Just a thought having nothing to do with whether global warming is true or not....
The difference is that climate scientists at the very top of their field - in terms of number of peer-reviewed articles published and positions held - vouch that An Inconvenient Truth is 99%+ accurate in portraying the current state of climate research.
Do you think that scientists that have a vested interest in global warming (ie reputations, grant money, etc.) might support a film that furthers their cause?
Science isn't researched in a vacuum. Nothing is apolitical.
Saddam was a terrorism sponsor. He paid the families of suicide bombers. He had connections with different terrorist organizations. He had the potential to produce WMD. Every country in the world thought he had WMD. He would not cooperate to dispel this conclusion. He always did enough to make sure we thought he had them. He was enough of a threat that it was deemed necessary to invade.
Now Iraq is full of terrorists. If Osama Bin Laden says that Iraq is the front line in the war on terror, shouldn't we believe him? Regardless of what was and wasn't before we invaded, Iraq is central to the war on terror now and must be taken care of. If we leave, it will only embolden our enemies and show the Iraqi people who have risked their lives to help us that it was foolish to ever trust the United States. If Iraq falls, no matter what we do afterwards, we will have lost and the terrorists will have won. If we fail, it won't just be the US in trouble but Europe will be the hardest hit. It amazes me that we get so much resistance from Europe when they are the one who have the most to lose if we lose Iraq.
Now, nobody fights against cleaner air and water. Everyone wants a cleaner environment. But that doesn't necessarily mean that everyone supports the environmentalist movement. The extremists within the movement make it impossible for regular, pragmatic people to support them. Most people want to be wise but know that there is a balance between economics and the environment. The best way to help the environment is improve technology whether it's wind farms to produce electricity, cleaner coal burning, improved nuclear power generation, alternative fuels for cars, or just picking up trash. In the end, technology will improve our environment a lot more than trying to convince 300 million people to change everything about their lives.
If you have exceptions for this or that, it'll just create a big black market for diesel. What about heating? A lot of people on the east coast use diesel for heating. That's why the prices increase in the winter. Electricity generation? Diesel is often used for that. If you have exceptions for different uses, you'll create a disaster in the enforcement. If you exempt farmers from it, what keeps someone from going to the place where farmers can get diesel and just saying you're a farmer. Will the government have to issue official "Farmer" id cards? How big of a farm gets the discount? Will a garden do? Will a government representative come out to my home to confirm I have the proper acreage before I can buy diesel at the discounted pumps? What if I'm a farmer and I buy more than I need? Can I sell it to my non-farming neighbor for $10/gallon and make a profit? Who's to stop me?
Artificial prices are doomed to fail because the incentive is too great to cheat. This just doesn't seem to be a viable solution.
Farm machinery needs fuel as well as semi trucks to bring the food to market. Just the influx of prices we've seen has pushed the price of food up. Imported food may have an advantage in that they can purchase some of their shipping fuel costs from other countries that don't have the artificially inflated fuel prices. It's just not a good idea.
New Orleans happened because the funds weren't used to shore up the levies like they were supposed to. I know it is popular to blame Huricane Katrina on global warming but we've had a lower than average year on hurricanes this year. I don't think it's conclusive.
Whats sad is that it's easier to convince people that the global war on terrorism can be controlled by spending billions of dollars and thousands of lives in Iraq than it is to convince people that Global Warming is real.
It wasn't easy. It took the killing of 3000 innocent people and the destruction of 2 buildings and part of the pentagon to convince people that the global war on terror was a good idea.
People will react to an imminent threat before they'll react to something 100 years into the future. I tend to think if the sudden killing of 3000 people could be attributed to global warming conclusively, we'd have more push to have something done about it.
Re:Nothing inconvenient about the results
on
An Inconvenient Truth
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· Score: 4, Insightful
$15/gallon gas will cause the price of food to skyrocket. Who would this affect the most? Probably the poor. Would this cause people to go on government assistance? Maybe that's the end goal? The more people that completely depend on the government, the more control the government has over people so they can tell them what they can and can't do. Then you'll have the environmentally minded and rich people who can afford the increase in prices still living their lifestyle of driving big cars and flying around the country (because they can afford it and I'm sure they have some justification) while they tell the rest of the people how "we all" have to sacrifice for the environment so we don't kill our grandchildren yada-yada-yada and they'll have no choice because if they don't comply they'll be cut off from the government assistance they depend on.
If the fuel prices are inflated artificially (ie taxed at a high rate) perhaps the only think it'll do is cause huge inflation and damage the economy but in the end nothing changes once things even out.
Straw Man. It was never claimed that Sadam had anything to do with 9/11. Only that he supported terrorism, which he clearly did (payoffs to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers), and ties to Al Qaeda which he did though not as strong as was put forth.
When I lived in Venezuela for a couple of years, it actually stuck in people's craw that we called ourselves Americans because they claimed to be Americans too (Suda Americanos). They liked to call us North Americans (Norte Americanos) not seeming to worry about the difference between Canadians and people from the US. They'd get so confused when I told them that Mexico was part of North America too....
A lot of people can only get decent reception through cable tv. Perhaps the counties that adopted cable tv quicker were counties that didn't get good over the air reception. They could have gotten their info from major networks but not until cable was available in their area. Something to think about....
If we can just figure out how to elliminate step 3 none of the other steps would even occur. Men need to learn to step up and take responsibility for themselves and women need to make the men commit to the relationship before kids are even a possibility. If the woman "gives it away" (ie not require any kind of committment from the man) than she has no power to keep him when she needs him. This is very likely where the the marriage traditions come from. It's to ensure the security of a woman who bears children.
So how can we elliminate step 3 for the benefit of society?
Whether Republicans are destroying American ideals is up for debate. As for the deficit, the deficit is steadily declining and at a much faster rate than expected because of the tax cuts. The US govt has a much higher revenue than before tax cuts. The real problem is reigning in spending. I very much admit that reducing or controling spending is an area that the Republican leadership has completely fallen down on, even though most Republicans want spending reduced. Increased revenue + decreased spending is the only way to reduce the deficit and the debt and the best way we've seen to increase revenue is by cutting taxes. It's counter-intuitive but true. Our tax levels are high enough to cause a negative effect on the country's ability to make money. Reducing that negative effect will increase everyone's ability to make money and will increase the amount of money paid in taxes even if the percentage rate is lower. It happened in the 60s with Kennedy. It happened in the 80s with Reagan and it's happening now with Bush. The Republicans aren't doing things as well as they should but they are definitely the "lesser of two weevils".
Absolutely correct. He did something dispicable. He's resigned. He's under investigation. My only point was that you can't just take it at face value. Dems are taking advantage of a situation to try and expand it for political gain. Foley is slime and he was taken down. What would you have done in Hastert's spot without the benefit of 20/20 hindsight? It's really easy to hold people to an impractically high standard when it helps your own political view. I know I've certainly done it.
I guess the really gaulling thing about this whole story is that it has nothing to do with any issues. Dems are basically using it to say, "See! All Republicans are nasty people!" but it has nothing to do with the arena of ideas which is where politics truly belongs.
Wow! My first troll moderation. I guess that's what happens when I point out the obvious to those who don't want to hear it. Show me where I was lying and being inflamatory just for the sake of being inflamatory. Everything I said was valid and my conclusions were logical. Could I be wrong? Possibly. Show me where and how. But hardly a troll. I guess it's easier to mod someone down who disagrees than make a decent rebuttal.
Of course it was a political play. It's the "October Surprise". It turns out that Hastart had heard that Foley was a little over friendly with the pages a few years ago. Everyone is saying that he should have done something about that then, but think about it. What should he have done? Launched an investigation against one of the few homosexuals in the Republican party based on something as subjective as "a little over friendly"? That would have been taken and ran with by the Democrats! A year ago Hastert saw the e-mails but they weren't bad enough (no where near as bad as the IM messages) to do anything about. Even 2 large Florida newspapers that knew about it didn't run the story because they didn't feel they warranted it. Now the IMs surface just before the election that were misreported as happening with a minor (Jorden Edmund was 18) and were quite possibly a prank and setup. This has definitely been blown out of proportion by those who want to take advantage of the situation.
It's also come to light that Foley's IM with the 18 year old former page was set up as something of a prank. The 18 year old kid was egging him on so that he could take the log and show his friends and laugh about it. Somewhere during the passing around, politicos got ahold of it and decided to use it against the congressman. As long as there is a log on either computer, you have no idea where your IM conversations are going to end up and who are going to read them. In fact, I regularly save tech support/customer support chat sessions in order to prove future failures were their fault should one occur.
Slashdot Mirror
Science isn't researched in a vacuum. Nothing is apolitical.
I fear the day where it's "uncool" to not stick some drug in you as part of your daily routine in order to get through the day
:)
Kinda like caffeine
Saddam was a terrorism sponsor. He paid the families of suicide bombers. He had connections with different terrorist organizations. He had the potential to produce WMD. Every country in the world thought he had WMD. He would not cooperate to dispel this conclusion. He always did enough to make sure we thought he had them. He was enough of a threat that it was deemed necessary to invade.
Now Iraq is full of terrorists. If Osama Bin Laden says that Iraq is the front line in the war on terror, shouldn't we believe him? Regardless of what was and wasn't before we invaded, Iraq is central to the war on terror now and must be taken care of. If we leave, it will only embolden our enemies and show the Iraqi people who have risked their lives to help us that it was foolish to ever trust the United States. If Iraq falls, no matter what we do afterwards, we will have lost and the terrorists will have won. If we fail, it won't just be the US in trouble but Europe will be the hardest hit. It amazes me that we get so much resistance from Europe when they are the one who have the most to lose if we lose Iraq.
Now, nobody fights against cleaner air and water. Everyone wants a cleaner environment. But that doesn't necessarily mean that everyone supports the environmentalist movement. The extremists within the movement make it impossible for regular, pragmatic people to support them. Most people want to be wise but know that there is a balance between economics and the environment. The best way to help the environment is improve technology whether it's wind farms to produce electricity, cleaner coal burning, improved nuclear power generation, alternative fuels for cars, or just picking up trash. In the end, technology will improve our environment a lot more than trying to convince 300 million people to change everything about their lives.
If you have exceptions for this or that, it'll just create a big black market for diesel. What about heating? A lot of people on the east coast use diesel for heating. That's why the prices increase in the winter. Electricity generation? Diesel is often used for that. If you have exceptions for different uses, you'll create a disaster in the enforcement. If you exempt farmers from it, what keeps someone from going to the place where farmers can get diesel and just saying you're a farmer. Will the government have to issue official "Farmer" id cards? How big of a farm gets the discount? Will a garden do? Will a government representative come out to my home to confirm I have the proper acreage before I can buy diesel at the discounted pumps? What if I'm a farmer and I buy more than I need? Can I sell it to my non-farming neighbor for $10/gallon and make a profit? Who's to stop me?
Artificial prices are doomed to fail because the incentive is too great to cheat. This just doesn't seem to be a viable solution.
Farm machinery needs fuel as well as semi trucks to bring the food to market. Just the influx of prices we've seen has pushed the price of food up. Imported food may have an advantage in that they can purchase some of their shipping fuel costs from other countries that don't have the artificially inflated fuel prices. It's just not a good idea.
New Orleans happened because the funds weren't used to shore up the levies like they were supposed to. I know it is popular to blame Huricane Katrina on global warming but we've had a lower than average year on hurricanes this year. I don't think it's conclusive.
People will react to an imminent threat before they'll react to something 100 years into the future. I tend to think if the sudden killing of 3000 people could be attributed to global warming conclusively, we'd have more push to have something done about it.
$15/gallon gas will cause the price of food to skyrocket. Who would this affect the most? Probably the poor. Would this cause people to go on government assistance? Maybe that's the end goal? The more people that completely depend on the government, the more control the government has over people so they can tell them what they can and can't do. Then you'll have the environmentally minded and rich people who can afford the increase in prices still living their lifestyle of driving big cars and flying around the country (because they can afford it and I'm sure they have some justification) while they tell the rest of the people how "we all" have to sacrifice for the environment so we don't kill our grandchildren yada-yada-yada and they'll have no choice because if they don't comply they'll be cut off from the government assistance they depend on.
If the fuel prices are inflated artificially (ie taxed at a high rate) perhaps the only think it'll do is cause huge inflation and damage the economy but in the end nothing changes once things even out.
I don't know. Just some thoughts and ramblings.
Slashdot comments have trouble, if that helps answer your question.
You're obviously not from Venezula.
Yeah, they call it the 0.113398093 kilogrammer.
Straw Man. It was never claimed that Sadam had anything to do with 9/11. Only that he supported terrorism, which he clearly did (payoffs to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers), and ties to Al Qaeda which he did though not as strong as was put forth.
When I lived in Venezuela for a couple of years, it actually stuck in people's craw that we called ourselves Americans because they claimed to be Americans too (Suda Americanos). They liked to call us North Americans (Norte Americanos) not seeming to worry about the difference between Canadians and people from the US. They'd get so confused when I told them that Mexico was part of North America too....
It's you dumb bastards who can't tell the difference between two European countries that should get a clue ;-)
;-)
There's a difference between one European nation and another?
Gee, I thought it was a Simpsons reference. :)
A lot of people can only get decent reception through cable tv. Perhaps the counties that adopted cable tv quicker were counties that didn't get good over the air reception. They could have gotten their info from major networks but not until cable was available in their area. Something to think about....
I believe I was placing blame on both parties pretty equally because that's where I think the blame belongs.
If we can just figure out how to elliminate step 3 none of the other steps would even occur. Men need to learn to step up and take responsibility for themselves and women need to make the men commit to the relationship before kids are even a possibility. If the woman "gives it away" (ie not require any kind of committment from the man) than she has no power to keep him when she needs him. This is very likely where the the marriage traditions come from. It's to ensure the security of a woman who bears children.
So how can we elliminate step 3 for the benefit of society?
If I had mod points, I'd mod you +5 funny!
Whether Republicans are destroying American ideals is up for debate. As for the deficit, the deficit is steadily declining and at a much faster rate than expected because of the tax cuts. The US govt has a much higher revenue than before tax cuts. The real problem is reigning in spending. I very much admit that reducing or controling spending is an area that the Republican leadership has completely fallen down on, even though most Republicans want spending reduced. Increased revenue + decreased spending is the only way to reduce the deficit and the debt and the best way we've seen to increase revenue is by cutting taxes. It's counter-intuitive but true. Our tax levels are high enough to cause a negative effect on the country's ability to make money. Reducing that negative effect will increase everyone's ability to make money and will increase the amount of money paid in taxes even if the percentage rate is lower. It happened in the 60s with Kennedy. It happened in the 80s with Reagan and it's happening now with Bush. The Republicans aren't doing things as well as they should but they are definitely the "lesser of two weevils".
Absolutely correct. He did something dispicable. He's resigned. He's under investigation. My only point was that you can't just take it at face value. Dems are taking advantage of a situation to try and expand it for political gain. Foley is slime and he was taken down. What would you have done in Hastert's spot without the benefit of 20/20 hindsight? It's really easy to hold people to an impractically high standard when it helps your own political view. I know I've certainly done it.
I guess the really gaulling thing about this whole story is that it has nothing to do with any issues. Dems are basically using it to say, "See! All Republicans are nasty people!" but it has nothing to do with the arena of ideas which is where politics truly belongs.
Wow! My first troll moderation. I guess that's what happens when I point out the obvious to those who don't want to hear it. Show me where I was lying and being inflamatory just for the sake of being inflamatory. Everything I said was valid and my conclusions were logical. Could I be wrong? Possibly. Show me where and how. But hardly a troll. I guess it's easier to mod someone down who disagrees than make a decent rebuttal.
Of course it was a political play. It's the "October Surprise". It turns out that Hastart had heard that Foley was a little over friendly with the pages a few years ago. Everyone is saying that he should have done something about that then, but think about it. What should he have done? Launched an investigation against one of the few homosexuals in the Republican party based on something as subjective as "a little over friendly"? That would have been taken and ran with by the Democrats! A year ago Hastert saw the e-mails but they weren't bad enough (no where near as bad as the IM messages) to do anything about. Even 2 large Florida newspapers that knew about it didn't run the story because they didn't feel they warranted it. Now the IMs surface just before the election that were misreported as happening with a minor (Jorden Edmund was 18) and were quite possibly a prank and setup. This has definitely been blown out of proportion by those who want to take advantage of the situation.
It's also come to light that Foley's IM with the 18 year old former page was set up as something of a prank. The 18 year old kid was egging him on so that he could take the log and show his friends and laugh about it. Somewhere during the passing around, politicos got ahold of it and decided to use it against the congressman. As long as there is a log on either computer, you have no idea where your IM conversations are going to end up and who are going to read them. In fact, I regularly save tech support/customer support chat sessions in order to prove future failures were their fault should one occur.