Heroin addiction is not spread by a pathogen, heroin is neither a virus nor a bacteria, and whatever it is they are giving those mice, it's not a vaccine.
You can be the most rabid Randian fanboy and have to admit the fact that government officials have a direct incentive not to do their jobs if they companies they are in charge of regulating can reward them with fat paychecks when they leave office.
I believe a "Randian" would say that's an inevitable side-effect of excessive government power. And that the more power government has over private dealings, the more incentive rent-seekers and leeches have to spend resources influencing government policy. I'm not "Randian", but I would agree with that assessment.
You're seriously trying to say that an example of regulatory capture (forcing out an official unfriendly to industry) is an example that regulatory capture doesn't exist?
How the hell did you get that? I'm saying that there is an incompetent idiot in charge of the agency, appointed by an incompetent idiot based strictly on his ideology, ignoring his complete lack of qualification. Another Democrat being anti-science.
Other than constantly with TEPCO and the Fukishima plant? When plants in the U.S. share the same design and are of the same age? How about plants in the U.S. that disconnected earthquake sensors in budget cuts? [crooksandliars.com]
So now you're going to switch to Japan? According to your rent boy Jaczko, we don't know what went wrong in Fukishima. So apparently he's even dumber than you are. Crooks and Liars is a bunch of partisan spinmasters and, LO! anti-science emos about nuclear, and you have STILL shown NO evidence of the nuclear industry "cutting corners". They CLAIM that a Virginia GOVERNMENT says that another state agency removed seismographs due to a "budget issue", which would have been GOVERNMENT budget - and you claim that is somehow related to the industry "making a buck". Complete bullshit - total fail. You suck at this.
Obama could have easily challenged Reagan from his right in the 80's, and that's just a fact you'll have to deal with.
He could challenge any statist on being a more tyrannical statist. Agreed. BFD.
Pull your head out, man.
Back at you. You have this completely black and white world view of "Left good, Right bad", when in fact even the label is misleading, shifting, and completely a matter of opinion. I could just as easily take your list of Reagan stuff (too lazy to read it all, sorry), and claim that makes Reagan to the Left of Obama. It's meaningless. That is, unless you want a nice, black/white, good/evil view of the world, and the only way to reconcile it is to oust any individual from your ideology when they do stuff that you decide disqualifies them from your self-defined buckets.
Guess what? BOTH sides are out to screw you, they just have different buttons to push to make them think they're on your side. Partisans as myopic as you are rare, as even most party-line voters will claim to be "liberal on social issues and conservative on fiscal ones" - or the opposite. The whole "is it left or is it right" argument is useless.
You could make a better argument by claiming that the Middle East conflict has dragged all US politicians into a holy war, and define each as supporting the Arabs or the Jews.
That depends entirely on what you mean by "insane left scale" and "insane right scale".
You have a lot of gall to be accusing other people of the 'No True Scotsman' fallacy (incorrectly, even!), while engaging in it yourself.
Mart
Ridiculous. There is no such fallacy anywhere in my argument. What you have quoted is nothing but a question of terms, and rather vague ones at that ("left" and "right" are definitions even more difficult to pin down than "Conservative" and "Liberal").
Obviously, you don't know how to identify fallacious arguments. Go read wikipedia again, maybe some day you'll figure it out.
What do you think the chances are that this "one world government" will place your rights (the individual) over the rights these people (who are also merely individuals) have assigned to themselves?
None at all. Case in point, Article 29 of the UN's "Universal Declaration of Human Rights":
(3) These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.
Are embryos thrown in the trash if not used for research? Yes or no.
Who the fuck cares?
Do the same individuals in the nuclear industry hop back and forth between government regulatory bodies and working for the very companies they were supposedly regulating: yes or no.
I don't know. They do this with the FDA, the EPA, and others, so I assume they do that at the NRC too. But not Obama's chairman - that guy is just an incompetent partisan douchebag that was the first cabinet level administrator brought before congress because of votes of no confidence by every directly reporting member of his staff. He's also clearly wholly unqualified for the position, and makes idiotic decisions based on emotional criteria. Much like yourself. Greg Jaczko, is that you?
Is the nuclear power industry given to pinching pennies and cutting corners to make a buck: yes or no.
No, you fucktard, not as far as safety is concerned. No iota of evidence for such an accusation.
Is Obama to the right of Reagan on the vast majority of issues: yes or no.
That's a great question! Oh, wait, no it's not. I reject the premise your question is based on.
Name one issue where Obama is actually on the actual left, much less many.
He is a Democrat and President, so by definition the head of the party, and thus on the left. So every position he takes is the leftist platform. Growing the government unchecked through deficit spending, 30,000 drones over the US, class warfare pitting the rich against the poor while shrinking the middle class, expanding the powers of the EPA, the DHS, and every other executive agency while marginalizing congress. These are all part of the leftist agenda now, as well as the Federal takeover of health care, massive new tax complications to an already incredibly complicated tax code - these are all tools of the left.
Notice that Reagan's rhetoric was practically the opposite of Obama's - yet their policy results are similar. Both increased the deficit and expanded the military industrial complex. But there are some that still think blind partisanship is the right answer.
You're using that phrase, "no true Scotsman", but it doesn't mean whatever it is you think it means.
I assume by this that you refuse to even acknowledge your own use of fallacious arguments. That's not just lazy, it's myopic.
Nuclear regulators ARE completely cooped by a penny pinching, corner cutting industry.
So your anti-science stance is pretty much the same as the ones you call AGW deniers: That the scientists are "in the tank", they have an agenda, and their research and arguments can't be trusted.
Obama IS to the right of Reagan, on everything from military spending to suspects rights to undocumented workers to the deficit to Social Security.
I can't really disagree with that, in that Obama and Reagan held similar positions on all of those issues. But Obama *is* on the left, he is the darling of the Democrats, many progressive organizations, the unions, and even the Socialist party. So --- take ownership of it. Those are leftist positions now. The right just wants less government, sound money, a non-interventionist foreign policy, and strict adherence to the Constitution.
Name a single Democrat who is as far on the insane left scale as Santorum is on the insane right scale. You can't. Democrats are, in fact, farther to the right on most issues than most people who are called "leftists" anywhere else in the world.
That depends entirely on what you mean by "insane left scale" and "insane right scale". Santorum favors big-government solutions, so he is more left than right on that scale. I'm assuming you are focusing on the social issues traditionally associated with the right, and it's hard to find anyone as insanely social authoritarian as Santorum, even in the Republican party. He's a Theocrat that would make the Muslim Brotherhood proud, if only he followed the right prophet.
Keep this in mind: Santorum doesn't really trust any scientific inquiry coming out of academia, because he's convinced they've been taken over by Satan. Not hyperbole. Here is a direct quote:
Satan has done so by attacking the great institutions of America, using those great vices of pride, vanity, and sensuality as the root to attack all of these strong plants that have so deeply rooted in American tradition. He was successful. The place where he was, in my mind, the most successful and first successful was in academia. He understood pride of "smart" people. He attacked them at their weakest, that they were in fact smarter than everybody else and could come up with something new and different, pursue new truths, deny the existence of truth, play with it, "because we're smart;" and so academia a long time ago fell.
Can I get some examples of main stream science denialism by democrats?
Obvious one right here. You can claim this is one both sides ignore - but like Republicans claiming to be "pro family", Democrats should be held to a higher standard when they are always claiming so vociferously to be the "pro science" party.
But there are others examples. Note, for example, that Democrats oppose scientific studies if it involves testing on animals - human embryo research, though, poses no problems for them. Democrats ignore the scientific consensus in favor of more nuclear power plants, and oppose them for mostly emotional reasons. Note also the Democrat's reliance on the Precautionary Principle for evaluating policy decisions. That idea "imposes a burden of proof on those who create potential risks, and it requires regulation of activities even if it cannot be shown that those activities are likely to produce significant harms." - that doesn't sound very scientific at all, but it's used to oppose all forms of GM food, nuclear power, and even to block research funding in the absence of the ability to prove a negative. This entirely unscientific principle was even evident in Katherine Sebelius's justification to block the availability of Plan B contraceptives over-the-counter
Humans do not in any way require meat, milk or eggs for a healthy diet. Avocado, quinoa, and soybeans each contain all of the essential amino acids the body needs.
No, they don't.
or peanut butter on whole wheat bread.
Like many others (sometimes estimated at 15% of the population), I cannot tolerate gluten, which severely restricts the vegetable protein available to us.
Saying we need milk is a little silly, considering it is produced by a completely different species for its own young. If you think about it, drinking milk is actually a little strange; ours is the only species that drinks the milk of other species.
Yet human digestion has evolved, in most people, to break down lactose and utilize animal milk as an important source of nutrition, protein, and good fats.
Studies have shown that Wind power can generate more than enough power for the planet.
Is this like the "studies" that have shown gerbils on treadmills can generate all the power we need?
There are so many problems with this assertion I don't know where to begin. Wind is intermittent, and wind farms usually have two power ratings: A capacity number, and a capacity factor number. The capacity of a wind farm might be 300 megawatts, but how much electricity it will actually produce depends on many factors, and if you look at the average production of all those wind turbines over a certain period of time - usually a year - and you divide that number by the maximum capacity of all those wind turbines, you get the capacity factor number. So for example, if the 300 megawatt wind farm is operating at 30% capacity, it would be producing an average of 100 megawatts at any time. But this doesn't mean that you can count on 100 megawatts coming out; on some day it might be 300, and on others it might be 30. This is a problem not only because you need to build many more wind turbines than the capacity numbers might lead you to believe (and the media usually reports capacity numbers, not capacity factors), but also because of the way the power grid works, which means there needs to be capacity somewhere else to make up for the reduced wind farm output.
So you might have many wind farms over a large area, so when there is less wind one place the grid can draw from where there is greater wind somewhere else. But the grid has to balance supply and demand at all times, so if bad luck has it that there's no or little wind over most of your wind farms on the same day, you still have a problem.
That's not to say we shouldn't be building wind farms at all, only that you need to be realistic about what can be accomplished, and stop giving people unrealistic expectations about what can be done.
Human beings on omnivores - which means we can live on plant or animals. So while you may not be a rabbit, you can lives on plants.
Aside from the typos in your claim, it's false. Humans require meat and animal products, milk and eggs at a minimum, for a healthy diet. No plant natively contains all the essential amino acids required for human nutrition. And I refuse to give up natural food for heavily processed ones (which is the only way to get adequate proteins from tofu - still a lower-quality protein than from meat and fish).
Wind alone can meet our energy needs: offshore wind potential in the U.S. is 900,000 MW, which is just about equivalent to our current generation capacity. Add solar, and efficiency improvements and a wind-solar world is in our reach.
False. This ignores the nature of power generated by wind energy, as well as the issues related to storage for peak use and transporting power inland 2,000 miles. The tractor trailers used to for distribution of just about every consumer good are nowhere near being able to run on anything but diesel
Incorrect. While this is an article of faith among "localvores", in point of fact food production and processing uses more energy. According to the Worldwatch Institute,
Worldwatch Institute has an agenda (similar to yours, I assume), and have cooked the numbers to make it look like transportation of food is irrelevant. Incorrect. Throwing in every packing plant, processing plant, retailer and building and the energy for those is disingenuous at best, but also doesn't address my point, which compared GROWING food with TRANSPORTING it. And, yes, transportation requires more, irregardless of whatever energy is used in our current over-processed (and lightly poisoned) food supply.
Buying locally produced food is not really meaningful (ecologically speaking), compared with the need to shift away from animal agriculture and processed foods and towards less-processed plant-based diets.
I can't live on plants - I'm not a rabbit, I'm a human being. I support local, organic farmers because Monsanto and ADM and their ilk are poisoning our food and cannot be trusted to keep food available, much less safe. Not to mention that the infrastructure required to maintain food supplies in urban areas is already fragile enough - increasing dependence on transportation of food even greater distances and control of it in even less hands is a very serious risk to peoples' food security.
Hydroelectric is maxed out in the US, and hydrogen isn't an energy source at all, just a possible storage mechanism. Wind and solar alone will never meet our energy needs. It actually takes more energy to transport food than it does to grow it, and your brave new world can't get food to the grocery store on 3 gallons of biofuel.
No, they don't. The have national votes on major issues, and anything that is not authorized by the Constitution (better than the US!!), but they are still primarily a representative democracy. It's just easier there for citizens to challenge the laws passed by parliament.
Frankly, with the level of understanding of issues held by the average voter in the US, I shudder to think what would happen if they were directly voting on laws. Most of them can't even do math.
I see no reason for smaller states to wield a disproportionate amount of power at the federal level. Is there a more "acceptable", but no less effective, means of ensuring 3rd parties fill seats in the senate?
They don't wield a "disproportionate" amount of power - on the contrary, they are less powerful than more populace states. You probably mean that the people of those states seem to wield a disproportionate amount of power in the senate (senators from small states represent less people than senators from populace state). But that is the only concession currently left to any of the small states. And they are states, not provinces or territories. The US is a conglomeration of sovereign states, left with most of their autonomy by the compact of the Constitution.
Without some influence as equal partners in the Federal compact, the small states would be marginalized by the larger ones. That would be a travesty, because the coastal states cannot represent the interests of the heartland states.
Not sure if you're a troll or an idiot. JotForm and Dajaz1 both had their sites returned after the feds admitted that there had been no wrongdoing
Oh, how kind of them! Were the companies compensated for their losses? Did they issue a formal apology so the businesses could demonstrate to customers that they had been wrongly accused?
What happened to "innocent until proven guilty"? This seems like the opposite. How about "prior restraint" of speech and trade? That's supposed to be illegal in the US.
What should happen, instead of these insignificant tweaks, is to eliminate making pennies altogether, as well as paper $1 bills. It's ridiculous to continue the waste associated with create paper $1 notes, that have such sort lifespans. They're only worth about 4 cents compared to the value of the dollar when the Federal Reserve was created. Make $1 coins instead. When all the paper runs out, people will have no choice but to use the coins, and save the treasury (and the taxpayer) about $300 million a year.
Wanting to make the playing field more level does not equal a totalitarian dictatorship.
Probably bad phrasing on my part. Leveling the playing field for opportunity is a good thing, but the agenda you're promoting is all about leveling the outcomes - that is, it makes everybody poor other than a small group of ruling elites. It's redistribution of resources and fruits of labor upwards.
You don't appear to have noticed that no man is an island, that it's completely unrealistic to assume that your "freedom" to do anything you like at any time for any reason and fuck everyone else is in any way sustainable.
Straw man. Opposition to new, unworkable global taxation system, that will mostly be used to further enrich the wealthy, does not advocate what you're claiming here.
Real freedom is food security.
Not really - there are farm animals fattened up for slaughter every day that have food security, but I wouldn't call them "free". And if you trust an all-powerful government to control all the food, you won't have food security for very long, because they don't care about you. History, again. Mao took over China and millions starved. Rebels in the early Soviet Union were punished with starvation, and millions died.
No, people do not always take care of private land.
That's true, but that's the more likely outcome. Your example of the redwoods is more of an exception, and in fact it was the state building of roads that did a lot of the destruction (and enabled greater clear-cutting of the private land). And it was actually state policies on the lumbering practices that did more to preserve the redwoods than did the taking of private lands. As for strip mining - again, government run program where mining rights on public land are "leased" to the mining companies.
Also, conservation easements? You don't seem to understand them. They're a way for the government to encourage private landowners to conserve private property -- the owner gets a property tax break in return for agreeing to not develop the land in certain ways.
No, YOU don't understand them. Most of the time, they lock away the land FOREVER from any development at all, and the tax treatment means shifting the tax burden from wealthy people with lots of land onto poorer people with little or none. Once again, redistributing resources upward.
government regulation is an absolute necessity for a market to function as a "free market" in the real world.
Straw man again, as I never argued against reasonable government regulation. Regulating the release of dangerous pollutions like sulphides and heavy metals into the air and water is essential. But that has nothing to do with the warmist agenda, which is not reasonable regulation of dangerous pollution, but total control of resources.
Even an idiot can see the bullshit in your argument. I pointed out that it was an obvious straw man and you just double down on the bullshit then call out the drones. Total police-state tactic of gunning down peaceful citizens because of their bumper stickers.
Here it is, folks, proof positive that the entire "denialist" meme perpetrated by the globalist fake environmentalists, seeking to implement a new global tyrannical government, is an attempt to portray any argument to their agenda comes from racist, anti-semetic holocaust deniers:
Curinir Wolf said:
" the biggest and most important players within the fascist movement came from the socialists"
During the era you refer to, all the biggest and most important players within the fascist movement came from the socialists. It was a threat to the socialists because it was the most appealing political vehicle for the real-world application of the socialist impulse. Socialists crossed over to join the fascists en masse. Mussolini was heralded in scholarly collections as an exemplar of the type of leader we needed in the age of the planned society. The academics, the New York Times editorial staff, and the Progressives were all part of this praise of the Fascist way - the same group that you belong to decrying "denialists" for getting in the way of the "progress" on a new system of global governance.
In 1933 and 1934, the American Left had to make a choice. Would they embrace the corporatism and regimentation of the New Deal or take a principled stand on their old liberal values? In other words, would they accept fascism as a halfway house to their socialist utopia? A gigantic battle ensued in this period, and there was a clear winner. The New Deal made an offer the Left could not refuse. And it was a small step to go from the embrace of the fascistic planned economy to the celebration of the warfare state that concluded the New Deal period.
WoofyGoofy said:
Look, you're a fucking idiot, OK? Socialism and fascism are two very different movements and that's why Italy and Germany went after the socialists in WWII [irrelevant repetition of German history with wikipedia links deleted]
Curinir Wolf said:
Wow I see you've been thoroughly indoctrinated.
WoofyGoofy said:
So believing that Germany persecuted leftists , socialists and communists is now a form of indoctrination.
Slashdot Mirror
Heroin addiction is not spread by a pathogen, heroin is neither a virus nor a bacteria, and whatever it is they are giving those mice, it's not a vaccine.
Curunir_wolf likes this
Damn you, LightSquared!
You can be the most rabid Randian fanboy and have to admit the fact that government officials have a direct incentive not to do their jobs if they companies they are in charge of regulating can reward them with fat paychecks when they leave office.
I believe a "Randian" would say that's an inevitable side-effect of excessive government power. And that the more power government has over private dealings, the more incentive rent-seekers and leeches have to spend resources influencing government policy. I'm not "Randian", but I would agree with that assessment.
You're seriously trying to say that an example of regulatory capture (forcing out an official unfriendly to industry) is an example that regulatory capture doesn't exist?
How the hell did you get that? I'm saying that there is an incompetent idiot in charge of the agency, appointed by an incompetent idiot based strictly on his ideology, ignoring his complete lack of qualification. Another Democrat being anti-science.
Other than constantly with TEPCO and the Fukishima plant? When plants in the U.S. share the same design and are of the same age? How about plants in the U.S. that disconnected earthquake sensors in budget cuts? [crooksandliars.com]
So now you're going to switch to Japan? According to your rent boy Jaczko, we don't know what went wrong in Fukishima. So apparently he's even dumber than you are. Crooks and Liars is a bunch of partisan spinmasters and, LO! anti-science emos about nuclear, and you have STILL shown NO evidence of the nuclear industry "cutting corners". They CLAIM that a Virginia GOVERNMENT says that another state agency removed seismographs due to a "budget issue", which would have been GOVERNMENT budget - and you claim that is somehow related to the industry "making a buck". Complete bullshit - total fail. You suck at this.
Obama could have easily challenged Reagan from his right in the 80's, and that's just a fact you'll have to deal with.
He could challenge any statist on being a more tyrannical statist. Agreed. BFD.
Pull your head out, man.
Back at you. You have this completely black and white world view of "Left good, Right bad", when in fact even the label is misleading, shifting, and completely a matter of opinion. I could just as easily take your list of Reagan stuff (too lazy to read it all, sorry), and claim that makes Reagan to the Left of Obama. It's meaningless. That is, unless you want a nice, black/white, good/evil view of the world, and the only way to reconcile it is to oust any individual from your ideology when they do stuff that you decide disqualifies them from your self-defined buckets.
Guess what? BOTH sides are out to screw you, they just have different buttons to push to make them think they're on your side. Partisans as myopic as you are rare, as even most party-line voters will claim to be "liberal on social issues and conservative on fiscal ones" - or the opposite. The whole "is it left or is it right" argument is useless.
You could make a better argument by claiming that the Middle East conflict has dragged all US politicians into a holy war, and define each as supporting the Arabs or the Jews.
You have a lot of gall to be accusing other people of the 'No True Scotsman' fallacy (incorrectly, even!), while engaging in it yourself.
Mart
Ridiculous. There is no such fallacy anywhere in my argument. What you have quoted is nothing but a question of terms, and rather vague ones at that ("left" and "right" are definitions even more difficult to pin down than "Conservative" and "Liberal").
Obviously, you don't know how to identify fallacious arguments. Go read wikipedia again, maybe some day you'll figure it out.
What do you think the chances are that this "one world government" will place your rights (the individual) over the rights these people (who are also merely individuals) have assigned to themselves?
None at all. Case in point, Article 29 of the UN's "Universal Declaration of Human Rights":
Are embryos thrown in the trash if not used for research? Yes or no.
Who the fuck cares?
Do the same individuals in the nuclear industry hop back and forth between government regulatory bodies and working for the very companies they were supposedly regulating: yes or no.
I don't know. They do this with the FDA, the EPA, and others, so I assume they do that at the NRC too. But not Obama's chairman - that guy is just an incompetent partisan douchebag that was the first cabinet level administrator brought before congress because of votes of no confidence by every directly reporting member of his staff. He's also clearly wholly unqualified for the position, and makes idiotic decisions based on emotional criteria. Much like yourself. Greg Jaczko, is that you?
Is the nuclear power industry given to pinching pennies and cutting corners to make a buck: yes or no.
No, you fucktard, not as far as safety is concerned. No iota of evidence for such an accusation.
Is Obama to the right of Reagan on the vast majority of issues: yes or no.
That's a great question! Oh, wait, no it's not. I reject the premise your question is based on.
Name one issue where Obama is actually on the actual left, much less many.
He is a Democrat and President, so by definition the head of the party, and thus on the left. So every position he takes is the leftist platform. Growing the government unchecked through deficit spending, 30,000 drones over the US, class warfare pitting the rich against the poor while shrinking the middle class, expanding the powers of the EPA, the DHS, and every other executive agency while marginalizing congress. These are all part of the leftist agenda now, as well as the Federal takeover of health care, massive new tax complications to an already incredibly complicated tax code - these are all tools of the left.
Notice that Reagan's rhetoric was practically the opposite of Obama's - yet their policy results are similar. Both increased the deficit and expanded the military industrial complex. But there are some that still think blind partisanship is the right answer.
You're using that phrase, "no true Scotsman", but it doesn't mean whatever it is you think it means.
I assume by this that you refuse to even acknowledge your own use of fallacious arguments. That's not just lazy, it's myopic.
Nuclear regulators ARE completely cooped by a penny pinching, corner cutting industry.
So your anti-science stance is pretty much the same as the ones you call AGW deniers: That the scientists are "in the tank", they have an agenda, and their research and arguments can't be trusted.
Obama IS to the right of Reagan, on everything from military spending to suspects rights to undocumented workers to the deficit to Social Security.
I can't really disagree with that, in that Obama and Reagan held similar positions on all of those issues. But Obama *is* on the left, he is the darling of the Democrats, many progressive organizations, the unions, and even the Socialist party. So --- take ownership of it. Those are leftist positions now. The right just wants less government, sound money, a non-interventionist foreign policy, and strict adherence to the Constitution.
That's a pretty long-winded "no true Scotsman" argument. Congratulations.
Name a single Democrat who is as far on the insane left scale as Santorum is on the insane right scale. You can't. Democrats are, in fact, farther to the right on most issues than most people who are called "leftists" anywhere else in the world.
That depends entirely on what you mean by "insane left scale" and "insane right scale". Santorum favors big-government solutions, so he is more left than right on that scale. I'm assuming you are focusing on the social issues traditionally associated with the right, and it's hard to find anyone as insanely social authoritarian as Santorum, even in the Republican party. He's a Theocrat that would make the Muslim Brotherhood proud, if only he followed the right prophet.
Keep this in mind: Santorum doesn't really trust any scientific inquiry coming out of academia, because he's convinced they've been taken over by Satan. Not hyperbole. Here is a direct quote:
Can I get some examples of main stream science denialism by democrats?
Obvious one right here. You can claim this is one both sides ignore - but like Republicans claiming to be "pro family", Democrats should be held to a higher standard when they are always claiming so vociferously to be the "pro science" party.
But there are others examples. Note, for example, that Democrats oppose scientific studies if it involves testing on animals - human embryo research, though, poses no problems for them. Democrats ignore the scientific consensus in favor of more nuclear power plants, and oppose them for mostly emotional reasons. Note also the Democrat's reliance on the Precautionary Principle for evaluating policy decisions. That idea "imposes a burden of proof on those who create potential risks, and it requires regulation of activities even if it cannot be shown that those activities are likely to produce significant harms." - that doesn't sound very scientific at all, but it's used to oppose all forms of GM food, nuclear power, and even to block research funding in the absence of the ability to prove a negative. This entirely unscientific principle was even evident in Katherine Sebelius's justification to block the availability of Plan B contraceptives over-the-counter
Oh, and then there's the Obama administration's decision to support the oil companies in the fracking lawsuit, even when their own task force had had exactly the opposite conclusion. There is even evidence that many in the current administration are guilty of scientific misconduct.
Weren't you around back in '04? We reelected Bush for fuck's sake.
... because John Kerry ...
FWIW, I'm a Christian who believes in both creation and evolution.
Similarly, I'm an Atheist who believes in AGW and Gaia.
Humans do not in any way require meat, milk or eggs for a healthy diet. Avocado, quinoa, and soybeans each contain all of the essential amino acids the body needs.
No, they don't.
or peanut butter on whole wheat bread.
Like many others (sometimes estimated at 15% of the population), I cannot tolerate gluten, which severely restricts the vegetable protein available to us.
Saying we need milk is a little silly, considering it is produced by a completely different species for its own young. If you think about it, drinking milk is actually a little strange; ours is the only species that drinks the milk of other species.
Yet human digestion has evolved, in most people, to break down lactose and utilize animal milk as an important source of nutrition, protein, and good fats.
Studies have shown that Wind power can generate more than enough power for the planet.
Is this like the "studies" that have shown gerbils on treadmills can generate all the power we need?
There are so many problems with this assertion I don't know where to begin. Wind is intermittent, and wind farms usually have two power ratings: A capacity number, and a capacity factor number. The capacity of a wind farm might be 300 megawatts, but how much electricity it will actually produce depends on many factors, and if you look at the average production of all those wind turbines over a certain period of time - usually a year - and you divide that number by the maximum capacity of all those wind turbines, you get the capacity factor number. So for example, if the 300 megawatt wind farm is operating at 30% capacity, it would be producing an average of 100 megawatts at any time. But this doesn't mean that you can count on 100 megawatts coming out; on some day it might be 300, and on others it might be 30. This is a problem not only because you need to build many more wind turbines than the capacity numbers might lead you to believe (and the media usually reports capacity numbers, not capacity factors), but also because of the way the power grid works, which means there needs to be capacity somewhere else to make up for the reduced wind farm output.
So you might have many wind farms over a large area, so when there is less wind one place the grid can draw from where there is greater wind somewhere else. But the grid has to balance supply and demand at all times, so if bad luck has it that there's no or little wind over most of your wind farms on the same day, you still have a problem.
That's not to say we shouldn't be building wind farms at all, only that you need to be realistic about what can be accomplished, and stop giving people unrealistic expectations about what can be done.
Human beings on omnivores - which means we can live on plant or animals. So while you may not be a rabbit, you can lives on plants.
Aside from the typos in your claim, it's false. Humans require meat and animal products, milk and eggs at a minimum, for a healthy diet. No plant natively contains all the essential amino acids required for human nutrition. And I refuse to give up natural food for heavily processed ones (which is the only way to get adequate proteins from tofu - still a lower-quality protein than from meat and fish).
And bacon. I needs me some bacon.
Wind alone can meet our energy needs: offshore wind potential in the U.S. is 900,000 MW, which is just about equivalent to our current generation capacity. Add solar, and efficiency improvements and a wind-solar world is in our reach.
False. This ignores the nature of power generated by wind energy, as well as the issues related to storage for peak use and transporting power inland 2,000 miles. The tractor trailers used to for distribution of just about every consumer good are nowhere near being able to run on anything but diesel
Incorrect. While this is an article of faith among "localvores", in point of fact food production and processing uses more energy. According to the Worldwatch Institute,
Worldwatch Institute has an agenda (similar to yours, I assume), and have cooked the numbers to make it look like transportation of food is irrelevant. Incorrect. Throwing in every packing plant, processing plant, retailer and building and the energy for those is disingenuous at best, but also doesn't address my point, which compared GROWING food with TRANSPORTING it. And, yes, transportation requires more, irregardless of whatever energy is used in our current over-processed (and lightly poisoned) food supply.
Buying locally produced food is not really meaningful (ecologically speaking), compared with the need to shift away from animal agriculture and processed foods and towards less-processed plant-based diets.
I can't live on plants - I'm not a rabbit, I'm a human being. I support local, organic farmers because Monsanto and ADM and their ilk are poisoning our food and cannot be trusted to keep food available, much less safe. Not to mention that the infrastructure required to maintain food supplies in urban areas is already fragile enough - increasing dependence on transportation of food even greater distances and control of it in even less hands is a very serious risk to peoples' food security.
Hydroelectric is maxed out in the US, and hydrogen isn't an energy source at all, just a possible storage mechanism. Wind and solar alone will never meet our energy needs. It actually takes more energy to transport food than it does to grow it, and your brave new world can't get food to the grocery store on 3 gallons of biofuel.
Or Switzerland ? They have direct democracy.
No, they don't. The have national votes on major issues, and anything that is not authorized by the Constitution (better than the US!!), but they are still primarily a representative democracy. It's just easier there for citizens to challenge the laws passed by parliament.
Frankly, with the level of understanding of issues held by the average voter in the US, I shudder to think what would happen if they were directly voting on laws. Most of them can't even do math.
Clue.
I see no reason for smaller states to wield a disproportionate amount of power at the federal level. Is there a more "acceptable", but no less effective, means of ensuring 3rd parties fill seats in the senate?
They don't wield a "disproportionate" amount of power - on the contrary, they are less powerful than more populace states. You probably mean that the people of those states seem to wield a disproportionate amount of power in the senate (senators from small states represent less people than senators from populace state). But that is the only concession currently left to any of the small states. And they are states, not provinces or territories. The US is a conglomeration of sovereign states, left with most of their autonomy by the compact of the Constitution.
Without some influence as equal partners in the Federal compact, the small states would be marginalized by the larger ones. That would be a travesty, because the coastal states cannot represent the interests of the heartland states.
Not sure if you're a troll or an idiot. JotForm and Dajaz1 both had their sites returned after the feds admitted that there had been no wrongdoing
Oh, how kind of them! Were the companies compensated for their losses? Did they issue a formal apology so the businesses could demonstrate to customers that they had been wrongly accused?
What happened to "innocent until proven guilty"? This seems like the opposite. How about "prior restraint" of speech and trade? That's supposed to be illegal in the US.
What should happen, instead of these insignificant tweaks, is to eliminate making pennies altogether, as well as paper $1 bills. It's ridiculous to continue the waste associated with create paper $1 notes, that have such sort lifespans. They're only worth about 4 cents compared to the value of the dollar when the Federal Reserve was created. Make $1 coins instead. When all the paper runs out, people will have no choice but to use the coins, and save the treasury (and the taxpayer) about $300 million a year.
Wanting to make the playing field more level does not equal a totalitarian dictatorship.
Probably bad phrasing on my part. Leveling the playing field for opportunity is a good thing, but the agenda you're promoting is all about leveling the outcomes - that is, it makes everybody poor other than a small group of ruling elites. It's redistribution of resources and fruits of labor upwards.
You don't appear to have noticed that no man is an island, that it's completely unrealistic to assume that your "freedom" to do anything you like at any time for any reason and fuck everyone else is in any way sustainable.
Straw man. Opposition to new, unworkable global taxation system, that will mostly be used to further enrich the wealthy, does not advocate what you're claiming here.
Real freedom is food security.
Not really - there are farm animals fattened up for slaughter every day that have food security, but I wouldn't call them "free". And if you trust an all-powerful government to control all the food, you won't have food security for very long, because they don't care about you. History, again. Mao took over China and millions starved. Rebels in the early Soviet Union were punished with starvation, and millions died.
No, people do not always take care of private land.
That's true, but that's the more likely outcome. Your example of the redwoods is more of an exception, and in fact it was the state building of roads that did a lot of the destruction (and enabled greater clear-cutting of the private land). And it was actually state policies on the lumbering practices that did more to preserve the redwoods than did the taking of private lands. As for strip mining - again, government run program where mining rights on public land are "leased" to the mining companies.
Also, conservation easements? You don't seem to understand them. They're a way for the government to encourage private landowners to conserve private property -- the owner gets a property tax break in return for agreeing to not develop the land in certain ways.
No, YOU don't understand them. Most of the time, they lock away the land FOREVER from any development at all, and the tax treatment means shifting the tax burden from wealthy people with lots of land onto poorer people with little or none. Once again, redistributing resources upward.
government regulation is an absolute necessity for a market to function as a "free market" in the real world.
Straw man again, as I never argued against reasonable government regulation. Regulating the release of dangerous pollutions like sulphides and heavy metals into the air and water is essential. But that has nothing to do with the warmist agenda, which is not reasonable regulation of dangerous pollution, but total control of resources.
Even an idiot can see the bullshit in your argument. I pointed out that it was an obvious straw man and you just double down on the bullshit then call out the drones. Total police-state tactic of gunning down peaceful citizens because of their bumper stickers.
Here it is, folks, proof positive that the entire "denialist" meme perpetrated by the globalist fake environmentalists, seeking to implement a new global tyrannical government, is an attempt to portray any argument to their agenda comes from racist, anti-semetic holocaust deniers:
Curinir Wolf said:
" the biggest and most important players within the fascist movement came from the socialists"
During the era you refer to, all the biggest and most important players within the fascist movement came from the socialists. It was a threat to the socialists because it was the most appealing political vehicle for the real-world application of the socialist impulse. Socialists crossed over to join the fascists en masse. Mussolini was heralded in scholarly collections as an exemplar of the type of leader we needed in the age of the planned society. The academics, the New York Times editorial staff, and the Progressives were all part of this praise of the Fascist way - the same group that you belong to decrying "denialists" for getting in the way of the "progress" on a new system of global governance.
In 1933 and 1934, the American Left had to make a choice. Would they embrace the corporatism and regimentation of the New Deal or take a principled stand on their old liberal values? In other words, would they accept fascism as a halfway house to their socialist utopia? A gigantic battle ensued in this period, and there was a clear winner. The New Deal made an offer the Left could not refuse. And it was a small step to go from the embrace of the fascistic planned economy to the celebration of the warfare state that concluded the New Deal period.
WoofyGoofy said:
Look, you're a fucking idiot, OK? Socialism and fascism are two very different movements and that's why Italy and Germany went after the socialists in WWII [irrelevant repetition of German history with wikipedia links deleted]
Curinir Wolf said:
Wow I see you've been thoroughly indoctrinated.
WoofyGoofy said:
So believing that Germany persecuted leftists , socialists and communists is now a form of indoctrination.
FTFY, you tool.