If by continuing presence you mean the fact that the jews are the only group to maintain any significant and continuous permanent habitation of the region for the last three thousand years then yes that's also part of what I'd mention, although it's neither a "land grab" nor a canard.
So yes, you will brazenly engage in hypocrisy with a straight face.
Your arguments on the other hand fit that definition handily, and your reference to the specious "canaanite" canard in another comment is a pretty clear giveaway that you're just here to shill for these guys: http://i.imgur.com/fVa0Nxq.jpg
Awww, did someone get butthurt that another canard went up in flames, so you had to try and project your racist shitbaggery onto someone else? Has that ever worked for you in the past? In any case, say hi to Francisco Pizarro and Bull Connor on your way into hell.
Israel launched a sneak attack on the Egyptian Air Force in 1967, supposedly because Egypt blockaded the Straits of Tiran, an important shipping route to Israel.
This presents a bit of a quandry for Zionist apologists: if that was a justified action, than all attacks from Hamas on Israel are justified in response to the total blockade of Gaza.
Your 500K children killed is a myth.
Hardly. Madeline Albrecht is even on record saying it was worth it.
How many Kurds did Saddam use mustard gas on? (Hint:>500K)
How bad does that zombie canard smell? It was bad enough when Bushies were using it in 2003. How many people Saddam had killed does what to justify the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children? Unless you were an Iraqi citizen of the time, how were your elected representatives engaged in said attacks?
Yes, everyone else is innocent in the world except the CIA.
Moranic wingnut deflection is moranic. But since you went there, the CIA have a proud history of being some of the biggest assholes on the planet. Now, before you get all butthurt and vomit up some other zombie winger canard (torture and rape rooms?), go ahead and tell us how many democracies Saddam had overthrown during his time in power compared to the CIA.
An American is more likely to be killed by a car than by a terrorist, and yet for some reason the US spends countless billions of dollars trying to stop terrorism.
Cars? Heck, bathtubs and home furniture are a greater risk to Americans than terrorism.
Perhaps the psychological factors are important, and indescriminately targetting civilians with military hardware is not as harmless as you seem to think?
Not really, when you look at the real underlying motivations. In Israel, it's to forestall any real peace process because any real peace would involve them returning illegal settlements. In America, the underlying motivation is profit. Those porno scanners and hellfire-equipped drones make someone a pretty penny.
Mark twain's trip is a particularly good account, the entire region was composed of malaria ridden swampland and ghost towns with the occasional temporary habitation by desert nomads. Multiple prominent leaders of the "palestinians" have admitted that the existence of any "palestinian" people is a complete and utter myth, invented solely as a political tool and populated by illegal immigrants from the surrounding arab nations.
Riiiight. And I bet you switch from that denial of Palestinian history to the "continuing presence" canard to justify Zionist land grabbing with a straight face, don't you? You know, the one that pretends that 5% of the population means that a bunch of immigrants can come in and take all the land within 50 years?
While it is true that they and other Arab neighbors did cause some problems by deciding not to bow to the reality of the political situation then and agree with the two-state solution created by the UN back then
The "reality of the situation" is that the proposal was to give 56% of the land to 31% of the population. And of that 31%, the vast majority were just off the boat from Europe. Of course the natives rejected such a deal, you would too.
No, that would be Hamas. Their charter calls for the destruction of Israel.
And the Likud charter lays claim to the occupied territories and denies any Palestinian state. Funny how the Zionist apologists never talk about that. Or the inconvenient fact that Hamas was created by Israel to undermine Fatah.
There seems to be some defect in your understanding of genocide as the number of Palestinian Arabs has long been increasing.
There seems to be some willful obtuseness in your comment, as you're swapping out the elimination of a country with the elimination of a people.
If you're outraged about the use of chemicals against "civilians," do you have any to spare?
Depends, do you have any sense of proportion? How about when it's Israel violating the cease fire and then killing hundreds of Palestinians a la Cast Lead? How about the fact that even the IDF admits that the rockets are a psychological and not a military threat? Or the fact that an Israeli is more likely to be killed in a car accident with a bus - not car accidents overall but car accidents with buses - than by a Palestinian?
It can't last forever since one of Hamas's basic goals is to destroy Israel.
And who created Hamas again? And the Likud Charter, again?
Who Are the Real Nazis?
By the racist Jonah Goldberg? More like Who Are the Real Shitbags.
Ah, I see you are repeating the propaganda approach without actually understanding the history of the region with regard to International Law.
Ah, I see you're spamming the "legal case for Israel" propaganda. Problem is, reality has a well-known anti-Zionist bias, and Israel has zero legal justification for it's formation or land grabs.
First, it was formed by a bunch of immigrants stealing land from the people already living there. Jews were a tiny minority - less than 10% of the population - in 1900. The Zionists "declaring independence" in 1948 were almost entirely just off the boat or first generation immigrants.
So, it's no different from Manifest Destiny: a sense of entitlement to other people's land.
The Israelis have always offered an Arab Palestinian State
That's always been slight-of-hand. Israel wants land, and peace gets in the way of their land-grabbing.
and in fact, the Arabs were offered international recognition of one in 1948 by the United Nations but they refused
And rightly so. The British Mandate of Palestine was going to give 56% of the land to 31% of the population, almost all of whom were immigrants. It's like if the minority Cuban immigrant population of Florida up and laid claim to most of the state - think the rest of the population might reject such a proposal?
The problem the Israelis have with the moves for Palestinian Statehood through the United Nations is *not* the creation of a Palestinian State. It is bypassing negotiations with the Israelis and bypassing mutual agreement and a *permanent* peace treaty
When did Zionists negotiate with Palestinians on the formation of Israel?
Another poster already called you out for that nonsense, but such hypocrisy deserves to be highlighted again.
for those of you who are also fooled by the falsehood that Israel is 'the last European colonial state' you may want to ponder the fact that Jews have been living continuously in the region of Palestine for over 3000 years
Ah, the "continuing presence" propaganda. Again. So if the surrounding Arab nations were to militarily wipe Israel off the map - something you guys have been yelling about for decades - to form an independent Palestinian state, you'd be just fine with it it, right? Because Palestinians have had a "continuing presence" in the area? Like most Zionist propaganda, this talking point doesn't stand up to two seconds of scrutiny.
Please also note that the Arabs and Muslims already have 56 large and mostly uncrowded countries.
Did the fact that sub-Saharan African countries were majority-black mean Apartheid was okay? Two seconds of scrutiny...
Israel is by no means perfect, but it does have a very good case under international law for doing what it is doing
You mean the international law that has always held that ALL the occupied territories of the West Bank and East Jerusalem have always been illegal and should be returned to the Palestinians? That international law?
Once you start learning the historical facts you kinda develop a completely different perspective on the issue.
I don't see the South electing a government with the stated goal of expelling or murdering every resident of the North, flatly stating that any and all negotiations are purely strategic moves to delay fighting when deemed necessary, that the commonly accepted "two state solution" will never be allowed to happen, or refusing to acknowledge the historical incidents predating the formation of their Northern neighbor and otherwise implicitly believing that no Northern citizen has a right to live.
Yeah, I don't like the Likud Charter either:
The Jewish communities in Judea, Samaria and Gaza are the realization of Zionist values. Settlement of the land is a clear expression of the unassailable right of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel and constitutes an important asset in the defense of the vital interests of the State of Israel. The Likud will continue to strengthen and develop these communities and will prevent their uprooting.... The Government of Israel flatly rejects the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state west of the Jordan river.
It's built on land stolen from the native population by a bunch of immigrants.
But why let facts and history get in the way?
Will you? Jews were less than 10% of the area population in 1900. When Zionists "declared independence" they were only 31% of the population, the vast majority just off the boat or first-generation. When they started the 1967 war and illegally seized the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, they settled the stolen land with....more immigrants.
History and facts have a well known anti-Zionist bias.
Israel is self-certifying at this point, so that is nonsense
You mean, the "wait out the clock" game that has been the Zionist goal since they first started to steal land from Palestinians in the 30's. Which is also rich, coming from the nation still pursuing Nazi war criminals and stolen assets from the 30's. If human beings lived 500 years Israel would still be hunting those people and assets down in the year 2400 A.D. But land stolen in an aggressive war of choice in 1967? 46 years is toooo loooong ago to worry about!
You do know that nations existed before the UN came along too, right?
You know that's an irrelevant comparison, right? The is no equivalence for Israel, where a nation is carved out of existing land and people for the benefit of an immigrant population. There was no U.N. recognizing American statehood in the 1600's at the expense of Native Americans.
Besides that, there have been Jews there continuously for thousands of years, and several Jewish states on that land.
Ah, the "continuous presence" canard. Problem: at 1900, Jews made up less than 10% of the population of Palestine. The "declaration of independence" was a land grab from a bunch of European immigrants no better than Manifest Destiny.
Second problem: if the surrounding Arab nations were to militarily "wipe Israel off the map", you'd have to be okay with that, because of a "continuing Palestinian presence" in the area.
The Palestinians and Israelis both act like a bunch of violent monsters
Were Native Americans fighting dispossession and Apartheid from European immigrants a "bunch of violent monsters", or were they legitimately pissed that their land was being stolen and their culture destroyed?
But hey, since us Israelis don't like it, it's probably a good idea...
Obvious context was Israeli policies and aggression towards the native population. That Israel has some great schools and water management policies doesn't have much to do with their practice of Apartheid.
Actually their most commonly cited reason for "murdering the Palestinians" is something along the lines of "INCOMING ROCKET!"
You mean this rocket right here? And the excuse for Israel violating ceasefires and killing hundreds of Palestinians a la Cast Lead?
More problems for tired Zionist apologia: Israel's justification for starting the 1967 war was the Egyptian blockade of the Straits of Tiran, one of many trade routes to Israel. But that means that Palestinian attacks in response to the total blockade of Gaza are perfectly justified by Israeli rules.
The Palestinians have been rejecting a two-state solution for more than 80 years.
Repeating a big lie doesn't make it true, it just makes you a bigger liar. The Palestinians are entitled to all of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, but they've been willing to make concessions on that in order to get a state of their own. But Israel keeps making more and more draconian demands, or pulls out of negotiations.
Because Israel isn't interested in peace. It's interested in land, and waiting out the clock until it becomes a matter of taking land from someone's great-great grandchild to give to someone else's great-great grandchild.
It would really lend to your credibility if you recognized at all the the Palestinians want to completely destroy Israel.
Tautology with no basis in reality. But even if it were true, that's batshit irrelevant to Palestinian right to self-determination, and their right to all of the land seized in the 1967 war started by Israel.
As it is, you seem pretty one sided in your view.
As it is, I find your lack of self-awareness disturbing.
Did you miss the news that it took the Israeli Supreme Court to (finally) protect female Jews from being harassed or arrested at the Western Wall by the Ultra Orthodox? How about opinion surveys of Americans on how it's acceptable to drone bomb the shit out of other countries?
Beam, motes. And if you want to bitch about the problems of fundamentalist islam, start with the nearest mirror, as it's usually:
1) In response to western imperialism. Yeah, you're pissed about the 911 attacks that killed 3,000. They're kinda pissed about American sanctions that killed 500,000 children in Iraq. And your overthrowing their secular democracy in Iran to be replaced by a brutal dictatorship from the Shah.
2) Financed by client states like Saudi Arabia. You know, where the hijackers were from, but was never on our blow-shit-up list. Huh.
3) Financed and supported by the CIA. The Mujahideen in Afghanistan, rebels in Libya and now Syria, and MEK in Iraq. Then there was that triffle of "buying" the services of young boys in Afghanistan to be raped by tribal warlords.
It demonstrates conclusively that the Palestinian nationhood argument is the real strategic deception â" one geared to set up the destruction of Israel.
Bullshit. The entirety of Israel is built on land stolen from the native population. First in 1948, when a bunch of immigrants from Europe decided they had a greater claim than those who had lived there for thousands of years. And then in 1967, when they started a war of territory expansion yet claimed to be the victims.
ALL of the occupied territories ALL of the settlements and ALL of East Jerusalem are illegal.
The Free Market Fairy still has no answer for climate change, and "incentives" are no solution. Your.5% tax idea might work - if you get a time machine and get Truman to implement one in 1950, because the time for timid attempts at changed passed at least five administrations ago.
The longer change has been put off, the worse things will get and the more drastic actions will have to be. Now is not the time for libertarian re-activeness, but Manhattan Project and "before this decade is out" pro-activeness.
And the best part is, it would be an economic gain for society. More green energy means more R&D and construction. The only losers are Exxon and the Randian's who want us to keep clapping so the Free Market Fairy doesn't die, to be replaced by Glinda, the Good Socialisticy Witch.
This question is easier to ask when you're making well-above-average computer-programmer-level salaries and quadrupling the price of electricity and fuel (or something) and the various manufactured things which depend on that price isn't going to really ding your lifestyle.
Ah, winger math. Where every cent sunk into a solar panel is a part of the cost, but none of the following are a cost of using fossil fuels:
1. Higher A/C bills during record heat waves, like last year when parts of the south went more than a month with every day going over 100 degrees.
2. Higher food costs as droughts kill crops or require more irrigation.
3. Cost of fighting forest fires, made worse by drought.
4. Flood fighting costs, as warmer winter air carries more water, for wetter snow and more spring rains.
5. Rising cost of gasoline.
6. Spending a trillion a year on the military-industrial-complex. What, you think it's coincidence that our military, regime changes, and supported coups are focused on the world's gas stations?
7. Tornadoes and hurricanes turning huge swaths of the country into federal disaster areas. Warmer, more humid air == more powerful storms.
Finally, even if you want to bury your head in your....sand on climate change, energy costs money. SAVING energy means SAVING MONEY.
Quit calling them fossil fuels, it's an inaccurate term with a lot of emotional baggage attached to it. The proper term is "carbon based" fuel sources, they don't all come from fossils.
Nonsense. Ethanol is a "carbon based" energy source, but it's not adding any new carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Burning oil and coal and natural gas does, because it's taking carbon out of the ground that would otherwise stay in the ground and putting it in the air.
Thus, the fossil fuel distinction is more than appropriate.
Renewable energy is widely used indeed, but so far often thanks to subsidies.
Oil is the most subsidized energy source of all: over a trillion a year in DOD spending. What, you thought we had the bulk of our military focused on the world's gas stations by accident? Supporting friendly dictatorships isn't done on the cheap (Saudi Arabia), nor overthrowing socialisticy democracies (Iran, Venezuela), or regime change (Iraq, Libya). Then there's the massive subsidies on the consumption side in the form of public roads and highways.
When the United States starts a drone war in support of the solar panel or geothermal industries, or directly pays for wind farms across the country, then maybe we can talk about "subsidization".
The market is what's killing us. If a disastrous activity is profitable, someone will do it for profit. The Free Market Fairy has no answer to problems of pollution or climate change.
Aside from the occasional meltdown caused by greed or hubris, and storing the waste for thousands and thousands of years. Why would anyone want to invest in a power source that will still be forcing you to maintain it's waste 15,000 years from now?
Considering that nuclear power is the cleanest form of main load power that we have this can hardly be an oversight.
Only if you're ignoring the danger and cost of nuclear power. You can talk about safe nuclear power after all profit has been removed from the equation, but you still have to store the waste for tens of thousands of years. It's the most expensive power source ever invented by man.
Natural gas would significantly reduce the source causes of these deaths and the author is aware:
If you add in the Muslims who practice genital cutting
If you do that, you have to include most Jews and half of Genteels on your list of "terrorists". Before anyone gets butthurt over calling circumcision MGM, only a minority of FGM involves the removal of the clitoris or sewing up the vagina like a turkey - which is indeed worse than circumcision. Type IA and IIA of female genital cutting involves trimming away some of the outer labia or clitoral hood - which is of course directly analogous to male circumcision.
If you really think honor killings aren't terrorism, you need to talk to a couple females. If you can find any.
Females are the ones who usually turn in the females for "honor killings". For some reason, that part of the storyline is always left out. Just like it is with FGM, which is performed by...females:
Sheelan Anwar Omer, a shy 7-year-old Kurdish girl, bounded into her neighbor's house with an ear-to-ear smile, looking for the party her mother had promised.
There was no celebration. Instead, a local woman quickly locked a rusty red door behind Sheelan, who looked bewildered when her mother ordered the girl to remove her underpants. Sheelan began to whimper, then tremble, while the women pushed apart her legs and a midwife raised a stainless-steel razor blade in the air. "I do this in the name of Allah!" she intoned.
As the midwife sliced off part of Sheelan's genitals, the girl let out a high-pitched wail heard throughout the neighborhood. As she carried the sobbing child back home, Sheelan's mother smiled with pride.
Slashdot Mirror
So yes, you will brazenly engage in hypocrisy with a straight face.
Awww, did someone get butthurt that another canard went up in flames, so you had to try and project your racist shitbaggery onto someone else? Has that ever worked for you in the past? In any case, say hi to Francisco Pizarro and Bull Connor on your way into hell.
Israel launched a sneak attack on the Egyptian Air Force in 1967, supposedly because Egypt blockaded the Straits of Tiran, an important shipping route to Israel.
This presents a bit of a quandry for Zionist apologists: if that was a justified action, than all attacks from Hamas on Israel are justified in response to the total blockade of Gaza.
Hardly. Madeline Albrecht is even on record saying it was worth it.
How bad does that zombie canard smell? It was bad enough when Bushies were using it in 2003. How many people Saddam had killed does what to justify the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children? Unless you were an Iraqi citizen of the time, how were your elected representatives engaged in said attacks?
Moranic wingnut deflection is moranic. But since you went there, the CIA have a proud history of being some of the biggest assholes on the planet. Now, before you get all butthurt and vomit up some other zombie winger canard (torture and rape rooms?), go ahead and tell us how many democracies Saddam had overthrown during his time in power compared to the CIA.
Heh. Or "did you mean the ancestral home of the Canaanites?"
Cars? Heck, bathtubs and home furniture are a greater risk to Americans than terrorism.
Not really, when you look at the real underlying motivations. In Israel, it's to forestall any real peace process because any real peace would involve them returning illegal settlements. In America, the underlying motivation is profit. Those porno scanners and hellfire-equipped drones make someone a pretty penny.
That someone just isn't you or me.
Riiiight. And I bet you switch from that denial of Palestinian history to the "continuing presence" canard to justify Zionist land grabbing with a straight face, don't you? You know, the one that pretends that 5% of the population means that a bunch of immigrants can come in and take all the land within 50 years?
The "reality of the situation" is that the proposal was to give 56% of the land to 31% of the population. And of that 31%, the vast majority were just off the boat from Europe. Of course the natives rejected such a deal, you would too.
And the Likud charter lays claim to the occupied territories and denies any Palestinian state. Funny how the Zionist apologists never talk about that. Or the inconvenient fact that Hamas was created by Israel to undermine Fatah.
There seems to be some willful obtuseness in your comment, as you're swapping out the elimination of a country with the elimination of a people.
Depends, do you have any sense of proportion? How about when it's Israel violating the cease fire and then killing hundreds of Palestinians a la Cast Lead? How about the fact that even the IDF admits that the rockets are a psychological and not a military threat? Or the fact that an Israeli is more likely to be killed in a car accident with a bus - not car accidents overall but car accidents with buses - than by a Palestinian?
And who created Hamas again? And the Likud Charter, again?
Who Are the Real Nazis?
By the racist Jonah Goldberg? More like Who Are the Real Shitbags.
News at 11.
Ah, I see you're spamming the "legal case for Israel" propaganda. Problem is, reality has a well-known anti-Zionist bias, and Israel has zero legal justification for it's formation or land grabs.
First, it was formed by a bunch of immigrants stealing land from the people already living there. Jews were a tiny minority - less than 10% of the population - in 1900. The Zionists "declaring independence" in 1948 were almost entirely just off the boat or first generation immigrants.
So, it's no different from Manifest Destiny: a sense of entitlement to other people's land.
That's always been slight-of-hand. Israel wants land, and peace gets in the way of their land-grabbing.
And rightly so. The British Mandate of Palestine was going to give 56% of the land to 31% of the population, almost all of whom were immigrants. It's like if the minority Cuban immigrant population of Florida up and laid claim to most of the state - think the rest of the population might reject such a proposal?
When did Zionists negotiate with Palestinians on the formation of Israel?
Another poster already called you out for that nonsense, but such hypocrisy deserves to be highlighted again.
Ah, the "continuing presence" propaganda. Again. So if the surrounding Arab nations were to militarily wipe Israel off the map - something you guys have been yelling about for decades - to form an independent Palestinian state, you'd be just fine with it it, right? Because Palestinians have had a "continuing presence" in the area? Like most Zionist propaganda, this talking point doesn't stand up to two seconds of scrutiny.
Did the fact that sub-Saharan African countries were majority-black mean Apartheid was okay? Two seconds of scrutiny...
You mean the international law that has always held that ALL the occupied territories of the West Bank and East Jerusalem have always been illegal and should be returned to the Palestinians? That international law?
Feel free to do just that at any time.
Yeah, I don't like the Likud Charter either:
It's built on land stolen from the native population by a bunch of immigrants.
Will you? Jews were less than 10% of the area population in 1900. When Zionists "declared independence" they were only 31% of the population, the vast majority just off the boat or first-generation. When they started the 1967 war and illegally seized the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, they settled the stolen land with....more immigrants.
History and facts have a well known anti-Zionist bias.
You mean, the "wait out the clock" game that has been the Zionist goal since they first started to steal land from Palestinians in the 30's. Which is also rich, coming from the nation still pursuing Nazi war criminals and stolen assets from the 30's. If human beings lived 500 years Israel would still be hunting those people and assets down in the year 2400 A.D. But land stolen in an aggressive war of choice in 1967? 46 years is toooo loooong ago to worry about!
You know that's an irrelevant comparison, right? The is no equivalence for Israel, where a nation is carved out of existing land and people for the benefit of an immigrant population. There was no U.N. recognizing American statehood in the 1600's at the expense of Native Americans.
Ah, the "continuous presence" canard. Problem: at 1900, Jews made up less than 10% of the population of Palestine. The "declaration of independence" was a land grab from a bunch of European immigrants no better than Manifest Destiny.
Second problem: if the surrounding Arab nations were to militarily "wipe Israel off the map", you'd have to be okay with that, because of a "continuing Palestinian presence" in the area.
Were Native Americans fighting dispossession and Apartheid from European immigrants a "bunch of violent monsters", or were they legitimately pissed that their land was being stolen and their culture destroyed?
Obvious context was Israeli policies and aggression towards the native population. That Israel has some great schools and water management policies doesn't have much to do with their practice of Apartheid.
You mean this rocket right here? And the excuse for Israel violating ceasefires and killing hundreds of Palestinians a la Cast Lead?
More problems for tired Zionist apologia: Israel's justification for starting the 1967 war was the Egyptian blockade of the Straits of Tiran, one of many trade routes to Israel. But that means that Palestinian attacks in response to the total blockade of Gaza are perfectly justified by Israeli rules.
Repeating a big lie doesn't make it true, it just makes you a bigger liar. The Palestinians are entitled to all of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, but they've been willing to make concessions on that in order to get a state of their own. But Israel keeps making more and more draconian demands, or pulls out of negotiations.
Because Israel isn't interested in peace. It's interested in land, and waiting out the clock until it becomes a matter of taking land from someone's great-great grandchild to give to someone else's great-great grandchild.
Tautology with no basis in reality. But even if it were true, that's batshit irrelevant to Palestinian right to self-determination, and their right to all of the land seized in the 1967 war started by Israel.
As it is, I find your lack of self-awareness disturbing.
Did you miss the news that it took the Israeli Supreme Court to (finally) protect female Jews from being harassed or arrested at the Western Wall by the Ultra Orthodox? How about opinion surveys of Americans on how it's acceptable to drone bomb the shit out of other countries?
Beam, motes. And if you want to bitch about the problems of fundamentalist islam, start with the nearest mirror, as it's usually:
1) In response to western imperialism. Yeah, you're pissed about the 911 attacks that killed 3,000. They're kinda pissed about American sanctions that killed 500,000 children in Iraq. And your overthrowing their secular democracy in Iran to be replaced by a brutal dictatorship from the Shah.
2) Financed by client states like Saudi Arabia. You know, where the hijackers were from, but was never on our blow-shit-up list. Huh.
3) Financed and supported by the CIA. The Mujahideen in Afghanistan, rebels in Libya and now Syria, and MEK in Iraq. Then there was that triffle of "buying" the services of young boys in Afghanistan to be raped by tribal warlords.
Bullshit. The entirety of Israel is built on land stolen from the native population. First in 1948, when a bunch of immigrants from Europe decided they had a greater claim than those who had lived there for thousands of years. And then in 1967, when they started a war of territory expansion yet claimed to be the victims.
ALL of the occupied territories ALL of the settlements and ALL of East Jerusalem are illegal.
Vote's split between two highly conservative candidates - both had platforms well to the right of anything Bush ran on in 2000. WYP?
I read it the first time. Longer explanation:
The Free Market Fairy still has no answer for climate change, and "incentives" are no solution. Your .5% tax idea might work - if you get a time machine and get Truman to implement one in 1950, because the time for timid attempts at changed passed at least five administrations ago.
The longer change has been put off, the worse things will get and the more drastic actions will have to be. Now is not the time for libertarian re-activeness, but Manhattan Project and "before this decade is out" pro-activeness.
And the best part is, it would be an economic gain for society. More green energy means more R&D and construction. The only losers are Exxon and the Randian's who want us to keep clapping so the Free Market Fairy doesn't die, to be replaced by Glinda, the Good Socialisticy Witch.
Ah, winger math. Where every cent sunk into a solar panel is a part of the cost, but none of the following are a cost of using fossil fuels:
1. Higher A/C bills during record heat waves, like last year when parts of the south went more than a month with every day going over 100 degrees.
2. Higher food costs as droughts kill crops or require more irrigation.
3. Cost of fighting forest fires, made worse by drought.
4. Flood fighting costs, as warmer winter air carries more water, for wetter snow and more spring rains.
5. Rising cost of gasoline.
6. Spending a trillion a year on the military-industrial-complex. What, you think it's coincidence that our military, regime changes, and supported coups are focused on the world's gas stations?
7. Tornadoes and hurricanes turning huge swaths of the country into federal disaster areas. Warmer, more humid air == more powerful storms.
Finally, even if you want to bury your head in your....sand on climate change, energy costs money. SAVING energy means SAVING MONEY.
Nonsense. Ethanol is a "carbon based" energy source, but it's not adding any new carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Burning oil and coal and natural gas does, because it's taking carbon out of the ground that would otherwise stay in the ground and putting it in the air.
Thus, the fossil fuel distinction is more than appropriate.
Oil is the most subsidized energy source of all: over a trillion a year in DOD spending. What, you thought we had the bulk of our military focused on the world's gas stations by accident? Supporting friendly dictatorships isn't done on the cheap (Saudi Arabia), nor overthrowing socialisticy democracies (Iran, Venezuela), or regime change (Iraq, Libya). Then there's the massive subsidies on the consumption side in the form of public roads and highways.
When the United States starts a drone war in support of the solar panel or geothermal industries, or directly pays for wind farms across the country, then maybe we can talk about "subsidization".
The market is what's killing us. If a disastrous activity is profitable, someone will do it for profit. The Free Market Fairy has no answer to problems of pollution or climate change.
Aside from the occasional meltdown caused by greed or hubris, and storing the waste for thousands and thousands of years. Why would anyone want to invest in a power source that will still be forcing you to maintain it's waste 15,000 years from now?
Only if you're ignoring the danger and cost of nuclear power. You can talk about safe nuclear power after all profit has been removed from the equation, but you still have to store the waste for tens of thousands of years. It's the most expensive power source ever invented by man.
Frakking, poisoning groundwater. Are you aware?
If you do that, you have to include most Jews and half of Genteels on your list of "terrorists". Before anyone gets butthurt over calling circumcision MGM, only a minority of FGM involves the removal of the clitoris or sewing up the vagina like a turkey - which is indeed worse than circumcision. Type IA and IIA of female genital cutting involves trimming away some of the outer labia or clitoral hood - which is of course directly analogous to male circumcision.
Females are the ones who usually turn in the females for "honor killings". For some reason, that part of the storyline is always left out. Just like it is with FGM, which is performed by...females: