Ghost Blog

M'tuqa (מתוקה),

Translation is HARD. Anyone who is bilingual sees bad translations and mistraslations all the time. No need to imply bias - this is just one data point.
 

Evidently, this made a splash in the Arab world too. I wonder what they are saying? Somehow it was inflammatory despite the fact that they didn't have the translation problem.
 

Thank you david.
It just seems to me that sometimes the West is saying free speech is fine as long as we agree with what you're saying.

Do you have a link for anything about the debate? arabic is fine.
;)
 

I am perplexed by how you seem to have changed Matoko.

You are not the same person I once admired, when you posted on LGF. I was terribly disappointed by your post "Whited Sepulchres". Even the title, taken from Matthew 23:27 spoke to me how much you had changed.

"Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which outwardly appear beautiful, but inwardly are full of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness"

I don't think that old "Matoko", for that was not your nik then, would have said something like that. I still love Israel and the Jews. They are not hypocrites to me. I agree with David. MEMRI was just one data point, and even if it were true, Israel has the same right as everyone else to play the propaganda game.

My final message to you was my last post (#103) on that WoC thread.

http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/008342.php#c103

And this:

Your life and mine now move in different directions. I no longer worry about Islamic extremism, seeing it as a passing phase, that will only last as long as peak oil lasts. A decade or two and it will be gone from our concern forever.

China to me is now the real challenge and opportunity for the 21st Century. And that is where my mind now focuses. I have no more time for these old problems, and that is the real reason I am moving on. I focus where science goes, at least in spirit. And leadership in science is passing to China.That is the West's greatest challenge. That is what we must compete with now.

Maybe I will encounter you again from time to time.
It won't be very often though, I suspect.

I hope you passed your Syriana test. I hope it was worth it.

DD
 

ex-LGF? How interesting.
 

lol.
i am STILL an LGFer, and you know it.
You even know my name there.
River Tam.

did you know also that i am one of very few, perhaps even the only one webdizen that has been IP-banned multiple times by both Charles Johnson and Marcos Zuniga?
Yet they always allow me back.... ;)

i have a hundred names and i say what i please, where i please.
i owe duty to no ideology except for Science and Truth.

Israel has the same right as everyone else to play the propaganda game.

so, MEMRI is the propaganda arm of Israel? You should tell the angry dog. He said their charter was to showcase moderate muslim voices in MENA.
Who knew?

Charles is not an Islam-basher. He is an evil-basher. Whether it is a bomb in MENA or a memo in the US.
He taught me to recognize evil.
Now i am trying to recognize good.

Some things Al-Khouly said were "good". He said there is no compulsion in Islam, and that wahabbism is not islamic, and that the Saud practice of Islam is perversion.
But no one will hear those things here because MEMRI did not translate them.
 

"i am STILL an LGFer, and you know it."

Not really. I rarely go to the comments myself now. I mainly just skim CJs stories. Like I said I no longer see Islamic extremism as a long-term threat to anyone. So I don't spend much time on it.

Speaking of which, did you see the oil and gold prices the past week? Sheesh. Things are moving. Someone is buying a lot of oil and the profits are being stashed in gold not US dollars.

"so, MEMRI is the propaganda arm of Israel?"

I have often suspected both MEMRI and DEBKA of being semiofficial. But who knows.

"He said there is no compulsion in Islam"

Isn't this one of the Meccan verses that they always use as an example of abbrogation? I seem to recall that it was regarded as replaced by Surah 9 stuff. I am no scholar though. Four major schools and who knows how many books. Too complicated. Truth is I don't have much interest in it now. I've no practical use for it and I'm not stocking a museum.

Now Confucianism we may have to learn. It's going to be difficult reading all the science publications in Chinese. I hope that they keep English versions going for at least my lifetime. But if the Chinese start to solve aging, we may have to learn Chinese to find out how they did it. Not to mention fusion and maglev, pebblebed reactors, etc, etc. where they are showing great interest. So far they dual publish all the major stuff in English. And most physics goes to ArXiv.

Sooner or later Mandarin will replace English as the science language. China is very aware of it - It bugs them like Taiwan. One day they'll pull all the English copies and refuse to licence translations. Learn Chinese or become a yokel. Expect petty harrassment like major papers published in Chinese-only publications. Its all about "face" and national honor. Gradually they will force us to use Mandarin for all international communications. Oh well, maybe we'll have computers by then to translate.
 

Dan, from your description the Chinese sound like pretty rational actors. In fact, if the worst problem is that they won't translate their scientific journals for you while they continue to push the frontiers of science (that other cultures have given up on), how can you complain that much?

otoh, if certain elements of islamic society (whatever that means) are determined to take us all down with them first, that does seem to be a valid concern. What portion of islamic society they comprise I have no idea, but if our policies are actually strengthening them, as seems to be the case, then it makes good sense to befriend those we can.

Or, I suppose we could abdicate the fight with extremists to the Chinese. They might be able to come up with a final solution.

In fact, once the oil runs dry and they've blown each other up, maybe the region would provide a nice relief valve for population pressure in China. Or perhaps not.
 

Lightsyde, I agree about China.

As for oil peak.
It won't take that long.
Assume we are at peak oil.
Next year the volume of production starts to fall. Initially the price rises in response to the imbalance between supply and demand. But then as the price continues to rise, you start to get destruction of demand. People start to economise, they use trains, they buy smaller cars, they move closer to work - lots of small adjustments, then in the longer term, new technologies are developed. Some of them will require totally new ways of doing things, some of them not.

Now at a certain price the rate at which demand is being destroyed, say 5% per year, will be the same as the rate at which production is going down because of oilwell depletion. That is the point of dynamic equilibrium.

Once you stabilize at that price, maybe $100 a barrel, maybe $150 say, the price will remain pretty constant from then on. Oh it may vary a bit due to hurricanes and wars and strikes, but on the whole the price will remain fairly stable near the equilibrium point.

But the oil production is falling at 5% per year.

That means that as we gradually substitute for oil, producers sell oil at around the same price, but they have less and less oil to sell so their net income steadily falls.

What do they do next? In many of those countries, say Oilistan, they have had huge population growth during the years of oil wealth and populations that are involved in service industries. Their numbers now far exceed the ability of their desert land to support them. They produce hardly anything they can sell, and everything is subsidised one way or another by oil income.

But the oil income after the peak is going down at 5% per annum. First unemployment grows, then the governments budgets go into crisis, then wages aren't paid until late and then... At some point society starts to break down.

You are the king of Oilistan and it is 10 years after the oil peak. Production is down 50% and you have used up the surpluses from the good years. You can do two things.

You can open up your country to foreign investment and modern factory production at real wages with both women and men working. They will need real educations for both men and women. Above all science and mathematics. They must produce competitive goods that they can sell at world prices overseas. And the rest of the world is very productive and very efficient. You must compete with the best.

Or you can buy big bulldozers so that you can sweep the dead bodies of your starving overlarge population into mass graves. The big bulldozers will use up the last of your oil. The few survivors, presumably the drivers of the bulldozers, can return to a traditional life of herding goats. They can read the blessed Koran every day and tell stories around the fires of the days when they were a great oil kingdom.

This is why I am not worried.
 

how dare you come here and sanctimoniously lecture me?
NO ONE tells me what to do.
I will see Syriana and decide for myself.

your silly peak oil futureworld will just generate more terrorists as far as i can tell, and they'll have bioweapons or nukes or chemo.

you said you weren't going to talk to me anymore--now execute.
bye.
 

Ok I go. But I have one last thing I want to say to lightsyde. You can delete this later if you like.

My projections show that by 2020 China will be the No.1 military and economic power in the world. No longer the USA.

That means that China will control the Persian Gulf.

Whatever solution the Americans impose in the next few years, the Chinese will redo it their way to suit themselves, as soon as they push out the Americans.

That is another reason we need to be oil free by 2020.

Shalom David.