the right toilet paper. As it was then, it will be now, as far as China's concerned. All they want is to keep the US and the rest of the world off their backs while they go and eliminate the only other government left that has a solid claim to the rulership of China.

[Self_Destructo]

All they want is to keep the US and the rest of the world off their backs while they go and eliminate the only other government left that has a solid claim to the rulership of China.

Sounds similar to the US government wanting the people to stay off thier backs while they enslave them.

[Lucifer]

All they want is to keep the US and the rest of the world off their backs while they go and eliminate the only other government left that has a solid claim to the rulership of China.

Sounds similar to the US government wanting the people to stay off thier backs while they enslave them.

Um, no, it doesn't. This is a standing political situation in China since the Maoists took over the government and the government of Chiang Kai Shek fled to Taiwan. There is no resemblance between this and any existing situation that may or may not exist in the US.

[Fonkay]

Off topic: You really should watch Fog of War Because it's slightly relative, but also because it's amazing.

[Sabarai]

China needs over 20 years to become economic just as powerfull as Europe and the US. Before that the leaders will have realised the danger of it and will stop it. Or else their own people will do that: The Chinese will see how free Europeans and Americans live, and how they are restricted to go anywhere and/or do anything and/or come out for their own opinion. It will not happen, unless China takes a different political course...

[Lucifer]

China needs over 20 years to become economic just as powerfull as Europe and the US. Before that the leaders will have realised the danger of it and will stop it. Or else their own people will do that: The Chinese will see how free Europeans and Americans live, and how they are restricted to go anywhere and/or do anything and/or come out for their own opinion. It will not happen, unless China takes a different political course...

Chinese culture has always been authoritarian. US and European cultures are both peppered with periods of freedom. Why would you expect China to take the same path of development as western countries?

I'd like to point out that Russia has also always been authoritarian, and western-style democracy is in the process of failing badly over there. People want the authoritarian structure.

You see, I woudln't want to live in such a culture, but an authoritarian structure is not inherently bad. What's bad are the human rights violations that tend to go with it. If you could eliminate those things, then you might wind up with a culture that works.

America no longer fears Chinese communism. We want them to quit murdering dissidents and quit massacring protestors and so forth, but we no longer fear their communism. So if a cold war and ensuing arms race develops between us and China, it won't be the same as the previous Cold War with USSR. In that one, we were deathly afraid of the communists ruling the world. China hasn't shown that they intend to rule the world, only that they intend to lay claim to lands which have previously in their history belonged to them. What they do after that, we don't know, but I expect they'll just sit on it and we're going to find ourselves in another age of colonialism instead. The area in which we've chosen to compete with China is in space, not in nuclear arms, so any MAD situation that occurs is likely to be temporary at best.

(disclaimer: self destructo obviously fears Chinese communism)

[Sabarai]

But I think Chinese neighboring countries won't like CHina conquering everything... They'll ask for help in the NATO or something and who knows what happens.

And the fact that the Chinese honor the biggest cruelest dictator in human history, Mao; with over 50 million deaths directly on his name, that's twice as much as Stalin and 2.5 times as much as Hitler, it may get quite interesting...

[Lucifer]

But I think Chinese neighboring countries won't like CHina conquering everything... They'll ask for help in the NATO or something and who knows what happens.

And the fact that the Chinese honor the biggest cruelest dictator in human history, Mao; with over 50 million deaths directly on his name, that's twice as much as Stalin and 2.5 times as much as Hitler, it may get quite interesting...

Except most of those deaths weren't on the same order as Stalin's or Hitler's. Mao killed his people by being stupid, Stalin and Hitler both murdered intentionally and wantonly. (I'm crediting most of Mao's death to starvation when he got progressive, mind you he was essentially ousted out of power over it too)

Neighboring countries asking for help is exactly what I'm talking about with China threatening nuclear attack. That cows the US, as you can see with North Korea. We just strolled into IRaq saying "They might have nukes", but knowing for real that they didn't and there was no danger. Why don't we do that in N Korea? THere's danger.

[Self_Destructo]

I'm not afraid of anything but God. I was trying to make a point that I am not the only one that thinks that. I am no where near the only one that thinks that. Many real conservative Christians have had dreams and visions about it, even people back into the 1800's.

If we attack North Korea we will lose. I think our president it smart enough to realize that and is going through China with it's diplomacy.

[Phytotron]

Sometimes I think SD might be a member of the Landover Baptist Church. But then I realise that he's even crazier than they pretend to be.

[Z-Man]

Semi-Back-On-Topic: I did the tornado analysis.

Here's what I did (I'm attaching an archive with the data and programs):
I downloaded all the tornado data for textas from here:
http://www.tornadoproject.com/alltorns/txtorn2.htm
(And the other pages), the gay demographics are from here:
http://www.gaydemographics.org/USA/stat ... unties.htm

I wrote a small python module that reads the tornado data directly. The gay demographics were too hard to parse directly, so I first converted them to a .txt file, edited out the non-data and just parsed the table line by line, column by column in another python module. The data is just stored there, not processed.

Another python module uses the two modules to load both data sets into one table. A function then calculates correlations between various properties: The risk of getting killed resp. injured by a tornado (tornado deaths divided by population), the ratio of gay couples to total couples, the ratio of unmarried couples to total couples (while I was at it...), and the total population of the counties. All averages are done weighted by the population as well; this makes sense, since then combining two counties into one by summing up all counts does not change the end results. It's important to take relative values for everything, so you don't introduce false correlations.

What is a correlation between X and Y precisely? Imagine plotting all measured values of X and Y into a graph. Then, the correlation is the slope of the line that best fits to the data. As all statistically measured data, this value has a certain uncertainty; the more data points you have, the lower this uncertainty gets; the wilder your points fluctuate about, the larger it gets. All correlations are printed as <correlation>/<uncertainty>. My program prints the result of the division as well as the correlation and uncertainty themselves. A correlation is said to be irrelevant if its absolute value is lower than the uncertainty; if that's the case, then the measurement can easily be explained by normal random fluctuations. This gets harder and harder as the correlation gets bigger than the uncertainty; a correlation is said to be surely relevant if it is bigger than the uncertainty by a factor of three, the chances of that happening randomly are something like one in a million.

Here's the point where you agree that's a sensible thing to do, before looking at the data.

So, here is the printout of the program for the death and injury risk by tornadoes, correlated to the unmaried/gay rate:

Code: Select all

Raw correlations:
Correlation Unmarried to Deaths   : -0.175480440271 = -0.000679858162723 / 0.00387426747774
Correlation Unmarried to Injured  : -0.451285580298 = -0.00682972627899  / 0.015133934203
Correlation Gay to Deaths         : -0.288996717321 = -0.00432169201839  / 0.0149541214809
Correlation Gay to Injured        : -0.640462403129 = -0.0590244310258   / 0.0921590880862

All correlations are well within the bounds of the statistical uncertainty. And negative. Which would mean (if the correlations were significant) that counties with more gays get less tornado casualties. Well, this is a little too good news for the gays, right? So my thought is, what if there's another, hidden correlation? It's well known that gays and unmarried couples tend to live in larger cities, and these tend to be in counties with larger population count. Indeed, the program says:

Code: Select all

Population density influence on census data:
Correlation Population to Unmarried : 3.90208324533 = 8.23103281714e-09 / 2.10939446948e-09
Correlation Population to Gay       : 4.54302031726 = 2.02597019988e-09 / 4.4595226488e-10

Those are significant correlations in the expected direction. Now, if we assume your risk of getting hurt or killed in a city is lower than on the country, we'd have identified a false correlation. Let's see:

Code: Select all

Correlation Population to Deaths  : -0.447742930591 = -1.36734122874e-11 / 3.05385330582e-11
Correlation Population to Injured : -0.847083371085 = -1.92015292401e-10 / 2.26678151119e-10

These correlations between population density and tornado calamity risk are not significant, but negative (More population per county => less calamity). They can be cleaned out of the statistics (like we would clean out the ambient tornado risk when comparing Texas with Alaska):

Code: Select all

Correlations, cleaned of population density dependencies:
Correlation Unmarried to Cleaned Deaths  : -0.0590988921406 = -0.00022878367845  / 0.00387120079858
Correlation Unmarried to Cleaned Injured : -0.0326032703809 = -0.000495301691218 / 0.0151917793961
Correlation Gay to Cleaned Deaths        : -0.0903466485306 = -0.0013497074474   / 0.0149392088069
Correlation Gay to Cleaned Injured       : -0.188105258738  = -0.0172889465386   / 0.0919110218106

Only clearly insignificant correlations remain.

That sort of rules out the theory that God tries to warn us by sending more tornadoes to sinful areas. At least, the hard data completely fails to warn me. And since God is perfect, he'd find a way to warn me that living togehter without being married is a Sin if he really wants to. He'd probalby look for a way to do so without killing thousands of people, I guess.

There's still the possibility open that God uses Tornadoes to kill sinners: it's possible to kill roughly 1% of the total gay population of Texas with tornadoes, evenly distributed among the counties, without lifting the Gay/Cleaned Deaths rating out of the insignifficant area. Provided there are no non-sinners killed by the tornadoes aimed for sinners. But why would He do that? Perhaps to kill them before they accumulate too much sin and have to be sent to hell? He's God, he would not have to send them there at all. He's making the rules. And the assumption "God does not direct tornadoes at sinners at all" explains the data much more easily, without further uncomfortable questions.

And of course, the question whether Homosexuality is a Sin and you go to Hell for it or not and whether God exists or not are completely beyond the scope of these statistics.

So, what now? I can do the same with other states with relatively little effort (some manual processing is required to make the county names match), but I see no real point.