Well played, Mr. Gore

[marincounty]

Originally posted by: alchemize

Originally posted by: marincounty
Most of you laughed at Al Gore when he was talking about a Social Security lockbox.
Are you still laughing? Oh yeah, Bush wants to go to mars.

Hot damn, we've got democratic control of two of three branches...social security lock...err...

Obama plans to go to mars on a stack of freshly printed dollar bills.

Yah, I'm still laughing that your partisan clock is stuck in 2006.

I'm not laughing that you still think Gore wouldn't have done a much better job for this country than the idiots you voted for. He has a better track record of being right than you do.

 

[alchemize]

Originally posted by: Craig234

Originally posted by: alchemize

Originally posted by: marincounty
Most of you laughed at Al Gore when he was talking about a Social Security lockbox.
Are you still laughing? Oh yeah, Bush wants to go to mars.

Hot damn, we've got democratic control of two of three branches...social security lock...err...

Obama plans to go to mars on a stack of freshly printed dollar bills.

Yah, I'm still laughing that your partisan clock is stuck in 2006.

Protecting the Social Security trust fund was relevant when we had a surplus (Clinton), not when the Republicans have brought our economy to the edge of collapse needing deficits.

And yours is stuck in 2006 as well.

Hint, the last budget passed by a republican congress was a few years ago also...

Oh, and
deficit you say?

 

[umbrella39]

Originally posted by: Sawyer
Once he stops flying the world in private jets, stops the suvs himself, reduces the size of his mansion/multiple homes then he will have some credibility.

This has and always will be moot. If he lived in a cave and walked everywhere he went he would have credibility? I think not. One has nothing to do with the other.

 

[AnnonUSA]

Yes Nice play by Al Gore! Please...... Global Warming is an issue for Al Gore as long as he can get rich from it.....


http://blog.nj.com/njv_paul_mu...lood_and_gor.html#more

 

[ElFenix]

Originally posted by: marincounty
Most of you laughed at Al Gore when he was talking about a Social Security lockbox.
Are you still laughing? Oh yeah, Bush wants to go to mars.

can anyone describe the social security lock box concept to me?

 

[fskimospy]

Originally posted by: Skoorb

If you can't even predict tomorrow's weather, how can you possibly have confidence in complex algorithms that model weather patterns decades into the future?

It is a fair question. Your counter-point to it is not fair. A fair analogy would be: You can't predict tomorrow's lottery number, but I'm expected to believe that you can predict what the combination of today's, tomorrow's, and the next day's number would be if added up?

In any case, ideologues exist on both sides. Go ahead and ask a big proponent of global warming to list off some of the key benefits of it and watch their eyes glaze. Question does not compute.

Your analogy is also wrong. In many cases we can predict macro level trends but be utterly lost when it comes down to the micro level. We can't predict the average temperature next week very accurately, but we sure as hell can predict the average temperature for a year pretty closely.

As for Al Gore needing to emit less carbon than the average person, that's an incredibly silly thing to say. Whether he is right or not and whether his arguments are credible or not has nothing to do with how much carbon he consumes. Furthermore, the idea that him flying around the world in a private jet trying to fight global warming is somehow a sign of hypocrisy is willful ignorance at best. It's in effect asking "Why is this business spending money on products and labor? Don't these idiots know you're supposed to be in business to MAKE money?!?!"

 

[Craig234]

Originally posted by: ElFenix

Originally posted by: marincounty
Most of you laughed at Al Gore when he was talking about a Social Security lockbox.
Are you still laughing? Oh yeah, Bush wants to go to mars.

can anyone describe the social security lock box concept to me?

The baby boom generation is a huge spike in the US population. The social security system was recognized long ago to face high payments when they retire.

Under Reagan, a commission was created on what to do, and it led to increasing the social security withholding - a surtax put into a 'trust fund' saved to pay the spike in payments.

But Reagan also passed the biggest tax cut in history almost entirely for the wealthy (at the same time, including the surtax, the largest tax increase in history for the working class). This resulted in net massive deficits, the country going broke. He turned to Alan Greenspan for what to do.

Greenspan told him to borrow the money from the trust fund. Not only would it help him pay the bills, financially it was treated as 'off the budget' borrowing. Reagan did it.

And ever since, what was supposed to be a measure for financial prudence, saving for the big payments for baby boomers, has instead been a massive tax (regressive, hitting the lower income workers much more than the wealthy) every president since has used to pay the bills - and add an 'IOU' to the file, creating trillions in debt for the government off the budget.

What Gore did was basically to suggest that the trust fund be protected from this borrowing/spending and the metaphor he used was a lockbox.

Of course, just as they had ridiculed his leadership creating the internet to keep him from getting credit, they ridiculed the lockox and assured voters big surpluses made it unneeded.

Here's Thom Hartmann's review of a book on this.

What do you do when you want to screw only the working people of your nation with the largest tax increase in history and hand those trillions of dollars to your wealthy campaign contributors, yet not have anybody realize you've done it? If you're Ronald Reagan, you call in Alan Greenspan.

Through the "golden years of the American middle class" - the 1940s through 1982 - the top income tax rate for the hyper-rich had been between 90 and 70 percent. Ronald Reagan wanted to cut that rate dramatically, to help out his political patrons. He did this with a massive tax cut in the summer of 1981.

The only problem was that when Reagan took his meat axe to our tax code, he produced mind-boggling budget deficits. Voodoo economics didn't work out as planned, and even after borrowing so much money that this year we'll pay over $100 billion just in interest on the money Reagan borrowed to make the economy look good in the 1980s, Reagan couldn't come up with the revenues he needed to run the government.

Coincidentally, the actuaries at the Social Security Administration were beginning to get worried about the Baby Boomer generation, who would begin retiring in big numbers in fifty years or so. They were a "rabbit going through the python" bulge that would require a few trillion more dollars than Social Security could easily collect during the same 20 year or so period of their retirement. We needed, the actuaries said, to tax more heavily those very persons who would eventually retire, so instead of using current workers' money to pay for the Boomer's Social Security payments in 2020, the Boomers themselves would have pre-paid for their own retirement.

Reagan got Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Alan Greenspan together to form a commission on Social Security reform, along with a few other politicians and economists, and they recommend a near-doubling of the Social Security tax on the then-working Boomers. That tax created - for the first time in history - a giant savings account that Social Security could use to pay for the Boomers' retirement.

This was a huge change. Prior to this, Social Security had always paid for today's retirees with income from today's workers (it still is today). The Boomers were the first generation that would pay Social Security taxes both to fund current retirees and save up enough money to pay for their own retirement. And, after the Boomers were all retired and the savings account - called the "Social Security Trust Fund" - was all spent, the rabbit would have finished its journey through the python and Social Security could go back to a "pay as you go" taxing system.

Thus, within the period of a few short years, Reagan dramatically dropped the income tax on America's most wealthy by more than half, and roughly doubled the Social Security tax on people earning $30,000 or less. It was, simultaneously, the largest income tax cut in America's history (almost entirely for the very wealthy), and the most massive tax increase in the history of the nation (which entirely hit working-class people).

But Reagan still had a problem. His tax cuts for the wealthy - even when moderated by subsequent tax increases - weren't generating enough money to invest properly in America's infrastructure, schools, police and fire departments, and military. The country was facing bankruptcy.

No problem, suggested Greenspan. Just borrow the Boomer's savings account - the money in the Social Security Trust Fund - and, because you're borrowing "government money" to fund "government expenditures," you don't have to list it as part of the deficit. Much of the deficit will magically seem to disappear, and nobody will know what you did for another 50 years when the Boomers begin to retire 2015.

Reagan jumped at the opportunity. As did George H. W. Bush. As did Bill Clinton (although Al Gore argued strongly that Social Security funds should not be raided, but, instead, put in a "lock box"). And so did George W. Bush.

The result is that all that money - trillions of dollars - that has been taxed out of working Boomers (the ceiling has risen from the tax being on your first $30,000 of income to the first $90,000 today) has been borrowed and spent. What are left behind are a special form of IOUs - an unique form of Treasury debt instruments similar (but not identical) to those the government issues to borrow money from China today to fund George W. Bush's most recent tax cuts for billionaires (George Junior is still also "borrowing" from the Social Security Trust Fund).

Former Bush Junior Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill recounts how Dick Cheney famously said, "Reagan proved deficits don't matter." Cheney was either ignorant or being disingenuous - it would be more accurate to say, "Reagan proved that deficits don't matter if you rip off the Social Security Trust Fund to pay for them, and don't report that borrowing from the Boomers as part of the deficit."

As the Associated Press reported on April 6, 2005:

"PARKERSBURG, West Virginia. (AP) -- President Bush on Tuesday used a four-drawer filing cabinet stuffed with paper representing government IOUs the president said symbolized the Social Security trust fund's bleak outlook for meeting Americans' future retirement needs. ...
"'A lot of people in America think there is a trust -- that we take your money in payroll taxes and then we hold it for you and then when you retire, we give it back to you,' Bush said in a speech at the University of West Virginia at Parkersburg.

"'But that's not the way it works,' Bush said. 'There is no trust "fund" -- just IOUs that I saw firsthand,' Bush said...

"[Susan] Chapman [of the Office of Public Debt] opened the second drawer and pulled out a white notebook filled with pseudo Treasury securities -- pieces of paper that offer physical evidence of $1.7 trillion in treasury bonds that make up the trust fund."

Later, Senator Rick Santorum made an odd admission for a Republican: ""You can't pay benefits with IOUs," he said on the Senate floor. "You have to pay it with cash."

And where will that cash - now nearly two trillion dollars - come from over the next decades as Boomers begin to retire?

Technically (and legally) it's simple - the Social Security Trust Fund will give back its IOUs to the Treasury Department and in exchange for them get cash to pay the Boomers' retirement checks. Practically, though, it'll be a crisis of biblical proportions. In order for the Treasury to come up with that kind of cash will require either massive tax increases or increased massive borrowing - at a time when we're already borrowing so heavily that China is propping up our economy with weekly loans.

Thus, Bush talks about a "crisis" in Social Security with some accuracy. But he doesn't dare tell us what the real "crisis" is, or how Reagan and Greenspan set it up, because when it becomes widely known that the real crisis is that Reagan set the course to steal Boomers' Social Security savings, it will destroy the reputation of both supply-side economics and the Republican Party for generations to come.

That Republicans and "conservative" Democrats have been able to perpetrate this fraud on America for the past 25 years tracks back to the initial and ongoing efforts of one man, Alan Greenspan, says Ravi Batra in his new book "Greenspan's Fraud: How Two Decades of His Polices Have Undermined the Global Economy."

And the Social Security fraud just outlined is only the beginning. Batra shows - in extraordinary (and easily understood) detail - how Greenspan has steadily worked for over two decades to sell out America's sovereignty and economic interests to those of the multinational corporations he so loves, and to sell out the working people of America (and their Social Security Trust Fund) to the super-rich who Greenspan has always represented.

Greenspan manipulated the stock market so his buddies could get rich, then warned them just in time to get out before it blew up. He's kept together tax cuts and pay increases for the CEO class by pumping cheap money into the economy so the Middle Class will go ever deeper into debt, setting up a housing bubble that could crash in a way that would make 1929 look like a mild bump in the economic road. And he's helped engineer and support international "free" trade policies that have disemboweled America's manufacturing and information technology sectors, with the happy result for Republicans that the once-politically-active and heavily unionized middle class is being replaced by a politically impotent mass of the working poor, too busy to worry about politics or challenge corporate news.

Most people, coming across this massive indictment of Greenspan, would probably react with skepticism. Why wasn't any of this in the paper? Why haven't I heard Democrats and liberals attacking Greenspan from the floors of Congress and in the progressive media?

As Batra points out, the truest testament to the power Alan Greenspan holds is that he's been able to do so much of this behind the scenes. He gently encourages and nudges, argues and lectures, leaks and pontificates. He suggests, rather than orders. And, of course, he holds the levers of the nation's money supply in his hands - making him a more fearsome threat to a sitting president or political party than J. Edgar Hoover ever was.

And, Batra documents, Greenspan has not been at all reluctant to use his considerable power to the benefit of those in office.

One example: During the Reagan and Bush presidencies, he was in favor of tax cuts. During Clinton's he was against them. During Bush Junior's he was again in favor of them.

Ravi Batra's book "Greenspan's Fraud" is not only required reading for all Americans because it so clearly lays out the crimes this man - and the Republican Party - have committed against the United States of America, but also because it's such a brilliant primer in macroeconomics overall. If you never were able to figure out, for example, what interest rates had to do with unemployment, or how the rich get richer in America while the poor get poorer, or why when the minimum wage is increased the economy gets better, Batra explains it all with elegance, wit, and comfortable clarity.

"Greenspan's Fraud" is one of the most important books you can read this year. Get two copies, because you're sure to have at least one friend you'll want to read this book, but your own copy will be so marked up and beloved that you'll not want to let go of it.

 

[shiner]

Suckers walk, money talks
But it can't touch my three lock box!

 

[shira]

Originally posted by: Skoorb

If you can't even predict tomorrow's weather, how can you possibly have confidence in complex algorithms that model weather patterns decades into the future?

It is a fair question. Your counter-point to it is not fair. A fair analogy would be: You can't predict tomorrow's lottery number, but I'm expected to believe that you can predict what the combination of today's, tomorrow's, and the next day's number would be if added up?

In any case, ideologues exist on both sides. Go ahead and ask a big proponent of global warming to list off some of the key benefits of it and watch their eyes glaze. Question does not compute.

No,the analogy I made is perfect.

Here's another perfect analogy:

If you can't predict with better than 50% accuracy whether this coin flip I'm about to make will be heads or tails, how can I possibly believe your long-term prediction that for a billion coin-flips there will be very close to 50% heads and 50% tails?

What YOU (and those right-wing cretins I was referring to) apparently don't understand is that global weather patterns are a lot like the tosses of innumerable 100-sided coins. Today's weather is the result of one such set of tosses - impossible to predict with any accuracy. But over the long term, we can make very accurate predictions about the statistical distribution of multiple years' worth of coin-tosses.

Is this really such a difficult concept to grasp?

 

[shira]

Originally posted by: Jaskalas

Originally posted by: Beattie
I dont get it.

Nothing is in imminent danger... the theory of global warming hasn't even been proven yet.

They don't keep repeating "the science is in" for nothing. They not only claim it is proven but that it is certifiable fact. That is where we tend to disagree and when the alarm bells start ringing we begin to roll our eyes.

Science never claims something is a "fact", because theories are always deficient. ALWAYS. The best we can say about a scientific theory is that we have a high degree of confidence in its predictions.

Only religious fanatics who believe in an unvarying, unchallengeable truth that comes from God insist that science deals in "facts."

Scientific theories are (hopefully increasingly accurate) approximations of (apparent) reality. Science is always wrong, because the business of science is to continually challenge current theories in order to make them better.

 

[Wreckem]

Originally posted by: ElFenix

Originally posted by: marincounty
Most of you laughed at Al Gore when he was talking about a Social Security lockbox.
Are you still laughing? Oh yeah, Bush wants to go to mars.

can anyone describe the social security lock box concept to me?

The lock box wouldn't have fixed Social Security but it would have lessened social securities deficits.

The "lock box" would have prevented Congress from using social security funds paid in to pay for stuff other than Social Security.

Al Gore proposed we stop spending Social Security money. But didnt propose how to come up with the respected budget shortfall that not spending that money would have created.

 

[StageLeft]

Originally posted by: shira

Originally posted by: Skoorb

If you can't even predict tomorrow's weather, how can you possibly have confidence in complex algorithms that model weather patterns decades into the future?

It is a fair question. Your counter-point to it is not fair. A fair analogy would be: You can't predict tomorrow's lottery number, but I'm expected to believe that you can predict what the combination of today's, tomorrow's, and the next day's number would be if added up?

In any case, ideologues exist on both sides. Go ahead and ask a big proponent of global warming to list off some of the key benefits of it and watch their eyes glaze. Question does not compute.

No,the analogy I made is perfect.

Here's another perfect analogy:

If you can't predict with better than 50% accuracy whether this coin flip I'm about to make will be heads or tails, how can I possibly believe your long-term prediction that for a billion coin-flips there will be very close to 50% heads and 50% tails?

What YOU (and those right-wing cretins I was referring to) apparently don't understand is that global weather patterns are a lot like the tosses of innumerable 100-sided coins. Today's weather is the result of one such set of tosses - impossible to predict with any accuracy. But over the long term, we can make very accurate predictions about the statistical distribution of multiple years' worth of coin-tosses.

Is this really such a difficult concept to grasp?

Then why do they continue to get it wrong, year after year? Their models are sh*t and the only time they admit they are wrong is with a preface of "Wow, it's much worse than we thought!" Your argument is similar to eskimospys but it's wrong because it's scale is incorrect. It may appear that we can predict 2009's temperature and if we're off by .2 C pretend we're close, but that's because it's always within a very tight range, just like your coin flip a billion times.

Your coin flip should be as such: if a perfect coin has a 50% chance of heads and I scratch one side of it, suddenly throwing those odds off, flip it 10 times and it is heads 7 times, you are going to say that over a billion flips it will be 700 million times heads, but of course it won't be because the scratch was a blip and in any case your data is so small it's impossible to project out. But you try anyway, and after 100 flips we're only at 55 heads, so now you say after one billion we'll have 550 million heads, but again no.

The best we can say about a scientific theory is that we have a high degree of confidence in its predictions.

Then surely you have questions about climate change.

And speaking of fanatics, have you been able to think of a few benefits to global warming or does the challenge simply not compute?

 

[LegendKiller]

Originally posted by: alchemize

Originally posted by: Craig234

Originally posted by: alchemize

Originally posted by: marincounty
Most of you laughed at Al Gore when he was talking about a Social Security lockbox.
Are you still laughing? Oh yeah, Bush wants to go to mars.

Hot damn, we've got democratic control of two of three branches...social security lock...err...

Obama plans to go to mars on a stack of freshly printed dollar bills.

Yah, I'm still laughing that your partisan clock is stuck in 2006.

Protecting the Social Security trust fund was relevant when we had a surplus (Clinton), not when the Republicans have brought our economy to the edge of collapse needing deficits.

And yours is stuck in 2006 as well.

Hint, the last budget passed by a republican congress was a few years ago also...

Oh, and
deficit you say?

Too bad they wanted to break their "promise"/"contract" and spend the money. Clinton poo-poohed them.

 

[Jiggz]

Originally posted by: shira

Originally posted by: Jaskalas

Originally posted by: Genx87
Yes, reducing Co2 is the same as stopping the National Socialists.

What a douchebag.

If your religious faith decreed that most the life on the planet was in imminent danger of dying then you too would easily compare Co2 to Nazis. In fact, Nazis would be pants by comparison.

The trouble is, right-wing true-believers won't ever acknowledge a cause-and-effect relationship between high CO2 levels (or specifically, mankind's contributions to high CO2 levels) and climate change, regardless of the weight of scientific evidence.

For right-wing ideologues, the damage caused by Hitler and the Nazis is easy to grasp, but throw anything of a statistical nature their way and watch their eyes glaze over. It's an IQ problem - they just don't have the brainpower to understand anything with more than one moving part.

A classic right-wing, anti-global-warming argument: "If you can't even predict tomorrow's weather, how can you possibly have confidence in complex algorithms that model weather patterns decades into the future?" To which a liberal with even a high-school education would respond: "If you can't predict what specific smokers will get lung cancer and/or heart disease - and when, how can you possibly say that smoking is bad for your health?

Right-wingers just don't get it. Pity them.

So where is this thing you referred to as " weight of scientific evidence"? So why do you think "Internet Inventor" Al Gore changed his terminologies from "Global Warming" to "Climate Change"? And don't be surprised if the term change again before the end of this year! And don't forget his net worth also "changed" from 10's of millions to 100's of millions in less than a decade! Now that's what you call a real "$climate $change"!

Oh by the way, don't ever assume conservatives don't give a crap about the environment, except that it's not going to be the way Al Gore preaches it or the way you believed him!

 

[silverpig]

Originally posted by: Genx87
Yes, reducing Co2 is the same as stopping the National Socialists.

What a douchebag.

Didn't you hear? CO2 only affects the Jews.

 

[CanOWorms]

Speaking in Oxford at the Smith School World Forum on Enterprise and the Environment , sponsored by The Times, Mr Gore said: ?Winston Churchill aroused this nation in heroic fashion to save civilisation in World War II.?

FUCK YOU AL GORE.

Winston Churchill was a monster and he slaughtered millions of civilized people in the name of his horrible, disgusting, and perverted Empire of Death. He was one of the worst monsters of the 20th century and is on the same level, if not worse, than Hitler.

Saved civilization? Maybe British civilization, but he destroyed so many others.

Winston Churchill is burning in hell right now.

 

[Drako]

Originally posted by: CanOWorms

Speaking in Oxford at the Smith School World Forum on Enterprise and the Environment , sponsored by The Times, Mr Gore said: ?Winston Churchill aroused this nation in heroic fashion to save civilisation in World War II.?

FUCK YOU AL GORE.

Winston Churchill was a monster and he slaughtered millions of civilized people in the name of his horrible, disgusting, and perverted Empire of Death. He was one of the worst monsters of the 20th century and is on the same level, if not worse, than Hitler.

Saved civilization? Maybe British civilization, but he destroyed so many others.

Winston Churchill is burning in hell right now.

You're right of course. We all would have been much better off under Nazi rule. :roll:

Wow, you're a retard.

 

[fskimospy]

Originally posted by: CanOWorms

Speaking in Oxford at the Smith School World Forum on Enterprise and the Environment , sponsored by The Times, Mr Gore said: ?Winston Churchill aroused this nation in heroic fashion to save civilisation in World War II.?

FUCK YOU AL GORE.

Winston Churchill was a monster and he slaughtered millions of civilized people in the name of his horrible, disgusting, and perverted Empire of Death. He was one of the worst monsters of the 20th century and is on the same level, if not worse, than Hitler.

Saved civilization? Maybe British civilization, but he destroyed so many others.

Winston Churchill is burning in hell right now.

Al Gore didn't say "All of Winston Churchill's policy decisions were good ones", he said that specific thing he did was a good thing and that's pretty hard to argue with.

 

[Craig234]

Originally posted by: Wreckem

Originally posted by: ElFenix

Originally posted by: marincounty
Most of you laughed at Al Gore when he was talking about a Social Security lockbox.
Are you still laughing? Oh yeah, Bush wants to go to mars.

can anyone describe the social security lock box concept to me?

The lock box wouldn't have fixed Social Security but it would have lessened social securities deficits.

The "lock box" would have prevented Congress from using social security funds paid in to pay for stuff other than Social Security.

Al Gore proposed we stop spending Social Security money. But didnt propose how to come up with the respected budget shortfall that not spending that money would have created.

Uh, three for a start, no tax cut fo rthe rich; no war in Iraq; no big increases in domestic spending for the K Street project special interest, e.g., medicare part d big pharma.

 

[CanOWorms]

Originally posted by: Drako

Originally posted by: CanOWorms

Speaking in Oxford at the Smith School World Forum on Enterprise and the Environment , sponsored by The Times, Mr Gore said: ?Winston Churchill aroused this nation in heroic fashion to save civilisation in World War II.?

FUCK YOU AL GORE.

Winston Churchill was a monster and he slaughtered millions of civilized people in the name of his horrible, disgusting, and perverted Empire of Death. He was one of the worst monsters of the 20th century and is on the same level, if not worse, than Hitler.

Saved civilization? Maybe British civilization, but he destroyed so many others.

Winston Churchill is burning in hell right now.

You're right of course. We all would have been much better off under Nazi rule. :roll:

Wow, you're a retard.

You're right of course. The choice is only between Nazi or British rule. :roll:

Wow, you're a retard.

 

[CanOWorms]

Originally posted by: eskimospy

Originally posted by: CanOWorms

Speaking in Oxford at the Smith School World Forum on Enterprise and the Environment , sponsored by The Times, Mr Gore said: ?Winston Churchill aroused this nation in heroic fashion to save civilisation in World War II.?

FUCK YOU AL GORE.

Winston Churchill was a monster and he slaughtered millions of civilized people in the name of his horrible, disgusting, and perverted Empire of Death. He was one of the worst monsters of the 20th century and is on the same level, if not worse, than Hitler.

Saved civilization? Maybe British civilization, but he destroyed so many others.

Winston Churchill is burning in hell right now.

Al Gore didn't say "All of Winston Churchill's policy decisions were good ones", he said that specific thing he did was a good thing and that's pretty hard to argue with.

I fail to see how it's hard to argue against his supposed role as savior of civilization.

 

[shira]

Originally posted by: Jiggz

Originally posted by: shira

Originally posted by: Jaskalas

Originally posted by: Genx87
Yes, reducing Co2 is the same as stopping the National Socialists.

What a douchebag.

If your religious faith decreed that most the life on the planet was in imminent danger of dying then you too would easily compare Co2 to Nazis. In fact, Nazis would be pants by comparison.

The trouble is, right-wing true-believers won't ever acknowledge a cause-and-effect relationship between high CO2 levels (or specifically, mankind's contributions to high CO2 levels) and climate change, regardless of the weight of scientific evidence.

For right-wing ideologues, the damage caused by Hitler and the Nazis is easy to grasp, but throw anything of a statistical nature their way and watch their eyes glaze over. It's an IQ problem - they just don't have the brainpower to understand anything with more than one moving part.

A classic right-wing, anti-global-warming argument: "If you can't even predict tomorrow's weather, how can you possibly have confidence in complex algorithms that model weather patterns decades into the future?" To which a liberal with even a high-school education would respond: "If you can't predict what specific smokers will get lung cancer and/or heart disease - and when, how can you possibly say that smoking is bad for your health?

Right-wingers just don't get it. Pity them.

So where is this thing you referred to as " weight of scientific evidence"? So why do you think "Internet Inventor" Al Gore changed his terminologies from "Global Warming" to "Climate Change"? And don't be surprised if the term change again before the end of this year! And don't forget his net worth also "changed" from 10's of millions to 100's of millions in less than a decade! Now that's what you call a real "$climate $change"!

Oh by the way, don't ever assume conservatives don't give a crap about the environment, except that it's not going to be the way Al Gore preaches it or the way you believed him!

Despite the OP, I couldn't care less what terms Al Gore has used or uses. I've been using the term "climate change" for many years, as have virtually all other people conversant on the topic (including ALL real climatologists - and note that job title: "climatologist," not "global warmologist"). The term "global warming" is used by serious climatologists only when "talking down", and by right-wing, know-nothing nut-jobs.

Your asking for the "weight of scientific evidence" supporting anthropogenic climate change is akin to special creationists insisting that they never see "intermediate forms." To demonstrate to you the absurdity of your question, let me ask YOU: Where is the weight of scientific evidence supporting general relativity? Come on, where is it? SHOW IT TO ME!!!

The "weight of evidence" you ask for is everywhere; it's not assembled in one neat little package. Try, for example, visiting the IPCC website and obtaining their publications. Or try subscribing to the International Journal of Climatology (Royal Meteorological Society) or the Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology (American Meteorological Society) and READING what workaday climatologists write. Do NOT restrict your reading to the rants of anti-climate-change demagogues who selectively pick and choose papers that support their pre-determined beliefs. Be a generalist.

Oh, but naturally you'll respond that the great majority of climatologists and all of the major scientific organizations who have announced their belief that anthropogenic climate change is real are part of a global scientific conspiracy to whip up climate-change hysteria. But just think about that hypothesis for a moment, and then ask yourself the obvious question, why on Earth would scientists align themselves with a conspiracy to spread false information? And WHY would there be such a conspiracy in the first place? Who would benefit?

 

[Wheezer]

Originally posted by: shira

Originally posted by: Jiggz

Originally posted by: shira

Originally posted by: Jaskalas

Originally posted by: Genx87
Yes, reducing Co2 is the same as stopping the National Socialists.

What a douchebag.

If your religious faith decreed that most the life on the planet was in imminent danger of dying then you too would easily compare Co2 to Nazis. In fact, Nazis would be pants by comparison.

The trouble is, right-wing true-believers won't ever acknowledge a cause-and-effect relationship between high CO2 levels (or specifically, mankind's contributions to high CO2 levels) and climate change, regardless of the weight of scientific evidence.

For right-wing ideologues, the damage caused by Hitler and the Nazis is easy to grasp, but throw anything of a statistical nature their way and watch their eyes glaze over. It's an IQ problem - they just don't have the brainpower to understand anything with more than one moving part.

A classic right-wing, anti-global-warming argument: "If you can't even predict tomorrow's weather, how can you possibly have confidence in complex algorithms that model weather patterns decades into the future?" To which a liberal with even a high-school education would respond: "If you can't predict what specific smokers will get lung cancer and/or heart disease - and when, how can you possibly say that smoking is bad for your health?

Right-wingers just don't get it. Pity them.

So where is this thing you referred to as " weight of scientific evidence"? So why do you think "Internet Inventor" Al Gore changed his terminologies from "Global Warming" to "Climate Change"? And don't be surprised if the term change again before the end of this year! And don't forget his net worth also "changed" from 10's of millions to 100's of millions in less than a decade! Now that's what you call a real "$climate $change"!

Oh by the way, don't ever assume conservatives don't give a crap about the environment, except that it's not going to be the way Al Gore preaches it or the way you believed him!

Despite the OP, I couldn't care less what terms Al Gore has used or uses. I've been using the term "climate change" for many years, as have virtually all other people conversant on the topic (including ALL real climatologists - and note that job title: "climatologist," not "global warmologist"). The term "global warming" is used by serious climatologists only when "talking down", and by right-wing, know-nothing nut-jobs.

Your asking for the "weight of scientific evidence" supporting anthropogenic climate change is akin to special creationists insisting that they never see "intermediate forms." To demonstrate to you the absurdity of your question, let me ask YOU: Where is the weight of scientific evidence supporting general relativity? Come on, where is it? SHOW IT TO ME!!!

The "weight of evidence" you ask for is everywhere; it's not assembled in one neat little package. Try, for example, visiting the IPCC website and obtaining their publications. Or try subscribing to the International Journal of Climatology (Royal Meteorological Society) or the Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology (American Meteorological Society) and READING what workaday climatologists write. Do NOT restrict your reading to the rants of anti-climate-change demagogues who selectively pick and choose papers that support their pre-determined beliefs. Be a generalist.

Oh, but naturally you'll respond that the great majority of climatologists and all of the major scientific organizations who have announced their belief that anthropogenic climate change is real are part of a global scientific conspiracy to whip up climate-change hysteria. But just think about that hypothesis for a moment, and then ask yourself the obvious question, why on Earth would scientists align themselves with a conspiracy to spread false information? And WHY would there be such a conspiracy in the first place? Who would benefit?

no one said anything about a "conspiracy".

there is no conspiracy....its is all a bunch of misguided fools who are full of shit.

kinda like the Klan, Nazis, or Communists.

 

[ElFenix]

Originally posted by: Craig234

The baby boom generation is a huge spike in the US population. The social security system was recognized long ago to face high payments when they retire.

Under Reagan, a commission was created on what to do, and it led to increasing the social security withholding - a surtax put into a 'trust fund' saved to pay the spike in payments.

But Reagan also passed the biggest tax cut in history almost entirely for the wealthy (at the same time, including the surtax, the largest tax increase in history for the working class). This resulted in net massive deficits, the country going broke. He turned to Alan Greenspan for what to do.

Greenspan told him to borrow the money from the trust fund. Not only would it help him pay the bills, financially it was treated as 'off the budget' borrowing. Reagan did it.

And ever since, what was supposed to be a measure for financial prudence, saving for the big payments for baby boomers, has instead been a massive tax (regressive, hitting the lower income workers much more than the wealthy) every president since has used to pay the bills - and add an 'IOU' to the file, creating trillions in debt for the government off the budget.

What Gore did was basically to suggest that the trust fund be protected from this borrowing/spending and the metaphor he used was a lockbox.

Of course, just as they had ridiculed his leadership creating the internet to keep him from getting credit, they ridiculed the lockox and assured voters big surpluses made it unneeded.
< snip >

that's why we need the lockbox. that doesn't explain how the lockbox, as gore proposed, would have worked.

Originally posted by: Wreckem

Al Gore proposed we stop spending Social Security money.

i'm still trying to figure out how we would have accomplished that. did he propose not buying bonds?

 

[fskimospy]

Originally posted by: CanOWorms

Originally posted by: eskimospy

Originally posted by: CanOWorms

Speaking in Oxford at the Smith School World Forum on Enterprise and the Environment , sponsored by The Times, Mr Gore said: ?Winston Churchill aroused this nation in heroic fashion to save civilisation in World War II.?

FUCK YOU AL GORE.

Winston Churchill was a monster and he slaughtered millions of civilized people in the name of his horrible, disgusting, and perverted Empire of Death. He was one of the worst monsters of the 20th century and is on the same level, if not worse, than Hitler.

Saved civilization? Maybe British civilization, but he destroyed so many others.

Winston Churchill is burning in hell right now.

Al Gore didn't say "All of Winston Churchill's policy decisions were good ones", he said that specific thing he did was a good thing and that's pretty hard to argue with.

I fail to see how it's hard to argue against his supposed role as savior of civilization.

You'll have to explain your position than. It didn't say he did great things for other cultures in the years prior to WWII. I think any rational person would say that civilization would have been a fair bit worse off had Hitler won WWII, and Churchill played an instrumental part in his defeat.