One member of the High Classical Pleistocene Megafauna (Great Ice Age Beasts) still exists. And that is Man itself. Us? Really? Yes. We evolved during the Pleistocene and developed the same extreme development of a certain organ that the other Great Ice Age Beasts developed. In our case it was our brain. We are the Irish Elk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_elk among primates, and our brain is our antlers. As long as we live, the Ice Age can never truly die, for the Ice Age lives in us.
Another interesting thing to realize is that while the Megafauna is all gone (except for us), the Ice Age flora is mostly all still here. Why is the hop hornbeam and the blue beech so strong-wooded? George Monbiot thinks it was to withstand mammoth and mastodon attack. Why does the young honey locust have foot-long assemblies of poly-thorns all up and down its trunk which disappear when the tree is too tall for mega-herbivores to reach the branches? Who was it protecting itself against? What about the osage orange? No-one eats those softball sized brain-wrinkly green fruits. But someone did . . . and spread the seeds. Who was it? And why is its wood sooooo tough? And covered with nasty thorns till again it is big tree-size? I speculate the thorns were to keep away mammoths and mastodons and stuff. But the giant ground slouth had arms, hands and claws made for grabbing and pulling down to the ground the thorniest branches. So maybe the super springy-wood branches which could survive that pull-down without snapping or breaking were the ones which preferrentially survived giant ground sloth assaults to live and breed. The ground sloth is gone but the osage orange lives on.
Unqualified support? Why did he boycott the Netanyahu appearance then? Why did he try inspiring some other Senators to do the same? Or am I falling for atmospherics?
By the way, Green is one group I will never vote for. Not after Nader Versus Gore and esPECially not after McGaw versus Wellstone.
We may also have to stop eating the WRONG hamburgers and limit ourselves to the RIGHT ones. I am reading more and more, here and there and everywhere; that properly managed pasture and/or range under livestock has the potential to suck down more skycarbon and bio-sequester it into the soil, then what it itself skydumps. I am reading anecdotal claims of that already being done in some places.
We really need indisputable science done to either confirm or debunk that happy hope.
But if it is really true, and conSIStently true when done correctly, then whatever money we spend on specifically and only pasture-range fed livestock is actually going to drive skycarbon reduction and soilcarbon restoration. If that is true, then eating grass-fed hamburgers helps to dewarm the global all by itself. And since restricting ourselves to pasture-range hamburgers ONLY means accepting much lower pasture-range produced ONLY livestock, the "eating less hamburgers" part would take care of itself.
I hope that Bernie and/or someone(s) on his staff are reading Hunter S. Thompson's book Fear and Loathing: On The Campaign Trail '72. It says some useful things about organizing with only moderate money but many willing people to make up for that lack of money.
It also says some harsh things about how McGovern, after his unlikely victory over the Establishment Democrats, went on to try appeasing them and winning their support for Election '72. Thompson went into some detail about just how self-destructive and self-defeating THAT was.
Why would that matter? Because if Sanders wins the nomination ( just as unlikely as McGovern), he will then have to decide whether to try "winning back" the Establishment Democrats or accept that they are his ( and ours) Evil Enemies who will collude against him to elect his Republican opponent. If he treats them as the Evil Enemies they are, he will at least keep the supporters who get him nominated. If he tries appeasing the Clintonite Obamacrat scum that he will have to defeat to get the nomination, he won't win over any scum-filth Clintobamacrats and he will lose all of his base supporters who would be appalled, disgusted and dispirited by his re-wooing of the allegedly humanoid filth-garbage whom he has just defeated.
I hope he reads Thompson's book and takes this particular lesson to heart.
If it is any comfort to the world's poor, the mass destruction won't stop at the doorstep of the poor. It will keep right on moving to the doorstep of the middle class and the modestly rich.
The various glaciers, icefields, and ice-cap edges were shrinking and melting right along all through that hiatus period anyway, so more heat was certainly entering the system regardless.
So when people told me "hiatus! ha ha ha!" I said that I considered global warming to be worse than embarrassment, and if the global was re-cooling then that was a good thing. I told them I would be looking to see all the ice formations begin re-growing to their former size and volume. If that happened, I would certainly accept being laughed at last.
Why is this an irony or even a problem? If China plans to make the Big Money in Afghanistan, then China should be the people bearing the Big Burden of keeping Afghanistan safe, peaceful and orderly.
I don't think the Chinese will putz around with any "hearts and minds" silliness. if the Taliban threaten China's plans to take the minerals out of Afghanistan, then China can simply send in a million or more Peoples Liberation Army troops with Tien An Men rules of engagement, and get any "bad for bussiness" problems exterminated in short order. China could also pressure Pakistan as much as necessary in order to force Pakistan to abandon its beloved little Taliban pets and mascots.
It it helps things any, I read some of the material presented here as fact-based material years before I had heard of DRG.
And I read it in places other than here. I suspect DRG read it in those same places.
I read long ago that 80F was the threshhold temperature for ocean water warm enough to gas off hurricane-loads of water vapor into the overlying air. If a hurricane gets started over a huge zone of 80F or higher ocean, it can somewhat "govern" its maximum growth by its own winds wave-churning ocean water deep enough to reach down and mix under-80 water with the 80 water at the surface. Drag the surface below 80 and less-than-hurricane loads of vapor can gas off into the air.
If one deepens the layer of 80+ water on the surface, it stands to reason that one could set higher the bar at which
the hurricane can finally wind-whip the ocean deep enough to drag up the now-deeper-down under 80 water. IFF! . . all other conditions were as perfect as before for the formation of a hurricane otherwise. I don't see why that becomes false or unreasonable just because it is repeated by someone who is accused of being discredited on some other issue-area.
As to the hysteria of "saving the planet", the planet will save itself, thank you very much. If saving itself involves exterminating species man, the planet will do that without batting a hurricane's eye. The planet got along fine before it met us, and it will get along fine once we're gone. The planet could give a rat's ass whether mankind lives or dies.
We should worry about preserving conditions which are beneficial to the lifestyle to which we humans have become accustomed. THAT is what man made climate change is putting at risk right now.
Some further thoughts . . . Confucius once said that something very important to do from time to time was Rectification of the Language. In our own day that would include pressure-washing the Luntzwords off the language and purging the Luntz-meanings from the words we want to keep.
"No Rectification without de-Luntzification".
People who use Luntz-type words which were not specifically invented by Luntz can be called Luntzy Louses.
And people who use words or meanings that Luntz specifically invented can be called Lousy Luntzes.
And I have decided to attach the prefix "Man Made" in front of every climate-related word or phrase that i use. For example, if one were to say " Man MADE climate change", one is half-way spoiling the Luntz effect right there. And I'll probably start calling myself a Warmist, too.
Frank Luntz invented the word "climate change" and tried it in some of his research test-bed focus groups. It played well, so he rolled it out. Someone should do a forensic literature search to see when the Koch/Exxon accusation that climate scientists came up with "climate change" when the warmup "stopped". If the first verifiable date for that accusation first seeing light in the media can be fixed in time and documented, and it turns out to be later than the date on which Frank Lunts introduced the word "climate change", then the Merchants of Carbon can be caught in a proven lie.
Anyone who uses the word "climate change" has been "Luntzed". ( Is "Luntzed" a word? If it isn't, maybe it should be). We should come up with some counter-Luntz reverse-spin language, like global heating or global burning, or The Global Warmocaust, or Climate d'Chaos Decay. The Big Heat. etc. And use such words in everyday conversation to see if any take hold. Fly little memes fly.
I know someone who was in the Peace Corps on Batanes Island in the Philippines. He told me that Batanes has long been in a traditional Hurricane Alley. They have traditionally built their houses with hurricanes in mind. The houses are made of stone walls several feet thick with a sacrificial cogon-grass thatch roof which protects from normal weather and blows right off in every hurricane. The stone walls are undisturbed. The people have the minor cost of replacing the sacrificial "lizard's tail" roof after every hurricane.
Maybe the Vanuatuans will adopt Batanesian architecture for their emerging hypercane future.
Since the next Prexy will be a Repuglan, it is likely that all Obama's executive initiatives which impinge upon fossil carbon profits will be reversed. (Of course all the Obama decisions which profit the Merchants of Fossil will be kept in place . . . things like throwing upen the Atlantic coastal shelf to oil exploration and opening the Beaufort/Chukchi Sea shelves to oil exploration and all the pipelines that were greenlight-redballed to provide a whole cats cradle of pipeline workaround routes for Alberta dilbitar if Obama should cancel Keystone North for symbolic diversionary reasons.)
So every reader's best investment would be in the means of survival in the teeth of a CPPM 600-700 world.
As noted topthread, any side the US backs will attract the other sides's attentive hatred. The only thing left to do is to give up our opposition to the Syrian Arab Republic and stop lending any support whatsoever to the SAR's opponents. Russia, Hezbollah, Iran and the SAR itself will take care of the rest.
The desired endstate should be the comprehensive extermination of all al Quaeda and ISIS personell within the borders of Syria and Iraq. That involves the diplomatic re-recognition of President Assad as being the legitimate president of the only legitimate government which Syria has . . . the Syrian Arab Republic. And that involves accepting whatever casualties the SAG/SAR feels it needs to impose in order to get the rebellion comprehensively exterminated and destroyed for decades to come.
Because the "questioning" is designed to scare and threaten politically engaged people out of excercising their basic human self-governance rights including those mentioned in the Constitution.
By the way, Keystone is not part of a "national" strategy for anything. Keystone is part of a private self-interested bussiness-sector strategy in search of special interest profits.
So , the Shiaraqi Government threatens to revoke the agreement? Oh please . . . ohhh pleeeeeeze do!
The Malikists prepared the ground of Iraqi Sunnistan for ISIS's entry by sectarian spiteful mistreatment and abuse of the Sunni Arabs there.
As long as the Shia regime remains committed to Shia Supremacism over the Sunni Arabs, they will keep losing every bit of Sunnistan.
It appears Cameroun has a functional army and a viable non-corrupt-enough government to function and organize a defense and then a counter-offensive. Nigeria appears to have none of those things. Then too, it is doubtful that Cameroun has Boko Haram agents or sympathisers hidden within its government, whereas Nigeria appears to have both.
Cameroun cares enough about the children to close schools and evacuate children and families from non-secured areas, to the best of its ability.
The NigeriaGov has shown no sign of any such concern.
I know there are "global warming skeptics" out there.
Well . . . this is your moment! This is your big contrarian investment opportunity. Buy up all the seaside coastal beachfront/swampfront property you can beg, borrow or steal the money to buy. You will be planting the seeds of vast new family fortunes when those of us who have avoided or fled the coasts realize what fools we've been and seek to buy our way back in.
Be bold! Put your money where your convinctions are! Who dares, wins!
That is what Rabin understood which led him and his delegation into his end of Oslo. That is what a voting majority of the Israeli public at the time understood and demonstrated their desire for by re-electing Rabin over Netanyahu. That is what Netanyahu , Likud, and elements within Israeli security understood when they arranged the Rabin assassination. They also understood that Peres had no basic bravery and no military-service credibility, and would not be able to hold up and advance his end of the process.
So Netanyahu knew what he was doing when he played his part in engineering the Rabin hit.
Regretabbly, the Rabinists and Rabin voters did not understand that they were in a Civil War which could only have been won by crushing the Likudists into political and civil extinction and the Likudist voters into humble obedience to the Rabinist majority.
"Mankind" and "Planet Earth" are two different things. It's like with the old country song: "I got along fine before I met you, I'll get along fine when you're gone." Earth got along fine before it met us, it'll get along fine when we're gone.
Nature is One Tough Mother.
Global warming will make ArctiCanada and Siberia warm and ice-free enough to find all kinds of more coal, gas, and oil up there. Which will all be sold, burned, and skydumped.
Global Heating will then melt all the ice off of
Greenland, Ellesmere Island, Baffin Island, etc. So much coal, gas, and oil will be found there that . . .
Global Steaming will melt all the ice off of Antarctica. So much coal, gas and oil will be found on the newly ice-freed Antarctica that . . .
Global Autoclaving will turn the Earth into a sterile dessicated Venusian hell-planet.
I am not sure Hagel was publicly complaining about a refusal to attack Assad more forcefully. I suspect he was demanding "clarity" of "thinking" more broadly in order to send as clear a signal as he dared to send that the Obama Administration should think about cancelling its remove-Assad policy and start a new accept-Assad policy in its place. And the suspicion that Hagel's remarks were a silent signal to "accept Assad" were what got him fired.
I find it strange to think that the SAG would ever negotiate in its own extermination to please a pack of so-called "moderate" Islamist rebels and leave their own constituencies helpless to the Sunni LiverEater genocides to be perpetrated against the Christians, Alawites, Kurds, etc.
The SAG will keep fighting until it can't keep fighting any more. And Russia, Iran, and maybe a couple others will do what they can to keep the SAA intact, viable, in the field, and fighting fighting fighting.
Global warming deniers who seize upon the Antarctic sea ice and other notional straws to buttress their denialism . . . should be encouraged to invest all the money they have and all the money they can borrow in buying up all the seaside oceanfront property they can afford. What a contrarian investment opportunity is laid out before them
Meanwhile, those who understand the Global is heating can try guessing how fast the oceans will rise and how far they will spread.
"I bought some beach front property in Arkansas."
"Arkansas"?
"Just wait awhile."
Any initially successful to repress and shut down the "price tagger" community would lead to a genuine Civil War. The Center-Left Lesser Israelists missed their last chance to win such a Civil War against the Center-Right Greater Likudistanis in the dragging couple years of Peres's post-Rabin Prime Ministership.
Carbon capture and sequestration need not be limited to at-the-smokestack. It can happen at the green-leaf and throughout the rhizosphere. But it would take the proper sort of land management to make that happen.
If you put your cellphone in a foil-lined case you would make it harder to track in between phone calls anyway, warrant or no. Of course no one could call you either, but would that be a worthwhile tradeoff to prevent anyone from following the location of your walking-around-phone except when you are actually making a call?
And if you are really that worried, ditch your cellphone and go back to copper landline phone service. If enough people did that, AT&T might have to drop its plans to rip out all the copper lines someday and digitize everybody.
I suspect that "beef" as such is not carbon intensive. It is corn/soy fed industrial feedlot beef which is carbon intensive.
I suspect that range-and-pasture ONLY beef would be as carbon suckdown/ bio-sequestering as was the buffalo which many Indian Nations persons ate for centuries after Pilgrim times. (And sad to say, today's corn/soy industrial factory turkeys are somewhat carbon intensive their own selves. I wonder how much less carbon intensive a return to ancient heritage-breed turkeys raised more craftsmanly on hundreds of thousands of little turkey gardens would be?)
I doubt Dempsey wanted/wants new wars any more than Hagel does. Hagel and Dempsey both more-or-less opposed bombing Syria and trying too hard to overthrow Assad. It seems Hagel decided that ISIS was much the greatest threat to the point where the R2P NeoWilsonians elsewhere in Obama's cabinet suspected Hagel of wanting Assad accepted and supported as a functional ally against ISIS.
So is Hagel out? Not until Obama finds a replacement. Which means if enough Senators can reject every replacement Obama nominates from now till January 2017, then Hagel will remain SecDef till then.
If Hagel is removed, Dempsey will be the next to be removed. As long as Hagel stays, Demsey is somewhat shielded and is harder to remove.
We should all want Obama's every replacement nominee to be rejected by the Senate, over and over and over again.
How many of America's Iraq and Afghanistan War veterans are members of one of the Indian Nations? How many of America's veterans might be, or might be related to, High Plains farmers and ranchers of ancestry other-than-Indian who might well share the Indian Nations' viewpoint on dirty filthy dilbit pipelines rammed across Indian Country? How many of those veterans might have some measure of knowledge of explosives and demolition and the deployment of such relative to the functional integrity of pipelines?
Will a dilbit ( diluted bitumen) pipeline be able to ram itself across the High Plains? Will it survive the attempt?
Most of Australia is high enough above sea level that rising sea levels are not Australia's problem. But if Man Made Global Heating drives Global Climate DeChaos Decay to the point where much of Australia becomes a drought-bound food-free heat-death zone of non-survival, then whoever has the last laugh . . . it won't be Australia.
Do high oil prices punish the US? If they do, and KSA is lowering oil prices now to bankrupt and shut in unconventional oil now so as to remove that as a long term price-competitor later, so that KSA can then raise oil prices later once there is no unconventional oil industry left to bring unconventional oil to market; then KSA price drops now to protect KSA price rises later will punish the US later. That is what Yves Smith is theorizing the Saudis to be doing.
Then too, if a dropping oil price can drop other fossil carbon prices low enough long enough to bankrupt some alternative energy companies, those bankrupted companies are removed as future harbors of refuge when KSA re-raises the oil price later.
Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism has offered an extended version of this theory . . that Saudi Arabia is dropping the price to punish several disobedient targets, including the US for failing to get Assad overthrown on Saudi Arabia's timetable. Also, if Saudi Arabia can keep oil at or under $80/barrel for long enough, they can drive enough frack-oil companies bankrupt enough that they won't re-emerge even after oil goes back up. Then Saudi Arabia can reduce production and create a much higher price per barrel. If that theory is correct, how long would they need to keep oil under $80-barrel to shut down much unconventional production?
And if that is their goal, and they achieve it; will the subsequent oil shortage and price rise lead to less oil-based carbon skydumping? If so, should we be mad or happy about what Saudi Arabia is doing?
The front lines are ever shifting and moving. Last year a front line ran through NorthEast Colorado. Another front line ran across that highway which got snowmelt-flooded and cut off that town in Alaska. Another front line was traced by Sandy's track.
Sooner or Later coastal Louisiana will be on the frontline for SuperKatrina 2.0. One prays the damage may be limited to only those people who vote for Landrieu or Cassady in Louisiana's upcoming Senatorial Runoff election.
The dilemma is an artificial dilemma of the West's own making, at the urging of the Saudists and Lesser Gulfies and the Erdogists of Turkey.
The West including America should simply switch sides and back the Syrian Arab Government, Hezbollah, Iran and Iraqi Shiistan in helping the SAG crush the cannibal headchopper rebellion by all means necessary and/or convenient. Let the Saudi/Gulfie/Tayippi investment in the so-called "moderate" so-called "opposition" be completely destroyed and incinerated.
If Tunisia gets the electric transmission infrastructure into Europe totally in place, then when neighboring countries build vastly huger solar farms on small fractions of their vastly huger territories, they might well choose to sell and deliver their current over those already-established Tunisia-Europe lines. Production profits for the Big Solar Farmers, transmission profits for Tunisia, more Zero Carbon electricurrent for Europe.
And it bears repeating . . . some of the vast quantities of electricurrrent generated by day could be used to split water into oxygen and hydrogen, and store the hydrogen in huge pressure tanks or caverns or whatever, and burn it back into water every night to re-extract the energy-of-electrolysis and send that electicurrent out over the very same Tunisia-Europe power lines.
Et Viola' ! Ze night-time intermittency problem, she is le' Solve!
Once Morocco gets those plants built, Morocco could then demonstrate a solution to the "storage problem" by using electricity to electrolize water and store the hydrogen just like natural gas till sundown and then after sundown re-oxidize the hydrogen to get back the energy invested in electrolyzing the water. The energy "get-back" could be extracted as electricity.
One good thing about such a march is that the marchers could see how many marchers there are, and take heart in numbers depending on the numbers. Another good thing is for marchers to meet eachother and exchange contact information and discuss about what to do on all the ordinary days between marches.
Make all your meat and dairy grass/pasture/range-fed. The multi-species pasture under cattle bio-sequesters more carbon in the roots and soil than the cattle vent into the air at every stage combined.
Eric Margolis observes Maliki to be an American sock puppet? Based on what? His massive backing and support from Iran? His disdain for America's hopes that he would integrate the Sons Of Iraq into Iraqi paid security forces/army/etc. as the US strongly hoped and thought had been negotiated? His refusal to grant the SOFA that the American government so badly wanted so the American government could keep troops there?
I am not impressed with the so-called 'astutefulness' of Eric Margolis's 'observationalizing'.
Whole sections of the security system in Iraq have been thoroughly Malikified. This new guy would have to wage and win a very nasty and possibly bloody purge of Maliki's legacy organizations if he hoped to force their defeated remnants into any sort of respect or even politeness whatsoever towards the Sunni Arab Iraqis. I don't claim enough expertise to predict whether he will purge the Malikists out of their lairs and bunkers, or whether he even can.
In fact, reading boing boing might be considered so self-targettingly dangerous as to increase one's "edgy-cred" even more than reading Noam Chomsky. Any American visiting Europe might find "boing-boing" opening as many doors as Chomsky's dropped name its-own-self.
Any boing-boing readers reading this post who stop reading boing-boing will be tagged as motivated by fear or caution and therefor as having something to be fearful or cautious about. Therefor any such boingboinger who suddenly stops will be targetted for twice as much double plus ultra super duper NSA surveillance. So you might as well keep reading boing-boing regardless.
I don't see our governators showing any belief in "national soveriegnty". The whole Free Trade Agenda is designed to destroy what national soveriegnty we had, and TTP and TTIP as well as any other such naftazoidal agreements are designed to destroy the very last traces of economic and political soveriegnty not yet destroyed.
What we have is simple carbon capture of government and the exploitation of carbon concerns in political culture-wars.
If we abolished all free trade agreements and restored national economic soveriegnty protectionist exceptionalism, then we would be able to take unilateral carbon reduction steps protected by our ability to exclude imports or even economic relations entirely with emerging carbon dumpers like China and many others.
Since NOxs and methane and CFC-type compounds and black carbon soot have more global warming impact per molecule than
CO2 does, and since those releases represent pure waste and loss of the molecules involved, perhaps it would make sense to try cutting their emissions to zero soonest while working through the political difficulties of CO2 reduction. We could also suck down more CO2 and sequester it in plant/soil systems with better encouragement and management of plant growth all over the world.
Cam, the offshoring of industry was engineered by the Free Tradists in power. Normal Americans did not ask for that. Since that production overseas releases more carbon than what the equivalent production used to release here, the solution to that problem would be to abrogate all free trade agreements, withdraw from all free trade treaties and organizations, restore protectionism, and re-onshore all our captive production-in-exile.
Free trade makes carbon skydumping reduction within America hard-to-impossible. Don't believe it? Keep free trade and see what happens.
Oslo Diplomacy and post-Oslo sincerity may have worked under Rabin. The Revisionists were very afraid that it would work which is why they engineered the Rabin assassination.
If the Lesser Israel Liberal-Laborists can't smash down the Greater Israel axis of Likud/Lieberman/Bennett/price taggers and destroy its power all the way to zero, then that Greater Israel axis will never permit Rabbi Bar-El's theory or any other theory to be reach successful application. The Greater Israel axis will either be smashed down by internal or external forces, or else it will win.
Is Boko Haram a jihadista group with criminal elements? Or a crime group with jihadista elements? If it is mainly jihadista, it will never sell the girls back to Nigeria, lest Nigeria permit them to go back to school. If it is mainly criminal, it may sell the girls back if the price is high enough. And then do the same thing over and over again.
Acting peaceful makes sense until the girls are back or it is clear they never will be. At the end of either of those two outcomes, the Boko Haram problem will be solved by the systematic extermination of every Boko Haram member. Stalin was sometimes right.
I believe a radical settler group decided it did not like Netanyahu's participation in any peace process (however derisory in reality). They have decided to perpetrate "deflection attacks" against designated hostages every time the government does not support the radical settlers as strongly as they wish. They hope to destroy relations between Israel and the Catholic Church, the US, etc. by creating more and more hate, rage, and eventual blowback.
Do Israelis against "price tag" outnumber Israelis for "price tag"?
I don't know. But even if there are, they are not ready to wage and win the Total Civil War against Israelis for "price tag" which would be necessary to crush and eliminate "price tag" activities and price tag supporters.
Even if such a Boycott Fossil Carbon movement is not quickly effective, it can be an organizing motivator for many people over time. Those people can begin to discuss parallel solutions and approaches to run concurrently with the BFC effort.
Perhaps the role of human support of plantlife all over the above-sea-level earth may also be considered. Much carbon has been gassed from soil into the sky over the last couple centuries. Can managing land guided by new knowledge start a process of plantlife/soil carbon restoration sufficient to suck some of the excess carbon back down out of the sky and re-store it in millions of square miles of plants and soil-under-plants?
Canadian blogger Jeff Wells at his Rigorous Intuition blog was inspired by the Israel/Hezbollah war to write a post about the assassination of Rabin. There was good reason to think a Rabin-led Israel would have followed Oslo in good faith to reach a peace a peace with Palestine after. There was good reason to think that the Israeli right wing thought so too. Wells goes into how powerful right wing forces within Israel designed and executed the Rabin assassination using Yigal Amir as their disposable "lone gunman". The goal was to take over Israel in order to renege on Oslo in order to drive more violence in order to right-wingify the Israeli electorate. http://rigint.blogspot.com/2006/07/violent-bear-it-away.html
I voted against McCain/Palin in 2008 because I suspected McCain's primary desire was to start a war with Iran to show that we could win such a war, the way we were winning the Vietnam War and would have won it if it hadn't been for those meddling kids.
If Saudi Arabia deployed stuff like this on 50,000 square miles of the Empty Quarter, they could become the . . . uhh . . . "Saudi Arabia of solar energy."
And so could Iran and Iraq and Egypt and Libya and Algeria and Morocco and and and . . .
Much of the problem occurrs at the topmost layer of the "one percent". How much of "the one percent's " income goes to the opoop (one percent of one percent)? How much of it goes to an even smaller fraction of people called the opoopoop (one percent of one percent of one percent)?
Also, what percent of the nations medicare taxes does the one percent pay? What percent of the nation's SS FICA taxes does the one percent pay?
Obama has no more elections left to run for. He is strictly working for the highest possible private sector payoffs and paybacks after he leaves office. Based on his goals and record to date, I think he will okay the Keystone XL Pipeline Northern Half.
The last time Israel's liberals tried that, Israel's conservatives assassinated Prime Minister Rabin.
It is not pleasant to think that the only way for Israel's liberals to guide Israeli policy would be to wage and win a civil war against Israel's conservatives. But is there anything else that would work?
There is a semi-leftwing econoblog called Naked Capitalism which has run posts on ACA among other subjects.
Some of those posts analyze in great detail the various hidden traps and restriction of access to degraded care which the Insurance Industry very carefully wrote into the law. The readers might ask themselves why Justice Roberts performed so many legal-logic contortions to uphold ACA (especially the Forced Mandate) when he realized it would not get 5 other Justices to uphold it without his help.
It is easy enough to go to Naked Capitalism and find those posts and comments.
Corporate takeover, monopolizatin, and subversion to private profit and control purposes also threatens the existence of free information exchange and access on the internet.
I read a critical post against TPP on Naked Capitalism recently, and one of the TPP provisions which the Obama Group is trying so hard to keep secret is a provision to permit private corporate owners of anything to do with internet transmission a free and high hand to prevent or remove any content or item at all which they please to prevent or remove.
For example, if I understand this provision right, under TPP the private owners of whatever cables or pipes or tubes this blog and these comments travel on . . . would have the perfect right to pre-ban or ban and remove your every post concerning global warning, carbon wean-off, etc. At least now, before TPP, the NSA can only record every keystroke and keystroker.
Actually, my understanding was that France and Italy in particular pushed hardest for this right from the start because they feared a huge influx of Lybian refugees. We went along with the Franco/Italian request and lent our particular military abilities to it.
It seems to me that most, or maybe almost all of the civilian drone deaths are due to the CIA's own drone program
and few or almost none being due to the Military's own drone program. They are two separate programs. If my understanding is correct, would cancelling the CIA's own drone program solve a lot of the problem?
He should not get them. At the very least the NYTimes should invite Iyad Alawi to write an equal-billing guest editorial about the nature of al Maliki's rule and methods of governance. And how al Maliki came to have so much power over Iraqi government to begin with.
I would agree with careful use of terms. If our killing level in Iraq was genocide, then the Civil War was genocide against the Confederacy, considering that something like 10 per cent of all men in the Confederate States were killed.
If the Civil War wasn't genocide, then the Iraq War 2.0 wasn't genocide either.
The policies of the DLC Free Trade NAFTAcratic Party have been more detrimental to working class white Americans than anything the Tea Party has achieved so far. I wonder how many Tea Party supporters were primed for Tea Partyism by having their jobs exported and lives destroyed by the Free Trade Mass-Jobicide of the last few decades? If we are really looking to blame somebody for the rise of Tea Partyism,
do the Free Trade Clintocrats deserve some of that blame?
If solar farms in the SouthWest could be built to reliably
provide as much power as all the dams in the West provide, and wired into the Western Grid; then the solar farms could provide power by day and the dams by night. That would allow for storing more water behind the dams to be even more sure of having enough to use through the night.
A few posts ago I left a comment linking to a Counterpunch article about how the Obama Administration has re-written Administrative and Agency rules to greenlight and redball a whole spider-webwork of pipelines leading from the tar sands, "around" the Keystone XL Northern Half proposal area, and linking up to the northern end of Keystone Southern Half or to other pipelines going right straight to refineries and/or coastal ports.
Obama will keep tactically delaying decision on "Keystone Northern Half" as part of his strategy of tricking the 350 activists into thinking stopping Keystone matters, and diverting their attention from the Huge Pipeline Web Workaround which Obama is assisting various oil companies in getting built. Once Obama is satisfied that the other workaround-pipelines are able to carry as much oil as Keystone Northern Half would have carried, then he will announce that it is "cancelled" and the 350 activists will be allowed to congratulate themselves on their "victory".
Aren't a majority of Jewish Israelis descended from North African and SouthWest Asian heritage groups nowadays? If so, wouldn't a majority of Israeli soldiers be descended from North African and SouthWest Asian heritage groups? (Unless the Gorbachev-and-after era Soviet/Russian influx changed those numbers again?)
I see that someone up above beat me to pointing out that this could all be a sneaky bait-and-switch kabuki dance between Obama and the Republicans where the Republicans will drop "defund Obamacare" at the last minute in return for Obama supporting "degrade and attrit Social Security" the way he has tried to ever since getting elected.
If Obama and the Republicans pull off this Grand Deceit, enough Democratic Senators will support the Republican Senators in passing "destroy Social Security" to get it passed. Obama will then sign it into law. Let's all watch out for that.
I read recently an article at resilience.org saying that Bill McKibben either knowingly or unknowingly uses "stop Keystone XL!" as a decoy to keep climate change activists wasting their time and energy and failing to think about how to lower use of carbon fuels in general, including thinking about how to force the issue of political-economic changes to make it possible. And the Obama Administration cleverly delays decision on Keystone XL to keep the activists thinking they are achieving something and to keep rope-a-doping them.
Here is an article from Counterpunch about how the Obama Administration works with the oil industry to green-light and speed-up construction of a whole webwork of pipelines that will bypass the whole "Keystone Northern Half" planned pipeline area. Once the whole pipeline workaround network is completely built, all the oil that would have moved through Keystone XL Northern Half will move through these other pipelines anyway. Obama will then pretend to surrender on Keystone XL after it doesn't matter anyway, and McKibben and the 350 group will be permitted to think they have won something. Here is the link. http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/09/09/the-flip-side-of-obamas-keystone-xl-delay/
AIPAC may be even more narrow than just an Israel Lobby in general. It may be a Likud Lobby in particular. It may have been penetrated and captured by Likudists ever since the Begin Prime-Ministership. It may even be involved in funding and supporting the Likudists and further-rightists within Israel itself to "keep Israel Likud" and keep "Greater Israel" on the table. Do those possibilities deserve some research?
By the way, I am surprised that Representative Ellison is in fact pro al Quaeda and wants to create an al Quaeda government in Syria in order to exterminate a million or more Syrian Alawites and a million or more Syrian Christians. I thought he was a more moderate Muslim than that.
If some of the Tahrir Revolutionaries 1.0 were opposed to al Sisi's call and were quick enough on their feet; they could have pretended to support it and eagerly yelled: "Where do you want us to gather to show our numbers?" And then they could all hav avoided that spot.
If they don't want their children serving in the Army, they could have their children doing National Service, like counting sewage or breaking rocks or whatever.
Here might well be an eleventh way that certain modern foods or modern methods of eating them are specifically making us fat. It is in an article called Is Sugar Toxic?
and is about the possibility that one particular sugar in particular, called fructose; is uniquely obesogenic. Fructose comes from HiFructose Corn Syrup and ALSO from SUCROSE which is also called "cane sugar". Every sucrose molecule divides in the intestine into a glucose molecule and a fructose molecule, and the fructose molecules from "cane sugar" are just as obesogenic as the fructose molecules from HiFructose Corn Syrup. Here is the link: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/magazine/mag-17Sugar-t.html?ref=magazine&pagewanted=all&_r=0moc.semityn.www
An energy-engineering-and-efficiency commentator blognamed Engineer Poet runs a blog called The Ergosphere. He has discussed the renewable-source-electricity storage problem in some of his posts. One of those posts (which I don't have the patience to try finding) notes that while we can't easily store electricity, we can store some of the things it does. He gives the example of windpower in Holland. When windpower-electricity is excess to ongoing power use needs, that windpower-excess is diverted to Holland's deepfreeze foodstorage warehouses to chill them even colder than the safe deepfrozen temperature. When the windpower dies down, those deepfrozen foodstorage warehouses can cruise on stored superchill for several to many hours, warming "up" to a still-safe very cold temperature. Then they draw conventional power through the grid from conventional sources to stay at that still-safe temperature until there is another windpower surplus which can superchill them back to even-colder-than the safe storage temperature. In essence, these deepfreeze warehouses are being used as "super-chill storage batteries", storing the cold which windpower electricity produced. http://ergosphere.blogspot.com/
(Engineer Poet also supports various in-his-mind new and improved nuclear power technologies. I hope that doesn't scare or repel anti-nuclear people from reading all the rest of his work).
And a thought occurred to me: renewably produced electricity could be used to electrolyze water into oxygen and hydrogen and the hydrogen could be stored until needed for electricity generation by fuel-celling it or conventionally burning it to turn turbines.
Didn't the Insider Republican Party inspire and organize and bring out these Tea Party activists to begin with? And now the Republican Inner Party members don't like where their proteges are going?
Too bad. So sad.
They have filled their toilet. Now let them swim in it. Or drown in it. Or flush themselves down, as the case may be.
Reality is the stuff that stays real, no matter how hard one tries to wish it away, or pray it away. People who expect to live for several more decades either will or won't feel the effects of global warming, depending on whether it is or isn't really happening.
So make your choice and make your plans. "Him who is not surprised when the future comes, lives very close to the truth."
That seems to be more of a diversion than a reply. If we went metric and measured hurricane windspeed in metric, but still left Cat5 open ended from X kph-Infinity kph, we would still have the same problem of information-hiding openendedness of the Cat5 category.
The metric system is just a silly legacy of the French Revolution. It bears no more relation to reality than the customary culture-rooted measuremement systems it affects to replace.
We here in America have gone as metric as we need to. We have metrified science and pharmacy and so forth. Dividing the temperature range between the freezing and boiling points of water into one hundred degrees is just as arbitrary as dividing it into 180 Farenheit degrees. And since the metric degrees are bigger and cruder, they mask finer grained detail which Farenheit degrees reveal and make
it possible to discuss.
I remember many years ago once meeting a visiting Soviet Professor of Economics here in Ann Arbor. We talked through a Ukrainian friend-of-mine interpreter. At some point he asked me when America would go metric. I offered the thought that America had a greater chance of going communist than going metric. I still think so. So there.
As hurricanes and tornados get bigger and better, perhaps
we need bigger and better ways to measure and describe them.
Currently the strength-category awarded to hurricanes tops out at C5 and the strength-category awarded to tornados tops out at F5. But that C5 and F5 are open ended and will be less specifically helpful as hurricanes and tornados get stronger.
So since every step up from Cat1 to Cat5 is like the rungs on a ladder, we should just add more rungs to the descriptive ladder. Since Cat3 is 111-129mph and Cat4 is
130-156mph, why make Cat5 be 157-Infinity mph? Why not cap out Cat5 at . . say . . 182mph? And make a new Cat6 class for 183-210mph? And a new Cat7 class for 211-235mph? And so on?
Two old-wisdom sayings: Reality is the stuff that remains real no matter how hard you believe otherwise. Also stated as "you can't bullshit the ocean. It's not listening." And . . . "him that is not surprised when the future comes lives very close to the truth."
I am planning my life in the expectation of a future of runaway Global Warming and Climate DeChaos Decay thanks to unrestrained carbon-loading of the atmoshphere. I gather you are planning on a future of no-such-thing happening. We shall see who lives "very close to the truth" and who will therefor "not be surprised when the future comes".
I will say this: if you are correct, then the Global is not really warming and will not warm, and none of the changes I expect to be happening will happen. If you are right and we are all wrong, you have a contrarian investing opportunity of historic dimensions lying at your feet. You should invest all the money you have, and all the money you can borrow, in raw land/ real estate/ REITs/ etc. based along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts . . . most especially in Florida/Alabama/Mississippi/Louisiana/Texas. When the oceans fail to rise the way we Global Warming Alarmists expect them to, you will have planted the seeds of a vast family fortune for your heirs to inherit. If you think you are right about the Climate Future, then I encourage you in the very strongest terms to put your money where your mouth claims to be.
For possible solutions to the problem of sucking back down and bio-sequestering the carbon already in the air I would suggest googling words like biochar, eprida, CHAB unit
(Combined Heat And Biochar unit) etc. Here is an article about an approach to carbon-sequestering shrub-and-tree based protein and starch agriculture:http://energybulletin.net/stories/2012-07-25/woody-agriculture-road-new-paradigm
These changes can only be achieved by the sort of force
embodied in energy taxes (especially carbon emission taxes) eventually rising to punitive levels. People who wish to suggest that sort of thing will have to earn the personal credibility shown by reducing their own carbon footprint in their own daily lives as much as feasibly possible. Individual action will have no effect on carbon emmissions, but it will gain those individuals the credibility needed to be taken seriously when they discuss the sorts of society-wide forced changes which will have to be imposed on the unwilling and the uncaring in order to prevent further excess carbon release . . . and to suck down the carbon already released.
I haven't personally met any serious global warming deniers. If I ever do, I will suggest they think about the possibility that if they are right, they have a tremendous contrarian investing opportunity.
If the earth-surface ice-features are not melting and will not melt, and if the oceans are not rising and will not rise; then seaside coastal ocean-front land will not start going underwater. Such land would be a tremendous investment and would plant the seeds of future family fortunes when we global warming accepters discover that the global isn't warming after all. I encourage everyone to encourage all the deniers to put all the money they have into coastal property, most especially along the Gulf Coast.
If I could stand to listen to Limbaugh, I would try to get on his show by feigning ditto-headness so I could get all his listeners thinking about contrarian investments in global no-warming.
If you are correct in your belief that the global is not warming and will not warm, and that therefor the icecaps and glaciers are not melting and will not melt and the ocean is not rising and will not rise . . . you have a tremendous contrarian investing opportunity lying before you at your feet.
You should borrow all the money you can against all the pledgeable assets you have or will have, and use that money to buy oceanside seafront property in Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Gulf Coastal Florida, etc. When the ocean fails to rise just like the wise men at Von Mises assure you it will fail to do; you will have planted the seeds of a vast family fortune for your heirs.
So what are you waiting for? Buy seaside oceanfront coastal land today!
I have been thinking about an open-ended method of hurricane rating for a while now. I gather that every 50 mile-per-hour incremental increase in a hurricane's sustained windspeed gets it a higher number up to Five. So why not continue raising the rating by the same increments?
Every 50 mph increase gets another number. Also, why not rate hurricanes according to how "wide" they are? A hundred
mile wide hurricane could be assigned the letter A, a hundred and fifty mile wide hurricane could be given B, a two hundred mile wide hurricane could be given C, and on up.
So a huge low-windspeed hurricane could be a 1-G or a small
high-windspeed hurricane could be a 4-B, and so forth.
By the way, perhaps we should think about open-ended rating increases for tornados too. F6, F7, etc.; if tornados rotate faster than before.
Phil D, a popular science writer who wrote a little book of some clarity on the subject called Hothouse Earth ( by John Gribbin) might be a small part of what you want. http://www.amazon.co.uk/Hothouse-Earth-Greenhouse-Effect-Gaia/dp/0552994502 He is no Rachel Carson, but then, who is? Only Rachel Carson, and she's dead now. Other people have been writing books but I can't remember their names. There is someone who has been setting up timelapse photo-cameras overlooking various glaciers and icecaps to capture their growth or shrinkage, and so far he has been capturing mainly shrinkage. It is called the Extreme Ice Survey. http://www.extremeicesurvey.org/ One can look at the pictures of retreating ice in place after place to see the real effects made visible.
Ways exist to stimulate plant growth so as to suck down some of the airborn carbon and bio-sequester it either in plantmass or in and under the soil. Ways also exist to manage agriculture so as to raise the amount of persistent rootmass and humus below the soil surface. The problem is how to support using these methods over millions of square miles of ag-and-pasture/range land so as to suck down and bio-sequester billions of tons of carbon over millions of square miles of land area. But people can't begin to even think about driving carbon bio-sequestration unless they know it even exists and can be applied.
A first step might be for growing numbers of people to realize such a possibility actually exists. And offering pathways to information about it might help such growing numbers to realize it. Then they can think about how to drive the process a tiny bit by their own individual actions, and how to drive it harder by organized political and economic pressure.
I believe that Prince alWaleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia is the next-largest owner of NewsCorp (Fox News's parent) after the Murdoch Family their own selves. Shortly after Fox hyped up the fakey controversy over that South Manhattan
Islamic center, various people wondered why Prince bin Talal
would continue supporting such a company by owning so much of it?
Well, I theorize that the Prince wishes to see Saudi Arabia remain able to sell gigabucks worth of oil to the boilers, engines, and furnaces of the world. And since Fox News does such good work clouding the global warming issues and delaying public demand for a solution to the problem; Prince bin Talal must find the money that Fox helps assure that both he and Saudi Arabia will continue making from oil to be worth the minor embarrassment of being caught co-owning a Muslim-bashing media property.
Oh! if only someone reading this comment were able to influence the Prince's thought-processes directly! That person could persuade the Prince to decide that global warming really is just as fake as Fox says it is. That person could further persuade the Prince to buy millions of acres of beachfront oceanside property all over the world so as to make a killing when the oceans fail to rise. Thus would justice be served.
If it takes a 2-opposing-teams contest about a situation to get ordinary Americans to take interest in the situation; then perhaps a place to introduce some team-versus-team conflict would be within the Democratic Party itself. If a genuinely "cut and run from Afghanistan" primary challenger were to fight Team Obama for the 2012 Democratic Nomination, and fight in the rudest and most unsportsmanly way possible;
then public onlookers might decide to take an interest in rooting for one team or the other. If Team CutAndRun were actually able to defeat and destroy Team Obama for the 2012 DemPres nomination, then the Democratic presidential campaign team would become Team CutAndRun. The Republicans would become Team StayTheCourse. Americans would have a choice of which team to root for and which team to root against. The Afghan War would become an important football field for political sports fans all over America. It could become the World Superbowl Series of political grudge fights.
The political-effectiveness difficulties which Luke Ryan cites probably concern enough millions of people that those millions of people could have a system-redirecting impact if they gave up on ineffective methods and found some effective methods instead. I don't know for sure what those methods would be. They would have to be diffuse and non-illegal to avoid meeting with immediate repression from the authorities. I suspect those methods would have to involve millions of changes of personal economic behavior by millions of those concerned people. Perhaps millions of little changes might cause a big shift if the changes are the right changes. Suppose, for example, that 50 million people who imagine themselves to be "peace-minded" were to
stop using credit cards for all but emergency uses? How much revenue would cease to flow to the major credit companies? How inspiring and hope-generating might their visible loss of size and power be?
Such a "shift the system" movement might develop a culture of passive-aggression,
sullen rejection, uncivil obedience and so forth; designed to slowly erode certain carefully selected pillars of system and regime power. At the same time, people who see eachother engaging in such passive-aggressive peacefully obstructive behavior might also support eachother in creating parallel mini-cultural and mini-economic spaces and systems.
How many people voted for a Representative in this district in 2008? And how many people voted for a representative in this district in 2010? And did people who
voted for the D candidate last time come out and vote for Shimkus this time? Or did
D voters from election 2008 not come out and vote this time? And if not, why not?
Someone should take the time to ask all those millions of D-voters of 2008 who did not vote at all this time what their reasons for not voting were. Actual research would give us information which mere speculation can never yield. Since I voted, I am not qualified to say why the non-voters non-voted. They will have to be asked.
One hopes that Shimkus is defeated for Chairman of the Energy Committee. But that is up to his fellow Republicans.
Those states, cities, regions, etc.; which voted for Climate Change Realists in their own non-federal-level localities will just have to try crafting energy conservation policies and actions in their own areas in the teeth of ferocious federal resistance and obstruction against every effort to conserve energy and lower fossil carbon use. Perhaps commenters on this thread might offer some ideas and resources for helping people in the Blue Zones to de-fossilize the energy supply sources for economic activity
within their own Blue Zones.
Since the coal industry hasbarists have invented the term War On Coal and gotten it accepted, people-for-survival might as well accept the term.
"I support the War On Coal. My survival is more important to me than coal's survival is."
One member of the High Classical Pleistocene Megafauna (Great Ice Age Beasts) still exists. And that is Man itself. Us? Really? Yes. We evolved during the Pleistocene and developed the same extreme development of a certain organ that the other Great Ice Age Beasts developed. In our case it was our brain. We are the Irish Elk
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_elk among primates, and our brain is our antlers. As long as we live, the Ice Age can never truly die, for the Ice Age lives in us.
Another interesting thing to realize is that while the Megafauna is all gone (except for us), the Ice Age flora is mostly all still here. Why is the hop hornbeam and the blue beech so strong-wooded? George Monbiot thinks it was to withstand mammoth and mastodon attack. Why does the young honey locust have foot-long assemblies of poly-thorns all up and down its trunk which disappear when the tree is too tall for mega-herbivores to reach the branches? Who was it protecting itself against? What about the osage orange? No-one eats those softball sized brain-wrinkly green fruits. But someone did . . . and spread the seeds. Who was it? And why is its wood sooooo tough? And covered with nasty thorns till again it is big tree-size? I speculate the thorns were to keep away mammoths and mastodons and stuff. But the giant ground slouth had arms, hands and claws made for grabbing and pulling down to the ground the thorniest branches. So maybe the super springy-wood branches which could survive that pull-down without snapping or breaking were the ones which preferrentially survived giant ground sloth assaults to live and breed. The ground sloth is gone but the osage orange lives on.
Unqualified support? Why did he boycott the Netanyahu appearance then? Why did he try inspiring some other Senators to do the same? Or am I falling for atmospherics?
By the way, Green is one group I will never vote for. Not after Nader Versus Gore and esPECially not after McGaw versus Wellstone.
We may also have to stop eating the WRONG hamburgers and limit ourselves to the RIGHT ones. I am reading more and more, here and there and everywhere; that properly managed pasture and/or range under livestock has the potential to suck down more skycarbon and bio-sequester it into the soil, then what it itself skydumps. I am reading anecdotal claims of that already being done in some places.
We really need indisputable science done to either confirm or debunk that happy hope.
But if it is really true, and conSIStently true when done correctly, then whatever money we spend on specifically and only pasture-range fed livestock is actually going to drive skycarbon reduction and soilcarbon restoration. If that is true, then eating grass-fed hamburgers helps to dewarm the global all by itself. And since restricting ourselves to pasture-range hamburgers ONLY means accepting much lower pasture-range produced ONLY livestock, the "eating less hamburgers" part would take care of itself.
I hope that Bernie and/or someone(s) on his staff are reading Hunter S. Thompson's book Fear and Loathing: On The Campaign Trail '72. It says some useful things about organizing with only moderate money but many willing people to make up for that lack of money.
It also says some harsh things about how McGovern, after his unlikely victory over the Establishment Democrats, went on to try appeasing them and winning their support for Election '72. Thompson went into some detail about just how self-destructive and self-defeating THAT was.
Why would that matter? Because if Sanders wins the nomination ( just as unlikely as McGovern), he will then have to decide whether to try "winning back" the Establishment Democrats or accept that they are his ( and ours) Evil Enemies who will collude against him to elect his Republican opponent. If he treats them as the Evil Enemies they are, he will at least keep the supporters who get him nominated. If he tries appeasing the Clintonite Obamacrat scum that he will have to defeat to get the nomination, he won't win over any scum-filth Clintobamacrats and he will lose all of his base supporters who would be appalled, disgusted and dispirited by his re-wooing of the allegedly humanoid filth-garbage whom he has just defeated.
I hope he reads Thompson's book and takes this particular lesson to heart.
If it is any comfort to the world's poor, the mass destruction won't stop at the doorstep of the poor. It will keep right on moving to the doorstep of the middle class and the modestly rich.
I think so too.
If we were nice about it, we could start a New Deal Revival Party. If we have to get mean about it we can start a Lower Class WarParty.
The various glaciers, icefields, and ice-cap edges were shrinking and melting right along all through that hiatus period anyway, so more heat was certainly entering the system regardless.
So when people told me "hiatus! ha ha ha!" I said that I considered global warming to be worse than embarrassment, and if the global was re-cooling then that was a good thing. I told them I would be looking to see all the ice formations begin re-growing to their former size and volume. If that happened, I would certainly accept being laughed at last.
Why is this an irony or even a problem? If China plans to make the Big Money in Afghanistan, then China should be the people bearing the Big Burden of keeping Afghanistan safe, peaceful and orderly.
I don't think the Chinese will putz around with any "hearts and minds" silliness. if the Taliban threaten China's plans to take the minerals out of Afghanistan, then China can simply send in a million or more Peoples Liberation Army troops with Tien An Men rules of engagement, and get any "bad for bussiness" problems exterminated in short order. China could also pressure Pakistan as much as necessary in order to force Pakistan to abandon its beloved little Taliban pets and mascots.
It it helps things any, I read some of the material presented here as fact-based material years before I had heard of DRG.
And I read it in places other than here. I suspect DRG read it in those same places.
I read long ago that 80F was the threshhold temperature for ocean water warm enough to gas off hurricane-loads of water vapor into the overlying air. If a hurricane gets started over a huge zone of 80F or higher ocean, it can somewhat "govern" its maximum growth by its own winds wave-churning ocean water deep enough to reach down and mix under-80 water with the 80 water at the surface. Drag the surface below 80 and less-than-hurricane loads of vapor can gas off into the air.
If one deepens the layer of 80+ water on the surface, it stands to reason that one could set higher the bar at which
the hurricane can finally wind-whip the ocean deep enough to drag up the now-deeper-down under 80 water. IFF! . . all other conditions were as perfect as before for the formation of a hurricane otherwise. I don't see why that becomes false or unreasonable just because it is repeated by someone who is accused of being discredited on some other issue-area.
As to the hysteria of "saving the planet", the planet will save itself, thank you very much. If saving itself involves exterminating species man, the planet will do that without batting a hurricane's eye. The planet got along fine before it met us, and it will get along fine once we're gone. The planet could give a rat's ass whether mankind lives or dies.
We should worry about preserving conditions which are beneficial to the lifestyle to which we humans have become accustomed. THAT is what man made climate change is putting at risk right now.
Some further thoughts . . . Confucius once said that something very important to do from time to time was Rectification of the Language. In our own day that would include pressure-washing the Luntzwords off the language and purging the Luntz-meanings from the words we want to keep.
"No Rectification without de-Luntzification".
People who use Luntz-type words which were not specifically invented by Luntz can be called Luntzy Louses.
And people who use words or meanings that Luntz specifically invented can be called Lousy Luntzes.
And I have decided to attach the prefix "Man Made" in front of every climate-related word or phrase that i use. For example, if one were to say " Man MADE climate change", one is half-way spoiling the Luntz effect right there. And I'll probably start calling myself a Warmist, too.
Frank Luntz invented the word "climate change" and tried it in some of his research test-bed focus groups. It played well, so he rolled it out. Someone should do a forensic literature search to see when the Koch/Exxon accusation that climate scientists came up with "climate change" when the warmup "stopped". If the first verifiable date for that accusation first seeing light in the media can be fixed in time and documented, and it turns out to be later than the date on which Frank Lunts introduced the word "climate change", then the Merchants of Carbon can be caught in a proven lie.
Anyone who uses the word "climate change" has been "Luntzed". ( Is "Luntzed" a word? If it isn't, maybe it should be). We should come up with some counter-Luntz reverse-spin language, like global heating or global burning, or The Global Warmocaust, or Climate d'Chaos Decay. The Big Heat. etc. And use such words in everyday conversation to see if any take hold. Fly little memes fly.
Now is the time for all good Global Warming skeptics to come to the aid of the coastal Florida real estate market. Buy Florida land!
I know someone who was in the Peace Corps on Batanes Island in the Philippines. He told me that Batanes has long been in a traditional Hurricane Alley. They have traditionally built their houses with hurricanes in mind. The houses are made of stone walls several feet thick with a sacrificial cogon-grass thatch roof which protects from normal weather and blows right off in every hurricane. The stone walls are undisturbed. The people have the minor cost of replacing the sacrificial "lizard's tail" roof after every hurricane.
Maybe the Vanuatuans will adopt Batanesian architecture for their emerging hypercane future.
Since the next Prexy will be a Repuglan, it is likely that all Obama's executive initiatives which impinge upon fossil carbon profits will be reversed. (Of course all the Obama decisions which profit the Merchants of Fossil will be kept in place . . . things like throwing upen the Atlantic coastal shelf to oil exploration and opening the Beaufort/Chukchi Sea shelves to oil exploration and all the pipelines that were greenlight-redballed to provide a whole cats cradle of pipeline workaround routes for Alberta dilbitar if Obama should cancel Keystone North for symbolic diversionary reasons.)
So every reader's best investment would be in the means of survival in the teeth of a CPPM 600-700 world.
As noted topthread, any side the US backs will attract the other sides's attentive hatred. The only thing left to do is to give up our opposition to the Syrian Arab Republic and stop lending any support whatsoever to the SAR's opponents. Russia, Hezbollah, Iran and the SAR itself will take care of the rest.
The desired endstate should be the comprehensive extermination of all al Quaeda and ISIS personell within the borders of Syria and Iraq. That involves the diplomatic re-recognition of President Assad as being the legitimate president of the only legitimate government which Syria has . . . the Syrian Arab Republic. And that involves accepting whatever casualties the SAG/SAR feels it needs to impose in order to get the rebellion comprehensively exterminated and destroyed for decades to come.
Because the "questioning" is designed to scare and threaten politically engaged people out of excercising their basic human self-governance rights including those mentioned in the Constitution.
By the way, Keystone is not part of a "national" strategy for anything. Keystone is part of a private self-interested bussiness-sector strategy in search of special interest profits.
So , the Shiaraqi Government threatens to revoke the agreement? Oh please . . . ohhh pleeeeeeze do!
The Malikists prepared the ground of Iraqi Sunnistan for ISIS's entry by sectarian spiteful mistreatment and abuse of the Sunni Arabs there.
As long as the Shia regime remains committed to Shia Supremacism over the Sunni Arabs, they will keep losing every bit of Sunnistan.
It appears Cameroun has a functional army and a viable non-corrupt-enough government to function and organize a defense and then a counter-offensive. Nigeria appears to have none of those things. Then too, it is doubtful that Cameroun has Boko Haram agents or sympathisers hidden within its government, whereas Nigeria appears to have both.
Cameroun cares enough about the children to close schools and evacuate children and families from non-secured areas, to the best of its ability.
The NigeriaGov has shown no sign of any such concern.
I know there are "global warming skeptics" out there.
Well . . . this is your moment! This is your big contrarian investment opportunity. Buy up all the seaside coastal beachfront/swampfront property you can beg, borrow or steal the money to buy. You will be planting the seeds of vast new family fortunes when those of us who have avoided or fled the coasts realize what fools we've been and seek to buy our way back in.
Be bold! Put your money where your convinctions are! Who dares, wins!
Daniel Barham,
Nothing anywhere in the Bible claims that Jewish slaves built the pyramids. The claim that it does is deeply a-textual.
President Obama must be sooooo hurt by all this. When he leaves office he will "cry all the way to the bank", in the deathless words of Liberace.
That is what Rabin understood which led him and his delegation into his end of Oslo. That is what a voting majority of the Israeli public at the time understood and demonstrated their desire for by re-electing Rabin over Netanyahu. That is what Netanyahu , Likud, and elements within Israeli security understood when they arranged the Rabin assassination. They also understood that Peres had no basic bravery and no military-service credibility, and would not be able to hold up and advance his end of the process.
So Netanyahu knew what he was doing when he played his part in engineering the Rabin hit.
Regretabbly, the Rabinists and Rabin voters did not understand that they were in a Civil War which could only have been won by crushing the Likudists into political and civil extinction and the Likudist voters into humble obedience to the Rabinist majority.
Oh well . . . . too late now.
"Mankind" and "Planet Earth" are two different things. It's like with the old country song: "I got along fine before I met you, I'll get along fine when you're gone." Earth got along fine before it met us, it'll get along fine when we're gone.
Nature is One Tough Mother.
I predict:
Global warming will make ArctiCanada and Siberia warm and ice-free enough to find all kinds of more coal, gas, and oil up there. Which will all be sold, burned, and skydumped.
Global Heating will then melt all the ice off of
Greenland, Ellesmere Island, Baffin Island, etc. So much coal, gas, and oil will be found there that . . .
Global Steaming will melt all the ice off of Antarctica. So much coal, gas and oil will be found on the newly ice-freed Antarctica that . . .
Global Autoclaving will turn the Earth into a sterile dessicated Venusian hell-planet.
I am not sure Hagel was publicly complaining about a refusal to attack Assad more forcefully. I suspect he was demanding "clarity" of "thinking" more broadly in order to send as clear a signal as he dared to send that the Obama Administration should think about cancelling its remove-Assad policy and start a new accept-Assad policy in its place. And the suspicion that Hagel's remarks were a silent signal to "accept Assad" were what got him fired.
I find it strange to think that the SAG would ever negotiate in its own extermination to please a pack of so-called "moderate" Islamist rebels and leave their own constituencies helpless to the Sunni LiverEater genocides to be perpetrated against the Christians, Alawites, Kurds, etc.
The SAG will keep fighting until it can't keep fighting any more. And Russia, Iran, and maybe a couple others will do what they can to keep the SAA intact, viable, in the field, and fighting fighting fighting.
Global warming deniers who seize upon the Antarctic sea ice and other notional straws to buttress their denialism . . . should be encouraged to invest all the money they have and all the money they can borrow in buying up all the seaside oceanfront property they can afford. What a contrarian investment opportunity is laid out before them
Meanwhile, those who understand the Global is heating can try guessing how fast the oceans will rise and how far they will spread.
"I bought some beach front property in Arkansas."
"Arkansas"?
"Just wait awhile."
Any initially successful to repress and shut down the "price tagger" community would lead to a genuine Civil War. The Center-Left Lesser Israelists missed their last chance to win such a Civil War against the Center-Right Greater Likudistanis in the dragging couple years of Peres's post-Rabin Prime Ministership.
Carbon capture and sequestration need not be limited to at-the-smokestack. It can happen at the green-leaf and throughout the rhizosphere. But it would take the proper sort of land management to make that happen.
If you put your cellphone in a foil-lined case you would make it harder to track in between phone calls anyway, warrant or no. Of course no one could call you either, but would that be a worthwhile tradeoff to prevent anyone from following the location of your walking-around-phone except when you are actually making a call?
And if you are really that worried, ditch your cellphone and go back to copper landline phone service. If enough people did that, AT&T might have to drop its plans to rip out all the copper lines someday and digitize everybody.
I suspect that "beef" as such is not carbon intensive. It is corn/soy fed industrial feedlot beef which is carbon intensive.
I suspect that range-and-pasture ONLY beef would be as carbon suckdown/ bio-sequestering as was the buffalo which many Indian Nations persons ate for centuries after Pilgrim times. (And sad to say, today's corn/soy industrial factory turkeys are somewhat carbon intensive their own selves. I wonder how much less carbon intensive a return to ancient heritage-breed turkeys raised more craftsmanly on hundreds of thousands of little turkey gardens would be?)
I doubt Dempsey wanted/wants new wars any more than Hagel does. Hagel and Dempsey both more-or-less opposed bombing Syria and trying too hard to overthrow Assad. It seems Hagel decided that ISIS was much the greatest threat to the point where the R2P NeoWilsonians elsewhere in Obama's cabinet suspected Hagel of wanting Assad accepted and supported as a functional ally against ISIS.
So is Hagel out? Not until Obama finds a replacement. Which means if enough Senators can reject every replacement Obama nominates from now till January 2017, then Hagel will remain SecDef till then.
If Hagel is removed, Dempsey will be the next to be removed. As long as Hagel stays, Demsey is somewhat shielded and is harder to remove.
We should all want Obama's every replacement nominee to be rejected by the Senate, over and over and over again.
How many of America's Iraq and Afghanistan War veterans are members of one of the Indian Nations? How many of America's veterans might be, or might be related to, High Plains farmers and ranchers of ancestry other-than-Indian who might well share the Indian Nations' viewpoint on dirty filthy dilbit pipelines rammed across Indian Country? How many of those veterans might have some measure of knowledge of explosives and demolition and the deployment of such relative to the functional integrity of pipelines?
Will a dilbit ( diluted bitumen) pipeline be able to ram itself across the High Plains? Will it survive the attempt?
Most of Australia is high enough above sea level that rising sea levels are not Australia's problem. But if Man Made Global Heating drives Global Climate DeChaos Decay to the point where much of Australia becomes a drought-bound food-free heat-death zone of non-survival, then whoever has the last laugh . . . it won't be Australia.
Do high oil prices punish the US? If they do, and KSA is lowering oil prices now to bankrupt and shut in unconventional oil now so as to remove that as a long term price-competitor later, so that KSA can then raise oil prices later once there is no unconventional oil industry left to bring unconventional oil to market; then KSA price drops now to protect KSA price rises later will punish the US later. That is what Yves Smith is theorizing the Saudis to be doing.
Then too, if a dropping oil price can drop other fossil carbon prices low enough long enough to bankrupt some alternative energy companies, those bankrupted companies are removed as future harbors of refuge when KSA re-raises the oil price later.
That's the theory as I understand it.
Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism has offered an extended version of this theory . . that Saudi Arabia is dropping the price to punish several disobedient targets, including the US for failing to get Assad overthrown on Saudi Arabia's timetable. Also, if Saudi Arabia can keep oil at or under $80/barrel for long enough, they can drive enough frack-oil companies bankrupt enough that they won't re-emerge even after oil goes back up. Then Saudi Arabia can reduce production and create a much higher price per barrel. If that theory is correct, how long would they need to keep oil under $80-barrel to shut down much unconventional production?
And if that is their goal, and they achieve it; will the subsequent oil shortage and price rise lead to less oil-based carbon skydumping? If so, should we be mad or happy about what Saudi Arabia is doing?
The front lines are ever shifting and moving. Last year a front line ran through NorthEast Colorado. Another front line ran across that highway which got snowmelt-flooded and cut off that town in Alaska. Another front line was traced by Sandy's track.
Sooner or Later coastal Louisiana will be on the frontline for SuperKatrina 2.0. One prays the damage may be limited to only those people who vote for Landrieu or Cassady in Louisiana's upcoming Senatorial Runoff election.
The dilemma is an artificial dilemma of the West's own making, at the urging of the Saudists and Lesser Gulfies and the Erdogists of Turkey.
The West including America should simply switch sides and back the Syrian Arab Government, Hezbollah, Iran and Iraqi Shiistan in helping the SAG crush the cannibal headchopper rebellion by all means necessary and/or convenient. Let the Saudi/Gulfie/Tayippi investment in the so-called "moderate" so-called "opposition" be completely destroyed and incinerated.
If Tunisia gets the electric transmission infrastructure into Europe totally in place, then when neighboring countries build vastly huger solar farms on small fractions of their vastly huger territories, they might well choose to sell and deliver their current over those already-established Tunisia-Europe lines. Production profits for the Big Solar Farmers, transmission profits for Tunisia, more Zero Carbon electricurrent for Europe.
And it bears repeating . . . some of the vast quantities of electricurrrent generated by day could be used to split water into oxygen and hydrogen, and store the hydrogen in huge pressure tanks or caverns or whatever, and burn it back into water every night to re-extract the energy-of-electrolysis and send that electicurrent out over the very same Tunisia-Europe power lines.
Et Viola' ! Ze night-time intermittency problem, she is le' Solve!
Once Morocco gets those plants built, Morocco could then demonstrate a solution to the "storage problem" by using electricity to electrolize water and store the hydrogen just like natural gas till sundown and then after sundown re-oxidize the hydrogen to get back the energy invested in electrolyzing the water. The energy "get-back" could be extracted as electricity.
One good thing about such a march is that the marchers could see how many marchers there are, and take heart in numbers depending on the numbers. Another good thing is for marchers to meet eachother and exchange contact information and discuss about what to do on all the ordinary days between marches.
Make all your meat and dairy grass/pasture/range-fed. The multi-species pasture under cattle bio-sequesters more carbon in the roots and soil than the cattle vent into the air at every stage combined.
I would rather see us reach $5-7 /gallon gas through peaceful taxation than through ISIS sabotage against oilfields.
Eric Margolis observes Maliki to be an American sock puppet? Based on what? His massive backing and support from Iran? His disdain for America's hopes that he would integrate the Sons Of Iraq into Iraqi paid security forces/army/etc. as the US strongly hoped and thought had been negotiated? His refusal to grant the SOFA that the American government so badly wanted so the American government could keep troops there?
I am not impressed with the so-called 'astutefulness' of Eric Margolis's 'observationalizing'.
Whole sections of the security system in Iraq have been thoroughly Malikified. This new guy would have to wage and win a very nasty and possibly bloody purge of Maliki's legacy organizations if he hoped to force their defeated remnants into any sort of respect or even politeness whatsoever towards the Sunni Arab Iraqis. I don't claim enough expertise to predict whether he will purge the Malikists out of their lairs and bunkers, or whether he even can.
You use fossil fuels every time you use a computer. How about you stop first to show the Unitarians how its done?
In fact, reading boing boing might be considered so self-targettingly dangerous as to increase one's "edgy-cred" even more than reading Noam Chomsky. Any American visiting Europe might find "boing-boing" opening as many doors as Chomsky's dropped name its-own-self.
Any boing-boing readers reading this post who stop reading boing-boing will be tagged as motivated by fear or caution and therefor as having something to be fearful or cautious about. Therefor any such boingboinger who suddenly stops will be targetted for twice as much double plus ultra super duper NSA surveillance. So you might as well keep reading boing-boing regardless.
I can imagine al Maliki laughing and thinking " if they want me to resign, let them come over here and resign me".
I don't see our governators showing any belief in "national soveriegnty". The whole Free Trade Agenda is designed to destroy what national soveriegnty we had, and TTP and TTIP as well as any other such naftazoidal agreements are designed to destroy the very last traces of economic and political soveriegnty not yet destroyed.
What we have is simple carbon capture of government and the exploitation of carbon concerns in political culture-wars.
If we abolished all free trade agreements and restored national economic soveriegnty protectionist exceptionalism, then we would be able to take unilateral carbon reduction steps protected by our ability to exclude imports or even economic relations entirely with emerging carbon dumpers like China and many others.
Since NOxs and methane and CFC-type compounds and black carbon soot have more global warming impact per molecule than
CO2 does, and since those releases represent pure waste and loss of the molecules involved, perhaps it would make sense to try cutting their emissions to zero soonest while working through the political difficulties of CO2 reduction. We could also suck down more CO2 and sequester it in plant/soil systems with better encouragement and management of plant growth all over the world.
Cam, the offshoring of industry was engineered by the Free Tradists in power. Normal Americans did not ask for that. Since that production overseas releases more carbon than what the equivalent production used to release here, the solution to that problem would be to abrogate all free trade agreements, withdraw from all free trade treaties and organizations, restore protectionism, and re-onshore all our captive production-in-exile.
Free trade makes carbon skydumping reduction within America hard-to-impossible. Don't believe it? Keep free trade and see what happens.
Oslo Diplomacy and post-Oslo sincerity may have worked under Rabin. The Revisionists were very afraid that it would work which is why they engineered the Rabin assassination.
If the Lesser Israel Liberal-Laborists can't smash down the Greater Israel axis of Likud/Lieberman/Bennett/price taggers and destroy its power all the way to zero, then that Greater Israel axis will never permit Rabbi Bar-El's theory or any other theory to be reach successful application. The Greater Israel axis will either be smashed down by internal or external forces, or else it will win.
And not only that . . . but a hexagon is also formed of six lines of equal length too! Eerier and eerier.
Is Boko Haram a jihadista group with criminal elements? Or a crime group with jihadista elements? If it is mainly jihadista, it will never sell the girls back to Nigeria, lest Nigeria permit them to go back to school. If it is mainly criminal, it may sell the girls back if the price is high enough. And then do the same thing over and over again.
Acting peaceful makes sense until the girls are back or it is clear they never will be. At the end of either of those two outcomes, the Boko Haram problem will be solved by the systematic extermination of every Boko Haram member. Stalin was sometimes right.
I believe a radical settler group decided it did not like Netanyahu's participation in any peace process (however derisory in reality). They have decided to perpetrate "deflection attacks" against designated hostages every time the government does not support the radical settlers as strongly as they wish. They hope to destroy relations between Israel and the Catholic Church, the US, etc. by creating more and more hate, rage, and eventual blowback.
Do Israelis against "price tag" outnumber Israelis for "price tag"?
I don't know. But even if there are, they are not ready to wage and win the Total Civil War against Israelis for "price tag" which would be necessary to crush and eliminate "price tag" activities and price tag supporters.
Even if such a Boycott Fossil Carbon movement is not quickly effective, it can be an organizing motivator for many people over time. Those people can begin to discuss parallel solutions and approaches to run concurrently with the BFC effort.
Perhaps the role of human support of plantlife all over the above-sea-level earth may also be considered. Much carbon has been gassed from soil into the sky over the last couple centuries. Can managing land guided by new knowledge start a process of plantlife/soil carbon restoration sufficient to suck some of the excess carbon back down out of the sky and re-store it in millions of square miles of plants and soil-under-plants?
Canadian blogger Jeff Wells at his Rigorous Intuition blog was inspired by the Israel/Hezbollah war to write a post about the assassination of Rabin. There was good reason to think a Rabin-led Israel would have followed Oslo in good faith to reach a peace a peace with Palestine after. There was good reason to think that the Israeli right wing thought so too. Wells goes into how powerful right wing forces within Israel designed and executed the Rabin assassination using Yigal Amir as their disposable "lone gunman". The goal was to take over Israel in order to renege on Oslo in order to drive more violence in order to right-wingify the Israeli electorate.
http://rigint.blogspot.com/2006/07/violent-bear-it-away.html
I voted against McCain/Palin in 2008 because I suspected McCain's primary desire was to start a war with Iran to show that we could win such a war, the way we were winning the Vietnam War and would have won it if it hadn't been for those meddling kids.
Support for Saudi Arabia is a mystery? Huge oil and huge money. Where's the mystery?
If Saudi Arabia deployed stuff like this on 50,000 square miles of the Empty Quarter, they could become the . . . uhh . . . "Saudi Arabia of solar energy."
And so could Iran and Iraq and Egypt and Libya and Algeria and Morocco and and and . . .
Much of the problem occurrs at the topmost layer of the "one percent". How much of "the one percent's " income goes to the opoop (one percent of one percent)? How much of it goes to an even smaller fraction of people called the opoopoop (one percent of one percent of one percent)?
Also, what percent of the nations medicare taxes does the one percent pay? What percent of the nation's SS FICA taxes does the one percent pay?
Obama has no more elections left to run for. He is strictly working for the highest possible private sector payoffs and paybacks after he leaves office. Based on his goals and record to date, I think he will okay the Keystone XL Pipeline Northern Half.
The last time Israel's liberals tried that, Israel's conservatives assassinated Prime Minister Rabin.
It is not pleasant to think that the only way for Israel's liberals to guide Israeli policy would be to wage and win a civil war against Israel's conservatives. But is there anything else that would work?
There is a semi-leftwing econoblog called Naked Capitalism which has run posts on ACA among other subjects.
Some of those posts analyze in great detail the various hidden traps and restriction of access to degraded care which the Insurance Industry very carefully wrote into the law. The readers might ask themselves why Justice Roberts performed so many legal-logic contortions to uphold ACA (especially the Forced Mandate) when he realized it would not get 5 other Justices to uphold it without his help.
It is easy enough to go to Naked Capitalism and find those posts and comments.
Corporate takeover, monopolizatin, and subversion to private profit and control purposes also threatens the existence of free information exchange and access on the internet.
I read a critical post against TPP on Naked Capitalism recently, and one of the TPP provisions which the Obama Group is trying so hard to keep secret is a provision to permit private corporate owners of anything to do with internet transmission a free and high hand to prevent or remove any content or item at all which they please to prevent or remove.
For example, if I understand this provision right, under TPP the private owners of whatever cables or pipes or tubes this blog and these comments travel on . . . would have the perfect right to pre-ban or ban and remove your every post concerning global warning, carbon wean-off, etc. At least now, before TPP, the NSA can only record every keystroke and keystroker.
Actually, my understanding was that France and Italy in particular pushed hardest for this right from the start because they feared a huge influx of Lybian refugees. We went along with the Franco/Italian request and lent our particular military abilities to it.
It seems to me that most, or maybe almost all of the civilian drone deaths are due to the CIA's own drone program
and few or almost none being due to the Military's own drone program. They are two separate programs. If my understanding is correct, would cancelling the CIA's own drone program solve a lot of the problem?
He should not get them. At the very least the NYTimes should invite Iyad Alawi to write an equal-billing guest editorial about the nature of al Maliki's rule and methods of governance. And how al Maliki came to have so much power over Iraqi government to begin with.
Her base is latte' liberals, perrier populists, silk and satin socialists, etc.
Her base was just fine with "Impeachment is off the table."
I would agree with careful use of terms. If our killing level in Iraq was genocide, then the Civil War was genocide against the Confederacy, considering that something like 10 per cent of all men in the Confederate States were killed.
If the Civil War wasn't genocide, then the Iraq War 2.0 wasn't genocide either.
We can thank Pelosi and Obama specifically and by name for that lack of prosecutions.
"Impeachment is off the table". I would call it the Pelosi-CheneyBush Administration.
These are the same industrial strip-fishmining fleets which destroyed the Newfoundland Cod fishery too.
The policies of the DLC Free Trade NAFTAcratic Party have been more detrimental to working class white Americans than anything the Tea Party has achieved so far. I wonder how many Tea Party supporters were primed for Tea Partyism by having their jobs exported and lives destroyed by the Free Trade Mass-Jobicide of the last few decades? If we are really looking to blame somebody for the rise of Tea Partyism,
do the Free Trade Clintocrats deserve some of that blame?
If solar farms in the SouthWest could be built to reliably
provide as much power as all the dams in the West provide, and wired into the Western Grid; then the solar farms could provide power by day and the dams by night. That would allow for storing more water behind the dams to be even more sure of having enough to use through the night.
A few posts ago I left a comment linking to a Counterpunch article about how the Obama Administration has re-written Administrative and Agency rules to greenlight and redball a whole spider-webwork of pipelines leading from the tar sands, "around" the Keystone XL Northern Half proposal area, and linking up to the northern end of Keystone Southern Half or to other pipelines going right straight to refineries and/or coastal ports.
Obama will keep tactically delaying decision on "Keystone Northern Half" as part of his strategy of tricking the 350 activists into thinking stopping Keystone matters, and diverting their attention from the Huge Pipeline Web Workaround which Obama is assisting various oil companies in getting built. Once Obama is satisfied that the other workaround-pipelines are able to carry as much oil as Keystone Northern Half would have carried, then he will announce that it is "cancelled" and the 350 activists will be allowed to congratulate themselves on their "victory".
Aren't a majority of Jewish Israelis descended from North African and SouthWest Asian heritage groups nowadays? If so, wouldn't a majority of Israeli soldiers be descended from North African and SouthWest Asian heritage groups? (Unless the Gorbachev-and-after era Soviet/Russian influx changed those numbers again?)
I see that someone up above beat me to pointing out that this could all be a sneaky bait-and-switch kabuki dance between Obama and the Republicans where the Republicans will drop "defund Obamacare" at the last minute in return for Obama supporting "degrade and attrit Social Security" the way he has tried to ever since getting elected.
If Obama and the Republicans pull off this Grand Deceit, enough Democratic Senators will support the Republican Senators in passing "destroy Social Security" to get it passed. Obama will then sign it into law. Let's all watch out for that.
I read recently an article at resilience.org saying that Bill McKibben either knowingly or unknowingly uses "stop Keystone XL!" as a decoy to keep climate change activists wasting their time and energy and failing to think about how to lower use of carbon fuels in general, including thinking about how to force the issue of political-economic changes to make it possible. And the Obama Administration cleverly delays decision on Keystone XL to keep the activists thinking they are achieving something and to keep rope-a-doping them.
Here is an article from Counterpunch about how the Obama Administration works with the oil industry to green-light and speed-up construction of a whole webwork of pipelines that will bypass the whole "Keystone Northern Half" planned pipeline area. Once the whole pipeline workaround network is completely built, all the oil that would have moved through Keystone XL Northern Half will move through these other pipelines anyway. Obama will then pretend to surrender on Keystone XL after it doesn't matter anyway, and McKibben and the 350 group will be permitted to think they have won something. Here is the link.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/09/09/the-flip-side-of-obamas-keystone-xl-delay/
AIPAC may be even more narrow than just an Israel Lobby in general. It may be a Likud Lobby in particular. It may have been penetrated and captured by Likudists ever since the Begin Prime-Ministership. It may even be involved in funding and supporting the Likudists and further-rightists within Israel itself to "keep Israel Likud" and keep "Greater Israel" on the table. Do those possibilities deserve some research?
By the way, I am surprised that Representative Ellison is in fact pro al Quaeda and wants to create an al Quaeda government in Syria in order to exterminate a million or more Syrian Alawites and a million or more Syrian Christians. I thought he was a more moderate Muslim than that.
If some of the Tahrir Revolutionaries 1.0 were opposed to al Sisi's call and were quick enough on their feet; they could have pretended to support it and eagerly yelled: "Where do you want us to gather to show our numbers?" And then they could all hav avoided that spot.
If they don't want their children serving in the Army, they could have their children doing National Service, like counting sewage or breaking rocks or whatever.
Here might well be an eleventh way that certain modern foods or modern methods of eating them are specifically making us fat. It is in an article called Is Sugar Toxic?
and is about the possibility that one particular sugar in particular, called fructose; is uniquely obesogenic. Fructose comes from HiFructose Corn Syrup and ALSO from SUCROSE which is also called "cane sugar". Every sucrose molecule divides in the intestine into a glucose molecule and a fructose molecule, and the fructose molecules from "cane sugar" are just as obesogenic as the fructose molecules from HiFructose Corn Syrup. Here is the link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/magazine/mag-17Sugar-t.html?ref=magazine&pagewanted=all&_r=0moc.semityn.www
An energy-engineering-and-efficiency commentator blognamed Engineer Poet runs a blog called The Ergosphere. He has discussed the renewable-source-electricity storage problem in some of his posts. One of those posts (which I don't have the patience to try finding) notes that while we can't easily store electricity, we can store some of the things it does. He gives the example of windpower in Holland. When windpower-electricity is excess to ongoing power use needs, that windpower-excess is diverted to Holland's deepfreeze foodstorage warehouses to chill them even colder than the safe deepfrozen temperature. When the windpower dies down, those deepfrozen foodstorage warehouses can cruise on stored superchill for several to many hours, warming "up" to a still-safe very cold temperature. Then they draw conventional power through the grid from conventional sources to stay at that still-safe temperature until there is another windpower surplus which can superchill them back to even-colder-than the safe storage temperature. In essence, these deepfreeze warehouses are being used as "super-chill storage batteries", storing the cold which windpower electricity produced.
http://ergosphere.blogspot.com/
(Engineer Poet also supports various in-his-mind new and improved nuclear power technologies. I hope that doesn't scare or repel anti-nuclear people from reading all the rest of his work).
And a thought occurred to me: renewably produced electricity could be used to electrolyze water into oxygen and hydrogen and the hydrogen could be stored until needed for electricity generation by fuel-celling it or conventionally burning it to turn turbines.
Didn't the Insider Republican Party inspire and organize and bring out these Tea Party activists to begin with? And now the Republican Inner Party members don't like where their proteges are going?
Too bad. So sad.
They have filled their toilet. Now let them swim in it. Or drown in it. Or flush themselves down, as the case may be.
Reality is the stuff that stays real, no matter how hard one tries to wish it away, or pray it away. People who expect to live for several more decades either will or won't feel the effects of global warming, depending on whether it is or isn't really happening.
So make your choice and make your plans. "Him who is not surprised when the future comes, lives very close to the truth."
There's nothing wrong with the Global Warmocaust Deniers that a few F6 and F7 tornados full of melon-sized hailstones won't cure.
That seems to be more of a diversion than a reply. If we went metric and measured hurricane windspeed in metric, but still left Cat5 open ended from X kph-Infinity kph, we would still have the same problem of information-hiding openendedness of the Cat5 category.
The metric system is just a silly legacy of the French Revolution. It bears no more relation to reality than the customary culture-rooted measuremement systems it affects to replace.
We here in America have gone as metric as we need to. We have metrified science and pharmacy and so forth. Dividing the temperature range between the freezing and boiling points of water into one hundred degrees is just as arbitrary as dividing it into 180 Farenheit degrees. And since the metric degrees are bigger and cruder, they mask finer grained detail which Farenheit degrees reveal and make
it possible to discuss.
I remember many years ago once meeting a visiting Soviet Professor of Economics here in Ann Arbor. We talked through a Ukrainian friend-of-mine interpreter. At some point he asked me when America would go metric. I offered the thought that America had a greater chance of going communist than going metric. I still think so. So there.
As hurricanes and tornados get bigger and better, perhaps
we need bigger and better ways to measure and describe them.
Currently the strength-category awarded to hurricanes tops out at C5 and the strength-category awarded to tornados tops out at F5. But that C5 and F5 are open ended and will be less specifically helpful as hurricanes and tornados get stronger.
So since every step up from Cat1 to Cat5 is like the rungs on a ladder, we should just add more rungs to the descriptive ladder. Since Cat3 is 111-129mph and Cat4 is
130-156mph, why make Cat5 be 157-Infinity mph? Why not cap out Cat5 at . . say . . 182mph? And make a new Cat6 class for 183-210mph? And a new Cat7 class for 211-235mph? And so on?
And why not do the same for tornados?
Two old-wisdom sayings: Reality is the stuff that remains real no matter how hard you believe otherwise. Also stated as "you can't bullshit the ocean. It's not listening." And . . . "him that is not surprised when the future comes lives very close to the truth."
I am planning my life in the expectation of a future of runaway Global Warming and Climate DeChaos Decay thanks to unrestrained carbon-loading of the atmoshphere. I gather you are planning on a future of no-such-thing happening. We shall see who lives "very close to the truth" and who will therefor "not be surprised when the future comes".
I will say this: if you are correct, then the Global is not really warming and will not warm, and none of the changes I expect to be happening will happen. If you are right and we are all wrong, you have a contrarian investing opportunity of historic dimensions lying at your feet. You should invest all the money you have, and all the money you can borrow, in raw land/ real estate/ REITs/ etc. based along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts . . . most especially in Florida/Alabama/Mississippi/Louisiana/Texas. When the oceans fail to rise the way we Global Warming Alarmists expect them to, you will have planted the seeds of a vast family fortune for your heirs to inherit. If you think you are right about the Climate Future, then I encourage you in the very strongest terms to put your money where your mouth claims to be.
I wrote a long comment and then erased it by hitting a wrong button. I don't have the patience to type it all again.
For possible solutions to carbon emmission problems I would suggest reading Peak Energy Blogspot and The Ergosphere and this low tech magazine article:http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2008/09/speed-energy.html
For possible solutions to the problem of sucking back down and bio-sequestering the carbon already in the air I would suggest googling words like biochar, eprida, CHAB unit
(Combined Heat And Biochar unit) etc. Here is an article about an approach to carbon-sequestering shrub-and-tree based protein and starch agriculture:http://energybulletin.net/stories/2012-07-25/woody-agriculture-road-new-paradigm
These changes can only be achieved by the sort of force
embodied in energy taxes (especially carbon emission taxes) eventually rising to punitive levels. People who wish to suggest that sort of thing will have to earn the personal credibility shown by reducing their own carbon footprint in their own daily lives as much as feasibly possible. Individual action will have no effect on carbon emmissions, but it will gain those individuals the credibility needed to be taken seriously when they discuss the sorts of society-wide forced changes which will have to be imposed on the unwilling and the uncaring in order to prevent further excess carbon release . . . and to suck down the carbon already released.
Perhaps we could speak of coal as being "mine-ufactured"
heh heh heh . . .
I haven't personally met any serious global warming deniers. If I ever do, I will suggest they think about the possibility that if they are right, they have a tremendous contrarian investing opportunity.
If the earth-surface ice-features are not melting and will not melt, and if the oceans are not rising and will not rise; then seaside coastal ocean-front land will not start going underwater. Such land would be a tremendous investment and would plant the seeds of future family fortunes when we global warming accepters discover that the global isn't warming after all. I encourage everyone to encourage all the deniers to put all the money they have into coastal property, most especially along the Gulf Coast.
If I could stand to listen to Limbaugh, I would try to get on his show by feigning ditto-headness so I could get all his listeners thinking about contrarian investments in global no-warming.
Nathan,
If you are correct in your belief that the global is not warming and will not warm, and that therefor the icecaps and glaciers are not melting and will not melt and the ocean is not rising and will not rise . . . you have a tremendous contrarian investing opportunity lying before you at your feet.
You should borrow all the money you can against all the pledgeable assets you have or will have, and use that money to buy oceanside seafront property in Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Gulf Coastal Florida, etc. When the ocean fails to rise just like the wise men at Von Mises assure you it will fail to do; you will have planted the seeds of a vast family fortune for your heirs.
So what are you waiting for? Buy seaside oceanfront coastal land today!
I have been thinking about an open-ended method of hurricane rating for a while now. I gather that every 50 mile-per-hour incremental increase in a hurricane's sustained windspeed gets it a higher number up to Five. So why not continue raising the rating by the same increments?
Every 50 mph increase gets another number. Also, why not rate hurricanes according to how "wide" they are? A hundred
mile wide hurricane could be assigned the letter A, a hundred and fifty mile wide hurricane could be given B, a two hundred mile wide hurricane could be given C, and on up.
So a huge low-windspeed hurricane could be a 1-G or a small
high-windspeed hurricane could be a 4-B, and so forth.
By the way, perhaps we should think about open-ended rating increases for tornados too. F6, F7, etc.; if tornados rotate faster than before.
Phil D, a popular science writer who wrote a little book of some clarity on the subject called Hothouse Earth ( by John Gribbin) might be a small part of what you want.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Hothouse-Earth-Greenhouse-Effect-Gaia/dp/0552994502 He is no Rachel Carson, but then, who is? Only Rachel Carson, and she's dead now. Other people have been writing books but I can't remember their names. There is someone who has been setting up timelapse photo-cameras overlooking various glaciers and icecaps to capture their growth or shrinkage, and so far he has been capturing mainly shrinkage. It is called the Extreme Ice Survey. http://www.extremeicesurvey.org/ One can look at the pictures of retreating ice in place after place to see the real effects made visible.
Ways exist to stimulate plant growth so as to suck down some of the airborn carbon and bio-sequester it either in plantmass or in and under the soil. Ways also exist to manage agriculture so as to raise the amount of persistent rootmass and humus below the soil surface. The problem is how to support using these methods over millions of square miles of ag-and-pasture/range land so as to suck down and bio-sequester billions of tons of carbon over millions of square miles of land area. But people can't begin to even think about driving carbon bio-sequestration unless they know it even exists and can be applied.
A first step might be for growing numbers of people to realize such a possibility actually exists. And offering pathways to information about it might help such growing numbers to realize it. Then they can think about how to drive the process a tiny bit by their own individual actions, and how to drive it harder by organized political and economic pressure.
So here are a few links to bio-sequestration possibilities. First, a very elementary Wiki-Overview:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosequestration
Then, terra preta: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta
and biochar: http://www.biochar-international.org/
Finally, a researcher with a company has been studying mycorrhizae and micorrhizal production of humus-precursors in the soil around their host plantroots as a way to increase soil humus loads. Just because he has based a company around his researches does not automatically make him suspect, I don't think.
http://www.soilsecrets.com/Soil%20Secrets%20Success%20Stories%204.pdf
http://www.sustainableabq.com/green_xeriscape.htm
I believe that Prince alWaleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia is the next-largest owner of NewsCorp (Fox News's parent) after the Murdoch Family their own selves. Shortly after Fox hyped up the fakey controversy over that South Manhattan
Islamic center, various people wondered why Prince bin Talal
would continue supporting such a company by owning so much of it?
Well, I theorize that the Prince wishes to see Saudi Arabia remain able to sell gigabucks worth of oil to the boilers, engines, and furnaces of the world. And since Fox News does such good work clouding the global warming issues and delaying public demand for a solution to the problem; Prince bin Talal must find the money that Fox helps assure that both he and Saudi Arabia will continue making from oil to be worth the minor embarrassment of being caught co-owning a Muslim-bashing media property.
Oh! if only someone reading this comment were able to influence the Prince's thought-processes directly! That person could persuade the Prince to decide that global warming really is just as fake as Fox says it is. That person could further persuade the Prince to buy millions of acres of beachfront oceanside property all over the world so as to make a killing when the oceans fail to rise. Thus would justice be served.
If it takes a 2-opposing-teams contest about a situation to get ordinary Americans to take interest in the situation; then perhaps a place to introduce some team-versus-team conflict would be within the Democratic Party itself. If a genuinely "cut and run from Afghanistan" primary challenger were to fight Team Obama for the 2012 Democratic Nomination, and fight in the rudest and most unsportsmanly way possible;
then public onlookers might decide to take an interest in rooting for one team or the other. If Team CutAndRun were actually able to defeat and destroy Team Obama for the 2012 DemPres nomination, then the Democratic presidential campaign team would become Team CutAndRun. The Republicans would become Team StayTheCourse. Americans would have a choice of which team to root for and which team to root against. The Afghan War would become an important football field for political sports fans all over America. It could become the World Superbowl Series of political grudge fights.
The political-effectiveness difficulties which Luke Ryan cites probably concern enough millions of people that those millions of people could have a system-redirecting impact if they gave up on ineffective methods and found some effective methods instead. I don't know for sure what those methods would be. They would have to be diffuse and non-illegal to avoid meeting with immediate repression from the authorities. I suspect those methods would have to involve millions of changes of personal economic behavior by millions of those concerned people. Perhaps millions of little changes might cause a big shift if the changes are the right changes. Suppose, for example, that 50 million people who imagine themselves to be "peace-minded" were to
stop using credit cards for all but emergency uses? How much revenue would cease to flow to the major credit companies? How inspiring and hope-generating might their visible loss of size and power be?
Such a "shift the system" movement might develop a culture of passive-aggression,
sullen rejection, uncivil obedience and so forth; designed to slowly erode certain carefully selected pillars of system and regime power. At the same time, people who see eachother engaging in such passive-aggressive peacefully obstructive behavior might also support eachother in creating parallel mini-cultural and mini-economic spaces and systems.
How many people voted for a Representative in this district in 2008? And how many people voted for a representative in this district in 2010? And did people who
voted for the D candidate last time come out and vote for Shimkus this time? Or did
D voters from election 2008 not come out and vote this time? And if not, why not?
Someone should take the time to ask all those millions of D-voters of 2008 who did not vote at all this time what their reasons for not voting were. Actual research would give us information which mere speculation can never yield. Since I voted, I am not qualified to say why the non-voters non-voted. They will have to be asked.
One hopes that Shimkus is defeated for Chairman of the Energy Committee. But that is up to his fellow Republicans.
Those states, cities, regions, etc.; which voted for Climate Change Realists in their own non-federal-level localities will just have to try crafting energy conservation policies and actions in their own areas in the teeth of ferocious federal resistance and obstruction against every effort to conserve energy and lower fossil carbon use. Perhaps commenters on this thread might offer some ideas and resources for helping people in the Blue Zones to de-fossilize the energy supply sources for economic activity
within their own Blue Zones.
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