redlegphi

I honestly don't understand what this guy is talking about. A lot of it doesn't even make sense. Is there some kind of civil war going on between Christians and "real" Christians that I don't know about? What's all this "establishment" worshiping the state nonsense? Could you boil this down to an abstract?

You are entitled to that opinion. You're just wrong. Yes. For example, Obama has blamed all of our economic problems on the Jews....just like Hitler! Also, the DNC has a militant arm of uniformed thugs who carry weapons and who routinely beat people up when they try to ask Obama about health care at town hall meetings...just like Hitler! Do I even have to mention that Obama has annexed portions of our neighboring countries and is violating the terms of a peace treaty by rapidly increasing the size of the military? And of course, there's all of the death camps.

Except that they aren't linked to. The only thing linked to at the examiner site is a pamphlet put out by SPPI which, unfortunately fails to fully cite which of Lindzen's papers they're pulling this from.

So his parents wanted to learn how to speak Russian, therefore he's a communist. Similarly, my parents only speak English, therefore I'm a monarchist. This could be a fun game!

As far as I can tell, none of the 200-some papers you copied and pasted to that one post are the paper in question here. If you haven't read the paper and don't have any clue where to find it, please just say so.

The first few posts of this thread link to a website which (inaccurately) summarizes Lindzen's paper. Yet you keep squawking about "the data". What data? A summary of a paper isn't "data", especially if it's not even an accurate summary. Point me towards the actual paper that purports to prove that CO2 isn't such a big deal. Have you read (or at least skimmed) said paper? Or are you just choosing to believe this science because you happen to agree with what the scientist says?

Have you actually seen his data? If so, would you mind pointing us towards the site?

If you look at a graph of temperatures over the last 10 years, you'll note that it jukes all over the place, just like the stock market. This is because there are factors that influence temperature on a day-to-day, week-to-week, and month-to-month basis that have stronger input than manmade CO2 (for example, a volcanic eruption). Because a lot of these factors are difficult/impossible to predict in the short-term, it's ludicrous to try and use a model designed to predict long-term temperature fluctuations to predict temperature change over the course of 10 years. The background noise is too high to pull anything meaningful out of that set of data. And speaking of data, could somebody post a link to Lindzen's paper that y'all want debunked. Or do you just want kallend to debunk the interpretation of the paper that's offered on some right-wing website?

If what they were hired to do and what they are actually doing start to be two different things, I'd suggest that what they are actually doing is far more important. And when what they're doing is killing Iraqi civilians and then either covering it up or getting their people out of Iraq before anybody can figure out what happened, I'd say that maybe they shouldn't have been hired to do the job in the first place.

Disagree. If you have a set number of police to patrol a given area and you decrease the number of places within that area where crimes can occur, you have ffectively increased the concentration of police in the areas that aren't monitored by cameras. Though I'm still not entirely sold on the concept of the state-run CCTVs due to civil liberties issues.

I don't recall KBR truck drivers carrying weapons with them. I'm sure some did, but I don't recall seeing them carrying them and I haven't heard of a KBR driver taking part in any combat situations, so I don't think that argument really works. As for offensive vs defensive, the terms are pretty much meaningless in this context. Yes, they were hired for a non-offensive role. However, if you're going to sit there and tell me that Blackwater contractors didn't go looking for fights or conduct "offensive" operations while on convoys, especially early in the war, I've got a bridge to sell you. As was already stated, the initial hires for Blackwater were SF/Seal/Ranger types. These are guys who are not going to be happy doing the same job that I can do with a couple of trucks full of artilleryman.

I was thinking more of "our" mercenaries. I hadn't really thought of the Sons of Iraq in that way, but I guess they technically are. I think the difference there is that when the Sons of Iraq go home at night, they're still on the battlefield. The only way they and their families will get peace in their lives is if they aren't causing their community to turn into more of a violent shithole. So I'd much rather have the Sons of Iraq on my side than Blackwater. Just my two cents though.

So you're saying that instead of building towers with machine guns with motion-sensors on them that could shoot pregnant Mexican teenagers as they tried to cross the border, we should take that money and actually help improve Mexico? What kind of sick liberal fascio-socio-communist are you?!?

I'm no legal scholar, but if I recall correctly for the case of Iraq, it depends on what the SOFA (or whatever other document supports troops and their civilian support being in the country) says. For example, the current Iraqi security agreement which allows US troops to be in Iraq says that US troops can be prosecuted by an Iraqi court if they commit a crime there under certain circumstances (not being on duty at the time of the crime, etc.). I'm pretty sure when we first invaded, Blackwater fell under the same rules as US troops, which basically meant that they'd be tried by a US court if they did something illegal.

To add on to the great points GeorgiaDon has already made, I will just point out that if we'd really like to get an epidemic started in this country, the best way to do it is get millions of people currently living here to be afraid to go to a hospital for fear they'll be deported.

I think use of mercenaries, in general, are a bad idea. I think using them in a COIN environment is an especially horrible idea. On the one hand, you have members of the US military who are motivated to end the war successfully so that they aren't leaving their families every other year to go to some shithole in the Middle East where people are trying to blow them up. On the other hand, you have the mercs of Xe/Blackwater, who depend on the conflict continuing for their paycheck and fell under pretty much no legal rules whatsoever. Which of these two groups is more likely to contribute to successfully ending the COIN fight in our favor?

What's sad is that we value the lives of border patrol agents and/or runaway teenagers more highly than a person born in Mexico.

The thuggish dogs that you see in our government are elected by our nation to carry out the will of our nation. Nations are formed on the premise that many working together toward one goal can get by a lot better than the same number of people striving independently. It's pretty much the same concept the insurance companies use to sell insurance. You can gamble by yourself without insurance, and maybe you'll be fine, or maybe you'll get an expensive disease and be completely fucked. OR, you can sign up for insurance and your risk and the risk of thousands of others is spread across the group, so that the expensive disease of one effects all in a minor way instead of one in an excessively major way. Unfortunately, the cold, hard realities of life and capitalism have made it so that not everybody can afford insurance, meaning there are those out there in our great nation who are forced to go it alone, walking the high wire without any of us to catch them if they're unlucky enough to fall ill. So now, our government is trying to come up with a way to allow the risk of the uninsured millions to be aggregated by somebody (potentially the government, though not necessarily depending on what they finally put in the bill), so that the overall risk of medical issues is further spread out among our nation and so we can all move forward together better than we could individually. That doesn't sound especially awful, undemocratic, or outside the scope of a government established to "promote the general welfare" to me. What you have described, on the other hand, sounds pretty close to anarchy, which is not a state of government that I'd like to live in.

My understanding of this is shite compared to bill, but I don't think they even have to travel anywhere. They just have to be moving at speeds approaching the speed of light. So they could be doing tiny circles around you at near light speed. Not really going anywhere, but still moving through time and space at a different rate than you. Or such is my understanding.

I could be wrong, but I think that exact passage from the Bible was used to justify the rule of absolute monarchs in Europe for several centuries. So maybe we should just stop trying to use the Bible to justify our actions and could instead use some common sense and logic. Just a thought.

You do realize that quoting the Bible doesn't constitute proof of something claimed by the Bible, right? Much like a Muslim quoting the Quran to you wouldn't constitute proof of what's in the Quran (feel free to substitute another religion and religious holy book).

One would think a skydiver would know a bit about the difficulty of spotting an aircraft at a great distance.

I could be wrong, but I don't think the Muslims believe that Mohammad's teachings trump earlier teachings. Rather, they believe that the word of God as passed to earlier prophets was corrupted by man as it was written down/passed on. Mohammad took dictation from Allah directly, so the Quran is the perfect word of Allah while the Bible is corrupted by the influence of man. It's funny, cause I pretty much agree with them other than the whole Quran being perfect part.

So, by this standard, people who can't have babies can't screw or they're evil, fornicating sinners who are going to burn in hell? Meaning couples who have hit menopause, naturally sterile couples, and couples who use birth control are all in for the big burn? Is that correct?

As I believe Al Franken once wrote, "Antarctica: it's a continent, not an ice cube."