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Author | Topic: Climate Change Denier comes in from the cold: SCIENCE!!! | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
dwise1 Member Posts: 5930 Joined: Member Rating: 5.8 |
So once again the Republicans show contempt for highly trained people who actually know what they're talking about. And who saw it coming. As soon as Trump won the Electoral College, scientists in the EPA and NOAA and other government agencies started backing up all their data and research on servers outside the country in order to prevent its disappearance by the new administration.
The state of Florida has appointed a science officer whose job is to examine and explain the science that will be necessary to confront the problems facing Florida from the climate crisis. Problems such as the disappearance of the entire state.
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5930 Joined: Member Rating: 5.8
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Not that I am agreeing with the political ideologies of marc9000 but I think that his point is that we the people will never regress in history and become Quakers simply to "save the planet". First, it wouldn't simply be a question of "saving the planet", but rather of ensuring our continued survival. It is far better and easier to prevent a disaster than it is to try to survive that disaster or even try to ignore the disaster (eg, lung/larynx/mouth cancer victims who have had their throat and half their face removed surgically and yet continue to smoke -- in Austria, I saw a pack of cigarettes whose health warning label was a graphic color photo of cancer surgical aftermaths). A possible analogy might be your car. You just keep driving it without ever performing any maintenance on it, not even an oil change. Then when you're driving through the middle of nowhere (driven there, had no cell phone coverage) your car breaks down completely, basically just falls apart on you. Now you are faced with a big survival emergency and I'll bet that you didn't pack any kind of emergency kit or supplies either, did you? And yet if you had just done what you needed to do to maintain your car that would not have happened. An even worse scenario would be that your car would fail in such a manner as to cause catastrophic collateral damage including mass casualties. All because you were too selfish and penny-pinching to meet your responsibilities in maintaining your car. Second, yes, there is always human nature. I want to share an image file, but to my knowledge I still cannot post images on this forum (Percy think's it's a http-v-https security issue and says he will try to fix it), so I'll provide the link to Ed Babinski's Facebook page where he posts it (if it doesn't work, go to that link): Update Your Browser | Facebook . In the meantime, I will describe it to you (setting a good example which you will yet again refuse to even consider following). It depicts a climate summit in which the speaker has listed the many benefits of addressing the climate change problem. One person in the audience complains angrily to the person next to him: "What if it's a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?" As we all witnessed in your adamant and intractable opposition to the clear teachings of Jesus, the only way to convince many people to do the right thing is to make it too expensive for them to continue to do the wrong thing. Too many people, especially Christians, are just too selfish and greedy and lacking in empathy or altruism. Starting on page 30 of his book, The Authoritarians (2006 -- available for free or for cheap at The Authoritarians ), Bob Altemeyer describes a simulation game that his son ran in which the participants run world governments and have to deal with events and with each other (my son was in such an exercise for one of his public administration classes). Bob used that exercise for his own experiments to see how the game would run with all high-RWA (right-wing-authoritarians) or all low-RWA participants. Here are some excerpts from that book starting at page 30 (go there to read the entire account) -- actually, the entire account is so good and informative that we cannot find what to cut out, not unlike Biden's COVID bill:
quote: Edited by dwise1, : Removed footnote numbers from quoted section
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5930 Joined: Member Rating: 5.8
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AZPaul3 writes:
Republican politics didn't bring green, untested, solar and wind power to Texas in recent years, to the extent that it failed them last month. But increasingly liberal voters in Texas did. Where did they come from? I'm glad I pretended you asked that. Then you failed, Bunkie. The Texas situation had nothing to do with technology and everything to do with republican politics. AZPaul3 is right and you and yours are dead wrong (with some having ended up more dead than others solely because of Republican politics and having nothing whatsoever to do with renewable energy). The figures I heard are that only about 10% of Texan energy comes from green sources (eg, wind and solar) and that the remaining 90% comes from fossil fuels. The immediate and principal cause of much of the failure was that it had gotten too cold for natural gas to flow and thus the fuel source for much of the electrical grid. So what did Gov. Abbott do? He went straight to the FAKE News Network to go onto serial liar Sean Hannity's show to lie out of his ass that it was entirely AOC and her Green New Deal that had caused Texas' catastrophic collapse -- despite the Green New Deal never having been implemented, let alone being promoted as legislature, and despite 90% of Texan energy being based on fossil fuels. marc, you undoubtedly saw Abbott lie out of his ass on FAKE News and you made the mistake of believing him. After all the times that the Republicans have lied to you, you no longer qualify for the Gomer Pyle Immunity Clause ("Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me."). It is solidly your fault for continuing to believe their lies. The actual cause of this disaster is deregulation under Republican mis-administration of the power grid. Around 2011 there was another cold snap which exposed the vulnerabilities of Texas' power grid to cold weather. After a comprehensive study outlined everything that Texas needed to do to winterize its power grid in order to prevent failures in the next cold snap to come, Texas Republicans decided to suggest to the privatized utilities that they voluntarily do what they needed to do and, of course, those privatized utilities, being far more interested in making as much of a profit as possible despite how much that might endanger the public that they are supposed to serve, did nothing to prepare for that catastrophic winter (refer to the story of the ant and the grasshopper if that is more on your level). Not only did they do nothing to winterize the power grid, but they also (with the help of Republican state government, no doubt) decided to isolate Texas' power grid from all other power grids primarily to avoid the federal regulation that that would have brought with it. Thus the Texas power grid had isolated itself from any kind of contingency emergency help. El Paso and eastern-most Texas (¿including Beaumont?) were both not on that isolated Texas power grid and so were able to draw power from the power grids of neighboring states and were able to survive. Now, wind turbines work very well in cold weather when properly designed and maintained -- a viral photo that was supposed to be from Texas during this freeze showing a helicopter spraying de-icing on a turbine was actually from Sweden a couple years ago. And as I understand it, photo-voltaic solar panels actually work much better when it's cold because of electical conductors' resistances' positive coefficient of temperature (ie, a conductor's resistance increases as the temperature increases, which is why super-conductor applications require extremely low temperatures -- this is something that everybody with any degree of electronics training would know, so it should qualify as common knowledge). In case I have to start to draw pictures in crayon, pushing current through a resistance results in some of that energy being lost as heat (which in turn increases resistance which increases the amount of energy lost as heat, rinse and repeat (though it's not as bad as the avalanche breakdown of semiconductors due to their negative coefficient of temperature -- hence the need to include current-limiting resistances in semiconductor circuits)). Now, why did that only happen to Texas? Why does everything work just fine in the rest of the country where it customarily gets far colder than in Texas? For example, I was stationed in the cold part of North Dakota -- the Fahrenheit and Celsius scales meet at -40° which I personally witnessed at least once. Yet our power grid never failed at the first hint of a chill (though a massive winter storm could, but even that would affect small communities and not everybody) and our heating fuel never failed us. Why would that be? Maybe because we knew what we needed to do to keep those systems operating and so we took care of that? But in the case of Texas in 2021, they had known for a decade what they needed to do, yet they refused to do that because it would have reduced their profit. How much is a human life worth? Ask a Republican and the answer would be: not much.
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5930 Joined: Member Rating: 5.8
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First act. Make coal illegal. Yesterday. Yes, I fully agree that the time to have switched away from coal was a long time ago. But managing the transition away from coal and other fossil fuels is a different and much trickier matter. I've long thought of offering this US Navy damage control situation analogy to similar arguments. We've all seen that scene in the 1965 John Wayne movie, In Harm's Way where Damage Control is working frantically with shoring timbers to keep a bulkhead from giving way, opening the rest of the ship to the sea. OK, so in this evolution what do you, in command of the DC team, decide to do? That bulkhead is full of cracks and leaks and needs a complete overhaul. So do you replace it right then and there with a serviceable bulkhead? Makes sense, right? But first you need to tear it out before you can replace it. And what will happen when you tear it out? The sea will rush in and sink your ship. Viable solution? OK, the best solution would have been to have started solving the problem long ago. That's like that protest slogan: "What do we want?" "Time Travel!" "When do we want it?" "Doesn't matter!" So when you're in middle of everything going to sh*t, what do you do? You try to hold everything together that you possibly can until everybody else can finally get their sh*t together. That's where we are now, only far too far behind the curve. The really big question is transitioning: how we are supposed to transition from the one situation to the other. In this case, how are we supposed to transition from carbon-fuel technology to carbon-free tech (or at the very least carbon-minimal)? A rather complicated problem which opponents seem to refuse to address.
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5930 Joined: Member Rating: 5.8 |
Good, some of the engineers are still awake.
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5930 Joined: Member Rating: 5.8
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OK, just woke up. Believe it or not, I intend absolutely no innuendoes here about anybody's sexual orientation. Seriously! For what it's worth, I'm a conscientious objector myself.
One of the big "Venus-Mars" thangs is supposed to be that he is always trying to figure out a solution to resolve her problem, whereas all she wants is for somebody to sympathize with her about her problem. Case in point, there was a core of middle-aged, senior ballroom dance students (many of them couples) loyal to this one teacher about in his 30's/40's whom another teacher described as "a queen". He was very good as a dance teacher, though expressively he could go over the top a bit but everybody took that in stride. This may surprise those outside the dance community, but many "of that particular age" are engineers, physicians, or other highly technical professional types. Problem solvers. So one night our teacher started expressing himself about a problem and I could see that every was getting ready to offer a solution while I wanted to tell all of them "he's not looking for a solution; he just wants to tell us how it makes him feel." Try to understand the audience here. One night in particular, he tried an approach outside of standard dance angles (similar to Kendo's 8 directions: forward, forward wall, wall, backward wall, backward, backward center, center, forward center) and tried to describe an angular situation that must have made sense to him, but which was completely wrong in any engineering or reality based situation. Lesson learned: don't even try to talk faulty tech with engineers. Action that needs to be taken under emergency conditions. Always dire, or at least very inconvenient. Most people don't like inconvenient, especially non-veterans. Funny thing about dire situations is that they pile up. The longer you take to deal with them, the worse they become and the harder it becomes to clean up after them. And the clean-up tab tends to grow exponentially. There was a point in the past when we could have acted and averted disaster. Later, we could still act and avert most of the disaster, but still incur some damage. The longer we wait, the more damage we incur, needless to say. It can be so completely and utterly frustrating to observe the totally unnecessary delays. But still, once we get to the actual implementation ... . But then my inner Chief (or inner engineer) comes out. However late we finally respond and regardless of how much damage we're taking from our too-late actions, we do still need to try to keep everything working as much as possible while we switch over to sanity. Edited by dwise1, : Minor editing.
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5930 Joined: Member Rating: 5.8
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Links? Warned by whom? Linked to through the Wikipedia article, 2021 Texas Power Crisis:
quote: Since you will undoubtedly refuse to click on that link (the better to avoid learning anything), here is the link to that report again, Report on Outages and Curtailments During the Southwest Cold Weather Event of February I-5 [sic], 2011 -- Causes and Recommendations prepared by the staffs of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation. And since we know already and so have very good reason to assume that you still haven't followed that link to that document, here it is yet again as a bare link so that you can examine the URL itself: https://www.ferc.gov/...lt/files/2020-04/08-16-11-report.pdf You can read the entire 357-page yourself and see for yourself what Texan Republicans in charge had been warned about and from that see how they had ignored those warnings. There is plainly no excuse for how horrifically the Texan Republican gov't completely screwed this up and got people killed and worse.
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5930 Joined: Member Rating: 5.8
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DWise1 writes:
Today, a few Republicans are somewhat more likely to cross the aisle and side with Democrats if the political winds blow them there. (pressure from their constituents can be an acceptable reason) Romney, Murkowski, Collins, McConnel, or the 10? who voted to remove Trump are examples. Other than possibly Joe Manchin, Democrats are more likely to follow orders from their leadership. AZPaul3 is right and you and yours are dead wrong (with some having ended up more dead than others solely because of Republican politics and having nothing whatsoever to do with renewable energy). Trying to switch the focus to national politics and away from the complete and utter fiasco of state Republican politics. Stick to the subject! And stop trying to practice your typical deceptive trickery. I have about four decades experience dealing with creationist liars and they used the exact same tricks that you are trying to use here.
Some Texas Republicans caved to green energy demands sooner than they should have, contributing to the blackouts. Your "nothing whatsoever" claim is false. And yet, green energy accounts for a very small percentage of energy production in Texas, whereas the vastly greater percentage is provided by fossil fuels. It is the failure of the fossil fuel distribution system that caused this disaster. Please pull your head out.
Texas has a LOT of government incentives for wind and solar. They guarantee profits to big, often foreign companies and lead to market distortions, especially when the voters are brainwashed into accepting the lie that fossil fuels are easily replaceable. And yet the inconvenient fact (OH! Did I just tap back into the original topic?) is that the vastly greater portion of Texas energy production which failed so utterly was firmly based on FOSSIL FUELS. AND THAT IS WHAT FAILED SO SPECTACULARLY! "Too cold for natural gas to flow"? I wonder why it flows so well in Alaska and Canada. Oh wow! Really? It flows so well in Alaska and Canada (and other very cold places) because they know full well how do to that! Unlike in Texas where nobody knows how to do anything at all that works! Especially if you have to spend any money to get the job done. Because that would cut into profits. Profits over people is the Republican mantra. Duh?!?!?!? And it's not the physical properties of natural gas that's in question, but rather the ability of the machinery which moves it to function in the cold. Which that machinery failed to do in Texas because they were too cheap to winterize that system as they had been advised to do a decade ago! Because of Republican policies that placed profits over human lives and which eliminated necessary regulation. It was Republican policies that killed those Texans, not green energy nor any other of your transparent and flimsy lies.
Before the grid frequency fell to dangerously low levels, some fossil fuel plants had to shut down to protect their equipment. Please pay attention to your own lies. "fossil fuel plants". You just said it yourself. fossil fuel plants And in case you still cannot see it: fossil fuel plants Are you still unable to see what you yourself just said or do I need to enlarge that even more? Not "green energy", but rather fossil fuel plants. So your failed attempts to blame green energy falls completely flat by your own admission that the power failure was due to fossil fuels.
Maybe Republicans in Texas were trying to save money, money that they need for their ever increasing problems. Like record numbers of illegals pouring over their southern border sporting Biden tee shirts, or an influx of Californians hoping their liberal ideas that are destroying California will somehow work differently in Texas. "saving money"? No, raking in profits by refusing to do their job! It's not thriftiness that was in operation, but rather greed. And there you are trying to shift the blame and change the subject, just like typical dishonest deceptive creationists! Have you ever tried to pilot a ship, a large ship? Those things don't turn on a dime, you should know. It takes a lot of time for any course change to take effect. The same holds true for a wide range of social changes like the economy and response to policy changes. Factors affecting the number of immigrants at our southern border go back many months, even years. You want to blame someone for the number of immigrants? Blame TRUMP! He's the one who was in charge when those immigrants went on the move. Plus, you're just making that shit up. Cite actual figures! Or admit that you're just lying yet again.
They should try to accept Californians on one condition, that they don't let them vote! There are over 230 bills being submitted by Republicans in state legislatures to keep people from being able to vote. They're reading the wrong message there. If nobody wants to vote for you, then you should try to find out why that is.
Considering the incentives for solar and wind, and the brainwashing that Texans and everyone else has that AOC is wiser than a tree full of owls, the GND really did have something to do with it. Except that it didn't! As you yourself pointed out! You still have not learned the first rule of lying your ass off, which is that you must keep your lies straight. And OBTW, AOC was in Texas helping Texans while Cruz was off vacationing in Cancún not caring the least bit about his constituents. By which she proved that she would make a far better senator for Texas than Cruz.
I didn't see Abbot on Hannity, I seldom catch Hannity. I'll have to circle back to you.
You can catch it on YouTube. You know how to STFW, so don't insist that we do that for you yet again.
What do you think of the lie, that all those products I listed in Message 722 can be made without fossil fuels? Or the lie by omission by the mainstream media, that illegals are now pouring over the southern border, many of them wearing Biden tee shirts? Yet again, you cannot respond to the issues under discussion, so you try desperately to change the subject. Like a typical lying piece-of-shite creationist. We already know what you are. You have demonstrated it far too many times already.
Maybe those Texas Republicans, caved to their constituents who believe the lies they are told by climate alarmists, that losing fossil fuels is no big deal. Except that is not what had happened. The failure was in fossil fuels failing to deliver because of destructive Republican policies. Do please try to pay attention.
I agree, there are three power grids, the eastern U.S., the western U.S. and Texas. Texas established their own to avoid federal meddling, the advantages of that for Texas have undoubtedly been many, but we can't tell, the mainstream media continues to lie by omission. Which would have required Texas to properly winterize their systems as per that 2011 report (https://www.ferc.gov/...lt/files/2020-04/08-16-11-report.pdf , though I have absolutely no doubt that you still have refused to look at it, so precious is your ignorance to you). By keeping Texas separate and hence not subject to federal regulation, Texas Republicans ensured the failure of their power system and the deaths of Texans.
And yes, some of extreme west and east Texas are on the others, and didn't have as many problems. But the main reason wasn't because of all the additional federal involvement in the two big grids, it was because they are bigger and more diverse, and can divert and cover additional power in some comparatively small areas when needed. And do please remind us why that would have been a problem for the rest of the state.
And another thing everybody should know, whether they believe climate alarmists lies or not, is that solar doesn't work at night. A Monday night was one of the key times when demand exceeded supply. Wow! You anti-science idiots never fail to astonish with your stupidity. Do you really believe that all scientists and engineers are naïve fools who always overlook the obvious? Rather it is you anti-science idiots who are the naïve fools. Ever hear of batteries? Apparently not! Every single solar power system ever conceived of has included ideas for storing energy for times of darkness. There's also a hydro-electric system in which you pump water up into a reservoir during the day time and then at night time run it through a turbine and generator. Scientists and engineers are actually smart people, unlike you and yours (according to your personal witness).
It's only natural that power generating equipment is better protected in central and northern climates, Texas isn't the only southern state that has some equipment outside rather than inside, since it seldom gets cold there. Yes, which is why they pay out that extra expense to properly winterize that equipment. And that extra investment shows. Texas was advised a decade ago that it needed to winterize its equipment. And it chose not to! That was not any kind of equipment failure, but rather a policy failure. A Republican policy failure which placed quick profit over the lives of the state's citizens. Again, how much is a human life worth in Texas? And if you are also one of those "pro-life" wienies, why are you so much anti-life when it comes to Texans?
Alaska doesn't have much air conditioning either. Human error and spending decisions aren't always the fault of Republicans. They are when those decisions cost lives, which is what happened in Texas. It is what it is.
Can you provide examples where the scientific community and Democrats have, for the past 10 years, been warning them that they needed to IMPROVE THEIR FOSSIL FUEL CAPACITY? Or has it all been about spending more money on wind and solar? What the fuck are you babbling on about there?
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5930 Joined: Member Rating: 5.8
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No, but it describes fairly thoroughly the differences between left and right wing thinking...at least in regards o Authoritarian tendencies. Each side tends to believe stereotypes about the other side. Except that Bob Altemeyer, the author of The Authoritarians (downloadable for free as a PDF or for cheap in a few e-book formats, plus an easy and interesting read), was not in the least engaging in spinning stereotypes about high-RWAs (right wing authoritarians). Rather, you and yours are the ones prone to engaging in stereotyping. [ Yes, we low-RWAs are also subject to stereotyping, but we also engage in much more independent thought than high-RWAs do. That is why we are so much more difficult to organize, kind of like trying to herd cats, whereas high-RWAs are so compliant that herds of sheep turn green with envy. ] Here is what Altemeyer wrote (pp ):
quote: Altemeyer, now retired, was a professor of psychology at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg (AKA "The Peg"). He conducted four decades of actual research in authoritarianism, gathering data in the wild (well, from his students and their families) and analyzing it. He spent most of his PhD career studying authoritarianism and published several papers on the subject. Then shortly before retirement, he wrote The Authoritarians as a more accessible work on the subject (his articles were heavily laden with mathematics and hence virtually unreadable by laypersons) and motivated by the greatest authoritarian threat at the time, Dubya (he and John Dean have since co-written a second book dealing with Trump). His entry into this specialization was almost by accident. From the introduction of The Authoritarians:
quote: He devised and perfected that tools of his craft, questionnaires, and collected data for the next four decades. He subjected all of his students to those questionnaires as well as those of their families whom he could get to volunteer. He also conducted diachronic studies, following those students throughout their lives to see how their attitudes and RWA ratings changed over time (eg, most arrived from being insulated in their families and communities with high RWA scores, then their experience in university lowered their RWA scores, but when then they had their own kids to raise their RWA scores went up, etc). After having arrived at his subjects' RWA scores, he also administered questionnaires about their attitudes and beliefs. Thus his findings of what high-RWAs think and believe are based on his research and not at all on any stereotyping. Just read the book. It's free and it is an easy and interesting read. And despite his joking that only masochists would read his footnotes, those footnotes contain the most interesting content.
In general,however, one group believs in caring for the group (of humanity on the planet) above their own self interests. The other side does not...but not simply because they are selfish or power hungry. The Hight RWA believe that it is detrimental to be forced to arrive at a consensus that impinges on personal freedom. No, that's not really what he found. Rather, you have just offered some of the rationalizations used by high-RWAs. High-RWAs operate on a daily basis in a heightened state of fear and hate (most of that hate generated by near paranoid fear). They tend to adopt a xenophobic world view of "them against us" in which "us" is a narrowly defined in-group. In that world view, those in the out-group are perceived as threats to your very existence. A corollary that should be noted is not mentioned by Altemeyer. The limbic system (AKA "r-complex", "reptilian brain" since we share that with reptiles). That includes the amygdala which includes the processing of emotional responses (including fear, anxiety, and aggression) also known as "fight or flight" -- it is reported that brain scans of right and left wingers show the amygdalae of right-wingers to be enlarged. On top of our limbic system we have the mammalian cortex and then the primate neo-cortex, which we use for our rational thought processing. Blood flow to the brain is important and physical anthropologists discuss (at least in science popularizing) the metabolic and nutritional demands that our brains place on our bodies. Punch line: Brain scans reportedly show changes in the distribution of blood in the brain (and hence greater or lesser brain activity) in response to different kinds of situations. When engaged in rational thought (eg, performing mental arithmetic), then blood flow is mainly to the neo-cortex. When responding to an emotional situation, especially to fear and anger, then blood flow to the neo-cortex is shut down and redirected to the limbic system, to a "fight or flight" response. I am a military veteran with 35 years of service. Our most important evolutions were training evolutions (yes, Navy). Consider that military service, especially in war time, has been described as weeks of boredom punctuated by minutes of sheer terror. In those minutes of sheer terror, all your brain's blood is redirected to your limbic system shutting down your neo-cortex (any hope of rational thought). So when the sh*t hits the fan, not only do you not have time to think, but you are also incapable of thinking. That is why you train constantly, so that in those emergency situations you don't have to think but rather your training kicks in and you do what you need to do to function and to survive and to do what you need to do. How that relates to high-RWAs with their hyper-active amygdalae is that high-RWAs will tend to react emotionally with their right-wing propaganda kicking in without putting any thought into it, whereas low-RWAs will actually stop and think about things. If you are an authoritarian wanna-be leader, then you would want to gather support from high-RWAs and to suppress the low-RWAs. High-RWAs are the actual "sheeple", ever ready to follow a leader, whereas low-RWAs are more like cats whose independent thinking makes them so difficult to herd as to spawn their own meme ("like herding cats"). As Altemeyer describes it (cannot find the actual text right now) when an authoritarian leader tells high RWAs that he believes what they do, then they believe him, but when he tells the same thing to low RWAs, they don't believe him and question his motives. Another characteristic of high RWAs is their cruelty. Well, it's more a tendency to blame and want to punish the victim. For example, when a hurricane hits a red state, then everybody, including those low-RWA Democrats, move immediately to help them recover. But when a blue state gets hit (eg, Hurricane Sandy hitting New York City) then the high-RWA Republicans work to block aid to the blue state. We saw this in action at the start of the pandemic. The earliest outbreaks were in the ports of entry which are predominantly in blue states like New York, California, and Washington. So the Trump Administration, gleefully noting that blue states were being affected, did the best it could to completely f*ck up our response (including having FEMA steal PPE and ventilators from states' shipments, which led to the Maryland governor to smuggle supplies in from South Korea in a James Bond operation). In order to punish the blue states. And starting from page 20 (but also read the preceding pages): quote: Just read the fracking book already!
What would happen, for instance, if the majority was poor and needed a lions share of the funds shared? That does not sound fair and equitable to me, and I wouldn't automatically believe that Jesus would support it. In such a situation as you describe, all of society would be on the verge of complete collapse. So there would be no optimal solution to save society. Let's try an analogy. You are on the USS Arizona on 07 Dec 1941 at 0806 when the last bomb has hit it. What is the optimal solution to saving the ship? If you were in a position to help evacuate wounded shipmates, would you refuse to do so because that would detract from saving the ship which you already know is a lost cause? In their opposition to social programs, Republicans bitch and moan that it's too expensive and, beside, there are those who cheat on those programs (Reagan's "welfare queens"). For one thing, evidence of cheating on these programs rank alongside "voter fraud" in that they constitute a very small percentage. So is this the Army? If one soldier out of 1,000 does something wrong, do you punish the 999 other soldiers who did right because of that f*ck-up? I've been there in the Air Force at tech school. Since our basic electronics doctrine (BED) school was on the other side of the runway from the Keesler Triangle, we had to march there in formation. One morning in the pouring rain, one airman out of the entire formation had forgotten his raingear, so nobody could wear their own raingear. We were all punished for one troop's f*ck-up. As the CO of Reese's military school in Malcolm in the Middle would say, "Now I will leave the room so that you can all thank him." Is that how we are supposed to run a social program? In the high-RWA mind, yes. In the rational mind, no. So how much does it really cost? Watch Robert Reich's video, Where Your Tax Dollars Really Go, in which he breaks down the Discretionary Spending Budget :
Income Security spending, which includes food stamps: 6%54% goes to defense, most of which goes to defense contractors. So you want to argue that that 6% is going to destroy the economy, then you answer this one pressing question for me: What the hell have you been smoking?
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5930 Joined: Member Rating: 5.8
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From the HBO series, The Newsroom (2012-2014), here is the interview with an EPA official:
Basically, "that would have been great to have done 20, even 10, years ago. Now it's too late." That aired in 2014.
ABE: One of the items he says we have to look forward to is mass migrations. Like the beginnings of starvation from crop failures in Central America which is part of what's driving their migration northwards to our southern border. This is part of the reason for our "immigration problem" and it's only going to get worse. In 1989 James Burke, BBC science correspondent who also did the PBS series "Connections" and "The Day the Universe Changed", did a series, "After the Warming" which looked at the effects of global warming (YouTube search page: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=james+burke+... ). The format is that he is reporting from the future that we are creating and describing how everything went down the tubes. He keeps hinting at their still awaiting data from the Atlantic. As we were all taught in elementary school (or a bit later), the Gulf Stream is a current of warm water running close to the surface which provides Europe with a temperate climate. What we were not taught is that as that warm water cools, it descends into the depths and then flows southwards to the Caribbean where it gets warmed and flows northwards again. It is a circuit, like where the electrons from the battery flows out to the devices, but they all have to be connected to a common return path (to chassis ground in a car) in order to complete the circuit and allow the electrons to flow. Or the central forced-air heating in your house which blows heated air out the vents throughout your house, but there still has to be that return vent (which is where you replace the filter periodically) taking in the cooler air to be heated and forced out the vents. If that circuit is not completed, then then the flow stops. In the Atlantic, that's referred to as a "conveyor system". Without that cold deep water returning south, you no longer have a Gulf Stream keeping Europe temperate. Now, that conveyor system depends on the sea water being a certain salinity, that it be salty enough. As the ice cap of Greenland melts, it dumps more and more fresh water into the northern seas, reducing the water's salinity. That is what will lead to the breakdown of that conveyor system which drives the Gulf Stream. In "After the Warming", they have just discovered that that conveyor system has stopped. Edited by dwise1, : ABE (not the Scottish ABE: "Anybody But England")
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5930 Joined: Member Rating: 5.8 |
When you read "meters", think "yards". Should be close enough.
Part of a page I'm working on for my website, "How to Learn to Think in Metric".
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5930 Joined: Member Rating: 5.8 |
The great flud(s)? According to research I did back when and posted on CompuServe in 1990 (GEOLOGICAL EVIDENCE OF AN ANCIENT EARTH), the melting of the ice sheet at the end of the last ice age, the Wisconsinan Ice Age:
quote ABE:So we are still in the middle of that world-wide flood; the waters have not receded! And now the "flood waters" are getting even higher. Since then, I learned of the Wallace Line in Indonesia:
quote Using Google Earth (which also displays sea depth), I found the depths of the Java Sea to be under 200 feet, similar to the depth of the Persian Gulf, which would be indicative of a land bridge during the Wisconsin Ice Age. However, between Bali and Lombok (through which the Wallace Line runs) sea depth is 2000 to 3000 feet deep, hence no land bridge for there. Same between Borneo and Sulawesi (about 5000 feet deep). Also, on a "Discovery"-type channel, they reported about an ancient sea-side temple complex somewhere on the coast of India. It stands there half submerged about a quarter mile out from shore (if I recall correctly).Edited by dwise1, : ABE
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5930 Joined: Member Rating: 5.8 |
So then he's pissed off for absolutely no reason?
And his point is ... ?
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