Disclaimer: The atmosphere is composed of about 78% Nitrogen and 21% Oxygen by volume. No other gas constitutes more than 1%. CO2 is, in fact, a trace gas representing approximately 0.04% of the volume of dry air in the atmosphere. Without a proper context, readers will fail to understand the true meaning of these CO2 measurements. In particular, there is well-founded documentation of atmospheric CO2 concentration exceeding 2000 ppm in the relatively recent past (in terms of geologic timescales), yet, during this time, plant and animal life thrived in abundance.
Additionally reference Wikipedia Atmopshere of Earth entry: “The three major constituents of air, and therefore of Earth’s atmosphere, are nitrogen, oxygen, and argon. Water vapor accounts for roughly 0.25% of the atmosphere by mass. The concentration of water vapor (a greenhouse gas) varies significantly from around 10 ppm by volume in the coldest portions of the atmosphere to as much as 5% by volume in hot, humid air masses, and concentrations of other atmospheric gases are typically quoted in terms of dry air (without water vapor). The remaining gases are often referred to as trace gases, among which are the greenhouse gases, principally carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and ozone.“
“Without a proper context, readers will fail to understand the true meaning of these CO2 measurements.”
I think most folks here understand it just fine, except for perhaps yourself.
Saying that CO2 is “only a trace gas” is like saying that arsenic is “only” a trace water contaminant.
Thank you for pointing out that CO2 is a greenhouse gas.
NAOM
Fuck off Troll/Bot! You’ve posted this exact piece of bullshit numerous times.
Mr. Tennessee – this might be easier for you, not sure how good Google Translate is with Russian but:
Отъебись тролль / бот! Вы отправили этот точный кусок дерьма много раз.
A 7 minute lecture that explains why the small amounts of carbon dioxide, water vapor, methane, and other greenhouse gases affect climate.
This is a very introductory lecture so even those with very little understanding of chemistry and physics ( a high school level will do it) can grasp it.
Joe and Suzy Sixpack didn’t get as far as physics and chemistry in high school.
As a matter of fact, there are tens of millions of people in this country who have degrees from more or less respectable universities that have had essentially ZERO instruction in any of the hard sciences. A single survey course can’t really be considered instruction or training,and not even that much is required in a lot of cases.
Hi OFM,
It is pretty hard to get into most respectable universities without biology, chemistry, and physics in high school at least in the US.
The atmosphere had no oxygen at all until plants converted CO2 to oxygen via carbon fixation.
While some animals and plants are good with higher CO2, humans are not one of those species, and neither are our major food crops, and neither is the food chain at the base of all the fish we eat.
Emitting high CO2 is like some anti-human form of terraforming on behalf of aliens. Making the planet uninhabitable for us, but much more habitable for some other species who we can’t eat.
NAOM- In case you didn’t see this reply at the end of the last thread regarding Bosch bike motors, here you go
Very true about the Bosch system. The manufacturer that seems to be getting the most attention currently is Chinese, and they offer two motor system that have taken the market by storm. They are very strong, reliable, and you can get one of them for under $500.
Here is a link to an American seller that has a good reputation- https://lunacycle.com/bafang-bbs02-750w-mid-drive-kit/
btw- 750watt is massive for a bike. 250 watt is plenty for flat land commute purposes
Cheers
Thanks, left a comment over there.
NAOM
My Bosch powered bicycle has been running flawlessly for three years on my daily commute.
I am VERY pleasantly surprised by what I have learned about this particular electric bike company here over the last few days.
The price and the fact that the battery itself has a name brand on it I know and trust says everything.
There isn’t really any reason, except for the battery being so expensive, for a very solid electric bike to cost more than a few hundred bucks. Electric motors and electronic gizmos are cheap these days, and a bicycle has very little in the way of material in it, less than hundred pounds, and not much is needed in the way of sophisticated machining of any of the parts, etc.
If the battery is really is good for twenty plus miles eight hundred times, that’s enough riding to out last ME.
And sixteen thousand miles at say thirty mpg over the next four or five years will run well over a thousand bucks for gasoline alone. The bike will pay for itself just on what you can save in gasoline.
Now the next question is how long it will be before there’s a local dealer network?
I would rather pay another ten or even twenty percent more to have a dealer handy, meaning I could get a needed part within an hour or so, almost every time, and in order to have a pro mechanic handy in the event of a problem above my pay grade with the electronic components.
Hi Hickory, I’m a road biker. A few years ago when you first started seeing the electric bikes on the Santa Ana river bike trail. I raced a few. Won and lost. Without the electric power, they were heavy slow bikes. Also, couldn’t out top end a road bike under electrical power. So it became a challenge to out last their battery. I had them fade behind as they lost battery and I think quiet because they didn’t want to pedal their beast home a long distance. My be I’m getting old, but I can’t keep up with the E bikes anymore. They must be more powerful than just a few years past.
My be I’m getting old, but I can’t keep up with the E bikes anymore.
I find that I can’t keep up in the city…if you have a lot of stoplights less than 500 meters apart, their startup torque will wear you down. Also, you never get to maximum speed and efficiency. Even worse when it’s below freezing (but you wouldn’t know anything about that 🙂 ).
With a couple of K to run, though, you should still be able to beat a legal eBike.
-Lloyd
I take the Palmer Report with a large side order of salt, but I do find it entertaining, and sometimes a little informative. Needless to say Palmer is all over Trump like a stink on a skunk. Here for your amusement is Palmer’s link to a 17 page PDF on Trump.
I don’t have time enough to chase down everything on the net relevant to my needs.
It’s got a lot of useful information in it. How solid it might be is open to question, but I’m hoping it gets a very wide audience, and I’m going to post it a bunch of places to help make sure it does get that audience.
Where there’s that much smoke, the odds are pretty damned good there’s at least SOME fire, lol.
Palmer Report has a website home page with frequent posting of articles. I like reading them. I think he jumps the gun a bit sometimes with allegations but he’s also posted a few gems.
Thanks S.
A good, albeit chilling summary.
Another unforeseen consequence of Arctic Ice loss:
SOLVING THE MYSTERY OF THE ARCTIC’S GREEN ICE:
– New model explains blooms of phytoplankton growing under Arctic sea ice
– The team’s mathematical modeling found that while the melt ponds contribute to conditions friendly to blooms, the biggest culprit is ice thickness.
“The meter decline in sea ice thickness in the Arctic in the past 30 years has dramatically changed the ecology in that area,” said Horvat. “All of a sudden, our entire idea about how this ecosystem works is different. The foundation of the Arctic food web is now growing at a different time and in places that are less accessible to animals that need oxygen.”
The data is preliminary but all the sites around the Arctic monitored by NOAA seem to be showing a winter spike higher than previously seen for both CO2 and CH4. Below is for Barrow, but all the data can be seen by clicking on a particular site from the map linked:
Then select ‘carbon cycle gases’, ‘time series’, ‘CO2’ or ‘CH4 etc., and Submit. All sites around the Arctic have similar patterns.
There have been several warm spells in Arctic this past winter.
The outliers all seem to be above the main cluster of points in both graphs.
With all those methane and CO2 pulses happening in the Arctic, it would seem there are intermittent sources up there that then disperse. Almost as if the Arctic is providing GHG’s of it’s own.
Is this echoed further south?
No, other stations near the arctic show a pulse – russia, norway/sweden and a couple more in alaska but further south the readings are lower and are not spiking. It sure looks scary…. And no, there are not huge herds of cattle in Barrow Alaska.
Must be the caribou herds then. 🙂
Well, one of the weirder attempts to slow down global warming is underway… with a Kickstarter… involving herds of caribou…
That’s pretty scary. That’s got to be a lot of Co2 to push the reading all the way up t0 420. I checked some of the other stations and Tiksi, Russia also has a spike.
CO2 peaks every April/May. Perhaps in the future NH summer the release of CO2 due to thawing permafrost will exceed the uptake of CO2 due to plant growth.
300 billion tons of carbon times 3.67 is 1,101 billion tons of carbon dioxide. Averaged over 83 years (between now and 2100) is about 13.26 billion tons of CO2 per year, so about 1.7 ppm per year average.
I wonder when summer NH carbon production from thaw will begin to exceed summer NH carbon absorption from plant growth.
Good thoughts Survivalist. Another factor is the ocean, which will absorb less CO2 the warmer it gets until it possibly becomes a source instead of a sink.
I wonder about the methane. With up to 3000 ppb occurring at times and atmospheric methane on the increase I don’t think it is being properly considered. 3000 ppb is 3 ppm and with an instantaneous warming effect of about 100 times CO2 that gives the effect of 300 ppm CO2 from methane alone.
The potential release of natural methane due to warming is large.
My suspicion (WAG) is that the estimate on 300 billion tons of carbon by 2100 is based upon global average temp increases and not NH average temp increases over land, which is where the permafrost is. Seeing as how NH avg land temps are warming faster than global avg temps it seems the 300 billion tons by 2100 is likely to be exceeded/occur more rapidly.
As well there is the issue of the decreased albedo of the land. I’m not sure how that factored in their estimate.
The climate scientists are a little smarter than you seem to give them credit for. My WAG is you are incorrect and they have used the appropriate temperature and have accounted for albedo effects.
Sink/source v warming would only apply if the ocean is saturated. How close are we to saturation?
NAOM
NAOM, the CO2 equilibrium is temperature dependent. The rate of exchange is temperature dependent. As the ocean warms and cools it will achieve a new equilibrium. Now it is warming so it is less able to absorb CO2.
The actual sink is biological and is also dependent upon the amount of Ca+ being added to the ocean, so is on a different rate and process.
All that means is that as the ocean warms more CO2 leaves the ocean than it absorbs, until a new equilibrium with the atmosphere and ocean is achieved. If the warming continues, the ocean keeps giving up more CO2.
Hi Gonefishing,
The solubility of CO2 in the ocean decreases as temperature rises. The plankton in the ocean takes up CO2 and some of the dead plankton sinks to the bottom without being consumed by other creatures and this carbon gets sequestered, that process may actually increase as the ocean warms, so far the proportion of carbon emissions that the planet can sequester has remained about 55%, as anthropogenic emissions decrease many carbon models predict that a greater proportion of emissions will be sequestered.
The carbon models don’t adequately factor in permafrost melt so this needs further work.
Also note that the warming ocean has been absorbing more CO2, from 1965 to 1975 it was about 12 Gt CO2 sequestered and from 2005 to 2015 it was about 21 Gt of CO2, so the biological effect has been overwhelming the solubility effect.
I don’t think it will be as bad as the natural methane releases that occur at my place after we have chilli or burritos for dinner. ?????
Further thought on methane. One ton of carbon equals 16/12 = 1.33 tons of methane.
I don’t know how much of that 300 billion tons of carbon is gonna go into the atmosphere as methane or CO2, but let’s pretend 10% for a WAG.
30×1.33 then is approx 40 billion tons of methane, or about .48 billion tons a year average between now and 2100.
Needless to say it won’t be a linear increase. It’ll likely start small and become a larger annual increase over time.
Also, about methane hydrates – there was an recent paper concluding that the situation might not be so bad for a lot of reasons but here is Guy McPherson’s response. He’s not buying it.
Both Tiksi russia and Barrow Alaska have spiked up to 420ppm for CO2, 10ppm higher than in Hawaii in just a few weeks time. That seems like a lot of Co2 but the 1ppm = 7.81 Gigatonnes of Carbon Dioxide is for worldwide, correct? So to just raise it in the arctic only should be some fraction of that – but that still seems like a huge number.
From what I understand the 1ppm equals 7.81 gigatonnes is for the entire atmosphere.
In the past I had been looking on earthnull school and had seen CO2 at 420ppm but only over megacities in China and USA. I haven’t gone on earthnull school in a while. 420 ppm over barren wilderness is an unsettling trend.
In what I understand CO2 doubles up as very efficient plant food, so a higher amount for barren wilderness is a plus in allowing the land not to be so barren anymore. Great for agriculture, perhaps?
Maybe consider going up there to Barrow and buying some land and growing avocados. Let us know how it goes.
In what I understand CO2 doubles up as very efficient plant food,…
You obviously understand very little! Try googling plant physiology and development.
Not that you’d be able to understand it!
Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self Assessments
Justin Kruger and David Dunning
The station at Mace Head, County Galway, Ireland is showing the same spike in CO2 (420ppm) and methane (2075ppb).
I looked at a lot of stations and many have methane or CO2 spikes (even Trinidad California), but not stations inland or further south.
I see some of the other gasses are also spiking, like CO.
Many of these stations have data going back a long time and the spikes are a lot larger than anything in the past.
They also measure isotope ratios of the carbon in the methane and the carbon13/carbon12 ratio is falling below the long term average. What does that imply?
Hi Preston, could you post a link to that data regarding the ratios.
“Burning plant material or fossilized plant material, such as fossil fuels, releases the 12C isotopes that plants absorbed through photosynthesis millions of years ago into the atmosphere in the form of CO2 molecules. The added 12C isotopes in the atmosphere decrease the overall 13C/12C ratio.”
click on carbon cycle gasses
click on time series
then select the carbon13/carbon12 parameter and
click submit
Hi Gone fishing,
Below 700 m the ocean warms very slowly and with the mixing from surface to deeper ocean it will take 400 to 1000 years before there is significant warming of the ocean surface.
For the past 100 years the ocean surface has warmed at about 0.64 C per century. It is indeed worrisome that the rate of ocean warming has increased to 1.36 C per century from 1970 to 2016, but looking at 1905 to 1950 there was a 1.25 C per century rise in surface ocean temperature.
Hi Gone fishing,
It is the average levels that matter not the short term spikes. The residence time of methane in the atmosphere is relatively short, the geochemistry essentially converts the carbon in the methane to carbon dioxide over a decade or so, the GWP on 100 or 200 year time frames is of far greater importance.
Birds on top of the world with nowhere to go. The University of Queensland School of Biological Sciences’ researcher Hannah Wauchope said that suitable breeding conditions for Arctic shorebirds could collapse by 2070.
“This means that countries throughout the world will have fewer migratory birds reaching their shores,” Ms Wauchope said.
Arctic breeding shorebirds undertake some of the longest known migratory journeys in the animal kingdom, with many travelling more than 20,000 kilometres per year to escape the northern winter.
The bar-tailed godwit flies from Alaska to New Zealand in a single flight of 12,000 kilometres without landing.
The study predicts that, in a warming world, migratory birds will become increasingly restricted to small islands in the Arctic Ocean as they retreat north.
Hi guys,
Just popping in briefly to inquire as to the whereabouts of James Howard Kunstler, as his last article was on the 17th. of March. Common cold?
27th was the last post. Today is the 30th.
Hi Paulo,
Are you getting this as his last post? If so, I am reading it as 17, not 27.
You’re right. It appears to be a problem related to my browser’s cache.
Thanks guys.
Nationwide precinct level maps of the 2008, 2012, 2016 U.S. presidential elections. Very interesting. Especially the one comparing 2016 results to 2012 results.
Oh, thank you very much! I have been looking for this data
Thanks again. As I remembered, the most exceptional thing about these maps is the urban/rural divide. Every single city everywhere, even really small ones, votes Democratic every single time. Almost all the depopulated rural areas vote Republican. The swing votes are the suburbs. Consistently.
Best Trump joke this week.
Trump sandwich, white bread, lots of baloney, Russian dressing, small pickle.
A former FBI agent testified that President Donald Trump helped spread fake news by embracing the stories against his opponents.
Senate intelligence committee leaders have received reports that Russia hired at least 1,000 trolls to spread fake news stories to hurt Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton during the presidential election.
Warner said in the latest case, the paid trolls apparently focused on swing states in an attempt to influence votes there — Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania — where people were “reading during the waning days of the election that “‘Clinton is sick,’ or ‘Clinton is taking money from whoever for some source’ … fake news.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday dismissed allegations of Kremlin interference in the U.S. elections as “fictional, illusory, provocations and lies.”
EPA Chief’s Refusal To Ban Brain-Damaging Pesticide Shows Profit Trumps Public Safety
“If the new administration is willing to support corporate interests over public safety in the face of such strong scientific evidence, then we should expect clear sailing for many other questionable pesticides in the future,”
Children especially experience greater exposure to organophosphate pesticides
OldMacDonald aka KGB, did your parents spray you in the orchard when you were a kid ? Proof Republicans dumb down their fly over voters.
I HAVE used this pesticide many times, personally, but not recently. Millions of other farmers have used it, and continue to use it. There is evidence, perhaps less than conclusive but highly suggestive, that it’s a significant health hazard especially to people who are exposed to it as workers. The evidence indicates that it’s a significant health hazard in terms of people eating it in trace amounts on their food, but the risk is apparently rather low. It could be that later on, we will know that it’s a high risk chemical.
I know what the risks are , or what they were believed to be, at the time I was using it, and considering all the OTHER things that could have wrong in my personal life, the risk to me, personally, was trivial. The odds of my getting severely hurt, or killed,for instance in an automobile accident were hundreds of times higher, maybe thousands of times higher.
Perfect safety is an illusion, it doesn’t exist. You can avoid almost any kind of accident by never getting out of bed, but the flip side of that coin is that you will suffer severely for lack of exercise.
We know now more than we did a few decades ago, more than we knew a decade ago. It’s a dangerous pesticide, more dangerous than previously estimated, no question at all. It should be phased out, on PUBLIC HEALTH GROUNDS, and the Obama administration made the right decision about that, in terms of what we know NOW that we didn’t know fifteen or twenty years ago.
But likewise, dangerous also are are automobiles, hot tubs, sun lamps, and hundreds, thousands of other chemicals that are known or strongly suspected to be hazardous environmentally in general, and to human health in particular.
It ought to be banned, based strictly on public health grounds, and the only real downside to that is that it really is a useful pesticide, one that enables lots of farmers to produce more food on less land using fewer OTHER chemical inputs.
Ban it, and hopefully, some other less problematic chemical will be substituted, and the price of food won’t go up VERY MUCH.
Of course the price of food doesn’t matter much to people like HB who according to his own words rake it in by the hundreds of thousands in the stock market from time to time, lol.
But the price of food matters to a LOT of people.
Consider the OTHER hand.
Like it or lump it, we are collectively using thousands of hazardous chemicals and pursuing dozens to hundreds to thousands of environmentally harmful or potentially harmful agricultural and industrial practices, and will continue to do so, for quite some time, because we HAVE NO CHOICE IN the short and medium term. People would literally be starving ALL OVER, otherwise, in LARGE numbers, rather than in only a few isolated locations. People would be unemployed by the tens of millions if we banned all the known dangerous chemicals and practices. Life would be a REAL riot, REAL QUICK, no joke.
Now whether this pesticide should be banned based on an examination of the BIG PICTURE is not so clear. There is no question whatsoever in the minds of nutritionists and physicians who study such matters that any individual forced to make the choice between plentiful and affordable fruits and vegetables with trace amounts of pesticides on them , versus eating few or none of these nutritionally critical foods, due to lack of money to pay for organic produce, or the lack of opportunity to purchase organic produce, is WAY BETTER OFF , MILES AND MILES better off, to choose the industrially grown fruits and veggies.
People who have plenty of money can afford organic produce. I can afford organic produce, although I don’t have much money, because I spend very little, having few expenses and no expensive habits.
But the KNOWN risk of eating conventionally grown fruits and veggies is so slight as to be negligible, on an individual basis. Collectively, it’s a problem. But then, so are cigarettes, and beer, and fast food burgers, and potato chips, and pizza, and ice cream. These things are so dangerous as to be highly significant health hazards on an INDIVIDUAL basis.
Risks are always relative. I drink VERY little, I use tobacco not at all, but I don’t freak out if somebody lights up a cigarette in my presence, because I evaluate the risk to my own health from inhaling A LITTLE BIT of second hand smoke, once in a WHILE, as trivial. I know and follow all basic industrial safety practices in my work, I drive carefully, and avoid rush hour traffic if I can, etc. I eat what’s recommended by the health care profession, taken as a whole.
But I never spent a single minute worrying about pesticide residues on domestically produced food, because THAT risk to my health is so far down the list of things that might harm me I will NEVER get that far down the list in trying to avoid health hazards.
Of course scientists, physicians, and bureaucrats whose job is to minimize any and every potential health hazard are predisposed to look at the harm, which tends to be localized, and ignore the benefits, which are spread over the entire population.
Millions and millions of poor people who are marginally to significantly better nourished MOST LIKELY means an average better public health outcome, although a few people WILL suffer great harm from ingesting this pesticide.
The researchers looking for health hazards get their paychecks BECAUSE of their finding things that ought to be banned, and to their credit, they do so, and work at getting the bans put into place. We NEED such people, and I strongly support their continued employment,and providing them with the money and other resources they need to do their jobs.
The regulatory process really only comes into play once the facts are established, and of course the regulatory process is a long way from perfect. Nevertheless a substantial number of pesticides HAVE been banned, and more will be, although it is obvious that the Trump administration is ready and willing to sell out the people for a piddly million bucks here and there in political donations, or sweetheart under the table deals.
A few people suffer allergic reactions to the vaccines that keep contagious diseases under control, but people with sense understand that we NEED vaccines. We NEED pesticides, we CANNOT live without them , given the cards in our hands at this time.
Now let’s briefly consider the situation of a working farmer who uses this chemical. If it is one he is dependent on, due to his location, the crops he grows, and or other aspects of his personal business and environmental situation, he will suffer significant material harm due to a ban, possibly to the extent of being driven out of business. SOME individuals always suffer in any case action is taken to protect the environment and public health.
The AVERAGE farmer who uses this chemical will either use a more expensive, less effective substitute, and change his production practices to compensate, maybe even up to the point of giving up producing a given crop, and substituting another. Farming is a super competitive totally cutthroat industry, and the lowest cost producers survive, while higher cost producers are forced out.
We apple guys aren’t dependent on this chemical, but we use it, or did, some time back. I haven’t used it personally in a long time. We can change our work practices and use something more expensive, and on the average, in terms of the BIG PICTURE, it won’t make a LICK of difference to us growers, because we PASS ALONG OUR COSTS.
If it costs me another nickel a pound to grow apples, you can rest assured this nickel will show up on BOTH sides of my ledger, income AND expense, within three or four years. Consumers will pay that nickel in the END, not farmers.
All growers are in essentially the same boat, except when a given chemical is approved for use locally, and other farmers in other locations who sell in the same market place are not allowed to use it. Then the guy who can use it has a significant competitive advantage.
The public doesn’t generally appreciate this basic truth, and sad to say, a lot of farmers have never bothered to think it thru. We need SOME chemicals, but we don’t usually have to have any GIVEN pesticide.
I don’t give a shit about the fortunes of any given chemical company. Farmers in general don’t give a shit about any particular company.
But old HB now, HE’s in the stock market, and he MIGHT be bragging about money he has made in pesticides, lol.
Trump is a dangerous nitwit, taken all around, but he was smart enough to understand the mood of the country, and because he understood the mood of the country, he won the election.
It’s not my fault the average D voter was so complacent as to think HRC had it in the bag, and that she should be ANOINTED president, without any competition in the primaries, except from a near unknown INDEPENDENT senator, starting from scratch, no money, no organization not much in the way of name recognition, from a tiny little state that seldom plays much of a role in national politics. The fact that he did so well, starting from so far behind, is MORE than AMPLE evidence that HRC was a LOUSY candidate, and the fact that her homies cheated every time they could to tilt the primaries in her favor is more evidence piled on.
When the R’s fuck up, I say so. They are fucking up THIS TIME, and they are fucking up on science in general, climate in general. It’s hard to think of ANYTHING the R’s aren’t fucking up at the moment, but I might come up with something they are doing right, for the right reason, sooner or later.
Old HB has to the best of my memory NEVER had anything to say about politics without his intent being obviously to deflect blame for Clinton losing onto somebody else, in most cases that being me, at least here in this forum.
Well, the bottom line is that I’m just one guy doing a little blogging, just like he’s supposedly just one little guy making a killing in the oil business, and the stock market, while posing as if he really gives a shit about the environment, and the country, etc. If he really has money, then I will concede that he might really give a shit about the people he hangs out with, who no doubt also have money.
I doubt if he knows shit from apple butter about the real issues involved in using pesticides.
He will never post any link that makes the D party and the Clinton faction of that party, the Republican Lite faction , look bad. He’s strictly a partisan wanna be DOG, and he is , but only lap doggie size.
When he gets off MY case, I will devote nearly all my political commentary to what’s wrong with the R party after that, excepting my clumsy efforts to teach limo type D’s a little about winning working class voters rather than pissing them off and predisposing them to vote R.
When it comes to leading a hard core big D Democrat to the light in terms of getting the party back to it’s roots, and back to it’s winning ways, I will be satisfied that I haven’t wasted my time if I convince only one or two I’m right, over the course of the next two or three years.
Culture wars, and political wars, are won one small battle at a time.
OldMacDonald aka KGB Trumpster all talk no action
“I will devote nearly all my political commentary to what’s wrong with the R party”
We have a long and proud history of playing the same sort of games the Russians have been playing, especially in Central and South America, but in other parts of the world as well.
Your empress to be wouldn’t have HAD a Russian problem if she had played by the rules and not had her secret email server to hide her connections to the scumbags contributing by the million to her family slush fund, and if the Democratic Party had played fair, during the primaries, well then, there wouldn’t be any problem with hacked emails either, and she would be prez today, most likely.
When you get caught cheating on the grand scale, it doesn’t really matter WHO outs you. It could have been the NYT, or the Washington Post, the result would be the same.
The fact remains that she displayed an appalling lack of judgement, an astounding level of arrogance, and that she ran as a business as usual Republican Lite candidate at a time when even the R core itself was sick and tired of R business as usual to the point that it rejected the entire R establishment and went with Trump, who basically HIJACKED the R party, given that he had basically zero political experience.
I will continue to point out the reasons WHY HRC was a rotten candidate, because by doing so I am reminding anybody who reads my remarks that in the future, they will do well to run candidates without baggage trains going back to their earliest days as politicians, and with the lowest approval ratings of any D presidential candidate EVER.
She was a very high risk candidate, from the word go, given her record, but I still thought she would win, and so did just about every body else hanging out in any liberally oriented forum.
But I was right, there was a possibility Trump would beat her, and he DID, although only by a hair.
And if she had had the political brains of a peanut, she would have campaigned like she meant it , in terms of at least PRETENDING she gave a fuck about the working people of this country.
But she put her political cards on the D’s with money, the sort who made up the delegate class at the DNC, where not a single guy or girl from a labor union was present to raise a hand when one speaker asked for a show of hands by workers representatives. There wasn’t even ONE on hand to raise a hand.
It was all Prada and Gucci.
Now you may or may not have some money, even a ton of money. You say you do, and that you have been making a killing in the markets, at a time when the people that elected Trump were in effect giving the middle finger to YOUR kind of Democrat.
She ran as a Republican Lite, and that’s what really cost her the election. That’s why the D’s as a party have been losing, and losing, and losing some more, for a long time now, until the R’s control DC, and most governors offices, and state legislature seats, etc, all the way down to dog catcher.
But it’s easy to see why a guy who is perfectly satisfied to pose as an environmentalist, while forgetting and bragging about making big money in oil, would blind himself to political reality.
I’m a realist, and will continue to point out corruption and incompetence wherever I run across it, and people like you will continue to vote your own self interests.
Well, I don’t have a LOT of money, I’m a long way from being rich, but I have money and property enough to meet my simple needs, and my political loyalties lie with the working classes, who are entirely distinct from the classes of people whose political loyalties lie with Republican Lite Democrats, and with Republicans.
It is often the case that you lose battles in the longer term process of winning the war.
HRC and her lap doggie boys and girls treated the classes of people I identify with with contempt, talked down to them, ignored them, characterized them as ignorant, racist, sexist, superstitious, xenophobic, etc, and while all these accusations are true to some extent, the fact is, the working classes are the true core of the traditional D party, and ENCOMPASS the minorities, both racial and ethnic.
My goal, as a political activist, is to get rid of the Republican Lite faction of the D party,which represents not the interests of MY people, but the interests of yours, the investor class.
This is about political hardball, and sometimes you win, and sometimes you lose. In the end, I’m confident the Sanders/ working class/ populist/ young well educated D’s will gain control of the D Party, and as a result , the D’s will start winning and making up the ground lost over the last couple of decades.
HRC played hardball, and she lost, due to her own stupidity or lack of judgement, in not recognizing the mood of the country. She would have won had she spent less time making secret speeches to the banksters, at a quarter million a pop, and spent more time talking about and working on the interests of the majority of the people of this country, rather than the investor class.
Little kids and hard core partisans seldom ever admit their mistakes, the usual thing is for them to blame anything that goes wrong on somebody else.
Well little lap doggie, sooner or later you may come to understand that you are not in control of the opposition, you don’t get to choose the opposition candidate, or the opposition platform, or the opposition coach.
If you lose, and you want to win next time, you look at the shortcomings of your team that you can FIX before the next time arrives.
Now people who are dyed in the wool partisans are always ready to believe their own favorite is a good guy or girl, and that the opposition is always the scumbag, and that anything the opposition has to say about the true believer’s candidate is just bullshit or outright lies, in the case of the Clinton camp, all summarized as a “Great Right Wing Conspiracy”.
Up until now, I have not actually bothered to post anything beyond the Cattle Gate example, here, because the members of this forum are mathematically literate, and one example is all that is needed when it’s one of the Cattle Gate kind.
But here’s a list, the first one that came up when I hit search with ” HRC associates and jail ” as the search terms.
It’s got some pretty juicy stuff in it, considering how many people on it were close associates of the Clintons, and spent a LOT of time in jail, as the result of the BUSINESS they shared WITH the Clintons.
Would you like to go thru this list, one scandal at a time, with me? Doing so will serve a great purpose, in that it will demonstrate to any D who swallowed the GRWC explanation whole that her ethical record is lousy.
It will help such D’s to understand that the OPPOSITION and MIDDLE OF THE ROAD VOTERS have a LONG memory when it comes to such things,which is why Clinton’s poll numbers were so pathetic. Nobody who REALLY knew her record trusted her,although many who did not trust her were willing to vote for her anyway, for various reasons. Some of those reasons were EXCELLENT reasons, no question.
After that, we can google ” HRC position flip flops” , and spend a few pleasant hours discussing why people who maybe didn’t care about her stealing a few dollars here and there still distrusted her because she flip flopped on numerous things many people think of as matters of PRINCIPLE.
The opposition also has a LONG memory when it comes to a politician flipflopping on key issues.
Like it or not, tens of millions of voters felt betrayed by some of those flip flops, and when the voter perceives a flip flop is in violation of his or her moral and or ethical beliefs, well, that voter is STRONGLY predisposed to vote for somebody else in the future.
We can enjoy an in depth discussion of the reasons HRC went into the race with such incredibly lousy plus and minus numbers concerning likely voters.
As a WRITER, I will continue to tell it like it is, as I see it, regardless of party or individual, and I have consistently posted comments to the effect that the D party overall is far superior to the R party, but that doesn’t help much, if the D’s in power are Republican Lite D’s, because R Lite D’s aren’t going to do much if anything for working class people.
But as a writer, I will not pretend or sugar coat anything concerning any politician, or party, because I value being ACCURATE in my analysis and observations above all else.
“R Lite” D’s spend their time looking after the interests of the investor class, the limo liberal class. Anything they do for the working class is mostly an after thought, a bone thrown from the banquet table for the working dogs.
Not to you directly OldFarmer.
When are people going to realize that our government, many of our candidates and elected officials as well as many citizens are not up to the task of leading and governing in the 21st century ( or even in the second half of the 20th century) ?
We have a basically good system of government that is being highly abused. It is like a house that has been left go and not cleaned up in a long time. The biggest pile of junk in it that needs to be cleaned out is the government collusion with the corporation.
SEPARATION OF CORPORATION AND STATE must be done quickly if we want to progress and survive.
Dissatisfaction at the citizen level and poor communication from the government has allowed the snake oil salesmen in the door, starting decades ago. Time to chase out the snakes and remove the unwanted parasites.
“When are people going to realize”
Russian, I mean Republican EPA Chief’s Refusal To Ban Brain-Damaging Pesticide
Dissatisfaction at the citizen level and poor communication from the government has allowed the snake oil salesmen in the door, starting decades ago.
Corporations have been aggressively manipulating public opinion. They are “conning” the public.
When a con artist steals your money, blame the con artist, not the victim.
So, the primary responsibility lies with to the corporations, not the public or government. Of course, it’s always good for crime victims to learn as much as they can to protect themselves…but don’t blame them if they don’t succeed at protecting themselves from the con artist. They didn’t make up the lies, even if we wish they hadn’t believed them.
Speaking about so-called ‘government’ and ‘corporations’ in the sense of them somehow being relatively-separate entities or as though one is like the ‘bad guy’/the perp and the other is like ‘the good guy’/the vict is just another con and typical kindergarten oversimplifications along the lines of the good vs evil mythos/dichotomy.
Nick, are you trying to say that the politicians do not know the money to elect them comes from corporations? Are you saying that the politicians do not know who is supporting the lobbyists that constantly attend the politicians?
Are you implying that much of the public does not know what goes on between the corporations and the government?
The response backfired, for some insane reason they believed that the baloney thrown out to them and ended up with the corporate heads inside the government now. Homogenized milk is one thing, but corpolitics quite another.
are you trying to say that the politicians do not know the money to elect them comes from corporations?
I’m thinking of the public, not the politicians. Most politicians are very aware of who’s pulling their strings, though some politicians are true believers, selected by corporate interests for their willingness to believe and rigidly follow “corporatist” ideas.
Are you implying that much of the public does not know what goes on between the corporations and the government?
Yes, partly. But, mostly the public doesn’t realize that the TV they’re watching, and the talk radio hosts they’re listening to, are cynical purveyors of conservative propaganda.
They don’t realize that Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh are cold, cynical propagandists.
I guess 13.25 million weekly listeners is quite a number. At least that leaves 305.65 million US people not listening to Rush. 🙂
So why are we so concerned about 4 percent of the population? Probably the same people listen to the other ultra conservative broadcasters too.
In primetime Foxnews network logged 2.37 million viewers, less than 1 percent of the population.
Now sports really pulls in the TV numbers, from 30 million to over 100 million for a big game. The top ten fictional TV shows each pull in more viewers than Rush has listeners.
Is the media that big of an influence or are the people just flocking to what they already believe anyway? Just a thought.
“So why are we so concerned about 4 percent of the population?”
13.25 million weekly listeners is almost 25% of the needed votes to win a national election.
“In primetime Foxnews network logged 2.37 million viewers, less than 1 percent of the population”
FoxNews runs 24/7 reaching hundreds of millions from airports to bedrooms. The Superbowl is 3 hours once a year. One time a year more than I go to church.
“flocking to what they already believe anyway?”
garbage in is garbage out, it’s about indoctrination
Hi Nick,
I occasionally disagree with you because as I see things, you are prone to oversimplifying some things, and to being too optimistic about a lot of things.
But in this case, I totally agree with you. Corporate money and corporate power are among the most important root causes of our having a dysfunctional government, and may be THE most important causes.
This is not to say however that occasionally people such as Hannity and Limbaugh are always wrong, or that the points they raise are always factually inaccurate.
Their arguments resonate with tens of millions of people for what are GOOD reasons so far as those people are concerned.
Consider for instance a little tempest in a tea cup about some woman at an elite law school insisting that she should be GIVEN FREE BIRTH CONTROL drugs or devices, even as she is choosing to live in one of the more expensive parts of the country, and spending megabucks to go to an expensive university. There was a regular shit storm of criticism of Limbaugh over this one.
Well, anybody who can’t understand that that sort of sense of entitlement ENRAGES people who have always paid for their own birth control, and who are working and paying taxes on LESS income, and trying to LIVE on what’s LEFT, than the TUITION at an expensive university is so fucking STUPID, stupid isn’t even a good word to describe them.
The typical culturally liberal person seems to think and believe that HIS beliefs and values are for some abstract reasons BETTER in some absolute fashion than those of cultural conservatives, while at the same time lecturing conservatives about criticizing other societies that practice the same values. A typical liberal is quite apt to lecture a conservative within five minutes about treating women as second class citizens AND about conservatives criticizing other cultures where women are treated far worse than by ANYBODY in the USA, including old line Mormons, etc.
IF I wanted to do so, I could compose a sarcastic piece ridiculing liberals for not believing in democracy, small d, because so many liberals run off at the mouth about doing away with conservative cultural values.
I don’t want to go THERE, for now. HERE is the real question, the one that should be keeping boneheaded college educated liberals awake at night.
Would you rather win the cultural versus conservative cultural DEBATE, or would you rather WIN ELECTIONS and have the D party back in power?
In the REAL world, it seems pretty obvious to me, at least, that if you want to win,at least for the next decade or so, you are going to have to reach out to independents and conservatives and find common ground with them.
Insulting them, talking down to them, making fun of them and their mores and values, and their supposed ( all too often real to be sure) lack of education, etc, is a SURE FUCKING WAY to help the R’s STAY in power.
Now along about a decade or so from now, things will begin to shift in a decisive way towards the liberal side in respect to the culture war, because the boomers will be well on the way OUT, and my generation will be just about GONE, in terms of voters, while the younger generations will be relatively far more numerous, than at present.
Everybody who has the foggiest idea about what is going on in this country, culturally, understands that the younger generations are solidly predisposed to being far more liberal than the older ones.
Big D Democrats with working brains understand this choice.
It’s extremely unfortunate for the D party, and for the people and for the country, that so many D’s who do have working brains choose to turn them OFF in this particular respect.
I’m not out to win a popularity contest here, so I’m free to tell it like it is, or at least the way I believe it is.
Ya got a choice to make. You can stay on your moral and cultural high horse, and talk down to the peasants, or you can get down off the horse, and MINGLE with them. Stay on the horse, keep on talking down to them and about them, the way so many liberals do, habitually, and they will remain strongly predisposed to vote for R type politicians.
Ya want to win the ARGUMENT, or the next election, and the one after that, and the one after that?
I suspect YOU get it, because I am convinced you are quite knowledgeable, maybe even a professional, when it comes to understanding and manipulating public opinion and beliefs.
If you don’t mind having the R’s in control for the next decade plus, you can wait for demographics to put the D’s back in power, most likely. It might take two decades, or even longer, for the demographic transition to giterdone, because of the incumbency problem.
I would really appreciate a straight forward, non evasive reply, pro or con, from you in this particular instance.
Incidentally, my personal opinion is that birth control ought to be totally free, including the necessary physicians visits, because this policy would go a long way towards solving a lot of tough problems ranging from unwanted kids to the abortion debate to population overshoot, etc. Every dollar so spent would probably save us a hundred, down the road.
MY point in mentioning it is that the average liberal is too stupid to understand how to win what should be overwhelming support for such a policy.
In a one on one with a hard core conservative, I simply ask him or her, quietly, what he thinks free universal birth control would cost him, annually, the answer being a trivial amount of money, maybe ten or twenty bucks, certainly not much more.
Then I ask him, quietly and respectfully, how much he thinks it will cost him to support another million unwanted kids, and another million after that, on and on, on welfare, and how many more cops and social workers are needed due to these unwanted kids, how much it costs to put them in jail because they don’t know any better, or even have any choice, other than to stand on a corner selling dope, etc,.
And THEN I SHUT MY FUCKING MOUTH, and let him think about it for himself.
When I get the response that government ought to play a smaller role in our lives, I say I agree in principle, but that the world, and this country, has gotten to the point that we have NO CHOICE except for the government to play a HUGE role in our lives.
It’s VERY easy, once you have established a respectful relationship, to demonstrate that we simply MUST HAVE public schools, public roads, publicly regulated utilities, a safety net for old people, regulations to prevent businesses from selling quack cancer cures, selling death trap cars, building houses that will fall down in short order, upstream businesses from dumping chemicals in the water people must drink downstream, patrol the borders, maintain public order, make sure the meat in supermarkets isn’t going to kill you if you eat it, etc etc etc.
So when such a conservative is respectfully reminded of all these things, well then, he or she tends to sort of sheepishly say I didn’t MEAN that sort of government interference in my life. It’s not usually necessary to point out that not much is left that the government doesn’t NEED to be involved with.
Hello OldMacDonald aka KGB Trumpster your post is just more proof
Ron Patterson says:
03/22/2017 AT 12:27 PM
Science has proven that Republican Conservatives, (i.e. Right-Wing Ideologues), are just plain dumb. That is they have much lower cognitive ability than their much smarter counterparts, Liberal Democrats.
I think it just confirms what most of us already know.
Trumpster says – “Consider for instance a little tempest in a tea cup about some woman at an elite law school insisting that she should be GIVEN FREE BIRTH CONTROL drugs or devices, even as she is choosing to live in one of the more expensive parts of the country, and spending megabucks to go to an expensive university. There was a regular shit storm of criticism of Limbaugh over this one.”
A “woman at an elite law school” will pay more in taxes in a life time than 100 trailer trash home schooled conservatives. Pull your head out and think of it as an investment.
OldMacDonald aka KGB is a Stupid Trumpster
Huntinton Beach- When you say stuff like this “OldMacDonald aka KGB is a Stupid Trumpster”,
you become a very small brained creature- like our president. No respect intended.
btw- I was an enthusiastic H. Clinton supporter, despite her big shortcomings. Its all relative, and she had a strong collection of attributes, for a politician. Thats it for me.
Just playing the OldMacDonald aka KGB trash talking game. I learned the branding process here from the king of fake trash talk.
anybody who can’t understand that that sort of sense of entitlement ENRAGES people
Limbaugh understands very well – that’s why he says it. He doesn’t care about birth control, (free or otherwise), or whether the story is true or a random anecdotal thing…but he knows how to push the buttons of his audience.
He’s manipulating them, and anyone who gets caught up in the anger, on either side.
“Well, anybody who can’t understand that that sort of sense of entitlement ENRAGES people who have always paid for their own birth control”
The problem is that that sort of IDIOT is the sort of person who can’t see past the end of their nose: they’re resenting the woman who is demanding what she deserves, rather than resenting the people who refuse to give her — or anyone else — what they all deserve. This is the behavior of the lobster pot analogy (when one lobster tries to climb out, the others supposedly pull it back in, rather than attacking the chef) — and it’s the behavior described in a great cartoon I saw a while back.
There are three people in the cartoon: two regular people and a CEO. The cartoon shows the CEO taking an entire plate of cookies, and leaving one cookie on the table. When one person reaches out to break off a bit of the remaining cookie, he turns to the other and says “Stop him! He’s talking part of your cookie!”
This has, of course, been the problem for movements trying to improve the world forever. Trying to change this attitude is called “class consciousness raising”.
Which is, of course, what you’re trying to do with the tactic you’re using. Unfortunately, when I’ve tried it, the hardcore right-wingers (they are not conservatives) agree that I’m right when it comes to practicalities, but end up saying that they’d rather make sure that women they don’t like don’t get birth control, despite the huge costs they’ll have to pay for the unwanted children later.
*Sigh* They’re fundamentally not practical people and I don’t know how to deal with them.
You seem to be dealing with a better breed of “conservatives”. I’m dealing with the ones who are still present in rural areas in the Northeast.
The new Republican head of the EPA thinks it’s safe to feed lead to children and that radon is A-OK. Think about the sort of lunatics we’re dealing with. Some people, I can just point this stuff out and they vote Democratic. But the ones who are *still* voting Republican *now* after GW Bush, the Iraq War, etc… a lot of them are completely unreachable.
‘Our’ government? ‘Our’ candidates?
Anarchy, GoneFishing. We will not have anything without it. Go lead and govern yourself, if you can, and leave the rest alone with this asinine ‘abused government’ shit.
You know we are fucked when ostensible adults like yourself continue on and on with this sort of mindfuck.
Anarchy is not the answer Caelan. The answer is education and a system of opportunity for all and not the few. What has happen is the results of the unwinding of the “New Deal” for the last 50 years by the Republicans.
By the way, thanks for the 1906 San Francisco link
You’re welcome– possibly one of the first car promos.
Nature is the answer, HuntingtonBeach, and being able to successfully dovetail into it and thus set up a more iron-clad long-term survival possibility.
As per your nickname, a beach full of pollution is not going to work very well, except maybe for the happy creatures that can handle it and that might appreciate, if they could feel a sense of appreciation, seeing some of its competition wiped off the face of the planet, and free up additional niches, so that they could multiply and rapidly evolve, maybe in part from our assorted wastes, including radioactive.
Superficial talk about Republicans, Democrats, Liberals or Progressive Conservatives, or what you put in your Kraft-brand Dinner yesterday, will only get us so far, such as from an evolutionary standpoint.
I would do less sociopoliticultural navel-gazing and pay more attention to the ‘New Deals’ that Mother Earth/Nature doles out, because we are on that dole.
CM-
None have a clue about anarchist thought or history.
Haven’t we been down this path before?
HB is a typical Dim, impossible to achieve any awareness, or class consciousness.
“class consciousness” – noun, awareness of one’s place in a system of social classes, especially (in Marxist terms) as it relates to the class struggle
Is that Republicans code for racism ?
Sometimes I wonder what kind of evolutionary adaptive strategies brought some people this far. Sheer luck? Numbers? I’m not necessarily talking about anyone in particular.
HI GF,
I disagree with you once in a while on a particular point, but in general, I think pretty much the way you do, and I am with you ONE HUNDRED PERCENT in that we need an ALL AROUND housecleaning in our government.
Corporations are synthetic alien non carbon life forms, with none of the built in inhibitions or mores humans are born with, but with basically all the rights of citizens. It’s impossible to punish a corporation, in any meaningful sense, since it’s not ALIVE, in the usual sense, but it is IMMORTAL, in terms of the law, so long as its owners want it to live.
Of all the things we have ever created, nothing is more worthy of loathing and fear than a typical multinational corporation, and our government is more or less owned and operated as a wholly owned subsidiary of these monsters. For instance- The Obama administration put Gold in Sacks executives in dozens of top positions. The R’s have typically been as bad or worse, I mention Obama doing it simply to make it clear that the D’s of recent times are not REAL D’s in the usual sense, they’r imitation REPUBLICANS.
The SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT thing that needs cleaning out is the influence of corporate money on our government. As a matter of fact, this might be THE most important problem afflicting our government, the one most often causing it to do the wrong thing, or nothing, all too often. The only other one that comes close may be the lack of a meaningful way to keep incumbents from remaining in power more or less for their entire lives, once in office. Nearly all of them, from both parties, wind up in the pocket of one or another special interest, sooner or later. This is of course directly related to the corporate money problem, so it might be best to consider these two problems as one and the same.
The R’s and their kind are a lot bigger problem,three times or more bigger, in terms of the overall long term welfare of this country and the world, than the D’s, but the D’s these days are mostly just a somewhat fuzzy dim mirror image of the R’s, in terms of the overall positions of the party.
The D’s do work seriously on a few things, and get a few things done, but they pay a lot more lip service to progress than they should be , given they are the so called party of the people.
For instance over a dozen D senators joined hands with the R’s a few weeks back and killed a bill that would have allowed the federal government to NEGOTIATE the price of drugs purchased for Medicare.
The government of virtually every other country I have ever heard of NEGOTIATES prices with the drug industry, but here in the USA, ENOUGH D’s side with the R’s to make it possible for the drug companies to continue to screw us.
NO question, an all around house cleaning and overhaul is necessary to the survival of the country, in terms of it being a decent place to live, long term.
Democrats Say It’s Pretty Obvious Why Michael Flynn Wants Immunity
FBI still investigating Trump. No charges for HRC, cleared by FBI.
When are you going to learn OldMacDonald aka KGB
If I ever get around to it, I will be giving Trump a lot more attention that HRC, but so long as you keep posting the personal attacks, I will keep on pointing out WHY Clinton was distrusted and loathed by so many millions of people , and WHY the D’s lost the WH this last time, and WHY the R party has been mopping the floor with the D party for a long time now. All the electrons I am putting into responding to you, little lap doggie, could be put to better use, but I will not allow very many comments referring to me as a Trumpster or KGB stoolie, etc, to pass unchallenged. I might miss one once in a while, but not many, lol.
You don’t HAVE anything to say, other than to make excuses for HRC’s losing. I doubt you have the CAPACITY to say anything else, given that you are a true believing partisan unable to comprehend political realities.
I plan on keeping you being my Trumpster until after the election of 2020 to keep you focused on the Clinton’s. I don’t want you trash talking the next Democrat nominee because it’s not going to be old man Socialist Bernie.
The Democrats will nominate a socialist next time. The choices are now stark:
socialism
fascism
aristocracy
anarchy
Take your pick.
A new political landscape and economic model is forming in the USA. What will the new terrain look like? To many it will be a dead zone, to others a side show, and to a few it will look very good.
As expected, US President Trump’s proposed budget is a nightmare for science, the environment, and parts of the technology industry. Welcome to the future, where America’s long national nightmare may not even have the funds to keep chugging along.
While we’ll focus on the the aforementioned areas, it’s important to note that the much of the budget is a slash-and-burn operation. It cuts or eliminates funding for poverty programs, like school meals for poor children and Meals on Wheels. It also cuts the Appalachian Regional Commission, which provides funding to help retrain coal miners who are losing their jobs, among many other functions. Meanwhile, Trump’s budget office director went on Morning Joe to claim that cuts to public broadcasting were justified because “Can we really continue to ask a coal miner in West Virginia or a single mum in Detroit to pay for these programs?” It even goes after the country’s birds.
The only departments that would see an increase are those of Defence, Veterans Affairs, and Homeland Security, the latter of which would get $US2.6 billion ($3.4 billion) to build the border wall, though it could cost 10 times that amount.
OldMacFarmer aka KGB says no problem, Trump doesn’t email. He tweets .
HB,
You are sounding more and more like the dummy in an Old Farmer ventriloquist act. Do you like being on his knee with his hand up your backside?
What nonsense will he make you say next?
Cattle Gate, Cattle Gate, Cattle Gate
It was all Prada and Gucci
Cattle Gate, Cattle Gate, Cattle Gate
As soon as he stops saying stupid things. Would you prefer I turn my attention to DoneFishing ? Because I can.
Spoken like a little wooden headed dummy. Bravo. Your master has the power to type. How exceptional.
Now hoping the next act will be entertaining. Probably too much to ask that your act gets the hook. But fear not little knothead, there are always simpletons who will jeer and clap to your antics.
How about we talk about the the Clintons close friends and business associates going to jail due to their little business affair known as White Water?
HRC is pretty much cursed with arrogance and delusions of grandeur, in some respects, but she learned at least enough at law school to cover her tracks to the point she didn’t get prosecuted when Cattle Gate and White Water made the news.
Catching a person robbing the bank one time is enough for most people to conclude they are not the most trustworthy and upright sort of individuals.
Now of course those who WANT to believe the Clintons were just a couple of naive country bumpkins who were enticed into such shady schemes by smooth talking crooks are perfectly free to do so.
BUT they might do well to stop and think about what that says about the processing and data storage capacity of the CPU’s between their ears, lol.
They did after all have the benefit of some considerable amount of time spent supposedly learning all about the law at university, etc.
“How about we talk about the the Clintons close friends and business associates going to jail due to their little business affair known as White Water?”
Trumpster, I’ll bet you know a lot more people who have been to jail than the Clintons.
I do indeed know a LOT of people who have been to jail, and some in jail at this very moment.
This comes of having lived among all social classes , excepting the rich to very rich class.
People who have spent their entire lives insulated from reality because they know only other people who live the way they do don’t actually know very much about people.
Whitewater was investigated thoroughly and no illegality by Clintons was found. I agree that cattle futures trading in HRC’s account looks suspicious and raises eyebrows. I am not a HRC supporter (I supported Bernie) but the Clintons have been scrutinized more than any other politician in the US. I think we should leave them alone. The D party needs to unite behind Bernie, Elizabeth Warren and Tulsi Gabbard.
~Mom’s Potato Clusters~
Some of us really do seem to like to project the ‘small-scale tribal notions’ on the out-of-scale/context mind-/cluster-fucks that are the nation-states.
Mother Nature needs to run for office and once she gets in, mash the whole thing up like potatoes and maybe add a bit of milk, chives/rosemary, garlic, butter, olive oil, pepper, and parmesan and/or salt to taste.
I’d vote for that.
Well, I really do hate to say anything that might be interpreted as supporting Trump, but at least when you tweet, the public knows what you are saying.
When your empress to be got caught with her pants down around her ankles with her secret email system, she managed mostly ( in my opinion and in the opinion of my personal attorney who is a life long straight D voter) to delete half the contents, without paying the price of going to jail for contempt or destruction of evidence, again MOSTLY, because the Justice Dept was at that time under the control of the D’s and the administration naturally wanted to minimize the scandal to the extent possible.
Of COURSE the R party would have behaved the same way under the same circumstances, nobody with a brain thinks otherwise.
And then during that time period, idiots like HB insisted that there was NO CHANCE, no RISK at all, that her home brew system could be hacked, or was hacked, lol.
Well, at least most of them have had sense enough to shut up about that, since the D party itself got the shit hacked out of it, lol. That alone was a big enough lapse of judgement to disqualify her for office in the opinion of everybody I have ever met personally who has had anything to do with handling high level government secrets, and I do know a few retired military people who were privy to such secrets at times.
Of course if the D Party had been playing by it’s own rules, instead of cheating to make sure she got the nomination, the hacked emails probably wouldn’t have even been released, or if they were released, they would have HELPED her rather than hurt her.
And if there was ANY ONE PERSON who in the ordinary course of affairs should be held accountable FOR THAT, it would be HRC, because she was de facto in control of the party machinery, and the usual thing is to hold the senior leader responsible for major failures of this sort, in war and in commerce.
But she WAS only a raw amateur when it comes to such things. Trump could teach her all about about stealing money in a few easy lessons if she were to sign on with him. He’s actually good at it.
IRENA: more solar than wind added in 2016 in strongest ever year for renewables
The year just passed saw a 161 GW increase in global renewable energy capacity with solar outpacing wind, shows data released by the Abu Dhabi-headquartered International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) on Thursday.
“This growth in deployment emphasizes the increasingly strong business case for renewables, which also have multiple socio-economic benefits in terms of fueling economic growth, creating jobs and improving human welfare and the environment. But accelerating this momentum will require additional investment in order to move decisively towards decarbonizing the energy sector and meet climate objectives. This new data is an encouraging sign that though there is much yet to do, we are on the right path,” Amin added.
Little old HB will never be able to get his little lap doggie head around it, but I wouldn’t be posting this sort of link if I were REALLY a Trumpster.
Of course the places it really needs posting are right wing oriented sites, and ya can bet that using other handles, I will be doing so.
You have to be pretty tough skinned to post that on most right-wing oriented sites…
Hi Nick,
No problem, I can take it, and dish it out, and do, until I get banned, which has happened often.
This comment was coherently composed when it was short, but I have added to it stream of thought style until it probably reads like a third class imitation of some old southern novelist such as Faulkner. Perceptive readers will be able to get the gist of it.
I’m looking for a kid that’s good on computers to teach me how to QUICKLY and easily get around bans on sites that don’t want the truth posted, so I can just keep on posting. Establishing one new identity at a time is tiresome and time consuming. It’s time for me to automate and mechanize, lol.
It’s just the internet, I don’t worry any more about what people say about me personally on the net than I do about getting hit by an asteroid. Panty wearing pinko commie Godless atheist socialist tree hugging whale lover, that’s me, lol, but the stuff I post gets thru to some of the people who hang out at such sites, because there are usually people at just about any site who are capable of thinking at least a little.
Every once in a while, I am threatened with violence, but I just laugh it off, and point out that I’m pretty much of a hard core right winger myself when it comes to looking after myself instead of peeing in my panties and calling the cops. There’s maybe one chance in ten thousand some nut case will actually hunt me up someday, but there’s a thousand times bigger chance I will kill myself accidentally on the tractor or felling a tree or driving on a public road or have a heart attack or stroke, so being a realist I don’t worry about such trivial potential problems. The odds are high I would hear about it if anybody comes poking around looking for me, and in actual fact I would call the cops and most likely the sheriff would be more than happy to make sure there would be a very fast response, if I call a second time, relatively speaking, considering this is a rural area. Any body suspicious from out of the neighborhood would be stopped, identified, maybe even searched, etc. The local sheriff takes proactive law enforcement seriously, when circumstances permit, and his deputies are mostly assigned to road patrol anyway.
Besides which I keep a loaded shotgun handy, since we have problems here with raccoons and foxes with rabies, lol, and there’s an occasional thief prowling around hoping to haul off something valuable.
I’m sure the stuff I post here gets thru to some people. They may not change their minds as the result of reading my stuff, but they WILL gain a little bit deeper insight into the subject matter, and that counts for a lot. A little nudge here and there NOW can result in big changes later. It’s not just nature that works in a non linear fashion, lol.
A man such as one of my fairly close relatives who lost his excellent coal industry job and voted for Trump out of anger and frustration with status quo politics is perfectly capable of understanding that his larger family and community is is heavily dependent on programs such as social security, medicare, etc.DEMOCRATIC PARTY programs.
Such a man for dead sure knows somebody whose kids really NEED free school lunches, maybe even his own kids.
He is capable of understanding that if a coal company dumps mine waste in a stream, there will be no fish in that stream, and that anybody who lives downstream must pay a lot more for water because it requires more treatment at the water plant, etc. All he needs in this case is a RESPECTFUL reminder.
He’s capable of understanding that the coal biz is in the pits ( pun!) mostly because gas is so cheap, rather than the so called war on coal. He understood it quite easily, when I pointed out to him the ACTUAL purchase price, wholesale, to the power companies, of gas, compared to coal, and how much cheaper a gas turbine is than a boiler system.
He is poorly educated, thru no fault of his own, but he’s sharp enough to understand that smoking kills people, and to understand that the warnings on the containers of industrial chemicals are there for a purpose, etc, and that we DO need environmental safeguards, etc.
If you remind him, and he’s at least about fifty or so, he will remember than the R party aligned itself with the tobacco industry, and R types maintained for years and years that smoking is not a major health threat, and anyway, it’s not the fucking government’s business if you want to kill yourself smoking , even though smoking is GOOD for you and will make you grow up big and strong.
He may well agree about his right to make up his own mind about his own life , who doesn’t?
But he’s also smart enough to understand that his own kids may take up the tobacco habit, and that given that possibility, he UNDERSTANDS the need to outlaw the advertising of tobacco products. Who want’s to go to their kids funerals ?
He’s smart enough to realize that when you have caught somebody lying to you once, you are wise to very carefully consider anything they have to say in the future before accepting it as factual, but a gentle RESPECTFUL reminder may be useful in getting him to remember this example.
What I am getting at is that if you WANT such a man’s VOTE, and you can get it, if you approach him respectfully, and avoid insulting him unnecessarily.
He will not flip from an R voter to a D voter immediately except on rare occasions, but given time, you can move him in the D direction, because he will come to recognize that’s the direction of his own enlightened long term self interests .
It took the R’s a while to take over, and it’s going to take the D’s a while to kick them out and replace them.
Folks who feel a COMPULSION to bad mouth religion are free to do so, but I hope I can get them to understand this one critical point.
WHAT MATTERS more, to you, as an individual ? Would you rather win the argument about god and atheism, and whether religions are good or bad for people and society, OR would you rather WIN ELECTIONS AND SEE THE D PARTY BACK IN POWER???? These two wants may not be mutually exclusive, but they are most certainly not joined at the hip, in terms of political strategies.
If you talk to and about such a man as my coal industry relative the way a few regulars in this forum talk about his kind of people, you’ve got a near zero chance of his doing other than responding to your words with the extended middle finger.
There are ENOUGH of his kind to keep the Trumpsters in power, if enough D’s persist in talking down to them and about them as if they were scum or near scum rather than citizens. Believe me, whatever you say about people these days, if you are a politician, somebody records it, and the opposition jumps on it like a duck on a june bug when it suits the opposition to do so.
HB, who brags about making a killing on his investments, is either too stupid to understand that the people who the D party MUST have to win elections DON’T HAVE a few million in the stock market, or even a few thousand,ninety nine percent of them, and that they have approximately zero use for his kind of big D Democrat,or else he is simply cynical and brazen enough to keep on talking his sort of propaganda, hoping that anybody who hears it will accept it, and many do.
THERE ARE DEMOCRATS out there who DO understand what must be done to return the D party to power. Tens of millions of them actually. 😉
There’s ENOUGH of them to kick the R Lite D party establishment out, although it’s going to take a while, and victory is by no means guaranteed. One of my personal goals as a political activist is to move a few D’s from the HRC camp to the Sanders camp, but as a writer or observer, I refrain from identifying myself as either a D or an R, because I want to be able to point out bullshit any time I see it, or think I see it. A self identified partisan cannot point out the errors of his leaders, or his faction, without being accused of being a traitor and a shill for the opposition. I prefer to be identified as a traitor and shill for BOTH sides, lol.
There’s a LOT to be said for conservatism as a philosophy, in the true meaning of the word, as opposed to the accepted corrupted meaning used today by both liberals and conservatives. The same applies to liberalism as a philosophy, it has a LOT to be said for it, although the word and the philosophy have been corrupted in the minds of the people.
This is from the HILL website. I just copied it, it’s not that long.
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders (I) on Friday defended voters of President Trump, saying that the election was Democrats’ to lose and that the party needs to better represent the working-class voters who supported Trump and other GOP lawmakers
“Some people think that the people who voted for Trump are racists and sexists and homophobes and deplorable folks. I don’t agree, because I’ve been there. Let me tell you something else some of you might not agree with, it wasn’t that Donald Trump won the election, it was that the Democratic Party lost the election,” Sanders said while speaking at an Our Revolution rally in Boston with fellow Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).
Sanders went on to say that a “fundamental restructuring of the Democratic party” was needed to win future elections and that problems with party’s current setup is why many were quick to support Trump in the election, not because of some of the rhetoric on the campaign trail.
“We need a Democratic Party that is not a party of the liberal elite but of the working class of this country, we need a party that is a grassroots party, where candidates are talking to working people not spending their time raising money for the wealthy and the powerful,” Sanders said. “And when we do that, when we transform the Democratic Party, we transform America.”
Sanders said most people believe in a progressive agenda, not a right-wing agenda.
At the start of his speech, Sanders also offered praise for Warren, saying that “you can tell the quality of a person by the enemies she makes, and to her credit Elizabeth Warren has made some wonderful enemies.”
Sanders said those enemies include Wall Street and the pharmaceutical and fossil fuel industries, and he encouraged voters to keep her in the Senate to fight for a progressive agenda.
xxxx
If Warren is the D nominee next time around, I will vote for her. She can win, no question in my mind.
How anybody who doesn’t have his head entirely up his ass so far he will never see daylight again could fail to agree with Sanders escapes me, but I DO recognize that the majority of people would rather be horsewhipped than think, sarcasm light blinking but not blazing.
The working classes of this country, and the socially conservative classes all taken as a whole, sent the current day REPUBLICAN LITE D party a MESSAGE, that message being that they WILL NOT be taken for granted.
Rather than be kept like a mistress, meaning literally tolerated and kept handy in order to get FUCKED by the elite, such people would rather just pack up and LEAVE the D party, no matter the consequences.
Now this IS harsh language, but sometimes it takes harsh language to get the message across, and I believe this is such a time. Such people do have self respect, you see, and at the very least Trump had political brains enough to point out to them that the D party ( as it exists for now, and as it ran HRC as the nominee) was just as surely fucking them as the Republican establishment, which is why he succeeded in actually coming in like a pirate and hijacking the R party and actually beating Clinton, although only by a hair.
Whether the balance of the truth is on Trump’s side, or Clinton’s side, the R side or the D side absolutely IS important, but within the context of pushing people’s hot buttons at a time when they are mad and scared and feeling betrayed, well, people tend to lash out, although they may regret doing so later. A hell of a lot of people who voted for Trump regret it already, and more will come to regret it soon, but the election is water under the bridge, and now it’s time to consider the NEXT MOVE.
The younger and better educated faction of the D party understood all the things I have been saying, and went by a landslide for Sanders, as did liberally oriented independent or middle of the road but D inclined voters. The older faction for understandable reasons pretty much stuck with Clinton, assuming she had it in the bag, and she did, except for the unfortunate fact that she is an exceptionally inept campaigner and was arrogant enough to think she would get away with such crap as her secret email system and rigging the primary election process in her favor.
Her MACHINE controlled the D party appartus to the extent she totally scared off EVERY OTHER SERIOUS POTENTIAL CANDIDATE EXCEPT SANDERS, who started with essentially ZERO in terms of organization and money, and not much more than nothing in terms of the general public knowing who he is and what he stands for.
I know half a dozen black farm hands in my immediate neighborhood, and hire a couple of them a day at a time once in a while to help me with chores I’m too old to handle alone, or jobs to big for one man, and when we knock off for lunch, we eat in the kitchen. There used to be a dining room, but I use it as a den. They vote, but they had never even heard of Sanders, and had no idea he was as strong an advocate for their interests as anybody in DC, until I showed them pictures of Sanders at events with black community leaders going back four decades or longer . With money and organization enough, and with the media with him instead of mostly being with Clinton, he would have won a LOT more votes in the southern states, but time was too short, Clinton had too big a lead, and too many cronies helping her in the party and in the press.
I seriously doubt if limo liberal types who brag about making six figures in a few weeks or months on investments will ever ACCEPT the message. They’re too wrapped up in their own affairs, and simply unable to really understand what having to work and worry about making a living is all about.
Here and there you will run across one of that type that started out with little or nothing and made it into the one percenter class, who is still capable of remembering that the other ninety nine percent still exist.There are some in my own family now, and while they make an effort to be nice if they run into a childhood friend who didn’t make it to the top, they never invite them to come for a visit, and when they get an invitation, they’re always too busy.
Most of that kind morph into what they profess to despise, a person who in essence says I got mine, if you aren’t smart enough or mean enough or lucky enough to get yours, tough luck buddy, while by way of cognitive dissonance they still manage to flatter themselves that they give a shit about anybody except themselves. Some of them are a little more honest with themselves, and just admit they are REPUBLICANS at heart, in terms of who they identify with and want to be around and with.
I ‘m not saying the make believe compassionate well to do big D Democrat won’t write a tax deductible check to a charity once in a while.That makes them feel good, and the check is never big enough that it means they will take a less expensive vacation, or eat a cheaper cut of meat, or drive an older car another couple of years. They generally don’t maintain any real contact with their original culture and society, other than to maybe occasionally visit their parents.Such a person rarely mingles socially with the people he grew up with, as a general rule. So far as he is concerned, they are abstractions.
Such a person generally does support civil rights for everybody, including minorities of the various sorts, and he is often smart enough to understand that sound environmental law is good for HIM and HIS kids, although it might hurt his bottom line, depending on what he does, or his investments. I’m not saying limo liberals are bad all the way around, but rather that they tend to be cynical and hypocritical, and that they have played a MAJOR role in the D party finding itself in the dog house.
There are exceptions to these observations, no doubt, but most of us understand that old saw about the exceptions proving the rule.
I have most certainly exaggerated my case for effect, for impact. I don’t really expect people with brains to take my more pointed accusations literally, but I do hope they will try to put themselves in the shoes of people who actually think the way I have been writing, and thus understand how they must change in order to connect with the working classes, and win elections.
OldMacDonald aka KGB, HRC would have continued Obama war on CO2. But before the election you couldn’t get over your hate and spread Russian fake news here every other day.
Your actions spell Trumpster, just accept that reality. Democrats don’t need you to advice them.
You might like Palmer report HB. The guys a bit over the top sometimes in the past but he’s got Trump square in his sights.
I read it a couple of days ago when you posted it. I think so too. We will see.
”Your actions spell Trumpster, just accept that reality. Democrats don’t need you to advice them.”
So sez a self identified one percenter with a fortune in the stock market limo liberal Republican Lite big D Democrat , old HB himself. A few days back he bragged about raking it in AGAIN, even here in this forum where nearly everybody is worried about the long term implications of current economic policies, resource depletion, etc.
Old lap doggie HB appears to be suffering from the delusion that the D party controls Washington, and the state houses, and governors offices, and the city and town councils of the USA, and that it’s the R party in the dog house, except for the WH itself.
I can’t personally remember him ever having anything to say indicating that he has ever been wrong about anything at all, or indicating that he is anything other than a true believer in the current day Republican Lite D party, which is so far down in terms of actual political power, compared to the time a few decades back when it was the party of the PEOPLE, rather than the D elite, that it’s just about DEAD.
But even though it IS just about dead, in terms of actual federal power, and power in most of the states, there’s plenty of reason to believe it can recover and take control again, if it is reborn as the party of the people.
But I doubt if old HB will ever manage to get his head around this possibility. True believers can continue to pray even as they see their merciful god take their children one after another, while blessing their enemies with health and wealth, lol, and old HB is a true believing Clintonite incapable of doing other than as he does, which is to blame somebody else, anybody else, for her losing.
He has NEVER had a single word, as best I can remember, to say about WHY the R’s are in control, other than that anybody who has ever voted R is stupid, or ignorant, or worse. Now THAT’S about as good a strategy for making sure the D’s stay in the dog house as I can imagine, but maybe somebody else can enlighten me, and tell me about a BETTER one.
I will gladly retract this observation if he can point to any previous comment indicating he TRULY UNDERSTANDS why the R’s are in power. I’ m getting old and senile, and might have missed it, lol.
Hello Trumpster,
“True believers” to me are Christians who waste half their Sunday at church. When they could be here on the internet.
The funny thing, it’s you who named your that, not me. Personally, I like OldMacDonald aka KGB. That’s mine now for 2 or 3 months. Everyday it just rings truer and truer. You did it all for free. Didn’t even get paid for it. Your quite a business man.
I suggest that you might be in need of broadening your rather limited intellectual horizons.
Any body who has not read this book is in about the same situation, relatively speaking, as an environmentalist who has not read Silent Spring, or anything by Darwin, when it comes to understanding politics, religion, and mass movements of any sort.
A lot more than ice and snow are changing in the Arctic.
Southern animals moving north, hybridization, diseases and the unmentioned increasing invasion of the Arctic by humans. Grizzly bears mating with polar bears. Red foxes out-competing Arctic foxes. Exotic diseases making their way into once-isolated polar realms. These are just some of the worrisome phenomena now occurring as Arctic temperatures soar and the Arctic Ocean, a once-impermeable barrier, melts. http://e360.yale.edu/features/arctic_roamers_the_move_of_southern_species_into_far_north
Not to mention Santa’s workshop and Superman’s Fortress of Solitude sinking below the waves.
I suspect those ideas would resonate with some people who don’t worry about bears…
The loss of Santas’s workshop is a mournful occurrence. One more burden humanity must carry. Though I did think that the Fortress was on land and there were several in different locations around the world.
I do hope people get your sense of humor Nick. Once they do, they may get a bit offended, but then good comedy does that.
Thanks.
Though, oddly enough, I wasn’t joking.
Most people don’t really know much about the Arctic, or the Arctic Ocean, but they feel an intuitive connection to the North Pole. Think of all the movies set there, with trains taking children to Santa’s workshop, etc.
The idea that Santa (if he existed….) would now be underwater might really be sobering for some folks.
Ooops.
If Santa did exist I doubt if a little ice melt would deter such a magical demigod.
Rudolf the red nosed dolphin had a very shiny nose and if you ever saw it you would even say it glows…
So you southerners have a flying boat pulled by dolphins every Christmas? Does Santa wear shorts down there?
.
Hey folks.
It’s been awhile since I’ve posted, though I still come around and browse the post on a regular basis, but I’ve got to ask, has the place gone downhill?
There seems to be a lot more hostility than I remember here. It seems the quality of the discussion has gone down. I notice that the usual minders/moderators continue to be here, but things still seem to have gone off the rails.
Or am I just not seeing things correctly anymore?
You are absolutely correct. The blog has been inundated by trolls, negators, and even some conspiracy theorists. Several posters troll and hound in highly negative and personal fashion. So yes, things have gone downhill and many people have ceased to respond due to the interference of those types in many discussions.
Still, some interesting info seeps in and occasional real information is passed between commenters so still worth being here, though annoying.
Now there is the pot calling the kettle black
GoneFishing says:
03/31/2017 AT 3:30 PM
Spoken like a little wooden headed dummy. Bravo. Your master has the power to type. How exceptional.
Now hoping the next act will be entertaining. Probably too much to ask that your act gets the hook. But fear not little knothead, there are always simpletons who will jeer and clap to your antics.
Welcome to the age of Trump
Bravo my little splinter, you have apply demonstrated your ability to find me just as you said you would. Now you can keep me company just the way you do OldFarmer.
I hope OFM does not get jealous that you are now attached to me.
HB said to Mr. GoneFishing about Old Farmer Mac.
“As soon as he stops saying stupid things. Would you prefer I turn my attention to DoneFishing ? Because I can.”
No spin StormWatcher. Just copied and pasted your comment.
Man up
Hello little Hurt Being. Running to Mommy and complaining again?
That’s unfortunate. There are so few worthwhile places left that I’m aware of. This was one of them. I guess all things end.
Oh well.
Girlfriend, the beauty of a blog vs. a TV is that you interact instead of playing couch potato. The grey matter between your ears is literally just dying waiting to put pen to paper. The regulars here have beaten the subjects of climate change and politics like flogging a dead horse. I believe your welcome to contribute with about any interest subject your heart desires.
Now it’s your turn to take the ball from out of bounds. Please don’t let your feelings get hurt if you bump a few elbows.
There are no free riders in life. I wouldn’t expect to get more out of something than I put in. I look forward to your contribution.
” I wouldn’t expect to get more out of something than I put in. I look forward to your contribution.”
So sez old HB himself, who devotes eighty or ninety percent of his comments to calling me Trumpster, etc. 😉
And when he posts about something else, he just parrots something said by somebody else. He has never demonstrated any personal mastery of any significant topic discussed here in this forum by way of making an original comment.
I can’t remember any occasion on which he asked one of the better informed people commenting about climate, resource depletion, population, etc, a question, in order to gain a deeper understanding of the topic.
Trumpster, no one here talks more about himself more than you. Sometimes it’s like we all know about every backwards hillbilly friend you have in Appalachia.
Not down hill, just more lively 🙂 the non oil thread seems to attract discussions regarding politics and climate change. Passionate topics. One thing I really like is all the links to interesting current events and data that get posted in the non oil thread. Up thread is a great example when Mr Kaplan posted some links to arctic CO2 and CH4 data. As well I like OFMs lengthy posts. The information sharing in the comments of non oil threads is why I read it. Although you do have a good point. Perhaps the WUWT types coming here to post bait could be ignored rather than taken to task. And maybe OFM and HB could become friends 🙂
It’s just a sign of the times. I think it has a lot to do with the Trumpocene.
Cheers!
The internet will work out just fine. All the mental oddballs and wackos will be quickly identified by AI software and offered jobs in government or in related corporations.
What better way to lock in the future?
This place has become The GoneFishing/Survivalist/Hightrekker/Duncan Idaho/HuntingtonBeach Show. Post anything not fully 100% in agreement with any of their individual viewpoints, and you can expect to have your intelligence insulted, be called stupid, an idiot, that you don’t know what you’re talking about, and so on. Collectively, they know-it-all, and will tell you so either directly or indirectly.
Geoff, I learned to respond back when attacked and trolled incessantly on this site. Javier is relentless, now HB is on the attack and a few others. I don’t put up with as much as I used to. If I hurt your feelings in the past, not intended, but you need to get over it or join the HB/Javier club.
Thanks for the link, I found one of my comments just below where you chose. It bears repeating. The living world has been stable for nearly a billion years. It has been growing and changing in form, but it never disappeared and achieved new stability even after disastrous physical setbacks.
Nature and the physical world tends toward stability. All these changes will reach a new stable position in the future. What that world will look like, what kinds of plants and animals will exist, we do not know.
Today is not a good predictor of what the future will be. We can extrapolate, take into account possible changes and innovations, but we don’t really know what the future will be like in general. Because so many things change.
We can however change ourselves, change our mindset and actions and end up with a different future.
There is a percentage of people doing this now and even big business and government is changing. There is no one answer, there are billions of answers that come into play. The individual can change much faster than governments or businesses. And we can have a great time doing it and sharing the changes.
Although now I believe we need both individual action and group action. As has been said by others, physics and chemistry are giving us a short timeline for action. Unlike opinion and politics, they just move forward with no concern while we talk among ourselves. That is why those who attempt to squelch or derail discussion and thought at this point are so dangerous. We now have a long list of known knowns to deal with. The unknown may or may not be revealed in the future and may blindside us or we may see them coming. But if we cannot or do not act on what we know right now, then the rest is unimportant.
What happened to Javier? I miss his pure comedy gold. And speaking of pure comedy gold-
“Global warming is all cyclical based on the sun, sunspot activity, and the polar magnetic fields around our planet. That is already well known to be the truth of what’s going on with global climate if you follow the work of the scientists whose methods include study of the actual climate data as opposed to the scientists who follow political and ideological orders.”
Perhaps Mr Riley would care to name some of those scientists he’s talking about who inform him of these facts regarding sun spots and polar magnetic fields so I can follow them and enlighten myself.
Don’t forget Javier. He’s usually good for a few miles of column and plenty of failed predictions.
I won’t miss Javier, but I’m wondering if Ronald Walter is still with us.
Most of the time when I hear about somebody I know but haven’t seen in a while,it’s because somebody calls to tell me when the burial services are scheduled.
RW’s comments almost always left me laughing. You could read almost all of them simultaneously as wicked sarcasm and true believer rants, regardless of the topic.
Maybe that was his point, the point being that nothing is either good or bad but that thinking makes it so.
Faster than forecast: the story ice tells about abrupt anthropocene climate change with Jason Box
There are some flaws with that work, that I see. The facts are, ships/buoys only reliably measure water temperature down to 150′ or so. Go any deeper to get temperatures, and you need submarines. Therefore any work talking about ships/buoys measuring temperatures all the way down to 300′ must be very misinformed, because that doesn’t happen. Now submarines (naval/research) do take water temperatures down at 300′ and even deeper, almost to 1000′. The problem is, these apparatuses move through water at depth. That causes the water to heat up near the hull, which impacts the measured and recorded water temperatures.
Serious scientists know we frankly have no idea what the real water temperatures are as deep as 1000′ ft down, unless the temperatures are taken by hanging a long-necked probe below a buoy or in the process of investigating an underwater volcano. To otherwise use temperature measurements taken by submarine is like measuring land temperature at a location directly above hot asphalt on a sunny Summer day and calling those measurements the truth. Of course if anyone wanted to do that they could, but they wouldn’t be faithful to real science that doesn’t need to rely on “correcting and adjusting” collected data in order to prove a prediction right.
Where do you get your facts from?
2000 meters is equal to 6561 feet and 8 inches.
“There is a neat program that is measuring the temperature and salinity of ocean surface waters around the world. The Argo program deploys floats that measure salinity and temperature throughout the surface layer of the ocean. Over 3,000 free-drifting floats have been deployed all over the ocean and each float is programmed to sink 2,000 meters down, drifting at that depth for about 10 days. The float then makes its way to the surface measuring temperature and salinity the whole time. Data is transmitted to a satellite once the float reaches the surface, so that scientists and the public have access to the state of the ocean within hours of the data collection.”
“Research groups from around the world have deployed thousands of Argo floats to measure since around the year 2000 to take temperature, salinity and other measurements. Technological advances have allowed a small fleet of deeper-diving floats to be deployed more recently. Some of those have been built to dive as deep as 20,000 feet.”
“Argo is a global array of 3,800 free-drifting profiling floats that measures the temperature and salinity of the upper 2000 m of the ocean. This allows, for the first time, continuous monitoring of the temperature, salinity, and velocity of the upper ocean, with all data being relayed and made publicly available within hours after collection.”
“How accurate is the Argo data?
The temperatures in the Argo profiles are accurate to ± 0.002°C and pressures are accurate to ± 2.4dbar. For salinity,there are two answers. The data delivered in real time are sometimes affected by sensor drift. For many floats this drift is small, and the uncorrected salinities are accurate to ± .01 psu. At a later stage, salinities are corrected by expert examination, comparing older floats with newly deployed instruments and with ship-based data. Corrections are made both for identified sensor drift and for a thermal lag error, which can result when the float ascends through a region of strong temperature gradients.”
There are some flaws with that work, that I see. The facts are, ships/buoys only reliably measure water temperature down to 150′ or so.
Hey moron, here’s a paper by two very serious psychologists from Cornell University who studied why idiots like you think they know enough about science to criticize it!
I’d suggest you read it but I highly doubt your reading comprehension skills would be up to par.
It’s interesting, but very misleading about economists. For instance, he says:
To get a clearer fix on how deeply our economics establishment is entrenched within its own counter-empirical worldview, let’s home in on what is undoubtedly the most consequential article of faith in its catechism: the gospel of the deficit hawk.
That’s just dishonest. Economists in general do not agree with “austerity”.
I think he was taking about our neoliberal friends who have been in ascendance within economics from Uncle Milton until the present.
But agree– some think the credit card is the answer.
Then we have the “loot and charge”, a bit of both, that Sir Ronnie The Lessor perfected, along with the Electronic Nuremberg Rally.
Wright Electric is a startup company that aims for electrification in the sky, to eliminate the biggest cost for airline carriers of today – fuel.
Wright’s goal is to develop a 150-seat all-electric airplane with a 300 mile (nearly 500 km) range that would compete in the 737 style Boeing and Airbus plane market.
Both Boeing and Airbus sold nearly 1,000 of those planes in 2016 – and at around $90 million each, so there is huge potential in electrification.
“These short-haul trips make up 30 percent of all flights, and is a $26 billion market.”
Wright already has a partner in British airline EasyJet, which could ultimately be the first to put such a plane into service.
Yes. I know what today’s date is but, this was actually posted over at insideevs.com three days ago. This article started me thinking about ways the range of electric aircraft could be extended. The Eco-Climb concept from Airbus as shown in the screen capture of the video at the linked page is a start. I think having the “sled” run on steel tracks like a train would allow the sled to draw power from the tracks during take off. A more esoteric approach would be to have a linear motor built into the runway to move the sled. The basic idea is to accelerate the aircraft past take off velocity using ground based power, reducing the amount of energy that needs to be carried on board the aircraft. There is really no need for an aircraft to be operating under it’s own power as long as it is in contact with terra firma!
Since electric aircraft are a lot less noisy than anything using combustion engines, they could climb at a far more leisurely pace in most cases and could probably cruise at lower altitudes. A quick Internet search reveals that propeller driven aircraft cruise as low as 5000 feet on short hops. Not having to climb to altitudes of 30,000 feet or more should save quite a bit of energy.
The point is, if we re-calibrate how we think about air travel and what constitutes normal in terms of cruising speed, cruising altitudes and climb rates, electric aircraft could be operated for maximum energy efficiency and battery powered commercial air travel might be closer than most people think.
edit: Incidentally the following is THE April Fool’s story from insideevs.com
I still think that NASA has a winner in the X57 concept aircraft. It appears to get around a lot of the lift to drag problem and some of the air drag problem by using a modified wing with essentially the whole wing having propeller thrust over it. Extending this to larger passenger planes would give a plane speed on the order of 300 + mph that will use only a small amount of energy compared to current jets and turboprops. Also eliminates concern about one or two motors shutting down.
NASA’s aeronautical innovators hope to validate the idea that distributing electric power across a number of motors integrated with an aircraft in this way will result in a five-time reduction in the energy required for a private plane to cruise at 175 mph.
Several other benefits would result as well. “Maxwell” will be powered only by batteries, eliminating carbon emissions and demonstrating how demand would shrink for lead-based aviation fuel still in use by general aviation.
Energy efficiency at cruise altitude using X-57 technology could benefit travelers by reducing flight times, fuel usage, as well as reducing overall operational costs for small aircraft by as much as 40 percent. Typically, to get the best fuel efficiency an airplane has to fly slower than it is able. Electric propulsion essentially eliminates the penalty for cruising at higher speeds.
Not sure how ionizing the liquid fuel would increase performance. Possibly the ICE would get a more uniform burn and boost efficiency. Too bad there is already an ICE design out there that gets 40 percent efficiency and is being ignored.
I sure hope the X-57 can translate into the private plane market and scale up to the 10 seater category ASAP.
OCEANS MELTING GREENLAND (OMG) PROJECT
Global sea level rise will be one of the major environmental challenges of the 21st Century. Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG) will pave the way for improved estimates of sea level rise by addressing the question: To what extent are the oceans melting Greenland’s ice from below? Over a five-year campaign, OMG will observe changing water temperatures on the continental shelf surrounding Greenland, and how marine glaciers react to the presence of warm, salty Atlantic Water. The complicated geometry of the sea floor steers currents on the shelf and often determines whether Atlantic Water can reach into the long narrow fjords and interact with the coastal glaciers. Because knowledge of these pathways is a critical component of modeling the interaction between the oceans and ice sheet, OMG will facilitate improved measurements of the shape and depth of the sea floor in key regions as well.
There is also a network of seismic detectors “listening” to ice movements in Greenland.
So finally we will have more probes on and around Greenland than we have had satellites and probes sent to Mars. Definitely a lot less expensive than the Mars missions along with being more relevant to our lives.
Probably one of the more important orbiting missions, GRACE measures mass changes allowing it to monitor water movement and storage in oceans, ice and underground. Due for replacement in 2017/2018.
I agree, GRACE was a big one, and our denier friends worse nightmare.
Here’s an example of the merchants of doubt out in full force. A full two hours, thirty six minutes and 20 seconds worth! Chaired by Representative Lamar Smith (R–TX).
Climate Science: Assumptions, Policy Implications, and the Scientific Method
Full Committee | 2318 Rayburn House Office Building Washington, D.C. 20515 | Mar 29, 2017 10:00am to 12:00pm
Opening Statements
Ranking Member Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX)
Ranking Member Suzanne Bonamici (D-OR) of the Subcommittee on Environment
Letters
Drs. John C. Fyfe, Gregory M. Flato, Nathan P. Gillett and Neil C. Swart, The Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis, Environment and Climate Change Canada
Dr. Benjamin D. Santer, Dr. Matthew H. England, Dr. Ed Hawkins, Prof. Michael E. Mann, Dr. Gerald A. Meehl, Dr. Yu Kosaka, Dr. Shang-Ping Xie
Witnesses
Dr. Judith Curry, President, Climate Forecast Applications Network; Professor Emeritus, Georgia Institute of Technology
Dr. John Christy, Professor and Director, Earth System Science Center, NSSTC, University of Alabama at Huntsville; State Climatologist, Alabama
Dr. Michael Mann, Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science, Pennsylvania State University; Director, Earth System Science Center (ESSC), Pennsylvania State University
Dr. Roger Pielke Jr., Professor, Environmental Studies Department, University of Colorado
Hello OldMacDonald aka KGB Trumpster, the trashing of HRC with fake news is how America got your puppet master. You must be proud.
The First Week Of Early Voting Bodes Well For Democrat Jon Ossoff
A special election in Georgia’s 6th district is testing the liberal backlash against Donald Trump.
After five days of early voting in the special election for Georgia’s 6th congressional district, Democratic voter turnout has significantly outpaced that of Republicans.
That is a good sign for Democrats hoping that the surge in liberal enthusiasm after the election of President Donald Trump will be enough to elect 30-year-old candidate Jon Ossoff.
I would have time to post a LOT more R dirty laundry except for the time I spend on you, but the more I spend on you, the better, in some ways.
I have been thinking about posting your wanna be empress’s record as a business person, above and beyond Cattle Gate.
All hard core D’s who are mathematically literate MUST recognize the fact that after a YEAR nobody has turned up a single link defending HRC in that little scam, based on mathematical reasoning.
Every body with an understanding of basic math KNOWS she’s a crook.
But lets move on, and discuss the fate of her business partners in White Water, lol.
Note that the New Yorker is generally recognized as one of the most liberal magazines in the USA, and also one of the top two or three in terms of reputation when it comes to getting the facts straight.
Clinton had no experience in such financial instruments.[2] Bill Clinton’s salary as Arkansas Attorney General and then Governor of Arkansas was modest and Clinton later said she had been interested in building a financial cushion for the future.[3][4] The Clintons’ combined income in 1978 from the governorship and Rose Law Firm amounted to $51,173,[5] equivalent to $187,900 in 2016. James Blair was a friend, lawyer, outside counsel to Tyson Foods, Arkansas’ largest employer, and had been doing so well trading commodities futures that he encouraged friends and family to enter the market too.[6][3][4] Blair in turn traded through, and relied upon cattle markets expertise from, broker Robert L. “Red” Bone of Refco, a former Tyson executive and professional poker player who was a World Series of Poker semifinalist.[4][7] In October 1978, when Bill Clinton was Attorney General and on the verge of being elected Governor,[1] Clinton opened a trading account, although Blair made most of the trades.
By January 1979, Clinton was up $26,000;[4] but later, she would lose $16,000 in a single trade.[4] At one point she owed in excess of $100,000 to Refco as part of covering losses, but no margin calls were made by Refco against her.[4] Near the end of the trading, Blair correctly sold short and gave her a $40,000 gain in one afternoon.[4] In July 1979,[1] once she became pregnant with Chelsea Clinton, “I lost my nerve for gambling [and] walked away from the table $100,000 ahead.”
HRC has been in the Republican policital cross hairs for a quarter of a century with NEVER a conviction. Now let’s talk about-
Watergate was a major political scandal that occurred in the United States in the 1970s, following a break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex in Washington, D.C. in 1972 and President Richard Nixon’s administration’s attempted cover-up of its involvement.
Yes, LET’S PLEASE talk about how she put picked up golf clubs for the first time and won the LPGA championship WITHIN A YEAR.
THOU ART INDEED A GREAT FOOL, HB.
IF you had lick of sense, you wouldn’t point out the mathematically obvious, or the fact that she got special treatment because she was WELL CONNECTED, with the GOVERNOR as HUBBY, and one of the VERY TOP MEN at Tyson her oh so special friend, it just might leave anybody who is NOT a die hard true believer that R’s can do no right, and D’s can do no wrong, WONDERING about being allowed to run that sort of deficit. Brokers have to make up such losses themselves , or their insurance companies have to make them good, in the event the customer can’t or won’t.
You might have very conveniently forgotten to mention that the broker involved got his license lifted, and in a modern court, with modern regulatory rules, the whole lot of them would have been convicted, no question at all.
It’s PAR FOR THE COURSE, when you are running a scam, to provide yourself with a little camoflauge. In this case it was managed by putting Hill in the hole, temporarily, a couple of times, so as to be able to say look,I’m a complete goddamn amateur , and it’s a total fucking accident that I did so incredibly well, as a matter of fact , so much BETTER than any OTHER client of my broker than not a single one has ever come forward telling us how much he made for THAT one.
The very idea that she would have an account with such a scumbag broker, with such a powerful insider supposedly advising her, is totally at odds with any ordinary standard of conduct for a politician who expects to attain high office.
Insider trading is one of the BIGGEST no no’s in the entire investment field. People are routinely jailed for it, unless maybe they are lawyers, and know how to cover their tracks well enough to avoid indictments and convictions.
There are millions of crooks in this country who have never been convicted of any thing more serious than a traffic offense.
Consider for instance the executives who were running the big banks that took part in the robo signing scam. Ask any attorney who is in civil or criminal practice, who does not work for such a bank, and he or she will tell you that if you do it, and it can be proven, you WILL go to jail.
Do you care to name a bankster who went to jail for scamming mortgage customers? CAN YOU??
People with good judgement JUST DON’T GET INVOLVED in schemes such as WhiteWater, ESPECIALLY if they are supposedly possessed of EXCELLENT judgement, as evidenced by the fact they have a law degree, UNLESS they smell BIG PROFITS.
The lack of judgement displayed in this case alone is enough to more than leave a thinking person thinking maybe Clinton cuts the corners very close indeed. TOO CLOSE maybe, to trust her.
Now as far as worrying about a family nest egg, a couple of hot shots with IVY credentials, political connections, and the fringes and bennies associated with being the FIRST COUPLE of the state with their actual income as given puts them at about one hundred ninety thousand bucks in 2016 money, which is NOT EXACTLY BROKE, and did I mention the perks that come with being the governor, such as business opportunities after leaving office?
The baggage train is real, and it goes all the way back to her earliest days , and all your denials simply make it more and more obvious to anybody who is NOT a Clinton true believer that you have no way of defending her, other than to attack me, and foam at the mouth and yell Great Right Wing Conspiracy, etc.
Now my little fool, whenever you get tired of calling me a Trumpster, etc, I will quit pointing out the ethical and judgemental flaws of your princess.
It amuses me no end that you think your arguments will convince anybody who is possessed of a little common sense that Cattle Gate wasn’t a run of the mill scam, the only thing about it being exceptional being that it involved the governors wife, and a VIP with the biggest company in the state, a company that incidentally is INTIMATELY involved in commodities, because chickens are a commodity type product, produced in commodity markets using commodity inputs, etc.
The odds against her doing so well, as an amateur, or as a pro, for that matter, have been variously calculated at not less than millions to one against.
We can talk about some other scandals later if you like, but I’m sort of FOND of this one, lol, because this is a forum wherein most of the regulars are MATHEMATICALLY LITERATE.
Given that virtually all of us are liberal to hard core liberal, and virtually all of us are big D D’s, I don’t expect to hear anybody proclaiming that my factual ducks are in a nice straight row, BUT…….
OTHER than you, who has DENIED they are in a nice straight row?????
We have some pretty juicy scandals brewing right now, involving Trump family members being involved in government business, and just about everybody, excepting ding a ling Trump true believers of course, is seriously upset and mad about it.
But I don’t hear much about Hillary setting the example, in terms of being de facto in charge of trying to radically rearrange our health care system, with that effort being conducted almost entirely in secret, with no body allowed to know what the end product was supposed to be, while she had no official position in the government, etc, etc,
Well, so far as our health care system is concerned, it really does need a radical overhaul.
I consistently advocate our moving to a system modeled after the one used in Canada and/ or the major Western European countries.
Hey OldMacDonald aka KGB Trumpster,
“Now my little fool, whenever you get tired of calling me a Trumpster, etc, I will quit pointing out the ethical and judgemental flaws of your princess.”
Just love poking the bear, I mean Russian
Just love poking the bear, I mean Russian
I know, and I don’t mind at all, thank you, because as long as you continue to do so,I have a good reason to rub everybody ( who supported Clinton instead of Sanders) nose in the obvious facts regarding her flaws as a candidate. They won’t love me for doing so, but the ones who are smarter than the average fence post will get the point.
As a matter of fact, I think maybe they have gotten it already, but I won’t let you get away with calling me Trumpster etc without a response.
On the other hand, it would be a more useful use of my time here to move on to new territory, given that by now the regulars and the lurkers have heard this one enough times for it to sink in, if it is ever going to sink in.
Now doing that is NOT making me any friends, any more than telling somebody you know just a little on a friendly basis that the significant other is sleeping around, but in the end, it does HIM some good, by forcing him or her to face up to reality.
We need a major clean out in DC, and cleaning out the Republican Lite D’s in favor of real D’s is a step in the right direction, both for the country and for the party.
A REAL DEMOCRAT would have won going away by a country mile.
A competent trainer doesn’t send a fighter with a glass jaw into the ring with an opponent who has the ability to land a few punches, even weak ones, on that jaw.
HRC had a glass jaw in terms of her baggage train, and since the fight was conducted with words and ink and video, rather than actual fists, well, Trump landed one after another, from start to finish on that glass jaw.
As a PRACTICAL matter, it didn’t even matter whether the baggage was real, or as Clinton true believers insist, the product of right wing propaganda.
It worked.
And incidentally, I can’t even IMAGINE that if Romney, or Trump, or any other R had pulled that little old Cattle Gate insider robbery that there would be dozens of comments expressing righteous liberal indignation and patting me on the back for reminding everybody not to forget that guy’s PROVEN ethical shortcomings, prosecuted or not.
“NEVER BEEN CONVICTED” is pretty much of a left handed compliment, although a true believer doesn’t realize it.
There are a number of business men in my neck of the woods who have never been convicted of anything more than a traffic violation that I steer clear of as a matter of common sense, knowing how they have cheated other people that WERE foolish enough to do business with them.
Bottom line, nominating a candidate with the worst polling numbers in the party’s history was a monumental mistake, and hopefully one that thinking D’s will avoid, as best they can, by supporting somebody else, in future elections.
Have fun clicking through the years and reading the climate predictions. Water is a big factor in future climate.
I just copied this from the NYT, it’s not fresh news.
But indicates that I know what I have been talking about in terms of the D’s needing working class people to win, and about people who are scared and frustrated abandoning the D party when they feel forgotten, or worse, betrayed, and millions of working class people believe they are BOTH, forgotten AND betrayed.
xxxx
“In the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election, many analysts suggested that Hillary Clinton lost to Donald J. Trump because of poor Democratic turnout.
Months later, it is clear that the turnout was only modestly better for Mr. Trump than expected.
To the extent Democratic turnout was weak, it was mainly among black voters. Even there, the scale of Democratic weakness has been exaggerated.
Instead, it’s clear that large numbers of white, working-class voters shifted from the Democrats to Mr. Trump. Over all, almost one in four of President Obama’s 2012 white working-class supporters defected from the Democrats in 2016, either supporting Mr. Trump or voting for a third-party candidate.”
xxxx
Note that the most reliable of all D party voting blocks, the black community, failed to turn out in the usual numbers for Clinton. I can think of several reasons why, all of them having to do with Clinton talking and walking the bankster’s talk and walk, or something along that line. There are LOTS of black folks in my part of the country who USED to work in industries that have been off shored.
I doubt they were exactly thrilled with her globalist positions.
And here’s another thing that just MIGHT be worth noting to the liberal faction that really gets it’s jollies making fun of religious folks.
A LOT of black Americans take their religion very seriously indeed.
In times past, they were willing to over look, to NOT notice the liberal cultural agenda, which is in large part entirely incompatible with their religious and cultural convictions. Serious black Christians are not too happy about abortion on demand, and some radical blacks view abortion as a whitey trick to get rid of black people.
Many older black people, and a lot of younger ones as well, have approximately zero use for the sexual revolution, because the black community has paid a very high price by way of the decline of marriage as a social norm, etc.
You can tune in to some black Christian preachers these days, on the radio, and hear them telling their listeners that the enemy is not JUST the R party. The D’s cultural agenda is coming in for increasing criticism.
And more than a few black people are earning serious money these days, and having made it into the middle class, and the upper middle class, as doctors, lawyers, business owners , high ranking government officials such as chiefs of police, mayors, superintendents of school systems, etc, SOME of them are not too happy with the tax bite that comes out of their salaries or profits. How many? I don’t know, but I have personally heard some black guys bitching about their property taxes and income taxes.
It doesn’t take a WHOLE LOT of movement from one side of the political balance beam scale to the other, when the scale is more or less in balance, to cause it to move abruptly in favor of one party or the other.
According to the NYT, Clinton lost a QUARTER of the white working class voters who went with Obama.
I doubt more than one percent of black voters abandoned abandoned the D’s and voted for Trump, but maybe that many more , or twice that many , were so lacking in enthusiasm for Clinton that they just didn’t vote.
A lot of people don’t seem to realize it, but there are some black people, not very many, who consistently vote R, for one reason or another, and that faction may have voted for Trump.
I will point out that many religious communities will respect those liberals who practice the social gospel — working for the poor, the sick, the ‘least among us’. This overcomes the difference in cultural shibboleths. Bernie may be a secular Jew, but he’s lived his life working to help others, and this earns respect among some conservative Christian religious communities. (This does not apply to “prosperity gospel” right wing groups, who have really sick beliefs and basically believe that wealth == godliness.)
Hillary Clinton never managed to come across looking like she gave a damn about poor Americans. I think she did care, but she appeared totally out of touch. Because she can’t campaign well if her life depends on it.
Here’s some red Trump meat for my favorite lap doggie.
He really ought to enjoy this link, although he might blow a fuse or two torturing himself figuring out why a Trumpster would post such links, lol.
Our Dishonest President
PART I
By THE TIMES EDITORIAL BOARD
APRIL 2, 2017
It was no secret during the campaign that Donald Trump was a narcissist and a demagogue who used fear and dishonesty to appeal to the worst in American voters. The Times called him unprepared and unsuited for the job he was seeking, and said his election would be a “catastrophe.”
Still, nothing prepared us for the magnitude of this train wreck. Like millions of other Americans, we clung to a slim hope that the new president would turn out to be all noise and bluster, or that the people around him in the White House would act as a check on his worst instincts, or that he would be sobered and transformed by the awesome responsibilities of office.
Instead, seventy-some days in — and with about 1,400 to go before his term is completed — it is increasingly clear that those hopes were misplaced.
In a matter of weeks, President Trump has taken dozens of real-life steps that, if they are not reversed, will rip families apart, foul rivers and pollute the air, intensify the calamitous effects of climate change and profoundly weaken the system of American public education for all.
His attempt to de-insure millions of people who had finally received healthcare coverage and, along the way, enact a massive transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich has been put on hold for the moment. But he is proceeding with his efforts to defang the government’s regulatory agencies and bloat the Pentagon’s budget even as he supposedly retreats from the global stage.
“
It is impossible to know where his presidency will lead or how much damage he will do to our ……..
Lap doggie demonstrates that he has mastered the trick of clicking on a link, and copying and pasting part of the contents. I hereby reward him with a symbolic pat on the head and atta boy.
I do have a somewhat twisted sense of humor, and don’t mind letting it show once in a while.
From here on out until further notice,I ‘m going to post as Trumpster when I post R party dirty laundry.
Here’s one for HRC fans.
It’s as much or more an opinion piece as otherwise, but it contains a lot of good solid factual information, while of course following the usual political playbook of either avoiding shortcomings, or saying they don’t exist, lol.
I love the Gaurdian, but when it comes to the feminist perspective, the editors and writers there are determined to make up for lost time, lol. That’s ok, it’s only fair.
I haven’t yet had time to read this, but the headline looked to good to pass it up.
The destruction of Hillary Clinton: sexism, Sanders and the millennial feminists
Sanders’s branding of Hillary as establishment, however, seemed vastly unjust and corrosively divisive to me, especially when delivered to a generation that knew very little about her beyond what Bernie told them. Like progressive, establishment is a pretty meaningless term, particularly when lobbed at one Washington politician by another. Neither Sanders nor Clinton had been working outside the system.
Appearances to the contrary, Sanders was not a union organizer, but rather a longtime member of the Senate. And if Clinton had more support from the Democratic party, that was due in large part to the relationships she had cultivated over the years, working with others – something Sanders was not particularly good at. Nonetheless, for weeks during the early months of the primary, I listened to 19-year-olds and media pundits alike lavish praise on Bernie Sanders for his bold, revolutionary message, and scorn Hillary for being a part of the establishment.
They described him as “heart” and her as “head” – a bitter irony for those of us familiar with the long history of philosophical, religious, and medical diatribes disqualifying women from leadership positions on the basis of our less-disciplined emotions. He was seen as authentic in his progressivism while she was pushed to the left by political expediency – as though a lifetime of fighting for equality and children’s rights meant nothing. He was the champion of the working class (conveniently ignoring that black and white women were members, and that their issues were also working class issues), but her longstanding commitments to universal health care, child care, paid sick leave, racial justice, the repeal of the Hyde amendment, and narrowing the wage gap between working men and women apparently evaporated because she’d accepted well-paid invitations to speak at Goldman Sachs.
OldFarmer, I have to give you some credit for the humor, but more importantly. You need to read your link to The Gaurdian at least twice before you go to bed at night.
Besides, if it wasn’t for me. Who would you discuss politics here with ? You would be lonely.
I’ve read the first one, the one about the book. There’s aren’t a lot of days I don’t read the US edition of the Gaurdian,paying particular attention to the political and cultural articles.
I got to thinking- You two guys are very similar in a lot of ways, just seen and felt different things in life. One lives in the old green cherokee hills (where baptists now rule), and the other on the golden urban desert beach (where only money rules).
Cousins of a sort. Enjoy the company.
More than either of you know
Before I say this, let me repeat that I agree with most of Hillary’s policies and if she had been miraculously made President by divine intervention she would have done an decent job.
Hillary was simply a bloody awful campaigner. She shouldn’t have run for President. It was done out of egoism. She was the wrong candidate, but she cared more about ego than about country. Infuriating. I remember when she ran for Senate as a carpetbagger in NY (against *truly* pathetic joke candidates), she promised up and down that she wasn’t just using it as a stepping stone to run for President. She was lying.
The fact that Bernie, a longtime member of the Senate, was able to run an anti-establishment campaign against her with great success *shows* what an awful campaigner she was.
Why did Bernie run? Because he saw that she was a bloody awful campaigner and was getting ready to lead the Democratic Party to a terrible loss. Which she did. He tried to give the Democratic Party a chance to win. He would have beaten Trump; all the statistics make it clear. Bernie had Pennsylvania for sure.
She couldn’t even find enough political common sense to nominate Bernie as her VP, which *might have actually won the election* (and you can be absolutely sure he would have accepted the job). Crummy campaigner.
Elizabeth Warren declined to run for President. *She* could probably have won, getting the same votes Bernie would have.
Hillary Clinton was just a bad campaigner. She’s always been a bad campaigner. It’s no shame; I’m also a bad campaigner which is why I haven’t been running for public office. She should have stuck to trial law for nonprofits, at which she was very good and could have been doing great things.
Today the market cap of Tesla exceeded the market cap of Ford…. The shorts are getting burned.
Sometimes I really wonder if Tesla will crash and burn, due to recklessly leapfrogging other companies by betting the farm on one new technology or on the readiness of a new technology for exploitation on the grand scale.
Bankruptcy seemed pretty close a couple of times. But even if the company as such fails, it seems very likely most of the various pieces of the carcass will be bought up and incorporated into other larger more dominant companies, and probably at prices that will make EARLY Tesla investors look pretty good.
My grandparents saw the coming ( not the ORIGINS ) of electricity, telephones, automobiles, air travel , antibiotics, radio, television, and other world shaking new technologies over the course of their lives.
I learned to work a mule, when I was a kid, but only because the folks kept a couple of horses and mules mostly for old times sake . Tractors ruled well before my own time, although there were still a few jobs a horse or mule could handle more efficiently than the tractors of that day.
A good mule can work right along with you picking up cantaloupes, or sweet corn, pulling a wagon without a driver, staying right in the same spot, and anybody who is fond of horses knows all about the ORIGINAL self driving vehicles, namely horse drawn delivery wagons.
So far self driving tractors are mostly a novelty, given the price of them, but in ten years ??????
A lot of people smarter than I am believe a successful transition to an industrial economy based on renewable energy, recycling and conservation out of reach, or impossible.
But when you look back at all the things that have come to be over the last couple of centuries………..
Why not?
If I were a young guy and building a new farm house, there’s no question in my mind that it would be so well insulated, and so situated in relation to sun and shade, etc, that I could heat and cool it with ten percent of the energy typically used in today’s new houses for heating and cooling.
And if I thought I would be able to drive for another twenty years, I would without question buy a Chevy Volt and put in ten kW worth of solar panels, as the next big project.
Trumpster sez we need to keep on burning coal. It’ll mean we have a bigger and better supply of idiots to vote for us, later on, and cut the grass an tote the trash ‘n take care of all that kinda work for us.
And besides that why should we waste good money on such foolishness as medical research ? Them that lives right ain’t got no reason to worry bout eternity, and them that don’t, well they deserve to git to the hot place just that much sooner anyway.
Trumpster knows how to play the religion card. It works for him and his faction, the way he plays it.
It’s extremely unfortunate, but that given there ARE tens of millions of voters who take their religion seriously, the liberal / secular faction of our society manages to play it incorrectly almost every time.
Their best strategy is to discard it as often as possible when electioneering.
The typical liberal /secular/ anti religious voter is already in the D party bag , and is more likely to brag about catching a venereal disease than he is to vote R/ Trump.
Head’s up for those who listen to The Power Hour –This Wednesday Joyce will have biologist Scott Compton of EMFwarriors.com on as a guest. He’ll be talking about his research involving wireless technologies and what all these electromagnetic fields are doing to our bodies.
Really now! ROFLMAO!! Non Native Electro Magnetic Fields? I checked out the site. Not a single link to any peer reviewed science or research on this topic is even listed. Just curious have you ever heard of cosmic rays? May I suggest you never fly in an airplane. You could be fried by high energy particles if you do. On the other hand I’m sure your tin foil hat will protect you!
Well if you have such a problem with this science why don’t you listen to The Power Hour tomorrow yourself, and consider a call during the listener call in time? Maybe read Mr. Compton’s scientific biography first.
Perhaps you may and may not agree with the material Joyce discusses, but she does offer lots of good information on worldwide news and alternative health techniques. I have gotten some good health advise for myself over the years. http://www.thepowerhour.com/welcome.htm
If you have any links to peer reviewed papers on the deleterious effects of nnEMFs by Scott Compton then please provide them and I will be happy to read them. Until then I remain highly skeptical! I did a google scholar search on papers by Scott Compton + EMFs and came up empty. I am even more skeptical of so called alternative health techniques. Most of the ones that have been tested and found to work have already been incorporated into standard medical practice.
In the mean time here’s a legitimate paper on the safety and potential benefits of using EMFs in the treatment of Alzheimers .
Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease
J Alzheimers Dis. 2016; 53(3): 753–771.
Published online 2016 Aug 3. Prepublished online 2016 May 30. doi: 10.3233/JAD-160165
PMCID: PMC4981900
Review of the Evidence that Transcranial Electromagnetic Treatment will be a Safe and Effective Therapeutic Against Alzheimer’s Disease
Gary W. Arendash*
Author information ► Article notes ► Copyright and License information ►
Abstract We have demonstrated in multiple studies that daily, long-term electromagnetic field (EMF) treatment in the ultra-high frequency range not only protects Alzheimer’s disease (AD) transgenic mice from cognitive impairment, but also reverses such impairment in aged AD mice. Moreover, these beneficial cognitive effects appear to be through direct actions on the AD process. Based on a large array of pre-clinical data, we have initiated a pilot clinical trial to determine the safety and efficacy of EMF treatment to mild-moderate AD subjects. Since it is important to establish the safety of this new neuromodulatory approach, the main purpose of this review is to provide a comprehensive assessment of evidence supporting the safety of EMFs, particularly through transcranial electromagnetic treatment (TEMT). In addition to our own pre-clinical studies, a rich variety of both animal and cell culture studies performed by others have underscored the anticipated safety of TEMT in clinical AD trials. Moreover, numerous clinical studies have determined that short- or long-term human exposure to EMFs similar to those to be provided clinically by TEMT do not have deleterious effects on general health, cognitive function, or a variety of physiologic measures—to the contrary, beneficial effects on brain function/activity have been reported. Importantly, such EMF exposure has not been shown to increase the risk of any type of cancer in human epidemiologic studies, as well as animal and cell culture studies. In view of all the above, clinical trials of safety/efficacy with TEMT to AD subjects are clearly warranted and now in progress.
The research with links to peer review papers is in the library not the main site. Go to http://emfwarriors.neutopia.co/ Several papers, presentations and lectures there.
I doubt I will bother to listen to a former lab assistant with grandiose ideas.
NAOM
For Dennis,
Sometime back I had some things to say about some shortcomings of accepted economic theory as it touches on globalism, or more specifically the outsourcing of industries and jobs.
You said my professors in introductory level econ taught this topic correctly. I agree, within the context of a strictly academic discussion, meaning within the walls of an intellectual box confining the discussion to theory.
I didn’t get back to the discussion then, for one reason or another, but the point I was trying to make was that there’s a LARGER real world box that must be considered in evaluating such arguments.
One of them is the political consequences of economic theory being used as the basis of political policy.
Globalism is definitely good for some people, and maybe it is good for the entire country, on the AVERAGE,but as they say a man with his hands in a fire and his feet in ice water may be happy on the average.
Here’s a consequence of globalism that is not considered in economic texts, at least not at the level I studied econ, taking just a few basic courses, intro level really. The from which this quote is taken is about revenge, but this paragraph caught my eye.
xxxx
It drives crime – up to 20% of homicides and 60% of school shootings are linked to revenge, studies show. And it shapes politics too. Donald Trump’s presidential victory, for instance, came as a result of “revenge of working-class whites… who felt abandoned by a rapidly globalising economy,” according to an article in the Washington Post. The same sentiment is echoed by many other outlets.
xxxx
Now here’s a thought or two that in my opinion, speaking as the token resident right wing redneck, of this forum are worthy of consideration, for purposes of perspective and nuance.
Globalism must be credited in great part as the key to the incredibly fast rise of the Chinese economy. Some economists, I have no idea how many, economists believe that without globalism,in effect meaning access to the American market, China would still be an almost entirely backward nation economically, and would still need a whole generation or maybe two or three generations, to reach that nations current level of economic development. That might be a gross exaggeration , or not. Furthermore, Western European countries might have provided the same market for Chinese goods, although at a lesser scale due to European countries being smaller, and maybe more careful about protecting their own industries.
Now IF China, and some other Asian nations were still economically backward, our global environmental problems would likely be far less grim than they are. Consider coal and oil consumption for instance, and climate. The time frame we would have left to solve the climate problem would probably be extended by a decade, or maybe two decades. It’s true the renewables industries would likely not be growing so fast as they are at present, but BASIC SCIENCE would still be advancing at a spectacular rate, and the renewables industries are not about basic science. They’re all about the APPLICATION of known science to the engineering and manufacture of solar cells, wind turbines, etc. If the internal combustion engine had never become a ” big thing” , and had languished as a forgotten laboratory curiosity, today’s engineers, using the basic science known today, could design an engine about as good as the actual state of the art, in pretty short order, maybe a year or two. It sure as hell wouldn’t take them a century plus to get from the Model T to the latest thing under the hood that still runs on oil. The science of lubrication, the art of casting and machining metals, the science of alloys, the science of electronic circuitry, etc, would all be at or somewhere near their current state of development, whether or not the internal combustion engine was or was not put into wide scale use.
The hard core Darwinian interpretation of this speculation leads to the conclusion that we Yankees might actually be a LOT better off WITHOUT globalization, considering the BIG picture.
Take it a step further, and consider the realities of history, such as the prevalence of war, and think about the possibility that one day we really might be in a situation where we are engaged in an arms race with China, or later on BRAZIL, perhaps. Arms races have a way of morphing into wars, occasionally. We might LOSE a war with an ever more powerful industrialized China, but we sure as hell wouldn’t ever lose one with a backward China, except if we were foolish enough to invade, boots on the ground style.
Now I am NOT advocating that we adopt a hard core isolationist philosophy, and while HB may never accept it as a fact, I have less use for Trump than HRC, etc.
What I am trying to do is to get the Republican Lite faction of the Democratic Party in particular to consider the LARGER implications of globalism. The R party types that control the R party have money, and people with a lot of money generally are in favor of whatever makes them more of it,and they aren’t EVER going to be interested.
But ONE OF THESE DAYS, they may find themselves in a situation analogous to the situation the Queen of England (IIRC, it could have been one of the kings ) found herself in when she called upon Scotland and Ireland to send desperately needed men for one of England’s many wars. Only about ten percent as many showed up, from one area, as in generations past, and when she sent inquiries as to why, one of her better educated subjects from the boonies sent her a reply to the effect that there are no men to be sent where there ARE NO MEN.
What had happened is that the more or less all powerful landlord class enclosed the common lands, and drove off the people who formerly lived by working the commons and the other remaining lands as small farmers. The land was mostly converted into pasture for sheep, etc, which required few men, and little in the way of investment on the part of the owners, and returned a larger profit.
It could be that someday the monied classes in here in Yankee land will come to realize that their short to mid term profits have turned out to be grossly inadequate to cover their long term losses if we lose our predominant position as the leading world power, and LOTS of economists happily make speeches to the effect that this is not JUST a possibility, but rather a more or less sure thing.
Some people will argue that we can retain our greatest measure of strength, but I would respectfully remind them of what happened to the owners of the textile and furniture industries when they went offshore. They made big money, FOR A WHILE.
But after a while, the local people figured out that they really don’t NEED Yankee owners, or Yankee management. All they need is the Yankee MARKET, and the power of advertising, and big box stores, etc, has enabled them to establish new brand names, or simply buy out some existing brand names with good reputations. The Yankees don’t count for much anymore, except where they have insider deals with the politicians who make the rules.
The generation of third world workers who started as machine operators and are near retirement age as department managers have kids who are graduating from business and engineering school, and who have access to capital, both human and financial, to start their own textile and furniture companies.
None of this is to say that there globalization is all bad. International trade is an essential part of just about any imaginable prosperous economy, and countries that trade together are far less likely to fight each other, at least in the short to medium term, etc.
But moderation in most things is the wiser path. A glass of wine, or maybe even TWO glasses, with your dinner is ok, and quite a lot of physicians are of the opinion that a GLASS or TWO is good for you.
I haven’t yet met a physician who maintains that you should drink the whole bottle.
We should never forget to be careful about what we wish for. Everything I have ever wished for, and gotten, has come with strings attached, and half the time , I overlooked at least a couple of strings during the wishing and getting stage.
Hi Old Farmer Mac,
The basic idea is that of comparative advantage. The idea that all workers are hurt by globalization is false. Some workers will be hurt, but even without globalization workers will lose jobs due to industrial progress which is a much larger factor in the loss of industrial jobs.
Now we could burn down the factories and throw wrenches in the gears so that those damn machines wouldn’t put all those people out of work, but I don’t think that is a great idea. 🙂
If we are concerned about the environment the biggest problem is population growth and the solution to that problem is better education, health care, and living standards for all citizens of the World. What helps 19% of the human population (or 36% of human population if we include both India and China) is probably good for humans as a whole, especially when those nations are relatively poor relative to the OECD.
I consider myself a member of the human race and concern myself with the welfare of all humans rather than just my narrow tribe. Hopefully more will join me.
Back atcha Dennis,
I don’t have any desire to argue with you, concerning anything you have just said, because you as usual know whereof you speak.
I too try to think like a member of the HUMAN SPECIES, rather than just a Yankee, and within the Yankee tribe, a member by origin of the working class tribe.
It’s a HELL OF A LOT EASIER to concern yourself with the welfare of EVERYBODY ELSE when your own economic status is satisfactory and improving. Otherwise, it’s not easy at all.
Maybe I’m a little too much a cynic, but I have never believed any of the bullshit I hear concerning serving the human race, or giving a fuck about poor people, etc, from the people who get to be MD’s, in more than one case out of a thousand maybe, because the other nine hundred and ninety nine go for every dime they can get. Ditto the dentists, the lawyers, the union guys with the really successful unions, and just about every body else I can think of who is doing well. They contribute something to charity, most of them, sure enough, but it is seldom enough that they drive an older car, or wear cheaper clothes, or eat cheaper foods, etc.
Some teachers, some cops, some firemen, some preachers, really do do what they do in large part to serve the rest of the human race, but to the vast majority of all the people in these lines of work, it’s mostly just a JOB.
SOMEBODY has to speak up for the working people in this country, or else they will vote for whichever person at least pays lip service to their needs and fears.
Now I do NOT have a lot of money, mostly because by choice I spent a lot more time doing to suit myself than I ever did trying to accumulate a lot of assets, but I have at times earned like a one percenter, and I live quite well, so I am not lashing out, although some people might think so.
A number of people I know who are well within the top ten percent, earnings wise, don’t live as well as I do, considering they live in apartments or subdivisions, and are tied to an employers clock, and have very little in the way of free time to spend observing nature, or pursuing a hobby, etc. Except for family obligations, I am free to do pretty much what I please, etc, and do it in a resort like environment.
No, I don’t want to burn down the factories, or throw sand and monkey wrenches in the gears, lol.
But I want a fair shake for the people who aren’t getting it, here inside the USA. One of the very most favorite things to bitch about , among the liberal/ D party establishment, excepting for bitching about the opposition, is the income inequality issue.
Well, as I see it, the D party establishment is paying that issue a LOT of lip service, and but it’s doing damn near NOTHING to actually DO anything about it.
Now tell me honestly. Do you PERSONALLY actually think that the savings that a teacher, cop, carpenter, or doctor or lawyer realizes by buying clothing made outside the country is ENOUGH to justify the loss of income suffered by the people put out of work by offshoring that industry? It’s not just that they don’t have money to spend to support the rest of the economy, it’s also that they require vastly increased expenditures in the form of subsidized medical care, etc.
Do you REALLY believe that if we ever have to fight a conventional war again, against a really powerful opponent, so that we will need to build ships and tanks and planes on the grand scale, we will be able to go to our enemy, and say pretty please, we don’t have much in the way of manufacturing capacity anymore, and we would like to buy some ships and tanks and planes from you, preferably on credit, before we actually get right down to the business of killing each other?
Do you really believe that so long as we have an education system that is more or less paralyzed by the teachers and government being wedded to the status quo that we will ever be able to provide a high tech job for the lower classes of this country? Are we better off with all these people working in industries that are somewhat less efficient than the competition in other countries, mostly because the foreigners pay less, and mostly cut more corners environmentally, or having those industries within our borders, where they keep hands busy?
In essence my bottom line argument is this:
Partisans on either side can either go for winning arguments, and you have a very powerful argument, backed up by pretty much the entire economics profession, when you talk about comparative advantage.
So within the context of economic theory, I understand that it’s economists ten, OFM zero.
But in the larger context, when the question is whether you would rather win the academic debate, or win elections, I think maybe I am scoring some points.
Hi Old Farmer Mac,
I am more concerned with doing what makes sense. I believe people should be free to choose how to spend their money.
I have repeatedly explained that putting up tariff walls will hurt just as many workers as it helps, you have so far not provided an answer to this very straightforward argument. You seem to care only about workers in industries that do not export any goods. I am concerned about all of the workers.
The price argument just adds insult to injury to the workers that are hurt by tariffs. Note that tariffs by the US results in retaliatory tariffs by other nations.
Dennis, we currently have asymmetric tarriffs: China has tarriffs on our goods, we don’t have tarriffs on Chinese goods. It’s crazy and stupid to allow this to continue, as it’s a direct subsidy to China. US governments are elected by the US people, not by the Chinese people.
Simple example: we have very low tarriffs on imported Chinese cars. China has 100% tarriffs on imported US cars.
If, Dennis, you are really interested in making sure that the US helps Chinese auto workers at the expense of American auto workers, I am sure this is a terribly virtuous position globally speaking, and please feel free to campaign for unilateral removal of tarriffs — but it won’t be popular in the US.
Hi Dennis,
I TOO am interested in doing what makes sense.
You say,
”I have repeatedly explained that putting up tariff walls will hurt just as many workers as it helps, you have so far not provided an answer to this very straightforward argument. You seem to care only about workers in industries that do not export any goods. I am concerned about all of the workers.”
I HAVE NOT DISPUTED that tariff walls hurt as many workers or people as they help. I don’t NEED to supply an answer of any sort to this argument, because I have NEVER disputed it.
I have tried to make it clear that I AM SPEAKING as a partisan FOR the people who are suffering immensely as the result of globalization. VIRTUALLY EVERYBODY else who comments on this matter, including you, yourself makes the argument YOU are making. Now that’s FINE, in terms of the narrower argument involving the OVERALL prosperity of the country, so long as globalization doesn’t get TOO far out of hand. It’s a winning argument.
BUT SOMEBODY must or at least SHOULD point out the SHORTCOMINGS of this argument, because it is as full of holes, real and potential, as a Swiss cheese, in terms of the BIGGER picture.
ONE of the potential shortcomings of this argument, which you seem to insist on framing strictly as the welfare of the AVERAGE, is political backlash.
Now tell me, yes or no, or simply say I don’t know, or don’t have an opinion, in answer to these questions.
Do you believe that our society is doing anything like enough to compensate the workers whose industries have been offshored?
Do you believe that political backlash as the result of these workers had something to do with Trump winning the presidency?
Do you believe that we are in an economically and physically safe situation, when we owe gazillions of dollars to potential enemies, who control key industries essential to our physical security- industries that have either been offshored, or driven into insolvency here in our own country, because other countries don’t pay Yankee wages, or adhere to Yankee environmental regulation of industry, and sometimes deliberately drive down the price of a commodity to drive other countries OUT of an industry?
It’s VERY comfortable to argue about the welfare and prosperity of the AVERAGE person, when you are personally a member of the class of people that happen to be on the winning side in the globalization argument. I have been on both sides, as an individual, and as a businessman, and a property owner, and even as a worker, since my one claim to professional fame is that I am pretty much of a CHAMPION when it comes to being a rolling stone.
I’ve hired migrant labor for peanuts, I’ve make excellent returns on investments in land held for sale to wealthy people moving to my part of the country, I’ve worked as a technician along side machine operators in a factory, thankfully getting a bigger paycheck. I grew up on a farm, proud but poor, and didn’t even KNOW I was poor until I went away to university. My extended family did after all own pretty much the entire neighborhood,and we were highly self sufficient, compared to other people, and hardly any of us had to kiss a boss’s ass or punch a time clock, unless we made the decision to go to town in order to get insurance on a large family and have extra cash to buy more property, etc. I made occasionally made six figures on an annual basis, literally, over two grand a week, as a tradesman, in the eighties, in EIGHTIES dollars, and I have held professional positions as a teacher and worked as a professional manager for other people.
So I KNOW both sides of the arguments.
I am NOT disputing your arguments. I am simply trying to get you and anybody else who reads them to THINK about my own, and since I am virtually alone in making them in THIS forum, I try to make them as forcefully as possible.
I said before , within the smaller box, within the CONTEXT of the average, within the context of STRICTLY ECONOMIC theory, free trade and globalism are winning arguments, although I personally make a BIG distinction between free trade and globalism, and am somewhat cynical when free trade is even mentioned, since there is actually such a little of it. It’s more the rule than the exception that countries which export like crazy to the USA manage to fix things so we export a hell of a lot less to them than we import FROM THEM, witness our generally enormous trade deficits.
MY comments and MY arguments are about the BIGGER picture.
Economics is one of the most fucked up professions EVER, and is KNOWN as the dismal profession.
MOST of the commentary here in this forum, when it comes to economics, is about pointing out the SHORTCOMINGS of generally accepted economic theory, such as approval of ever increasing growth without end, etc.
Folks with some understanding of the physical sciences such as geology and climate, etc, are very quick to point out the problems inherent in strictly economics based reasoning. My intent is to extend this criticism to the political and cultural realms.
I personally maintain that there are political and cultural issues that are of sufficient importance to sufficient numbers of people that have suffered the unpleasant consequences of globalization that they figuratively presented the middle finger to people who maintain that globalization is GOOD for the USA, and that that middle finger is ONE OF the key reasons Trump is president today, rather than Clinton.
MY personal belief is that free trade, to the extent that it exists, is good for the USA, and for workers in general, as well as the better off economic classes, in the longer term, and on the average.
But we must never forget that as individuals, we must survive the short term before we worry about the long term. The long term is an abstraction if you are out of work, or scared of being out of work, or if you have been working harder but living less well, for a number of years.
It is also my personal belief that globalization played a VERY IMPORTANT role in HRC losing, and Trump winning, even though in actual fact, the R party is far more responsible for offshoring our lost industries.
And while nobody can be SURE PRECISELY what policies Trump and the R’s will pursue, it seems like a pretty safe bet to me that in terms of the big picture, his homies and buddies will be the only winners, while just about every body else loses, short to medium term, and probably long term as well.
And in the LONG TERM, even the REAL Trumpsters, the elites who are super rich and super powerful, will suffer a huge net loss. A hundred million dollars isn’t enough to save you from cancer, nor even five hundred million, except in a few cases. But a few tens of billions spent on medical research might do the trick. Those billions won’t be spent on medical research with the Trumpsters in power.
A good friend and former business associate died of pancreatic cancer that spread to his liver about four years ago this week.
He was a hard core Trumpster type when it came to the government taking his money, and spending it on anything that didn’t benefit him personally and directly.
I can say this much for him, on his deathbed he admitted that he wished he had paid more attention to socialist/Democratic busybodies determined to play mommy to the world, and less to the hard core free market types that kept reassuring him it was nobody’s goddamned business but his own if he wanted to drink a six pack almost every day, and smoke a pack of Camels as well.
Now having beat all around the bush, trying to get my point across, the point still boils down to this.
WHEN we consider the BIG PICTURE, has globalization REALLY helped us, or hindered us? The contextual box I have in mind in posing this question is the status and welfare of the USA, taken as a whole.
Considering that the race for president came down to three rust belt states, and the numbers there in Trump’s favor were razor thin, but ENOUGH for him to carry those three states, I believe that it’s entirely reasonable to say that globalization backlash played a KEY ROLE in putting Trump in the WH, and maybe even THE key role.
‘Nuf said, if I haven’t gotten the point across yet, it’s either because my head is full of concrete, and I’m WRONG, or else that anybody who disagrees is politically naive or a true believer in globalism, and therefore unwilling to consider the possibility that globalism is not NECESSARILY all it’s cracked up to be.
MAYBE I’m the kid marching to the music, and all the REST of the band is out of step, lol.
Now somebody is SURE to point out that automation, etc, is responsible for a lot of lost workers jobs, implying that I am too stupid to know and understand this perfectly obvious fact.
I know. I devoted at least three or four thousand hours to becoming a first class hands on welder, one of the kind who had a business card advertising that I could fix anything except a broken heart or the crack of dawn . The coming of automated welding cut my earnings opportunities in half, and I never welded professionally again. I shut down the farming operation because it was too small to be economic.I couldn’t justify spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on expanding at my age, in order to compete with the bigger guys using the latest generation of partially automated and sometimes fully automated equipment.
A glass or two of wine is generally believed to be harmless, if not actually good for you, in the consensus opinion of the health care professions.
I believe free trade is good for us, and for everybody in general, in moderation. The whole bottle is not so good for us.
Nuf said. Time to move on.
OldFarmerMac, Dennis:
I’ve actually studied a disturbing amount of economics. The fact is that there is zero evidence of the theory of comparative advantage and a lot of evidence that it’s false. The theory of *absolute* advantage is, of course, true. If you don’t know the difference, I can explain, or you can look it up.
Short summary. Absolute advantage says that the country which produces product X most cheaply will (in an open market) end up specializing in product X and making all of it, while every other country will stop making product X. This is basically true.
Comparative advantage (which is false) claims that (in an open market) if China produces *everything* more cheaply than the US, the US will specialize in whatever China has the *smallest* advantage in, and China will abandon that industry. This does not happen. China takes over every single industry they have an absolute advantage in; all of them, no exceptions.
I’d advise not appealing to the theory of comparative advantage, which is false; any argument you want to make with it can be better made with absolute advantage, which happens to be true.
-without globalization, women rights would still be middle age standard in many more places in the world than is currently the case
-without globalization, energy supply around the world, from oil to solar panels, would be much more expensive
On the other hand, without globalization, the (massive) tyranny of of the two big religions would have been much less over the past 2000 yrs.
Good and bad.
FUTURE CARBON DIOXIDE, CLIMATE WARMING POTENTIALLY UNPRECEDENTED IN 420 MILLION YEARS
“Over the next 100 to 200 years, carbon dioxide concentrations in the Earth’s atmosphere will head towards values not seen since the Triassic period, 200 million years ago. Furthermore, by the 23rd century, the climate could reach a warmth not seen in 420 million years, say researchers….
This long-term view also offers a valuable perspective on future climate change. It is well recognized that the climate today is changing at rates well above the geological norm. If humanity fails to tackle rising CO2 and burns all the readily available fossil fuel, by AD 2250 CO2 will be at around 2000 ppm — levels not seen since 200 million years ago….
Professor Foster adds: “However, because the Sun was dimmer back then, the net climate forcing 200 million years ago was lower than we would experience in such a high CO2 future. So not only will the resultant climate change be faster than anything Earth has seen for millions of years, the climate that will exist is likely to have no natural counterpart, as far as we can tell, in at least the last 420 million years.”
There are many ‘subtle’ effects of global warming, for example it is likely that dengue hemorrhagic fever distribution may extend north from the Caribbean basin up into places Houston, Jackson, Birmingham, Augusta, Raleigh, and Richmond, along with all the coastal plain territory downstream of the Piedmont margin. Agriculture and recreation industries can be greatly affected by this kind of factor.
President Trump’s Climate Change Policy: Charlie Rose
Last week President Trump signed an executive order designed to unravel former President Obama’s climate change initiatives and to revive the coal industry. We are joined by Barbara Finamore. She is a senior lawyer and Asia director at the National Resources Defense Council. (Source: Bloomberg)
Malaria was a major problem in the American colonies and right up until the early twentieth century in the US as far north as New England. Control and mosquito eradication programs became steadily more effective from the late 1800’s into the 1900’s.
“They who want to die quickly, go to Carolina.”
Along with people in the Louisiana and Georgia, during in the late 18th and 19th centuries in South Carolina, especially around Charleston, had such a high mortality that less than 20% reached their 20th birthday. Most of those who died did so because of malaria, or because of being in a weakened state after a bout of malaria. It’s almost unimaginable that so many mothers and fathers would be burying their children so young. Anyone who has experienced such a loss knows that this life event alters your life forever.
Another staggering set of statistics, just in the fifty years that one group, England’s Society for the Propagation of Gospel in Foreign Parts, was sending young men to South Carolina – of the total fifty young men (one per year), only 43% survived, and many resigned within five years of setting foot on South Carolina soil due to poor health from malaria. And, of course, it goes almost without saying the medical lack of knowledge as to what caused malaria back then, and how to treat it also was another gravestone upon many. It left much of the South a place to die rather than a place to live. Perhaps, no greater community suffered from the spread of malaria than those in and around South Carolina for more than a century (except those living in The Floridas and coastal Louisiana).
Malaria is one of the big reasons my family settled in the mountains, rather than the lowlands, lol.
Life was tough back in pre industrial days, and no mistake.
It blows me away to read the comments in this forum, and many others, about the evils of pesticides, with zero acknowledgement of the positive aspects of using them. Without pesticides, millions of Southern flavor Yankees would be dead of malaria within a year or two, barring breakthroughs on the medical front.
I think scientists rely too much on human action in their prognostications. Sure it is likely humans will try to use as much fossil energy as possible. However nature is certainly willing to provide all the carbon dioxide and methane needed to produce a warm world. Why should we have to work to hard to achieve the goal of the current civilization? Sure it might take a little longer to reach 6C, but it will save a lot of effort and wasted time on our part to try and dig out and burn that much carbon.
Hey look on the bright side! About 360 mya we were in the Carboniferous when all those coal deposits were formed. That’s when what is now America was really great! Trump is just helping us get back to that greatness as fast as he can! CO2 concentration was about 1500 ppm…
Not to mention that 400 million years from now all those depleted coal deposits will have been completely replenished and future generations of giant mutant sapient arthropods will be able to create an industrial civilization based on mining and burning them for energy. They will build tall skyscrapers and study the Trumpocene…
Cheers!
I guess DT did not read the warning labels.
They will build tall skyscrapers and study the Trumpocene…
In an hour of depression, I managed a smile… thanks.
Peace, brother!
Coal deposits will not be replenished if mushrooms have anything to say about it.
@#DJTrump
The “fungus” among us, preventing coal formation!
Sad!!
That’s along the lines of the idea behind my choice of the ‘Tribe Of Pangaea- First Member’ moniker-as-an-allegory at the defunct The Oil Drum.
The theoretical landmass, known as Pangaea, ostensibly occurred around about 260 million years ago, roughly at or just before the time of the ‘Great Dying’…
Fast forward 260 million years and we now have the ‘Tribe Of Pangaea- Redux’, maybe…
Rewind ~420 million years and, to put it into perspective, one of the earliest group of land plants, the cooksonia, existed around about then. There was apparently not much else. I suppose there were nice beaches, but probably no palm trees, etcetera.
That was about half a billion years ago. That’s a very long time, and predates Pangaea by a wide margin. But how long is long anyway? Maybe it’s a blink of another kind of eye. Maybe we exist in some kind of very fast explosion, but don’t see it as such because our short, ephemeral lives are relative to the ‘inside’ of it and its own speed which we see as ‘slow’.
Insofar as one particular species that contaminated the planet’s atmosphere and created a life for itself, so another may very well again contaminate the planet’s ecosphere but create a death for itself…
‘Life is short.’…
But you know, I guess life and consciousness are simply a mere side effect of the processes and progression of the universal explosion, the laws of physics– little self-similar echoing building-block ‘buds’, that the more complex ones might simply call ‘life’, that pop in and out of existence, or what some of them might call ‘existence’, or ‘think’ of ‘it’ as such…
But anyway, as you can see, it’s shaping up to be a pleasant day on Cooksonia Beach, with the sun peeking out… Care for a swim?… What’s in there?… Is that to be us?… What could we have used for making ‘spirits’ back then?… Or food?…
Fast forward ~200 years…
The March PIOMAS Artcic Sea Ice volumes numbers came out – they continue to set all time low numbers and are about 2,000 km3 below last year at this time.
The running average number below is still following the linear trend from December and sets new low records every day. The DMI numbers for volume, which are output every day, indicate that the rate of increase has fallen lower than last year so far in April (I think mostly because of a lot f transport either side of Svalbard into the Atlantic). A melt season as high as 2012 or 2007 will lead to virtually zero ice in September.
If the trend continues the low will only be 1 million km3 above the ice free point. The rate of loss appears to be greater than 3.0 km3 per decade in the last decade. That could mean an ice free point as early as 2020. Very likely by 2025.
BTW: hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil:
NASA OFFICIALS EXPECT FEWER EARTH SCIENCE MISSIONS IN COMING YEARS
“Expect fewer missions to study planet Earth in NASA’s future, agency officials told an advisory group last week. A blueprint of the Trump administration’s proposed NASA budget would cancel four Earth science missions already in the agency’s portfolio and slash research funding geared toward future projects. NASA officials said last week that the proposal, if enacted, will reduce the scope of the agency’s Earth science program, but still continue development of many key missions.”
PAINTINGS, SUNSPOTS AND FROST FAIRS: RETHINKING THE LITTLE ICE AGE
“The whole concept of the ‘Little Ice Age’ is ‘misleading,’ as the changes were small-scale, seasonal and insignificant compared with present-day global warming, a group of solar and climate scientists argue.”
“In addition to new-builds, the marine division of Siemens, which developed the technology for Ampere, believes 84 ferries are ripe for conversion to electric power. And 43 ferries on longer routes would benefit from conversion to hybrids that use diesel engines to charge their batteries. If this were done, nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions would be cut by 8,000 tonnes per year and CO2 emissions by 300,000 tonnes per year, equivalent to the annual emissions from 150,000 cars, according to a report penned jointly by Siemens and the environmental campaign group, Bellona.”
Have no fear, global warming and climate change will continue whether we watch it or not. Certainly does reduce the entertainment factor. You know, the one where we get lots of new information and then don’t act upon it. Meanwhile people propose small ineffective measures that are decades too late, pretending that they will make a difference.
Maybe California will set up it’s own program as the governor promised. I have little in depth knowledge on USA politics, but I understand that the government structure is such that the President can be stopped from having much influence on a lot of issues. It’s looking like that was quite prescient of the founding fathers.
I’m not sure I got this right, but if 2000km3 more ice (net) is melted each year then that is taking 7e20 J of heat. If the net melting stops (i.e. the ice settles out at a low yearly average, maybe with clear months in the summer) then that heat would go to into something else – e.g. melting Greenland (it would be able to do the same 2000 km3 each year, which is about 6mm sea level rise) or warming the Arctic (it would produce 0.23K temperature rise per year in the top 50m) or warming the atmosphere (if it all went there it would produce 0.13K rise per year). It all looks kind of unstoppable, and the albedo impact probably out does those numbers anyway.
The rate of loss was 3000 km3 per decade, which is 300 km3 per year. It appears to be accelerating, so may be as much as 500 km3 per year loss.
Most of the extra heating due to open water versus ice is going into the upper layer of the Arctic Ocean. In addition to ocean ice loss, spring melt season is occurring earlier on land exposing dark ground and water to the increasing solar radiation of springtime. The land albedo change heating could become significantly larger than the Arctic heating due to a much larger area involved and it is lower in latitude.
Consider that the snow cover can reach 48 million km2 and 98 percent is in the northern hemisphere, bounded in the north by the Arctic Ocean. So with a warming ocean in the north and warming continents in the southern boundary, snow cover will reduce.
From NSIDC; Snow’s albedo, or how much sunlight it reflects back into the atmosphere, is very high, reflecting 80 to 90 percent of the incoming sunlight. By contrast, trees, plants, and soil reflect only 10 to 30 percent of sunlight. Snow cover wields the largest influence during springtime (April to May) in the Northern Hemisphere, when days become longer and the amount of sunshine increases over snow-covered areas. Snow’s high reflectivity helps Earth’s energy balance, because it reflects solar energy back into space, which helps cool the planet.
Changes in climate can affect how much snow falls and influence the timing of the winter snow season. Between 1966 and 2010, the amount of land and sea ice that is snow-covered each year has decreased over many Northern Hemisphere regions, especially during the spring snowmelt season. Scientists are modeling how Earth’s climate might change over the next 100 years, and the results suggest that snow will cover less of the planet, particularly over Europe and Asia. Climate warming can reduce snowfall, and cause earlier spring melts and shorter snow cover seasons. For instance, warmer air in Alaska has caused the snow to melt earlier each spring, lengthening the snow-free summer season.
Current rate by that linear trend is 2700 km3 per year. Presumably this will not be sustained, but if not then the heat not used in melting will go somewhere els – and this year has been anomalously warm anyway. On the albedo – how much has the change in the Arctic been balanced in the past, on a yearly average, by the increased sea ice in the Antarctic, which looks now to be reversed and adding another negative feed back?
I am not sure what time period you used to achieve 2700 km3 loss per year. If it is the dotted line on the graph, that is far too short a period to measure for a trend. Natural variability can give high rates in both directions for short periods. Five year averages would mask out most of the natural variability.
PIOMAS gives the loss rate at 3000 km3 per decade. At 2700 km3 per year the Arctic would reach an ice free state next year.
The last dozen years appear to have a greater than 3000 km3 per decade.
I’m not looking at a trend I’m looking at one year. It’s a running average – when it gets to zero it would mean there is no ice at any time, and that would take 6 years at current rate. That won’t happen but when the line flattens the impact seen will be from one year to the next not from a previous average trend to another trend.
I’m concerned with regards to how this heating of the ocean once ice free/freer will contribute to the heating and destabilization of methane in subsea permafrost. Anybody know of any recent models or estimates.
“It is relatively shallow, with average depth of 100 m”
All we need is 4000 ppb of methane in atmosphere to be equivalent to CO2 heating. Then the changes in the Arctic will add at least another CO2 equivalent to that. I think that is enough to dislocate the climate and ecology, so no more need be said.
Try this:
MODELING THE EVOLUTION OF CLIMATE-SENSITIVE ARCTIC SUBSEA PERMAFROST IN REGIONS OF EXTENSIVE GAS EXPULSION AT THE WEST YAMAL SHELF
NB: As a rule you start to see methane hydrate deposits in a seafloor that is 400 – 500m below sea level. When drilling at a water depth of say 400m, you expect to find a 3-400 m thick hydrate layer. Beneath this depth temperatures are too high for gas hydrate formation so free gas and water is found. In 1,000 meter water depths, the hydrate layer will be 600-ish meters thick; naturally thickness of the hydrate zone will depend on the temperature gradient. IoW sediments that display a higher geothermal gradient the hydrate zone will be thinner. Don’t confuse sub-sea with land deposits of methane hydrate.
Things are heating up, February temperature anomaly.
That video has it right, climate change, global warming, or whichever term you want to use is undeniably as old as Earth itself. The climate began changing in the hours after our planet was formed and sometimes happens fast, sometimes happens slow. In any event it will continue on no matter what until that fateful day when Earth comes crashing into the sun and gets pulverized.
This is a Dialogue Pair: a tactic used by Media Manipulation boiler rooms and trolls in their basements.
A canned comment that has nothing to do with the comment it is paired with, and is inserted solely to advance a political rather than scientific agenda.
Thanks Lloyd,
What’s the proper reply?
My first reaction is to post the science and the data:
Temperatures change in response to change in heat content… which changes in response to forcings… which are mostly CO2 since mid-20th century…
… and therefore temperature has followed, and will continue to follow the logarithm of CO2, as below…
Hey Bill, your comment is mostly correct, though fairly meaningless to the discussion. You need to change that last sentence though, very wrong scientifically.
Just think of the time span you speak about. Life didn’t even exist during most of that.
There may be another 1 billion years of life left on this planet. Just think about that. Civilization has only existed about 10,000 years. 10,000 years is a long time but life might go on for 100,000 times that long before the sun gets too hot for much water to be around and life to exist. By then the sun might be 13% brighter and it would be a hot world ruled by GHG’s since no ice will have existed for long time, in fact some say liquid water will cease to exist on the planet at around that time.
The point is, we have to deal with now and we need to deal with our own culpability and responsibility. Humans are capable creatures and can both wreck and build. Do we build a sustainable society or do we just lay down and say things have always been changing so why bother?
==How to deal with climate change==
the survey’s results are in. new technology not new taxes is the answer every one can agree on when deciding the right way to reverse climate change.
“Roughly two-thirds of Americans say climate scientists should have a major role in policy decisions about climate matters”
“Some 46% say tougher fuel efficiency standards for cars and trucks can make a big difference in addressing climate change; 45% say corporate tax incentives that encourage businesses to reduce carbon emissions caused by their actions can too.”
“Corporate tax incentives to encourage businesses to reduce the “carbon footprint” from their activities − 67% of liberal Democrats say this can make a big difference, while 23% of conservative Republicans agree for a difference of 44 percentage points.”
This is another dialogue pair- or maybe dialogue triplet.
Even less to do with the topic, and completely unscientific.
And it suggests to me that 55% of Americans are morons. I can’t be sure, mind you, but it’s a reasonable inference.
It’s also worth noting that the premise “technology not new taxes is the answer” is not supported by the public opinion research cited by Amanda.
Remember, we are humans, and humans have really big brains. Thus, we all have the capability to deal with whatever climate change brings, especially if, in fact, it actually is manmade, in which case we have all the understanding we need in order to reverse it. That said, by far the more important matter at this point in time is how everyone, no matter where in the world they live, needs access to safe, affordable, reliable sources of energy. Thus, we all would be better served if all the funding, effort, and time scientists and politicians spend nowdays trying to prove climate change got directed instead toward raising the living standards of the poor areas of the world to the same levels all of us here are blessed enough to enjoy.
Quadruplets? Maybe there’s something in the water.
Note that there are three handles here…funny they all decided this was the comment.
The dangers of climate change produced by life, itself, is about as old as life on Earth…
“Before the GOE [Great Oxygenation Event], any free oxygen… produced was chemically captured by dissolved iron or organic matter. The GOE was the point in time when these oxygen sinks became saturated, at which point oxygen, produced by the cyanobacteria, was free to escape into the atmosphere…
The increased production of oxygen set Earth’s original atmosphere off balance. Free oxygen is toxic to obligate anaerobic organisms, and the rising concentrations may have destroyed most such organisms at the time. Cyanobacteria were therefore responsible for one of the most significant extinction events in Earth’s history…” ~ Wikipedia
This is in part why concerns about C02 and other greenhouse gas levels need to be taken seriously.
Please feel free to boilerplate this comment in its entirety where deemed important.
Bow down to the mutated cyanobacteria. They are the ones that created us and life as we know it. Such humble but effective organisms are the original disruptors and dislocators. It took 2.3 billion years to create a very complex creature capable of undoing through tremendous effort and technology what simple bacteria accomplished just by being alive.
Philip Klinkner, a political scientist at Hamilton College and an expert on race relations, has pored over this ANES data and tells me that “whether it’s good politics to say so or not, the evidence from the 2016 election is very clear that attitudes about blacks, immigrants, and Muslims were a key component of Trump’s appeal.” For example, he says, “in 2016 Trump did worse than Mitt Romney among voters with low and moderate levels of racial resentment, but much better among those with high levels of resentment.”
The new ANES data only confirms what a plethora of studies have told us since the start of the presidential campaign: the race was about race. Klinkner himself grabbed headlines last summer when he revealed that the best way to identify a Trump supporter in the U.S. was to ask “just one simple question: is Barack Obama a Muslim?” Because, he said, “if they are white and the answer is yes, 89 percent of the time that person will have a higher opinion of Trump than Clinton.” This is economic anxiety? Really?
_snip_
Their view is backed by a detailed Gallup analysis of interviews with a whopping 125,000 Americans, which found that Trump supporters, far from being the “left behind” or the losers of globalization, “earn relatively high household incomes and are no less likely to be unemployed or exposed to competition through trade or immigration.” The “bottom line” for Gallup’s senior economist Jonathan Rothwell? “Trump’s popularity cannot be neatly linked to economic hardship.”
So I guess to be elected, Hilary should have been more racist?
Daily CO2
March 28, 2017: 409.47 ppm
March 28, 2016: 406.02 ppm
https://www.co2.earth
Disclaimer: The atmosphere is composed of about 78% Nitrogen and 21% Oxygen by volume. No other gas constitutes more than 1%. CO2 is, in fact, a trace gas representing approximately 0.04% of the volume of dry air in the atmosphere. Without a proper context, readers will fail to understand the true meaning of these CO2 measurements. In particular, there is well-founded documentation of atmospheric CO2 concentration exceeding 2000 ppm in the relatively recent past (in terms of geologic timescales), yet, during this time, plant and animal life thrived in abundance.
Additionally reference Wikipedia Atmopshere of Earth entry: “The three major constituents of air, and therefore of Earth’s atmosphere, are nitrogen, oxygen, and argon. Water vapor accounts for roughly 0.25% of the atmosphere by mass. The concentration of water vapor (a greenhouse gas) varies significantly from around 10 ppm by volume in the coldest portions of the atmosphere to as much as 5% by volume in hot, humid air masses, and concentrations of other atmospheric gases are typically quoted in terms of dry air (without water vapor). The remaining gases are often referred to as trace gases, among which are the greenhouse gases, principally carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and ozone.“
“Without a proper context, readers will fail to understand the true meaning of these CO2 measurements.”
I think most folks here understand it just fine, except for perhaps yourself.
Saying that CO2 is “only a trace gas” is like saying that arsenic is “only” a trace water contaminant.
https://www.skepticalscience.com/CO2-trace-gas.htm
Thank you for pointing out that CO2 is a greenhouse gas.
NAOM
Fuck off Troll/Bot! You’ve posted this exact piece of bullshit numerous times.
Mr. Tennessee – this might be easier for you, not sure how good Google Translate is with Russian but:
Отъебись тролль / бот! Вы отправили этот точный кусок дерьма много раз.
Hi Louis Tennesse,
See
http://www.kaltura.com/index.php/extwidget/preview/partner_id/1090132/uiconf_id/20652192/entry_id/0_n9uzmhwk/embed/auto?
A 7 minute lecture that explains why the small amounts of carbon dioxide, water vapor, methane, and other greenhouse gases affect climate.
This is a very introductory lecture so even those with very little understanding of chemistry and physics ( a high school level will do it) can grasp it.
http://forecast.uchicago.edu/lectures.html
The full set of lectures is at the link above.
The following is also good (a 9 minute lecture) and comes before the first video I linked.
http://www.kaltura.com/index.php/extwidget/preview/partner_id/1090132/uiconf_id/20652192/entry_id/1_znqmr7tt/embed/auto?
Hi Dennis,
You can take this to the bank.
Joe and Suzy Sixpack didn’t get as far as physics and chemistry in high school.
As a matter of fact, there are tens of millions of people in this country who have degrees from more or less respectable universities that have had essentially ZERO instruction in any of the hard sciences. A single survey course can’t really be considered instruction or training,and not even that much is required in a lot of cases.
Hi OFM,
It is pretty hard to get into most respectable universities without biology, chemistry, and physics in high school at least in the US.
The atmosphere had no oxygen at all until plants converted CO2 to oxygen via carbon fixation.
While some animals and plants are good with higher CO2, humans are not one of those species, and neither are our major food crops, and neither is the food chain at the base of all the fish we eat.
Emitting high CO2 is like some anti-human form of terraforming on behalf of aliens. Making the planet uninhabitable for us, but much more habitable for some other species who we can’t eat.
NAOM- In case you didn’t see this reply at the end of the last thread regarding Bosch bike motors, here you go
Very true about the Bosch system. The manufacturer that seems to be getting the most attention currently is Chinese, and they offer two motor system that have taken the market by storm. They are very strong, reliable, and you can get one of them for under $500.
Here is a link to an American seller that has a good reputation-
https://lunacycle.com/bafang-bbs02-750w-mid-drive-kit/
And here is a Seattle based company that sells 4 bike models based on that motor system, direct sell to customers-
https://www.radpowerbikes.com/collections/2016-electric-bikes
btw- 750watt is massive for a bike. 250 watt is plenty for flat land commute purposes
Cheers
Thanks, left a comment over there.
NAOM
My Bosch powered bicycle has been running flawlessly for three years on my daily commute.
I am VERY pleasantly surprised by what I have learned about this particular electric bike company here over the last few days.
The price and the fact that the battery itself has a name brand on it I know and trust says everything.
There isn’t really any reason, except for the battery being so expensive, for a very solid electric bike to cost more than a few hundred bucks. Electric motors and electronic gizmos are cheap these days, and a bicycle has very little in the way of material in it, less than hundred pounds, and not much is needed in the way of sophisticated machining of any of the parts, etc.
If the battery is really is good for twenty plus miles eight hundred times, that’s enough riding to out last ME.
And sixteen thousand miles at say thirty mpg over the next four or five years will run well over a thousand bucks for gasoline alone. The bike will pay for itself just on what you can save in gasoline.
Now the next question is how long it will be before there’s a local dealer network?
I would rather pay another ten or even twenty percent more to have a dealer handy, meaning I could get a needed part within an hour or so, almost every time, and in order to have a pro mechanic handy in the event of a problem above my pay grade with the electronic components.
Hi Hickory, I’m a road biker. A few years ago when you first started seeing the electric bikes on the Santa Ana river bike trail. I raced a few. Won and lost. Without the electric power, they were heavy slow bikes. Also, couldn’t out top end a road bike under electrical power. So it became a challenge to out last their battery. I had them fade behind as they lost battery and I think quiet because they didn’t want to pedal their beast home a long distance. My be I’m getting old, but I can’t keep up with the E bikes anymore. They must be more powerful than just a few years past.
My be I’m getting old, but I can’t keep up with the E bikes anymore.
I find that I can’t keep up in the city…if you have a lot of stoplights less than 500 meters apart, their startup torque will wear you down. Also, you never get to maximum speed and efficiency. Even worse when it’s below freezing (but you wouldn’t know anything about that 🙂 ).
With a couple of K to run, though, you should still be able to beat a legal eBike.
-Lloyd
I take the Palmer Report with a large side order of salt, but I do find it entertaining, and sometimes a little informative. Needless to say Palmer is all over Trump like a stink on a skunk. Here for your amusement is Palmer’s link to a 17 page PDF on Trump.
http://www.palmerreport.com/politics/download-the-palmer-report-on-trump-russia/2093/
Thanks for posting the Palmer link.
I don’t have time enough to chase down everything on the net relevant to my needs.
It’s got a lot of useful information in it. How solid it might be is open to question, but I’m hoping it gets a very wide audience, and I’m going to post it a bunch of places to help make sure it does get that audience.
Where there’s that much smoke, the odds are pretty damned good there’s at least SOME fire, lol.
Palmer Report has a website home page with frequent posting of articles. I like reading them. I think he jumps the gun a bit sometimes with allegations but he’s also posted a few gems.
Thanks S.
A good, albeit chilling summary.
Another unforeseen consequence of Arctic Ice loss:
SOLVING THE MYSTERY OF THE ARCTIC’S GREEN ICE:
– New model explains blooms of phytoplankton growing under Arctic sea ice
– The team’s mathematical modeling found that while the melt ponds contribute to conditions friendly to blooms, the biggest culprit is ice thickness.
“The meter decline in sea ice thickness in the Arctic in the past 30 years has dramatically changed the ecology in that area,” said Horvat. “All of a sudden, our entire idea about how this ecosystem works is different. The foundation of the Arctic food web is now growing at a different time and in places that are less accessible to animals that need oxygen.”
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2017-03/hjap-stm032817.php
The data is preliminary but all the sites around the Arctic monitored by NOAA seem to be showing a winter spike higher than previously seen for both CO2 and CH4. Below is for Barrow, but all the data can be seen by clicking on a particular site from the map linked:
https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/dv/iadv/index.php?code=brw
Then select ‘carbon cycle gases’, ‘time series’, ‘CO2’ or ‘CH4 etc., and Submit. All sites around the Arctic have similar patterns.
There have been several warm spells in Arctic this past winter.
The outliers all seem to be above the main cluster of points in both graphs.
With all those methane and CO2 pulses happening in the Arctic, it would seem there are intermittent sources up there that then disperse. Almost as if the Arctic is providing GHG’s of it’s own.
Is this echoed further south?
No, other stations near the arctic show a pulse – russia, norway/sweden and a couple more in alaska but further south the readings are lower and are not spiking. It sure looks scary…. And no, there are not huge herds of cattle in Barrow Alaska.
Must be the caribou herds then. 🙂
Well, one of the weirder attempts to slow down global warming is underway… with a Kickstarter… involving herds of caribou…
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/907484977/pleistocene-park-an-ice-age-ecosystem-to-save-the/description
Thanks very much for that info and link.
That’s pretty scary. That’s got to be a lot of Co2 to push the reading all the way up t0 420. I checked some of the other stations and Tiksi, Russia also has a spike.
CO2 peaks every April/May. Perhaps in the future NH summer the release of CO2 due to thawing permafrost will exceed the uptake of CO2 due to plant growth.
1ppm = 7.81 Gigatonnes of Carbon Dioxide
https://www.skepticalscience.com/print.php?r=45
“Scientists project that up to 300 billion metric tons of Arctic carbon may be released into the atmosphere by 2100.”
https://eos.org/research-spotlights/arctic-permafrost-thaw-would-amplify-climate-change
“One ton of carbon equals 44/12 = 11/3 = 3.67 tons of carbon dioxide.”
http://grist.org/article/the-biggest-source-of-mistakes-carbon-vs-carbon-dioxide/
300 billion tons of carbon times 3.67 is 1,101 billion tons of carbon dioxide. Averaged over 83 years (between now and 2100) is about 13.26 billion tons of CO2 per year, so about 1.7 ppm per year average.
I wonder when summer NH carbon production from thaw will begin to exceed summer NH carbon absorption from plant growth.
Good thoughts Survivalist. Another factor is the ocean, which will absorb less CO2 the warmer it gets until it possibly becomes a source instead of a sink.
I wonder about the methane. With up to 3000 ppb occurring at times and atmospheric methane on the increase I don’t think it is being properly considered. 3000 ppb is 3 ppm and with an instantaneous warming effect of about 100 times CO2 that gives the effect of 300 ppm CO2 from methane alone.
The potential release of natural methane due to warming is large.
My suspicion (WAG) is that the estimate on 300 billion tons of carbon by 2100 is based upon global average temp increases and not NH average temp increases over land, which is where the permafrost is. Seeing as how NH avg land temps are warming faster than global avg temps it seems the 300 billion tons by 2100 is likely to be exceeded/occur more rapidly.
As well there is the issue of the decreased albedo of the land. I’m not sure how that factored in their estimate.
http://e360.yale.edu/features/as_arctic_ocean_ice_disappears_global_climate_impacts_intensify_wadhams
Hi Survivalist,
The climate scientists are a little smarter than you seem to give them credit for. My WAG is you are incorrect and they have used the appropriate temperature and have accounted for albedo effects.
Sink/source v warming would only apply if the ocean is saturated. How close are we to saturation?
NAOM
NAOM, the CO2 equilibrium is temperature dependent. The rate of exchange is temperature dependent. As the ocean warms and cools it will achieve a new equilibrium. Now it is warming so it is less able to absorb CO2.
The actual sink is biological and is also dependent upon the amount of Ca+ being added to the ocean, so is on a different rate and process.
All that means is that as the ocean warms more CO2 leaves the ocean than it absorbs, until a new equilibrium with the atmosphere and ocean is achieved. If the warming continues, the ocean keeps giving up more CO2.
Hi Gonefishing,
The solubility of CO2 in the ocean decreases as temperature rises. The plankton in the ocean takes up CO2 and some of the dead plankton sinks to the bottom without being consumed by other creatures and this carbon gets sequestered, that process may actually increase as the ocean warms, so far the proportion of carbon emissions that the planet can sequester has remained about 55%, as anthropogenic emissions decrease many carbon models predict that a greater proportion of emissions will be sequestered.
The carbon models don’t adequately factor in permafrost melt so this needs further work.
Also note that the warming ocean has been absorbing more CO2, from 1965 to 1975 it was about 12 Gt CO2 sequestered and from 2005 to 2015 it was about 21 Gt of CO2, so the biological effect has been overwhelming the solubility effect.
I don’t think it will be as bad as the natural methane releases that occur at my place after we have chilli or burritos for dinner. ?????
Further thought on methane. One ton of carbon equals 16/12 = 1.33 tons of methane.
I don’t know how much of that 300 billion tons of carbon is gonna go into the atmosphere as methane or CO2, but let’s pretend 10% for a WAG.
30×1.33 then is approx 40 billion tons of methane, or about .48 billion tons a year average between now and 2100.
Needless to say it won’t be a linear increase. It’ll likely start small and become a larger annual increase over time.
Also, about methane hydrates – there was an recent paper concluding that the situation might not be so bad for a lot of reasons but here is Guy McPherson’s response. He’s not buying it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7D5xCE8zXI
Both Tiksi russia and Barrow Alaska have spiked up to 420ppm for CO2, 10ppm higher than in Hawaii in just a few weeks time. That seems like a lot of Co2 but the 1ppm = 7.81 Gigatonnes of Carbon Dioxide is for worldwide, correct? So to just raise it in the arctic only should be some fraction of that – but that still seems like a huge number.
From what I understand the 1ppm equals 7.81 gigatonnes is for the entire atmosphere.
In the past I had been looking on earthnull school and had seen CO2 at 420ppm but only over megacities in China and USA. I haven’t gone on earthnull school in a while. 420 ppm over barren wilderness is an unsettling trend.
In what I understand CO2 doubles up as very efficient plant food, so a higher amount for barren wilderness is a plus in allowing the land not to be so barren anymore. Great for agriculture, perhaps?
Maybe consider going up there to Barrow and buying some land and growing avocados. Let us know how it goes.
In what I understand CO2 doubles up as very efficient plant food,…
You obviously understand very little! Try googling plant physiology and development.
Not that you’d be able to understand it!
http://psych.colorado.edu/~vanboven/teaching/p7536_heurbias/p7536_readings/kruger_dunning.pdf
Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self Assessments
Justin Kruger and David Dunning
The station at Mace Head, County Galway, Ireland is showing the same spike in CO2 (420ppm) and methane (2075ppb).
I looked at a lot of stations and many have methane or CO2 spikes (even Trinidad California), but not stations inland or further south.
I see some of the other gasses are also spiking, like CO.
Many of these stations have data going back a long time and the spikes are a lot larger than anything in the past.
They also measure isotope ratios of the carbon in the methane and the carbon13/carbon12 ratio is falling below the long term average. What does that imply?
Hi Preston, could you post a link to that data regarding the ratios.
“Burning plant material or fossilized plant material, such as fossil fuels, releases the 12C isotopes that plants absorbed through photosynthesis millions of years ago into the atmosphere in the form of CO2 molecules. The added 12C isotopes in the atmosphere decrease the overall 13C/12C ratio.”
http://www.dummies.com/education/science/environmental-science/isotopes-how-do-scientists-know-that-humans-cause-global-warming/
It’s in the link George Kaplan posted above, it’s an option on the graphing page to show the ratios.
https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/dv/iadv/index.php?code=brw
click on carbon cycle gasses
click on time series
then select the carbon13/carbon12 parameter and
click submit
Hi Gone fishing,
Below 700 m the ocean warms very slowly and with the mixing from surface to deeper ocean it will take 400 to 1000 years before there is significant warming of the ocean surface.
For the past 100 years the ocean surface has warmed at about 0.64 C per century. It is indeed worrisome that the rate of ocean warming has increased to 1.36 C per century from 1970 to 2016, but looking at 1905 to 1950 there was a 1.25 C per century rise in surface ocean temperature.
Hi Gone fishing,
It is the average levels that matter not the short term spikes. The residence time of methane in the atmosphere is relatively short, the geochemistry essentially converts the carbon in the methane to carbon dioxide over a decade or so, the GWP on 100 or 200 year time frames is of far greater importance.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2012/01/much-ado-about-methane/
Birds on top of the world with nowhere to go.
The University of Queensland School of Biological Sciences’ researcher Hannah Wauchope said that suitable breeding conditions for Arctic shorebirds could collapse by 2070.
“This means that countries throughout the world will have fewer migratory birds reaching their shores,” Ms Wauchope said.
Arctic breeding shorebirds undertake some of the longest known migratory journeys in the animal kingdom, with many travelling more than 20,000 kilometres per year to escape the northern winter.
The bar-tailed godwit flies from Alaska to New Zealand in a single flight of 12,000 kilometres without landing.
The study predicts that, in a warming world, migratory birds will become increasingly restricted to small islands in the Arctic Ocean as they retreat north.
https://www.uq.edu.au/news/article/2016/07/birds-top-of-world-nowhere-go
Hi guys,
Just popping in briefly to inquire as to the whereabouts of James Howard Kunstler, as his last article was on the 17th. of March. Common cold?
27th was the last post. Today is the 30th.
Hi Paulo,
Are you getting this as his last post? If so, I am reading it as 17, not 27.
I’m getting this as his most recent post
http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/curse-thinking-class/
You’re right. It appears to be a problem related to my browser’s cache.
Thanks guys.
Nationwide precinct level maps of the 2008, 2012, 2016 U.S. presidential elections. Very interesting. Especially the one comparing 2016 results to 2012 results.
https://decisiondeskhq.com/data-dives/creating-a-national-precinct-map/
Oh, thank you very much! I have been looking for this data
Thanks again. As I remembered, the most exceptional thing about these maps is the urban/rural divide. Every single city everywhere, even really small ones, votes Democratic every single time. Almost all the depopulated rural areas vote Republican. The swing votes are the suburbs. Consistently.
Best Trump joke this week.
Trump sandwich, white bread, lots of baloney, Russian dressing, small pickle.
1,000 Paid Russian Trolls Spread Fake News On Hillary Clinton, Senate Intelligence Heads Told
A former FBI agent testified that President Donald Trump helped spread fake news by embracing the stories against his opponents.
Senate intelligence committee leaders have received reports that Russia hired at least 1,000 trolls to spread fake news stories to hurt Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton during the presidential election.
Warner said in the latest case, the paid trolls apparently focused on swing states in an attempt to influence votes there — Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania — where people were “reading during the waning days of the election that “‘Clinton is sick,’ or ‘Clinton is taking money from whoever for some source’ … fake news.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday dismissed allegations of Kremlin interference in the U.S. elections as “fictional, illusory, provocations and lies.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/russian-trolls-fake-news_us_58dde6bae4b08194e3b8d5c4?
Run OldMacDonald aka KGB Run, their closing in on you. You are a proud stupid conservative fool Republican who has been conned. Proven by science.
Not just Russia, see the following (also reported on the BBC).
http://www.huffingtonpost.com.mx/entry/macedonian-teen-claims-trump-supporters-paid-him-60k-to-produce-fake-news-during-campaign_us_584ac403e4b0bd9c3dfc51b7
NAOM
EPA Chief’s Refusal To Ban Brain-Damaging Pesticide Shows Profit Trumps Public Safety
“If the new administration is willing to support corporate interests over public safety in the face of such strong scientific evidence, then we should expect clear sailing for many other questionable pesticides in the future,”
Children especially experience greater exposure to organophosphate pesticides
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/scott-pruitt-pesticide-chlorpyrifos_us_58dd331de4b0e6ac7092fbd8?
OldMacDonald aka KGB, did your parents spray you in the orchard when you were a kid ? Proof Republicans dumb down their fly over voters.
I HAVE used this pesticide many times, personally, but not recently. Millions of other farmers have used it, and continue to use it. There is evidence, perhaps less than conclusive but highly suggestive, that it’s a significant health hazard especially to people who are exposed to it as workers. The evidence indicates that it’s a significant health hazard in terms of people eating it in trace amounts on their food, but the risk is apparently rather low. It could be that later on, we will know that it’s a high risk chemical.
I know what the risks are , or what they were believed to be, at the time I was using it, and considering all the OTHER things that could have wrong in my personal life, the risk to me, personally, was trivial. The odds of my getting severely hurt, or killed,for instance in an automobile accident were hundreds of times higher, maybe thousands of times higher.
Perfect safety is an illusion, it doesn’t exist. You can avoid almost any kind of accident by never getting out of bed, but the flip side of that coin is that you will suffer severely for lack of exercise.
We know now more than we did a few decades ago, more than we knew a decade ago. It’s a dangerous pesticide, more dangerous than previously estimated, no question at all. It should be phased out, on PUBLIC HEALTH GROUNDS, and the Obama administration made the right decision about that, in terms of what we know NOW that we didn’t know fifteen or twenty years ago.
But likewise, dangerous also are are automobiles, hot tubs, sun lamps, and hundreds, thousands of other chemicals that are known or strongly suspected to be hazardous environmentally in general, and to human health in particular.
It ought to be banned, based strictly on public health grounds, and the only real downside to that is that it really is a useful pesticide, one that enables lots of farmers to produce more food on less land using fewer OTHER chemical inputs.
Ban it, and hopefully, some other less problematic chemical will be substituted, and the price of food won’t go up VERY MUCH.
Of course the price of food doesn’t matter much to people like HB who according to his own words rake it in by the hundreds of thousands in the stock market from time to time, lol.
But the price of food matters to a LOT of people.
Consider the OTHER hand.
Like it or lump it, we are collectively using thousands of hazardous chemicals and pursuing dozens to hundreds to thousands of environmentally harmful or potentially harmful agricultural and industrial practices, and will continue to do so, for quite some time, because we HAVE NO CHOICE IN the short and medium term. People would literally be starving ALL OVER, otherwise, in LARGE numbers, rather than in only a few isolated locations. People would be unemployed by the tens of millions if we banned all the known dangerous chemicals and practices. Life would be a REAL riot, REAL QUICK, no joke.
Now whether this pesticide should be banned based on an examination of the BIG PICTURE is not so clear. There is no question whatsoever in the minds of nutritionists and physicians who study such matters that any individual forced to make the choice between plentiful and affordable fruits and vegetables with trace amounts of pesticides on them , versus eating few or none of these nutritionally critical foods, due to lack of money to pay for organic produce, or the lack of opportunity to purchase organic produce, is WAY BETTER OFF , MILES AND MILES better off, to choose the industrially grown fruits and veggies.
People who have plenty of money can afford organic produce. I can afford organic produce, although I don’t have much money, because I spend very little, having few expenses and no expensive habits.
But the KNOWN risk of eating conventionally grown fruits and veggies is so slight as to be negligible, on an individual basis. Collectively, it’s a problem. But then, so are cigarettes, and beer, and fast food burgers, and potato chips, and pizza, and ice cream. These things are so dangerous as to be highly significant health hazards on an INDIVIDUAL basis.
Risks are always relative. I drink VERY little, I use tobacco not at all, but I don’t freak out if somebody lights up a cigarette in my presence, because I evaluate the risk to my own health from inhaling A LITTLE BIT of second hand smoke, once in a WHILE, as trivial. I know and follow all basic industrial safety practices in my work, I drive carefully, and avoid rush hour traffic if I can, etc. I eat what’s recommended by the health care profession, taken as a whole.
But I never spent a single minute worrying about pesticide residues on domestically produced food, because THAT risk to my health is so far down the list of things that might harm me I will NEVER get that far down the list in trying to avoid health hazards.
Of course scientists, physicians, and bureaucrats whose job is to minimize any and every potential health hazard are predisposed to look at the harm, which tends to be localized, and ignore the benefits, which are spread over the entire population.
Millions and millions of poor people who are marginally to significantly better nourished MOST LIKELY means an average better public health outcome, although a few people WILL suffer great harm from ingesting this pesticide.
The researchers looking for health hazards get their paychecks BECAUSE of their finding things that ought to be banned, and to their credit, they do so, and work at getting the bans put into place. We NEED such people, and I strongly support their continued employment,and providing them with the money and other resources they need to do their jobs.
The regulatory process really only comes into play once the facts are established, and of course the regulatory process is a long way from perfect. Nevertheless a substantial number of pesticides HAVE been banned, and more will be, although it is obvious that the Trump administration is ready and willing to sell out the people for a piddly million bucks here and there in political donations, or sweetheart under the table deals.
A few people suffer allergic reactions to the vaccines that keep contagious diseases under control, but people with sense understand that we NEED vaccines. We NEED pesticides, we CANNOT live without them , given the cards in our hands at this time.
Now let’s briefly consider the situation of a working farmer who uses this chemical. If it is one he is dependent on, due to his location, the crops he grows, and or other aspects of his personal business and environmental situation, he will suffer significant material harm due to a ban, possibly to the extent of being driven out of business. SOME individuals always suffer in any case action is taken to protect the environment and public health.
The AVERAGE farmer who uses this chemical will either use a more expensive, less effective substitute, and change his production practices to compensate, maybe even up to the point of giving up producing a given crop, and substituting another. Farming is a super competitive totally cutthroat industry, and the lowest cost producers survive, while higher cost producers are forced out.
We apple guys aren’t dependent on this chemical, but we use it, or did, some time back. I haven’t used it personally in a long time. We can change our work practices and use something more expensive, and on the average, in terms of the BIG PICTURE, it won’t make a LICK of difference to us growers, because we PASS ALONG OUR COSTS.
If it costs me another nickel a pound to grow apples, you can rest assured this nickel will show up on BOTH sides of my ledger, income AND expense, within three or four years. Consumers will pay that nickel in the END, not farmers.
All growers are in essentially the same boat, except when a given chemical is approved for use locally, and other farmers in other locations who sell in the same market place are not allowed to use it. Then the guy who can use it has a significant competitive advantage.
The public doesn’t generally appreciate this basic truth, and sad to say, a lot of farmers have never bothered to think it thru. We need SOME chemicals, but we don’t usually have to have any GIVEN pesticide.
I don’t give a shit about the fortunes of any given chemical company. Farmers in general don’t give a shit about any particular company.
But old HB now, HE’s in the stock market, and he MIGHT be bragging about money he has made in pesticides, lol.
Trump is a dangerous nitwit, taken all around, but he was smart enough to understand the mood of the country, and because he understood the mood of the country, he won the election.
It’s not my fault the average D voter was so complacent as to think HRC had it in the bag, and that she should be ANOINTED president, without any competition in the primaries, except from a near unknown INDEPENDENT senator, starting from scratch, no money, no organization not much in the way of name recognition, from a tiny little state that seldom plays much of a role in national politics. The fact that he did so well, starting from so far behind, is MORE than AMPLE evidence that HRC was a LOUSY candidate, and the fact that her homies cheated every time they could to tilt the primaries in her favor is more evidence piled on.
When the R’s fuck up, I say so. They are fucking up THIS TIME, and they are fucking up on science in general, climate in general. It’s hard to think of ANYTHING the R’s aren’t fucking up at the moment, but I might come up with something they are doing right, for the right reason, sooner or later.
Old HB has to the best of my memory NEVER had anything to say about politics without his intent being obviously to deflect blame for Clinton losing onto somebody else, in most cases that being me, at least here in this forum.
Well, the bottom line is that I’m just one guy doing a little blogging, just like he’s supposedly just one little guy making a killing in the oil business, and the stock market, while posing as if he really gives a shit about the environment, and the country, etc. If he really has money, then I will concede that he might really give a shit about the people he hangs out with, who no doubt also have money.
I doubt if he knows shit from apple butter about the real issues involved in using pesticides.
He will never post any link that makes the D party and the Clinton faction of that party, the Republican Lite faction , look bad. He’s strictly a partisan wanna be DOG, and he is , but only lap doggie size.
When he gets off MY case, I will devote nearly all my political commentary to what’s wrong with the R party after that, excepting my clumsy efforts to teach limo type D’s a little about winning working class voters rather than pissing them off and predisposing them to vote R.
When it comes to leading a hard core big D Democrat to the light in terms of getting the party back to it’s roots, and back to it’s winning ways, I will be satisfied that I haven’t wasted my time if I convince only one or two I’m right, over the course of the next two or three years.
Culture wars, and political wars, are won one small battle at a time.
OldMacDonald aka KGB Trumpster all talk no action
“I will devote nearly all my political commentary to what’s wrong with the R party”
We have a long and proud history of playing the same sort of games the Russians have been playing, especially in Central and South America, but in other parts of the world as well.
Your empress to be wouldn’t have HAD a Russian problem if she had played by the rules and not had her secret email server to hide her connections to the scumbags contributing by the million to her family slush fund, and if the Democratic Party had played fair, during the primaries, well then, there wouldn’t be any problem with hacked emails either, and she would be prez today, most likely.
When you get caught cheating on the grand scale, it doesn’t really matter WHO outs you. It could have been the NYT, or the Washington Post, the result would be the same.
The fact remains that she displayed an appalling lack of judgement, an astounding level of arrogance, and that she ran as a business as usual Republican Lite candidate at a time when even the R core itself was sick and tired of R business as usual to the point that it rejected the entire R establishment and went with Trump, who basically HIJACKED the R party, given that he had basically zero political experience.
I will continue to point out the reasons WHY HRC was a rotten candidate, because by doing so I am reminding anybody who reads my remarks that in the future, they will do well to run candidates without baggage trains going back to their earliest days as politicians, and with the lowest approval ratings of any D presidential candidate EVER.
She was a very high risk candidate, from the word go, given her record, but I still thought she would win, and so did just about every body else hanging out in any liberally oriented forum.
But I was right, there was a possibility Trump would beat her, and he DID, although only by a hair.
And if she had had the political brains of a peanut, she would have campaigned like she meant it , in terms of at least PRETENDING she gave a fuck about the working people of this country.
But she put her political cards on the D’s with money, the sort who made up the delegate class at the DNC, where not a single guy or girl from a labor union was present to raise a hand when one speaker asked for a show of hands by workers representatives. There wasn’t even ONE on hand to raise a hand.
It was all Prada and Gucci.
Now you may or may not have some money, even a ton of money. You say you do, and that you have been making a killing in the markets, at a time when the people that elected Trump were in effect giving the middle finger to YOUR kind of Democrat.
She ran as a Republican Lite, and that’s what really cost her the election. That’s why the D’s as a party have been losing, and losing, and losing some more, for a long time now, until the R’s control DC, and most governors offices, and state legislature seats, etc, all the way down to dog catcher.
But it’s easy to see why a guy who is perfectly satisfied to pose as an environmentalist, while forgetting and bragging about making big money in oil, would blind himself to political reality.
I’m a realist, and will continue to point out corruption and incompetence wherever I run across it, and people like you will continue to vote your own self interests.
Well, I don’t have a LOT of money, I’m a long way from being rich, but I have money and property enough to meet my simple needs, and my political loyalties lie with the working classes, who are entirely distinct from the classes of people whose political loyalties lie with Republican Lite Democrats, and with Republicans.
It is often the case that you lose battles in the longer term process of winning the war.
HRC and her lap doggie boys and girls treated the classes of people I identify with with contempt, talked down to them, ignored them, characterized them as ignorant, racist, sexist, superstitious, xenophobic, etc, and while all these accusations are true to some extent, the fact is, the working classes are the true core of the traditional D party, and ENCOMPASS the minorities, both racial and ethnic.
My goal, as a political activist, is to get rid of the Republican Lite faction of the D party,which represents not the interests of MY people, but the interests of yours, the investor class.
This is about political hardball, and sometimes you win, and sometimes you lose. In the end, I’m confident the Sanders/ working class/ populist/ young well educated D’s will gain control of the D Party, and as a result , the D’s will start winning and making up the ground lost over the last couple of decades.
HRC played hardball, and she lost, due to her own stupidity or lack of judgement, in not recognizing the mood of the country. She would have won had she spent less time making secret speeches to the banksters, at a quarter million a pop, and spent more time talking about and working on the interests of the majority of the people of this country, rather than the investor class.
Little kids and hard core partisans seldom ever admit their mistakes, the usual thing is for them to blame anything that goes wrong on somebody else.
Well little lap doggie, sooner or later you may come to understand that you are not in control of the opposition, you don’t get to choose the opposition candidate, or the opposition platform, or the opposition coach.
If you lose, and you want to win next time, you look at the shortcomings of your team that you can FIX before the next time arrives.
Now people who are dyed in the wool partisans are always ready to believe their own favorite is a good guy or girl, and that the opposition is always the scumbag, and that anything the opposition has to say about the true believer’s candidate is just bullshit or outright lies, in the case of the Clinton camp, all summarized as a “Great Right Wing Conspiracy”.
Up until now, I have not actually bothered to post anything beyond the Cattle Gate example, here, because the members of this forum are mathematically literate, and one example is all that is needed when it’s one of the Cattle Gate kind.
But here’s a list, the first one that came up when I hit search with ” HRC associates and jail ” as the search terms.
We can go thru it one at a time, if you like.
http://www.gargaro.com/clintonconvicts.html
It’s got some pretty juicy stuff in it, considering how many people on it were close associates of the Clintons, and spent a LOT of time in jail, as the result of the BUSINESS they shared WITH the Clintons.
Would you like to go thru this list, one scandal at a time, with me? Doing so will serve a great purpose, in that it will demonstrate to any D who swallowed the GRWC explanation whole that her ethical record is lousy.
It will help such D’s to understand that the OPPOSITION and MIDDLE OF THE ROAD VOTERS have a LONG memory when it comes to such things,which is why Clinton’s poll numbers were so pathetic. Nobody who REALLY knew her record trusted her,although many who did not trust her were willing to vote for her anyway, for various reasons. Some of those reasons were EXCELLENT reasons, no question.
After that, we can google ” HRC position flip flops” , and spend a few pleasant hours discussing why people who maybe didn’t care about her stealing a few dollars here and there still distrusted her because she flip flopped on numerous things many people think of as matters of PRINCIPLE.
The opposition also has a LONG memory when it comes to a politician flipflopping on key issues.
Like it or not, tens of millions of voters felt betrayed by some of those flip flops, and when the voter perceives a flip flop is in violation of his or her moral and or ethical beliefs, well, that voter is STRONGLY predisposed to vote for somebody else in the future.
We can enjoy an in depth discussion of the reasons HRC went into the race with such incredibly lousy plus and minus numbers concerning likely voters.
As a WRITER, I will continue to tell it like it is, as I see it, regardless of party or individual, and I have consistently posted comments to the effect that the D party overall is far superior to the R party, but that doesn’t help much, if the D’s in power are Republican Lite D’s, because R Lite D’s aren’t going to do much if anything for working class people.
But as a writer, I will not pretend or sugar coat anything concerning any politician, or party, because I value being ACCURATE in my analysis and observations above all else.
“R Lite” D’s spend their time looking after the interests of the investor class, the limo liberal class. Anything they do for the working class is mostly an after thought, a bone thrown from the banquet table for the working dogs.
Not to you directly OldFarmer.
When are people going to realize that our government, many of our candidates and elected officials as well as many citizens are not up to the task of leading and governing in the 21st century ( or even in the second half of the 20th century) ?
We have a basically good system of government that is being highly abused. It is like a house that has been left go and not cleaned up in a long time. The biggest pile of junk in it that needs to be cleaned out is the government collusion with the corporation.
SEPARATION OF CORPORATION AND STATE must be done quickly if we want to progress and survive.
Dissatisfaction at the citizen level and poor communication from the government has allowed the snake oil salesmen in the door, starting decades ago. Time to chase out the snakes and remove the unwanted parasites.
“When are people going to realize”
Russian, I mean Republican EPA Chief’s Refusal To Ban Brain-Damaging Pesticide
1,000 Paid Russian Trolls Spread Fake News On Hillary Clinton, Senate Intelligence Heads Told
Dissatisfaction at the citizen level and poor communication from the government has allowed the snake oil salesmen in the door, starting decades ago.
Corporations have been aggressively manipulating public opinion. They are “conning” the public.
When a con artist steals your money, blame the con artist, not the victim.
So, the primary responsibility lies with to the corporations, not the public or government. Of course, it’s always good for crime victims to learn as much as they can to protect themselves…but don’t blame them if they don’t succeed at protecting themselves from the con artist. They didn’t make up the lies, even if we wish they hadn’t believed them.
Speaking about so-called ‘government’ and ‘corporations’ in the sense of them somehow being relatively-separate entities or as though one is like the ‘bad guy’/the perp and the other is like ‘the good guy’/the vict is just another con and typical kindergarten oversimplifications along the lines of the good vs evil mythos/dichotomy.
Nick, are you trying to say that the politicians do not know the money to elect them comes from corporations? Are you saying that the politicians do not know who is supporting the lobbyists that constantly attend the politicians?
Are you implying that much of the public does not know what goes on between the corporations and the government?
The response backfired, for some insane reason they believed that the baloney thrown out to them and ended up with the corporate heads inside the government now. Homogenized milk is one thing, but corpolitics quite another.
are you trying to say that the politicians do not know the money to elect them comes from corporations?
I’m thinking of the public, not the politicians. Most politicians are very aware of who’s pulling their strings, though some politicians are true believers, selected by corporate interests for their willingness to believe and rigidly follow “corporatist” ideas.
Are you implying that much of the public does not know what goes on between the corporations and the government?
Yes, partly. But, mostly the public doesn’t realize that the TV they’re watching, and the talk radio hosts they’re listening to, are cynical purveyors of conservative propaganda.
They don’t realize that Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh are cold, cynical propagandists.
I guess 13.25 million weekly listeners is quite a number. At least that leaves 305.65 million US people not listening to Rush. 🙂
So why are we so concerned about 4 percent of the population? Probably the same people listen to the other ultra conservative broadcasters too.
In primetime Foxnews network logged 2.37 million viewers, less than 1 percent of the population.
Now sports really pulls in the TV numbers, from 30 million to over 100 million for a big game. The top ten fictional TV shows each pull in more viewers than Rush has listeners.
Is the media that big of an influence or are the people just flocking to what they already believe anyway? Just a thought.
“So why are we so concerned about 4 percent of the population?”
13.25 million weekly listeners is almost 25% of the needed votes to win a national election.
“In primetime Foxnews network logged 2.37 million viewers, less than 1 percent of the population”
FoxNews runs 24/7 reaching hundreds of millions from airports to bedrooms. The Superbowl is 3 hours once a year. One time a year more than I go to church.
“flocking to what they already believe anyway?”
garbage in is garbage out, it’s about indoctrination
Hi Nick,
I occasionally disagree with you because as I see things, you are prone to oversimplifying some things, and to being too optimistic about a lot of things.
But in this case, I totally agree with you. Corporate money and corporate power are among the most important root causes of our having a dysfunctional government, and may be THE most important causes.
This is not to say however that occasionally people such as Hannity and Limbaugh are always wrong, or that the points they raise are always factually inaccurate.
Their arguments resonate with tens of millions of people for what are GOOD reasons so far as those people are concerned.
Consider for instance a little tempest in a tea cup about some woman at an elite law school insisting that she should be GIVEN FREE BIRTH CONTROL drugs or devices, even as she is choosing to live in one of the more expensive parts of the country, and spending megabucks to go to an expensive university. There was a regular shit storm of criticism of Limbaugh over this one.
Well, anybody who can’t understand that that sort of sense of entitlement ENRAGES people who have always paid for their own birth control, and who are working and paying taxes on LESS income, and trying to LIVE on what’s LEFT, than the TUITION at an expensive university is so fucking STUPID, stupid isn’t even a good word to describe them.
The typical culturally liberal person seems to think and believe that HIS beliefs and values are for some abstract reasons BETTER in some absolute fashion than those of cultural conservatives, while at the same time lecturing conservatives about criticizing other societies that practice the same values. A typical liberal is quite apt to lecture a conservative within five minutes about treating women as second class citizens AND about conservatives criticizing other cultures where women are treated far worse than by ANYBODY in the USA, including old line Mormons, etc.
IF I wanted to do so, I could compose a sarcastic piece ridiculing liberals for not believing in democracy, small d, because so many liberals run off at the mouth about doing away with conservative cultural values.
I don’t want to go THERE, for now. HERE is the real question, the one that should be keeping boneheaded college educated liberals awake at night.
Would you rather win the cultural versus conservative cultural DEBATE, or would you rather WIN ELECTIONS and have the D party back in power?
In the REAL world, it seems pretty obvious to me, at least, that if you want to win,at least for the next decade or so, you are going to have to reach out to independents and conservatives and find common ground with them.
Insulting them, talking down to them, making fun of them and their mores and values, and their supposed ( all too often real to be sure) lack of education, etc, is a SURE FUCKING WAY to help the R’s STAY in power.
Now along about a decade or so from now, things will begin to shift in a decisive way towards the liberal side in respect to the culture war, because the boomers will be well on the way OUT, and my generation will be just about GONE, in terms of voters, while the younger generations will be relatively far more numerous, than at present.
Everybody who has the foggiest idea about what is going on in this country, culturally, understands that the younger generations are solidly predisposed to being far more liberal than the older ones.
Big D Democrats with working brains understand this choice.
It’s extremely unfortunate for the D party, and for the people and for the country, that so many D’s who do have working brains choose to turn them OFF in this particular respect.
I’m not out to win a popularity contest here, so I’m free to tell it like it is, or at least the way I believe it is.
Ya got a choice to make. You can stay on your moral and cultural high horse, and talk down to the peasants, or you can get down off the horse, and MINGLE with them. Stay on the horse, keep on talking down to them and about them, the way so many liberals do, habitually, and they will remain strongly predisposed to vote for R type politicians.
Ya want to win the ARGUMENT, or the next election, and the one after that, and the one after that?
I suspect YOU get it, because I am convinced you are quite knowledgeable, maybe even a professional, when it comes to understanding and manipulating public opinion and beliefs.
If you don’t mind having the R’s in control for the next decade plus, you can wait for demographics to put the D’s back in power, most likely. It might take two decades, or even longer, for the demographic transition to giterdone, because of the incumbency problem.
I would really appreciate a straight forward, non evasive reply, pro or con, from you in this particular instance.
Incidentally, my personal opinion is that birth control ought to be totally free, including the necessary physicians visits, because this policy would go a long way towards solving a lot of tough problems ranging from unwanted kids to the abortion debate to population overshoot, etc. Every dollar so spent would probably save us a hundred, down the road.
MY point in mentioning it is that the average liberal is too stupid to understand how to win what should be overwhelming support for such a policy.
In a one on one with a hard core conservative, I simply ask him or her, quietly, what he thinks free universal birth control would cost him, annually, the answer being a trivial amount of money, maybe ten or twenty bucks, certainly not much more.
Then I ask him, quietly and respectfully, how much he thinks it will cost him to support another million unwanted kids, and another million after that, on and on, on welfare, and how many more cops and social workers are needed due to these unwanted kids, how much it costs to put them in jail because they don’t know any better, or even have any choice, other than to stand on a corner selling dope, etc,.
And THEN I SHUT MY FUCKING MOUTH, and let him think about it for himself.
When I get the response that government ought to play a smaller role in our lives, I say I agree in principle, but that the world, and this country, has gotten to the point that we have NO CHOICE except for the government to play a HUGE role in our lives.
It’s VERY easy, once you have established a respectful relationship, to demonstrate that we simply MUST HAVE public schools, public roads, publicly regulated utilities, a safety net for old people, regulations to prevent businesses from selling quack cancer cures, selling death trap cars, building houses that will fall down in short order, upstream businesses from dumping chemicals in the water people must drink downstream, patrol the borders, maintain public order, make sure the meat in supermarkets isn’t going to kill you if you eat it, etc etc etc.
So when such a conservative is respectfully reminded of all these things, well then, he or she tends to sort of sheepishly say I didn’t MEAN that sort of government interference in my life. It’s not usually necessary to point out that not much is left that the government doesn’t NEED to be involved with.
Hello OldMacDonald aka KGB Trumpster your post is just more proof
Ron Patterson says:
03/22/2017 AT 12:27 PM
Science has proven that Republican Conservatives, (i.e. Right-Wing Ideologues), are just plain dumb. That is they have much lower cognitive ability than their much smarter counterparts, Liberal Democrats.
I think it just confirms what most of us already know.
Trumpster says – “Consider for instance a little tempest in a tea cup about some woman at an elite law school insisting that she should be GIVEN FREE BIRTH CONTROL drugs or devices, even as she is choosing to live in one of the more expensive parts of the country, and spending megabucks to go to an expensive university. There was a regular shit storm of criticism of Limbaugh over this one.”
A “woman at an elite law school” will pay more in taxes in a life time than 100 trailer trash home schooled conservatives. Pull your head out and think of it as an investment.
OldMacDonald aka KGB is a Stupid Trumpster
Huntinton Beach- When you say stuff like this “OldMacDonald aka KGB is a Stupid Trumpster”,
you become a very small brained creature- like our president. No respect intended.
btw- I was an enthusiastic H. Clinton supporter, despite her big shortcomings. Its all relative, and she had a strong collection of attributes, for a politician. Thats it for me.
Just playing the OldMacDonald aka KGB trash talking game. I learned the branding process here from the king of fake trash talk.
anybody who can’t understand that that sort of sense of entitlement ENRAGES people
Limbaugh understands very well – that’s why he says it. He doesn’t care about birth control, (free or otherwise), or whether the story is true or a random anecdotal thing…but he knows how to push the buttons of his audience.
He’s manipulating them, and anyone who gets caught up in the anger, on either side.
“Well, anybody who can’t understand that that sort of sense of entitlement ENRAGES people who have always paid for their own birth control”
The problem is that that sort of IDIOT is the sort of person who can’t see past the end of their nose: they’re resenting the woman who is demanding what she deserves, rather than resenting the people who refuse to give her — or anyone else — what they all deserve. This is the behavior of the lobster pot analogy (when one lobster tries to climb out, the others supposedly pull it back in, rather than attacking the chef) — and it’s the behavior described in a great cartoon I saw a while back.
There are three people in the cartoon: two regular people and a CEO. The cartoon shows the CEO taking an entire plate of cookies, and leaving one cookie on the table. When one person reaches out to break off a bit of the remaining cookie, he turns to the other and says “Stop him! He’s talking part of your cookie!”
This has, of course, been the problem for movements trying to improve the world forever. Trying to change this attitude is called “class consciousness raising”.
Which is, of course, what you’re trying to do with the tactic you’re using. Unfortunately, when I’ve tried it, the hardcore right-wingers (they are not conservatives) agree that I’m right when it comes to practicalities, but end up saying that they’d rather make sure that women they don’t like don’t get birth control, despite the huge costs they’ll have to pay for the unwanted children later.
*Sigh* They’re fundamentally not practical people and I don’t know how to deal with them.
You seem to be dealing with a better breed of “conservatives”. I’m dealing with the ones who are still present in rural areas in the Northeast.
The new Republican head of the EPA thinks it’s safe to feed lead to children and that radon is A-OK. Think about the sort of lunatics we’re dealing with. Some people, I can just point this stuff out and they vote Democratic. But the ones who are *still* voting Republican *now* after GW Bush, the Iraq War, etc… a lot of them are completely unreachable.
‘Our’ government? ‘Our’ candidates?
Anarchy, GoneFishing. We will not have anything without it. Go lead and govern yourself, if you can, and leave the rest alone with this asinine ‘abused government’ shit.
You know we are fucked when ostensible adults like yourself continue on and on with this sort of mindfuck.
Anarchy is not the answer Caelan. The answer is education and a system of opportunity for all and not the few. What has happen is the results of the unwinding of the “New Deal” for the last 50 years by the Republicans.
By the way, thanks for the 1906 San Francisco link
You’re welcome– possibly one of the first car promos.
Nature is the answer, HuntingtonBeach, and being able to successfully dovetail into it and thus set up a more iron-clad long-term survival possibility.
As per your nickname, a beach full of pollution is not going to work very well, except maybe for the happy creatures that can handle it and that might appreciate, if they could feel a sense of appreciation, seeing some of its competition wiped off the face of the planet, and free up additional niches, so that they could multiply and rapidly evolve, maybe in part from our assorted wastes, including radioactive.
Superficial talk about Republicans, Democrats, Liberals or Progressive Conservatives, or what you put in your Kraft-brand Dinner yesterday, will only get us so far, such as from an evolutionary standpoint.
I would do less sociopoliticultural navel-gazing and pay more attention to the ‘New Deals’ that Mother Earth/Nature doles out, because we are on that dole.
CM-
None have a clue about anarchist thought or history.
Haven’t we been down this path before?
HB is a typical Dim, impossible to achieve any awareness, or class consciousness.
“class consciousness” – noun, awareness of one’s place in a system of social classes, especially (in Marxist terms) as it relates to the class struggle
Is that Republicans code for racism ?
Sometimes I wonder what kind of evolutionary adaptive strategies brought some people this far. Sheer luck? Numbers? I’m not necessarily talking about anyone in particular.
HI GF,
I disagree with you once in a while on a particular point, but in general, I think pretty much the way you do, and I am with you ONE HUNDRED PERCENT in that we need an ALL AROUND housecleaning in our government.
Corporations are synthetic alien non carbon life forms, with none of the built in inhibitions or mores humans are born with, but with basically all the rights of citizens. It’s impossible to punish a corporation, in any meaningful sense, since it’s not ALIVE, in the usual sense, but it is IMMORTAL, in terms of the law, so long as its owners want it to live.
Of all the things we have ever created, nothing is more worthy of loathing and fear than a typical multinational corporation, and our government is more or less owned and operated as a wholly owned subsidiary of these monsters. For instance- The Obama administration put Gold in Sacks executives in dozens of top positions. The R’s have typically been as bad or worse, I mention Obama doing it simply to make it clear that the D’s of recent times are not REAL D’s in the usual sense, they’r imitation REPUBLICANS.
The SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT thing that needs cleaning out is the influence of corporate money on our government. As a matter of fact, this might be THE most important problem afflicting our government, the one most often causing it to do the wrong thing, or nothing, all too often. The only other one that comes close may be the lack of a meaningful way to keep incumbents from remaining in power more or less for their entire lives, once in office. Nearly all of them, from both parties, wind up in the pocket of one or another special interest, sooner or later. This is of course directly related to the corporate money problem, so it might be best to consider these two problems as one and the same.
The R’s and their kind are a lot bigger problem,three times or more bigger, in terms of the overall long term welfare of this country and the world, than the D’s, but the D’s these days are mostly just a somewhat fuzzy dim mirror image of the R’s, in terms of the overall positions of the party.
The D’s do work seriously on a few things, and get a few things done, but they pay a lot more lip service to progress than they should be , given they are the so called party of the people.
For instance over a dozen D senators joined hands with the R’s a few weeks back and killed a bill that would have allowed the federal government to NEGOTIATE the price of drugs purchased for Medicare.
The government of virtually every other country I have ever heard of NEGOTIATES prices with the drug industry, but here in the USA, ENOUGH D’s side with the R’s to make it possible for the drug companies to continue to screw us.
NO question, an all around house cleaning and overhaul is necessary to the survival of the country, in terms of it being a decent place to live, long term.
Democrats Say It’s Pretty Obvious Why Michael Flynn Wants Immunity
“Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/democrats-michael-flynn_us_58de6ab0e4b0e6ac709451f1?
FBI still investigating Trump. No charges for HRC, cleared by FBI.
When are you going to learn OldMacDonald aka KGB
If I ever get around to it, I will be giving Trump a lot more attention that HRC, but so long as you keep posting the personal attacks, I will keep on pointing out WHY Clinton was distrusted and loathed by so many millions of people , and WHY the D’s lost the WH this last time, and WHY the R party has been mopping the floor with the D party for a long time now. All the electrons I am putting into responding to you, little lap doggie, could be put to better use, but I will not allow very many comments referring to me as a Trumpster or KGB stoolie, etc, to pass unchallenged. I might miss one once in a while, but not many, lol.
You don’t HAVE anything to say, other than to make excuses for HRC’s losing. I doubt you have the CAPACITY to say anything else, given that you are a true believing partisan unable to comprehend political realities.
I plan on keeping you being my Trumpster until after the election of 2020 to keep you focused on the Clinton’s. I don’t want you trash talking the next Democrat nominee because it’s not going to be old man Socialist Bernie.
The Democrats will nominate a socialist next time. The choices are now stark:
socialism
fascism
aristocracy
anarchy
Take your pick.
A new political landscape and economic model is forming in the USA. What will the new terrain look like? To many it will be a dead zone, to others a side show, and to a few it will look very good.
As expected, US President Trump’s proposed budget is a nightmare for science, the environment, and parts of the technology industry. Welcome to the future, where America’s long national nightmare may not even have the funds to keep chugging along.
While we’ll focus on the the aforementioned areas, it’s important to note that the much of the budget is a slash-and-burn operation. It cuts or eliminates funding for poverty programs, like school meals for poor children and Meals on Wheels. It also cuts the Appalachian Regional Commission, which provides funding to help retrain coal miners who are losing their jobs, among many other functions. Meanwhile, Trump’s budget office director went on Morning Joe to claim that cuts to public broadcasting were justified because “Can we really continue to ask a coal miner in West Virginia or a single mum in Detroit to pay for these programs?” It even goes after the country’s birds.
The only departments that would see an increase are those of Defence, Veterans Affairs, and Homeland Security, the latter of which would get $US2.6 billion ($3.4 billion) to build the border wall, though it could cost 10 times that amount.
Read the article to see the proposed cuts and increases.
https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2017/03/here-are-all-the-science-and-technology-initiatives-trumps-budget-would-decimate/
OldMacFarmer aka KGB says no problem, Trump doesn’t email. He tweets .
HB,
You are sounding more and more like the dummy in an Old Farmer ventriloquist act. Do you like being on his knee with his hand up your backside?
What nonsense will he make you say next?
Cattle Gate, Cattle Gate, Cattle Gate
It was all Prada and Gucci
Cattle Gate, Cattle Gate, Cattle Gate
As soon as he stops saying stupid things. Would you prefer I turn my attention to DoneFishing ? Because I can.
Spoken like a little wooden headed dummy. Bravo. Your master has the power to type. How exceptional.
Now hoping the next act will be entertaining. Probably too much to ask that your act gets the hook. But fear not little knothead, there are always simpletons who will jeer and clap to your antics.
How about we talk about the the Clintons close friends and business associates going to jail due to their little business affair known as White Water?
HRC is pretty much cursed with arrogance and delusions of grandeur, in some respects, but she learned at least enough at law school to cover her tracks to the point she didn’t get prosecuted when Cattle Gate and White Water made the news.
Catching a person robbing the bank one time is enough for most people to conclude they are not the most trustworthy and upright sort of individuals.
Now of course those who WANT to believe the Clintons were just a couple of naive country bumpkins who were enticed into such shady schemes by smooth talking crooks are perfectly free to do so.
BUT they might do well to stop and think about what that says about the processing and data storage capacity of the CPU’s between their ears, lol.
They did after all have the benefit of some considerable amount of time spent supposedly learning all about the law at university, etc.
“How about we talk about the the Clintons close friends and business associates going to jail due to their little business affair known as White Water?”
Trumpster, I’ll bet you know a lot more people who have been to jail than the Clintons.
I do indeed know a LOT of people who have been to jail, and some in jail at this very moment.
This comes of having lived among all social classes , excepting the rich to very rich class.
People who have spent their entire lives insulated from reality because they know only other people who live the way they do don’t actually know very much about people.
Whitewater was investigated thoroughly and no illegality by Clintons was found. I agree that cattle futures trading in HRC’s account looks suspicious and raises eyebrows. I am not a HRC supporter (I supported Bernie) but the Clintons have been scrutinized more than any other politician in the US. I think we should leave them alone. The D party needs to unite behind Bernie, Elizabeth Warren and Tulsi Gabbard.
~Mom’s Potato Clusters~
Some of us really do seem to like to project the ‘small-scale tribal notions’ on the out-of-scale/context mind-/cluster-fucks that are the nation-states.
Mother Nature needs to run for office and once she gets in, mash the whole thing up like potatoes and maybe add a bit of milk, chives/rosemary, garlic, butter, olive oil, pepper, and parmesan and/or salt to taste.
I’d vote for that.
Well, I really do hate to say anything that might be interpreted as supporting Trump, but at least when you tweet, the public knows what you are saying.
When your empress to be got caught with her pants down around her ankles with her secret email system, she managed mostly ( in my opinion and in the opinion of my personal attorney who is a life long straight D voter) to delete half the contents, without paying the price of going to jail for contempt or destruction of evidence, again MOSTLY, because the Justice Dept was at that time under the control of the D’s and the administration naturally wanted to minimize the scandal to the extent possible.
Of COURSE the R party would have behaved the same way under the same circumstances, nobody with a brain thinks otherwise.
And then during that time period, idiots like HB insisted that there was NO CHANCE, no RISK at all, that her home brew system could be hacked, or was hacked, lol.
Well, at least most of them have had sense enough to shut up about that, since the D party itself got the shit hacked out of it, lol. That alone was a big enough lapse of judgement to disqualify her for office in the opinion of everybody I have ever met personally who has had anything to do with handling high level government secrets, and I do know a few retired military people who were privy to such secrets at times.
Of course if the D Party had been playing by it’s own rules, instead of cheating to make sure she got the nomination, the hacked emails probably wouldn’t have even been released, or if they were released, they would have HELPED her rather than hurt her.
And if there was ANY ONE PERSON who in the ordinary course of affairs should be held accountable FOR THAT, it would be HRC, because she was de facto in control of the party machinery, and the usual thing is to hold the senior leader responsible for major failures of this sort, in war and in commerce.
But she WAS only a raw amateur when it comes to such things. Trump could teach her all about about stealing money in a few easy lessons if she were to sign on with him. He’s actually good at it.
IRENA: more solar than wind added in 2016 in strongest ever year for renewables
The year just passed saw a 161 GW increase in global renewable energy capacity with solar outpacing wind, shows data released by the Abu Dhabi-headquartered International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) on Thursday.
“This growth in deployment emphasizes the increasingly strong business case for renewables, which also have multiple socio-economic benefits in terms of fueling economic growth, creating jobs and improving human welfare and the environment. But accelerating this momentum will require additional investment in order to move decisively towards decarbonizing the energy sector and meet climate objectives. This new data is an encouraging sign that though there is much yet to do, we are on the right path,” Amin added.
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2017/03/31/irena-more-solar-than-wind-added-in-2016-in-strongest-ever-year-for-renewables/
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/03/trumps-epa-cuts-budget/521223/
Little old HB will never be able to get his little lap doggie head around it, but I wouldn’t be posting this sort of link if I were REALLY a Trumpster.
Of course the places it really needs posting are right wing oriented sites, and ya can bet that using other handles, I will be doing so.
You have to be pretty tough skinned to post that on most right-wing oriented sites…
Hi Nick,
No problem, I can take it, and dish it out, and do, until I get banned, which has happened often.
This comment was coherently composed when it was short, but I have added to it stream of thought style until it probably reads like a third class imitation of some old southern novelist such as Faulkner. Perceptive readers will be able to get the gist of it.
I’m looking for a kid that’s good on computers to teach me how to QUICKLY and easily get around bans on sites that don’t want the truth posted, so I can just keep on posting. Establishing one new identity at a time is tiresome and time consuming. It’s time for me to automate and mechanize, lol.
It’s just the internet, I don’t worry any more about what people say about me personally on the net than I do about getting hit by an asteroid. Panty wearing pinko commie Godless atheist socialist tree hugging whale lover, that’s me, lol, but the stuff I post gets thru to some of the people who hang out at such sites, because there are usually people at just about any site who are capable of thinking at least a little.
Every once in a while, I am threatened with violence, but I just laugh it off, and point out that I’m pretty much of a hard core right winger myself when it comes to looking after myself instead of peeing in my panties and calling the cops. There’s maybe one chance in ten thousand some nut case will actually hunt me up someday, but there’s a thousand times bigger chance I will kill myself accidentally on the tractor or felling a tree or driving on a public road or have a heart attack or stroke, so being a realist I don’t worry about such trivial potential problems. The odds are high I would hear about it if anybody comes poking around looking for me, and in actual fact I would call the cops and most likely the sheriff would be more than happy to make sure there would be a very fast response, if I call a second time, relatively speaking, considering this is a rural area. Any body suspicious from out of the neighborhood would be stopped, identified, maybe even searched, etc. The local sheriff takes proactive law enforcement seriously, when circumstances permit, and his deputies are mostly assigned to road patrol anyway.
Besides which I keep a loaded shotgun handy, since we have problems here with raccoons and foxes with rabies, lol, and there’s an occasional thief prowling around hoping to haul off something valuable.
I’m sure the stuff I post here gets thru to some people. They may not change their minds as the result of reading my stuff, but they WILL gain a little bit deeper insight into the subject matter, and that counts for a lot. A little nudge here and there NOW can result in big changes later. It’s not just nature that works in a non linear fashion, lol.
A man such as one of my fairly close relatives who lost his excellent coal industry job and voted for Trump out of anger and frustration with status quo politics is perfectly capable of understanding that his larger family and community is is heavily dependent on programs such as social security, medicare, etc.DEMOCRATIC PARTY programs.
Such a man for dead sure knows somebody whose kids really NEED free school lunches, maybe even his own kids.
He is capable of understanding that if a coal company dumps mine waste in a stream, there will be no fish in that stream, and that anybody who lives downstream must pay a lot more for water because it requires more treatment at the water plant, etc. All he needs in this case is a RESPECTFUL reminder.
He’s capable of understanding that the coal biz is in the pits ( pun!) mostly because gas is so cheap, rather than the so called war on coal. He understood it quite easily, when I pointed out to him the ACTUAL purchase price, wholesale, to the power companies, of gas, compared to coal, and how much cheaper a gas turbine is than a boiler system.
He is poorly educated, thru no fault of his own, but he’s sharp enough to understand that smoking kills people, and to understand that the warnings on the containers of industrial chemicals are there for a purpose, etc, and that we DO need environmental safeguards, etc.
If you remind him, and he’s at least about fifty or so, he will remember than the R party aligned itself with the tobacco industry, and R types maintained for years and years that smoking is not a major health threat, and anyway, it’s not the fucking government’s business if you want to kill yourself smoking , even though smoking is GOOD for you and will make you grow up big and strong.
He may well agree about his right to make up his own mind about his own life , who doesn’t?
But he’s also smart enough to understand that his own kids may take up the tobacco habit, and that given that possibility, he UNDERSTANDS the need to outlaw the advertising of tobacco products. Who want’s to go to their kids funerals ?
He’s smart enough to realize that when you have caught somebody lying to you once, you are wise to very carefully consider anything they have to say in the future before accepting it as factual, but a gentle RESPECTFUL reminder may be useful in getting him to remember this example.
What I am getting at is that if you WANT such a man’s VOTE, and you can get it, if you approach him respectfully, and avoid insulting him unnecessarily.
He will not flip from an R voter to a D voter immediately except on rare occasions, but given time, you can move him in the D direction, because he will come to recognize that’s the direction of his own enlightened long term self interests .
It took the R’s a while to take over, and it’s going to take the D’s a while to kick them out and replace them.
Folks who feel a COMPULSION to bad mouth religion are free to do so, but I hope I can get them to understand this one critical point.
WHAT MATTERS more, to you, as an individual ? Would you rather win the argument about god and atheism, and whether religions are good or bad for people and society, OR would you rather WIN ELECTIONS AND SEE THE D PARTY BACK IN POWER???? These two wants may not be mutually exclusive, but they are most certainly not joined at the hip, in terms of political strategies.
If you talk to and about such a man as my coal industry relative the way a few regulars in this forum talk about his kind of people, you’ve got a near zero chance of his doing other than responding to your words with the extended middle finger.
There are ENOUGH of his kind to keep the Trumpsters in power, if enough D’s persist in talking down to them and about them as if they were scum or near scum rather than citizens. Believe me, whatever you say about people these days, if you are a politician, somebody records it, and the opposition jumps on it like a duck on a june bug when it suits the opposition to do so.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KycVvwinpY
HB, who brags about making a killing on his investments, is either too stupid to understand that the people who the D party MUST have to win elections DON’T HAVE a few million in the stock market, or even a few thousand,ninety nine percent of them, and that they have approximately zero use for his kind of big D Democrat,or else he is simply cynical and brazen enough to keep on talking his sort of propaganda, hoping that anybody who hears it will accept it, and many do.
THERE ARE DEMOCRATS out there who DO understand what must be done to return the D party to power. Tens of millions of them actually. 😉
There’s ENOUGH of them to kick the R Lite D party establishment out, although it’s going to take a while, and victory is by no means guaranteed. One of my personal goals as a political activist is to move a few D’s from the HRC camp to the Sanders camp, but as a writer or observer, I refrain from identifying myself as either a D or an R, because I want to be able to point out bullshit any time I see it, or think I see it. A self identified partisan cannot point out the errors of his leaders, or his faction, without being accused of being a traitor and a shill for the opposition. I prefer to be identified as a traitor and shill for BOTH sides, lol.
There’s a LOT to be said for conservatism as a philosophy, in the true meaning of the word, as opposed to the accepted corrupted meaning used today by both liberals and conservatives. The same applies to liberalism as a philosophy, it has a LOT to be said for it, although the word and the philosophy have been corrupted in the minds of the people.
This is from the HILL website. I just copied it, it’s not that long.
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders (I) on Friday defended voters of President Trump, saying that the election was Democrats’ to lose and that the party needs to better represent the working-class voters who supported Trump and other GOP lawmakers
“Some people think that the people who voted for Trump are racists and sexists and homophobes and deplorable folks. I don’t agree, because I’ve been there. Let me tell you something else some of you might not agree with, it wasn’t that Donald Trump won the election, it was that the Democratic Party lost the election,” Sanders said while speaking at an Our Revolution rally in Boston with fellow Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).
Sanders went on to say that a “fundamental restructuring of the Democratic party” was needed to win future elections and that problems with party’s current setup is why many were quick to support Trump in the election, not because of some of the rhetoric on the campaign trail.
“We need a Democratic Party that is not a party of the liberal elite but of the working class of this country, we need a party that is a grassroots party, where candidates are talking to working people not spending their time raising money for the wealthy and the powerful,” Sanders said. “And when we do that, when we transform the Democratic Party, we transform America.”
Sanders said most people believe in a progressive agenda, not a right-wing agenda.
At the start of his speech, Sanders also offered praise for Warren, saying that “you can tell the quality of a person by the enemies she makes, and to her credit Elizabeth Warren has made some wonderful enemies.”
Sanders said those enemies include Wall Street and the pharmaceutical and fossil fuel industries, and he encouraged voters to keep her in the Senate to fight for a progressive agenda.
xxxx
If Warren is the D nominee next time around, I will vote for her. She can win, no question in my mind.
How anybody who doesn’t have his head entirely up his ass so far he will never see daylight again could fail to agree with Sanders escapes me, but I DO recognize that the majority of people would rather be horsewhipped than think, sarcasm light blinking but not blazing.
The working classes of this country, and the socially conservative classes all taken as a whole, sent the current day REPUBLICAN LITE D party a MESSAGE, that message being that they WILL NOT be taken for granted.
Rather than be kept like a mistress, meaning literally tolerated and kept handy in order to get FUCKED by the elite, such people would rather just pack up and LEAVE the D party, no matter the consequences.
Now this IS harsh language, but sometimes it takes harsh language to get the message across, and I believe this is such a time. Such people do have self respect, you see, and at the very least Trump had political brains enough to point out to them that the D party ( as it exists for now, and as it ran HRC as the nominee) was just as surely fucking them as the Republican establishment, which is why he succeeded in actually coming in like a pirate and hijacking the R party and actually beating Clinton, although only by a hair.
Whether the balance of the truth is on Trump’s side, or Clinton’s side, the R side or the D side absolutely IS important, but within the context of pushing people’s hot buttons at a time when they are mad and scared and feeling betrayed, well, people tend to lash out, although they may regret doing so later. A hell of a lot of people who voted for Trump regret it already, and more will come to regret it soon, but the election is water under the bridge, and now it’s time to consider the NEXT MOVE.
The younger and better educated faction of the D party understood all the things I have been saying, and went by a landslide for Sanders, as did liberally oriented independent or middle of the road but D inclined voters. The older faction for understandable reasons pretty much stuck with Clinton, assuming she had it in the bag, and she did, except for the unfortunate fact that she is an exceptionally inept campaigner and was arrogant enough to think she would get away with such crap as her secret email system and rigging the primary election process in her favor.
Her MACHINE controlled the D party appartus to the extent she totally scared off EVERY OTHER SERIOUS POTENTIAL CANDIDATE EXCEPT SANDERS, who started with essentially ZERO in terms of organization and money, and not much more than nothing in terms of the general public knowing who he is and what he stands for.
I know half a dozen black farm hands in my immediate neighborhood, and hire a couple of them a day at a time once in a while to help me with chores I’m too old to handle alone, or jobs to big for one man, and when we knock off for lunch, we eat in the kitchen. There used to be a dining room, but I use it as a den. They vote, but they had never even heard of Sanders, and had no idea he was as strong an advocate for their interests as anybody in DC, until I showed them pictures of Sanders at events with black community leaders going back four decades or longer . With money and organization enough, and with the media with him instead of mostly being with Clinton, he would have won a LOT more votes in the southern states, but time was too short, Clinton had too big a lead, and too many cronies helping her in the party and in the press.
I seriously doubt if limo liberal types who brag about making six figures in a few weeks or months on investments will ever ACCEPT the message. They’re too wrapped up in their own affairs, and simply unable to really understand what having to work and worry about making a living is all about.
Here and there you will run across one of that type that started out with little or nothing and made it into the one percenter class, who is still capable of remembering that the other ninety nine percent still exist.There are some in my own family now, and while they make an effort to be nice if they run into a childhood friend who didn’t make it to the top, they never invite them to come for a visit, and when they get an invitation, they’re always too busy.
Most of that kind morph into what they profess to despise, a person who in essence says I got mine, if you aren’t smart enough or mean enough or lucky enough to get yours, tough luck buddy, while by way of cognitive dissonance they still manage to flatter themselves that they give a shit about anybody except themselves. Some of them are a little more honest with themselves, and just admit they are REPUBLICANS at heart, in terms of who they identify with and want to be around and with.
I ‘m not saying the make believe compassionate well to do big D Democrat won’t write a tax deductible check to a charity once in a while.That makes them feel good, and the check is never big enough that it means they will take a less expensive vacation, or eat a cheaper cut of meat, or drive an older car another couple of years. They generally don’t maintain any real contact with their original culture and society, other than to maybe occasionally visit their parents.Such a person rarely mingles socially with the people he grew up with, as a general rule. So far as he is concerned, they are abstractions.
Such a person generally does support civil rights for everybody, including minorities of the various sorts, and he is often smart enough to understand that sound environmental law is good for HIM and HIS kids, although it might hurt his bottom line, depending on what he does, or his investments. I’m not saying limo liberals are bad all the way around, but rather that they tend to be cynical and hypocritical, and that they have played a MAJOR role in the D party finding itself in the dog house.
There are exceptions to these observations, no doubt, but most of us understand that old saw about the exceptions proving the rule.
I have most certainly exaggerated my case for effect, for impact. I don’t really expect people with brains to take my more pointed accusations literally, but I do hope they will try to put themselves in the shoes of people who actually think the way I have been writing, and thus understand how they must change in order to connect with the working classes, and win elections.
OldMacDonald aka KGB, HRC would have continued Obama war on CO2. But before the election you couldn’t get over your hate and spread Russian fake news here every other day.
Your actions spell Trumpster, just accept that reality. Democrats don’t need you to advice them.
You might like Palmer report HB. The guys a bit over the top sometimes in the past but he’s got Trump square in his sights.
http://www.palmerreport.com
I read it a couple of days ago when you posted it. I think so too. We will see.
”Your actions spell Trumpster, just accept that reality. Democrats don’t need you to advice them.”
So sez a self identified one percenter with a fortune in the stock market limo liberal Republican Lite big D Democrat , old HB himself. A few days back he bragged about raking it in AGAIN, even here in this forum where nearly everybody is worried about the long term implications of current economic policies, resource depletion, etc.
Old lap doggie HB appears to be suffering from the delusion that the D party controls Washington, and the state houses, and governors offices, and the city and town councils of the USA, and that it’s the R party in the dog house, except for the WH itself.
I can’t personally remember him ever having anything to say indicating that he has ever been wrong about anything at all, or indicating that he is anything other than a true believer in the current day Republican Lite D party, which is so far down in terms of actual political power, compared to the time a few decades back when it was the party of the PEOPLE, rather than the D elite, that it’s just about DEAD.
But even though it IS just about dead, in terms of actual federal power, and power in most of the states, there’s plenty of reason to believe it can recover and take control again, if it is reborn as the party of the people.
But I doubt if old HB will ever manage to get his head around this possibility. True believers can continue to pray even as they see their merciful god take their children one after another, while blessing their enemies with health and wealth, lol, and old HB is a true believing Clintonite incapable of doing other than as he does, which is to blame somebody else, anybody else, for her losing.
He has NEVER had a single word, as best I can remember, to say about WHY the R’s are in control, other than that anybody who has ever voted R is stupid, or ignorant, or worse. Now THAT’S about as good a strategy for making sure the D’s stay in the dog house as I can imagine, but maybe somebody else can enlighten me, and tell me about a BETTER one.
I will gladly retract this observation if he can point to any previous comment indicating he TRULY UNDERSTANDS why the R’s are in power. I’ m getting old and senile, and might have missed it, lol.
Hello Trumpster,
“True believers” to me are Christians who waste half their Sunday at church. When they could be here on the internet.
The funny thing, it’s you who named your that, not me. Personally, I like OldMacDonald aka KGB. That’s mine now for 2 or 3 months. Everyday it just rings truer and truer. You did it all for free. Didn’t even get paid for it. Your quite a business man.
I suggest that you might be in need of broadening your rather limited intellectual horizons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_True_Believer
Any body who has not read this book is in about the same situation, relatively speaking, as an environmentalist who has not read Silent Spring, or anything by Darwin, when it comes to understanding politics, religion, and mass movements of any sort.
A lot more than ice and snow are changing in the Arctic.
Southern animals moving north, hybridization, diseases and the unmentioned increasing invasion of the Arctic by humans.
Grizzly bears mating with polar bears. Red foxes out-competing Arctic foxes. Exotic diseases making their way into once-isolated polar realms. These are just some of the worrisome phenomena now occurring as Arctic temperatures soar and the Arctic Ocean, a once-impermeable barrier, melts.
http://e360.yale.edu/features/arctic_roamers_the_move_of_southern_species_into_far_north
Not to mention Santa’s workshop and Superman’s Fortress of Solitude sinking below the waves.
I suspect those ideas would resonate with some people who don’t worry about bears…
The loss of Santas’s workshop is a mournful occurrence. One more burden humanity must carry. Though I did think that the Fortress was on land and there were several in different locations around the world.
I do hope people get your sense of humor Nick. Once they do, they may get a bit offended, but then good comedy does that.
Thanks.
Though, oddly enough, I wasn’t joking.
Most people don’t really know much about the Arctic, or the Arctic Ocean, but they feel an intuitive connection to the North Pole. Think of all the movies set there, with trains taking children to Santa’s workshop, etc.
The idea that Santa (if he existed….) would now be underwater might really be sobering for some folks.
Ooops.
If Santa did exist I doubt if a little ice melt would deter such a magical demigod.
Rudolf the red nosed dolphin had a very shiny nose and if you ever saw it you would even say it glows…
So you southerners have a flying boat pulled by dolphins every Christmas? Does Santa wear shorts down there?
.
Hey folks.
It’s been awhile since I’ve posted, though I still come around and browse the post on a regular basis, but I’ve got to ask, has the place gone downhill?
There seems to be a lot more hostility than I remember here. It seems the quality of the discussion has gone down. I notice that the usual minders/moderators continue to be here, but things still seem to have gone off the rails.
Or am I just not seeing things correctly anymore?
You are absolutely correct. The blog has been inundated by trolls, negators, and even some conspiracy theorists. Several posters troll and hound in highly negative and personal fashion. So yes, things have gone downhill and many people have ceased to respond due to the interference of those types in many discussions.
Still, some interesting info seeps in and occasional real information is passed between commenters so still worth being here, though annoying.
Now there is the pot calling the kettle black
GoneFishing says:
03/31/2017 AT 3:30 PM
Spoken like a little wooden headed dummy. Bravo. Your master has the power to type. How exceptional.
Now hoping the next act will be entertaining. Probably too much to ask that your act gets the hook. But fear not little knothead, there are always simpletons who will jeer and clap to your antics.
Welcome to the age of Trump
Bravo my little splinter, you have apply demonstrated your ability to find me just as you said you would. Now you can keep me company just the way you do OldFarmer.
I hope OFM does not get jealous that you are now attached to me.
HB said to Mr. GoneFishing about Old Farmer Mac.
“As soon as he stops saying stupid things. Would you prefer I turn my attention to DoneFishing ? Because I can.”
No spin StormWatcher. Just copied and pasted your comment.
Man up
Hello little Hurt Being. Running to Mommy and complaining again?
That’s unfortunate. There are so few worthwhile places left that I’m aware of. This was one of them. I guess all things end.
Oh well.
Girlfriend, the beauty of a blog vs. a TV is that you interact instead of playing couch potato. The grey matter between your ears is literally just dying waiting to put pen to paper. The regulars here have beaten the subjects of climate change and politics like flogging a dead horse. I believe your welcome to contribute with about any interest subject your heart desires.
Now it’s your turn to take the ball from out of bounds. Please don’t let your feelings get hurt if you bump a few elbows.
There are no free riders in life. I wouldn’t expect to get more out of something than I put in. I look forward to your contribution.
” I wouldn’t expect to get more out of something than I put in. I look forward to your contribution.”
So sez old HB himself, who devotes eighty or ninety percent of his comments to calling me Trumpster, etc. 😉
And when he posts about something else, he just parrots something said by somebody else. He has never demonstrated any personal mastery of any significant topic discussed here in this forum by way of making an original comment.
I can’t remember any occasion on which he asked one of the better informed people commenting about climate, resource depletion, population, etc, a question, in order to gain a deeper understanding of the topic.
Trumpster, no one here talks more about himself more than you. Sometimes it’s like we all know about every backwards hillbilly friend you have in Appalachia.
Not down hill, just more lively 🙂 the non oil thread seems to attract discussions regarding politics and climate change. Passionate topics. One thing I really like is all the links to interesting current events and data that get posted in the non oil thread. Up thread is a great example when Mr Kaplan posted some links to arctic CO2 and CH4 data. As well I like OFMs lengthy posts. The information sharing in the comments of non oil threads is why I read it. Although you do have a good point. Perhaps the WUWT types coming here to post bait could be ignored rather than taken to task. And maybe OFM and HB could become friends 🙂
It’s just a sign of the times. I think it has a lot to do with the Trumpocene.
Cheers!
The internet will work out just fine. All the mental oddballs and wackos will be quickly identified by AI software and offered jobs in government or in related corporations.
What better way to lock in the future?
This place has become The GoneFishing/Survivalist/Hightrekker/Duncan Idaho/HuntingtonBeach Show. Post anything not fully 100% in agreement with any of their individual viewpoints, and you can expect to have your intelligence insulted, be called stupid, an idiot, that you don’t know what you’re talking about, and so on. Collectively, they know-it-all, and will tell you so either directly or indirectly.
Then again, we were (or I was, as the case may be) warned this would happen. http://peakoilbarrel.com/petroleum-supply-monthly-texas-cc-estimate-permian-and-eagle-ford/#comment-575066
Geoff, I learned to respond back when attacked and trolled incessantly on this site. Javier is relentless, now HB is on the attack and a few others. I don’t put up with as much as I used to. If I hurt your feelings in the past, not intended, but you need to get over it or join the HB/Javier club.
Thanks for the link, I found one of my comments just below where you chose. It bears repeating.
The living world has been stable for nearly a billion years. It has been growing and changing in form, but it never disappeared and achieved new stability even after disastrous physical setbacks.
Nature and the physical world tends toward stability. All these changes will reach a new stable position in the future. What that world will look like, what kinds of plants and animals will exist, we do not know.
Today is not a good predictor of what the future will be. We can extrapolate, take into account possible changes and innovations, but we don’t really know what the future will be like in general. Because so many things change.
We can however change ourselves, change our mindset and actions and end up with a different future.
There is a percentage of people doing this now and even big business and government is changing. There is no one answer, there are billions of answers that come into play. The individual can change much faster than governments or businesses. And we can have a great time doing it and sharing the changes.
Although now I believe we need both individual action and group action. As has been said by others, physics and chemistry are giving us a short timeline for action. Unlike opinion and politics, they just move forward with no concern while we talk among ourselves. That is why those who attempt to squelch or derail discussion and thought at this point are so dangerous. We now have a long list of known knowns to deal with. The unknown may or may not be revealed in the future and may blindside us or we may see them coming. But if we cannot or do not act on what we know right now, then the rest is unimportant.
What happened to Javier? I miss his pure comedy gold. And speaking of pure comedy gold-
“Global warming is all cyclical based on the sun, sunspot activity, and the polar magnetic fields around our planet. That is already well known to be the truth of what’s going on with global climate if you follow the work of the scientists whose methods include study of the actual climate data as opposed to the scientists who follow political and ideological orders.”
http://peakoilbarrel.com/petroleum-supply-monthly-texas-cc-estimate-permian-and-eagle-ford/#comment-575018
Perhaps Mr Riley would care to name some of those scientists he’s talking about who inform him of these facts regarding sun spots and polar magnetic fields so I can follow them and enlighten myself.
Don’t forget Javier. He’s usually good for a few miles of column and plenty of failed predictions.
I won’t miss Javier, but I’m wondering if Ronald Walter is still with us.
Most of the time when I hear about somebody I know but haven’t seen in a while,it’s because somebody calls to tell me when the burial services are scheduled.
RW’s comments almost always left me laughing. You could read almost all of them simultaneously as wicked sarcasm and true believer rants, regardless of the topic.
Maybe that was his point, the point being that nothing is either good or bad but that thinking makes it so.
Faster than forecast: the story ice tells about abrupt anthropocene climate change with Jason Box
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSxO4ktvfDs
There are some flaws with that work, that I see. The facts are, ships/buoys only reliably measure water temperature down to 150′ or so. Go any deeper to get temperatures, and you need submarines. Therefore any work talking about ships/buoys measuring temperatures all the way down to 300′ must be very misinformed, because that doesn’t happen. Now submarines (naval/research) do take water temperatures down at 300′ and even deeper, almost to 1000′. The problem is, these apparatuses move through water at depth. That causes the water to heat up near the hull, which impacts the measured and recorded water temperatures.
Serious scientists know we frankly have no idea what the real water temperatures are as deep as 1000′ ft down, unless the temperatures are taken by hanging a long-necked probe below a buoy or in the process of investigating an underwater volcano. To otherwise use temperature measurements taken by submarine is like measuring land temperature at a location directly above hot asphalt on a sunny Summer day and calling those measurements the truth. Of course if anyone wanted to do that they could, but they wouldn’t be faithful to real science that doesn’t need to rely on “correcting and adjusting” collected data in order to prove a prediction right.
Where do you get your facts from?
2000 meters is equal to 6561 feet and 8 inches.
“There is a neat program that is measuring the temperature and salinity of ocean surface waters around the world. The Argo program deploys floats that measure salinity and temperature throughout the surface layer of the ocean. Over 3,000 free-drifting floats have been deployed all over the ocean and each float is programmed to sink 2,000 meters down, drifting at that depth for about 10 days. The float then makes its way to the surface measuring temperature and salinity the whole time. Data is transmitted to a satellite once the float reaches the surface, so that scientists and the public have access to the state of the ocean within hours of the data collection.”
http://www.windows2universe.org/earth/Water/temp.html
“Research groups from around the world have deployed thousands of Argo floats to measure since around the year 2000 to take temperature, salinity and other measurements. Technological advances have allowed a small fleet of deeper-diving floats to be deployed more recently. Some of those have been built to dive as deep as 20,000 feet.”
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/deep-ocean-waters-are-trapping-vast-stores-of-heat/
“Argo is a global array of 3,800 free-drifting profiling floats that measures the temperature and salinity of the upper 2000 m of the ocean. This allows, for the first time, continuous monitoring of the temperature, salinity, and velocity of the upper ocean, with all data being relayed and made publicly available within hours after collection.”
http://www.argo.ucsd.edu
“How accurate is the Argo data?
The temperatures in the Argo profiles are accurate to ± 0.002°C and pressures are accurate to ± 2.4dbar. For salinity,there are two answers. The data delivered in real time are sometimes affected by sensor drift. For many floats this drift is small, and the uncorrected salinities are accurate to ± .01 psu. At a later stage, salinities are corrected by expert examination, comparing older floats with newly deployed instruments and with ship-based data. Corrections are made both for identified sensor drift and for a thermal lag error, which can result when the float ascends through a region of strong temperature gradients.”
http://www.argo.ucsd.edu/FAQ.html
And here’s one on underwater volcanoes.
http://www.radionz.co.nz/news/environment/323024/nz-scientists-explore-spectacular-underwater-volcanoes
There are some flaws with that work, that I see. The facts are, ships/buoys only reliably measure water temperature down to 150′ or so.
Hey moron, here’s a paper by two very serious psychologists from Cornell University who studied why idiots like you think they know enough about science to criticize it!
I’d suggest you read it but I highly doubt your reading comprehension skills would be up to par.
http://psych.colorado.edu/~vanboven/teaching/p7536_heurbias/p7536_readings/kruger_dunning.pdf
Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self Assessments
Justin Kruger and David Dunning
Hi Fred,
You seem to be the go to guy here when it comes to keeping up with the news on the biological tech front.
So you may have seen this already.
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2017-04-screening-dark-genome-disease.html
I’m sure a lot of us would appreciate hearing what you have to say about this application of the Crispr tech.
I would prefer to let an expert in the field talk about applications of CRISPR-cas9.
Genome Engineering 3.0: George Church
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KoNTEPC6afU
While Dean Baker is resource illiterate, still a good read:
https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-wrongest-profession-baker#
It’s interesting, but very misleading about economists. For instance, he says:
To get a clearer fix on how deeply our economics establishment is entrenched within its own counter-empirical worldview, let’s home in on what is undoubtedly the most consequential article of faith in its catechism: the gospel of the deficit hawk.
That’s just dishonest. Economists in general do not agree with “austerity”.
I think he was taking about our neoliberal friends who have been in ascendance within economics from Uncle Milton until the present.
But agree– some think the credit card is the answer.
Then we have the “loot and charge”, a bit of both, that Sir Ronnie The Lessor perfected, along with the Electronic Nuremberg Rally.
The Future Of Air Travel? Meet The 150-Seat Wright Electric Airplane
Wright Electric is a startup company that aims for electrification in the sky, to eliminate the biggest cost for airline carriers of today – fuel.
Wright’s goal is to develop a 150-seat all-electric airplane with a 300 mile (nearly 500 km) range that would compete in the 737 style Boeing and Airbus plane market.
Both Boeing and Airbus sold nearly 1,000 of those planes in 2016 – and at around $90 million each, so there is huge potential in electrification.
Wright already has a partner in British airline EasyJet, which could ultimately be the first to put such a plane into service.
Yes. I know what today’s date is but, this was actually posted over at insideevs.com three days ago. This article started me thinking about ways the range of electric aircraft could be extended. The Eco-Climb concept from Airbus as shown in the screen capture of the video at the linked page is a start. I think having the “sled” run on steel tracks like a train would allow the sled to draw power from the tracks during take off. A more esoteric approach would be to have a linear motor built into the runway to move the sled. The basic idea is to accelerate the aircraft past take off velocity using ground based power, reducing the amount of energy that needs to be carried on board the aircraft. There is really no need for an aircraft to be operating under it’s own power as long as it is in contact with terra firma!
Since electric aircraft are a lot less noisy than anything using combustion engines, they could climb at a far more leisurely pace in most cases and could probably cruise at lower altitudes. A quick Internet search reveals that propeller driven aircraft cruise as low as 5000 feet on short hops. Not having to climb to altitudes of 30,000 feet or more should save quite a bit of energy.
The point is, if we re-calibrate how we think about air travel and what constitutes normal in terms of cruising speed, cruising altitudes and climb rates, electric aircraft could be operated for maximum energy efficiency and battery powered commercial air travel might be closer than most people think.
edit: Incidentally the following is THE April Fool’s story from insideevs.com
Tesla Files New Patent For Gas Engine With ‘Plasma Igniter’
I still think that NASA has a winner in the X57 concept aircraft. It appears to get around a lot of the lift to drag problem and some of the air drag problem by using a modified wing with essentially the whole wing having propeller thrust over it. Extending this to larger passenger planes would give a plane speed on the order of 300 + mph that will use only a small amount of energy compared to current jets and turboprops. Also eliminates concern about one or two motors shutting down.
NASA’s aeronautical innovators hope to validate the idea that distributing electric power across a number of motors integrated with an aircraft in this way will result in a five-time reduction in the energy required for a private plane to cruise at 175 mph.
https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/nasas-x-57-electric-research-plane
Several other benefits would result as well. “Maxwell” will be powered only by batteries, eliminating carbon emissions and demonstrating how demand would shrink for lead-based aviation fuel still in use by general aviation.
Energy efficiency at cruise altitude using X-57 technology could benefit travelers by reducing flight times, fuel usage, as well as reducing overall operational costs for small aircraft by as much as 40 percent. Typically, to get the best fuel efficiency an airplane has to fly slower than it is able. Electric propulsion essentially eliminates the penalty for cruising at higher speeds.
Not sure how ionizing the liquid fuel would increase performance. Possibly the ICE would get a more uniform burn and boost efficiency. Too bad there is already an ICE design out there that gets 40 percent efficiency and is being ignored.
I sure hope the X-57 can translate into the private plane market and scale up to the 10 seater category ASAP.
OCEANS MELTING GREENLAND (OMG) PROJECT
Global sea level rise will be one of the major environmental challenges of the 21st Century. Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG) will pave the way for improved estimates of sea level rise by addressing the question: To what extent are the oceans melting Greenland’s ice from below? Over a five-year campaign, OMG will observe changing water temperatures on the continental shelf surrounding Greenland, and how marine glaciers react to the presence of warm, salty Atlantic Water. The complicated geometry of the sea floor steers currents on the shelf and often determines whether Atlantic Water can reach into the long narrow fjords and interact with the coastal glaciers. Because knowledge of these pathways is a critical component of modeling the interaction between the oceans and ice sheet, OMG will facilitate improved measurements of the shape and depth of the sea floor in key regions as well.
https://omg.jpl.nasa.gov/portal/
About the temperature/salinity probes being dropped around Greenland as part of the OMG program
https://sealevel.nasa.gov/news/50/omg-how-fast-are-oceans-melting-greenland
There is also a network of seismic detectors “listening” to ice movements in Greenland.
So finally we will have more probes on and around Greenland than we have had satellites and probes sent to Mars. Definitely a lot less expensive than the Mars missions along with being more relevant to our lives.
Probably one of the more important orbiting missions, GRACE measures mass changes allowing it to monitor water movement and storage in oceans, ice and underground. Due for replacement in 2017/2018.
GRACE mission: 15 years of watching water on Earth
https://sealevel.nasa.gov/news/76/grace-mission-15-years-of-watching-water-on-earth
I agree, GRACE was a big one, and our denier friends worse nightmare.
Here’s an example of the merchants of doubt out in full force. A full two hours, thirty six minutes and 20 seconds worth! Chaired by Representative Lamar Smith (R–TX).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WM86Bl4jSEI
Climate Science: Assumptions, Policy Implications, and the Scientific Method
Full Committee | 2318 Rayburn House Office Building Washington, D.C. 20515 | Mar 29, 2017 10:00am to 12:00pm
Opening Statements
Ranking Member Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX)
Ranking Member Suzanne Bonamici (D-OR) of the Subcommittee on Environment
Letters
Drs. John C. Fyfe, Gregory M. Flato, Nathan P. Gillett and Neil C. Swart, The Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis, Environment and Climate Change Canada
Dr. Benjamin D. Santer, Dr. Matthew H. England, Dr. Ed Hawkins, Prof. Michael E. Mann, Dr. Gerald A. Meehl, Dr. Yu Kosaka, Dr. Shang-Ping Xie
Witnesses
Dr. Judith Curry, President, Climate Forecast Applications Network; Professor Emeritus, Georgia Institute of Technology
Dr. John Christy, Professor and Director, Earth System Science Center, NSSTC, University of Alabama at Huntsville; State Climatologist, Alabama
Dr. Michael Mann, Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science, Pennsylvania State University; Director, Earth System Science Center (ESSC), Pennsylvania State University
Dr. Roger Pielke Jr., Professor, Environmental Studies Department, University of Colorado
GF—
You might like this:
http://newatlas.com/3d-image-antarctica-ice/48640/
Thanks.
Well worth the time to read and think about the implications.
http://www.salon.com/2017/04/01/so-much-for-the-populist-presidency-donald-trump-has-failed-to-learn-the-lessons-of-his-own-victory/
Hello OldMacDonald aka KGB Trumpster, the trashing of HRC with fake news is how America got your puppet master. You must be proud.
The First Week Of Early Voting Bodes Well For Democrat Jon Ossoff
A special election in Georgia’s 6th district is testing the liberal backlash against Donald Trump.
After five days of early voting in the special election for Georgia’s 6th congressional district, Democratic voter turnout has significantly outpaced that of Republicans.
That is a good sign for Democrats hoping that the surge in liberal enthusiasm after the election of President Donald Trump will be enough to elect 30-year-old candidate Jon Ossoff.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/first-week-early-voting-democrat-jon-ossoff_us_58dfcabfe4b0b3918c83efcb?
Back to you HB,
I would have time to post a LOT more R dirty laundry except for the time I spend on you, but the more I spend on you, the better, in some ways.
I have been thinking about posting your wanna be empress’s record as a business person, above and beyond Cattle Gate.
All hard core D’s who are mathematically literate MUST recognize the fact that after a YEAR nobody has turned up a single link defending HRC in that little scam, based on mathematical reasoning.
Every body with an understanding of basic math KNOWS she’s a crook.
But lets move on, and discuss the fate of her business partners in White Water, lol.
Note that the New Yorker is generally recognized as one of the most liberal magazines in the USA, and also one of the top two or three in terms of reputation when it comes to getting the facts straight.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1997/02/17/susan-mcdougals-silence
Hello OldMacDonald aka KGB Trumpster,
Cattle Gate, Cattle Gate, Cattle Gate
Background and Clinton’s trading
Clinton had no experience in such financial instruments.[2] Bill Clinton’s salary as Arkansas Attorney General and then Governor of Arkansas was modest and Clinton later said she had been interested in building a financial cushion for the future.[3][4] The Clintons’ combined income in 1978 from the governorship and Rose Law Firm amounted to $51,173,[5] equivalent to $187,900 in 2016. James Blair was a friend, lawyer, outside counsel to Tyson Foods, Arkansas’ largest employer, and had been doing so well trading commodities futures that he encouraged friends and family to enter the market too.[6][3][4] Blair in turn traded through, and relied upon cattle markets expertise from, broker Robert L. “Red” Bone of Refco, a former Tyson executive and professional poker player who was a World Series of Poker semifinalist.[4][7] In October 1978, when Bill Clinton was Attorney General and on the verge of being elected Governor,[1] Clinton opened a trading account, although Blair made most of the trades.
By January 1979, Clinton was up $26,000;[4] but later, she would lose $16,000 in a single trade.[4] At one point she owed in excess of $100,000 to Refco as part of covering losses, but no margin calls were made by Refco against her.[4] Near the end of the trading, Blair correctly sold short and gave her a $40,000 gain in one afternoon.[4] In July 1979,[1] once she became pregnant with Chelsea Clinton, “I lost my nerve for gambling [and] walked away from the table $100,000 ahead.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Clinton_cattle_futures_controversy
HRC has been in the Republican policital cross hairs for a quarter of a century with NEVER a conviction. Now let’s talk about-
Watergate was a major political scandal that occurred in the United States in the 1970s, following a break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex in Washington, D.C. in 1972 and President Richard Nixon’s administration’s attempted cover-up of its involvement.
Yes, LET’S PLEASE talk about how she put picked up golf clubs for the first time and won the LPGA championship WITHIN A YEAR.
THOU ART INDEED A GREAT FOOL, HB.
IF you had lick of sense, you wouldn’t point out the mathematically obvious, or the fact that she got special treatment because she was WELL CONNECTED, with the GOVERNOR as HUBBY, and one of the VERY TOP MEN at Tyson her oh so special friend, it just might leave anybody who is NOT a die hard true believer that R’s can do no right, and D’s can do no wrong, WONDERING about being allowed to run that sort of deficit. Brokers have to make up such losses themselves , or their insurance companies have to make them good, in the event the customer can’t or won’t.
You might have very conveniently forgotten to mention that the broker involved got his license lifted, and in a modern court, with modern regulatory rules, the whole lot of them would have been convicted, no question at all.
It’s PAR FOR THE COURSE, when you are running a scam, to provide yourself with a little camoflauge. In this case it was managed by putting Hill in the hole, temporarily, a couple of times, so as to be able to say look,I’m a complete goddamn amateur , and it’s a total fucking accident that I did so incredibly well, as a matter of fact , so much BETTER than any OTHER client of my broker than not a single one has ever come forward telling us how much he made for THAT one.
The very idea that she would have an account with such a scumbag broker, with such a powerful insider supposedly advising her, is totally at odds with any ordinary standard of conduct for a politician who expects to attain high office.
Insider trading is one of the BIGGEST no no’s in the entire investment field. People are routinely jailed for it, unless maybe they are lawyers, and know how to cover their tracks well enough to avoid indictments and convictions.
There are millions of crooks in this country who have never been convicted of any thing more serious than a traffic offense.
Consider for instance the executives who were running the big banks that took part in the robo signing scam. Ask any attorney who is in civil or criminal practice, who does not work for such a bank, and he or she will tell you that if you do it, and it can be proven, you WILL go to jail.
Do you care to name a bankster who went to jail for scamming mortgage customers? CAN YOU??
People with good judgement JUST DON’T GET INVOLVED in schemes such as WhiteWater, ESPECIALLY if they are supposedly possessed of EXCELLENT judgement, as evidenced by the fact they have a law degree, UNLESS they smell BIG PROFITS.
The lack of judgement displayed in this case alone is enough to more than leave a thinking person thinking maybe Clinton cuts the corners very close indeed. TOO CLOSE maybe, to trust her.
Now as far as worrying about a family nest egg, a couple of hot shots with IVY credentials, political connections, and the fringes and bennies associated with being the FIRST COUPLE of the state with their actual income as given puts them at about one hundred ninety thousand bucks in 2016 money, which is NOT EXACTLY BROKE, and did I mention the perks that come with being the governor, such as business opportunities after leaving office?
The baggage train is real, and it goes all the way back to her earliest days , and all your denials simply make it more and more obvious to anybody who is NOT a Clinton true believer that you have no way of defending her, other than to attack me, and foam at the mouth and yell Great Right Wing Conspiracy, etc.
Now my little fool, whenever you get tired of calling me a Trumpster, etc, I will quit pointing out the ethical and judgemental flaws of your princess.
It amuses me no end that you think your arguments will convince anybody who is possessed of a little common sense that Cattle Gate wasn’t a run of the mill scam, the only thing about it being exceptional being that it involved the governors wife, and a VIP with the biggest company in the state, a company that incidentally is INTIMATELY involved in commodities, because chickens are a commodity type product, produced in commodity markets using commodity inputs, etc.
The odds against her doing so well, as an amateur, or as a pro, for that matter, have been variously calculated at not less than millions to one against.
We can talk about some other scandals later if you like, but I’m sort of FOND of this one, lol, because this is a forum wherein most of the regulars are MATHEMATICALLY LITERATE.
Given that virtually all of us are liberal to hard core liberal, and virtually all of us are big D D’s, I don’t expect to hear anybody proclaiming that my factual ducks are in a nice straight row, BUT…….
OTHER than you, who has DENIED they are in a nice straight row?????
We have some pretty juicy scandals brewing right now, involving Trump family members being involved in government business, and just about everybody, excepting ding a ling Trump true believers of course, is seriously upset and mad about it.
But I don’t hear much about Hillary setting the example, in terms of being de facto in charge of trying to radically rearrange our health care system, with that effort being conducted almost entirely in secret, with no body allowed to know what the end product was supposed to be, while she had no official position in the government, etc, etc,
Well, so far as our health care system is concerned, it really does need a radical overhaul.
I consistently advocate our moving to a system modeled after the one used in Canada and/ or the major Western European countries.
Hey OldMacDonald aka KGB Trumpster,
“Now my little fool, whenever you get tired of calling me a Trumpster, etc, I will quit pointing out the ethical and judgemental flaws of your princess.”
Just love poking the bear, I mean Russian
Just love poking the bear, I mean Russian
I know, and I don’t mind at all, thank you, because as long as you continue to do so,I have a good reason to rub everybody ( who supported Clinton instead of Sanders) nose in the obvious facts regarding her flaws as a candidate. They won’t love me for doing so, but the ones who are smarter than the average fence post will get the point.
As a matter of fact, I think maybe they have gotten it already, but I won’t let you get away with calling me Trumpster etc without a response.
On the other hand, it would be a more useful use of my time here to move on to new territory, given that by now the regulars and the lurkers have heard this one enough times for it to sink in, if it is ever going to sink in.
Now doing that is NOT making me any friends, any more than telling somebody you know just a little on a friendly basis that the significant other is sleeping around, but in the end, it does HIM some good, by forcing him or her to face up to reality.
We need a major clean out in DC, and cleaning out the Republican Lite D’s in favor of real D’s is a step in the right direction, both for the country and for the party.
A REAL DEMOCRAT would have won going away by a country mile.
A competent trainer doesn’t send a fighter with a glass jaw into the ring with an opponent who has the ability to land a few punches, even weak ones, on that jaw.
HRC had a glass jaw in terms of her baggage train, and since the fight was conducted with words and ink and video, rather than actual fists, well, Trump landed one after another, from start to finish on that glass jaw.
As a PRACTICAL matter, it didn’t even matter whether the baggage was real, or as Clinton true believers insist, the product of right wing propaganda.
It worked.
And incidentally, I can’t even IMAGINE that if Romney, or Trump, or any other R had pulled that little old Cattle Gate insider robbery that there would be dozens of comments expressing righteous liberal indignation and patting me on the back for reminding everybody not to forget that guy’s PROVEN ethical shortcomings, prosecuted or not.
“NEVER BEEN CONVICTED” is pretty much of a left handed compliment, although a true believer doesn’t realize it.
There are a number of business men in my neck of the woods who have never been convicted of anything more than a traffic violation that I steer clear of as a matter of common sense, knowing how they have cheated other people that WERE foolish enough to do business with them.
Bottom line, nominating a candidate with the worst polling numbers in the party’s history was a monumental mistake, and hopefully one that thinking D’s will avoid, as best they can, by supporting somebody else, in future elections.
Have fun clicking through the years and reading the climate predictions. Water is a big factor in future climate.
http://www.global-warming-forecasts.com/
Steven Chu on permafrost feedbacks
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHqKxWvcBdg
I just copied this from the NYT, it’s not fresh news.
But indicates that I know what I have been talking about in terms of the D’s needing working class people to win, and about people who are scared and frustrated abandoning the D party when they feel forgotten, or worse, betrayed, and millions of working class people believe they are BOTH, forgotten AND betrayed.
xxxx
“In the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election, many analysts suggested that Hillary Clinton lost to Donald J. Trump because of poor Democratic turnout.
Months later, it is clear that the turnout was only modestly better for Mr. Trump than expected.
To the extent Democratic turnout was weak, it was mainly among black voters. Even there, the scale of Democratic weakness has been exaggerated.
Instead, it’s clear that large numbers of white, working-class voters shifted from the Democrats to Mr. Trump. Over all, almost one in four of President Obama’s 2012 white working-class supporters defected from the Democrats in 2016, either supporting Mr. Trump or voting for a third-party candidate.”
xxxx
Note that the most reliable of all D party voting blocks, the black community, failed to turn out in the usual numbers for Clinton. I can think of several reasons why, all of them having to do with Clinton talking and walking the bankster’s talk and walk, or something along that line. There are LOTS of black folks in my part of the country who USED to work in industries that have been off shored.
I doubt they were exactly thrilled with her globalist positions.
And here’s another thing that just MIGHT be worth noting to the liberal faction that really gets it’s jollies making fun of religious folks.
A LOT of black Americans take their religion very seriously indeed.
In times past, they were willing to over look, to NOT notice the liberal cultural agenda, which is in large part entirely incompatible with their religious and cultural convictions. Serious black Christians are not too happy about abortion on demand, and some radical blacks view abortion as a whitey trick to get rid of black people.
Many older black people, and a lot of younger ones as well, have approximately zero use for the sexual revolution, because the black community has paid a very high price by way of the decline of marriage as a social norm, etc.
You can tune in to some black Christian preachers these days, on the radio, and hear them telling their listeners that the enemy is not JUST the R party. The D’s cultural agenda is coming in for increasing criticism.
And more than a few black people are earning serious money these days, and having made it into the middle class, and the upper middle class, as doctors, lawyers, business owners , high ranking government officials such as chiefs of police, mayors, superintendents of school systems, etc, SOME of them are not too happy with the tax bite that comes out of their salaries or profits. How many? I don’t know, but I have personally heard some black guys bitching about their property taxes and income taxes.
It doesn’t take a WHOLE LOT of movement from one side of the political balance beam scale to the other, when the scale is more or less in balance, to cause it to move abruptly in favor of one party or the other.
According to the NYT, Clinton lost a QUARTER of the white working class voters who went with Obama.
I doubt more than one percent of black voters abandoned abandoned the D’s and voted for Trump, but maybe that many more , or twice that many , were so lacking in enthusiasm for Clinton that they just didn’t vote.
A lot of people don’t seem to realize it, but there are some black people, not very many, who consistently vote R, for one reason or another, and that faction may have voted for Trump.
I will point out that many religious communities will respect those liberals who practice the social gospel — working for the poor, the sick, the ‘least among us’. This overcomes the difference in cultural shibboleths. Bernie may be a secular Jew, but he’s lived his life working to help others, and this earns respect among some conservative Christian religious communities. (This does not apply to “prosperity gospel” right wing groups, who have really sick beliefs and basically believe that wealth == godliness.)
Hillary Clinton never managed to come across looking like she gave a damn about poor Americans. I think she did care, but she appeared totally out of touch. Because she can’t campaign well if her life depends on it.
Here’s some red Trump meat for my favorite lap doggie.
He really ought to enjoy this link, although he might blow a fuse or two torturing himself figuring out why a Trumpster would post such links, lol.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/our-dishonest-president-l-a-times-editorial-eviscerates-trump-195956411.html
This is how you do it if you mean it Trumpster
Our Dishonest President
PART I
By THE TIMES EDITORIAL BOARD
APRIL 2, 2017
It was no secret during the campaign that Donald Trump was a narcissist and a demagogue who used fear and dishonesty to appeal to the worst in American voters. The Times called him unprepared and unsuited for the job he was seeking, and said his election would be a “catastrophe.”
Still, nothing prepared us for the magnitude of this train wreck. Like millions of other Americans, we clung to a slim hope that the new president would turn out to be all noise and bluster, or that the people around him in the White House would act as a check on his worst instincts, or that he would be sobered and transformed by the awesome responsibilities of office.
Instead, seventy-some days in — and with about 1,400 to go before his term is completed — it is increasingly clear that those hopes were misplaced.
In a matter of weeks, President Trump has taken dozens of real-life steps that, if they are not reversed, will rip families apart, foul rivers and pollute the air, intensify the calamitous effects of climate change and profoundly weaken the system of American public education for all.
His attempt to de-insure millions of people who had finally received healthcare coverage and, along the way, enact a massive transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich has been put on hold for the moment. But he is proceeding with his efforts to defang the government’s regulatory agencies and bloat the Pentagon’s budget even as he supposedly retreats from the global stage.
“
It is impossible to know where his presidency will lead or how much damage he will do to our ……..
http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-ed-our-dishonest-president/
Lap doggie demonstrates that he has mastered the trick of clicking on a link, and copying and pasting part of the contents. I hereby reward him with a symbolic pat on the head and atta boy.
BRAVO,Lap Doggie
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/donald-trump-russia-independent-probe-ap-norc-poll/
I do have a somewhat twisted sense of humor, and don’t mind letting it show once in a while.
From here on out until further notice,I ‘m going to post as Trumpster when I post R party dirty laundry.
Here’s one for HRC fans.
It’s as much or more an opinion piece as otherwise, but it contains a lot of good solid factual information, while of course following the usual political playbook of either avoiding shortcomings, or saying they don’t exist, lol.
I love the Gaurdian, but when it comes to the feminist perspective, the editors and writers there are determined to make up for lost time, lol. That’s ok, it’s only fair.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/commentisfree/2017/apr/03/the-destruction-of-hillary-clinton-sexism-sanders-and-the-millennial-feminists
I haven’t yet had time to read this, but the headline looked to good to pass it up.
The destruction of Hillary Clinton: sexism, Sanders and the millennial feminists
Sanders’s branding of Hillary as establishment, however, seemed vastly unjust and corrosively divisive to me, especially when delivered to a generation that knew very little about her beyond what Bernie told them. Like progressive, establishment is a pretty meaningless term, particularly when lobbed at one Washington politician by another. Neither Sanders nor Clinton had been working outside the system.
Appearances to the contrary, Sanders was not a union organizer, but rather a longtime member of the Senate. And if Clinton had more support from the Democratic party, that was due in large part to the relationships she had cultivated over the years, working with others – something Sanders was not particularly good at. Nonetheless, for weeks during the early months of the primary, I listened to 19-year-olds and media pundits alike lavish praise on Bernie Sanders for his bold, revolutionary message, and scorn Hillary for being a part of the establishment.
They described him as “heart” and her as “head” – a bitter irony for those of us familiar with the long history of philosophical, religious, and medical diatribes disqualifying women from leadership positions on the basis of our less-disciplined emotions. He was seen as authentic in his progressivism while she was pushed to the left by political expediency – as though a lifetime of fighting for equality and children’s rights meant nothing. He was the champion of the working class (conveniently ignoring that black and white women were members, and that their issues were also working class issues), but her longstanding commitments to universal health care, child care, paid sick leave, racial justice, the repeal of the Hyde amendment, and narrowing the wage gap between working men and women apparently evaporated because she’d accepted well-paid invitations to speak at Goldman Sachs.
OldFarmer, I have to give you some credit for the humor, but more importantly. You need to read your link to The Gaurdian at least twice before you go to bed at night.
Besides, if it wasn’t for me. Who would you discuss politics here with ? You would be lonely.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/dec/21/clintons-democratic-party-donors-recover
I’ve read the first one, the one about the book. There’s aren’t a lot of days I don’t read the US edition of the Gaurdian,paying particular attention to the political and cultural articles.
I got to thinking- You two guys are very similar in a lot of ways, just seen and felt different things in life. One lives in the old green cherokee hills (where baptists now rule), and the other on the golden urban desert beach (where only money rules).
Cousins of a sort. Enjoy the company.
More than either of you know
Before I say this, let me repeat that I agree with most of Hillary’s policies and if she had been miraculously made President by divine intervention she would have done an decent job.
Hillary was simply a bloody awful campaigner. She shouldn’t have run for President. It was done out of egoism. She was the wrong candidate, but she cared more about ego than about country. Infuriating. I remember when she ran for Senate as a carpetbagger in NY (against *truly* pathetic joke candidates), she promised up and down that she wasn’t just using it as a stepping stone to run for President. She was lying.
The fact that Bernie, a longtime member of the Senate, was able to run an anti-establishment campaign against her with great success *shows* what an awful campaigner she was.
Why did Bernie run? Because he saw that she was a bloody awful campaigner and was getting ready to lead the Democratic Party to a terrible loss. Which she did. He tried to give the Democratic Party a chance to win. He would have beaten Trump; all the statistics make it clear. Bernie had Pennsylvania for sure.
She couldn’t even find enough political common sense to nominate Bernie as her VP, which *might have actually won the election* (and you can be absolutely sure he would have accepted the job). Crummy campaigner.
Elizabeth Warren declined to run for President. *She* could probably have won, getting the same votes Bernie would have.
Hillary Clinton was just a bad campaigner. She’s always been a bad campaigner. It’s no shame; I’m also a bad campaigner which is why I haven’t been running for public office. She should have stuck to trial law for nonprofits, at which she was very good and could have been doing great things.
Today the market cap of Tesla exceeded the market cap of Ford…. The shorts are getting burned.
Sometimes I really wonder if Tesla will crash and burn, due to recklessly leapfrogging other companies by betting the farm on one new technology or on the readiness of a new technology for exploitation on the grand scale.
Bankruptcy seemed pretty close a couple of times. But even if the company as such fails, it seems very likely most of the various pieces of the carcass will be bought up and incorporated into other larger more dominant companies, and probably at prices that will make EARLY Tesla investors look pretty good.
My grandparents saw the coming ( not the ORIGINS ) of electricity, telephones, automobiles, air travel , antibiotics, radio, television, and other world shaking new technologies over the course of their lives.
I learned to work a mule, when I was a kid, but only because the folks kept a couple of horses and mules mostly for old times sake . Tractors ruled well before my own time, although there were still a few jobs a horse or mule could handle more efficiently than the tractors of that day.
A good mule can work right along with you picking up cantaloupes, or sweet corn, pulling a wagon without a driver, staying right in the same spot, and anybody who is fond of horses knows all about the ORIGINAL self driving vehicles, namely horse drawn delivery wagons.
So far self driving tractors are mostly a novelty, given the price of them, but in ten years ??????
A lot of people smarter than I am believe a successful transition to an industrial economy based on renewable energy, recycling and conservation out of reach, or impossible.
But when you look back at all the things that have come to be over the last couple of centuries………..
Why not?
If I were a young guy and building a new farm house, there’s no question in my mind that it would be so well insulated, and so situated in relation to sun and shade, etc, that I could heat and cool it with ten percent of the energy typically used in today’s new houses for heating and cooling.
And if I thought I would be able to drive for another twenty years, I would without question buy a Chevy Volt and put in ten kW worth of solar panels, as the next big project.
Trumpster sez we need to keep on burning coal. It’ll mean we have a bigger and better supply of idiots to vote for us, later on, and cut the grass an tote the trash ‘n take care of all that kinda work for us.
https://phys.org/news/2017-04-surge-coal-pollution-smaller-newborns.html
And besides that why should we waste good money on such foolishness as medical research ? Them that lives right ain’t got no reason to worry bout eternity, and them that don’t, well they deserve to git to the hot place just that much sooner anyway.
http://www.opposingviews.com/i/society/biden-warns-about-proposed-%E2%80%98draconian%E2%80%99-cuts-medical-research
Trumpster knows how to play the religion card. It works for him and his faction, the way he plays it.
It’s extremely unfortunate, but that given there ARE tens of millions of voters who take their religion seriously, the liberal / secular faction of our society manages to play it incorrectly almost every time.
Their best strategy is to discard it as often as possible when electioneering.
The typical liberal /secular/ anti religious voter is already in the D party bag , and is more likely to brag about catching a venereal disease than he is to vote R/ Trump.
Head’s up for those who listen to The Power Hour –This Wednesday Joyce will have biologist Scott Compton of EMFwarriors.com on as a guest. He’ll be talking about his research involving wireless technologies and what all these electromagnetic fields are doing to our bodies.
Really now! ROFLMAO!! Non Native Electro Magnetic Fields? I checked out the site. Not a single link to any peer reviewed science or research on this topic is even listed. Just curious have you ever heard of cosmic rays? May I suggest you never fly in an airplane. You could be fried by high energy particles if you do. On the other hand I’m sure your tin foil hat will protect you!
Well if you have such a problem with this science why don’t you listen to The Power Hour tomorrow yourself, and consider a call during the listener call in time? Maybe read Mr. Compton’s scientific biography first.
Perhaps you may and may not agree with the material Joyce discusses, but she does offer lots of good information on worldwide news and alternative health techniques. I have gotten some good health advise for myself over the years. http://www.thepowerhour.com/welcome.htm
If you have any links to peer reviewed papers on the deleterious effects of nnEMFs by Scott Compton then please provide them and I will be happy to read them. Until then I remain highly skeptical! I did a google scholar search on papers by Scott Compton + EMFs and came up empty. I am even more skeptical of so called alternative health techniques. Most of the ones that have been tested and found to work have already been incorporated into standard medical practice.
In the mean time here’s a legitimate paper on the safety and potential benefits of using EMFs in the treatment of Alzheimers .
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4981900/
Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease
J Alzheimers Dis. 2016; 53(3): 753–771.
Published online 2016 Aug 3. Prepublished online 2016 May 30. doi: 10.3233/JAD-160165
PMCID: PMC4981900
Review of the Evidence that Transcranial Electromagnetic Treatment will be a Safe and Effective Therapeutic Against Alzheimer’s Disease
Gary W. Arendash*
Author information ► Article notes ► Copyright and License information ►
Abstract
We have demonstrated in multiple studies that daily, long-term electromagnetic field (EMF) treatment in the ultra-high frequency range not only protects Alzheimer’s disease (AD) transgenic mice from cognitive impairment, but also reverses such impairment in aged AD mice. Moreover, these beneficial cognitive effects appear to be through direct actions on the AD process. Based on a large array of pre-clinical data, we have initiated a pilot clinical trial to determine the safety and efficacy of EMF treatment to mild-moderate AD subjects. Since it is important to establish the safety of this new neuromodulatory approach, the main purpose of this review is to provide a comprehensive assessment of evidence supporting the safety of EMFs, particularly through transcranial electromagnetic treatment (TEMT). In addition to our own pre-clinical studies, a rich variety of both animal and cell culture studies performed by others have underscored the anticipated safety of TEMT in clinical AD trials. Moreover, numerous clinical studies have determined that short- or long-term human exposure to EMFs similar to those to be provided clinically by TEMT do not have deleterious effects on general health, cognitive function, or a variety of physiologic measures—to the contrary, beneficial effects on brain function/activity have been reported. Importantly, such EMF exposure has not been shown to increase the risk of any type of cancer in human epidemiologic studies, as well as animal and cell culture studies. In view of all the above, clinical trials of safety/efficacy with TEMT to AD subjects are clearly warranted and now in progress.
The research with links to peer review papers is in the library not the main site. Go to http://emfwarriors.neutopia.co/ Several papers, presentations and lectures there.
I doubt I will bother to listen to a former lab assistant with grandiose ideas.
NAOM
For Dennis,
Sometime back I had some things to say about some shortcomings of accepted economic theory as it touches on globalism, or more specifically the outsourcing of industries and jobs.
You said my professors in introductory level econ taught this topic correctly. I agree, within the context of a strictly academic discussion, meaning within the walls of an intellectual box confining the discussion to theory.
I didn’t get back to the discussion then, for one reason or another, but the point I was trying to make was that there’s a LARGER real world box that must be considered in evaluating such arguments.
One of them is the political consequences of economic theory being used as the basis of political policy.
Globalism is definitely good for some people, and maybe it is good for the entire country, on the AVERAGE,but as they say a man with his hands in a fire and his feet in ice water may be happy on the average.
Here’s a consequence of globalism that is not considered in economic texts, at least not at the level I studied econ, taking just a few basic courses, intro level really. The from which this quote is taken is about revenge, but this paragraph caught my eye.
xxxx
It drives crime – up to 20% of homicides and 60% of school shootings are linked to revenge, studies show. And it shapes politics too. Donald Trump’s presidential victory, for instance, came as a result of “revenge of working-class whites… who felt abandoned by a rapidly globalising economy,” according to an article in the Washington Post. The same sentiment is echoed by many other outlets.
xxxx
Now here’s a thought or two that in my opinion, speaking as the token resident right wing redneck, of this forum are worthy of consideration, for purposes of perspective and nuance.
Globalism must be credited in great part as the key to the incredibly fast rise of the Chinese economy. Some economists, I have no idea how many, economists believe that without globalism,in effect meaning access to the American market, China would still be an almost entirely backward nation economically, and would still need a whole generation or maybe two or three generations, to reach that nations current level of economic development. That might be a gross exaggeration , or not. Furthermore, Western European countries might have provided the same market for Chinese goods, although at a lesser scale due to European countries being smaller, and maybe more careful about protecting their own industries.
Now IF China, and some other Asian nations were still economically backward, our global environmental problems would likely be far less grim than they are. Consider coal and oil consumption for instance, and climate. The time frame we would have left to solve the climate problem would probably be extended by a decade, or maybe two decades. It’s true the renewables industries would likely not be growing so fast as they are at present, but BASIC SCIENCE would still be advancing at a spectacular rate, and the renewables industries are not about basic science. They’re all about the APPLICATION of known science to the engineering and manufacture of solar cells, wind turbines, etc. If the internal combustion engine had never become a ” big thing” , and had languished as a forgotten laboratory curiosity, today’s engineers, using the basic science known today, could design an engine about as good as the actual state of the art, in pretty short order, maybe a year or two. It sure as hell wouldn’t take them a century plus to get from the Model T to the latest thing under the hood that still runs on oil. The science of lubrication, the art of casting and machining metals, the science of alloys, the science of electronic circuitry, etc, would all be at or somewhere near their current state of development, whether or not the internal combustion engine was or was not put into wide scale use.
The hard core Darwinian interpretation of this speculation leads to the conclusion that we Yankees might actually be a LOT better off WITHOUT globalization, considering the BIG picture.
Take it a step further, and consider the realities of history, such as the prevalence of war, and think about the possibility that one day we really might be in a situation where we are engaged in an arms race with China, or later on BRAZIL, perhaps. Arms races have a way of morphing into wars, occasionally. We might LOSE a war with an ever more powerful industrialized China, but we sure as hell wouldn’t ever lose one with a backward China, except if we were foolish enough to invade, boots on the ground style.
Now I am NOT advocating that we adopt a hard core isolationist philosophy, and while HB may never accept it as a fact, I have less use for Trump than HRC, etc.
What I am trying to do is to get the Republican Lite faction of the Democratic Party in particular to consider the LARGER implications of globalism. The R party types that control the R party have money, and people with a lot of money generally are in favor of whatever makes them more of it,and they aren’t EVER going to be interested.
But ONE OF THESE DAYS, they may find themselves in a situation analogous to the situation the Queen of England (IIRC, it could have been one of the kings ) found herself in when she called upon Scotland and Ireland to send desperately needed men for one of England’s many wars. Only about ten percent as many showed up, from one area, as in generations past, and when she sent inquiries as to why, one of her better educated subjects from the boonies sent her a reply to the effect that there are no men to be sent where there ARE NO MEN.
What had happened is that the more or less all powerful landlord class enclosed the common lands, and drove off the people who formerly lived by working the commons and the other remaining lands as small farmers. The land was mostly converted into pasture for sheep, etc, which required few men, and little in the way of investment on the part of the owners, and returned a larger profit.
It could be that someday the monied classes in here in Yankee land will come to realize that their short to mid term profits have turned out to be grossly inadequate to cover their long term losses if we lose our predominant position as the leading world power, and LOTS of economists happily make speeches to the effect that this is not JUST a possibility, but rather a more or less sure thing.
Some people will argue that we can retain our greatest measure of strength, but I would respectfully remind them of what happened to the owners of the textile and furniture industries when they went offshore. They made big money, FOR A WHILE.
But after a while, the local people figured out that they really don’t NEED Yankee owners, or Yankee management. All they need is the Yankee MARKET, and the power of advertising, and big box stores, etc, has enabled them to establish new brand names, or simply buy out some existing brand names with good reputations. The Yankees don’t count for much anymore, except where they have insider deals with the politicians who make the rules.
The generation of third world workers who started as machine operators and are near retirement age as department managers have kids who are graduating from business and engineering school, and who have access to capital, both human and financial, to start their own textile and furniture companies.
None of this is to say that there globalization is all bad. International trade is an essential part of just about any imaginable prosperous economy, and countries that trade together are far less likely to fight each other, at least in the short to medium term, etc.
But moderation in most things is the wiser path. A glass of wine, or maybe even TWO glasses, with your dinner is ok, and quite a lot of physicians are of the opinion that a GLASS or TWO is good for you.
I haven’t yet met a physician who maintains that you should drink the whole bottle.
We should never forget to be careful about what we wish for. Everything I have ever wished for, and gotten, has come with strings attached, and half the time , I overlooked at least a couple of strings during the wishing and getting stage.
Hi Old Farmer Mac,
The basic idea is that of comparative advantage. The idea that all workers are hurt by globalization is false. Some workers will be hurt, but even without globalization workers will lose jobs due to industrial progress which is a much larger factor in the loss of industrial jobs.
Now we could burn down the factories and throw wrenches in the gears so that those damn machines wouldn’t put all those people out of work, but I don’t think that is a great idea. 🙂
If we are concerned about the environment the biggest problem is population growth and the solution to that problem is better education, health care, and living standards for all citizens of the World. What helps 19% of the human population (or 36% of human population if we include both India and China) is probably good for humans as a whole, especially when those nations are relatively poor relative to the OECD.
I consider myself a member of the human race and concern myself with the welfare of all humans rather than just my narrow tribe. Hopefully more will join me.
Back atcha Dennis,
I don’t have any desire to argue with you, concerning anything you have just said, because you as usual know whereof you speak.
I too try to think like a member of the HUMAN SPECIES, rather than just a Yankee, and within the Yankee tribe, a member by origin of the working class tribe.
It’s a HELL OF A LOT EASIER to concern yourself with the welfare of EVERYBODY ELSE when your own economic status is satisfactory and improving. Otherwise, it’s not easy at all.
Maybe I’m a little too much a cynic, but I have never believed any of the bullshit I hear concerning serving the human race, or giving a fuck about poor people, etc, from the people who get to be MD’s, in more than one case out of a thousand maybe, because the other nine hundred and ninety nine go for every dime they can get. Ditto the dentists, the lawyers, the union guys with the really successful unions, and just about every body else I can think of who is doing well. They contribute something to charity, most of them, sure enough, but it is seldom enough that they drive an older car, or wear cheaper clothes, or eat cheaper foods, etc.
Some teachers, some cops, some firemen, some preachers, really do do what they do in large part to serve the rest of the human race, but to the vast majority of all the people in these lines of work, it’s mostly just a JOB.
SOMEBODY has to speak up for the working people in this country, or else they will vote for whichever person at least pays lip service to their needs and fears.
Now I do NOT have a lot of money, mostly because by choice I spent a lot more time doing to suit myself than I ever did trying to accumulate a lot of assets, but I have at times earned like a one percenter, and I live quite well, so I am not lashing out, although some people might think so.
A number of people I know who are well within the top ten percent, earnings wise, don’t live as well as I do, considering they live in apartments or subdivisions, and are tied to an employers clock, and have very little in the way of free time to spend observing nature, or pursuing a hobby, etc. Except for family obligations, I am free to do pretty much what I please, etc, and do it in a resort like environment.
No, I don’t want to burn down the factories, or throw sand and monkey wrenches in the gears, lol.
But I want a fair shake for the people who aren’t getting it, here inside the USA. One of the very most favorite things to bitch about , among the liberal/ D party establishment, excepting for bitching about the opposition, is the income inequality issue.
Well, as I see it, the D party establishment is paying that issue a LOT of lip service, and but it’s doing damn near NOTHING to actually DO anything about it.
Now tell me honestly. Do you PERSONALLY actually think that the savings that a teacher, cop, carpenter, or doctor or lawyer realizes by buying clothing made outside the country is ENOUGH to justify the loss of income suffered by the people put out of work by offshoring that industry? It’s not just that they don’t have money to spend to support the rest of the economy, it’s also that they require vastly increased expenditures in the form of subsidized medical care, etc.
Do you REALLY believe that if we ever have to fight a conventional war again, against a really powerful opponent, so that we will need to build ships and tanks and planes on the grand scale, we will be able to go to our enemy, and say pretty please, we don’t have much in the way of manufacturing capacity anymore, and we would like to buy some ships and tanks and planes from you, preferably on credit, before we actually get right down to the business of killing each other?
Do you really believe that so long as we have an education system that is more or less paralyzed by the teachers and government being wedded to the status quo that we will ever be able to provide a high tech job for the lower classes of this country? Are we better off with all these people working in industries that are somewhat less efficient than the competition in other countries, mostly because the foreigners pay less, and mostly cut more corners environmentally, or having those industries within our borders, where they keep hands busy?
In essence my bottom line argument is this:
Partisans on either side can either go for winning arguments, and you have a very powerful argument, backed up by pretty much the entire economics profession, when you talk about comparative advantage.
So within the context of economic theory, I understand that it’s economists ten, OFM zero.
But in the larger context, when the question is whether you would rather win the academic debate, or win elections, I think maybe I am scoring some points.
Hi Old Farmer Mac,
I am more concerned with doing what makes sense. I believe people should be free to choose how to spend their money.
I have repeatedly explained that putting up tariff walls will hurt just as many workers as it helps, you have so far not provided an answer to this very straightforward argument. You seem to care only about workers in industries that do not export any goods. I am concerned about all of the workers.
The price argument just adds insult to injury to the workers that are hurt by tariffs. Note that tariffs by the US results in retaliatory tariffs by other nations.
Dennis, we currently have asymmetric tarriffs: China has tarriffs on our goods, we don’t have tarriffs on Chinese goods. It’s crazy and stupid to allow this to continue, as it’s a direct subsidy to China. US governments are elected by the US people, not by the Chinese people.
Simple example: we have very low tarriffs on imported Chinese cars. China has 100% tarriffs on imported US cars.
If, Dennis, you are really interested in making sure that the US helps Chinese auto workers at the expense of American auto workers, I am sure this is a terribly virtuous position globally speaking, and please feel free to campaign for unilateral removal of tarriffs — but it won’t be popular in the US.
Hi Dennis,
I TOO am interested in doing what makes sense.
You say,
”I have repeatedly explained that putting up tariff walls will hurt just as many workers as it helps, you have so far not provided an answer to this very straightforward argument. You seem to care only about workers in industries that do not export any goods. I am concerned about all of the workers.”
I HAVE NOT DISPUTED that tariff walls hurt as many workers or people as they help. I don’t NEED to supply an answer of any sort to this argument, because I have NEVER disputed it.
I have tried to make it clear that I AM SPEAKING as a partisan FOR the people who are suffering immensely as the result of globalization. VIRTUALLY EVERYBODY else who comments on this matter, including you, yourself makes the argument YOU are making. Now that’s FINE, in terms of the narrower argument involving the OVERALL prosperity of the country, so long as globalization doesn’t get TOO far out of hand. It’s a winning argument.
BUT SOMEBODY must or at least SHOULD point out the SHORTCOMINGS of this argument, because it is as full of holes, real and potential, as a Swiss cheese, in terms of the BIGGER picture.
ONE of the potential shortcomings of this argument, which you seem to insist on framing strictly as the welfare of the AVERAGE, is political backlash.
Now tell me, yes or no, or simply say I don’t know, or don’t have an opinion, in answer to these questions.
Do you believe that our society is doing anything like enough to compensate the workers whose industries have been offshored?
Do you believe that political backlash as the result of these workers had something to do with Trump winning the presidency?
Do you believe that we are in an economically and physically safe situation, when we owe gazillions of dollars to potential enemies, who control key industries essential to our physical security- industries that have either been offshored, or driven into insolvency here in our own country, because other countries don’t pay Yankee wages, or adhere to Yankee environmental regulation of industry, and sometimes deliberately drive down the price of a commodity to drive other countries OUT of an industry?
It’s VERY comfortable to argue about the welfare and prosperity of the AVERAGE person, when you are personally a member of the class of people that happen to be on the winning side in the globalization argument. I have been on both sides, as an individual, and as a businessman, and a property owner, and even as a worker, since my one claim to professional fame is that I am pretty much of a CHAMPION when it comes to being a rolling stone.
I’ve hired migrant labor for peanuts, I’ve make excellent returns on investments in land held for sale to wealthy people moving to my part of the country, I’ve worked as a technician along side machine operators in a factory, thankfully getting a bigger paycheck. I grew up on a farm, proud but poor, and didn’t even KNOW I was poor until I went away to university. My extended family did after all own pretty much the entire neighborhood,and we were highly self sufficient, compared to other people, and hardly any of us had to kiss a boss’s ass or punch a time clock, unless we made the decision to go to town in order to get insurance on a large family and have extra cash to buy more property, etc. I made occasionally made six figures on an annual basis, literally, over two grand a week, as a tradesman, in the eighties, in EIGHTIES dollars, and I have held professional positions as a teacher and worked as a professional manager for other people.
So I KNOW both sides of the arguments.
I am NOT disputing your arguments. I am simply trying to get you and anybody else who reads them to THINK about my own, and since I am virtually alone in making them in THIS forum, I try to make them as forcefully as possible.
I said before , within the smaller box, within the CONTEXT of the average, within the context of STRICTLY ECONOMIC theory, free trade and globalism are winning arguments, although I personally make a BIG distinction between free trade and globalism, and am somewhat cynical when free trade is even mentioned, since there is actually such a little of it. It’s more the rule than the exception that countries which export like crazy to the USA manage to fix things so we export a hell of a lot less to them than we import FROM THEM, witness our generally enormous trade deficits.
MY comments and MY arguments are about the BIGGER picture.
Economics is one of the most fucked up professions EVER, and is KNOWN as the dismal profession.
MOST of the commentary here in this forum, when it comes to economics, is about pointing out the SHORTCOMINGS of generally accepted economic theory, such as approval of ever increasing growth without end, etc.
Folks with some understanding of the physical sciences such as geology and climate, etc, are very quick to point out the problems inherent in strictly economics based reasoning. My intent is to extend this criticism to the political and cultural realms.
I personally maintain that there are political and cultural issues that are of sufficient importance to sufficient numbers of people that have suffered the unpleasant consequences of globalization that they figuratively presented the middle finger to people who maintain that globalization is GOOD for the USA, and that that middle finger is ONE OF the key reasons Trump is president today, rather than Clinton.
MY personal belief is that free trade, to the extent that it exists, is good for the USA, and for workers in general, as well as the better off economic classes, in the longer term, and on the average.
But we must never forget that as individuals, we must survive the short term before we worry about the long term. The long term is an abstraction if you are out of work, or scared of being out of work, or if you have been working harder but living less well, for a number of years.
It is also my personal belief that globalization played a VERY IMPORTANT role in HRC losing, and Trump winning, even though in actual fact, the R party is far more responsible for offshoring our lost industries.
And while nobody can be SURE PRECISELY what policies Trump and the R’s will pursue, it seems like a pretty safe bet to me that in terms of the big picture, his homies and buddies will be the only winners, while just about every body else loses, short to medium term, and probably long term as well.
And in the LONG TERM, even the REAL Trumpsters, the elites who are super rich and super powerful, will suffer a huge net loss. A hundred million dollars isn’t enough to save you from cancer, nor even five hundred million, except in a few cases. But a few tens of billions spent on medical research might do the trick. Those billions won’t be spent on medical research with the Trumpsters in power.
A good friend and former business associate died of pancreatic cancer that spread to his liver about four years ago this week.
He was a hard core Trumpster type when it came to the government taking his money, and spending it on anything that didn’t benefit him personally and directly.
I can say this much for him, on his deathbed he admitted that he wished he had paid more attention to socialist/Democratic busybodies determined to play mommy to the world, and less to the hard core free market types that kept reassuring him it was nobody’s goddamned business but his own if he wanted to drink a six pack almost every day, and smoke a pack of Camels as well.
Now having beat all around the bush, trying to get my point across, the point still boils down to this.
WHEN we consider the BIG PICTURE, has globalization REALLY helped us, or hindered us? The contextual box I have in mind in posing this question is the status and welfare of the USA, taken as a whole.
Considering that the race for president came down to three rust belt states, and the numbers there in Trump’s favor were razor thin, but ENOUGH for him to carry those three states, I believe that it’s entirely reasonable to say that globalization backlash played a KEY ROLE in putting Trump in the WH, and maybe even THE key role.
‘Nuf said, if I haven’t gotten the point across yet, it’s either because my head is full of concrete, and I’m WRONG, or else that anybody who disagrees is politically naive or a true believer in globalism, and therefore unwilling to consider the possibility that globalism is not NECESSARILY all it’s cracked up to be.
MAYBE I’m the kid marching to the music, and all the REST of the band is out of step, lol.
Now somebody is SURE to point out that automation, etc, is responsible for a lot of lost workers jobs, implying that I am too stupid to know and understand this perfectly obvious fact.
I know. I devoted at least three or four thousand hours to becoming a first class hands on welder, one of the kind who had a business card advertising that I could fix anything except a broken heart or the crack of dawn . The coming of automated welding cut my earnings opportunities in half, and I never welded professionally again. I shut down the farming operation because it was too small to be economic.I couldn’t justify spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on expanding at my age, in order to compete with the bigger guys using the latest generation of partially automated and sometimes fully automated equipment.
A glass or two of wine is generally believed to be harmless, if not actually good for you, in the consensus opinion of the health care professions.
I believe free trade is good for us, and for everybody in general, in moderation. The whole bottle is not so good for us.
Nuf said. Time to move on.
OldFarmerMac, Dennis:
I’ve actually studied a disturbing amount of economics. The fact is that there is zero evidence of the theory of comparative advantage and a lot of evidence that it’s false. The theory of *absolute* advantage is, of course, true. If you don’t know the difference, I can explain, or you can look it up.
Short summary. Absolute advantage says that the country which produces product X most cheaply will (in an open market) end up specializing in product X and making all of it, while every other country will stop making product X. This is basically true.
Comparative advantage (which is false) claims that (in an open market) if China produces *everything* more cheaply than the US, the US will specialize in whatever China has the *smallest* advantage in, and China will abandon that industry. This does not happen. China takes over every single industry they have an absolute advantage in; all of them, no exceptions.
I’d advise not appealing to the theory of comparative advantage, which is false; any argument you want to make with it can be better made with absolute advantage, which happens to be true.
-without globalization, women rights would still be middle age standard in many more places in the world than is currently the case
-without globalization, energy supply around the world, from oil to solar panels, would be much more expensive
On the other hand, without globalization, the (massive) tyranny of of the two big religions would have been much less over the past 2000 yrs.
Good and bad.
FUTURE CARBON DIOXIDE, CLIMATE WARMING POTENTIALLY UNPRECEDENTED IN 420 MILLION YEARS
“Over the next 100 to 200 years, carbon dioxide concentrations in the Earth’s atmosphere will head towards values not seen since the Triassic period, 200 million years ago. Furthermore, by the 23rd century, the climate could reach a warmth not seen in 420 million years, say researchers….
This long-term view also offers a valuable perspective on future climate change. It is well recognized that the climate today is changing at rates well above the geological norm. If humanity fails to tackle rising CO2 and burns all the readily available fossil fuel, by AD 2250 CO2 will be at around 2000 ppm — levels not seen since 200 million years ago….
Professor Foster adds: “However, because the Sun was dimmer back then, the net climate forcing 200 million years ago was lower than we would experience in such a high CO2 future. So not only will the resultant climate change be faster than anything Earth has seen for millions of years, the climate that will exist is likely to have no natural counterpart, as far as we can tell, in at least the last 420 million years.”
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/04/170404124402.htm
There are many ‘subtle’ effects of global warming, for example it is likely that dengue hemorrhagic fever distribution may extend north from the Caribbean basin up into places Houston, Jackson, Birmingham, Augusta, Raleigh, and Richmond, along with all the coastal plain territory downstream of the Piedmont margin. Agriculture and recreation industries can be greatly affected by this kind of factor.
President Trump’s Climate Change Policy: Charlie Rose
Last week President Trump signed an executive order designed to unravel former President Obama’s climate change initiatives and to revive the coal industry. We are joined by Barbara Finamore. She is a senior lawyer and Asia director at the National Resources Defense Council. (Source: Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2017-04-04/president-trump-s-climate-policy-charlie-rose-video
Malaria was a major problem in the American colonies and right up until the early twentieth century in the US as far north as New England. Control and mosquito eradication programs became steadily more effective from the late 1800’s into the 1900’s.
“They who want to die quickly, go to Carolina.”
Along with people in the Louisiana and Georgia, during in the late 18th and 19th centuries in South Carolina, especially around Charleston, had such a high mortality that less than 20% reached their 20th birthday. Most of those who died did so because of malaria, or because of being in a weakened state after a bout of malaria. It’s almost unimaginable that so many mothers and fathers would be burying their children so young. Anyone who has experienced such a loss knows that this life event alters your life forever.
Another staggering set of statistics, just in the fifty years that one group, England’s Society for the Propagation of Gospel in Foreign Parts, was sending young men to South Carolina – of the total fifty young men (one per year), only 43% survived, and many resigned within five years of setting foot on South Carolina soil due to poor health from malaria. And, of course, it goes almost without saying the medical lack of knowledge as to what caused malaria back then, and how to treat it also was another gravestone upon many. It left much of the South a place to die rather than a place to live. Perhaps, no greater community suffered from the spread of malaria than those in and around South Carolina for more than a century (except those living in The Floridas and coastal Louisiana).
http://www.historiaobscura.com/tag/malaria-in-colonial-america/
Malaria is one of the big reasons my family settled in the mountains, rather than the lowlands, lol.
Life was tough back in pre industrial days, and no mistake.
It blows me away to read the comments in this forum, and many others, about the evils of pesticides, with zero acknowledgement of the positive aspects of using them. Without pesticides, millions of Southern flavor Yankees would be dead of malaria within a year or two, barring breakthroughs on the medical front.
I think scientists rely too much on human action in their prognostications. Sure it is likely humans will try to use as much fossil energy as possible. However nature is certainly willing to provide all the carbon dioxide and methane needed to produce a warm world. Why should we have to work to hard to achieve the goal of the current civilization? Sure it might take a little longer to reach 6C, but it will save a lot of effort and wasted time on our part to try and dig out and burn that much carbon.
Hey look on the bright side! About 360 mya we were in the Carboniferous when all those coal deposits were formed. That’s when what is now America was really great! Trump is just helping us get back to that greatness as fast as he can! CO2 concentration was about 1500 ppm…
Not to mention that 400 million years from now all those depleted coal deposits will have been completely replenished and future generations of giant mutant sapient arthropods will be able to create an industrial civilization based on mining and burning them for energy. They will build tall skyscrapers and study the Trumpocene…
Cheers!
I guess DT did not read the warning labels.
They will build tall skyscrapers and study the Trumpocene…
In an hour of depression, I managed a smile… thanks.
Peace, brother!
Coal deposits will not be replenished if mushrooms have anything to say about it.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mushroom-evolution-breaks-down-lignin-slows-coal-formation/
Tks, nature is fascinating!
@#DJTrump
The “fungus” among us, preventing coal formation!
Sad!!
That’s along the lines of the idea behind my choice of the ‘Tribe Of Pangaea- First Member’ moniker-as-an-allegory at the defunct The Oil Drum.
The theoretical landmass, known as Pangaea, ostensibly occurred around about 260 million years ago, roughly at or just before the time of the ‘Great Dying’…
Fast forward 260 million years and we now have the ‘Tribe Of Pangaea- Redux’, maybe…
Rewind ~420 million years and, to put it into perspective, one of the earliest group of land plants, the cooksonia, existed around about then. There was apparently not much else. I suppose there were nice beaches, but probably no palm trees, etcetera.
That was about half a billion years ago. That’s a very long time, and predates Pangaea by a wide margin. But how long is long anyway? Maybe it’s a blink of another kind of eye. Maybe we exist in some kind of very fast explosion, but don’t see it as such because our short, ephemeral lives are relative to the ‘inside’ of it and its own speed which we see as ‘slow’.
Insofar as one particular species that contaminated the planet’s atmosphere and created a life for itself, so another may very well again contaminate the planet’s ecosphere but create a death for itself…
‘Life is short.’…
But you know, I guess life and consciousness are simply a mere side effect of the processes and progression of the universal explosion, the laws of physics– little self-similar echoing building-block ‘buds’, that the more complex ones might simply call ‘life’, that pop in and out of existence, or what some of them might call ‘existence’, or ‘think’ of ‘it’ as such…
But anyway, as you can see, it’s shaping up to be a pleasant day on Cooksonia Beach, with the sun peeking out… Care for a swim?… What’s in there?… Is that to be us?… What could we have used for making ‘spirits’ back then?… Or food?…
Fast forward ~200 years…
The March PIOMAS Artcic Sea Ice volumes numbers came out – they continue to set all time low numbers and are about 2,000 km3 below last year at this time.
http://psc.apl.uw.edu/research/projects/arctic-sea-ice-volume-anomaly/
https://sites.google.com/site/arctischepinguin/home/piomas
The running average number below is still following the linear trend from December and sets new low records every day. The DMI numbers for volume, which are output every day, indicate that the rate of increase has fallen lower than last year so far in April (I think mostly because of a lot f transport either side of Svalbard into the Atlantic). A melt season as high as 2012 or 2007 will lead to virtually zero ice in September.
http://polarportal.dk/en/havisen-i-arktis/nbsp/sea-ice-extent/
If the trend continues the low will only be 1 million km3 above the ice free point. The rate of loss appears to be greater than 3.0 km3 per decade in the last decade. That could mean an ice free point as early as 2020. Very likely by 2025.
BTW: hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil:
NASA OFFICIALS EXPECT FEWER EARTH SCIENCE MISSIONS IN COMING YEARS
“Expect fewer missions to study planet Earth in NASA’s future, agency officials told an advisory group last week. A blueprint of the Trump administration’s proposed NASA budget would cancel four Earth science missions already in the agency’s portfolio and slash research funding geared toward future projects. NASA officials said last week that the proposal, if enacted, will reduce the scope of the agency’s Earth science program, but still continue development of many key missions.”
https://spaceflightnow.com/2017/04/03/nasa-officials-expect-fewer-earth-science-missions-in-coming-years/
Incidentally.
PAINTINGS, SUNSPOTS AND FROST FAIRS: RETHINKING THE LITTLE ICE AGE
“The whole concept of the ‘Little Ice Age’ is ‘misleading,’ as the changes were small-scale, seasonal and insignificant compared with present-day global warming, a group of solar and climate scientists argue.”
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/04/170404084420.htm
Excellent and realistic analysis. Thanks.
At least those nasty Vikings are doing their bit,
PINING FOR CLEANER AIR IN THE NORWEGIAN FJORDS
“In addition to new-builds, the marine division of Siemens, which developed the technology for Ampere, believes 84 ferries are ripe for conversion to electric power. And 43 ferries on longer routes would benefit from conversion to hybrids that use diesel engines to charge their batteries. If this were done, nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions would be cut by 8,000 tonnes per year and CO2 emissions by 300,000 tonnes per year, equivalent to the annual emissions from 150,000 cars, according to a report penned jointly by Siemens and the environmental campaign group, Bellona.”
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-39478856
Have no fear, global warming and climate change will continue whether we watch it or not. Certainly does reduce the entertainment factor. You know, the one where we get lots of new information and then don’t act upon it. Meanwhile people propose small ineffective measures that are decades too late, pretending that they will make a difference.
Maybe California will set up it’s own program as the governor promised. I have little in depth knowledge on USA politics, but I understand that the government structure is such that the President can be stopped from having much influence on a lot of issues. It’s looking like that was quite prescient of the founding fathers.
I’m not sure I got this right, but if 2000km3 more ice (net) is melted each year then that is taking 7e20 J of heat. If the net melting stops (i.e. the ice settles out at a low yearly average, maybe with clear months in the summer) then that heat would go to into something else – e.g. melting Greenland (it would be able to do the same 2000 km3 each year, which is about 6mm sea level rise) or warming the Arctic (it would produce 0.23K temperature rise per year in the top 50m) or warming the atmosphere (if it all went there it would produce 0.13K rise per year). It all looks kind of unstoppable, and the albedo impact probably out does those numbers anyway.
The rate of loss was 3000 km3 per decade, which is 300 km3 per year. It appears to be accelerating, so may be as much as 500 km3 per year loss.
Most of the extra heating due to open water versus ice is going into the upper layer of the Arctic Ocean. In addition to ocean ice loss, spring melt season is occurring earlier on land exposing dark ground and water to the increasing solar radiation of springtime. The land albedo change heating could become significantly larger than the Arctic heating due to a much larger area involved and it is lower in latitude.
Consider that the snow cover can reach 48 million km2 and 98 percent is in the northern hemisphere, bounded in the north by the Arctic Ocean. So with a warming ocean in the north and warming continents in the southern boundary, snow cover will reduce.
From NSIDC;
Snow’s albedo, or how much sunlight it reflects back into the atmosphere, is very high, reflecting 80 to 90 percent of the incoming sunlight. By contrast, trees, plants, and soil reflect only 10 to 30 percent of sunlight. Snow cover wields the largest influence during springtime (April to May) in the Northern Hemisphere, when days become longer and the amount of sunshine increases over snow-covered areas. Snow’s high reflectivity helps Earth’s energy balance, because it reflects solar energy back into space, which helps cool the planet.
Changes in climate can affect how much snow falls and influence the timing of the winter snow season. Between 1966 and 2010, the amount of land and sea ice that is snow-covered each year has decreased over many Northern Hemisphere regions, especially during the spring snowmelt season. Scientists are modeling how Earth’s climate might change over the next 100 years, and the results suggest that snow will cover less of the planet, particularly over Europe and Asia. Climate warming can reduce snowfall, and cause earlier spring melts and shorter snow cover seasons. For instance, warmer air in Alaska has caused the snow to melt earlier each spring, lengthening the snow-free summer season.
Current rate by that linear trend is 2700 km3 per year. Presumably this will not be sustained, but if not then the heat not used in melting will go somewhere els – and this year has been anomalously warm anyway. On the albedo – how much has the change in the Arctic been balanced in the past, on a yearly average, by the increased sea ice in the Antarctic, which looks now to be reversed and adding another negative feed back?
I am not sure what time period you used to achieve 2700 km3 loss per year. If it is the dotted line on the graph, that is far too short a period to measure for a trend. Natural variability can give high rates in both directions for short periods. Five year averages would mask out most of the natural variability.
PIOMAS gives the loss rate at 3000 km3 per decade. At 2700 km3 per year the Arctic would reach an ice free state next year.
The last dozen years appear to have a greater than 3000 km3 per decade.
I’m not looking at a trend I’m looking at one year. It’s a running average – when it gets to zero it would mean there is no ice at any time, and that would take 6 years at current rate. That won’t happen but when the line flattens the impact seen will be from one year to the next not from a previous average trend to another trend.
I’m concerned with regards to how this heating of the ocean once ice free/freer will contribute to the heating and destabilization of methane in subsea permafrost. Anybody know of any recent models or estimates.
“It is relatively shallow, with average depth of 100 m”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberian_Shelf
Disintegrating Permafrost Cap in ESAS
http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/373/2052/20140451
All we need is 4000 ppb of methane in atmosphere to be equivalent to CO2 heating. Then the changes in the Arctic will add at least another CO2 equivalent to that. I think that is enough to dislocate the climate and ecology, so no more need be said.
Try this:
MODELING THE EVOLUTION OF CLIMATE-SENSITIVE ARCTIC SUBSEA PERMAFROST IN REGIONS OF EXTENSIVE GAS EXPULSION AT THE WEST YAMAL SHELF
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2014JG002685/full
NB: As a rule you start to see methane hydrate deposits in a seafloor that is 400 – 500m below sea level. When drilling at a water depth of say 400m, you expect to find a 3-400 m thick hydrate layer. Beneath this depth temperatures are too high for gas hydrate formation so free gas and water is found. In 1,000 meter water depths, the hydrate layer will be 600-ish meters thick; naturally thickness of the hydrate zone will depend on the temperature gradient. IoW sediments that display a higher geothermal gradient the hydrate zone will be thinner. Don’t confuse sub-sea with land deposits of methane hydrate.
Things are heating up, February temperature anomaly.
And here is March, second hottest on record.
https://climate.copernicus.eu/resources/data-analysis/average-surface-air-temperature-analysis/monthly-maps/march-2017
Simon Reeve – climate change is real and happening fast
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3B_4HMAtjIQ
That video has it right, climate change, global warming, or whichever term you want to use is undeniably as old as Earth itself. The climate began changing in the hours after our planet was formed and sometimes happens fast, sometimes happens slow. In any event it will continue on no matter what until that fateful day when Earth comes crashing into the sun and gets pulverized.
This is a Dialogue Pair: a tactic used by Media Manipulation boiler rooms and trolls in their basements.
A canned comment that has nothing to do with the comment it is paired with, and is inserted solely to advance a political rather than scientific agenda.
Thanks Lloyd,
What’s the proper reply?
My first reaction is to post the science and the data:
Temperatures change in response to change in heat content… which changes in response to forcings… which are mostly CO2 since mid-20th century…
… and therefore temperature has followed, and will continue to follow the logarithm of CO2, as below…
Hey Bill, your comment is mostly correct, though fairly meaningless to the discussion. You need to change that last sentence though, very wrong scientifically.
Just think of the time span you speak about. Life didn’t even exist during most of that.
There may be another 1 billion years of life left on this planet. Just think about that. Civilization has only existed about 10,000 years. 10,000 years is a long time but life might go on for 100,000 times that long before the sun gets too hot for much water to be around and life to exist. By then the sun might be 13% brighter and it would be a hot world ruled by GHG’s since no ice will have existed for long time, in fact some say liquid water will cease to exist on the planet at around that time.
The point is, we have to deal with now and we need to deal with our own culpability and responsibility. Humans are capable creatures and can both wreck and build. Do we build a sustainable society or do we just lay down and say things have always been changing so why bother?
==How to deal with climate change==
the survey’s results are in. new technology not new taxes is the answer every one can agree on when deciding the right way to reverse climate change.
“Roughly two-thirds of Americans say climate scientists should have a major role in policy decisions about climate matters”
“Some 46% say tougher fuel efficiency standards for cars and trucks can make a big difference in addressing climate change; 45% say corporate tax incentives that encourage businesses to reduce carbon emissions caused by their actions can too.”
http://www.pewinternet.org/2016/10/04/public-views-on-climate-change-and-climate-scientists/
“Corporate tax incentives to encourage businesses to reduce the “carbon footprint” from their activities − 67% of liberal Democrats say this can make a big difference, while 23% of conservative Republicans agree for a difference of 44 percentage points.”
http://www.pewinternet.org/2016/10/04/the-politics-of-climate/
This is another dialogue pair- or maybe dialogue triplet.
Even less to do with the topic, and completely unscientific.
And it suggests to me that 55% of Americans are morons. I can’t be sure, mind you, but it’s a reasonable inference.
It’s also worth noting that the premise “technology not new taxes is the answer” is not supported by the public opinion research cited by Amanda.
Remember, we are humans, and humans have really big brains. Thus, we all have the capability to deal with whatever climate change brings, especially if, in fact, it actually is manmade, in which case we have all the understanding we need in order to reverse it. That said, by far the more important matter at this point in time is how everyone, no matter where in the world they live, needs access to safe, affordable, reliable sources of energy. Thus, we all would be better served if all the funding, effort, and time scientists and politicians spend nowdays trying to prove climate change got directed instead toward raising the living standards of the poor areas of the world to the same levels all of us here are blessed enough to enjoy.
FYI
https://youtu.be/OBYmeLBWjeI
Quadruplets? Maybe there’s something in the water.
Note that there are three handles here…funny they all decided this was the comment.
The dangers of climate change produced by life, itself, is about as old as life on Earth…
This is in part why concerns about C02 and other greenhouse gas levels need to be taken seriously.
Bow down to the mutated cyanobacteria. They are the ones that created us and life as we know it. Such humble but effective organisms are the original disruptors and dislocators. It took 2.3 billion years to create a very complex creature capable of undoing through tremendous effort and technology what simple bacteria accomplished just by being alive.
Analysis: Just four years left of the 1.5C carbon budget
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-four-years-left-one-point-five-carbon-budget
Top Democrats Are Wrong: Trump Supporters Were More Motivated by Racism Than Economic Issues
https://theintercept.com/2017/04/06/top-democrats-are-wrong-trump-supporters-were-more-motivated-by-racism-than-economic-issues/
Philip Klinkner, a political scientist at Hamilton College and an expert on race relations, has pored over this ANES data and tells me that “whether it’s good politics to say so or not, the evidence from the 2016 election is very clear that attitudes about blacks, immigrants, and Muslims were a key component of Trump’s appeal.” For example, he says, “in 2016 Trump did worse than Mitt Romney among voters with low and moderate levels of racial resentment, but much better among those with high levels of resentment.”
The new ANES data only confirms what a plethora of studies have told us since the start of the presidential campaign: the race was about race. Klinkner himself grabbed headlines last summer when he revealed that the best way to identify a Trump supporter in the U.S. was to ask “just one simple question: is Barack Obama a Muslim?” Because, he said, “if they are white and the answer is yes, 89 percent of the time that person will have a higher opinion of Trump than Clinton.” This is economic anxiety? Really?
_snip_
Their view is backed by a detailed Gallup analysis of interviews with a whopping 125,000 Americans, which found that Trump supporters, far from being the “left behind” or the losers of globalization, “earn relatively high household incomes and are no less likely to be unemployed or exposed to competition through trade or immigration.” The “bottom line” for Gallup’s senior economist Jonathan Rothwell? “Trump’s popularity cannot be neatly linked to economic hardship.”
So I guess to be elected, Hilary should have been more racist?
-Lloyd
I’ve moved this to the new thread… comment there.
-Lloyd
Hi all,
New post up at link below.
http://peakoilbarrel.com/texas-and-eagle-ford-update-april-2017/
Also new Open Thread at link below
http://peakoilbarrel.com/open-thread-non-petroleum-april-6-2017/