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U.S. Politics, 7


TerraPrime

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Yeah, the Sharia stuff is pretty bizarre. They say it's the number 1 threat to America, then as evidence, they cite overturned court cases. It's daft.

The conservatives get these little hobby horses from time to time, detailing great threats that are supposedly on the way. For instance, they think liberals are determined to implement a VAT soon, which they must be ever vigilant against, but I never hear that idea mentioned on the left.

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Can someone tell me why the fuck Republicans keep trying to bring up Sharia law like there's some danger of it becoming the legal standard in America? Is it because we have a black President with a funny name?

http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/09/gingrich-calls-for-federal-law-banning-shariah-law-in-us.php?ref=fpa

KEEP FEAR ALIVE!!!!!!!!

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If you want to see a perfect example of the battle going on right now for the soul of the GOP, watch

this.

It's refreshing to see a Republican (is the attorney, Tamara Holder, also a Republican?) who would speak up against bullshit racist rhetoric masquerading as fiscal conservatism. Well done.

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It's refreshing to see a Republican (is the attorney, Tamara Holder, also a Republican?) who would speak up against bullshit racist rhetoric masquerading as fiscal conservatism. Well done.

Honestly, this is the kind of thing that, to me, pretty well proves that the response to this year's elections (like most) are going to be a response to economic conditions. The GOP is at war with itself, which in any other economic climate might harm the party, but this year it doesn't matter because the recession is bad enough that even some voters who say they prefer Democrats on the issues plan to vote for Republicans. Christine O'Donnell may very well have destroyed Republican hopes for a Senate seat in Delaware, and Sharron Angle may have done the same in Nevada, but because it's a mid-year election in a dreadful economic climate, it doesn't matter.

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http://petrole.blog.lemonde.fr/2010/09/16/interview-with-robert-l-hirsch-22/

http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2010-09-16/exclusive-interview-robert-hirsch

oil man: In the book that you are about to publish, your case is that ‘peak oil’ may happen very soon indeed. According to you, when might we be getting into trouble ? In ten years, in less than ten years ?

Let me begin with this : the background is the production. World oil production had been rising and then it’s been flat, fluctuating, since the middle of 2004 : it's been on a ‘plateau’. The economic recession led to a decline in demand, but not much.

The world demand is going up again. It’s back to where it was before the beginning of the crisis in 2008.

Correct. And the oil production fluctuates in a band of 4 or 5 %. It’s not very big. I think that the world oil production cannot go higher than that.

What is your hypothesis ?

We will stay in this band, and within 2 to 5 years, world oil production will go into decline.

. . .

According to you, what would be the pace of decline, once that decline starts ?

That’s a crucial question, because the decline rate is going to determine how much trouble we’re in. In the book we look at two decline rates : 2 % and 4 % a year. Clearly the smaller the decline rate is, the less difficult it will be to deal with. 4 % is really catastrophic. 2 % is going to be less difficult but still very difficult.

How difficult ?

In our 2005 report, we worked on a world wide “crash program”, which is the best that you can possibly do. You can’t go faster than that, so it’s a limiting case. With a worldwide crash program, it’s going to take you more than ten years to catch up, because the problem is running away from you ! If you’re in a race with another person, and that other person gets a head start, even if you manage to run faster than him, it may take a very long time to catch up.

What should we expect, before the world is able to catch up with the ‘peak oil’ issue ?

From a world standpoint, Growth Domestic Product will decline every year for over a decade, and could easily be down 20 or 30 % over this period of time. That’s what I mean when I say « catastrophic ».

Wherever you live, somebody has to get food to you. And modern farming is run by oil, because the tractors that plow the ground and plant the seeds, and do the harvesting, run on oil. And then you have to transport the food to some kind of processor, and from there to the consumer.

In 2008, when the price of the barrel of oil was above 130 dollars, there’s been hunger demonstrations in more that 20 countries all over the Third World. Do you believe that it is the kind of things that we have to expect a much larger scale and for many years ?

Yes. My background is physics. There’s a term that I love. It's called “non-linear”. Linear is like this (Dr Hirsch draws a straight line in the air).

Non-linear is this, or that, or this, that, that (he draws many lines and curves going into very different directions), and so many things feed back on other things, and so forth.

Getting in and trying to understand the problem in some kind of detail is impossible because it’s very non-linear : that will impact this, and that will impact that, and that will impact people.

And people may behave rationally, or they may strike and go out in the streets. There may be political chaos ! When that happens, the police have to get out and then, you know, wars may happen. It gets very messy.

. . .

Peak oil : “A conspiracy to keep it quiet” in Washington, says Robert Hirsch

Interview with Robert L. Hirsch (2/2) - to full text of original

. . .

oil man: - What happened after you published your on ‘peak oil’ for the US Department of Energy (DoE) ?

The people that I was dealing with said : « No more work on peak oil, no more talk about it. »

People that were high in the administration hierarchy ?

The people that I was dealing with were high in the laboratory level. They were getting their instructions from people on the political side of the DoE, at high levels.

After the work we did on the 2005 study and the follow-up of 2006, the Department of Energy headquarters completely cut off all support for oil peaking and decline analysis. The people that I was working with at the National Energy Technology Laboratory were good people, they saw the problem, they saw how difficult the consequences would be – you know, the potential for huge damage – yet they were told : « No more work, no more discussion. »

That was in 2006, under Bush administration. Has anything changed with the Obama administration ?

It has not changed. I have friends who simply won’t talk about it now. So I have to assume that they are receiving the same kind of instructions

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God, I hope so. If we get ahead of the curve a decline in oil would be one of the best things for America right now. That is IF we get ahead of the curve. We are already dipping our toe in the water, and we are at least on par or ahead of Europe. We are well ahead of Asia. And to be honest, I think that Obama is more likely to move on this opportunity - although he may yet disappoint.

Particularly if the Senate retains the filibuster. There are currently 41 reasons why the US won't develop a serious energy policy...perhaps 46 counting a few Democrats. Americans were strongly in favor of reforming the health insurance system and we barely got that; I can't see that we'll be luckier in terms of energy policy, which has a lot less traction with the public.

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I don't really see matters improving any for years...maybe decades. Welcome to the new dark ages...

http://www2.macleans.ca/2010/09/14/third-world-america/

In February, the board of commissioners of Ohio’s Ashtabula County faced a scene familiar to local governments across America: a budget shortfall. They began to cut spending and reduced the sheriff’s budget by 20 per cent. A law enforcement agency staff that only a few years ago numbered 112, and had subsequently been pared down to 70, was cut again to 49 people and just one squad car for a county of 1,900 sq. km along the shore of Lake Erie. The sheriff’s department adapted. “We have no patrol units. There is no one on the streets. We respond to only crimes in progress. We don’t respond to property crimes,” deputy sheriff Ron Fenton told Maclean’s. The county once had a “very proactive” detective division in narcotics. Now, there is no detective division. “We are down to one evidence officer and he just runs the evidence room in case someone wants to claim property,” said Fenton. “People are getting property stolen, their houses broken into, and there is no one investigating. We are basically just writing up a report for the insurance company.”

If a county without police seems like a weird throwback to an earlier, frontier-like moment in American history, it is not the only one. “Back to the Stone Age” is the name of a seminar organized in March by civil engineers at Indiana’s Purdue University for local county supervisors interested in saving money by breaking up paved roads and turning them back to gravel. While only some paved roads in the state have been broken up, “There are a substantial number of conversations going on,” John Habermann, who manages a program at Purdue that helps local governments take care of infrastructure, told Maclean’s. “We presented a lot of talking points so that the county supervisors can talk logically back to elected officials when the question is posed,” he said. The state of Michigan had similar conversations. It has converted at least 50 miles of paved road to gravel in the last few years.

Welcome to the ground level of America’s economic crisis. The U.S. unemployment rate is 9.5 per cent. One in 10 homeowners are behind on their mortgage payments. Home sales are at record lows. While the economy has been growing for several quarters, the growth is anemic—only 1.6 per cent in the second quarter of this year—and producing few new jobs.

Cincinnati, Ohio, is cutting back on trash collection and snow removal and filling fewer potholes.

The city of Dallas is not picking up litter in public parks. Flint, Mich., laid off 23 of 88 firefighters and closed two fire stations. In some places it’s almost literally the dark ages: the city of Shelton in Washington state decided to follow the example of numerous other localities and last week turned off 114 of its 860 street lights. Others have axed bus service and cut back on library hours. Class sizes are being increased and teachers are being laid off. School districts around the country are cutting the school day or the school week or the school year—effectively furloughing students. The National Association of Counties estimates that local governments will eliminate roughly half a million employees in the next fiscal year, with public safety, public works, public health, social services, and parks and recreation hardest hit by the cutbacks. A July survey by the association of counties, the National League of Cities, and the U.S. Conference of Mayors of 270 local governments found that 63 per cent of localities are cutting back on public safety and 60 per cent are cutting public works.

Hard core Vigilantism going completely unchallenged, anybody? Along with large scale criminal gangs, volunteerism for firefighting and maybe things like libraries and even eductation? The shape of the nation is changing before our very eyes and the morons in congress - Republicans and Democrats alike - are completely ignoring this in favor of idiotic ideological squabbles that solve absolutely nothing and collecting all the corporate bribe money they can lay hands on.

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Americans were strongly in favor of reforming the health insurance system and we barely got that; I can't see that we'll be luckier in terms of energy policy, which has a lot less traction with the public

We didn't get reform. The corporations got a giant handout and the right to impose major insurance hikes on *everybody*. How much do you figure *YOUR* insurance payments will increase as a result of this so called 'reform' in a few more months?

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God, I hope so. If we get ahead of the curve a decline in oil would be one of the best things for America right now. That is IF we get ahead of the curve. We are already dipping our toe in the water, and we are at least on par or ahead of Europe. We are well ahead of Asia. And to be honest, I think that Obama is more likely to move on this opportunity - although he may yet disappoint.

How are you on a par with Europe? Your per capita oil consumption is massively greater than Europe and Europe has gone a long way towards natural gas instead, which admittedly presents its own problems.

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I don't really see matters improving any for years...maybe decades. Welcome to the new dark ages...

http://www2.macleans.ca/2010/09/14/third-world-america/

Hard core Vigilantism going completely unchallenged, anybody? Along with large scale criminal gangs, volunteerism for firefighting and maybe things like libraries and even eductation? The shape of the nation is changing before our very eyes and the morons in congress - Republicans and Democrats alike - are completely ignoring this in favor of idiotic ideological squabbles that solve absolutely nothing and collecting all the corporate bribe money they can lay hands on.

Yeah, but at least the feds can afford to spend nearly $1M in stimulus dollars teaching people in Africa how to clean their foreskins after sex.

http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/75198

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Anybody who said things like this woman is saying, I would be more than hesitant to put in charge of anything. If one of my friends started talking this level of crazy, I'd remind myself never to ask them to feed my cats while I was away, much less vote them into political office.

Hey, if what you said/did in high school is now going to be relevant, then I guess her opponent being a marxist in college is relevant as well. It certainly seems more relevant to the kind of policy decisions they'd be called on to make as Senators.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/09/17/days-decidedem-candidate-comes-scrutiny-delaware-race-bidens-old-senate-seat/

For that matter, maybe Obama doing snorting cocaine in college deserves a second look. After all, wasn't finding proof that Dubya did cocaine in college the Holy Grail for Democrats in 2000 and 2004?

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Yeah, but at least the feds can afford to spend nearly $1M in stimulus dollars teaching people in Africa how to clean their foreskins after sex.

Why stop there? Here is a complete list of all NIH grants used to support HIV/AIDS prevention programs that you can misrepresent. Some of them probably don't even employ American professors and graduate students and are, therefore, even more worthy of your contempt. By the way I think this fine itellectual specimen stole your idea for a thread title.

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Why stop there? Here is a complete list of all NIH grants used to support HIV/AIDS prevention programs that you can misrepresent. Some of them probably don't even employ American professors and graduate students and are, therefore, even more worthy of your contempt. By the way I think this fine itellectual specimen stole your idea for a thread title.

Hmmm.... you may not know this, Raidne, but FLoW actually opposes funding to NIH and NSF (and I presume NASA, DoE, EPA, USDA, FDA, as well) to support scientific research.

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Why stop there? Here is a complete list of all NIH grants used to support HIV/AIDS prevention programs that you can misrepresent.

How did I misrepresent the program? Heard about it over the weekend, didn't believe it, googled it, and there it was.

Some of them probably don't even employ American professors and graduate students and are, therefore, even more worthy of your contempt.

Gee, that's a toughie. I'm not too keen on the government sponsoring stuff even when it employes American professors and grad students. But you have a point -- it would be worse if they weren't even Americans.

Here's the problem. People are pissed that the federal government has spend so much money. Unfortunately, they really haven't been able to do much about it recently, so they're taking out their frustrations on the levels of government they can affect most easily.

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How did I misrepresent the program? Heard about it over the weekend, didn't believe it, googled it, and there it was.

Gee, I don't know. You tell me why you didn't mention that it was part of a much larger AIDS prevention program if you did your due dilligence and all.

And thanks, Terra. No, I did not know that, although I probably should have guessed. Scientific research is for liberal elites.

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Hey, I'm confused.

I thought the Tea Party movement is a loosely associated group of independent groups with no central theme other than that they don't like the current situation?

No. The central theme is that they aren't a fan of the federal government, don't trust it or most politicians in general, and think it spends too much money nad/or is involved in things in which it shouldn't be involved. That still is an awfully broad description, and leaves room for some ancillary issues that have nothing to do with that as well. That's why I described them as a "blunt" instrument. You get a whole bunch of other crap mixed in their with that core issue.

How can we say Tea Party is doing X? Isn't it a bit unfair to them to paint them such a broad brush?

No, not if you limit it to the core issue.

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