BadDog40
Well-Known Member
To be blunt.Uncle Buck is an antagonist. Or troll, whichever name you prefer........
That may be, but we all have our own antagonistic quality. What fun would it be sitting around patting each other on the back?
let the libs hike
- Thread starter feff f
- Start date
That may be, but we all have our own antagonistic quality. What fun would it be sitting around patting each other on the back?
UncleBuck
Well-Known Member
To be blunt.
you mad i called you on your logical fallacy?
i can count to potato.
UncleBuck
Well-Known Member
i do not recall making any logical fallacies in this thread, but i do recall pointing out one of yours.
i can count to potato.
hazyintentions
Well-Known Member
I am not even going to try...
MuyLocoNC
Well-Known Member
I just want to get this straight, if anyone even mentions illegal immigration, Creeping Big-Brother State or radical islam, they are automatically a bigoted racist? That about right? I guess the debate must be over, just like "The Phenomenon previously known as Global Warming".
dukeanthony
New Member
Most of the time
Yeah
Illegal Immigration and Islam is not destroying our country
Oh and Global Warming is real
dukeanthony
New Member
Care to take a guess at How much The COCK brothers have spent to debunk global warming?
speak for yourself......
Next time you are going to be sarcastic, can you please tell us.
I rhought for a second you were serious
Brian Sussman is about to come out with another book that will absolutely destroy AL Gore. Why won't he debate anyone?If hes right, then whats he scared of? www.DebateMeAlGore.com
BadDog40
Well-Known Member
Who's he going to debate? The 97% of scientists that agrees with him or Billo Reilly?
dukeanthony
New Member
Yet another tentacle of the "Kochtopus", the shadowy assemblage of front groups that helped kill this year's cap and trade bill, is attempting to strangle regional clean energy initiatives on the East and West Coasts. The Kochtopus is a network of astroturf groups funded by the Koch brothers, who have made billions of dollars from Koch Industries, an enormous dirty energy corporation.
Not content with retarding progress on climate change at the federal level, industry-funded astroturf groups have taken aim at a regional cap-and-trade system in New York and the nation's most ambitious state clean energy program in California.
This time it is the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity that is protecting the billionaire brothers' ability to pollute. Assisted by a conglomeration of 58 front groups called the State Policy Network, AFP and its allies have been clouding out the facts on climate change with lies and confusion.
Despite the amusing name, the Kochtopus is a very sophisticated and calculated propaganda apparatus that has seriously manipulated public opinion to the detriment of the American people and the planet. The front groups that comprise it have proven very effective to their corporate puppeteers, who will continue to fund and exploit them to prevent much needed regulation of the dirty energy industry. These groups must be recognized as pawns and charlatans before they further delay action against catastrophic global warming.
Not content with retarding progress on climate change at the federal level, industry-funded astroturf groups have taken aim at a regional cap-and-trade system in New York and the nation's most ambitious state clean energy program in California.
This time it is the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity that is protecting the billionaire brothers' ability to pollute. Assisted by a conglomeration of 58 front groups called the State Policy Network, AFP and its allies have been clouding out the facts on climate change with lies and confusion.
Despite the amusing name, the Kochtopus is a very sophisticated and calculated propaganda apparatus that has seriously manipulated public opinion to the detriment of the American people and the planet. The front groups that comprise it have proven very effective to their corporate puppeteers, who will continue to fund and exploit them to prevent much needed regulation of the dirty energy industry. These groups must be recognized as pawns and charlatans before they further delay action against catastrophic global warming.
dukeanthony
New Member
Warren Buffett pays taxes on a smaller percentage of his billions in income than his cleaning lady. He thinks this to be both morally wrong and practically misguided, and he said so in a New York Times op-ed recently, complaining that he and his fellow gazillionaires have been “coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress.”
Buffett’s argument was refuted by the right-wing billionaire and funder of extremist organizations, Charles Koch, who justifies his puny tax rate with the argument that government spending often “does more harm than good,” and adds, “my business and non-profit investments are much more beneficial to societal well-being than sending more money to Washington.”
Well, they are certainly more beneficial to Koch personally. His fortune not only benefits from the low taxes he pays but also from significant public subsidies. ThinkProgress points out:
According to Forbes, the Koch brothers have seen their wealth rise $11 billion in recent years, making the Koch brother among the richest in the country by being worth around $22.5 billion each. Much of those profits, however, are due to soaring gas prices and the fact Koch Industries has avoided compensating the public for one hundred million tons of carbon pollution the company produces each year. Other Koch companies also receive significant taxpayer subsidies, despite Koch’s supposed opposition to government spending.
Koch naturally thinks his money is better spent as he sees fit, and I don’t blame him. The very money he should be paying in taxes goes into tax-deductible organizations designed to increase his wealth and influence.
For instance, as I noted in this column in December of last year, when President Barack Obama noted in 2008 that the science underlying man-made global warming was “beyond dispute,” the libertarian Cato Institute took out a full-page ad in The New York Times to attempt to undermine what was then a statement of fact—just a warning shot in a campaign that has resonated with considerable success throughout the mainstream media.
The Cato Institute, it turns out, was begun 34 years ago with a grant from Charles and David Koch. According to the Center for Public Integrity, the Kochs gave Cato $11 million alone in the seven-year period between 1986 and 1993. Cato now enjoys over 100 full-time employees, “and its experts and policy papers are widely quoted and respected by the mainstream media. It describes itself as nonpartisan, and its scholars have at times been critical of both parties. But it has consistently pushed for corporate tax cuts, reductions in social services, and laissez-faire environmental policies.”
Jane Mayer notes in her profile of the Kochs in The New Yorker that Cato scholars have been particularly energetic in promoting the Climategate scandal. Last year, private emails of climate scientists at the University of East Anglia, in England, were mysteriously leaked, and their exchanges appeared to suggest a willingness to falsify data in order to buttress the idea that global warming is real.
In the two weeks after the emails went public, one Cato scholar gave more than 20 media interviews trumpeting the alleged scandal. In fact, the researchers have since been exonerated as has the data. (One wonders, however, if the recent Murdoch empire’s wiretapping and email-hacking scandals might have had something to do with feeding these conspiracy mongers. Certainly it would not be the first time Murdoch employees conspired with criminals for the purposes of what Rupert and Co. call “journalism.”
Meanwhile, the phony Climategate controversy led to significant questioning of the worldwide scientific consensus on global warming and led more Americans than any time since 1997 to question its reality. The Kochs promote this statistic on their company’s website, Mayer noted, but fail to come clean about their own role in creating it.
Naomi Oreskes, a professor of history and science studies at the University of California, San Diego, and the co-author of Merchants of Doubt, explains that the brothers, who lead an enormous industrial concern “with refineries and pipelines,” have “a lot at stake.” She adds, “If the answer is to phase out fossil fuels, a different group of people are going to be making money, so we shouldn’t be surprised that they’re fighting tooth and nail.”
Mayer also reports that during 1980s the Koch family foundations contributed more than $30 million to George Mason University, much of which went to the Mercatus Center, a nonprofit organization they helped to set up in order to promote “market-oriented ideas.”
According to an environmental lawyer Mayer quotes, the plan is to “take corporate money and give it to a neutral-sounding think tank,” which “hires people with pedigrees and academic degrees who put out credible-seeming studies. But they all coincide perfectly with the economic interests of their funders.”
Of course these are just a couple of the myriad areas in which wealthy folks like the Kochs use the tax code to not only to avoid paying their fair share of the costs of keeping this nation going—protecting it, defending it, and the like—but enriching themselves and their friends at the rest of our expenses.
It surely is no coincidence that during the period in which all this investment in right-wing ideological argumentation has taken place, rich people have been asked to pay a smaller and smaller percentage of their wealth as it has piled higher and higher in their coffers.
In 1974 the top 0.1 percent of American families earned 2.7 percent of all income in the country. But by 2007, this same tiny slice of the population, aided in part by significantly lower rates of taxation legislated by Congress, had increased its holdings to fully 12.3 percent—roughly five times as great as it had been three decades earlier. Half of the U.S. population owned barely 2 percent of its wealth, putting the United States near Rwanda and Uganda and below such nations as pre-Arab Spring Tunisia and Egypt in terms of income inequality.
And the problem is only getting worse. By the end of 2010, as corporate profits rose by fully 14 percent, workers’ wages dropped to their lowest level ever measured in American history, falling below 50 percent of national income.
Is it any wonder that folks like Charles Koch like their own “business and non-profit investments” better than, say, allowing the government to pay for roads, parks, national defense, and Medicare? Again, I don’t blame him. But the real question is: How in the world did we come up with a tax program that allows him to get away with it?
Buffett’s argument was refuted by the right-wing billionaire and funder of extremist organizations, Charles Koch, who justifies his puny tax rate with the argument that government spending often “does more harm than good,” and adds, “my business and non-profit investments are much more beneficial to societal well-being than sending more money to Washington.”
Well, they are certainly more beneficial to Koch personally. His fortune not only benefits from the low taxes he pays but also from significant public subsidies. ThinkProgress points out:
According to Forbes, the Koch brothers have seen their wealth rise $11 billion in recent years, making the Koch brother
Koch naturally thinks his money is better spent as he sees fit, and I don’t blame him. The very money he should be paying in taxes goes into tax-deductible organizations designed to increase his wealth and influence.
For instance, as I noted in this column in December of last year, when President Barack Obama noted in 2008 that the science underlying man-made global warming was “beyond dispute,” the libertarian Cato Institute took out a full-page ad in The New York Times to attempt to undermine what was then a statement of fact—just a warning shot in a campaign that has resonated with considerable success throughout the mainstream media.
The Cato Institute, it turns out, was begun 34 years ago with a grant from Charles and David Koch. According to the Center for Public Integrity, the Kochs gave Cato $11 million alone in the seven-year period between 1986 and 1993. Cato now enjoys over 100 full-time employees, “and its experts and policy papers are widely quoted and respected by the mainstream media. It describes itself as nonpartisan, and its scholars have at times been critical of both parties. But it has consistently pushed for corporate tax cuts, reductions in social services, and laissez-faire environmental policies.”
Jane Mayer notes in her profile of the Kochs in The New Yorker that Cato scholars have been particularly energetic in promoting the Climategate scandal. Last year, private emails of climate scientists at the University of East Anglia, in England, were mysteriously leaked, and their exchanges appeared to suggest a willingness to falsify data in order to buttress the idea that global warming is real.
In the two weeks after the emails went public, one Cato scholar gave more than 20 media interviews trumpeting the alleged scandal. In fact, the researchers have since been exonerated as has the data. (One wonders, however, if the recent Murdoch empire’s wiretapping and email-hacking scandals might have had something to do with feeding these conspiracy mongers. Certainly it would not be the first time Murdoch employees conspired with criminals for the purposes of what Rupert and Co. call “journalism.”
Meanwhile, the phony Climategate controversy led to significant questioning of the worldwide scientific consensus on global warming and led more Americans than any time since 1997 to question its reality. The Kochs promote this statistic on their company’s website, Mayer noted, but fail to come clean about their own role in creating it.
Naomi Oreskes, a professor of history and science studies at the University of California, San Diego, and the co-author of Merchants of Doubt, explains that the brothers, who lead an enormous industrial concern “with refineries and pipelines,” have “a lot at stake.” She adds, “If the answer is to phase out fossil fuels, a different group of people are going to be making money, so we shouldn’t be surprised that they’re fighting tooth and nail.”
Mayer also reports that during 1980s the Koch family foundations contributed more than $30 million to George Mason University, much of which went to the Mercatus Center, a nonprofit organization they helped to set up in order to promote “market-oriented ideas.”
According to an environmental lawyer Mayer quotes, the plan is to “take corporate money and give it to a neutral-sounding think tank,” which “hires people with pedigrees and academic degrees who put out credible-seeming studies. But they all coincide perfectly with the economic interests of their funders.”
Of course these are just a couple of the myriad areas in which wealthy folks like the Kochs use the tax code to not only to avoid paying their fair share of the costs of keeping this nation going—protecting it, defending it, and the like—but enriching themselves and their friends at the rest of our expenses.
It surely is no coincidence that during the period in which all this investment in right-wing ideological argumentation has taken place, rich people have been asked to pay a smaller and smaller percentage of their wealth as it has piled higher and higher in their coffers.
In 1974 the top 0.1 percent of American families earned 2.7 percent of all income in the country. But by 2007, this same tiny slice of the population, aided in part by significantly lower rates of taxation legislated by Congress, had increased its holdings to fully 12.3 percent—roughly five times as great as it had been three decades earlier. Half of the U.S. population owned barely 2 percent of its wealth, putting the United States near Rwanda and Uganda and below such nations as pre-Arab Spring Tunisia and Egypt in terms of income inequality.
And the problem is only getting worse. By the end of 2010, as corporate profits rose by fully 14 percent, workers’ wages dropped to their lowest level ever measured in American history, falling below 50 percent of national income.
Is it any wonder that folks like Charles Koch like their own “business and non-profit investments” better than, say, allowing the government to pay for roads, parks, national defense, and Medicare? Again, I don’t blame him. But the real question is: How in the world did we come up with a tax program that allows him to get away with it?
MuyLocoNC
Well-Known Member
I agree, global warming is happening, but man has nothing to do with it.
He could debate any one of the 31,000 American scientists that signed the OISM Global Warming petition or maybe
Dr. Ivar Giaever, a former professor with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the 1973 winner of the Nobel Prize.
UncleBuck
Well-Known Member
no he couldn't, because many of them are dead or never consented to being on that phony list.
dukeanthony
New Member
A number of critics of the petition questioned the scientific credentials and the authenticity of the names of the signatories.
In May 1998 the Seattle Times wrote:
“Several environmental groups questioned some of the names in the petition. For instance: "Perry S. Mason", who was a legitimate scientist who shared the name of a TV character. Similarly, "Michael J. Fox", "Robert C. Byrd", and "John C. Grisham" were signatories with names shared with famous people. Geraldine Halliwell was added as: "Dr. Geri Halliwell" and "Dr. Halliwell." This name may have been contributed by a proxy trying to discredit the petition since Ms. Halliwell has never admitted to signing the petition.Asked about the pop singer, Robinson said he was duped. The returned petition, one of thousands of mailings he sent out, identified her as having a degree in microbiology and living in Boston. "When we're getting thousands of signatures there's no way of filtering out a fake", he said.[21]
”
In 2001, Scientific American reported:
“Scientific American took a random sample of 30 of the 1,400 signatories claiming to hold a Ph.D. in a climate-related science. Of the 26 we were able to identify in various databases, 11 said they still agreed with the petition —- one was an active climate researcher, two others had relevant expertise, and eight signed based on an informal evaluation. Six said they would not sign the petition today, three did not remember any such petition, one had died, and five did not answer repeated messages. Crudely extrapolating, the petition supporters include a core of about 200 climate researchers – a respectable number, though rather a small fraction of the climatological community.[22]”
In a 2005 op-ed in the Hawaii Reporter, Todd Shelly wrote:
“In less than 10 minutes of casual scanning, I found duplicate names (Did two Joe R. Eaglemans and two David Tompkins sign the petition, or were some individuals counted twice?), single names without even an initial (Biolchini), corporate names (Graybeal & Sayre, Inc. How does a business sign a petition?), and an apparently phony single name (Redwine, Ph.D.). These examples underscore a major weakness of the list: there is no way to check the authenticity of the names. Names are given, but no identifying information (e.g., institutional affiliation) is provided. Why the lack of transparency?[23]”
To the issue of duplicate names, the Global Warming Petition Project had responded:
“Thousands of scientists have signed the petition more than once. These duplicates have been carefully removed from the petition list. The list contains many instances of scientists with closely similar and sometimes identical names, as is statistically expected in a list of this size, but these signers are different people, who live at different addresses, and usually have different fields of specialization. Primarily as a result of name and address variants, occasional duplicate names are found in the list. These are immediately removed.[24]
In May 1998 the Seattle Times wrote:
“Several environmental groups questioned some of the names in the petition. For instance: "Perry S. Mason", who was a legitimate scientist who shared the name of a TV character. Similarly, "Michael J. Fox", "Robert C. Byrd", and "John C. Grisham" were signatories with names shared with famous people. Geraldine Halliwell was added as: "Dr. Geri Halliwell" and "Dr. Halliwell." This name may have been contributed by a proxy trying to discredit the petition since Ms. Halliwell has never admitted to signing the petition.Asked about the pop singer, Robinson said he was duped. The returned petition, one of thousands of mailings he sent out, identified her as having a degree in microbiology and living in Boston. "When we're getting thousands of signatures there's no way of filtering out a fake", he said.[21]
”
In 2001, Scientific American reported:
“Scientific American took a random sample of 30 of the 1,400 signatories claiming to hold a Ph.D. in a climate-related science. Of the 26 we were able to identify in various databases, 11 said they still agreed with the petition —- one was an active climate researcher, two others had relevant expertise, and eight signed based on an informal evaluation. Six said they would not sign the petition today, three did not remember any such petition, one had died, and five did not answer repeated messages. Crudely extrapolating, the petition supporters include a core of about 200 climate researchers – a respectable number, though rather a small fraction of the climatological community.[22]”
In a 2005 op-ed in the Hawaii Reporter, Todd Shelly wrote:
“In less than 10 minutes of casual scanning, I found duplicate names (Did two Joe R. Eaglemans and two David Tompkins sign the petition, or were some individuals counted twice?), single names without even an initial (Biolchini), corporate names (Graybeal & Sayre, Inc. How does a business sign a petition?), and an apparently phony single name (Redwine, Ph.D.). These examples underscore a major weakness of the list: there is no way to check the authenticity of the names. Names are given, but no identifying information (e.g., institutional affiliation) is provided. Why the lack of transparency?[23]”
To the issue of duplicate names, the Global Warming Petition Project had responded:
“Thousands of scientists have signed the petition more than once. These duplicates have been carefully removed from the petition list. The list contains many instances of scientists with closely similar and sometimes identical names, as is statistically expected in a list of this size, but these signers are different people, who live at different addresses, and usually have different fields of specialization. Primarily as a result of name and address variants, occasional duplicate names are found in the list. These are immediately removed.[24]
dukeanthony
New Member
The term "scientists" is often used in describing signatories; however, many of the signatories have degrees in engineering or medicine, including veterinary medicine. The distribution of petitions was relatively uncontrolled: those receiving the petition could check a line that said "send more petition cards for me to distribute".
it must be real then. good, back to drowning polar bears.
i am freezing. had to turn the heat on 2 days ago. the last couple days of summer were brutaly cold.