A disgusting vat of filth that no self-respecting intelligent person would wade into.

Originally posted by SlaveNoMore
Gitmo has been established many times over as Camp Cupcake.

Ahh, good old Camp Cupcake. What magical summers I spent there as a child. When you went to Camp Cupcake, were they still doing that thing where they held you upside down and stuffed cupcakes up your nose until you puked?

[nononono]

Originally posted by Adder
You have an interesting way of not jumping (that is, by jumping in).

I provided clarifying information, since you seemed to be at a dramatic loss as to how it could be harmful to refer to U.S. troops as torturers. I specifically did not get involved in whether you had or had not been (commonly or otherwise) doing so. Claro?

[Adder]

Originally posted by sebastian_dangerfield
The problem with this argument is that Hussein was a repressor of Radical islam. He was a secular dictator.

If you make the argument that Iraq is part of the greater war on Islamofascism, you leave yourself open to the rebuttal, "Yes, because you deposed the strongman in charge of the country and made it so."

At that point, you get stuck spinning your wheels with the "we had a moral need to liberate the Iraqis." That's a non-starter (See: Darfur). At that point, a cynic might use the "better the war be in Iraq than the US" argument, otherwise known as the "flypaper" defense. The problem with that is you kinda piss off the world community when you make that admission, and you tell the soldiers' families "Yep, your son/husband/daughter is basically bait."

W bet and lost. It's a debacle. We're stuck staying the course, but W's got no moral high ground for any of his arguments. The truth is he created a pile of shit so bad we're stuck with it forever.

That is the second one in a row that I agree with. Something strange must be going on.

[Penske_Account]

Originally posted by ironweed
Ahh, good old Camp Cupcake. What magical summers I spent there as a child. When you went to Camp Cupcake, were they still doing that thing where they held you upside down and stuffed cupcakes up your nose until you puked?

I did that to some of the kids of the left wing hippies when I went to Camp as a kid. Good times.

[Spanky]

When I was a kid Carter came out with the "Global 2000 Report", that pretty much said that the world would be hell hole by the year 2000 because of environmental mistreatment of the planet. Well, the report turned out to be all bunk.

In the seventies I was also told that the world was getting cooler and that Snow would be a regular phenomenon in Mexico by the year 2000.

In College I was told that because of global warming that many sea level cities would be flooded by the year 2000 "unless something was done". 2000 came and went and no cities were under water, there was no snow in Mexico, and I had plenty of clean water and clean air.

Just prior to the first gulf war Carl Sagan gathered a bunch of climatologists and other scientists who said that if Saddam lit just half the oil wells in Kuwait (because at the time he was threatening to light them all if we invaded) that it would probably plunge the entire world into the equivalent of a nuclear winter. All the smoke in the atmosphere because of the oil fires would plunge the earth in darkness killing off crops and causing mass starvation. We invaded, Saddam lit them all, and things got a little hazy for a while in the gulf region.

Now much of the third world has embraced free markets and because of this billions of people are being pulled out of poverty because of mass industrialization. However, we are now being told that this industrialization, that is ending poverty for the majority of the worlds population, should be curbed because if we don't there will be major problems.

Because of "climatologists" track record I want absolute proof before we condemn much of the world’s population to continued poverty because we need to curb industrialization.

George Will said it better than I.


Global Warming? Hot Air.

By George F. Will
Thursday, December 23, 2004; Page A23

In today's segmented America, Michael Crichton's new novel, "State of Fear," might seem to be reading just for red states. Granted, a character resembling Martin Sheen -- Crichton's character is a prototypical Hollywood liberal who plays the president in a television series -- meets an appropriately grisly fate. But blue states, too -- no, especially -- need Crichton's fable about the ecology of public opinion.

"State of Fear," with a first printing of 1.5 million copies, resembles Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" -- about 6 million copies sold since 1957 -- as a political broadside woven into an entertaining story. But whereas Rand had only an idea -- a good one (capitalism is splendid), but only one -- Crichton has information. "State of Fear" is the world's first page turner that people will want to read in one gulp (a long gulp: 600 pages, counting appendices) even though it has lots of real scientific graphs, and footnotes citing journals such as Progress in Physical Geography and Transactions -- American Geophysical Union.


Crichton's subject is today's fear that global warming will cause catastrophic climate change, a belief now so conventional that it seems to require no supporting data. Crichton's subject is also how conventional wisdom is manufactured in a credulous and media-drenched society.

Various factions have interests -- monetary, political, even emotional -- in cultivating fears. The fears invariably seem to require more government subservience to environmentalists and more government supervision of our lives.

Crichton's villains are environmental hysterics who are innocent of information but overflowing with certitudes and moral vanity. His heroes resemble Navy SEALs tenured at MIT, foiling the villains with guns and graphs.

The villains are frustrated because the data do not prove that global warming is causing rising sea levels and other catastrophes. So they concoct high-tech schemes to manufacture catastrophes they can ascribe to global warming -- flash floods in the American West, the calving of an Antarctic iceberg 100 miles across, and a tsunami that would roar at 500 mph across the Pacific and smash California's coast on the last day of a Los Angeles conference on abrupt climate change.

The theory of global warming -- Crichton says warming has amounted to just half a degree Celsius in 100 years -- is that "greenhouse gases," particularly carbon dioxide, trap heat on Earth, causing . . . well, no one knows what, or when. Crichton's heroic skeptics delight in noting such things as the decline of global temperatures from 1940 to 1970. And that since 1970, glaciers in Iceland have been advancing. And that Antarctica is getting colder and its ice is getting thicker.

Last week Fiona Harvey, the Financial Times' environmental correspondent, fresh from yet another international confabulation on climate change, wrote that while Earth's cloud cover "is thought" to have increased recently, no one knows whether this is good or bad. Is the heat-trapping by the clouds' water vapor greater or less than the sun's heat reflected back off the clouds into space?

Climate-change forecasts, Harvey writes, are like financial forecasts but involve a vastly more complex array of variables. The climate forecasts, based on computer models analyzing the past, tell us that we do not know how much warming is occurring, whether it is a transitory episode or how much warming is dangerous -- or perhaps beneficial.

One of the good guys in "State of Fear" cites Montaigne's axiom: "Nothing is so firmly believed as that which least is known." Which is why 30 years ago the fashionable panic was about global cooling. The New York Times (Aug. 14, 1975) reported "many signs" that "Earth may be heading for another ice age." Science magazine (Dec. 10, 1976) warned about "extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation." "Continued rapid cooling of the Earth" (Global Ecology, 1971) could herald "a full-blown 10,000-year ice age" (Science, March 1, 1975). The Christian Science Monitor reported (Aug. 27, 1974) that Nebraska's armadillos were retreating south from the cooling.

Last week The Post reported that global warming has caused a decline in Alaska's porcupine caribou herd and has lured the golden orange prothonotary warbler back from southern wintering grounds to Richmond a day earlier for nearly two decades. Or since global cooling stopped. Maybe.

Gregg Easterbrook, an acerbic student of eco-pessimism, offers a "Law of Doomsaying": Predict catastrophe no later than 10 years hence but no sooner than five years away -- soon enough to terrify, but far enough off that people will forget if you are wrong. Because Crichton remembers yesterday's discarded certitudes, millions of his readers will be wholesomely skeptical of today's.

[nononono]

Originally posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy
So we should all keep our mouths shut about abu Ghraib and Gitmo?

Maybe, somewhere along the line, if we stand up for our values and put more effort into reconstruction and Civ-Ops, we'll send a stronger positive message. It is the Bush Administration that chooses to violate our values in Gitmo, thumb their nose at the world, and then complain that we have a bad image.

Sigh. Greedy, you did the same silly, reactionary, empty thing Adder did.

As far as Guantanamo goes, perhaps this is radical, but it occurs to me (hold onto your hat!) that war is a dirty business. And humans are flawed. We're going to fuck up somewhere. Pretending this could possibly ever happen and still run an effective war and intelligence operation is purposefully and disingenuously naive. I'm not defending the fuck-ups, but I also don't find everything that has occurred on Guantanamo to be offensive, and certainly not against "our values."

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but reconstruction and civil matters are not our only concerns. There's this little thing called national security that some of us are concerned about, too (for starters), but of course what we're down to now, even if we managed to agreed on what "our values" are, is disagreeing as to method.

[Penske_Account]

Originally posted by Spanky

Because of "climatologists" track record I want absolute proof before we condemn much of the world’s population to continued poverty because we need to curb industrialization.




Global Warming? Hot Air.

.

Translation:

Originally posted by Spanky
Just prior to the first gulf war Carl Sagan gathered a bunch of climatologists . . .

Just prior to the second gulf war I was told that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Does this mean I shouldn't trust our government?

[Penske_Account]

Originally posted by nononono
Sigh. Greedy, you did the same silly, reactionary, empty thing Adder did.

As far as Guantanamo goes, perhaps this is radical, but it occurs to me (hold onto your hat!) that war is a dirty business. And humans are flawed. We're going to fuck up somewhere. Pretending this could possibly ever happen and still run an effective war and intelligence operation is purposefully and disingenuously naive. I'm not defending the fuck-ups, but I also don't find everything that has occurred on Guantanamo to be offensive, and certainly not against "our values."

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but reconstruction and civil matters are not our only concerns. There's this little thing called national security that some of us are concerned about, too (for starters), but of course what we're down to now, even if we managed to agreed on what "our values" are, is disagreeing as to method.

2. You should submit this to the judges as part of GF of the Year nomination. The political/human rights essay part.

[Greedy,Greedy,Greedy]

Originally posted by nononono
Sigh. Greedy, you did the same silly, reactionary, empty thing Adder did.

As far as Guantanamo goes, perhaps this is radical, but it occurs to me (hold onto your hat!) that war is a dirty business. And humans are flawed. We're going to fuck up somewhere. Pretending this could possibly ever happen and still run an effective war and intelligence operation is purposefully and disingenuously naive. I'm not defending the fuck-ups, but I also don't find everything that has occurred on Guantanamo to be offensive, and certainly not against "our values."

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but reconstruction and civil matters are not our only concerns. There's this little thing called national security that some of us are concerned about, too (for starters), but of course what we're down to now, even if we managed to agreed on what "our values" are, is disagreeing as to method.

When you fuck up, you go fix the fuck up. Abu Ghraib can be defended on this grounds: yeh, some of our guys screwed up, but we went in and fixed it and shut the place down. Gitmo can't - because we keep screwing up every day.

[Penske_Account]

Originally posted by ironweed
Just prior to the second gulf war I was told that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Does this mean I shouldn't trust our government?

I relied on Kerry when he said:

With respect to Saddam Hussein and the threat he presents, we must ask ourselves a simple question: Why? Why is Saddam Hussein pursuing weapons that most nations have agreed to limit or give up? Why is Saddam Hussein guilty of breaking his own cease-fire agreement with the international community? Why is Saddam Hussein attempting to develop nuclear weapons when most nations don't even try, and responsible nations that have them attempt to limit their potential for disaster? Why did Saddam Hussein threaten and provoke? Why does he develop missiles that exceed allowable limits? Why did Saddam Hussein lie and deceive the inspection teams previously? Why did Saddam Hussein not account for all of the weapons of mass destruction which UNSCOM identified? Why is he seeking to develop unmanned airborne vehicles for delivery of biological agents?

A brutal, oppressive dictator, guilty of personally murdering and condoning murder and torture, grotesque violence against women, execution of political opponents, a war criminal who used chemical weapons against another nation and, of course, as we know, against his own people, the Kurds. He has diverted funds from the Oil-for-Food program, intended by the international community to go to his own people. He has supported and harbored terrorist groups, particularly radical Palestinian groups such as Abu Nidal, and he has given money to families of suicide murderers in Israel.

[Diane_Keaton]

Originally posted by sebastian_dangerfield
The problem with this argument is that Hussein was a repressor of Radical islam. He was a secular dictator. If you make the argument that Iraq is part of the greater war on Islamofascism, you leave yourself open to the rebuttal, "Yes, because you deposed the strongman in charge of the country and made it so."

You don't think Hussein fits within "Islamofacsist?" Islamic. Pretty fascist. I don't know why people make a big deal out of the Hussein-as-secular-dude point. Like we should be thankful he was holding back and protecting us from Muslims even crazier than him. (Thanks!) That's not a lot of solace. How long would he have been the "repressor of Radical Islam"?

[Penske_Account]

Originally posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy
When you fuck up, you go fix the fuck up. Abu Ghraib can be defended on this grounds: yeh, some of our guys screwed up, but we went in and fixed it and shut the place down. Gitmo can't - because we keep screwing up every day.

JUst like in every prison, urban Public school and urban police department in America. Where are the liberals on taking responsiibility and fixing those mistakes? Its okay for the dems to be racist and/or classist oppressors of America's school children and urban poor but if we don't give our Islamofacist terrorist combatants the 5 star hotel treatment with a leather bound Koran in every nighttable the Dems go ballistic. Its a sick twisted amoralistic value system that produces such hatred of one's self freedom and country.

[nononono]

Originally posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy
When you fuck up, you go fix the fuck up. Abu Ghraib can be defended on this grounds: yeh, some of our guys screwed up, but we went in and fixed it and shut the place down. Gitmo can't - because we keep screwing up every day.

I find it, as a sort of an aside, completely ridiculous that people are so sensitive that we had to shut down the place. Fixing the fuck-up in Abu Ghraib's case could have been accomplished by a clean-up and punishment of all responsible or involved, not necessarily a shuttering. I can understand wanting to raze Dachau. I can understand bulldozing countless prisons in Saddam's Iraq. I would imagine Ho Chi Minh City has a couple of spots no one should have to pass by. But what Lynndie England and her moronic band of trash did doesn't come close to the kind of power and terror exercised in those other examples (which is not to say they might not have done much worse, had they the unfettered power and brainstems to do so). Soccer in Iraq, anyone? http://espn.go.com/oly/s/2002/1220/1480103.html
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/si_...son_of_saddam/

Guantanamo doesn't even come close.

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally posted by Diane_Keaton
You don't think Hussein fits within "Islamofacsist?" Islamic. Pretty fascist. I don't know why people make a big deal out of the Hussein-as-secular-dude point. Like we should be thankful he was holding back and protecting us from Muslims even crazier than him. (Thanks!) That's not a lot of solace. How long would he have been the "repressor of Radical Islam"?

No. The man was a predictable dictator. You could box him in because he was afraid of losing power. Radicals don't care about dying. You can't box in a person who's willing to die.

Re your last odd "point," shoot yourself. You're just going to die later anyway.