Still Hating America.

[Shape Shifter]

Originally posted by Gattigap
Wow. You're really into this.

I'm still wondering how he buys stock in an LLP.

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally posted by Shape Shifter
I'm still wondering how he buys stock in an LLP.

From a partnership broker.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Conservatives apparently have realized that they can no longer deny global warming, and instead are going to use the issue to score points of Al Gore for failing to do enough to address the problem, and for -- horrors -- finding a way to use free enterprise to do something about the problem. In the scheme of things, this is a big sign of progress.

[SlaveNoMore]

Tyrone Slothrop
Conservatives apparently have realized that they can no longer deny global warming, and instead are going to use the issue to score points of Al Gore for failing to do enough to address the problem, and for -- horrors -- finding a way to use free enterprise to do something about the problem. In the scheme of things, this is a big sign of progress.

FWIW, I don't deny global warming. I also don't deny global cooling. Both happen. Both happened before. Both will happend again. Who gives a fuck. Wear shorts. Or wear a sweater.

What I do give a fuck about, however, is hypocritical assholes like Gore that want to tax and mandate everyone else's behavior, while taking a pass on their own.

And, in the scheme of things, the fact that you have stopped defending the indefensible (Gore = hypocrite) and are now merely attacking conservatives, is not a sign of progress - it is just typical.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by SlaveNoMore
What I do give a fuck about, however, is hypocritical assholes like Gore that want to tax and mandate everyone else's behavior, while taking a pass on their own.

Taking a pass? He's paying more for his electricity, right? He doesn't have to do that. He's spending some money on carbon credits (a small part of which he may recoup through his equity interest in the company offering them). He doesn't have to do that. That's the opposite of taking a pass.

[SlaveNoMore]

Tyrone Slothrop
He's spending some money on carbon credits (a small part of which he may recoup through his equity interest in the company offering them). He doesn't have to do that. That's the opposite of taking a pass.

Hmm, I didn't see you jump through these contortions when hundreds of blogs over the last 5 years were suggesting that Cheney somehow indirectly "profited" from drumming up the Iraq War because of his stock in Haliburton.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by SlaveNoMore
Hmm, I didn't see you jump through these contortions when hundreds of blogs over the last 5 years were suggesting that Cheney somehow indirectly "profited" from drumming up the Iraq War because of his stock in Haliburton.

I'm pretty sure I've said here that I think the attacks on Cheney based on his Halliburton connections are stupid.

eta: I said it three years ago yesterday.

[Greedy,Greedy,Greedy]

Originally posted by SlaveNoMore
"As the controversy over global warming doomsayer Al Gore’s voracious energy-eater mansion rolls on, there’s an angle I think merits deeper investigation than it is currently getting. While much of the focus has been on whether or not Gore is an environmental hypocrite, the story has raised the profile of the role of “carbon offsets” in achieving a “greener,” more environmentally friendly world.

In its original story, The Tennessean newspaper in Nashville reported that Gore buys “carbon offsets” to compensate for his home’s use of energy from carbon-based fuels. What is a “carbon offset,” exactly? Essentially, it’s a payment someone makes to an environmentally friendly entity to compensate for personally using non-green energy.

As Wikipedia explains, a carbon offset “is a service that tries to reduce the net carbon emissions of individuals or organizations indirectly, through proxies who reduce their emissions and/or increase their absorption of greenhouse gases.” Wikipedia goes on to explain that “a wide variety of offset actions are available; tree planting is the most common. Renewable energy and energy conservation offsets are also popular, including emissions trading credits.”

So far, so good. So, where does Gore buy his ‘carbon offsets’? According to The Tennessean newspaper’s report, Gore buys his carbon offsets through Generation Investment Management. a company he co-founded and serves as chairman:
Gore helped found Generation Investment Management, through which he and others pay for offsets. The firm invests the money in solar, wind and other projects that reduce energy consumption around the globe…

As co-founder and chairman of the firm Gore presumably draws an income or will make money as its investments prosper. In other words, he “buys” his “carbon offsets” from himself, through a transaction designed to boost his own investments and return a profit to himself. To be blunt, Gore doesn’t buy “carbon offsets” through Generation Investment Management - he buys stocks.
And it is not clear at all that Gore’s stock purchases - excuse me, “carbon offsets” purchases - actually help reduce the use of carbon-based energy at all, while the gas lanterns and other carbon-based energy burners at his house continue to burn carbon-based fuels and pump carbon emissions - a/k/a/ “greenhouse gases” - into the atmosphere.

As the news media swarmed around the story of Gore’s gargantuan energy consumption yesterday, Gore’s people touted his purchase of “carbon offsets” as evidence that he lives a “carbon-neutral” lifestyle, but the truth is Gore’s home uses electricity that is, for the most part, derived from the burning of carbon fuels. His house gets its electricity from Nashville Electric Service, which gets its from the Tennessee Valley Authority, which produces most of its power from coal-burning power plants. Which means most of the power being consumed at the Gore mansion comes from carbon-emitting power sources.

But do Gore’s “carbon offsets” payments really compensate for his big non-green power usage?
Wikipedia again: The intended goal of carbon offsets is to combat global warming. The appeal of becoming “carbon neutral” has contributed to the growth of voluntary offsets, which often are a more cost-effective alternative to reducing one’s own fossil-fuel consumption. However, the actual amount of carbon reduction (if any) from an offset project is difficult to measure, largely unregulated, and vulnerable to misrepresentation.

Did you get that? Carbon offsets are an “alternative to reducing one’s own fossil-fuel consumption” and yet “the actual amount of carbon reduction (if any) from an offset project is difficult to measure, largely unregulated, and vulnerable to misrepresentation.”

One way to misrepresent things: Tell a newspaper your stock purchases are really purchases of “carbon offsets.”

Gore travels the nation and the world blaming man’s use of carbon-based energy for global warming - burning thousands of gallons of jet fuel as he goes. His efforts are being rewarded. Politically, he’s helped put climate change at the top of the national and even global agenda. And that has driven up the perceived prospects and in many cases the stock value of companies viewed as “green” or environmentally friendly.
Companies like those his investment management firm invest his own and other peoples’ money in. (You can see a list of Generation Investment Management’s holdings here, courtesy of the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission.)

As one commenter posting on a few blogs covering the Gore story yesterday put it: Hmmm. The Goracle is chairman and a founding partner of Generation Investment Management LLP, a boutique international investment firm that invests other peoples’ money, for a fee, into the stocks of ‘green’ companies. … So when Al beats the drum for possible future global warming, he’s also drumming up business.

And profiting from hyping the “global warming” crisis.
In a nutshell, Gore consumes large amounts of carbon-based electricity while he trumpets the global warming crisis that drives up the value of “green” companies like the ones in which he buys carbon offsets invests in their stocks.
And “carbon offsets” are a dodgy way for someone to claim to be carbon-neutral even as they consume large amounts of carbon-based energy. The notion that selling carbon offsets actually helps the environment is taken as a given by those who sell them and by those who buy them, but at this point it is unproven.
While some bloggers and pundits have likened “carbon offsets” to the “indulgences” the pre-Reformation Catholic Church sold to the wealthy so they could continue to sin (see video at end of this post), the writer of the blog The Virginian says carbon offsets are more like the “sumptuary laws” of medieval times, laws that regulated and reinforced social hierarchies and morals through restrictions on clothing, food, and luxury expenditures.
In the Late Middle Ages sumptuary laws were instated as a way for the nobility to cap the conspicuous consumption of the up-and-coming bourgeoisie of medieval cities. … The danger is that the use of “carbon offsets” will create two things that re morally monstrous: a de-facto sumptuary law and the impoverishments of the poor and powerless of this planet. The creation of an aristocratic elite that differentiates itself from the hoi polloi by its ability to buy “carbon offsets” while the rest of the planet is forced by environmental laws into a smaller and smaller carbon straightjacket is not so far fetched.
Read the whole thing.
None of this should be construed as me not believing in global warming. I do believe the planet is getting warmer. I don’t necessarily agree that man’s activities are the primary or even significant cause of that warming - after all, the Earth warmed up significantly centuries before the Industrial Age, and there is plenty of evidence that cyclical solar activity impacts the earth’s temperatures.
But burning fossil fuels is stupid even if it doesn’t contribute a whit to global warming - petroleum can be used to make products that are much more valuable than gasoline and jet fuel, and even if carbon pollution doesn’t cause global warming, it is pollution that makes the air we breathe dirty and fouls the land and the water. And then of course there’s that whole problem of the geopolitical issues of oil and that related problem of buying oil from societies from whence come people who want to kill us.
As the story evolves, it should move away from Gore’s “Gulfstream Liberal” hypocrisy and on to more important questions such as the efficacy of “carbon offsets,” and a variety of other economy-oriented policy issues that impact the environment, such as whether market-based solutions or government-planned approaches are more likely to foster the technology innovation and lifestyle choice changes that benefit the environment.

....Hypocrisy, after all, abounds. Even Gore’s huge electric power usage at his Nashville home isn’t the only example of how the prophet of environmental doom hasn’t always lived as if he believes his message. During the eight years Gore was vice president, he voted in four national elections. Every single time, he and his entourage and security detail and accompanying media flew to Nashville on a large government jet, burning thousands of gallons of fossil fuels and pumping huge amounts of carbon emissions directly into the earth’s atmosphere, and then rode in a caravan of fossil fuel-burning vehicles from Nashville International Airport about 40 miles east on I-40 to Carthage, Tennessee, so the local and national TV cameras could get video of him at the voting booth. And then the whole caravan headed back to Nashville for the plane ride back to DC. Traffic had to be halted on Nashville’s interstates and side streets every time - sometimes during rush hour - idling thousand of vehicles that just sat there, burning fossil fuels and emitting carbon pollution, just so Gore could create a media photo-op. He could have instead voted by mailing in an absentee ballot - that would have been the “green” thing to do - and a skillful press aide could easily have turned that into a widely publicized pro-green photo-op"


smackdown found here

Spanky?

Did Slave give you all the keys, or just this one sock?

[Spanky]

Originally posted by Mmmm, Burger (C.J.)
Fish, barrel:

chart

It's not worth fighting the facts, only the connection between this and human activity. And even that's worth fighting only if your corporate name as more than one X in it.

Did you miss this part:

"compellig evidence that the world has increased in temperature every year since 1977.

You say "fish in a barrel" and then you show me a chart that shows that the temperature has NOT increased every year since 1977.

I put that language specifically in so I would get all that crap everyone on the board posted.

According to many reports (and your little graph) the temperature of the planet did not rise or in fact decreased from 1998 to 2004.

And from the mid 40s to the late seventies the temperature of the earth declined.

Oct. 23, 2006 - In April, 1975, NEWSWEEK published a story about a very different kind of disaster. Citing "ominous signs that the earth's weather patterns have begun to change dramatically," the magazine warned of an impending "drastic decline in food production." Political disruptions stemming from food shortages could affect "just about every nation on earth." Scientists urged governments to consider emergency action to head off the terrible threat of . . . well, if you had been following the climate-change debates at the time, you'd have known that the threat was: global cooling.

How did NEWSWEEK—or for that matter, Time magazine, which also ran a story on the subject in the mid-1970s—get things so wrong? In fact, the story wasn't "wrong" in the journalistic sense of "inaccurate." For decades there had been a trend toward slightly cooler temperatures in the Northern hemisphere. In the mid-1970s, scientists were focusing on an increase of dust and "aerosols" (suspended droplets of liquid, mostly sulfuric acid) in the atmosphere. These, the result of increased agriculture and burning of coal in power plants, lower the Earth's temperature by reflecting sunlight back into space."


I stated an increase in temperature "every year" because if carbon is accumulating in the atmosphere and this is leading to an increase in temperature, then ever year since man started putting carbon in the atmosphere in significant quantities, the average temperature of the earth should have gone up. Not fluctuated, or shown trends, but gone up consistently every year, from year to year over the entire time period.

However, there have been fluctuations meaning that in some years the temperature has been lower than the previous one. To me that means that no conclusions can be drawn form this data But you say 'there are other factors that also lead to fluctuations" but it is the overall trend that matters. Well if there are other factors in each year that can override mans contribution to the situation, that means the contribution provided by man is less significant and therefore not the critical factor, and therefore, not something we should worry about.

Adder said earlier just because the oceans have not risen doesn't mean that dire consequences are not possible. OK fine. But my point is before we start implementing policies that are going to cost the economy greatly and hamper economic growth (thereby making people poorer than they have to be) show me some concrete incontrovertible proof that man is causing global warming, that global warming will continue and that it has caused serious problems (not WILL cause serious problems, but HAS caused serious damage).

Until I see some evidence of damage, I think any sacrifice made to avoid this "impending disaster" is premature. We don't know the costs of this predicted disaster caused by global warming, but we are damn sure that the actions taken to avoid this disaster will cost a great deal, including condemning much of the worlds population to poverty they would not have to otherwise endure.

There are too many other problems that are actually causing damage that need to be focused on to worry about ones that might cause damage. And before you apply Chemo you better be damn sure there is cancer.

[Spanky]

To bad we didn't listend to the Democrats and Liberals in Washington who recommended that we discontinue funding and research for SDI (I mean after it became clear that the success of the Patriot Missiles in Gulf War I was exaggerated, it should have been obvious to everyone it could never work) otherwise we would be a lot safer today considering the fact that that rational and stable guy running North Korea can now hit us..... I mean... wait....

NKorea capable of building a missile that can hit the US: US intel

North Korea is technically capable of building a long-range missile that can hit the United States despite a test failure last year, a senior US military intelligence official said Tuesday.
Lieutenant General Michael Maples, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, said North Korea has probably learned from the failure of its Taepodong-2 missile during a test in July, and made changes to its other missiles.


"I believe they have the technical capability, as we saw by the Taepodong, but they have not successfully tested it yet," he told the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Asked how long before North Korea would have a missile capable of reaching the United States, he said, "I would probably estimate it's not a matter of years."

Maples made the comments in testimony about global threats that singled out North Korea and Iran as the two states of greatest concern.

In the case of North Korea it cited proliferation fears heightened by the July missile tests and North Korea's nuclear test in October.

North Korea agreed on February 13 on steps toward disabling its nuclear program in return for US supplies of fuel oil or other economic assistance.

Michael McConnell, the national director of intelligence, said US intelligence was unable to monitor North Korea compliance with the agreement "at the level we would like."

"We can verify many of the conditions from external observation, but not at the level you're asking about in terms of detail," he said.

"There's some open questions, but so far the indications are in the positive direction," he said.


North Korea has a known nuclear reactor at Yongbyon but US intelligence also believes it was secretly pursuing a separate uranium enrichment program, which also would be covered by the agreement.

Another intelligence official, Joseph Detrani, said US intelligence had high confidence in 2002 that North Korea was acquiring equipment for a uranium enrichment program.

US intelligence still believes the program exists, but its confidence in that assessment is now "mid-level."

[Adder]

Originally posted by Spanky
Did you miss this part:

"compellig evidence that the world has increased in temperature every year since 1977.

You say "fish in a barrel" and then you show me a chart that shows that the temperature has NOT increased every year since 1977.

I put that language specifically in so I would get all that crap everyone on the board posted.

According to many reports (and your little graph) the temperature of the planet did not rise or in fact decreased from 1998 to 2004.

And from the mid 40s to the late seventies the temperature of the earth declined.

Oct. 23, 2006 - In April, 1975, NEWSWEEK published a story about a very different kind of disaster. Citing "ominous signs that the earth's weather patterns have begun to change dramatically," the magazine warned of an impending "drastic decline in food production." Political disruptions stemming from food shortages could affect "just about every nation on earth." Scientists urged governments to consider emergency action to head off the terrible threat of . . . well, if you had been following the climate-change debates at the time, you'd have known that the threat was: global cooling.

How did NEWSWEEK—or for that matter, Time magazine, which also ran a story on the subject in the mid-1970s—get things so wrong? In fact, the story wasn't "wrong" in the journalistic sense of "inaccurate." For decades there had been a trend toward slightly cooler temperatures in the Northern hemisphere. In the mid-1970s, scientists were focusing on an increase of dust and "aerosols" (suspended droplets of liquid, mostly sulfuric acid) in the atmosphere. These, the result of increased agriculture and burning of coal in power plants, lower the Earth's temperature by reflecting sunlight back into space."

Are you really this stupid? It's science. A theory doesn't pan out, or we learn something new, and our understanding changes. Whether they were wrong then has fuck-all to do with whether they are wrong now.

I stated an increase in temperature "every year" because if carbon is accumulating in the atmosphere and this is leading to an increase in temperature, then ever year since man started putting carbon in the atmosphere in significant quantities, the average temperature of the earth should have gone up.

Okay, you are this stupid. This is wrong as a simple matter of logic, much less for the complex systems of climate science. First of all, who says that carbon is the ONLY factor effecting temperatures? Um... parently only you. Second, who said each marginal unit of carbon effects climate the same way? Again, no one except you. Third, who says that the planet's atmostphere can't absorb some base level of carbon with no ill effects? Yup, no one but you. Four, who assumes that even if human are releasing enough carbon into the atmosphere to effect it, climate change is constant and linear? Answer again, is only someone with the IQ of a poached salmon.

Well if there are other factors in each year that can override mans contribution to the situation, that means the contribution provided by man is less significant and therefore not the critical factor, and therefore, not something we should worry about.

Wow.

But my point is before we start implementing policies that are going to cost the economy greatly and hamper economic growth (thereby making people poorer than they have to be) show me some concrete incontrovertible proof that man is causing global warming, that global warming will continue and that it has caused serious problems (not WILL cause serious problems, but HAS caused serious damage).

If your argument is that you think it costs too much (you are probably wrong, btw, as this is the standard argument against any and all evironmental regulation, and has always been wrong in the past), then say that. Don't say absurd things like, "gee, it was colder last year, so we can't be causing global warming."

We don't know the costs of this predicted disaster caused by global warming, but we are damn sure that the actions taken to avoid this disaster will cost a great deal, including condemning much of the worlds population to poverty they would not have to otherwise endure.

How are we doing that when we ask people to use more energy-efficient light bulbs, turn down the thermostat a degree, buy hybrid cars, require cars to be more fuel efficient or ask people to think about walking? How does buidling wind generation do that? How does building nuclear power plants do that?

[Adder]

Originally posted by Spanky
(I mean after it became clear that the success of the Patriot Missiles in Gulf War I was exaggerated, it should have been obvious to everyone it could never work)

Just because you keep repeating this straw-man does not mean anyone ever agrued this.

North Korea is technically capable of building a long-range missile that can hit the United States despite a test failure last year, a senior US military intelligence official said Tuesday.
Lieutenant General Michael Maples, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, said North Korea has probably learned from the failure of its Taepodong-2 missile during a test in July, and made changes to its other missiles.

This is probably not news.

Another intelligence official, Joseph Detrani, said US intelligence had high confidence in 2002 that North Korea was acquiring equipment for a uranium enrichment program.

US intelligence still believes the program exists, but its confidence in that assessment is now "mid-level."

It is interesting that you did not choose to highlight this portion of the article.

[Adder]

Here is yet another conspiracy theory on the dismissal of USAs.

The Richmond Democrat


February 28, 2007 Wednesday 9:13 AM EST


LENGTH: 280 words

HEADLINE: The Richmond DemocratIs Bush admin purging prosecutors to block probes?

BYLINE: The Cheshire CatJ.C. Wilmore



Feb. 28, 2007 ( delivered by Newstex) -- It is becoming icreasingly obvious that the Bush administration is trying to slow down or derail key corruption investigations by removing U.S. Attorneys involved in prosecuting corrupt Republicans. Consider the case of the prosecutor who took down Randy"Duke" Cunnigham:

Officials say the removals include those of Carol C. Lam in San Diego, who led the corruption prosecution of former congressman Randy"Duke" Cunningham (R-Calif.), and Kevin V. Ryan in San Francisco, who has handled the probe into a lab at the center of a sports doping scandal involving baseball player Barry Bonds and other athletes.[]

Hmmm, a little payback for the"Duke" Cunningham scandal. Who else has a dog in this fight?But Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, said that Ms. Lam and Kevin V. Ryan, the United States attorney from San Francisco, among others, were being pushed out "without cause." Mr. Ryan's office has been investigating the backdating of stock options granted to corporate executives.[]

Hmmm, backdated stock options for corporate executives . . . I wonder where they send their political contributions?

Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) . Who are these principled professionals being replaced with?Another recent change that has attracted widespread criticism from Democrats came in Arkansas, where U.S. Attorney H.E. Cummins III of Little Rock was replaced on an interim basis by J. Timothy Griffin, a former research director for the Republican National Committee.[]

Yeah, nothing to be concerned about here, is there?

I even more skeptical of this one, but who knows. Kevin Ryan, in particular, did not seem terribly impressive from the quotes I have seen in the press.

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Anyone -

This debate sucks. I won't get into specifics of the thing because it's all been argued before - here, there, everywhere.

In scanning page after page of this thing I see nothing but crap. I see conservatives trying to change the issue from science to whether Al Gore is a hypocrite. So he is. So what?

I see liberals ignoring just about every argument Spanky offers as heresy because, no matter how much evidence the guy uses, their knee jerk reaction to almost any skepticism of the "Global Warming Crisis" is to react like the Vatican does to a new form of birth control. You wonder why the people in this country don't listen to the San Francisco Wing of the Democrat Party? It's not because those bleeding hearts lack evidence - it's because they argue their points with a religious fervor that immediately turns everybody off. Ty generally has a great wealth of evidence behind what he posts here, and he and Spanky duke it out very well. But in his wake, there's this jerk-off echo chamber of liberals who do nothing but flip snarky responses at Spanky and offer shrill back ups for Ty's positions. Here's a tip - leave Ty's evidence to stand on its own; that's usually enough. Spanky will poke some holes in it and make everyone consider it with the proper critical eye. In the end, we'll come to the rational conclusions:

1 - There is some truth to Global Warming, and man being its cause, but the solution is not as easy as the knee-jerk panaceas offered by the hysterical Left wingers who've made the issue their new religion, nor is the assignment of blame; and

2 - That Spanky - who seems to understand the economic impact of the sort of "feel good" agendas favored by the Left better than anyone on this board - makes a very fucking important point when he says we can't just turn economies inside out to satisfy the Left's pet issue of the moment.

We reached a conclusion weeks ago that the science of global warming is not settled, and really never could be unless we had climatoligical data going back millions of years. Should we take measured steps to avoid pollution? Yes, for many reasons beyond just global warming. Should those steps be radical to the point they damage economies and put people in already precarious financial positions in worse ones? Of course not.

So why the fuck are we bitching about Al Gore being a hypocrite? No shit... he's a fucking politician. And why is every one of Spanky's reasoned arguments met with hyperbolic ranting replies? Ya think he doesn't realize he's at a disadvantage, and that his opponents are probably correct in a healthy percentage of their claims? My suspicion is most of the Lefty Echo Chamber here is just so fucking annoying you've pushed him to want to argue every point if for no other reason than to laugh at a bunch of fulminating fellow travelers. I know that's what I'd do...

Driving a big goddamned SUV,
SD

[Shape Shifter]

Originally posted by sebastian_dangerfield
Lefty Echo Chamber

Did you follow the ironweed recipe last night, only subbing vodka for the whiskey and topping it with mushrooms? There's nobody here spouting the crunchy granola SF liberal line. We're all fucking lawyers and we all like our toys. Having said that, I think what the "Left" is saying here is that we need to at least acknowledge that there appears to be a problem, and that problem could have enormous consequences if we fail to address it (very similar to what Spanky seems to be saying about NK missiles).

Nobody wants to take away your SUV at gunpoint. But GW is something that needs to be addressed by the government - volutary measures just aren't going to get it done. As Spanky can explain from reading The Economist, there would be the free rider problem and incentives not to go along. Furthermore, because the problem needs to be addressed globally, it will have to be done by governments.

I don't see this as a "liberal" issue or a "conservative" issue. If the "conservatives" here were being intellectually honest, they would agree that this is one of the issues, like national defense, that are the proper role of the federal government.

The only echo chamber here is slave and spanky mouthing the Drudge line, refusing to concende that there may be a problem, not because of lack of evidence, but because of their visceral dislike of Al Gore and the crunchy granola non-bathing Loony Left they see in drum circles in their neck of the woods. But that's not who they're arguing with on this board.