Heck, I remember Jim Gronen.
Steve
What testimony does he consider to be reliable?
This is key. For everything else in the military, sometimes even trivial things, you need your CO to sign off on them (EACH time). But somehow for easy access to classified information, nothing …
For sure. This guy was a complete doofus and he was leaking secrets for months. A competent spy could operate for years or decades. For example, the Walker Spy ring which only got busted because Walker’s wife was drunk dialing the FBI.
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Lots of Portuguese in my hometown of Dighton MA. Close to New Bedford and Fall River MA both big fishing ports. Portuguese came here cause they know how to fish.
'38Packard
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Everyone that joins the military has to pass a background check, and personal references. At least they did in my day. The excuse offered in recent years, for rejecting legal resident aliens, from certain places where people pray a certain way, for enlistment, is the background check is too hard to do.
Keep the porosity of background checks in mind the next time someone starts saying better background checks is the route to reduced gun violence.
Steve
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The Scientific Method, theory, experiment.
The Captain
So he trusts the testimony of a PERSON who states things about scientific method, theory, or experiment? Didn’t that PERSON witness those results with their eyes?
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They might be reliable but their results and what we choose to conclude from them change all the time. Even N D-T said so. Besides, observation, what can be shown, which means seen and believed, is the ever vaunted empirical data. I see it=I believe it. I don’t see it = I won’t believe it, in a nutshell.
And while I also believe eyewitness accounts are too unreliable, what about lots of witnesses? Or are they all crazy, stupid, blind, biased and lying? It’s not like they’re trying to prove the existence of gravity. It only has to meet a reasonable doubt criteria. A celebrity “expert” finds a new way to tell everybody else they’re stupid and he’s not.
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You really want to discuss how the Scientific Method works? I don’t.
The Captain
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Funny how some science is settled but other science is unsettled. We can question the Big Bang but not Global Warming and Masking.
The Captain
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When I first started out as a lowly programmer, someone in IT told me - you can’t hide data from the IT people.
We are the ones who have to be able to get at it when other people can’t. At the time he was talking about individual salaries in our company, but it’s easy to see how that applies to other things in other places.
We’ve come a long way technology-wise since those days, but there’s still a certain element of truth in that. Even secure data access has to be programmed and tested. That’s a simplistic statement obviously, but sometimes IT has access to data that it shouldn’t have. Probably he had top-secret access for some such reason.
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According to the evening news, the perp was indeed an IT guy, with a “Top Secret” security clearance, working in an intelligence unit.
So much for betting the farm on background checks, vs “making an example” out of this kid, to give anyone else who wants to scamper off with classified docs something to think about.
Manning was mentioned above. Sentence was 35 years, but was commuted after 7 years.
Steve
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That’s not actually funny at all. It’s not like all science is of the same confidence level. But more on point about big bang, global warming and masking, all three of those have very strong scientific evidence to back them up, especially the first two (and let’s throw evolution into that category as well). Doesn’t mean they won’t be over-turned in the future with better observation, better modeling, a better theory. But still, your insistence that global warming is some global order liberal hoax is hard to swallow.
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I suppose the foundation of science is going where the evidence leads. Science has changed it’s conclusion before…flat earth---->round earth, earth in center of solar system—>earth in orbit around sun.
Ideology seems to be immune to fact, however. Many of us have seen this piece, with Dr Tyson, before. Ideology is an ever shrinking pocket of ignorance.
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Captain,
I might be slightly changing what you are saying…but this kid easily could have been set up to spill the information…in part the right information to curb allies…and in part the wrong information to foil other people.
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The main difference between the Big Bang and Global Warming is that no one is using the Big Bang as a political tool. The problem is not the science but the politics of science.
Swallow that!
The Captain
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The video is about theists vs. atheists not so much about science. My choosing atheism (a terribly misleading label) had nothing to do with science, it had to do with morality, with civics, with dignity. After decades of research the clincher was a statement by Ayn Rand, “Anyone who believes in a supernatural all powerful being has no self respect” or words to that effect.
Why terribly misleading? This atheist believes in god or gods but not in the traditional sense. God and gods are memes, emergent properties of complex systems. As Neil deGrasse Tyson says, something to fill a gap in human understanding. We need to know. That’s why people continually ask why the market went up or down. It did because that is what markets do, the emergent property of markets. As good an explanation as “god did it” but with a secular flavor.
As people become more secular politicians are shifting from religion to science as the preferred tool for population control. Climate science?
The Captain
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The only people politicizing climate science are the reality deniers who were brainwashed by the fossil fuel industry. Climate change deniers are on a par with Holocaust deniers and ‘moon landing was faked reality deniers.
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That is most certainly a possibility.
The Captain
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