The price of oil is near a record high in inflation-adjusted real terms, not nominal terms. Inflation, which has been running 2 to 3 percent annual for several years, has nothing to do with the skyrocketing oil prices. Oil is spiking because the fragile supply chain can no longer respond to supply disruptions. Under these circumstances even the threat of war with Iran is sufficient to cause the price to spike.
As rising oil prices threaten global economic growth and the fragile American recovery, gold is spiking and copper is plummeting. Gold is the traditional safe haven for poor economic times while demand for copper is driven by economic activity. Both are being driven by oil prices in the opposite direction. Let me reemphasize: none of this has anything to do with inflation which is running at 2 to 3%.
Last friday Brent Crude Oil was trading at $126/barrel. This is near the all time high in modern history. We are already at the point where oil supply has become much less responsive to the price and price spikes are commonplace. It's a curious time for somebody to be declaring peak oil "debunked".
Oil is finite and the price of oil is getting exponentially more expensive as was predicted decades ago. Meanwhile, solar technology has been benefiting from a Moore's Law rate of advancement and the price of solar energy is plummeting exponentially. Even without cap-and-trade, the price of solar energy is projected to achieve grid parity by the end of this decade. Given prevailing trends, we can expect that people will use energy to make petrochemicals synthetically from the carbon in the air, using Green Freedom or some other such technology in the next 20 years.
Solar is the power source of the near future. If we embrace that fact now we can begin to adapt and avoid a huge amount of economic dislocation and suffering. Or we can get dragged into the future kicking and screaming and burdening the human race with massive ecological damage.
"Killed off" is a broadly accurate term. Nobody has ever suggested that 100% of the Mayan population died. It is sufficient that the vast majority of the Mayan population died while the rest were forced to abandon the ruins of their cities to eek out a primitive existence in the jungle.
Do you not realize the similarities between your proposed policies towards religion and those of Stalinist Russia? Are you unaware that the Communist Party also sought to have the church wither away as an obsolete institution? Actually your policies are even more draconian than Stalin's. Under Stalin, prayer was discouraged and recognized as contrary to Soviet doctrine, but it wasn't illegal per se. Your criminalization of public religion would immediately give the state massive power to regulate thought. This power would immediately be abused and distorted to consolidate power and eliminate dissent.
If you are willing to criminalize those expressing a different religious outlook, then you are no better than the religious criminals you emulate. You have learned far too little from history.
No, intolerance is the problem. There are tolerant religious people like Martin Luther King and Gandhi. There are intolerant religious people like Bin Laden and Benito Mussolini. There are tolerant atheists like Andrei Sakharov and Vaclav Havel. And there are intolerant atheists like Josef Stalin and Mao Zedong.
The reason "it took Christians almost three centuries from the death of Christ to start slaughtering their opponents" is because it took them 300 years to consolidate power. Prior attempts to seize power were simply dispatched with force. If Christians had been in power for centuries and only gradually started to oppress people, you might argue that their ideology was inherently more peaceful. But if a group becomes violent the microsecond they seize power, then, no, I'm not going to give them credit for the period when the Romans were forcibly keeping them in check.
When people are bashing Mormons for child abuse, nobody points out the colossal problem of child abuse in the Catholic church? I find that pretty hard to believe.
Iran's actions are deplorable and I am actively objecting to them via Amnesty International.
I am not defending Iran. I am objecting to the reductive, jingoistic, and false indictment of the one billion plus Muslims on the planet based upon the actions of select despots.
How would the prospective forger have known about Anthony Watt's involvement in the Expanded Climate Communications? This is accurate information and the only possible source for it was the leaked strategy memo. Only somebody working with the Heartland institute could have had the necessary information to "fake" that memo. It could not have been an invention of unscrupulous activists as Heartland claims.
The best evidence that the strategy memo is authentic is the amount of material in that memo that has subsequently been confirmed by other sources:
From Desmogblog:
The DeSmogBlog has reviewed that Strategy document and compared its content to other material we have in hand. It addresses five elements:
The Increased Climate Project Fundraising material is reproduced in and confirmed by Heartland's own budget.
The "Global Warming Curriculum for K-12 Classrooms" is also a Heartland budget item and has been confirmed independently by the author, Dr. David Wojick.
The Funding for Parallel Organizations; Funding for Selected Individuals Outside Heartland are both reproduced and confirmed in the Heartland budget. And Anthony Watts has confirmed independently the payments in Expanded Climate Communications.
Christians murdered people as soon as they got political power. Muslims murdered people as soon as they got political power. And during the few times in history when Jews managed to seize power, they murdered people too.
The lesson, in case this isn't obvious to you, is that ideology by itself confers no moral advantage whatsoever. Once a group has political power its principles are distorted to suite the needs of the elite.
In other words, there is no such thing as a true, fixed interpretation of a religion or ideology. Ideologies emerge from a surrounding geopolitical and economic reality and are always in flux with that surrounding geopolitical and economic reality subject to individual interpretation. It is bogus to say "Christians believe in X, and Buddhist believe in Y, while Muslims believe in Z." Distinct individual agents are constantly reinventing their interpretation of their religious experience.
Their is divide in human culture between those who believe in peace and those who don't. There are Christians and Muslims and Jews and Atheists in both camps, but the majority of people in all religions want peace. I saw this in my graduate program which had a good mix of Jews, Atheists, Muslims, and Christians in it. This was an educated crowd and everybody there wanted to get along. The trick for the human race is to not let our belligerent minorities set us against each other. They are eager to spark conflict and set us against each other for their own gain.
Are you talking about the most recent Iraq War? Do you imagine your brutal invasion and occupation of a foreign nation premised upon falsified claims of WMDs to be merely "resistance to subjugation"? Do you consider the million Iraqi deaths caused by America's actions to be "fuel for Muslim's bullshit sense of victimhood"?
So typical of Muslims. We must be destroyed and subjugated, and if we resist, we fuel your bullshit sense of victimhood.
What a perfect exhibit of the Orwellian mindset that has taken over so many Americans. No matter how many Muslim nations Americans are occupying, bombing, and threatening, most Americans imagine themselves to be the victims. And then they portray the world's Muslim community as idiotic and belligerent in what amounts to a textbook case of psychological projection.
When the USA uses drones to execute Muslims for uploading dissident YouTube videos it is far superior to Iran's execution of dissidents. Christianity recognizes that everybody is endowed with basic human rights except Muslims.
A pardon is a joke and whitewashes history and puts a false Disney happy ending on a horrific story.
I don't see it that way at all. Yes, a pardon is a symbolic gesture. But given that Turing is dead, can the State do anything besides purely symbolic gestures?
What the pardon signifies is that the State realizes its mistake. Far from denying anything, the pardon affirms the horrific hardship created by the State against Turing and others, and apologizes for it. You may choose to personally reject that policy; that is your right. But I actually would find it credible that the State regrets driving a one of the most brilliant British minds into suicide because he was gay. I shocked that the British government disagreed.
Everyone deserves mathematical assurances that his vote is counted and confidential. There's lots of systems out there, but one has already been successfully deployed. It's called Scantegrity II by Ron Rivest of MIT. It's already been tested in an election in Takoma Park. If you are using optical scan machines the marginal cost to add Scantegrity was only a few hundred bucks per voting machine.
Even if we stopped burning coal and gasoline, we are still going to need hydrocarbons for all sorts of things like pharmaceuticals and jet fuel and plastics. Processes like these show how we can get those hydrocarbons in a carbon neutral/ carbon negative way. Additionally this is a potentially a critical back-up technology to have developed as oil reserves are inevitably depleted. This particular process is neat, but the Green Freedom initiative at Los Alamos National Laboratory is even better because it can produce almost any form of hydrocarbon, not just methanol.
And, yes, if you burned coal as a power source for a synthetic fuel concept, you would be wasting energy and adding more CO2 to the air. Nobody is proposing doing that so that point is not relevant.
Some students and some classes could and should be taught online. However, these decisions need to be made by school districts, parents, and students. The governor shouldn't be placing a huge unfunded mandate on local schools just because Apple cut him a check.
There can never be "an honest-to-god movement to stop the corporations *and* the unions". The only way people have ever managed to successfully oppose corporate power is by collective action, ie: unions. The labor movement is how working people finally got a fair shake in this country and gave us things like basic safety standards and the weekend. Your own beloved Teddy Roosevelt supported the United Mine Workers by giving struggling miners fair pay.
Aside, this portrayal of Obama as a "union man" is laughable. The only reason conservatives think about Obama is a "union man" is because they hate unions and because they need to make Obama into a conservative boogeyman. It certainly isn't because Obama has done anything for union workers.
Socialism: an economic system characterized by social ownership of the means of production and cooperative management of the economy.
In a socialist society, capital accrues to the public. Having public dollars go towards private companies is the exact opposite of socialism.
When you say ignorant shit like "Government forcing private individuals to purchase something from a private entity simply because they're citizens is Socialist" you are only proving how abused and hence meaningless the term "socialist" has become in modern political discourse, especially among the right.
Slashdot Mirror
The price of oil is near a record high in inflation-adjusted real terms, not nominal terms. Inflation, which has been running 2 to 3 percent annual for several years, has nothing to do with the skyrocketing oil prices. Oil is spiking because the fragile supply chain can no longer respond to supply disruptions. Under these circumstances even the threat of war with Iran is sufficient to cause the price to spike.
As rising oil prices threaten global economic growth and the fragile American recovery, gold is spiking and copper is plummeting. Gold is the traditional safe haven for poor economic times while demand for copper is driven by economic activity. Both are being driven by oil prices in the opposite direction. Let me reemphasize: none of this has anything to do with inflation which is running at 2 to 3%.
Last friday Brent Crude Oil was trading at $126/barrel. This is near the all time high in modern history. We are already at the point where oil supply has become much less responsive to the price and price spikes are commonplace. It's a curious time for somebody to be declaring peak oil "debunked".
Oil is finite and the price of oil is getting exponentially more expensive as was predicted decades ago. Meanwhile, solar technology has been benefiting from a Moore's Law rate of advancement and the price of solar energy is plummeting exponentially. Even without cap-and-trade, the price of solar energy is projected to achieve grid parity by the end of this decade. Given prevailing trends, we can expect that people will use energy to make petrochemicals synthetically from the carbon in the air, using Green Freedom or some other such technology in the next 20 years.
Solar is the power source of the near future. If we embrace that fact now we can begin to adapt and avoid a huge amount of economic dislocation and suffering. Or we can get dragged into the future kicking and screaming and burdening the human race with massive ecological damage.
"Killed off" is a broadly accurate term. Nobody has ever suggested that 100% of the Mayan population died. It is sufficient that the vast majority of the Mayan population died while the rest were forced to abandon the ruins of their cities to eek out a primitive existence in the jungle.
Do you not realize the similarities between your proposed policies towards religion and those of Stalinist Russia? Are you unaware that the Communist Party also sought to have the church wither away as an obsolete institution? Actually your policies are even more draconian than Stalin's. Under Stalin, prayer was discouraged and recognized as contrary to Soviet doctrine, but it wasn't illegal per se. Your criminalization of public religion would immediately give the state massive power to regulate thought. This power would immediately be abused and distorted to consolidate power and eliminate dissent.
If you are willing to criminalize those expressing a different religious outlook, then you are no better than the religious criminals you emulate. You have learned far too little from history.
No, intolerance is the problem. There are tolerant religious people like Martin Luther King and Gandhi. There are intolerant religious people like Bin Laden and Benito Mussolini. There are tolerant atheists like Andrei Sakharov and Vaclav Havel. And there are intolerant atheists like Josef Stalin and Mao Zedong.
The reason "it took Christians almost three centuries from the death of Christ to start slaughtering their opponents" is because it took them 300 years to consolidate power. Prior attempts to seize power were simply dispatched with force. If Christians had been in power for centuries and only gradually started to oppress people, you might argue that their ideology was inherently more peaceful. But if a group becomes violent the microsecond they seize power, then, no, I'm not going to give them credit for the period when the Romans were forcibly keeping them in check.
When people are bashing Mormons for child abuse, nobody points out the colossal problem of child abuse in the Catholic church? I find that pretty hard to believe.
Iran's actions are deplorable and I am actively objecting to them via Amnesty International.
I am not defending Iran. I am objecting to the reductive, jingoistic, and false indictment of the one billion plus Muslims on the planet based upon the actions of select despots.
How would the prospective forger have known about Anthony Watt's involvement in the Expanded Climate Communications? This is accurate information and the only possible source for it was the leaked strategy memo. Only somebody working with the Heartland institute could have had the necessary information to "fake" that memo. It could not have been an invention of unscrupulous activists as Heartland claims.
Christians murdered people as soon as they got political power. Muslims murdered people as soon as they got political power. And during the few times in history when Jews managed to seize power, they murdered people too.
The lesson, in case this isn't obvious to you, is that ideology by itself confers no moral advantage whatsoever. Once a group has political power its principles are distorted to suite the needs of the elite.
Whereas Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Communism, Capitalism, Feminism, Hinduism, Existentialism, Liberalism, and Conservatism are fixed ideologies and perpetually free of internal contradictions?
Osama bin Laden was Mujahideen and, yes, Reagan was a huge supporter of his efforts.
Actually my post demonstrates nothing of the sort since (a) I'm not Muslim and (b) you're response is just regurgitated anti-Muslim bullshit.
In other words, there is no such thing as a true, fixed interpretation of a religion or ideology. Ideologies emerge from a surrounding geopolitical and economic reality and are always in flux with that surrounding geopolitical and economic reality subject to individual interpretation. It is bogus to say "Christians believe in X, and Buddhist believe in Y, while Muslims believe in Z." Distinct individual agents are constantly reinventing their interpretation of their religious experience.
Their is divide in human culture between those who believe in peace and those who don't. There are Christians and Muslims and Jews and Atheists in both camps, but the majority of people in all religions want peace. I saw this in my graduate program which had a good mix of Jews, Atheists, Muslims, and Christians in it. This was an educated crowd and everybody there wanted to get along. The trick for the human race is to not let our belligerent minorities set us against each other. They are eager to spark conflict and set us against each other for their own gain.
Are you talking about the most recent Iraq War? Do you imagine your brutal invasion and occupation of a foreign nation premised upon falsified claims of WMDs to be merely "resistance to subjugation"? Do you consider the million Iraqi deaths caused by America's actions to be "fuel for Muslim's bullshit sense of victimhood"?
What a perfect exhibit of the Orwellian mindset that has taken over so many Americans. No matter how many Muslim nations Americans are occupying, bombing, and threatening, most Americans imagine themselves to be the victims. And then they portray the world's Muslim community as idiotic and belligerent in what amounts to a textbook case of psychological projection.
Exactly.
When the USA uses drones to execute Muslims for uploading dissident YouTube videos it is far superior to Iran's execution of dissidents. Christianity recognizes that everybody is endowed with basic human rights except Muslims.
I don't see it that way at all. Yes, a pardon is a symbolic gesture. But given that Turing is dead, can the State do anything besides purely symbolic gestures?
What the pardon signifies is that the State realizes its mistake. Far from denying anything, the pardon affirms the horrific hardship created by the State against Turing and others, and apologizes for it. You may choose to personally reject that policy; that is your right. But I actually would find it credible that the State regrets driving a one of the most brilliant British minds into suicide because he was gay. I shocked that the British government disagreed.
My condolences about the skankage. That's harsh.
Everyone deserves mathematical assurances that his vote is counted and confidential. There's lots of systems out there, but one has already been successfully deployed. It's called Scantegrity II by Ron Rivest of MIT. It's already been tested in an election in Takoma Park. If you are using optical scan machines the marginal cost to add Scantegrity was only a few hundred bucks per voting machine.
Even if we stopped burning coal and gasoline, we are still going to need hydrocarbons for all sorts of things like pharmaceuticals and jet fuel and plastics. Processes like these show how we can get those hydrocarbons in a carbon neutral/ carbon negative way. Additionally this is a potentially a critical back-up technology to have developed as oil reserves are inevitably depleted. This particular process is neat, but the Green Freedom initiative at Los Alamos National Laboratory is even better because it can produce almost any form of hydrocarbon, not just methanol.
And, yes, if you burned coal as a power source for a synthetic fuel concept, you would be wasting energy and adding more CO2 to the air. Nobody is proposing doing that so that point is not relevant.
Mulberry trees are native. The guy lives on Mulberry street.
Some students and some classes could and should be taught online. However, these decisions need to be made by school districts, parents, and students. The governor shouldn't be placing a huge unfunded mandate on local schools just because Apple cut him a check.
There can never be "an honest-to-god movement to stop the corporations *and* the unions". The only way people have ever managed to successfully oppose corporate power is by collective action, ie: unions. The labor movement is how working people finally got a fair shake in this country and gave us things like basic safety standards and the weekend. Your own beloved Teddy Roosevelt supported the United Mine Workers by giving struggling miners fair pay.
Aside, this portrayal of Obama as a "union man" is laughable. The only reason conservatives think about Obama is a "union man" is because they hate unions and because they need to make Obama into a conservative boogeyman. It certainly isn't because Obama has done anything for union workers.
Socialism: an economic system characterized by social ownership of the means of production and cooperative management of the economy.
In a socialist society, capital accrues to the public. Having public dollars go towards private companies is the exact opposite of socialism.
When you say ignorant shit like "Government forcing private individuals to purchase something from a private entity simply because they're citizens is Socialist" you are only proving how abused and hence meaningless the term "socialist" has become in modern political discourse, especially among the right.