homersapien

Well, Democrats made an attempt to reform campaign financing: https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2021/01/for-the-people-act-democrats/ ".....The bill is supported by a broad coalition of progressive groups under the banner of the Declaration for American Democracy. Its nearly 180 members include People’s Action, MoveOn.org, the League of Conservation Voters and the Service Employees International Union. The Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump super PAC that took $300,000 from dark money group Sixteen Thirty Fund, one of the left’s largest dark money groups, reportedly also supportsthe bill. Despite the enthusiasm from Democrats, Schumer will face an uphill battle to actually pass the bill. In 2019, an earlier version of the bill passed in the House along partisan lines. Not a single Republican voted for the bill, and it was never introduced in the then-majority Republican Senate. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) called that iteration of the bill “a radical half-baked socialist proposal.”....

I've never thought of "efficient and quiet" as sexy. But I think I get your point.

Yep. You're right. It's all a massive hoax involving a financial scam.

Do your own research. Just search their names and follow up. And I don't recall citing any single researcher by name. (Correct me if I'm wrong.) I have cited primarily sites that compile research as in Academic societies and government sites like NASA and NOAA. But what's the point? You clearly believe the entire subject is a global hoax or scam: 97+% of all climatologists and related scientists in geology, meteorology, biology, chemistry, etc. in the world are all participates in this hoax. How can anyone argue with that? It's a fool's errand.

FWIW, I don't "spurn" never Trumper conservatives. Just the opposite - I respect them.

My mistake. I shouldn't have mentioned it knowing that some MAGA would jump on it as an opening to avoid my main point. This why I later "crawfished" on it: "Given the context there's nothing illegal about it (as I questioned in an earlier post). It's just blatantly transactional and morally/ethically revealing. (But then we already knew that about Trump.) But I stand by my comment that this is a political gift for the Democrats. But thanks for confirming my instincts Salty. You are a predictable passive-aggressive MAGA.

He should have run all that money through his PAC before he took possession of it, like Trump does.

The ones who have been presented in this discussion as examples are.

Don't hold your breath waiting.

The last Trump rally?

"Crime"? I am not talking about crime. I am talking about refuting/rejecting policies meant to address AGW which is simply politics.

When was the last polar shift emt? Where did you get the idea it was associated with global warming?

I am not a lawyer nor do I know the law - if any- that would cover this incident. But to me - and I think to most people - this constitutes a clear quid pro quo situation. It's pretty specific. What is the difference between this and what Menendez did? But again, my point is this obviously good campaign material, assuming that a majority of Americans disapprove of his "intent" which was quite apparent.

Wrong. Wrong and Wrong. 1) That is the basic question Climate scientists started asking when they first became aware of the possibility. 2) You apparently didn't. 3) Is this a joke? You have obviously done zero reading on this. I hate to provide my go-to source for beginners, but you need to at least start somewhere. I sure as hell don't have time to spoon feed you references like I am tutoring a child. https://skepticalscience.com/ 4) Well, well. I can tell by this irrational, emotional response that you have no more arguments - at least ones that can't be easily refuted. You have simply decided to deny facts because you want to. You're completely unteachable. What a waste of time you've been. (But I love the irony that you call me "ignorant".)

Wrong. First, All models show a range because neither the data or the model is precise. That's impossible. (This is pretty much how all science-based predictions/models work - on probabilities. That's inherent to any research based on data collection.) But you are wrong in any case. https://science.nasa.gov/earth/climate-change/study-confirms-climate-models-are-getting-future-warming-projections-right/Study Confirms Climate Models are Getting Future Warming Projections Right

No worries. Trump has a plan for that: While campaigning in Iowa last September, former President Donald Trump made a promise to voters if he were elected again: “Following the Eisenhower model, we will carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history,” he said.

The actual implications of Leftfield's post flew right over your head. 15 hours ago, Leftfield said: Once again, temperature increases lead to release of CO2 into the atmosphere - release from oceans, ice, soil, plants, etc First, the two (numbered) statements you made are false: 1) Climate scientists can predict how much warming additional CO2 added to the atmosphere will cause. Valid scientific theory is predictive. It's the very basis of modeling. 2) Had there been no increase in the release of CO2 as a result of the industrial age and population growth, temperature would not have increased since then. (Or at least it would be consistent with the natural geologic, epochal time frame, which practically amounts to the same thing.) What Leftfield is describing, is called in climate science an "amplifying feedback loop": "In climate science, amplifying feedback loops are situations where a climate-caused alteration can trigger a process that causes even more warming, which in turn intensifies the alteration." (I mentioned another amplifying feedback loom earlier in this - or perhaps a different - AGW thread consisting of the release of vast quantities of methane being released in the arctic tundra in Siberia and elsewhere. The point then was also misunderstood and quickly devolved in an irrelevant discussion of the relative merits of methane as a greenhouse gas.) The point is, such amplifying feedback loops (I don't know how many there are) act to accelerate the effects of greenhouse warming which is fundamentally caused by the emission of CO2 currently stored in the ground by burning fossil fuels. The existence of these accelerating feedback loops means that the the ultimate rate and extent of global warming is not simply limited to the amount of CO2 released by continuing to burn fossil fuels, but in addition, the amount of CO2 released by all the feedback loops created by those increased temperatures. Bottom line, the increase of greenhouse gases will not only continue, but possibly continue at an increasing rate. Temperature will almost certainly continue to increase at an increasing rate, as the data shows. To people that actually understand the science of AGW, this should be very concerning, if not terrifying. (At least if they are young and/or have progeny they care about.)

I have no idea what you are talking about. It is bribery. Our entire political system works on it. And I am not deflecting on anything. People understand what he did. He promised to eliminate environmental regulations in return for a billion dollars. People who are concerned about our environment (CO2) understand that. And if you believe the polls, that is a majority of Americans. To MAGA's who think AGW is a hoax, it won't matter. (As IM4's "like" to your post demonstrates.) I don't know what's happening to you Salty. Either you are evolving into more of a MAGA or you have a personal problem with me.

That ship has sailed.

Oh, it obviously won't hurt him with the MAGAs who are deniers or don't care, but polling of the general populace suggests otherwise. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/08/09/what-the-data-says-about-americans-views-of-climate-change/

By Joseph Stiglitz Joseph Stiglitz is a professor of economics at Columbia University and winner of the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize in economics. His newest book is “The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society.” Amid another election season, our impulse to debate American democracy through a single political lens is understandable. But we’d be better served considering a second closely related question too: Which economic system serves the most people? On one side of the economic debate are those who believe in largely unfettered markets, in which companies are allowed to agglomerate market power or pollute or exploit. They believe firms should maximize shareholder value, doing whatever they can get away with, because bigger profits serve the common good. The most famous 20th-century proponents of this low-tax/low-regulation shareholder-centric economy, often referred to as neoliberalism, are Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek. These Nobel Prize-winning economists took the idea beyond the economy, claiming this kind of economic system was necessary to achieve political freedom. They worried about the growth of government in the aftermath of the Great Depression, when under the influence of John Maynard Keynes, the state was taking on new responsibilities to stabilize the economy. In “Capitalism and Freedom,” Friedman argued that “free markets” were indispensable to ensure political freedom. In Hayek’s words, government overreach would lead us down “The Road to Serfdom.” We’ve now had four decades of the neoliberal “experiment,” beginning with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. The results are clear. Neoliberalism expanded the freedom of corporations and billionaires to do as they will and amass huge fortunes, but it also exacted a steep price: the well-being and freedom of the rest of society. Neoliberals’ political analysis was even worse than their economics, with perhaps even graver consequences. Friedman and his acolytes failed to understand an essential feature of freedom: that there are two kinds, positive and negative; freedom to do and freedom from harm. “Free markets” alone fail to provide economic stability or security against the economic vagaries they create, let alone allow large fractions of the population to live up to their potential. Government is needed to deliver both. In doing so, government expands freedom in multiple ways. The road to authoritarianism is not paved by government doing too much but too little. The surge in support for populism, especially of the ugly nationalist variety, has many causes. It would be overly simplistic to ascribe it just to economics. Still, it is no coincidence that populist nationalism is a graver threat in countries such as Israel, the Philippines and the United States than in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, where high-quality free public education, strong unemployment benefits and robust public health care free their citizens from the common American anxieties over how to pay for their children’s education or their medical bills. Discontent festers in places facing unaddressed economic stresses, where people feel a loss of control over their destinies; where too little is done to address unemployment, economic insecurity and inequality. This provides a fertile field for populist demagogues — who are in ample supply everywhere. In the United States, this has given us Donald Trump. We care about freedom from hunger, unemployment and poverty — and, as FDR emphasized, freedom from fear. People with just enough to get by don’t have freedom — they do what they must to survive. And we need to focus on giving more people the freedom to live up to their potential, to flourish and to be creative. An agenda that would increase the number of children growing up in poverty or parents worrying about how they are going to pay for health care — necessary for the most basic freedom, the freedom to live — is not a freedom agenda. Champions of the neoliberal order, moreover, too often fail to recognize that one person’s freedom is another’s unfreedom — or, as Isaiah Berlin put it, freedom for the wolves has often meant death to the sheep. Freedom to carry a gun may mean death to those who are gunned down in the mass killings that have become an almost daily occurrence in the United States. Freedom not to be vaccinated or wear masks may mean others lose the freedom to live. There are trade-offs, and trade-offs are the bread and butter of economics. The climate crisis shows that we have not gone far enough in regulating pollution; giving more freedom to corporations to pollute reduces the freedom of the rest of us to live a healthy life — and in the case of those with asthma, even the freedom to live. Freeing bankers from what they claimed to be excessively burdensome regulations put the rest of us at risk of a downturn potentially as bad as the Great Depression of the 1930s when the banking system imploded in 2008. This forced society to provide banks hundreds of billions of dollars in the largest bailout ever. The rest of society faced a reduction in their freedoms in so many ways — including the freedom from the fear of losing one’s house, one’s job and, with that, one’s health insurance. Sometimes, how these trade-offs should be made is obvious: We should curtail corporations’ freedom to exploit workers, consumers and communities. Sometimes the trade-offs are more complex; how to assess them is more difficult. But just because they’re difficult is no reason to shirk addressing them, to pretend that they don’t exist. Some cases of unfreedom can benefit a society as a whole, expanding the freedom of all, or at least most, citizens. Stop lights — which curtail my freedom to cross the intersection — provide a good example. Without them, there would be gridlock. Their intrusion on my freedom enhances that of all of us — in a fundamental sense, even my freedom. This reasoning applies broadly. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has reminded us that if we are to be free from the fear of harm coming from outside, we need defense, and that has to be paid for. We also need money to make the necessary social investments for a 21st-century economy — in basic research and technology, in infrastructure, in education, and in health. (Much of the country’s success evolves from initial research done at our universities, all either state-supported or nonprofits.) This all requires tax revenue. And taxation, as we know, requires compulsion to prevent the free-riding by some on the contributions of others. Neoliberal capitalism has thus failed in its own economic terms: It has not delivered growth, let alone shared prosperity. But it has also failed in its promise of putting us on a secure road to democracy and freedom, and it has instead set us on a populist route raising the prospects of a 21st-century fascism. These would-be authoritarian populists reduce our freedom while failing to deliver on their promises, as the form of crony capitalism offered by Trump illustrates. The elimination of Obamacare or a tax cut for billionaires and corporations funded in part by a tax increase for the rest of us would decrease the security, well-being and freedom of ordinary Americans. Trump’s first administration gives a glimmer of what a second might look like. There is an alternative. A 21st-century economy can only be managed through decentralization, entailing a rich set of institutions — from profit-making firms to cooperatives, unions, an engaged civil society, nonprofits and public institutions. I call this new set of economic arrangements “progressive capitalism.” Central are government regulations and public investments, financed by taxation. Progressive capitalism is an economic system that will not only lead to greater productivity, prosperity and equality but also help set all of us on a road to greater freedoms. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/05/13/stiglitz-captialism-economics-democracy-book/

That makes no sense whatsoever. Are you suggesting this was not a political blunder? If so, why?

Nice evasion. Why bother to respond?

For what it's worth: https://publichealth.jhu.edu/center-for-gun-violence-solutions/research-reports/firearm-violence-in-the-united-states https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/04/26/what-the-data-says-about-gun-deaths-in-the-u-s/ Doesn't address "carrying", just ownership and access.