Strictly speaking the reason nobody in the US supports large Hydro projects is that most of them have already been completed. It's not like we can re-engineer Iowa to be a huge plateau so that the Mississippi dam in Nebraska can generate power from a 100 ft drop.

Nuclear is virtually impossible to get support for anywhere because it's a classic Black Swan risk. Yeah if everything works you're Sweden and you've got no environmental impact, but if there's a disaster after the power company's fucked up safety procedures you're doing $100 Billion in damage. Moreover in a loosish union of sovereign states it's really difficult to convince one to accept all the nuclear fuel.

Interestingly enough I've never heard a single environmentalist group make all four of those claims. To my knowledge no actual environmental group makes any claims regarding wind power and birds, that entire conversation is all conservative anti-environmentalists talking to themselves.

In other words this is the equivalent of a liberal arguing that conservatives are insane because they a) strongly support local law enforcement's right to stop damn near everybody, while b) claiming that opposing government authority with your personally-owned firearm is your sacred duty. Yes both of those guys probably voted for Romney, but they aren't the same guy.

Who said anything about what I think? There's a difference between understanding the intellectual underpinnings of a movement and agreeing with it.

Regardless, very few social movements in the US are totally divorced from self-interest. Black abolitionists, for example, were quite self interested. Even white abolitionists tended to frame their arguments in terms of their own self-interest -- "we can't compete with slave wages," "the slave power will take our freedoms," etc.

As far as I can tell the only Americans who currently support a system that will not result in nice things for other people being cut while nice things for them get a healthy boost are very wealthy limousine liberals and relatively poor working class white conservatives. And both of those groups actually believe that in the long term they'll be better off if their nice things get cut.

The 1% argument isn't just about helping poor people. It's about helping the everyone including the upper bits of the Middle Class (ie: all of the 99% who aren't in the 1%). It's also about reining in the people who are are in that 1%. Among most of it's adherents the idea is that you tax guys like Mitt Romney, and use the money to pay for nice things for everyone. Thus you get proposals like a financial transaction tax, ending the 529 deduction, etc.

Paul Ryan is thinking about the helping poor people side of the equation. But he doesn't seem to think the Middle Class seems serious economic help, and if he proposes any new spending it will almost certainly be paid for by cutting some other spending, not increasing the tax burden of the 1%. Whatever he ends up proposing will almost certainly be mostly tax cuts targeted at helping poor people, plus some rethinking of how current government money is spent.

Depends on what you use the tax for.

I live in a very low-income Cleveland suburb (per capita income is roughly $20k). If you used the Carbon tax to pay for a much expanded Rapid (the local light rail service), or made the buses come every 15 minutes instead of every 40 or hour, most of my coworkers would probably stop driving their cars so much. They'd still need them for grocery-shopping, days when the kid would not go to fucking sleep so mommy really needs to sleep in, etc. but even if the tax doubles gas prices they'd probably save money if they just used the bus/Rapid three times a week.

BTW, this kind of thinking is one reason conservatives rarely get anywhere in the black community. If you think of a reason that a left-wing policy would hurt the poor (and blacks a) tend to be poor, and b) the ones who aren't tend to be very sympathetic to the poor), but the Congressional Black Caucus strongly supports it; your first reaction should not be "why are those morons voting against their own interest?" It should be "Why would those rational human beings disagree with me abhttp://politics.slashdot.org/story/15/03/17/0025235/politics-is-poisoning-nasas-ability-to-do-science?sbsrc=md#out their own interests?" In this case the reason is a combination of coalition-building the CBC, and the blacks who overwhelmingly support it, thinks a government dominated by white pro-Carbon Tax liberals would be better for it then the alternative), and a very different definition of their own interests (ie: many of them would actually prefer to drive less and bus more).

It's similar to what happens when Liberals ask "What's the matter with Kansas?" The answer turns out to be a combination of a) different priorities (many Kansans prefer a universe where they make slightly less money and abortion is harder to get), and b) different perceptions of their interests (Kansans tend to think of themselves as people who will be ricvh real soon now; or at least as people who only have a middle-class lifestyle because some rich guy can afford to hire them; which means that if you start talking about taxing the rich they get uncomfortable).

It's impossible with home equity, because most people don't actually know what their homes are worth.

Just do a survey of people at a dinner party about their guess as their home;s worth. Then use the Zillow zestimate tool. nLast time I tried this everyone was off by at least 25%, and despite the fact Zestimates are known to be high most of them were too high.

I get by on no home and $25k.

So if you didn't mind a) giving up your nice car for a slightly older one with better mileage, b) selling your house and moving to an apartment, c) declaring staycations to be the bomb, d) deciding that your kids would just have to live with a normal public school education and student loans, etc. you'd be fine.

But generally if you're the kind of person who actually buys a home, a couple cars, in a nice suburb with good schools, etc. you are not willing to do that kind of thing.

Strictly speaking if you asked anyone in the Occupy Wall Street movement whether US taxes should go up to pay for hospitals and primary education in Mogadishu almost all of them would say yes. Add in the "why do we need to raise taxes? we can just cut defense spending and use that money" and you've got damn near everybody. The rest of the economic left would agree. And it's not like Paul Ryan is bitching about the evils of the 1%.

The reasons that aid isn't a lot larger is there's a) numerous veto-points in the US System for people like Paul Ryan who disagree with the "1%" argument and b) it's remarkably hard to get get everyone else to actually cut checks. They almost all show up for the big donor's conference, and say they'll donate a huge dollar amount, but very follow through is generally lacking.

Basically as a practical matter the policy you say liberals should implement can't happen until there's a One World Government which can just do shit without paying attention to the goddamn subcommittee chairman from Canada. And unless I'm mistaken* you would oppose that quite strongly.

*This assumption is based entirely on the strong correlation between criticizing the left for it's concern about economic inequality and opposing things like One World Government. In real life, unlike Sherlock Holmes, the guy who guesses based on correlation isn't always right.

With Checks and balances and powerful individual Congressman it's virtually impossible to get a big program through. There're almost a dozen veto points (ie: the sub-committee, the full committee, the full house, all three processes in the Senate, the reconciliation committee to get the bills to say the same thing, vote in both the house and the senate on the bill; then the President has to sign). You either need a) a vast consensus that something is a good idea, b) a small idea that threatens nobody, or c) a major push by somebody with clout. NASA's too-small budget is $18.4 Billion a year, which is $184 Billion in the 10-year-budget window; and thus can't be too small to pay attention to. The 'consensus' that exists today is low tax, low spending, free-market and a government space agency does not fit the plan. And nobody is gonna push NASA when something immediate is always sucking up the oxygen in the room.

Thus we have a system that has no trouble passing a new tax break, but can't for the life of it agree on funding the Border Patrol because everyone is in a death struggle over Obama's immigration plans.

OTOH, let's say we had the Canadian Constitution. If Obama was Prime Minister he'd necessarily have a majority of the lower house, and he'd also have veto-power over everyone on his side's re-election (you can't run for a seat in Canada without the signature of the Party leader on your papers, altho this year all the parties swear they won't veto any of their local riding association's nominees). He'd also have control of the Senate because the PM appoints Senators. Reconciliation would consist of him saying "hey Senator, that was a good point, we'll go with your bill" and a rubber-stamp. The bill would be signed by a Governor-General Obama appointed.

Don't get me wrong, there are checks on a PM's power. Notably he has to have approval from his Cabinet, and his Parliamentary majority to keep his job, and if he loses either he tends not to be PM for very long (Chretian was forced out by his Parliamentary caucus), but while he retains the confidence of Parliament a Prime Minister can just do shit. He doesn't have to worry about whether the other party will put his proposal in Subcommittee A (whose Chair hates him and won't even schedule a vote on principle) or Subcommittee B (whose chair hates him, but loves the idea and will vote on it after only three hours of Obama-bashing). PM Obama fires both Subcommittee Chairs and if Parliament doesn't like it there's a new election and within four months the people will have picked a Palrliament where the PM and the Subcommittee Chairs are on the same side.

What the OP meant is that the Nazis literally invented techniques of mass-murder because the old stand-by (shooting a bunch of people in the head) a) took a lot of labor (the Order Police who were supposed to be controlling Poland for them had time for very little except Jew-killing when they were shooting each one in the head individually), and b) gave tens of thousands of Germans PTSD from shooting little kids in the head. They kept doing it until they invaded Russia, but then they had a million-odd Soviet prisoners of war, the Russians would not trade for them (Stalin even refused to trade his son for a high-ranking German General). Rather then engage in the time-sink of killing a million of these guys one-by-one they invented a new kind of Gas Chamber. It looked safe (so the Soviet prisoners would go in without trying to over-power their guards), only brought a handful of Germans into the process, and solved the problem of what to feed these guys permanently.So they started applying the technique to the Jews too.

ISIS is definitely evil, but I sincerely doubt they have the ability to organize anything but a really big machete rampage. They are definitely not going to pioneer entirely new technologies of mass death.

Dude, learn some fucking international law.

In '47 there was a press release. China has never made a formal claim before any international legal body, or even bothered to explain precisely (as in which geographical coordinates) the line ends. The line is not connected, and even in the spots where there's actually as line the map is small enough (and the line wide enough) that it's like 5-10 miles wide.

If the "we owned it before you existed" legal standard was actually a legal standard maybe a half-dozen African states would have a legal right to exist. The others were all created by (and therefore owned) by various European Empires, and were therefore owned by Europe before they existed. The Americas south of the Rio Grande would be split between Spain and Portugal, north would be English. Austria-Hungary would have an extremely compelling legal case, to much of Eastern Europe, and the Turks could annex the Balkan peninsula up to (and including) the bits of Serbia not given back to the Habsburgs.

The only modern state which makes any claims based on something as tenuous as "600-year-old historical links" is Israel. I don't know if you'd noticed but in the Court of International law the only world leader who ever took their claim to Jerusalem even a little bit seriously was Dubya.

The Vietnamese will be likely to stop the flights.

Their current big international dispute is over their maritime boundaries with China. The CHinese claim almost the entire South China Sea on the basis of something called the "nine-dashed-line," and have a tendency to periodically engage in extreme brinksmanship with all their neighbors in the region, including Vietnam. They actually fought a war with the Chinese in '79. Which means if the Russian flights support China in any way the Vietnamese have every reason to stop them.

But they aren't involved, so we'll just have to put up with it like we do in Europe.

You're talking about FedEx and UPS. I've never made a post on the issue that wasn't a direct response to you talking about FedEx and UPS.

You're ignoring their justification, and that Wilson isn't using any legal recourse. They say they can refuse to ship products that are potentially illegal without proof that both sides of the transaction have the proper license/paperwork/etc. Since Wilson doesn't have a case against them in Court, that implies they do have the right to jerk his ass around until he comes up with firearm manufacturing licenses from his buyers. It's not like he a) doesn't know how to do this shit himself, or b) couldn't get a lawyer from Texas to sue them for him for the publicity.

And as I've said before, this isn't Wilson's major problem in the long-term. He can figure something out, even if it's only "I'll ship to gun stores who then hold the product for my clients," "I'll hire this random chick to mail packages on behalf of my subsidiary, and neither chick nor subsidiary's name will ever appear on my publicity," or "the post office better be nice to me or the entire NRA will call their Senators." His long-term problem is that any 3D printer company he uses is doomed on the global market, so no sane 3D printer company will allow Defense Distributed designs to be printed on their machines.

If milling parties are not so common that there are 3 million households with a fully milled AR-15 receiver they aren't common enough to seriously inconvenience gun-grabbers. You're treating the Feds, who literally have a $1 Trillion budget and the sovereign right to borrow $80 billion for no good reason, like they're the Ferguson PD or something.

To do this they'd need a Constitutional Amendment. That can;t happen unless 38 states want it to happen, and if 38 states want it to happen then 38 states are full of people who want your guns to be grabbed, and if the voters of 38 states send gun-grabbers to Congress and force a Constitutional Amendment it's likely that Congress adds Billion$ to the ATF budget every year until your ass is in jail.

That ATF that can track you down, get a warrant for the buddy they knew had to be at your party, when they find his receiver they can threaten him with prison until he snitches about the rest of your party-goers, who then get to choose between prison and snitching on the two guys your buddy forgot/that other milling party they heard about/etc.

You can't read the debates they had. There are no minutes for the Constitutional Convention. There are numerous high-IQ people who don't understand the difference between "the people" and an individsual person who swear up and down that every time a Founder mentioned the collective group klnown as the people have the right to own guns it means that every single individual among that group had the right to own precisely the arsenal he wanted, but these people suck at a) grammar, and b) history.

One of the defining elements of an individual right is they can't make you do it, if you choose to do it they can't say what you do with it, etc. Obama can't pass a law saying all people have to publicly denounce Mitt Romney, go to secret Kenyan Muslim Church, and subscribe to the New York Times. Yet George Washington ordered all American men to a) buy a gun, b) buy a specific model, and c) register it with a dual hatted state/Federal local militia captain so that he could force guys who had two to bring them to militia drill and share with the poor. That's not an individual right of every American to own whatever firearm he wants, it';s a collective right for the people of that local county to have enough arms (and proper arms) to defend themselves from a) the Indians, b) the British, and c) the Feds.

Note that I'm not saying the pro-gun control side is right with these posts. I honestly have no fucking idea how the Founders would apply a rule intended to create a vast militia to support a minuscule standing army in a time when a) no state actually has militia duty, and b) the Federal military is large enough that it could totally crush the rifle-armed militia of any individual state in a week.