I'd say that the Portuguese invading, capturing a fort in Hong Kong and using it to protect Portuguese trading colonies from Chinese resistance counts as "fucking with China", even if China did eventually kick the Portuguese out. And that happened about 500 years ago.
I'd also say that popes sending missionaries to convert thousands of Mongols and Chinese during the Khanates was "fucking with China", which went on from the 1300s onwards.
There's of course a lot more to the history. But representing it as "Westerners who fuck with China will get what their predecessors elsewhere got, which is "played by smarter people":" isn't just oversimplification - it eliminates the long history of Westerners fucking with China without getting "played by smarter people". Likewise the Kipling poem is a quaint relic of the Victorian culture of pretending that the foreigners are getting the better of the English empire that is exploiting them, often to death.
In 1410 the West was at the end of the Middle Ages, which ended around 1500, the start of "modern history". The West was heavily fucking with SW Asia through the Crusades. But Marco Polo had already been to China in 1261, and through the 1300s popes sent missionaries, with success in converting Mongols but expulsion (and probably worse) when the Chinese repelled the Mongols.
People with inferior technology and economics fuck with other countries all the time. The Qaeda has been fucking with the US and other Western countries despite that severe inferiority.
The West has been fucking with China for 600 years. If I were saying "ruling China for 600 years", or even "fucking over", you might have an argument.
No, you are arguing a bunch of straw men that I did not state. I said the West had been fucking with China for that time, which you attempted to deny. If Portugal hadn't been fucking with China in the 1500s, China wouldn't have kicked them out after a substantial time.
I didn't say that China was defenseless, or inferior, or that today's China doesn't have blame for its current problems. Indeed I said that it does.
I did not say that China has been totally fucked over by only the West for these centuries. Indeed I noted that Japan's invasion was part of the fucking, though that invasion wasn't exclusive of the West fucking over China in that episode. I'd get into how the US cutting off Japan after its attack of China was no defense of China but more a provocation to US war with Japan, but you're just preaching from your own fallacies, so I won't bother.
You are the one setting up claims of blaming the West for everything. Yours is the childish, preposterous game.
No, you're editing the facts. The Portuguese had already taken over a fort in Hong Kong to defend colonies supporting their trade shortly after they arrived in 1513. All that is "fucking with China". The Opium War represents a peak of fuckery, not the beginning. The West didn't stop fucking with China when Japan invaded in the 1930s - leaving China twisting in the wind was a big part of the fuckery. And though the Western fuckery since the Communist government hasn't been forced, that's not all to fuckery: the pollution and labor exploitation of China and its people is largely Western fuckery, without which China's native masters wouldn't have the grist for the fuckery mill. There have been plenty of other fuckers of China other than Western, including thousands of years of Chinese aristocracy of one ideology or another. But that doesn't discount the half-millennium of Western fucking.
Chinese Communism is a kind of socialism, that has some extremes of capitalism along with some extremes of capitalism.
should say
Chinese Communism is a kind of socialism, that has some extremes of capitalism along with some extremes of socialism.
But close enough I suppose.
BTW, while Paul is right to hate the current corporatist system, he's wrong where he says about the current system that Michael Moore hates "It has nothing to do with capitalism." It has everything to do with capitalism, as I said. It's capitalism gone too far: without regulation to protect the people from it (and it from itself).
Ron Paul is the most reliable voter (Appendix One, pg. 37) against any regulation that puts Greenhouse pollution costs on the real books, so economics can govern it properly. Paul is also a theocrat. He's a corporate anarchist: a "libertarian" who believes the government has jurisdiction only over the army and the police - and the police don't have jurisdiction over corporations (only the market has power there). Ron Paul is nuts. But even crazy people can tell that corporatism is killing us.
Yes, that's part of the corruption - not just any US corps get that kind of government sponsorship. Just the ones in a crony relationship. But in China, the crony relationship isn't just bribery/graft. It's an industrial policy designed to improve the domestic industry and the economy it supports. In the US, those results are incidental at best.
Spain was a fascist state until the late 1970s, as was Argentina for years until that same time. Chile was fascist around that time. El Salvador was fascist through the 1980s.
You're distinguishing between "capitalism we want" and "capitalism we don't want" (corporatism). Corporatism is capitalism, it's just a kind of capitalism: an extreme one. Just as Chinese Communism is a kind of socialism, that has some extremes of capitalism along with some extremes of capitalism. But capitalism is simply the assignment of the highest value to capital (property), typically at the expense of devaluing either or both of labor and whatever's left that's not property (eg. the environment, ethics, capital in the public domain). Corporatism is indeed an extreme development of capitalism, though it's not very different from protocapitalist systems like feudalism.
You're right about the benefits to the US having a rival that makes the US recognize some limits. But you ignore the problems that come from the rival being a country like China, which is a mafia state. Especially when China gets its way instead of the US getting its way. While the US can be pretty bad, China can be much worse.
You also somehow ignore that Westerners have been fucking with China for at least 600 years, which until the last few decades effectively set China back about 600 years. And even China's rise has been through Westerners fucking with China, which has left China a polluted, exploited wasteland atop which some rich and powerful Chinese people hold total power in partnership with the Westerners who moved their manufacturing and banking there.
When Kipling wrote the lines you quote, the West was at the peak of fucking with China. There are far more Easterners buried wherever Westerners hustled, or invaded, the East. Don't be so complacent about the harmlessness of either China or the West.
It is more than just savvy business wheeling and dealing, since it's the Chinese government wheeling and dealing. Which means it's a monopoly: only the government agency can negotiate for that business inside China. And only the specific Chinese corps the government picks can get the business. Those picked corps are picked not necessarily for the best interests of China, but rather for whatever is in the best interest of the government officials with the power to pick them. Which might or might not be the best interests of China. That's Communism.
But it's also industrial policy, which is indeed savvy business wheeling and dealing. The US doesn't have anything like that, except for the corruption part where some industries have orgs that lobby our government to do business with foreign governments that require their government to mediate such international trade, or where the US government does occasionally require our government to play that role in foreign trade, where the orgs use some method other than competitive bids/RFPs to pick which members get the business. The US could have an industrial policy as effective in strategy as China's extreme one, but without requiring the government to actually conduct the negotiations. Just review the completed deals to ensure they comply with the policy, perhaps just random samples plus any over a large value threshold (which would pay in taxes enough to fund the review).
Instead, the US abandons industrial policy, and therefore industrial strategy. And watches China ascend at our expense. Though the top US capitalists have already invested in China's industries, so China's gain is their gain, while they've divested from US liabilities, so our expense is not theirs.
You're conflating "accurate" with "precise". Besides, can you show me the actual precision of the tree rings data vs that of the thermometer data? If I were even less educated in climatology, I wouldn't believe that tree rings could be used as temperature sensor records at all. Evidently the scientists more educated in climatology are satisfied with using them that way.
The CO2 concentration from burning petrofuels (and other controllable GHG sources, like cement) is not in a simply proportional relationship to temperature. The relationship is complex, but there are thresholds that, when passed, produce major new changes in effect even with only continuing small changes in concentration.
The results of the climate changing as rapidly as we now expect are not just "inconveniences". Most immediately, the majority of humans who live at seashores are also the least capable of moving elsewhere without causing damage. We're talking about hundreds of millions of refugees who can't offer anything but a total survival burden wherever they go to. Largely concentrated in countries that are already very close to (or already embroiled in) war over resources. Climate change disruption to civilization will probably push over the edge many conflicts any of which could escalate to war or collapse of trade that will multiply the devastation. And motivate many more people to grab what they can in the shortest term, a death spiral that can even lead to extinction. We're still able to nuke ourselves to extinction over a local conflict; more parties with that power join the club all the time; WMD other than nukes proliferate even more - and it doesn't take more than just refusal to cooperate for one region's suicide to take down the rest of us.
Alarmism is always wrong, and accepting the high probability of climate change before acting to mitigate it is not alarmism. The mitigations have all kinds of other benefits to us, including economic recovery. Just because some deniers - who are trying to alarm people into ignoring the threat and necessary counteraction - call the messengers "alarmist" doesn't mean they are. It means that Fox News is the heart of modern American culture.
Ray Nagin is a Republican, and yours is a straw man.
If we had to depend on Al Gore, who Americans chose to be president instead of Bush, we would have had a FEMA capable of evacuating a coastal city that wasn't where his brother was the governor.
But none of these people are indispensable. Louisiana's levee boards were loaded with people who refused to believe the evidence that the longer term held the threat of catastrophe, instead insisting on wasting the preparation time on greedy little schemes. Just as climate change deniers are insisting on the large scale, even after Katrina demonstrated the folly of doing so.
Of course we need our freedom. I need my freedom to live on my property without it being inundated by more severe weather, or be invaded by gangs surviving after a collapse. The freedom to pollute is much less necessary.
Because the change is rapid, and will likely cause very severe conditions within the foreseeable future. The collapse of our civilization during our grandchildren's lifetime, and possibly damage we will see ourselves. Especially because we can avert that damage by changing our industrial and consumer behavior to properly account for the pollution costs before they're fully manifest (but when it'll be too late to change). The history of climate change is more evidence that the climate can be changed, and the recent history of the present climate change shows that we are changing it differently than the way it was changing before.
We are humans. We don't handle nature by simply adapting when we can do something about it to protect ourselves better. I don't want my great grandchildren forced to hunt rats and hide from Mad Max if it costs me an upgrade from the coal plant giving my state cancer in favor of a geothermal plant that will give America competitive products to sell.
I read that tiny code snippet, too. It is explicitly a "fudge factor" - the comment is what says it is so. But the "fudge" is just calibrating the tree data to temperature by using actual thermometer measurements, so tree data can be used where there are no thermometer measurements but there are trees. That is "artificial" because the science doesn't have a mathematical model for the mechanism of the divergence. But it does have the measured model. Which is what makes it "very artificial". But not arbitrary, and certainly not reverse engineered to support a preconceived projection future data.
ESR pointed it out on his blog, but he says he had heard about it somewhere else, then grepped for the comment. So he had no scientific context, or any other, for interpreting that code and its comment. And when the scientific context was explained, he didn't change his understanding. Which is not scientific. It's gossip.
When dilettantes insist on gossip instead of the explanations of scientists, in the summary and in specific issues like the divergence correction, that's denial. Cry out loud if that's your reaction. Though I am emotional about the conceited insistence of some people on denying a major threat they're rejecting for psychologically defective reasons rather than intellectual ones, it's the facts and logic that make us disagree. Your being flip about something that, especially if you're correct, should come with some emotions for you, doesn't make me respect your conclusion any more.
No, I'm alarmed by actual damage done by Bush but denied by you Republicans. You're alarmed by imaginary scandals cooked up by you Republicans.
The difference is that I'm alarmed by facts, but you're alarmed by Republicans telling you non-Republicans are alarmists. You're buried in layers of nightmare.
Right in that discussion posters point out that the "ARTIFICAL" data that's supposedly the fraud is just the correction to the divergence of "trees as proxy thermometers" data from actual, reliable thermometers that is necessary to use trees as more reliable proxy thermometers.
What you are seeing is esr as a proxy for every geek dilettante in climate science, "discovering" the tools like Columbus discovered America. And really you're seeing the divergence of such a proxy from actual climate scientists. Except when actual climate scientists use such tools, the result is greater accuracy, not merely confirming their preconception of trees despite the forest.
The whole aim of climate change denial is to keep the populace consuming and polluting by alarming it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them informed by science. Or, to be more fair to Mencken, the alarmism is anti-science to keep oil and coal corps and their cronies as filthy rich as always.
Especially "expansion of government power" alarmists who interfere with our organized collective action ("government") to deal with the threat of climate change.
Alarmists who voted for Bush twice as he actually expanded government power beyond any reasonable limit - while failing to protect us from climate change.
Then in a few years when our surprise extension runs out, the Greenhouse will be nice and thick for the return to the typical solar cycle, frying us, too late to ever fix or minimize.
Any excuse to ignore the threat should be taken - damn the consequences just a little later.
Is this really the end of processing Kodachrome, or just the end of that particular kind of machine? Is there another way to develop and print Kodachrome?
I expect that for quite some time after the "deadline" people will come up with undeveloped rolls of pictures they want to see. Is there really no other way, however exotic? Looks like maybe not.
Do you see the difference between saying "no" before the act and saying "stop" during the act? This is why there are degrees of different crimes. Is using your tongue during a kiss, that's rejected by the person you're kissing, "rape"?
FWIW, Assange isn't accused of not stopping during the act. He's accused of using a condom with a hole in it, and further accused of deliberately making that hole. There is no evidence, AFAIK, of the accusations. Which doesn't mean they're false - in this case, though there are plenty of cases in which such accusations are false. Everyone has a right to require proof of accusations before they're considered true. And to held responsible for an actual act.
Note that I am not dismissing Assange's responsibility if he knowingly used a defective condom, and if he deliberately made the defect. Consent contingent on a standard quality condom can be reasonably inferred as part of a contingency on using a condom, and reasonably retracted after the fact if the condom is found to be less than standard quality, and Assange would be liable if he broke it and knowingly used it despite the contingency. But increasing the probability of pregnancy or infection is not the same as forced intercourse. Assange's liability might even be higher for increasing the risk of the sex than if he'd forced sex but with a working condom. But they are certainly distinct.
And so disputing the semantic difference of "rape" accusations from what actually occurred is legitimate. Especially considering the circumstances of Assange's notoriety, which a reasonable person would expect are designed to accuse him of a discrediting crime like "rape" in public, which creates images of forced sex. Which makes the distinction between forced sex and less safe sex important.
The city hasn't ratified their behavior, only their inspiration. The sabotage and the leniency towards it is a measure of the popularity of the saboteurs' cause.
The direct action here is the ban, which gets the goods. After years of SUV makers bribing governments around the world with their own direct action for loopholes and blind eyes favoring them despite the consequences.
SUVs are trucks. They get truck tax breaks, truck emissions loopholes, and they're the big, powerful cars we call trucks. But somehow they do not require the truck license to drive them, which requires taking a different test for handling bigger, more powerful cars in some trickier maneuvers.
If all those soccer moms, yuppies and other people driving a car too big for them had to get a truck license instead of the drivers license they already got in high school, most of them would not. And there would be a whole lot less SUVs driving around. And most of their drivers, when they cut us off, would at least have the skills to do so more safely.
Such a simple change: require the truck license to drive the truck. Saving lives and sanity, not to mention fuel supplies.
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I'd say that the Portuguese invading, capturing a fort in Hong Kong and using it to protect Portuguese trading colonies from Chinese resistance counts as "fucking with China", even if China did eventually kick the Portuguese out. And that happened about 500 years ago.
I'd also say that popes sending missionaries to convert thousands of Mongols and Chinese during the Khanates was "fucking with China", which went on from the 1300s onwards.
There's of course a lot more to the history. But representing it as "Westerners who fuck with China will get what their predecessors elsewhere got, which is "played by smarter people":" isn't just oversimplification - it eliminates the long history of Westerners fucking with China without getting "played by smarter people". Likewise the Kipling poem is a quaint relic of the Victorian culture of pretending that the foreigners are getting the better of the English empire that is exploiting them, often to death.
In 1410 the West was at the end of the Middle Ages, which ended around 1500, the start of "modern history". The West was heavily fucking with SW Asia through the Crusades. But Marco Polo had already been to China in 1261, and through the 1300s popes sent missionaries, with success in converting Mongols but expulsion (and probably worse) when the Chinese repelled the Mongols.
People with inferior technology and economics fuck with other countries all the time. The Qaeda has been fucking with the US and other Western countries despite that severe inferiority.
The West has been fucking with China for 600 years. If I were saying "ruling China for 600 years", or even "fucking over", you might have an argument.
No, you are arguing a bunch of straw men that I did not state. I said the West had been fucking with China for that time, which you attempted to deny. If Portugal hadn't been fucking with China in the 1500s, China wouldn't have kicked them out after a substantial time.
I didn't say that China was defenseless, or inferior, or that today's China doesn't have blame for its current problems. Indeed I said that it does.
I did not say that China has been totally fucked over by only the West for these centuries. Indeed I noted that Japan's invasion was part of the fucking, though that invasion wasn't exclusive of the West fucking over China in that episode. I'd get into how the US cutting off Japan after its attack of China was no defense of China but more a provocation to US war with Japan, but you're just preaching from your own fallacies, so I won't bother.
You are the one setting up claims of blaming the West for everything. Yours is the childish, preposterous game.
Goodbye.
No, you're editing the facts. The Portuguese had already taken over a fort in Hong Kong to defend colonies supporting their trade shortly after they arrived in 1513. All that is "fucking with China". The Opium War represents a peak of fuckery, not the beginning. The West didn't stop fucking with China when Japan invaded in the 1930s - leaving China twisting in the wind was a big part of the fuckery. And though the Western fuckery since the Communist government hasn't been forced, that's not all to fuckery: the pollution and labor exploitation of China and its people is largely Western fuckery, without which China's native masters wouldn't have the grist for the fuckery mill. There have been plenty of other fuckers of China other than Western, including thousands of years of Chinese aristocracy of one ideology or another. But that doesn't discount the half-millennium of Western fucking.
Not entirely well said:
should say
But close enough I suppose.
BTW, while Paul is right to hate the current corporatist system, he's wrong where he says about the current system that Michael Moore hates "It has nothing to do with capitalism." It has everything to do with capitalism, as I said. It's capitalism gone too far: without regulation to protect the people from it (and it from itself).
Ron Paul is the most reliable voter (Appendix One, pg. 37) against any regulation that puts Greenhouse pollution costs on the real books, so economics can govern it properly. Paul is also a theocrat. He's a corporate anarchist: a "libertarian" who believes the government has jurisdiction only over the army and the police - and the police don't have jurisdiction over corporations (only the market has power there). Ron Paul is nuts. But even crazy people can tell that corporatism is killing us.
Yes, that's part of the corruption - not just any US corps get that kind of government sponsorship. Just the ones in a crony relationship. But in China, the crony relationship isn't just bribery/graft. It's an industrial policy designed to improve the domestic industry and the economy it supports. In the US, those results are incidental at best.
You're right, your comment is a not very subtle attempt at "argument". It's a not very anything.
Spain was a fascist state until the late 1970s, as was Argentina for years until that same time. Chile was fascist around that time. El Salvador was fascist through the 1980s.
You're distinguishing between "capitalism we want" and "capitalism we don't want" (corporatism). Corporatism is capitalism, it's just a kind of capitalism: an extreme one. Just as Chinese Communism is a kind of socialism, that has some extremes of capitalism along with some extremes of capitalism. But capitalism is simply the assignment of the highest value to capital (property), typically at the expense of devaluing either or both of labor and whatever's left that's not property (eg. the environment, ethics, capital in the public domain). Corporatism is indeed an extreme development of capitalism, though it's not very different from protocapitalist systems like feudalism.
You're right about the benefits to the US having a rival that makes the US recognize some limits. But you ignore the problems that come from the rival being a country like China, which is a mafia state. Especially when China gets its way instead of the US getting its way. While the US can be pretty bad, China can be much worse.
You also somehow ignore that Westerners have been fucking with China for at least 600 years, which until the last few decades effectively set China back about 600 years. And even China's rise has been through Westerners fucking with China, which has left China a polluted, exploited wasteland atop which some rich and powerful Chinese people hold total power in partnership with the Westerners who moved their manufacturing and banking there.
When Kipling wrote the lines you quote, the West was at the peak of fucking with China. There are far more Easterners buried wherever Westerners hustled, or invaded, the East. Don't be so complacent about the harmlessness of either China or the West.
It is more than just savvy business wheeling and dealing, since it's the Chinese government wheeling and dealing. Which means it's a monopoly: only the government agency can negotiate for that business inside China. And only the specific Chinese corps the government picks can get the business. Those picked corps are picked not necessarily for the best interests of China, but rather for whatever is in the best interest of the government officials with the power to pick them. Which might or might not be the best interests of China. That's Communism.
But it's also industrial policy, which is indeed savvy business wheeling and dealing. The US doesn't have anything like that, except for the corruption part where some industries have orgs that lobby our government to do business with foreign governments that require their government to mediate such international trade, or where the US government does occasionally require our government to play that role in foreign trade, where the orgs use some method other than competitive bids/RFPs to pick which members get the business. The US could have an industrial policy as effective in strategy as China's extreme one, but without requiring the government to actually conduct the negotiations. Just review the completed deals to ensure they comply with the policy, perhaps just random samples plus any over a large value threshold (which would pay in taxes enough to fund the review).
Instead, the US abandons industrial policy, and therefore industrial strategy. And watches China ascend at our expense. Though the top US capitalists have already invested in China's industries, so China's gain is their gain, while they've divested from US liabilities, so our expense is not theirs.
You're conflating "accurate" with "precise". Besides, can you show me the actual precision of the tree rings data vs that of the thermometer data? If I were even less educated in climatology, I wouldn't believe that tree rings could be used as temperature sensor records at all. Evidently the scientists more educated in climatology are satisfied with using them that way.
The CO2 concentration from burning petrofuels (and other controllable GHG sources, like cement) is not in a simply proportional relationship to temperature. The relationship is complex, but there are thresholds that, when passed, produce major new changes in effect even with only continuing small changes in concentration.
The results of the climate changing as rapidly as we now expect are not just "inconveniences". Most immediately, the majority of humans who live at seashores are also the least capable of moving elsewhere without causing damage. We're talking about hundreds of millions of refugees who can't offer anything but a total survival burden wherever they go to. Largely concentrated in countries that are already very close to (or already embroiled in) war over resources. Climate change disruption to civilization will probably push over the edge many conflicts any of which could escalate to war or collapse of trade that will multiply the devastation. And motivate many more people to grab what they can in the shortest term, a death spiral that can even lead to extinction. We're still able to nuke ourselves to extinction over a local conflict; more parties with that power join the club all the time; WMD other than nukes proliferate even more - and it doesn't take more than just refusal to cooperate for one region's suicide to take down the rest of us.
Alarmism is always wrong, and accepting the high probability of climate change before acting to mitigate it is not alarmism. The mitigations have all kinds of other benefits to us, including economic recovery. Just because some deniers - who are trying to alarm people into ignoring the threat and necessary counteraction - call the messengers "alarmist" doesn't mean they are. It means that Fox News is the heart of modern American culture.
Ray Nagin is a Republican, and yours is a straw man.
If we had to depend on Al Gore, who Americans chose to be president instead of Bush, we would have had a FEMA capable of evacuating a coastal city that wasn't where his brother was the governor.
But none of these people are indispensable. Louisiana's levee boards were loaded with people who refused to believe the evidence that the longer term held the threat of catastrophe, instead insisting on wasting the preparation time on greedy little schemes. Just as climate change deniers are insisting on the large scale, even after Katrina demonstrated the folly of doing so.
Of course we need our freedom. I need my freedom to live on my property without it being inundated by more severe weather, or be invaded by gangs surviving after a collapse. The freedom to pollute is much less necessary.
Because the change is rapid, and will likely cause very severe conditions within the foreseeable future. The collapse of our civilization during our grandchildren's lifetime, and possibly damage we will see ourselves. Especially because we can avert that damage by changing our industrial and consumer behavior to properly account for the pollution costs before they're fully manifest (but when it'll be too late to change). The history of climate change is more evidence that the climate can be changed, and the recent history of the present climate change shows that we are changing it differently than the way it was changing before.
We are humans. We don't handle nature by simply adapting when we can do something about it to protect ourselves better. I don't want my great grandchildren forced to hunt rats and hide from Mad Max if it costs me an upgrade from the coal plant giving my state cancer in favor of a geothermal plant that will give America competitive products to sell.
Do you have some kind of factual or logical basis to throw out the air measurements? Or aren't you really just a witch.
I read that tiny code snippet, too. It is explicitly a "fudge factor" - the comment is what says it is so. But the "fudge" is just calibrating the tree data to temperature by using actual thermometer measurements, so tree data can be used where there are no thermometer measurements but there are trees. That is "artificial" because the science doesn't have a mathematical model for the mechanism of the divergence. But it does have the measured model. Which is what makes it "very artificial". But not arbitrary, and certainly not reverse engineered to support a preconceived projection future data.
ESR pointed it out on his blog, but he says he had heard about it somewhere else, then grepped for the comment. So he had no scientific context, or any other, for interpreting that code and its comment. And when the scientific context was explained, he didn't change his understanding. Which is not scientific. It's gossip.
When dilettantes insist on gossip instead of the explanations of scientists, in the summary and in specific issues like the divergence correction, that's denial. Cry out loud if that's your reaction. Though I am emotional about the conceited insistence of some people on denying a major threat they're rejecting for psychologically defective reasons rather than intellectual ones, it's the facts and logic that make us disagree. Your being flip about something that, especially if you're correct, should come with some emotions for you, doesn't make me respect your conclusion any more.
No, I'm alarmed by actual damage done by Bush but denied by you Republicans. You're alarmed by imaginary scandals cooked up by you Republicans.
The difference is that I'm alarmed by facts, but you're alarmed by Republicans telling you non-Republicans are alarmists. You're buried in layers of nightmare.
Right in that discussion posters point out that the "ARTIFICAL" data that's supposedly the fraud is just the correction to the divergence of "trees as proxy thermometers" data from actual, reliable thermometers that is necessary to use trees as more reliable proxy thermometers.
What you are seeing is esr as a proxy for every geek dilettante in climate science, "discovering" the tools like Columbus discovered America. And really you're seeing the divergence of such a proxy from actual climate scientists. Except when actual climate scientists use such tools, the result is greater accuracy, not merely confirming their preconception of trees despite the forest.
The whole aim of climate change denial is to keep the populace consuming and polluting by alarming it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them informed by science. Or, to be more fair to Mencken, the alarmism is anti-science to keep oil and coal corps and their cronies as filthy rich as always.
Especially "expansion of government power" alarmists who interfere with our organized collective action ("government") to deal with the threat of climate change.
Alarmists who voted for Bush twice as he actually expanded government power beyond any reasonable limit - while failing to protect us from climate change.
No, the actual threat, not the BS you heard on Fox News.
You idiots aren't entertaining.
Then in a few years when our surprise extension runs out, the Greenhouse will be nice and thick for the return to the typical solar cycle, frying us, too late to ever fix or minimize.
Any excuse to ignore the threat should be taken - damn the consequences just a little later.
Is this really the end of processing Kodachrome, or just the end of that particular kind of machine? Is there another way to develop and print Kodachrome?
I expect that for quite some time after the "deadline" people will come up with undeveloped rolls of pictures they want to see. Is there really no other way, however exotic? Looks like maybe not.
Do you see the difference between saying "no" before the act and saying "stop" during the act? This is why there are degrees of different crimes. Is using your tongue during a kiss, that's rejected by the person you're kissing, "rape"?
FWIW, Assange isn't accused of not stopping during the act. He's accused of using a condom with a hole in it, and further accused of deliberately making that hole. There is no evidence, AFAIK, of the accusations. Which doesn't mean they're false - in this case, though there are plenty of cases in which such accusations are false. Everyone has a right to require proof of accusations before they're considered true. And to held responsible for an actual act.
Note that I am not dismissing Assange's responsibility if he knowingly used a defective condom, and if he deliberately made the defect. Consent contingent on a standard quality condom can be reasonably inferred as part of a contingency on using a condom, and reasonably retracted after the fact if the condom is found to be less than standard quality, and Assange would be liable if he broke it and knowingly used it despite the contingency. But increasing the probability of pregnancy or infection is not the same as forced intercourse. Assange's liability might even be higher for increasing the risk of the sex than if he'd forced sex but with a working condom. But they are certainly distinct.
And so disputing the semantic difference of "rape" accusations from what actually occurred is legitimate. Especially considering the circumstances of Assange's notoriety, which a reasonable person would expect are designed to accuse him of a discrediting crime like "rape" in public, which creates images of forced sex. Which makes the distinction between forced sex and less safe sex important.
The city hasn't ratified their behavior, only their inspiration. The sabotage and the leniency towards it is a measure of the popularity of the saboteurs' cause.
The direct action here is the ban, which gets the goods. After years of SUV makers bribing governments around the world with their own direct action for loopholes and blind eyes favoring them despite the consequences.
SUVs are trucks. They get truck tax breaks, truck emissions loopholes, and they're the big, powerful cars we call trucks. But somehow they do not require the truck license to drive them, which requires taking a different test for handling bigger, more powerful cars in some trickier maneuvers.
If all those soccer moms, yuppies and other people driving a car too big for them had to get a truck license instead of the drivers license they already got in high school, most of them would not. And there would be a whole lot less SUVs driving around. And most of their drivers, when they cut us off, would at least have the skills to do so more safely.
Such a simple change: require the truck license to drive the truck. Saving lives and sanity, not to mention fuel supplies.