Crap Throwing Monkey

But - and this is a key point here - choosing not to go is NOT censorship. But even so...honestly, if I'd paid for a concert and got a fifteen-minute PSA for the Republican Party, I'd feel pretty ripped off.

Might even out-gay your roller skate.

Cats are smarter than people give them credit for...

I've always had the impression that Bashar Assad was a little less nuts and a little more willing to face reality than his father. It's just so damned unfortunate he looks like he walked out of a Monty Python skit...

Why? Am I too level headed? Can I come back if I shout out a hearty "!@#$ the Dixie Chicks!"

Except that it was the "All crap of the past 15 years" roster. Tuttle didn't make the cut. Same reason I never came out and said "What are you nuts? Have you forgotten Hank Bullough and Bruce Mathison?" in that other thread... But other than that little "15 years" criteria...he certainly deserved to.

More to the point: if you care, don't go. I opted out of watching Clinton play the sax; why can't I opt out of listening to the Dixie Chicks proselytize?

Nothing with the kind of accuracy they'd need. A good portion of Iran's nuclear program is in underground, hardened bunkers, the kind of thing that needs a precise deep penetrator...the kind of thing you can't really mount on a Jericho II. Their sub forces...rumor is they have three new submarines of German design that can deploy into the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf, and carry nuclear cruise missiles. I can believe the latter; the former I think is a stretch, as it's a non-trivial matter to sail a diesel submarine with 45 days' provisions from Tel Aviv (or wherever they're based - might be Haifa) to the Indian Ocean unsupported...particularly if they don't transit the Suez Canal, which I suspect they don't do (I could be wrong...but the paperwork involved in sailing through the Suez would mean Israeli subs would be transiting in the open, which is completely inconsistent with typical Israeli military practice). But either way...both platforms would only be effective combined with nuclear weapons against Iranian nuclear targets. And Israeli nuclear policy is based on ambiguity: everyone suspects Israel has nukes, but no one knows they do, which is just how the Israelis want it. Plus, the Israeli nuclear program is intended specifically for strategic use against a dire and immediate threat against the very existence of Israel...and it's a pretty far stretch to characterize Iran's nuclear program as such, all Iran's rhetoric notwithstanding. I just don't see where it's in Israel's interest to drastically change their long-standing nuclear policy of ambiguity to eliminate an Iranian threat that's less real than hypothetical. It's NOT in their interests, frankly: they'd be more secure maintaining the ambiguity of their program in the face of an active Iranian weapons program than they would be nuking an Iranian program and lifting the veil of ambiguity over theirs. Doesn't mean they wouldn't do it - people have a very funny way of doing things that are not in their best interests. Just means they'd be pretty stupid to.

Considering their draft spots (and Armour's injury), were Copeland and Armour really that bad? Copeland, at least, outperformed the much higher drafted players you listed as busts. Armour had a good rookie year before his injury (which, as I recall, was just something he could never recover from). Can you really hold Armour's injury against him? And was Copeland's performance really all that out of line for a 4th rounder?

And that after a perfect season for the Vikings. It was the first kick he missed all year.

I don't know if you've noticed...but the Republicans actually can't multi-task.

The difference is, no one mistook Clinton for a professional musician simply because he was a political figure. But professional entertainers are portrayed as experts outside of their fields all the time. Which, as I said, is usually less their fault than it is the media's. Although sometimes, entertainers actually ARE professionally skilled outside of entertainment fields. Hedy Lamarr springs most immediately to mind. But Sean Penn's not an expert on hurricane relief just because he brought a leaky boat to New Orleans, no matter how much the media portrays him as such. And I never bothered watching that episode of Arsenio, either. I didn't vote for Clinton because of his saxophone skills any more than I'd go to a Sean Penn movie for his politics.

The second was from Time Magazine. And people giving a sh-- what Time Magazine thinks about global warming is part of the problem anyway.

I heard that Tampa's very unhappy with that joke too... (You know it had to be done...)

It might spoil it for me... ...but then, if I thought it would, I just wouldn't go. Startling concept, I know...

No, that's not what I said. I said a good chunk of what's presented as "science" isn't actually science, it's either marketing or policy. And too much of it is crap. Right now, for instance, I'm looking for a list of major greenhouse gasses - aside from CO2, which everyone knows about, and methane, which some do, what are the other industrial byproducts that could be responsible? So far I've discovered two things: 1) the biggest contributor to the greenhouse effect, by far, isn't CO2, it's water vapor. Increased gasseous H2O in the atmosphere will actually have a bigger effect than increased CO2. So how, then, have water vapor levels changed over the past 150 years? And why? (Usually, the "why" is stated as "Because CO2 is making us warmer", which would lead to another unresearched question: what is the relationship between CO2 levels and water vapor levels? There's an underlying assumption that warming due to CO2 is causing increased water vapor...when it's entirely possible that increased water vapor from surface evaporation is causing the warming, and CO2 is a minor player. CO2's role as the main contributor to warming is, in fact, untested.) 2) it's impossible to find an honest graph of greenhouse gas emissions and levels. Generally, they're all manipulated in some way to prove some point or another. One I just found had fossil fuel consumption and "carbon flux" plotted along the same time axis...but on two different unlabelled vertical scales. It was impossible to tell if any correllation was true and accurate, or manufactured by manipulating the data. But people always trot out "evidence" like that to prove global warming does or does not exist (Gore's book, as a matter of fact, was full of that crap.) So are greenhouse gas emissions affecting climate? Yes. Exactly how, though - or even if it's a man-made or natural effect - are open to question. Hell, it could be that the increasing solar activity since the Maunder Minimum (i.e. the "Little Ice Age") is putting more water vapor into the atmosphere and warming the planet, and increased CO2 levels are conicidental (or even some sort of a byproduct of decreased glaciation and ice caps - there's a definite record between ice coverage and CO2 levels going back 400k years, but there's an untested assumption that CO2 levels caused decreased glaciation, without even considering the possibility of a mechanism by which ice cover itself might affect CO2 levels.) No one's doing the differential studies that would determine any of this...largely because the public debate is so corrupted by junk science that the scientific environment simply won't allow it. How easy do you think it is right now to get a journal paper through peer review right now that says "Gee, maybe CO2 isn't the end-all and be-all of global warming studies."

Yeah, what LA said. I'm not entirely pleased with the whole "So-and-so's opinion deserves mention because so-and-so is a celebrity" attitude...but in Pitt's defense, that's less his fault than it is the media's. Now, if he'd done something stupid like bought a leaky canoe and went down to "help" in the immediate aftermath, thinking he could because he was a celebrity...that I'd have a problem with.

Athlete's foot on steroids.

Still around. Actually, it's not uncommon. Group A strep. Although there's apparently a new and worse version of the disease caused by MRSA. And a hundred years ago, it was known as "gas gangrene", cause by Clostridium perfringens. It was never exactly a new disease. (And yeah, bug people, I know gas gangrene isn't strictly necrotizing fasciitis. Just humor me this once...)

I can't point you to one that refutes global warming. I can - when I find them again (I really have to bookmark them, this is the third time in 24 hours I've been asked for them) - give you some reliable sources that demonstrate not only some of the scientific controversy surrounding the research, but also the hideously inaccurate, ignorant, and panicky nature of popular media coverage on the subject. For starters, though...dig up the National Science Foundation's report on global warming from a few weeks ago. Though it was overwhelmingly "pro-" global warming, it was such an abortion of scientific research that a common sense reading of it by a person of average intelligence (i.e. an above-average American) will find serious flaws in the reasoning (such as their labelling the past 150 years as an "abnormal warming trend" based on a 400-year data set...conveniently forgetting to mention that from 400 years ago to 150 years ago is conventionally considered an abnormally cold period. Arbitrarily redefining an abnormally cool period of time as "normal" to establish that we're not abnormally warm is very bad practice.) After that...somewhere in my browser history I have a link to an article about the recent conjecture that 2005 was the warmest year on record...according to one NASA scientist using a questionable data set, questionable methodology (including ignoring margins of error - which are considerable - in his measurements and arbitrarily assuming the "correct" data points are at the top of his error bars)...and justifying his "scientific conclusion" with "Well...this is what I believe." (Direct quote...the scientist's name, BTW, is Hansen. At Goddard, I believe). His conclusions are only disputed by such charlatans as...the entire NOAA. Of course...the media never reported the NOAA's considerable questions about Hansen's conclusions, even though the conclusions themselves were widely reported as cold, hard fact. Which really is my complaint with "global warming"...what true science there is, is typically buried under a massive pile of nonsense, junk science, and policy masquerading as science, so that any real scientific discussion is damned near impossible, and the public at large is only exposed to the utter garbage like Gore's book. There's very valid questions about global warming that aren't getting answered (for example: how much of a role solar output's playing...or hell, simply whether or not extrapoliting millenia-long climate trends from decades-long temperature records is a valid method or not) because too many people on both sides of the issue are too busy trying to make policy to fit their agendas to actually do the science.

Why, because I said Al Gore's book is sh--? Al Gore's book is sh--. That's a commentary on Gore's book, not global warming.

Funny. I read the book this weekend. It makes weak points based on emotional appeals and not solid science. Frankly...it was an atrocity of scientific analysis.

Ronnie Jones...I knew DeHaven wasn't the worst, but apparently my subconscious did me the favor of blocking out all memories of the stiff between him and Bobby April...

Good point...

Ed, you do realize that no one takes you seriously anymore, don't you?