Sen. Harry Reid, NV: Wildfires caused by global warming

They're simply showing what a mockery the Cheney-Bush regime is making of America.

Thanks, Rich

I just soak it in a good thick teriyaki.

BBQ salmon steaks can be very tasty. But the deep red northwest Pacific ones have the best flavor; the lighter Atlantic salmon tends to be bland.

The northwest-indian-style chunky smoked salmon is very good too, much more flavor than lox or nova. Dinner: toasted bagels, smoked salmon, Cowgirl cheese, sliced onions, capers, white wine or beer.

John

Dismantlng your own civil liberties certainly does, so why did you do it? And who was the "you" that did it? Think about this for a while ...

But that's not where most of the money is going.

That's the way you like to see it.

As customers, and suppliers. That American icon, the Abrams battle tank has a German main gun and British armour. Russia and the US are both run by demented oligarchies, but you guys used to have a lot more money than the Russians.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

They're not dismantled--that's hysteria.

Terror's been a bonanaza for opportunists--politicians, that is--of all stripes. SuperOsama's just one of Mencken's hobgoblins, straight out of the box.

Naturally the real Osama's got to be handled, but by changing his lifestyle, not ours. Nationalizing and federalizing airport security-- tripling their pay and making them permanent civil-service hires, so that they can strip-search grannies and x-ray their shoes with fancy new state-of-the-art equipment, while being less effective than ever before--is mostly useless.

It's not completely useless though--it serves as a wonderful display- case model of government-run enterprises. Inexplicably, some people clamor for more and more of this!

True, now. Most of our money is presently spent on ineffectual social programs.

You're welcome.

No, we just plain like you, grouchy though you might be. We are your sons and daughters but a generation or two removed(*), we are kindred spirits in this great democratic experiment, and we like your cheese.

(*) (It seems Graham and I are clansmen. (Which explains his dashing good looks...))

Let's hope Putin makes a nice neighbor.

Cheers, James Arthur

(*) Except that he's fat, and you're not.

John

We're borrowing it from the Chinese.

Not true.

But that wasn't what I meant. More of your military spending goes on preparing for the next war - based on the assumption that it s going to be a replay of the last war - rather than on protecting the world from current threats. You'd like to think that the weapons that you have got are an effective means of protecting the world, but your opponents aren't all that fond of attacking you where you are strongest, and tend concentrate on subverting hearts and minds - an area where you don't spend anything like enough money where it would be useful.

Willingly.

I'm sure the affection is reciprocated, and I'm equally sure that it has virtually no relevance to the way you spend your money (as in garrisoning your forward defence posts).

And intellectual incapacity.

As Lord Palmerston said: "Nations have no permanent friends or allies; they only have permanent interests."

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Bill, that link is just plain embarrassing--no wonder you have such wacky, misbegotten theories.

Here's the actual data:

summarized here:

The U.S. 2007 budget was $2,731 billion ($2.7e12), of which only

$500 billion was for defense, $69 billion for Homeland wasted-money nonsense, and some other pittance for the war.

That total is less than the $614 billion spent by HHS (Medicare, Medicaid, and a few of the manifold assistance programs) alone, not to mention $586 billion on Social Security, $52 billion on food stamps, $21 billion on farm subsidies, $42 billion on housing subsidies, $43 billion on unemployment...

So, your information is wrong on its face--those idiots don't know how to count, much less account.

Willingly.

Oh baloney--another one of your bankrupt theories. Graham's plenty smart. Runs in the family. Not that it matters, but I clear genius with several sigma to spare; iterate the requirement, and I make the second cut.

Cheers, James Arthur

I guess the way the Apache tribe managed forest handled the Rodeo-Chediski fire a few years back, they must have global cooling on their side :)

Some good links here:

John

The Arizona indigenous tribes have an advantage... they regularly tell the state and the greenies to go pound sand ;-)

...Jim Thompson

Yep. But there are regulars here that will still deny the conclusion. They are nutcases through and through.

...Jim Thompson

I guess that's a possibility. One of the tribes, I can't remember which now... maybe Navajo, owns a coal-slurry powered unit at Four Corners.

...Jim Thompson

Not exactly. The plant is located on Navajo land, but not owned by any tribe (unles they hold stock).

I think the native people should get into the nuclear generating plant business. ;-)

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

I rather liked the way they lumped the interest on the national debt into military expenditure, on the not-unreasonable basis that this was just paying for previous wars.

But the expenditure on Medicare isn't ineffectual, nor is it a social program.

of which $486 billion is on old age and survivor insurance, which isn't ineffectual

which isn't ineffectual

That isn't a social program - it's just buying votes in rural areas.

They do know how to account - its just that you don't like the way they look at the expenditures. And your accounting strikes me as no less partisan, albeit in the opposite direction.

Willingly.

You do well on IQ tests. Fine. So do I and so does every member of Mensa. There may be a few false positives in there somewhere. In fact scoring over 140 on an IQ test - which is what most people are claiming when they claim to be above the "genius" level, just means that you, along with some 0.25% of the population, are above the level where regular IQ tests give meaningful results. Scoring 150 doesn't place you another standard deviation above the herd - it just means that you found the test easy. There are around a million people in the U.S. who would score above 140 on the regular tests, but nobody has put together a test that will spread them out along the tail of the bell curve and calibrated it so that an extra ten points on the score would correspond to another standard deviation.

And having a high processing capacity doesn't mean that you use it well - if Graham is smart, he's still managed to decide that the entire IPCC is in conspiracy to lie to him about global warming, and all those nice people who get money from Exxon-Mobil are altruistically blowing the whistle on the IPCC.

Jim Thompson claims to have scored well enough on his IQ test to have qualified to join Mensa. He had enough sense not to join, but he doesn't seem to be interested enough in the real world to have woken up to the deficiencies of the current U.S. administration,

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

True. The name Richard Lindzen comes up fairly early in the report, and the American Enterprise Institute.

Richard Lindzen is a well known shill for Exxon-Mobil, and the American Enterpise Institute is heavily funded by Exxon-Mobile

Exxon-Mobile seesm to be spending quite a lot of effort getting nonsense written into the minority pages of the senate committee on the environment and public works. The majority pages paint a rather different picture.

If you believe that you have to be a nut case to believe something that Exxon-Mobile doesn't want you to believe.

As usual, Jim isn't paying enough attention to the world outside electronics, which makes him distinctly gullible.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

That's one of their most glaring errors--wrongly attributing all debt to warfare.

We've spent a great deal more on welfare, Medicare, Medicaid and Johnson's war on poverty. Social programs have been roughly 2/3rds the budget for quite some time; by any fair measure, they deserve an equal proportion of the debt.

That's not opinion, that's accounting...amortization.

(If you had three resistors dissipating heat, would you blame one for the entire loss?)

I regard it as effectual mostly at raising the cost of medical care, and secondarily, a means of re-distributing wealth. And it's socialized medicine--not a road, not part of the defense of the nation, not maintaining the means of governance, nor part of some other Constitutional purpose.

Of course it is--as a retirement or investment plan the system has an appalling efficiency: a large fraction of money is lost the moment it's sent in. IOW, a huge NEGATIVE return. If saved in their own accounts, people would still have that money which their government squanders, plus interest.

I've explained why their accounting is improper. Either they're nitwits, or blackguards.

Willingly.

would

My remark was immodest and I regret it, but my god you're dense Bill-- you've still way underestimated me, you are again far off the mark, have not understood what I said, have again misapplied a bunch of wrong assumptions, and then woven another complicated story to explain.

Which was my point--you leap to conclusions not supported by the data.

And, when your conclusion is shown conclusively to be wrong, you equivocate.

If you persist even when wrong, people will think you wrong when you persist.

With best regards, James Arthur