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Mr. Oragahn
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Post by Mr. Oragahn » Tue Apr 21, 2009 2:47 pm

Antarctic ice is growing, not melting away
News.com.au wrote: Dr Allison said there was not any evidence of significant change in the mass of ice shelves in east Antarctica nor any indication that its ice cap was melting. "The only significant calvings in Antarctica have been in the west," he said. And he cautioned that calvings of the magnitude seen recently in west Antarctica might not be unusual.

"Ice shelves in general have episodic carvings and there can be large icebergs breaking off - I'm talking 100km or 200km long - every 10 or 20 or 50 years."

Ice core drilling in the fast ice off Australia's Davis Station in East Antarctica by the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Co-Operative Research Centre shows that last year, the ice had a maximum thickness of 1.89m, its densest in 10 years. The average thickness of the ice at Davis since the 1950s is 1.67m.

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Post by PunkMaister » Tue Apr 21, 2009 9:44 pm

Who is like God arbour wrote:The truth about Obama's birth certificate
    • FactCheck.org is a nonpartisan, nonprofit website that describes itself as a "'consumer advocate' for voters that aims to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics." It is a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Centerof the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, and is funded primarily by the Annenberg Foundation.

      Most of its content consists of rebuttals to what it considers inaccurate, misleading, or false claims by politicians. FactCheck has also targeted misleading claims from various partisan groups.
I've done some digging of my own and guess what I've found out about so called Factcheck! Here's the scoop:

Inconsistencies undermine FactCheck report on Obama "birth certificate"
By Reuven Koret August 24, 2008



Image

The embedded EXIF file information dates the image file from March 12, 2008, while FactCheck claims vaguely that the shot was taken "recently"


The Annenberg Political Factcheck website has published photographs and an analysis of what it says is the "original birth certificate" of Barack Hussein Obama II. While the physical document depicted in the photos resemble the document image previously scanned and published by the Daily Kos website and Obama's own "Fight the Smears" site in June, FactCheck's case for authenticity and its claims to objectivity are undermined by a litany of process flaws, conflicts of interest and factual inconsistencies that raise doubts about its motives and methods of those of the Obama campaign.

The Factcheck.org report, titled "Born in the USA," accompanied by an image of the Bruce Springsteen album cover, starts:

In June, the Obama campaign released a digitally scanned image of his birth certificate to quell speculative charges that he might not be a natural-born citizen. But the image prompted more blog-based skepticism about the document's authenticity. And recently, author Jerome Corsi, whose book attacks Obama, said in a TV interview that the birth certificate the campaign has is "fake."

We beg to differ. FactCheck.org staffers have now seen, touched, examined and photographed the original birth certificate. We conclude that it meets all of the requirements from the State Department for proving U.S. citizenship. Claims that the document lacks a raised seal or a signature are false. We have posted high-resolution photographs of the document as "supporting documents" to this article. Our conclusion: Obama was born in the U.S.A. just as he has always said.

FactCheck claims that its staffers have "seen, touched, examined and photographed the original birth certificate" begs the question and obscures the truth. In fact, the article later goes on to make clear that this is in fact not "the original birth certificate" but "a 'certification of birth,' also known as a short-form birth certificate. The long form is drawn up by the hospital and includes additional information such as birth weight and parents' hometowns."

"The Hawaii Department of Health's birth record request form does not give the option to request a photocopy of your long-form birth certificate, but their short form has enough information to be acceptable to the State Department. We tried to ask the Hawaii DOH why they only offer the short form, among other questions, but they have not given a response."

This would seem to suggest that Factcheck went through the process of requesting the birth certificate (after all, why else reproduce and link the request form?), but no -- it turns out that they had a special invitation to visit the birth certificate at its residence, as if they were visiting some long lost relatives or a reclusive celebrity:

"Recently FactCheck representatives got a chance to spend some time with the birth certificate, and we can attest to the fact that it is real and three-dimensional and resides at the Obama headquarters in Chicago."

For an organization that claims to be fastidious with the facts, the sentence is vague and overly cute. Who made the invitation to "spend some time with the certificate"? How exactly did it happen that they "got a chance"? Did FactCheck approach the Obama Campaign or did the Obama Campaign approach FactCheck? And what are the forensic analysis credentials of the FactCheck staff that allows them to conclude definitively that the birth certificate is real and original?

And when is "recently"? The controversy over the birth certificate has been raging for ten weeks. Was it coincidental that it would emerge right after Obama returned from his "vacation" in Hawaii? The claim of "recently" is thrown into further doubt by the revelation that embedded date information in the photographs indicates that the photos were taken nearly a half year ago.

Factcheck.org posted 9 photographs of what it claimed were different aspects of Obama's "Certificate of Live Birth", all in less than optimal and idiosyncratic lighting conditions. All of them were taken over a less than seven minute period on March 12, 2008 from 10:40:18 to 10:47:02 at night.

No wonder FactCheck sufficed left it a vague "spend some time" when the duration of the entire photography session took 6 minutes and 44 seconds. Talk about: "Wham, bam, thank you, Obama!" Does that sound like a serious and thorough examination to

FactCheck will need to explain these hard chronological facts, which can be verified from the published photos by anyone with an EXIF reading tool, publically available on the net and as part of graphics software.

If the embedded graphical information is correct, it means that FactCheck is lying about doing the photo session "recently" and may be lying about much more, since it would be implausible that "FactCheck" was even checking facts about the birth certificate in March 2008.

Factcheck may try to argue that the photographer "forgot" to set the correct time. But that would further illuminate the shoddy level of professionalism in disregarding the need for exact documentation of the date, a carelessness echoed in the introductory remarks of its article ("recently" is not a fact, especially when it is not clearly associated with the location of the photo shoot ? where the documents "reside" is hardly the same thing). If so, FactCheck would also need to show some other published photos published with the same camera that show an identical offset between the camera's time and the real time.

Exactly for such reasons -- the lack of professionalism, exactitude and transparency concerning the provenance of this paper and the circumstances of the photographic session -- the reasonable demand from the skeptics -- who were initially made suspicious by the fact that the purported certificate image was published first (initially in relatively low resolution and only later in high resolution) in the far-left partisan Daily Kos blog -- has always been that the paper certificate must be subjected to the scrutiny of objective media or document forensics specialists, and mainstream journalists who can ask the hard question not just about this document image or that document image but examine it for themselves and query Obama himself about the many lingering mysteries and evasions in this whole affair.

It is striking, too, that Newsweek reprints the FactCheck report under the organizational byline without the minimal scrutiny that one would expect from a serious news magazine. In effect it is an advertorial serving the interests of the Obama campaign, not an objective piece of journalism. Indeed, at the end there is a credit: "Republished with permission from factcheck.org."

FactCheck itself, as a project primarily funded by the Annenberg Foundation, hardly fits the bill of being a disinterested party, especially given Obama's four year stint as founding chair of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, currently being investigated due to its massive withholding of papers which document the catestrophic failure of the project, including public funds wasted under Obama's leadership, and his relations in that project with former Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers.

Most curious, too, is the apparent lack of curiosity of FactCheck in pursuing the original "long-form" birth certificate that was supposedly used as the basis for the short form. After all, Barack Obama refers explicitly to possessing this document in "Dreams from My Father". Since FactCheck apparently has sufficiently close relations with the Obama teams to merit the exclusive privilege of being invited to "spend some time" (or at least 6 minutes and 44 seconds) with the reclusive short-form, one might think that if they were really interested in checking facts or examining original records they would doggedly pursue the paper source document -- the real thing from 47 years ago, not something cleaned and extracted from a database and thus subject to all kinds of potential revision and redaction.

The Ides of March: A link with the pilfering of Passport files at State?

Rather than asking the hard questions of Obama himself, or even the Obama campaign, or even requesting additional documents from the State of Hawaii in the public interest (they said they "tried" to ask about the long form but failed to get an answer), FactCheck falls back on the rather lame claim that the short form has "enough information to be acceptable to the State Department" and goes so far as to include a footnote linking to the State Department's Passport application requirements.

But isn't that bar set a bit too low for the man who wants to be President, especially as you can be a citizen without being "natural born" as article two of the Constitution require, especially when there are multiple reports coming from Kenya -- including several from Obama's own relatives -- that he was actually born in Kenya and came to Hawaii only days after birth, apparently at his mother's insistence that he would be recorded as being born in the USA? Apparently not too low for FactCheck. From their report it would appear that they are not interested or, perhaps more correctly, conflicted in their interests.

But the repeated references to State Department requirements for a passport take on a new significance in the light of the recognition, pointed out by an Israel Insider reader, that this "new" certificate of live birth is recorded as being photographed on March 12, 2008, and a contract employee of an Obama advisor -- allegedly a former CIA agent -- was caught breaking into Obama's passport files on March 14, 2008. Indeed, his passport file was looked at twice before--both times BEFORE this "certification of live birth" (not "certificate of birth," as FactCheck sloppily calls it) was photographed.

Shades of Watergate dirty tricks! Were those passport file break-ins ever investigated or prosecuted? Is it coincidental then that FactCheck inexplicably and repeatedly points out that this certificate of live birth contains all data required by the State Dept. to receive a passport?

The issue has never been whether or not Obama can prove U.S. citizenship well enough to get a passport. He gets around just fine, on one passport or another. The issues are where he was born, whether he is a natural born citizen under the Constitution, whether he ever was a citizen of another country, and, if so, whether he ever renounced that foreign citizenship. So why exactly was someone associated with Obama's campaign looking into his passport files? A suspicious mind might speculate that it was to see whether there was already a certificate of live birth (or a birth certificate) on file in the passport office and/or to see which data it contained and whether ALL data matched up with what was on the photographed certificate and to ensure that all data matched up with what Obama wants us to believe about his birth?

A cynic might speculate -- and it is only speculation, not a fact claim -- that these photos were originally taken to proudly show off how wonderful this document looked, complete with every detail necessary to obtain a U.S. passport -- the generation date, the embossed seal, the signature, the place of birth. And, based the embedded image information (unfortunately, for them, overlooked), it was conveniently photographed late one night in March 2008, before anyone even began to question his birth certificate in the blogosphere. "Recently", as FactCheck claims, being a relative term. Given these circumstances, it is incumbent on FactCheck to provide the exact date, place, and all participants in its photo shoot, and the circumstances by which this visit was arranged.

All of this, of course, would mean that FactCheck is working hand-in-glove with the campaign of that other Annenberg grantee, Barack Hussein Obama II. Either that, or their camera has a defective date function or special time machine capabilities worthy of their subject. In any case, Israel Insider and millions of Americans would really like to hear the clarifications about these discrepancies from the fellows at FactCheck, rather than accuse them of malfeasance.

A Very Short Photo Session: Wham, Bam, Thank You, Obama

The photographs themselves of course superficially resemble what a real short-form certificate should look like, although it is impossible to ascertain from a series of jpg images. Remarkably, for an organization which purports to be dedicated to checking facts, no high resolution of the document's two sides was made so that professionals could compare that scan with the scan previously published in the Daily Kos. The Obama headquarters has no scanner? FactCheck has no scanner? Only a Canon Powershot 570 with an unset date? Or perhaps they were granted a mere six minutes and 44 seconds and had no time for a scan.

Comparing the high resolution Daily Kos scan (as opposed to the scan originally published) with the FactCheck photos, there are obvious and dramatic differences. The scan shows only the thinnest of fold marks at the top and none below, no seal and no signature block. Oddly, only the June 6, 2007 date stamp is visible. Only after extreme manipulations of the Daily Kos image did some graphic specialists managed to squeeze out the blurred and color enhance image of something that just might be a seal or a signature block. But even then, the blurry seal trace did not appear in the correct size or expected location.

Those stark differences clearly validate the skepticism with which the scan was regarded by Israel Insider and others from the start. Why, then, did it take the campaign ten weeks to produce photos that show the missing seal, signature block and deep fold marks, so deep that they degrade some letters and print of the seal? What changed between June 12 and August 21?

Black out: Who forgot about concealing that all-important, or unimportant, file number?

Then there is the issue of the redacted file number which for the last ten plus weeks has been blacked out . Here's the explanation that comes from the Obama campaign, according to FactCheck:

We asked the Obama campaign about the date stamp and the blacked-out certificate number. The certificate is stamped June 2007, because that's when Hawaii officials produced it for the campaign, which requested that document and "all the records we could get our hands on" according to spokesperson Shauna Daly. The campaign didn't release its copy until 2008, after speculation began to appear on the Internet questioning Obama's citizenship. The campaign then rushed to release the document, and the rush is responsible for the blacked-out certificate number. Says Shauna: "[We] couldn't get someone on the phone in Hawaii to tell us whether the number represented some secret information, and we erred on the side of blacking it out. Since then we've found out it's pretty irrelevant for the outside world."
That's odd. What "rush" to release the document? Who exactly was rushing them? The bloggers over at Daily Kos? Why was the Obama campaign in such a "rush" if there was no problem and no real pressure to produce? They couldn't wait another few hours or a day to talk to the Hawaii Health Department before rushing to print at the Daily Kos? And then, after the redacted document was up, they couldn't have replaced it with an unredacted image, just as Kos later replaced, without telling anyone, a medium resolution with a high resolution image? Who told them to do that?

Only last week, the Honolulu Advertiser quoted Janice Okubo, Director of Communications in Hawaii's Department as Health, as saying that with the file number one could hack into the system. "Potentially, if you have that number, you could break into the system." Okubo seems on intent on defending the Obama campaign even if she admits that the image they presented as authentic lacked visible stamps and seals. "They responded and apparently it isn't good enough that he posted his birth certificate," Okubo said. "They say they want it because they claim he is not a citizen of the United States. It's pretty ridiculous."

So which is it? Is the file number irrelevant, as the campaign now claims, or is it a data that could be used to hack into the system, as Hawaii claims. If it is irrelevant, why is Janice Okubo providing excuses for the Obama campaign? If it is dangerous for data security, why is the Obama campaign ignoring that danger? And why does Okubo say it's "ridiculous" to be asking questions about the provenance of a vital record of a presidential candidate when the proffered proof clearly lacked the requisite stamps and signatures. Or did Obama's people and Okubo have a heart to heart between body surfing sessions at Waikiki?

Despite the points scored by the Obama campaign in gaining high level media coverage for a favorable puff piece, the FactCheck photospread -- revealing so much that the scan did not --unwittingly serves to validate the legitimacy of the probing questions and analyses that have been asked over the past two and a half months by Israel Insider and various bloggers, document examiners, and average citizens.

While the quality and consistency of the analyses of these amateur sleuths have been irregular, and have taken wrong turns on several occasions, shouldn't the burden of proof for documenting one's citizenship and producing the original vital records fall on the candidate and the legal authorities empowered for this purpose, not ordinary citizens disturbed by the lack of transparency of a presidential candidate and his arrogant unwillingness to produce documents expected of regular Americans?

The FactCheck report may have Obamatons humming "Born in the USA", but anyone serious about getting to the truth of Obama's constitutional qualifications will be disappointed by their casual and smug report. And they will expect more from a candidate who, like the protagonist in the opening lines of the Springsteen song, seems to "spend half [his] life just covering up."

The evidentiary and analytical shoddiness of the FactCheck report, both in terms of the dubious dating of the photos, the inexactitude in the circumstances of the shoot, apparent inconsistencies between the photos and the scan, and the failure to pursue the more significant, truly original, long form birth certificate, all point to the inadequacy of the proof presented to date to validate Obama's claim to being a "natural born" US citizen.

That question, it now seems, will need to be answered in federal court.
Link here


Here's the scoop on the matter of NationalSocialism:
National Socialism is a political term that is both vague and ambiguous. As the name suggests, features of nationalism and socialism are combined and interrelated to form an overall National Socialist ideology, although the combination process is neither obvious nor straightforward. The term most typically refers to Nazism, which was the ideology of the German Nazi Party (National Socialist German Workers' Party, or Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP)), which was led by Adolf Hitler.

As a generic concept, National Socialism opposes capitalism, communism, conservatism, international socialism and liberalism.[1] It also opposes certain nations, ethnicities and other groups that are deemed to be enemies of the specific ethnicity to which it is applied. Several political parties other than the Nazis in Germany have used the name National Socialist Party or National Socialist Movement. Maurice Barrés was the first to coin the term "national socialism".[2]

The National Socialist Program as advanced by Hitler in 1920 set out 25 points that constituted the party's fundamentals. The points were prepared in a one-night meeting between Hitler and Anton Drexler, and were presented at a public meeting on 24 February 1920, where they were affirmed by the attendees. There were attempts to alter the program in the early 1920s, most notably by Gregor Strasser, but Hitler quashed such deviations at the 1926 Bamberg Conference, and the points were declared soon thereafter to be "immutable" at the party's 1926 General Meeting.[3][4]. The program advocated uniting the German people (through Pan-Germanism), implementing profit-sharing in industry, nationalizing trusts, providing an extensive welfare state, instituting government control of the media, and persecuting Jews, in part by canceling their German citizenship.[5] The Program stated that "[o]nly a member of the race can be a citizen.... no Jew can be a member of the race."

Hitler's variety of National Socialism was founded on a Weltanschauung in which history was reducible to a racial struggle in the Darwinian sense. National Socialism was thus a Messianic movement, centered in the Fuhrerprincip and anchored in the thesis that only through racial purity could Germany find her salvation. The movement was based on anti-Semitism, anti-Marxism and hyper-nationalism, manifesting itself through Pan-Germanism and the quest for Lebensraum.[6]
And here is the scoop on Nationalism which is what I consider myself:
Nationalism refers to an ideology, a sentiment, a form of culture, or a social movement that focuses on the nation.[1] It is a type of collectivism emphasizing the collective of a specific nation. While there is significant debate over the historical origins of nations, nearly all specialists accept that nationalism, at least as an ideology and social movement, is a modern phenomenon originating in Europe.[2] Precisely where and when it emerged is difficult to determine, but its development is closely related to that of the modern state and the push for popular sovereignty that came to a head with the French Revolution in the late 18th century. Since that time, nationalism has become one of the most significant political and social forces in history, perhaps most notably as a major influence or cause of World War I and especially World War II due to the rise of fascism, a radical and authoritarian nationalist ideology.[3][4][5][6]

As an ideology, nationalism holds that 'the people' in the doctrine of popular sovereignty is the nation, and that as a result only nation-states founded on the principle of national self-determination are legitimate. Since most states are multinational, or at least home to more than one group claiming national status,[7] In many cases nationalist pursuit of self-determination has caused conflict between people and states including war[8] (both external and domestic), secession; and in extreme cases, genocide.

Nationalism is a strong social phenomenon in the world as national flags, national anthems and national divisions are examples of 'banal' nationalism that is often mentally unconscious.[9] Moreover, some scholars argue that nationalism as a sentiment or form of culture, sometimes described as 'nationality' to avoid the ideology's tarnished reputation, is the social foundation of modern society. Industrialization, democratization, and support for economic redistribution have all been at least partly attributed to the shared social context and solidarity that nationalism provides.[10][11][12]

Nevertheless, nationalism remains a hotly contested subject on which there is little general consensus. The clearest example of opposition to nationalism is cosmopolitanism, with adherents as diverse as liberals, Marxists, and anarchists, but even nationalism's defenders often disagree on its virtues, and it is common for nationalists of one persuasion to disparage the aspirations of others for both principled and strategic reasons. Indeed, the only fact about nationalism that is not in dispute may be that few other social phenomena have had a more enduring impact on the modern world.
So while it could be argued that NationalSocialism can be derived from Nationalism they are not by any means the same exact thing unless you want to argue that the American Revolution and the rise of the Nazis are fully interchangeable when they are not.


Mr. Oragahn wrote:Antarctic ice is growing, not melting away
News.com.au wrote: Dr Allison said there was not any evidence of significant change in the mass of ice shelves in east Antarctica nor any indication that its ice cap was melting. "The only significant calvings in Antarctica have been in the west," he said. And he cautioned that calvings of the magnitude seen recently in west Antarctica might not be unusual.

"Ice shelves in general have episodic carvings and there can be large icebergs breaking off - I'm talking 100km or 200km long - every 10 or 20 or 50 years."

Ice core drilling in the fast ice off Australia's Davis Station in East Antarctica by the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Co-Operative Research Centre shows that last year, the ice had a maximum thickness of 1.89m, its densest in 10 years. The average thickness of the ice at Davis since the 1950s is 1.67m.
That does not surprise me in the slightest as geologically Earth has indeed gone thru periods of warming followed by long during glacial periods. In fact ironically is due to Global warming that the long yet overdue Ice age has not set in yet but eventually will.

And to those that ask why I profoundly dislike so called environmentalists the reason is because in my experience 9 out of 10 times the so called environmentalist is not really an environmentalist at all but a Marxist/communist radical using environmental issues to peddle their own agenda across which many times have as little to do with the environment as apples have to do with oranges. Take this perp for example Tito Kayak

This are the kind of people now at the forefront of so called enviromental issues and also sindicate issues overhere, yesterday I heard on the radio some dumbarse chick saying that Private Enterprise does not generate jobs yeah right and pigs fly!

Finally this little video from Fiel a la Vega should answer some questions as to who and what we Puertorricans are all about:
Salimos de aqui

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Post by 2046 » Wed Apr 22, 2009 12:04 pm

Jedi Master Spock wrote:
2046 wrote:Interesting read: Liberal Fascism

Just to confuse the issue that much more. ;)

Suffice it to say that leftist statism, historically, is more dangerous than any conservative statism that can be dreamt up.
Seen it before. In my opinion, Goldberg is full of it, and his book is fairly near to complete garbage.
Insofar as I never got around to finishing it I would agree, except he does raise some interesting points.

Basically I think fascism, in all its common forms of the time, falls somewhat outside the right-left dichotomy we are used to in the US. Australia's left and right, for instance, believe different things than our own. Oh, sure, the fascists bitched about communists, but that means little. The modern Republican party often merely puts a spin on Democrat party leftism, instead of genuinely being conservative.

That is to say, the fascists had accepted many of the premises of the left, and rolled their own solutions therefrom.

It's kind of like watching MSNBC, then watching Fox News, then watching Lou Dobbs. You get the first two down with no problem but the last one just leaves you going "WTF?"

Still, from a perspective of the modern American dichotomy, I would say that the fascists were hardly conservative. (The liberals of the time . . . if you'll forgive my time-shift . . . loved them some Mussolini.) They either were socialists or favored similar non-capitalist systems. They were authoritarians, interested in indoctrination not education. Italy gives us the example of massive growth of government, massive growth in entitlement spending (e.g. healthcare, welfare), and so on.

This is all quite similar to the American 'progressive', as Goldberg notes in a shorter piece here.
It's for very good reasons that most historians place fascism in the right wing; fascists were reacting to the rise of communism on the left.
But they hated capitalism just as virulently, portraying themselves as a third way but really just being socialist with some faux competition and extra corruption.
Fascist regimes emphasized traditions, rejected pluralism, rejected democracy, rejected pacifism, rejected - explicitly - liberals. The direct historical descendants of fascist parties? Universally on the far right fringe.
Once you get into the far fringes, you usually find that the political spectrum is not really a line, but a circle. Where the fringes meet on the bottom, you find many of the same psychoses. The list of things above works just as well for far left fringe groups, if not better.

For instance, I hardly see rejection of democracy as a right-wing belief or phenomenon, and I'm a little surprised you suggested it.

But, insofar as matters like allowing self-governance via completely separate legal systems for ethnic or religious groups within US borders (e.g. Sharia law), I guess you could say conservatives are not multicultural. However, it's also true that there are left-wing anti-pluralist, anti-pacifist groups such as La Raza, which basically advocates a reconquista and Hispanic dominance.
Neo-nazi groups are largely conservative or reactionary.
They're largely buttholes and white supremacists, which are not political views. There was aliberal democrat neo-Nazi in Britain, for instance.

Frankly, I didn't find much on neo-Nazi politics in a 15 minute search, despite my usual powerful Google-Fu. I heard they liked Ron Paul, for instance, but he's not especially conservative in a lot of ways, and was previously a publisher of racist trash, which was probably the part they liked.

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Post by Mr. Oragahn » Sat Apr 25, 2009 11:08 am

2046 wrote: Frankly, I didn't find much on neo-Nazi politics in a 15 minute search, despite my usual powerful Google-Fu. I heard they liked Ron Paul, for instance, but he's not especially conservative in a lot of ways, and was previously a publisher of racist trash, which was probably the part they liked.
Interesting. Do you have any of such information?
It would be a good thing to put into perspective against the usual super google support he found on internet, like he's the next saviour of all freedoms and so on, since what you say clearly seems to speak of the opposite.

On another note, this winter, we had snow in the garden. A lot, it stayed for long, several centimeters thick. The last time we had so much snow, as much as we could literally go skying down the hills, it was in the early 70s.
Last winter has obviously not matched this long held record, but it was warming to see the snow back in winter.

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Post by PunkMaister » Sat Apr 25, 2009 10:19 pm

Mr. Oragahn wrote:
2046 wrote: Frankly, I didn't find much on neo-Nazi politics in a 15 minute search, despite my usual powerful Google-Fu. I heard they liked Ron Paul, for instance, but he's not especially conservative in a lot of ways, and was previously a publisher of racist trash, which was probably the part they liked.
Interesting. Do you have any of such information?
It would be a good thing to put into perspective against the usual super google support he found on internet, like he's the next saviour of all freedoms and so on, since what you say clearly seems to speak of the opposite.

On another note, this winter, we had snow in the garden. A lot, it stayed for long, several centimeters thick. The last time we had so much snow, as much as we could literally go skying down the hills, it was in the early 70s.
Last winter has obviously not matched this long held record, but it was warming to see the snow back in winter.
There's a whole lot of people on this world that pretend to be something when in reality there something else entirely. There's a lot of people now in the liberal arena that say they are Pro human rights but if you look closely it depends on who's rights are they specifically talking about, they are talking about rights for certain groups while taking away some, most or all rights from others. The same goes for the environmental movement where there is a a whole lot of leftist radicals whose agendas have absolutely nothing to do with the environment in the first place and simply use Environmental issues as a platform to launch "protests" aimed that de-stabilizing economy and society as a whole rather than to protect the environment.

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Post by Jedi Master Spock » Sun Apr 26, 2009 5:58 pm

Mr. Oragahn wrote:On another note, this winter, we had snow in the garden. A lot, it stayed for long, several centimeters thick. The last time we had so much snow, as much as we could literally go skying down the hills, it was in the early 70s.

Last winter has obviously not matched this long held record, but it was warming to see the snow back in winter.
The thing to bear in mind about global warming is that it does not mean everywhere on the globe gets warmer in all seasons. In general, weather will tend to get more extreme as you dump more energy in the system.

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Post by Mr. Oragahn » Mon Apr 27, 2009 12:48 am

Jedi Master Spock wrote:
Mr. Oragahn wrote:On another note, this winter, we had snow in the garden. A lot, it stayed for long, several centimeters thick. The last time we had so much snow, as much as we could literally go skying down the hills, it was in the early 70s.

Last winter has obviously not matched this long held record, but it was warming to see the snow back in winter.
The thing to bear in mind about global warming is that it does not mean everywhere on the globe gets warmer in all seasons. In general, weather will tend to get more extreme as you dump more energy in the system.
When and where were those balancing extremes?

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Post by Jedi Master Spock » Mon Apr 27, 2009 6:10 am

Mr. Oragahn wrote:
Jedi Master Spock wrote:
Mr. Oragahn wrote:On another note, this winter, we had snow in the garden. A lot, it stayed for long, several centimeters thick. The last time we had so much snow, as much as we could literally go skying down the hills, it was in the early 70s.

Last winter has obviously not matched this long held record, but it was warming to see the snow back in winter.
The thing to bear in mind about global warming is that it does not mean everywhere on the globe gets warmer in all seasons. In general, weather will tend to get more extreme as you dump more energy in the system.
When and where were those balancing extremes?
Let's rewind a little to here. That was twelve years ago.

Weather is a very complex thing - one of the very systems that gave rise to the study of chaos - and global warming is about looking at the global average on the broadest possible scale. Overall warming can cause all sorts of different small-scale events - such as re-routing ocean currents, which can easily cause cooling or warming in particular areas.

For example, the western parts of Europe experience a lot of warming from the Gulf Stream. If the Gulf Stream falters - which is part of many global warming forecasts - Western Europe will cool sharply even as the global average temperatures rise.

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Post by Mr. Oragahn » Mon Apr 27, 2009 8:55 am

Jedi Master Spock wrote:
Mr. Oragahn wrote:
Jedi Master Spock wrote: The thing to bear in mind about global warming is that it does not mean everywhere on the globe gets warmer in all seasons. In general, weather will tend to get more extreme as you dump more energy in the system.
When and where were those balancing extremes?
Let's rewind a little to here. That was twelve years ago.

Weather is a very complex thing - one of the very systems that gave rise to the study of chaos - and global warming is about looking at the global average on the broadest possible scale. Overall warming can cause all sorts of different small-scale events - such as re-routing ocean currents, which can easily cause cooling or warming in particular areas.

For example, the western parts of Europe experience a lot of warming from the Gulf Stream. If the Gulf Stream falters - which is part of many global warming forecasts - Western Europe will cool sharply even as the global average temperatures rise.
I was rather expecting a case to balance this very specific winter, like a significant warm up someplace else, like in the US for example, on the east coast.
I realize that my post about the snowy winter appeared fairly naive in its approach, but there's been this canicule some years ago, third age people were not prepared and several died of dehydration (well, that's the story, now to say that some retirement houses didn't jump on the occasion to dust off the much crippled to get freshier customers...).
Following this period, and two years in its wake, global warming was on the lips of everybody as the cause of the canicule. It was a peak for the anthropogenic global warming craze, saying things could only get worse, that we'd have to get used to it, etc.
It just amuses me that when we have a winter which actually happens to be like they were a few decades ago, the same screaming people are not heard, and these same people were certainly not there to explain why things happened. They just cared about rolling the snowball.

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Post by Mr. Oragahn » Mon Apr 27, 2009 2:25 pm

PunkMaister wrote:
Mr. Oragahn wrote:
2046 wrote: Frankly, I didn't find much on neo-Nazi politics in a 15 minute search, despite my usual powerful Google-Fu. I heard they liked Ron Paul, for instance, but he's not especially conservative in a lot of ways, and was previously a publisher of racist trash, which was probably the part they liked.
Interesting. Do you have any of such information?
It would be a good thing to put into perspective against the usual super google support he found on internet, like he's the next saviour of all freedoms and so on, since what you say clearly seems to speak of the opposite.

On another note, this winter, we had snow in the garden. A lot, it stayed for long, several centimeters thick. The last time we had so much snow, as much as we could literally go skying down the hills, it was in the early 70s.
Last winter has obviously not matched this long held record, but it was warming to see the snow back in winter.
There's a whole lot of people on this world that pretend to be something when in reality there something else entirely. There's a lot of people now in the liberal arena that say they are Pro human rights but if you look closely it depends on who's rights are they specifically talking about, they are talking about rights for certain groups while taking away some, most or all rights from others. The same goes for the environmental movement where there is a a whole lot of leftist radicals whose agendas have absolutely nothing to do with the environment in the first place and simply use Environmental issues as a platform to launch "protests" aimed that de-stabilizing economy and society as a whole rather than to protect the environment.
It still doesn't tell me where to find the documents which reveal this aspect of Ron Paul though.

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Post by Jedi Master Spock » Wed Apr 29, 2009 7:01 am

Mr. Oragahn wrote:It still doesn't tell me where to find the documents which reveal this aspect of Ron Paul though.
This is the best my google-fu could turn up, along with some articles about fundraising and endorsements.

Basically speaking, there have been some newsletters put out under Ron Paul's name by his organization(s) that contain a great deal of racist material friendly to the white supremacist movement - anti-black rhetoric, endorsing David Duke, et cetera. Also, Ron Paul's amazing fundraising came in part from white supremacy groups, which unequivocally endorsed him during the primary season.

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Post by Mr. Oragahn » Wed Apr 29, 2009 2:56 pm

Jedi Master Spock wrote:
Mr. Oragahn wrote:It still doesn't tell me where to find the documents which reveal this aspect of Ron Paul though.
This is the best my google-fu could turn up, along with some articles about fundraising and endorsements.

Basically speaking, there have been some newsletters put out under Ron Paul's name by his organization(s) that contain a great deal of racist material friendly to the white supremacist movement - anti-black rhetoric, endorsing David Duke, et cetera. Also, Ron Paul's amazing fundraising came in part from white supremacy groups, which unequivocally endorsed him during the primary season.
Good find, it reminds that I dead hear something like that in the end of 08 about him.

The other problem though is where to get the money from outside of classic circles which generally fund the same sort of politicians?

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Post by Jedi Master Spock » Thu Apr 30, 2009 6:14 pm

Mr. Oragahn wrote:Good find, it reminds that I dead hear something like that in the end of 08 about him.

The other problem though is where to get the money from outside of classic circles which generally fund the same sort of politicians?
Well, it's funny you should mention it, because Obama got most of his campaign cash from outside the usual circles. His legendary campaign fundraising came mostly (>50%) from small individual donors on the internet. Since he had that in addition to the traditional Democratic big-money donors, he set new sky-high campaign fundraising records, but it's the small individual donors that put him into play and put him over the top.

The answer of where to find the money is one that Ron Paul and Howard Dean both answered successfully: The internet! Their independence from normal funding sources is one of the reasons why they are often considered different kinds of politicians than the usual.

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Post by Mr. Oragahn » Fri May 15, 2009 12:10 am

Jedi Master Spock wrote: Climate scientists do by and large agree. It's only a small number who do not; all the major aggregates of opinion have shown landslide support.
Speaking of results, though, have any of the global warming alarmist predictions panned out yet? Aren't they still peddling the hockey stick fraud? I heard Gore took it out but supposedly lots of the online nuts keep using it.
Global average temperatures have continued to rise since the early beginning of global warming "alarmism." That's the major prediction being panned out. Thirty years of continued warming since those predictions began have been quite convincing.

Two other things you might look at are ocean acidification - the ocean absorbing CO2 is one of the major damping factors in these models, and variation in how it is treated accounts for much of their variation - and the prediction that the Gulf stream will falter.

The Gulf stream prediction is one you might want to pay particular attention to, since it's a prediction that was being discussed a lot in the 1990s and seems to be starting to pan out now. This one is particularly tricky, because the Gulf stream brings a lot of warmth to the US and northern Europe, and so as a result of global warming, we expect to see a small measure of localized cooling. (In related news, Australia, of course, is expected to roast.)

The predictions about Arctic and Antarctic melting have also been panning out so far. Much was made of one particular ice shelf's continuing stability in the news lately, but overall, we're seeing a lot of reduction in ice and a corresponding sharp rate of sea level rise (as predicted).

So... yes, so far we've seen:
  • Temperature increase (as predicted)
  • Ice area loss (as predicted)
  • Ocean pH decline (as predicted)
  • Sea level rise/ice volume decline (as predicted)
  • Gulf stream starting to falter (as predicted).
Global warming alarmism? So far, pretty good track record for the past thirty years since it first became "fashionable." There's the prediction of increased hurricane energy, but that one hasn't really been completely confirmed or denied yet. There's a lot of statistical noise, and some concerns about macro-level pattern shifts (e.g., the effect of the Gulf stream) on hurricane formation.
I'm not saying I agree with every bit of the Republican science-related policies. Abstinence-only education smack in the middle of the MTV society is retarded, for example. "But", as they say, "their heart's in the right place" . . . isn't that what they say about all the myriad failed Democrat policies?
And that's one of the major policy changes I mentioned. Most important is that rather than simply taking the left side of the left vs right "culture war," Obama cites empirical evidence as the reason for the policy change.
All of which would be addressed within this set of ten myths about global warming:
MYTH 2: The "hockey stick" graph proves that the earth has experienced a steady, very gradual temperature increase for 1000 years, then recently began a sudden increase.

FACT: Significant changes in climate have continually occurred throughout geologic time. For instance, the Medieval Warm Period, from around 1000 to1200 AD (when the Vikings farmed on Greenland) was followed by a period known as the Little Ice Age. Since the end of the 17th Century the "average global temperature" has been rising at the low steady rate mentioned above; although from 1940 – 1970 temperatures actually dropped, leading to a Global Cooling scare.

The "hockey stick", a poster boy of both the UN's IPCC and Canada's Environment Department, ignores historical recorded climatic swings, and has now also been proven to be flawed and statistically unreliable as well. It is a computer construct and a faulty one at that.

MYTH 9: Receding glaciers and the calving of ice shelves are proof of global warming.

FACT: Glaciers have been receding and growing cyclically for hundreds of years. Recent glacier melting is a consequence of coming out of the very cool period of the Little Ice Age. Ice shelves have been breaking off for centuries. Scientists know of at least 33 periods of glaciers growing and then retreating. It’s normal. Besides, glacier's health is dependent as much on precipitation as on temperature.


MYTH 10: The earth’s poles are warming; polar ice caps are breaking up and melting and the sea level rising.

FACT: The earth is variable. The western Arctic may be getting somewhat warmer, due to unrelated cyclic events in the Pacific Ocean, but the Eastern Arctic and Greenland are getting colder. The small Palmer Peninsula of Antarctica is getting warmer, while the main Antarctic continent is actually cooling. Ice thicknesses are increasing both on Greenland and in Antarctica.

Sea level monitoring in the Pacific (Tuvalu) and Indian Oceans (Maldives) has shown no sign of any sea level rise.
This would show a considerable amount of cherry picking.

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Post by Jedi Master Spock » Fri May 15, 2009 2:32 am

Mr. Oragahn wrote:
MYTH 2: The "hockey stick" graph proves that the earth has experienced a steady, very gradual temperature increase for 1000 years, then recently began a sudden increase.
Not at all true, nor all that relevant to the global warming models. What is more relevant is that the sharpness of the temperature increase is quite unusual.
MYTH 9: Receding glaciers and the calving of ice shelves are proof of global warming.

FACT: Glaciers have been receding and growing cyclically for hundreds of years. Recent glacier melting is a consequence of coming out of the very cool period of the Little Ice Age.
... i.e., warming up since then. Ice turning into water pulls heat out of the rest of the system, and when there's a substantial period of change in one direction or another, it is one of the indicators of global warming or cooling.

In this particular case, reduction in ice levels have been predicted by global warming models, and those predictions have been precisely fulfilled as the years have passed.

It's been warmer - for example, in the Cretaceous. And transitioning to something like a Cretaceous climate in the course of a mere couple centuries would be catastrophic for us.
FACT: The earth is variable. The western Arctic may be getting somewhat warmer, due to unrelated cyclic events in the Pacific Ocean, but the Eastern Arctic and Greenland are getting colder.
Unrelated cyclic events? Not exactly.

The reason why northern Europe - from Greenland on down - is starting to cool I linked you to earlier in the other thread - Gulf stream changes. It's a prediction dating back at least fifteen years as part of the global warming models. The fact of the matter is that global warming models do not project all of the Earth becoming uniformly warmer at the same time.
The small Palmer Peninsula of Antarctica is getting warmer, while the main Antarctic continent is actually cooling. Ice thicknesses are increasing both on Greenland and in Antarctica.
In parts of Greenland and parts of Antarctica. Other parts are shedding ice like nobody's business. Overall? Both the arctic and antarctic systems are losing ice on the whole.
Sea level monitoring in the Pacific (Tuvalu) and Indian Oceans (Maldives) has shown no sign of any sea level rise.
The sea does not rise all places at the same rate at the same time, curiously enough - according to some measurements - but there's no question that it's rising overall. And rising, moreover, faster than we expect from ice melt alone - some of the sea level rise is due to thermal expansion rather than ice melt. Water does expand a little bit as you warm it up.
This would show a considerable amount of cherry picking.
No, not at all. The cherry picking is going on in the list you quoted - "Well, some glaciers are growing, so it's not a problem... some places are cooling, so it's not a problem."

Run the actual statistical correlation between CO2 levels and global average temperatures and you'll get a remarkably high figure. It's noncoincidental.

The models made these predictions years earlier; we see these effects happening now. The most dangerous effect of carbon overload, IMO, is ocean acidification, which I don't think you'll find mentioned on any "global warming myths" website, but it's a key feature of some of the most catastrophic projections, e.g., those involving a crash of the ocean's ecology. Ocean acidification alone is worth being worried about, regardless of whether you're living in a hurricane prone area, or a low-lying area, or anywhere else potentially impacted directly by global warming.

The only "alarmist" projection I haven't seen pan out yet is the hurricane one. While a link is suggested through the proxy of surface sea temperatures, it's hard to rigorously (statistically) tie hurricane activity to human activity, so the jury is still out. If, over the next ten or twenty years, we see a significant trend in hurricane activity, we might be able to nail down the relationship.

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