Take a look at his comments.. I don't think I've ever seen anyone so consistently moderated -1. Personally I think he's on some kind of long term false-flag crusade to discredit conservatives. But, if you like this sort of thing, there are some real gems in there:
As for Jesus, I hope the Koch brothers will help bring Him to California, forcibly if necessary.
What you have just described is the sole and singular reason corporations were formed in the first place. That is to limit the risk to an investor to the amount of money they have put into it. ie the value of the stocks they hold.
No, limited liability is a rather newer invention than incorporation. Only by about a millennium and a half.
Wait, is this still about their refusal to support, much less join, the invasion of Iraq? Because they felt the reasons given were lies? Even though the U.S. threatened that when the time came for it spend Iraqi money on "reconstruction" they would exclusively source from fellow warmongers?
I'm not sure how you could've possibly missed this -- but it turned out they were right.
Having missed that story, it seems to center around a calculation of needed energy if the whole planet displayed circa-2010 American consumption within two decades. That is, as far as I can tell at a glance, without accounting for improved efficiency of power generation, storage, distribution, and use.
Setting aside the question of whether the rest of the planet actually aspires to US consumption patterns (which I think are widely perceived as unnecessarily wasteful) the submission you linked to says
Economists and energy experts shy away from issues of equity and morality, but climate change and environmental justice are inseparable: It's impossible to talk intelligently about climate without discussing how to distribute limited energy resources.
Which seems reasonable to me. Certainly such considerations do not in any way shape or form proscribe some kind of return to the bronze age.
But yes, in cases where the wants of a few are at odds with the needs of many, I would argue the latter should prevail. Especially if it turns out that the few are disproportionately responsible for causing the problem.
Except that the "throw away Western civilization" is only ever thrown out there by the "do nothing" crowd as a caricature of progressive proposals. That said, there is ample precedence for the concept of you break it you pay for it, so some wealth redistribution is going to be a factor in most reasonable strategies.
I appreciate the effort, but it is pointless I'm afraid. I'm assuming that these folks actually mean well, in the sense that they genuinely believe that 97% of climate scientists are involved in some harebrained conspiracy ("green is the new red"). My point is that once that idea is firmly lodged into someone's mind, no amount of links to actual science is going to change their opinion. If anything, it'll just reaffirm it.
I think you may have misunderstood my post -- probably I wasn't sufficiently clear. That the real reasons for these policies is a "desire for control" is precisely what I was suggesting.
Ah, my bad, I had taken "that position" in your post to mean the position of the Crime Agency Boss mentioned in TFS, which is to say that security should trump freedom.
Of course. But when people who have literally led governments or armed forces can still maintain that position, any appeal to blind trust by an authoritarian government must surely demand a healthy degree of scepticism.
On the other hand, people who've been actually in charge of government and military units know better than most why "blind trust" is the only kind they can appeal to. They know the real reasons for these measures, and why the public must not.
What lead to a change in the Iraqi government was that Maliki refused to allow US troops to stay permanently. Word is the successor comes pre-agreed on that issue.
Meanwhile IS is the enemy in Iraq but somehow we're not supposed to notice that they are our allies in Syria. Who would have thought that they might use the same weapons we gave them in A suddenly in B?
And since they are additionally quite heavily funded mostly from Saudi Arabia, which is basically the most brutal theocratic dictatorship on the planet, not to mention our favorite client state in the region, killing IS supply lines really should just be a matter of saying the word.
Crap, hit submit prematurely by accident. I wanted to point out that the "first world" qualifier is not even necessary.
Actually, the drug addicts are the low hanging fruit, and the war on drugs is precisely why the US has imprisoned a far higher percentage of its population than any other first world nation.
I think you will find most Muslims are not actually preoccupied with world domination. It is kind if like how the average American probably doesn't really support their government's foreign policy aimed at global hegemony, by any means, at any cost.
US Defense budgets and military personnel strength are in steep decline and will be for years to come due to sequestration and other cuts.
I assume you mean the 2013 cuts -- those have been matched, basically dollar for dollar, by increasing the "temporary" budget for Afghanistan. US military spending remains outrageous, at about the level of the rest of the world put together.
The US was attacked on 9/11 because of existing religious extremism and anti-Americanism, not the other way around, the US didn't cause it.
Fundamentalism is a part of it, yes, but would never amount to anything like what we've seen were it not for widespread anti-US sentiments stemming from more pragmatic reasons, such as US foreign policy for the last, oh, seven decades. 911 was a scandalous crime, no doubt about it, but to state that it is completely unrelated to your own actions is patently false.
It is baffling how you could get such simple questions so wrong. Substituting slogans for facts and thinking?
Coming from someone who apparently still believes the Iraq war had anything to do with 911 other than rhetoric, and somehow still manages to delude himself that anti-American sentiment somehow thrives in complete isolation of its international posturing -- yeah, baffling is what that is.
I think the point is that when the police are shooting people in great numbers -- I don't think the US has a peer in that dept -- then it might not be a great idea to give them even more destructive weaponry. Sure it would be "contingency" equipment when anyone asks, but sooner or later it'll be standard issue.
Remember those billions (!) of rounds of ammo that DHS bought?
In combination with the, shall we say, questionable record of accountability of police actions, tooling up to this extent seems like a disaster waiting to happen.
"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh." - Voltaire
