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Thread: Welcome to day 1 of the illegitimate U.S. government, make your predictions here

  1. #151
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    Re: Welcome to day 1 of the illegitimate U.S. government, make your predictions here

    Quote Originally Posted by tom444 View Post
    See how obtuse the right is^^^. This poster probably really beliefs that.
    You bet your ass I believe it. There is no way anyone thinks Biden is capable to run this country. You/they voted purely on hate for Trump. Never mind there is now a man in mental decline running the most powerful country in the world... even though he isn't. You got what you wanted.... the radical progressives running the show. Good luck!

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    Re: Welcome to day 1 of the illegitimate U.S. government, make your predictions here

    Quote Originally Posted by Mojouw View Post
    From the carbon cycle. And the movement of carbon through the various ecological and biological systems. Where else could it come from?
    The carbon cycle, very good. So let's back up a step. Knowing what you do about the carbon cycle - before it was incorporated into primitive photosynthetic organisms ... that carbon was where?
    See you Space Cowboy ...

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    Re: Welcome to day 1 of the illegitimate U.S. government, make your predictions here

    Quote Originally Posted by steelreserve View Post
    The carbon cycle, very good. So let's back up a step. Knowing what you do about the carbon cycle - before it was incorporated into primitive photosynthetic organisms ... that carbon was where?
    I know where you are going with this. The idea that there is the same amount of carbon in the system now than there was at any point in the past since there can not magically be new inputs of carbon into the system. While there are methods for increasing the amount of carbon in the overall system by small degrees (primarily in the form the interaction of solar radiation with various compounds in the upper atmosphere - it the basic principle behind radiocarbon dating for instance), nothing is going to massively change it by orders of magnitude or something.

    So let us just jump a few moves to the end of this. Explain to me how all forms of carbon are the same? Because for the argument I suspect your are trying to slowly roll out to work, that has to be the case.

    But even outside of the boundaries of any climate change discussion, we know that "carbon" is not the same depending on the compound under consideration. Carbon bound up in complex hydrocarbons do not function the same as carbon in the form of carbon dioxide or even carbon monoxide. Because the amount of carbon in the overall system is not the problem. It is the form it takes in that system and the availability of reservoirs for each particular form of carbon/carbon containing compounds.

  4. #154
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    Re: Welcome to day 1 of the illegitimate U.S. government, make your predictions here

    pollution is fine if you pay for it , oh and by the way the people you are paying are putting it in their pockets they are not making that pollution go away ...

    so goods and services go up by a large measure and the pollution levels do not change ...

    its just another way to siphon money off the people and many of you are to stupid to see it
    Kenny Pickett is who I though he was .. Eagles problem now

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    Re: Welcome to day 1 of the illegitimate U.S. government, make your predictions here

    Quote Originally Posted by Mojouw View Post
    I know where you are going with this. The idea that there is the same amount of carbon in the system now than there was at any point in the past since there can not magically be new inputs of carbon into the system. While there are methods for increasing the amount of carbon in the overall system by small degrees (primarily in the form the interaction of solar radiation with various compounds in the upper atmosphere - it the basic principle behind radiocarbon dating for instance), nothing is going to massively change it by orders of magnitude or something.

    So let us just jump a few moves to the end of this. Explain to me how all forms of carbon are the same? Because for the argument I suspect your are trying to slowly roll out to work, that has to be the case.

    But even outside of the boundaries of any climate change discussion, we know that "carbon" is not the same depending on the compound under consideration. Carbon bound up in complex hydrocarbons do not function the same as carbon in the form of carbon dioxide or even carbon monoxide. Because the amount of carbon in the overall system is not the problem. It is the form it takes in that system and the availability of reservoirs for each particular form of carbon/carbon containing compounds.
    No, you thought you knew where I was going with this.

    The real point is that given the process by which they are formed, all of the carbon currently contained in fossil fuels originally started out as carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, before being converted into organic matter and eventually hydrocarbons. Burning those as fuel simply returns some fraction of them to their previous form. You are not really introducing new CO2 into the ecosystem so much as restoring some fraction of what was already there in the past.

    We're almost to the good part! Clearly, you wouldn't want to restore the CO2 concentration all the way to ancient levels - but the good news is you can't do that, or even come close. What fraction of it do you think is even possible to restore as atmospheric CO2 before you run out of hydrocarbons? (Hint: It's not much!)
    See you Space Cowboy ...

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    Re: Welcome to day 1 of the illegitimate U.S. government, make your predictions here

    hydroxychloroquine


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    Re: Welcome to day 1 of the illegitimate U.S. government, make your predictions here

    Quote Originally Posted by tom444 View Post
    hydroxychloroquine
    deflection, its all you got. Along with monkey pics. Atleast Trump had hope with hydroxychloroquine, Biden says nothing we can do to change outcome in next few months. I wonder if he has holding white flag. 1 week in and already broken promises, job loss, back to energy dependence, and China as well as Russia benefiting. I really think hair product is cause of joe’s dementia, too much sniffing.

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    Re: Welcome to day 1 of the illegitimate U.S. government, make your predictions here

    Quote Originally Posted by steelreserve View Post
    No, you thought you knew where I was going with this.

    The real point is that given the process by which they are formed, all of the carbon currently contained in fossil fuels originally started out as carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, before being converted into organic matter and eventually hydrocarbons. Burning those as fuel simply returns some fraction of them to their previous form. You are not really introducing new CO2 into the ecosystem so much as restoring some fraction of what was already there in the past.

    We're almost to the good part! Clearly, you wouldn't want to restore the CO2 concentration all the way to ancient levels - but the good news is you can't do that, or even come close. What fraction of it do you think is even possible to restore as atmospheric CO2 before you run out of hydrocarbons? (Hint: It's not much!)
    Well...that is a version of the argument I figured you were making and it is not a new one. But we could play it out if you want.

    How far back in time do you propose to go? Previous geologic epochs? If so, which one? The rise of mammals? KT Boundary? Break up of Pangea? Rise of single cell life? Rise of C4 plants? Or just plant life in general? Or algae? Prior to the cooling of the crust? After? Before or after the formation of the atmosphere? What about the oceans?

    Depending on when you want to pick...the level of CO2 varies wildly. There was point during the history of the earth that there was so much oxygen in the atmosphere and so little CO2 that spontaneous combustion is believed to have been not only possible but fairly common. There was a period of time were the appearance and proliferation of some of the most basic carbon fixing plant species removed so much Co2 from the atmosphere that they accelerated the arrival of one of the ice ages. Alternatively there have been times when CO2 levels were higher than they are today in a period of Eath's history with almost no sea /glacial ice and ocean levels 100+ feet higher than they are today.

    So I am not sure what you point is?

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    Re: Welcome to day 1 of the illegitimate U.S. government, make your predictions here

    Deaths: 419, 000

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    Re: Welcome to day 1 of the illegitimate U.S. government, make your predictions here


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    Re: Welcome to day 1 of the illegitimate U.S. government, make your predictions here


  12. #162
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    Re: Welcome to day 1 of the illegitimate U.S. government, make your predictions here

    Quote Originally Posted by Mojouw View Post
    Well...that is a version of the argument I figured you were making and it is not a new one. But we could play it out if you want.

    How far back in time do you propose to go? Previous geologic epochs? If so, which one? The rise of mammals? KT Boundary? Break up of Pangea? Rise of single cell life? Rise of C4 plants? Or just plant life in general? Or algae? Prior to the cooling of the crust? After? Before or after the formation of the atmosphere? What about the oceans?

    Depending on when you want to pick...the level of CO2 varies wildly. There was point during the history of the earth that there was so much oxygen in the atmosphere and so little CO2 that spontaneous combustion is believed to have been not only possible but fairly common. There was a period of time were the appearance and proliferation of some of the most basic carbon fixing plant species removed so much Co2 from the atmosphere that they accelerated the arrival of one of the ice ages. Alternatively there have been times when CO2 levels were higher than they are today in a period of Eath's history with almost no sea /glacial ice and ocean levels 100+ feet higher than they are today.

    So I am not sure what you point is?
    The point is knowing your parameters. What math problem are you trying to solve and what are the inputs?

    In this case, the only two relevant numbers are the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere (X), and the amount of combustible hydrocarbons available to humans (Y). Will X+Y put you over whatever "acceptable" level you should maintain? Well, most climate change arguments just use some open-ended umlimited version of Y, as if you could keep adding CO2 forever. Is that good science?

    What are the parameters? Well, let's go back three billion years to the Great Oxygenation Event, immediately before which represented the highest concentration of atmospheric CO2 in history. That is your maximum value of Y. Over the next billion or two years, virtually all of that was converted into free oxygen and single-celled marine life. Almost all of the carbon, in its various forms, ended up in the biosphere or on the ocean floor.

    Now, knowing the very specific conditions under which fossil fuels form - how much of that environmental carbon do you think ended up as combustible hydrocarbons, instead of inert things like calcium carbonate or mundane sedimentary rock? All of it?

    What else might have affected the amount of hydrocarbons available for man-made climate change? Well, since you're such a big science guy, surely you know that 1 to 3 billion years ago, nothing lived on land, it was all primitive marine organisms. And what else do we know happens on the ocean floor? Well, unless you're a plate tectonics denier, you know that the entire oceanic crust is subducted into the mantle every 250 million years or so and replaced with fresh volcanic rock. Everything else in it is carried into the mantle and destroyed too, which includes organic matter and fossil fuels. Over billions of years, you lose most of your carbon from the environment, and on a long enough timeline, lose so much that you have difficulty sustaining plant life. Most of this happens in the first billion or so years, when there is the largest starting pool of carbon. This process is well known to geologists and astrophysicists as it relates to exoplanetary science, but for some reason (can't imagine why) is largely ignored by climate science. It also explains why very few of the combustible hydrocarbons in existence today are more than ~250 million years old.

    So, how much of that original carbon is available to humans, as recoverable, combustible hydrocarbons that will result in man-made climate change? Being generous, we're talking single-digit percentages of the original atmospheric carbon content. Realistically, it may only be 1-2%. A piddling amount in comparison with irreversible natural processes that have already taken place. And that is what we are obsessing over.

    Will that be enough to render the planet inhospitable? Why, thankfully, we have all of those wonderful examples of past climates, that you pointed out while trying to flex your intellectual muscle, that demonstrate no, you cannot cause a climate disaster by restoring a small percentage of that CO2 to the atmosphere. Yes, you can cause changes, the laws of thermodynamics make that indisputable. But it will be more of a climate inconvenience than a climate emergency.

    I remember having this same conversation about 10 years ago with a woman I know who is an honest to god climate researcher; spends half her time in places like Alaska and Norway measuring ice melt. You could see the gears turning in her head, with the kind of alarm of somebody questioning whether the last several years of their life had been meaningless, and how that could be possible over something so simple. Yet the math doesn't lie. In the end, she was reduced to, "OK, there might not be drastic climate change, but it's still important to study the side effects of smaller changes." The inevitable conclusion among almost any climate change advocate who has been willing to engage in honest discussion, rather than angrily reciting doctrine.

    Funny thing is, I am actually more of an environmentalist than most people you would find. I am just not concerned very much about climate change at all, because of what the scientific evidence says. It is much more concerning that, for example, we have cut down more than half the world's trees, or killed two-thirds of the fish, or generate alarming amounts of trash. But those things do not get the same attention because they are specific problems with specific solutions, not a mysterious boogeyman that can be used as a blanket justification for all sorts of odd behaviors and policies. In that sense, it is far more similar to a superstition or a religious doctrine than a scientific principle. Hundreds of years from now, historians will look back at all the bizarre rituals people performed in the name of climate change, in much the way we look back at people who did dances and used holy water to try to cure the plague, or any number of similar instances where they tried foolish measures to prevent something they didn't understand.

    So, what is the end result here? By all means, you should be thanking me, because you can rest easy that you no longer have to worry about one of your greatest concerns. But instead, you will probably just be mad, because you would rather hold on to all that fear, and you couldn't bear to admit that the answer is so simple, or that anyone without a PhD and lifelong career in science (other than you, of course, you are special) could grasp scientific principles. "But I'm sure that's a little much for you to comprehend."

    Commence the yeah-buts.
    See you Space Cowboy ...

  13. #163
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    Re: Welcome to day 1 of the illegitimate U.S. government, make your predictions here

    Quote Originally Posted by tom444 View Post
    Dr. Pepper is more qualified.

    - - - Updated - - -

    Quote Originally Posted by tom444 View Post
    Deaths: 419, 000


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    Teach a lib to fish--he is back the next day asking for more free fish.

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  14. #164
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    Re: Welcome to day 1 of the illegitimate U.S. government, make your predictions here

    Quote Originally Posted by steelreserve View Post
    The point is knowing your parameters. What math problem are you trying to solve and what are the inputs?

    In this case, the only two relevant numbers are the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere (X), and the amount of combustible hydrocarbons available to humans (Y). Will X+Y put you over whatever "acceptable" level you should maintain? Well, most climate change arguments just use some open-ended umlimited version of Y, as if you could keep adding CO2 forever. Is that good science?

    What are the parameters? Well, let's go back three billion years to the Great Oxygenation Event, immediately before which represented the highest concentration of atmospheric CO2 in history. That is your maximum value of Y. Over the next billion or two years, virtually all of that was converted into free oxygen and single-celled marine life. Almost all of the carbon, in its various forms, ended up in the biosphere or on the ocean floor.

    Now, knowing the very specific conditions under which fossil fuels form - how much of that environmental carbon do you think ended up as combustible hydrocarbons, instead of inert things like calcium carbonate or mundane sedimentary rock? All of it?

    What else might have affected the amount of hydrocarbons available for man-made climate change? Well, since you're such a big science guy, surely you know that 1 to 3 billion years ago, nothing lived on land, it was all primitive marine organisms. And what else do we know happens on the ocean floor? Well, unless you're a plate tectonics denier, you know that the entire oceanic crust is subducted into the mantle every 250 million years or so and replaced with fresh volcanic rock. Everything else in it is carried into the mantle and destroyed too, which includes organic matter and fossil fuels. Over billions of years, you lose most of your carbon from the environment, and on a long enough timeline, lose so much that you have difficulty sustaining plant life. Most of this happens in the first billion or so years, when there is the largest starting pool of carbon. This process is well known to geologists and astrophysicists as it relates to exoplanetary science, but for some reason (can't imagine why) is largely ignored by climate science. It also explains why very few of the combustible hydrocarbons in existence today are more than ~250 million years old.

    So, how much of that original carbon is available to humans, as recoverable, combustible hydrocarbons that will result in man-made climate change? Being generous, we're talking single-digit percentages of the original atmospheric carbon content. Realistically, it may only be 1-2%. A piddling amount in comparison with irreversible natural processes that have already taken place. And that is what we are obsessing over.

    Will that be enough to render the planet inhospitable? Why, thankfully, we have all of those wonderful examples of past climates, that you pointed out while trying to flex your intellectual muscle, that demonstrate no, you cannot cause a climate disaster by restoring a small percentage of that CO2 to the atmosphere. Yes, you can cause changes, the laws of thermodynamics make that indisputable. But it will be more of a climate inconvenience than a climate emergency.

    I remember having this same conversation about 10 years ago with a woman I know who is an honest to god climate researcher; spends half her time in places like Alaska and Norway measuring ice melt. You could see the gears turning in her head, with the kind of alarm of somebody questioning whether the last several years of their life had been meaningless, and how that could be possible over something so simple. Yet the math doesn't lie. In the end, she was reduced to, "OK, there might not be drastic climate change, but it's still important to study the side effects of smaller changes." The inevitable conclusion among almost any climate change advocate who has been willing to engage in honest discussion, rather than angrily reciting doctrine.

    Funny thing is, I am actually more of an environmentalist than most people you would find. I am just not concerned very much about climate change at all, because of what the scientific evidence says. It is much more concerning that, for example, we have cut down more than half the world's trees, or killed two-thirds of the fish, or generate alarming amounts of trash. But those things do not get the same attention because they are specific problems with specific solutions, not a mysterious boogeyman that can be used as a blanket justification for all sorts of odd behaviors and policies. In that sense, it is far more similar to a superstition or a religious doctrine than a scientific principle. Hundreds of years from now, historians will look back at all the bizarre rituals people performed in the name of climate change, in much the way we look back at people who did dances and used holy water to try to cure the plague, or any number of similar instances where they tried foolish measures to prevent something they didn't understand.

    So, what is the end result here? By all means, you should be thanking me, because you can rest easy that you no longer have to worry about one of your greatest concerns. But instead, you will probably just be mad, because you would rather hold on to all that fear, and you couldn't bear to admit that the answer is so simple, or that anyone without a PhD and lifelong career in science (other than you, of course, you are special) could grasp scientific principles. "But I'm sure that's a little much for you to comprehend."

    Commence the yeah-buts.
    Sure, man-made climate change will not extinguish all life on the planet. As you have pointed out there was life here in past epochs when there was high(er) amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere. But it certainly has a shot of moving the climate out of the goldilocks zone that makes human life as we know it possible. Say you melt all the sea ice because enough CO2 gets pushed into the atmosphere - and there is certainly enough available from fossil fuels and whatnot to do this. Plus the math is swayed because, as you have pointed out, we keep cutting down the largest CO2 sinks available. That is going to raise ocean levels to far more than "inconvenient" levels for a great deal of people.

    But stop short of that. Let's keep some ice around and say we only lose bits of coastline (I mean those bits will involve large swaths of population, but lets not quibble on the details). Still we are going to heat the planet up more than a bit. Now we are interfering with the narrow range of conditions that crop plants find viable. Going to start seeing troubles with the food supply in more than a few places.

    Because, this is the thing. We can talk about CO2 until we are blue in the face (see what I did there?) but it is more than that...despite what I read as your claims to the contrary, but I might be mistaken. But there is a shockingly narrow range of conditions that make human life possible. We have the entire history of the Earth to see that the stuff we need to live (rainfall, edible plants, amenable surface temperatures, etc.) only flourishes in a relatively tight band of overall climatic conditions. We also know enough (and there is a troubling amount we do not know) about how the global climate and everything associated with it works that we understand it to be a multi-faceted system with tons of interdependent variables. So if you tweak CO2, you raise temperatures, you melt ice, you raise sea levels and water temps, you change ocean currents, then you change atmospheric mixing, then you change local temps, then you change rainfall regimes, then you change what lives in specific spot on the planet, and on and on and on.

    We have numerous examples of shifts in small amounts of one or more of the mechanisms involved in global climate change in near and long term history. They have collapsed entire civilizations. Caused the migration of populations. Turned forests into deserts and deserts into forests. Spurred plagues and massive population booms. Changed the course of our entire evolution as a species - we never walk upright if the forests don't collapse. Heck a few hundred thousand years ago or so, the climate shifted and almost all the ancestral humans on the planet died. You can still see the impact of the bottleneck in population in our DNA. A little while after that, the climate changed just a teeny bit in our favor and made the beginnings of modern agriculture possible. Small shifts, a degree here, a bit of wind pattern there, some expansion/contraction of sea ice over there, etc. have had massive game-changing impacts to the human experience.

    And I agree that there are plenty of other environmental issues and problems to tackle. I also agree that those issues need far more attention and directed solutions than they are currently getting. Heck, we could add the loss of topsoil to the breadbasket of the United States and other global agricultural zones as a pressing issue. Get rid of that stuff and we all start getting skinny real quick.

    But I can not support the idea that a even a small rise (or fall for that matter) in global temperature(s) would be just inconvenient. I mean I guess, we can agree that right now the rise we have seen is inconvenient for most us. But if I lived in Indonesia or some other low lying coastal zone, I would not see it as inconvenient. If I lived in one of the various corners of the globe that gets battered by "once a century storms" twice a season now, I wouldn't see it as inconvenient.

    Finally, you may want to check some of your math and information on carbon cycling. Much of the world's coal deposits are far older than your 250 million year figure. Additionally, carbon can only be eventually subducted into the mantle if you have enough reservoirs to take it all in. Due to many of the factors you mention when outlining other environmental issues, the planet currently does not. Further, the process for cycling that much carbon through the system operate on geologic time - as you have pointed out is a staggeringly long period. That cycle is now being swamped. It is like trying to sponge up a small inland sea with a dishtowel. You can do it - eventually. But what takes place in the meantime?

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    Re: Welcome to day 1 of the illegitimate U.S. government, make your predictions here

    Quote Originally Posted by Mojouw View Post
    Finally, you may want to check some of your math and information on carbon cycling. Much of the world's coal deposits are far older than your 250 million year figure. Additionally, carbon can only be eventually subducted into the mantle if you have enough reservoirs to take it all in. Due to many of the factors you mention when outlining other environmental issues, the planet currently does not. Further, the process for cycling that much carbon through the system operate on geologic time - as you have pointed out is a staggeringly long period. That cycle is now being swamped. It is like trying to sponge up a small inland sea with a dishtowel. You can do it - eventually. But what takes place in the meantime?
    I will focus on this part first, since I think you may have misunderstood it. The key is not that that subduction WILL balance the equation by removing environmental carbon from the system - it is that subduction ALREADY removed the vast majority of it hundreds of millions of years ago. The carbon fate of the planet is already decided, has been for far longer than humans have existed, and all we are doing is playing around with the remaining couple percent, and driving ourselves crazy over it.

    Right now, the subduction process would also be doing next to nothing, even on a geologic time scale. It is more effective the higher the concentration of carbon in the environment, and there just is not very much of it right now compared to historically. Nearly all of that action would have happened 500 million to a billion years ago or earlier. It is not too far-fetched to speculate that 90 percent of the carbon dioxide that ever existed in the environment was already buried in the mantle before the first creatures ever crawled out of the ocean, and out of the remainder, how much turned into recoverable hydrocarbons? Probably not too much.

    You point out several examples of past changes in the climate, before humans had begun burning hydrocarbons in significant quantities at all. Now, that is a classic example that many conservatives have used to say, "See! That PROVES man-made climate change is a myth, it's all nature!" - but they don't really understand why, so it looks stupid. Well, as sometimes happens, they lucked into it in a broken-clock-is-right-twice-a-day sense. Some of those changes had some relation to greenhouse gas levels, some were for other reasons, but the point that should overwhelmingly be taken away is that these changes can and do happen without us, which makes climate science kind of like trying to measure precisely how fast someone is walking, while you're in a moving car with no speedometer. And also you don't even know which direction the car is going, for that matter, or why. No controls, many unknown variables, just an unfinished equation.

    Suppose I gave you the equation x + 3y = z, and if z is greater than 100, there might be a disaster. Then I told you x equals 20. Will there be a disaster or not? Well, what's y? That's the state of climate science.

    And yet, we are being told that we should - no, that we MUST - bet everything on that. As you said, there is so much that we don't even understand. Well, "I don't understand" is not a reason to make drastic changes and uproot society. That is what crazy people do.

    However, if certain information puts an upper limit on y, and reduces the likely value of y to 1/50 of that, then while you still couldn't tell for certain, your estimate would be many times more likely to be accurate than someone who just left y as a random number.

    Given that, and since the effectiveness of carbon dioxide at trapping heat is inversely related to the square of the concentration (each successive incremental increase in heat requires doubling the CO2 level), and also given the propensity for significant changes in the climate to happen independently of human activity - all signs would point to our ability to influence the climate as the equivalent of a fart in a hurricane. The evidence suggests that all we can really do with hydrocarbons, even if we burn it all, is indeed to change the climate within a very narrow range. In all likelihood, you will just run out of hydrocarbons before you accomplish very much. More likely, the problem will be solved on its own long before that, as soon as someone invents commercially viable photovoltaics and some sort of battery (or equivalent) that can store it. No need to uproot society, no need for a new Manhattan Project. There are just a lot more important things to worry about.

    Finally, I would say that right now, we are not even at the point of a climate inconvenience. What you call a climate inconvenience is simply people demonstrating a lack of comprehension of scale, by ascribing random local fluctuations in the weather to a long-term structural change that they want to believe in. There also seems to be a disproportionate belief that everything is going to happen all of a sudden; we'll wake up one day and coastal cities will all be underwater, and there will be millions of refugees, and half the crops die at once and we all starve. Well, that's just not how it works. In the course of the hundreds of years that these changes take, most of civilization is torn down and rebuilt on its own anyway, often more than once. Cities are not flooded. People are not really displaced in the disastrous sense that is portrayed. It happens so slowly that people adjust on their own, most of the time without really noticing it. It would be the equivalent of saying that we ought to still be recovering from the Great Chicago Fire, or feeling the effects of the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

    Fortunately, today we have the ability to adapt much better to changes in the climate than cavemen did, or even than people in the Middle Ages. But god damn, does it make a scary story.
    See you Space Cowboy ...

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    Re: Welcome to day 1 of the illegitimate U.S. government, make your predictions here

    Quote Originally Posted by steelreserve View Post
    I will focus on this part first, since I think you may have misunderstood it. The key is not that that subduction WILL balance the equation by removing environmental carbon from the system - it is that subduction ALREADY removed the vast majority of it hundreds of millions of years ago. The carbon fate of the planet is already decided, has been for far longer than humans have existed, and all we are doing is playing around with the remaining couple percent, and driving ourselves crazy over it.

    Right now, the subduction process would also be doing next to nothing, even on a geologic time scale. It is more effective the higher the concentration of carbon in the environment, and there just is not very much of it right now compared to historically. Nearly all of that action would have happened 500 million to a billion years ago or earlier. It is not too far-fetched to speculate that 90 percent of the carbon dioxide that ever existed in the environment was already buried in the mantle before the first creatures ever crawled out of the ocean, and out of the remainder, how much turned into recoverable hydrocarbons? Probably not too much.

    You point out several examples of past changes in the climate, before humans had begun burning hydrocarbons in significant quantities at all. Now, that is a classic example that many conservatives have used to say, "See! That PROVES man-made climate change is a myth, it's all nature!" - but they don't really understand why, so it looks stupid. Well, as sometimes happens, they lucked into it in a broken-clock-is-right-twice-a-day sense. Some of those changes had some relation to greenhouse gas levels, some were for other reasons, but the point that should overwhelmingly be taken away is that these changes can and do happen without us, which makes climate science kind of like trying to measure precisely how fast someone is walking, while you're in a moving car with no speedometer. And also you don't even know which direction the car is going, for that matter, or why. No controls, many unknown variables, just an unfinished equation.

    Suppose I gave you the equation x + 3y = z, and if z is greater than 100, there might be a disaster. Then I told you x equals 20. Will there be a disaster or not? Well, what's y? That's the state of climate science.

    And yet, we are being told that we should - no, that we MUST - bet everything on that. As you said, there is so much that we don't even understand. Well, "I don't understand" is not a reason to make drastic changes and uproot society. That is what crazy people do.

    However, if certain information puts an upper limit on y, and reduces the likely value of y to 1/50 of that, then while you still couldn't tell for certain, your estimate would be many times more likely to be accurate than someone who just left y as a random number.

    Given that, and since the effectiveness of carbon dioxide at trapping heat is inversely related to the square of the concentration (each successive incremental increase in heat requires doubling the CO2 level), and the propensity for great changes in the climate to happen independently of human activity - all signs would point to our ability to influence the climate as the equivalent of a fart in a hurricane. The evidence suggests that all we can really do with hydrocarbons, even if we burn it all, is indeed to change the climate within a very narrow range. In all likelihood, you will just run out of hydrocarbons before you accomplish very much. More likely, the problem will be solved on its own long before that, as soon as someone invents commercially viable photovoltaics and some sort of battery (or equivalent) that can store it. No need to uproot society, no need for a new Manhattan Project. There are just a lot more important things to worry about.

    Finally, I would say that right now, we are not even at the point of a climate inconvenience. What you call a climate inconvenience is simply people demonstrating a lack of comprehension of scale, by ascribing random local fluctuations in the weather to a long-term structural change that they want to believe in. There also seems to be a disproportionate belief that everything is going to happen all of a sudden; we'll wake up one day and coastal cities will all be underwater, and there will be millions of refugees, and half the crops die at once and we all starve. Well, that's just not how it works. In the course of the hundreds of years that these changes take, most of civilization is torn down and rebuilt on its own anyway, often more than once. Cities are not flooded. People are not really displaced in the disastrous sense that is portrayed. It happens so slowly that people adjust on their own, most of the time without really noticing it. It would be the equivalent of saying that we ought to still be recovering from the Great Chicago Fire, or feeling the effects of the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

    Fortunately, today we have the ability to adapt much better to changes in the climate than cavemen did, or even than people in the Middle Ages. But god damn, does it make a scary story.
    Much of that seems to not hold up to scrutiny. Again, you can focus solely on CO2 levels but the overall systemic factors are far more complex. However, I suspect that line of discussion will just lead you to declare that I'm dodging the question or reciting doctrine I learned off CNN or whatever.

    The last time there was anything more than current CO2 levels in the Earth's atmosphere was roughly before people existed. During the Pliocene we have ample evidence to indicate that the globe was roughly 4 degrees C warmer overall (more in specific parts like Antarctica), the plant and animal regimes were totally different (the stuff we eat or get eaten by), and sea levels were 20+ meters higher (that is a lot of water). Parts of inland Europe were underwater. I see that as more than an inconvenience or something to adapt our way out of. Your mileage may vary.

    Finally, you do not appear to be addressing the time component of any of this. Previous episodes of release and absorption of CO2 occurred on geological time scales - thousands and thousands of years. No one really knows what happens when you change variables in the complex system that is global climate on decade or yearly time scales. It just hasn't happened before.

    Again, you are seriously underestimating the impact of existing GHG in the atmosphere and based on the little bit I know, similarly underplaying the amount of additional CO2 needed to produce large swings.

    While Paleo-climate modelling and analogies are rough proxies for future events, there are more than a few highly disturbing signs. The planet, at least during the bit where it was/is stable, has not warmed this rapidly before. The existing balancing mechanisms that exist planet-wide to cope with excess GHG in the system appear to be stressed right to the breaking point - if not beyond. Meanwhile emissions increase and available reservoirs go down. Anyone who claims they can accurately forecast the future is madman, but it is not hard to be pessimistic about the long-term outcome(s) of all this. Now, what is the time scale for that? Certainly after you and I die. Maybe in our kid's lifetimes? And definitely grandkids.

    And you are totally correct, a massive amount of stuff can happen in a 2 generation timeline. A new technology could emerge and flourish that could help stabilize and then reverse current trends. No one really knows and the history of the human species is innovating our way out of catastrophe.

    Finally, environmental and climate change has caused precisely the short time scale disasters that you claim can not happen.Repeatedly. It is nice to think that our advanced technology and material capabilities separate us from other historical examples, but it wouldn't take much. A small amount of drying in the rainfall patters across the American West can create drought conditions similar to the Dustbowl. Fortunately a 2021+ US has the infrastructure to deal with that for a few years...but for 5? 10? That answer is less clear. What about a country like India with a far less developed infrastructure base - what happens if small changes in global climate drive regional shifts in agricultural productivity? We know from repeated historical examples that when the monsoon fails, the Indian subcontinent is devastated by famine. We also know that it takes very very little change in the overall climate system to not only disrupt but end the rainfall patterns that deliver the monsoons. Again, will this happen? Not sure. But it has before and those precedents point to far more than inconvenient local weather patterns. I can not imagine what a mass famine involving the rush of people to newly plentiful agricultural lands from newly arid zones between and along the borders of two nuclear states that hate each other might look like.

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    Re: Welcome to day 1 of the illegitimate U.S. government, make your predictions here


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    Re: Welcome to day 1 of the illegitimate U.S. government, make your predictions here

    US deaths 1918 flu: 675,000

    • This week’s national ensemble forecast predicts that 17,000 to 29,300 new deaths will likely be reported in the week ending February 13, 2021. The national ensemble predicts that a total of 465,000 to 508,000 COVID-19 deaths will be reported by this date.
    https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019...asting-us.html

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    Re: Welcome to day 1 of the illegitimate U.S. government, make your predictions here

    Quote Originally Posted by Mojouw View Post
    Much of that seems to not hold up to scrutiny. Again, you can focus solely on CO2 levels but the overall systemic factors are far more complex. However, I suspect that line of discussion will just lead you to declare that I'm dodging the question or reciting doctrine I learned off CNN or whatever.

    The last time there was anything more than current CO2 levels in the Earth's atmosphere was roughly before people existed. During the Pliocene we have ample evidence to indicate that the globe was roughly 4 degrees C warmer overall (more in specific parts like Antarctica), the plant and animal regimes were totally different (the stuff we eat or get eaten by), and sea levels were 20+ meters higher (that is a lot of water). Parts of inland Europe were underwater. I see that as more than an inconvenience or something to adapt our way out of. Your mileage may vary.

    Finally, you do not appear to be addressing the time component of any of this. Previous episodes of release and absorption of CO2 occurred on geological time scales - thousands and thousands of years. No one really knows what happens when you change variables in the complex system that is global climate on decade or yearly time scales. It just hasn't happened before.

    Again, you are seriously underestimating the impact of existing GHG in the atmosphere and based on the little bit I know, similarly underplaying the amount of additional CO2 needed to produce large swings.

    While Paleo-climate modelling and analogies are rough proxies for future events, there are more than a few highly disturbing signs. The planet, at least during the bit where it was/is stable, has not warmed this rapidly before. The existing balancing mechanisms that exist planet-wide to cope with excess GHG in the system appear to be stressed right to the breaking point - if not beyond. Meanwhile emissions increase and available reservoirs go down. Anyone who claims they can accurately forecast the future is madman, but it is not hard to be pessimistic about the long-term outcome(s) of all this. Now, what is the time scale for that? Certainly after you and I die. Maybe in our kid's lifetimes? And definitely grandkids.

    And you are totally correct, a massive amount of stuff can happen in a 2 generation timeline. A new technology could emerge and flourish that could help stabilize and then reverse current trends. No one really knows and the history of the human species is innovating our way out of catastrophe.

    Finally, environmental and climate change has caused precisely the short time scale disasters that you claim can not happen.Repeatedly. It is nice to think that our advanced technology and material capabilities separate us from other historical examples, but it wouldn't take much. A small amount of drying in the rainfall patters across the American West can create drought conditions similar to the Dustbowl. Fortunately a 2021+ US has the infrastructure to deal with that for a few years...but for 5? 10? That answer is less clear. What about a country like India with a far less developed infrastructure base - what happens if small changes in global climate drive regional shifts in agricultural productivity? We know from repeated historical examples that when the monsoon fails, the Indian subcontinent is devastated by famine. We also know that it takes very very little change in the overall climate system to not only disrupt but end the rainfall patterns that deliver the monsoons. Again, will this happen? Not sure. But it has before and those precedents point to far more than inconvenient local weather patterns. I can not imagine what a mass famine involving the rush of people to newly plentiful agricultural lands from newly arid zones between and along the borders of two nuclear states that hate each other might look like.

    Well, since the overwhelming majority of climate alarmism is directed at carbon dioxide, and proposed solutions to climate change are almost exclusively directed at reducing carbon dioxide emissions - it stands to reason that it should be the focus of the debate. And like I said, the available evidence is that you just can't get there from here using carbon dioxide alone, as hydrocarbon fuels are a finite resource, and there are simply not enough of them to produce the kinds of changes envisioned.

    I don't know what part of that doesn't stand up to scrutiny - I mean, you want to talk about settled science, there it is. Those are well-understood processes and you can do the calculations yourself if you want.

    On the other hand, you have climate science, where there's an underlying reason that people are trying to prove, but no clear inputs or outputs. Is that how science works - you start by asserting that the explanation is true, and then look for data? That sounds more like the reverse of science. And no one is supposed to challenge the hypothesis in the meantime? Well, that's not science either.

    At any rate, the one worrisome point is that yes, if the climate were to change faster than nature is used to, then some plant and animal life wouldn't be able to handle it. But, there have been times when the environment has changed very fast indeed, even overnight. Species died. Things changed. It happened, and might happen again. The big question is: So what? As long as humans survive, which is not really in doubt, it is not a whole lot different from any number of environmental changes that have occurred in the past. Why is that only unacceptable in this one special case, when the change is for this particular reason? I mean, plants and animals wreak havoc on their ecosystems all the time, given the slightest opportunity to assert their dominance. At that point, it is really just a moral question, where it is assumed that humans "should" act in certain ways because we are "better" than natural forces. Meh.

    And again, all of that is assuming that you have enough hydrocarbons to cause all of this, which in my estimation, you probably don't.

    So much attention is being paid to this in the meantime, and with key technology in the commercialization of alternate forms of energy advancing so quickly, that it is almost impossible there will not be a long-term solution to it in the next 20 years, and it will arise on its own. There is too much money to be made, and too many eager participants (one is born every minute) for it not to, and whoever cracks a couple of key problems will be the next Elon Musk. In the meantime, it would be so much better if the government would get out of the way and leave the average citizen alone. Because out of all the possible solutions, browbeating everyone into compliance sure is not the one that is going to work.

    Personally, I am just as eager as anyone to see some form of renewable energy become commercially viable, but the reason has more to do with the old-fashioned problem that we will eventually run out of coal and oil. We have become conditioned to think that, because they were saying this in the 70s and they have always found more, it's going to keep going on forever. (I think that is the basis for a lot of people's willingness to believe that the amount of carbon we can contribute to the atmosphere is open-ended). But that is not going to be the case, and it will probably surprise people when they finally learn just how finite the supply is.

    In the end, you and I want the same thing, but I just don't see a lot of reason to be concerned, and certainly no reason at all worth coercing people's behavior.
    See you Space Cowboy ...

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    Re: Welcome to day 1 of the illegitimate U.S. government, make your predictions here

    Quote Originally Posted by silver & black View Post
    You bet your ass I believe it. There is no way anyone thinks Biden is capable to run this country. You/they voted purely on hate for Trump. Never mind there is now a man in mental decline running the most powerful country in the world... even though he isn't. You got what you wanted.... the radical progressives running the show. Good luck!
    exactly, apparently they wanted biological men being able to dominate women’s sports. They must be so proud! cant wait to see outrage when Russian transgenders sweep the women’s gold medals. Biden’s mouth will be wide open with drool running down his chin. Russian transgenders on the podium getting all three medals because Biden is a woke demented fuck stick. liberalism is worse than cancer.

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    Re: Welcome to day 1 of the illegitimate U.S. government, make your predictions here



    Give a lib a fish--he eats for a day

    Teach a lib to fish--he is back the next day asking for more free fish.

    ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ

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    There is no way anyone thinks Biden is capable to run this country
    But Trump was? Post that in the funny pages where it belongs.


    Quote Originally Posted by silver & black View Post
    You bet your ass I believe it. There is no way anyone thinks Biden is capable to run this country. You/they voted purely on hate for Trump. Never mind there is now a man in mental decline running the most powerful country in the world... even though he isn't. You got what you wanted.... the radical progressives running the show. Good luck!
    Who told you that, Hannity?


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    Re: Welcome to day 1 of the illegitimate U.S. government, make your predictions here

    What Have We Done?

    By E.P. Unum

    January 21, 2021

    Joseph R. Biden was just inaugurated as the 46th President of the United States yesterday. I have nothing further to say about this historical event attended primarily by 26,000 National Guard Troops, FBI, NSA, CIA Operatives.

    That fact alone is a very telling story. Apparently, additional security was deemed necessary for a President-Elect who received allegedly 80 million votes, more than any other person in the history of our country. All of the “peaceful riots ” throughout the summer and Fall, where stores and businesses were looted and destroyed, monuments toppled and police and citizens were killed, did not require the assistance of armed troops to quell these “activities”.

    I also will not comment on the 17 Executive Actions signed by our new President on his first afternoon in office. None of these offer any hope or unity nor are they of any benefit to the American people or to America. Indeed, they will drive us further downward.

    But here are some lessons we can learn from the new change in leadership to the America we know:

    Perhaps now you understand why there was never any action against the Clintons or Obama, how they destroyed emails and evidence and phones and servers, how they spied and wiretapped, how they lied to the FISA Court, had conversations on the tarmac, sent emails to cover their rears after key meetings, how Comey and Brennan and Clapper never were brought to any justice, how the FBI and CIA lied, how the Steele Dossier, paid for by Hillary Clinton, was passed along, how phones got factory reset, how leak after leak to an accomplice corrupt media went unchecked, why George Soros is always in the shadows, why Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan and George Bush and John McCain were all involved, why they screamed Russia and pushed a sham impeachment, why no one ever goes to jail, why no one is ever charged, why nothing ever happens.

    Perhaps now you know why there was no wrongdoing in the falsification of the FISA Warrants, why the Durham Report was delayed, why Hunter Biden has not been charged, why the FBI sat on his laptop for almost a year while Trump was being impeached on fictitious charges, why the Bidens’ connection to China was overlooked as was unleashed the perfect weapon, a virus that was weaponized politically to bring down the greatest ever economy known to man and at the same time usher in an unverifiable and unnecessary system of mail-in voting that corrupted the very foundation of our democracy.

    Maybe now you can understand why the media is 24/7 propaganda and lies, why up is down and down is up, right is wrong and wrong is right, why social media can now silence the First Amendment and speak over the President of the United States.

    This has been the plan by the Deep State all along. They didn’t expect Trump to win in 2016. He messed up their plans, and delayed them a little….four years to be exact. They weren’t about to let it happen again. Covid was like manna from heaven for democrats and the socialist left, it was a tool to inject fear into all Americans and it was weaponized.

    Governors who shut down their states and crumbled their economies out of fear. The media, never to let a good crisis go to waste, helped shame and kill the economy, and the super lucky unverifiable mail-in ballots were just the trick to make sure the 47-year career politician, allegedly with hands in Chinese payrolls, the man that couldn’t finish a sentence or collect a crowd, miraculously became the most popular vote recipient of all time.

    You have just witnessed a silent, bloodless coup, the overthrow of the US free election system, the end of our Constitutional Republic, and the beginning of the downward slide of capitalism and the free enterprise system into the abyss of socialism and communism. What a remarkable achievement!

    We have sacrificed the greatest engine of freedom, growth, and prosperity known to man on the altar of ignorance and totalitarianism.

    What will happen next? Well, here’s a brief list:

    · Expect the borders to open up. Increased immigration.

    · Expect agencies like CBP and INS and Homeland Security to be muzzled or even deleted.

    · Law enforcement will see continued defunding.

    · Elimination of the electoral college will be attempted.

    · History as we know it will be erased. Our children will no loger study the American Revolution, the Civil War, World War I, II, Korea or Vietnam. These will be replaced with classes on “ white priviledge”, “how American racism stole lands from native Indians ” and the “ need for racial equity ” because America is a terrible nation.

    · The Supreme Court will be packed with liberal judges.

    · Your 2nd Amendment will be attacked and there may be a gun confiscation or gun buyback programs enacted and you will find it difficult to own a weapon…and ammunition of any kind.

    · If you have a manufacturing job or oil industry job, get ready to be unemployed.

    · If you own and run a business, brace for the impact of higher taxes and more governmental regulations.

    · Maybe you’ll be on the hook for slavery reparations, or have your suburbs turned into Section 8 housing.

    · Your taxes are going to increase dramatically and businesses will pay more.

    · We will be paying more for gasoline at the pump and we will soon find ourselves once again dependent on foreign oil.

    President Trump made us energy independent. For the first time in our history, the USA became an oil-exporting nation. Biden’s illogical and corrupt dismantling of the Keystone Pipeline not only displaced 42,000 high-paying union jobs but now Canada will sell the oil in Alberta BC to China while we search for new supplies at higher prices. Well done Joe!

    In a couple of years, we will see the onslaught of inflation, high unemployment, less productivity as more and more people become dependent on the government for subsistence, all of which is the natural course of socialist economies.

    The dollar will no longer be the world’s reserve currency and America will no longer be the bastion of freedom it once was.

    America will be overtaken by China as the largest economy in the world and, because we have become so complacent, we will find ourselves in the middle of great turmoil and upheaval with lots of civil strife that will make 2020 look like a walk in the park.

    I could go on and on. There is no real recovery from this. The national elections from here on will be decided by New York City, Chicago, and California. The Constitutional Republic we created will be dead. Mob rule and appeasement will run rampant. The candidate who offers the most from the Treasury will get the most votes. But the votes cast won’t matter, just the ones received and counted. That precedent has been set.

    Benjamin Franklin was walking out of Independence Hall after the Constitutional Convention in 1787, when someone shouted out, “Doctor, what have we got? A republic or a monarchy?’”

    Franklin responded, “A republic, if you can keep it.”

    Ladies and gentlemen, we have now lost the Republic our forefathers bequeathed to us, the Republic we fought and bled for these past two hundred and forty-five years. Some of you are wondering how this came to pass. The answers are indeed quite simple. We did it to ourselves:

    · We turned from God. We erased God from our halls of Justice and the Town Square.

    · We turned from family.

    · We turned from our country, our Flag, our Monuments to our leaders who paved the way. We denigrated all of these with revisionist history and the tearing down of monuments to our civilization and way of life.

    · We replaced achievement and recognition by embracing “ participation trophies ” so that our children can all feel a sense of accomplishment even when there was none.

    · We embraced degeneracy culture, inviting pornography into our laptops and living rooms.

    · We became some infatuated with technology that we lost the human touch…we found it easier to send emails or facebook or twitter posts to a friend or co-worker ten feet away from us rather than walking over to chat with them. We have, in essence, become too high tech and low touch . It sort of begs the question… what does it matter if we wire the entire world if we lose our immortal souls?

    · We celebrated and looked to fools as our heroes, comedians whose idea of a joke is holding up a bloody head of our President. That’s not funny. It’s sad.

    · We worshipped ourselves selfishly and took for granted what brave men and women fought and died to give us. Their sacrifices are no longer valued, replaced instead with scorn because they may have committed “ transgressions measured by today’s standards, not theirs ”.

    We disregarded history and all it teaches.

    On our watch, America just died a little. It’s likely she’ll never be the same again. Not until the 74 million Americans who voted for President Trump stand up and shout “we will no longer tolerate this and we want our country back ” and do something about it.

    For starters, get off Twitter and Facebook and refuse to be a part of their efforts to disrespect the First Amendment. I did. And I don’t miss it at all. If companies want to insult all the people who supported President Trump by denying them jobs, fight back. Don’t buy their products. Shun them. Until we take those steps, they will continue to wield their power, but the ultimate power is in your hands…the power of the consumer.

    We did this to ourselves. We made our bed, now we have to sleep in it….until we get off our asses and remake it. Some of you have no idea what you’ve done. You know now. It is time to do something about it. Sadly, some of you do know what you have done. To them, I say…if you kick a dog long enough, pretty soon he’s gonna bite. I am tired of being kicked and insulted and disregarded as if I don’t matter. We do matter.

    We are Americans

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    Old School Misfit Array title="silver & black has a reputation beyond repute"> silver & black's Avatar

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    Re: Welcome to day 1 of the illegitimate U.S. government, make your predictions here


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    Re: Welcome to day 1 of the illegitimate U.S. government, make your predictions here

    Quote Originally Posted by silver & black View Post
    I say…if you kick a dog long enough, pretty soon he’s gonna bite. I am tired of being kicked and insulted and disregarded as if I don’t matter. We do matter.
    We don't kick dogs, we kick assholes and clearly you're a major league asshole.


  26. #176
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    Re: Welcome to day 1 of the illegitimate U.S. government, make your predictions here

    Quote Originally Posted by tom444 View Post
    We don't kick dogs, we kick assholes and clearly you're a major league asshole.

    No problem. I'll continue to be a major league asshole. You continue to be a major league pussy. Deal?

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    Re: Welcome to day 1 of the illegitimate U.S. government, make your predictions here

    Quote Originally Posted by silver & black View Post
    No problem. I'll continue to be a major league asshole. You continue to be a major league pussy. Deal?
    Asshole comment from a real pussy.

    - - - Updated - - -

    If you're going to criticize Biden put some teeth in it and forget the lightweight made up crap people like Black & Silver try to pass off as legitimate criticism.




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    Re: Welcome to day 1 of the illegitimate U.S. government, make your predictions here

    Moderators is there really a reason Tom444 is still here? He really adds nothing to any of these discussions.

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    Re: Welcome to day 1 of the illegitimate U.S. government, make your predictions here

    Silver & Black

    When I wrote "
    We don't kick dogs, we kick assholes and clearly you're a major league asshole." I was talking about the guy who wrote "What Have We Done?" being an asshole not you. Truth.

    Now, as for EzraTank, well he is an ............


  30. #180
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    Re: Welcome to day 1 of the illegitimate U.S. government, make your predictions here

    Quote Originally Posted by EzraTank View Post
    Moderators is there really a reason Tom444 is still here? He really adds nothing to any of these discussions.
    So you are advocating for censorship? I'm not a fan of a lot of massholes. I will admit that some are ok, but what you are doing seems a bit like.............."Cancel Culture". If you are part of the "Cancel Culture", then that's on you. I don't support it.

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