overtone

W was the executive officer in charge of the Democratic Congress pushed bank bailouts. That's why there were no strings on the money - unlike the situation when Obama managed the bailout of GM (which was also launched under W, but not fixed in management details until Obama took office) , the executives of the banks were not regulated or subject to oversight, and so they used a lot of the money to pay themselves big bonuses for their valuable contributions. Homeowners, meanwhile, got no effective foreclosure relief - even in many cases of fraud and dishonest banking practices (such as robosigning and erroneous foreclosure of properties not in default by banks with no legal title). But Tar got to keep his otherwise probably defaulted pension - and we didn't, or haven't so far, suffered another Great Depression; some of the New Deal was still in place, and held.

I'm not a pacifist. Even so I don't have any problem telling pacifists from anti-Americans. I don't. I think he was failing. I think that because I kept track of the inspectors, and their reports. What is nonsense is to think he got rid of the WMDs the W administration said he had, in any such fashion. Nothing. As long as you don't try to claim he transported and put the nuclear weapons program, the nerve gas manufacturing centers, the missile development operations, and the rest of the stuff W&Co said he had, into those holes, without a trace left behind. We brought war and chaos and theocratic rule to Iraq, exactly as was predicted by sane and competent and knowledgable people. That was not useful. That was a horrible crime, a very bad thing to have done. That they were bringing war rather than peace was of course obvious. But in addition, there is no evidence that W&Cheney had any plans of bringing democracy to Iraq any time soon.

And that is problem for the rest of us. Because they won't. Living and learning about banking man. Although if the crash of '08 didn't teach you anything, I don't know what would. (Lots of your fellow citizens lost their pensions, in that crash. You were lucky, not safe). Y'know, genuine conservatives don't trust banks. Banks as we know them are inventions of liberalism, and they are supposed to be regulated carefully according to conservative principles as well as liberal ones. One of those conservative principles is this: Trust everybody, and cut the deck. Don't forget that last part: cut the deck. If you vote for a Republican, and win, that will be you voting against maintaining what's left of the reasonable, working system of government you got from the liberals of the Roosevelt administration, and the liberals of the civil rights era. Never mind progress, we're talking loss. You will be voting for a continuation of Reagan's dismantling of the New Deal, so far advanced by W&Cheney. And if you come around eight years later when the obvious consequences have happened to your country, as with W, and try to tell people it was everybody's fault, and both sides are to blame, and we are all in it together, and so forth, I think the words will stick in your throat. I would hope so.

What was the original language of that article?

I had no problem making that distinction. Neither did tens of millions of other people. Why would that be confusing to anyone? Nonsense. This is where the "ignorant" comes into the term "ignorant dupe". The world, and millions of people in the US, knew then that the invasion was "inappropriate". Back then, not now. We knew there were no WMDs (such as were described) then, not now. We knew Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11, that there was a lot of tension between Shiite and Sunni communities in Iraq, that Iran was the likely beneficiary of Saddam's removal, then - not now. This isn't hindsight, this is what I and millions of people like me knew going in. I'm telling you that I and millions of other Americans - and these are even people in the American news bubble - knew that the invasion was almost certain to be a disaster, a quagmire that would burden the US for decades to come. Well known American pundits and intellectuals referred to the future of W's Folly as "the peace from hell". That was before, not after, W launched it. This horrible mess was in general predicted, foreseen. So why are you blowing those people off even now? No, we don't. That has been proved over and over - from the Pentagon Papers to Wikileaks, every time we get one of these "security breaches" we find out, yet again, that we the citizens were being lied to and misled and deliberately deceived about matters well known to our enemies, that reflected badly on our government. The biggest single security breach of that kind - stuff our enemies don't know, that damages America or Americans - I've seen in my lifetime was the outing of Valerie Plame by the W administration. The reasons for that outing were disgraceful: domestic political self-interest. You voted for that administration after it did that. So your concerns for secrecy and security breaches seem either late or shallow, frankly.

If you insist on confusing your votes for horrible Republican politicians with your character as a human being, I can't do anything about that. But I do not share your confusion. The current Republican Party is the Party equivalent of a failed State. It is incapable of governing, it is completely corrupt, it has no defensible principles or ideology, and it has an agenda most decent human beings would reject on sight if they saw it. Including you, if your self-descriptions have any basis in reality at all. It has been a force for embarrassing fuckup and disaster, and nothing but fuckup and disaster, since 1980. Furthermore, I can document this contention - the list of embarrassments and disasters and incompetencies and amoral errors and flat-out evils dealt to the US by the Republican Party since 1980 is hundreds of items long and growing week by week. This documentation of events is historical.

One (expensive) gun per adult male, by law, in several areas. And that pattern (corrected for race, specifically, after 1865) common, in many regions of rural America, over its entire history. Well, you guys and the NRA can go ahead and battle it out. Because that's been working so well for y'all. And the reasonable folks will just have to wait until things settle down a bit, before we can get reasonable gun control in the US. The stats are usually compiled per capita or per household - in modern times, family and household are not really synonymous. This is a major factor in prevalence stats. The overall picture remains - we have seen a dramatic increase in what one might as well call private arsenals, in the US. Which is crazy for all kinds of reasons, but which is not, statistically, driving gun violence.

But in a democracy, the citizens need to know what's going on. So the question is one of fact: was that stuff secret for a good reason, or a bad reason? It has the US setting it in motion in 2006, as a direct consequence of the Iraq invasion. This is where the ignorant dupe part comes in. Millions of your countrymen were trying to stop the Iraq invasion, and they had good reason - you blew them off. Now you are looking at that horrible mess - millions dead, millions refugee, the rise of Islamic jihad and empowerment of factions like ISIL, the destruction of the most secular country in the Muslim world and its replacement by theocracy and sectarian violence and exported terrorism, all for lies and bad reasons, and not seeing it. The Arab Spring was being "fostered" by the US as of 2005, if not earlier, but without success - it eventually launched in Tunisia, without US permission or guidance, and has been from its outset opposed by the US almost everywhere it took hold. You know, many people regard the resistance to the US attempted imposition of client government in Iraq, the rebellion against the prospect of another rightwing strongman and the insistence on democratic elections, as an early success of the Arab Spring.

I've never seen anyone do that. What I see is people rebelling against their parents specific views by claiming a contrary ideology they do not in fact possess, and then returning to the proper label for their ideology later as agreement with their parents matters less. I also have seen hard core conservative Republican college students become more and more liberal as they acquired an education. That's a pretty common pattern.

In the early colonies and pioneer communities 85% of the population was farmers and rural people of various kinds. According to the census. By 1860, it had dropped - only 60% of the citizen labor force was farming. In early America, on the farms and in the rural areas, the people who could afford a gun, owned a gun. By and large. Agreed? City dwellers, people reliant on stores for all their food, were the minority. In several areas of the early US, every adult male citizen owned a gun. By law. This is a matter of record. In many others, the ordinary citizen was routinely expected to be able to join a militia at need. The bulk of the military in the early US was militia. So guns were essentially everywhere - normally encountered objects. Several major advances in firearm technology and design were made in early America, and the most common improvement was something that made a private rifle cheaper, more reliable, and easier for a private citizen to handle and maintain. Such advances are normally in response to demand, no? So you don't like the word "ubiquitous" any more than you like the word "awash". What term would you find acceptable, that describes a landscape in which almost every adult male citizen owns a firearm, or one in which most of the households have a gun on the premises, or one in which 4H and other gun safety programs were coordinated through the local high schools, so that it was common to see a bunch of kids (a significant fraction of the male population) bring their rifles to school and put them in their lockers on training or examination days. You seem to have no idea what my "conclusion" was. In addition, you seem in an odd state of denial regarding guns, hunting, and the ordinary life of rural Americans - your assertion that hunting was a symbol of high status and a recreational activity of the rich until 1930, for example, was just weird. It is a fact that gun ownership among nonwhites and nonmales has been much less prevalent in the US - often by law, as well as poverty and community oppression. This is still true. Contrast the law's handling of the Bundy family organized armament and public threats with its response to the Black Panther's acquisition of firearms in the mid 1900s, or the MOVE conflict in the 1980s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOVE To this day, black people have some of the highest rates of gun violence and lowest rates of gun ownership in the US.

So before there was a country, the colonial powers put considerable effort into keeping weapons out of the hands of the peasantry. As in Europe. Any idea why? And yet the rebel militia in the American Revolution were in many cases the best armed force in the field. In many towns the militia was every adult man, and expected to provide their own firearm. We see towns with laws requiring the possession of a firearm in good working order by every adult man fit for service. These are matters of record. There were large and populated regions in this country in which almost every household had a firearm, at all times in the history of this country. If you prefer a different term than "awash", I won't argue. No. That is the old view, from early, not the new one. In the US the lower classes have been hunting since the founding. The gun, like the horse and dog, were sources of status, naturally - but they were a considerable expense, so that's natural. Hunting was viewed as a luxury sport by the Europeans, from the very early colonies, and still carries that aura in Europe today (as well as among the aristocracy in the US) Encountering the red cultures brought the introduction (for the whites with open minds, especially the Scotch Irish) of hunting (as well as combat) as the ordinary pursuit of a free man or boy - and of course the demand for a firearm. This combination vermin control and food supply, an important aspect of pioneer farming, was reinforced by the importance of the attractiveness of hunting as a lifestyle and hunting for markets - plume hunters, market hunters, fur and hide hunters, hunting put so much pressure on the landscape as the cities grew that some of the wildlife has never recovered. It's the usual first cause listed for the disappearance of the passenger pigeon, the woods bison, etc. The wolves and bears and cougars that vanished from the east were often shot. So were the beaver, and other fur-bearers, until they became nocturnal. Not fewer. Lower percentage. And part of that is the reduction in the size of households - more households for a given population dilutes the rate of gun ownership. And part of it is increasing poverty - as in the early days, the very poor cannot afford guns. So you don't like the observation that widespread and ubiquitous firearm possession long predates the modern gun lobby. So pick a different word for widespread and ubiquitous, than "awash". But don't try to argue that having a lot of guns around in the US is a recent phenomenon.

It would have had to have been strong to have any global footprint at all, let alone the noticeable one it did have. The global footprint is of course of a much smaller, slower change - as one would expect from distant places responding months and years later to events half way around the world. The retreat of the glaciers from North America featured many large scale events capable of altering the weather or even changing the climate. At one point an icewater lake the size of Superior and Michigan combined drained to the bottom in a couple of days (an ice plug gave way) - that changed the weather for the entire eastern half of NA. At another point an ice plug gave and the entire icewater drainage of the glacial front was rerouted suddenly from the Gulf of Mexico to the North Atlantic - where it hit still a couple of degrees above zero, and floated out on top of the ocean chilling the entire air mass headed for northern Europe for hundreds of years. These things are bound to have showed up in the ice, in the rock.

Ok, read. The following statement agrees with it completely, and is what I have found elsewhere: the global changes that track the dramatic fluctuations in the North Atlantic were much smaller, and much slower. You can see that in the map, you can read it in the prose if you are careful. AGW is a global imposition of large, rapid, semi-permanent climate change. That is a different, more significant, and more dangerous circumstance. btw: edited in some stuff above, in the earlier post

No, it doesn't. Careful reading is important, because that article is deceptively written for some reason. No, it wasn't. Not globally. Globally, the changes were slower and smaller than the ones in progress now and predicted for the near future from AGW. IIRC this exact issue - the global influence of the North Atlantic climate fluctuations at the end of the last glaciation - came up a couple of weeks ago on this forum, and I happened to have a reference handy. I've lost it. But if I get a minute I'll try to find it again - and of course, you could do some research yourself. There are several differences between past climate changes and this one, besides their being slower and smaller. One of them is that this is a rapid warming, rather than a cooling - in the past, warmings have been slower than coolings. Another is that this change is hitting organisms already vulnerable from habitat loss and degradation, the spread of diseases as well as competitive or predatory species, genetic bottlenecking due to fragmentation or reduction of breeding populations, and so forth. But perhaps the most significant difference is that those rapid fluctuations you linked were over landscapes recently colonized in the first place. As you document, the region around Greenland is and has been subject to large and rapid changes in its climate fairly frequently, faster than evolution can track in macroscopic organisms, and so any species found there is either recently immigrated from a reserve population elsewhere or capable of handling the kinds of changes imposed. So extinctions would not be expected to be common. AGW, on the other hand, is imposing large and rapid changes on many areas that have been stable enough for long enough to have fostered evolutionary adaptation to the one climate regime in that place. Extinction is expected to be more common, in such circumstances.

Oh, it went farther and got uglier than that. http://www.truth-out.org/progressivepicks/item/33180-wikileaks-reveals-how-the-us-aggressively-pursued-regime-change-in-syria-igniting-a-bloodbath http://www.globalresearch.ca/we-re-going-to-take-out-7-countries-in-5-years-iraq-syria-lebanon-libya-somalia-sudan-iran/5166 In other words, W&Co were encouraging - via the Saudis and Egypt as well as more directly - Sunni extremist forces in Syria and conflict between Sunni and Shia (Saudi and Iranian backed) sects in Syria. They were doing that in hopes of bringing down the Syrian government. No, it was not. It was in sectarian civil war, with ethnic cleansing in all regions and no functioning government. There were bodies being left in the streets of the capital city killed by having holes drilled in their heads. The Kurdish region was raising its own army and flying its own flag and making oil deals without even consulting Baghdad.

Depends on who they are, where they live, and what kind of gun it is. But the first notice is that they aren't doing that calculation in the first place. That's not the relevant calculation, for many of them. It's not necessarily the most relevant calculation for estimating the value of gun possession in home defense, either. btw: This country was awash in guns long before there was a "gun lobby". Just saying.

The problems created by W were much too severe to "correct", at least in one lifetime, and Obama turned out to be right in saying he could do better - he did. Not that "do better than W" was a high bar to clear - all Obama had to do for that criterion was not use the US military to create horrible new disasters all over the planet, and put them on the US credit card. It goes back to before the Iraq invasion, when the US was not seeking regime change in Syria, and it's been muddled since. The US has never known what to do about this Arab Spring business, in large part because its leaders and motivators regard the US as an enemy or obstacle - and they are right. In Yemen, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, even Egypt, basically anywhere except maybe Libya, the US has not been a friend to the Arab Spring. So whatever the role the US played in encouraging opposition to Assad in Syria, recently, our major influence was to destroy the government of Iraq, abet the Sunni Islamic jihadist revolt that morphed into ISIL on Syria's border, and seed Syria with a million or more Islamic refugees and all the disorder of war on the eve of a major drought.

Probably the best idea available. By the time the subject came up, the US had no actual allies in Syria - what would the goal have been, make Syria into Pretend Puerto Rico Mideast? Find some Syrian version of Adnan Chalabi and helicopter him in with the US Army and his own Abu Ghraib? Mission Accomplished - the gift that just keeps on giving. There will be people dying by the thousands for decades to come because of that US administration. And not just in the US.

On paved roads in reasonably well populated areas (where getting stuck is not going to get you frozen to death) the safety gain from a 4WD is probably illusory, may even be negative. For the unskilled, prone to fishtailing, front wheel drive seems to offer some safety gain over rear - if you remember to add weight over the back tires, which a lot of people don't, and get good bad weather tires in the first place, which rear wheel drive owners pay better attention to. But not four beyond that. Four provides extra low speed traction for acceleration from a stop, an occasionally valuable and reassuring but seldom safety-enhancing capability (you are normally pretty safe when stopped). And interestingly enough, the same people who buy Jeep Cherokees and huge 4WD pickups to drive paved and plowed roads to the shopping mall seem to be the ones who buy firearms to fend off home invasions, double lock their doors even when they're home, install car alarms that go off at a touch, and so forth. That's the excuse, when they're hiding their paranoia behind myths of libertarianism - they pretend that, but the actual fear is of their neighbors.

I'm not, actually. I know from other sources that the changes in climate elsewhere, as a result of whatever happened in the North Atlantic, were much smaller and much slower (as one would expect from the global effects of a large but local phenomenon), and my intention was to point out to you that your source is apt to mislead you if not read carefully. You might come away with the impression that the climate of the entire planet has been naturally and historically subject to the kinds of dramatic fluctuation that Greenland and the North Atlantic experienced at the end of the last glaciation. That is not the case. The current AGW, on the other hand, is global and does threaten the entire planet with such rapid and dramatic events - some of them semi-permanent changes, tipping points that haven't been crossed in many millions of years, some of them (hopefully unlikely) truly catastrophic. There are very few comparable precedents for this scale of such rapid and large change, - and they were all apparently catastrophic, from the point of view of the existing living beings.

People do have an irrational and exaggerated fear of terrorism. It's been responsible for a lot of bad law and worse government. We wouldn't want to follow that model - right? They are a negligible risk in the first place, and easily reduced even further by choice. Or they calculate the odds differently, view the situation in other terms. It's common for Americans to think of themselves as individuals, rather than statistical averages. It's also common for Americans to want more protection from some threats than from others, and to take risks for perceived benefits of many kinds. I've known suburbanites to buy their teenage child a car, and allow them to drive it, for example - and the State usually does nothing about that. I'd say Hollywood - the movie industry.

Anyone catch the "debate"? The next President of the United States was on stage, representing the best America has to offer unless it does something about the Republican Party. Transcript here: http://driftglass.blogspot.com - - - - Closing Statements: John Kasich: I have the power! Jeb Bush: I haz plans and very detailed files. Chris Christie: The State of the Union speech was a disaster and Obama is a lunatic. I fight everyone all the time. I'll fight anyone in this room for a dollar. I'll fight two dogs at once. Ben Carson: There are many Americans in America. We can't solve this problem with traditional solutions so visit my website. Marco Rubio: Free enterprise is God's favorite system. Obama has been working for seven years to destroy this country, betray you all, and sell your kids into slavery. Ted Cruz: Benghaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaazi. Now in 3D. Donald Trump: Construction workers were weeping because our President let 10 sailors be caught by those ragheads. They were stong, sweaty, manly men and they cried in my arms. We held each other through the night. Also we'll win like crazy under Trump. - - - - - The Party of Lincoln, winning like crazy under Trump.

So anyone who wants to can reduce their risk to negligible, without imposing on their neighbors or passing a single law.

Gun violence from drug dealers and suicides, is what I said. Yep. The regular citizenry is not at great risk from it. Statistically.

No, I said the Republican Party itself - the leadership and Congressmen and so forth - is a "foul hulk of perverted, bigoted, corrupt, incompetent ugly,". The motives of the people who vote for them I leave to the particulars. Which of course is a major characteristic of the Republican Congress, since Gingrich got it organized that way in 1994. That's among the many reasons that Gingrich's Party is America's biggest problem right now. Nobody said that. I said that anyone who voted for W twice has a completely screwed up notion of reality. So why doesn't that make sense? Seems to fit what we've seen these past few decades. Actually, I think only the good people who follow the current Republican Party are ignorant dupes. There are plenty who are signing on to that Party on purpose, knowing what they are doing or at least having a good idea, not duped at all.