That “group think” problem is non partisan… Don’t ya think.
I would say there are countries that should feel guilty about their human rights (China, Saudie Arabia etc.) unless we don’t consider women and children as deserving of them. The biggest hole in the Kyoto Protocol was that the US would be held accountable for their environmental short commings. Of course, having a part in drawning up the Protocol ourself, we couldn’t expect to sign it as we can’t trust our own lawyers. Bush pulled out of them saying it would " hurt our economy." Now, there is an economic genius. He wanted all that credit for himself I guess.
And “gay” people aren’t normal ? So exactly what affliction do they suffer from ? I guess some of us havn’t had enough behavior science to realize that homosexuality is on a continuum. I would not want to be the one who decided at what point a person suddenly became abnormal. Some people are at ease with this…that 's a scare. That gives “them” ( whoever they are) the right to deny “them” (the abnormal people of this world) rights that everyone else has. .“not normal” ? Please define who is ? I would say it isn’t normal to be a bigot.
@dagosa My point was that individual ingenuity and effort is what makes countries successful, not group think and big government.
Yes, there are many countries with human rights abuses; some of the worst, Nigeria and others, sit on the UN Human Rights Commission.
What is normal or not is not a matter of bigotry; it is the recognition of what is mainstream and accepted pratice, and what is different. I had an uncle who was born with a severe deformity (hunchback), and in our town of 5000 he was accepted for what he was, and nobody made fun of him. He was also very intelligent and ended up as deputy mayor presiding over the town’s rapid growth (now 24,000). The rest of his siblings were healthy and strong farm men and women. He was treated differently only with respect to not having to heavy physical work.
With respect to Kyoto, Bill Clinton enthusiastically endorsed it (assuming congress would ratify it) without realizing it would severely handicap the economy, without making a real impact on CO2 reduction worldwide since all those growing countries were exempt from it. However, US CO2 emissions have already stabilized due to using more gas for power generation and lower gasoline consumption.
I agree that making promises you can’t keep is bad public policy and bad for you political future.
Meanwhike the Dauntless,greenie weenie Al Gore,jets around the earth in his CO2 spewing fuel guzzling jet powered Bat plane on a mission to save the World and just maybe a few of us low IQ people from ourselves.But forgetting that we people that produce are the “salt of the earth”“the people make the land great,the land doesnt make the people great” lets not forget we achieved,because we strove-Kevin
Can we let Al Gore and Newt Gingrich cancel each other out? The solution to our problems is near the center and we really need to just ignore the outrageous on the extreme right and left.
@Docnick
"What is normal or not is not a matter of bigotry; it is the recognition of what is mainstream and accepted pratice, and what is different. "
The scientific view of what is NORMAL.
“Homosexuality is one of the three main categories of sexual orientation, along with bisexuality and heterosexuality, within the heterosexual-homosexual continuum (with asexuality sometimes considered a fourth). Scientific and medical understanding is that sexual orientation is not a choice, but rather a complex interplay of biological and environmental factors,[1][3] especially with regard to early uterine environment.[4] While there are those who still hold the view that homosexual activity is “unnatural” or “dysfunctional”,[5][6] research has shown that homosexuality is an example of a NORMAL and natural variation in human sexuality and is not in and of itself a source of negative psychological effects.[1][7] Prejudice and discrimination against homosexual and bisexual people, however, have been shown to cause psychological harm.[7][8]” THAT’S BIGOTRY
@Kmccune “Meanwhike the Dauntless,greenie weenie Al Gore,jets around the earth in his CO2 spewing fuel guzzling jet powered Bat plane on a mission to save the World and just maybe a few of us low IQ people from ourselves”
So that makes Gore a hypocrite because he travels cross country giving speeches in a plane ? You would rather he travel by what ?
@RodKnox “Can we let Al Gore and Newt Gingrich cancel each other out?”
Let’s see, Al Gore promotes an idea (it isn’t even his originally) that 95% of the scientific community agrees with, along with NASA and the military who are now making long range plans to deal with the effects of climate change both as a military strategy to evaluate long term trouble spots in the world and their projected budgets. So while the rest of you that don’t, sit and complain about Gore, everyone else that knows and trusts science is actually preparing for it…while
Newt Gingrich thinks Jr. High kids can be competent custodians and wants to roll back child labor laws so we can compete with China on “their” level.
Newt quote; “I’m not a natural leader. I’m too intellectual; I’m too abstract; I think too much.”"
Does he think at all ?
Not even close !
“Newt Gingrich thinks Jr. High kids can be competent custodians. . .”
@Dagosa–and if these kids work hard as custodians and save their money, they can go to college and become teachers if they want to take a cut in salary.
Do you actually think that anyone is listening to Newt? But then is anyone really paying much attention to Al?
The far left and far right ideologues are becoming irrelevant as the proponents of the outrageous. The Republican primary was a Friar’s Roast extraordinaire. And I am unconvinced of the need to hide from Al Gore’s threat that the sky is falling. Just tonight I saw a video of the smog in China and it was very much like what I saw in S California in 1968. The environment needs more respect but nit picking in the US while a third of the northern hemisphere is an environmental nightmare is quite useless. Should we declare war on China and India?
Well a pedophile is abnormal, at least in our current mores in this country. Not sure where that fits on the continuum or maybe at right angles to it but seems anyway there are fewer hetero peds than homo peds. But then mass murderers are usually white heteros for some reason.
I kind of look at normal as the bell shaped curve, not a continuum and those that are a couple standard deviations from the center, I consider not normal.
"but seems anyway there are fewer hetero peds than homo peds. "
Not true at all. Just put out there by some groups looking for scapegoats.
Could be which is why I said “seems”. From my limited personal experience, I’ve probably known of about four peds and they have all been far along that continuum to homosexual is all. Of course not all proven but several in jail anyway.
@Bing "I kind of look at normal as a bell shaped curve"
Boy, that could be unfortunate for left handlers. Where right handlers make up 70 to 95 percent of some populations, “a few standard deviations from the center” would definitly include a few lefties and ambidextrous people. Your mistake is thinking that anyone in the bell curve is abnormal as it’s just a numerical count of characteristics of a population of all normal people. All normal people are made up of heterosexuals, homosexuals and bisexuals.
Then, to throw in petophiles when that is a deviant behavior that for our society…like other totally unacceptable behaviors is punishable as a crime. Petophiles could be homosexual, or heterosexual or bi, in the same way they could be left or right handed or ambidextrous.
Now, if we think that being gay, strait or bi is a crime, then we become abnormal because normal people, and the law and society donot see it that way.
Lets see Al Gores achievements-
No.1-inventing the internet
No.2-World class hypocrite(remember how big his castle is?) he should scrap the jet and stay home and use the internet he helped invent or use public transportation.
By the way ,I didnt say mankind wasnt affecting the climate-you make me me sound like Dixie Ray(I believe was her name)-Kevin
“Newt quote; ‘I’m not a natural leader. I’m too intellectual; I’m too abstract; I think too much.’ Does he think at all ?”
The conservative columnist in my local paper, with whom I agree on the vast majority of issues, described Newt Gingrich as, “someone who seems intellectual only to those who are uninformed or unintelligent”. This columnist, Paul Mulshine, is an example of a true conservative, rather than the neo-conservatives (or liberals) who seem to believe that our mission in life is to intervene in every country whose politics we don’t like. True conservatives only believe in military intervention when our country is directly threatened, and I am in full agreement with Mr. Mulshine on this and other issues.
“there are fewer hetero peds than homo peds”
Absolutely not accurate! Once I locate the statistics on this topic, I will post them.
@kmccune
Please read !
I think that speaks for itself. No single person invented the Internet or claimed to. That system of communication was already in use for military purposes. But it was not the Internet as we know it. He helped initiate the Internet for our use as we know it. But this achievement was deserving of recognition. And to keep claiming that he invented it without a little reseach is false. He helped create the initiative for use as we know it today.
So again, he has to take a train and walk and can’t drive which spews out pollutants as well just to get to his destinations cross country…and using any plane makes him a hypocrite. Huh ? And because he lives in a big house he’s a hypocrite ? And, practicing free speak to promote what most educated people already believe and make money at it makes him a hypocrite. By that definition, just about every one is a hypocrite.
I feel free to mock or defend conspicuous personalities from the right or the left and in recent years the right has given me a great deal more to mock than the left. The GOP primary was such a joke that the comedians were drowning in material. The GOP’s most qualified leaders chose to sit out the Jerry Springer extravaganza and who can blame them? But how would the election have unfolded if Bachman or Gingrich or Perry had been the Republican nominee? Luckily the Constitution makes change difficult, otherwise D.C. would have been closed up long ago and the states would have become 6 or more regional common market confederacies. I hope we can continue to muddle through. But our greatest enemy is the plutocracy that is evolving. We may find that the new Kapitalism is worse than the Communism that we were taught to fear.
Good thoughts Rod,
The interdependence of the states makes it very difficult for any to succeed from the union as you stated. It’s pretty much sink or swim as a union. The decline of our nation as an industrial and economic power is destined to happen to some degree if we expect conditions in the rest of the world to improve. That all this wealth has to pass through the hands of a few in power worries me as well. As anti American as this may sound, officially uniting with Canada ( because of it’s abundance of natural resources ) and Mexico ( cultural , manufacturing) would put us on a more sound footing. Of course, what do I know. I’m in favor of making Israel a state of the United States and annexing Sweden for it’s scenery.
We do that and every road sign and publication would need to be in English, French, Spanish, and Yiddish.
“We do that and every road sign and publication would need to be in English, French, Spanish, and Yiddish.”
Hebrew, rather than Yiddish, is spoken in Israel.
There are major differences between those two languages.
dagosa and Bing, one standard deviation is 97%, so lefties and ambidextrous would not be outside one standard deviation. If the % of the population that is homosexual is as great as the Homosexual community claims it is, then it is also within one standard deviation.
The general goal in manufacturing is to have product meeting specifications to be within three standard deviations, meaning that 99.97% of the product is within specifications. When that doesn’t happen, the process is considered out of control. I really have a little trouble applying this definition to human behavior though.
In both manufacturing and in human behavior, just because something is beyond the three standard deviations, does not mean that it is defective or does not meet specifications. standard deviation is used to identify if a process is in control, you can have more product out of spec than 0.03%, which means the process is out of control or you could have less than 0.03% that is out of spec which means you have better control over the process. Would you discard a product that you have invested in and meets specifications just because it is outside three standard deviations? Of course not.
We also don’t make laws based on standard deviations of human behavior. If we decided that only behaviors that are outside three standard deviations should be outlawed, then we would have very few laws. Murder and pedophilia probably would not be against the law. If we dropped it to one standard deviation, then watching more than 5 hours of TV a day or spending more than 6 hours on the internet might be against the law.
BTW, Al Gore believes that 95% of scientists agree with him, but I don’t believe that is completely true. I think you would be hard pressed to find even a handful of legitimate scientists that don’t believe the earth is warming up. Of those who do, 95% probably believe that humans are responsible for a portion of that.
I have not followed every press release, speech or statement from Al Gore, but I have seen enough to get the impression that he believes that the global warming is 100% man made. I don’t think anywhere near 95% of all scientists believe that. The % of human involvement in global warming seems to be a pretty large gray area among scientists.