Thanks.

I do love his analogy. Perfection.

I don't support our pulling out of the Paris Accord. I think it was the wrong thing to do. And I don't mind GDP growth for other nations, even China. What I do mind is the notion that the world's greatest polluter can increase its amount of Co2 emitted and still be touted as successfully contributing to reduced Co2 emissions worldwide.

"Telling China to limit their total CO2 emission to pre 2005 values is like telling a teenager in the middle of puberty to limit their food consumption to the same amount as when they were 9 years old. It's just not an option."

Who's telling China to do that? I only suggested that China's pledge to reduce their Co2 emissions to 60-65% of their 2005 levels as a ratio of GDP isn't all that it's made out to be. Your analogy is faulty because food consumption is necessary for life, but spending billions on destroying coral reefs while making artificial islands in the South China Sea is not. The CCP certainly has the funds necessary to effect a bigger, better and faster transition to green energy. Put another way, I believe that China has the potential to benefit both their people through economic growth and simultaneously do more in combating global climate change. I simply don't trust their current government to do it. I've been living in China now for over 19 years...and one thing that strikes me is the prevalence of appearance over substance. Perhaps you simply give them more credence in the latter, while my own perception seems to verify the former.

"But their total emissions is still increasing! This is just a farce and they're doing nothing!"

The second half of your statement is a strawman. They are doing something, just not enough, imho. And China's emissions have yet to plateau, therefore it's not an achievement yet.

"Now you may say "China's not putting funds towards green energy!" Well, that's also not true. China already surpassed the US, in spending on renewable energy. In fact, China spent $103 billion on renewable energy in 2015, far more than the US, which only spent $44 billion. Also, they will continue to pour enormous amounts of resources into renewable energy, far more than any other country."

This is also misleading. What I'm suggesting is that China could do more. It's certainly a matter of opinion on whether the Chinese government is properly funding green initiatives. For example, both your article and the amounts you cite ignore the fact that those numbers include Chinese government loans, tax credits, and R&D for Chinese manufacturers of solar panels...both for domestic use AND especially for export. The government has invested heavily into making solar panels a "strategic industry" for the nation. Their cheaper manufacturing methods, while polluting the land and rivers with polysilicon and cadmium, have created a glut of cheap panels...with a majority of the panels they manufacture being exported to Japan, the US and Europe. It's also forced many "cleaner" manufacturers of solar panels in the US and Europe out of business. China continues to overproduce these panels, and thus have "installed" much of the excess as a show of green energy "leadership." But what you don't hear about much is curtailment, that is the fact that huge percentages of this green energy never makes its way to the grid. It's lost, wasted...and yet we're supposed to give them credit for it? So...while you appear to want to give them full credit for their forward-looking investments, I will continue to look deeper and keep a skeptical eye on a government that has certainly earned our skepticism.

""But China is building more coal plants!" Well that's not really true either. China just scrapped over 100 coal power projects with a combined power capacity of 100 GW . Instead, the aforementioned investments will add over 130GW in renewable energy. Overall, Chinese coal consumption may have already peaked back in in 2013."

Well, yes, it really is true. China announcing the scrapping of 103 coal power projects on January 14th this year was a step in the right direction, and certainly very well timed politically. But you're assuming that that's the entirety of what China has recently completed, is currently building, and even plans to build. If you look past that sensationalist story, you'll see that they continue to add coal power at an accelerating pace. As to China's coal consumption already having peaked...lol...well, if you think they'd never underreport and then quietly revise their numbers upwards a couple of years later, then you should more carefully review the literature.

"So in the world of reality, how is China doing in terms of combating global warming? It's doing a decent job. So no "@Diogenes", China is NOT the single biggest factor in our future success/failure, because it is already on track to meeting its targets."

Well, your own link states:

"We rate China’s Paris agreement - as we did its 2020 targets - “medium.” The “medium“ rating indicates that China’s targets are at the last ambitious end of what would be a fair contribution. This means they are not consistent with limiting warming to below 2°C, let alone with the Paris Agreement’s stronger 1.5°C limit, unless other countries make much deeper reductions and comparably greater effort."

And if the greatest emitter of Co2 isn't the biggest factor, then what is? I'm not saying that China bears all the responsibility or even blame. I'm far more upset with my own country and government. But to suggest that China adding the most Co2 of any nation on earth (almost double what the US emits) isn't the largest single factor that influences AGW...I'm having trouble processing your rationale for saying so. Even if we don't question if they're on track to meet their targets, they'll still be the largest emitter of Co2...unless India somehow catches up to them.

To restate my position:
The US shouldn't have withdrawn from Paris.
China is not a global leader in fighting climate change.
To combat climate change, every nation needs to pull together.
China is not "pulling" at their weight, which means that other nations must take up more of the slack.
Surging forward, while "developed" nations stagnate will weaken the CCP's enemies...and make no mistake, they view most of us as their enemies.
The former is part of the CCP's long-term strategy for challenging the current geopolitical status quo.
I believe that the Chinese Communist Party is expending massive amounts of resources abroad and militarily, when the bulk of those funds would better serve their own people, environment and combating the global crisis of climate change.

Yes, that's where we differ, because she sure didn't seem to be trying to leave to me, just had an inability to stand still under stress, like many 15 year olds. (And as I've said, it's the macing a handcuffed, secured girl that's out of line imo, the manhandling was just more than needed and was certain to escalate problems rather than solve them, so not smart but on the low end of the scale of acceptability, the macing was a pure assault in my eyes, for no good reason beyond sadism. It was not the right way to get her in the car.)

Keep in mind, she gets on her bike and rides (slowly) with ZERO complaint from the officer she's right in front of, he LET her do it, then got pissed off that she did it. WTF?!
Again, this could have been solved with a simple command to sit down, a command they did not give. Also, detained is not under arrest. You are under zero obligation to submit to detention. If they thought she was leaving the scene, they should have arrested her. Instead, they said repeatedly that they were detaining her for 'cooperation of investigation' (not a crime) and a medical release (something they probably need for their own liability purposes, but not something they can arrest a person for as far as I know).

Yes, the little girl was in the wrong...did my saying exactly that confuse you?

Yes, I absolutely think that if an officer pepper sprayed another officer's child for something the first officer screwed up (like failing to put her all the way in the car) the parent would go ballistic and sue...no matter how their child had acted. Rude behavior is not a threat, the only legitimate reason to use force. I don't think they would see it like you do if it was their child.
Yes, they would also probably reprimand the child too, but bad manners do not excuse assault with a weapon on a handcuffed detainee.

There was no reason to use mace, the proper response is to pull her into the car from the other side.

Your analogy only works if the wolf hounds go after the sheep when there's not a wolf in sight.

Hours? Really? Try an extra 10 seconds to avoid 15 minutes of battle and days of court. "Sit down" doesn't take even that. If they don't have the patience to verbalize the instructions they want followed, they should quit. Deescalation is their job, and they absolutely failed, as they often do.

Remember, they repeatedly say they're only detaining her because she may need medical treatment, then they treat her in a way that ensures she needs medical treatment. If they were really trying to help her, they failed so utterly miserably that they all should quit today...but we know that was bullshit lies, right?

I'm guessing you've never had a gun to your head and a knee on your neck face down in a gutter because an officer made a mistake reading your licence plate and had zero patience for the car thief he was taking down, followed by threats of retaliation if you report them. You might give them less cooperation and leeway if you had.

We really do see an entirely different world.

What I see originally happening here is a dispute/conflict between two citizens. The driver and the cyclist. There was a collision that damaged the car and maybe the cyclist. The cyclist is a minor, and the only account we get on video is the driver fairly insistent they were the ones that got hit when the cyclist ran a traffic sign. Blame on that doesn't matter to the video though because the police aren't meant to address blame and never attempt to.

Do we agree on the above preamble view of what happened at least? I think we do, so I'll pick up with that assumed.

The cyclist does not want to cooperate with the required exchange of information for insurance and liability purposes. So presumably the driver got the police get involved. This is exactly what I think we all should want. Rather than expecting the parties involved resort to their own use of force, we want to defer that to trained police officers. This is preferable for either party to simply being victimised with no recourse for injury to the cyclist if the driver's at fault or damages to the car if the cyclist is.

I again would hope we are still on the same page at this point, lets call it point B?

If I understand right, we now diverge in that I believe when office says come here to the cyclist, the cyclist is in the wrong for instead dodging around the officer and trying to take off on their bike. When the officer immediately stops them from that physically and tells them they are being detained, the cyclist is again wrong for actively resisting for the entire remainder of the video.

You seem to think the officers would be angry to see their child in the video, and we agree on that. We disagree on whom they would be angry with though. I'm pretty sure the officers would angry with their kid for consistently resisting the officers and would likely be telling their kid they are lucky the officers were as gentle as they were because they absolutely didn't need to be.

I don't know who to credit the analogy to, but this feels to me like an instance of the police being the wolf hounds protecting the us sheeple. Their use of violence and force looks scary to us and we just wish those mean, nasty and violent wolfhounds would be replaced with more mild mannered sheep. It's not until an actual wolf comes along that all of sudden we wonder were those hounds are because we went to get as close under their shadows as we can.

The reason it comes to mind is because having 3-4 officers spending hours begging, pleading and otherwise trying to non-violently persuade a cursing, kicking, resistant teenager to take accept pretty basic instructions is not what I want. I get the impression you would prefer that, but I do not. I want the officers sitting at nearby coffee shop bored and eating donuts instead. When they come to deal with this incident, I want them back to those donuts as quickly as possible. The reason being, when a wolf somewhere starts up a domestic dispute, or starts beating up someone in the street, or breaking into somebodies home I want the police unhindered and ready to their 'real' jobs.

Lets see ....grass roots movement or TYT making you believe it is a grass roots movement.

We have a " fan" who sent in this video and I love it... It is his own organization.


The Justice Democrats are a political action committee[1] founded on January 23, 2017, by Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks,

Kyle Kulinski of Secular Talk, and

former leadership from the 2016 Bernie Sanders presidential campaign.

Its stated goal of reforming the Democratic Party by running "a unified campaign to replace every corporate-backed member of Congress and rebuild the [Democratic] party from scratch" starting in the 2018 Congressional midterm elections.[2][3]

The Justice Democrats have been described as attempting to create a left-wing populist movement analogous to the right-wing Tea Party movement.[4]


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justice_Democrats

@newtboy
i like the 'failing liver" analogy.
appropriate and easily understood.

and i can understand where milkmandan is coming from,but my perspective is more aligned with yours newt.

what consistently baffles me,is how so many people are willing to simply accept this short term strategy from our politicians.

there is no surprise when corporations push for this,they are just focusing on their own interests and bottom line,which is short term profit.

or the politicians who bow to their neoliberal masters to receive those tasty campaign contributions.

or even the banks,who again focus on their short term gains.

these players are all behaving as they always have:for their own self interest.so there should be no shock or surprise when they act exactly as they have always acted.

but when i see everyday,normal people defend the behavior and actions of oliticians,financial institutions and multi-national corporations.it baffles me as to why they would choose to do such a thing.

we can understand why those players seek to retain a system which benefits them,their shareholders and their bottom line,but that system no longer serves the interests of the people,community and society as a whole.

so why make arguments defending it?

it is,quite frankly,killing us slowly as a species.

look at germany.
that country has slowly been recruiting,educating and now poised to corner the market in:new energy,renewable energy and are leading the world in breakthrough technologies in all energy fields.

germany has long played the long game.
they now dominate the entire EU in finance,and are now focusing on dominating the globe with new energy technology.

and what are we doing here in america?
pushing through more and more neoliberal policies that immiserate the working poor,both here and abroad.desperately continuing our destruction of entire ecosystems to exploit our natural resources for:oil and gas.military conflicts,which only make this country less safe,all to exploit other nations and extract THEIR oil and gas,and the cost in human lives is absolutely indefensible.

all of it.
every single bit of it for short term gains for an extremely small minority.

and here we are,with trump opening the flood gates to further exploit and destroy our natural resources with no thought or plan for the future.no investment in our communities,nor our society as a whole.

and for those who wish to make an argument that hillary would be better.i will only concede that on a domestic level this may have been true,but hillary is a neoliberal corporatist,and she would have pushed for even MORE military intervention in the middle east.MORE sanctions against countries unwilling to play ball,in order to politically squeeze them out,and even MORE of this countries policy of "regime change" to exploit and extract from those countries their precious resources.

i strongly suspect Iran would have been next on her agenda.

so when are some of these people going to step up,and realize that both trump AND clinton are (or would have been) disasterous for us as a community,a nation and as a species?

because they both only offer short term solutions to long term problems.and those short term solutions only benefit a minority of the population.

we could turn this ship around TODAY,right now,if we so choose.
we need more politicians like elizabeth warren and tulsi gabbard.we need more integrity in our media and journalists willing to do their job and criticize power,not bow to it just for access.we need the people to become engaged and confront their representatives,and make them uncomfortable,not treat them as celebrities.

and we need to reject the system where rich people choose who we get to vote for,and begin to dismantle this two party duopoly.

because trump vs hillary?
this election cycle has just revealed that both these candidates are not the disease,but rather the symptom of a very broken,and dysfunctional political system.

we need to begin to invest in the future.
and reject the status quo as no longer being viable for the continued existence of the human species.

and with the newly energized american public,who are growing in numbers daily,and is a direct response to the unmitigated disaster that is trump.there may be hope for us yet.

because if we stay on this trajectory,we are fucking doomed.

First-off, I completely agree, but mostly because of your first point about assault and the generalisation that it's currently something that would freak a lot of people out.

I think it will be great when society comes to a point where it's acceptable that someone might have transitioned. At (or approaching) that time I think it's something that a partner should generally know. Having said that, I certainly don't think it should be an obligation.

My present-day analogy is divorce... it's now acceptable to most people to be involved with someone who's divorced, but it's not something that's always discussed as a relationship blooms. However, it is an important part of a person's past that says something about them, and if it comes out far later in the relationship that says something too.

The mirror of this is that someone's reaction to the revelation of divorce/transition says something about them, and their acceptance of your past.

BTW, I'm saying this as someone who's divorced. Y'know, just in case it matters to you. In the long term. If we have a 'long term'. Damn, I'm ruining the moment, amn't I.

Lawsuit for false advertising?

Overall, this seems rather analogous to bottled water. Penn and Teller did a brilliant "Bullshit" episode about bottled water back in the day. It got sifted, but is now dead. The entire episode (first half is about feng shui, second half about water) is available on vimeo, though:
https://vimeo.com/193125042

Long story short, most bottled water presents itself as coming from a mountain spring, or glacier, or whatever. But in reality, the vast majority is simply municipal water from whatever city the packaging plant is in, usually not going through any additional filtration or purification at all.

At least with water, it is possible to test for contaminants. Diamonds can be graded / assayed to certify some basic characteristics, but of course there is no straightforward way to track their history and know where they came from, etc. At least, not short of having a paper trail tracing it back to the place and time that it was mined, which could easily be faked.

Bottled water gets away with promoting an "image" of being sourced from mountain springs or whatever by never actually claiming that it is in a legal sense. Usually there is fine print available noting the location that the water came from / was packaged. This diamond company seems to go beyond that and to make claims about their diamonds that are impossible to actually prove. Hopefully they get nailed/shut down.

I never claimed to or would say I speak for all of any group. Congrats on assuming.

I fail to see how fighting against equal protection for trans people under hate crime laws isn't transphobic. And his flimsy defense of "it will force me to call someone something i dont want to" isn't true of the bill in the slightest if you read the thing and mostly a smoke screen for his distaste for trans acceptance. The place where Peterson works adopted almost identical protection for trans individuals in 2014. But he hasn't noticed or been effected... because it doesn't do what he thinks.

And your analogy is stupid and reductive. Someone being upset they can't call people "faggot" anymore because of PC nonsense doesn't put you on the same level of marginalized groups fighting for basic rights anymore than his refusal to accept that trans people get to self identify / get equal protection puts him anywhere close to the trans and gay people fighting at Stonewall for the right to exist.

Regardless of all of that, I wasn't talking to you and I was offering someone who seemed genuinely interested in the other side some view of that side. I'm not interested in the vitriol from some rando on the internet who has made being "anti-sjw/anti-feminist" an identity.

I may be the only one who thinks like this, but it reminds of Taleb's Thanksgiving Turkey analogy:

https://www.businessinsider.com.au/nassim-talebs-black-swan-thanksgiving-turkey-2014-11?r=US&IR=T

It is binary at one stage of processing. when a neuron has enough input it fires an action potential which is a binary one or zero. that then gets "read" by the synaptic terminal and turns back into an analog signal to a "post synaptic" neuron.
As you said, how this signal is then processed by the next neuron depends on a lot of factors including the effects of other neurons. Synaptic strength refers to the amount of electricity the post synaptic neuron sees given this binary 1 or 0 and is often measured at rest. However, if other neurons are firing it can go up or down, amplifying or shrinking it by activating other voltage sensitive ion channels or by increasing the conductance across the lipid bilayer of the cell so that the electricity leaks out of the dendrite of the neuron before it is processed at the soma (the cell body where a new action potential can be generated)

You are gonna hate me now, but I grew up reading Dean Koontz and Stephen King years before the librarian at my middle suggested Lovecraft, so 12? My first Stephen King was Night Shift, with the eye in the middle of a mummified hand; Jerusalem's Lot ruined my ability to sleep. For some strange reason Lovecraft comforted me but King disturbed me lol -- My first Lovecraft reading was The Festival.

Anyway, it's my mom's fault, i jus read whatever she had lying around the house, which also included Mary Higgins Clark, Robert Ludlum, Danielle Steel, Michael Crichton, and who even knows what else.

Totally agree in having absorbed the material rather than fully understood. I mean shit, how does a 4th grader even under The Rising Sun? It's just shocking and strange. Like d3coding a new language.

I also read a lot of young adult thriller suspense books, notably Alfred Hitchcock's young readers books and short story collections. Ray Bradbury collections, random Asimov Foundation books, and old copies of Analog, that my dad would buy from local library sales. (Thas how poor people shop for books hahaha) He was the old school scifi guy, but not at all into horror.

I suppose I don't mind hacks. Reading the letters of Oscar Wilde changed my opinions on EVERYTHING. If Wilde belongs to the criminal class or what Danny Devito's character Frank terms the "Fringe" class, there must be some saving grace even in the intellectual crime of the hack writer.

@newtboy,

No, it's about law. Warren Jeffries people did all that, on a smaller scale. They weren't their own country, even though they got away with it for decades. Law.

Forgive my lack of familiarity with him, but your telling me he (on a smaller scale than Texas), stopped paying taxes, and instead collecting them. Started up his own legal and justice system. He created his own borders within which the police would not dare set foot because it would be a death sentence for them. And after he'd done all this the US military itself failed to remove him as well?

Or are you meaning not just scale, but severity and all the other rather meaningful extremes of sovereignty that the Taliban and Al Qaida achieved? It's the same then in the sense that me punching you is violent just me killing ten people is violent, but in another sense they are nothing alike...

No, but they couldn't indiscriminately bomb Houston and any large gatherings either....not even if Spencer might be there. The first American civilian they kill will start a war...a real, legitimate war.

Your not embracing the analogy. Spencer's terrorists are still killing American civilians every week, outside of Texas borders. The American military is just corrupt enough that as long as its democrats/republicans dying,(whomever we choose to not be in power) they let it slide because it shows the need for the military to 'protect' the country.

You need to take a harder look at Pakistani politics to see just how powerful Al Qaida and the Taliban's control over the tribal areas has been.

More over, all of the above definitions of state within a state violence and jihad doesn't require war as the response to acts of war. To invade Afghanistan to prevent another 9/11 is dubious at best. Even the Kissinger's of the world wouldn't count the value of that trade off, losing a couple thousand Americans to an attack each decade or so is 'acceptable' loses.
Call it the price of freedom and carry on. The real trick was that if the Taliban and Al Qaida were so tight with Pakistan's military and intelligence services, how concerned should America be that the Pakistani proxies in their tribal regions and Afghanistan are so keen to target Americans. That lead directly to Pakistan's nuclear arsenal being a big enough concern with that pairing that maybe it was time to tell Pakistan they had to end their little dance with terrorists hitting Americans and they had better make a choice who they are going to side with in the Jihad that was already being waged for 2 decades.

@newtboy,

Then, you (We) are suggesting legitimizing their claim to be autonomous states by accepting that classification to be able to declare war against them.

I addressed exactly that in my longer follow up to Enoch. I am asking you to open your eyes and look at the reality on the ground. It's not about legitimizing claims to statehood for convenience or opportunity or semantics or whatever. It is that an area of land larger than many European countries was running under their laws. Was paying them taxes. Was under their justice system. Was under their rule in every single manner. At that point you need to recognize the reality and call a spade a spade and start acting in accordance with reality and not just the borders drawn up on somebody's map somewhere.

You want an analogy in America, than have the whole state of Texas under the control of Richard Spencer and his likes. The American police don't go there, because they fear for their lives. Even the American military has stopped pushing in because their losses were too much. Instead the American military is using back chanels to mostly direct their violent terrorist attacks towards the Mexicans. If Mexico gets tired of Texans coming in and killing them, do they have no further recourse than to ask pretty, pretty please to the US to extradite Spencer and crack down on extremists? That is the reality in Tribal Pakistan with the Taliban calling all the shots.

@enoch

Here's the deal, my friend.

The internet does not come with a tone of voice. You might consider that the way you read my words are not the way they are said in my head (cue to your cafe analogy.)

And I can't read tone of voice either. I supply it. And I have bodily reactions to you, too, my friend.

We both do this because both of us are a bit difficult, and both of us are supplying tone of voice that makes the words on the page different.

I'm not going to apologize for what I wrote. I meant what I said. Every word. And there is nothing wrong with what I wrote. You didn't like it for your own reasons, but there is nothing intrinsically wrong with anything I said.

I will say that you have supplied a context to gorillaman that he could have supplied himself with the sarcasm button. He didn't do that. So was he kidding? I don't know.

You assume that anyone who reads his post has the extensive knowledge of his motives and personality. Newcomers won't. And here is an embarrassing admission -- although I too have been on this site for ten years, I don't have a sense of who gorillaman is. Sorry, gorillaman. I just haven't been paying attention to you. This is a character flaw on my part, also, since you seem intent on listing my flaws. I am pretty much in my head, and until there have been repeated interactions, I don't really take in people. I am selfish that way.

About the Homeland Security remark. Gorillaman was given the benefit of the doubt for his motives, he was given context. I assumed that I would be accorded the same gift.

So let me give context.

I am repulsed by the term Homeland Security. I was repulsed the first time I heard it, I am repulsed every time I hear it.

So when I take on racism, homophobia, sexism, xenophoabia, or any garden variety hatred, I invoke Homeland Security to protect us from what is the real threat. Not scary brown skinned people. But the people amongst us who truly are a threat to our way of life.

My mistake -- and it was a mistake -- was to assume that people get the connection. Because of context. Which of course isn't good enough.

I like my jab at the concept of Homeland Security. But it obviously isn't working. I'll have to rework it, make it clear. give it context.

Because I agree with you there, my friend. Homeland Security evokes the Third Reich and it turns my stomach. Every time.