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Really? You don't see that? Granted, things have gotten dramatically better than even 15-20 years ago. But it's still trivial to see disparities in the media. Just one item: what's the shelf-life of a female actress? As opposed to that of a male actor? The entire point of the existence of feminism is to point out the situations where the established patriarchy is so blinded by history and habit that it just doesn't understand the problem.

of course, feminists don't stoop so low as to take action in 'end-justifies-hypocritical-means' discrimination towards males, right? *cough*

  I dont' know what media you read/watch/listen to, but the stuff I'm exposed to is almost absurdly pro female. Men are ridiculed, dumped on, stereotyped, sexually abused (kicked in the balls/slapped), depicted as pedophiles, rapists, idiots, etc for their traits in almost every TV show and commercial. these roleplay situations wouldn't be so bad if women weren't curiously exempt from all that when the person dishing out the verbal/physical attack is male (the only time not is when it's time to show the male as 'wrong' again).. in fact even when males are shown in traditional roles, they cannot be without a gaggle of females undermining their authority, masculinity, and confidence at every turn. In contrast, you rarely if ever see a woman treated this way.. In news coverage, if a woman gets hurt or killed doing her job, suddenly the story deserves weeklong coverage, otherwise it's over and done with in 2 minutes. If a woman is mutilated sexually, it gets national coverage as a serious crime... if a man is sexually mutilated, it gets national coverage...by comedians and (all female usually) morning talk shows where the guy is ridiculed for being literally emasculated. Of course, this is no surprise most of the writers and editors nowadays are female (most communications major graduates are female and have been for quite some time, the others being feminist doormat males). so much for women having the better character..

I find it ironic that women are the ones claiming men are simple, stupid, and easy to understand and that women are 'spiritually more enlightened' complex little snowflakes, but yet their depictions of men in the media they produce suggest a very neanderthal, childlike caricature at best, and to this male anyway, highly inaccurate.

Why? Why do you want to understand these people? I'm serious. Why deliberately fill your head with hatred and evil and seek to know what motivates these people? Can you? Is it possible? To what end?

Most "hate sites" aren't filled with cartoon villains spewing senseless hate. The media presents a caricature of insane mass murderers, but if you're adventurous enough to go and have a look for yourself, they're often filled with reasonable people who are raising some good points about how they've been marginalized in some way or another. There's more than one side to every story, but the news isn't ever going to tell the side of such a politically unpopular group for fear of being branded as hate-group-sympathizers.

So how are you going to know which ones are just bigots and assholes and which ones are intelligent people who actually have something interesting to say? You go listen for a bit with an open mind. Even if you don't agree with the conclusions they draw it's sometimes quiet enlightening to find out how they got there.

If I didn't know better I'd say this is a deliberate caricature of the misappropriated hype around 3D printers.

3D printers are good for making unique parts. As soon as the worldwide demand for a part exceeds more than about 100, the time and energy cost of manufacture per part will exceed the cost of tooling up one of the many mass manufacture processes available to make the part in bulk. That is highly unlikely to change - not least because the better 3D printing gets, the quicker and cheaper it gets to make the unique tools for a bulk operation.

If it wasn't for the total unsuitability of 3D printing for press fit interfaces, this might have had a niche application for circumventing the IP restrictions on establishing a mass manufacture operation. As it is, it's just another chapter in the myth that one day we will download and manufacture most of our own hardware at home. The world is a big place with a lot of people in it, and against the odds we are actually relatively efficient at cooperating with each other when it comes to products that lots of us want.

Well, part of that reason is that phone/tablet apps are very limited subsets of their desktop analogs. It's a toy platform, you can't expect people to spend professional-level money on its software. I'm not going to drop $45 on a photoshop clone when all I can realistically do with it is finger-painting and morphing people's faces into goofy caricatures. The few apps that are truly valuable tend to come with the base OS: web browser, email, notepad. I could maybe use a simple spreadsheet, but Google web apps already cover that.

The day I can use a tablet as my main work computer, is the day I'll start investing real money in its software.

The best way of permanently tainting the "Apple uses slave labour" allegation is to do a story about Apple using slave labour, but mixing various lies in with the truth. Wait a while for it to become popular than announce that some of it was fabricated. The average human will then recall "that story which was shown to be full of lies!" every time someone gives evidence of abuse.

Caricaturing your opponents as deceitful fools is such an old propaganda (being the original term for "PR" before somone invented the term "PR") trick.

Really you ever notice any movement that gets off the ground that (however politely) wants gov't to fuck off and leave us alone always gets treated with contempt and ridicule in the media?

They're not - The media asks these 'movements' pointed questions, the 'movements' squirm and claim they're being treated with comptempt and ridicule as an out to dealing with the questions... Teabaggers: Cut Gov't Spending! Media: So cut your medicare? Teabaggers: Cut all govt spending except medicare! Media: So we can cut the military? That costs billions. Teabaggers: Stop treating us with comtempt and ridicule! ...and yes the same thing happened with the 99 percenters when the media talked to them...

Well, it's also that the media seeks out the most ridiculous caricature of the movement they can find to put on TV. When interviewing a Tea Party protester, CNN never puts the college professor concerned about reckless government spending on TV...no, they find the toothless redneck wielding the "Obama is a muslim" sign and interview him. And when Fox News talks to an Occupier, it's not the business owner out at the marches for a day upset about the bailouts for Wall Street while Main Street pays for it...no, it's the stoned hippy in the drum circle who can only mumble "man....it's like....the corporations...man..." Makes for better TV.

The problem with both movements is that they have no leaders, so the movements get defined not by their best people, but by their worst.

I think they both have some good points, and it's a shame all the rhetoric prevents real dialog. I think the two groups are two sides of the same coin and could find some common ground that would make real change if everything in the media weren't couched in this "us vs them" mentality. For instance, seems to me the Tea Party is angry at government for bailing out the banks and the failing industries, while the Occupiers are angry at the banks...for getting bailed out by the government! I think we could find common ground there with a "Too Big to Fail = Too Big to Exist" trust-busting policy.

Arguably, (American) conservatism favors a predator/prey societal structure.

This is the leftist caricature of conservatism. It is as accurate as saying the left are all authoritarian communists who want to take your freedom away. A conservative might describe his own position more as, "a rising tide lifts all boats, and overweight government pulls everyone down." Which has truth in it at some level.

There used to be a great website based in the Au that did to 100 and 200 book lists for Science fiction and Fantasy. It also did movies and TV shows. Later on it used to allow for user voting. I tried to find it on the interweb just now and couldn't find it. I am not sure if that is because it is gone, or if there are just too much other crap out there getting better Google rankings. Anyway it used to be a wonderful resource. I pretty much would go through it and just pick out the ones I haven't read yet. Most were older books. In my opinion much of the best science fiction was the older stuff, most of the new stuff is garbage (and has been for awhile). Less people actually writing and more people selling. Few exceptions out there, I really liked John Scalzi's "Old Mans War".

Anyway I have seen some good recommendations so far. I would second Stephen R.R. Donaldson's Thomas Covenant series for fantasy, as well as Joe Haldman's Forever War, as well as Canticle for Leibowitz. Dune was great, but I think most people would agree with that, however Frank Herbert has a ton of other books, most of which are also quite good. There are plenty of classics out there, one I was surprised to see not mentioned yet is Fahrenheit 451by Ray Bradbury. I have Day of the Triffids on my nightstand right now to read, and Wrinkle in Time is also a classic. Anything by Ursla L. Guin like "Left Had of Darkness" is also good.

The easy thing about older good science fiction is that books used to be a lot shorter back then. You can destroy a lot of good books in a short period of time. The not so easy part, is that unless you want to pay a bunch for new copies from a Chapters or an Amazon, it is HARD to find a lot of these at a used book store. I have YET to find a Stanilaw Lem book anywhere. People tend to get rid of the crap, and keep the good. So some authors you just don't see all that often as people tend to hold on to them (likely because they are favorite books also). Some older but not ancient fantasy might be the Terry Broks Sword of Shanara series, or David Eddings The Elenium and The Tamuli. I can list a ton of Fantasy, but none of it is particularly old. I like my old science fiction a lot more than old Fantasy. David Brin was also a favorite from the Uplift War series.

Much depends like anything on personal preference. Some of Heinlein's stuff is really good, however sometimes I get sort of sick of some of his protagonists, same with Ben Bova. Some are a bit to over the top Anne Ryndian caricatures. Anyway there is a host of great old Science fiction out there, it is just a matter of finding it. As I said it is too bad I can't find that website, as it was a great resource. Also Aldus Huxley and George Orwell, Phillip K. Dick. Used to read a lot of Pohl, Sagan, and Asimov...

Depends on what you define as old and obscure also. Anything by Neal Stevenson is good, Snow Crash being one of the highlights or Cryptonomicon, but neither are particularly old to me. Particularly if you are mentioning ones like E.R. Eddison The Worm Ouroboros which was done in the early 1900's. Which by the way I hated. I only got through a few chapters before I threw it down in disgust. Reading the old englishly phrasing drove me batty. If you want REAL old science fiction, the two big ones of course are Jules Verne and H.G. Wells.

Anyway that should give you a lot to chew on for awhile.

Well, yea, it's sort of a repeating story. Businessman creates a conglomerate empire, too often through dubiously ethical means. Later on, either through guilt or through boredom, the power that's acquired is used more towards philanthropy or just rots in a vault somewhere because the purpose was never the power itself or to wield it but the challenge to acquire that power in the first place and how to use it. Of course, that's just a caricature of the situation, and it's silly to label such people as one-dimensional supervillains.

But I think the point stands that as much as we can be happy that, say, philanthropists do go out of their way to spend their money for the benefit of others, we often turn a blind eye to the fact that government trivially spends more and does greater pragmatic good (health care, paid or manditory, and food programs come to mind), often again through dubiously ethical means*. And not being one-dimensional, I don't think it reasonable to label a person "good" or "evil" in a one-dimensional sense. Certainly, it's hard to think of any one person as a stellar example of perfection in some area. But, then, that's fine. I certainly don't expect as such. That's just hyper projecting and distorting actions, as if there needs to be some level of Godhood attributed to people to have respect or disrespect for their real actions. I think it's enough to just appreciate reality as it is.

*As much as I'm all about freedom and choice, I think it a bit dubious to pretend that business always gives you choice and government does not. A business that dumps toxic waste into a shared river certainly isn't giving you a choice. Neither is a business who, having undercut the competition, has decided to grant you such a pitiful wage that it's neigh impossible for many people to save enough to move away. Thankfully, government has been forced to step in and take away some of these evils. And that's the point, in fact, that the vast majority of people deciding to force actions, even if it goes against the freedom of a few, might be the right and ethical thing to do. It's not a matter of "might makes right", as certainly democracies are just as capable of and have harmed minorities in the past. The point, then, is the matter at hand heavily determines how ethical the situation is, not simply waving a hand about the mechanism and entirely ignoring the consequences. So, while I don't embrace at all the idea of government nosing itself into every bit of what would be great freedom, I think it crazy to call for anarchy just because government makes things worse at times; no system is perfect, which is why you have to actually weigh what's actually going on and not just hand wave in a one-dimensional sort of way.

PS - Thank you very much for the links. Your two examples are very much good examples of the point, as of how different Andrew Carnegie and John Rockefeller were.

Marketing targeting STUPID PEOPLE works. It just bounces off anyone with a trace of actual intellect. I for one am perfectly OK with genetically stupid people being selected OUT of the gene pool by their own characteristics. Not that that is a significant result of marketing in actual fact, mind, but I would be fine with it if it were. I can't imagine why some caricature of a do-gooder busybody would NOT be fine with it.

Skinnier models look better on TV and in print. But in real life, not so much. What we should be teaching young people is that the old adage that the camera puts on 15 lbs is an understatement. That's why most actors are short and skinny. That male actor w/ the chiseled face and ripped muscles is 5-foot nothing and a 120 pounds. Models are like that, just taller to emphasize what they're modeling. Both kinds of performers look like caricatures in real life. Pretty caricatures, but I doubt something that would look attractive next to someone who is fit and trim but still much heavier.

That's interesting what you say about all-powerful parents. I didn't have parents that I'd ever think to caricature that way. Yet, they had no trouble teaching me to be disciplined. Now that I'm an adult, I'm skeptical of anyone that wants to be more authoritarian than my parents were. What do they need that control for, if not to aggrandize themselves and prove their importance to themselves by treating others like a child -- in a way I never had to struggle with? It seems like so many other things that are inflicted upon people as children, they pass on their maltreatment to others and act as if it's the most normal thing in the world. I find it sad that these people don't recognize this and instead try to work against those who would like a world where we humans treat each other more as equals. It's more possible than most think -- the first step is to get out of thinking as if nothing else is possible other than how the majority acts now.

Perhaps to you. Also you might wish to investigate who Guy Faulks actually was, who he associated with, what his "ideals" where and what theat whole plan would have resulted in.

I have. But at this point, it doesn't matter. He has become a symbol and his original message has long since become irrelevant.

While I get your point, I would say a symbol based on a very deep fallacy...that's not a good way to start, and I would say that's not at all irrelevant. It might be to the people who worship the caricature (which in and of itself is half the point I'm making), but to me it also shows how myopic and infused with 'form over substance' that particular movement can mostly be.

And there are a hell of a lot more people on the internet working toward change that have absolutely no interest in the methods of anon let alone participate or support them than are just being connected via the web.

Again, you are right but real life is bigger and more complicated.

For the past 20 years or so, those of us who had an interest in civil rights in the Internet sphere had been doing much fighting against windmills. I used to work with the EFF, tried to found a EFF Europe, got into a few lawsuits, even gained a little bit of publicity. I also watched how the lobbyists and corrupt politicians steamrolled over us without a second thought because we were few and couldn't compete in the bribery. I've heard the tales from the other folks about how the EFF once tried to enter the lobby circus in Washington DC and the only thing it got them was burning out their own people.

You can't say I didn't try. And I still believe in the EFF et al. - but I also think they don't have the resources nor abilities to mobilize masses of people and on their own they wouldn't have been able to put a stop on ACTA.

Anonymous - for whatever reasons of coolness and movie cliches - reach people and get newspaper and TV news coverage. When's the last time you've seen the EFF mentioned in the evening news?

We definitely need both. Someone who can mobilize people to go on the street and give the TV news the footage they want to put your issue into the evening news, and someone who fights in the courtrooms and can provide expert talks to the news.

Good for you (heartfelt). Bob knows we need activism and folks working to change the system and try to make this a better place for all concerned.

That said, Paris Hilton got a lot of media coverage too. not sure that's worth anything on it's face without substance. And King got covered by the media plenty. Principled effective action can take place in the public eye, but takes talent and sacrifice most often. Above all it benefits from being couched in authenticity. Not only in the symbology, but in the motivation for the actions. People smell the bullshit. You may be running in circles where anon cache is high, but i can assure you that is limited and I work in deep nerdom.

The vein these guys tweak is mostly an immature one by my way of thinking. I'd prefer a less self centered and self aggrandizing hypocritical vigilante process, sexy or not.

Many actions limit the freedoms of legally operating web presences. Yet they espouse freedom of speech. That's hypocrisy to my mind.

And I can't tell you how often I've read someone claiming that anon gets the credit for the occupy movement. How many ways is a statement like that telling?

I have no doubt there are good people involved but they sure must be the minority, because the actions and statements are often more akin to a child with a gun, or action bend on proving they have an enormous e-penis than mature action to make a better world. The later seems more like cover to fuck with people who have offended them or behaved contrary to their dictates or to moon authority (not that mooning authority every now and again isn't a good move mind you, just don't sell it to me as mythica

Theodor Seuss Geisel was good at condensing something to a caricature of reality, and environmentalism was no exception. Like his World War 2 cartoons, which in the case of the Japanese were unremittingly racist, the Lorax's enemy became unrecognizable. Who, really, needs a "thneed"? This was obvious to me even as a child. I knew that people built houses and published newspapers from forest products. By eliding those things, Seuss managed to condense an entire string of arguments down to one easy-to-digest -- but wholly false -- narrative. For that reason, I have always rated The Lorax as the least of his children's books.

Her: "What looks like a bear, acts like and bear and IS a bear?"

Me: "Gee honey bubbles, I have no idea... I know I know - A BEAR!!!!"

Her: "Nuh uh!"

Me: "No? Then what looks like a bear and acts like a bear and IS a bear that ISN'T a Bear?"

Her: "A BERENSTAIN BEAR!!!!"

My daughter, the genius. If the CIA is a bear, Stratfor is a Berenstain Bear. Kind of like how a Southern Mansion is a Southern Mansion, but a Southern Mansion Style McMansion in the exurbs of San Diego is a caricature of a Mansion. Both comfy places to live, the McMansions just fake and cheezy and third rate as fuckall.

My day job is an electronic design engineer.

So is mine. Guess what, that doesn't make us biologists!

As with everything in technology and science, EE is a very specialized profession. Drawing conclusions about biology based on your experience in EE is not a very safe thing to do. You need to learn quite a lot more bio (and specifically, evolutionary bio) before deciding whether it makes sense. Based on what you've said so far, my guess is that you've never had a bio class which covered evolution in a serious way at all (or worse, you were taught a caricature version of evolution by creationist-influenced educational material, which is depressingly common in the US).

While we're both EEs of some sort, I happen to have studied evolution quite a bit more than you. Let me point out where you have and haven't gone off the rails:

I put together hundreds of components to make something perform a function. If I took one of my designs, copied it, but occasionally left out a component, or added a component, or changed the value of a component there will be several outcomes.
1- Total non function
2- Degraded function
3- No Change in function
4- Improved function

All these possibilities have been studied extensively by evolutionary biologists, and are accounted for in standard evolutionary theory.

If I were to assign a probability based on experience, 2 is most likely followed by 3, 1 and 4.

I'd like to point out that we EEs are seldom in the habit of making random component and/or connection changes. Unless your favorite design methodology is quite... unusual, that means you're not actually basing your opinion on experience, you're just guessing. You then make a very dubious projection of those guesses onto biology (dubious because circuits don't work the way gene expression does at all).

I have no doubt that the long term outcome is LOSS of information and function.

This'd be why I think you've never had so much as a decent intro to evolution course. You seem to have missed the cornerstone of evolution: survival of the fittest. Yeah, there are rejects, and there are probably more misses than hits. But they don't survive to reproduce (or, to be more accurate, they survive to reproduce less often, and thus their frequency in the population diminishes over time).

Also, focusing on "information gain" is a classic mistake made by creationists. All that the theory of evolution claims is that organisms better adapted to their environment have a better chance of reproducing and passing their genes on to the next generation. If you can demonstrate that principle to be true, that's actually all you need to get "information gain", because mutations that give a survival advantage while also increasing complexity will naturally spread through populations, displacing the older and simpler version.

It's also worth noting that evolution does not predict "advances" in complexity. It just predicts adaptation. It's well known that evolutionary adaptation includes the loss of functionality which has been rendered useless by a change in an organism's environment. For example, cavefish are descended from ordinary fish, but many cave species have only vestigial remnants of eyes with reduced or no function:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amblyopsidae

Highly functional eyes don't have any survival advantage in a cave, and they require a significant investment of energy during development from a fertilized egg to an adult ready to start the next generation of fish. Mutations which reduced the size and/or function of adult fish eyes were thus an advantage, because that reduces the amount of energy and protein and so forth which an adult fish needs to put into an egg in order for that egg to be viable enough to hatch and survive development to adulthood. During times of food scarcity, such fish would have a better chance of reproducing than

I don't know why so many people praise Gattaca. The whole movie is one big caricature, including the would-be astronauts who don't do anything convincing as part of their training, the investigator sniffing hairs, the overly sentimental cripple character, the missions whose nature is never revealed, the relationship between the brothers and pretty much everything else in it. It doesn't show the true lives of any characters, nor does it reveal any depth in their social interactions or the mechanisms of how the DNA-aware world works. It is all a cardboard stage with matchstick characters, designed for emotional manipulation rather than intellectual stimulation. It's not a bad movie overall, but due to the lack of depth and plausibility, I don't think it can be treated as serious entertainment or hard sci-fi.

Or take the more recent example of Walnuts where the actual verified health benefits are illegal to be represented in packaging and marketing material because that makes them a "drug"

http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/health-care/8294-walnuts-are-drugs-says-fda

It is also why you can't actually get natural Red Rice Yeast in any form unless it has been deneutered of any helpful benefits because it competes with STATIN cholesterol drugs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_yeast_rice#Regulatory_restrictions

The FDA is in criminal conspiracy to make the only available healthy choices "processed foods" of some sort or another. It no longer serves the purposes of its founding, but is now a gross caricature of its former self. I'm glad it is not funded well, because if it was, it would be even worse. It is also on my list of reasons why government regulations are evil, because they can't do what they are supposed to do, and therefore do things that they can do but shouldn't.

Look, I'm not against regulation, I'm against OVER regulation. We don't need "more" we need "better" and more isn't better.

Monckton also believes he has a cure for cancer, aids, graves disease and multiple-sclerosis.

Not sure about aids, graves disease and multiple sclerosis, but I know the cure for cancer - stop eating carbohydrates. Lustig and Gary Taubes do pretty good exposes on the chronic toxicity of carbohydrates. But again, the point is, Monckton is simply a caricature, much like Al Gore, James Hansen or Michael Mann.

If we double every 20 years, then that means we will use more energy in the next 20 years then we have used since the beginning of civilisation. Obviously something is going to break there eventually.

Fair enough, we certainly going to plateau, and if one is really desirous of being pessimistic, you can read this: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/

That all being said, I suppose one could make the statement that we need to grow our energy faster than our population - which means population controls (anathema to ideas of freedom - see David Wingrove's "Chung Kuo" for an interesting scifi novel based on the premise of unlimited birth rate), or more aggressive exploitation, or a combination of both. We're lucky, of course, that it seems that wealth tends to slow growth rates down, so aggressive exploitation might actually drive natural population control.

The price of energy should reflect its future availability.

NOOOOOO!!!!! That's what Big Oil *wants* you to think! Artificial scarcity is anathema to free markets, and the psychological trick of publishing stats on "proven reserves" in scary ways only distorts the market. The price of energy should reflect supply and demand. Increasing supply will lower prices.

Only took 20 years for the North Atlantic fish populations to tank, and we needed a moratorium on fishing.

Actually, we didn't need a moratorium - the natural economics work themselves out naturally. Once it becomes uneconomical to fish an area, people stop fishing it. Yes, this can be devastating to people who have bet their lives on the idea that they will always be able to economically fish an area, but making those kinds of plans isn't very prudent.

You complain that AGW isn't happening or it isn't a problem. But what you really mean is that you don't want to do anything about it. Hence the attack on the science.

No, I really do mean that AGW isn't happening, or it isn't a problem, or there is nothing we can do about it in terms of *mitigation*. I'm open to adaptation if necessary. My attack on the premise of significant or catastrophic AGW is based on my popperian view of science as falsifiable hypotheses, and comes from an honest conviction. My dislike for big government comes from a completely separate honest conviction regarding the proper place for government based on the works of classic liberals like Bastiat. I'm simply lucky that the two convictions aren't in conflict with each other :)

Just remember what you said and where you stood today, and tell it to your grand-children, when you give them sage advice about politics.

Absolutely. And I hope if our grand-children are living in a Maunder minimum event with historically low temperatures for decades, you'll have the integrity to admit to them you had it figured wrong :)

In the end, I think it's just as rare to find a gun-toting gay republican as it is to find a libertarian AGW believer, or big-government AGW skeptic. One can assert that the big/small government views is what drives the AGW views, but I think that sells people short, and is mostly an artifact of how it has been politicized. I think the problem that you rightfully point out is that often the argument over the science (be it of a

You did suggest that you'd insure the world against CAGW for $350. This is not helpful for discussing what the risk is.

Sorry, I said I'd insure *you* against CAGW for $350 a year for the next 100 years, not the world. They'd have to pay me $350 a year too if they wanted in on it :)

I have heard no "skeptic" ever talking about risk.

Well, I'm sure you've heard skeptics talk about global warming being overstated (i.e., its risks are overstated), but I'm not sure if that's what you mean. Maybe Lomberg suits your criteria: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Skeptical_Environmentalist

Wind energy is already about on parity with coal power generation

Um, try unsubsidized wind energy without carbon fuel backup generators that kick in when wind dies down :) There's a reason why we stopped using windmills :)

Despite much information from conservatives on electric/hybrid cars, they do show promise for a future technology.

My Prius still runs on gas, and since it gets better mileage, I drive it more. Even if it was pure electric, that electricity is going to ultimately come from some carbon based fuel. Look, I love technology, but when Government Motors builds a Volt that is subsidized by the general public bailout, but only affordable to the top 1%, I'm a bit concerned that the best laid plans of mice and men have gone aglay :)

For the "skeptic", we simply have: four-legs good, environmentalism bad. We don't talk risk. We don't talk technology. We don't talk solutions. We just have denial of the problem, because even admitting climate change is occurring would be against the group think.

That's an unfair caricature. Yes, there are bible thumping moron skeptics, just like there are reincarnation believing global warming pot smoking hippies without jobs. Lomborg *is* talking risk. Lomborg *is* talking technology.

Look, climate change *is* occurring, and it will *always* occur, no matter what we do. If we can at least agree on *that*, then we can say "hey look, if climate changes this much, what kinds of technologies will we need to develop to survive"? Instead, we're force fed a diet of "reduce your CO2 footprint!"

Here's my assertion - exploit the cheapest energy we can as quickly as we can to bring people out of poverty. Increased wealth means increased survivability. Run as quickly as we can towards sustainable nuclear energy (thorium in particular). If we ever hit peak oil (there's a chance that abiogenic petroleum saves us), we'll make the transition to pure electric (nuclear) when it is economically feasible, and not one moment before. Those actions will solve the problem of surviving climate change (which as we all know, happens always).