[Mike Morin]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('BigTex', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Cloud9', '[')b]"A totalitarian system of government in which a single authoritarian party controls state-owned means of production ". Sounds like our current situation to me.

[VMarcHart]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Mike Morin', 'T')here is nothing in the teachings of Jesus that would justify violence and war.

[timmac]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'S')ocialism, Good Idea Gone Bad, or Just Plain Bad?

I once did a biography of Lenin, the one who brought communism to Russia and set the stage for for too mant crimes against humanity to name, and was really set to thinking. Is socialism/Communism bad because of the people in charge, or because the system itself is evil.

The idea of Socialism is utopian. A society where evryone selflessly does his or her job for the common good and expects no more in return than anyone else gets so everyone gets taken care of. In small communities of like-minded people this has even worked, and worked well. There are two problems with this system though. Not everyoone thinks alike regardless of the amount of indoctrination they receve, and every society eventually grows large to need full time leaders. Let's examine these two problems.

Since not everyone will think alike, and since mankind is inherrently greedy and selfish it will not take long for somebody to decide that what he or she does for the community is worth more than what some or all of the other people do. Once this happens others will follow suit, there will be hoarding, and the system breaks down.

Socialism places a lot of power in leadership to maintan the staus quo, so much so in fact that leaders tend to move the Socialist community to Communism. Communism is a totalitarian system that places godlike powers in the hands of the government. Since power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely you wind with people like Stalin, Mao, Castro et al running the show. Even leaders who entered office pure soon become intoxicated with the total power and become corupt despots. While this now allows the forced equality of reciept . . . or else, it does not motivate people to produce anything to share with the community in the first place. It also is the direct cause of millions of murders of dissidents, students, artists, innocents whose identities are mixed up, loyal people the leader grows suspicious of, and the list goes on.

Based on the way the system develops naturally I must conclude that it the system of Socialism/Communism that is inherrently bad, if not outright evil. If the nature of man were more pure and innocent it could work, but that is not the case and it doesn't. It is foolishness to promote such a society, and it is a cause of the ignorant who either don't know history, or actually believe they can do it better. These people need to be educated so they will shut up and realize just how great a system we have in America.

[VMarcHart]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('timmac', 'I') will stay with the American way of doing things, good or bad its still the greatest nation on planet earth.

[Lore]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('timmac', '
')I agree I will stay with the American way of doing things, good or bad its still the greatest nation on planet earth..

[BigTex]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('VMarcHart', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('timmac', 'I') will stay with the American way of doing things, good or bad its still the greatest nation on planet earth.

[dinopello]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('BigTex', 'I') think that the founding fathers had some good ideas about a nation with limited government, protection of property rights and a high level of personal freedom.

[BigTex]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('dinopello', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('BigTex', 'I') think that the founding fathers had some good ideas about a nation with limited government, protection of property rights and a high level of personal freedom.

[DefiledEngine]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '
')Someday, some intelligent life form will look back on us (if they are intelligent enough to grasp the concept of the past and not otherwise too busy looking for food) and discover that too much surplus intelligence (combined with favorable tool making abilities) does nothing except enable overshoot on a dramatically larger scale than is otherwise normally observed in nature.

Our brain size will ultimately be an evolutionary dead end, since it seems to offer no durable competitive survival advantage, but is prone to destructive neuroses when asked to live within limits or in a sustainable manner (or even when asked to acknowledge such things).

[Cid_Yama]

Whatever comes out the other end will be creatures like these.

[BigTex]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('DefiledEngine', 'W')hatever comes out on the other side of this ecological bottle neck, you better believe they will be intelligent and have large brains.

[Novus]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '[')url=http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/0,1518,658952,00.html]Countries Ask How Germany Avoided Mass Unemployment[/url] By SPIEGEL Staff
Germany, second only to China as the world's leading exporter of goods, has been particularly hard-hit by the collapse of global markets. But the mass unemployment some had feared has failed to materialize. Labor experts in many countries are wondering how Germany has done it.

Business wasn't going well for Schneider, a mid-sized company in the western German state of Rhineland-Palatinate, at the beginning of the year. But the company, which manufactures camera lenses and filters, did not lay off any of its workers. Instead, it put 230 employees onto a short-time working program, including Dirk Christian, a technical supervisor in a final assembly plant.

Christian, 33, took advantage of his free time to renovate his apartment -- and to get married. "Short-term work prevents layoffs," says Christian, "which, of course, makes it easier to make important life decisions, like getting married."

Germany currently has 1.1 million workers participating in short-time working programs, known in German as Kurzarbeit. They include people like Christian, who don't have enough work, but who also are nevertheless not being let go. They stay at home for days or even weeks at a time, and yet they receive 80 to 90 percent of their wages, thanks to subsidies paid by the Federal Employment Agency.

[Quinny]

I'd question the title, but +1

[mattduke]

Eliminate government money and avoid the depressions to begin with.

[Stonemason]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('mattduke', 'E')liminate government money and avoid the depressions to begin with.

[the48thronin]

Here NOW in the USA we appear to be turning socialist, but watching the results that these "turns" bring about I call it Fascism...

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '[')b]This seems like just another port trucker protest… But what is missing from the story?

[meemoe_uk]

thread split from ' runaway global warming has arrived part 2' due to thread post overloading.

Cid_yama wrote :
>We discuss the actual science here,
LOL.Cid thinks science consists of 2 things.
a.) copy and pasting other people's writing
b.) links
When I do a science experiment and invite Cid to join in, he runs away scared, totally abandoning AGW, and so do the rest of the peakoil forum AGW gang. This goes for any method which involves making predictions for the next 24 months. Even Tanada shys away from testing AGW with predictions. Recently AGWer have been prefering 50-100 year predictions. i.e. tests that aren't practical to this forum. In this they abide by another crucial base of religion, the avoidance of the scientific method.

It's fabulous aspect of AGWers, common to all religions but more apparent in them,
- their adherence to their beliefs
- their absolute refusal to test their beliefs.

We need to do more DIY tests for AGW. I'll be working on my lakes don't lie project. Can we brain storm some simple tests for AGW that the active members can carry out, and the AGWer's can be horrified by?

Jbrovant wrote
>Care to elaborate on why you think increased high altitude cloud cover will more than offset increased thermal absorption in the IR/NIR bands caused by low altitude saturation of the atmosphere by water vapor resulting in a net cooling effect then?

No. It's not high altitude clouds that are critically affected by recent increases in Earth bound galactic cosmic rays. They get a lot even during solar maximums. It's low cloud formation which has critically altered recently.

The more accurrate question is...
Wrt to low altitude atmos water and global atmos temperature, does the insulation effect of clouds offset their albedo cooling effect, compared to equivalent atmos water in a non condensed state?

[Cloud9]

The number of persons working for government exceeds the number of people working in production by 4 million.

http://seekingalpha.com/article/180879- ... nment-jobs

[Leanan]

I think this is a sign of the collapse of our manufacturing base more than socialism. Look at the jobs he's counting as "production" - mining and logging, construction, and manufacturing. How many Americans work in those jobs, even in the best of times? The US has become a nation of office workers.

[Jotapay]

Goddamn bureaucrats.