WilliePilgrim's Comments (1010)

“OK...well, extacy will do that to you.
Things never being as they seem, I wonder if what's really going on with Tiger and his family is something other than just the girls. If Tiger was doing more extacy with his wife they'd probably still be together in some kind of polyamorous accomodation that respects each others' boundaries.”

“Nowhere does he talk about his fantasy involving sleeping with anyone. Boinking? Yes. Sleeping? No.”

“Conservatives of the old-school have long claimed that the Gov't's ambitions for a strong centralized power was to help people, were largely about helping people that were namely themselves. This statistic does little to deflate those claims and much to support them. Is there no outrage that our nations capitol has become a symbol of the differences between the managerial beaurocracy and the rest of the country?”

“Oh, and while I may think the price is a bit over the top, I fully support anyone who wishes to commit an act of civil disobedience when it comes to getting it. The states should but out of people's business. The prohibition on under-age drinking has driven drinking by teens into a place where it is now harder to controll and causes more damage. Mothers against drunk driving....what will you do when computers take over the driving for us? Mothers against drunk passengers?”

“Y'know, scientific experiments have proven over and over again that it would taste twice as good if they doubled the price. Of course, some would argue with science, especially those that can afford $150 beers thinking "how can I be both rich enough to afford this stuff and yet stupid enough to buy it at that price?" And to think it doesn't even come with a little umbrella? Ha, I say! Ha!”

“Wow! What a spectacular display. As our world becomes more and more connected, and as our examination of the planet itself becomes more detailed and thorough, we are coming to realize that these kinds of cosmic phenomena are not quite as rare as we once believed, and there's evidence that during certain portions of our cyclic and periodic travels through the galaxy they could be a lot more common and may have been instrumental in the onset of dark ages of the past such as the one that stalled the bronze age and perhaps even earlier. But what ever their cause, frequency and source, they should serve as an alarm to our civilization regarding the need for our future to be a space faring one. My hopes are slim that the US can do this now with our current beaurocratic culture and hypesensitivity to risk in space developement, on top of our seemingly unbreakable attachment to cold-war era thinking of only using balistic misile tech for launching systems. But maybe China or India or some consortium of devleoped nations and industries will re-vitalize Robert Truax's concept of the SeaDragon, or begin work on a electromagnetic mass accelerating rail gun so that we can get to orbit cheap enough to initiate large scale and permanent stations that can observe, warn us and do something about cosmic impactors. Our future could very well depend on it far more than a bit of warming.”

“It's typically not just sea-level rise that made ancient cities disappear. Sometimes it is subsidence caused by a myriad of conditions such as volcanic eruptions, quakes, isostatic rebound/subsidence and even sedimentation. The planet is anything but stable and whether this predicted change is due to CO2 or not is largely a result of modelling which is fine but frought with difficulty in predicting the specifics of any particular trend.
Don't believe that tectonics means it will take a long time for a specific island to submerge though on average it might be correct. The devil, as they say, is in the details...there, and in trying to controll ,or even predict ,nature.”

“Would any group of people, knowing what we know now about the planet's geophysics purposely choose to live on a sinking tectonic plate ontop of a handfull of low coral atolls and barely above sea-level reefs, even if we knew that sea-leve, for whatever reason, wasn't going to rise? Tsunamis from quakes or cosmic impacts, or even rogue waves threaten these inhabitants every day.
I know I'm labelled a denier by some though I believe the climate is warming and changing and some of it attributable to human impacts, but just not very much and the tens of trillions expected to be diverted to CO2 issues would be much better spent in fortifying lowlying nations, or moving them altogether. So, you don't have to deny warming to be labelled a denier. One simply needs to disagree with any of the specifics.
I feel sorry for the people of Tuvalu,but perhaps instead of devoutly studying the scripture in their prominent church they should be requesting that the world's religions come to their aid, help them bring shiploads of rock and fill material to elevate and armor their island and hold on until the next cooling phase begins, which could be sooner than we think, but everything on earth points to its return more surely than the guy in the sky to whom they've been praying...and no, I don't mean Al Gore in his private jet.”

“On the face of it, taxing the speculators makes so much sense. Who could disagree? You'd have to be 'out of touch' or maybe a little too much in touch to not see it. I guess I'm in some other category because while I'm as poor a churchmouse I can't see how creating a new revenue stream for a congress that has become drunk with the never ending flow of power that those revenues bring will benefit us much. Of course we need revenue to fund socially beneficial programs and I'm not a guy who hates government, but lately I can't help but notice that the more money there is to disburse the more serious the potential for corruption seems to be...and in some cases actual corruption...and not just to those awefull GOP apparatchiks and their lobbyists, but even the Democrats! Yes, it's true! It's as if they're more concerned with making themselves cozy with the very industries they are regulating and taxing with an eye towards becoming a consultant for these lobbyists...all of which is perfectly legal, you understand. I just wish I got better government for all that we pay into it, but the likelihood seems remote as long as congress appeals mostly to the powerhungry instead of those who have a true desire for public service even when it costs them personally. Genuine transparency could help but those in control don't seem too interested currently.”

“To whatever degree the title of this article is true, any anxiety over it is overblown and misplaced. Once upon a time, when we were locked in a cold war where nuclear tipped balistic missiles were pointed at major cities around the world, the space race, aside from the ostensible prestige it implied, was all about military high ground. Now that concern is minor and we are left with a space program designed around balistic missiles that the DoD liked for reasons having little to do with space developement. Had we really been interested in space developement we would have launched using a Robert Truax's SeaDragon and had permanent space stations of great size and capability, but SeaDragon could not be done in secret and not squirreled away in silos in secret spots, so Sea Dragon was only good for space developement, not war, so it was axed. Now we see that space dev. is a money maker and loosing our lead means there are serious business competitors. Good. That will stimulate us if our leadership pulls their collective brains our from their archaic nether-regions. There's been some good movement however, with Obama's promoting the creation of prizes for industial advances targetting energy and space! Let's keep this momentum moving and get NASA and DoD out of the way.”

“It may not be quite that simple. Don't forget that the criminal component makes millions from its illegal status. Prohibition promotes crime. Send some support to the good folks at LEAP (Law Enforcement Against Prohibition) and help bring some sanity to those who want rational law enforcement to focus on genuine crime.”

“Monkeys have never been known to get tired of being monkeys.”

“Possibly the most compellingly beautiful women I've ever seen; an exquisite amalgamation of my first girlfriend (Italian with that distinctive Italian face...those eyes, that nose and that mouth) and my strikingly beautiful platinum blond mother, and Cher or Ronnie Specter. The video is so surreal with such incredibly vivid and astonishingly penetrating images and actions. I can still see it when I shut my eyes, and I hear it (en francais!). Perfectly pop and yet deeper than prayer.”

“I can't say how low they'll go but if it's going to be determined by what they're worth, I'd say they ought to be paying us to watch them on top of the 20 minutes of commercials that are impossible to avoid when you first pop them into the player.”

“These days the best university, at least if we mean the best available learning experience and not the nicest quad or swankiest architecture or best endowment, exists right at most people's fingertips. It's called the internet and despite the fact that most students use it only for cheating on homework, plagerizing and social networking or finding out about which hottie is america's most scandalous, one can from the comfort of one's home experience and learn from the greatest lecturers at places like Harvard, MIT, CalTech and almost anywhere. One day we will look on our current practice of making education hard to get as one of the dumbest ideas we ever hobbled ourselves with. Learning and education should be free and lifelong...and believe it or not, fun.”

“Krakaur is a fine writer but I'd be reluctant to have writers determine our military's leadership based on what to us seems like an acceptible behavior. It may be a bad decision but guys like McChrystal are pretty rare. His superb qualifications and his unparalelled experience and his grasp of the situation; the fact that it's evolved since the early days in Afghanistan, and the support he has from his troops, should over-ride what from the present postion seems to be more a case of "poor form" rather than as a bad decision. There was a similar situation, as we all recall, with George Patton, where a newspaper story reveals what was an instance of poor form, one which the soldier who was slapped even thought was overblown, and it determined who would lead in the invasion of Germany. The result was that Allied forces missed the opportunity to ovewhelm a retreating enemy and thousands of people were killed as a result from a war that became far more protracted than it would have been, if only we had Patton and his proven abilities leading instead of being pulled from leadership. It may have been noble but that's little satisfaction for those who paid the terrible price. The idea of a humane war is a contradiction in terms but any decision that prolongs it is truly and measurably inhumane.”

“Well, the CEO's pay may be way out of alignment but it's not the CEO's fault that it's that way. They are at once lucky and smart in various combination and what they do with their money is their business...and if it's not their business, whose business should it be? Some career politicians? The best way to get the money away from them is to make it easier for small businesses to grow and hire and pay better than the big corps; in other words really make them compete and abandon the elusive notion of legislated equality and fairness in the majority of those places where we apply those draconian measures.”

“They (expecially the orange bubble thingee) look like they were designed to carry their passengers (or should we call them "payloads"?..I'm sure we'll have to pay loads to buy them) through a "series of tubes", which considering the carnage on our highways (and that's just on our highways now) it might be the only sensible way to go.”

“If one ever sees a well fed population of polar bears, one is looking at an anomoly in the polar bear's usual natural history. Polar bears are famous for their ravenous appetites and are one of the few large terrestrial or marine mammal predators that wil, without hesitation, come right up and prey on just about anything it can, including other polar bears. Furthermore one of the most serious threats to the species is not the loss of ice, but rather the loss of their original habitat which up until commercial harvesting of bird-eggs and fish from the many shoals and small islands of the North Atlantic, used to reach down to the St Lawrence in the West and possibly as far south as the rookeries near the mouth of the Straits of Gibraltar.
If the ice melts, it will mean a temporary loss of one of the polar bears' habitats but it will also mean a proliferation of seals and without ice a flourishing of plankton from the water's exposure to summer sun=plankton=fish=seals=polar bears, provided we don't commercially harvest it unwisely.
But first we need to be realistic about what we are dealing with and the current emotions regarding the polar bears instead of the integrity of the entire oceanic habitat is not very good.”

“Funny bit. Colbert's breat and Gore is a good sport. It's why, even though I don't think CO2 is the big threat requiring some complex trading scheme, costing trillions, a breeding ground for corruption and waste, and doing little and possible screwing up things even worse (though that's another discussion), I heart Al Gore. I also love the the environment and want to see a vigorous and muscular international effort to address what I consider more critical and immediate needs while boosting by a large margin research efforts to study and address the problem. Surely nobody anymore believes we're in imminent danger of turing into a greenhouse furnace as Venus has been so famously mischaracterized, but our fisheries are collapsing for real, our coastal waters are messed up with runoff and silt (cause of coral die-off), and habitat for wild and diverse ecosystems are being fragmented and crowded out. Resources extraction is messy and the result is a further frazzeled food web and declining overall health. But it's not CO2 and I don't think it will be. I've studied the arguement everyway possible and I still read all that I can but the reality is that at its worst it's still far less problematic than many other issues. If I'm wrong I'll change my mind and I hope Mr Gore will too but the debate, contrary to his statement is just not over in the sense that certainty has been achieved.”

“Turning oneself in via 911 is far better than continuing to pose a threat to others and for that the drunk driver deserves praise and encouragement if drinking continues to be a problem. Instead the posters smug chuckling we should hope that others take the hint as well and one thing that could help is if anyone who does report themselves drunk while driving can have that taken into consideration and if done before any harm, can be used to absolve them of liability and expunge their record. The 5th amendment might turn out to be a usefull tool to keep productive people out of trouble in ways never imagined by the original writers.”

“Should be interesting; the effusive versus the elusive.
But in all seriousness, I would look forward to a genuine debate, and not just one of those speechifying forums that often are delivered disquised as debate.
I think we might find some interesting and surprising revelations.
Our commonly held estimations of both men are so overly informed by the media that I have come to doubt everything I have ever felt about these guys at one time or another and simply shrug my shoulders and say to myself there's just no way anyone can know (let alone communicate to others) just what it is that goes on in the complex minds of these enigmatic personalities.”

“Anything to assert that climate is supposed to always be just the way we say it should be based on todays science because we all know we won't ever be smarter than we are now. Is that some sort of religious dogma? It seems the deniers are those who deny that science is still in its infancy.”

“While I recognize that the climate has been warming to varying degrees for the last 10K years, I also recognize that the history of the glacier in Kilimanjaro is one that has seen it gone before. It's present incarnation is due to precipitation, or should I say reduced precipitation. The moisture that produces precip in that region is from the transpiration of H2O from the forests to the west of the mountain from where its consistent and prevailing winds originate. Of course the forests have been cut down so the precip and the cooling cloud that would bing them to the elevations where snow is produced, is much reduced. The minor elevation in temps at that alt have negligible effects.
For the unique montane biosystem up near the glacier it could mean that it can at last expand up higher since the ice will have retreated at least for a little while. If the nations surrounding Kilimanjaro wish to see an ice field up there they should start seriously applying themselves towards reforesting the source of Kilimanjaro's snow; the forests to the west in Central Africa which have been reduced by the arid conditions which resulted from deforestation.”

“In a word, no. A real game changer will be when we discover that the cumulative effects of our bad management of resources and not the mere correlation to a number which for most of its record in history has been arrived at by proxy is the real problem. We already know that co2 varies and trying to control the climate by controlling co2 is like trying to put out fire by controlling the smoke.
Furthermore the physics of it are such that no matter how much co2 you put in at this point the saturation point has already been reached. It will not interfer with any more IR...it doesn't really "absorb" heat anyway...another misconception that is often employed. For instance does our jacket absorb heat? Not much unless it's made of concrete. You need mass to absorb energy. The mass of the co2 in the atomoshpere even at current levels is vanishingly small. We'd be better off putting our resources into other methods to address climate change just as the dutch and many civilizations have done to make the world habitable for a long time.”