The biggest reason, really, was that there are a lot more plugins available for Photoshop on PC than there are for Mac. When she does digital "art", as opposed to weddings and events, she likes to push the envelope in manipulation as much as she can and there's just more out there for Windows. Plus, of all things, she actually prefers the stupid XP Start bar to the Mac OS/X dock. Incidentally, we both actually like the Gnome bars on Linux best of all, and she'll use my Linux box to surf and chat with... but she's not jumping into Linux just yet for her work because the applications aren't quite up to scratch on it yet.
I looked into it actually and it turns out a big problem with it is Canon, whose when I checked last, only made their SDK available for Windows and it was a closed source product. I tried plugging her camera into the trusty Linux box last with OpenSuse 10, and it was like flying into total darkness. Now that you've jogged my memory a bit, I'll have to try it now that I'm onto Ubuntu.
But you didn't back up the files for an entire year? WTF! That's some weapons-grade FAIL right there.
She used the firewire drive that had her backup to copy the contents of the folder over, thinking, that, she was, in effect, making a backup. Then we put a copy onto my linux box from the firewire drive. She checked the results of the folder and saw the names were the same, the file counts were same, and a spot check of the images showed that there some there, then, she blew away the Mac drive.
My wife is a pro-photographer and takes like, 500+ images per job, and, we had the $3000 dual G5 Mac and Aperature and Aperature yakked and we lost a year of work because Aperature's doesn't generate unique filenames for its images across subdirectories and when you export it overlays them...
Since then, she's switched to a WinPC and Lightroom, and Lightroom is both stable for her, and reliable and does more and she will never touch a Mac again. The moral of the story is that Adobe Lightroom is the real target, not Aperature... even the feature sets of Lightroom have her not missing her Mac...
Children go to school to learn things that are of the temporal world, not the spiritual world. That's been the basic agreement of public schools. They learn what science knows. I'm very deeply faithful, but I do not want my son learning about someone else's religious beliefs being rammed down his throat. I came to believe what I believe through my own relationship with God and that's for me to explore, and no one else. In matters of this world, though, evolution is accepted science, and, until we have a better, scientifically provable model that makes better predictions than evolution theory does, then its time to shut the f-- up. Same goes for GW too. I'm a skeptic, but until I write a better program than Hansen's crapp y FORTRAN, what I've got is not -science-.
The main thing though, is to teach children the basics of science. Like, if you ask a question about how the world works, how do you organize your thoughts into a program so that you can come up with an experiment to answer it, and in doing so, how can you understand the limits of your own answer? If you do that, first and foremost, and from an early age, you'll have an entire generation of people that are thinking properly.
Nuclear is less cost-effective than wind, especially when one takes into account total life cycle costs and interest on capital costs.
Get rid of all the stupid lawsuits, and the capital costs drop to 1/10th of that. All the utilities are basing their costs on the limerick experience, which just kept getting sued and halted over and over again by the fruitcakes until it cost too much. So its really like smashing someone's car in, and then saying, you can't drive because the windshield's broken.
If I say that "Americans like to play baseball" no one thinks that I mean that all, or even most, Americans play baseball.
But you can say that Americans like baseball, because baseball is an extremely popular sport. On the other hand, reading the ins and outs of what you argue the crimes of the Bush administration are, is well, not. Look at it this way. If digging up and agreeing with all of your assessments were true, then you might think Air America would have had better ratings than a Phillies baseball game, and its not even close! Far more people like baseball than really anything else. Most fathers do not tell their children about how "Bush lied", but I guarantee you nearly every American father has, at least once, brought out some kind of a ball, and some kind of a bat, to play with his son, or heck, daughter. So, yes, you can say "Americans did this or that.", but, not in your case. It's simply not true, and if we go by your definition, its a total lie. If, on the other hand, you genuinely believe that -everyone- is as into reading about Bush stuff as you are, based on the news boards you hang out on, based on your own filtering of information, then you aren't lying. But you are doing the same thing Bush did, and that makes your charge even more ridiculous.
It isn't even remotely related to the Fairness Doctrine [wikipedia.org] as I presume you know.
It's entirely related to the Fairness doctrine. You claim that the Bush administration manipulates information to achieve political ends, and surprise, the Fairness doctrine is an attempt by the left wing to manipulate information, to well, political ends!
I would agree that you need someone like Dick Cheney to orchestrate a fiasco like this [latimes.com]. But I don't think I'd call repeatedly forcing discredited claims into the channel to "guide their analysis" being "on the ball" (unless you're making a play on his code name, and mean it in a derogatory sense).
Discredited by who? That's the thing. You have to trust the people doing the discrediting and if, in fact, they engage in politics on the side it automatically discredits him. But let's just go through a couple of these to illustrate this:
Richard Clarke - he was a Clinton boy and got pegged as such, and when the new people came in, things changed, he engaged in political shenanigans and the Administration, wrongly, lost trust in him about his line of expertise.
Sources from Germany and France which "discredited" various Iraq / 9-11 links, and that couldn't be trusted. I mean, its pretty hard when the head of Germany and France at the time are talking about the EU supplanting the USA, pushing to sell weapons to the Chinese, and then, all of a sudden, they say, "hey usa, we like you, so don't go to war because we know your report is crap".
In all honesty, if the French sent me, as President, any intelligence which might dissuade me from acting a certain way, unless I could get my own sources to corroborate, I'd be very inclined to throw it out - especially as much as NATO is split along the lines of the US+UK versus the Continent and has been since its founding.
At this point, too, you really can't call the war a fiasco, because, well, we've achieved all but the loftiest of our foreign policy goal from it, and we've just about won the thing. And yeah, I'd filter the LA Times right out as a source, and judging by the layoffs, I'd guess a lot of other people are doing it too, because LA Times can't get anyone to pay for their content. On the other hand, plenty of people pay to listen to baseball games online. So again, are you lying when you said that Americans all are researching to support your talking points, or, are you just saying what you believe, and just mistakenly so...
It's not a lie to throw out or manipulate information and be wrong for doing so.
Well, now I lean more Republican than Democrat myself (and more Libertarian than either), but you're crazy if you think that free speech is safer with the Republicans than the Democrats
We, the American people. The public. People whole follow the news, who watch C-SPAN or even The Daily Show, who look things up rather than just letting them slide by.
Oh look, a little lie of our own!!! "We, the American people", is a total fabrication. In fact, the vast majority of the American people care about one thing in this election - the price of gasoline. If all Americans were as involved, as you said, you wouldn't have a bunch of liberal blogs taking donations and ad revenue to, "get the message out"....
Ah, but then if you try to paint the report as an independent source of factual information to which you are simply responding (rather than a contrived source of spin that you engineered to justify your actions) you are....wait for it...lying!.
But that's not what they were doing. What they were doing is working to ensure that the reports being issued by those agencies followed a "Fairness Doctrine" and received proper information to help guide their analysis! You can't rely on a report made by one guy in a vacuum, you need to have somebody who is experienced, on the ball coordinating information across multiple agencies, bringing their own vast experience to the table... you really need someone like Dick Cheney!
It's pretty simple, when you think about it. Democratic power centers tend to be around government, public institutions and universities, and, quite frankly, churches [fundy protestants aside]! Democrats are all about a sort of civic system that really believes in the role of government, the university and all of the leaders in filtering information and then making decisions, well democratically. In their world, you can't have everyone saying something because, a lot of people don't know what they are doing. There is some validity to that argument except the potential for abuse is so ripe that that we don't do that in America any more. Every President abused the federal power over the media. Roosevelt, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon...all are on record as having, at some point, threatened to yank broadcast licenses for airing speech that they didn't like. Cronkite's condemnation of VietNam wasn't just a reporter giving his opinion - it was very well respected reporter putting his rear and his company, CBS, on the line, in the face of government that could have very well shut him down, but ultimately, the government backed down and a decade later Reagan got rid of the fairness doctrine altogether. Of course, the government STILL manipulates the press - "oh, you want to talk to a general...."
Republican power centers tend to be around businesses. Guess who generally has more money and wants more independent control? why business does! So yeah, Republicans want to be able to say whatever they want, and pretty much want anyone in the media to be able to say whatever they want, even if it means that Bush or even their own party gets torpedoed by everyone on the planet, as ultimately, such a system makes a better system for our ends.
So.. quite ironically, Democrats are ideologically opposed to unbridled free speech, and Republicans tend more towards it, and, to make matters even crazier, it is the Republican religious belief in free markets that has honestly given way to the commercialization of many of the very alternative lifestyle companies the Democrats socially oppose.
The reason given is that the development of the new launch system costs money. There is no added budget to develop it, so the money to design and build the new system has to come from some other part of the budget
The problem, really, is that the shuttle is too darned old. The program never really lived up to its promise as a cheap way to get into space. Originally, the Shuttle was supposed to bring launch costs down to something like $100/lb and have a two week turnaround time. What we have sucks! The Shuttle was to be a stepping stone for cheap space flight for everyone and what we have now is an overly expensive turkey. Imagine your commercial airliner whipping out a big camera to look at its underside to see if it is safe to land. That's what the shuttle does. It's a joke!
Among many problems, the shuttle's tiles have a knack for getting dinged or falling off on every flight, and that means a much, much more expensive turnaround. A built in design flaw of having the rocket on the side of the shuttle basically means that the already fragile tiles now have to get damaged. Then you have consumables to refill or refurbish that aren't as easy as topping off a tank, and instead of a reusable space plane that makes space cheap, we have expensive space plane that has to be semi-rebuilt every time we fly it.
Cool technology, in that, the shuttle is practically a space station in its own right... it has a nice big roomy crew compartment, and the cargo bay is cool. But, the job of the shuttle was to be cheap to fly, not so that space stations would cost 100 billion dollars, and have a few astronauts, but should be costing 2 billion dollars, and be like hotels.
All of these scientists bitching about the cost of manned spaceflight do have a point. But they forget they are bitching about the expense of manned flight in an era where NASA, by flying the shuttle, has seemingly invented the most expensive way to do it possible. There's nothing magical about the Russian space program or its expense.. just imagine, for the amount of money we've ploughed into NASA just to orbit the earth and do nothing in the shuttle, we could back on the moon AND mars.
So yeah, kill it. Bum a ride for a few years, then we go to the moon, to mars, and to asteroids, and get back to exploring space again.
But, increasingly, we are discovering that the plums they "cherry picked" hadn't been in the pudding until they had them put there.
See now, here's where I have to ask... what is "we are discovering", and just "who" is doing this discovering.
They (esp. Cheney) went to great lengths to make sure that the spin they wanted was included in reports, news stories, etc. so that they could subsequently quote it.
Calling someone and saying you want a report colored a certain way is no different than a Phd student having his thesis get altered at the request of his adviser.
Where do you get this impression that people that work for you are entitled to write whatever they want? As the boss, you are perfectly entitled to get them to color whatever report they write as you believe the world to be. If you don't like it, then you can quit!
But don't do something with guns, otherwise, liberals and weak old ladies will get bent out of shape and vote to ban them. Bring swords to work and maybe a bunch of slings and big rocks.
Can some less physics challenged person enlighten me as to how we can actually manipulate a single photon. That to me seems to be such a small amount of energy as to be undetectable. I mean if I remember correctly, if you bounce one electron down from one high level to a lower level on one atom, then, it would give off one photon... and getting one atom to do that seems rather a tall challenge..
Specifically, you seem to have bought into the (recent) Republican embrace of what used to be a Democratic mainstay, the relativism of truth and honesty. Under this definition a whacked out con man who tells you he's going to give you magic powers isn't lying if he believes his own lies.
First off, I've long since lost any belief that Republicans were any different on the score of moral relativism as soon as they abandoned both the balanced budget and the notion of protecting individuals from big government both in the supposed name of national security. So let's get -that- on the table.
In your example, and I think this is where we disagree, is that the conman isn't lying. He's not lying, because he believes what he is saying. Lying to me is telling someone something you believe is true, when you believe that to be false. That's all that it is and all that is required. Thus, in my world view... if Bush goes, and as you say, cherry picks supportive information from various sources and uses that bolster his argument, that's not lying, that's salesmanship, an entirely different thing. And, for the record, when Democrats do the same, more power to them. To me, all that is really required of honesty is to be doing that which is true to you, nothing more, and nothing less.
Combining these, you are effectively using two standards for evaluating claims; pro-Bush, statements must only be believed by someone, somewhere, to be acceptable, whereas anti-Bush statements must never have been made by any Democrats or they will be dismissed as "talking points" and implicitly ignored.
Actually no. In fact, I think I noted that my original reply to your laundry list of accusations, was in fact, nothing more than another set of talking points. The gist of this thread, for me, has been to say what really happened, irrespective of the talking points of either side. Bush didn't lie, per say. He just believed what he wanted to believe, ignored all contrary evidence, sold the war by picking out what he agreed with, and did it. It's certainly arguable that it was reckless, that he misjudged the risks, and so on, but I don't think it was dishonest... I don't see the motive for lying, other than, he felt that it was in the national security interests of the USA to yank Saddam.
Now, I will say though, that there's a good bet that he's actually lying -now- about the war winding down, but that to me would be a lie designed to get us out. There's all this theater going on about the SOFA with Iraq, and I'd be willing to bet that the Administration is, behind the scenes, orchestrating the Iraqi government into imposing a withdrawal date on the USA to provide both a declaration of victory for the USA and maximum local credibility for our government in Iraq.
But even then, too, you have to ask, why were there and why are we staying. Right now, there have only been thankfully 2 US soldiers killed in Iraq in July, putting us on course for less than 10 killed during the entire month, God willing! Al Qaeda is on the run or at least managable by the local government. The Iraqi government put together the police and military to actually credibly take down the militias and did so. Other arab governments are actually accepting the new Iraqi government and they are finally getting debt forgiveness. Oil production is up, the local economy is actually booming, electrical production is up... they are preparing for elections? What more do US Soldiers need to do?
Here's my prediction. George Bush actually -wins- the war in Iraq, goes down in history as actually one of America's greatest Presidents, but, at the same time, without the war in Iraq, John McCain has no plan and Barrack Obama's own domestic agenda suffers no nationalistic resistance in the afterglow of victory and Democrats win in a landslide this fall.
f you're going to dispute them, go ahead and do it. But do it by citing some sort of externally verifiable source (say, like a news report or a public document) cut out the creepy Democrats-are-everywhere paranoia, OK?
Lalala... I'm all paranoid.... lalalala....
You are listing talking points claiming that Bush lied. These talking points originated with, came from, and are being circulated by people within the Democratic Party and the left wing in general. Who else would do it? Do you suppose the NRA, the Republican Party or the Heritage Foundation are?
As for the Bush lying arguments, all you really have are a) statements by Democrats to that effect, b) evidence against those points which shows that, if Bush were aware of it, he had to lie.
Let's assume for a minute that Bush saw -every- piece of intelligence that said that Iraq did not have WMD and Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. Why would it be a lie for him to choose to ignore it, in favor of evidence that agrees with more of his gut feeling on the issue of the danger of Iraq? Let's recall that there was no real proof that OBL was responsible for 9/11 until -after- we invaded Afghanistan. All we had at that time was a bad guy with a known motive, and a few Korans left in the cars with the hijackers. That's it. Bush saw that, looked a ton of conflicting intelligence, rolled the dice, saw OBL, and turned out to be right.
So, why wouldn't he do the same thing again in Iraq? Yes, he might have thought it through more and realized that he sorta got lucky in Afghanistan, or his gut might have been saying all along that, absent any good intelligence on the middle east, that, maybe Saddam was a part of it. When he said Saddam was a part of 9/11, and Cheney certainly said it... why wouldn't they say what they believed, especially since they had just vindicated themselves with their bet on Afghanistan?
On the other side of the aisle, what if, it turns out that global warming isn't really happening, that the planet is going through cycles? Does that make Hansen, Gore, etc, all liars? Surely someone had presented something to either of those gentlemen suggesting some contrary view and surely they chose to ignore it!
The whole "Bush lied" argument, is just ridiculous, and the worst part of you're argument is that you have absolute no proof that he did not believe what he said, when he said. None. You are asking me to prove that Bush told the truth and refute all your dumb points is like asking someone to prove they are not a witch by drowning. It's a retarded game cooked up by political types, with political origins...and you've just bought into it completely. It's absurd.. you say that Bush lied by "cherry picking" information... well, since when do you present information that you do not believe in when asked to make decisions. Where's Al Gore talking about sunspot theory? It's a retarded process.
P.S. Do you honestly believe that the Democrats could ever get together and agree on a coherent set of talking points and get people to spread them? Seriously
Sure they can and they do, otherwise, they would not be one of two dominant political parties in the USA. They circulate talking points all the time to all of the media. Their allies in the media pick them up and echo them. They coordinate their national message. So do Republicans. They have their allies in the media too. It's pretty simple. Everyone engages in propaganda.
Why didn't he wait, maintain his innocence and try to come out of jail early? What does it mean 15-to life? Can he come out early for good behavior?
The penal system expects remorse for one's crime as the first step towards rehabilitation. Holding to one's innocence, thus, doesn't get you anything, because you haven't taken any steps towards your rehabilitation....
And myspace is so "heinous", as the summation implies, for going after people that impersonate other people, then, would it be wrong for me to impersonate you...on your bank site, to your employer...
You are simply a technocrat, i.e. a person who worships technology and which worship blinds him to the understanding that technology is incapable of solving many, many societal problems.
So be it, but any problem that cannot be solved because of an existing technology means that there is a market for a new technology.
You are obviously not familiar with the utterly wasteful and energy intensive nature of the Fischer-Tropsch synthesis.
Use nuclear power.
Bio-fuels are another red herring. Unless a vast scale commercial algae based systems are developed (at herculean expenditures, multi-decade effort and massive alteration of sea ecosystems) all the bio-fuel technologies must make a choice between agrarian use of land for fuel crops or for food crops.
Again, you take a simple all or nothing approach. Future fuels portfolio is going to be a mix. Biofuels plays a part of that mix. First off, at today's oil prices, switching to any alternative fuel mix is ultimately profitable and so its a no-brainer.
If this source dries up, even if we capture the maximum amount of sunlight available for conversion on land we would still be rather short by a factor of a few million.
That's actually factually incorrect. I think you can conservatively say that the average solar flux is about 500 watts per square meter. If you've got a roof that's 4 square meters, and a good conversion, with a bit of storage for peak moments, that's more than enough solar energy to run a house. The earth is actually pretty big... you know, its a planet!
Dude, you have next to no idea what is involved in laying down tracks. Hint: you need a continuously level ground of appropriate strength, bridges, tunnels etc. Even expanding an existing track from a single to a double (two way) layout is a massive proposition involving widening the underlying foundation, which usually takes many many years per track.
Dude, you have no idea how fast things move when there is a national impetus to do so. Levelling is not that hard in an era of GPS and laser levels. Railroads can build themselves out by transporting goods across existing lines to expansion areas, so you have none of the goofy weight problem you have when building roads for cars. I mean, when the USA wanted to build railroads, we did, and fairly quickly. If you wanted to get some real speed, you simplify eminent domain for governments, waive some environmental requirements, and boom, you can get really moving. If, as you say, we're facing "social collapse", then, how are a people facing social collapse going to let some rare frog stop the rapid construction of new infrastructure.
Stronger countries are better able to change themselves than weaker ones, always, and right now the USA is still in pretty good shape. We'll get through this change in fuels quite well, but I wouldn't want to be a frog trapped beneath the railroad.
Baloney (unless by "giant lie" you mean "a set of undisputed facts that I don't like").
No....all of your supposed facts are disputed, really more talking points you've been spoon-fed by your DNC masters.
When have I said anything about exculpating the Democratic party? You're the one who keeps bringing them up.
Well you see that's the whole point of your talking points, now isn't it. Dems can't very well go towards their Hanoi Jane base and say that they are against the war when, in fact, they voted for it in order to appeal to the center. So, the only way they can come off clean is to tell their suckers, I mean, donors, that they were lied to. That's what this is all about. In fact, Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D), actually designed this whole plan even back before the war vote took place.
Unless by "simple truth" you mean "racist rant buried in a glib generalization and topped off with a bad analogy" this too is baloney.
Actually, it's not baloney at all, and your Democratic buddies appeal to that in trying to end the war. That's why they say : "Arabs aren't capable of Democracy." Why is that? What's wrong with them. Sounds pretty racist to me.
The entire country demonstrably didn't want to go to war with Iraq, or anyone else. They wanted Osama Bin Laden captured and tried for his crimes.
This really illustrates just how out of touch you are. Americans didn't want a trial for Bin Laden. they wanted him DEAD. And, a bunch of arabs to go with. People were pissed off over 9/11. I know that many liberals, such as MoveOn, don't care when Americans are killed by state sponsored terror, but, most US citizens do care about that and were so fed up with decades of Arab terror against the USA that they were willing to just say, Saddam, Osama, really, they never even had to meet, because they are all arabs and it doesn't matter which ones we blasted.
The truth is, and you won't admit it, is that America is a religious country that saw, despite even Bush's feeble protests, that 9/11 was the beginning of a religious war, not a criminal prosecution as you would have us believe. Islam v Christianity, that's what you don't get. Bush exploited that to get us into Iraq to further his own neocon designs, and the Dems went along with it to get votes in case it worked.
Mark my words, if you think "Bush lied" sticks, because of your talking points, just wait and see what will happen to a hypothetical Pres Obama if goes anything less than ballistic in response to a terrorist attack on the USA. You'll hear - Obama let them go because he is a muslim charges coming out of the woodworks and those -will- stick.
The whole point of your entire argument is a giant lie, that's what I'm getting at. The entire reason for your trail of reasoning is to exculpate the Democratic Party from their support for the war.
The simple truth of the matter is, the entire country wanted to have a war with Iraq, for a million reasons, but, pretty much, people were sick of arabs in general and Saddam in particular. It's like, if there's a guy that's robbed twenty stores on a block, and then, he gets executed for killing someone, it's really not so bad that he gets executed for a crime he didn't commit because he was a bad guy anyway.
Reading this, the Democrats jumped onto the war bandwagon themselves, sold out their Hanoi Jane base and hopped on the Iraqi express. Yes, a few people out there said that "this would be like Vietnam....", but, they had said that Haiti, Iraq I, Panama and Kosovo would be like Vietnam and they were all wrong. For pretty much 20 years, the USA has had its way in interventions... so, why not go along with the war. If Bush -did- conquer Iraq and Afghanistan and put in a democracy in under a year, he goes down in history as not just one of the greatest Presidents ever, but one of the greatest leaders of any nation ever... when you look at territory gained, especially if successes in Afghanistan and Iraq translated into further invasions of Iran and Syria (on the drawing board at the time). So Democrats sold out and jumped on the Invasion of Iraq Express.
And, I'd be willing to bet, that, if Iraq began pumping a ton of oil, and it did lower oil prices, Democrats will, after having disowned the invasion, be reminding us that they were actually in favor of it....
That's not to say Bush is a saint and Dems aren't. For all we know, Bush may have even offered to tak e the Dem arrows in exchange for their war vote, preferring to roll the political dice and coming up well, not so good. And certainly, Republicans in congress, running so far away from the war, have not done themselves any favors by trying to put distance between themselves and Bush. Honestly, Republicans needed to stick with him even if his popularity did hit 15%...
And Bush did screw up too, because he was so sure that it would be like Panama that he never thought through or even accepted the conseqences of it perhaps being something better.
Bush used the claim that our allies had "learned" about Sadam's attempts to purchase yellowcake in the state of the union address, even after he had been told that the intelligence community had debunked it. He also failed to mention that our allies had "learned" this non-fact from the Bush administration.
The intelligence community has been staggeringly wrong on a number of issues and Bush went with his gut. Saddam was an ass and getting rid of him removed the thorny problem of him re-arming once sanctions were lifted. Good call. And, if we lied to our "allies", then, so what. US European allies, except for the UK, are so worthless that they make the last 60 years of American support for the liberation of Europe to be a total wasted effort.
Cheney claimed that they "knew" Sadam had bio-weapon lans and "knew where they were"
They all claimed that we would be "greeted as liberators"
In the case of Kurdish Iraq, Americans WERE greeted as liberators. And, had we finished the job in 1991, and not subjected the Iraqis to a decade's stuff.
They claimed that the war would "pay for itself"
Yeah, and Democrats said that Medicare would only cost 10 billion dollars a year, and it does that now, a day. Shall we start shooting all the liberals who gave us that crockfest?
Remember "mission accomplished"?
THE MISSION WAS ACCOMPLISHED! The goal of the war was to replace the government of Iraq, prevent the new creation of WMD. Mission, accomplished. It is only because of the generosity and bold vision of Bush that the USA decided to stay in Iraq and try and rebuild that shattered nation. But there was no need to do that. We could have just let them have a civil war and leave!
Even the "he tried to kill my daddy claim" was a lie; there is no credible evidence that Sadam ever tried to kill Bush Sr
Uh, no. Bill Clinton actually broke up a plan by Saddam to try and whack Bush Sr on a trip to Kuwait.
They planted stories in the press ("the smoking gun that is a mushroom cloud", "able to strike in 45 minutes") through gullible reporters and then "responded" to the stories as if they were based in fact when they were nothing but talking points they themselves had planted.
And, Democrats don't.
They said that congress had seen "the same intelligence information we have" when in fact that was not the case; congress had been shown a carefully cheery picked version sculpted to make the case for war
Congress had every right to not vote for the war. You can say as much as you want, but at the end of the day, power mad Democrats wanted to be seen as tough on the war on terror and voted for it.
They claimed that Iraq was involved in 9/11
If I was in Bush's seat, I think it is reasonable to view any attempt to discredit the Atta meeting in Prague as a sort of lie to designed to protect America's enemies by paralyzing the country into action, - particularly if it was coming from the Europeans. You simply cannot trust European intelligence with regards to any American interest, so I think it was entirely reasonable to trust your own gut and think they were involved. Clearly, Saddam had the motive.
To claim that they didn't lie about anything regarding Iraq is either a sign of coolaid overdose, sock puppetry, or terminal cluelessness.
Since you are so big into honesty, when will your side admit that carbon caps are a feel good, do nothing answer to your imagined global warming crisis? I'm honestly looking forward to asking President Obama when gasoline will be $2/ gallon again, or when he is going to have a trial for a couple of suicide bombers hitting San Fransisco.
Which would do nothing for the problem of occupation of Iraq. If unable to deploy IEDs the insurgents would adapt other methods, such as car bombs, sniper, RPG, mortar and rocket attacks (which is what Hamas and Hezbollah are up to as they are unable to plant IEDs on the Israeli side of the border in their war).
Yeah, and right now, the USA is deploying sonars to detect where snipers shot from, developing technology to intercept RPG and mortar and rockets, and yes, we will share that technology with our Israeli allies, and Hamas and Hizbollah can go crying back to their Iranian masters, just before we bomb them too.
How so? Here is an (extreme - but just to illustrate the point) example: food and water. Is the demand for food and water "elastic"? At some point the "free market" model breaks down and the former "buyer" will logically resort to any and all desperate means necessary to procure sustenance, violence included.
But oil isn't water. You can live without oil.
Incidentally, this is among reasons why medical care does not (and cannot) operate as "trade" and thus is not subject to the "market" model, but that is another discussion.
People do shop when they make medical decisions... more importantly, they do not shop enough. The reason that there is no pricing information is the fault of the medical establishment and a lawsuit industry that precludes rational courses of treatment.
There is a very great difference between the jump from "SUV" to "small car" versus "small car" to "no car". The first jump is essentially in the varying "comfort" zones.
First off, you can have a pretty small "small car". If you have a car with a Again, you severely underestimate the levels of dependence on oil in most manufacturing processes.
And you under estimate the ability of people to respond to shortages through the rapid adoption of technologies.
You want to keep painting doom and gloom for the USA and the west, you can go right ahead. But, for those of us that don't need prozac, but South Africa's SASOL had no problem supplying oil to their country during the time when they under very heavy sanctions for apartheid. Similarly, before that, the NAZI economy actually -increased- its production of quite a few items towards the end of the war and was able to also synthesize fuel until we bombed their plants. There's more than plenty of coal to do coal to liquids for the next 100 years, if we wanted to, and the only reason there's not more plants doing that now is that those startups (besides SASOL), that are capable of doing this sort of thing are focusing on biodiesel instead because diesel is actually in greater demand than gasoline.
A massive (and again vastly expensive and decades long) expansion of railways would be required to sustain even a portion of US econ
How can you say that a railroad expansion would be expensive or even vast when we have machines that lay the track? And seriously, how can you even possibly believe that a country that created and deployed hundreds of thousands of miles of fiber optic and coax cable in a decade to watch better TV and send emails is going to even have a problem building sufficient new technology cars, rails and whatever it takes to get its people to work and on time.
The USA will come through this little hiccup just fine, because Americans are just too damned good. All you people on the rest of the world betting on the USA going down in flames can throw your chips on the table now, bet everything you've got, because we Yankees are going to pick them up and school you folks!
Many analysts believe (and I agree with them) that the Western technological culture is hopelessly addicted to oil and that the growth demand is pretty much inflexible unless truly drastic changes are made to the Western (and by extension all other countries which adopted or are adopting this system such as Japan and China) life-style and technology. Consider this: every electronic device uses plastic as its chief (by volume) component. Nearly all food processing involves plastic in packaging.
Well, that's the supposed theory of "inelastic" demand, and in a free market society, it's just not right. Pretty much, people will switch to the cheapest thing, and can do it pretty quickly. Have a look at July car sales. Five years ago, you couldn't sell a small car in the USA, and now, the SUV is dead. These kinds of decisions are being made in every material. If plastic gets to be too expensive, people will switch to glass or steel or wood, all of which can be made with coal as an energy source and last I checked, there's plenty of coal. So what, as you say, if individual transportation becomes too expensive. Or, perhaps people will use coal steam cars. Or, coal to liquids might work, or, maybe just electric cars or maybe there will be no cars at all. In that case, in case you haven't looked a map, you'll be pleasantly surprised to find that nearly every American city is built on or near a rail stop. Sure, suburban people might move back to cities, maybe we will have to give up cars, maybe we won't, but either way, people will survive. I mean, you are talking about a country that survived a switch from an agrarian to an industrial economy, survived the onset of global economic competition. Americans are good at coping with change.
Going cold turkey on oil means death as far as Western technological civilization as we know it is
Not at all. A few hundred years ago, western technological civilization ran out of wood. Life became much less comfortable for a while but ultimately necessity proved to be the mother of invention, and the west invented the industrial revolution.
See above. All the Iraqi oil would do (assuming that it can be brought to market quickly enough...delay the inevitable...
Delay the inevitable is -good-. It gives us time to invest in other technologies. That's why I say, drill in ANWR, offshore, everywhere. Bring the prices down a bit and take that money and pump it into new technologies.
The imperial longevity is in reverse proportion to the amount of people involved, availability and speed of communication and transportation technologies and the cost of running the empire. That is why you will note that as we progress in history the average reign of an "empire" has shortened dramatically. The US empire is already showing all the signs of collapse, after mere few decades of openly imperial policies
Well, that's all pretty good propaganda if you want to make yourself feel good but consider this - the Roman achilles heel, economically, was grain to feed the city. They literally had to get grain from other places. They fought Carthage over Sicily, and won, and were later to take over a number of places with a hunger for food that makes our own oil addiction seem quaint. During the wars, Rome had its homeland invaded, its standing army utterly crushed, its cities looted, but eventually, after hanging in there for a long time , finally triumphed over there big rival and ran with free control of the med. sea for quite some time.
The imperial longevity is in reverse proportion to the amount of people involved, availability and speed of communication and transportation technologies and the cost of running the empire. That is why you will note that as we progress in history the average reign of an "empire" has shortened dramatically
Actually, no. There's no reason that empires must be automatically short, even today. You might say, too, that the longevity of empires has more to do with vast disparities in e
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Why did she get a new computer?
The biggest reason, really, was that there are a lot more plugins available for Photoshop on PC than there are for Mac. When she does digital "art", as opposed to weddings and events, she likes to push the envelope in manipulation as much as she can and there's just more out there for Windows. Plus, of all things, she actually prefers the stupid XP Start bar to the Mac OS/X dock. Incidentally, we both actually like the Gnome bars on Linux best of all, and she'll use my Linux box to surf and chat with... but she's not jumping into Linux just yet for her work because the applications aren't quite up to scratch on it yet.
I looked into it actually and it turns out a big problem with it is Canon, whose when I checked last, only made their SDK available for Windows and it was a closed source product. I tried plugging her camera into the trusty Linux box last with OpenSuse 10, and it was like flying into total darkness. Now that you've jogged my memory a bit, I'll have to try it now that I'm onto Ubuntu.
But you didn't back up the files for an entire year? WTF! That's some weapons-grade FAIL right there.
She used the firewire drive that had her backup to copy the contents of the folder over, thinking, that, she was, in effect, making a backup. Then we put a copy onto my linux box from the firewire drive. She checked the results of the folder and saw the names were the same, the file counts were same, and a spot check of the images showed that there some there, then, she blew away the Mac drive.
My wife is a pro-photographer and takes like, 500+ images per job, and, we had the $3000 dual G5 Mac and Aperature and Aperature yakked and we lost a year of work because Aperature's doesn't generate unique filenames for its images across subdirectories and when you export it overlays them...
Since then, she's switched to a WinPC and Lightroom, and Lightroom is both stable for her, and reliable and does more and she will never touch a Mac again. The moral of the story is that Adobe Lightroom is the real target, not Aperature... even the feature sets of Lightroom have her not missing her Mac...
Children go to school to learn things that are of the temporal world, not the spiritual world. That's been the basic agreement of public schools. They learn what science knows. I'm very deeply faithful, but I do not want my son learning about someone else's religious beliefs being rammed down his throat. I came to believe what I believe through my own relationship with God and that's for me to explore, and no one else. In matters of this world, though, evolution is accepted science, and, until we have a better, scientifically provable model that makes better predictions than evolution theory does, then its time to shut the f-- up. Same goes for GW too. I'm a skeptic, but until I write a better program than Hansen's crapp y FORTRAN, what I've got is not -science-.
The main thing though, is to teach children the basics of science. Like, if you ask a question about how the world works, how do you organize your thoughts into a program so that you can come up with an experiment to answer it, and in doing so, how can you understand the limits of your own answer? If you do that, first and foremost, and from an early age, you'll have an entire generation of people that are thinking properly.
Nuclear is less cost-effective than wind, especially when one takes into account total life cycle costs and interest on capital costs.
Get rid of all the stupid lawsuits, and the capital costs drop to 1/10th of that. All the utilities are basing their costs on the limerick experience, which just kept getting sued and halted over and over again by the fruitcakes until it cost too much. So its really like smashing someone's car in, and then saying, you can't drive because the windshield's broken.
If I say that "Americans like to play baseball" no one thinks that I mean that all, or even most, Americans play baseball.
But you can say that Americans like baseball, because baseball is an extremely popular sport. On the other hand, reading the ins and outs of what you argue the crimes of the Bush administration are, is well, not. Look at it this way. If digging up and agreeing with all of your assessments were true, then you might think Air America would have had better ratings than a Phillies baseball game, and its not even close! Far more people like baseball than really anything else. Most fathers do not tell their children about how "Bush lied", but I guarantee you nearly every American father has, at least once, brought out some kind of a ball, and some kind of a bat, to play with his son, or heck, daughter. So, yes, you can say "Americans did this or that.", but, not in your case. It's simply not true, and if we go by your definition, its a total lie. If, on the other hand, you genuinely believe that -everyone- is as into reading about Bush stuff as you are, based on the news boards you hang out on, based on your own filtering of information, then you aren't lying. But you are doing the same thing Bush did, and that makes your charge even more ridiculous.
It isn't even remotely related to the Fairness Doctrine [wikipedia.org] as I presume you know.
It's entirely related to the Fairness doctrine. You claim that the Bush administration manipulates information to achieve political ends, and surprise, the Fairness doctrine is an attempt by the left wing to manipulate information, to well, political ends!
I would agree that you need someone like Dick Cheney to orchestrate a fiasco like this [latimes.com]. But I don't think I'd call repeatedly forcing discredited claims into the channel to "guide their analysis" being "on the ball" (unless you're making a play on his code name, and mean it in a derogatory sense).
Discredited by who? That's the thing. You have to trust the people doing the discrediting and if, in fact, they engage in politics on the side it automatically discredits him. But let's just go through a couple of these to illustrate this:
Richard Clarke - he was a Clinton boy and got pegged as such, and when the new people came in, things changed, he engaged in political shenanigans and the Administration, wrongly, lost trust in him about his line of expertise.
Sources from Germany and France which "discredited" various Iraq / 9-11 links, and that couldn't be trusted. I mean, its pretty hard when the head of Germany and France at the time are talking about the EU supplanting the USA, pushing to sell weapons to the Chinese, and then, all of a sudden, they say, "hey usa, we like you, so don't go to war because we know your report is crap".
In all honesty, if the French sent me, as President, any intelligence which might dissuade me from acting a certain way, unless I could get my own sources to corroborate, I'd be very inclined to throw it out - especially as much as NATO is split along the lines of the US+UK versus the Continent and has been since its founding.
At this point, too, you really can't call the war a fiasco, because, well, we've achieved all but the loftiest of our foreign policy goal from it, and we've just about won the thing. And yeah, I'd filter the LA Times right out as a source, and judging by the layoffs, I'd guess a lot of other people are doing it too, because LA Times can't get anyone to pay for their content. On the other hand, plenty of people pay to listen to baseball games online. So again, are you lying when you said that Americans all are researching to support your talking points, or, are you just saying what you believe, and just mistakenly so...
It's not a lie to throw out or manipulate information and be wrong for doing so.
Well, now I lean more Republican than Democrat myself (and more Libertarian than either), but you're crazy if you think that free speech is safer with the Republicans than the Democrats
Two words: Fairness doctrine.
We, the American people. The public. People whole follow the news, who watch C-SPAN or even The Daily Show, who look things up rather than just letting them slide by.
Oh look, a little lie of our own!!! "We, the American people", is a total fabrication. In fact, the vast majority of the American people care about one thing in this election - the price of gasoline. If all Americans were as involved, as you said, you wouldn't have a bunch of liberal blogs taking donations and ad revenue to, "get the message out".. ..
Ah, but then if you try to paint the report as an independent source of factual information to which you are simply responding (rather than a contrived source of spin that you engineered to justify your actions) you are....wait for it...lying!.
But that's not what they were doing. What they were doing is working to ensure that the reports being issued by those agencies followed a "Fairness Doctrine" and received proper information to help guide their analysis! You can't rely on a report made by one guy in a vacuum, you need to have somebody who is experienced, on the ball coordinating information across multiple agencies, bringing their own vast experience to the table... you really need someone like Dick Cheney!
It's pretty simple, when you think about it. Democratic power centers tend to be around government, public institutions and universities, and, quite frankly, churches [fundy protestants aside]! Democrats are all about a sort of civic system that really believes in the role of government, the university and all of the leaders in filtering information and then making decisions, well democratically. In their world, you can't have everyone saying something because, a lot of people don't know what they are doing. There is some validity to that argument except the potential for abuse is so ripe that that we don't do that in America any more. Every President abused the federal power over the media. Roosevelt, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon...all are on record as having, at some point, threatened to yank broadcast licenses for airing speech that they didn't like. Cronkite's condemnation of VietNam wasn't just a reporter giving his opinion - it was very well respected reporter putting his rear and his company, CBS, on the line, in the face of government that could have very well shut him down, but ultimately, the government backed down and a decade later Reagan got rid of the fairness doctrine altogether. Of course, the government STILL manipulates the press - "oh, you want to talk to a general...."
Republican power centers tend to be around businesses. Guess who generally has more money and wants more independent control? why business does! So yeah, Republicans want to be able to say whatever they want, and pretty much want anyone in the media to be able to say whatever they want, even if it means that Bush or even their own party gets torpedoed by everyone on the planet, as ultimately, such a system makes a better system for our ends.
So.. quite ironically, Democrats are ideologically opposed to unbridled free speech, and Republicans tend more towards it, and, to make matters even crazier, it is the Republican religious belief in free markets that has honestly given way to the commercialization of many of the very alternative lifestyle companies the Democrats socially oppose.
For two things:
a) provide tie-ins to doctors for uplinks of diseases
b) allow people look up the names of those people with hiv.
The reason given is that the development of the new launch system costs money. There is no added budget to develop it, so the money to design and build the new system has to come from some other part of the budget
The problem, really, is that the shuttle is too darned old. The program never really lived up to its promise as a cheap way to get into space. Originally, the Shuttle was supposed to bring launch costs down to something like $100/lb and have a two week turnaround time. What we have sucks! The Shuttle was to be a stepping stone for cheap space flight for everyone and what we have now is an overly expensive turkey. Imagine your commercial airliner whipping out a big camera to look at its underside to see if it is safe to land. That's what the shuttle does. It's a joke!
Among many problems, the shuttle's tiles have a knack for getting dinged or falling off on every flight, and that means a much, much more expensive turnaround. A built in design flaw of having the rocket on the side of the shuttle basically means that the already fragile tiles now have to get damaged. Then you have consumables to refill or refurbish that aren't as easy as topping off a tank, and instead of a reusable space plane that makes space cheap, we have expensive space plane that has to be semi-rebuilt every time we fly it.
Cool technology, in that, the shuttle is practically a space station in its own right... it has a nice big roomy crew compartment, and the cargo bay is cool. But, the job of the shuttle was to be cheap to fly, not so that space stations would cost 100 billion dollars, and have a few astronauts, but should be costing 2 billion dollars, and be like hotels.
All of these scientists bitching about the cost of manned spaceflight do have a point. But they forget they are bitching about the expense of manned flight in an era where NASA, by flying the shuttle, has seemingly invented the most expensive way to do it possible. There's nothing magical about the Russian space program or its expense.. just imagine, for the amount of money we've ploughed into NASA just to orbit the earth and do nothing in the shuttle, we could back on the moon AND mars.
So yeah, kill it. Bum a ride for a few years, then we go to the moon, to mars, and to asteroids, and get back to exploring space again.
I'm excited!
But, increasingly, we are discovering that the plums they "cherry picked" hadn't been in the pudding until they had them put there.
See now, here's where I have to ask... what is "we are discovering", and just "who" is doing this discovering.
They (esp. Cheney) went to great lengths to make sure that the spin they wanted was included in reports, news stories, etc. so that they could subsequently quote it.
Calling someone and saying you want a report colored a certain way is no different than a Phd student having his thesis get altered at the request of his adviser.
Where do you get this impression that people that work for you are entitled to write whatever they want? As the boss, you are perfectly entitled to get them to color whatever report they write as you believe the world to be. If you don't like it, then you can quit!
But don't do something with guns, otherwise, liberals and weak old ladies will get bent out of shape and vote to ban them. Bring swords to work and maybe a bunch of slings and big rocks.
Can some less physics challenged person enlighten me as to how we can actually manipulate a single photon. That to me seems to be such a small amount of energy as to be undetectable. I mean if I remember correctly, if you bounce one electron down from one high level to a lower level on one atom, then, it would give off one photon... and getting one atom to do that seems rather a tall challenge..
Specifically, you seem to have bought into the (recent) Republican embrace of what used to be a Democratic mainstay, the relativism of truth and honesty. Under this definition a whacked out con man who tells you he's going to give you magic powers isn't lying if he believes his own lies.
First off, I've long since lost any belief that Republicans were any different on the score of moral relativism as soon as they abandoned both the balanced budget and the notion of protecting individuals from big government both in the supposed name of national security. So let's get -that- on the table.
In your example, and I think this is where we disagree, is that the conman isn't lying. He's not lying, because he believes what he is saying. Lying to me is telling someone something you believe is true, when you believe that to be false. That's all that it is and all that is required. Thus, in my world view... if Bush goes, and as you say, cherry picks supportive information from various sources and uses that bolster his argument, that's not lying, that's salesmanship, an entirely different thing. And, for the record, when Democrats do the same, more power to them. To me, all that is really required of honesty is to be doing that which is true to you, nothing more, and nothing less.
Combining these, you are effectively using two standards for evaluating claims; pro-Bush, statements must only be believed by someone, somewhere, to be acceptable, whereas anti-Bush statements must never have been made by any Democrats or they will be dismissed as "talking points" and implicitly ignored.
Actually no. In fact, I think I noted that my original reply to your laundry list of accusations, was in fact, nothing more than another set of talking points. The gist of this thread, for me, has been to say what really happened, irrespective of the talking points of either side. Bush didn't lie, per say. He just believed what he wanted to believe, ignored all contrary evidence, sold the war by picking out what he agreed with, and did it. It's certainly arguable that it was reckless, that he misjudged the risks, and so on, but I don't think it was dishonest... I don't see the motive for lying, other than, he felt that it was in the national security interests of the USA to yank Saddam.
Now, I will say though, that there's a good bet that he's actually lying -now- about the war winding down, but that to me would be a lie designed to get us out. There's all this theater going on about the SOFA with Iraq, and I'd be willing to bet that the Administration is, behind the scenes, orchestrating the Iraqi government into imposing a withdrawal date on the USA to provide both a declaration of victory for the USA and maximum local credibility for our government in Iraq.
But even then, too, you have to ask, why were there and why are we staying. Right now, there have only been thankfully 2 US soldiers killed in Iraq in July, putting us on course for less than 10 killed during the entire month, God willing! Al Qaeda is on the run or at least managable by the local government. The Iraqi government put together the police and military to actually credibly take down the militias and did so. Other arab governments are actually accepting the new Iraqi government and they are finally getting debt forgiveness. Oil production is up, the local economy is actually booming, electrical production is up... they are preparing for elections? What more do US Soldiers need to do?
Here's my prediction. George Bush actually -wins- the war in Iraq, goes down in history as actually one of America's greatest Presidents, but, at the same time, without the war in Iraq, John McCain has no plan and Barrack Obama's own domestic agenda suffers no nationalistic resistance in the afterglow of victory and Democrats win in a landslide this fall.
f you're going to dispute them, go ahead and do it. But do it by citing some sort of externally verifiable source (say, like a news report or a public document) cut out the creepy Democrats-are-everywhere paranoia, OK?
Lalala... I'm all paranoid.... lalalala....
You are listing talking points claiming that Bush lied. These talking points originated with, came from, and are being circulated by people within the Democratic Party and the left wing in general. Who else would do it? Do you suppose the NRA, the Republican Party or the Heritage Foundation are?
As for the Bush lying arguments, all you really have are a) statements by Democrats to that effect, b) evidence against those points which shows that, if Bush were aware of it, he had to lie.
Let's assume for a minute that Bush saw -every- piece of intelligence that said that Iraq did not have WMD and Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. Why would it be a lie for him to choose to ignore it, in favor of evidence that agrees with more of his gut feeling on the issue of the danger of Iraq? Let's recall that there was no real proof that OBL was responsible for 9/11 until -after- we invaded Afghanistan. All we had at that time was a bad guy with a known motive, and a few Korans left in the cars with the hijackers. That's it. Bush saw that, looked a ton of conflicting intelligence, rolled the dice, saw OBL, and turned out to be right.
So, why wouldn't he do the same thing again in Iraq? Yes, he might have thought it through more and realized that he sorta got lucky in Afghanistan, or his gut might have been saying all along that, absent any good intelligence on the middle east, that, maybe Saddam was a part of it. When he said Saddam was a part of 9/11, and Cheney certainly said it... why wouldn't they say what they believed, especially since they had just vindicated themselves with their bet on Afghanistan?
On the other side of the aisle, what if, it turns out that global warming isn't really happening, that the planet is going through cycles? Does that make Hansen, Gore, etc, all liars? Surely someone had presented something to either of those gentlemen suggesting some contrary view and surely they chose to ignore it!
The whole "Bush lied" argument, is just ridiculous, and the worst part of you're argument is that you have absolute no proof that he did not believe what he said, when he said. None. You are asking me to prove that Bush told the truth and refute all your dumb points is like asking someone to prove they are not a witch by drowning. It's a retarded game cooked up by political types, with political origins...and you've just bought into it completely. It's absurd.. you say that Bush lied by "cherry picking" information... well, since when do you present information that you do not believe in when asked to make decisions. Where's Al Gore talking about sunspot theory? It's a retarded process.
P.S. Do you honestly believe that the Democrats could ever get together and agree on a coherent set of talking points and get people to spread them? Seriously
Sure they can and they do, otherwise, they would not be one of two dominant political parties in the USA. They circulate talking points all the time to all of the media. Their allies in the media pick them up and echo them. They coordinate their national message. So do Republicans. They have their allies in the media too. It's pretty simple. Everyone engages in propaganda.
Why didn't he wait, maintain his innocence and try to come out of jail early? What does it mean 15-to life? Can he come out early for good behavior?
The penal system expects remorse for one's crime as the first step towards rehabilitation. Holding to one's innocence, thus, doesn't get you anything, because you haven't taken any steps towards your rehabilitation....
And myspace is so "heinous", as the summation implies, for going after people that impersonate other people, then, would it be wrong for me to impersonate you...on your bank site, to your employer...
You are simply a technocrat, i.e. a person who worships technology and which worship blinds him to the understanding that technology is incapable of solving many, many societal problems.
So be it, but any problem that cannot be solved because of an existing technology means that there is a market for a new technology.
You are obviously not familiar with the utterly wasteful and energy intensive nature of the Fischer-Tropsch synthesis.
Use nuclear power.
Bio-fuels are another red herring. Unless a vast scale commercial algae based systems are developed (at herculean expenditures, multi-decade effort and massive alteration of sea ecosystems) all the bio-fuel technologies must make a choice between agrarian use of land for fuel crops or for food crops.
Again, you take a simple all or nothing approach. Future fuels portfolio is going to be a mix. Biofuels plays a part of that mix. First off, at today's oil prices, switching to any alternative fuel mix is ultimately profitable and so its a no-brainer.
If this source dries up, even if we capture the maximum amount of sunlight available for conversion on land we would still be rather short by a factor of a few million.
That's actually factually incorrect. I think you can conservatively say that the average solar flux is about 500 watts per square meter. If you've got a roof that's 4 square meters, and a good conversion, with a bit of storage for peak moments, that's more than enough solar energy to run a house. The earth is actually pretty big... you know, its a planet!
Dude, you have next to no idea what is involved in laying down tracks. Hint: you need a continuously level ground of appropriate strength, bridges, tunnels etc. Even expanding an existing track from a single to a double (two way) layout is a massive proposition involving widening the underlying foundation, which usually takes many many years per track.
Dude, you have no idea how fast things move when there is a national impetus to do so. Levelling is not that hard in an era of GPS and laser levels. Railroads can build themselves out by transporting goods across existing lines to expansion areas, so you have none of the goofy weight problem you have when building roads for cars. I mean, when the USA wanted to build railroads, we did, and fairly quickly. If you wanted to get some real speed, you simplify eminent domain for governments, waive some environmental requirements, and boom, you can get really moving. If, as you say, we're facing "social collapse", then, how are a people facing social collapse going to let some rare frog stop the rapid construction of new infrastructure.
Stronger countries are better able to change themselves than weaker ones, always, and right now the USA is still in pretty good shape. We'll get through this change in fuels quite well, but I wouldn't want to be a frog trapped beneath the railroad.
Baloney (unless by "giant lie" you mean "a set of undisputed facts that I don't like").
No....all of your supposed facts are disputed, really more talking points you've been spoon-fed by your DNC masters.
When have I said anything about exculpating the Democratic party? You're the one who keeps bringing them up.
Well you see that's the whole point of your talking points, now isn't it. Dems can't very well go towards their Hanoi Jane base and say that they are against the war when, in fact, they voted for it in order to appeal to the center. So, the only way they can come off clean is to tell their suckers, I mean, donors, that they were lied to. That's what this is all about. In fact, Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D), actually designed this whole plan even back before the war vote took place.
Unless by "simple truth" you mean "racist rant buried in a glib generalization and topped off with a bad analogy" this too is baloney.
Actually, it's not baloney at all, and your Democratic buddies appeal to that in trying to end the war. That's why they say : "Arabs aren't capable of Democracy." Why is that? What's wrong with them. Sounds pretty racist to me.
The entire country demonstrably didn't want to go to war with Iraq, or anyone else. They wanted Osama Bin Laden captured and tried for his crimes.
This really illustrates just how out of touch you are. Americans didn't want a trial for Bin Laden. they wanted him DEAD. And, a bunch of arabs to go with. People were pissed off over 9/11. I know that many liberals, such as MoveOn, don't care when Americans are killed by state sponsored terror, but, most US citizens do care about that and were so fed up with decades of Arab terror against the USA that they were willing to just say, Saddam, Osama, really, they never even had to meet, because they are all arabs and it doesn't matter which ones we blasted.
The truth is, and you won't admit it, is that America is a religious country that saw, despite even Bush's feeble protests, that 9/11 was the beginning of a religious war, not a criminal prosecution as you would have us believe. Islam v Christianity, that's what you don't get. Bush exploited that to get us into Iraq to further his own neocon designs, and the Dems went along with it to get votes in case it worked.
Mark my words, if you think "Bush lied" sticks, because of your talking points, just wait and see what will happen to a hypothetical Pres Obama if goes anything less than ballistic in response to a terrorist attack on the USA. You'll hear - Obama let them go because he is a muslim charges coming out of the woodworks and those -will- stick.
The whole point of your entire argument is a giant lie, that's what I'm getting at. The entire reason for your trail of reasoning is to exculpate the Democratic Party from their support for the war.
The simple truth of the matter is, the entire country wanted to have a war with Iraq, for a million reasons, but, pretty much, people were sick of arabs in general and Saddam in particular. It's like, if there's a guy that's robbed twenty stores on a block, and then, he gets executed for killing someone, it's really not so bad that he gets executed for a crime he didn't commit because he was a bad guy anyway.
Reading this, the Democrats jumped onto the war bandwagon themselves, sold out their Hanoi Jane base and hopped on the Iraqi express. Yes, a few people out there said that "this would be like Vietnam....", but, they had said that Haiti, Iraq I, Panama and Kosovo would be like Vietnam and they were all wrong. For pretty much 20 years, the USA has had its way in interventions... so, why not go along with the war. If Bush -did- conquer Iraq and Afghanistan and put in a democracy in under a year, he goes down in history as not just one of the greatest Presidents ever, but one of the greatest leaders of any nation ever... when you look at territory gained, especially if successes in Afghanistan and Iraq translated into further invasions of Iran and Syria (on the drawing board at the time). So Democrats sold out and jumped on the Invasion of Iraq Express.
And, I'd be willing to bet, that, if Iraq began pumping a ton of oil, and it did lower oil prices, Democrats will, after having disowned the invasion, be reminding us that they were actually in favor of it....
That's not to say Bush is a saint and Dems aren't. For all we know, Bush may have even offered to tak e the Dem arrows in exchange for their war vote, preferring to roll the political dice and coming up well, not so good. And certainly, Republicans in congress, running so far away from the war, have not done themselves any favors by trying to put distance between themselves and Bush. Honestly, Republicans needed to stick with him even if his popularity did hit 15% ...
And Bush did screw up too, because he was so sure that it would be like Panama that he never thought through or even accepted the conseqences of it perhaps being something better.
Bush used the claim that our allies had "learned" about Sadam's attempts to purchase yellowcake in the state of the union address, even after he had been told that the intelligence community had debunked it. He also failed to mention that our allies had "learned" this non-fact from the Bush administration.
The intelligence community has been staggeringly wrong on a number of issues and Bush went with his gut. Saddam was an ass and getting rid of him removed the thorny problem of him re-arming once sanctions were lifted. Good call. And, if we lied to our "allies", then, so what. US European allies, except for the UK, are so worthless that they make the last 60 years of American support for the liberation of Europe to be a total wasted effort.
Cheney claimed that they "knew" Sadam had bio-weapon lans and "knew where they were"
They all claimed that we would be "greeted as liberators"
In the case of Kurdish Iraq, Americans WERE greeted as liberators. And, had we finished the job in 1991, and not subjected the Iraqis to a decade's stuff.
They claimed that the war would "pay for itself"
Yeah, and Democrats said that Medicare would only cost 10 billion dollars a year, and it does that now, a day. Shall we start shooting all the liberals who gave us that crockfest?
Remember "mission accomplished"?
THE MISSION WAS ACCOMPLISHED! The goal of the war was to replace the government of Iraq, prevent the new creation of WMD. Mission, accomplished. It is only because of the generosity and bold vision of Bush that the USA decided to stay in Iraq and try and rebuild that shattered nation. But there was no need to do that. We could have just let them have a civil war and leave!
Even the "he tried to kill my daddy claim" was a lie; there is no credible evidence that Sadam ever tried to kill Bush Sr
Uh, no. Bill Clinton actually broke up a plan by Saddam to try and whack Bush Sr on a trip to Kuwait.
They planted stories in the press ("the smoking gun that is a mushroom cloud", "able to strike in 45 minutes") through gullible reporters and then "responded" to the stories as if they were based in fact when they were nothing but talking points they themselves had planted.
And, Democrats don't.
They said that congress had seen "the same intelligence information we have" when in fact that was not the case; congress had been shown a carefully cheery picked version sculpted to make the case for war
Congress had every right to not vote for the war. You can say as much as you want, but at the end of the day, power mad Democrats wanted to be seen as tough on the war on terror and voted for it.
They claimed that Iraq was involved in 9/11
If I was in Bush's seat, I think it is reasonable to view any attempt to discredit the Atta meeting in Prague as a sort of lie to designed to protect America's enemies by paralyzing the country into action, - particularly if it was coming from the Europeans. You simply cannot trust European intelligence with regards to any American interest, so I think it was entirely reasonable to trust your own gut and think they were involved. Clearly, Saddam had the motive.
To claim that they didn't lie about anything regarding Iraq is either a sign of coolaid overdose, sock puppetry, or terminal cluelessness.
Since you are so big into honesty, when will your side admit that carbon caps are a feel good, do nothing answer to your imagined global warming crisis? I'm honestly looking forward to asking President Obama when gasoline will be $2/ gallon again, or when he is going to have a trial for a couple of suicide bombers hitting San Fransisco.
Fricking traitors.
Which would do nothing for the problem of occupation of Iraq. If unable to deploy IEDs the insurgents would adapt other methods, such as car bombs, sniper, RPG, mortar and rocket attacks (which is what Hamas and Hezbollah are up to as they are unable to plant IEDs on the Israeli side of the border in their war).
Yeah, and right now, the USA is deploying sonars to detect where snipers shot from, developing technology to intercept RPG and mortar and rockets, and yes, we will share that technology with our Israeli allies, and Hamas and Hizbollah can go crying back to their Iranian masters, just before we bomb them too.
How so? Here is an (extreme - but just to illustrate the point) example: food and water. Is the demand for food and water "elastic"? At some point the "free market" model breaks down and the former "buyer" will logically resort to any and all desperate means necessary to procure sustenance, violence included.
But oil isn't water. You can live without oil.
Incidentally, this is among reasons why medical care does not (and cannot) operate as "trade" and thus is not subject to the "market" model, but that is another discussion.
People do shop when they make medical decisions... more importantly, they do not shop enough. The reason that there is no pricing information is the fault of the medical establishment and a lawsuit industry that precludes rational courses of treatment.
There is a very great difference between the jump from "SUV" to "small car" versus "small car" to "no car". The first jump is essentially in the varying "comfort" zones.
First off, you can have a pretty small "small car". If you have a car with a Again, you severely underestimate the levels of dependence on oil in most manufacturing processes.
And you under estimate the ability of people to respond to shortages through the rapid adoption of technologies.
You want to keep painting doom and gloom for the USA and the west, you can go right ahead. But, for those of us that don't need prozac, but South Africa's SASOL had no problem supplying oil to their country during the time when they under very heavy sanctions for apartheid. Similarly, before that, the NAZI economy actually -increased- its production of quite a few items towards the end of the war and was able to also synthesize fuel until we bombed their plants. There's more than plenty of coal to do coal to liquids for the next 100 years, if we wanted to, and the only reason there's not more plants doing that now is that those startups (besides SASOL), that are capable of doing this sort of thing are focusing on biodiesel instead because diesel is actually in greater demand than gasoline.
A massive (and again vastly expensive and decades long) expansion of railways would be required to sustain even a portion of US econ
How can you say that a railroad expansion would be expensive or even vast when we have machines that lay the track? And seriously, how can you even possibly believe that a country that created and deployed hundreds of thousands of miles of fiber optic and coax cable in a decade to watch better TV and send emails is going to even have a problem building sufficient new technology cars, rails and whatever it takes to get its people to work and on time.
The USA will come through this little hiccup just fine, because Americans are just too damned good. All you people on the rest of the world betting on the USA going down in flames can throw your chips on the table now, bet everything you've got, because we Yankees are going to pick them up and school you folks!
Semper Fi!
Many analysts believe (and I agree with them) that the Western technological culture is hopelessly addicted to oil and that the growth demand is pretty much inflexible unless truly drastic changes are made to the Western (and by extension all other countries which adopted or are adopting this system such as Japan and China) life-style and technology. Consider this: every electronic device uses plastic as its chief (by volume) component. Nearly all food processing involves plastic in packaging.
Well, that's the supposed theory of "inelastic" demand, and in a free market society, it's just not right. Pretty much, people will switch to the cheapest thing, and can do it pretty quickly. Have a look at July car sales. Five years ago, you couldn't sell a small car in the USA, and now, the SUV is dead. These kinds of decisions are being made in every material. If plastic gets to be too expensive, people will switch to glass or steel or wood, all of which can be made with coal as an energy source and last I checked, there's plenty of coal. So what, as you say, if individual transportation becomes too expensive. Or, perhaps people will use coal steam cars. Or, coal to liquids might work, or, maybe just electric cars or maybe there will be no cars at all. In that case, in case you haven't looked a map, you'll be pleasantly surprised to find that nearly every American city is built on or near a rail stop. Sure, suburban people might move back to cities, maybe we will have to give up cars, maybe we won't, but either way, people will survive. I mean, you are talking about a country that survived a switch from an agrarian to an industrial economy, survived the onset of global economic competition. Americans are good at coping with change.
Going cold turkey on oil means death as far as Western technological civilization as we know it is
Not at all. A few hundred years ago, western technological civilization ran out of wood. Life became much less comfortable for a while but ultimately necessity proved to be the mother of invention, and the west invented the industrial revolution.
See above. All the Iraqi oil would do (assuming that it can be brought to market quickly enough...delay the inevitable...
Delay the inevitable is -good-. It gives us time to invest in other technologies. That's why I say, drill in ANWR, offshore, everywhere. Bring the prices down a bit and take that money and pump it into new technologies.
The imperial longevity is in reverse proportion to the amount of people involved, availability and speed of communication and transportation technologies and the cost of running the empire. That is why you will note that as we progress in history the average reign of an "empire" has shortened dramatically. The US empire is already showing all the signs of collapse, after mere few decades of openly imperial policies
Well, that's all pretty good propaganda if you want to make yourself feel good but consider this - the Roman achilles heel, economically, was grain to feed the city. They literally had to get grain from other places. They fought Carthage over Sicily, and won, and were later to take over a number of places with a hunger for food that makes our own oil addiction seem quaint. During the wars, Rome had its homeland invaded, its standing army utterly crushed, its cities looted, but eventually, after hanging in there for a long time , finally triumphed over there big rival and ran with free control of the med. sea for quite some time.
The imperial longevity is in reverse proportion to the amount of people involved, availability and speed of communication and transportation technologies and the cost of running the empire. That is why you will note that as we progress in history the average reign of an "empire" has shortened dramatically
Actually, no. There's no reason that empires must be automatically short, even today. You might say, too, that the longevity of empires has more to do with vast disparities in e