TenuredVulture wrote:...Karl Popper...

it's barely relevant, but Karl Popper is the main man of my current favorite health care radical, rheumatologist/epidemiologist/stats master/bull shit blaster Dr. Nortin Hadler.

The Nightman Cometh wrote:I was joking, but its weird to me that no one has brought up his Soviet policy, which is the biggest problem I have with what Reagan did. I probably don't have much of an argument here given how things ended up, but it annoys me how high tensions were raised given that the Soviet Union was well on its way to collapsing already even without the escalation of the arms race. I don't think it was worth the risk and I know of at least one documented case during Reagan's presidency where it almost DID cost us everything.

Again I realize this is all moot though.

There are some interesting accounts of all this though that challenge the notion that Reagan was ready to blow up the world. Reagan appears to have believed that nuclear weapons were literally evil. During the Reykjavik summit with Gorbachev, he seemed to recognize something about Gorbachev that almost no one else did--that this was someone he could work with. He thus defied his own administration and successfully figured out a way to negotiate actual arms reductions.

Again, there is much work to be done to understand a very interesting period in American political history.

drsmooth wrote:

allentown wrote:In the end, much of what you say doesn't matter.

It does if your purpose is to assess what the person contributed, how much they actually conceived strategy and directed the flow of events, vs merely what took place during his reign.

I generally agree with you that it doesn't matter a whole lot in the grand scheme of things.

Well, I assume there is a reason that good things or bad things, apart from natural disasters and unexpected nasty bad actor shocks from abroad, happen in a particular guy's reign. Did he communicate well with the public and successfully sell what his administration wanted to accomplish. Whether he was speaking as a sock puppet or grand visionary, whether he spoke off the top of his head or from a teleprompter, Reagan excelled at this. Was the President able to sell the plan to Congress. I think he gets pretty good marks there, also. I say this as a guy who is not a particular booster of Reagan or his policies. Regardless of his personal strengths and weaknesses, he had an effective administration and avoided the Nixon- or Johnson-type paranoia. He must have appointed effective subordinates, since they seem to have effectively carried out the general thrust of his policy desires. To me, a lot of those goals, especially in areas like the environment and helping the least advantage in society, were pretty rotten goals. For good or for bad, I think his appointees pretty much did what he wanted them to do. He wasn't a detail guy, but a President shouldn't try to be. If the President is one of his administrations top 3 creative/knowledge guys on foreign policy, economic policy, legal strategy, military strategic plan, science policy, health policy, etc. then that is a really hurting admnistration, because the President should have a dozen or more strategic thinkers/planners/key implementers in each of these areas, who vastly outstrip his knowledge and abilities there.

A University President can have a great, world-class physics, chemistry, biology, economics, and mathematics departments, while knowing squat about any of them. He will be regarded as a rousing success by one and all if he is great at schmoozing the alums, a terrific fund-raiser, has an excellent architect throw up a really fine building or two, and leaves the faculty to go about the business of teaching and conducting research without impediment from himself and under the guidance of well-chosen academic deans. It is much the same with a United States President.

drsmooth wrote:

TenuredVulture wrote:...Karl Popper...

it's barely relevant, but Karl Popper is the main man of my current favorite health care radical, rheumatologist/epidemiologist/stats master/bull $#@! blaster Dr. Nortin Hadler.

These days, opper is probably more well known for his philosophy of science and epistemology, not so much his political philosophy.

JD Hayworth is a blithering idiot

I'd really like to have a thread dedicated to Corporations and how they rule the world. I wanted to put this in the health/food thread, but really, it is a political issue really too. So I'll put it here ....

Have any of you seen Food Inc. and if so, how do you reconcile that?

If you'd like another slice of life example of how politics is wholly corrupt listen to this interview just today with an investigative journalist, who has followed Richard Blum closely, husband of Feinstein and how this man and his ilk have been ruinous to UC school system, 3rd world, and nuclear disarmament, and how Feinstein has used her clout to increase their wealth in an un--godly proportion. This is why I'm such a hater and am not interested in token incremental policies. We are sliding down a slope with exponential momentum. Our system is so broken, if there was anywhere I could go, I would...

jerseyhoya wrote:JD Hayworth is a blithering idiot

actually that's mccain, hayworth is a pompous idiot. the race is actually keating vs. abramoff.[/i]

I don't think there has been much of any discussion here about the details emerging re: the problems with climate change data collection, "climate-gate", and all of the other stuff that you would think would be top of the hour news but seems to be un-newsworthy to America's editors.

It makes me wonder - PTK - as a guy who is hip to the really really REAL truth that's out there, are you buying this whole climate change thing or do you have your doubts?

And no, BlueState (AKA BSG) does not need a special thread dedicated to corporations.

isn't the whole board dedicated to the corporation known as the Phillies?

VoxOrion wrote:I don't think there has been much of any discussion here about the details emerging re: the problems with climate change data collection, "climate-gate", and all of the other stuff that you would think would be top of the hour news but seems to be un-newsworthy to America's editors.

It makes me wonder - PTK - as a guy who is hip to the really really REAL truth that's out there, are you buying this whole climate change thing or do you have your doubts?

And no, BlueState (AKA BSG) does not need a special thread dedicated to corporations.

I've been under the impression that the fact the climate is changing is pretty well accepted, but whether or not it's man made being the debate.

Maybe, I don't know. People invested in the climate change thing are like tent revivalists and I'm not handling any snakes tonight for either side. I know there was this little discussed "climategate" incident and there's a new thing brewing where IPCC scientists are about to come out and discuss the poor placement of weather stations and all of the factors that may (or are, I don't know how far they'll go with it) be creating false data to show warming (for example, by being placed near industrial areas, urban areas, in locations that were farmland and were built up around, the large number of weather stations that were removed or are no longer operational, etc).

Which all seems like the kind of stuff that PTK is particularly interested in uncovering, so I want to know what PTK thinks.

The "climategate" was the top news story on everything I saw on TV while it was going on. A Pew research poll showed that 84% of scientists agree there is global warming, they're just not all in agreement as to the causes

Chavez, when asked "will the Phillies continue to demoralize K-Rod?"

The Dude wrote:The "climategate" was the top news story on everything I saw on TV while it was going on. A Pew research poll showed that 84% of scientists agree there is global warming, they're just not all in agreement as to the causes

I'm made uncomfortable by all of the need for polling in this regard. I mean, isn't science... empirical? Why the need for popular consensus? How do you poll "scientists"?

Though there was a period of time when I was doing research re: origins of man/origins of the universe, and one common theme that kept cropping up were scientists complaining about how popular media takes things and turns them into more than any scientist expected with little clarification, attention to detail, and next to nothing in the way of caveats. That's probably the answer to my own question.

Yes, science should be empirical, but there are always quacks that go against the grain with bizarre theories. Most of the crap you hear the news report on health, science, etc., is stuff from journals that aren't peer reviewed. That's the problem, not the actual scientists doing the work and having their work tested by their peers

But isn't lack of peer review one of the greatest problems with climate change theory? I know there's a lot changing there, but it sounds like the turn toward more peer review is going a direction that probably wasn't expected - for example, my understanding about all of this crappy weather station business is being driven by a response for more review. The peers are saying "your models are deeply flawed".

The problem is, sociologically we're all so invested in climate change being real that it's not going to be easy to digest data that suggests things aren't what we were told they were going to be. Already there's a large backing away from the idea of specifically global "warming" in favor of "climate change". I mean, you grew up, just like I did, being told that there as an Ice Age coming. At some point do we, as grown ups, stop and say "seriously, knock it off."

I have a feeling that at some point in the next decade we're going to look back and see that hyperbole like "An Inconvenient Truth" (the hockey stick is already falling apart, and the Al Gore "The Science is Settled" clips are already becoming the soundbite of mockery) and old episodes of kids shows (which are full of global warming programming) was driven by well meaning people who were trying to use an opportunity to get society to be more conservation oriented and went too far, thus losing a war for the sake of a battle or two.

I think the peer-reviewed articles agree there is global warming. After that is when it gets dicey.

VoxOrion wrote:I don't think there has been much of any discussion here about the details emerging re: the problems with climate change data collection, "climate-gate", and all of the other stuff that you would think would be top of the hour news but seems to be un-newsworthy to America's editors.

It makes me wonder - PTK - as a guy who is hip to the really really REAL truth that's out there, are you buying this whole climate change thing or do you have your doubts?

And no, BlueState (AKA BSG) does not need a special thread dedicated to corporations.

Surely the planet goes through cycles and always has. But to deny that carbon emissions has had any impact on the planet... is hard to imagine. I'd prefer to just acknowledge that the planet is massively polluted and we are not living in a balanced fashion. The polar caps are melting it seems. Very few people seem to deny that there is a correlation to man's impact on the planet, and certain phenomena. To what degree? What would have been going on regardless? I'm not going to say, the last two blizzards were because of climate change. But anyone who says, it's 100% hooey has a steep hill to climb to make that case.

I don't know a great deal about climate change/global warming/Teh Hotness, so maybe I'm off base here. But what I remember finding compelling in what I did read was the seemingly inexorable and accelerating melting of the polar ice caps and the likely consequences of rising sea levels.

If that's factually inaccurate--if the caps aren't melting--I think the benefits of knowing about that, and not spending the staggering amounts of money we'll otherwise spend to ameliorate the effects of rising oceans or (more likely, given how we do things) to deal with the awful consequences of flooded coastal regions, would be pretty well received. But it seems like--and again, if I'm wrong, tell me--most/all the voices casting doubt on global warming have a clear and powerful financial incentive to do so.

IMO the biggest threat here is falling even further behind in green technology. There are potentially millions of jobs there that we can't afford to let slip away regardless of how you feel about global warming.