tvashtarkatena

All socialist organizations, if you think about it...

New York was a very, very different place in the '30s and '40s...

We know that atmospheric methane levels fall during ice age advancement and fall during retreat. This is probably due in part to gas hydrates, although the mechanism still isn't well understood. As an ice age advances, oceanic gas hydrates release their methane, but polar gas hydrates recapture some of it. Exactly how these two opposing processes interact remains unknown. The release of oceanic gas hydrates will probably not a be problem during this period of human caused global warming because sea levels will rise. Unfortunately for us, as the permafrost melts, the enormous amount of methane trapped in hydrates there will be released. This is a major problem. The gas hydrate cycle has little to do with the current unprecedented warming trend, however, the vast majority of which is caused by carbon from fossil fuel combustion. I think you'll find that none of the proposed solutions for haulting human caused climate change require us to retreat to caves dimly lit with burning animal fat. Life could go on relatively normally, and may even improve as our environment gets cleaned up.

Anyone whose ever driven one knows that Comets don't handle tight corners worth a damn.

that statement speaks volumes about you Oh, you have no idea... I have an idea what a child will tell you in response to every lesson you try to teach there after. When you're raised by two New Yorkers, a child has to be pretty damn creative to even register...

Oh, you have no idea...

There's no more useful thing to teach a child than a heartfelt Fuck You.

...or Kennedy's affair with Marilyn. Or the lust in Carter's heart, or, or...

What this chart tells us is that Japan is serious about nukes, but no one else, especially China, considering the size of its economy, is. Compare this chart to planned capacity for coal fired generation and those bars get really, really short.

Get off your cyber-asses and volunteer to canvas for the Darcy Burner campaign this weekend if you give a shit about throwing the bastards out. It's a tight race and they need the help. This election ain't gonna win itself.

A handful? You have apparently omitted the catholic church.

Except one thing...China dies without it's export business and importation of energy. The world has a lot of leverage on that country. Iran, in contrast, is much more self sufficient, and they've got oil. Tonto.

Name one instance where a high profile evangelical was accused of unseemly behavior: sex with prostitutes, tax evasion, etc...and it WASN'T true. Just one. I'm waiting...

nice sentimental argument, if only two stark realities weren't stepping all over it. 1) Nukes are the most expensive form of power plant. Being the savvy business types they are, China's not going to build them, nor will many other countries...including ours, if you ask me. 2) China could care less about the environment...the country is a disaster in that regard. Unless there is a global effort to cut CO2 emissions with an enforcement mechanism (economic sanctions, etc.) for non-compliance, they'll burn coal...without all the fancy scrubbers.

Gay sex and marriage, for that matter, is fine...unless you're the leader of a 30 MILLION member organization that is actively working to make it illegal for everyone else. Those evangelicals just can't keep their blessed fingers out of the adolescent/cheap prostitute/Chippendale dancer cookie jar. Perhaps if they had wive's that didn't consider 2 hours of makeup removal a form of foreplay, they'd stay home more.

This is the most misguided argument I've heard so far. Coal fired power plants currently represent the largest source of greenhouse gases. The earth currently has enough coal to last well over 2 centuries; plenty long enough time to completely fuck our climate, even at the current rate of warming. Unless we actively decide otherwise through public policy, we will switch from gas to coal. Case in point: the 'Green' party in Germany was successful in getting the goverment to shut down its nuke plants. Guess what's going to replace them? Coal. Of the hundreds of new power plants China's building, most are coal. It's pretty obvious to the casual free market economist that running out of oil will likely exacerbate greenhouse gas emissions rather than decrease them. Determining large scale direction for society wide infrastructure is what public policy is for. That's how we got railroads, phones, water, and power. The libertarian argument that somehow things will just work out is either based on an imagined history that never was or just pure fantasy.

But...Bush IS an idiot. We all know that Bush didn't invent the internal combustion engine or the coal fired boiler. No shit. He completely deserves our 'dissapproval' because, in six LONG years in office, not only did he fail to show one iota of leadership in addressing the world's most pressing environmental threat, he actively worked to undo the solutions brought forth by other nations. In short, he sold us all out in favor of his corporate base in the energy sector. For this an many, many other spectacular foreign and domestic policy failures, outrageous lies, and willful disregard for the constitution he swore to defend, he should go down in history as one of our worst presidents.

Bee-yooo-dee-ful. "This is really routine when any sort of situation like this arises, so we're prepared," Carolyn Haggard said. Uh...I think that's the problem. Perhaps he was just 'testing his faith'.

Here's a tedius article about what can be done to hault global warming. It is doable: http://fire.pppl.gov/energy_socolow_081304.pdf

The type of fossil trees found near vantage are all hardwoods that grow just fine at our latitudes. It was wetter back then in that area because the Cascades weren't there to block moisture coming in from the ocean at that time. In addition, E Wa wasn't in the same spot on the earth as it is now due to tectonic movement. There are no methane bubbles in the icecaps. There are air bubbles that contain varying PPM of greenhouse gases, of which methane is one. Methane is produced by rotting plant material in swamps or animal lower colons. Rice patties are man-made swamps. Cows, also man-made, fart a lot. If the permafrost continues to melt, much more methane will be released from rotting tundra, accelerating the current warming trend. Then we won't just be farting, we'll be shitting our pants. As for links, you can Google as well as I can. Sciam.com is a good, accessible source for science articles on the subject, as are many other science publications. You won't have to look far...the information is all over the place.

It's fundamentally wrong to double-, triple-, and quadruple tax. K Kubed is right. You would need 11-tuple taxation to provide a back round independent solution for the unification of liberalism, libertarianism, conservatism, socialism, and Rastafarianism sufficient to balance the strong I’ve-fuckin’-gotta-have-one-a-those-right-now with the weak perhaps-someone-else-needs-it-more-than-I forces. Unfortunately, this would produce 10 to the 500th unique but consistent versions for your form 1040, which would require an IRS the size of a galactic supercluster to process, assuming you could find an accountant. Double, triple, and quadruple taxation, while it may mimic aspects of the observable universe, produces overly liberal universes where smarmy, overly educated and underemployed massage therapists take time out from tantric sex with their transgender friends to pull honest, hardworking mill workers from their trailers and force them to respectfully discuss “Hegemony or Survival” while sipping steaming earthenware bowls of organic chai with their pinkies in the air. In a zero taxation universe libertarianism is favored, whereby mulleted multitudes drop the home schooled children they’re sodomizing to swarm into the cities in battered F150s, ignoring pedestrian crossing signs, to snatch well-nurtured children from Montessori schools for later use as bear bait, before flushing their parents out of their community forums, hunt them down, and forcing them to eat undercooked red meat laced with Copenhagen while listening the Hank Williams Jr. at as high a volume as their one working speaker can put out. A single taxation universe quickly decays to an n-tuple taxation universe where nearly all available energy is spent arguing what ‘n’ should be.

Although the State gleans more from rich estates, and the rich may be required to divest a portion of the estate's portfolio to pay the tax, the loss of a few 10k - 100k, or the need to take on a mortgage to retain the family home/ranch/farm has a significantly greater impact upon the lower to middle-income, relatively. This would only apply to a handful of households in Washington. Most of those affected folks could avoid hardship though proper execution of a living will. The vast majority of folks subject to this tax (and an even greater majority of the revenues collected from it) are wealthy enough to avoid hardship. Whether or not you agree with the estate tax, it is definitely a tax on the wealthy.

Inexlicably, someone cut and pasted some of my 'humor' on another site recently and didn't get a single response. Anonymity can be a blessing. Mimicry, while the sincerest form of flattery, is sometimes just a bad idea.

Oh, wait. You were talking about shower-wear. My bad.

Most models predict harsher, dryer winters for the world's grain producing plains that would lead to desertification and a loss in arable land that far exceeds that from oceanic inundation. Nearly all uncultivated northern terrain in NA, and EAsia is an extension of these plains, and would suffer an even harsher fate. That land would become LESS arable, not more. If the Gulf Stream is shortcircuited due to the introduction of massive amounts of fresh water from the Greenland Icecap, Europe could ironically be plunged into an ice age...again, with a massive loss of arable land. This actually happened after the last ice age, so it's not just a theory. Finally, many crops are day length, not just temperature, dependent. Any gardener knows this. They would grow no closer to the poles than they do now, regardless of temperature. I realize that this kind of information requires more in depth thinking than "Hey, it's gonna get warmer, so we can just move our tomato plants further north!", but, then again, what do I know? I'm just a dumbass.