No blood for oil...how about lithium?

[Max™]

In a twist worthy of Shyamalan, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor because of 9/11.

[Pirian]

In a twist worthy of Shyamalan, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor because of 9/11.

And the Japanese are actually aliens. And that's not the illegal kind.

[Colenzo]

How about, Osama was dead the whole time. Kind of like a sixth sense type deal.

[Max™]

Osama WAS his own birth certificate, and only Glen Beck could see him.

[SwampdonkeyPLD]

lol grasping at straws just a bit aren't we Swampy? I'd love to see you pull a source that says you didn't pull that out of your ass.

P.S. libs don't think 9/11 was a conspiracy, they think we were deliberately mislead into invading Iraq under false/invented pretenses. BIG difference.

Actually your P.S. is wrong according to that poll. I'll find it, I think it was done w/in the past year. It was done in order to see whether more libs think it was an inside job than do Repub's think Obama is from another country.

[Mizango]

Just because it isn't feasible in the next 2-3 decades doesn't mean it isn't worth mentioning.

And these ridiculous NASA budget cuts don't help. The officials have forgotten that it takes money to make money - yes, NASA is extraordinarily expensive, but the long-term benefits far outweigh the short-time costs.

Right on the money on both accounts.

>implying NASA isn't the biggest economical waste of money in the US

Nigga u dum

[Max™]

Actually your P.S. is wrong according to that poll. I'll find it, I think it was done w/in the past year. It was done in order to see whether more libs think it was an inside job than do Repub's think Obama is from another country.

Wait, we're now talking about a poll that was taken in order to see if a larger portion of group A believes statement A than the portion of group B that believes statement B?

I'm going to flip a (fair) coin, and I'll get heads or tails with a 1/2 probability for either, I'm going to assume heads is most likely, while my friend is going to toss a d6, and assume getting a 1, 4, or 5 is most likely.


On our own, our assumptions are arbitrary, but acceptable measures of our preconceptions of the events. If you try to compare my assumption that heads will occur more often, to his assumption that (1, 4, 5) will occur more often, you will learn that comparing uncorrelated statistics is useless.

[Cephius]

Actually your P.S. is wrong according to that poll. I'll find it, I think it was done w/in the past year. It was done in order to see whether more libs think it was an inside job than do Repub's think Obama is from another country.

lol

"Of the following hypotheticals, please check the box next to the one you think is more likely true:

[ ] Obama is from another country
[ ] 9/11 was an inside job

OH MY GOD LIBERALS THINK 9/11 WAS AN INSIDE JOB"

[Kuya]

Stephen Walt says this about this news:

Color me skeptical. The past few weeks have seen a spate of news suggesting that the US/NATO effort in Afghanistan isn't going well at all. For starters, the assault on Marjah last spring failed to achieve any decisive strategic goals. The much-heralded summer offensive in Kandahar has been delayed and downgraded, and U.S. officials have been steadily lowering expectations. We learnt over the weekend that U.S. intelligence is increasingly focused on uncovering corruption, which means we are getting sucked back into "nation-building" instead of focusing our assets on destroying al Qaeda (which is what President Obama said he'd do when he (foolishly) decided to increase the U.S. commitment in Afghanistan. The Taliban managed to bomb Afghan President Hamid Karzai's semi-bogus "peace jirga," and Karzai himself is said to be losing faith in our ability to prevail and hoping to cut a deal with the Taliban.

So today -- surprise, surprise -- comes news that Afghanistan isn't a poor country whose primary strategic asset is its ability to grow opium poppies. Nope, turns out Afghanistan is just brimming with iron ore, lithium, cobalt, copper, and other strategic minerals. This report -- which comes from "a small team of Pentagon officials and American geologists" may well be completely correct, but isn't the timing of the release a mite suspicious? This looks to me like an attempt to provide a convincing strategic rationale for an effort that isn't going well.

http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/

[Cephius]

Stephen Walt says this about this news:



http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/

I wouldn't doubt it, wouldn't be the first time a story was pushed through the media in hopes of garnering support for a failing war effort. Though if I had a guess, the mineral deposits are real but we've probably known about them for a long time, and it's just now conveniently getting released to the public as a "news" story.

I'm curious though, what does Karzai hope to gain by "striking a deal" with the Taliban? Surely he knows they're as likely to slit his throat as they are to deal with him as a government official. Unless this is more of a "I'll give you something if you stop trying to bomb my car" type of thing

[Mizango]

Man yall repub. niggas still on that Obama is from Mars bullshit? lol

[Mizango]

I mean hell im still waiting on Revelations and him being the AC to come to fruition and to prove to me the bible can be right for once. Im sure if you throw enough darts in the dark..something, something.

[Max™]

I wouldn't doubt it, wouldn't be the first time a story was pushed through the media in hopes of garnering support for a failing war effort. Though if I had a guess, the mineral deposits are real but we've probably known about them for a long time, and it's just now conveniently getting released to the public as a "news" story.

I'm curious though, what does Karzai hope to gain by "striking a deal" with the Taliban? Surely he knows they're as likely to slit his throat as they are to deal with him as a government official. Unless this is more of a "I'll give you something if you stop trying to bomb my car" type of thing

*linked this on the last page before we started trying to uncover the retrocausal influences 9/11 had on history*

http://www.gl.iit.edu/govdocs/afghanistan/Industry.html

Afghanistan has reserves of a wide variety of nonenergy mineral resources, including iron, chrome, copper, silver, gold barite sulfur, talc, magnesium, mica, marble, and lapis lazuli. By 1985 Soviet surveys had also revealed potentially useful deposits of asbestos, nickel, mercury, lead, zinc, bauxite, lithium, and rubies.

The Afghan government in the mid1980s was preparing to develop a number of these resources on a large scale with Soviet technical assistance. These efforts were directed primarily at the country's large iron and copper reserves.

The iron ore deposits contained an estimated 1.7 billion tons of mixed hematite and magnetite, averaging 62 percent iron. These reserves, among the world's largest, are located at Hajji Gak, almost 4,000 meters up in the Hindu Kush, northwest of Kabul in Bamian Province. Development started in 1983, and because the Afghan authorities had put forth no plan to establish an iron and steel industry, the output appeared destined for the Soviet steel mills in Tashkent.

Btw, Miz, I love that we both had the urge to make refererences to throwing darts blindly, I was going to put "my friend is going to toss darts at a phone book, and assume hitting a man's name is more likely" but figured dice toss + assumption vs coin toss + assumption fit better.

[wagon]

So since its gonna take ~40 years to set up the infrastructure and local personnel trained to do this shit, does this mean we are really setting up for the long haul in Afghanistan?

We are in afghan for the long haul regardless, the mineral deposit is just icing on the cake

[Max™]

Seriously though, kinda sucks that this might fuck over another population of snow leopards that were filtering back into their old Afghan ranges.


http://naturescrusaders.files.wordpr...eopardcub2.jpg

Spoiler: show

http://www.photoethnography.com/blog...eopardCubs.jpg

http://naturescrusaders.files.wordpr...ncia_uncia.jpg

Anyone know where we can mine for more big beautiful cats?

[Mizango]

I wish. I saw something on Nat.Geo where they were talking about how the Snow Leopards were making a slight and slow comeback into the area, and then this news broke today lol.

[Caiyuo]

So you're saying if we built a giant space-econoline van we could move the snow leopards to the asteroids with shitty minerals like buttanium and use the same transport to bring the good asteroids back to earth? I mean yeah it saves on gas but where do you put that many white vans?

[Max™]

Dunno, I bet we'd need a big fucking empty parking lot, like they use for planes or some shit.

[Takedown3]

So you're saying if we built a giant space-econoline van we could move the snow leopards to the asteroids with shitty minerals like buttanium and use the same transport to bring the good asteroids back to earth? I mean yeah it saves on gas but where do you put that many white vans?

precisely my good man, PRECISELY

[Khamsin]

Why do we care? Whether the Afghans utilize their resources or not isn't really our concern. Unless we're just afraid of what they'll do with their newfound money. Maybe they'll not even bother mining it themselves, if they don't have the equipment/infrastructure, and sell the mining rights to someone else.