The real problem is that this error had to be found out by reverse engineering because climate scientists have a bad habit of not releasing their code and data. We're told that they use a list of high quality temperature sensing stations and discouraged from actually checking. Then when somebody actually does go out and check, we find a significant fraction of them are just awful, hopelessly compromised by local heat island effects. Fixing those problems will only increase the accuracy of predictions and data quality but instead of welcoming it, we had an abortive attempt to take the station list locations private for "privacy reasons" after being public for decades.
Data quality is a major issue with global warming. If the numbers aren't right, we don't really know what's going on. This is just one more case of obfuscation hiding error and the AGW proponents falling back to the nearest trench line and adopting the same shoddy tactics of delay, deny, and obfuscate on data quality issues.
This is not how real science is done and that's why so many people who know and love the scientific method and its fruits have a growing unease about the whole AGW enterprise. Can you blame them?
The US is reputed to have one of the best temp sensor networks in the world and I believe has the only organized effort to go to original sources and check stations. Yet instead of calling for a review of all the data and figuring out, for real, how bad the problem is, what we get is a political effort to firewall the contamination and an implied "let's not bother" checking the rest. Real science is "trust but verify". Climate science seems to have a strain of something else going on.
For those outside the US who might not get the joke, a Democrat congressman in the last Congress was caught on tape taking a $100,000 bribe. Raids on his house yielded $90,000 in currency stored in his freezer. He was as dirty as can be. His Capitol Hill offices were raided and records seized to further his bribery prosecution. The Speaker of the House, #3 in line for the presidency and fellow Republican castigated the Bush administration and strongly resisted the Capitol Hill raids. In reality, Bush's own party would impeach him if he were to act as parent fantasizes and we have fairly recent proof that institutional jealousy is alive and well in DC.
The original article is about an executive order. My comments have been about the executive order and the Iraq war which is the subject of the executive order and about the history of the powers that GWB invoked.
The parent poster assumed that the administration is acting in defiance of the Constitution and assumed that he was in some ideological echo chamber where a little detail like proving it was not necessary. Sorry, it is necessary and tossing in a hated group like the RIAA doesn't mean that GWB is right or wrong. The situations are not analogous.
You need to start with the Ford and Carter era legislation and see if they are legitimate. If not, we've got larger problems. Assuming the relied statues are OK, you have to look and see if the emergency declaration regarding Iraq is OK. If not, this is a problem too. Finally you need to see if GWB is applying the statutes appropriately to the emergency at hand. If that's OK then you should have no problem with the situation. If it is not then protest away. What peeved me about the RIAA guy was that he didn't even pretend to go through a serious analysis, merely libeling our country as being ruled by a bunch of gangsters and took his point to be *self evident*. That's moronic.
For the record, the statutes are merely updates of very long-standing war powers and I don't think there are problems with them. You support our enemies, we get to take your stuff. The emergency declaration over the Iraq reconstruction is also legitimate. I think that it's possible for the Bush admin to too broad on seizures with the executive order as written and I'd suggest a rewrite but I don't think there's any actual evidence that this is more than just sloppy writing and would suggest political remedies (election and impeachment) if they seize too broadly. So far they are not.
So where do you differ in your analysis? And could you leave the socialist bullshit aside? Unless you're an anarchist, war powers is one of the few things that libertarians grant are a legitimate function of the state. This is part of them in all their ugly glory. Be an adult over it. If you are an anarchist, feel free to just say "I'm an anarchist" because at that point, I've got little interest left in your analysis of the legitimacy of government power.
When the US committed to not only putting a well deserved boot into the face of Baathist tyranny in Iraq but also to hang around afterwards and help get the country back to a regular system of government independent of other powers, this was not normal behavior for the US and required special legislation. We don't do this sort of thing on the whim of any president alone. Were we to pull out of Iraq, the emergency powers would lapse irrespective of how much an emergency Iraq would be in after our departure.
The emergency is trying to fulfill our obligations to the Iraqi people by stabilizing their elected government until they can manage it themselves while trying to minimize our dead and wounded and lost treasure. Why we undertook those obligations is a much longer conversation and a difficult one because the President of the US is constrained from saying the plain truth, that Iraq had bought immunity from the UN by buying the vetoes of Russia, France, and likely the PRC and was profoundly corrupting the international system. We officially still don't notice this because we're just not up to doing a rip and replace on the UN system. Instead we just demonstrated, courtesy of the US armed forces, that you can buy as many votes in Turtle Bay as you like but if your acts are noxious enough (and one thing that nobody disputes is that Saddam was noxious and abnoxious), you're still getting deposed. This has had a salutory effect no matter the other difficulties.
There's a reason that 87% of the UN's budget has been threatened (countries are saying they'll withhold the money) unless the UN undergoes significant reform. The US only accounts for 22% of the UN budget. Everybody knows that the system is profoundly, corrosively corrupt but nobody wants to say so out loud because admitting it publicly would cause more trouble than 10 Iraq wars.
I'm sorry, where exactly did you get the right to pick out my hypotheticals? Nowhere? I thought so.
You have a general common law right to use your property as you please. The government does not have the inherent right to micromanage what you will do with your property absent some constitutional grant of power. Just because my neighbors donate their land to the National Parks system does not mean that I should suddenly lose the full use of my property because I've become an inholder. But that does happen. Real estate may and does carry risk, just like any other investment. But government interference in the peaceful use of property beyond what is constitutionally permissible is not a risk. It is an assault.
Getting back to the executive order, seizing the assets of those who participate in the bloody assault on the democratically elected government of Iraq is also an assault. But you're allowed to do that in war, assault your enemies. Regulatory takings are not that kind of relationship. The property owners are not enemies of the US. Those who fund suicide bombings to kill our troops are enemies of the US and deserve any assault we can throw at them.
There's quite a bit of difference between paying zakat to some foundation that you know is financing jihadi travel to Iraq and making a speech saying that you believe that US interests would be best served by a different strategy in Iraq and troop levels should come down. The former is what the executive order is talking about, not the latter and I would support immediate impeachment were Hillary's campaign funds seized in the manner you suggest, Bush and Cheney both. They would be gone in a heartbeat and they know it which is why your suggested combination is not sinister, merely stupid.
I do realize that this would turn over the executive to Nancy Pelosi, a political figure I find ideologically loathesome. It would be a worthwhile price to pay in the never never land where Bush/Cheney actually acted as you suggest.
My comment was aimed at the fact that Democrats are protesting this because it's Bush doing it. Were Clinton (either one) signing the same executive order, you wouldn't get a peep out of them. That's why they "don't have a leg to stand on". It's the political posturing where they pretend to be in favor of our rights when in reality they're just mad that they're not the ones in charge and looking to grab at every argument available, right or wrong.
The big guys keep buying up the small companies in just about every field and very smart people keep making small companies worth buying. Scaled Composites didn't win by much and the big guys don't have enough money to buy out all the small companies. At a certain point, somebody's going to figure out how to stay independent and consistently win against the entrenched incumbents and they simply won't sell, taking the bigger payments that staying independent will provide.
That's neither here nor there, we still will get to space faster due to the X-Prize competition.
No, regulatory takings are buying a property that the law says you can build a subdivision on, taxing you on that basis, and then passing a law that denies you the ability to build and destroys the vast majority of the land's economic value without any compensation. You don't get to expropriate without just compensation no matter the process you adopt. Just because it's still yours on paper doesn't make it any less expropriation.
The executive is not rewriting property law. It is making clear that assets used to further a war are subject to seizure, as they have always been in wartime and getting a move on a program to do just that. It's about time.
Or are you one of those people who thinks that there is no war?
Eventually, one way or another, the Iraq war will end and with it this emergency order. Regulatory takings are a permanent assault.
There's a good reason that war is called "the health of the state". It's because a lot of corner cutting is justified to minimize the carnage. This is the usual, sad but predictable necessity. Regulatory takings are not necessary and not temporary.
You sir, are a moron. One can tell that without being a lawyer. The vast majority of the time when somebody makes a mistake in legal interpretation at this level, they generally haven't committed a crime. The law is often written with huge leeway for interpretation. If somebody calls foul, a judge will interpret and draw better lines and everybody agrees to them going forward. In this case, there's nothing unusual in engaging the accountants to hamstring people working to make it more likely our soldiers get killed. That's what this is about. You send money to fund Iraqi mayhem and the end result is US military personnel have to stay longer, at increased risk, and some of them will die of it. You deserve to get your assets frozen over that and more besides.
The big game is actually expanding the high energy lifestyle to the bottom 2B in the world today. For that, there is no one source that can do it all, not even good old hydrocarbons including with FT conversion. If you want to make money hand over fist (and God bless 'em I say) enlarge your market to the entire planet and sell energy no matter what form it takes.
The oil companies are transforming right in front of your eyes. Are you blind? Conversion to hydrogen makes them more money because they know the energy game better than anybody on the planet. They'll stay in business and only grow with a conversion to hydrogen.
The order cites IEEPA (passed 1977 under President Carter) and National Emergencies Act (passed in 1976 under President Ford). Now you may or may not think that these are good laws but please stop making stuff up about how this is all 9/11 overreaction. Emergency powers have a long history and tend to creep up on you.
The Dems and the Left would have a leg to stand on in protesting this stuff if they hadn't argued the exact opposite when the stakes are much lower, ie regulatory takings over some snail or slug on your property.
Try $3.40 for pipelined merchant grade hydrogen. Google it and you'll see that the paper is using old numbers. There is a great deal of effort going into making hydrogen production cheap enough to use as a transport fuel. His calculations on tanks are similarly outdated (most modern hydrogen tank designs use carbon composite, not steel).
Nobody's saying that hydrogen is an ideal fuel source. It just happens to be one of the most likely candidates to replace gasoline because there is no one fuel source that can replace gasoline and out of all the candidates, hydrogen functions best as a multi-feedstock middleware.
1. Hydrogen's less dangerous than the gasoline we already use 2. Recharge times don't matter if you have a standard tank form and run your system like propane tank exchanges. 3. The price is rapidly dropping from $6 gge when GWB came in office to around $4 today and dropping fast. It's projected to drop under $3 gge in 2010 at which point you're within the realm of commercial practicality. 2010 is not that far off. 4. H2 is created by lots of different creation pathways. Some are very clean while others are fairly dirty. You can change your microbe mix in a water treatment plant to optimize for hydrogen production, for instance, and use the hydrogen to help power the plant. 5. Actually, we do have such an industry, it would just need to be scaled up to handle a mass changeover. But a thin infrastructure with local production of hydrogen in government pumps on interstates would allow people to travel across the country with a hydrogen car and would be buildable for well under $100M. That would let people start creating demand for more pumps and then the market could take over. 6. Since you can make hydrogen from just about anything, I think that centralized production is likely to be much less important in a hydrogen world than it is in a petrochem world. 7. What happens to the H2 tanks is exactly what happens to the gasoline tanks today. Explosions happen. Leaking hydrogen is less of a hazard than leaking gasoline not least of which because hydrogen is very light and will tend to float up pretty quickly, dispersing to harmeless concentrations very fast. 8. Huge tanks are just nonsense. There are companies that have built normal sized tanks that can hold enough hydrogen to go 300 miles. Right now it's a question of getting the price down to the point where it's practical. 9. Fine, name one practical alternative. The key bit about hydrogen is that it serves wonderfully as a middleware energy storage mechanism. Everything else either won't scale, won't work, or is likely not dropping in price fast enough to make it in time. 10. H2 doesn't power the engines in fuel cell cars, electricity does. Batteries aren't getting better fast enough to have electric cars. hydrogen fuel cells get the juice to the electromotors (which I do trust a grease monkey to maintain) and are likely going to start showing up in vehicles in the next 5 years (GM says 2011 which means they're already gearing up car designs today).
Yeah, you thought up 10 reasons why it won't work. They just have the disadvantage of being bogus, every one.
When fuel tanks rupture, gasoline liquid drops down, pools, runs around and creates vapor at a rate depending on the temp outside. Hydrogen gas, OTOH is very light, already a gas, and just shoots out and quickly rises up and out of the accident area. The danger from gasoline at a real world accident is much higher than hydrogen.
What's the penalty for downloading Casablanca? What's the penalty for downloading Harry Potter 5? They're exactly the same. Changing the copyright rules would: 1. Create a huge pool artwork in modern formats that could be mined by technically adept but artistically challenged people 2. Would enlarge the number of derivative or mashup arts that could be produced 3. Would raise the bar for the production of new artwork (if it's not significantly better than something 15 years old, it won't make much money) 4. Would increase the pressure to produce new, decent work out of the huge art houses like Disney because they can't live off their back catalog anymore. 5. Would clean up our politics by removing the impulse to buy legislation extending copyright on economic powerhouses like Mickey Mouse.
There's more but this is what I had off the top of my head.
ElleyKitten - Nobody uses the electric chair except Nebraska. The other 37 states with the death penalty all use lethal injection. Electrocution also makes bodies unsuitable for transplantation as you are cooking the flesh which is just as effective as poisoning it. You're just wrong on the facts.
The embryonic potential to develop into an independent adult does not depend on any future series of events actually happening. I recruit an infertile couple to become parents to a "snowflake baby" and a thawed embryo is implanted (in reality they keep implanting until one takes) eventually resulting in an independent adult. The embryos that were picked have the exact same potential as the embryos which were not picked and my success or failure to recruit sufficient "snowflake baby" couples does not change embryonic potential one whit. Otherwise you end up with rights being conditioned on somebody else's actions and that's never correct.
Your partial concession on artificial wombs leads me to believe you haven't thought the consequences through. There is no reason to do it unless what is being aborted is a person. And if you're aborting people, the convenience of the mother (the vast majority of abortions are convenience abortions) does not have exclusive priority.
I do not believe that our technological capability should increase or decrease our rights. That way lies Huxley's Brave New World and I'll pass, thank you. You seem to differ though I'd love to hear that I'm wrong. As for pro-lifers and women, I'm a husband to one and a father to two and you have no idea how much I love and respect them so keep your bigotry and suppositions to yourself.
The Bush stuff is boring and I'll let you have the last word other than to say that I continue to largely disagree.
About the stem cell stuff, you're just dead wrong. The embryonic stem cell people have been misrepresenting adult cell progress as embryonic cell progress, minimizing the utility of adult stem cells, and flat out lying about the progress that they've been making. No research program ever has "enough money". There's always demand for more and the embryonic camp has gone about getting their funds unethically by working very hard to confuse the public about the results to date and the likelihood of adult stem cells solving the problems that the general public wants solved.
All the stem cell therapies to date are using adult cells. All the therapies that are closest to approval are adult cell therapies. Absent a number of breakthroughs happening in the embryonic field and not happening in the adult field, this is unlikely to change.
People without an ideological ax to grind would tend to want to fund the avenues of research that look most promising and reserve a tiny bit of blue sky money for the long-shots. But the embryonic stem cell folk are not satisfied with blue sky money. They want a bigger share of the pie and to hell with the therapies that are delayed on the adult side for lack of funds. That's what really gets me steamed. In the real world, it's the embryonic researchers who are the villains of the story because their lobbying to misallocate funds delays treatments and denies some until that misallocation stops. So stop it.
I haven't the foggiest what would be a stronger bond, however I wouldn't have come up with carbon nanotubes either so my inability doesn't mean much. If this company ends up making really good climbers, makes practical power beaming a reality and nothing else (ie no space elevator) they still have a shot at turning a decent return on investment and also making the world a better place in the meantime.
Before some guy in a lab in Japan found carbon nanotubes in the early '90s talk about space elevators had to deal in vague discussions about "unobtanium". There simply wasn't anything with even the theoretical strength necessary. Next week, some guy in a lab in Latvia might discover something else that can practically form an elevator. You just don't know. Now that we have at least one material that might be made to work, it makes sense to start working on all of the *other* major problems that need to be solved before an elevator goes up.
No, let me help you out. You have a severe case of Bush Derangement Syndrome. Be reassured that it's self-limiting and should pass sometime in January 2009 just like its predecessor disease anti-Clinton hysteria died down shortly after the big creep left the White House. Most people think that labelling somebody as pushing the envelope is a criticism (which it was in this case) not a support (which it was not).
You protest just a bit too much about straw men, having raised quite a few in your preceding post. Signing statements giving guidance and interpretation are not a Bush invention. He has pushed the envelope by using them more frequently and more broadly than any other President in the history of the Republic but there really are only three remedies for that prior to 2009, corrective legislation, judicial rebuke, or impeachment.
The bottom line is that there are two competing avenues of research, embryonic and adult stem cells. A significant part of this country thinks that embryonic research should go full steam ahead and to hell with adult stem cell research. A significant part of the country thinks that adult should go full steam ahead and to hell with embryonic research. And the vast majority of the country just wants their miracle cures (preferably delivered by flying car) as soon as possible and can and are swayed by propaganda from one or the other camp. That's what's going on. It's pretty clear which camp you're in and I find your self-serving arguments repugnant.
A lot of people have problems with condemned prisoners being organ donors starting with Amnesty International. I should have made myself more clear, though, that I meant executed prisoners. We purposefully spoil the meat of prisoners via lethal injection. The PRC purposefully preserves as much as possible, sometimes even prepping prisoners for post-mortem donation by injecting drugs to facilitate the process right before they shoot them.
There is a medical condition that prevents some people from feeling pain. They can accidentally cut off a finger and just not notice. I think that such people have rights (as does the law) but you seem not to. Maybe you ought to rethink that.
As for technological progress shifting rights, does that mean that when the artificial womb is developed, abortion should be outlawed? And if we regress technologically and can no longer produce such marvels, should it be relegalized? I think not.
As for pro-lifers and fertility clinics, you just haven't been listening much. The Catholic Church has been anti-fertility clinics from the beginning for exactly this reason among others. No doubt other pro-life sub-groups have similar histories.
Slashdot Mirror
The real problem is that this error had to be found out by reverse engineering because climate scientists have a bad habit of not releasing their code and data. We're told that they use a list of high quality temperature sensing stations and discouraged from actually checking. Then when somebody actually does go out and check, we find a significant fraction of them are just awful, hopelessly compromised by local heat island effects. Fixing those problems will only increase the accuracy of predictions and data quality but instead of welcoming it, we had an abortive attempt to take the station list locations private for "privacy reasons" after being public for decades.
Data quality is a major issue with global warming. If the numbers aren't right, we don't really know what's going on. This is just one more case of obfuscation hiding error and the AGW proponents falling back to the nearest trench line and adopting the same shoddy tactics of delay, deny, and obfuscate on data quality issues.
This is not how real science is done and that's why so many people who know and love the scientific method and its fruits have a growing unease about the whole AGW enterprise. Can you blame them?
The US is reputed to have one of the best temp sensor networks in the world and I believe has the only organized effort to go to original sources and check stations. Yet instead of calling for a review of all the data and figuring out, for real, how bad the problem is, what we get is a political effort to firewall the contamination and an implied "let's not bother" checking the rest. Real science is "trust but verify". Climate science seems to have a strain of something else going on.
Please mark parent +1 funny.
For those outside the US who might not get the joke, a Democrat congressman in the last Congress was caught on tape taking a $100,000 bribe. Raids on his house yielded $90,000 in currency stored in his freezer. He was as dirty as can be. His Capitol Hill offices were raided and records seized to further his bribery prosecution. The Speaker of the House, #3 in line for the presidency and fellow Republican castigated the Bush administration and strongly resisted the Capitol Hill raids. In reality, Bush's own party would impeach him if he were to act as parent fantasizes and we have fairly recent proof that institutional jealousy is alive and well in DC.
The original article is about an executive order. My comments have been about the executive order and the Iraq war which is the subject of the executive order and about the history of the powers that GWB invoked.
The parent poster assumed that the administration is acting in defiance of the Constitution and assumed that he was in some ideological echo chamber where a little detail like proving it was not necessary. Sorry, it is necessary and tossing in a hated group like the RIAA doesn't mean that GWB is right or wrong. The situations are not analogous.
You need to start with the Ford and Carter era legislation and see if they are legitimate. If not, we've got larger problems. Assuming the relied statues are OK, you have to look and see if the emergency declaration regarding Iraq is OK. If not, this is a problem too. Finally you need to see if GWB is applying the statutes appropriately to the emergency at hand. If that's OK then you should have no problem with the situation. If it is not then protest away. What peeved me about the RIAA guy was that he didn't even pretend to go through a serious analysis, merely libeling our country as being ruled by a bunch of gangsters and took his point to be *self evident*. That's moronic.
For the record, the statutes are merely updates of very long-standing war powers and I don't think there are problems with them. You support our enemies, we get to take your stuff. The emergency declaration over the Iraq reconstruction is also legitimate. I think that it's possible for the Bush admin to too broad on seizures with the executive order as written and I'd suggest a rewrite but I don't think there's any actual evidence that this is more than just sloppy writing and would suggest political remedies (election and impeachment) if they seize too broadly. So far they are not.
So where do you differ in your analysis? And could you leave the socialist bullshit aside? Unless you're an anarchist, war powers is one of the few things that libertarians grant are a legitimate function of the state. This is part of them in all their ugly glory. Be an adult over it. If you are an anarchist, feel free to just say "I'm an anarchist" because at that point, I've got little interest left in your analysis of the legitimacy of government power.
In short, it is not correct analysis.
When the US committed to not only putting a well deserved boot into the face of Baathist tyranny in Iraq but also to hang around afterwards and help get the country back to a regular system of government independent of other powers, this was not normal behavior for the US and required special legislation. We don't do this sort of thing on the whim of any president alone. Were we to pull out of Iraq, the emergency powers would lapse irrespective of how much an emergency Iraq would be in after our departure.
The emergency is trying to fulfill our obligations to the Iraqi people by stabilizing their elected government until they can manage it themselves while trying to minimize our dead and wounded and lost treasure. Why we undertook those obligations is a much longer conversation and a difficult one because the President of the US is constrained from saying the plain truth, that Iraq had bought immunity from the UN by buying the vetoes of Russia, France, and likely the PRC and was profoundly corrupting the international system. We officially still don't notice this because we're just not up to doing a rip and replace on the UN system. Instead we just demonstrated, courtesy of the US armed forces, that you can buy as many votes in Turtle Bay as you like but if your acts are noxious enough (and one thing that nobody disputes is that Saddam was noxious and abnoxious), you're still getting deposed. This has had a salutory effect no matter the other difficulties.
There's a reason that 87% of the UN's budget has been threatened (countries are saying they'll withhold the money) unless the UN undergoes significant reform. The US only accounts for 22% of the UN budget. Everybody knows that the system is profoundly, corrosively corrupt but nobody wants to say so out loud because admitting it publicly would cause more trouble than 10 Iraq wars.
I'm sorry, where exactly did you get the right to pick out my hypotheticals? Nowhere? I thought so.
You have a general common law right to use your property as you please. The government does not have the inherent right to micromanage what you will do with your property absent some constitutional grant of power. Just because my neighbors donate their land to the National Parks system does not mean that I should suddenly lose the full use of my property because I've become an inholder. But that does happen. Real estate may and does carry risk, just like any other investment. But government interference in the peaceful use of property beyond what is constitutionally permissible is not a risk. It is an assault.
Getting back to the executive order, seizing the assets of those who participate in the bloody assault on the democratically elected government of Iraq is also an assault. But you're allowed to do that in war, assault your enemies. Regulatory takings are not that kind of relationship. The property owners are not enemies of the US. Those who fund suicide bombings to kill our troops are enemies of the US and deserve any assault we can throw at them.
There's quite a bit of difference between paying zakat to some foundation that you know is financing jihadi travel to Iraq and making a speech saying that you believe that US interests would be best served by a different strategy in Iraq and troop levels should come down. The former is what the executive order is talking about, not the latter and I would support immediate impeachment were Hillary's campaign funds seized in the manner you suggest, Bush and Cheney both. They would be gone in a heartbeat and they know it which is why your suggested combination is not sinister, merely stupid.
I do realize that this would turn over the executive to Nancy Pelosi, a political figure I find ideologically loathesome. It would be a worthwhile price to pay in the never never land where Bush/Cheney actually acted as you suggest.
My comment was aimed at the fact that Democrats are protesting this because it's Bush doing it. Were Clinton (either one) signing the same executive order, you wouldn't get a peep out of them. That's why they "don't have a leg to stand on". It's the political posturing where they pretend to be in favor of our rights when in reality they're just mad that they're not the ones in charge and looking to grab at every argument available, right or wrong.
The big guys keep buying up the small companies in just about every field and very smart people keep making small companies worth buying. Scaled Composites didn't win by much and the big guys don't have enough money to buy out all the small companies. At a certain point, somebody's going to figure out how to stay independent and consistently win against the entrenched incumbents and they simply won't sell, taking the bigger payments that staying independent will provide.
That's neither here nor there, we still will get to space faster due to the X-Prize competition.
No, regulatory takings are buying a property that the law says you can build a subdivision on, taxing you on that basis, and then passing a law that denies you the ability to build and destroys the vast majority of the land's economic value without any compensation. You don't get to expropriate without just compensation no matter the process you adopt. Just because it's still yours on paper doesn't make it any less expropriation.
The executive is not rewriting property law. It is making clear that assets used to further a war are subject to seizure, as they have always been in wartime and getting a move on a program to do just that. It's about time.
Or are you one of those people who thinks that there is no war?
Eventually, one way or another, the Iraq war will end and with it this emergency order. Regulatory takings are a permanent assault.
There's a good reason that war is called "the health of the state". It's because a lot of corner cutting is justified to minimize the carnage. This is the usual, sad but predictable necessity. Regulatory takings are not necessary and not temporary.
You sir, are a moron. One can tell that without being a lawyer. The vast majority of the time when somebody makes a mistake in legal interpretation at this level, they generally haven't committed a crime. The law is often written with huge leeway for interpretation. If somebody calls foul, a judge will interpret and draw better lines and everybody agrees to them going forward. In this case, there's nothing unusual in engaging the accountants to hamstring people working to make it more likely our soldiers get killed. That's what this is about. You send money to fund Iraqi mayhem and the end result is US military personnel have to stay longer, at increased risk, and some of them will die of it. You deserve to get your assets frozen over that and more besides.
It's only not clear if you haven't read the article. The Iraq War is the emergency.
The big game is actually expanding the high energy lifestyle to the bottom 2B in the world today. For that, there is no one source that can do it all, not even good old hydrocarbons including with FT conversion. If you want to make money hand over fist (and God bless 'em I say) enlarge your market to the entire planet and sell energy no matter what form it takes.
The oil companies are transforming right in front of your eyes. Are you blind? Conversion to hydrogen makes them more money because they know the energy game better than anybody on the planet. They'll stay in business and only grow with a conversion to hydrogen.
The order cites IEEPA (passed 1977 under President Carter) and National Emergencies Act (passed in 1976 under President Ford). Now you may or may not think that these are good laws but please stop making stuff up about how this is all 9/11 overreaction. Emergency powers have a long history and tend to creep up on you.
The Dems and the Left would have a leg to stand on in protesting this stuff if they hadn't argued the exact opposite when the stakes are much lower, ie regulatory takings over some snail or slug on your property.
Try $3.40 for pipelined merchant grade hydrogen. Google it and you'll see that the paper is using old numbers. There is a great deal of effort going into making hydrogen production cheap enough to use as a transport fuel. His calculations on tanks are similarly outdated (most modern hydrogen tank designs use carbon composite, not steel).
Nobody's saying that hydrogen is an ideal fuel source. It just happens to be one of the most likely candidates to replace gasoline because there is no one fuel source that can replace gasoline and out of all the candidates, hydrogen functions best as a multi-feedstock middleware.
1. Hydrogen's less dangerous than the gasoline we already use
2. Recharge times don't matter if you have a standard tank form and run your system like propane tank exchanges.
3. The price is rapidly dropping from $6 gge when GWB came in office to around $4 today and dropping fast. It's projected to drop under $3 gge in 2010 at which point you're within the realm of commercial practicality. 2010 is not that far off.
4. H2 is created by lots of different creation pathways. Some are very clean while others are fairly dirty. You can change your microbe mix in a water treatment plant to optimize for hydrogen production, for instance, and use the hydrogen to help power the plant.
5. Actually, we do have such an industry, it would just need to be scaled up to handle a mass changeover. But a thin infrastructure with local production of hydrogen in government pumps on interstates would allow people to travel across the country with a hydrogen car and would be buildable for well under $100M. That would let people start creating demand for more pumps and then the market could take over.
6. Since you can make hydrogen from just about anything, I think that centralized production is likely to be much less important in a hydrogen world than it is in a petrochem world.
7. What happens to the H2 tanks is exactly what happens to the gasoline tanks today. Explosions happen. Leaking hydrogen is less of a hazard than leaking gasoline not least of which because hydrogen is very light and will tend to float up pretty quickly, dispersing to harmeless concentrations very fast.
8. Huge tanks are just nonsense. There are companies that have built normal sized tanks that can hold enough hydrogen to go 300 miles. Right now it's a question of getting the price down to the point where it's practical.
9. Fine, name one practical alternative. The key bit about hydrogen is that it serves wonderfully as a middleware energy storage mechanism. Everything else either won't scale, won't work, or is likely not dropping in price fast enough to make it in time.
10. H2 doesn't power the engines in fuel cell cars, electricity does. Batteries aren't getting better fast enough to have electric cars. hydrogen fuel cells get the juice to the electromotors (which I do trust a grease monkey to maintain) and are likely going to start showing up in vehicles in the next 5 years (GM says 2011 which means they're already gearing up car designs today).
Yeah, you thought up 10 reasons why it won't work. They just have the disadvantage of being bogus, every one.
When fuel tanks rupture, gasoline liquid drops down, pools, runs around and creates vapor at a rate depending on the temp outside. Hydrogen gas, OTOH is very light, already a gas, and just shoots out and quickly rises up and out of the accident area. The danger from gasoline at a real world accident is much higher than hydrogen.
What's the penalty for downloading Casablanca? What's the penalty for downloading Harry Potter 5? They're exactly the same. Changing the copyright rules would:
1. Create a huge pool artwork in modern formats that could be mined by technically adept but artistically challenged people
2. Would enlarge the number of derivative or mashup arts that could be produced
3. Would raise the bar for the production of new artwork (if it's not significantly better than something 15 years old, it won't make much money)
4. Would increase the pressure to produce new, decent work out of the huge art houses like Disney because they can't live off their back catalog anymore.
5. Would clean up our politics by removing the impulse to buy legislation extending copyright on economic powerhouses like Mickey Mouse.
There's more but this is what I had off the top of my head.
ElleyKitten - Nobody uses the electric chair except Nebraska. The other 37 states with the death penalty all use lethal injection. Electrocution also makes bodies unsuitable for transplantation as you are cooking the flesh which is just as effective as poisoning it. You're just wrong on the facts.
The embryonic potential to develop into an independent adult does not depend on any future series of events actually happening. I recruit an infertile couple to become parents to a "snowflake baby" and a thawed embryo is implanted (in reality they keep implanting until one takes) eventually resulting in an independent adult. The embryos that were picked have the exact same potential as the embryos which were not picked and my success or failure to recruit sufficient "snowflake baby" couples does not change embryonic potential one whit. Otherwise you end up with rights being conditioned on somebody else's actions and that's never correct.
Your partial concession on artificial wombs leads me to believe you haven't thought the consequences through. There is no reason to do it unless what is being aborted is a person. And if you're aborting people, the convenience of the mother (the vast majority of abortions are convenience abortions) does not have exclusive priority.
I do not believe that our technological capability should increase or decrease our rights. That way lies Huxley's Brave New World and I'll pass, thank you. You seem to differ though I'd love to hear that I'm wrong. As for pro-lifers and women, I'm a husband to one and a father to two and you have no idea how much I love and respect them so keep your bigotry and suppositions to yourself.
The Bush stuff is boring and I'll let you have the last word other than to say that I continue to largely disagree.
About the stem cell stuff, you're just dead wrong. The embryonic stem cell people have been misrepresenting adult cell progress as embryonic cell progress, minimizing the utility of adult stem cells, and flat out lying about the progress that they've been making. No research program ever has "enough money". There's always demand for more and the embryonic camp has gone about getting their funds unethically by working very hard to confuse the public about the results to date and the likelihood of adult stem cells solving the problems that the general public wants solved.
All the stem cell therapies to date are using adult cells. All the therapies that are closest to approval are adult cell therapies. Absent a number of breakthroughs happening in the embryonic field and not happening in the adult field, this is unlikely to change.
People without an ideological ax to grind would tend to want to fund the avenues of research that look most promising and reserve a tiny bit of blue sky money for the long-shots. But the embryonic stem cell folk are not satisfied with blue sky money. They want a bigger share of the pie and to hell with the therapies that are delayed on the adult side for lack of funds. That's what really gets me steamed. In the real world, it's the embryonic researchers who are the villains of the story because their lobbying to misallocate funds delays treatments and denies some until that misallocation stops. So stop it.
I haven't the foggiest what would be a stronger bond, however I wouldn't have come up with carbon nanotubes either so my inability doesn't mean much. If this company ends up making really good climbers, makes practical power beaming a reality and nothing else (ie no space elevator) they still have a shot at turning a decent return on investment and also making the world a better place in the meantime.
Before some guy in a lab in Japan found carbon nanotubes in the early '90s talk about space elevators had to deal in vague discussions about "unobtanium". There simply wasn't anything with even the theoretical strength necessary. Next week, some guy in a lab in Latvia might discover something else that can practically form an elevator. You just don't know. Now that we have at least one material that might be made to work, it makes sense to start working on all of the *other* major problems that need to be solved before an elevator goes up.
No, let me help you out. You have a severe case of Bush Derangement Syndrome. Be reassured that it's self-limiting and should pass sometime in January 2009 just like its predecessor disease anti-Clinton hysteria died down shortly after the big creep left the White House. Most people think that labelling somebody as pushing the envelope is a criticism (which it was in this case) not a support (which it was not).
You protest just a bit too much about straw men, having raised quite a few in your preceding post. Signing statements giving guidance and interpretation are not a Bush invention. He has pushed the envelope by using them more frequently and more broadly than any other President in the history of the Republic but there really are only three remedies for that prior to 2009, corrective legislation, judicial rebuke, or impeachment.
The bottom line is that there are two competing avenues of research, embryonic and adult stem cells. A significant part of this country thinks that embryonic research should go full steam ahead and to hell with adult stem cell research. A significant part of the country thinks that adult should go full steam ahead and to hell with embryonic research. And the vast majority of the country just wants their miracle cures (preferably delivered by flying car) as soon as possible and can and are swayed by propaganda from one or the other camp. That's what's going on. It's pretty clear which camp you're in and I find your self-serving arguments repugnant.
A lot of people have problems with condemned prisoners being organ donors starting with Amnesty International. I should have made myself more clear, though, that I meant executed prisoners. We purposefully spoil the meat of prisoners via lethal injection. The PRC purposefully preserves as much as possible, sometimes even prepping prisoners for post-mortem donation by injecting drugs to facilitate the process right before they shoot them.
There is a medical condition that prevents some people from feeling pain. They can accidentally cut off a finger and just not notice. I think that such people have rights (as does the law) but you seem not to. Maybe you ought to rethink that.
As for technological progress shifting rights, does that mean that when the artificial womb is developed, abortion should be outlawed? And if we regress technologically and can no longer produce such marvels, should it be relegalized? I think not.
As for pro-lifers and fertility clinics, you just haven't been listening much. The Catholic Church has been anti-fertility clinics from the beginning for exactly this reason among others. No doubt other pro-life sub-groups have similar histories.