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Virginia AG Probing Michael Mann For Fraud
eldavojohn writes "Republican Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli has requested receipts and research documents relating to nearly half a million dollars in state taxpayer money used to conduct climate change research at the University of Virginia while under direction of Michael Mann, originator of the famous 2001 IPCC Hockey Stick graph depicting rapid climate change. Mann appears to be a prime target for Cuccinelli — who has also requested hearings with the EPA to contest the grounds of their carbon dioxide studies. Mann's expenditures of taxpayer money may become problematic if Cuccinelli finds violations of Virginia's Fraud Against Taxpayers Act. Cuccinelli has been active in pushing conservative views in the past, including an effort to remove the titillating mammary from the beloved Great Seal of Virginia. No end in sight for the politicizing of the science and research surrounding climate change."
He deserves jail for Transformers 2 alone!
He's also the asshole that told all the public universities in Virginia they could no longer have policies of non-discrimination towards gays.
Stay classy.
After the whole Climategate thing fizzled, I was wondering when some enterprising Republican in the US would take it upon himself to try to drum up some more bullshit. I guess after the guy was done making sure you can discriminate against the gays the way the good lord intended, Cuccinelli thought he'd move on to something that's a better use of the taxpayer's dollars.
Yay Virginia!
Great...
Definitely the beginning of the end when science is evaluated by non-scientists (or bought/paid for court "expert witnesses").
*insert pithy sig here*
What an asshole...going after academics for political reasons. What's next?
Per Square Mile, a blog about density
That's pure trolling from Cuccinelli, he has not asked for the data (which is open) related to the papers in question, but ALL of Mann's e-mail with about 20 people.
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/05/cuccinelli_is_using_the_law_to.php
I bet the faculty union has the best lawyers money can buy. This is not some poor schlep, he has a Ph.D., he will be fine. He'll probably start a center afterwards to defend scientist that are attacked. Some sort of center for research ethics or what not.
Maybe someone should sue Cuccinelli for fraud. After all, this sounds like a waste of taxpayer money if I've ever heard of one.
Per Square Mile, a blog about density
This is but one of many shenanigans the new Virginia AG is involved in.
sPh
Even if the investigation comes up empty, as I expect it will, it could have a very damaging effect upon Mann's career. It also could have a chilling effect not only on other climate scientists, but even discouraging science students in even choosing a career in climate science.
Of course not... It's about ratings. The facts are worthless without the song and dance... and then they just get drowned out in the same.
Oh, you don't need meth and you don't need speed
Cuz' Everything is better with A Bag of Weed
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Wow, way to make us embarrassed to live in Virginia, Cuccinelli. This guy is the worst of the worst, he's abusing his position and wasting taxpayer money to legislate his extremist political views. I'm pretty sure that's not what the AG position is intended for.
Dear Virginia: GTFO. Especially since there's apparently no chance of tits with Cuccinelli in charge.
it is a great day for economic development in DC and Maryland, who is going to locate a scientific research institution or bio-technology business in Virginia with this going on?
When this investigation comes up with nothing, can we sue the AG for wasting taxpayer dollars?
The AG is an ass and a bigot. Mann is an ass at the least. They both need to be investigated.
"Because if he's not, and Mann DID commit some sort of fraud, any and all AGW claims will be blown to smithereens."
Even if we assume that Mann bribed all scientists reviewing his work, killed Kennedy and in fact is a reincarnation of Hitler (pre-emptive Godwining) - it won't change ANYTHING.
Mann's papers are just several of many thousands, written by different teams from various parts of the world with different methodologies and data sources used.
Oh .. I seriously need to get coffee
But how many of those thousands of papers and researchers used Mann's research as a basis?
Can you envision any scenario where a republican calling for a fraud investigation related to climate research would not be criticized as "politicizing science"? I agree that's probably what's happening in this particular case, but it seems that any call for an investigation would end up being impugned as "politicizing science" regardless of the investigation's merits.
"Because if he's not, and Mann DID commit some sort of fraud, any and all AGW claims will be blown to smithereens."
Even if we assume that Mann bribed all scientists reviewing his work, killed Kennedy and in fact is a reincarnation of Hitler (pre-emptive Godwining) - it won't change ANYTHING.
Mann's papers are just several of many thousands, written by different teams from various parts of the world with different methodologies and data sources used.
That's not relevant to the politics of the situation. If Mann's emails reveal he cooked the books or undermined peer review, AGW-addressing acts such as cap-and-trade will be politically dead.
Hell, look how lame the results from Copenhagen were in the wake of the Climategate data leakage.
He is just another Republican carpetbagger (from New Jersey). These grifters evidently think that everyone in the South is an easy mark.
So you guys are upset that the AG is probing for misuse of public funds? The article itself says it will be "problematic" if violations ARE found... problematic??
I thought Copenhagen stalled because a third of the poorest countries were angry that they would not be allowed to develop and that us Big Countries were getting to much of an advantage?
The Americans with Disabilities Act protects genetic defect diseases too...
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704471504574438900830760842.html
Considering that much of AGW research was done long before Mann's papers - it's still won't change anything.
Didn't one of the leading climate scientists come out and say there wasn't any statistically important heating of the earth over the past 10 years?
He's also the asshole that told all the public universities in Virginia they could no longer have policies of non-discrimination towards gays.
Stay classy.
Well, I live in Northern Virginia by DC so I'm painfully aware of his policies. In 2004, as a State Senator in Virginia's Senate, he stated "Homosexuality is wrong." This was in regards to a bill that would be introduced to add homosexuality under hate crime legislation after a particularly disturbing case. Cuccinelli vowed to fight any extension of gay rights. He would be reelected in 2007 and appointed as Attorney General this year.
Your fancy logic is no use here, this is politics. You have to disprove Cuccinelli's belief that "homosexuality is wrong" and his apparent reinforcement that it moves him up the voting chain so the populace agrees. Good luck, I sometimes have to interact with these people and often just sidestep any conversation in regards to gay rights (trust me, it's not worth it).
It doesn't end at gay rights either.
My work here is dung.
The motto on the Great Seal of Virginia is "Sic Semper Tyrannis". It means "thus always to yyrants" and was attributed to Brutus after stabbing Caesar and was also what John Wilkes Booth said after murdering Lincoln. Timothy McVeigh was wearing the motto (with a picture of Lincoln, not the VA seal) when we was arrested.
That (now) hateful phrase remains on the seal, but at least the cartoon titty is gone.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
'Global warming' -- sorry, I forgot, it became 'climate change' when the planet stopped warming
I guess the glaciers in Glacier National Park are disappearing because we don't allow enough logging to keep the trees in check, and a northwest passage is opening up because we tolerate too many whales.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
He didn't have all these problems when he was doing Miami Vice.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Its better to test these claims in front of a court than to listen to the defamation of sciene much longer. Much easier to defend yourself there.
I don't know about you, but I would expect the glaciers to recede and the arctic ice to thin in periods between ice ages.
There is also the part that arctic ice has actually been increasing over the past few years.
IMO, the big grand treaties method is the wrong approach. From an emission standpoint, the developing nations and other small countries are irrelevant and will remain so for some time yet.
It would be a better idea to just work on the G8+China+EU and maybe Australia, agreeing on something, or even just getting the US and China to agree on something. It would achieve the majority of the results for a lot less work and get it done a lot faster. Once that's done, then they can work on hashing things out with the developing nations and other small emitters.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
I thought it failed because the poorest third were angry that they weren't going to be guilt-tripping the developed third into propping them up through international welfare.
Actually, I'm pretty sure that's what actually happened.
Not a matter of "YOU BROWN FOLK STAY POOR". We drove our car through standing water and it flooded, killed our car, we've got a mess on our hands. We're waving our arms shouting "Look if you go this way, global warming. Bad shit. Go around the long way. It's harder, but if we had known about this shit we'd be going that way too".. meanwhile the third world refuses to understand what we're saying, and instead are just preoccupied with the fact that we went right through the high water and now they have to go around. ... but more than that, what they REALLY want is just reparations from the industrialized world. Nothing like a big fat annual check for never managing to get a working competitive economy in order.
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
Guys, the hockey stick graph has been proven to be, at best, a very narrow view of the data, and at worse, a hoax. If you take federal grant money, and you perpetrate a hoax, it is a crime.
Enter the attorney general.
If you think *he* is wasting Virginia's tax-payer dollars, what do you think of the billions in federal funds used to whip the public into a frenzy ala global warming?
The problem with treaties are, most other nations can cheat on them, but when we have a treaty, by our Constitution, they become law.
Yes, a leading climate scientist made that statement recently. Do you understand what the term statistically significant means, and what the implications of that observation are? Two important points to remember are that such an observation is not inconsistent with AGW, and that you cannot do statistics on a sample of one.
If each year we look back and determine whether there was statistically significant warming in the past X years, we would expect to see no statistically significant warming in some years. Similarly, if you throw loaded dice time and time again, you would expect some runs that appear to show no statistically significant deviation from what would be expected from fair dice.
... and what happened to those countries who chose to persecute their best and brightest ?
Greece after Socrates ... Italy after Galileo ... Germany after Kristallnacht ... America next ???
in the pursuit of forcing their ideology on others,
I think you actually mean..
in the pursuit of whatever the hell they damn well please, be that their ideology or wallet or libido
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
Actually, Cuccinelli wasn't "appointed" as attorney general—he was elected. He defeated Democrat Steve Shannon by a huge margin. We chose to have this guy as AG, and it wasn't even close. Any informed voter should have known what they were getting into with Cuccinelli. He's really, really far right, and he's never hid it. It doesn't speak well of Virginia.
You would think that by this time, the discussion would have moved from "is global warming real?" to "what do we do about it?" No such luck.
Wouldn't it be more like that the warming was so low that it could easily be explained with sampling accuracy error.
You have to disprove Cuccinelli's belief that "homosexuality is wrong" and his apparent reinforcement that it moves him up the voting chain so the populace agrees.
There are large portions of the population which (for whatever reason) don't want to support "gay rights".
The goal then, should be to re-frame the argument in a way as to remove the government from areas which it doesn't belong (like defining marriage).
Think of it this way, if the government had no concern for marriage and only "cared" about civil unions, what issue would it be what the sexes of the two parties are?
You want to "marry" a man or woman or child or goat or rock (or a mix), that's between you and the church.
Everything else is a contract, let the lawyers fight over it.
...covered up by whitewash investigations that were less than a fig leaf, then, yeah, okay.
Now, just because this particular brand of bunghole is wrong on gays, doesn't mean he's wrong on the whole AGW fraud. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
Did Mann have copyrights to the data, or was it collected from other sources only with permission for his research?
Just because a research project is gov't funded doesn't mean their data is in the public domain.
No, it means the amount warming was low enough to possibly be explained by natural causes, by chance. We know that significant warming did occur. Again, we would expect to see no statistically significant warming every so often. At a 95% confidence interval, we would expect it 1 out of 20 times. For this same reason, 1 in 20 scientific papers reaches the wrong conclusion, because what you would expect to happen due to chance sometimes doesn't happen, or conversely, what you would expect to happen doesn't happen due to chance.
The bottom line is that you cannot do statistics on a sample of one. This is why repeatability of experiments is so important in science. If we continue to see periods of no statistically significant warming, then you've got something interesting and not just a chance event.
but I woulf not bet on it. Besides, the idea may not be to prove anything, just a selected release of specific emails to prove anything that Cuccinelli pleases. We have a junior Kenneth Starr on our hands.
How about: "Virginia AG Probing *Scientist* Michael Mann For Fraud" ... Because there is a famous film director by the same name who I love and you scared me for a minute.
Not at all, at least in the sense that denialists think: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8511670.stm
Phil Jones said it was "not significant at the 95% significance level" but that the warming trend was very close to 95% significant and that short time intervals usually don't provide enough data to achieve a 95% confidence level anyway. If he could conclude that there was warming with, say, only 90% certainty rather than the 95% that a good scientist would hope for, why would you assume that means there wasn't any warming?
"No end in sight for the politicizing of the science and research surrounding climate change."
As I recall it was Al Gore who first politicized this area of science. How much of the blame does he get for letting the political genie out of the bottle on a topic so important as this one could be? Seems to me that if we are going to bust anyones chops for that particular offense, it oughta be his...
Of course, YMWV.
"...there are some things that can beat smartness and foresight. Awkwardness and stupidity can." ~ Mark Twain
"There is also the part that arctic ice has actually been increasing over the past few years."
Actually, this hasn't happened. True, the sea ice extent has increased from a low in 2007, but overall it continues it's decline from 1970 or so. But sea ice volume has continued to decrease due to the loss of multi-year ice, so the overall amount of ice continues to decrease. Sea ice extent is a measure of how things are doing right now (ie, weather) while sea ice volume is a measure of how things are doing long term (ie, climate). I'm not convinced there's enough data to say convincingly that the ice will go away in the next few decades, but there's definitely enough data to say convincingly that arctic ice has not been increasing over the past few years.
But 10 years of no statistically significant warming?
At what point do they decide...something fishy is going on here?
I remember a bit more. The expert correctly calculated that the least squares fit to the specified interval had a positive slope, but enough variance that it was only significant at like a 94% confidence level, so it didn't quite meet a 95% confidence level. (To reach that you would have to include *gasp* 11 years, or start a 10 year interval one year earlier or later). Of course, that's statistical significance rather than "importance" - it's perfectly possible to have not quite statistically significant evidence (like, 18.5:1 odds of something being true rather than the usual 19:1) of something important (trajectory of a killer asteroids or whatever), or overwhelming evidence of something trivial (you are reading a post from some AC!)
When scientists take taxpayers' money, they should expect politics to come with it. If you want to do research without politics involved, pay for it yourself.
> The point is, I would highly doubt that a news periodical like Time would
> just pull a story out of their arses without any actual basis to them.
You do understand that even in their greatest era of actual news reporting, all news-providing entities are in the fundamental business of providing entertainment for their customers? And that newness, controversy, and oh-my-gawd-doom stories have been entertaining to the masses since, oh 30,000 BC? The idea that anything that appears in Time Magazine has a factual basis, or even a strong factual basis, can be easily refuted by scanning through a few issues from the 1930s.
sPh
Didn't one of the leading climate scientists come out and say there wasn't any statistically important heating of the earth over the past 10 years?
That would be Phil Jones of the CRU.
a) in CS, statistics are done over a course of 30 years;
b) Where by statistically important he meant we can't be 95% sure: if there is a bridge over a canyon and someone told me "We can't be statistically sure it'll collapse if you cross it", I wouldn't go.
On the other hand, the speed of melting has been unprecedented, and it was predicted before it occurred, because increasing greenhouse gasses were predicted to increase temperatures. The melting is also continuing at an accelerating rate, for example, in the Antarctic and Greenland. You may be referring to the Arctic sea ice extent increasing, but the volume is decreasing because the ice is getting thinner. Besides, some years the Arctic sea ice extent will increase due to natural variations. The long-term trend is that the area of Arctic ice is also decreasing.
I think another leading climate scientist came out and said that there was statistically important heating over the last 10 years and that the earlier statement was an error
the current Governor is a graduate of Regent Law School. As Pogo said, education is finished in Virginia.
was making a big push to lure bio-tech to Prince William. don't think that is going to happen now.
"Flamebait"... lol
:)
Sometimes the Truth hurts. In this case, it hurts me, for pointing it out. I was halfway expecting that, actually, because I knew that however true, what I wrote wouldn't sit well with some moderator who has a partisan political agenda to push.
So it goes!
"...there are some things that can beat smartness and foresight. Awkwardness and stupidity can." ~ Mark Twain
It used to be full to people with at least average intelligence, now it's just a bunch of morons that take on faith everything the liberal establishment tells them. Throwing out 90+% of the data that doesn't agree with hour "theory" isn't science. Calling these criminals a thousand times doesn't make them scientists. The state of education in this world is just sad.
Does the US have a concept of parliamentary privilege?
Is said republican willing to details his accusations of fraud outside of a legislative chamber?
What's the test for defamation in Virginia? Accusing someone's lifelong work of fraud in front of the world's media could potentially be libelous (IANAL).
My guess is this has little to do with Michael Mann or the University of Virginia. This has everything to do with the AG's petition to put the EPA's threatened regulation of carbon dioxide under review. The AG is seeking to undermine the EPA's grounds for action by showing that it is based on weak, missing, or faulty scientific evidence.
The law the AG is using is the Virginia Fraud Against Taxpayers Act, a relatively new "whistleblower" law. The kinds of fraud this law attempts to cover are:
* Submitting false service records or samples in order to show better-than-actual performance.
* Falsifying natural resource production records -- Pumping, mining or harvesting more natural resources from public lands that is actually reported to the government.
* Billing for research that was never conducted; falsifying research data that was paid for by the U.S. government.
Arguably, if the AG can show that the climate science was cooked, he could have a case. If he wins it, he may have established a legal precedent for throwing out the climate data in the EPA case.
This sounds like a pretty smart legal move, if you are a Republican and you control the governorship of Virginia.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
I'd rather correct you:
The AG's job regarding legal advice is to provide it in response to requests from state institutions. In this case, I believe, nobody asked him - he just decided that it was in his political interest to create the opinion from his reading of the laws.
He's - if I can borrow the term - legislating from the AG's office. I'd rather he go back to prosecuting people who harm society by breaking the law. (We'll, I'd rather he leave office. Steve Shannon is no great shakes, but I voted for him as a way to vote against this kind of activism).
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
and have no opportunities for political career. oddly, such people not only can keep in public life in usa, but also create immense problems for the society.
Read radical news here
...what with ecological oblivion facing the Gulf Coast.
Someone help me, I'm drowing in metaphors!
The same AG who changed the Virginia state seal to cover up a breast. The same state seal designed by George Wythe, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. http://hamptonroads.com/2010/04/cuccinelli-opts-more-modest-state-seal
There, fixed that for you.
The Daily Mail twisted the words of a scientist who was interviewed by The BBC when he said the rate of warming had decreased, not that temperatures had decreased.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
I don't doubt that being gay is often genetic. It surely is sometimes merely congenital. Probably occasionally developmental. Arguably cultural. Potentially chosen or don't have clearly gay brains. Not that there's anything wrong with that. It is not like the world is hurting for more straight people. And in a pinch gay people still keep taking one for the team and spawn offspring.
Consider the source, this information was published by the Daily Mail, one of Brittan's worst tabloids and are constantly in court over one libel case or another.
The Daily Mail published quotes from a BBC interview were out of context. So something does seem fishy but it's easier to vilify the scientists then to punish publishers when they deliberately publish misleading information.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
I'm left handed, I think that I deserve special protection also.
"I guess the glaciers in Glacier National Park are disappearing because we don't allow enough logging to keep the trees in check,"
Or a multi year drought reduces snow fall, so that glaciers recede even at constant temperature. Warming isn't the only thing that makes glaciers shrink, or that changes the width of tree rings.
No end in sight for the politicizing of the science and research surrounding climate change.
Isn't that what the Virginia AG is investigating Mr. Mann for to begin with (using taxpayer money to perform a fraudulent study to back a political ideology/policy push)?
Is it now OK to misuse taxpayer money for political purposes as long as they benefit the Progressive movement and/or it's goals?
It's so hard to keep up with what laws those on the Progressive Left can violate in the pursuit of forcing their ideology on others, as the list just keeps growing every day.
Some animals are more equal than others.
Strat
in the pursuit of forcing their ideology on others,
I think you actually mean..
in the pursuit of whatever the hell they damn well please, be that their ideology or wallet or libido
That may also be true, but it's the possibly fraudulent misuse of taxpayer money to create false/misleading research to further a political agenda that is the crux of the issue here.
I would have thought that Slashdotters would be the first to argue for strict enforcement of ethics regarding public-funded science used in formulating policy and legislation being non-partisan/nonpolitical. It's not like there isn't plenty of reasonable suspicion to warrant an investigation unless one is wearing kool-aid glasses.
Legislation involving climate change issues will affect staggering amounts of wealth and who gets it, and who gets it taken away. Shouldn't the science (and the scientists) being used to justify such staggering transfers of wealth (hint: not *to* Americans as a whole) be held to very high standards?
Why shouldn't Mr. Mann be treated the same way any average citizen would that was suspected of misusing large amounts of public money? It seems to me that those that defend climate change and Mr. Mann's research should welcome this as an opportunity to end the demagoguing on both sides and prove they and Mr. Mann were right all along.
Unless, of course, this is all distraction because they know the facts don't support their positions.
It seems the last several decades that any time that someone or some organization on the left violates the law and/or ethical rules etc, anyone who has the audacity to call them on it is labeled a racist, homophobe, misogynist, xenophobe, ad-nauseum, and personally & viciously attacked/destroyed. Look at ACORN and the two college students. ACORN still receives Federal funding while forces on the left attempt to destroy the students.
They don't want debate, they want you to STFU and sit down. They'll tell you what's best for you, and if they want your opinion, they'll give it to you. Rules and laws are to keep the masses obedient, they only apply to them if they allow it.
Again, some animals are more equal than others.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Actually it's more of... well I can't think of a good metaphor.
But to say "Go around the long way. It's harder, but if we had known about this shit we'd be going that way too" is pretty disingenuous since we got rich going the easy way and still don't show any signs of being serious about going the hard way.
It's hypocritical of the developed nations who got rich filling the atmosphere with carbon to tell the developing nations they can't do the same while we're still filling the atmosphere with carbon.
I stole this Sig
Except that his "lie" has been independently reproduced and been confirmed. Let me cite guardian.co.uk:
Bob Marshall, the nuttiest right wing nut in all of Virginia, represents Prince William County.
The state has many regions, Southwest is different from Central Virginia, which is different from Hampton Roads and so forth.
It is not as simple as NoVA versus the rest of the state.
This is great news! We must stop the lies and deceptions and politics involved in climate "science" or religion (which it has become.) The EPA has declared the life giving gas carbon dioxide to be a poison!!! This is *extremely* dangerous! These types of lies and misconceptions MUST STOP NOW!! This is a great step forward in the right direction. Carbon dioxide is essential for life on this planet, it is NOT a poison! To some people, understanding this truth is like trying to convince someone who believes in intelligent design that people evolved. This type of thinking is extraordinarily dangerous and should be stamped out quickly and peacefully. Kudos to Virginia's attorney general!
I had not considered the question of faculty recruitment, you are correct. But on the other hand, surely from Cuccinelli's point of view that would be a feature, not a bug.
harry_readme.txt to be specific. The first rule of science is that others must be able to reproduce your work; they can't even reproduce their own work. Mann is just as much a fraud as East Anglia; red noise produces hockey stick when pushed into the Mann model. Don't believe the hype - read the programmers.
Hey moron: Do you have any clue just how many glaciers around the globe are shrinking and how many are *growing*? No? Didn't think so.
Well, yes, that is flamebait. Global warming was politicized long before Al Gore came along - however his success pushed it into the area of public conversation, and then it because more recognizable to a lot of people.
While I don't claim this piece is unbiased, it is _very_ informative on the politics behind global warming campaigning. It's also quite a few years old and possibly out of date, but certainly enlightening nonetheless. I recommend you have a look.
http://www.cbc.ca/fifth/denialmachine/index.html
Now back to our regular topic, which has nothing at all to do with any of this post...
.
Northern VA is not really part of VA - you might as well live in Boston.
look, i know james cameron has been accused of politicization of environmental issues with avatar, but i struggle to understand what "public enemies", "miami vice", "heat", or "last of the mohicans" is offensive to right wing demagogues in the employ of oil companies
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Mann_(director)#Filmography
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Come and see the violence inherent in the system. Help! Help! I'm being repressed!
I don't see how stating a normative opinion discredits a person. As far as a first statement goes that's more of an emotional argument, but I'm glad you followed it up with his unwillingness to defend human rights. I've been seeing a lot of those on /. lately, more so than usual, and so I appreciate your fervent intent to keep things in context, and to keep us informed instead of blindfolded.
I myself am pretty conservative when it comes to the moral implications of homosexuality, but I believe that human rights come first.
This whacko published a lie; he propogated it like any other not-quite-reviewed aspect of science.
But see, Al Gore took this data, and started handing out pieces of paper because, when paid, Al would do (something, in theory) due to Mann's faulty science.
Isn't Al Gore culpable for all kinds of liability? Hundreds-of-millions are involved.
How about getting this lie pushed into grade schools around the planet? Something must be done about that, too.
AND HOW ABOUT STOPPING CAP-AND-TRADE NOW THAT WE KNOW BETTER? Sheesh. Anything for power, these people.
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
A very large percentage of the population around the world happens to agree with him. (I dont, personally, but they are clearly the majority around the world.)
However you do NOT have to convince them otherwise in order to convince them that gays should not be legally persecuted. You just have to convince them that the entire subject is outside of the proper purvue of the government to begin with, generally a much easier argument.
Of course, if what you want is not to simply put gay people on an even playing field legally, but you really want to give them special privileges instead, no argument is going to work with these people. Or with me either, for that matter. "Hate crime" legislation is dangerous nonsense. If violent crimes are not being dealt with properly, that is an issue to be dealt with across the board, but we should never have a law that imposes a heavier penalty for assaulting a member of a 'protected class' differently than an assault on any other citizen, and we also should insofar as at all possible avoid defining crimes by ultimately unknowable mental states of the aggressors, rather than simply by their actions.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
"Compared to Physics of almost any kind, "climate science" is a soft and politicized science. Since it allows no experiments," I just can't let this lie. I am strongly in the sceptic camp. That being said, to claim that there is no science, including experimental science, in climate research is to expose yourself as a complete ignoramus. There have been extensive experimental evaluations of the absorption of EMR by trace gases in the atmosphere (see Hottell, Leckner). There is very detailed science, including experimentation, in determining the 'standard atmosphere', without which air travel would be considerably more dangerous. Indeed, every facet of this particular area of applied science is deeply rooted in pure science. Mann et. al. are (in my opinion) guilty of bad record keeping. The journals that published the original hockey stick are guilty of not using the right peers for review. Hansen et. al. are guilty of reinventing the wheel when it comes to radiant heat transfer methods. But all of them are better scientists than most of the people who post here. A bit thin skinned and prone to tantrums, but then, so am I.
We lived in VA for awhile when I was growing up. One of the things I remember all too well is the bigotry and all the kids calling each other homosexual epithets constantly. Moving there from California where such behavior was unusual was quite a shock. I've been going to gay night clubs for decades to watch the cabarets and I doubt I have heard the word gay, queer and fag as many times in all the clubs combined than I did those two semesters in VA.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Mods turned me into a newt!
(I got better...)
Really, though...
"...there are some things that can beat smartness and foresight. Awkwardness and stupidity can." ~ Mark Twain
Even modern climate scientists agree that the Earth should now be cooling. That's a huge part of their objection - that manmade warming is preventing the onset of a global ice age that is due. We should, according to them, embrace the natural reality of shrinking arable land and expansion of glaciers because that is the natural course according to their calculations. The warming of the Earth must be prevented even if we benefit from it.
And of the billions who would starve to death in that course? They don't figure. Rounding errors. Casualties of math.
Explain that to them.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
As I recall it was Al Gore who first politicized this area of science. How much of the blame does he get for letting the political genie out of the bottle on a topic so important as this one could be? Seems to me that if we are going to bust anyones chops for that particular offense, it oughta be his...
Does this mean that if someone is already involved in one political issue and they decide they really care strongly about something else they shouldn't discuss that issue in the public sphere? That seems unreasonable.
The skewing of data - which you may or may not believe happened, but I think did, and does, by *both* sides - has made me a skeptic of both sides respective points. I find it laughable that AGW proponents absolutely _refuse_ to publicly tackle the core issue if AGW is indeed happening: and that is that there are TOO MANY PEOPLE on Earth already, at least for the infrastructure we have in place to feed and house and move them around. Seems to me that if they want to stop AGW, they gotta start with the A part of the equation. But no, instead it's all electric cars and inefficient solar and wind power instead of proven nuclear, etc etc... OTOH are those who don't give a shit about all the things I truly love and enjoy, like pristine woodlands, healthy ecosystems, mountains and clean seas, because they are so short-sighted and materialistic that they cannot see the havoc they are sowing with their unabashed consumption of the very limited resources available on this little blue ball.
Daniel Quinn was onto something when he wrote:
"The premise of the Taker story is the world belongs to man...The premise of the Leaver story is man belongs to the world."
I enjoy life more as a Leaver.
"...there are some things that can beat smartness and foresight. Awkwardness and stupidity can." ~ Mark Twain
except when we went the "easy way", it wasn't the "easy way". It was just "the way". We've sinced learned it's not the best way, but honestly had we not gone the "easy way" there would be no talk about easy way or hard way. SOMEBODY had to do it, somebody had to get humankind to the point where we can say "Oh, shit. Maybe this isn't good".
So now if you picture the whole world as a closed system, we've got a finite amount of stuff with which to do stuff. Iunno, effort let's call it. To keep carbon emmisions at X level, the lowest amount of effort would be to not do anything. Don't build anything else -- anywhere.
What the first world nations want is to say "Don't build anything else -- except for me"
The third world nations?
"Tear down your shit -- so we can build it here instead"
And there's also that many poorer nations get businesses building there *BECAUSE* of their lax laws on industry and pollution.
It's not a matter of being fair to anyone, it's ALL tied up with money. You can't be fair in the way they're crying that it should be fair. Look, WE WON! We developed before they did, we figured out that actually it might not be the best idea to go around tearing everything up and burning it all down. Complaints about the situation-as-it-stands are nothing more than petty envy. We have, they don't, they're pissed about it and want to key our car.
At this point, we *can't* stop our output of carbon. They don't have an output started, so they don't have to worry.. but the developed world? We've got our own problem to deal with, and that's how to transition away from fossil fuels and reducing carbon output (I don't think there's a person alive who says that's a bad idea, but of course when you get into how soon and in what way whackos jump out from the closet screaming about riding horses tomorrow).
And really, we're not even asking them to remain in their stone age lives. Far as I'm aware, the main thing the first world nations want the third to do is when they build, to NOT build using 1880s designs and tech because they're just inefficient and needlessly filthy polluting affairs. They WANT to build that shit, because it's the cheapest way to go and global warming pff it's hot already isnt it?
And, of course, when you're building something new it's much.. much.. MUCH cheaper to just make it good, as opposed to modernizing an old existing whateverthehell. We know this, we've been doing it here.
That's really the difference, why I come off so negatively towards the third world nations in all of this. Yeah, we industrialized and advanced at the cost of the environment. And now we're trying to fix it. They're not pissed because we advanced at the cost of the environment, they're only pissed because they're not getting to do the same thing. Well, yanno what, that ship has sailed. Not anyone's fault they weren't on it, that's just how the cards fell. It's no fucking different than if they made the claim that America's economy benefited from the use of slave labor, and therefor THEY should be allowed to benefit from the use of slave labor because, liek omgosh thats only fair. Petty idiots.
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
Looks like only documents from 2005 can be requested since the law has a six year clock. Sounds like prosecutorial misconduct that he is demanding documents on every grant. Hope he is penalized for that.
Be interesting to see where this leads, even though I think we all know what it'll be.. that is, this just going away, quietly, when nobody's watching. Nothing'll happen.
There's already been a few investigations into the whole climategate email thing.. nothing's happened. Basically there were a few *internal* investigations. I don't think any outside agency, any third party without any conflicting interest in maintaining a good face to the public and the politicans that pay them, has looked into any of it. I point that out to illustrate how little confidence I have in 'em.
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
If you look at popular magazine articles about global warming, they're 50-50 for supporting it or dissenting from it.
If you look at peer reviewed scientific articles, it's a slightly different balance. There's almost one article saying that global warming isn't happening. We'll call it zero. There are hundreds supporting global warming, with the major differences being in cause and extent and severity of future trends.
But most people don't read the peer reviewed articles. They read Time and Cosmopolitan and watch Fox News [sic]. Most people aren't qualified to have an educated opinion about global warming, because they aren't reading research, they're reading the words of people that don't know anything. I don't care how many times you tell me that, in your opinion, d(x^2)/dx = 3x. You're still wrong. I don't care how many people agree with you either. You're all wrong.
Climate Science isn't a popularity contest. It's science.
That means this is an even larger disaster than ever expected. Someone must be going around tampering with glaciers, old growth forests and all the other sources of data to fabricate this warming. Whoever is out there with the power to do all this can be extremely dangerous. He could make everyone's clocks run faster by 1/100th of a second (in America alone, this adds up to 1.5 days), he could add imperceptible inclines to roads everywhere to decrease everyones MPG by a few inches- worst of all, he could slightly increase the weight of all coins, adding to the weight we carry, stressing our joints and adding hundreds of dollars in costs to the already budget-strained Medicare program.
My webcomic
My new bumper sticker:
Save the Ice,
Kill a Whale.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
I'm just pointing out that this is the liberal/progressive cash cow from government, and though this Cuccinelli guy is most likely overstepping, there is a great deal of fraud within today's climate science where bad models are being used to justify draconian and asphyxiating economic policy.
The conservative cash cow tends to be defense contracts and federal land leases. Their bogeymen are terrorists and whoever may have a nuke with plans to hit us. This thing with Mann and Cuccinelli has nothing to do with defense or drilling, so I didn't include conservatives. If Dr. Mann was taking the opposite side and had inverted his hockey stick, screaming that we weren't doing enough to boost greenhouse gas emissions or nuclear detonations, I'd want him to be investigated, too.
Dr. Mann cherry picked his proxy datasets to flatten out well-documented prior high temperature periods, wed those to recent instrument data when the proxies diverged, and groomed them with bogus filters to make the recent half century look like a run-away freight train of increasing temperatures. He hid his data and process from any and all that sought to recreate his research and verify his results. That in itself is scientific fraud, paid for by the taxpayers of the US and the commonwealth of Virginia. After this, he had this graph planted prominently in the IPCC summary for policy makers, where it became the banner and clarion call for all of the environmentalist left, since the beginning of this last decade.
I love how moderation tends to run far amok on political threads. I guess I didn't contribute in the appropriate way by heaping scorn on the republican AG of VA, therefore getting an overrated and off-topic scoring. How exactly are you supposed to check misguided vitriol, itself off-topic, that paints with a large brush, but gets moderated as insightful?
-- Len
No end in sight for the politicizing of the science and research surrounding climate change.
All the AGW advocates had to do was play the science straight and they should have been able to make their point on the merits. For whatever reason thats the one thing they did not do and we are treated to the spectacle of weekly revelations of fraudulent manipulation of the data on a global scale. And these clownshoes still insist that "the science is settled". Nuhuh sez I. They are going to have to work very hard in the full light of day to establish that the books are not in fact cooked. The Mann Hockey Stick is an egregious example of what went on and thanks to the leaks from the East Anglia CRU we know exactly what he did. Fraud. And on the public dime/shilling. Who's he think he is? Dan Rather?
The vast majority of that overpopulation is in poor areas of the world where the CO2 output is fairly low, the western nations that produce all that pollution have very low growth or even declining populations.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Clearly Mann engaged in thought crimehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughtcrime He dared to suggest that the oil/coal/government official denial of climate change might be incorrect. Remember, "We have always been at war with Eastasia"
Why is Snark Required?
Any informed voter should have known what they were getting into with Cuccinelli. He's really, really far right, and he's never hid it. It doesn't speak well of Virginia. Croatia Vacation Rentals
Actually, I got it from the actual interview where they asked the guy the questions and he filled in his responses. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8511670.stm
Not too many. It's just an U.S. thing, pretty prominent within the U.S., but not so much outside.
In the future, Ken Cuccinelli will be posthumously charged with Crimes against Humanity and the Eco-Systems of Earth, for willfully obstructing the scientific investigation and mitigation of Global Warming.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
kdawson asked me to pass a message on to everyone who has replied to this story:
YHBT
YHL
HAND
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
No, it means that you shouldn't ignore the elephant in the room when contorting an idea to demonize someone you do not agree with.
The comment was made to remind a person that when they bitch about it being politicized, they shouldn't over look the people who they agree with that politicized it too. If it's bad, then it's bad. If it's only bad when one person or set of people does it, it's a setup to push an agenda.
if we don't fight people like this then they will win. Is that the kind of world you really want to live in? your children and their children? If the populace believe these things, then its your duty to teach them otherwise and show them what is the truth about minorities and other disenfranchised people of this country.
Then you got it wrong, did you read the link you provided as it said nothing of the sort.
He expressly said
Only the Daily Mail re-interpreted that as no warming in the last 10 years.
From the link you provided.
Also you might want to note that in 1998 there was a massive temperature anomaly related to ENSO (IIRC) which affects the average. Graph is here courtesy of NASA, article is here. There still has been an increase since 1995, expect the 09/10 data to be pretty bad due to ENSO, several Australian cities including Perth and Darwin just sweltered through their hottest summers ever, most of the world had fairly warm winters (this is overshadowed by the cold snaps in UK, Washington caused by a shift in the polar jet stream, which is consistent with previous ENSO events).
Natural events like ENSO are going to ensure that this is not a linear progression, 10 years is not long enough to collect enough data to establish a global trend, 15 years is barely enough data. Which is what professor Jones said and why most graphs are 50 to 100 years. It was a British tabloid that said there is no significant warming in the last 10 years, not Phil Jones.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Hehe, maybe it's just me, but when scanning the headlines, my mental spam filter kicked in and thought ""Virginia", that's probably just another way of spelling Vi@gr@. I'll ignore this spam message. Only then I realized that maybe it was actually a real story.
This is just silly. Anthropogenic global warming was politically opposed from the very start by pro-oil think tanks, and they kept the scientific concerns unnoticed for twenty years. There's no way such a major issue could not "become politicized", it was already. And while Al Gore was a politician, and talked about the threat of global warming comparatively early, the same could be said of Margaret Thatcher.
The question is not who made it a political issue. The question is who succeeded in making it a partisan political issue, and that was not Al Gore.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
No, it means that you shouldn't ignore the elephant in the room when contorting an idea to demonize someone you do not agree with.
The elephant in the room is Cuccinelli. He's the one conducting an inquisition against an individual scientist because his discoveries are ideologically "inconvenient." This hasn't happened since the Soviets persecuted geologists because they deemed that plate-tectonics didn't fit with Marxist-Leninist theory.
Take a look at the numbers, all over the areas you describe, the "Third World", population growth parallels that of industrialized nations while the use of consumables, pollution and carbon emissions rises at a much faster rate than that of the 'developed' world for at least the next 20 years. Only Russia has had a negative growth in population, and they have apparently overcome that recently. Check the first link, you might find it eye-opening and educational, because population growth pretty much everywhere is on the + side, and the second link will show you that the western nations have stabilized their pollution and carbon emissions, by and large, while the very areas you claim don't show relatively large increases of said.
Note source of article/graphs for the second link and following info is Mongabay.com:
Mongabay.com is considered a leading source of information on tropical forests by some of the world's top ecologists and conservationists.
I doubt they are a 'right wing tool', & they are using DOE EIA numbers. Accordingly:
According to the Energy Information Administration, after China and the United States, among major polluters only India is expected to have significant growth of emissions over the next 20 years.
According to the Department of Energy's (DOE) Energy Information Administration (EIA), after China and the United States, among major polluters only India is expected to have significant growth of emissions over the next 20 years.
"...there are some things that can beat smartness and foresight. Awkwardness and stupidity can." ~ Mark Twain
It's been interesting to hear the narrative pushed at you from the wingnuts, you mean? Because the first notable paper on global warming, by Plass in 1956, was called “The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climate Change”.
But apropos spin...
Who wrote that? Republican strategist for the Bush administration, Frank Luntz, in 2002.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
The arguments for hate crime laws are not hard to understand.
If a white man beats up another white man after he has been to the polling booth, that's bad for a lot of reasons. If a white man beats up a black man after he has been to the polling booth, that's bad for all the aforementioned reasons, but it could also be an attempt to scare other black people from voting. It's not just an attack on that man, it's an attack on his class/category. A person motivated by hate may take the normal punishment for such a crime, and still consider it a success if it worked as intended.
Similar things would be attacks on gays in order to keep them in the closet, and from publicly defending their interests, attacks on muslim women who refuse to wear a veil, etc. Such attacks are already illegal for obvious reasons, but society believes (correctly, in my opinion) that commiting crimes in order to suppress minorities is especially bad, and deserving of extra sanction.
The only issue I have with hate crime laws is if they are directed against particular groups only. It's not what kind of group it is that matters, but the intent of the suppressing act.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
There is a good summary of separated homosexual twin studies here. The conclusion is that, if one twin is gay, then the probability of the other being gay is around 55%. Many people misunderstand genetics and statistics, and think that this implies being gay is not genetic, since they expect there to be a 100% probability "because it's genetic and twins have the same genes". This is a incorrect view. Quote from a more detailed explanation of why:
"Assume that 5% of males have a homosexual orientation as adults. Consider two identical newborn twin boys who were separated at birth and raised in different homes without any contact with each other. If homosexuality were caused by something in the environment, then, if twin #1 turned out to be gay, the chances of the other twin becoming a gay adults would only be about 5%. That is because the second twin would have been exposed to a totally different environment during his upbringing. So his chances of being gay would be the same as for any other male -- about 5%. But, studies have reliably shown that if one twin is gay, there is about a 55% chance that the other twin will be gay."
and about 50% of studies find that genetics is a significant factor in homosexuality and 50% do not
If one identical twin develops schizophrenia, the other twin has "only" a 48% chance of also developing the disorder. This does not mean that genetics is not a significant factor.
it has been interesting to watch the spin doctors morph AGW into what I think is a more likely and accurate way to put it - "climate change". Something Earth has experienced for its entire existence.
"Global warming" is an accurate term - it was meant to refer to the global mean temperature increasing. The problem was that many non-scientists don't understand how mean values are calculated, and hence didn't understand that the mean could increase even though some regions might cool. The myth that Any Cooling Disproves Global Warming became widespread, and so scientists began to talk about "climate change" instead.
> genetics and biology account for about 20% of the variance in homosexuality (and about 50% of studies find that genetics is a significant factor in homosexuality and 50% do not).
I assume there have been studies of identical twins? How strongly correlated are their sexualities? I know it's more complex than that, but I would be interested to hear a summary of the results and the most common complications which cause half of the researchers to disagree with the other half.
"No end in sight for the politicizing of the science and research surrounding climate change." Duh. Since the funding for it comes from government it is politicized from the start. What the OP is saying is that only disagreement or challenge to one viewpoint is politcs, the other side is pristine pure selfless logic. Crap. It's ALL politics. Why else do progressives attack anything that questions AGW? True science accepts challenges either as corrections to a theory or as test of validity.
...we also should insofar as at all possible avoid defining crimes by ultimately unknowable mental states of the aggressors, rather than simply by their actions.
I hear this a lot, but we already have crimes defined by mental state: first-degree and second-degree murder, for example (premeditated and spur-of-the-moment passion, respectively). I suppose hate crimes could be lumped with the former, but they don't always end in the victim's death.
Of course, if what you want is not to simply put gay people on an even playing field legally, but you really want to give them special privileges instead, no argument is going to work with these people.
Here is an example of one of the policies in question.
Is not being fired simply for being black a "special privilege?"
Is not being denied entrance as a student simply for being black a "special privilege?"
Is not being denied financial aid simply for being black a "special privilege?"
Is not being denied the ability to participate in graduation simply for being black a "special privilege?"
Is not being called a [racial slur of choice] in the workplace or the classroom a "special privilege?"
Now s/black/gay and s/racial/sexual/. Do any of the above statements make _more_ sense after that? People should be hired/accepted/funded/allowed participation from the best possible candidate regardless of race, military background, age, disability, religion, gender, nationality, and so forth. Because there have been problems with issues in the past, they have been enumerated as things you should not discriminate against. It's not providing [positive] special treatment, it's ensuring against [negative] special treatment.
If violent crimes are not being dealt with properly, that is an issue to be dealt with across the board, but we should never have a law that imposes a heavier penalty for assaulting a member of a 'protected class' differently than an assault on any other citizen
If basic laws provide sufficient deterrence to common crime but a specific class of people are still being targeted, then some kind of additional measure is needed. Let's say that there's an acceptable level of muggings - there's a few, but in general, the threat of imprisonment is enough to deter most would-be muggers, and the punishment/rehabilitation level is maximizes deterrence, minimizes state costs, and minimizes repeat offenders by effectively rehabilitating them. At the same time, anti-Catholic sentiment has caused a rampant level of muggings of nuns that is not deterred by the basic statues.
To alter the already correct formula that deters casual muggings to attempt to protect the nuns would be a societal harm.
Further, hate crime prosecutions are often done to change the venue when local forces are sympathetic to the cause and chose not to use the existing laws. For example, U.S. v. Cecil Price et al.
we also should insofar as at all possible avoid defining crimes by ultimately unknowable mental states of the aggressors, rather than simply by their actions.
By that logic there should be no distinction between involuntary manslaughter and first degree murder.
there are TOO MANY PEOPLE on Earth already
Only if you assume there will be NO FURTHER TECHNOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT.
Which, of course, would be quite stupid to assume.
In reality, we can easily support hundreds of billions of people all living at what we would call "western standards", whatever that means in 20-80 years time.
it's in my head
He expressly said
What's interesting in this case is why did the journalist ask such a specific questions? The answer is that somebody who knows enough about statistics to know how Jones would have to reply handed them the questions to ask.
In other words somebody who knows that the data shows AGW is real but knows how to cherry pick the data to find periods with no statisticaly significant signal prompting the journalists to get quotes that can be used by the deniers. Nice.
Feel strongly about climate change does he? Well, maybe there's a reason:
As Gore spoke these words, pictures of electric cars, windmills and solar panels appeared in multiple slides on the screen with company names at the bottom such as Amyris (biofuels), Altra (biofuels), Bloom Energy (solid oxide fuel cells), Mascoma (cellulosic biofuels), GreatPoint Energy (catalytic gasification), Miasole (solar cells), Ausra (utility scale solar panels), GEM (battery operated cars), Smart (electric cars), and AltaRock Energy (geothermal power). As such, like an investment advisor or stock broker giving a seminar to prospects and clients, Al Gore was actively recommending people put money in companies he already has a financial stake in.
Read more
Of course nothing will happen. All the loonies are crying "no smoke without fire" but all investigations find that not only is there no fire there is no smoke
That won't stop the loonies however, they'll just invent another made up story and try again, claiming that there was a coverup.
I thought it failed because the poorest third were angry that they weren't going to be guilt-tripping the developed third into propping them up through international welfare.
Actually, I'm pretty sure that's what actually happened.
Not a matter of "YOU BROWN FOLK STAY POOR". We drove our car through standing water and it flooded, killed our car, we've got a mess on our hands. We're waving our arms shouting "Look if you go this way, global warming. Bad shit. Go around the long way. It's harder, but if we had known about this shit we'd be going that way too"..
While ordering a monster truck to try going through again. Which is much closer to the truth than your little analogy, because the poor countries didn't ask for more money but for the rich to actually agree to reduce emissions instead of just waving hands.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Is not being fired simply for being black a "special privilege?"
Is not being denied entrance as a student simply for being black a "special privilege?"
Is not being denied financial aid simply for being black a "special privilege?"
Is not being denied the ability to participate in graduation simply for being black a "special privilege?"
Is not being called a [racial slur of choice] in the workplace or the classroom a "special privilege?"
In some sectors it is a special privilege not to be fired simply because you are black or a woman. Especially when everyone else is being fired. This is racism just like being fired just because of the color of your skin. The examples you mentioned have nothing to do with hate crimes only discrimination with the possible example of your last example. People should not be discriminated against for any reason that isn't job related. And before you get your panties in a bunch let me explain that: You don't hire someone who can't lift 40kg if the job requires you to lift 40kg. You don't hire someone who has expressed rabid and violent anti-semism to help Jews. You don't hire a black man to infiltrate the KKK.
Further, hate crime prosecutions are often done to change the venue when local forces are sympathetic to the cause and chose not to use the existing laws. For example, U.S. v. Cecil Price et al.
This is actually one of the few positive uses of hate crime legislation, to change the venue of a case. Which I'm sure is covered under some other law as well but not being a lawyer and never studied law I don't know for sure.
we also should insofar as at all possible avoid defining crimes by ultimately unknowable mental states of the aggressors, rather than simply by their actions.
By that logic there should be no distinction between involuntary manslaughter and first degree murder.
But that is a straw-man argument because the mental states of many murders can be determined while an assault on a black/latino/gay man usually isn't. If you beat your wife to death with a blender it is involuntary murder but if you poisoned her that is first degree murder because the poison required planing (most of time). If I beat up a black man is it because I wanted his wallet or because he was black and just happen to steal his wallet? And what about the other way around? Where a black/latino/gay man beats me up (whiter then freshly fallen snow) because I express an opinion they strongly disagree with? If hate crimes are needed then they shouldn't be discriminatory either.
Al Gore wasn't the first person to "politicize this area of science" because there were plenty of earlier discussions about climate change in the political realm. Climate change inevitably has a political aspect. When you're talking about the possibility of a process having a negative effects on the health and economics of the whole world, it's kind of a good idea to move beyond the science and inform people so that they can make a political decision about it. For another example, if an asteroid was discovered to be on a path to impact the Earth you can bet the science would be quickly "politicized" as well. If your chosen subject was "Earth-orbit-crossing asteroids" it would automatically have a political aspect to it. The only thing that would temper the political aspect would be the rarity of a big impact.
The difference between the way the politicization is happening is: Al Gore tried to represent the current science of climate change accurately and get the information to the public (whether he accomplished that is debatable), but Cuccinelli is apparently attempting to use politics to negate the science or at least undermine or discourage its message.
[Shrug] On one hand it should be no big deal because the relevant university will have all the grant expenditures and the public publications record should already include all the "receipts and reports" necessary. The accounts were audited at the time and the reports peer-reviewed. On the other hand, the level of detail requested is ridiculous, such as years of personal e-mails from fricking 1999 to 2005 and justification for a document's absence if not found. It is a witch hunt. It's unnecessary political meddling in the scientific process, and if this sort of thing keeps up its going to result in some scientists staying away from climate change research because of the political meddling. Which, of course, would give critics like Cuccinelli what they want, and is exactly the opposite of what should be happening (if there is something wrong with the current science we need MORE climate change study to figure out what is actually happening, not less). It's a "win" for him whether they find anything or not.
It's nothing but an abuse of power to make a request like this unless he has specific accusations of fraud with some evidence to back it up. "I don't believe the scientific results" and a bunch of stolen e-mails from a different institution isn't good enough. He's punishing the researchers involved by simply wasting their time, and in the end he'll do some stupid press release saying "We didn't get all the documents we requested, so there will always be some doubt." Win!
The reason that many people use any cooling as "disproof" of Global Warming is because proponents of AGW have use any warming as "proof" of Global Warming.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
"It's been interesting to hear the narrative pushed at you from the wingnuts, you mean? Because the first notable paper on global warming, by Plass in 1956, was called “The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climate Change”."
Personally, in these cases I refer them to Svante Arrhenius, who had calculated that doubling CO2 level raises temperature by 4-5C. In 1908.
http://www.aip.org/history/climate/co2.htm
Two people have responded with justifications for "hate crime" legislation. The problem is that those proposing these laws never try and prove that existing laws are insufficient detterent. For example, the argument was made in 2000 that hate crime legislation was needed in Texas because of the guys who drug a black man behind a pickup. Two of the three involved were sentenced to death. There was no evidence that the third was involved because of racism. Texas has no "hate crime" laws, yet this case was used to promote the idea of passing one. Exactly what greater penalty would a "hate crime" law have imposed on the men sentenced to death (note: there was no evidence that the one who was not sentenced to death had racial motivations in committing the crime).
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
The reason that many people use any cooling as "disproof" of Global Warming is because proponents of AGW have use any warming as "proof" of Global Warming.
There are idiots on both sides of the aisle.
Most people miss the "Global" part of Global Warming. However, it does manifest itself locally in terms of an increase in odd weather patterns. This is not to say that odd patterns don't happen on their own, or weather patterns don't change over time without being attributed to human-caused Global Warming.
It's important to remember that statements such as "It's cold here!" or "It's really hot here!" or "We had an unusually _____ summer/winter here!" are all anecdotal, and don't really count as evidence either way, unless their net effect is represented on a 'Global' scale.
In reality, we can easily support hundreds of billions of people all living at what we would call "western standards", whatever that means in 20-80 years time.
... are planning on stacking them all up in warehouses, Matrix-style, or what? Never mind your presumption about Helium 3 or Mr. Fusion, or whatever you think is going to provide climate control and food/water processing and transportation for hundreds of times more people than are currently packed into the world's livable spots. Do you really want to live like that? I guess if you're a never-leave-Mom's-basement type, that might seem just fine.
What a load of crap. Hundreds of billions of people living well on a world that can barely support a few percent of that number now? And
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
But that's why judges and juries are given discretion in sentencing. "Assault" can be prosecuted and sentence in a wide range of ways, and they motivations of the attacker can always be considered. You don't need new laws to decide that one incidence of "beating up" should result in a week in jail and another several years.
Hate crime laws are just a way of dividing people into various identity groups so that they focus on the privileges and protections for their own "group", distracted from the work of the "political class" which is to always gain more money and power for itself, at the expense of all others.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
exactly. if i hadn't replied in this thread i'd give you a mod point.
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
Indeed. And it's more entertaining because the proponents of AGW have been shutting down monitoring in remote locations and encouraging more monitoring where there are large thermal accumulators in the form of pavement and buildings.
I'm not going to say that it's not happening or that we don't need to be vastly better about our treatment of the environment- but the AGW people have very definitely applied bad science in their arguments and theories and all we as a civilization REALLY know is that we've not the foggiest about any of it. Climate changes. We've only got a geological record and our presumptions may/may not be accurate- and we've certainly no clean data that's not bent by peoples' assumptions, or that has been collected for long enough to make statements like Global Cooling (which was the in-vogue thing back a couple of decades back...) or AGW. We really, really don't.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
The amount of human life that can be sustained on the planet is directly attributed to the resources required to sustain them, and this amount of resources goes down as technological advances allow them to be created more efficiently. We are now growing 10 times more corn/acre than we did 50 years ago. Genetically engineered crops won't require fertilizer or pesticides, and will use far less water. While hundreds of billions is far fetched, the basic point is this: If we used 1700's agricultural and energy technology(wood burning stoves for heating/cooking) this planet wouldn't be able to support a tenth of the current population. It would be worse if we were all hunter gatherers. The viewpoint that the solution is less people is, frankly, myopic.
how do you troll yourself? i'm curious about that one.
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
Good analogy. Except your car is a concrete mixer, and the flooding started when you ran into the dam with it. And now you're standing on the other side with your concrete mixer watching the developing world try to plug the leaks in the dam with mud and saying "fuck you, I got to the other side".
The viewpoint that the solution is less people is, frankly, myopic.
... is just silly. Just as silly as suggesting that there are ways to grow nutrious food without fertile soil. Plants cannot synthesize everything that makes good food literally out of the air.
You're missing the point. The problem is too many people. Right now. Given the available technology now and for the intermediate future, there are too many people. The "solution" may indeed by found in technolgy, but that we are decades - at least - away from ways to transport (for example) food to even twice as many people as we have now without needing more energy than is available. To say nothing of the people from whom that energy must be purchased.
Because the NIMBY leftists can't stand nuclear power, and because wind and solar can only scratch around the surface of the shortcomings, we are going to be in a worsening state in this regard for decades, yet. Waving your hands and pretending that a change on the scale of that from hunter gatherers to current industrialized agriculture is just around the corner and will be hundreds of times more efficient
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
For grins you should look up who performed those dozen other studies and what their relationship is with Mr. Mann.
Things are frequently not as they appear.
or you could do like Texas does and call any killing "murder" when charged and let the jury determine whether the accused caused the death *and* any mitigating circumstances (like those that would in other states get an involuntary manslaughter charge). IMO prosecutors have too much career advancement incentive to over-charge in systems that have such fine gradients of offenses.
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
kids in CA use those terms quite extensively in group voip chats, like ventrilo when playing WoW and other games in my experience. YMMV, ofc.
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
As some of the data has refused to fit those theories, it has been interesting to watch the spin doctors morph AGW into what I think is a more likely and accurate way to put it - "climate change".
Oddly enough, that exact terminology change is covered in the documentary I mentioned. As well as the reasons behind it.
I find it laughable that AGW proponents absolutely _refuse_ to publicly tackle the core issue if AGW is indeed happening: and that is that there are TOO MANY PEOPLE on Earth already
Lucky for us, we don't have to guess about this. Sustainability has been modeled extensively, and we're generally expected to sort out the "sweet spot" in population around 8.4 Billion. We're just over 7 billion now. This is not the problem. Source.
instead it's all electric cars and inefficient solar and wind power instead of proven nuclear
You're taking the extreme end of the argument and presenting it as the central argument. I'm all for electric cars, solar and wind power, but I'm also all for huge deployments of nuclear. And nuclear is easier to deploy fast.
they are so short-sighted and materialistic that they cannot see the havoc they are sowing with their unabashed consumption of the very limited resources available on this little blue ball
No, I care deeply about healthy ecosystems. I also like consuming. I want energy available in massive amounts, cheap and plentiful, but with little environmental impact.
Fixing our current issues does not require some Luddite reversion, it requires intelligent, measured, and prompt application of technology. Unfortunately, it is my belief that this directly conflicts with vested corporate interests, and that is why we're even having this debate.
.
... he could slightly increase the weight of all coins,.
Someone, please, think of the vending machines!!
TFOAE
too bad the party everyone thinks is going to do that is too busy bailing out oppressed classes like bankers...
oops. that was the quiet part.
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
As I recall it was Al Gore who first politicized this area of science.
How? Oh, right, by being Al Gore.
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
Allow me to put this into context for you: I assume you have a job. I assume you get criticism in the course of your job either from clients or a boss. Now put that criticism in the form of someone whom you do not directly answer to, someone who has only a surface understanding of what you do. Oh and did I mention this criticism contains personal attack on your integrity. Imagine giving a completely professional point-by-point reply to this criticism and the only reply you get is another personal attack of your integrity. Repeat this as many times as needed to make you bitter.
Wouldn't it be more like that the warming was so low that it could easily be explained with sampling accuracy error.
No, it would be a) only quite unlikely, just not very unlikely that there was no warming, and b) that the sample size of 10 (years in this case) is just too small to make the claim - which is exactly why they specifically asked for 10 and not more years (11 would have already tipped the scale).
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
And it's more entertaining because the proponents of AGW have been shutting down monitoring in remote locations and encouraging more monitoring where there are large thermal accumulators in the form of pavement and buildings.
No, they haven't.
Next time before repeating a tired old bullshit, could you be bothered to run a two-minute investigation with Google (or Bing if you prefer) that will point you to a credible rebuttal from actual scientists? Thank you.
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
But every victim of a violent crime is part of some category, and furthermore, that category is usually the basis of the aggressor's selection. Go back to your white man beating up white man example, and be more specific in your hypothetical example: Why did he beat him up?
Was it because the victim looked at him funny? Then it's a hate crime: the attacker is trying to intimate everyone who looks at him funny. Was it because he owed money and didn't pay it back? The attacker was trying to send a message to everyone who owes him money. Was it because he wore a red shirt? The attacker is anti-redshirt. Was it because the victim was just in the wrong place at the wrong time? The attacker is telling everyone, "stay away from me."
Attaching importance to the motivation is silly, because the motivation will ALWAYS be stupid and will almost always apply to a whole group of people.
In some sectors it is a special privilege not to be fired simply because you are black or a woman. Especially when everyone else is being fired. This is racism just like being fired just because of the color of your skin.
Laws preventing discriminatory firing do not protect against otherwise legitimate firing. If you don't do the job, you tend to get fired, no matter what colour your skin is.
Likewise, the laws that do prevent discriminatory firing are worded in a neutral way, so that the same law that prevents you from being fired for being black, or female, or gay, also prevent you from being fired for being white, or male, or straight.
If I beat up a black man is it because I wanted his wallet or because he was black and just happen to steal his wallet? And what about the other way around? Where a black/latino/gay man beats me up (whiter then freshly fallen snow) because I express an opinion they strongly disagree with? If hate crimes are needed then they shouldn't be discriminatory either.
Hate crimes do work both ways. Again, the laws do not define a hate crime as a crime committed against a black person, they define a hate crime as a crime committed against someone because of their skin colour, regardless what that colour is.
Hate crimes legislation protects straight white men, too.
In some sectors it is a special privilege not to be fired simply because you are black or a woman. Especially when everyone else is being fired.
If a law is improperly used or enforced, it does not make it a bad law.
The examples you mentioned have nothing to do with hate crimes only discrimination with the possible example of your last example.
The discussion is about how his views on homosexuality affect his political actions against gay rights. The most recent example was his attempt to get rid of Virginia's colleges policy of non-discrimination against gays.
People should not be discriminated against for any reason that isn't job related.
Can you point to anything in what I posted or the policy I linked to this disagrees with that?
But that is a straw-man argument because the mental states of many murders can be determined while an assault on a black/latino/gay man usually isn't. If you beat your wife to death with a blender it is involuntary murder but if you poisoned her that is first degree murder because the poison required planing (most of time). If I beat up a black man is it because I wanted his wallet or because he was black and just happen to steal his wallet?
The fact that it's a hate crime law does not relieve the requirement for the prosecutor to demonstrate the violation of the law beyond a reasonable doubt or the responsibility of the jury to acquit if that is not done. In your above example, you should not be charged with a hate crime. On the other hand, if before you do so, you send an e-mail to the local KKK listserv saying that you're going to go put a black man in his place, then you should. See the difference?
If hate crimes are needed then they shouldn't be discriminatory either.
True. But again, hate crime charges should only be brought when there's clear intent to perpetrate a crime against one or more people specifically because of a factor unrelated to the crime.
We're already producing more food worldwide than needed. Our problem is the allocation of those resources, and that's a question of politics - nothing else.
http://www.nytimes.com/1986/09/09/science/scientific-advances-lead-to-era-of-food-surplus-around-world.html
As to power: Solar is currently doubling in efficiency every second year. In 20 years we're thus able to supply the (known) energy requirements of Earth with solar alone.
http://www.livescience.com/environment/080219-kurzweil-solar.html
As to space: Urbanization has been going on for quite some time. Let's look at some popular population densities and project that crudely over available land mass:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_population_density
While Swedish myself (and we have a LOT of unpopulated land available - welcome over!) I like the Netherlands. Wonderful country. Pop. density 400/km2. Pop. density on the available landmass (excluding Antarctica) today, 50/km2. That is, without changing anything else, and with everyone living the good life of people in the Netherlands, we'd already be able to support comfortable living space for 72 billion people (and please remember that millions of people are happy to live a lot more urbanized than the average of the Netherlands).
So, the question is simple. Why do you claim things that simply aren't true? What's your agenda - and why? Is it important for you to claim that the world is overpopulated for some other reasons than you've posted so far?
it's in my head
That won't stop the loonies however, they'll just invent another made up story and try again, claiming that there was a coverup.
At this point the Progressives in Congress & the White House don't even care anymore about studies, right, wrong, facts, lies, or science. They are hell-bent on either passing climate change legislation or going around Congress by just having the EPA jackboot the changes with new rules.
The Progressive political backers of climate change are in it for power and ideology, as the whole idea behind what's being done is to set up a massive wealth transfer system to bleed America and give the money to the rest of the world. Basically, they think America (and Americans) are too rich & too free, so they intend to fix both of those issues through climate change legislation, along with healthcare and the other initiatives being pushed by Progressives in Washington.
It's all about turning America into a semi-Socialist second- or third-rate power while feeding off the spoils of it's demise and the suffering of the American people.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
How sad is it when this right-wing nutcase is legitimately questioning Michael Mann's work?
We all deserve better than this!
This is not just politics, it's our planet. Let's get the research done accurately and without bias!
Let's not waste billions of dollars on meaningless theories. There are so many other things that could use the wasted money.
What's your agenda - and why?
My agenda is simple. I merely point out that none of the proposed wonderful things are currently, in any practical way, useful. Despite your assurance that past gain in (for example, solar) efficiency won't be in any way hampered by those pesky laws of physics (or cloud cover), that doesn't help with the fact that there isn't a hint of the infrastructure required to turn intermittent solar energy into, say, the highly energy-dense liquid fuels needed to move a caravan of trucks loaded with surplus protein into those spots in the world where people are starving to death.
Population densities can't be thought of as a mere matter of square kilometers. Coastal regions are subject to floods and storms. Mountains can't support the same sort of settlement as plains. Potable water is all but gone in huge swaths of the world, with no prospect of many aquifers seeing replenishment for generations if used to water the crops needed to feed more people (let alone the GP's proposed hundreds of times as many people).
Most of the world isn't the Netherlands and can't ever be, especially if you have any interest at all in preserving certain habitats and species. If the only thing you want is a hundred times as many people packed into every available corner of the earth, then that's a different set of priorities, certainly.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Oh cheap energy solves a lot of the problems you bring up, like how to create easily accessible energy for transportation and desalination of sea water.
When it comes to coastal regions, guess why I chose the Netherlands ;)
I'm the GP that said "hundreds of billions" and I stand by that statement. What you fail to do is to realise how much change our everyday tech development brings the world. The best way to realise the fallacy of thinking of today's problems tomorrow is to go back in history.
After all, London wasn't drowned in manure.
http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/our-economic-past-the-great-horse-manure-crisis-of-1894/
it's in my head
In my opinion "Global Warming" is a simplification of a topic too complex for the general public. Whether it was a poor choice in naming, simplifying the subject for public debate, or an attempt to make it sound scary really doesn't matter at this point. It has both helped and hurt the discussion.
It also doesn't matter whether the planet has climate cycles. AGW doesn't threaten the planet, it will be here long after we are gone. If what we are doing is causing severe changes we should be looking to see how we can change what we are doing. It's not inconceivable that what we are doing is affecting the climate, we've done it before. We had to change farming techniques rather than sit back and say "droughts are normal".
But no, instead it's all electric cars and inefficient solar and wind power instead of proven nuclear, etc etc...
Your stance is just as narrow minded as many of the renewable energy proponents. We don't have any technologies that are a single solution to fossil fuels. We could address a lot of our usage through simple efficiency requirements. Push CAFE requirements higher. Change building codes to require minimum environmental efficiency. Require remodeling to bring the affected areas up to current codes. I would even require new buildings to install 1kw solar for each 1000 sq/ft of enclosed space. Not as a solution, but as an incremental step. Builders won't do it themselves, they'll skip a 50 cent part on a $300k house if they can get away with it.
While I support building more nuclear plants, it's just part of the solution. Even if we granted permits for 100 new nuclear plants this year, it would be a decade before any of them came online. Focusing solely on nuclear is almost as bad as the big ethanol push a few years ago. We chose ethanol over biodiesel even though it meant specially designed 'flex fuel' engines, necessitating new cars. Bio OTOH was suitable for use in existing diesel engines. Trains, trucks, heavy equipment, etc. (BTW, since the new ULSD engines that is no longer the case. So we've actually made things worse in that respect) We chose to try and change millions of cars rather than focus on a less visible high usage market. Why not bio for the home heating market? Nuclear is another half attempt unless we get the political will to do something about spent fuel. And just like ethanol, it comes at the expense of another technology that could be retrofitted to existing installed technology. The US will likely never stop using coal. We have too much of it. So why aren't we cleaning up the coal plant emissions? I have a theory that it's our 'I don't want to pay for that' culture. Short term people get outraged "our taxes are paying so xxxx utility can get free stuff", regardless of the fact that if we regulated cleaner emissions xxxx utility would just pass the cost to rate payers anyway, after fighting for years in court.
Another day, another update to a Google android app.
The problem is that those proposing these laws never try and prove that existing laws are insufficient detterent.
The Federal Hate Crime law was passed in 1969 after numerous racial attacks during the civil rights movement, including the Birmingham Church bombing and the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. In case you think that if hate crimes were such a problem, the law would have been passed far earlier, I'll point out that the Civil Rights Act was only passed in 1964.
For example, the argument was made in 2000 that hate crime legislation was needed in Texas because of the guys who drug a black man behind a pickup. Two of the three involved were sentenced to death. There was no evidence that the third was involved because of racism. Texas has no "hate crime" laws, yet this case was used to promote the idea of passing one.
I'm not sure what your point is. A shocking hate crime was used to pass a hate crime law in a state that had previously not had one. The fact that one of the three people involved didn't exhibit racial motivation doesn't change the fact that it highlighted the absence of a hate crime law.
Exactly what greater penalty would a "hate crime" law have imposed on the men sentenced to death
It's the same reason that we convict people already serving life sentences or sentenced to death - it shows that society rejects the actions of that criminal and holds them to account. Would you suggest that if someone serving life without parole in a state without capital punishment kills a guard, that they should not be charged with that crime?
And not all hate crimes are capital offenses.
(note: there was no evidence that the one who was not sentenced to death had racial motivations in committing the crime).
And nothing about how the case played out suggested that he would have been charged with a hate crime if the statute had existed at the time.
The milankovitch cycle does not explain that there will 'eventually be another ice age." The cycle perfectly explains the historical ice ages but also notice that the cycle was in effect before the ice ages also.
The M-cycle creates ice ages when the Earth's mean temperature is at the low end. When it is at the high end, the M-cycle is irrelevant and changes nothing about climate.
I think there is an important distinction here. Al Gore, whether you agree with him or not, pushed climate research (again whether you agree with the research's conclusions or not) into broader and more visible discussion. This is what should happen with academic research. In this case, the VAG is trying to censure the discussion by threatening the funding of academic research. Research should never be hindered this way. If he thinks the results of Mann's research is bad, he should prove it with research that has different and more valid results (can't think of a better way to put it, but I think you get the idea). If Mann's research was fudged, someone else ought to be able to prove it with their own research to rebutt it. Since no one has so far, maybe this is one far right conservative's only imaginable way of countering someone's theory.
If it is found that Mann did not do anything wrong, I hope someone charges the VAG with misappropriating the public's money. Especially as I see this as twisting a law to meet his ideological beliefs. Mind you, that is what lawyers do: make rules and then figure out ways to twist or break them. Similar to accountants and wall street types.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
You don't hire a black man to infiltrate the KKK.
Are you sure about that?
I welcome our new 99% overlords.
Snowfall will affect the height of glaciers. Glacier recession happens at the edge of a glacier, where it is affected mainly by temperature. Glaciers move over time, and the bottom is pushed into warmer areas where it can't stay frozen year after year. In stable conditions the amount that is eroded from the edge of the glacier balances the distance the glacier moves, and there is no recession.
Does a few years of snowfall really make a difference on rate that the edge of a glacier melts? Or does snowfall affect the rate that a glacier moves? I don't know. Yes, lack of snow should cause a glacier to decrease in mass due to normal melting, even at constant temperature, but I would guess that its effects on glacial recession in a short term (multiple years) would be negligible compared to the effect of warming.
If a white man beats up a black man after he has been to the polling booth, that's bad for all the aforementioned reasons, but it could also be an attempt to scare other black people from voting.
Or.. to phrase it differently:
If a white man beats up a $GROUP.MEMBER after he/she has been to the polling booth, that's bad for all the aforementioned reasons, but it could also be an attempt to scare other $GROUP from voting.
Where $GROUP can be: Democrats, women, men, christians, muslims, jews, atheists, french, polish, yankees fan.
How is it not a hate crime if a black guy beats up a white guy in your scenario?
We're all members of groups which could be discriminated against, does that mean we call get hate crime protection?
Hate crime laws were conceived with good intentions but the result is:
"If you get into a fight with someone, you better make damn sure they're the same color as you"
Otherwise, a simple assault charge could turn into years in PMITA prison, it all depends on if the prosecutor is running for office when your case goes to trial.
The goal then, should be to re-frame the argument in a way as to remove the government from areas which it doesn't belong (like defining marriage).
Unfortunately, that will then be framed as well as an "attack on marriage" and an assault on the "sanctity of marriage."
But if you even use the word "sanctity" to define marriage, it's clearly not something that the government should be involved in. :-P
As soon as you see the term NIMBY leftist, you just know its a lbertarian wanker agenda.
There are lots of rigth wing NIMBYS too, but that woudlnt give himan opportuntiy for a juvenille attack on what Americans laughably call their rleft wing, known to the rest of us as normal right wing.
"Perhaps there is more then one elephant in the room."
Well thats what I herd!
First point, those particular mental-state inferences are *relatively* amenable to evidence. If I spend months obtaining different chemicals, using fake names to do so, then finally mix those up to make a bomb to kill someone, we may fairly infer that I planned the killing. In the context of 'hate crime' laws the scenarios tend to be much less clear-cut. Many people (in all probability the majority of people) tell tasteless jokes or make crude comments that I perceive as racist. If one of those people later commits a crime, and the victim of the crime happens to be of a different colour/ethnic group than the perpetrator, is this really evidence of hatred? Remember that many people make such comments but dont commit any crimes. Remember that others make these comments then commit crimes against people of their own group. Remember that if they randomly target, they will sometimes choose targets from another group. If they target based on some non-protected criteria that may skew the chances of them choosing a target which is a member of a protected group, even though the selection was driven by entirely different criteria. Give me a few thousand cases and some time to do the math and I could tell you with a fair degree of certainty that *some* of the cases must have been driven by the prohibited forms of discrimination (or not) but in any individual case? It's often going to be completely unknowable. And given the dynamics of the justice system, this can only lead to constant pressure to erode standards of proof in order to give the law application.
Furthermore in the case of premeditated vs. spontaneous murder the dichotomy is fairly good. You cant really have it both ways, either you planned it and took concrete steps beforehand or you did not, there is precious little middle ground there. Distinguishing motive, however, is more fuzzy, because it is normal for people to act based on not a single, but multiple coinciding motivations. Someone may dislike you based on your skin colour, yet mug you primarily because you happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time flashing a lot of cash. That person would certainly have mugged you if your skin colour had been different, let us say, but perhaps would have hesitated a moment before doing it anyway in that case. Hate crime or not? The closer you look at these issues the murkier they get, the more room there is for the prejudice and motivations of the court officers themselves to decide cases rather than any objective facts.
Now beyond the fact that the two cases (discriminating planned vs. spontaneous crimes as opposed to discriminating crimes motivated by hatred of a protected group from crimes motivated by other factors) are actually quite different, I think that a good case can be made that we should NOT be discriminating between premeditated and spontaneous murder as we do anyway. The murder victim is just as dead either way, the relatives are harmed just as much, why should it make so much difference in sentencing? What is the underlying message this teaches? That it is better to be hot-headed and dangerous than cold-blooded and dangerous? I am not at all certain that is a beneficial message. If we must distinguish two classes, the medieval icelandic system seems to me more logical and beneficial - in that system it was trying to conceal your crime that elevated a murder from the second to the first degree. That distinction, at least, serves a clear and beneficial purpose - it taught people to take responsibility for their actions, and punished those that made it more difficult to enforce the law.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
I've not been following the whole shebang closely but I did hear that some poor nations were seeking reparations -- essentially, their stance being that the first world has degraded the planet while getting rich. Neighbor's peeing in your pool to avoid a higher water bill, you're going to get some sort of restitution out of him.
A lot of the reason the poor nations are trying to (fairly severely) curtail the emissions from first-world nations isn't that they care about the environment. Once again, it comes back to money. If *we* can't emit X amount of CO2, companies that make goods will move to a country with more room to spare -- or simply purchase 'carbon credits' from some poor nation that's not using their full allotment.
Now to come full circle and piss everyone off--
this is no different than health care. Rather than try to fix up the status quo so that it's better, everybody is always more eager to throw out the status quo entirely and build up a new system.. but yanno what, that doesn't work. That never works. Christ, that never works in VIDEO GAMES. Nobody can ever fully realize the repercussions of any action, and the more drastic the action, the more numerous the changes, the more complication is thrown in. Shit goes wrong. Even if it goes right *eventually*, shit will go wrong for longer than I care for shit to be wrong.
I mean, if we REAAALLLLY cared about the environment we'd all just turn off our computers, quit commuting to our jobs, kill off about 90% of the earth's population and return to living as hunter/gatherers.
That's a bit too drastic, though, y'see what I mean? Those poor countries, really there's no changes in store for any of them with any sort of climate change agreement. They don't have a hat in the ring to get trampled. Of course they don't give a shit what troubles may be caused by any sort of agreement, because those troubles will be to a one in other countries while their own country can only gain from any sort of agreement.
And, again, it's harder to retrofit a ship under steam than it is to build it right initially. Poor nations want first nations to retrofit their entire economic, manufacturing, and social structure. First nations want the poor nations to just build shit right the first time around -- let's be honest, they might be jealous of our factories but why the fuck would we shut down our efficient and clean factories just to watch them move overseas to some hot hellhole and build a cheap slapshod factory that BELCHES emissions? Maybe we'd be more agreeable to concessions on our part if they were more agreeable to concessions as well.
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
As such, like an investment advisor or stock broker giving a seminar to prospects and clients, Al Gore was actively recommending people put money in companies he already has a financial stake in.
Yawn - Gore actually has been saying all this long before most of these companies even existed - and its quite funny he gets attacked for putting his money where his mouth is instead of doing what his opposition does, saying what their money source tells them to.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
I've not been following the whole shebang closely but I did hear that some poor nations were seeking reparations
That's what it all boils down to - you "heard" something, and I can guess where you herd it. FOX News? Wattsupwiththat?
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Yes, and many AGW proponents use that very argument to use any unusual weather pattern as "proof" of AGW, even when it is the opposite of what they had predicted. Hurricanes more severe than normal...proof of AGW. Hurricanes less severe than normal...proof of AGW.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
NIMBYism is independent of left/right politics.
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
There is a reason the number is 10 years. If you do the analysis with 20 years of past data the warming trend is significant.
This meme will never go away because it is an abuse of statistics. If you have an effect in your data over time you will always need some minimum window size in time to see that effect with significance in the statistical sense.
For example random digits
1112211112211122322222122332222123333322333222333222333333444334
The above clearly trends upwards. But if you go away and do analysis you will be able to pick your window (for instance the sequence 3222221 appears in the above data) so that at any given point along this data set there appears to be no change or even the reverse change in the average magnitude of the digits.
This is what is going on here. It's a cheap trick by people who know the general public cant do stats.
Boy, you're sure clever. I love the way you jump to conclusions and then use those assumptions as the basis to denigrate my stance on some matter by brushing it off as "just so much babble from the bleating masses, AGAIN".
No, I don't watch Fox News. Wanna know something neat? None of the fucking news-as-entertainment stations actually provide news.
Pr0tip Billy: Stop being a dismissive douchebag. Where are YOU getting your information? Are you sitting in on these hearings? Taking notes? Hmm? I just didn't feel like citing sources. Have you done that? No? Hmm. So.. so you're saying you can't actually disprove anything I'm saying, but because you THINK that it SOUNDS LIKE it came from Fox News, it's gotta be wrong. And the only reason you think it sounds like it came from Fox News is because you disagree with what I've said and you don't care for Fox News.
ps: this ain't /b/. nobody 'herd' anything.
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
squiggleslash sure talks a lot, until you ask him if he has a degree in computer sciences and also when you ask him to prove existence of programs he says he has written, lol, but we all know he does not actually have or done for anyone (let alone have them rated well):
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1640368&cid=32096038
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1640368&cid=32096066
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1640368&cid=32096094
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1640368&cid=32096232
Sure a lot of mod downs though, so keep blowing your mod points there, "Sir Talk A Lot" (LMAO). You're doing a wonderful job of showing everyone here just how "expert" (not) you are in computers, you ne'er do well squiggleslash.
Keep digging.
Oh look, it's the troll that's been stalking Falconhell, Clone53421, Squiggleslash, Tom Hudson, Red Flayer, and GMHowell.
For those new to this, the troll is someone claiming to be a defender of a certain Alexander Peter Kowalski, the author of a tool, apkapp2backgrounddaemonprocessengine, generally considered malware by a large number of anti-malware companies and organizations.
CA
PestPatrol
SpywareDB("Dangerous!")
Freedom Anti-Spyware
Spycheck (Spanish-language) - "Recomendacion: DESACTIVAR Y ELIMINAR"
Spyware No-More ("Threat risk: High risk", "Advice: Remove This is a very high risk threat and should be removed immediately as to prevent harm to your computer and / or to protect your privacy")
Mr Kowalski, or his admirer, got upset because someone had the audacity to link to a threat describing Kowalski's attempts to remove some embarrassing comments posted under his name. Rather than deal with it maturely, this person has been attempting to stalk said poster and those who pointed out Kowalski wasn't doing himself any favors.
So if you see these comments posted as replies to Falconhell, clone, squiggleslash, Tom Hudson, Red Flayer, or GM Howell, now you know why they're appearing. And if you feel like joining in, well, come on in, the water's lovely!
Do you have a degree in CSC or CIS squiggleslash? No?? We thought not. You're by no means an expert to comment on anything in the art and sciences of computing then. The same things you note have happened to others that write good softwares, such as Dr. Mark Russinovich of Microsoft even and also Nir Sofer of Nirsoft, to name only a couple. Your lack of expertise is showing itself squiggleslash. APK's program passed all 21 points of CA's test if a program is a malware (and according to their test, it literally is not, because it passed all 21 points) and has zero threat levels ratings by CA. Go get a degree and then get back to us, because until then? Your credibility as an expert is non-existent and your avoidance of answering a simple question just says it all.
No, you don't, so how do we expect you to take you seriously when you claim to be an expect on anything when virtually all people with maturity have an abundance of facial hair? Get back to us when you grow something below your lips, or else get a real job rather than selling crapware that's so bad it's considered malware by the anti-malware community and writing articles promoting bogus anti-virus solutions.
Think of it this way, if the government had no concern for marriage and only "cared" about civil unions, what issue would it be what the sexes of the two parties are?
You want to "marry" a man or woman or child or goat or rock (or a mix), that's between you and the church.
Everything else is a contract, let the lawyers fight over it.
What a curious distinction - surely all a marriage is, is a contract, a civil union, if you like? Whether people choose to ask their god(s) for blessing of the union is an individual choice; but the main point of marriage is that it is a recognized, legal form with tangible consequences, as it clarifies things like custodial rights, inheritance issues, legal procedures in case of divorce etc etc.
It is tragic that it is necessary to talk about gay rights at all as a seperate issue; gays are humans, simply, and it ought to be a non-issue.