1. They should add to that list of questions basic economics questions.

   Conservatives ‘might’ score higher but so many are woefullly uninformed.

   I myself was when I was a liberal….. in 1991. That year I went to the library 3 times a week for a full year (before the Internet) in order to figure what was ‘true’ when I had my core beliefs challenged.

2. The Big Black Hole in our economy and our culture is the money spent on “education.” People like William Ayers are the tip of the iceberg. Our schools no longer impart a solid course of education that imparts real skills and knowledge base. They are indoctrinated, which means that the education professionals are subverting our society and ripping off the taxpayer.

   You cannot build enough gallows for the numbers of these people who deserve to mount those steps.

   http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/11/how_the_academic_left_elected.html

3. Education is an industry like automobiles. Where union employees are on a mission to get paid well, do their time, and to hell with everything outside their little gimme vision of the world.

4. >would likely bankrupt the coal industry

   Yeah right.

5. @ Mitsu:

   Transript of Obama response to the San Francisco Chronicle in January 2008. Video available on YouTube:

   “Let me sort of describe my overall policy.

   What I’ve said is that we would put a cap and trade system in place that is as aggressive, if not more aggressive, than anybody else’s out there.

   I was the first to call for a 100% auction on the cap and trade system, which means that every unit of carbon or greenhouse gases emitted would be charged to the polluter. That will create a market in which whatever technologies are out there that are being presented, whatever power plants that are being built, that they would have to meet the rigors of that market and the ratcheted down caps that are being placed, imposed every year.

   So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can; it’s just that it will bankrupt them because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.

   That will also generate billions of dollars that we can invest in solar, wind, biodiesel and other alternative energy approaches.

   The only thing I’ve said with respect to coal, I haven’t been some coal booster. What I have said is that for us to take coal off the table as a ideological matter as opposed to saying if technology allows us to use coal in a clean way, we should pursue it.

   So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can.

   It’s just that it will bankrupt them.”

6. An added thought on The Chosen One’s thought processes:

   IF you are going to bankrupt anyone building a coal fired plant – THEN you are destroying the very businesses you say you are going to charge tremendously high fees from for “greenhouse gases” – SO if you’ve destroyed these industries exactly where in the hell are all of these billions of dollars supposed to come from that you’re going to use to fund the development of alternative energy sources?

7. Mitsu, you hadn’t been aware of the speech to which Scottie refers? I’d thought you were better informed than that.

8. There is no intenetion of developing alternative energy sources. Look at what they are doing now; it is all an illusion. There are pretty much regulations in the way to prevent the deployment of any type of “alternative” sources they espouse.

   “Alternative” energy is the pretty girl on stage to distract us whilst the magician pulls the fast one.

   The plan is to reduce energy utilization by lowering the standard of living of everyone (except for our betters, of course).

9. Mitsu wrote, “Yeah right”

   Occam wrote, “I’d thought you were better informed than that.”

   A resounding NO! 🙂 But alas… I too was negligent pre-1991….

10. Occam….come on now, play nice.

    I mean seriously, Mitsu is simply unknowingly providing more evidence of how (un)informed the typical Obama supporter is, so have a little pity and understanding why don’t ya?

    The comment they made simply confirmed what the poll revealed.

11. While I don’t doubt many Obama voters were ignorant of the issues, would a similar poll show McCain voters to be well-informed?

    As a college professor, I find most students to be woefully uninformed. I also find them to be very uninterested in “politics”. It is even unclear to me what they think Politics are, hence the quotation marks.

    It seems doubtful to me that McCain and Palin supporters should develop a Myth that Republicans are informed while Democrats are uninformed. The Democratic Party did that for years when they lost elections, and it seems somewhat self-defeating. “Find me better voters, and my sde will win.”

    Now I know that what is probably being argued here is that the Media is evil, but it is amazing to me that in a nation of some 100 million voters, the majority watched Saturday Night Live or read the liberal newspapers.

    P.S. If you really want to be resentful, look up how Democrats and liberals reacted in 2000, 2002, and 2004 responded. But again:

    1. How different are voters for Obama than voters for McCain? and

    2. Is this a winning strategy?

12. Of course I heard about that interview. His comments were referring to new polluting coal plants, not “the coal industry”. Clean coal plants, however, are another story, and if you read the rest of his quote, he makes that clear when he says “if technology allows us to use coal in a clean way, we should pursue it.” In other words the cap-and-trade system would only punish new, polluting coal plants, not clean coal plants using carbon sequestration.

    The other thing totally missed in all this is that McCain’s cap-and-trade system was in this respect very much the same as Obama’s. It would also have penalized new polluting coal plants in the same way.

13. Obama got elected because he ran a good campaign, I was undecided until the ballot was in my hand, and I had rooted for McCain most of the way … by the end of the campaign I just couldn’t see me standing by an elderly (not old but ‘elderly’ … sorry but it is a factor) McCain as Commander in Chief and palin in the wings.

14. Scottie, I wasn’t being snarky.

    “if technology allows us to use coal in a clean way, we should pursue it.”

    Uh…how are you going to burn coal and not produce CO2? Even the Messiah is going to have a tough row to hoe on that one. It’s equivalent to saying that if technology should let us to swim without getting wet, then He’s all for it.

    But let’s parse Obama’s statement. He’s talking about greenhouse gases, and then throws in this nonsense about using coal “in a clean way.” That invites those not paying attention to think of acid rain or other pollution that technology could conceivably obviate, not emissions that must necessarily result from combustion of coal.

    So either a) he’s too stupid to realize that, or b) he thinks his acolytes won’t think for a femtosecond about what He’s just said. Point b) is clearly true; the jury is still out on point a).

    The proper response was a loud guffaw. Kudos to anyone who so responded.

    It’s much like the geniuses who propose battery-powered cars to cut greenhouse gases, to whom it apparently has not occurred that we’d need to charge the batteries somehow.

15. I think that poll was a Rovian conspiracy by the right-wing Zionist cabal, the same ones that brought down the twin towers.

    But who says Americans have to have all the brains anyway? We should redistribute them around the world to make the playing field even. Equal rights for all!

16. Clean coal discussed:

    http://www.triplepundit.com/pages/askpablo-clean-coal.php

17. Btw, “carbon sequestration” is nonsense, from an energetic point of view. It’s roughly equivalent thermodynamically to saying we’ll use hydroelectric power, and then pump all the water back behind the dam. It can be done, of course, but energetically will obviate the point of the combustion in the first place. To put the matter into the financial context for your delectation, it’s analogous to “getting out of debt” by getting a consolidation loan.

    The Second Law of Thermodynamics: you can’t win, you can’t break even, and you can’t quit the game.

18. It seems like there are two possible conclusions you could draw from this survey. First, that Obama supporters are much less informed than McCain supporters (and perhaps that is why they voted for Obama in the first place). Second, that Obama’s campaign was much more successful, generally, at getting negative publicity to stick than McCain’s campaign was.

    We can’t really come to the first conclusion because

    a. We do not have a comparison group of McCain voters.

    b. Even if we did have such a comparison group, and it was shown that McCain supporters answered the questions better on average, we would still have problems because there are more anti-Obama/Biden questions than there are anti-McCain/Palin questions. A simple strategy like “always give the answer that favors my own candidate” would therefore produce the result that McCain supporters are more informed, even if they weren’t.

    I don’t know why they didn’t balance the questions and include a sample of McCain supporters, if they really wanted to make the point that Obama supporters are less informed.

    The second conclusion, that the Obama campaign was more effective than the McCain campaign, is consistent with the data, and might be true if we found that McCain supporters answered similarly to Obama supporters.

19. Occam, your statement is simply wrong on the engineering and the physics. Carbon sequestration can cost as little as 10% of the total energy output of a coal plant. At most it would cost around 40% of the energy. As noted in the above article, if you combined clean coal with wind power and carbon sequestration, the whole shebang could potentially work.

    In any event, the whole point is that the supposed “correct answer” to the question posed in the survey is wrong on its face. Obama was not talking about the entire coal industry, as well — his program would have penalized new plants. That’s the way cap and trade works. And, finally, McCain’s plan was basically the same as Obama’s in this respect.

20. Pingback:David’s Blog of Common Sense » Election Ignorance

21. Son, I taught thermodynamics for 30 years. But maybe the Messiah can repeal the Second Law of Thermodynamics, just doing what God would do if he knew what He knows.

    I’m not saying that carbon sequestration cannot be done, but rather that its cost will be prohibitive energetically and economically. Btw, I believe you will find that energetic analyses will all over the shop based upon what the analyst takes to be his standard states, i.e., what one considers to be the starting and ending points. Choice of standard states is difficult, and if performed incorrectly, leads to specious results.

    For example, again in the financial context, inappropriate choice of standard states can make credit card purchases look free. You wave a piece of plastic, and walk away with goods. Great. Except your credit card balance is no longer in the standard state (in this case whatever the balance, if any, was beforehand).

    This example is hopelessly prosaic and simple-minded, but people commonly – indeed, typically – make exactly the same type of conceptual mistake in thermodynamic calculations all the time.

22. I absolutely agree that a comparison poll of McCain supporters would be of great interest.

23. Mistu Occam, your statement is simply wrong on the engineering and the physics. Carbon sequestration can cost as little as 10% of the total energy output of a coal plant. At most it would cost around 40% of the energy. As noted in the above article, if you combined clean coal with wind power and carbon sequestration, the whole shebang could potentially work.
    

    No Mitsu, YOUR wrong… and you are showing how flamingly ignorant you are to people who know physics. I can’t talk about anyone else though.

    Did you know that 50% of the energy generated is lost getting to the delivery point?

    Even if I give you the benefit of the doubt, which for someone who knows physics and chemistry is hard, and we say your 40% is correct.

    That leaves 10% of the energy left for usage. Your system would require 5 times the usage of coal to deliver the same unit of energy.

    So somehow you think that having to burn 5 times the amount of coal will result in 1/5th the power generated per unit of wear and tear on the coal plant.

    The difference you think your getting is in water and O2 that came from the air. But when you’re working to trap the carbon, that process is more expensive than burning. So your numbers are way off.

    Again, giving you the benefit of the doubt.

    You don’t really even have to do the physics to work it out. Divert 40% of something, you have to generate twice as much to get back to where you are.

    No?

    So you just doubled the rate of coal burn without gaining the production from it.

    And you just doubled the energy cost per unit, while making it four times harder to expand capacity.

    Meanwhile… GLOBAL WARMING IS A HOAX.

    This past month they just discovered two different major effectors to our climate.. Water being more at play than before (reported today), a magnetic tendril link between the sun and earth in which high energy particles flow through a magnetic pipe (this month). There is also other things. but none of this stuff is in the models.

    Hansen, the guy that did this modeling. The head of much of this. He is not even a climatologist. He originally pushed global cooling. But that was before you were born, and when I was young. I remember the stories of a coming ice age… but things warmed up and Hansen was left with models predicting an ice age. So what did he do? he tweaked his models, got on the socialist globalist totalitarian bandwagon, and started pushing global warming.

    Well solar cycle 24 is a very interesting thing. It’s as if god wishes to keep confounding the plans of evil people. (I don’t believe that, but it has a sort of odd nicety about it). the sun has been quite almost devoid of sun spots for around 300 days. Now a few have appeared, but the count is one for the top records in recent history. If it keeps going, we may be more worried about what happened the last time it went for a long way. (see maunder minimum).

    What you don’t get mitsu, and we all understand why. Is that all these games they are playing DEPEND on your kind of ignorance. It’s a special kind though. Other ignorant people in the past knew they were ignorant, they would try to learn. Your type of ignorance comes with a form of hubris that no matter how many times your wrong, its inconceivable that your wrong. There is no reason to learn anything, you know it. except that when pressed for facts and basis, you get them wrong, but claim your conclusion is right. so you dnt have to learn anything.

    Everything your keepers told you is all you need to know, and everything they told you is perfect knowledge, so there is no reason to insult them and check the facts.

    That’s the difference between collective, and individual… we don’t trust other individuals because its natural for them to trick for gain. You trust the leaders of your collective, they are beyond reproach, because if not, the truth is way too hard to face.

24. What I have said is that for us to take coal off the table as a ideological matter as opposed to saying if technology allows us to use coal in a clean way, we should pursue it.

    Allowing for Obama’s typically fractured grammar when speaking extemporaneously, I interpret this sentence to mean:

    [We should] take coal off the table [as a matter of ideology even if] technology allows us to use coal in a clean way.

    Neo: It would be nice to see a similar survey of McCain supporters. I predict that you’d see slightly higher correct responses to questions about McCain, and moderately lower incorrect responses to questions about Obama.

25. by the way… wind power kills birds and bats… the wing going by causes a serios pressur drop that shreds their lungs and organs.

    there is no way to get energy from where the wind blows to where you need it efficiently.

    the technology is VERY wasteful if you take into account the construction, maintenence and other costs of materials accounted going back to smelting metal… which agenda false science tupe stuff never does.

    the solutions are worse than the problem.
    which is the point… because as churchill said, crisis was the best invention for demagogary.

26. I’m for fossil power until we can get nuclear power up an running.

27. nyomythus wrote, “by the end of the campaign I just couldn’t see me standing by an elderly (not old but ‘elderly’ … sorry but it is a factor) McCain as Commander in Chief and palin in the wings.”

    Agist and Sexist!

    Wonderful ! /end sarcasm

    Palin/McCain had the BETTER solutions, had the prescription for the economy (cuts in capital gains taxes, corporate taxes and not raising income taxes) and had the most “executive” experience over the other 3 men.

    You chose a man who had no executive experience, and with his legislative eperience voted present 45% of the time and has NO bills he can point to to say, “see, this is why you should vote for me!”.

    His proposals HAVE people DIVESTING. They’d rather pay the capital gains taxes on gains now than later when he raises them.

    His votes on Fannie and Freddie reflected his second largest recipient of funds from them.

    He and the dominant drive-by media misrepresented McCain and Palin’s positions because they didn’t know the facts themselves, don’t know economics and weren’t truthful about Sarah.

    You enabled the negligent media. Thanks!

28. a 1971 Washington Post scare piece entitled “U.S. Scientist Sees New Ice Age Coming” fretted that burning fossil fuels discharges particles into the atmosphere that reflect the sun’s rays back into space. Emissions over 5—10 years supposedly “could be sufficient to trigger an ice age.”

    The NASA research behind this hysteria was supported by a “computer program developed by Dr. James Hansen,”
    

    and

    Washington Post and Science magazine

    The world could be as little as 15 or 25 years away from a disastrous new ice age, a leading atmospheric scientist predicts. Dr. S. I. Rasool of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and Columbia University used a computer program by his colleague, Prof. James Hansen, that studied clouds above Venus.

    By 2021, fossil-fuel dust injected by man into the atmosphere could screen out so much sunlight that the average temperature could drop by six degrees, resulting in a buildup of new glaciers that could eventually cover huge areas.
    

    more at…
    http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2007/sep/19/inside-the-beltway-69748548/

    no ice age came in 10 years…

    meanwhile… we have been cooling since 98…

    COOLING.. (as have the other planets)

    Paleoclimatologist: Expect Global COOLING — ‘There’s been no global warming in the 21st century’
    lfpress.ca/newsstand/News/Local/2008/11/17/7433876-sun.html

29. Mitsu,

    Clean coal has nothing to do with CO2. It has everything to do with carbon alone. When carbon mixes with 2 oxygen molecules it becomes CO2 which is NOT a pollutant.

    Unfortunately, Coal has not burned as cleanly as natural gas can burn in the past. But Coal burning plants have been gaining breakthroughs to emit less and less hydrocarbons (and other pollutants) and in turn more and more CO2. That’s efficiency just like cars. It used to be that NOC, Hydro Carbons, Carbon Monoxide and other pollutants used to come out of tailpipes at higher rates.

    Now cars emit almost nothing but water vapor and CO2. So greenies have to attack CO2.

    Problem is that greenhouses with pumped in CO2 have livelier plants because vegetation uses CO2. Mammals and humans breathe oxygen. Plants breathe CO2.

    While the hottest decade in the last century was the 1930’s we have environmentalists COSTING people more and making life extremely hard with no scientific or economic common sense.

    We are all for being clean. But in the sense that people think that clean burning coal plants would emit less CO2???? No !!! Not unless you are God !

    The only thing that would help emit less CO2 is if we needed less electricity and therefore burnt less coal, natural gas or anything carbon based.

    burning carbon based anything is what makes CO2.

30. Are we still stuck on stupid – Anthropogenic Global Warming, and the neural flatulence called cap and trade (a.k.a., getting around the prior rejections by a prior president and Congress of Kyoto)?

    Crafting economic and energy policy around junk science is beyond dumb. It’s malpractice and malfeasance.

31. avisitorhere and others rightly note the missing comparison group of McCain voters. We all tend to remember what fits our narrative better, and have difficulty remembering things that contradict it.

    I have seen limited data showing that conservatives can name more of the Bill of Rights and answer basic civics questions better, but the results were not overwhelming. We’ve got our share of fools and buffleheads over here.

32. Mr. Obama is a very skilled politician who usually manages to be on both sides of an issue — often at the same time. He will “consider” off shore drilling. He is in favor of coal if it can be clean. He is in favor of nuclear power if we solve the problem of waste. He supports the Second Amendment but believes in reasonable gun controls.

    His skill as a politician greatly eclipsed that of McCain.

33. We’ve got our share of fools and buffleheads over here.

    Indeed.

    The critical aspect: maintaining skepticism in proportion to the implausibility of (or lack of precedent for) the assertion (particularly when that assertion is highly self-serving for those making it). Extraordinary claims, extraordinary proof, and all that.

34. When we start counting on politicians actually to know anything about economics or science, we are in trouble.

35. Occam, Fredhjr,

    i dont think that mitsu and the other leftists realize that being green is a bourgeoisie LUXURY.

    that to go green is to have energy to waste, to have exess productivity and capital enough where people say, i want the more expensive item.

    they have lack of vision… they dont see that way before 100 years is up, we will be mining garbage dumps for raw materials… sending trash to the sun… (who i bet will claim we can pollute).. and tons of other things..

    IF no one puts a stranglehold on productivity and production by taking ownership of everything and slowing progress as much as possible to create advantage and dynastic progress.

36. Clearly there are a lot of very stupid voters in this country. Obama was smart enough to target the stupid voters. That strategy paid off for him very well. If you can gather enough Mitsus to vote for you, you too can be president.

37. As an add on to my previous post.

    There are two factors in turning a fuel to energy.
    1) Burning the carbon based fuel as efficiently as possible so that they byproducts are CO2 and very little else.
    2) Utilizing that heat to generate the power/electricity as efficiently as possible.

    For instance:
    In automobiles there is no getting around the fact that it takes a certain amount of carbon based fuel to propel a 2 ton (4,000 lb) vehicle forward and then keep it going through the aerodynamic drag. Over the years there has been gains where what comes out of tailpipe is more or less 99.9% CO2 but that is good. CO2 is not a pollutant it is what plants breathe.

    Also over the years engines have gotten more efficient only as a factor of being able to utilize the heat (in the pistons) more efficiently with fuel injectors, aluminum engines, overhead cams, etc but when it comes down to it there is no MIRACLE cure for the fact that heat will only propel a certain amount of weight so far so fast.

    This is true with coal based power plants as well. Nobody is for dirty coal. Everybody is for ‘clean’ coal. All that means is burning it efficiently enough so it doesn’t look like an 1800’s train belching out carbon into the air but instead is CO2.

    The heat that burning carbon based fuels generates can only generate so much electricity per amount of heat. There is no miracle amount of electricity.

    Force or heat can be used to create electricity with generators. Nuclear, coal, natural gas, hyrdro can create enough force to equal 1,000’s of wind turbines. Solar panels are so costly and will take so much acreage.

    So called “green energy” (wind and solar) provides this country 1% of it’s energy needs. T Boone Pickens is right. You need to use our resources (he insists natural gas). But that is burning a carbon based fuel and making CO2 !!!

    OK – That’s my primer. Class dismissed.

    Next topic – race relations ! Read Ward Connerly’s new book !

38. Yes, obviously the public’s skewed knowledge of candidate trivia had a large effect on the election…

    Have you ever considered that the apparent media bias for Obama was not the cause of his victory but rather another effect of the much larger forces that led to both? MSM bias for Obama did not cause him to win; the two are correlated. Both were caused by the strong undercurrents of public sentiment already in place that I have faith are not very much affected by irrelevant minutiae.

39. Anyone who’s looked at the infrared spectra of CO2 and of water should be prima facie skeptical of AGW.

    The IR spectrum of CO2 shows two sharp bands around 2350 and 1600 cm-1, IIRC.

    That of water shows a big potato that extends from 3000 to 3300 cm-1, so the integrated intensity (the oscillator strength) is much greater than that of CO2. In addition, CO2 is ca. 500 ppm (0.05%) of the atmosphere, whereas water is ca. 10,000-20,000 ppm (1-2%, or 7.5-15 mm Hg) of the atmosphere, all on a molar basis.

    Bottom line: before performing calculation #1, a rational observer would consider CO2 to be the pea under the mattress in terms of solar absorption. Water is a) much more abundant, b) much more absorptive, and c) much more variable in partial pressure (i.e., humiidity) than CO2.

    Proponents of AGW have to rebut those considerations. To date, I’ve not seen any such rebuttal. What I have seen would be appeals to a) the precautionary principle (“how can we be sure it’s not true, and b) the welfare of the children. In short, arguments that can be made for anything, and are beneath consideration.

    Furthermore, proponents use AGW to try to enforce exactly the same environmental and anti-capitalist initiatives they have been proposing unsuccessfully for a generation. That alone should set any sentient being’s antennae quivering (“You have to do what we’ve been proposing since the Carter Administration; it’s for the children!”).

40. “Both were caused by the strong undercurrents of public sentiment already in place that I have faith are not very much affected by irrelevant minutiae.”

    That explains why the media voted about 9-1 for Mondale while Reagan won every state but one, and 525 of a possible 538 electoral votes–those strong undercurrents reflected in the “apparent” media bias.

    I’m wasting my time, but you can’t seriously believe it is “trivial” not to know the current Speaker of the House and Majority Leader in the Senate. There is some obligation on the voter to be at least marginally informed about government in order to make an intelligent decision about those seeking to occupy leadership roles.

41. Not only do I agree with what Occam wrote there at the end, I note that many (if not most) only care about carbon emissions – nothing else.

    There are MANY “solutions” out there that increase Methane production (and if AGW is real then that is thousands of times worse), sulfuric gas (H2SO4 falling from the sky is a Bad Thing(TM) – much worse than AGW), and all sorts of other things.

    Some, like solar panels, work well when you take into account their running lifetime but when you look at what it takes to produce and destroy them (that is – life cycle from raw materials to how to dispose of them when they are no longer useful) their greenhouse gas emissions is *horrid* along with many other caustic materials. They are only good if you ignore making and destroying them.

    Some, like Tidal Generators are great with respect to emissions – they pretty much have none. They are also low impact when you create them, run them, and dispose of them. Maintenance is easy, clean, and cheap and they can generate vast amounts of power. Sounds great huh – they are the wave of the future! Well, except for the fact that when you have enough to actually produce useful amounts of energy the first thing they suck their energy from is long shore currents. These are the currents that build beaches (that is, stops erosion) and keep nutrients flowing in the surf. In fact it stops them completely enough that they pretty much sterilize the areas they are attempted in. But hey – at least they don’t produce CO2!!!!

    Yep, as stated above, those three laws of thermodynamics are killer. You pretty much have to get the energy from someplace. Coal gets it from long dead things and re-releases so you get a shift in energy from the stuff stored to heat, electricity, noise, etc – thankfully nearly all of that (say, CO2) is not a pollutant but is recycled back into the ground to make coal again.

    Wind wil drastically change weather patterns (though feel free to disbelieve this – we do not do it at a large enough scale to prove it yet), tidal kills tidal regions, pretty much anything does. If we can get Solar to be produced/disposed of clean and have a higher energy density (it can’t power us yet even if it were perfectly clean) then it may work. Those are really big “ifs” but they probably aren’t impossible – they are just a ways off.

    As of right now the cleanest is Nuclear but that is an evil word in and of itself to those that think we can overcome thermodynamics. Anymore very little actual waste and what there is has a short half-life (we reuse the long half-life stuff and we are even currently producing much of that “waste” for medical use because we do not have enough). But then we have all these movies that say otherwise and they must be true.

42. Dropping the voting age to 18 was a bad idea. It takes more sense to vote than to drink. Lower the drinking age and raise the voting age for a better America.

43. Occam wrote, “Bottom line: before performing calculation #1, a rational observer would consider CO2 to be the pea under the mattress in terms of solar absorption. Water is a) much more abundant, b) much more absorptive, and c) much more variable in partial pressure (i.e., humiidity) than CO2.”

    Rational is the key word…. They are sooo focused like a laser beam on the grain of sand on the coffee table when the elephant in the room did something else on it…

    And then they make claims about how ‘we’ don’t ‘care’…

44. Occam, please just look up the engineering of carbon sequestration plants if you want to understand the precise thermodynamics. CCS (carbon capture and sequestration) is not attempting to reverse the combustion process; obviously if that’s what it was, it would not work (I am assuming that’s what you’re imagining). All they are doing is capturing the carbon at the output and compressing and storing it. The additional fuel required for this is realistically estimated at around 25%, but the carbon reduction is something along the lines of 80-90%. So yes, this is an economically feasible and workable technology. In fact, conservatives criticizing Obama for his interview response initially were critical because they misinterpreted it as attacking not just new coal plants but even new clean coal plants that use CCS (carbon capture and sequestration).

    As for my own technical background, my degree from Harvard was in physics. I’m quite sure, since you taught thermodynamics for 20 years, if you just looked up the technology you’d understand it.

    Regarding your point about water vapor, Occam: of course you are correct that water vapor is a greenhouse gas. In fact it accounts for 70% of the greenhouse effect. CO2 accounts for about 26% of the effect. The point, however, is that additional water vapor is not being pumped into the atmosphere; we are pumping CO2 in. What limits the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere is, you guessed it, temperature. The warmer the atmosphere, the more water vapor it can hold. Thus, as the atmosphere warms, more water vapor is held in the atmosphere, causing more greenhouse effect, etc. It’s a positive feedback loop.

45. Mitsu, The 26% number above is an opinion not supported by facts.

    The warmest decade in this last 100 years was the 1930’s.

    This planet is not warming.

    This is the reason why Bjorn Lomborg makes sense to me. His thesis is concerning the LIMITED resources that countries have and diverting those resources away from medicine or food or shelter for climate change would have a negative impact on people.

    I agree with Bjorn.

    We are as a nation already making great strides via the private sector in finding the supply of new and alternative energy to meet the demand. It must be a solution that is cost effective.

    There are quite higher priorities. National security, the economy, and keeping the environment clean rate WAY higher than climate change. Climate change can be studied. But the crisis mongerers that want to sell us on a path of pain are neither factually accurate most times nor do are their opinions supported by facts.

46. That video is staggering. My God. It’s so much worse than I thought.

    This also shows how successfully the Big Media have ghetto-ized Fox News and other conservative/contrarian news organizations. Just walled them off completely, demonized them, and encysted the information that only they have persisted in putting out there.

47. avisitorhere Says:

    “While I don’t doubt many Obama voters were ignorant of the issues, would a similar poll show McCain voters to be well-informed?”

    I guess my answer is yes. The republicans would know the anti-republican memes in the same proportions as the dems and ALSO know fewer (but more) anti dem memes than anti republican…

    Thanks to watching the same MSM… while also augmented by other sources… creating the disparity…..

    That’s the point of the survey. Showing the effects of the MSM harping on Palin while not reporting on Obama or Biden in critical ways…

    Of course, an argument can be made for confirmation bias. It’s why asking some republicans the same questions might actually help further make their case of media bias…

48. Thomass is exactly right, the point of that study (and website) wasn’t to say ‘nyahh-nyahh, we Repubs are smarter- look at these stupid Dems’, it was to show how many people just absorbed the extremely biased media (and entertainment world) lines as gospel, and were swayed by that info, even though it was incomplete, and sometimes incorrect.

    It’s about controlling the message- it matters not how good your message is if you can’t get it out in front of those too lazy to go get the facts themselves.

49. Mitsu, this is from the link you provided (a terribly unscientific analysis, I’m afraid):

    “CCS can reduce the carbon dioxide emissions of a coal fired power plant by 80-90%, making the “clean coal” red herring strangely plausible. But if that sounds too good to be true, it probably is, right? The energy required to capture, compress, and pump the CO2 into the ground would increase the fuel needs of the plant by 10-40%. With oil prices approaching $100/barrel last week (and probably reaching it this week) the growing cost of fuels might make this economically infeasible in the minds of most politicians and energy company executives.”

    So, he’s talking about coal fired plants, then tries to explain how the rising cost of crude oil would make coal plant owners unlikely to see a fuel increase of 10-40% as feasible? Wouldn’t the rising cost of oil mean electricity costs go up too, and therefore, their potential revenues would go up making it a better idea?

    The real problem is that if you’re positing that this is feasible, you’ll have to show that clean coal plants with CCS make more profit than the cost of that 10-40% added fuel plus added wear and maintenance on the equipment of the added burning. Good luck on that, especially at the high end.

50. Well, we still need to give Obama a chance, I mean he hasn’t, or hasn’t had a chance, to do anything Presidential yet, he has shown capacity to think for himself, criticize as you wish it’s ultimately a good thing but just keep the thought in mind that we really should give him a chance — important national and international issues will arise so let’s wait and see; as one little person on the planet that’s all I can do anyway.

51. Peter, the minutiae is often what sticks in the mind, though, suggesting that it has a greater effect than you posit. The undercurrents of public sentiment are precisely what we rely on journalists to stay aloof from. I agree that they are not the entire cause of public perception, but they are a key feedback loop, amplifying narratives that are already settling in.

    Think how powerful that is. You are an undecided individual who speculates that candidate A might be too close to a particular industry or segment of society. This speculation has arisen for no clear reason except that someone in the media has asserted it. You hold that suspicion in the back of your mind and suddenly, two weeks later, a misreported, out-of-context quote supports it. You will now begin to see everything about the candidate through that lens, because neutrality and indecision take energy to maintain. We want a summary for easy storage.

    Certainly, something major could come and knock that narrative out, or a collection of rumors from another direction could undermine the other candidate more, but the inertia of voting against A is already in place – based on nothing.

    If you think that scenario is unlikely, compare the vague and sometimes conflicting hopes for Obama during the campaign to the resentment that is showing up among his supporters now that he is making actual concrete decisions. They are beginning to suspect they’ve been had, wondering where the hell their original impressions came from.

52. A few thoughts before getting back to real life for the day…

    First, it’s amazing how Mitsu took The One’s own words on bankrupting the coal fired plant industry and somehow managed to claim that he said something other than what he said.

    Geez…Orwell would have been proud.

    Regarding alternative energy, battery powered cars, etc. – one of the things that the environuts always overlook is the fact that when producing an electric car you are actually generating MORE waste – not less, in the long run.

    While it takes at least as much energy and resources to produce the basic electric car in the first place – this does not take into account the ADDITIONAL energy and resources it takes to produce the huge battery systems these vehicles require.

    Batteries that are chock full of toxic chemicals, and will one day pollute our landfills and junkyards with far more hazardous mixtures than the good old fashioned internal combustion engine which by and large is far more easily recycled back into basic components.

    The toxic wastes from the batteries, however, are another thing entirely.

    Then, as another gentleman pointed out, there is the charging of batteries if you go completely to an electric powered vehicle.

    The nation’s power grid can barely handle the current power demands – it is not capable of handling current power demands AND a sizable percentage of the nations vehicles at the same time without a massive increase in the number of power plants.

    Unfortunately, no coal fired plants cause The One has decided to bankrupt them.

    Unfortunately, no nuclear power plants cause The One is never going to be convinced the waste can be handled safely.

    Unfortunately, the price of oil – though falling now – will eventually go back up as the economy recovers, making the production of electricity via oil based fuels an expensive proposition that negates any advantages of an electric powered car.

    So long term the Obama supporter has made a voting decision that is going to leave all of us sitting beside the road wondering how to get from point A to point B.

    Speaking of the Obama voter and any potential comparison to the McCain voter.

    It’s my understanding that Obama garnered a far larger share of the “youth vote”, while McCain got a larger share of the middle aged vote.

    If that’s the case, I would expect the McCain voter to be better informed on average simply because the “youth vote” has consistently displayed a lack of basic knowledge already on a wide range of subjects (this thread being an excellent example!).

    Like others, I would also like to see a comparable poll of McCain voters asked similar questions.

53. Occam, please just look up the engineering of carbon sequestration plants if you want to understand the precise thermodynamics.

    Like talking to a rock.

    MITSU, SOME OF US ARE TECHNICAL. For us this isnt looking for the nicest sounding lie to make up our minds.

    I attended Bronx High School of Science as physics major, now I make my living doing computer science, and applied physics for doctors at a research hospital. (On the side I am signed fashion/celebrity photo journalist, author, and a few other things. some nykers are eclectic that way).

    May I ask YOUR CV now?

    What you keep doing is acting like a cultist trying to push their religious doctrine on others. but since its not about beings and such you don’t see its still a religious behavior which secular people fall into when they don’t have a religion to take up the space.

    You keep acting as if we will read the passage in your text, a light will shine down on us, and we will refute our 40 or so odd years of life experience, and what amounts to hundreds of years of physics knowledge, to ignore the salient points they are leaving out so as to have an ignorant epiphany (which is false).

    CCS (carbon capture and sequestration) is not attempting to reverse the combustion process; obviously if that’s what it was, it would not work (I am assuming that’s what you’re imagining). All they are doing is capturing the carbon at the output and compressing and storing it.

    Your VERY ignorant… CO2 is a GAS… compressing CO2 makes blocks of ice that people use to keep ice cream cold. It takes up a huge amount of space. And if storage fails, then like metal hydrate it boils off and makes a massive deadly cloud that kills everything in its wake like Bophal India (that was an accident, but there is another incident where a lake bed warmed up, hydrates came up, and a few villages died in their sleep).

    So obviously, this is not what they are going to do. so what IS the process? you cant even tell us Mitsu, but you can sure tell us to look. What makes you think we haven’t? we are techno weenies and physics people, we watch physics and that stuff the way a jock watches football. If I ask Occam something as to the new way to generate antimatter on a desktop (laser created positrons), he probably would have heard about it (if not now, within a few weeks when it percolated to what he reads).

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_capture_and_storage

    what is really sad is that fredhjr, occam, and myself will explain in empirical terms why its unworkable. You believe that if its unworkable they wont push it (meritocracy), but that’s not what happens when socialism is your state. MERIT violates marxes concept of equality, so no choices are made by merit any more. TRUTH not existing, insures that they refuse to believe that a line of thinking will lead to a predictive conclusion (Even though that is what one has to do to design the thing that is being tested so it can work, even partly).

    IDEOLOGY is the basis for decisions, not MERIT. You believe IDEOLOGY = MERIT, but it can’t since it’s a condensation of all the complexity of life and outcomes into a set of rules that can be states in a book smaller than a dictionary. SMALLER THAN A DICTIONARY.

    So we go to wiki to get a few FACTS for mitsu to ignore. But I realize that others here are reading to, and so I don’t answer for you mitsu, I am answering for the others who haven’t decide to completely ignore reality.

    Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is an approach to mitigating global warming based on capturing carbon dioxide (CO2) from large point sources such as fossil fuel power plants and storing it instead of releasing it into the atmosphere. Although CO2 has been injected into geological formations for various purposes, the long term storage of CO2 is a relatively untried concept.

    So, we are going to use a untried technology to prevent a false situation from happening.

    Capturing and compressing CO2 requires much energy and would increase the fuel needs of a coal-fired plant with CCS by 25%-40%[1]. These and other system costs are estimated to increase the cost of energy from a new power plant with CCS by 21-91%[1]. These estimates apply to purpose-built plants near a storage location: applying the technology to preexisting plants or plants far from a storage location will be more expensive.
    

    Just as I said based on your numbers mitsu. If you reduce the amount delivered to the consumer by 40% your going to have to double your consumption of coal. But that consumption is also reduced by 40%, so its actually worse than double. (they just are too lazy to do the numbers right since not doing so serves their purpose and no one can call them to the table for it).

    If you read the rest of it, it sounds like an awful solution. for instance, where is the sequestration to happen? how do you get the CO2 from the plants to the sequestration point? if you build the plants at the sequestration point, you lose the energy in transmission to the delivery point.

    Basically mitsu is showing how wonderfully great America is!!!!!!!!

    He is showing that a person with a very narrow bit of knowledge and totally ignorant of everything else, can earn 250k a year plus and can function that incompetently in every other sphere!!!

    If mitsu was from my wifes country, or was like my grandfather, he would be very skilled in tons of things and understand the way the real world works, but wouldn’t be able to make 250k because they cant act right in the same room with the delusional people in their own bubble world, like mitsu.

    Tune in later to see how mitsu once again being foiled, returns like an evil villain in a comic book or a monster in a movie. No matter how many times he loses the point, he ignores it.

    because mitsu cant debate to a resolution, mitsu has to win even if mitsu is wrong.

    mitsus view of the world is like arguing who is stronger captain namor, or captain America. both like socialism are faked realities with their own premised rules, and so one CAN argue who is stronger. Doesn’t mean that namor or America exists, or that the whole thing is valid in reality. this is the problem that mitsu has. Very smart, so smart that mitsu can fool himself into thinking that throwing wrong facts at us he will win the debate.

    But that’s exactly the same behavior that took merit off the table!!! In other words, the people he is quoting are doing the same thing. plinking away with the wrong and false information that serves a political end (Stalinism is what that is called. Bet you didn’t know that THAT is what it is), because everything is political, so everything is a weapon.

    In other words mitsu, they are winning the argument in the same way your trying to win the argument. By wearing down the opponent with wrong facts till they give up and give in. which is not a way to get to a valid empirical end, it’s the way to show that an ignorant or manipulative person can win by other means than merit.

    They can win their argument by telling the big lie over and over to the people who are receptive to the big lie, and by getting mean and nasty on those who try to show that it’s a big lie.

    This is why we are not going to have the revelation you want, because we are making our choices from empiricism, not ideology. we are not getting our orders from a higher group of intellectuals dictating reality to a lower class set of prols (that’s you mitsu), who then go off like automatons and believe what they are told, like children believe in santa claus.

    Stalinism says that the facts and history and the things we use to gauge reality and make choices are to be manipulated to create and control ends (tends to make a paranoid and frozen population who no longer can associate with each other).

    This is why people in russia believe right now that they are in an economic boom, but each of them believes another part of the country is getting the good stuff while they live the same as before.

    Subjected to more than a century of propaganda masquerading as news, Russians often seem to live in a different reality from the rest of us.
    And sure enough, at a time when their country is locked in its worst financial crisis in a decade, they are more optimistic about the economy than they have ever been. According to opinion polls, 57 per cent reckon it is flourishing, up from 53 per cent in July.
    The survey’s findings are a triumph for the state, proving that the Kremlin has not lost its touch when it comes to manipulating fact. Obeying orders from the top, Russian television has banned the use of words such as “crisis”, “decline” and “devaluation”. Coverage of the mayhem in the country’s stock market, where shares have fallen by 75 per cent since August, is scant.
    

    Sergey, and I keep telling you that under socialism, the facts you use to know the world are subjected to the whims of the state and the whims of elite socialists who wish to control and manipulate an outcome.

    You don’t undersdtand that to guarantee or claim to control an outcome is to imply you have control over the parts to create that outcome (us people).

    They either herd cattle and call that progress, or they leave us alone realizing you cant herd cats, and let progress happen on its own. There is no middle ground.

    You cant claim to control an outcome and have the subjects who create that outcome be free to act on their own mind and own terms based on the real facts.

    You either use force to compel them, or you give them a false reality by controlling the information they use to make choices.

    Once end justifies the means thinking is here, you no longer can trust ANY information. you not longer can trust ANY policy. You not logner can believe any point.

    Unless you can work it out yourself and vette people not only for facts but for ideology.

    Otherwise your attempting to find truth among pathological liars and refusing to hear that the people you trust are pathological liars who want power over you and your assets for themselves.

54. he has shown capacity to think for himself

    all his choices are HEAVY IDEOLOGICAL… that is not thinking for yourself. that is taking a simplefied view of the world and casting that to everything…

    in other words, he sees everything through the limited schema of ideology… NOT through the complete vision of empirical reality which he denies since he beleives ideology.

    in other words he is following a doctrine that is not allowed to evolve at all since to do so is to become something else piece by piece. (which is what they do in capitalism. they replace each capitalist brick with a socialist brick. as the system fails, they blame the capitalists, so the people rush to put new socailist bricks in place, before long, there is a completely new brick structure that replaces the old because no one conserved the old, and allowed a fish to evolve into a man… and allowed capitalism, to evolve into a dictatorship.

    you guys keep ignoring that socialists goal is a dictatorship of the proletariat.

    DICTATORSHIP is the stated goal…

    and you argue constantly that that horrible end is not the goal, will not get there, and will not happen. even though its a key necessity of a centralized planned economy… which is what natinoalization is, the people who couldnt make money running businesses since their work is checked against productivity or losses, now control businesses and dont care about such.

    and as each organ lies, since lying is the way they got power, and is a social good. the whole system slowly gets out of wack…

    you can read the books by bella dodd online. they are free… she was a TRUE BELEIVER, who backed up her beleifs by immigrating to russia to be socialist…

    her whole writing, is much like neos discovery (As is much of that category of writing), but neo had it much easier.

    the more in denial the people are, the harder they have it when reality comes crashing through the door and they realize what they did, and there is no turning back or escaping.

55. Were it possible to give people like Al Gore and Mr Hansen a truth serum, i’d almost guarantee they’d admit to man made global warming as a factual hoax. These aren’t stupid men.

    So what gives?

    We have to conclude these are people who for some reason despise the thought of free individuals prospering without a central planning daddy. EVEN if the premise for such planning needs has to be based on totally bogus and outlandish concepts.

    What we need is a revolution that exposes these intellectual control freaks for the power hungry bastards they are.

56. The matrix was a metaphor for what its like to live in a socialist/communist state. particularly a Stalinist one.

    The inputs to the reality you perceive are changed (like in 1984 too), so that you choose to take the action they want without them having to force you.

    You laugh when you watch a hypnotists show, because you maintain your privileged view of reality, while the subjects get handed a reality from a central person on stage who tells them how to act.

    If ALL the news said the same thing, a person in this situation coming from a system of merit, will blindly trust the information. they will incorporate that into their world view. if the scholl is also spitting out the info, and tv shows pile on the bandwagon, you have a powerful force that will redefine the facts because we use perception to determine facts.

    So once merit is off the table, and the end justifies the means, its perfectly moral to trick everyone. Its perfectly normal to not tell them the errors, since they are not able to change anything. You cant let people believing in a false reality take control of the steering wheel, so they stop listening to the public that they are manipulating. The dictatorship is a natural progression from this, as eventually the separation from reality is so great even useful idiots start to see. This is the period they are in right now in Venezuela.

    When this happens they try to use the same political terrorism that was normalized (Stalin again) in our minds as the way to effect change…

    Really? Is it really normal that the only way to effect change is political terrorism?

    Nope… but worse is the fact that once its normalized, the condition of might makes right is the new way to merit. And the state is the mightiest might.

    A democratic republic is founded on a power vested in the people who vote. What does the violence and actions of the gay community after the vote? Political terrorism, which says you can only be safe by voting or siding with the group that would beat you up and harrase you and hurt you otherwise.

    And somehow, the people are twisted enough to believe that if the gay people kill enough Christians, and hurt enough mormons, and blacklist enough restaurants, and harrase the elderly, priests will perform nuptuals for them and their cause is legitimized.

    At some point the public realizes that they hasve no say unless they are willing to go to war on the streets for it. after all, if they were attacking the black national socialists, the response to their actions would be a tad more violent.

    Eventually what will happen is that easy prey like the religious will run out. the promises will fall through, and the enemies of the people rhetoric will be trumped out in some form. though probably not in a form directly connectable to prior terms. (just as gulag, work camp, concentration camp, re-education camp, are all the same thing for the most part). a new label for a new time, to cover the old and make it fresh.

    Eventually one group who is mutually exclusive with another group (black/Hispanic vs gay community), will square off..

    And that’s when the state will step in and say no more of this. no more protests, because they serve no purpose other than destabilize and ruin democratic function. but that’s when the new communist leaders take up the concept of sovereign democracy. a new label for dictatorship of the proletariat, like communist, and communitarian are.

    Heck, even mitsu would know what a liger is… the combination of a lion and a tiger… but yet is ignorant of what a communitarian is… communist totalitarian…

    That’s how stupid the left is.

    Consistently the left believers put into office despots, and dictators…

    Yet they belive they don’t, despite their system when fully operational is a DICTATORSHIP of the proletariat… meaning that the rulers are dictators on behalf of the people, which is the claim that ALL dictators make. No?

    thats real dense… they keep implementing a dictatorship system, and yet cant realize why they keep making the worlds dictators because they have to blame something else…

57. First of all, let me just point out the bizarre nature of this “debate”: it is CONSERVATIVES who have primarily been pushing clean coal technology and CCS. This was a big part of Sarah Palin’s stump speeches attacking Barack Obama.

    >SOME OF US ARE TECHNICAL

    Indeed, as am I (as I already mentioned, my degree is in physics from Harvard — Bronx Science is a good high school, but last time I checked, Harvard was the top college in the country in math and physics, which is one reason I went there, the other because, though I also got into Caltech and MIT, I wanted a liberal arts education). The engineers who built the CCS plant in Germany, which is operational now, are also “technical”. As are the many engineers and physicists who work in the field.

    Being “technical” usually means discussing subjects like this in a sober manner, without yelling and screaming, and tearing your hair out.

    Can we attempt to have such a conversation?

    First of all, the estimates are that CCS will increase the *fuel consumption* of plants by 25%. Not 100%. I believe you’re making a simple math error here: you’re thinking the 25% is a reduction in the power output of the plant which comes out entirely from the usable power (i.e., 50% of recoverable power after taking into account transmission losses). First of all, that in itself is in error; if the raw power output of a plant were to go down by 25%, if you assume a transmission loss of 50%, the actual net power coming from the plant would be 50% x 75%, or 37.5%, vs. 50% of the power the plant would have generated without CCS, i.e., a 25% reduction, because the CCS power comes out at the source, not at the delivery point, so you take it out prior to the transmission loss. However, in fact what they’re saying is the increased fuel needs of the plants are about 25%, which means the actual power loss is closer to 20%, i.e., 1/1.25.

    Obviously CCS is still a new technology and there are many unanswered questions about it, but as I keep saying, this is not an area about which there is controversy, as in “does CCS require doubling the fuel requirements, or not?”, except perhaps in the halls of the the Bronx Science high school…

    In any event, the whole point of my comment is that the question in this case was wrong: Obama did not say he would bankrupt the entire existing coal power industry, he was talking about cap and trade which would penalize NEW coal plants, AND WHICH MCCAIN ALSO SUPPORTS.

58. You can’t expect children to be able to resist, propaganda, Neo. Certainly these young folks would be unable to resist the indoctrination.

59. like i said… talking to a rock…

    somehow we went from the validity of the technology to finding who to blame for suggesting it… the conservatives… like the butler, always.

    this is the best explanation of mitsu to date
    (even if mitsu isnt from the US)

    U.S. Teens Brimming With Self-Esteem
    news.yahoo.com/s/hsn/20081112/hl_hsn/usteensbrimmingwithselfesteem

    basically mitsu is average, but believes that they are in the top 20% and are so frustrated that they are not treated teh way intelligentsia (they belive) should be treated. with defference and worship that they gave their leaders.

    basically the article defines a overconfidence delusion… (which politically is intention given the outcome when they all think they are greater than they are and come crashing down when reality doesnt bend to their wishes without effort).

    Today’s American high school students are far likelier than those in the 1970s to believe they’ll make outstanding spouses, parents and workers, new research shows.
    They’re also much more likely to claim they are “A” students with high IQs — even though other research shows that today’s students do less homework than their counterparts did in the 1970s.
    

    they divorce in greater numbers, they have promiscuous sex and carry deseases in greater numbers, they belive their education superior to the past, when its inferior by a HUGE margin… and on and on..

    is it any wonder tha mitsu is trying to confirm his view of himself over and over… that all he needs is one win to bolster against all the failures to preserve his self esteem.

    his self esteem is soooo large that he cant concede that he has a wrong position. he is a contortionist par excellence…

    “High school students’ responses have crossed over into a really unrealistic realm, with three-fourths of them expecting performance that’s effectively in the top 20 percent,”

    this is why they cant listen to someone with experience, that actually works in the fields, and so on..

    they have all the answers because they are all geniues… thats gives them false hubris that real geniuses dont actually have (being confident is not the same as hubris).

    affirmative action promotions are like this. if they werent different affirmative action wouldnt be necessary (see much chinese affirmative action?). so they have more confidecne than their abilities merit. some of them may actually have the merit, but they are lost in a sea of overconfident people who have inflated egos and want to be leaders through having letters and such, and not by having the actual best argument.

    “When we look at the responses of the students in the ’70s, they are certainly confident that they are going to perform well, but their responses are more modest, a little more realistic” than teens in 2006, Twenge said.

    really? us older people are amazed… duh.

    bet mitsu will claim that he is special and this doesnt apply to him… (after all he is a harvard law physicist who runs ministryofthought.com who for a cum laude physics guy should be tops, and though havent really worked as a top physicist. unless this is a different mitsu).

    basically he thinks that degrees are proof that he is right… but occam, fred, and myself… we have seen so many paper degrees that cant do anything. they are quite disfunctional despite passing high degrees.

    by the way mitsu… i work with researchers, i write research software… i alsl design merdical equimenend and i do electronics too… i am a very capable person. and as mentioned went to bronx science…

    but i have no degrees. 🙂

    yet the phd researchers come to me for answers!!!

    they are quite ignorant and narrow… not at all like the people we used to produce from schools.

    young people entering the workforce may score well in job interviews if they exude self-confidence, she said, but that can quickly sour if a new employer doesn’t provide them with the perks or promotions they feel they deserve. “They don’t set the right goals for themselves, because they are overconfident — and that’s when it blows up in their face,”

    this is about when they side with socialism!!!!

    why?

    because if the system wasnt fixed, then a harvard cum laude physicist should have an office with a view, and perks, and perhaps tenure…

    but the REAL WORLD, as we have been trying to teach this person, doesnt work that way…

    degrees and tests and things are how you prove to a school that you should be allowed to play with the expensive toys. but reality, dont care about degrees.

    edison HATED guys with degrees because they were disfunctional… and had no vision. take a look who actually generates our disruptive technology.. (hint: its not harvard physicists).

    edison once asked a person with a degree how much volume a lamp had. the person went away with the lamp glass, and proceeded to measure the sphere… and then the column… and so on…

    when done, after a week… they said to edison, that it had this approximate volume. edison didnt hire him. because he said he needed to know exactly. the college degrees professional said it was impossible…

    edison walked over to a faucet filled up the lamp with water, and poured the water into a measuring flask.

    thats why the researchers work with me…

    they can do great lab work.. tehy can sometimes quote facts and figures..

    but they couldnt get themselves out of a lawn maze if their life depended on it.

    most are just learners, and cant actually apply what they know with any flair.

    and there is a lot more of them now since most are crippled in many ways.

    even this article spouts BS as most do at some point (usually while trying to get another opinion conveniently from a socialist)

    “The fact is that we are all getting smarter — IQ is going up quite dramatically over this same period of time,” Crocker noted. “Students may believe that they are getting trained better than they used to, that they are learning skills that they didn’t use to have. So, maybe their predictions aren’t unreasonable.”

    IQ is not going up… not at all.

    so in reality, people like mitsu are like my friend. she graduated summa cum laude… lots of degrees… wonderful person (as i am SURE mitsu is because mitsu is concerned, but doesnt know how to make things better on his own).

    she is suicidal as she has only worked for the DMV coming out of school.

    like so many, her tests meant nothing, her skills were lax beacuse she was so keen on memory, not application.

    she was crippled by the system..

    mitsu, remember one thing…

    Age and treachery outdoes youth and enthusiasm.

    the experienced always trump the naive.

60. Ymarsakar, resisting propaganda must be tempted with the urge to invent conspiracy theory. Obama hasn’t done anything yet, thus there is the human tendency to invent a hypothesis, hypothesis is the better word, to rise to the level of ‘theory’ is giving to much — it goes back to my argument on how faith clouds our judgment, the magisteria of reason and the magistria of faith are opposites, and though we may think we can separate the two, well, the overlap is incompatible with the other, oil and water, when we look to the stars and don’t know what they are, then we invent a reason for what they are, that they have some purpose for us, ugh, I’ll stop now.

61. Regarding how “faith clouds our judgement”, it’s interesting that the political left – which is generally where one finds disdain for faith systems based upon religion – seems to continuously try to create utopia or paradise (their own versions of heaven on earth), and likewise seem quite capable of blindly following messianic leaders themselves – complete with predictions of doomsday if they don’t get their way.

    Examples:

    Al Gore (AGW) – if we don’t do as he and his cohorts say, the world itself is doomed! Anything that disputes the received wisdom is considered heresy.

    Obama (Hope, Change…whatever that means) – only by electing this Kenyan can the US hope to have any moral standing in the world and finally begin – that is only begin – to dispel the curse of racism!

    Looks like even the left has to have a religion of some sort – even if they refuse to acknowledge it as such.

    Please note that I’m neither advocating, nor defending, any particular religious or non-religious view of life. Simply pointing out an interesting observance.

62. If you believe that in today Russia Kremlin has the same control over media and information as in Soviet era, this is simply absurd. We have Euronews TV in every home 24/7/365 with Russian translation, western newspapers in every newsstand and a radically different psychology of audience which has conflicting narratives of every kind. So no, we live in the same universe, only with different experience and much less naivety. The basic fact about Russian optimism is simple: Russian people never in their history live better than now. 8 years ago middle class comprised 10% of population, now it is 30%. In big cities the number is up to 50%, in capitals, as Moscow and Petersburg, up to 70%. In Moscow almost every family has a car, half of them European cars, and a 1/4 – very expensive car, like Mersedes or BMW, or Landrover. My sons and a daughter are software engineers, they earn $3000 a month – and this is normal wages in Moscow.

63. Standard states, Mitsu. Standard states. For example, do the calculations take into account the energy required to drill the sequestration facility? That to capture and compress an enormous amount of CO2 into the facility?

    Think about capturing the CO2 from your car, and how that would affect efficiency, and you’ll see the source of my skepticism.

    And as for Harvard, it turns out that Harvard’s undergraduate program in chemistry is too weak to be accredited by the American Chemical Society. You might wonder how I happen to know that.

64. (Pulls up chair and digs into popcorn, while watching *discussion* regarding CO2 sequestration between Occam and Mitsu. This should be fun.)

65. In the early ’50s, C. M. Kornbluth published a science fiction story, “The Marching Morons”.

    We appear to have arrived.
    –

66. Sergey,
    no… i was never claiming that its the same as in the past… but a lot of russians do not go on the internet… putins new textbooks glorifying stalin… nashi…

    not the same… not by a long shot… true…

    but compared to america? we arent that much different now either…

    its a shame… because russian people when unleashed from these few horrible masters, do very well on their own. smart, resourceful, hardy, and more…

    their leaders tend to dig graves and one way or another people fall into it.

    since putin has been elected more than 200 journalists have been murdered…

    even if you have foreign sources, that puts a damper on a whole lot.

    just as the politcal terrorism of the gays right now is forcing issues too.

    such a wonderful beautiful rich culture and art… mostly destroyed compared to its past.

    that in itself is a crime.

67. >like talking to a rock

    Well, that’s not much of an argument, is it, Artfldgr? Your “50% transmission efficiency” argument has an elementary error in it, as I pointed out, above (i.e., because the sequestration occurs at the source, not the destination) … did you even read my argument, or are you content to merely issue content-free potshots?

    >mitsu is average

    Well, that may well be, Artfldgr, but that would mean an “average” person was able to get into Harvard, be one of the top 4 students in math his freshman year, score in the top 1 percentile on standardized tests, and score well above 4 standard deviations above the norm on the Stanford-Binet test when he was 5 years old. I read at the 12th grade level when I was in 3rd grade, read philosophers when I was in 4th grade. I certainly don’t dispute that I may well be “average”, however, despite all this, and I don’t at all believe that doing well on intelligence tests at all indicates that my arguments are correct. However, I do assert that your arguments are quite erroneous and sloppy, not because you are “average” but because you’re being lazy and not even bothering to think through what you’re saying, or read or respond carefully to what I or others are saying.

    >skepticism

    I understand you’re skeptical, Occam, and unlike Artfldgr, I do believe in your willingness to engage in reasoned debate in an honest fashion. The calculations certainly include the energy required to compress and store the CO2 — as I mentioned, there is already a working plant in operation in Germany today. I do not know if the calculations include the energy required to drill the sequestration facility, but my guess is, that energy is relatively small, but that would be an interesting thing to check. Again, the point here is that they’re not attempting to undo the combustion, they’re just storing the CO2, so there’s no particular reason to think, a priori, that such a thing would be impossible to do with energy less than that gained in the combustion. Sure, you could be “skeptical” it is possible but we already have a working demonstration plant in operation now, whose efficiency can be measured.

    And again: this is all a huge topic drift from the simple point I was making that the questionnaire had at least one obvious error in it, which doesn’t depend on whether or not CCS is viable. And again: CCS is something that conservatives not only “introduced” but are pushing hard because they want to promote the coal industry. Some environmentalists are still somewhat dubious of even clean coal because of the environmental impact of coal mining.

68. occam,
    he doesnt get it… he never will, its the harvard education.

    remove 40%, you have to burn 40% more to replace the missing capacity.

    so now, we have to double mining output. i bet mitsu has never seen a huge coal mine (i have)

    go here, and see aerial photos.
    http://www.geology.wisc.edu/~maher/air/air09.htm

    look at the biggest ones.. and now double them.

    then double the number of terex trucks.

    here is a photo of a terex titan disconntinued in 1990. caries 350 tons per load
    http://www.bigthings.ca/bc/pictures/truck1.jpg
    takes 8 train cars to transport to the site and then be assembled.

    then you have to double the coal processing facilities… double the number of mack trucks and such to transport it (about 4 miles to a gallon)

    there is also all the supporting facilities… repairs, and maintenance…

    basically you end up more than doubling emissions.

    and no one has figured out how much extra energy on top of the extra energy would be needed to mine the extra energy.

    he has no ideas of the numbers here.

    http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/coal/page/special/feature.html

    take a look… he is proposing increasing mining to now produce 1 BILLION short tons of EXTRA coal.

    basically doubleing the industry… doubling the damage of the mines.. more than doubling the loads per year on highways and rails. doubling the volume of sequestration area needed.

    of course that entails how much more oil? how much more diesel? how much more smelting of iro and forming. then there is the glass… and the rubber tires three stories high… how many more TONS of polutants to manufacture just the new rail cars, the coal trucks, the terex, etc.

    basically all these energy idots play the same shell game that a car dealer does. they tell you the loan rate and pin you to as much as you can afford… but dont work in insurance costs, maintenance, emergencies, and more.

    at 36 dollars a short ton… its impossible for alternatives to do anything against it.

    and without capital… the thing obama doesnt like, these power companies cant upgrade from what they have to maybe a supercritical turbine.. .

    and why has no one decided to recapture the 65% of waste heat that is lost?

    and of course mitsu hasnt discussed drillling down about 4 miles and getting geothermal… somehting available anywhere you can drill that deep.

    thats how batty the greenies are…

    the best options are not on the table..

    nuclear, and geothermal.

    if we could transport energy, we could get lots from volcanoes.

    did you know the rockies are a volcano chain?

    but who is pitching this? its not even on the radar!!!!

    [by the way… russia has i think the record in deep drilling… they have drilled so deep that the equipment melts]

    want to talk about huge amounts of energy?
    not to mention mature technology?
    clean? (as clean as it can be)

    problem is that as you generate with that, and the cost of coal goes down, the costs of the geothermal doesnt follow… so eventually, it stops being competitive as long as cheaper mature already situated systems.

    meanwhile… global waming is a hoax.

    you can tell because one of the main leaders is gorbechev… a man who led one of THE most polluted raped lands on the planet…

    suddenly he finds religion and wants things clean?

    “In October 1917, we parted with the old world, rejecting it once and for all. We are moving toward a new world, a world of Communism. We shall never turn off that road.” — Mikhail Gorbachev
    .
    “The threat of environmental crisis will be the ‘international disaster key’ that will unlock the New World Order.” — Mikhail Gorbachev, quoted in “A Special Report: The Wildlands Project Unleashes Its War On Mankind”, by Marilyn Brannan, Associate Editor, Monetary & Economic Review, 1996, p. 5
    

69. As a non-technical outsider, please let me thank the mitsu vs everybody else debaters for an interesting back and forth. Since my physics is of the 45 years ago, high school variety, I have no idea who’s correct. But let me just offer one observation. We are seeing here a replay of the MSM vs Joe the Plumber. Here it is “I Graduated from Harvard so I Know” vs “I’ve Had Decades of Direct Hands-On Training and Experience.” Get ready because this will be the theme for the next 4 years. The Obama appointed “Pointy Headed Intellectuals” are already sharpening their pencils to put the plans together for the Next Great Utopian Experiment. Don’t get in their way, because the consequences won’t be pleasant.

70. Artfldgr, I’ll say it once more: you’re making an elementary mistake. CCS does not require doubling the fuel requirements. I’ve already explained why your argument is wrong, above.

71. (i.e., because the sequestration occurs at the source, not the destination) …

    thats wrong… period… you havent read..

    and 50% is the amojunt of transmission loss through wires and cables.

    i thought you were conversant with this info?

    sequestration CANT happen on location…

    you havent read the stuff… i am quoting it as i write.. duh. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_capture_and_storage#CO2_storage_.28sequestration.29

    Various forms have been conceived for permanent storage of CO2. These forms include gaseous storage in various deep geological formations (including saline formations and exhausted gas fields), liquid storage in the ocean, and solid storage by reaction of CO2 with metal oxides to produce stable carbonates.

    how many coal plants are on the ocean?
    how many are situated near deep geological formation? (and will you set off explosives next to your power plant to map the ground?)

    just cause they draw the little picture of the coal plant on the diagrams near the sequestration doesnt mean thats how it is. 🙂

    why dont you read the link and see their methods of storage…

    convert the CO2 to bicarbonates (using limestone)
    now we have to mine limestone on top of the doubling of coal.

    i find this one teh absolute sickingly funny.

    ‘lake’ deposits CO2 directly onto the sea floor at depths greater than 3000 m, where CO2 is denser than water and is expected to form a ‘lake’ that would delay dissolution of CO2 into the environment.

    but if you put them in that, or in clathrate hydrates, and the environement warms up…

    Over 1,700 people had died in Lower Nyos, and many others were left homeless and sick. when lake nyos burped up the gases sequestered there by nature.

    i can see it now… they sequester in the great lakes… then a cloud goes poof, and a whole city of a million people suffocate.

    of course this will all make the lakes and ocean more acidic…

    and i am willing to talk, but your not tryig at all to listen to occam, fred, or myself.

    at the very first post using your numbers i showed a doubling of coal usage…

    that was confirmed in the papers on sequestration.

    and so far, the only thing that got your attention is saying its like talking to a rock

    here is an article on the german plant.
    http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/0,1518,562910,00.html

    The technology, which would see coal-fired power plants pumping CO2 underground, could help reverse climate change. But it could also be dangerous.

    the way you talk, this is easy, a done deal, safe and clean.

    its none of thos things…

    the technology won’t be ready for the market until 2020 at the very latest. Nor is it certain if the gas can be kept from seeping out of its underground storage area. Capturing carbon dioxide emission from coal-fired power plants and pumping it into underground storage also takes energy. Fully 20 percent more coal would be required to produce the same amount of energy.
    

    so after they burn more coal… put it under ground… they dont even know if it will stay there.

    this is typical of the left… and of those with modern educations.

    you cant see anything otehr than things that seem to confirm your thing…

    you dotn realize that i have nothing against whole unit clean systems… but i do when they wont work.

    you on the other hand, refuse to read all the negatives that they are stating in your links, we are stating, and so on.

    The CO2 will be pumped about 800 meters (2,600 feet) below the earth’s surface into a saline aquifer with porous sandstone. There have been concerns about the safety of the facility. The list of open questions is long — with worries about leakage a priority. Should CO2 work its way back to the surface, concentration at leak points could be deadly. Should CO2 make up just 8 percent of air volume, it is deadly.

    basically.. this thing fails, and the twon of ketzin may end up being abandoned for more than 100 years as they wait for the carbon to work out and have the area safe.

    nuclear bomb would be cleaner…

72. they dont even know if it will dissolve the rocks and then cause huge problems… like the ground collapsing… or the gas burbig up and killing people and wildlife…

    http://www.co2sink.org/ is the site for the project.

    and here is where they are… boy is this expensive… but since its tax money.. who cares.

    http://www.co2sink.org/newsline/Flyer_Third%20year%20progress%2014_05_07.pdf

    (by the way… humans only account for about 1/3 of Co2 production… )

    and here is the interesting part that mitsu hastn told us…

    The installation will take a few months which
    should enable injection to commence before
    autumn this year. Linde AG has been awarded a
    contract for the supply of CO2. This will be
    highly pure (> 99%) and will come mostly from
    the Leuna refinery some 150km away. This CO2
    is a byproduct of H2 production.

    they are going to use refined CO2.. 🙂

    they started injecting june of this year.

    for two years they will pump expensive refined CO2 under the ground… then see what happens…

    does the water take it away?
    does it dissolve the rocks.

    if the water takes it awy… could it pop up miles away and kill?

    fun stuff… all for nothing.

73. Look, Artfldgr, I’m not saying that CCS is a proven technology, or even that it WILL work. This whole long thread was simply over a casual comment I made that one of the answers to the questions in the questionnaire was wrong, and it really has nothing to do with whether or not CCS is going to prove to be viable in the long term. I, myself, don’t have any stake in CCS — personally I much prefer renewable energy, and possibly nuclear, if the waste disposal problem can be adequately solved.

74. (gets up to nuke more popcorn….)

75. (And again, just to repeat, the estimates are not that you “lose 25%” of the energy doing CCS, but that the *additional fuel requirements* of CCS are about 25%. That estimate includes all transmission costs, pumping costs, etc… though it may not include the cost of creating the sequestration facility in the first place, as Occam points out.)

76. This is very interesting because Secular Muslims, the ones we must build a bridge with, our liberal allies in the Islamic world, they love Obama — the Jihadist hate him; I’m telling you we may yet have a great warrior for western democracy in Obama:

    http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D94I3RCG0&show_article=1

77. The U.N. says the 40 signatories to the Kyoto treaty have, on average, cut their emissions to 5% below their levels of 1990 – just meeting the goals for 2008 to 2012. So on the surface, things look very good.
    But the data are deceiving. As the publication the New Scientist noted, “Much of the 17% drop is a consequence of the economic downturn of eastern and central European nations in the 1990s.”
    “Downturn” is almost too polite a term. Take the period right after the collapse of communism in 1990, when many countries in the area were struggling to rebuild their economies after decades of top-down stagnation. This economic implosion led to a 37% drop in greenhouse gas emissions among the so-called “economies in transition” from 1990 to 2006.
    In other words, it took a regional depression for Kyoto to meet its goals…
    A depression is exactly what it would take for the USA to meet Kyoto targets too. Mega-polluters China and India are exempt from Kyoto, despite being the fastest-growing CO2 emitters, for one simple reason: the whole purpose is to reduce economies to Third-World status, and China and India are already there.

    The U.N. itself estimates that reducing global warming would require a permanent hit of at least 1.5% of world GDP – or roughly $1 trillion a year for decades to come.
    For the U.S., the hit might be even more severe. Under Kyoto’s strict requirements, according to forecasts from the U.S. Energy Department, the costs could reach as high as 4.1% of GDP – or about $570 billion a year. It would kill nearly 5 million jobs. Still want to sign on?
    In two weeks’ time, global warming bureaucrats from around the world plan to meet in Poznan, Poland, to plan their next move – including figuring out a way to get President-elect Obama aboard the Kyoto train. On Tuesday, Obama vowed to “once again engage vigorously in these negotiations.”
    We hope that once he realizes this Kyoto deal is intended to economically damage the very people who put him in office, he’ll have a change of heart.

78. Obama also stated that electricity rates would NECESSARILY SKYROCKET in the same speech. Meaning they will, and they will have to, in order to support his plan. I heard it with my own ears.

    That being the case, a lot of people will freeze to death under our current system. Sounds to me like he intends to re-design the problems to suit his solutions.

79. Let me come in late and start with a question.

    Consider the burning of methane, the burning of heavy fuel oil, and the burning of coal.

    Burning methane, you start with four carbon-hydrogen bonds and end up with one molecule of CO2 and two of water.

    Burning fuel oil, you have roughly one carbon-carbon bond for each two carbon-hydrogen bonds; for each carbon atom you produce (roughly) one CO2 molecule and one water molecule.

    Burning coal … well, I have to assume that you produce more than one CO2 molecule for each water molecule.

    Now, for the chemists and mechanical engineers out there: which bonds yield more energy: the carbon-carbon bonds or the carbon-hydrogen bonds? If we replace coal with natural gas, will we produce less CO2 per erg, or BTU, or therm, or quad of energy that we extract or more? How much?

    I’m not an AGW alarmist; I suspect that it’s a minor factor in our present climate change. But there is a reason for long-term concern, and that is ocean acidification.

    I’m in favor of exploring everything. If we can make wind power work, let’s do it, whether it’s by small generators on
    homes or big ones offshore. With newer kinds of semiconductors, we should be able to make photovoltaic surfaces with less energy input and fewer harmful substances.
    As to battery recycling, it seems a no-brainer. Surely it must be cheaper and easier to extract the critical substances from the compounds in which we concentrated it than from the earth. Is the problem that we don’t design the battery housings to allow easy recovery of the materials? Let’s fix that, confound it!

    As to energy from agriculture, there are two big problems: water and the exhaustion of the soil. Do we return to the soil the phosphorus and trace minerals that fuel production absorbs? (The fuel refining process should separate them for return.) Can we operate this process on salt water or the heavily mineralized runoff from other agriculture? What happens if we have a multi-year drought.

    There’s one thing I’m not in favor of, and that’s CNG fuel for motor vehicles. Liquid fuel has so many advantages over compressed gas that it’s silly to use the gas there. Use the gas for stationary power plants instead; save the liquid for the motor vehicles. Work on enhancements like hybrids (including mixed series-parallel designs–you should understand why they are a good idea). Work on better batteries and better ways of using them. Encourage telecommuting. But don’t put millions of compressed gas vessels on our roads.

80. Now, for the chemists and mechanical engineers out there: which bonds yield more energy: the carbon-carbon bonds or the carbon-hydrogen bonds?

    From memory,

    C-H bond energy is ca. 105 kcal/mol

    C(sp3)-C (sp3) is ca. 85.

81. Yes, but you also have to consider the energy that gets bound up in the carbon dioxide and water. When you subtract those off, what results? How much CO2 for each unit of energy?

82. As I’ve said in other posts, all of this “evidence” for how bad a president Obama will be is convincing only to those who are already convinced. To the rest, it just looks like lunatic raving.

    Most people don’t have a great knowledge of politics because there isn’t much reason to have one. We have a representative democracy, so we delegate knowing about politics to them. We vote for the ones we like, and if they don’t work out, we vote for someone else.

    Most people who voted for Democrats didn’t like what the Republicans had done, and turned them out. Obama seemed like a safe, sober choice – he ran a campaign that reassured people that he wasn’t crazy, and that was good enough.

83. Hyman, the point of neo’s post was the incredible ignorance of those Obama supporters who were interviewed. Watch the video.

    It wasn’t that the people in it didn’t like what the Republicans had done, but rather that they had no idea what they or the Democrats had done. Read parts of Obama’s or Biden’s speeches, they sneered, thinking that they they were quotes from McCain or Palin. They were grossly unaware of what the Messiah had actually said.

    They’d never heard of Pelosi, or Reid, or Frank. They were voting on glitz, not information.

    Obama seemed like a safe, sober choice

    Quite the contrary. Obama seemed like an exciting, glamorous choice, and that’s clearly what influenced a lot of people.

84. Scottie Says, Regarding how “faith clouds our judgement”, it’s interesting that the political left – which is generally where one finds disdain for faith systems based upon religion – seems to continuously try to create utopia or paradise (their own versions of heaven on earth)…

    So tapping into some unseen force that only people who claim to have ‘faith’ have access to is not a characteristic of the credulity that deludes and lures people into Utopian wish-thinking? Of course it is, and by saying so you make my argument for me.

85. That’s infuriating that the U.N. is still prattling about global warming when it stopped warming A DECADE AGO! I am already run out of patience with those who still do not challenge that bland nonsense. I feel as if I am in some weird alternate universe where I am watching the denizens of it go about their business based on flawed information. We are about to drive a stake into the heart of our economy and also put many other economies at great risk – all for a hypothesis that is seriously flawed and for which some nations are wise to not have to comply with Koyto.

    The next four years are going to be a painful lesson in reality for these idiots who voted for Oobonga.

86. Hyman Rosen Says:

    “Most people who voted for Democrats didn’t like what the Republicans had done, and turned them out. ”

    Sure, and now we’ll work on arguments for why Democrats are not doing a good job (when justified at least, unlike the ravings from Kos). Welcome to payback. 🙂

87. It’s going to be a blessed relief to go back to whining about a government that’s not doing a good job, after enduring a government that adopted torture as policy.

88. Mitsu, I’m interested in how you figure that Obama’s statement was only about new coal plants. From his interview quoted previously:

    “That will create a market in which whatever technologies are out there that are being presented, whatever power plants that are being built, that they would have to meet the rigors of that market and the ratcheted down caps that are being placed, imposed every year.“

    Am I wrong in understanding this to mean that caps would be made harsher each year? If so, why would he not, at some point, include existing plants? I admit, he’s difficult to parse, but that’s the implication as I read it, as is the sentiment that he’d just as soon see the whole coal industry collapse. Oh, yeah, and our electricity costs skyrocket.

89. Of interest, I saw a television commercial last night during Hannity and Colmes.

    The government is now offering free cell phones to people on welfare and / or receiving food stamps.

    I seriously doubt many who watch that show are in either program, so I wonder why the commercial is being aired on that show – and that news network – unless the government is just trying to piss me off.
    Step one in preparation for the citizen stool pigeons – er, army?

90. @ nyomythus,

    You stated:

    “So tapping into some unseen force that only people who claim to have ‘faith’ have access to is not a characteristic of the credulity that deludes and lures people into Utopian wish-thinking? Of course it is, and by saying so you make my argument for me.”

    I’m not making any argument for you. I never claimed anyone was tapping into anything – only making the comparisons between how established religions approach a matter vs how the left approaches a matter.

    Both incorporate an act of faith, but I made no assertions regarding “tapping into some unseen source”.

    You’re kind of ignoring the final statement I made from where you quoted me:

    “Please note that I’m neither advocating, nor defending, any particular religious or non-religious view of life. Simply pointing out an interesting observance.”

    If anything, I would point out that those of a religous bent – if you wish to discuss some “unseen source” – are placing their faith in what they believe to be a higher power whereas those on the far left are placing their faith in a man or ideology.

    Now the difference is this:

    If you don’t believe in a higher power, god, deity, the great mushroom in the sky, or whatever – faith placed in such an entity by another person – a person of religious faith – does no harm to you or anyone else because by your very world view such an entity has no influence or control over your life.

    If something doesn’t exist – as many on the left assert – how can it impact your life?

    However, the *faith* such as it is of those on the left, by placing it in an ideology and/or a man or group, by it’s very nature becomes a political force, and that political force is going to exert itself onto the public at large, which in turn WILL exert an influence for good or ill on the general public if it’s social or political aims are brought to fruition.

    Now before anyone goes all crazy screaming about bible thumpers and political influence, bear in mind that though bible thumpers generally disagree with things like gay life style and abortion – on a societal level they have not been able to roll anything back that they disagreed with.

    I’m not saying they have not been politically active – I’m just saying they have not been wildly successful.

    Quite the contrary is happening however from the left as they try to force their own views of how society SHOULD be onto the rest of society, and have no hesitations in trying to force such change with the full weight of the government when they control it.

    The recent displays of gay rights activists re Prop 8 are object lessons in how the left feels it’s appropriate to behave when they don’t have their way.

    Now we get to look forward to how the left is going to do now that they are in complete control of 2 of the 3 branches of government.

    It’s going to be an interesting 2 years.

91. It’s going to be a blessed relief to go back to whining about a government that’s not doing a good job

    Are you implying that He (PBUH) will not do a good job?

    Blasphemer!

92. What I’d like to put my peepers on is the REAL Birth Certificate. Not some scanned “certification”.

    “The “Certification of Live Birth” that was posted by the Obama campaign (now conveniently removed) cannot be viewed as authoritative.

    “Hawaii Revised Statute 338-178 allows registration of birth in Hawaii for a child that was born outside of Hawaii to parents who, for a year preceding the child’s birth, claimed Hawaii as their place of residence.

    The only way to know where Senator Obama was actually born is to view Senator Obama’s original birth certificate from 1961 that shows the name of the hospital and the name and signature of the doctor that delivered him as well as a document ID number.”

    At this point, I would almost be willing to bet that there IS no Original Birth Certificate, and that the “Certification of Live Birth” is all there is; which means no hospital, no doctor signature, no ID number that would be on a Real Birth Certificate.

    No court is gonna touch this, though. The result of actually examining it would be devastating. Riots would be the least….

93. Frankly, I would hate to see any controversy about Obama’s citizenship at this point. Two years ago, OK, but not now. It would tear the country apart, and regardless of the merit of the argument, appear as an illegitimate attempt to undo the election. So if I had such data personally, I would deep-six it.

94. Before the W administration, I styled myself as something of a Libertarian. I contributed to IJ and FiRE, subscribed to Reason, and whined about eminent domain, asset forfeiture, the war on drugs, comic-book censorship, and restrictions on abortion.

    For the duration, I’ve become a total Democrat because I despise this administration with every fiber of my being – the point wasn’t just to elect Obama, but to relegate the Republicans to the outer darkness of politics where I hope they languish for decades.

    I expect that once Obama takes over, I’ll be able to go back to my old whiny self, happily complaining about trivia, secure in the knowledge that my government is no longer torturing and murdering prisoners.

95. Hyman LIED when he wrote, “It’s going to be a blessed relief to go back to whining about a government that’s not doing a good job, after enduring a government that adopted torture as policy.”

    Or so the liberal leftist liar claim went. I defy you to find the order/law/policy that adopted “torture” as a policy.

    As much as you hated ‘listening’ to Bush as I did because his communication was lacking, he specifically stated over and over that we do not torture.

    Where the debate was was if waterboarding constituted torture. THAT difference of opinion led people to say we adopted torture because it was done to 3 people.

    In your quest to persuade people. Please don’t lie. Write facts.

    Hyman led by hate wrote, “For the duration, I’ve become a total Democrat because I despise this administration with every fiber of my being ”

    Your hate has taken a hold of you so bad that a libertarian which believes in cutting government to the tune of 80% now wants to grow government by what? 20% in 4 years??? Obama’s stated policies have people divesting, bracing themselves, hunkering down and spending less and therefore GDP has dropped and revenues into the government has dropped. The Obaminator who was the second largest recipient of Fannie and Freddie money and opposed the reforms in 2005/2006 on the along with every other Democrat has precipitated a credit crisis that has you voting “for” him – because you hate.

    Hyman full of hate and prone to lie wrote, “happily complaining about trivia, secure in the knowledge that my government is no longer torturing and murdering prisoners. ”

    I hope you know you aren’t persuading anybody here. Just as I know I’m probably not persuading you. I’ll call it like I see it with you because you really should understand – you aren’t arguing with facts on your side but pure emotion not based on facts……

96. The only question, of those in your blog posting, I did not know was that Obama got Democratic opponents kicked off the ballot in his first election.

    Looking into this, I found this article:

    http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/politics/obama/chi-070403obama-ballot-archive,0,5693903.story?page=1

    It states that what he did was challenge, in court, signatures on the other candidate’s petitions to be on the ballot. Enough signatures were found to be insubstantial to have the candidates removed from the ballots.

    In spirit, it was fairly dirty politics. Nothing was illegal. And while I would prefer my president-elect not to have done this, I know that we would not have fared better in this respect with any candidate whose campaign was run by Karl Rove or Steve Schmidt, the guy who smeared McCain in 2000 in South Carolina. That was far more dirty — it was dishonest and not conducted in a court of law.

    And what about those questionable voter registrations gathered by ACORN? They should be challenged. Obama’s petition challenging seems to be in the same vein.

97. Also note, Tina Fey was not the first person to attempt to substantiate Palin’s foreign policy experience by saying she could see Russia from Alaska. According to this article, it was Steve Doocy of Fox News who first said it, and then Cindy McCain who backed him up.

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/greg-mitchell/cindy-mccain-on-abc-today_b_122759.html

98. @ Gerbeel Haamster,

    I agree – I too want to see proof of his natural born US citizenship. I’ve heard he has a Kenyan grandmother who describes on film watching his birth – in Kenya.

    I’ve also heard he possessed an Indonesian passport.

    Indonesia only issued passports to Indonesian citizens, btw.

    These are only two of the question marks on his eligibility for the executive office.

    It’s an easy question to resolve on The One’s part – all He need do is pick up the phone and ask that the original documentation be made available to the press and to non-partisan, non-biased experts who can authenticate the documentation.

    There are also, of course, the pesky legal challenges being mounted in at least 8 states last I heard.

    This is not a question that is going to go away, and the sooner The Messiah answers truthfully and fully and provides the necessary documentation to back up His claim to natural born citizenship, the sooner we can all lay this matter to rest and move on, and it’s a question that will not hang over his administration for the next 4 years.

    Of course He can also continue to do as He has done so far and obfuscate as much as possible. That will really help the matter go away, ya know….

    Regarding riots if he’s proven NOT to be a natural born US citizen, I don’t see that happening.

    @ Hyman Rosen,

    I guess you haven’t heard yet. The One apparently intends to keep the vast majority of the current security apparatus and policy decisions from the Bush administration in place.

    Oh, I’m sure He’ll proudly hail His *accomplishment* in bringing the troop levels down in Iraq (as established by the agreement between the current Bush administration and the Iraqi government), and I’m sure He’ll make a lot of noise regarding the prison at Gitmo – but it looks like He’s already making subtle announcements and policy shifts that indicate He’s going to quietly continue the policies of His predecessor.

    I’m just wondering how long it will be before his left wing base starts to gag on his course changes….

99. Scottie, a quick Google search yielded this image of Obama’s birth certificate.

    http://www.swamppolitics.com/news/politics/blog/2008/10/obama_mccain_us_citizens.html

100. Hyman Rosen has a pretty good point. What is the difference between denying consenting gay adults the right to marry freely the person they love most in the world and denying consenting black adults the right to marry freely the person they love the most?

     A gay person is, of course, free to enter into a heterosexual marriage, and a black person is, of course, free to enter into a marriage with another black person. What does this fact have anything to do with using the force of the state to prevent these people form marrying outside these arbitrarily defined groups?

     Oh, and while most marriages have been between one man and one woman, the vast majority of human societies defined marriage as polygamous. That is, while polygamy was for practical purposes limited to the wealthy, there were no legal or other social barriers to it. “Traditional” marriage as practiced now in this country is anything but traditional. It not only goes against most of human history, in which marriage could easily be between one man and several women, but has also overturned most other marriage traditions. The very fact that women entering into marriage do not become the property of their husbands underlines the massive changes the institution of marriage has undergone in recent decades; it’s fair to say that “traditional” marriage is almost nothing like marriage as practiced by most people for most of human history. It’s like calling the nuclear family a “traditional family,” when the nuclear family is an incredibly recent invention at total odds to the extended family structure that most humans throughout history experienced. Claims to “traditional marriage” are almost always ahistorical and anachronistic.

101. Meep Says:

     “Hyman Rosen has a pretty good point. What is the difference between denying consenting gay adults the right to marry freely the person they love most in the world and denying consenting black adults the right to marry freely the person they love the most?”

     Ok…
     1) You have to redefine marriage to not allow a black and a white to marry.
     2) You have to redefine marriage to allow two men to marry.

     In the end, you don’t have a right to redefine marriage via government or popular vote (either example 1 or 2). It’s a religious sacrament and it’s for churches and their members to work out.

     Basically the left started it as a wedge issue. They knew the religious would be on defensive and they could point to them and call them haters and bigots… for resisting them using the state to redefine a religious sacrament…

102. To return to the poll in question:
     While it seems public ed is getting worse by the hour, the poll is actuallydiscussing the post-grad (HS or Coll) information. In other words, what have the respondents learned in the last two years, and more specifically, about the candidates? It points to the media, not public ed, although the lack of thinking skills is probably involved.
     But it’s interesting to ask whether more people know about the$150,000 dresses or the $150,000,000 the Chicago Annenberg Challenge pissed away. And the answer is in the media’s interest in each.
     Or Troopergate versus the real Ayers/O connection and what Ayers is up to now.
     Or which states have the rape-kit situation Palin was falsely accused of favoring (IL is one).

     This is all about the media.

103. “how the left feels it’s appropriate to behave when they don’t have their way.”
     You would get better picture of it reading history of Russian revolution of 1917. Ivan Bunin, a Nobel Prize winner for literature, decribed it brilliantly in his memoir “Okayannue dni” (Damned Days):
     “My only desperate wish seeng this was: Machine-guns! Machine-guns! Only this can stop these hordes of subhuman scum from ruining the state.”
     Alas, his advice fell on deaf ears of Alexander Feodorovich Kerenskii, the Supreme Leader of Interim Government, who infamously said: “We have no foes from the Left.” Four months later he was ousted from his office by these non-existing foes.

104. Elrond,

     That’s NOT a “Birth Certificate”. And no one who actually knows anything says it is.

     It’s exactly what it says it is: “A Certificate of Live Birth”. Much of the info on a Birth Certificate is missing.

     Pull out your Birth Certificate and compare. And then read my post more carefully.

105. @ Elrond Hubbard,

     As Gerbeel Haamster has already pointed out, that is not actually a “Birth Certificate” that you linked to, it was a “Certification of Live Birth”.

     It only says Obama was born. It does not say where.

     My understanding of Hawaiian law of that time was that parents had up to a full year to register the birth of their offspring with Hawaiian officials, no matter where they were born.

     It was entirely possible for Obama’s mother to bring the child back to Hawaii sometime within one year of his birth and register his birth with the appropriate state officials.

     Regarding that document itself, even Hawaii doesn’t place a huge amount of faith in it apparently, this from their own website:

     “In order to process your application, DHHL utilizes information that is found only on the original Certificate of Live Birth, which is either black or green. This is a more complete record of your birth than the Certification of Live Birth (a computer-generated printout). Submitting the original Certificate of Live Birth will save you time and money since the computer-generated Certification requires additional verification by DHHL.” ( http://hawaii.gov/dhhl/applicants/appforms/applyhhl ).

     So, basically if you are requesting certain information, the document you linked to is insufficient for Hawaii even though Hawaii issued it – yet you’re going to make the case that it should still be sufficient evidence to allow this guy to be president?

     Also, The One has spent considerable legal resources fighting these very inquiries.

     If he had nothing to hide, and if revealing the original documentation verifying his legitimate status as a US citizen were available and could easily shut down any questions along that avenue – why hasn’t he done so?

     Why has he instead spent so much money attempting to bury this question?

     If you’re in court and documentation will help you, you produce it. If it hurts you, you try to suppress it.

     Why would The Messiah attempt to suppress any inquiries into where he was actually born along with all pertinent documentation?

106. The religious sacrament of marriage is a thing apart from the legal institution of marriage. It’s the latter where marriage equality is important. The former is no problem – any number of churches and synagogues now provide the religious sacrament for gay couples. The legal institution is necessary so that married gay couples can have the same rights and benefits as straight ones – joint income taxes, medical decision making, child custody, common property, inheritance, et al.

107. http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=29582

     American Public Flunks Basic Civics

     *Fully 71 percent of Americans flunked a 33-question civic-literacy survey conducted by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. Among 2,508 respondents ISI randomly selected, 1,791 failed this test of U.S. historical, political, and economic basics. The average score was just 49 out of 100 — a solid F. While just 2.6 percent scored Bs on this quiz, only 0.8 percent earned As.
     *Just 49 percent of rank-and-file Americans can identify the legislature, executive, and judiciary as our three branches of government.

     *Forty percent of college graduates have no idea that corporate profits equal revenues minus expenses. (Thus, congressional demagoguery about “windfall profits” falls on sympathetic ears.) Only 24 percent of college grads realize that the First Amendment forbids the establishment of an official U.S. religion.

     *Amazingly enough, this sample’s 164 self-identified elected officials know even less than laymen. They averaged only 44, as the blind lead the bland. Among office holders, 30 percent did not know that the Declaration of Independence heralds “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

     *However, we the people closely follow popular culture here in the United States of “American Idol.” Only 21 percent of respondents correctly identified Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address as the source of the words “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” But 56 percent properly named Paula Abdul as a judge on the karaoke sensation “American Idol.”

108. Hyman Rosen Says:

     “The religious sacrament of marriage is a thing apart from the legal institution of marriage.”

     I understand the difference between legal and common use of terms but I don’t buy your point here. Why has the state co-opted this term as a legal term? The government simply imposed a tax and license system on the religious sacrament. It can’t be separated.

     “The former is no problem – any number of churches and synagogues now provide the religious sacrament for gay couples.”

     Which is fine and good. That’s where this should be dealt with. Not in government.

     “The legal institution is necessary so that married gay couples can have the same rights and benefits as straight ones”

     It’s called civil unions. If there really are protections loopholes (which I doubt is always factually true) they should be going to court to close those.

     Really, the state needs to be out of the marriage business. It’s none of its business. Just like it is none of yours to try to redefine it using the state.

     “The former is no problem – any number of churches and synagogues now provide the religious sacrament for gay couples.”

     Which is fine and good. Thats where this should be dealt with.

     “The legal institution is necessary so that married gay couples can have the same rights and benefits as straight ones”

     Its called civil unions. If there really are protections loopholes (which I doubt is always factually true) they should be going to court to close those.

     Really, the state needs to be out of the marriage buisness. Its none of its buisness. Just like it is none of yours to try to redefine it using the state.

109. a quick Google search yielded this image of Obama’s birth certificate.

     thats not a birth certificate… see how easy it is to trick a person on the left… they go online thinking we arent that clever, and they find a birth cert, that isnt a birth cert.

     what was the time of birth?
     who were the two parents?
     what was the doctors name?
     the hospitals name?

     you see. that paper is NOT a birth cert… how about reading the link you put up before you throw crap at the wall to see if it sticks?

     this is what is called a COLB, a CERTIFICATE OF LIVE BIRTH, not a BIRTH CERTIFICATE.

     the document has been analysed by several forensics people online and their work you can go and review and DUPLICATE.

     even the COLB is fake, its his sisters.

     and a COLB was available to those born out of the country.

     Hawaii Revised Statute 338-178 allows registration of birth in Hawaii for a child that was born outside of Hawaii to parents who, for a year preceding the child’s birth, claimed Hawaii as their place of residence,”

     the left keeps thinking the right is stupid because if the right were smart they would be as stupid as the left.

     the problems can all be put to rest by obama in a heartbeat by releasing his actual birth certificate.

     after all, the people and his family in kenya believe he was born in kenya.
     his sister here gives two different hospitals that he was born at (neat trick)
     a imam claims to be the son of the imam that gave barry his middle name after birth in kenya.

     [this may actually make him a british citizen… since kenya at the time had not be overhtrown by his cousins plot with the communists helping]

     take some time… people have taken the time to put in their COLBS from the same years as comparissons…

     NOTHING about it is right… the borders are off (they are preprinted, so only obamas is cut and pasted? you can SEE it easily)… there is no stamp… you can play with the colors and see his sisters name come through (thats with the KOS copy) and a lot more… fonts are different. they are not lined up in the same places as the type in other colbs, which are all the same otehr than barrys.

     and as of this morning… one lawsuit of seventeen has been dismissed…

     “does not have a direct and tangible interest in the vital statistic records being sought, namely the birth certificate of President Obama,” Bert Ayabe wrote.

     [no one is willing to say who has standing!!! in other words who will be cheated or harmed if he is in office. given that all docs and treaties and such he signs are then null and void, and that other countries after the fact will use that against us as much as in shakespears richard the iii. so all of us technically have standing as citizens that our leader is a valid leader. the courst are basically ruling no one has standing!!!]

     none of the dissmissals are because of the birth cert being produced or valid… but for other reasons… so they are avoiding being the devil that causes civil war…

     meanwhile. the electoral college hasnt put in their votes… which is why obama is PRESUMTIVE president… they could still put in mccain… and historically they have dones this once before.

     thats december 5th

     he has a deadline with a candidate suing that has a deadline of december 1st.

     and as far as standing…

     i guess “we the people” really is no longer in force now

     here is a version of the original analysis, an obama supporter attacked his property

     atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2008/07/atlas-exclusive.html

     the whole analysis is there… you can see the borders… the mismatching on the online version from kos…

     its very thorough as the person who did it does this for a living and appears in court.

     he goes to comparign the test samples from many years and resolutions, they are all centered, their fonts are the same, the positions of things are the same within X pixels…

     look at the obama kos image and they are not centered… its off by an average of 75 pixels not the others 15 pixels.

     the KOS border is completely different than the others…

     he took them and with some work overlayed them upon each other to match them up. since COLBs are typed print on PREPRINTED paper with security marks on it, all the COLB papers should match up since they all come from the SAME printer…

     the 2007 colb and 2008 colb borders match, obamas 2007 does not… its completely different…

     “Several letters were distinctly different in width and kerning from the 2007 / 2008 certificate font versus the font used in the KOS image such as O, H, N, R, and C. ”

     the most interesting is the HEAT MAPS… this is where they play with the colors the same way, and see what appears that is picked up. in this way scans show natural things that other things do not.

     The 2007, 2008, and the two KOS images were also analyzed for jpeg compression variations by creating a heat map showing where the difference for a particular compression level is indicated. A change was considered relevant once the sum of the changes to the error level values exceeded 10% of the previously calculated compression error rates. The heat map created from the 2007 and 2008 images showed the fonts, seal image, and security border are all identical consistent values. To eliminate any subjective presumptions and to increase the number of comparative tests the same analysis was then conducted on the 2006 and prior certificate images which all found the fonts, seal images, and security borders to also be compressed with identical consistent values. The same analysis on the KOS image indicated that the security border has a different error value than the fonts and the seal image.

     all of the others are the same… the kos shows variations in compression in different areas.

     for the less technical… they recompressed a previously compressed border which was copied into the document.

     in other words. you take the original COLB scan at that acompression… and you copy the border and make a new one. when the jpeg compresses, its compressing on top of compressing. showing that the elements in the document were made in different stages and using different sources none of them being original scans…

     The image contains numerous visible artifacts located at various points throughout the image. These artifacts are not found on any other known good image from any examined time frame.

     basically he shows the flaws in detail…

     A close examination of the security border itself reveals several repeating inconsistencies. Among them is a “weak line” which repeats once after every second bold line and a slightly downward curving end point where a straight line should end. This pattern continues around the entire perimeter of the security border. Upon very close inspection portions of the security border also repeat every 240 pixels. By mapping this repeating pattern it becomes apparent that the pattern is laid out as a 240 x 240 pixel square that can be accurately extrapolated to the next position by simply counting 240 pixels. This type of tiling effect is commonly seen when an image has been modified by filling an area using an image editing application’s tile or pattern fill function.

     all that work on something that is supposed to be a clean scan… why?

     The COLB certificates are printed directly in the clerk’s office at the time they are requested. The system uses a standard laser printer and the border is printed at the same time as the text and other images on top of preprinted security paper. He stated the border is a vector image and would appear crisp and defined. When asked if a COLB can be printed off center he said it was not possible and any misfeed would simply jam in the printer. When asked if he had seen the images on-line he replied that he had — and that there is “no way” they had printed something that looked like that which further backed up my conclusions. Now let’s start to put the pieces of the puzzle together. The KOS image security border pattern does not match any known specimen from any known year. It does not match the pre-2006 nor does it match the post-2006 certificate patterns. The placement of the text in all of the pre-2006 and post-2006 certificates are almost identical pixel location matches while the image’s text placement does not match any known specimen from any known year. The shape and kerning of the fonts used in the 2006 through 2008 certificates are identical while the shape and kerning of the fonts used in the image does not match any known specimen. The KOS image shows clear signs of tampering such as the mismatch in RGB and error levels, visible indications of the previous location of the erased security border, easily detectable patterns of repeating flaws around the new security border, EXIF data that says the image was last saved with Photoshop CS3 for Macintosh, and finally a technician from Hawaii who confirms it just looks wrong.

     There are two obvious scenarios used to create the image that can be ascertained from evidence. Either a real COLB was scanned into Photoshop and digitally edited or a real COLB was first scanned to obtain the graphic layout then blanked by soaking the document in solvent to remove the toner. After rescanning the blank page to a separate image the graphics from the previously obtained scan could then be easily applied to the blank scan after some editing and rebuilding. It would also explain why date stamp bleeds through the paper and the various bits of toner located around the image as well as the remnants of the previous location of a security border.

110. What is the difference between denying consenting gay adults the right to marry freely the person they love most in the world and denying consenting black adults the right to marry freely the person they love the most?
     

     because MARRYING is a RELIGIOUS SERVICE and a UNION is a STATE SERVICE.

     they have unions with all the same rights as marraige… what they dont have is the ability to force a preist and a religion to practice acts agasinst their own ideas of wahts right and wrong.

     in other words they are going to beat up on religion till religion complies and lets them walk down church aisles… rather than by a court judge.

     marraige is a church institution
     civil unions are the states copy of marraige

     if a club or org, or religion, or even constition cant preserve its salient points…

     then it can evolve into something else, which is why ideology is not allowed to change… even in the face of scientific evidence. if it cahnges it becomes something else.

     if marraige changes then it will cease to be marraige. just as a human is no longer a fish from whence it came way back when.

     stagnation and complete conservation is what they do, while claimig progress and such.

     if a club says members have to have A, B, C and D… that defines the club…

     if someone else comes in and says no no no… members should have A, C, D, G and Y…

     would that be the same club, or a different one?

     ah… and thats where the problem is… who gets to define membership in a group? the people who are the leaders of that group, or outside members that want to have the groups power and cache, but also want to gut the internals and make it their own!

     in other words… civil unions are no good… why? because people who are members of churches and religions are happier, stay together longer, have more success, are healthier, and so forth…

     so we attribute these qualities not to sorting the population and extracting a subset based on rules which act as a filter… no… they are cargo cult and image only.. so they think that being a member of the church conveys things…

     but of course as soon as they are members, and the sorting rules change, the positive outcomes of the group fade away…

     when few people went to college… college meant more salary… now that all do… college doesnt mean anything near as much (except in the most technical areas you cant fake).

     lets put it this way… your at a baseball game. and if you stand up you can see better…

     the minute everyone stands up, then what?

     the advantage of being in the minority group that sorts out to better is gone.

     if you carefully analyse it… they are being used to crush a organization that by its nature and its rules show that acceptig a cultural way of life can lead to better ways of living… and that all ways of living ar enot the same…

     and therefore, these fringe groups perform less well not because of oppression, but because they are less capable!

     the church proves (like genetics) that an aspect of ideology is false… that all groups and types are inherently equal.

     there is a mathematical reason why gay families underperform heterosexual families… and a host of genetic things too (like what happens when biological parents are not around. prader willis syndrome, early menses, etc).

     in fact, the gay movement and leftist communists deny the necessity of family…

     [which destroys the ability for new family dynasties to threaten old ones]

     that familes are unnatural… but there is HUGE biological evidence to show that hetersexual familes are the biological norm…

     in fact… grandparents are necessary… since their success in helping the family becomes a feedback tothe genes of the children!!! that the old age errors that help get preserved because of familial feedback is key…

     much of what we are doign have negative genetic effect, and all of it is based on assertions made in the 20s and 30s that are not allowed to change.

     The 4,600-year-old grave contained the remains of a man, woman and two youngsters, and DNA analysis shows they were a mother, father and their children.

     “Their unity in death suggests unity in life,” Dr Haak said in today’s edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

     While tools and remains from the Stone Age have long been studied, there are few clues to the social relationships between people.

     “By establishing the genetic links between the two adults and two children buried together in one grave, we have established the presence of the classic nuclear family in a prehistoric context in Central Europe – to our knowledge the oldest authentic molecular genetic evidence so far,” Dr Haak says.

     basically the family is the key unit… and the destruction of such is a necessity to undo the genetics that benifit that grouping… why?

     the math that proves the sorting is what shows what they are agaisnt.

     men and women are not equal, they are complimentary.

     they have skilsl they do the same or near the same
     they ahve skilsl that one side does better than the other
     they have skills that only one side can do

     i wrote a paper on it… (though am loath to publish it and get attacked).

     if you take two entities, and you lay out 20 skills qualities by a letter… and give them values based on those three rules above… you will fint somethig interesing.

     the combines ability of the complimentary pair is much greater than the abilities of the homogeneous pairs.

     it doesnt matter what these skills are or how they are divided by asexless mathematical modeling.. the results are always the same…

     the pairings that are complimentary are more efficient, effective, independent, and interdpendent than the others. and so they are more successful, live longer, gather more, and so on.

     homogneous parings which the rulers of a separated gender society… they cant do as well… so the idea is to trick us into thinking that the best pairing is the worst… (and what games they play)

     it would take book volumes to just lay it all out… but its there.. its easy to do… its just huge and no one wants to truge through it when its easier to just say they are bigots, and easier to throw rocks than debate.

     but then again.. the minute we let political terrorism be a normal way to an end in a democratic republic, we lsot the democratic republic.

111. The legal institution is necessary so that married gay couples can have the same rights and benefits as straight ones – joint income taxes, medical decision making, child custody, common property, inheritance, et al.

     townhall.com/blog/g/bf1c9989-4f8a-4def-ae64-60928e4072e1

     ELTON JOHN SOLVES GAY MARRIAGE CONTROVERSY

     One of the world’s most prominent gay entertainers offered some rare common sense on the explosive issue of same sex marriage. In New York City for a gala AIDS benefit, rock legend Sir Elton John appeared with his long-time partner, David Furnish. “We’re not married,” he told the press, “Let’s get that straight. We have a civil partnership…I don’t want to be married! I’m very happy with a civil partnership. The word ‘marriage,’ I think, puts a lot of people off.

     You get the same equal rights that we do when we have a civil partnership. Heterosexual people get married. We can have civil partnerships”. If more people on all sides of this issue embraced the simple, irrefutable logic of this clear-thinking superstar, a vastly divisive, unnecessary controversy could reach a successful and amicable solution.

     so again.. a leftist is being shown that they are actually wrong on the issues when they are forced to look at the details…

     will that turn the tide? nope… cause theire is no logical basis for the position, there is no logical bases to get off the position either.

112. Gerbeel,
     I was born in Colorado in ’62. My state issued document is titled “Certificate of Live Birth”, i.e. birth certificate. That is what they are officially called. How can you say a “Certificate of Live Birth” is not a “birth certificate”, when they obviously are? Are you implying the State wishes to keep my true heritage a secret from me?

     And for once(just this once, so far), Hyman is right. Before the Mormans in Illinois(around 1830, or so), marriage was done in a church. Now, it is a State regulated affair, or a civil contract, if you will. No sanctity about it whatsoever.
     When asked what the greatest Commandment was, Jesus answered “love God”. When asked what was the second greatest, He answered “love your neighbor as yourself”. Well, guess what? Your neighbor is gay. They should be allowed what you allow yourself. Period.

113. Hyman Rosen:
     “It’s going to be a blessed relief to go back to whining about a government that’s not doing a good job, after enduring a government that adopted torture as policy.”

     A perfect example for this thread of an indelibly engraved “truth” that requires absolutely no evidence for.

114. I would certainly not fight the renaming of the legal institution to “civil union” for all couples, but I guess some others would see it as destroying marriage.

     I believe you can read through Andrew Sullivan’s blog for pointers to the evidence that our government intentionally tortured prisoners and thereby murdered some.

115. It’s no wonder a member of the leftist illuminati was elected. It didn’t matter that there wasn’t much substance to the promised “change,” just that he had a nice smile.

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