Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

You're really arguing that conservatives are fascists for NOT wanting centralized control of the internet when the primary trait of fascism is centralized control of the economy and all means of production (this doesn't necessarily mean centralized ownership, just control i.e. regulation).

Fascism/socialism/communism are all just far left ideologies with some differences in methodologies and implementation. They are all born from the same idea of central planning. The true far right ideology is anarchy. In the real world neither extreme is a good idea.

As I said earlier, both of the studies you list have serious methodoligical issues.

Powell did a simple search using the terms "global warming" or "global climate change" and got his results from there. Papers not using those terms were rejected outright. It's like doing a study on cars and using the search term "Porches are the best" in your criteria and miraculaously finding that 97% of your results agree with your premise (who else is going to include that phrase?). His definition of rejecting the theory was also very strict to make sure the number of actual papers in the no pile were low.

Cook's study had several problems, from selection issue to classification issues. Several researchers had publicly declared that Cooks study mis-characterized their papers. Not all of those researcher are anti-AGW either, some are AGW advocates, but they were honest enough to state the rated papers took no real stand on the issue. Much like Powells study, when the requirements were changed to look for papers that outright claimed climate change was primarily due to human intervention the number of papers in the consensus dropped from the thousands to the hundreds or even the tens.

Most papers in both study sets simply took no real stand on mans overall impact on climate change. They neither claimed mans impact on climate was significant or completely neutral but in both studies conditions were set so that neutral papers defaulted to pro AGW.

For the paper that was the target of this witch hunt Soon and all his coauthors have repeatedly stated that they received no outside funding for their work.

Greenpeace started this as a way to discredit a paper without actually taking on any of the aspects discussed in the paper itself.

Pretty much every climate model of the past 2 decades has predicted much hotter temperatures that we are currently seeing, that's not a sign of bias, that's a provable fact.

The paper is not about the easily verifiable preface that most AGW models have been way off on the high side but an explanation as to why.

The fact that you attack the GP as bias when he is merely stating a know fact is more an indication of your bias on this matter than theirs.

I believe the critiques of all of the 95+% papers (and if you google it you will find many) are based on the fact that their filtering criteria are generally poorly conceived of and executed and the methods used to gauge the pro/con aspects of the paper are highly bias.

These papers generally start by using limited databases to perform their searches on, then they use poor keyword/phrase filtering to select/eliminate candidates. For at least one paper (possibly Cooks) the blind analysis was also shown to not actually be blind. In other words the reviewers used knowledge of the papers authors as well as a discussions amongst themselves to influence their rating of it.

So a paper that states at some point that "humans have had some impact on climate" is rated as pro AGW although the paper itself may not give any quantifiable value for that impact or even state the impact was significant. Meanwhile papers that may point toward causes of climate change completely unrelated to human activity were not even included in the counting because of key word filtering.

It's the same methodology a lot of managers use when they want to give a promotion to their favorite employee but union or corporate rules prevent favoritism. They massage a posting for a new job that is so specific as to eliminate all other candidates, even if those specifics don't actually have any relation to the job being advertised. There is a chance their friend was the best suited for the new position but the methodology used to hire them puts the results in doubt.

You do know that the budget cannot be filibustered in the Senate right? It's a simple 50% +1 vote. The main reason they were not brought up for a vote was that Reid's Senate never bothered to even write them.

The normal process is the President submits a budget to congress, the Senate creates a budget proposal (if they are the same party it's usually based to some degree on the Presidents but can be completely different) and passes it, the House creates a budget proposal and passes it, these are compared and committees try to hammer out the differences. The problem for almost the entirety of Obama's two terms is that the Democratic Controlled Senate failed to even bother to propose their own budget, let alone pass one, and tried to govern using continuing resolutions which require constant renewal. Obama's budgets were of no help since they were only presented to the Senate when Republicans forced Reid too bring them to the floor and even then they couldn't break double digits of 'yes' votes if they managed even a single one.

The guest interviews are edited to hell and back. The 5 minutes of air time usually results from 60+ minutes of actual interview time.

The interviews are one more heavily edited than the corespondents pieces so I wouldn't trust them for either accuracy or as a proper representation of Stewart's brilliance. The "5 minute" interview often takes over an hour and is then edited down to get the best couple of questions.

It's like shooting a shell full of birdshot into a hen house; sure you'll probably end up with some chicken for supper but it's not in any way an accurate representation of your hunting ability.

Nuclear power was never an important part of Quebec's power network (roughly around 0.2% of total); it's network is almost entirely made up of hydro dams.

Due to political intervention, Ontario has one of the worst managed power systems in the world but no matter how hard the Liberal government of Ontario keeps trying to shutdown down nuclear there is no way for them to do it. Even with them paying an above market price premium for 'green' energy they can't simply can't replace the 58% of the system that comes from nuclear. They've even had to restart previously shutdown reactors to meet demand and while they did scrap the plans to build 2 new reactors (though that might change) they are retrofitting their current reactors too extend their lifespans.

You cannot filibuster a budget vote. Most of the time Reid wouldn't even allow Obama's proposals to even come to the floor because he understood how terrible they were.

Budgets (in the Senate) are passed with a simple majority vote of 51 but none of Obama's proposals have ever been able to get more than 5 Democrat votes (in most cases 0) let alone 51 and the Senate, under Reid's leadership has failed to even propose a budget for most of Obama's 2 terms.

The Republican led House has passed several budgets, but like most other House created legislation, once it reached the Senate it died. Usually, if the Senate had a valid budget proposal at that point the two would be debated on and an attempt would be made to work out a deal. This negotiation might fail but at least there would have been an attempt.

So rant all you want but if you want to point fingers the complete failure to pass a real budget for most of Obama's presidency has little to do with the Republicans, despite your wishing it so.

A prime example of scientific knowledge vs the public's at large.

DDTs was/is one of the safest and most effective pesticides to date. While almost no real research into DDT has found any real adverse affects we do know that the ban of DDT, especially in African countries, has greatly affected infection/death rates.

Take Sri Lanka malaria rates:
pre-ban : 2.8 million+ / year
with DDT : 17 /year
post ban : 2.5million + /year

In DDTs case, environmentalist pushed hard to demonize a chemical that almost all research pointed to as safe and even studies that found it to be possibly harmful in certain conditions to be the least harmful of all the alternatives.

Would advocating for the housing bubble raise to the level of an error to you?

Of course he denies, post bust, that he even actually advocated for the Fed to aid in creating the bubble in the first place but his long list of statements to the contrary don't help his cause.

Krugman is probably the perfect example of how most economists are actually just ideologues pretending to be scientists. His pieces for the NYT often read like the rants on DailyKos.

His predictions as to the success or failure of a plan are almost entirely based on who is currently in power (and he has a terrible track record on real world predictions of global financial events from the housing bubble to the state of the EU) and his post analysis almost always centers around the same points (increased government spending being one of this favorite gotos) as to why something either worked or wasn't as bad as it could have been with no real data to back up his suppositions.

Historically the education vs part affiliation in the US breaks down as:

No HS diploma = Strong Democrat advantage (this is also the smallest voting group)
HS diploma = Statistical tie
Some college = Republican advantage
College degree = Republican advantage
Post Doctorate = Democrat advantage

That's been the case for at least the last 14 years according to most exit polls (cnn has some good exit pool data) with the McCain/Obama election being a slight outlier. A similar pattern tends to appear in income distributions with low and exceptionally high earners favoring Dems and middle earners favoring Repubs.

It happened 2 1/5 hours before the EURO conference and while Knight is a white supremacist he was also the head of the Jefferson Heights Civic Association and set up the earlier meeting as part of that while he had access to a free room.

He rented the room for EURO but had access to it all day and decided to use it in the morning for local issues.