No I don't. I agree there are cold, hard things in the world, but *you* choose to focus on that.

Oh, him. After I donated in 2008 he kept sending me emails. It does occasionally come in handy, like when my wife tells to mow the grass. "Not right now, honey, Barack Obama just sent me an email."

It is your choice to make your eventual obliteration the focus of your life. That's something you can either try to change (good luck with that), or it's something you can choose to accept. But choosing to accept that doesn't mean you have to sit around being miserable and resentful while you wait for the Grim Reaper. The world is only as cold and hard as the things in it you choose to focus on. There's also more wondrous and amazing and even funny things in the world than you an get around to thinking about in a lifetime.

It's like summer vacation when you're in school. You only get ten weeks or so of it, not nearly enough to get to all the things you want to do. And there are some people who will react to that by spending the whole time from day 1 unhappy about going back to school. What a waste of existence! But that's definitely a choice open to you.

Imagine your last few seconds of consciousness before you die. How would you like to spend them? Being angry? Sad? I think that's a waste of precious time. I'd like to have someone I love very much tell me a very funny joke.

No, we all make the choice of the kind of world we want -- or maybe it'd be better to say the kind of world we can live with. It just so happens that some people can live with a world that they don't like very much, so long as that doesn't demand very much of them.

Anyone can by choice have an immense effect on the world around them. Maybe they can't change the *whole* world very noticeably, but they can transform their own neighborhood.

The world is cold and hard as we allow it to be. It is a *choice*, albeit one made by default for people who think like you.

Oh, yeah. The rational actor theory. But by the same postulates that underly that theory there should be no human being who eats unhealthy, boozes or gambles excessively, or picks fights he obviously can't win.

I have an alternative theory which states that going by actual behavior most people discount their future welfare to zero when there's an immediate reward, even a trivial one. It's almost impossible to resist an immediate burst of pleasure a nasty habit's got you hooked, whether it's a relaxing smoke or that glow of self-righteousness you get when you act on your bigotry.

People will literally kill themselves for a little short-term reward. Forgoing a little profit is nothing compared to that. If you look at places where segregation was historically sanctioned, you'll see you're entirely right: it's economically irrational. That didn't stop people from doing it.

I also mulled laying off gambling before I went broke.

Therefore I am, morally speaking, thin and rich.

Which makes sense. Sea level rise in the last 50 years has amounted to about 4 inches, probably not enough to make drains run backwards.

The way sea level rise will make itself known isn't through changes in day to day phenomena, but in exceptional phenomena like storm surge flooding. This is a place where inches may well matter. People plan around concepts like a "ten year flood" or a "hundred year flood", and this creates a sharp line on the map where there is no sharp line in reality. Depending where on the domain of the bell curve their chosen planning horizon is, a few inches could turn a ten year flood into a five year flood, which has immense practical implications.

When people way that there is nothing intrinsically worse about a globe that's four degrees hotter they're right. But *change* that undermines human plans represents a big challenge. Change also represents a big challenge to species populations that can't relocate on the timescale of change.

She can't hear reality over the roar of the hundred million dollars she was paid for halving the shareholder value of HP. Clearly she isn't deluded; she just lives in an alternate reality from the rest of us.

Not precisely correct from an anatomical standpoint. The rocks in question are superior to the c1 vertebra.

Start at 11:14 -- if you take her later comments around 13:29 out of context, it sounds like she is criticizing GWB's push for war. If you put it in context, it is exceptionally clear she is criticizing cutting taxes during war and that her opinion is that getting rid of Saddam is equivalent to whatever went on in Bosnia and that we should do it. She doesn't care if the world community is against war in Iraq -- she thinks we should go alone, but she also thinks GWB should have tried harder to get world support.

So... she supports the war (increases costs) but does not support tax cuts. That's about exactly what the GP said. To mean the opposite, she would have to have said war with Saddam is a bad idea. Period. What she did say is that war in Iraq was a _good_ idea AND taxes should not be cut. Seriously, explain how she didn't say that.

That's the way it always is with an adverse inference. For example, one party requests discovery, the other party destroys it -- adverse influence instruction. Nobody knows for certain what was destroyed (if they did, it would be actual evidence because there'd be a copy or something like that) -- but the jury is allowed to infer (i.e guess) that it would be damaging. That's the whole point of the adverse inference instruction -- by destroying possible evidence, it is presumed you are destroying evidence that would be damaging, even if in actual fact the evidence would not have been damaging. It's the best we can do in that circumstance and the evidence destroyer, whether Olly North or HRC, should get fucked hard over it.

The fact that I recognize HRC for a neo-con warmonging surveilling Democrat makes me a Republican? Funny -- I can't tell the difference between the New GOP (aka Democrats) and the Old GOP (aka parody of itself). If Nixon had a godchildren, they'd be named GWB, Obama, and Clinton. These latter three get to do way more than he ever did, and Obama even got Nixon's health care plan passed.

Anyway, go take your partisan bullshit and fuck yourself with it in the eye. I hate them both, GOP and DNC alike because they are exactly alike.

Having fun isn't necessarily stupid. Having fun with flamboyantly dangerous things isn't necessarily stupid. It's endangering unwilling bystanders that's stupid.

Some people like to build and shoot powerful crossbows, or even replicas of medieval siege weapons. These are extremely dangerous and useless things. The dangerous power of a trebuchet to throw an upright piano 150 yards is part of the charm.

But a trebuchet is something that takes certain amount of thought and sacrifice to obtain and use. This flamethrower thing is more like a powerful handgun. There's been a recent fad for ridiculously overpowered handguns, which pack superfluously fatal power into a convenient, affordable form factor. The recent brouhaha over "armor piercing" ammunition was a side effect of a manufacturer selling a cut-down semi-automatic carbine as a "handgun", even though if you look at videos of people using them they're obviously terrible as handguns. This raised the question of whether 5.56 NATO ammunition should be regulated as "handgun ammunition", and in the end I think the decision not to was reasonablee. These aren't cop-killing or military handguns. They're extremely dangerous toys designed to get your rocks off.

There are some who'd say that because these guns are dangerous and impractical they should be banned. But I don't agree. "Impractical" isn't the same as "useless" because getting your rocks off is a legitimate use for a thing. I think people should be able to enjoy their ridiculous firearms as long as they do it at some kind of appropriate range. I also think there's a real danger though from stupid people who will go plinking in the woods with the things like they were BB guns.

That's really the only problem I have with this flamethrower, whether it's gold, chrome, or gunmetal gray. Any idiot can buy one, but it'd take someone reasonably intelligent and determined to find a place where it can be used safely. I'm not against people buying them, but I am for coming down hard on people who use them where they're a danger or public nuisance.

But if a Clinton get's elected again, I know at least one thing for sure, that is that she won't start approving tax cuts while boosting spending (gotta boost that Military industrial complex or they might not get their checks at election time) like the Republicans want.

When HRC was agitating to get a war started in Iraq back in the early 2003, she said exactly that, which is awesome if you consider starting a war in Iraq a good thing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

• 1:40 HRC enters room
• ~ Code pink intro: war in Iraq will harm American and Iraqi families and cost a lot.
• 6:30 HRC parrots the WMD arguments, blames the danger to Iraqis on Hussein, ignores harm to Americans, financial costs, and the fact that Iraq was not a threat to the US nor involved in 9/11.
• 8:52 HRC lies about careful review of WMD info. HRC never even read the National Intelligence Estimate which while suggesting WMDs existed, also contained significant disagreements with that conclusion that a reader not interested in a particular outcome would have agreed called the whole thing into question.
• 10:00 Audience member: not up to the US to disarm Hussein, up to the world community, Iraq has no connection to terrorism, not only are Iraqi people in danger, so are US people, and will harm the economy. It's reckless.
• 11:14 HRC: The world community would not take on difficult problems without US forcing the issue. Goes on and on about Bosnia. Segues into how GWB tax cuts are a bad idea.
  
• 13:29 Interesting note on the negative effect of the tax cuts: "Here at home, this administration is bankrupting our economy forcing us to make the worst kinds of false choices between national and homeland security, which they don't fund ..."
  
• -- IOW, HRC would have preferred GWB raise taxes for more war and domestic surveillance. --
• 14:12 HRC is given a pink slip
• 14:20 HRC goes off: "I am the Senator from NY I will never put my people at risk ..."
• -- Yeah, like Saddam had anything to do with 9/11