Free Republic

the original version can be found @ the draft gore website ... it's actually poster art that's for sale: www.draftgore.com/images/Poster.jpg now if that isn't unintentional self-parody enough, this hagiograph might just make you blow your coffee all over the keyboard ... yes, it's a pro-Gore tome titled after "The World According to Garp." However, in the John Irving story, the story protagonist was conceived of the last act of wounded ball-turret gunner Technical Sergeant Garp who muttered "Garp! Garp!" I just don't know what to say, but that the silly season is upon us.

http://i22.tinypic.com/2lmxef6.jpg

My atheist predictions:

The USA will come to be dominated politically by Mormons and Latin Catholics. Both groups tend toward entrepreneurship, pro-life & other standard conservative stances.

Europeans, generally, are going to run *back* into the waiting arms of Christiandom when they find what’s lacking in cultural relativism, esp. that which allows crap like Sharia courts. Were the Caliphate ever to become a reality across the Mediterranean DMZ, Europe might even find a way to desecularize quickly.

Asia will be forced to likewise retrench in its Buddhist tradition, along with Chinese Confucianism, in response to the broadening cultural conflict with Islam.

All societies go through cycles of secularization, etc. With each cycle the back pews move a bit more to the middle rows and the bulk of the layity moderates somewhat. The two most humanist religions - Christianity and Buddhism - will be most able to coexist a more secularized polity.

Islam and Hinduism, however, will have a harder time with secularization b/c each religion holds onto some atavistic doctrines that haven’t been supplanted by more humanist canons. The civil war within Islam will continue so long as Islamists insist on compulsory belief which will breed more apostates than it would otherwise were Islam to secularize itself. Hindu fundies will try to obstruct the conversion of the Dalits (and other higher-cast Hindus) to Buddhism, but they’ll have far less success than Muslim fundies in limiting conversions to other faiths. The civil wars in Sri Lanka and Burma may play into this, perhaps Bangladesh if she continues to be beggared by her non-Muslim neighbors.

Increased population throughout Asia, Asia Minor and Africa will particularly intensify renewed interest in religion b/c of increased intercultural frictions. It’ll be up to the more-secular moderates in all societies to try to stem the worst aspects of the trend.

Just because we Americans are drifting toward the back pews into a broader, mellower agnosticism and deism, with a concomitant increased proportion of actual nontheists, atheists and antithiests doesn’t necessarily bring us to the opposite conclusion that the polity will suddenly revel in epiphanous frissons of apostasy and apognosis.

Witness the broadening reach of Buddhism, particularly Zen & Theravada. Buddhism isn’t just for the avante-liberal and groovy peaceniks...

Reminds me of Voltaire's prayer: "O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous."

I don't know if the link was apparent ... see also: Reuters Article - Kyoto Projects Hurting Ozone Layer

Yes, that, and the EU’s carbon credit cheating that lead to CC prices plummeting...

see also: "...Maurice Strong is one of the main brains behind the gw/cc scam. He's currently working with China on expanding their economy and knows well how much they're polluting the world."

Al Gore an unwitting patsy? I don’t think so. Al Gore are partner in Generation Investment Management, which purportedly seeks to establish the rules and licensing for a new carbon-trading scheme as well as doing investment management on large funds heavily into environmental resource investments, etc.

Consider Gore’s movie ... propaganda or science?

Of course they intend to deceive, Kyoto’s carbon trading scheme creates an array of vested interests in maintaining CO2’s status as THE main climate change culprit. Al Gore’s company seeks to set the terms & licensing of CO2 credit trading in the USA. A big upset may be coming however — SOOT IS challenging the conventional wisdom on CO2’s dominant role in atmospheric warming
Please see my other post:
Soot vs. CO2: The climatology upset: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/1897435/posts
and
http://www.scientificblogging.com/the_soot_files
and
http://leebert.newsvine.com

These vast shrouds of soot are predominantly from coal-fired industrial sources in Asia, creating the notorious Asian Brown Cloud. Most of the soot falling on the Arctic comes from Asia, 90 percent of the Arctic melt is due to dirty snow melting faster than it can be created. Climate models show that 25 percent of *ALL* global warming is from the Arctic & tundra ice loss.

About 30 percent of the warming on the American West coast is due to Asian soot. 40 percent of the warming in the vast Pacific is due to Asian soot - that’s 30 percent of the Earth’s surface area, causing up to 12 percent of all global warming - just from Asian soot alone. The American Sierra’s are melting sooner due to dirty snow, same goes for the glacial recessions in the Northern Rockies.

There are more vast palls of soot spanning the globe from seasonal slash&burns in the tropics & subtropics, creating a double-whammy for mountaintop glaciers in the tropics — Kilimanjaro’s suffering from lowered microclimate precipitation due to deforestation, coupled with increased solar luminence...

We’re off-shoring production to China, shifting jobs, etc. overseas. In countries committed to Kyoto’s carbon trading scheme, Kyoto’s serving to back-door emissions with the shifted production, which then accelerates globalization by encouraging the additional shifting of production (and jobs) to Asia along with the emissions.

Airborne soot causing 50 percent of warming once blamed on CO2

> Unless I miss my mark, I'm thinking you're
> referring to the Buchananite/Novak wing of
> the conservative movement,

Yup, them. Maybe being liberal I haven't fully examined the distinction & I probably should.

Best regards,

/lee

>Please don't take it personally my comment about
> "the left" denying that there ever were WMD.

Oh, I *know* the left youre talking about.. I gripe about them often, as does Hitchens..

> Clearly however you are in a distinct minority
> now among the liberal, left-leaning movement

We are few... just look at the estrangement of Hitchens... somehow that Scientology apologist Cockburn is lauded while the Hitch is reviled...

> of those who will admit we were right to do what we
> did in Iraq and that we're wrong not to be
> asking what became of WMD.

It's a problem of proportionalism, I'm afraid. The anti-conservative paranoia of the *honest and earnest* part of the left is as deep-seated as say some of the xenophobic attitudes I see from the other side of the aisle (no, let's not go there and just relish this moment of allied thinking ... ;-), and hence they misperceive and/or exaggerate the threat of US hegemony vs. Islamic fascism & WMD in Araby. And that's the earnest and guileless left, the Buddhists, the Quakers, the milquetoast isolationists... Then there's the crypto-fascist WWPrs and LaRoucheite Ramsey Clarkers & Chomskyites who are deluded to a level I find hard to comprehend. They feed the most puerile propaganda to the guiless sheep and still think it'd be nice if Kosovo was a howling wasteland so long as it proved that the USA was evil incarnate.

I'm an apostate's apostate, so I'm in disagreement with everyone.

> The left will even deny now that Saddam EVER had
> WMD. We must not cave in to their intellectual
> dishonesty.

Hey, I'm a left-leaning "liberal" and I'm tracking the WMD evidence... see http://apognosis.com/wikka.php?wakka=IraqiWMDevidence

So does Chris Hitchens, an avowed Socialist (Fabian Socialist, former Trotskyite, never Maoist or Stalinist)... see: http://www.hitchensweb.com

/lee

And... when dealing with a rogue state intent upon concealment and deception, why would anyone give them the benefit of the doubt? It has been demonstrated that Saddam's weapons apparats consistently deceived and fooled the IAEA, UNSCOM and other inspection teams time and time again.

Yet another example of the deceptions found in the early 1990's:
"...The vast amounts of electrical power required by the EMIS process were provided by an electrical substation, with underground power lines designed to mask the amount of electricity consumed at Al Tarmiya...."

http://tinyurl.com/95x7g

Canard wrote:

>Your timeline doesn't make sense.

Are we in agreement there was a 3-4 year period where the Iraqis went seriously back to work after the inspectors had been kicked out and that there was a great deal of new construction at the site in the period '99 - '02 ?

> The uranium at
>Al Tuwaitha was catalogued and sealed by the IAEA
>after Gulf War One. That was my point. As that
>uranium was already there, why negotitate
>to expensively import more of the same in the
>late 90s?


If it were just a simple matter of that being enough, I'd see your point, but evidence shows there are 2 reasons that wasn't enough: They needed more ore to sift out the increasingly miniscule fractions of high-grade uranium they wanted as bomb-grade precursor, and they had to keep two sets of books to obscure their activities from the IAEA.

Remember that the IAEA got snookered by the No. Koreans? And not that the IAEA regimen was itself really tough, w/ inspections only 2x/year, but there was more that the IAEA missed, lots more.

There was the 50 kg of bomb-grade uranium(!) the IAEA either missed or let Saddam keep (isn't that enuf to make 2 uranium bombs?) and an entire, highly radioactive underground complex at the site that the IAEA had missed. In Oct 2004 a shipment of 308 pounds of "weapons-grade" plutonium went to France for conversion to reactor-grade plutonium.

Understand that they were trying to continue all this work on the sly so as to not draw new attention on their nuke program, so that they could be ahead of the game when the sanctions were finally eased.

You can google for these quotes:

According to Charles Duelfer in his report to the United States Congress, he confirmed that the Al Tuwaitha laboratory "was intentionally focused on research applicable for nuclear weapons development." and that the research continued until the U.S. invasion in 2003. He also reported that Iraq was "preserving and expanding knowledge to design and develop nuclear weapons." (Source: Duelfer's testimony before the U.S. Congress.)

"The plutonium processing was dispersed on-site by the bombing in 1991," said Michael Levi, the Federation's director. "But the Iraqis started to rebuild it. And they continued building there after 1998, when the Iraqis ended the inspections. "

"...So far, Marine nuclear and intelligence experts have discovered 14 buildings that betray high levels of radiation. Some of the readings show nuclear residue too deadly for human occupation."

> My point is that the president and his entire
> team have conceded the field.

The media reports this as a foregone conclusion, but I haven't heard a definitive statement from the administration to that effect. I think they are reticent, fearful of boasting or perhaps worse, betraying ongoing intelligence.

> They've long ago accepted as truth that the intel on
> WMD was wrong. They don't even argue the point
> anymore.

The media implies they have but they haven't.

> If you can show me otherwise, fine.

I have. See the apognosis site.

75% of Niger's export trade is uranium.