drsmooth wrote:

TomatoPie wrote:Vaguely political facts

1950: 1 out of 5000 people worldwide died of combat

gonna have to see a source and method on that. Seems wildly high, in 1950.

As Steven Pinker showed in the 2011 book Better Angels of Our Nature, total casualties of combat, including indirect casualties from the economic harm associated with fighting, have been declining, even as the global population has risen. In 1950, one person in 5,000 worldwide died owing to combat; by 2010, this measure was down to one person in 300,000. In recent years, far more people have been killed by car crashes than by battle. Simultaneously, per capita military expenditure has shrunk. My favorite statistic about the world: the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute reports that, adjusting to today’s dollars, global per capita military spending has declined by one-third in the past quarter century.

TomatoPie wrote:

drsmooth wrote:

TomatoPie wrote:Vaguely political facts

1950: 1 out of 5000 people worldwide died of combat

gonna have to see a source and method on that. Seems wildly high, in 1950.

As Steven Pinker showed in the 2011 book Better Angels of Our Nature, total casualties of combat, including indirect casualties from the economic harm associated with fighting, have been declining, even as the global population has risen. In 1950, one person in 5,000 worldwide died owing to combat; by 2010, this measure was down to one person in 300,000. In recent years, far more people have been killed by car crashes than by battle. Simultaneously, per capita military expenditure has shrunk. My favorite statistic about the world: the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute reports that, adjusting to today’s dollars, global per capita military spending has declined by one-third in the past quarter century.

jerseyhoya wrote:It's 1 in 5000 people not 1 in 5000 deaths

So 500,000 combat deaths in 1950, probably mostly in Korea

~23,000 in 2010

jerseyhoya wrote:What ISIS Really Wants

This is really long. I learned a lot. I highly recommend reading it if one is interested.

Yet another invasion and occupation would confirm that suspicion, and bolster recruitment. Add the incompetence of our previous efforts as occupiers, and we have reason for reluctance. The rise of ISIS, after all, happened only because our previous occupation created space for Zarqawi and his followers. Who knows the consequences of another botched job?

Given everything we know about the Islamic State, continuing to slowly bleed it, through air strikes and proxy warfare, appears the best of bad military options. Neither the Kurds nor the Shia will ever subdue and control the whole Sunni heartland of Syria and Iraq—they are hated there, and have no appetite for such an adventure anyway. But they can keep the Islamic State from fulfilling its duty to expand. And with every month that it fails to expand, it resembles less the conquering state of the Prophet Muhammad than yet another Middle Eastern government failing to bring prosperity to its people.

Last fall, I visited the Philadelphia mosque of Breton Pocius, 28, a Salafi imam who goes by the name Abdullah. His mosque is on the border between the crime-ridden Northern Liberties neighborhood and a gentrifying area that one might call Dar al-Hipster; his beard allows him to pass in the latter zone almost unnoticed

pacino wrote:Nobody gave a shit with the happenings in North Dakota, why start now? There's this idea out there that the pipeline is some job creator and some 'get us off foreign oil!!!' thing and no evidence to the contrary seems to affect anyone for it.

TenuredVulture wrote:I'm probably as anti-internal combustion engine we could easily stop 90% of our driving if we wanted to as anyone. But we're going to be using oil for stuff for quite some time. We need to move that oil from the ground to refineries. This is, inevitably, nasty, nasty business--there is no "risk free" way of moving oil around. Pipelines leak, trains and trucks crash. Keystone may be less bad than trucking the oil out of Canada.

TomatoPie wrote:plenty of oil for everybody.

Great time to invest in energy, BTW