The Gaming Den

PhoneLobster wrote:

Koumei wrote:we'll miss your incompetence.

This is "The Mad Monk" we are talking about here.

I don't think you'll be missing out on any incompetence.

Hell you won't even be missing out on the insane arrogance Turnbull was famed for.

Like Cthulhu said, Tony Fucking Abbott!.

Oh yeah, this is going to be good. and by good, I mean comedy awful.

The Family: DC’s C Street Group Tied To Proposed Death Penalty for Gays in Uganda

Just so we’re clear - there are members of Congress who are part of a secret organization that, as part of its religious agenda, endorses killing people for being gay.

And Rick Warren is totally cool with it. The guy that Obama had give his inaugural prayer as a "bipartisan gesture" mentored and supported several of the people in Uganda who are now trying to kill and imprison people for being gay. Kind of makes all of your crowing about the "abortion holocaust" look like a big ol' crock of shit, doesn't it, Rick?

Keep it classy, Republicans.

The Jawa Report: Breaking News: Boobies Are Popular

They reference Slate: kausfiles.com

It references the Weekly Standard

It doesn't get any linkier than this. ...

After all, The Huffington Post is run by a stand-up, professional, liberal, feminist woman—Arianna Huffington. Surely, her site would be irreproachable on such matters.

"So, what do nipple slips and boob jobs have to do with liberal politics?"--Amanda Hess, Washington City Paper

Similarly, let's not call Huffington Post a "news" site, let's call it ... I don't know, a "views" site. Not opinion & news but opinion & news & newsy nudity! Sort of like a laundromat/bar or bookstore/coffeeshop. If that gives Arianna a competitive advantage over her more prudish, anti-objectification competitors ... well, maybe that's where the market will go.

Maybe where the market will go?

Are you kidding me?

First rule of blogging is and always will be: Tits = Hits baby.

I'm not sure how that's news.

Have you looked at CNN lately?

-Crissa

LGF founder tzors about his faction.

-Crissa

Crissa wrote:LGF founder tzors about his faction.

-Crissa

And another Conservative jumps off the Crazy Train. Probably for the best - he'd be getting purged from the party soon enough anyways.

I'm really surprised about the Little Green Footballs guy jumping off the crazy train, because he was quite a contributor to the Glen Beckesque denialosphere.

Pajama Media has been an invaluable source of completely batshit rightwing crazy since its founding. To have one of the founders come out and say "Whoah guys! Y'all just got too crazy." is kind of profound.

-Username17

Well, technically he's always censored posts and comments for language and made fun of the teabaggers' ignorance. It's just that when he took on Pam Geller of Atlas Shrugged for supporting violent racism his racist posters felt unwelcome there. He has even taken on Glen Beck post-CNN and been referred to on his show as 'that crazy blogger Johnson'.

Remember, just because he's not okay with openly racist language and splitting brown people and gay people's heads doesn't mean he thinks that oppression equals paying more taxes or having less functional rights.

-Crissa

Senator Ben Nelson (D-NE) puts forth suggestion of how to balance the war-spending deficit.

No, no one I've read has a clue how this balances the budget. Maybe the military pays the bonds back with winning from the war or something. Sell off Afghanistan?

-Crissa

Former Republican House Speaker Charged With Felony Assault After Sexual Encounter

Millions in U.S. Drink Dirty Water, Records Show

ACORN Report Finds No Illegal Conduct

And probably the most interesting story today: Russian Secret Service Responsible For "ClimateGate"

Why is Russia interested in perpetuating global warming? Because the melting ice in the polar ice cap is opening new shipping lanes to Canada that are a hell of a lot faster and thus more lucrative for Russians. Not to mention the prospect of all that land in Siberia actually becoming great farming land. As such there are forces in the Russian government and business community who are actively cheering on global warming because it allow their country to exploit more of their natural resources.

There's also the fact that that Russia is a massive exporter of oil and natural gas, and Putin is a multi-multi billionaire because he’s used the KGB before to leverage himself in the oil and gas industry:

Putin “effectively” controls 37% of the shares of Surgutneftegaz, an oil exploration company and Russia’s third biggest oil producer, worth $20bn, he says. He also owns 4.5% of Gazprom, and “at least 75%” of Gunvor, a mysterious Swiss-based oil trader, founded by Gennady Timchenko, a friend of the president’s, Belkovsky alleges. Asked how much Putin was worth, Belkovsky said: “At least $40bn. Maximum we cannot know. I suspect there are some businesses I know nothing about.” He added: “It may be more. It may be much more".

Yes, this is the stupidest thing ever, but it would explain why Russian secret service would be involved in trying to fuck over AGW research. Anyways - there are a lot more dollars going to into the argument to discredit climate science than dollars going to fund climate science.

So we're basically fucked, I guess.

FrankTrollman wrote:Should we get rid of Evangelicals? Absolutely. But it has to be done slowly and carefully, because it's a nasty tumor. Abrogating freedom of expression is the equivalent of shooting the patient to get at that tumor.

This is actually exactly a parallel of the war on terror. Should we stop terrorists from blowing shit up, yes. Should we do it by giving up all our rights, fuck no. The terrorism fear mongering is exactly the opposite of how religious fanatics should be dealt with.

Trying to suppress evangelicals won't work and in the process tramples on freedoms. The right way to do it is even handed laws that ban bullshit and enforced public education. You don't need an honour killings law, just enforce the existing anti-killing law.

For the "How the fuck was this guy the top legal voice in the country?" file:

[url=http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2009_12/021378.php wrote:Alberto Gonzalas[/url]]We should have abandoned the idea of removing the U. S. attorneys once the Democrats took the Senate. Because at that point we could really not count on Republicans to cut off investigations or help us at all with investigations. We didn't see that at the Department of Justice. Nor did the White House see that. Karl didn't see it. If we could do something over again, that would be it.

And from the 'Why couldn't the media have reported on this years ago?' file:

[url=http://www.slate.com/id/2237789/ wrote:Al Gore[/url]]"[W]e're putting 90 million tons of it into the air today and we'll put a little more of that up there tomorrow. The physical relationship between CO2 molecules and the atmosphere and the trapping of heat is as well-established as gravity, for God's sakes. It's not some mystery. One hundred and fifty years ago this year, John Tyndall discovered CO2 traps heat, and that was the same year the first oil well was drilled in Pennsylvania. The oil industry has outpaced the building of a public consensus of the implications of climate science.

"But the basic facts are incontrovertible. What do they [global warming deniers] think happens when we put 90 million tons up there every day? Is there some magic wand they can wave on it and presto! -- physics is overturned and carbon dioxide doesn't trap heat anymore? And when we see all these things happening on the Earth itself, what in the hell do they think is causing it? The scientists have long held that the evidence in their considered word is 'unequivocal,' which has been endorsed by every national academy of science in every major country in the entire world.

"If the people that believed the moon landing was staged on a movie lot had access to unlimited money from large carbon polluters or some other special interest who wanted to confuse people into thinking that the moon landing didn't take place, I'm sure we'd have a robust debate about it right now."

Emphasis mine.

-Crissa

Crissa wrote:And from the 'Why couldn't the media have reported on this years ago?'

Holy shit Batman that's like ... wait a minute I seem to be channeling Dr. Evil here, I mean why worry about billions (natural CO2 emissions) when we can worry about millions.

Wikipedia "Natural sources of carbon dioxide are more than 20 times greater than sources due to human activity, but over periods longer than a few years natural sources are closely balanced by natural sinks such as weathering of continental rocks and photosynthesis of carbon compounds by plants and marine plankton."

I love this quote (I'm really not sure it's true but I'm inclined to go along with it unless proven otherwise just because I like the rain forest ecosystem) "Land use change (mainly deforestation in the tropics) account for up to one third of total anthropogenic CO2 emissions."

That would explain all the seas turning into dead carbonated water and the melting of the permafrost releasing untold billions of tons of greenhouse gases.

Oh, wait, it doesn't.

You do realize that it doesn't matter that you'd pouring sand on a beach on a lake and the beach adds and subtracts more sand than you added: You're adding sand to the beach. The beach will get bigger. The lake will get smaller.

Or are you arguing that the millions of tons put out by people hasn't added up? Or that the atmosphere doesn't contain more CO2 than at any time in written history? Or that...

What exactly, are you adding to the conversation?

-Crissa

PS: Emissions of CO2 by human activities are currently more than 130 times greater than the quantity emitted by volcanoes, amounting to about 27 billion tonnes per year.[37]
What's a few billion tons of toxic gas between friends?

Crissa, I think he was saying that deforestation is the biggest cause of Global Nasty Weather.

Crissa wrote:I'm not sure how that's news.

Have you looked at CNN lately?

CNN? Have you looked at Fox News ever? The channel is soft-core porn masquerading as news on a regular basis.

That was my point, Neeek.

-Crissa

deforestation is nearly entirely human-made. I don't see how that could help tzor's point at all.

Tzor's traditional response to all discussions of global warming is to cherry pick some completely random quotes and throw them out like they mean something in an attempt to encourage the idea that there is "controversy" over whether global warming:

• happens.
• is man made.
• is bad.

None of those three are under any serious debate in any serious scientific communities. There are lots of things that are under debate, like whether the ocean's oxygen producing plankton can evolve to the new higher carbonic acid levels in the ocean as fast as we're changing those levels; or what the best way to produce power for industry and civilian use in a carbon-neutral manner is. But despite right wing hysteria on the subject, and I do mean hysteria, those three big ones are pretty well decided.

-Username17

What is Tzor saying? Sometimes even Tzor doesn’t know. Fortunately this is not one of those times. So let’s get back to the original statement of Al Gore and his “Global Warming” problem: CO2 is the significant (if not the only) cause of “global warming” and all manmade increases are due to fossil fuel output in industrial nations. This is the driving statement that underlies such insane tax regimens like “cap and trade.”

This is the clause that drives me crazy. Clearly we had experienced a period of global warming. (Are we currently experiencing a period of global cooling? Like the stupid question of when we are “in” and “out” of a recession, ask me ten years from now.) Clearly CO2 is a factor in global warming. But how much of a factor and is there indeed a real “panic” that the world will end?

Crissa wrote:That would explain all the seas turning into dead carbonated water and the melting of the permafrost releasing untold billions of tons of greenhouse gases.

I’m sorry, I had thought it was due to nitrogen. At least this is true in the Gulf of Mexico, fertilizer from big animal factories have been dumping nitrogen into the water which in turn leads to blooms that take all the oxygen out of the water (replacing it with CO2) and in turn leading to massive sea like kills.

The melting of the permafrost is releasing methane. Now that’s a real global warming gas, more dangerous than CO2 in terms of trapping heat.

Crissa wrote:Or that the atmosphere doesn't contain more CO2 than at any time in written history? Or that...

Written history? Open your mind Crissa, not only is the earth older than written history, man is older than written history. Carbon Dioxide through Geologic Time: “Since of the Earth's atmosphere is out-of-balance with the conditions expected from simple chemical equilibrium, it is very hard to say what precisely sets the level of the carbon dioxide content in the air throughout geologic time. While scientists are fairly certain that a 100 million years ago carbon dioxide values were many times higher than now, the exact value is in doubt. In very general terms, long-term reconstructions of atmospheric CO2 levels going back in time show that 500 million years ago atmospheric CO2 was some 20 times higher than present values. It dropped, then rose again some 200 million years ago to 4-5 times present levels--a period that saw the rise of giant fern forests--and then continued a slow decline until recent pre-industrial time.”

Meanwhile, back to my original point, which I am pretty sure I had.

The earth goes through a series of global warming and cooling cycles. Some green house gases (CO2 and methane) may play a role and might influence those cycles. Various effects of man (more than just simple fossil fuel emissions) can also have a significant impact on the cycles. (Of course they also have a significant impact on the planet itself, not related in any way with the state of global temperatures. Deforestation of the rain forest is BAD. Fertilizer pollution of the oceans by modern agriculture is BAD. Coal fired plants spreading acid rain everywhere is BAD.)

Somewhere in Africa there is a hospital that, led by the “Global Warming” crisis instilled by the industrial nations and the UN, has only a single solar powered system which can barely sustain their single refrigerator which is needed to keep drugs and other things at proper temperature. They don’t even have enough power for lights. Meanwhile, another “developing” nation, China, spews out CO2 like crazy, while the world demands more and more “hush money” from a nation (The United States) that is already so deep in debt it is practically owned by China.

So, let’s put this in terms that Frank can understand. What we have here is a patient in an emergency room; he’s overweight, a smoker, drank like a fish and hasn’t exercised in god knows when; he has high blood pressure, high levels of bad cholesterol, and currently has significant blockage in the heart. Given this situation, having an all out war with the red wine industry is not the most productive way to treat the patient.

Tzor wrote:What is Tzor saying? Sometimes even Tzor doesn’t know. Fortunately this is not one of those times. So let’s get back to the original statement of Al Gore and his “Global Warming” problem: CO2 is the significant (if not the only) cause of “global warming” and all manmade increases are due to fossil fuel output in industrial nations. This is the driving statement that underlies such insane tax regimens like “cap and trade.”

Ahhh... so you're strawmanning Al Gore. That's depressingly familiar territory.

Just a head's up: Al Gore never once said that burning a log didn't put carbon dioxide into the air, nor would it in any way affect the logic of incentivizing reductions in Carbon Dioxide Emissions if he did. That entire thesis statement is just completely logically wrong, because it sets up an argument for you to attack that your environmentalist opponents are not making.

• Carbon Dioxide is a destabilizing chemical to the atmosphere, and among its harmful effects is the fact that it is a decently powerful greenhouse gas.
• Anthropogenic sources of Carbon Dioxide, including the burning of fossil fuels have blatantly and measurably exceeded the Earth's capacity to absorb Carbon Dioxide, resulting in atmospheric increases in CO2 levels that are alarming.
• Placing absolute caps on Carbon Dioxide emissions and allowing corporations to buy and sell space within the target levels is a time honored method to convince corporations to reduce emissions and to invest in research and infrastructure that will further reduce Carbon emissions. Similar strategies have been employed with Sulfur to reasonable success.
• Cap-n-Trade is a capitalist, market-driven solution to the problem, and the alternative is not "do nothing" it's use Communist or Fascist solutions instead.

-Username17

I would think written history is important here.

It documents the amount of climate change human civilization has been able to survive.

Modern humans have been on the planet making cities for at least 14000. That's a fourteen, with a thousand. We only have books for less than two thousand continuous, and even that's pushing it.

Or do you want another bronze age? Because that apparently happened and un-happened several times in human history.

-Crissa

No Frank, it’s not a straw man, it is the core difference.

• Carbon Dioxide is not a “destabilizing” chemical; it’s the whole key to the Carbon cycle that keeps aerobic life alive on this planet. It is a “greenhouse” gas but not a decently powerful one (that would be methane).
• Human activity (“sources” is a misnomer, since 1/3 of those sources is actually the destruction of the sink, not the increase of the source) has resulted in a slowly increasing rise in overall CO2 levels which had been slowly decreasing prior to the industrial age.
• Creating an artificial market in an artificial commodity and then putting that artificial commodity on a so called “open market” is a plan that only an Enron could come up with (oh wait, they did) and I am appalled that a intelligent atheistic communist like you, Frank, would dare praise such a ponzi scheme.
• Cap-n-Trade has failed in Europe! (Unless you were a speculator and then you won big time!) As we discover even more stranger ways in which to game the carbon cycle it gets even stranger. (They are now working on the details that would allow old fashioned dairy farmers who compost their fields and grass feed their cows to get credits because the grass is putting CO2 into the soil; never mind that cows also emit methane which is far worse than CO2 as a greenhouse gas!) Cap-n-Trade is not “Capitalist” it is “Ponzi.”

There is some evidence that we may be entering a global cooling phase, in which case a lot of my concern is significantly diminished as one cannot fool all of the people all of the time. My concern has always been that if CO2 is not the major cause of global warming and is indeed only a contributing factor, that minor changes to a contributing factor won’t do a hill of beans towards the problem and we would have spent decades not only spinning our wheels but backstabbing the economy which is the only way major world wide projects can be funded.

Crissa, we know a whole lot about humanity that goes well before written history; who moved where and how, for example. The ice bridge between Asia and the United States can be documented by population flow and not through written records. Humanity has “survived” both periods of warm and cold and has survived in both areas of heat and cold. More importantly, most of written history is full of crap information which is not even half useful or reliable. There is an old joke about the dark ages in Europe. During this time a great supernova occurred, the light was so bright as to be seen during the day. It lasted a very long time. This is recorded in locations from China to Africa. Ironically there is no mention of it whatsoever among the monks of Europe (the only ones who knew how to write at the time).

Historical question: What does “Vinland” mean? If you translate it as “wine land” you have grapes growing up in Canada in the Medieval Warm Period from AD 800-1300.

The earliest etymology of "Vinland" is found in Adam of Bremen's 11th Century Latin Descriptio insularum Aquilonis ("Description of the Northern Islands"): "Moreover, he has also reported one island discovered by many in that ocean, which is called Winland, for the reason that grapevines grow there by themselves, producing the best wine." (Praeterea unam adhuc insulam recitavit a multis in eo repertam occeano, quae dicitur Winland, eo quod ibi vites sponte nascantur, vinum optimum ferentes). The implication is that the first element is Old Norse vín (Latin vinum), "wine".

If you translate this as pasture land, then suddenly this example of extreme warm temperature in an extremely northern latitude (on the wrong side of the happy gulf stream … we are not talking Europe here) goes away from the equation. This is the “written” history we are talking about here and as you can see it is hardly reliable, even as heresay.

tzor wrote:Cap-n-Trade has failed in Europe! (Unless you were a speculator and then you won big time!) As we discover even more stranger ways in which to game the carbon cycle it gets even stranger. (They are now working on the details that would allow old fashioned dairy farmers who compost their fields and grass feed their cows to get credits because the grass is putting CO2 into the soil; never mind that cows also emit methane which is far worse than CO2 as a greenhouse gas!) Cap-n-Trade is not “Capitalist” it is “Ponzi.”

My understanding is the first run of it "failed" because they overestimated how many units to put on the market. This lead to it being undervalued, and then they proceeded to put out more carbon than normal. So, it's not that the system itself failed, but rather, it was executed poorly.

The nice thing about being the second people to try it is that we can learn from their mistakes.

Again, a wall of text and lies. Let's go after the most obvious and painful ones in this post, because you're operating at slightly better than one falsehood a sentence, making a point by point refutation take way longer than your bullshit screeds take to write.

Vinland? Seriously? You know that the same people named Greenland that as a PR move to try to get settlers to move there, right? Nova Scotia was a cold and shitty hell pit the whole time, naming it something that sounds Mediterranean does not change that.

But I think the most egregious piece of deception you got there is the idea that Cap-n-Trade is some sort of scam idea created by Enron. It is part of US Law already and has been since 1990. The discussion is not whether to have Cap-n-Trade or even whether it works. We've been doing Sulfur Dioxide emissions trading for nearly 20 years. And it can't have been invented by Enron, because Enron did not exist as such in 1990.

Honestly Tzor, I know you get all your information from Right-wing hack sites, but try to give your audience a little bit of credit. The rumor that Enron (1994) created Emissions Credit Trading (US Law in 1990) is simply not credible. I'm sure it sounds awful, but you seriously might as well be accusing Martin Luther King of having made a fortune in the 1987 S&L bailout. It fails on basic "before and after" comparisons.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote:But I think the most egregious piece of deception you got there is the idea that Cap-n-Trade is some sort of scam idea created by Enron.

Enron Sought Global Warming Regulation, Not Free Markets by Paul J. Georgia February 2, 2002

Enron became one of the biggest corporate boosters of the Kyoto global warming treaty, which would require huge reductions in energy use by consumers and industry. According to an internal Enron memo, quoted by The Washington Post, the Kyoto treaty would “do more to promote Enron’s business than almost any other regulatory initiative outside of restructuring the energy and natural gas industries in Europe and the United States.”

Next Bernie Madoff? Emissions Cap-and-Trade Aids the Corrupt, Hurts the Little Guy By William O'Keefe Posted April 13, 2009 (Also quotes the Washington Post quote.)

Albert Einstein once observed that things should be made as simple as possible but no simpler. The corollary is that policies should be made no more complex than necessary. Cap-and-trade, however, is excessively complex.