Slashdot Mirror

When Democrats abandoned the working class (ie most people) for ever more niche groups, like transgenders, that gave them a loss

I'm curious to know how you figure they did this. Their economic policies didn't change; the democrats are still the party that aims to reduce taxes on the 99% while the republicans still aim to reduce taxes for the top 1%. Their education policies didn't change; they still favor funding public education while the republicans still favor various "market based solutions" and other such tactics that are shown to reduce accessibility to education. What exactly do you think they did that favored "niche groups" over the working class?

Their economic policies most certainly did change. Supply and demand is a basic thing. By increasing how many H1B and other visas you increase supply. By favoring free trade you decrease job demand. You realize that Bill Clinton let China in the WTO and signed NAFTA into law. Thus we have less in real wages than in the 70s. I'll provide links, but despite all the talk about increasing productivity the reality is that most of the gains have gone to the top 1%. To be fair to the Democrats, this trend is consistent across both D and R administrations. Still, they have done exactly *nothing* to try and turn it around other than lip service about training for the new economy. Want to see Democrats that really pushed for the little guy (ie the 99%)? Think Teddy Roosevelt and breaking up trusts, which today would be more like huge corporations. Think FDR who despite his *many* faults was at least trying to do something. Think Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. The Democrats were at one time the party of the little guy. No more.

Turns out that hating white males

Where did you see them doing this? What policies or proposals did you see that could be said to be aiming for that to happen?

If I say that preference will be given to women and minorities then what I have really said is that everyone other than white males will be given an advantage. That could be restated as everyone is equal but white males get penalized. Can it be more clear? In case that isn't clear enough they have run job descriptions that specifically asked for no white straight males.

Citations:

https://www.epi.org/productivi... https://www.theatlantic.com/bu... https://www.spiked-online.com/... https://www.inc.com/suzanne-lu...

Hmm. Lets just explore for a moment who is demanding racial segregation in the US.

http://www.spiked-online.com/n...
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
https://www.thecollegefix.com/...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/5...
https://www.washingtonexaminer...

Are those "rich reichtard nazis"? I'm not familiar with the term, so I'll have to assume so for the moment.

Citations:

https://berniesanders.com/open... https://www.bbc.com/news/world... http://www.spiked-online.com/n... https://www.washingtontimes.co...

What speech codes? Like treating people with respect? And which words or phrases are now criminalized?

Not using people's "right" pronouns could get you fined in NY
In Canada it's basically illegal to insult anyone or say or do something they don't like: "A teenager was later arrested for growling and woofing at two Labrador dogs in public, a café owner was investigated for showing biblical passages on a TV screen, and an LGBT group was arrested under section 5 for protesting anti-gay persecution in the Middle East. While one would hope such a law would only be used in extraordinary circumstances, it's actually very common."
40% of millenials are OK with making "offensive" speech illegal
The overwhelming majority of college staff are leftists and colleges overwhelmingly limit speech on campus
EU is banning anything that is politically sensitive: "To paraphrase Humpty Dumpty, hate speech means just what those in power choose it to mean – neither more nor less. And now, continent-wide censorship has been forced upon us by the powerful, and they will decide what the rest of us can and cannot say and can and cannot hear, all with the aim of dictating what we can and cannot think."

I could go on...

That's literally what lynch mobs and the KKK said.

Lucky we aren't talking about a lynch mob then. We are talking about people wanting to distance themselves from a disturbed individual. Nothing more, nothing less. That's how the world works.

And out comes the dissembly and revisionist history. This wasn't about people wanting to distance themselves from someone, this was about an anonymous mob engaging in mass public character assassination using stories that even the supposed victim publicly called bullshit on. But even with the woman herself saying these stories were almost wholly fabrications and the self-claimed good guys were shitty people who treated her poorly the attempt at character assassination and total social/political/business ostracization was successful.

This isn't about a "disturbed individual", it's about unpersoning someone with anonymous accusations that are an automatic social death sentence regardless of what even the supposed victim herself said.

And how are your slurs relevant here? Never heard pissbaby nor fuckboy before, did you just make them up? Those that spout SJW (which is anybody that thinks women have any right to anything judging the idiots using the word here and elsewhere) and try to portrait men who doesn't like sexual misconduct or even (gasp!) rape as weak, effeminate or "cucks" that are just fishing for pitty-sex. The reality is that mature, confident men with a normal sex-life (whatever their sexuality) doesn't like sexual misconduct nor rape.

So first you accuse a group of people of making up a "slur of the day" because you believe that is relevant, then when I point out that it is in fact your in-group which has a proven record of doing exactly that you claim the opposite, and that you have never heard two incredibly common slurs which you could see used very regularly with a simple google search.

You also just proved my point about witch hunt accusations and character assassination by doing it yourself. Your last sentence is a transparent personal attack (which you will presumably deny with accusations of "defensiveness" or other emotional straw manning) implying anyone who disagrees with you or dares to apply a group name to an organized and violent toxic ideology is not mature, not confident, sexually deviant, and supports rape.

That's literally right out of the playbook of the religious right. You're pulling a voldemort here and making it impossible to even name the ideology and group being disagreed with. It's the exact same as if the GOP were to say that anyone who uses the phrase "neoliberal economics" is a terrorist.

Some years ago I thought the characterization of many men as not only thinking women as weaker, less worth than men but even secretly hating women was bullshit. Thanks to you and your ilk I now realize that this is true and that many in the technical field hold those views.

The only people who hate women and see them as weak and less worthy are the ones whose entire worldview revolves around forcibly keeping women down as weak defenseless non-agent victims in need of perpetual rescue. Nobody hates women more than feminists.

No evidence? Several persons, male and female, have described in detail how this individual acts. That's evidence. It would be evidence in a court of law and it is evidence outside it.

It's obvious you and your ilk defines evidence as "anything I agree with" and not as the rest of the world does. And that factor repeats - you and your ilk doesn't know how the world works but don't like anything that goes against your fucked-up concept world.

Again you are projecting. Anonymous libels are not evidence, it's how lynch mobs work. The victim herself has publicly stepped forward and completely rebuked the entire narrative, and even pointed out the people portrayed as heroes and saviors were treating h

.
Wikipedia: where truth dies online

The hilarious part is that the mother is so completely clueless to her daughter's feelings and she can't possibly comprehend that her daughter might simply not like working with computers.

Not clueless, brainwashed. You're talking about personal autonomy and preferences, feminism denies the very existence of such things. Proponents of "choice feminism", are marginalized by the movement, which is inherently illiberal (if not totalitarian).

Check this review
http://www.spiked-online.com/r...

Example article
http://www.herizons.ca/node/52...
"Whatever its origins, choice feminism has co-opted feminist language in a way that takes the political out of the personal. It’s all about whatever makes you feel good—right now! We need to reclaim the word choice"

Speaking of lynch mobs...

Companies should not be permitted to profit from the sale of addictive substances for recreational purposes.

like tobacco in cigarettes?

or the 200 other ingredients in there to get you addicted?

The poster is saying what's typically said. You would think that selling a highly addictive substances for recreational purposes would make you rich and invincible, entire nations hopelessly enslaved by your product. Addict-zombie attack. But you'd be wrong.

Sometimes, the answer isn't the easy one. The lesson painfully learned from prohibition is that prohibition raises demand, not lowers it.

On the other hand, education and regulation, not out-and-out bans, really work. Tobacco smoking in the U.S. used to be around 50% in the Don Draper years. Now it's under 20 and still dropping. Tobacco companies are having to merge to maintain market share.

The difference is between people politely, but firmly, told to take their habit outside or into a (dirty) designated area or else you'll get a fine, and police breaking down doors and throwing flash-bombs that kill your grandma with a heart attack (because the Informant lied, and the Chief gave the green-light because the Politician wanted to go on the news that evening with pictures of drugs on the table.

...Wikipedia has been a massive success but has always had immense flaws, the greatest one being that nothing it publishes can be trusted. This, you might think, is a pretty big flaw. There are over 21million editors with varying degrees of competence and honesty. Rogue editors abound and do not restrict themselves to supposedly controversial topics, as the recently discovered Hillsborough example demonstrates....

Yes, because the common ideal that Al Qaeda is a bunch of impoverished religious extremist is so inaccurate.

I couldn't tell if you were being sarcastic or not, but it is true that a lot of terrorist are well educated.

Remind me, is it called the "justice" system or the "rehabilitative" system? Historically, has the focus been on "just and deserved punishment", or "rehabilitation"? When people criticize a judgement, do they typically say "he wasnt rehabilitated" or "justice was not done"? Do they call it "ineffective", or do they call it "unjust"?

You should read CS Lewis' essay on The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment (warning, PDF). I think he makes an excellent case why straying away from a "retributive" or "punitive" justice system is about the least humane and most dangerous thing you could do. Do you really want the government deciding when your prison term is up / "justice has been served" based on whether they think you have been rehabilitated or not?

Britain, at least from my POV, has undertaken a huge, perhaps unprecedented social experiment in immigration and mosaic, cultural restructuring.

The true extent of that, probably dwarfs your POV. It is more telling that the CIA unit tasked with locating Bin Laden jokingly called themselves the Manson Family. It is mass immigration and open borders paired with the threat of terrorism that government may use to justify warrantless wiretapping of its own citizens.

I don't think you can accurately model inferences from personal data; non-sequiturs abound. We don't need a government database to prove this, Amazon recommendations will do fine. When Amazon get it wrong ("clean underwear", some homosexual text etc), it's amusing and the user can usually omit the data point that caused the error. When the government get it wrong, they're potentially ruining someones life!

"My question is, how is it that the "defenders of children" never have a clue about children?"

The "defenders of children" are not really "defenders of children". Many of the larger children's charities are self-promoting organisations who do very little to help children. They plead for donations, but rather than using those donations to protect children, they use the money to pay for advertising and other marketing activities. The extra donations which they receive as a result of those marketing activities can be used to pay for more advertising, and the cycle of growth continues, with the organisations becoming increasingly profitable, without helping children.

Frank Furedi dicussed this issue a few years ago, in an article at Spiked Online.

I agree, I've seen this in the UK too. Lobbying groups such as the NSPCC put out claims such as 20,000 images a week (they're a charity, but they're also lobbying for new laws, such as criminalising possession of cartoons that appear to depict an under-18 year old).

And not just child porn - we have politicians such as Martin Salter making claims about a porn trade involving women from Guatemala being raped and murdered on camera, in order to push his law that criminalises possession of images involving consenting adults (even when the acts are staged).

Not to mention the scaremongering put out by Government-funded groups such as the POPPY project to do with sex trafficking, in order to support the Government's own proposed laws on consensual prostitution.

OK, your still not seeing it, I will give it another try and I will attempt to be a little more civil this time. But before we get started, I want you to read this article to get an idea of the issues I'm talking about.

It's not that disagree with you about the reasoning behind Kyoto, or the effectiveness of selling carbon credits. But neither of those things have anything to do with what is presently happening. That you fear the political implications does not suddenly transform good science into hype and FUD. It would be better for me if I contented myself with the idea that AGW is some "vast left-wing conspiracy". I have too much to worry about in my own life. But that's not how it works.

The issue is that the science is directly connected to the politics and when you see an attack on the politics, you are taking it as an attack on the science. I originally made no reference to the science behind global warming and even stated it was independent of my argument when I made mention to the "even of it is happening, the so called solutions aren't addressing the claimed problem and all of them have been hijacked for political manipulation and gain" Now those aren't my exact words, but it's close enough. You took that as an attack on the science without any consideration of what was actually said or the context in which it was said.

And it isn't just you, when a journalist quote or represent conclusions or statements of the science and people point out their flaws or unsupported statements, it is taken as an attack on the science. Gwynne Dyer said in an Op-ed back in 2005 over an interpreted a statement from James Lovelock concerning global warming "it would cause a massive human die-off" Lovelock's state actually was "Unless we stop now, we will really doom the lives of our descendants. If we just go on for another 40 or 50 years faffing around, they'll have no chance at all, it'll be back to the Stone Age. There'll be people around still. But civilization will go." So does the science affirm that there _will_be_ a massive human die off or then end of civilization? No, it doesn't those are opinions and interpretations of possibilities. The science doesn't exactly rule it out but it doesn't rule out aliens coming in with some laser refrigerator large enough to cool the planet with technology unimaginable to us and thereby saving the world either. Yet when criticizing those comments, We are labeled as "deniers" and attacked by people like you for being stupid and not knowing science as if the science actually does say civilization will be destroyed in 50 for certain. But some how, we should be prosecuted like Nazi war criminals as David Roberts suggests with this comment. "When we've finally gotten serious about global warming, when the impacts are really hitting us and we're in a full worldwide scramble to minimize the damage, we should have war crimes trials for these bastards -- some sort of climate Nuremberg."

Now, knowing that in today's environment the politics and the science can't be separated, you end up with scientific conclusions or statements made for the purpose of furthering the politics. Germany's Environment Minister, Jürgen Trittin claimed that Katrina was caused by Global Warming stating the the US had to sign Kyoto and refused to back down on the statement even after the science and scientists said it had nothing specific to do with global warming.

But wait, it gets better because now we only have two months to save the world. Does the Science actually say that if we don't act within two month, we will definitely see the "killing or making refugees of billions of people in Asia, Africa and America"? Does the science even speak of ""The first offers must come from the rich countries lik

You joke, but the UK has already banned hats and hoodies in some bars and malls for that very reason....

Look at paragraph 4

Furthermore, the response to "Silent Spring" did not stop the sale of DDT to third-world nations

Wrong. The response to "Silent Spring" was that anti-DDT donor organizations who funded the bulk of many third-world countries' public health budgets refused to continue donating if they used DDT.

So there are no "tens of millions of humans who died of preventable malaria infections." That claim is made up by businesses with a vested interest in the production and use of DDT as part of a smear campaign.

Ah, the always excellent: "It's funded by eevil corporations and therefore false!" argument. Nice one. No, again, wrong. It's not just the eeeevil corporations that Wikipedia told you were eeevil:

According to Dr Donald Roberts, professor of medical entomology at the Uniformed Services Hospital of the Health Sciences in Maryland, USA, the huge drop in houses sprayed with DDT has resulted in an average annual increase of 4.8 malaria cases per 1000 of the population in Latin America, from the mid-1980s to the mid-90s.

For the whole of Latin America, a minimum of 1.8million additional cases of malaria were occurring each year up to 1996. Case rates have continued to grow since 1996, and according to Dr Roberts, 'we can reasonably expect that the number of excess cases is now much greater than in 1996'. Only Ecuador, which has continued to use DDT, has seen a reduction in the number of malaria cases in recent years.

Other mosquito-borne diseases are also on the rise. Until the 1970s, DDT was used to eradicate the aedes aegypti mosquito from most tropical regions of the Americas. The reinvasion of aedes aegypti since then has brought devastating outbreaks of dengue fever, dengue hemorrhagic fever, and a renewed threat of urban yellow fever.

I'm not the one making stuff up here.

http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/3454/ ... or Google it?

Even if every word Gore and his acolytes pronounced were true, it also is the case that there is a considerable portion of the collectivist Left who are using the issue as a stalking horse for every harebrained coercive social-engineering folly on their wish list.

From wealth redistribution to urban growth boundaries to mass transit, everything they have failed to win at the ballot box, they now hope to achieve by bamboozling the public into thinking it is critical to fighting global warming.

Hope you all like Mao suits and bicycles and brutalist concrete hi-rise apartments, because that's where the global warming train is headed. Even Stalinist show trials are in the offing if the left wing kooks get their way.

One line of argument I found interesting is that 'the increased use of surveillance by the British government, and its singular determination to collect and share data on everyone who lives in the UK, are desperate attempts by the government to make a connection with its citizens. Feeling themselves increasingly estranged from the public, government officials have become obsessed with finding out who we are and what we do, and with monitoring and measuring every aspect of our lives.' http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/5112/

Yet for whatever reason, fusion funding has been dropping for decades.

The reason is simple: unrealistic always 30-years-away hot fusion schemes (Tokomak-based, mostly) are being promoted to take attention and funding away from cheap energy alternatives and preserve the money-spinning oil/gas/coal/nuclear energy status quo. Much cheaper alternatives do exist. Thin film solar in combination with cheap storage http://www.google.com/search?q=eestor&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8 for example.

The US has pulled funding of ITER (the planned international Tokokmak research reactor) http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/4559/ Let's hope that this is in indication that the hot-fusion farce is about to end.

Oh please learn how nasty coal mining and power production is.

Coal contains uranium at 1.3ppm and thorium at 3.2ppm.

For electricity use we get 6000 kWH/ton out of coal and 2000000000 kWH/ton out of uranium.

To produce 1000kWH of electricity we use 5g of uranium plant. In a coal plant we release 0.2g of uranium and 0.5g of thorium into the atmosphere.

For equivalent radioactive output from a uranium plant, you have to grind up 4% of it's fuel and release it into the atmosphere directly over the plant.

http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/4259/
http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/colmain.html

The deaths due to Chernobyl are disputed but WHO estimates about 10000 people which is a lot less than your million people number. Hiroshima estimates are around 100,000 deaths with the highest estimates at 200,000 deaths - and that's for a nuclear weapon targeted directly at a civilian population.

Basically your numbers are made up and your comparisons flawed.

http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/0000000CA34A.htm Of course, the view you are given of Tuskegee is slanted & far from the truth of what actually happened. At the time the approved treatment was a series of arsenic injections, they were painful, and there was serious doubt as to whether or not it had any benefit vs. doing nothing. A large number of blacks did not complete the standard treatment, and there was no tracking for them at the time. What isn't commonly reported, they did offer treatment to all of the participants, many took it - the arsenic based treatment, the same treatment given to whites, many declined. Those that declined the treatment as well as those who accepted it were followed for a small cash stipend. 95% of syphilis goes into remission without treatment, a small portion of that crowd develops problems from latent syphilis.

The government didn't infect any of these people. Every single one of them was offered treatment. Every single one of them in the non-treatment group rejected treatment. Now it sounds a little different, doesn't it?

The movie The Great Global Warming Swindle is a fraud. The filmmaker has been convicted in the past of "creative editing". And sure enough, Professor Carl Wunsch from MIT, who is shown in key moments of the movie, is crying foul.

The link to your article has nothing by that MIT professor in it.

Also, it was written by someone who obviously hasn't even seen the movie in question (Swindle). Just read the part where he says that "everybody agrees that temps are higher now than 100 years ago and CO2 is high ...." It does not go onto say that the "Swindle" movie offered an alternate reasoning for this to be true, and backed it up with very persuasive data.

Another funny fact: many of the "scientists" shown in the movie are introduced as members of renowned academic institutions... which they left long ago. In other words, the movie is misrepresenting lobbyists as scientists. That should speak volumes about the integrity of the filmmakers.

Another funny fact about the IPCC report, which is mentioned in the film, is that there was NOT consensus among the "2500+ scientists" who "wrote" the report. In point of fact, the report was compiled in large part by bureaucrats and many of the scientists, including 1 interviewed in the "swindle" movie, had no involvement or had opposing views to the ones that were published.

One scientist, who proved that malaria would not increase due to rising temperatures (due to global warming or otherwise) told them repeatedly to remove his name from the report, which, of course, stated the worst. Obviously, they ignored him and his (correct, according to me) assessment completely and he wanted his name off the report. After much argument, he finally had to threaten legal action just to get his name removed!

I will not accept data collected and assembled in this manner to form my opinion. The fact that they are grasping at straws of credibility to hold this thing together makes this--"the most important climate change report"--absolutely and indisputably invalid. The scientific community should stand up for themselves and proclaim a "do-over".

I only mention the IPCC report because the 'swindle' movie was mainly just a response to that. It all goes back to the original post of this article: Crying wolf diminishes credibility of anthropogenic climate change "alarmists" (heroes?) as a whole.

Anthropogenic climate change may be real, but I'm reiterating that Gadwin's Law is now in full effect with the popular invocation of the word "denier". The debate is over, but only because we can't behave ourselves.

We may be destroying our planet with greenhouse emissions, or we may be needlessly destroying our economy with alarmism. I don't think we'll know for sure for a long time.

Personally, I've looked at the data, and I'm waiting to be convinced either way.

"The advisory committee's report is not the first to express doubt as to whether the prime goal of Greenpeace activities really is to protect natural resources. Patrick Moore, who co-founded Greenpeace in Canada in 1971, has his doubts, too. He believes that the thrust of the group's campaigns has, for some time, been geared primarily towards self-promotion. And he argues that such misguided priorities can actually end up being harmful to the environment. For example, Moore points out that the sinking of the Brent Spar oil platform owned by the Shell Corporation in 1995 - which Greenpeace protested against by calling for a global boycott of Shell - would have done no damage to the environment. In Germany, Greenpeace officials had to concede that they had misled the public by exaggerating the risk of pollution from oil residues on the Brent Spar platform. Moore also believes that Greenpeace's outright rejection of genetic engineering does not benefit the 'public good', since it tends to scaremonger about pretty safe and good advances in crop production and agriculture more broadly." from http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/artic le/2843/

I won't even begin to comment on the parent AC's unsubstantiated racial profile of "happy slappers".

Happy slapping is not "a serious problem"; it is a moral panic that has grown up out of alarmist reports in the gutter press.

See these rather more informed articles.

Whatever happened to the vaunted Slashdotter cynicism towards FUD? I know things trend leftward here on /. but don't facts and reality have any weight any more? Check out this website with supporting cites of Crichton's thoughts that the "Panic now" approach to global warming is not the best way to go: http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=16260#r ight The argument I always stick on is that Mars is warming as well and there is no way that our SUV's could possibly warm Mars. Earth has been warming and cooling periodically since its inception. Let's find out if action is required before taking drastic steps that WILL cause deaths and misery among the poor. For example, in America if gas goes up to $6 a gallon then we can mostly suck it up. . .except for the very poor. This type of thing will raise food prices (how do you think food gets to the stores?) and limit the employment options for the poor to travel to find the good jobs by raising the cost of transportation. And that's just in America, what about in places that are really desperately poor. When you make $200 a year a small increase in the price of gasoline takes a huge bite out of your living standard as every product from food to building materials has to get there with gasoline. Bjorn Lomborg in his book, "The Skeptical Environmentalist" pointed out facts like these and was pilloried as a heretic for it. I don't care about agendas, I only care about facts and results. I refuse to support actions that the facts don't currently support as necessary when the guaranteed results cause misery and needless deaths. Do you guys remember DDT? Environmental extremists caused it to be taken off the market and not used any more. This has resulted and in millions upon millions of deaths for no good reason. Oopsy. http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/000000005591 .htm "Malaria is on the increase in all tropical regions of the planet - especially in Africa. In 2000, the disease killed more than one million people and made 300 million seriously ill." There are many, many, many peer reviewed serious scientists who think that Global Warming cannot conclusively be blamed on human behavior. Further, others point out myriad BENEFITS to global warming, so even if it is caused by humans it may be a blessing and increase quality of life. http://www.nationalcenter.org/NPA165.html "If history is any indication, greater precipitation may be only one of many benefits of global warming. For example, between the 10th and 12th Centuries, when the temperature of the planet was roughly 0.5 degrees Celsius warmer than it is today, agriculture in North America and Europe flourished and the southern regions of Greenland were free of ice, allowing cultivation by Norse settlers. " Check out he dissenters before you advocate actions that will get people killed.

In fact, DeWitt's 1956 article in the Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry came to a very different conclusion. DeWitt reported no significant difference in egg hatching between birds fed DDT and birds not fed DDT. Carson also omitted to mention DeWitt's report that DDT-fed pheasants hatched about 50 percent more eggs than 'control' pheasants. As to DDT causing cancer in humans, study after study reports no association between DDT exposure and cancer rates.

Dr Joel Bitman and his associates at the US Department of Agriculture published an article in Nature in 1969, which found that Japanese quail fed DDT produced eggs with thinner shells and lower calcium content. Further examination of Dr Bitman's study revealed that the quails under experiment had been fed a diet with a calcium content of only 0.56 percent, whereas a normal quail diet consists of 2.7 percent calcium. Calcium deficiency is known to cause thin eggshells. After much criticism, Bitman repeated the test, this time with sufficient calcium levels, and the birds produced eggs without thinned shells.

Following years of feeding experiments, scientists at the Department of Poultry Science at Cornell University 'found no tremors, no mortality, no thinning of eggshells and no interference with reproduction caused by levels of DDT which were as high as those reported to be present in most of the wild birds where "catastrophic" decreases in shell quality and reproduction have been claimed' (2).

In fact, I have noticed--and "experts" have noted--that "delayed adulthood" (a.k.a. "arrested development," "extended adolescence") has become common. My 28-years-old-going-on-16 son is a good example.

I can see the sophistication of such "Skript kiddie" operations as indicating some "kid" in his late-20s or early-30s, still living at home, and with the moral compass of your common housecat.

Granted, this may be easy for me to say, as I have not been directly, personally affected (no one I know has been killed/injured/involved) by terrorism...

Well, I have been directly affected by terrorism. I stood on the sidewalk and watched in horror as innocent people flung themselves out of a quarter-mile-high building instead of being burned to death. I saw, heard, and felt the impact of the second plane. I dodged falling debris with the rest of the crowd, and walked up Broad Street to get away from the site with my fellow New Yorkers, hitting the redial button on my cell phone until I could get through to my family to tell them I was still alive.

And, I agree with you.

I watched three thousand innocent people murdered just because they had the courage to live as free people. And how are we honoring their memory? By giving up the freedoms they died for, for a false sense of security.

We've been told "They hate us for our freedoms." If that's true, then why has Switzerland, where people have at least as much individual liberty as we do, not been attacked by The Terrorists?

We've been told that we need to give up some freedoms in the name of safety. If giving up individual liberty makes you safer, then why is it that in countries where individual liberties are suppressed the most that people have the most to fear? I'm not saying that the people who want to reduce our liberty in the name of security are tyrants; I believe they think they're doing the right thing. However, the belief that you must choose between liberty and safety is not true. Perhaps it's up to the citizens of the free world to let our politicians know this. Or, we can just sit around on our well-regulated duffs and hope that the government can keep us safe.

http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&q=freon+s huttle+foam+nasa&btnG=Search+News

From the first site returned (and similar to several others)
http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/0000000CAD09 .htm

...If we are not prepared to take bold, calculated risks, this brings hazards of its own. For example, the detachment of a lump of insulation foam that imperilled Discovery's latest mission has been connected to the fact that NASA has changed its foam formula, in order to comply with environmental guidelines. Under pressure from the Environmental Protection Agency, NASA reduced the use of the refrigerant freon because of its role in ozone depletion - even though the replacement foam formula is known to be less effective at adhering to fuel tanks. Of the four large pieces of foam shed by Discovery, at least two were applied using the new formula (5).

If I'm misinformed, I'm not alone. Regardless of which exactly which formulas were used on which flights, we know that there are better formulas and we choose not to use them despite knowing how critical this is to a safe mission. Your facts have the stench of butt-covering and obviscation trying to deflect from the core fact that freon based foams should have been used when it was known they had suppior characteristics.

"There is a 'rooted public perception of what al-Qaeda is', says Dolnik, who is currently carrying out research on the Terrorism and Political Violence Programme at the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies in Singapore; but, he says, such perceptions are far from accurate. Dolnik argues that where many imagine that al-Qaeda is 'a super organisation of thousands of super-trained and super-secret members who can be activated any minute', in fact it is better understood as something like a 'global ideology that has not only attracted many smaller regional groups, but has also facilitated the boom of new organisations that embrace this sort of radical and violent thinking'. Dolnik and others believe that, in many ways, the thing we refer to as 'al-Qaeda' is largely a creation of Western officials."

People should check out this article: Does al-Qaeda exist?

"There is a 'rooted public perception of what al-Qaeda is', says Dolnik, who is currently carrying out research on the Terrorism and Political Violence Programme at the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies in Singapore; but, he says, such perceptions are far from accurate. Dolnik argues that where many imagine that al-Qaeda is 'a super organisation of thousands of super-trained and super-secret members who can be activated any minute', in fact it is better understood as something like a 'global ideology that has not only attracted many smaller regional groups, but has also facilitated the boom of new organisations that embrace this sort of radical and violent thinking'. Dolnik and others believe that, in many ways, the thing we refer to as 'al-Qaeda' is largely a creation of Western officials."

Uh, dude? You do know that global warming isn't contested, right?

Really? See http://www.sepp.org/books/hotcold.html and http://www.spiked-online.com/Printable/00000002D37 1.htm among others.

Not so long ago, we were facing imminent threat of an ice age caused by -- you guessed it -- our polluting ways. The proponents then were as convinced of their inerrancy as you are now.

When your computer model can accurately predict whether it will rain ten years from next Friday, then your inanity will warrant a rethink.

Judge Andrew MacKay refused to believe Schmeiser's initial assertion that so much transgenic canola pollen had drifted on to his field solely via wind and bees. During the trial, Schmeiser had already admitted 'experimenting' with Monsanto's Roundup Ready seed on his field. Herbicide-tolerant plants with a purity grade of 95 to 98 percent in relation to the patent-protected characteristic had been found in large areas of Schmeiser's canola cultivation area. Various experts testified in court that unintentional mixing via pollen flight from neighbouring fields could not have caused the discovery of this much Roundup Ready

Numerous farmers and agricultural experts share this view, as did the judge, who pronounced: 'I have found that he [Schmeiser] seeded that crop from seed saved in 1997 which he knew or ought to have known was Roundup tolerant, and samples of plants from that seed were found to contain the plaintiffs' patented claims for genes and cells.'

Now, personally, I'm of the belief that if Schmeiser arrived at his particular seed crop genetics through natural selection (which appears to be the case from my cursory research) then he should be allowed to make use of that crop HE developed naturally. But it appears that the law's viewpoint is that he knowingly developed "Roundup" proof crops to specifically use Monsanto's "Roundup" herbicide without paying them a license fee. That's definitely a violation of existing patent law.

A lot of Europeans (more and more) think this way. Spain is a nice, recent example. "Go to war without our consent? Fuck off!"

I think you're conflating a the mechanism of government, i.e., democracy with people's attitudes towards their role in regard to government, i.e., do I trust them? What do they do for me? Do I even recognize their authority? These are not rhetorical questions. A fine example of this is the difficulty encountered by the Soviets in the early 20s as they tried to pacify the countryside: Russian peasants saw government as none of their business and their business, none of government's. For them, the village was the unit of autonomy. The Tsar had largely allowed this to go on, but Lenin wasn't having it. He essentially declared war on the class he swore to protect. This is an extreme example, however, I use to illustrate my point. It's not that Europeans see themselves as subjects to be guided, with no real input (though to hear some quarters, Europe and especially the UK are suffering some of the same problems suffered by we in America) -- rather, you will find far less questioning of the reach and authority of government in Europeans circles than in America.

I'd have to argue that the preponderance of political parties and alliances has more to do with two key differences: those of the bicameral, 3-branched system of federal government in America and the parliamentary system so popular on the continent, and thosee organization of political power. Popular media presents the American two-party system as two monolithic organizations with party lines strict as communists and all diametrically opposed to the other. Nothing could be further from the truth. Within both parties are people who fall outside any common mold: democrats who oppose gun control (Zell Miller, senator from Georgia), pro-choice republicans (Mitt Romney, governor of Massachusetts), tax-and-spend Republicans (Richard Nixon and George W Bush). I think as an accident of history, people in this country (whose political life began with any number of parties) began consolidating into large alliances that became known as the political affliations they are today. I would liken them to the parliamentary alliances formed among disparate parties in European houses, towards the aim of exerting more power for their common goals.

As for the personal privacy issue, I politely request you check your facts. As a rule, in the US corporations cannot collect anything more than aggregrate information (i.e., information about you that does not uniquely identify you) without your explicit consent, and in many cases where the consumer was too liberal in exercising said consent, the courts generally find in their favor. For Americans its a plenty important issue, and I have to wonder where you get the idea they don't care about it. (I don't, personally, but that's because I think privacy is a legal fiction for neurotic political pressure groups -- a topic for another discussion).

Read the other link I offered. It has commentary:

[...] In discussions about issues as diverse as AIDS, Kosovo, abortion, state intervention, animal rights, the global economy and gay rights, one side has accused the other of being akin to 'Nazis' or 'Holocaust deniers'. What should be a rational debate, a battle between the arguments for and against particular points of view, becomes posed as a defence of moral absolutes. [...]

(Sorry for the misspellings.)

whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever argument was in progress

And Greenpeace aren't head cases? What do you call ramming Sailboats with powerboats because you don't like their sponsor?
Believe it or not, some of us happen to think owning firearms and hunting are basic human rights and necessary survival skills, your religion ( which is what environmentalism is) notwithstanding.
The "Deep Ecology" movement is at least as intolerant and militant a fundamentalist religion as militant Islam. It also presents a much greater threat to human life. After all, one of environmentalism's greatest "achievements", the banning of DDT, causes the deaths of over 1 Million people a year from Malaria.

That would be nice wouldn't it? Unfortunately, it would be a little more difficult to make invisible terrorist ties to Canada and Mexico. But I am actually a little surprised we didn't go after Saudi Arabia instead.

That is interesting, especially considering the term 'Al Qaeda' is actually a term invented in 1998 after the Oklahoma City bombings to describe very loosely knit extremist organizations around the world. Now that we have given them an umbrella name to operate under, we have not only given their efforts focus, but allow independent groups completely unrelated to bin Laden to claim affiliation with this 'Al Qaeda' thing. It's this exaggeration which has allowed the current administration to link any terrorist group they please in Iraq back to bin Laden.

For some reason, I find it joyless to indirectly participate (via my tax dollars and due to the place of my birth) in the unilateral invasion of a country on anecdotal evidence. If we had given UN inspectors the time they requested instead of bullying the international community it is possible we could have resolved the situation without getting anyone killed. Is that too much to ask?

Do you think it is worth putting that corner of the world in that much danger to prove that point?

Our fault? If by that you mean imperialists then yes. This is an issue with a much longer backstory, but when you invade peoples lands and completely alter their ways of living without their consent and at the behest of the international community it tends to fuck things up. People have struggled to feed themselves in Africa since the beginning of time, perhaps. But now they have guns, tanks, armies, corruption (of course) and international debts. Desperation is the seed of corruption. Since the fall of the Taliban, many kurds have been forced into corruption - dealing opium - to survive because they are out of options. It would be a bald-faced lie to say our specific western cultural influence has not lead Africa to its current state.

The smart thing to do would be to not hand out guns in the first place.

Cheers, and Happy New Year

Mercury: Overplayed or Overstated?
DDT: Controls Malaria which kills over a million people per year. and is a major killer of children under 5.
Dioxin: A baddie, But was it truly necessary to evacuate people?
Asbestos: Only things I saw was people complaining about others getting money for 'exposure' while showing no detrimental health effects.

Please note that the editor of "E&E" is one of the few environmental scientists who agreed with Bjorn Lomborg "Skeptical Environmentalist", and a self-confessed environmental sceptic. As stated there, the journal itself has a "stance [that] is critical of conventional wisdom".

Now, I don't read E&E (I tend to read the mainstream geophysics journals: GAFD, JGR(Oceans) and GRL -- "E&E" is not a mainstream geophysics journal), but I am slightly concerned about work published in a journal with an agenda. One may also be concerned about the suitability of referees selected by an editor out to prove a point, rather than to publicise good science.

"There is a real moral panic underway in the UK about this now"

Oh, do give over.

For one thing the UK *is not* the tabloids.

They try to foster a particular opinion as being national whether it is or not, and the Sun recently dropped the ball bigtime with their 'Bruno Bonkers' headline that they had to reprint because it was insensitive trash.

The whole deal with 'peadophiles' in the UK is that we don't have the association with 'Terrorism' that the US has. We've had terrorism for so long that it doesn't affect us. Kiddy Fiddlers, on the other hand, are this scary lurking menace that haunt the internet, street corners and *live in your town*.

The Brass Eye Peadophile special nailed this concept completely, and the flak that surrounded it was indicative of the PR value of this kind of fear.

The British public, generally speaking, have a bit more cynicism.

I'd just like to point folks to this in hopes that we can collectively steer this topic where it ought to be with our elected officials. Alternately, we could take Lessig up on his bet.

A quick Google returns this page containing: "...The ACEEE study notes that U.S. oil imports more than doubled during the past 15 years and oil imports now exceed domestic oil production. The U.S. possesses just two percent of world oil reserves, and this percentage is dropping. " So where does your 80% domestic figure comes from? I agree with you about the new imperialist drive, though.

Actually, from what I've read, studies have shown that societies go through stages in terms of pollution. First, they are primitive. They pollute a lot per person, but most die young from disease, so the net effect is small. Next, they begin to industrialize, and pour soot and ash and other crap all over the place. Finally, they become wealthy enough to begin curtailing their pollution because they are no longer worried about dying at age 35 from starvation or other third-world maladies. E.g., slash-and-burn forestry in the rainforests is because poor people want a decent life, not because McDonald's is raping them for its french fry containers.
The solution to global pollution is global wealth, not Soviet-style top-down repression. Oh, yes, and I agree the jury is still out on global warming; let's get some better computer models; even the experts admit their models are not proven to be reliable yet.
Here're a couple of good link to discussions on this subject:
http://www.spiked-online.com/sections/science/deba tes/kyoto/
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/edu/gwdebate/

There is not an infinite amount of money in some other dimension where it magically appears on this planet whenever we want it. It comes from turning natural resources into products.

That is true to some extent. There are two caveats. First, every exchange in a free market is an increase in wealth to both the buyer and the seller. This is a basic rule of economics, buyers pay less than they value an item at, and sellers ask for more than they value an item at. So we could all become billionaires...

But more on your point, humanity increases the availability of natural resources through the use of human intelligence. Your comment about "hitting a brick wall" will not happen as long as humans are free to come up with new ideas to solve problems, and there is an existing free market to properly value resources.

I highly suggest a reading of Julian Simone's work The Ultimate Resource which discusses how natural resource "shortages" have always been predicted, yet never actually happen because increasing value of scarce resources motivate people to think of new ways of obtaining those resources.

Of course, there are market externalities, such as global atmospheric resources, that cannot be represented in our existing law as private resources. So this doesn't mean that all environmental laws are bad. But we should be very careful that the costs of an environmental law is not larger than the benefit (e.g., millions dead each year because of malaria due to DDT ban, etc.)