Since I commented on this thread, I can only comment my support of this. Modded up to +5, if I only could!
And no, this commenter is not a commie! A well-run government that wisely allocates taxes for the benefit of all its citizens is light years of political advancement beyond those worthless 18th-century labels.
Since money now = speech, and by extension, votes, taxes should be based solely upon the percentage of a nations' wealth that the people controlling that wealth hold and not on the percentage of the demographic that those people occupy.
In other words, the 0.01% of the population controlling 80% (or x% amount) of a nation's wealth should pay 80% (or x% amount) of the taxes necessary to fund the activities required of government. Our representatives could then concentrate on determining exactly which functions their constituents want to fund, based on the actual costs of those programs, not on what the politicians and special-interest pundits merely imagine that they should cost.
As always, anticipating the knee-jerk derision of the usual supply-sider apologists.;}
While Trumpkin MAY not have NEEDED to lie, cheat, or steal, his history of business practices show him to have been a liar, a cheat, and he has habitually cheated his contractors at every chance he got, as his lack of real business acumen bankrupted one business after another. His only real product is a has-been, never-was facade of chintzy glitter with which he has attempted to impress and over-compensate for his own insecurities and his lack of any true ability, above that of being a first-class bully and a con man, a parasite on the skills and abilities of his hired help.
The mirror of his actions constantly reminds the informed that he should never be trusted with anything important. Most of the world's leaders have already seen through his deceptive blustering, and are hoping the gullible US voters that support him will soon get wise to his charades.
The GOP leadership must have thought he could pull the wool over our eyes long enough to capture the entire government, but even those dinosaurs have found that his antics and lies are uncontrollable. The smartest of them still cling to the hope we voters won't notice before they can gerrymander another election and solidify their hold on our government before they lose the whole shooting match; or the whole world goes up in a nuclear cloud or drowns in the rising acidic oceans of uncontrollable global warming, whichever comes first.
Aighearach (97333) has provided an anecdote that simply illustrates how he/she can provide us with negative knowledge which he/she thinks proves a point.
Aighearach (97333) does not provide us any supporting facts to account for how the local algae blooms could possibly occur from entirely natural causes, or even how these seemingly natural blooms must be unconnected to undisclosed or unstudied effects of Man Made Climate Changes that might have affected the natural processes of those lakes.
While there may be a number of potential causes for the effects described by Aighearach (97333), without the complete information set, this anecdote is merely more negative knowledge, and so is also worthless in the form it has been presented, ie: Broken Logic.
Humans have always had uproars about ridiculous and meaningless differences.
The only real effect of these imbecilic ploys has been to deflect, subvert, and otherwise distract public attention from the truly important discussions affecting real events and actually relevant outcomes of the effects of climate change on the natural systems of the planet.
Now can we get on with a comprehensive discussion about the relevant topics?
A common effect of long term drought in a specific area is flash flooding (due to the dying off or the destruction by fire of desiccated vegetation) which, when the rains return is just what most climate models predict.
The Russians don't have to be running any news sites to be able to flood them with fake, misleading and disruptive "news". As I recall, the Wikki leaks that leaked the disruptive DNC non-story have been shown to be connected to known Russian hackers.
Putin has near total control of political operatives in the Ukraine takeover (not to mention the 900 actual armed tanks within the boundaries of that beleaguered country) and in the faked Crimean separation that resulted in an outright land grab of Ukrainian's territory.
That Russian operatives have been attempting to influence elections in France and Germany (with various levels of success) is well established, so it is not such a heavy intellectual lift to suspect that they would attempt to influence elections in their only major competition on the world's political stage.
In a post-WMD world, we have become more distrustful of our own government leaders and many of us have now developed a healthy (if cynical) skepticism their pronouncements, which only supports the notion that our elections can be influenced in the Russians favor, especially with the "liar-in-chief" providing his own narcissistic misleading, disruptive, and deflective Tweets, including his peculiar fanboy adulations of the dictator, Putin.
Republicans have been allowing their ideology and lust for political power to hound both of the Clintons, even though many progressives feel that the trade deals and so-called welfare deals that they signed onto have actually been anti-progressive in their effects.
Croney capitalism has no native party but will corrupt any politician with weak principles and a desire to remain in office with copious donations to their reelection campaigns.
Our political system is well past due for term limits and a shorter campaign cycle with universal funding that would allow even a poor worker to aspire to office, no matter which political party they may choose to affiliate themselves.
As it is now, nearly all candidates are preselected by political insiders, irrespective of party, which effectively prevents most independent candidates from getting the exposure they need to aspire to national political office. In most of the states, the independent voter is forced to lie about her or his party affiliation to have any contribution to the nomination process of a party's candidates.
IMHO, all parties are a perversion of the Constitution's stated electoral process, but that has been going on since the first round of elections since the Constitution was adopted, due to the human nature to form associations based on self-interest and class struggles.
The individual states are constrained by their own limited tax bases and can not bring the combined resources of the entire nation to bear on finding a solution to the problem providing true health care instead of this system of enriching the owners and investors of a few insurance companies who can (in the absence of governmental protections) hold every individual hostage to the unavoidable frailties of human life.
The health care problems of the people do not have a marketplace solution because the participants do not exist in a state of equality, which is a precondition for arriving at a perfect marketplace solution. We are seeing the evolution of political and economic thought take place before our very eyes.
The blind adherence to the political and economic theories developed in the past are no longer relevant in this post-technological era. Civilization has finally developed the ability to make a paradise on Earth possible in real time, for every inhabitant of the planet, if only we can find the true grit to move past the superstitions and false traditions of the past.
...is a fool's bargain, no matter who proposes it.
Whatever happened to all of the opposing viewpoints actually working with each other to arrive at a negotiated approach to solving the actual problem, instead of merely seeing who can spew the most piss to discredit and demonize the opposition.
Really, if this Congress and this Presidential administration and the crippled idiocy of a captured Judiciary is the best our nation can do, our founding father's grand experiment in allowing the people to rule has failed miserably, being wholly replaced by a kleptocracy of the entitled few and their ethically and morally challenged philosophy of greed and corruption.
Waiting now for the typical/. crews of trolls to flame and disrupt this submission, as usually happens with every submission on this forum.
It is typical of a self-serving, knee-jerk reaction showing no capability or interest in distinguishing fact from fiction.
For a community of supposedly tech-savvy and intelligent representatives of the human race, this only highlights that humanity's purported large brains are devolving into the shambles of the undisciplined thought processes of mob reactions and superstitious, unscientific group-speak, devoid of any critical thinking or attention to even the mundane details of ethics or morality.
IMO, Trump's administration has already far surpassed any other administration for its attempts at manipulation and deceptiveness at nearly all, if not at every level of public discourse. Lies, misinformation, and distractions run roughshod over the freedoms and civil rights of the citizens of this country.
The point is not that other administrations have not attempted to spin and manipulate. It's that this administration seems to be in the thrall of a totally self-involved, narcissist who seeks only his own self-aggrandizement, not that different from the depravity shown by the dictatorships of North Korea and Russia.
My only hope is that all our elected representatives will take to heart the sage advice of the lame duck, Senator McCain, who at the end of his political career has realized that it is time to return to the principles of one person, one vote, and to resist the ideological trappings of party in a return to actually representing the needs and desires of real people.
Perhaps the lasting effect of the Trump administration will be to awaken a sleeping public to demand a return to true integrity and support for the democratic principles in our political and social discourse, reversing the trends of the past 40 years that have worked to destroy the fragile gains of human rights and concern for human values above the narrow perversions of greed and brutish reliance on violence that our baser natures find so easily accepted as the first response to every problem.
Republicans have not really cared about fairness since the Dixiecrats jumped ship and joined the Democrats. Then they found Jesus and read Naomi Klein's book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism and learned how to better manipulate the US public by capitalizing on every crisis that came along.
A rising tide once lifted all boats. Now the only ones afloat are those that are bringing in cheap crap from the cheapest sweat shops that can be found the world. All the others have been sunk by the tidal waves of greed and corruption that now rules politics.
I deleted my Twitter account because it devolved into a litany of ad hominem attacks and I was inundated with a constant barrage of banal and repetitive tweets about useless crap.
The major news always aggregates more than I will ever want to know about celebrities and political clap-trap, all of it amounting to a #swamp of misspellings and misinformation and uninformed opinions.
If I want entertainment, I watch Netflix, because our public airwaves have been coopted by advertisements aimed mostly at the affluent and the easily frightened souls who are sickly results of our industrialized food system and the consumerization of our economy.
Oh, and we have allowed lawyers to make taking personal responsibility and the use of common sense a rarity, while anyone with enough money can literally get away with mass murder.
Even our postal system has been perverted to subsidize the worthless junk mail that inundates us all with unwanted advertisements that businesses can use to reduce their tax burdens at the expense of the legitimate uses of first class mail that are still required for certain legal transactions and (mostly) secure communications.
I agree that the ballot box is no longer an effective means of protest, as is writing to your representative, with the exception of a very few who may be true statesmen or stateswomen. When the police protect property rights by provoking the angry crowd, they are breaking the law. Any provokers are also breaking the law, even when the laws are so often used to protect the property rights of CAPITAL above the HUMAN civil right of protest, or the human rights of securing "... the blessings of liberty to themselves and their posterity".
It's so sad that we must resort to protests in order to gain the attention of our elected representatives or to get proper news coverage. The peaceful protests to protect our water rights should not have been necessary if our Constitution were actually what runs the country. Instead, a totally illegal system of lobbying and an arcane and convoluted system of Congressional rules allow the two-party con to pervert the simplicity and adaptability of our Constitution.
The fake 2 party politics we now suffer under allows a vote-and-forget laziness to become the norm. Our nation has become a nation of entitled "Me-firsts", lead by a constant barrage of instant media and entertainment in lieu of real news.
News should not have to be exciting to be reported, but the commercialization of the process and funding of news gathering has devolved into the feel-good pap that defrauds the US people from access to the real news that keeps a government honest and effective.
All too often, the real news is painted by professional media specialists and political agents to suit the radical agendas and politicial viewpoints of the extremes.
"Coal plants don't have fumes and emissions, since they throw nothing into the air that could cause global warming;p"
To be sure, coal plants throw CO2 (carbon dioxide), SO2, (Sulfur dioxide), Hg (Mercury), and particulates into the air. I assume you forgot to add the {sarcasm} tag...
Slashdot Mirror
Since I commented on this thread, I can only comment my support of this. Modded up to +5, if I only could!
And no, this commenter is not a commie! A well-run government that wisely allocates taxes for the benefit of all its citizens is light years of political advancement beyond those worthless 18th-century labels.
Since money now = speech, and by extension, votes, taxes should be based solely upon the percentage of a nations' wealth that the people controlling that wealth hold and not on the percentage of the demographic that those people occupy.
In other words, the 0.01% of the population controlling 80% (or x% amount) of a nation's wealth should pay 80% (or x% amount) of the taxes necessary to fund the activities required of government. Our representatives could then concentrate on determining exactly which functions their constituents want to fund, based on the actual costs of those programs, not on what the politicians and special-interest pundits merely imagine that they should cost.
As always, anticipating the knee-jerk derision of the usual supply-sider apologists. ;}
and as Bernie Turpin observed, "Mars isn't any place to raise a kid"...
While Trumpkin MAY not have NEEDED to lie, cheat, or steal, his history of business practices show him to have been a liar, a cheat, and he has habitually cheated his contractors at every chance he got, as his lack of real business acumen bankrupted one business after another. His only real product is a has-been, never-was facade of chintzy glitter with which he has attempted to impress and over-compensate for his own insecurities and his lack of any true ability, above that of being a first-class bully and a con man, a parasite on the skills and abilities of his hired help.
The mirror of his actions constantly reminds the informed that he should never be trusted with anything important. Most of the world's leaders have already seen through his deceptive blustering, and are hoping the gullible US voters that support him will soon get wise to his charades.
The GOP leadership must have thought he could pull the wool over our eyes long enough to capture the entire government, but even those dinosaurs have found that his antics and lies are uncontrollable. The smartest of them still cling to the hope we voters won't notice before they can gerrymander another election and solidify their hold on our government before they lose the whole shooting match; or the whole world goes up in a nuclear cloud or drowns in the rising acidic oceans of uncontrollable global warming, whichever comes first.
Aighearach (97333) has provided an anecdote that simply illustrates how he/she can provide us with negative knowledge which he/she thinks proves a point.
Aighearach (97333) does not provide us any supporting facts to account for how the local algae blooms could possibly occur from entirely natural causes, or even how these seemingly natural blooms must be unconnected to undisclosed or unstudied effects of Man Made Climate Changes that might have affected the natural processes of those lakes.
While there may be a number of potential causes for the effects described by Aighearach (97333), without the complete information set, this anecdote is merely more negative knowledge, and so is also worthless in the form it has been presented, ie: Broken Logic.
Humans have always had uproars about ridiculous and meaningless differences.
The only real effect of these imbecilic ploys has been to deflect, subvert, and otherwise distract public attention from the truly important discussions affecting real events and actually relevant outcomes of the effects of climate change on the natural systems of the planet.
Now can we get on with a comprehensive discussion about the relevant topics?
A common effect of long term drought in a specific area is flash flooding (due to the dying off or the destruction by fire of desiccated vegetation) which, when the rains return is just what most climate models predict.
The Russians don't have to be running any news sites to be able to flood them with fake, misleading and disruptive "news". As I recall, the Wikki leaks that leaked the disruptive DNC non-story have been shown to be connected to known Russian hackers.
Putin has near total control of political operatives in the Ukraine takeover (not to mention the 900 actual armed tanks within the boundaries of that beleaguered country) and in the faked Crimean separation that resulted in an outright land grab of Ukrainian's territory.
That Russian operatives have been attempting to influence elections in France and Germany (with various levels of success) is well established, so it is not such a heavy intellectual lift to suspect that they would attempt to influence elections in their only major competition on the world's political stage.
In a post-WMD world, we have become more distrustful of our own government leaders and many of us have now developed a healthy (if cynical) skepticism their pronouncements, which only supports the notion that our elections can be influenced in the Russians favor, especially with the "liar-in-chief" providing his own narcissistic misleading, disruptive, and deflective Tweets, including his peculiar fanboy adulations of the dictator, Putin.
IMHO, Mod +5 for this, AC#54898871.
Republicans have been allowing their ideology and lust for political power to hound both of the Clintons, even though many progressives feel that the trade deals and so-called welfare deals that they signed onto have actually been anti-progressive in their effects.
Croney capitalism has no native party but will corrupt any politician with weak principles and a desire to remain in office with copious donations to their reelection campaigns.
Our political system is well past due for term limits and a shorter campaign cycle with universal funding that would allow even a poor worker to aspire to office, no matter which political party they may choose to affiliate themselves.
As it is now, nearly all candidates are preselected by political insiders, irrespective of party, which effectively prevents most independent candidates from getting the exposure they need to aspire to national political office. In most of the states, the independent voter is forced to lie about her or his party affiliation to have any contribution to the nomination process of a party's candidates.
IMHO, all parties are a perversion of the Constitution's stated electoral process, but that has been going on since the first round of elections since the Constitution was adopted, due to the human nature to form associations based on self-interest and class struggles.
+5 mod points for this, AC #5490063! Thank you for your cogent remarks.
-5 mod points to you, AC troll (#54899891)
Do you have these flame bait comments in a script somewhere?
Be gone! Let the adults in the room take it from here, and return to using your stinking mouth hole to its only useful function: sucking on pond scum!
Even scavengers and scum suckers like you have a purpose in the grand scheme of life on earth.
The individual states are constrained by their own limited tax bases and can not bring the combined resources of the entire nation to bear on finding a solution to the problem providing true health care instead of this system of enriching the owners and investors of a few insurance companies who can (in the absence of governmental protections) hold every individual hostage to the unavoidable frailties of human life.
The health care problems of the people do not have a marketplace solution because the participants do not exist in a state of equality, which is a precondition for arriving at a perfect marketplace solution. We are seeing the evolution of political and economic thought take place before our very eyes.
The blind adherence to the political and economic theories developed in the past are no longer relevant in this post-technological era. Civilization has finally developed the ability to make a paradise on Earth possible in real time, for every inhabitant of the planet, if only we can find the true grit to move past the superstitions and false traditions of the past.
...is a fool's bargain, no matter who proposes it.
Whatever happened to all of the opposing viewpoints actually working with each other to arrive at a negotiated approach to solving the actual problem, instead of merely seeing who can spew the most piss to discredit and demonize the opposition.
Really, if this Congress and this Presidential administration and the crippled idiocy of a captured Judiciary is the best our nation can do, our founding father's grand experiment in allowing the people to rule has failed miserably, being wholly replaced by a kleptocracy of the entitled few and their ethically and morally challenged philosophy of greed and corruption.
Waiting now for the typical /. crews of trolls to flame and disrupt this submission, as usually happens with every submission on this forum.
It is typical of a self-serving, knee-jerk reaction showing no capability or interest in distinguishing fact from fiction.
For a community of supposedly tech-savvy and intelligent representatives of the human race, this only highlights that humanity's purported large brains are devolving into the shambles of the undisciplined thought processes of mob reactions and superstitious, unscientific group-speak, devoid of any critical thinking or attention to even the mundane details of ethics or morality.
IMO, Trump's administration has already far surpassed any other administration for its attempts at manipulation and deceptiveness at nearly all, if not at every level of public discourse. Lies, misinformation, and distractions run roughshod over the freedoms and civil rights of the citizens of this country.
The point is not that other administrations have not attempted to spin and manipulate. It's that this administration seems to be in the thrall of a totally self-involved, narcissist who seeks only his own self-aggrandizement, not that different from the depravity shown by the dictatorships of North Korea and Russia.
My only hope is that all our elected representatives will take to heart the sage advice of the lame duck, Senator McCain, who at the end of his political career has realized that it is time to return to the principles of one person, one vote, and to resist the ideological trappings of party in a return to actually representing the needs and desires of real people.
Perhaps the lasting effect of the Trump administration will be to awaken a sleeping public to demand a return to true integrity and support for the democratic principles in our political and social discourse, reversing the trends of the past 40 years that have worked to destroy the fragile gains of human rights and concern for human values above the narrow perversions of greed and brutish reliance on violence that our baser natures find so easily accepted as the first response to every problem.
To be fair, the corporate Democrats have been trying hard to gin up their game ever since Jimmy Carter left the White House to build houses.
Republicans have not really cared about fairness since the Dixiecrats jumped ship and joined the Democrats. Then they found Jesus and read Naomi Klein's book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism and learned how to better manipulate the US public by capitalizing on every crisis that came along.
A rising tide once lifted all boats. Now the only ones afloat are those that are bringing in cheap crap from the cheapest sweat shops that can be found the world. All the others have been sunk by the tidal waves of greed and corruption that now rules politics.
I deleted my Twitter account because it devolved into a litany of ad hominem attacks and I was inundated with a constant barrage of banal and repetitive tweets about useless crap.
The major news always aggregates more than I will ever want to know about celebrities and political clap-trap, all of it amounting to a #swamp of misspellings and misinformation and uninformed opinions.
If I want entertainment, I watch Netflix, because our public airwaves have been coopted by advertisements aimed mostly at the affluent and the easily frightened souls who are sickly results of our industrialized food system and the consumerization of our economy.
Oh, and we have allowed lawyers to make taking personal responsibility and the use of common sense a rarity, while anyone with enough money can literally get away with mass murder.
Even our postal system has been perverted to subsidize the worthless junk mail that inundates us all with unwanted advertisements that businesses can use to reduce their tax burdens at the expense of the legitimate uses of first class mail that are still required for certain legal transactions and (mostly) secure communications.
I agree that the ballot box is no longer an effective means of protest, as is writing to your representative, with the exception of a very few who may be true statesmen or stateswomen. When the police protect property rights by provoking the angry crowd, they are breaking the law. Any provokers are also breaking the law, even when the laws are so often used to protect the property rights of CAPITAL above the HUMAN civil right of protest, or the human rights of securing "... the blessings of liberty to themselves and their posterity".
It's so sad that we must resort to protests in order to gain the attention of our elected representatives or to get proper news coverage. The peaceful protests to protect our water rights should not have been necessary if our Constitution were actually what runs the country. Instead, a totally illegal system of lobbying and an arcane and convoluted system of Congressional rules allow the two-party con to pervert the simplicity and adaptability of our Constitution.
The fake 2 party politics we now suffer under allows a vote-and-forget laziness to become the norm. Our nation has become a nation of entitled "Me-firsts", lead by a constant barrage of instant media and entertainment in lieu of real news.
News should not have to be exciting to be reported, but the commercialization of the process and funding of news gathering has devolved into the feel-good pap that defrauds the US people from access to the real news that keeps a government honest and effective.
All too often, the real news is painted by professional media specialists and political agents to suit the radical agendas and politicial viewpoints of the extremes.
Good points. should be modded up.
To be sure, coal plants throw CO2 (carbon dioxide), SO2, (Sulfur dioxide), Hg (Mercury), and particulates into the air. I assume you forgot to add the {sarcasm} tag...
Great comment, despite the mangling of the spelling and the language. Should be modded up to +5
Good comment. Deserves to be modded up to +5
Sort of reminds me of an unlikely and unqualified candidate for a certain national office.
Modded -1 Flamebait in order to preserve my own comments in this thread...
Modded +1 in order to preserve my own comments in this discussion.