Politics

[John Wasmuth]

…you’re HEALED!!!

Hallelujah!!!!

 

[Red Leg]

But it does change our ability to pay for our national interests, a fact that cannot be ignored.

Absolutely. But at the end of the day, this has nothing to do with fairness. Whether Europe collectively invests 5, 3, or zero percent in their own defense, access to European markets remains a critical US national interest.

 

[Lone Star Bluegrass]

Looks like Zelensky got some bad advice during a meeting with Senate Democrats Friday morning before he met with Trump.

Disaster in the Oval Office: Dems lead Zelensky, Ukraine off a cliff with pressure to reject mineral deal

Before meeting Trump, Zelensky met with anti-Trump Democrats who advised him to reject the terms of the mineral deal the president was offering, according to Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn).

nypost.com

 

[Brent in Az]

Zelensky is one of the most respected leaders of the free world, while Trump and Vance are seen as Putin's puppets.

https://www.reddit.com/r/UkraineWarVideoReport/comments/1j1mzog/factcheck_on_jd_vance_statements

You don't seem to set the bar very high.

 

[YancyW]

None of our investment in defense or support of NATO has anything to do with giving Europe a break. That doesn't mean they haven't taken advantage of our commitment to our national interests. But getting Europe to pay more in no way changes our national interests - not an iota. The "big beautiful ocean" as my uniquely inarticulate president refers to the Atlantic, was a great barrier in the 19th century. Not so much today when our economy is absolutely dependent upon a worldwide and highly vulnerable web of trade access. That will not change no matter how much Trump reaches out to Putin or how much we slash our own power projection capabilities or alienate our allies. We can either shoulder whatever is necessary to protect our critical national interests voluntarily or we will do so when we are suddenly facing the gun muzzle of some other power.

How would you force other NATO countries to live up to the commitments they made as part of membership?

Any country falling short of the defense spending commitment 2 out of any 3 years gets the boot for a decade? Just let it slide and send a strongly worded letter annually? Or something else?

 

[John Wasmuth]

Makes perfect sense

 

[Red Leg]

Looks like Zelensky got some bad advice during a meeting with Senate Democrats Friday morning before he met with Trump.

Disaster in the Oval Office: Dems lead Zelensky, Ukraine off a cliff with pressure to reject mineral deal

Before meeting Trump, Zelensky met with anti-Trump Democrats who advised him to reject the terms of the mineral deal the president was offering, according to Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn).

nypost.com

He also met with republicans and a joint republican/democrat group. This is an editorial. It doesn't mean it isn't worth reading. It may even be partially or wholly correct. But it is designed to create or reinforce a particular point of view. If the reader only reads editorials that support such a view it is simply confirmation bias.

 

[Brent in Az]

Actually, I guess he shouldn't have noted Vance was either a liar or horribly misinformed to his face. The ignorant or untruthful with great power are capable of all sorts of retaliation. That vertically challenged thing also gets repeated. Always a good line when there are no merits to a position I assume.

Zelinskyy shouldn't go away mad......he just needs to go away. Maybe he can go hang out with the Democrats who coached him into starting that shit show at the Whitehouse.

 

[Red Leg]

How would you force other NATO countries to live up to the commitments they made as part of membership?

Any country falling short of the defense spending commitment 2 out of any 3 years gets the boot for a decade? Just let it slide and send a strongly worded letter annually? Or something else?

Whatever works?

My point is very simple. No matter how frustrated we may become, our critical national interests with regard to Europe do not change in the least. I would go further to say, they also do not align with the strategic goals of Russia anymore today than they did fifty years ago.

 

[lwaters]

Of course he is. And he keeps referring to what the President asks of him.

It's probably going to take some money out of my pocket but I'm absolutely loving what Musk and DOGE are doing! It is long overdue. Many are like like me who may recieve some sort of funds from the government at times but also pay a lot of tax... And just simply want to have a leaner, less intrusive government that gets out of managing people's lives and back to the Constitutional roles of the government. Maintain the roads and bridges. Provide for the defense of the Nation.

But cut the graft, waste, corruption. Why should we not expect our government to be accountable?

Trump campaigned on this all and the People spoke with their votes. Trump is our president and certainly seems to be on top of all this.

Well I got a check for 288 dollars from the department of agriculture. So as far as I'm concerned Musk can get totally rid of that.

 

[Red Leg]

Zelinskyy shouldn't go away mad......he just needs to go away. Maybe he can go hang out with the Democrats who coached him into starting that shit show at the Whitehouse.

Go watch the whole interview. It went fine until the President and particularly Vance started spewing nonsense that Zelensky tried to correct. Of course that is verboten in the sanctity of the Oval office where our leadership can say or exaggerate whatever it likes.

Yes, he should have gritted his teeth and let either the lying or misinformed deputy leader of the free world say whatever he wanted. But it is simply wrong to put it all on Zelensky.

 

[Scott CWO]

Hi Scott. I agree. We all need to educate ourselves. I'm a scientist, retired now after a long career. I led large teams of scientists doing mindbendingly complex work. It was challenging and very fulfilling. Because of this background I understand how scientists in other fields do their work. When I see the overwhelming majority of climate scientists making the same observations, with evidence, which is then studied, repeated and confirmed, I'm comfortable with accepting their advice and warnings. Why aren't you?

Yes, the earth's climate has changed through the eons of time. But consider this. It took hundreds of millions of years for algae in the oceans to lay deep seams of slowly rotting carboniferous material, sucking stupendous quantities of carbon dioxide out of the air in the process and delivering the climate we have today. Now, us humans are releasing vast quantities of this stored carbon back into the atmosphere in a very short space of time. Anyone can understand that this has to have an effect. And it is. It's measurable. In the last 20 years we've been able to see it with our own eyes. It is the rate of change that is the problem. It's going to be very difficult and expensive to deal with and so limiting the impact is very much worth doing.

The climate doesn't care how we vote. A hurricane doesn't know if you're right or left of centre, and how far. This issue is not a matter of epochs. The effects are already being felt and will be very troubling in the next 50 and 100 years. I care about that and I'm sure you do too. It will affect our children and theirs and further generations of our families.

What's strange is how some folk feel that the facts of climate change are a personal attack upon them. It's not personal. It's factual. And, it's so easy to deal with. And so profitable. And healthier. Who doesn't want cleaner air to breathe? I have four ICE cars and enjoy keeping them going, but hardly ever drive them these days. It's fun. And it's thrifty, to extract maximum value from them. I tend to ride a bike most places. If I need another car it won't pollute the air we breathe with all kinds of emissions. Where's the problem with that?

I think it's magical the way aeroplanes fly and sailboats sail. And how so much electricity can be sucked out of sunlight. How electricity can be converted from wind, wave and tidal energy, or from the hot depths of the earth beneath our feet. How hydrogen can be split out of seawater with this energy. Bloody fantastic. It's as simple as using the force that is all around us. It's beautiful. How can people not be fascinated by this? Particularly when it's also a big part of the solution to a huge problem we face. Planting trees will help too. Who doesn't like trees?

C'mon Scott. Try to look at things differently. It's a wonderful feeling knowing that your energy needs have been fulfilled from a few panels sitting still in the sunlight, instead of burning stinky, dead algae and ruining the place. Yeah, I still do that from time to time, but less and less. Loving our beautiful planet and living in it comfortably and sustainably is something we can all do, and enjoy doing. For the benefit of us all.

As a fellow scientist, I disagree that it is an emergency. There have been many, many periods on earth before and after life appeared with much warmer conditions due to much higher CO2 levels. Denying this is folly and an inconvenient truth to the emergency crowd. Most scientists are liberal and left of center so the fact that most are onboard with you is not surprising. Just because some changes are occurring within your lifetime doesn’t prove it will keep accelerating or even continue. Quite frankly, nobody knows and it is hardly an emergency. There were exceedingly warm and exceedingly high CO2 periods in the earth’s past and yet, the earth survived and even flourished. Do you really think warming is ALL bad?

As I said, I am all for a clean environment. Nobody enjoys the wilderness and the outdoors more than I. However, there is nothing as efficient as the modern combustion engine and likely never will be. Petroleum products are used in so many products that we will likely never stop using. The batteries in you EV are encased in plastic. Half your vehicle is plastic. Half the materials in your home appliances are plastic. By the time batteries are made, they are black, not green. Wind power is black, not green. I manage the wildlife biology on dozens of large ranches. I have seen the damage done to the environment and wildlife by wind and solar projects. It’s a joke and a black eye. Meanwhile in the last 20 years, directional drilling for oil/gas has made the drilling and delivery of oil/gas much less impactful on the landscape than ever before. From one pad, ten wells can be drilled. Back in the 1990s, I was upset when drilling came to some of our ranches. Now, it isn’t nearly as problematic as wind and solar.

In the USA and other large countries with larger rural areas, most homes in the countryside are run on propane, a byproduct of oil/gas drilling. Once you get outside of any town in the USA, most of the homes, farms and ranches are heated/cooled with propane. It is not possible to construct pipelines for natural gas to all these distant homes. Solar and wind are not reliable enough at this point to replace propane. We don’t have enough electricity to replace propane either and it is more expensive, let alone the environmental damage caused by transmission line construction. This whole fantasy about getting rid of fossil fuels is ridiculous.

 

[Scott CWO]

Go watch the whole interview. It went fine until the President and particularly Vance started spewing nonsense that Zelensky tried to correct. Of course that is verboten in the sanctity of the Oval office where our leadership can say or exaggerate whatever it likes.

Yes, he should have gritted his teeth and let either the lying or misinformed deputy leader of the free world say whatever he wanted. But it is simply wrong to put it all on Zelensky.

This is exactly what happened! A guy that’s seen the death and destruction that Zelensky has witnessed has a low BS meter and I don’t blame him.

 

[375 Ruger Fan]

Zelinskyy shouldn't go away mad......he just needs to go away. Maybe he can go hang out with the Democrats who coached him into starting that shit show at the Whitehouse.

My dad was a career military officer, a pilot in the US Air Force. He served multiple deployments to Vietnam and other SEA countries in support of the Vietnam War. For most of my childhood, my dad was either deployed fighting a war or on "Alert" as a Strategic Air Command crew during the Cold War. I can remember asking my dad about war and he told me "When Statesmanship fails, war usually follows." What we saw last week in the Whitehouse was a failure of Statesmanship.

 

[Scott CWO]

After the "Bay of Pigs" fiasco Cuba was convinced that the US would invade. The Cuban take is those missiles would deter any future attempts by the US to do so.

Sorry but the main purpose of those missiles had little to do with Cuba and a lot more to do with the USSR. The USSR could still hit us with other missiles if we invaded Cuba.

 

[lwaters]

My dad was a career military officer, a pilot in the US Air Force. He served multiple deployments to Vietnam and other SEA countries in support of the Vietnam War. For most of my childhood, my dad was either deployed fighting a war or on "Alert" as a Strategic Air Command crew during the Cold War. I can remember asking my dad about war and he told me "When Statesmanship fails, war usually follows." What we saw last week in the Whitehouse was a failure of Statesmanship.

The US government and people are so divided that I'm actually amazed that China hasn't taken back Taiwan.

 

[Scott CWO]

The problem is that crowd has been caught in staggering, breath-taking dishonesty, as per the 2 mail server breaches at the University of East Anglia back around 2010.

One thing I have observed with the data - every time they discover an error in their calculations or data, it makes things look worse.

An errata distribution should follow a normal Gaussian curve. Only in "climate science," it just doesn't. The probability of errors occurring in only one direction is literally zero. In the real world, there should be relative parity in errors where conclusions are overstated vs understated. Every "error" they need to correct seems to be an assertion that they previously understated the magnitude of the threat.

A gaggle of scientists wrote a letter to Einstein upbraiding him on relativity. Einstein's response (paraphrasing): If I were wrong, it would have only taken one of them to expose the error.

While a bit hyperbolic, this is accurate (from the Paramount+ show "Landman"

100% true. It’s a lefty wet dream to get rid of fossil fuels. It is in so many products and parts of our lives. How the heck would we get to Africa to hunt without jet fuel? Have been to an airport lately? All are busy as hell but nobody is supposed to travel anymore? Take an electric train across the ocean? Electric trains between every city? Building all this rail lines across our farms and ranches and getting rid of air travel? Yeah, that’s good for the environment! People need to wake up and get some common sense and unfortunately, common sense is in low supply in much of the “scientific” world.

 

[Tundra Tiger]

For too long the world has taken advantage of our generosity and sense of fairness.
Solve your own problems and lie in the bed you make.

Advice you should follow! Enjoy your cave!

 

[Aaron N]

In other news, it +3c here in central Alberta, and the last day I have to get the family out ice fishing before the season closes at the end of the month. The things that I can control in my world are pretty effing amazing at this point in time!

 

[Scott CWO]

ya know what? You guys are right.
I've been reading NYT and watching NBC to improve my diet. And coupled with this place's comments... I've turned over a whole new leaf.
Why didn't I see it before?!

Zelensky is not only just amazing, bold, and dashing, but also clearly a genius.
A man to be respected, idolized, and looked up to (he'll need to be on a chair for that bit.)
And hey... quite the fashion trend setter in that avant-garde military look.
Totally makes the old fashioned and respectable suit and tie a thing of the past. Antiquated. Silly. Obsolete and shameful at this point.

You may be asking yourselves what won me over.

It's all the democrat, hollywood, and WEF-connected people fawning over him. Especially 2-tier Keir in the UK. Solid guy there. Because if THEY think he's great, I should too.

Also... because Trump.

Weird post. I can agree with some people on certain things and disagree completely on others. I don’t give a dang what the liberals think of Zelensky and there are things about him I do not like. One thing I do admire are his guts and balls to speak the truth while Trump speaks exaggerations. Exaggeration is a form of lying in my book and for most people. If you can’t win your argument with the truth, exaggeration shows me weakness.