If you click the link, you see that it was indeed revised.
And I think their description was apt. TIS is indeed not that closely linked to the Eternal Champion cycle, except in some packaging, as that review says. I read most of all the other incarnation books (including Jerry Cornelius), and I agree with that description.
I'd like to see a variation on this experiment that doesn't plant in Earth dirt shipped to the Moon, but rather plants in Moon dust taken from the Moon, and compares to that grown in Earth dirt there. Further research might show that mulching with Moon dust could multiple the dirt stocks without shipping so much between gravity wells. If we could ship just seeds (and probably some water), Moon farming could be a lot more cost effective.
This craft reminds me of the early Michael Moorcock SF story The Ice Schooner:
Although part of the general repackaging of Moorcock's fantasy output around the Eternal Champion theme, The Ice Schooner is not really that closely linked to the other novels. Having a hero and a quest is not really enough; there are few novels in the genre by any author which would share these common elements.
The much revised novel is set in a future Ice Age, so severe that oceans of ice cover almost the entire surface of the Earth. On these frozen wastes sail great ship-like wind powered sledges, hunting the land whales evolved from the sea creatures of our own time. Konrad Arflane is captain of such a vessel fallen on hard times until he rescues a dying man out on the remote ice. He turns out to be the ruler of an important city, but more relevantly to the plot, he gives Arflane a quest, to find the fabled lost city of New York, a vision, in his daughter, and a ship, a great ice schooner, to captain.
Those publicly traded accounting reports are essential for investors, but are still summaries. What would need to work at an "open co-op" like this one, would be fuller, perhaps even complete, disclosure. Though some of that info is kept private (even in public companies) to protect from competition finding a weakness or a business secret advantage to copy. And this open co-op doesn't have many of the protections that a publicly traded corp has.
But indeed we have models in various places. This new "open company" isn't entirely alien. It's like most open source: its components have pedigrees from other projects. The new project picks the ones that work, and make them work together. Relying on best fitting the current environment and the efficiencies of openness rather than secrets and monopolies to compete.
It would have been interesting if the UAW had bought GM and/or Ford this year, because those corps owe that union more in healthcare benefits than those corps are valued at in the stock market. What would have been especially interesting would have been seeing those car corps run as co-ops, with the workers owning shares, voted through the union, and splitting the profits according to how their job is supposed to be paid by union collective bargaining agreements. It's interesting not just because of the co-op in what was once the absolute peak of US capitalism (especially Ford). But mainly because the union would then be the boss, with the union's own agreements setting the pay the union has to pay its members. A highly structured co-op.
And since this financial crisis is still just getting started, we just might see it happen.
Well, that points to an overall problem of the size of the number of committers to the project, like any other open project developing software. If this project can't keep the number of contributors down to a scale consistent with its needs, then the whole project will fail anyway, even before there's anything produced to sell.
Plenty (though a shrinking minority) of people are still denying that human activity causes climate change. There's plenty of those kinds of comments even in my subthread, the rest of this story's discussion, and lots of places people talk about the causes of climate change. Mainly some (losing) debate that the cause isn't humans (the Sun, unknown cycles, "god's wrath"). Not so much "which humans", though I'd expect some people insisting on their own privileges to pollute will blame the more recently developed countries, "because they're the ones who tipped the balance". And variations on those themes.
The guy doing this determines the operating expenses, including (I'd assume) their own salary. If it's really as open as they claim, all the accounting will be public, too. So anyone who wants to do some work can see how much the company is spending on those operating expenses, and the (ongoing) income statements. If they accept it as reasonable, they can do the work, or they can just not do the work.
This principle could work. It's like a cooperative company, "employee owned", but without employees owning shares in the corporation getting dividends of the profits (income - expenses), just a direct share. Eliminating the shareholding eliminates control, but it also makes coming and going as a "profitholder" much easier.
Of course the real problem is the "trust metric". It's a popularity rating, set by members of the group on anyone else who joins the group. Joining requires only contributing code. There's going to be a fair amount of (paid) work by group members reviewing the code to decide trust, but that's a necessary part of software quality anyway.
The real problem is for people who contribute code (or review, or other work) who aren't rewarded with trust metrics by others in the group, perhaps because of a bias by some against others because of the type of work. If some people contribute only code, and others contribute only review, that might lead to a "class war" where one group discounts the value of the other, regardless of the (only guessable) "real" value of each kind of work to the profits being divided up. If more people review than code, even if that's not necessary, and the reviwers all have a bias in rewarding each other's work more than they reward coders, an coders don't have a bigger bias against reviewers to compensate for their smaller numbers, then reviewers will get a higher rate of reward than coders. Which could prevent any coders from contributing. Or the sizes/biases could be reversed, and reviewers could get shorted enough that no one reviews.
I think this project goes too far all at once. If this system were familiar across our large Internet development population through its exercise within closed groups, with more permanent membership, perhaps assigned traditionally by a boss who hires, it's less likely to be torn apart by people who don't understand they're working against their own best interests. Then, once it's understood to be workable by people who understand their best interests, and not just an easy target for losers looking to game a system they merely clumsily destroy, maybe the transition from co-op to open co-op would work.
Does anyone know of any successful closed co-ops running like this one, but centrally hired, fired and assigned shares of the profits?
The splitting of these kinds of loops sounds like it's even more powerful a technique than I (fuzzily) recalled. And if the loops can be rezipped, so those three states with their different properties can be selected, then that kind of material could be really interesting. Especially if different areas can be un/zipped among the states.
What you want is a global cap on pollution, in which each polluter pays for a share on an equal basis. There's no way to enforce such a market on such a distributed, nonphysical "resource" as our capacity for pollution. That needs a government cap, which is the only way we know how to do such a thing like that.
Cap & trade isn't a tax. But it is compatible with a tax. A tax is also a way of using the government to enforce quotas and limits. Government taxation is a way to get money that's part of the cost of the pollution collected by people who will spend it minimizing mitigating the risks and damages from the pollution. Since government is the way we currently spend the money to protect from and clean up after damage caused by climate change, that is where we're starting.
And we are just starting. Gore's carbon offsets are a voluntary way to do what a mandatory system will require. He is showing by example how operating that way can still be economical, how such a system can work. If we just mandated it at the beginning, basic ignorance, fear and partisan bias would kill the change without any momentum or clear examples.
Gore does "trade". The US government will probably phase in "cap" to further encourage people to trade who otherwise wouldn't. If that doesn't establish a normal economy of these costs, we might also tax. That is how wise leaders manage the rollout of such a basic, widespread, and deeply opposed by obsolete powers new system.
What a load of malarkey. The overwhelming consensus of climate scientists is that humans have already caused serious damage to our climate, pushed it towards catastrophe, and continue pushing it more each day. Their consensus is the closest science can offer to certainty. But you don't know - because you don't want to know.
What I said is that the offsets aren't magic, which means they're not "smoke and mirrors". If you can decide that "offsets aren't magic" means that Gore's problem is "smoke and mirrors", you should just keep it to yourself, because you're malfunctioning. Dark Ages, blah blah blah.
You're an ignoramus. Learn basic facts and logic before talking like your sense of the world has any value to anyone else who is interested in reality.
Thanks, here's some more sense. Bush's "respect" for "states rights" saw him ignore Louisiana's request for allowing New Mexico's offered National Guard. The Posse Comitatus act protects states from a rogue governor colluding with a nearby state's invasion, requiring the Federal government to approve any accepted offer for "help" by other states sending their National Guard. Louisiana governor Blanco made the formal request the week before Katrina hit, as New Mexico governor Richardson had offered to send help. Katrina hit on Sunday, but the White House didn't even respond until the following Thursday, during which time New Orleans got whipped, then flooded, and lay drowning in the flood for several days. Though Bush didn't just "ignore" the request: he tried to force Blanco to give up control of the National Guard to Bush, by withholding permission until she agreed. Considering how many people were killed by Federal troops in New Orleans and around the Gulf Coast unnecessarily, Blanco's restraint was exactly what our system provided for when it gave the governors the power to refuse to let their guard be "nationalized".
But that's just one example, the most immediate. Everyone knows how badly Bush's FEMA failed New Orleans at every step, including to date - 3.5 years later. Most should know that Bush and his Republican Congress, including one of Louisiana's senators, defunded the Federal levees and the other emergency/relief systems everyone counted on, severely once they got the chance. Leaving Louisiana to drown, and then rot while the rest of the Gulf Coast got funded to clean up, was a Republican policy.
Texas was more "prepared" during Katrina because Bush's Republicans continued funding Texas' preparations, since Texas was a wholly owned Republican corruption operation. But I don't know how prepared Texas actually was for Katrina, since all we have is Texans' word for it - and the Republicans who ran the whole operation, their political headquarters in Texas.
BTW, New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin is a Republican. Louisiana elections are nonpartisan for in-state offices. Nagin personally donates as much to Republican campaigns as to Democratic ones, but his Democratic donations are to people directly connected to Louisiana or himself personally. He donated to get Bush elected - not exactly a Democratic move. And I knew that he was Republican (he had been CEO of the local Cox cable corp) when I voted for him in 2002, when I lived there. Maybe that makes us both "nonpartisan", but there's nothing "Democratic" about Nagin, or how much I hate him.
"Big government" help is exactly what's needed in the biggest hurricanes in history. It's what was needed when Katrina hit, and in maintaining defenses. It's what was needed when Republicans instead deregulated our financial system. It's what was needed to protect us from the 9/11/2001 planebombs. Bush and his Republicans proved that "shrinking government to drown in the bathtub" just drowns Americans along with it, literally in the case of Katrina.
This whole conversation is weird. Everyone knows how badly Republicans failed Louisiana in Katrina. Jindal's own story is one of a whole bunch of Republicans failing to do anything except bureaucracy, except for the lone Democrat: Sheriff Harry Lee (who I also hated), who actually cut the BS to get people rescued. Jindal's story is a lie he made up for TV, but the facts it's loosely based on are true, and tell of universal Republican failure and a Democrat's heroic effort.
An ideal situation would be people choosing officials from the Democratic Party and at least one other party in competition to provide boring government competence, even in "exciting" events like volcanoes and hurricanes. With Republicans filling half the duopoly, we're getting nothing but neverending catastrophe.
My post about buying one of these cars in the US was no "troll": it was factual and logical. If these trollmods disagree, they can do so. Instead, they anonymously try to hide the comment. Because it's correct, and that scares them.
There's nothing "ideological" about my post. It's purely practical. I'm posting to expose the dangerous lies and stupid preconceptions that Jindal and his party continue to push (all government work is communism and must be stopped) even as we are most in need of coming together to solve the epic problems Jindal's party is responsible for. It's against ideology, in factual, practical terms.
Whereas your "kill all ideologues, even those who really aren't" is the kind of ideological rant that would, if you applied it, find you killing yourself. Except you're merely an ideologue ranter, not one to practically apply what you say.
We need volcano monitoring. People who try to stop it must be stopped. People who band together with those people must be stopped. They're dangerous ideologues. That necessity is not "ideology", it's practical survival.
Well, your post was kinda flattering, if inaccurate. I thank you for the accurate flattery:).
I've been much less "partisan" since Republicans lost most of their power after holding way too much for way too long. I don't know how I look otherwise. FWIW, my "partisan" attitude is not so much a Democratic partisan, because I'm not a Democrat (I'm independent), as it is highly anti Republican, since that party has been such a damaging collection of bad people for so long, and we're so damaged by it.
In this case, you're going along with Jindal's Republican lie that $140M is spent by Democrats on volcano monitoring, when I pointed out the fact is that the monitoring gets only a (relatively small) fraction of that overall budget amount. And though Republicans did indeed spend some considerable money on volcano monitoring when they were the ones writing, passing and signing USGS budgets, I never complained - because I never saw evidence it was too much. In fact, if I'd seen evidence that it was too little, I probably would have complained. As I just did when Jindal attacked it, even if he has only lies and partisan posturing to offer, without power to screw up that budget (at the present time). Indeed, I could have pointed out the further Republican hypocrisy of Sarah Palin not only accepting the money Jindal badmouthed (but can't stop), but Palin's refusing to even comment on that dramatic divergence from the official Republican position on that budget, even as she continues to run for president. Because I'm talking about Jindal, disaster preparedness, and Republican refusal to learn from Katrina (or anything else), not the vaster and duller subject of mere Republican hypocrisy.
If you can show evidence that the current system (including the safety of USGS/contractor jobs in this Republican recession) "works fine" without the stimulus budget, I'd like to see it. All I can see is Jindal claiming he learned from his (imaginary, and self-defeating as a fable) Katrina experience that the government shouldn't fund monitoring for natural disasters. Katrina was predicted by government monitoring, too, but the full necessary system under Republican control and development didn't seem to "work fine". Except to Jindal, for whom it works fine as a (made up, self-defeating) story to tell on TV.
Nonsense. Gore's home is highly energy efficient. The energy he uses is produced by non/less polluting alternative sources. His large "home" includes offices for his wife, himself, space for staff and a lot of security.
Even at that scale, and even before he renovated years ago, Gore's house didn't use anywhere near "50 times" as much as a "normal" house.
You Republicans (er, "libertarians") will just lie and say anything to attack people who actually work to protect us in this country.
The Greenhouse pipeline of effects from causes is long enough (years) that any event depopulating the Earth enough to stop significant new human contributions would be just the beginning of many years of the climate returning to its recently mild and stable state. Sealevel rise alone, not to mention droughts, floods and storms, will probably displace hundreds of millions of refugees. Most of whom live in or near places already close to subsistence and close to the edge of war or other mass violence - or collapse of their civilization.
Our civilization is fragile, compared to the destruction that is likely if we don't reverse our Greenhouse pollution quite soon. If we wait 30 years, two human generations (especially in most coastal areas), we're probably going to be depopulated by several billion people, after at least that many are forced to flee to other areas and conflict with the people already there. Such changes are vastly more than what would destroy our civilization.
Why should you care at all how much energy Gore uses, if none (or little) of it causes Greenhouse pollution? Do you demand that we all live worse, even if we don't have to?
Gore is a leader because he leads. He took political risks - and real political damage - for years while he was ahead of public opinion. Now that the evidence is so overwhelming that even bad leaders like Bush admit the problem Gore has been working to solve while they've been working to cause it, Gore is widely recognized as that leader because he helped get the public to accept the science. Though the public is so hard to lead that even an example of a rich guy living well without causing the harm he's working to avert isn't good enough for some people.
So what? The offsets aren't some magic. If indeed Gore owns the offsets company (which I'll believe when I see proof), then that company has to buy them from somewhere that is actually reducing carbon emissions to sell to Gore.
I'm always impressed when some Republican (er, "libertarian") badmouths someone like Gore who is using economics to solve real physical problems because they might be making a profit or making some savings. It makes your ideology obviously not economics, but just vendettas.
Yes, you've nailed it exactly (though unfortunately there's more people than just the dwindling "right" that is stuck on the doomed path).
The debate over causes of climate change is worthwhile only as a means to the end of identifying what we can change here and now to avert disaster. We can't change the frequency and size of volcanic eruptions. But we can reverse the destruction of vegetation that naturally balances our atmosphere, but now synthetically unbalances us as we burn it instead of grow it. And even bigger and more changeable is the amount of ancient vegetation in fossil fuels that once stored Greenhouse gases, giving our atmosphere a stable, mild climate, that we now burn to "fire up" the Greenhouse.
The real answers don't come from finding someone to blame. They come from finding what we can change. And as hard as the beneficiaries (and irrational lovers/phobics) of petrofuels might make it to change, they're still easier than changing the volcanoes. And, as far as we can tell right now, probably sufficient. So it's worth identifying their contributions, then scaling them down.
If our climate change and energy debates revolved more around who can change instead of who to blame, we might get workable consensus much faster and more easily.
Because "stable" is relative. You probably notice the seasons changing, too. But we've been in a stable range for the past 12,000 years or so, neither ice age nor steamy jungle (or parched desert), which is unusually long. We're becoming unstable not from any natural increase in Greenhouse gases or other factors, but from the dramatic and recent increase in accumulating Greenhouse gases from human activity (a dramatic and recent increase in the human population has contributed). The human activity contribution has multiplied many times over, tipping the natural balance from the old stability towards some new global climate different from the old one.
There's nothing we can do about the natural contributions of Earth's own systems to the Greenhouse - except where we're increasing it by cutting trees, replacing them with livestock, helping heat the oceans to kill coral reefs, create dead zones instead of carbon-based life ecosystems and acidifying them to release more oceanic carbon into the air. The Earth's baseline Greenhouse gas cycles are stable enough for us to live in, as we evolved to do over thousands and millions of generations.
But the sudden extra dumping of Greenhouse pollution is pushing those cycles out of their groove, into a new groove that leaves the weather more violent and the seas swollen with melted ice. If we don't rein in our artificial contributions, even though they're small compared to the natural baseline, we're going to inherit a whirlwind that will probably destroy our civilization.
That's why Al Gore is warning us so urgently. And why Republican governors are dangerous sources of hot air.
When Republican governor of Louisiana Bobby Jindal took to TV immediately after President Obama's address to the Joint Session of Congress last month, he whined that the government funded volcano monitoring is "wasteful spending". Of course he was lying, since he said "$140M for volcano monitoring", when that money is for USGS "facilities and equipment, including stream gages, seismic and volcano monitoring systems and national map activities", all kinds of important stuff for running and protecting our country.
Then Jindal went into some kind of weird story about his standing for sanity during Hurricane Katrina (which he was lying about, too - and it was a story about the lone Democrat getting things done, surrounded by Republicans including Jindal doing nothing but flapping their lips). Reminding us what happens when the government doesn't monitor predictable local natural disasters that kill thousands and destroy cities.
This was the official Republican response. Maybe they just want to keep secret their main competition for spewing filthy hot air that kills Americans.
Slashdot Mirror
If you click the link, you see that it was indeed revised.
And I think their description was apt. TIS is indeed not that closely linked to the Eternal Champion cycle, except in some packaging, as that review says. I read most of all the other incarnation books (including Jerry Cornelius), and I agree with that description.
I'd like to see a variation on this experiment that doesn't plant in Earth dirt shipped to the Moon, but rather plants in Moon dust taken from the Moon, and compares to that grown in Earth dirt there. Further research might show that mulching with Moon dust could multiple the dirt stocks without shipping so much between gravity wells. If we could ship just seeds (and probably some water), Moon farming could be a lot more cost effective.
This craft reminds me of the early Michael Moorcock SF story The Ice Schooner:
Those publicly traded accounting reports are essential for investors, but are still summaries. What would need to work at an "open co-op" like this one, would be fuller, perhaps even complete, disclosure. Though some of that info is kept private (even in public companies) to protect from competition finding a weakness or a business secret advantage to copy. And this open co-op doesn't have many of the protections that a publicly traded corp has.
But indeed we have models in various places. This new "open company" isn't entirely alien. It's like most open source: its components have pedigrees from other projects. The new project picks the ones that work, and make them work together. Relying on best fitting the current environment and the efficiencies of openness rather than secrets and monopolies to compete.
It would have been interesting if the UAW had bought GM and/or Ford this year, because those corps owe that union more in healthcare benefits than those corps are valued at in the stock market. What would have been especially interesting would have been seeing those car corps run as co-ops, with the workers owning shares, voted through the union, and splitting the profits according to how their job is supposed to be paid by union collective bargaining agreements. It's interesting not just because of the co-op in what was once the absolute peak of US capitalism (especially Ford). But mainly because the union would then be the boss, with the union's own agreements setting the pay the union has to pay its members. A highly structured co-op.
And since this financial crisis is still just getting started, we just might see it happen.
Well, that points to an overall problem of the size of the number of committers to the project, like any other open project developing software. If this project can't keep the number of contributors down to a scale consistent with its needs, then the whole project will fail anyway, even before there's anything produced to sell.
Plenty (though a shrinking minority) of people are still denying that human activity causes climate change. There's plenty of those kinds of comments even in my subthread, the rest of this story's discussion, and lots of places people talk about the causes of climate change. Mainly some (losing) debate that the cause isn't humans (the Sun, unknown cycles, "god's wrath"). Not so much "which humans", though I'd expect some people insisting on their own privileges to pollute will blame the more recently developed countries, "because they're the ones who tipped the balance". And variations on those themes.
The guy doing this determines the operating expenses, including (I'd assume) their own salary. If it's really as open as they claim, all the accounting will be public, too. So anyone who wants to do some work can see how much the company is spending on those operating expenses, and the (ongoing) income statements. If they accept it as reasonable, they can do the work, or they can just not do the work.
This principle could work. It's like a cooperative company, "employee owned", but without employees owning shares in the corporation getting dividends of the profits (income - expenses), just a direct share. Eliminating the shareholding eliminates control, but it also makes coming and going as a "profitholder" much easier.
Of course the real problem is the "trust metric". It's a popularity rating, set by members of the group on anyone else who joins the group. Joining requires only contributing code. There's going to be a fair amount of (paid) work by group members reviewing the code to decide trust, but that's a necessary part of software quality anyway.
The real problem is for people who contribute code (or review, or other work) who aren't rewarded with trust metrics by others in the group, perhaps because of a bias by some against others because of the type of work. If some people contribute only code, and others contribute only review, that might lead to a "class war" where one group discounts the value of the other, regardless of the (only guessable) "real" value of each kind of work to the profits being divided up. If more people review than code, even if that's not necessary, and the reviwers all have a bias in rewarding each other's work more than they reward coders, an coders don't have a bigger bias against reviewers to compensate for their smaller numbers, then reviewers will get a higher rate of reward than coders. Which could prevent any coders from contributing. Or the sizes/biases could be reversed, and reviewers could get shorted enough that no one reviews.
I think this project goes too far all at once. If this system were familiar across our large Internet development population through its exercise within closed groups, with more permanent membership, perhaps assigned traditionally by a boss who hires, it's less likely to be torn apart by people who don't understand they're working against their own best interests. Then, once it's understood to be workable by people who understand their best interests, and not just an easy target for losers looking to game a system they merely clumsily destroy, maybe the transition from co-op to open co-op would work.
Does anyone know of any successful closed co-ops running like this one, but centrally hired, fired and assigned shares of the profits?
OK, so what you mean is "No! No!... Yes!" :)
The splitting of these kinds of loops sounds like it's even more powerful a technique than I (fuzzily) recalled. And if the loops can be rezipped, so those three states with their different properties can be selected, then that kind of material could be really interesting. Especially if different areas can be un/zipped among the states.
What you want is a global cap on pollution, in which each polluter pays for a share on an equal basis. There's no way to enforce such a market on such a distributed, nonphysical "resource" as our capacity for pollution. That needs a government cap, which is the only way we know how to do such a thing like that.
Cap & trade isn't a tax. But it is compatible with a tax. A tax is also a way of using the government to enforce quotas and limits. Government taxation is a way to get money that's part of the cost of the pollution collected by people who will spend it minimizing mitigating the risks and damages from the pollution. Since government is the way we currently spend the money to protect from and clean up after damage caused by climate change, that is where we're starting.
And we are just starting. Gore's carbon offsets are a voluntary way to do what a mandatory system will require. He is showing by example how operating that way can still be economical, how such a system can work. If we just mandated it at the beginning, basic ignorance, fear and partisan bias would kill the change without any momentum or clear examples.
Gore does "trade". The US government will probably phase in "cap" to further encourage people to trade who otherwise wouldn't. If that doesn't establish a normal economy of these costs, we might also tax. That is how wise leaders manage the rollout of such a basic, widespread, and deeply opposed by obsolete powers new system.
What a load of malarkey. The overwhelming consensus of climate scientists is that humans have already caused serious damage to our climate, pushed it towards catastrophe, and continue pushing it more each day. Their consensus is the closest science can offer to certainty. But you don't know - because you don't want to know.
What I said is that the offsets aren't magic, which means they're not "smoke and mirrors". If you can decide that "offsets aren't magic" means that Gore's problem is "smoke and mirrors", you should just keep it to yourself, because you're malfunctioning. Dark Ages, blah blah blah.
You're an ignoramus. Learn basic facts and logic before talking like your sense of the world has any value to anyone else who is interested in reality.
Obviously because climatologists control the weather. I fear their power, so I bow to their lies.
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That comment explaining how climate change threatens our civilization isn't "flamebait". That mod is just one of the Greenhouse denier trollmods.
Thanks, here's some more sense. Bush's "respect" for "states rights" saw him ignore Louisiana's request for allowing New Mexico's offered National Guard. The Posse Comitatus act protects states from a rogue governor colluding with a nearby state's invasion, requiring the Federal government to approve any accepted offer for "help" by other states sending their National Guard. Louisiana governor Blanco made the formal request the week before Katrina hit, as New Mexico governor Richardson had offered to send help. Katrina hit on Sunday, but the White House didn't even respond until the following Thursday, during which time New Orleans got whipped, then flooded, and lay drowning in the flood for several days. Though Bush didn't just "ignore" the request: he tried to force Blanco to give up control of the National Guard to Bush, by withholding permission until she agreed. Considering how many people were killed by Federal troops in New Orleans and around the Gulf Coast unnecessarily, Blanco's restraint was exactly what our system provided for when it gave the governors the power to refuse to let their guard be "nationalized".
But that's just one example, the most immediate. Everyone knows how badly Bush's FEMA failed New Orleans at every step, including to date - 3.5 years later. Most should know that Bush and his Republican Congress, including one of Louisiana's senators, defunded the Federal levees and the other emergency/relief systems everyone counted on, severely once they got the chance. Leaving Louisiana to drown, and then rot while the rest of the Gulf Coast got funded to clean up, was a Republican policy.
Texas was more "prepared" during Katrina because Bush's Republicans continued funding Texas' preparations, since Texas was a wholly owned Republican corruption operation. But I don't know how prepared Texas actually was for Katrina, since all we have is Texans' word for it - and the Republicans who ran the whole operation, their political headquarters in Texas.
BTW, New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin is a Republican. Louisiana elections are nonpartisan for in-state offices. Nagin personally donates as much to Republican campaigns as to Democratic ones, but his Democratic donations are to people directly connected to Louisiana or himself personally. He donated to get Bush elected - not exactly a Democratic move. And I knew that he was Republican (he had been CEO of the local Cox cable corp) when I voted for him in 2002, when I lived there. Maybe that makes us both "nonpartisan", but there's nothing "Democratic" about Nagin, or how much I hate him.
"Big government" help is exactly what's needed in the biggest hurricanes in history. It's what was needed when Katrina hit, and in maintaining defenses. It's what was needed when Republicans instead deregulated our financial system. It's what was needed to protect us from the 9/11/2001 planebombs. Bush and his Republicans proved that "shrinking government to drown in the bathtub" just drowns Americans along with it, literally in the case of Katrina.
This whole conversation is weird. Everyone knows how badly Republicans failed Louisiana in Katrina. Jindal's own story is one of a whole bunch of Republicans failing to do anything except bureaucracy, except for the lone Democrat: Sheriff Harry Lee (who I also hated), who actually cut the BS to get people rescued. Jindal's story is a lie he made up for TV, but the facts it's loosely based on are true, and tell of universal Republican failure and a Democrat's heroic effort.
An ideal situation would be people choosing officials from the Democratic Party and at least one other party in competition to provide boring government competence, even in "exciting" events like volcanoes and hurricanes. With Republicans filling half the duopoly, we're getting nothing but neverending catastrophe.
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My post about buying one of these cars in the US was no "troll": it was factual and logical. If these trollmods disagree, they can do so. Instead, they anonymously try to hide the comment. Because it's correct, and that scares them.
There's nothing "ideological" about my post. It's purely practical. I'm posting to expose the dangerous lies and stupid preconceptions that Jindal and his party continue to push (all government work is communism and must be stopped) even as we are most in need of coming together to solve the epic problems Jindal's party is responsible for. It's against ideology, in factual, practical terms.
Whereas your "kill all ideologues, even those who really aren't" is the kind of ideological rant that would, if you applied it, find you killing yourself. Except you're merely an ideologue ranter, not one to practically apply what you say.
We need volcano monitoring. People who try to stop it must be stopped. People who band together with those people must be stopped. They're dangerous ideologues. That necessity is not "ideology", it's practical survival.
Well, your post was kinda flattering, if inaccurate. I thank you for the accurate flattery :).
I've been much less "partisan" since Republicans lost most of their power after holding way too much for way too long. I don't know how I look otherwise. FWIW, my "partisan" attitude is not so much a Democratic partisan, because I'm not a Democrat (I'm independent), as it is highly anti Republican, since that party has been such a damaging collection of bad people for so long, and we're so damaged by it.
In this case, you're going along with Jindal's Republican lie that $140M is spent by Democrats on volcano monitoring, when I pointed out the fact is that the monitoring gets only a (relatively small) fraction of that overall budget amount. And though Republicans did indeed spend some considerable money on volcano monitoring when they were the ones writing, passing and signing USGS budgets, I never complained - because I never saw evidence it was too much. In fact, if I'd seen evidence that it was too little, I probably would have complained. As I just did when Jindal attacked it, even if he has only lies and partisan posturing to offer, without power to screw up that budget (at the present time). Indeed, I could have pointed out the further Republican hypocrisy of Sarah Palin not only accepting the money Jindal badmouthed (but can't stop), but Palin's refusing to even comment on that dramatic divergence from the official Republican position on that budget, even as she continues to run for president. Because I'm talking about Jindal, disaster preparedness, and Republican refusal to learn from Katrina (or anything else), not the vaster and duller subject of mere Republican hypocrisy.
If you can show evidence that the current system (including the safety of USGS/contractor jobs in this Republican recession) "works fine" without the stimulus budget, I'd like to see it. All I can see is Jindal claiming he learned from his (imaginary, and self-defeating as a fable) Katrina experience that the government shouldn't fund monitoring for natural disasters. Katrina was predicted by government monitoring, too, but the full necessary system under Republican control and development didn't seem to "work fine". Except to Jindal, for whom it works fine as a (made up, self-defeating) story to tell on TV.
Nonsense. Gore's home is highly energy efficient. The energy he uses is produced by non/less polluting alternative sources. His large "home" includes offices for his wife, himself, space for staff and a lot of security.
Even at that scale, and even before he renovated years ago, Gore's house didn't use anywhere near "50 times" as much as a "normal" house.
You Republicans (er, "libertarians") will just lie and say anything to attack people who actually work to protect us in this country.
The Greenhouse pipeline of effects from causes is long enough (years) that any event depopulating the Earth enough to stop significant new human contributions would be just the beginning of many years of the climate returning to its recently mild and stable state. Sealevel rise alone, not to mention droughts, floods and storms, will probably displace hundreds of millions of refugees. Most of whom live in or near places already close to subsistence and close to the edge of war or other mass violence - or collapse of their civilization.
Our civilization is fragile, compared to the destruction that is likely if we don't reverse our Greenhouse pollution quite soon. If we wait 30 years, two human generations (especially in most coastal areas), we're probably going to be depopulated by several billion people, after at least that many are forced to flee to other areas and conflict with the people already there. Such changes are vastly more than what would destroy our civilization.
Why should you care at all how much energy Gore uses, if none (or little) of it causes Greenhouse pollution? Do you demand that we all live worse, even if we don't have to?
Gore is a leader because he leads. He took political risks - and real political damage - for years while he was ahead of public opinion. Now that the evidence is so overwhelming that even bad leaders like Bush admit the problem Gore has been working to solve while they've been working to cause it, Gore is widely recognized as that leader because he helped get the public to accept the science. Though the public is so hard to lead that even an example of a rich guy living well without causing the harm he's working to avert isn't good enough for some people.
So what? The offsets aren't some magic. If indeed Gore owns the offsets company (which I'll believe when I see proof), then that company has to buy them from somewhere that is actually reducing carbon emissions to sell to Gore.
I'm always impressed when some Republican (er, "libertarian") badmouths someone like Gore who is using economics to solve real physical problems because they might be making a profit or making some savings. It makes your ideology obviously not economics, but just vendettas.
Yes, you've nailed it exactly (though unfortunately there's more people than just the dwindling "right" that is stuck on the doomed path).
The debate over causes of climate change is worthwhile only as a means to the end of identifying what we can change here and now to avert disaster. We can't change the frequency and size of volcanic eruptions. But we can reverse the destruction of vegetation that naturally balances our atmosphere, but now synthetically unbalances us as we burn it instead of grow it. And even bigger and more changeable is the amount of ancient vegetation in fossil fuels that once stored Greenhouse gases, giving our atmosphere a stable, mild climate, that we now burn to "fire up" the Greenhouse.
The real answers don't come from finding someone to blame. They come from finding what we can change. And as hard as the beneficiaries (and irrational lovers/phobics) of petrofuels might make it to change, they're still easier than changing the volcanoes. And, as far as we can tell right now, probably sufficient. So it's worth identifying their contributions, then scaling them down.
If our climate change and energy debates revolved more around who can change instead of who to blame, we might get workable consensus much faster and more easily.
Because "stable" is relative. You probably notice the seasons changing, too. But we've been in a stable range for the past 12,000 years or so, neither ice age nor steamy jungle (or parched desert), which is unusually long. We're becoming unstable not from any natural increase in Greenhouse gases or other factors, but from the dramatic and recent increase in accumulating Greenhouse gases from human activity (a dramatic and recent increase in the human population has contributed). The human activity contribution has multiplied many times over, tipping the natural balance from the old stability towards some new global climate different from the old one.
There's nothing we can do about the natural contributions of Earth's own systems to the Greenhouse - except where we're increasing it by cutting trees, replacing them with livestock, helping heat the oceans to kill coral reefs, create dead zones instead of carbon-based life ecosystems and acidifying them to release more oceanic carbon into the air. The Earth's baseline Greenhouse gas cycles are stable enough for us to live in, as we evolved to do over thousands and millions of generations.
But the sudden extra dumping of Greenhouse pollution is pushing those cycles out of their groove, into a new groove that leaves the weather more violent and the seas swollen with melted ice. If we don't rein in our artificial contributions, even though they're small compared to the natural baseline, we're going to inherit a whirlwind that will probably destroy our civilization.
That's why Al Gore is warning us so urgently. And why Republican governors are dangerous sources of hot air.
When Republican governor of Louisiana Bobby Jindal took to TV immediately after President Obama's address to the Joint Session of Congress last month, he whined that the government funded volcano monitoring is "wasteful spending". Of course he was lying, since he said "$140M for volcano monitoring", when that money is for USGS "facilities and equipment, including stream gages, seismic and volcano monitoring systems and national map activities", all kinds of important stuff for running and protecting our country.
Then Jindal went into some kind of weird story about his standing for sanity during Hurricane Katrina (which he was lying about, too - and it was a story about the lone Democrat getting things done, surrounded by Republicans including Jindal doing nothing but flapping their lips). Reminding us what happens when the government doesn't monitor predictable local natural disasters that kill thousands and destroy cities.
This was the official Republican response. Maybe they just want to keep secret their main competition for spewing filthy hot air that kills Americans.