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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
I agree. Why don't we avoid taking a leaf from Trump's book, and instead base our posts (and our insults, sure) in facts?
Oh God! Natural light!At least with climate change denialism there are actual vaguely understandable reasons besides "Just because". There's the wishful thinking angle, the profit angle, the "screw it it's hopeless anyway so we might as well loot as much as possible before we croak" angle, and the fact that it's a very complicated problem even without being politicized.
That said, I could definitely see Republicans and the energy companies funding them pushing for fracking in national parks that do actually have resources untapped.
edited 2nd Apr '17 11:57:41 PM by M84
Disgusted, but not surprised
Touché.
x12 Same, disliking or not trusting certain people and groups ("Justice Democrats", the US Green Party, certain groups in my country that decided loyalty to the former authoritarian government was more important than actually following social democrat ideas) who are or claim to be social democrats doesn't mean I don't believe in social democracy. Only that I may have some problems with those people.
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Which is the entire reason Yosemite became a national park in the first place. At first it was designated as the first state park, but was misused by the state of California and oppened to exploitation. The Sierra Club was actually first formed to promote Yosemite as a national park.
Lots of rangers are also worried about general exploitation in whatever form that takes.
edited 3rd Apr '17 5:04:58 AM by megaeliz
Fox News of all places, is shaming Pruitt's Climate Change denial. I never thought I'd see the day.
https://thinkprogress.org/amp/p/64d0ce34a1ac
edited 3rd Apr '17 5:09:14 AM by megaeliz
Where do we begin. They've began to drink the anti-trade kool-aid. They want to primary Democrats in conservative states for not voting in lockstep with the party. They threaten to break off and form a third party if their demands are not met in their entirety (thus turning the US into a de facto one party state). Their policies have very little substance behind the ideals (though this at least could be rectified). They hypocritically support absolute scumbags within the party like Tulsi Gabbard.
They are everything wrong with the Sanders campaign's worst supporters (who Bernie mostly slapped down, it should be said) writ large and without a central leader.
edited 3rd Apr '17 5:45:07 AM by Rationalinsanity
Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.Also it might not be a terrible idea for the reasonable Bernie supporters to form something in the vain of The Bull-Moose or the Vermont Progressive parties. But not until after 2018 or even better 2020. I feel bad for saying this, but as desperately as this country needs more options, we need to stand behind the democrats to give them the numbers needed to check Trump.
a few pages back I linked to the go fund me page for the effort to petition the UN to make several National Parks World Heritage sites. It was started by park rangers worried about the GOP trying to defund or exploit the parks.
https://www.gofundme.com/AltParks
edited 3rd Apr '17 5:51:35 AM by megaeliz
This can only mean good...
Trump ready to 'solve' North Korea problem without China
"If China is not going to solve North Korea, we will. That is all I am telling you," he said in an interview with UK newspaper the Financial Times.
Pressed on whether he thought he could succeed alone, he replied: "Totally."
During a trip to Asia in March, US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said pre-emptive military action was an option "on the table".
A month earlier, Defence Secretary James Mattis warned that any use of nuclear weapons would be met with an "overwhelming" response.
US officials stress that contingency planning for the military option has been discussed for decades, but the preferred course of action remains pressing North Korea to abandon its weapons programmes via sanctions and other diplomatic pressure.
Mr Trump is expected to put pressure on China's president to do much more about North Korea at their meeting this week - and he has implied that the issue of trade could be used as leverage.
The president told the Financial Times that "trade is the incentive. It is all about trade." But he said he did not plan to discuss tariffs during the meeting.
At the end of March, he signed two executive orders to deal with the US trade deficit, reviewing current rules and foreign trade abuses.
White House officials insisted China was not the focus of his orders - but it is the largest source of the US trade deficit, accounting for about $347bn (£276bn) a year, out of a total of $502bn (£400bn).
And Mr Trump himself tweeted that "the meeting next week with China will be a very difficult one in that we can no longer have massive trade deficits".
Mr Trump has not said how he will negotiate trade with China while also pressing them to influence Pyongyang.
Trump to 'reboot' US-Egypt ties with Sisi meeting
A senior Trump administration official briefed reporters that human rights concerns would be raised at Monday's meeting, but that it would be handled in a "private, more discreet way."
"We believe it's the most effective way to advance those issues to a favourable outcome," the official added.
To assist it in the fight against IS, Mr Sisi is believed to want an increase in the $1.3bn (£1bn) in military aid that Egypt receives annually.
The White House has promised to maintain a "strong and sufficient" level of support, but recently proposed drastic cuts to its international aid budget.
The administration official said Mr Trump was also "interested in hearing President Sisi's views on the Muslim Brotherhood", which the Egyptian leader wants the White House to designate a terrorist organisation.
Brotherhood officials insist that the group opposes violence. However, members of some of its regional offshoots have condoned or committed violent acts.
<facepalm> That meeting this weekend is not going to be pleasant, is it. Xi Jinping will probably respond to the "trade deficit" talk by saying "Yeah, that's rich coming from someone who still owes my country over half a billion dollars."
I can see the "negotiations" ending with Xi agreeing to give Jong Un a figurative (or literal?) slap on the wrist in exchange for Trump letting China have the South China Seas unchallenged. Trump of course will proclaim this was a YUUGE victory, and his hardcore supporters will eat it up.
edited 3rd Apr '17 5:58:20 AM by M84
Disgusted, but not surprised
"I alone can fix it." that sounds familiar.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?list=PL0hKMB1-xkc-XWNf9VL-LxVYysdHpjyMF&v=juvYqEF3BzA
edited 3rd Apr '17 5:58:29 AM by megaeliz
No, it would be absolutely moronic for the Sanders supporters to form a 3rd party. Unless you ditch first past the post (I don't buy the predictions of a total Republican implosion anymore, yes I think Trump will hurt them at every level but they'll always have 30-40% support) it will just result in the left being exiled from the halls of power.
Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.
That. We ARE Struggling Together after all.
One more thing: CIA operations may be disrupted by new Wikileaks' data release
The code could be used to create a "signature" for CIA malware, said one virus hunter.
The information is part of a larger cache about CIA hacking tools that started to be released last month.
The release of the information could be "one of the most technically damaging" said Nicholas Weaver, a computer security researcher at the University of California in Berkeley, in an interview with the Washington Post.
"It seems designed to directly disrupt ongoing CIA operations and attribute previous operations," he said.
Before now, the information released about the CIA's hacking tools by Wikileaks has largely been only text describing many different ways the agency spies on targets.
The latest release differs as it involves actual code used to hide the ultimate origins of malware used by the US organisation.
It shows the obfuscation techniques used to make it harder to reverse engineer malware to unmask who made it.
Included in the code library are fragments of Chinese and Farsi that are intended to be used in malware, as well as methods of moving data around that seek to thwart tools examining whether different samples have anything in common.
The CIA would not comment on the authenticity of the information released by Wikileaks, but a spokesman said Americans should be "deeply troubled" by the organisation's actions.
"Dictators and terrorists have no better friend in the world than Julian Assange, as theirs is the only privacy he protects," said the spokesman.
Has anyone seen this? It's a Donald Trump tweet archive. It has all the tweets organized by topic and key words. it's revealing to see it all in one place.
http://www.trumptwitterarchive.com/
edited 3rd Apr '17 6:15:03 AM by megaeliz

Guys, let's not get into this kind of bullshit where we are saying they'll literally do anything just because reasons. If there's no oil or natural gases to be obtained through fracking Yellowstone, then they are probably not going to suggest putting it up there. For one, they're not so stupid as to go about obtaining a resource from an area where they know it doesn't exist. For another, even if one of them thought they could do that, the actual companies that would have to put up the bill for building a large part of the infrastructure aren't going to put in resources for a project that they know won't result in profit down the line. Because that's fucking stupid.
I really don't like the strawmanning that happened here, nor do I like that it seems to be the road this thread is headed down with a lot of the posts going on here.