wxman91
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Posts posted by wxman91
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But some 21 year old white kid with racist views shooting up a traditional black church is an indictment of every white guy in the south?
Can you point to Obama making that statement? I'd like to read that.
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Say it turns out to be such (someone who actively sought out overseas training, etc.). What will the President do then?
Then he can speak freely about this being a terrorist attack and continue to pursue reasonable measures to diminish the threats posed by ISIS and associated groups. But this is just something we are going to have to accept will happen in a free and open society.
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But a foreign born Muslim seeking out and killing Marines requires some deciphering as to motive?
Probably not, but wouldn't it also be good to know whether this was just a disillusioned lone actor who was seduced by online militant rhetoric or whether this was someone who actively sought out overseas training, etc.? I sure would like the President to be informed about these things before making sweeping statement about an attack that had just occured.
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No disagreeing with your post but that was not even close to what happened in the SC shootings. "Lone gunman" was never used in that situation.......it jumped right away to racially motivated and an act of terror by a white supremacist......then the flag issue caught fire for justification and rationalization. Again seems like some want to have it both ways when you tread lightly as is comes to Islam and the shooting in SF.
In SC, almost immediately you had in hand a manifesto from the shooter stating that he was trying to start a race war. We are all pretty sure we know what yesterday's attack is, but it is not nearly as cut-and-dried, and to say that the president is somehow in the wrong for using cautious words reflects your own bias rather than speaking to his.
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How about we start blaming the perpetrators and quit making excuses, rationalizations, justifications, etc.
Because people want to use everything for a political motive. There can't just be a tragedy - there has to be someone to blame behind it - something that went wrong. On the left it is easy access to guns and the demonization of Muslims, on the right it is the lack of guns and the failure to eliminate terror groups. The problem is, in reality, there is likely nothing that could be done about this. If the US went over and blew up every training camp in ISIS territory it wouldn't have made a bit of difference. If we banned the sales of all but pea-shooters, this a**hole would have found a gun anyway. We can be sad about this event, but in the end, nothing can or should change in relation to this attack.
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Mankato-RIT tied at 1. 2nd intermission
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That argument that a higher % of total income is paid out in taxes by lower income households is BS. "Leftie propaganda"...right smokey??
I will say this again...the lower 20% of household incomes in this country pay roughly 16% of their overall income/dollars earned in federal, state and local taxes. This 20% is also in the bucket that pays a NEGATIVE 9% of the total income tax in this country. You understand the negative part??
Common sense for most people would have been to change their rhetoric and ramble when trying to reenter a message/opinion board and website under a different moniker... especially after getting the boot multiple times!! If you want to get tossed again from this site...I'll dance with you.
I was under the impression that political posts on this message board were frowned upon, but given that this thread is still going...
I think the argument that chicagoland is trying to clumsily make is that certain states, especially those with Republican legislatures, are trying to draw businesses in by scrapping corporate and income taxes in favor of sales taxes. This is an inherently regressive tax situation, where lower income folks are made to pay more in taxes while the burden is shifted away from higher income folks. While this does not overall mean that lower income folks are paying more overall in taxes due to the federal tax system, it does exacerbate the income gap and make lower income folks more reliant on government subsidies (be it food stamps, medicaid, welfare, disability, etc.). The other thing this does is perpetuate a "race to the bottom" mentality, whereby states vie for businesses by cutting them every break possible. While this may end up good for the state that gets the business, it is questionable (well, not so much in my mind) whether it is good for the country overall. The culture of business ownership has gone from stakeholder to shareowner, where profit is the only thing that matters. See the various activist shareholders in the news lately that demanded that some tech companies slash worker pay to increase share value. We go down this road, and see how pensions have been eliminated, profit sharing scratched, health insurance cut, and wages stagnant. The profit-at-all-costs culture is the very being of capitalism, but the result is what we have seen in this country - a redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich. The simple fact is the fastest route to socialism is capitalism on steroids (and frankly, vice versa). What we should be striving for is a middle ground. That sweet spot is an open debate, but I lean left, and tend ot think that the social safety net is important and the best case scenario for health care is single-payer (not gov't run). My dream tax fix would be to eliminate the corporate income tax, but make all cap gains/investment income/dividends subject to the marginal rate. Preferred rates for already having money is the absolute worst part of the system right now.
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Good news for UND!
People have to remember that UASs are not all about killing terrorists and spying. There can be huge applications for scientific research and things like agriculture and border security as the article states. Having a better strategy on how to incorporate these into the airspace safely is important.
On the privacy front, it still takes a several team crew to get these things up and running. They aren't just going to be flying around tracking everybody, it would have to be a targeted effort, hopefully with laws written that include a significant reason to do so (manhunt, etc.). The paranoia on this seems to be over-the-top, like the NSA stuff (nobody is listening to your phone calls!). We need to encourage innovation and development, keeping the US at the forefront of this technology.
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No doubt, the 5 goal third period vs the Gophers in 1998. When Blake tied it up at 3 with the wicked wrister that beat DeBus glove side, that was the loudest I had ever heard any crowd.
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wxman... You had a decent post, but as a "skeptic" I have a bit of a problem with people who hold the warming position. It primarily has to do with the poor rhetoric and catastrophic scenarios that the "warming" side put forward which has so many on this board upset. The fact is that solutions that have been put forward (carbon tax, cap-and-trade, etc.) provide a nearly negligible impact while enacting a serious economic burden. The fact is that I haven't been sold on the fact that a warmer world is worse than a cooler one. Clearly, we want to have clean energy technology, but CO2 is far from a pollutant; especially compared to most industrial gasses which for the most part have been tremendously reduced over the past several decades.
I was happy to see that you are at least willing to talk about ocean cycles and solar irradiance, but you're totally downplaying solar irradiance's effect. Recorded data over the last 400 years has had solar irradiance at it's highest until this last decade. Actually, this cycle has been surprisingly inactive compared to the previous cycles. Also, do you have a source for the 40%+ number? One problem that I always have with this argument is that increased temperatures will cause CO2 to be released from oceans/streams/lakes. How much of the increase in CO2 is simply due to an increased temperature? I know that this is one of the proposed feedback loops, but if solar irradiance, ocean cycles, or something else is primarily responsible this greatly would downplay the anthropogenic argument.
To the first part of your post, that is political, not scientific. I think the scientists should stay out of policy and just present the facts.
The 40% number is simply the pre-industrial 280ppm to the current near 400ppm. Oceans could not have contributed to the rising atmospheric levels because the oceans are now a net sink for CO2. Hence the discussion you may sometimes hear about ocean acidification.
The fact that some of the "experts" have had email uncovered that showed that they were trying to manipulate information and people, makes you wonder what is the truth. I was also under the opinion that there was information that the temperature has actually gone down a bit over the last decade. Whether that is factual or not, the fact that the "experts" have now changed their terminology from "global warming" to "climate change" makes you wonder if they are setting themselves up to argue either way for their agenda. If the temperature goes up it is because of man, if it goes down, it is because of man as well. It does make me wonder if this whole thing is a way for some do-gooders to redistribute the wealth with the U.S. having to pay other less fortunate countries carbon credits for their emissions. If in fact, the U.S. and other countries agree to this accord, I will find myself firmly in the camp of this being an agenda with some truth behind it.
The "name change" is a bad argument. The first IPCC report came out in 1990. So, even back several decades ago they were officially calling it "climate change". The scientific community moved away from global warming because the public was interpreting that as it should be warming at every place every year, when it really refers to a long-term (multi-decadal and longer) warming averaged over the earth. Try to tell people in ND this year, or Seattle this summer that this is one of the warmest years on record. It is, but they aren't seeing it in their backyards. Climate change is also preferred because temperature isn't the only variable to be concerned about. People and infrastructure can handle more heat waves and higher temps, but really I think the key is changing precipitation patterns.
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Sad to see a group of Sioux (and even Bison) fans so uneducated about the topic of anthropogenic climate change
Greenhouse Gases:
95% Water Vapor
4% CO2
CH4, N2O, CFC's make up the rest.
Of the CO2 total 96% in naturally occuring. So man made CO2 is about .12% of all Greehouse gases. And we're the problem??
Man's burning of previously sequestered carbon is the sole reason for the 40%+ rise from pre-industrial levels of CO2 to the current levels. Prior to man's activities, CO2 was "traded" between the atmosphere, earth and oceans in a natural cycle. Now, all of these reservoirs are accumulating carbon that had long ago been put in the ground.
Water vapor is the most important greenhouse gas, but the amount of water vapor is a feedback based on temperature, not a primary forcing.
I read somewhere that the scientist that is mainly attributed to being the main authority on global warming was also the same guy who, in the 1970s (IIRC) who was calling the alarm out for Global Cooling.
In the end, what I began to believe is that you don't allow alarmists towards any of the major repetitive events or environmental factors that have had a historical tendency to imitate, when graphed out, a sine wave.
Temperature and Climate cycles are one of these sine waves.
Sure, we affect it, but not to the extent that the alarmists speak of.
And by the way, I've yet to review other countries outside the U.S.'s environmental laws. Maybe because I can't find them online. Ours is a novel sized document. I wonder what Russia and China's are like?
Maybe the environmentalists should attack the countries that aren't writing books after books on laws and other ways to restrict how businesses do business and how those businesses can affect the environment they are in.
If that doesn't work, we can immediately improve our environment and its policy by doing away with California. 1 reason would be we get rid of the smog infested Californian cities such as LA. 2nd reason is that we get rid of the looniest environmentalists. Sure, that still leaves the Pacific Northwest, but their population base isn't as large and I think we could easily marginalize them.
Global cooling was never a mainstay scientific theory. It was always dwarfed in scientific publications by theories about warming. The first writings about CO2-induced warming were well over 100 years ago. The "cooling" scare came about because of two separate issues colliding: the PDO/AMO cycle resulting in several cold winters in the US, and the confirmation of the Milankovitch cycles in the ice core record which showed that we were close to being "due" in the interglacial cycle. As usual, the media in their infinite quest for ratings, chose to focus on the disaster ice age scenario. Never trust the media to faithfully report on science, they always leave out the relevant caveats and go with the most ridiculous, dire scenarios. That goes for AGW too.
I don't know if the sine waves you are talking about are the 11-year solar cycles, the PDO/AMO ocean cycles, or the ice ages, but the most relevant one at the moment is the PDO/AMO because it is on the decadal scale. There does seem to be a sine wave aspect to the global temperatures over the past century. There are theories about whether this is all ocean-related, or may also have to do with aerosols, especially in the post-WWII era. Either way, if there is a true sine wave, it is superimposed upon a long term rising trend. If this is the case, and what we've seen over the past decade is the downturn in the sine wave countered by the rising trend (resulting in a generally flat period of global temps), then we should be looking for a rising temperature regime to begin again later this decade or in the 2020s, with a very sharp upward trend especially in the 2030s and 2040s. Things that could change this would be a very, very deep solar min, or a resumption of higher solar activity. Solar energy, measured by irradiance, cosmic rays, and other variables, has been flat or in decline for 3 to 5 decades, and is unlikely to have played much of a role in the later 20th century warming.
Just for clarification - I do have an AtSci degree, but not in climatology. My job does not depend one way or the other on this matter. I do not subscribe to the Al Gore catastrophic theory, and I think many to most on the "warming" side are sick and tired of him. I am saddened that this became a political issue, and both sides are to blame for that. Reagan may have been a great leader, but one of his greatest missteps was the demonization of people looking out for the environment. I am for a combination of energy sources in the US, with a movement more towards nuclear for power generation and nat gas for power and transportation. Common sense solar, wind, and geothermal combined with a smart grid should also play a role.
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I'm not going to get into the argument about whether global warming is or isn't BS. But how does forcing "environmentally unfriendly" industries to move to nations without environmental laws while simultaneously increasing the cost of EVERYTHING in the U.S. help the planet. China and India win again.
Fine, I'm not a big fan of cap-and-trade. But where's the alternative? Why haven't the Republicans come up with anything realistic? The fact is that this bill is completely watered-down because the dems are so afraid of seeming too anti-business.
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Humans are single-handedly changing the composition of the atmosphere, increasing a radiatively important gas by a tremendous amount over a short period of time. While there are still uncertainties in the magnitude (and signs) of some feedbacks, it is without a doubt that this will have significant cumulative ramifications down the road (both climate and oceans). Did the dems craft the greatest bill around? Certainly doesn't look like it. Far too complicated and backloaded. But what was the repub alternative? A prize system. Seriously. As if there aren't already monetary incentives (hint: free-market capitalism) available. Maybe if the repubs actually come up with something that isn't completely useless, then there can be some discussion, but until then this is the only game in town. (no idea if the senate will pass it).
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I'm in Grand Forks and they never switched the game back to Lacrosse to start the 3rd OT. Is everyone else still on the Lacrosse game?
I'm still on the Lacrosse game, but I'm in Virginia, so...
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Nice timing.
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Minnesota State is playing in the DII Women's Championship on ESPN2 right now. If anyone is interested.
26-19 just over 6 minutes into the game! No defense at all. Unreal.
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Actually, there is potentially 400 billion barrels in the Bakken. That is nearly twice as much as in Saudi Arabia and 10 times as much as ANWR. It could last nearly 100 years using your estimate. As someone else said, they have unlocked the key to producing it through horizontal drilling, but the next challenge is getting it to the market. It has been estimated that in the next few years North Dakota will need 17,000 more workers for the oil field, but this generation of computer geeks doesn't want to get dirty. I say bring on the Texicans!
From nextenergynews.com (02/13/08):
Massive Oil Deposit Could Increase US reserves by 10x
America is sitting on top of a super massive 200 billion barrel Oil Field that could potentially make America Energy Independent and until now has largely gone unnoticed. Thanks to new technology the Bakken Formation in North Dakota could boost America
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Ok Mr. Half Empty!
Sorry
I do think that this is good for the ND economy. But this isn't like the Beverly Hillbillies where you poke a hole in the ground and oil shoots out.
BigGame says that getting it out of the ground isn't a problem, but even with the horizontal drilling techniques, there is likely a limit to how much can be produced in a day. For example (from the Wikipedia Bakken page):
In 2007, production from Elm Coulee averaged 53,000 barrels per day (84 m
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A good friend of mine is a retired physical science teacher from Bismarck. He still does some work with the state's geologists and the geologists said they are calling that area around Williston, Parshall, ect..."little Saudi"! The untapped oil reserve I guess is unbelievable.
It is completely irrelevant how much oil is there. It only matters at what pace that it can be brought out of the ground and made into a usable form.
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Does anyone other than me remember that the Vikings lost to the Packers 34-0 a few weeks ago?
Brooks freaking Bollinger was the QB. This team is 6-2 with Tarvaris as the starter. And the O-line is opening up epic holes. The Packer game was about as bad as it can get. I would not be afraid to play them in the playoffs.
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Arlington just has MS-13 -- Arlington criminals prefer machetes to guns
LOL. Yeah, that was a big story, especially in 2005 and early '06. Haven't heard much about it since. Most of it was out in Fairfax Co., west of Arlington. Its too darn expensive for too many of the gang members (and me) to live in Arlington!
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http://www.theconservativevoice.com/article/21605.html
*I'm quoting the Conservative Voice!! I'm going to hell for sure!*
This is a terrible argument if you know the area. I hate to say this, because it sounds racist and maybe is, but the difference between Arlington and DC isn't guns, it is African Americans. The people committing crimes don't cross the river because of gun laws, its because the crimes are over drugs and gangs in their own neighborhoods. DC has something like 63 cars stolen every day, Arlington 2. Is that because of guns? No, its because of the types of people that live there.
Fargo the new Detroit??
in Community
Posted
How would his use of those words, especially in the immediate hours after the attack affect anything? It would make you feel better? All of the sudden the terrorists would stop because they got called out? As with everything in Obama's presidency, he is being criticized for something that the opposition has no realistic opposing view on. Health care - not perfect, still 100x better than the alternatives posed. Economy - middling, and still far better off than where we would be with the R alternative. Iran - do we think "bomb, bomb, bomb" is the answer? Simply put, Obama's opponents are getting more and more frustrated as the president works his way into the upper eschelon historically.