>> You could try being concise instead of going on for pages. You could come up with one argument that doesn't involve your personal feelings to start with.
You claim that this error in reasoning applies to the whole gamut of anti-war activists, that none of us are coming up with truly rational arguments. The *fact* that our invasion has energized Islamic extremists, while embarassing and silencing moderates, is to you an irrational argument. The *fact* that Iraq had no WMDs with which to threaten us, and that the architects of this fiasco ignored and manipulated contrary intelligence, is not something you think rational-minded people should be thinking about. The *fact* that we've killed four thousand of our own soldiers and broken tens of thousands more, while not even making an effort to count the Iraqi dead, is irrational tearjerking to you. The *fact* that we have pushed strenuously for the Iraqis to pass an oil law that would hand most of the control and profit to multinational oil companies is, to you, bleeding-heart whining, a point that cannot even be discussed until I convince you that there is something the least bit wrong with that.
I'm not about to accept your asinine ground rules, where I have to spend even a moment explaining why indefensible behavior is indeed indefensible. The burden is on you to explain why the United States was right in launching this war.
>> The reason that "moral justification" isn't guiding policy of US leaders is fairly clear to responsible individuals. A responsible person will say "I did everything I could" even when things go bad. A moral rationalizer will say "don't blame me, I made the morally justified choice even though other non-morally justified choices would have succeeded".
If only Hitler had been less responsible.
>> "Don't blame me" doesn't bring back the dead. Feeling good about yourself isn't a good guideline for policy choices when the difference between success and failure is life and death for people -- which it always is in foreign policy.
You're going to invoke the tragedy of the dead in justifying a war that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis?
Or is valuing their dead one of those "personal feelings" that shouldn't impact policy decisions?
The decision to go to war in Iraq was deathly serious. But it was you and your ideological comrades who screwed the pooch.
>> BTW: I don't know what you think neocons are -- anyone who doesn't agree with you maybe. You seem extremely close-minded.
A "neocon", in my mind, is someone who believes that the United States has an unparalleled right to the use of force against other countries, someone who believes that we are justified in using force and coercion to ensure access to resources under foreign soil, and someone who proclaims his own seriousness -- his own steely resolve to do what must be done -- when deep down he is a coward who allows himself to be terrorized by the idea that the world isn't completely under his thumb.
And yes, I do think you're a neocon.
I have to laugh when you call me closed-minded. Wasn't it you who said this?
Anti-war folks seem to be extremely intellectually lazy, dishonest, discontent, and altogether unable to put together a logical argument of any kind on the subjects they talk the most about. They seem indifferent to the real consequences of their choices and they have no apparent curiosity or desire to understand other viewpoints.
Hint: It was.
Let's see, what would be the "real world consequences" of not invading Iraq? Four thousand dead soldiers, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis would still be alive today. The U.S. wouldn't be on the hook for about three trillion dollars, which could have been better spent securing our own borders and fostering our own energy security. We would have more leverage against Iran. Afghanistan would probably be in much better shape. Military readiness would be higher, recruitment would be easier
So, before I can state that it is wrong to overthrow governments that haven't harmed us, or to overthrow a government which simply isn't giving us sufficiently cheap access to our natural resources, I have to provide a six page logical proof explaining why such behavior is wrong?
Thank you for confirming my mental model of the neocon mind.
You don't see the relevance of our addiction to propping up third-rate thugs, when the subject at hand is whether or not we should once again overthrow a foreign government?
When we propped up the Shah in Iran, we did a morally unjustifiable thing, one which cost us support in the region, and eventually lead to a counterrevolution that spread anti-American sentiment throughout the region. Your response, if you're a rational human being, is to wonder if that intervention served our interests, or served the ideals America claims to cling to. You would then start questioning whether the decision to invade Iraq was entirely noble, or whether the same sort of motivations were at play.
Instead, because you're human instead of rational, you assume that the person who brings up some sordid historical tidbit must "hate America", and must be bringing it up in order to disgrace our proud and just nation. The idea that it is the behavior itself that is disgraceful, or that some of us "anti-war folks" love this country too much to stand idly by as it repeats the most obvious mistakes of the past, never crosses your mind. You assume that your opponents are enemies and fools, you treat them as such, and no meaningful exchange of ideas ever occurs.
Anti-war people solve plenty of problems. Isolationism may be far preferable to our current course, but that doesn't us isolationists. Diplomacy is a word that has fallen out of favor in right wing circle. In fact, it seems to be getting the "smear word" treatment that they gave "liberal" thirty years ago, turning it from a political affiliation into an insult. But diplomacy has, in its own quiet, unassuming way, done more good than all the chickenhawk warmongering of the last fifty years.
In closing, we unbury the past not just to shame you and your allies, but also to remind you that, hey, this thing you're so eager to do is not a nice thing, or an easy thing, or a predictable thing. You've gotten it horribly wrong before, and you may want to think a while before getting it horribly wrong again. If only a few of patriots who planned the current war had spent some time thinking such seditious thoughts, we'd be in a far better position today.
Look, if you're going to conduct that sort of war, then you end up with two problems. First, instead of playing referee in a civil war where most of the bullets are being exchanged by the locals, you end up with just about all the small arms fire directed at you.
Then there is the tiny problem of salesmanship. This war had to be sold (at least retroactively) as a liberation, for the good of the grateful inhabitants. By employing the sort of tactics you're proposing, you lose any shot at the moral high ground. Eventually, you're clamped down atop the populace as tightly as Saddam ever was, using the same sort of brutal methods he employed. Then what have you accomplished?
Oh, yeah. You've gassed up your SUVs for a couple of decades.
The final problem: what exactly would you have had the Armed Forces bomb? Every piece of infrastructure you bomb is one more thing that will have to be rebuilt. Every house you demolish will create a dozen potential recruits for an insurgency. Perhaps we should have simply killed the whole of the adult male population. That certainly would reduce the number of potential terrorists.
If Seward's tactics are what it takes to win, a lot of people at home would start questioning the need to play the game at all. There would be huge demonstrations, far bigger and more destabilizing than anything the current anti-war movement has been able to marshal. Then Seward's tactics would have to be deployed at home.
This brings up a couple of interesting questions. Like, if you can dismiss the opinions of urbanites on the environment, can we dismiss rural opinions on terrorism? Really, we're selling our freedoms up the river to comfort a bunch of people whose towns have no more enticing target than the local bowling alley.
Your criteria for who gets to make decisions is wrongheaded. Urbanites shouldn't be dismissed on environmental matters, any more than rural folks should be ignored when it comes to terrorism.
Re: Farmland. Urbanites are at the forefront of the movement to protect open space and farmland near urban hubs. The open space movement, community-supported agriculture, and new urbanism all touch on the subject. We're less clueless than you seem to imagine.
The anecdote is interesting. The fact that there are differences between Abraham Lincoln and Barak Obama is not. For one thing, Lincoln is dead, and I'm foresquare against zombies in the Oval Office, even if the Constitution didn't forbid Lincoln from serving a third term.
>> Obama is a conventional Chicago politician, despite all the hype about change, and people are starting to realize that he's essentially empty. Obama hasn't accomplished anything substantial. Rhetoric (including memoirs) is no accomplishment, and Obama has nothing else significant to point to. Name one important piece of legislation Obama has contributed to. Name a significant accomplishment Obama has had in the business world. Name any significant bipartisan work he has performed. Name a significant project he's headed.
You're being far too harsh. Today's political news certainly does focus on the candidates. Who paid what for a haircut, who teared up in front of the cameras, whether the candidate is black enough or too abrasive or can't bowl for crap or too old or too young. Then they discuss how each of these factors plays with the various "key demographics", whether they be white soccer moms, elderly Florida Jews, Cuban exiles, blue collar males, urban Hispanics, NASCAR dads, and the Amish.
I think that the giant, sucking gap that you're noticing is a vacuous, superficial, talking-point centered discussion of *policy*.:)
>> First, salon.com is not a source, so I'll ignore it. Better yet, I'll ridicule it.
And I will respond with indifference. The validity of a single article only loosely correlates with the reputation of the outlet as a whole. Either respond directly to the article or I'll assume that you're more interested in smearing environmentalists than actually understanding the issues.
>> Rather than letting the UN decide to ban DDT, how about we let the people affected decide if they want it banned.
The U.N. did not ban DDT. In fact, the WHO
>> Why not ask them? Oh, here is an article by AFRICAN AMERICAN ENVIRONMENTALIST ASSOCIATION, begging for DDT.
I'm not clear on why I should believe this group. They speak for African Americans, not native Africans. Their site has a very 1997-era HTML flair to it. Their organization doesn't have a Wikipedia entry.
As to their actual proposals, they're not too bad. They support indoor spraying, not massive air drops. I'm okay with that idea, and so are many environmental organizations (something you would have learned, had you read the article).
>> I find it rather condescending that the elitists at Salon.com will sit there and say that killing mosquitoes would not stop malaria while you have people who are dieing from Malaria screaming for DDT to kill the mosquitoes... you know, the insect that causes malaria!!??!!!
You claim to have ignored the article, and then you tell me what the elitists you didn't read are saying? That's chutzpah. The article says no such thing.
>> Really? Did they not read Newsweek April 28, 1975? It contained an article called "The Cooling World". Here is a quote:
Newsweek is not, and never has been, where scientists of good standing go to discuss claims and weigh evidence.
>> So they were doing no such thing, eh? Well, either the article I'm quoting from was never really written or realclimate.org is dead fucking wrong. I wonder which one it is? I'm sure that realclimate.org has fact-checkers and all. I mean, it took me about 120 seconds to find, maybe we expect too much of them. Or maybe they have an agenda to push and don't see a problem with lying to get that agenda pushed through.
Or maybe, just maybe, realclimate isn't making the claim you seem to be thinking they're making. You don't seem to have read their claims in your rush to respond to them.
They're not saying that no scientist warned of the possibility of global cooling. But they note that papers predicting warming outnumbered papers predicting cooling by 6 to 1. So if "the scientists" as a whole were telling us anything, it was that there would be global warming.
Now, what the varied and contradictory lot who can be classified as "environmentalists" were predicting is a completely different affair. We rarely agree on anything, then or now. That must be disheartening to people like you, who want to use a single outdated Newsweek article to discredit the entire movement. But that's the way it is.
>> Where are the food shortages and mass starvation I read about so long ago?
Safely contained in the third world, where folks like yourself don't need to worry about them.
>> Why are we all not dying from skin cancer due to the depleted Ozone layer?
Mostly because the world got together and greatly reduced the amount of CFCs getting into the atmosphere. The ozone layer has been slowly recovering since.
>> Aren't we supposed to be in an ice age now?
Simple answer: no. Climate scientists predicted no such thing.
Government (in the Enlightenment sense, at least) is a relatively recent phenomenon. Let's not pretend that any one group of people can claim perfect insight into the proper role of government. Original intent can go hang itself.
I don't want Obama hacking on the kernel in his free time. But if he's never heard of Linux, or some other similar project that exhibits the power of loose groups of dispersed collaborators, extreme transparency, and a "we're not in it for the buckage" attitude, that would be disappointing. It would also make me wonder how valid his vision of reform really is.
>> If you spill hot coffee on yourself, it's not your fault it's the fault of the company that provided it because they didn't warn you that it was hot.
Why do you anti-government types keep bringing up this widely misrepresented example?
Here's what happened:
Woman buys coffee. Woman spills coffee. Woman gets severe burns. Woman gets saddled with a few thousand in medical bills. Woman asks McDonalds if they would kindly reimburse her medical expenses. McDonalds tells woman to jump in lake. Woman launches investigation in preparation for lawsuit. Woman finds out that McDonalds serves their coffee way hotter than most places, to mask the fact that they use crap beans. Woman also finds out that McDonalds has settled several hundred scalding cases, and considers those injuries a cost of doing business.
Why is it that, according to the anti-government crowd, only the woman (81 years old, never had a prior litigious moment in her life) showed a lack of personal responsibility? If it's such an obviously bogus case of a woman refusing to take responsibility for her own mistakes, why did twelve jurors go along with it? If the system is rigged in favor of frivolous lawsuits, why did the award come out to the profit McDonalds makes from a few days of coffee sales?
The number of inactive/abandoned projects is no indicator of anything. The number of abandoned projects on my hard drive says everything about me and nothing about the utility of hard drive technology.
I think your objections to Sourceforge are missing the point. "Throw it onto Sourceforge" isn't meant to be a concrete suggestion, but shorthand for "make it an open source project with widely distributed commit rights, and try to develop a community around it." Maybe they're not a worthy receptacle of such open source cred, and maybe in a couple of years the new shorthand will be "github it" (looks cool, check it out). It's not important.
The actual cost of the nuclear insurance subsidy has been estimated at anywhere between 200M/year and 3B/year. So we're actually talking about an increase of 1.2x to 2.5x, as your report claims about $1.2B in nuclear subsidies.
But, as I pointed out earlier, it's pointless to take a big, established generation source and compare it to a new, marginal technology in terms of "subsidies per kilowatt". New technologies are supposed to require more research, represent greater risk to investors, and lack the economies of scale of the more established technologies. The United States *massively* subsidized nuclear technology during its earliest phases. I wonder how the nuclear industry of 1960 would have fared in your report.
When it comes to wind power, the primary costs are all in capital investment. Once the turbines are up and running, the fuel is free and the maintenance is rather low. So under the current subsidy scheme, all the subsidies I can find are handed out in the first 10 years of a wind farm's existence (depreciation over 5 years instead of 20, and a 1.9c tax credit for every kWH produced in the first ten years of a farm's life. So when you argue as though the subsidies scale linearly with the amount of renewable energy being produced, you're arguing against the flow of reality.
Look at page 76 of this report, where it talks about levelized cost calculations. Looking only at the operations, maintenance, and fuel costs of an installation, wind energy is the clear winner. So in ten years, when the subsidies supporting a wind farm dwindle to nothing, and the comparable nuclear plant is still getting millions worth of subsidized insurance, the "subsidies per megawatt" for those installations will paint a very different picture.
Renewables also have the advantage of being immune to fluctuations in fuel prices. Nuclear fuel (though a small part of the cost of nuclear power, fluctuates wildly in the markets), and the cost of natural gas has shot up by about 50% in the last year. This advantage of renewable power is entirely overlooked when you insist on reducing the whole, complicated picture to a simple analysis of "subsidies per kilowatt".
I also question the mathiness of your analysis of the costs of incentives. Though you say that cost of production must come down "by an order of magnitude" for wind and solar to make economic sense, the primary subsidy (the Production Tax Credit) weighs in at a mere $0.02/kWH. So there is no reason to require huge gains in economic efficiency. Rather small ones will do.
Once again, you bring up the old lie that the vast majority of any renewable penetration would have to be backed capacity-for-capacity by non-renewables. There are a dozen ways to make up for the intermittency problem.
* Geothermal is perfect for baseload, and thermal storage solar's generation profile very nearly mirrors the demand curve. * The proliferation of plug-in hybrids that interact with a smart grid, charging when demand is low and selling back to the grid when demand is high. * Interconnecting geographical regions, so that oversupply in one region can be matched to overdemand in another. * Diversifying sources for renewables. * Increasing energy efficiency to make it cheaper to build the generative capacity to serve a given human need. * Weather forecasting to predict the highs and lows. * Use of emergency generators as standby generative capacity. * Load shedding. * Rolling brownouts. * Shutting off the TV and going to play outside.
Yes, those last three were listed in order of awfulness.
Lastly, you still haven't addressed hde huge hidden subsidy of all fossil power. Producers don't pay a cent for the right to dump CO2 in the atmosphere. Unless the economic cost of a ton of emitted CO2 is really $0.00, then the economic picture is heavily and artificially skewed in favor of the entrenched technologies.
I think our discussion thus far has been based on mutual overreaction. It seemed to me that your initial position was that Joseph Smith's travails made it impossible for a reasonable person to question his motives. My position was always that, because some benefits did accrue to him, there was still quite a bit of room for doubt. But for me, Smith is too complex a figure, and the evidence is too controversial and contradictory to let anyone make absolute claims about what was going on in his mind.
Re: absurdist claims. The absolute, most jaw-droppingest claim I've ever heard about the Church came from a fellow attendee at an ex-Mormon conference (back when all that exmo stuff was exciting and novel to me). During their "testimony meeting", this woman got up and, with perfect seriousness, explained that there is a giant pyramid built beneath the LDS Conference Center. As the Brethren take turns at the podium, this pyramid is sapping the psychic energy from the audience and channeling it into the speaker. The guy next to me and I were laughing so hard that the woman behind us asked, "Am I going to have to separate you two?" It wasn't the first time I'd met pyramid lady, and I'm absolutely convinced that she believed every word she was saying.
Could The Book of Mormon have been dictated by Smith, without the aid of notes or outlines? That troubled me for a long time after I left. I never came to any sure conclusions on the matter, but I did have some thoughts in favor of the idea that he could.
1) Smith had several years between the time he first started talking about the plates and the time he started translating. The translation process took only a couple of months, but there may have been time prior for him to work out plotting, characters, theology, etc.
2) The Isaiah chapters and the retelling of the Sermon on the Mound cut down the page count a bit.
3) Jerald and Sandra Tanner claimed that "and it came to pass" might have been Smith's way of stalling for time while he figured out what to say next. Not a whole lot of their work resonated with me, but that bit made some sense to me.
4) People were much better at telling improv stories back then. They didn't have cable, so they had to make their own fun. Lucy Mack Smith's memoirs talked some about her son's impressive storytelling skills. I think she was pretty old when she wrote her memoirs, so it's tough to be certain of how much credence to give them.
Just as an aside on that last point, Lucy Mack tells a story about a dream Joseph Smith Sr. had, one which really closely parallels Lehi's Tree of Life Vision. But it could be argued that the story from the Book of Mormon influenced her recollection of the dream.
Even accounting for all that, it's an impressive feat, and doubly so given Smith's education level. I can respect someone believing that the feat was entirely impossible.
>> Smith's claim was divine inspiration. And that means perfection. If he wanted to convince people he could translate variances would be fine. If he wanted to convince people that he was talking to angels and translating by the power of God, they would be unacceptable.
I don't remember the exact nature of the debate, but I have a vague recollection that positing perfection in the initial translation causes some problems for apologists. There are thousands of changes between the first edition and subsequent editions, and while the vast majority are mere typographical problems, there are a couple that make the "Joseph Smith as high-resolution photocopier" theory hard to maintain. But maybe that's what his early followers expected of him.
You're right that I (like many former Mormons) am more interested in the tawdry, the salacious, and the weird in LDS history. Part of that is the tendency to prefer information that supports my own biases, and part is a distrust of the version of history I got in seminary. I think by the time I read "In Sacred Loneliness," I'd gotten through the worst of my sc
I notice that you're still not accounting for the "deferred taxes". For at least one of the big three tax categories you mention, ExxonMobil annually claims something like $30B in liabilities, but only writes a check for $8-$10B. I find that inexplicable.
In the 2007 report, ExxonMobil claimed a 32% return on average capital employed, and a 34% "net income to average shareholder's equity". Perhaps I'm confused about what those terms mean.
Another question I have is whether any of those numbers include the $.18/gallon tax we pay at the pump. I consider most of that tax as returned to the oil industry, in the form of improved roads (and therefore a bigger market for their product).
As I said in a previous post, the subsidies to wind and solar are fairly small in terms of
>> For the environmental damage, let's charge wind with the damage from mining all that copper, steel and aluminum. Solar with the chemicals needed to make them. Both with the oil needed to run their systems, and on and on... If you want to get extreme, you can make ANYTHING look bad.
By all means, let's charge them with it. I'm guessing that if you compare the full lifecycle of wind and coal, including all the resulting environmental damage, and included that in the sticker price, it would be the death knell for every coal-fired plant in the world. Because the current system charges coal plants $0.00/ton for the CO2 they emit. That's the biggest subsidy the energy industry has, and it shows up nowhere in the report you cite.
You're ignoring a few whopper subsidies. The Price-Anderson Act limits the potential liabilities for a nuclear accident to $10B, a figure small enough that they can buy insurance for it. Anything above that is covered by the U.S. I've heard plenty of experts talk about how, without this law, the nuclear industry would be uninsurable.
Also, there is the fact that very little oil is used to generate electricity. So I'm not surprised that the amount of subsidies given to oil-based electrical generation is similarly tiny.
Finally, the subsidies being granted are on the order of a couple of cents per kilowatt hour. So a complete conversion to, say, wind power would be huge in absolute terms, we're talking about paying 30% more for our electricity, max. That's a small price to pay for energy independence and a reduction of greenhouse gases.
You could also have included the next sentence in the article: "But this year, reckons Rune Moesgaard of the Danish Wind Industry Association, wind power will actually save consumers money for the first time, as the benefits resulting from lower power prices outweigh the falling cost of the subsidy."
Then again, quoting someone named Rune Moesgaard would have made it hard to take you seriously. So I understand.
Also, I think subsidy per unit production is a very misleading way to evaluate it, when comparing an entrenched primary power source with upstarts that generate a tiny fraction of our energy supply. I'm guessing that the total subsidies for the oil industry are higher, even though the current price of oil makes any subsidies ridiculous.
Oil companies don't seem to pay $200B/year. The $3 of taxes for every dollar of profit is also unlikely.
From the Exxon-Mobil 2006 annual report: $39.5B profit (after taxes). $30.3B "sales-based taxes" and $39.2B "other taxes and duties". So we're already at less than a 2-to-1 taxes to profits.
But it gets better. Go down to the "liabilities" section, and the "income taxes payable" section is only $8B. Another $20.8B is listed as "deferred". I looked at earlier reports, and it's a striking pattern: They claim to incur two to three times more tax liability every year than they actually seem to pay.
I don't fully understand what's going on there, or what sort of taxes fall under "sales" and what falls under "other", but I know that if I was making a 32% return on my money every year, and the IRS let me defer most of my tax burden for even a year, I'd call that a huge tax break.
There's another subsidy you could argue over: estimates of the economic damage caused by the global warming effects of each barrel pumped range all over the map, but $50/barrel isn't unreasonable. Factor that in, and the oil companies are actually operating at an enormous loss.
Then you have the I-can't-believe-this-isn't-obvious principle: pulling natural resources out of the ground doesn't generate wealth. From an accounting standpoint, it should be considered capital depletion, not income. To me, the oil industry as a whole is like a trust fund kid who says that going to the ATM is his "job".
On an unrelated note, the whole "baseload" problem is easily surmounted. Read up on concentrating solar power. Short version: sunlight heats a fluid, which drives a Stirling engine. The fluid doesn't go cold just because the sun goes down. Hell, with a big enough, insulated enough reservoir, it could probably produce for weeks without input. Additional heat input could also come from burning natural gas.
It's one way. Another is to make photovoltaics less efficient, in such a way that the cost drops faster than the efficiency. Going from 10% to 5% efficiency is great, so long as you also go from $400/m^2 to $100/m^2.
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>> am voting for the Cylons this upcoming election
Not many people in this day and age who will admit to voting Republican.
Put photos of John McCain and Col. Tigh side by side. You'll see what I mean.
>> You could try being concise instead of going on for pages. You could come up with one argument that doesn't involve your personal feelings to start with.
You claim that this error in reasoning applies to the whole gamut of anti-war activists, that none of us are coming up with truly rational arguments. The *fact* that our invasion has energized Islamic extremists, while embarassing and silencing moderates, is to you an irrational argument. The *fact* that Iraq had no WMDs with which to threaten us, and that the architects of this fiasco ignored and manipulated contrary intelligence, is not something you think rational-minded people should be thinking about. The *fact* that we've killed four thousand of our own soldiers and broken tens of thousands more, while not even making an effort to count the Iraqi dead, is irrational tearjerking to you. The *fact* that we have pushed strenuously for the Iraqis to pass an oil law that would hand most of the control and profit to multinational oil companies is, to you, bleeding-heart whining, a point that cannot even be discussed until I convince you that there is something the least bit wrong with that.
I'm not about to accept your asinine ground rules, where I have to spend even a moment explaining why indefensible behavior is indeed indefensible. The burden is on you to explain why the United States was right in launching this war.
>> The reason that "moral justification" isn't guiding policy of US leaders is fairly clear to responsible individuals. A responsible person will say "I did everything I could" even when things go bad. A moral rationalizer will say "don't blame me, I made the morally justified choice even though other non-morally justified choices would have succeeded".
If only Hitler had been less responsible.
>> "Don't blame me" doesn't bring back the dead. Feeling good about yourself isn't a good guideline for policy choices when the difference between success and failure is life and death for people -- which it always is in foreign policy.
You're going to invoke the tragedy of the dead in justifying a war that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis?
Or is valuing their dead one of those "personal feelings" that shouldn't impact policy decisions?
The decision to go to war in Iraq was deathly serious. But it was you and your ideological comrades who screwed the pooch.
>> BTW: I don't know what you think neocons are -- anyone who doesn't agree with you maybe. You seem extremely close-minded.
A "neocon", in my mind, is someone who believes that the United States has an unparalleled right to the use of force against other countries, someone who believes that we are justified in using force and coercion to ensure access to resources under foreign soil, and someone who proclaims his own seriousness -- his own steely resolve to do what must be done -- when deep down he is a coward who allows himself to be terrorized by the idea that the world isn't completely under his thumb.
And yes, I do think you're a neocon.
I have to laugh when you call me closed-minded. Wasn't it you who said this?
Hint: It was.
Let's see, what would be the "real world consequences" of not invading Iraq? Four thousand dead soldiers, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis would still be alive today. The U.S. wouldn't be on the hook for about three trillion dollars, which could have been better spent securing our own borders and fostering our own energy security. We would have more leverage against Iran. Afghanistan would probably be in much better shape. Military readiness would be higher, recruitment would be easier
So, before I can state that it is wrong to overthrow governments that haven't harmed us, or to overthrow a government which simply isn't giving us sufficiently cheap access to our natural resources, I have to provide a six page logical proof explaining why such behavior is wrong?
Thank you for confirming my mental model of the neocon mind.
You don't see the relevance of our addiction to propping up third-rate thugs, when the subject at hand is whether or not we should once again overthrow a foreign government?
When we propped up the Shah in Iran, we did a morally unjustifiable thing, one which cost us support in the region, and eventually lead to a counterrevolution that spread anti-American sentiment throughout the region. Your response, if you're a rational human being, is to wonder if that intervention served our interests, or served the ideals America claims to cling to. You would then start questioning whether the decision to invade Iraq was entirely noble, or whether the same sort of motivations were at play.
Instead, because you're human instead of rational, you assume that the person who brings up some sordid historical tidbit must "hate America", and must be bringing it up in order to disgrace our proud and just nation. The idea that it is the behavior itself that is disgraceful, or that some of us "anti-war folks" love this country too much to stand idly by as it repeats the most obvious mistakes of the past, never crosses your mind. You assume that your opponents are enemies and fools, you treat them as such, and no meaningful exchange of ideas ever occurs.
Anti-war people solve plenty of problems. Isolationism may be far preferable to our current course, but that doesn't us isolationists. Diplomacy is a word that has fallen out of favor in right wing circle. In fact, it seems to be getting the "smear word" treatment that they gave "liberal" thirty years ago, turning it from a political affiliation into an insult. But diplomacy has, in its own quiet, unassuming way, done more good than all the chickenhawk warmongering of the last fifty years.
In closing, we unbury the past not just to shame you and your allies, but also to remind you that, hey, this thing you're so eager to do is not a nice thing, or an easy thing, or a predictable thing. You've gotten it horribly wrong before, and you may want to think a while before getting it horribly wrong again. If only a few of patriots who planned the current war had spent some time thinking such seditious thoughts, we'd be in a far better position today.
More rubble, less trouble. Blah blah blah.
Look, if you're going to conduct that sort of war, then you end up with two problems. First, instead of playing referee in a civil war where most of the bullets are being exchanged by the locals, you end up with just about all the small arms fire directed at you.
Then there is the tiny problem of salesmanship. This war had to be sold (at least retroactively) as a liberation, for the good of the grateful inhabitants. By employing the sort of tactics you're proposing, you lose any shot at the moral high ground. Eventually, you're clamped down atop the populace as tightly as Saddam ever was, using the same sort of brutal methods he employed. Then what have you accomplished?
Oh, yeah. You've gassed up your SUVs for a couple of decades.
The final problem: what exactly would you have had the Armed Forces bomb? Every piece of infrastructure you bomb is one more thing that will have to be rebuilt. Every house you demolish will create a dozen potential recruits for an insurgency. Perhaps we should have simply killed the whole of the adult male population. That certainly would reduce the number of potential terrorists.
If Seward's tactics are what it takes to win, a lot of people at home would start questioning the need to play the game at all. There would be huge demonstrations, far bigger and more destabilizing than anything the current anti-war movement has been able to marshal. Then Seward's tactics would have to be deployed at home.
This brings up a couple of interesting questions. Like, if you can dismiss the opinions of urbanites on the environment, can we dismiss rural opinions on terrorism? Really, we're selling our freedoms up the river to comfort a bunch of people whose towns have no more enticing target than the local bowling alley.
Your criteria for who gets to make decisions is wrongheaded. Urbanites shouldn't be dismissed on environmental matters, any more than rural folks should be ignored when it comes to terrorism.
Re: Farmland. Urbanites are at the forefront of the movement to protect open space and farmland near urban hubs. The open space movement, community-supported agriculture, and new urbanism all touch on the subject. We're less clueless than you seem to imagine.
The anecdote is interesting. The fact that there are differences between Abraham Lincoln and Barak Obama is not. For one thing, Lincoln is dead, and I'm foresquare against zombies in the Oval Office, even if the Constitution didn't forbid Lincoln from serving a third term.
>> Obama is a conventional Chicago politician, despite all the hype about change, and people are starting to realize that he's essentially empty. Obama hasn't accomplished anything substantial. Rhetoric (including memoirs) is no accomplishment, and Obama has nothing else significant to point to. Name one important piece of legislation Obama has contributed to. Name a significant accomplishment Obama has had in the business world. Name any significant bipartisan work he has performed. Name a significant project he's headed.
s/Obama/Lincoln/g
You're being far too harsh. Today's political news certainly does focus on the candidates. Who paid what for a haircut, who teared up in front of the cameras, whether the candidate is black enough or too abrasive or can't bowl for crap or too old or too young. Then they discuss how each of these factors plays with the various "key demographics", whether they be white soccer moms, elderly Florida Jews, Cuban exiles, blue collar males, urban Hispanics, NASCAR dads, and the Amish.
:)
I think that the giant, sucking gap that you're noticing is a vacuous, superficial, talking-point centered discussion of *policy*.
>> First, salon.com is not a source, so I'll ignore it. Better yet, I'll ridicule it.
And I will respond with indifference. The validity of a single article only loosely correlates with the reputation of the outlet as a whole. Either respond directly to the article or I'll assume that you're more interested in smearing environmentalists than actually understanding the issues.
>> Rather than letting the UN decide to ban DDT, how about we let the people affected decide if they want it banned.
The U.N. did not ban DDT. In fact, the WHO
>> Why not ask them? Oh, here is an article by AFRICAN AMERICAN ENVIRONMENTALIST ASSOCIATION, begging for DDT.
I'm not clear on why I should believe this group. They speak for African Americans, not native Africans. Their site has a very 1997-era HTML flair to it. Their organization doesn't have a Wikipedia entry.
As to their actual proposals, they're not too bad. They support indoor spraying, not massive air drops. I'm okay with that idea, and so are many environmental organizations (something you would have learned, had you read the article).
>> I find it rather condescending that the elitists at Salon.com will sit there and say that killing mosquitoes would not stop malaria while you have people who are dieing from Malaria screaming for DDT to kill the mosquitoes... you know, the insect that causes malaria!!??!!!
You claim to have ignored the article, and then you tell me what the elitists you didn't read are saying? That's chutzpah. The article says no such thing.
>> Really? Did they not read Newsweek April 28, 1975? It contained an article called "The Cooling World". Here is a quote:
Newsweek is not, and never has been, where scientists of good standing go to discuss claims and weigh evidence.
>> So they were doing no such thing, eh? Well, either the article I'm quoting from was never really written or realclimate.org is dead fucking wrong. I wonder which one it is? I'm sure that realclimate.org has fact-checkers and all. I mean, it took me about 120 seconds to find, maybe we expect too much of them. Or maybe they have an agenda to push and don't see a problem with lying to get that agenda pushed through.
Or maybe, just maybe, realclimate isn't making the claim you seem to be thinking they're making. You don't seem to have read their claims in your rush to respond to them.
They're not saying that no scientist warned of the possibility of global cooling. But they note that papers predicting warming outnumbered papers predicting cooling by 6 to 1. So if "the scientists" as a whole were telling us anything, it was that there would be global warming.
Now, what the varied and contradictory lot who can be classified as "environmentalists" were predicting is a completely different affair. We rarely agree on anything, then or now. That must be disheartening to people like you, who want to use a single outdated Newsweek article to discredit the entire movement. But that's the way it is.
>> REALLY!!??! You're joking, right? How many millions of people have died due to the banning of DDT?
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/06/29/rachel_carson/
>> Where are the food shortages and mass starvation I read about so long ago?
Safely contained in the third world, where folks like yourself don't need to worry about them.
>> Why are we all not dying from skin cancer due to the depleted Ozone layer?
Mostly because the world got together and greatly reduced the amount of CFCs getting into the atmosphere. The ozone layer has been slowly recovering since.
>> Aren't we supposed to be in an ice age now?
Simple answer: no. Climate scientists predicted no such thing.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/03/the-global-cooling-mole
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=94
Methinks you need to find better examples.
Government (in the Enlightenment sense, at least) is a relatively recent phenomenon. Let's not pretend that any one group of people can claim perfect insight into the proper role of government. Original intent can go hang itself.
When you're behind the wheel, your car certainly behaves as though it's sentient. And a bit malicious. Ease up there, leadfoot.
I don't want Obama hacking on the kernel in his free time. But if he's never heard of Linux, or some other similar project that exhibits the power of loose groups of dispersed collaborators, extreme transparency, and a "we're not in it for the buckage" attitude, that would be disappointing. It would also make me wonder how valid his vision of reform really is.
Fortunately, he seems rather clued in to me.
>> If you spill hot coffee on yourself, it's not your fault it's the fault of the company that provided it because they didn't warn you that it was hot.
Why do you anti-government types keep bringing up this widely misrepresented example?
Here's what happened:
Woman buys coffee. Woman spills coffee. Woman gets severe burns. Woman gets saddled with a few thousand in medical bills. Woman asks McDonalds if they would kindly reimburse her medical expenses. McDonalds tells woman to jump in lake. Woman launches investigation in preparation for lawsuit. Woman finds out that McDonalds serves their coffee way hotter than most places, to mask the fact that they use crap beans. Woman also finds out that McDonalds has settled several hundred scalding cases, and considers those injuries a cost of doing business.
Why is it that, according to the anti-government crowd, only the woman (81 years old, never had a prior litigious moment in her life) showed a lack of personal responsibility? If it's such an obviously bogus case of a woman refusing to take responsibility for her own mistakes, why did twelve jurors go along with it? If the system is rigged in favor of frivolous lawsuits, why did the award come out to the profit McDonalds makes from a few days of coffee sales?
http://lawandhelp.com/q298-2.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonald's_coffee_case
>> Finally, of course the EU is going to kick your ass. It's 5-10 countries pilled into one monstronsity!
Of course. Nobody ever beat Voltron.
I think you forgot to include Luxembourg in your count, which is an understandable oversight.
The number of inactive/abandoned projects is no indicator of anything. The number of abandoned projects on my hard drive says everything about me and nothing about the utility of hard drive technology.
I think your objections to Sourceforge are missing the point. "Throw it onto Sourceforge" isn't meant to be a concrete suggestion, but shorthand for "make it an open source project with widely distributed commit rights, and try to develop a community around it." Maybe they're not a worthy receptacle of such open source cred, and maybe in a couple of years the new shorthand will be "github it" (looks cool, check it out). It's not important.
The actual cost of the nuclear insurance subsidy has been estimated at anywhere between 200M/year and 3B/year. So we're actually talking about an increase of 1.2x to 2.5x, as your report claims about $1.2B in nuclear subsidies.
But, as I pointed out earlier, it's pointless to take a big, established generation source and compare it to a new, marginal technology in terms of "subsidies per kilowatt". New technologies are supposed to require more research, represent greater risk to investors, and lack the economies of scale of the more established technologies. The United States *massively* subsidized nuclear technology during its earliest phases. I wonder how the nuclear industry of 1960 would have fared in your report.
When it comes to wind power, the primary costs are all in capital investment. Once the turbines are up and running, the fuel is free and the maintenance is rather low. So under the current subsidy scheme, all the subsidies I can find are handed out in the first 10 years of a wind farm's existence (depreciation over 5 years instead of 20, and a 1.9c tax credit for every kWH produced in the first ten years of a farm's life. So when you argue as though the subsidies scale linearly with the amount of renewable energy being produced, you're arguing against the flow of reality.
Look at page 76 of this report, where it talks about levelized cost calculations. Looking only at the operations, maintenance, and fuel costs of an installation, wind energy is the clear winner. So in ten years, when the subsidies supporting a wind farm dwindle to nothing, and the comparable nuclear plant is still getting millions worth of subsidized insurance, the "subsidies per megawatt" for those installations will paint a very different picture.
Renewables also have the advantage of being immune to fluctuations in fuel prices. Nuclear fuel (though a small part of the cost of nuclear power, fluctuates wildly in the markets), and the cost of natural gas has shot up by about 50% in the last year. This advantage of renewable power is entirely overlooked when you insist on reducing the whole, complicated picture to a simple analysis of "subsidies per kilowatt".
I also question the mathiness of your analysis of the costs of incentives. Though you say that cost of production must come down "by an order of magnitude" for wind and solar to make economic sense, the primary subsidy (the Production Tax Credit) weighs in at a mere $0.02/kWH. So there is no reason to require huge gains in economic efficiency. Rather small ones will do.
Once again, you bring up the old lie that the vast majority of any renewable penetration would have to be backed capacity-for-capacity by non-renewables. There are a dozen ways to make up for the intermittency problem.
* Geothermal is perfect for baseload, and thermal storage solar's generation profile very nearly mirrors the demand curve.
* The proliferation of plug-in hybrids that interact with a smart grid, charging when demand is low and selling back to the grid when demand is high.
* Interconnecting geographical regions, so that oversupply in one region can be matched to overdemand in another.
* Diversifying sources for renewables.
* Increasing energy efficiency to make it cheaper to build the generative capacity to serve a given human need.
* Weather forecasting to predict the highs and lows.
* Use of emergency generators as standby generative capacity.
* Load shedding.
* Rolling brownouts.
* Shutting off the TV and going to play outside.
Yes, those last three were listed in order of awfulness.
Lastly, you still haven't addressed hde huge hidden subsidy of all fossil power. Producers don't pay a cent for the right to dump CO2 in the atmosphere. Unless the economic cost of a ton of emitted CO2 is really $0.00, then the economic picture is heavily and artificially skewed in favor of the entrenched technologies.
I think our discussion thus far has been based on mutual overreaction. It seemed to me that your initial position was that Joseph Smith's travails made it impossible for a reasonable person to question his motives. My position was always that, because some benefits did accrue to him, there was still quite a bit of room for doubt. But for me, Smith is too complex a figure, and the evidence is too controversial and contradictory to let anyone make absolute claims about what was going on in his mind.
Re: absurdist claims. The absolute, most jaw-droppingest claim I've ever heard about the Church came from a fellow attendee at an ex-Mormon conference (back when all that exmo stuff was exciting and novel to me). During their "testimony meeting", this woman got up and, with perfect seriousness, explained that there is a giant pyramid built beneath the LDS Conference Center. As the Brethren take turns at the podium, this pyramid is sapping the psychic energy from the audience and channeling it into the speaker. The guy next to me and I were laughing so hard that the woman behind us asked, "Am I going to have to separate you two?" It wasn't the first time I'd met pyramid lady, and I'm absolutely convinced that she believed every word she was saying.
Could The Book of Mormon have been dictated by Smith, without the aid of notes or outlines? That troubled me for a long time after I left. I never came to any sure conclusions on the matter, but I did have some thoughts in favor of the idea that he could.
1) Smith had several years between the time he first started talking about the plates and the time he started translating. The translation process took only a couple of months, but there may have been time prior for him to work out plotting, characters, theology, etc.
2) The Isaiah chapters and the retelling of the Sermon on the Mound cut down the page count a bit.
3) Jerald and Sandra Tanner claimed that "and it came to pass" might have been Smith's way of stalling for time while he figured out what to say next. Not a whole lot of their work resonated with me, but that bit made some sense to me.
4) People were much better at telling improv stories back then. They didn't have cable, so they had to make their own fun. Lucy Mack Smith's memoirs talked some about her son's impressive storytelling skills. I think she was pretty old when she wrote her memoirs, so it's tough to be certain of how much credence to give them.
Just as an aside on that last point, Lucy Mack tells a story about a dream Joseph Smith Sr. had, one which really closely parallels Lehi's Tree of Life Vision. But it could be argued that the story from the Book of Mormon influenced her recollection of the dream.
Even accounting for all that, it's an impressive feat, and doubly so given Smith's education level. I can respect someone believing that the feat was entirely impossible.
>> Smith's claim was divine inspiration. And that means perfection. If he wanted to convince people he could translate variances would be fine. If he wanted to convince people that he was talking to angels and translating by the power of God, they would be unacceptable.
I don't remember the exact nature of the debate, but I have a vague recollection that positing perfection in the initial translation causes some problems for apologists. There are thousands of changes between the first edition and subsequent editions, and while the vast majority are mere typographical problems, there are a couple that make the "Joseph Smith as high-resolution photocopier" theory hard to maintain. But maybe that's what his early followers expected of him.
You're right that I (like many former Mormons) am more interested in the tawdry, the salacious, and the weird in LDS history. Part of that is the tendency to prefer information that supports my own biases, and part is a distrust of the version of history I got in seminary. I think by the time I read "In Sacred Loneliness," I'd gotten through the worst of my sc
I notice that you're still not accounting for the "deferred taxes". For at least one of the big three tax categories you mention, ExxonMobil annually claims something like $30B in liabilities, but only writes a check for $8-$10B. I find that inexplicable.
In the 2007 report, ExxonMobil claimed a 32% return on average capital employed, and a 34% "net income to average shareholder's equity". Perhaps I'm confused about what those terms mean.
Another question I have is whether any of those numbers include the $.18/gallon tax we pay at the pump. I consider most of that tax as returned to the oil industry, in the form of improved roads (and therefore a bigger market for their product).
As I said in a previous post, the subsidies to wind and solar are fairly small in terms of
>> For the environmental damage, let's charge wind with the damage from mining all that copper, steel and aluminum. Solar with the chemicals needed to make them. Both with the oil needed to run their systems, and on and on... If you want to get extreme, you can make ANYTHING look bad.
By all means, let's charge them with it. I'm guessing that if you compare the full lifecycle of wind and coal, including all the resulting environmental damage, and included that in the sticker price, it would be the death knell for every coal-fired plant in the world. Because the current system charges coal plants $0.00/ton for the CO2 they emit. That's the biggest subsidy the energy industry has, and it shows up nowhere in the report you cite.
You're ignoring a few whopper subsidies. The Price-Anderson Act limits the potential liabilities for a nuclear accident to $10B, a figure small enough that they can buy insurance for it. Anything above that is covered by the U.S. I've heard plenty of experts talk about how, without this law, the nuclear industry would be uninsurable.
Also, there is the fact that very little oil is used to generate electricity. So I'm not surprised that the amount of subsidies given to oil-based electrical generation is similarly tiny.
Finally, the subsidies being granted are on the order of a couple of cents per kilowatt hour. So a complete conversion to, say, wind power would be huge in absolute terms, we're talking about paying 30% more for our electricity, max. That's a small price to pay for energy independence and a reduction of greenhouse gases.
You could also have included the next sentence in the article: "But this year, reckons Rune Moesgaard of the Danish Wind Industry Association, wind power will actually save consumers money for the first time, as the benefits resulting from lower power prices outweigh the falling cost of the subsidy."
Then again, quoting someone named Rune Moesgaard would have made it hard to take you seriously. So I understand.
Also, I think subsidy per unit production is a very misleading way to evaluate it, when comparing an entrenched primary power source with upstarts that generate a tiny fraction of our energy supply. I'm guessing that the total subsidies for the oil industry are higher, even though the current price of oil makes any subsidies ridiculous.
Oil companies don't seem to pay $200B/year. The $3 of taxes for every dollar of profit is also unlikely.
From the Exxon-Mobil 2006 annual report: $39.5B profit (after taxes). $30.3B "sales-based taxes" and $39.2B "other taxes and duties". So we're already at less than a 2-to-1 taxes to profits.
But it gets better. Go down to the "liabilities" section, and the "income taxes payable" section is only $8B. Another $20.8B is listed as "deferred". I looked at earlier reports, and it's a striking pattern: They claim to incur two to three times more tax liability every year than they actually seem to pay.
I don't fully understand what's going on there, or what sort of taxes fall under "sales" and what falls under "other", but I know that if I was making a 32% return on my money every year, and the IRS let me defer most of my tax burden for even a year, I'd call that a huge tax break.
There's another subsidy you could argue over: estimates of the economic damage caused by the global warming effects of each barrel pumped range all over the map, but $50/barrel isn't unreasonable. Factor that in, and the oil companies are actually operating at an enormous loss.
Then you have the I-can't-believe-this-isn't-obvious principle: pulling natural resources out of the ground doesn't generate wealth. From an accounting standpoint, it should be considered capital depletion, not income. To me, the oil industry as a whole is like a trust fund kid who says that going to the ATM is his "job".
On an unrelated note, the whole "baseload" problem is easily surmounted. Read up on concentrating solar power. Short version: sunlight heats a fluid, which drives a Stirling engine. The fluid doesn't go cold just because the sun goes down. Hell, with a big enough, insulated enough reservoir, it could probably produce for weeks without input. Additional heat input could also come from burning natural gas.
It's one way. Another is to make photovoltaics less efficient, in such a way that the cost drops faster than the efficiency. Going from 10% to 5% efficiency is great, so long as you also go from $400/m^2 to $100/m^2.