Ian -- Have you tried to apply your methodology starting in 2002? I picked that year because it was 6 years before the 2008 crash, and 2010 is six years before the predicted 2016 crash.

I have a link to J.K. Galbraith quotes. The ones you gave are included. Maybe that is why I like Larry Beinhart view of the economy, since he is a novelist.

Palin -- Sounds like Utopia (acting on the largest number of complaints). When I had a problem with a delay in getting my passport (after the repugs privatized one of the processes), I called by congress worman. My passport arrived soon after. You would probably call it a coincidence. Do you have any better suggestions?

It's down the rabbit hole....one pill make you larger and one pill makes you small....Go ask Alice...;-} or the Cheshire Cat...and speaking of Axis...off with their heads.

I wonder what the Reverend Charles Dodgson was smoking when he thought of the Cheshire Cat? Gotta watch those Reverends...right Jimmy?

I've seen a couple of version of movies of Alice In Wonderland over the years. Some were very wild indeed!

Ecocide i think we should study it very will before we impose it. reverse lookup cell.

Oh White Rabbit...Please, guide the waaaaaaaaaaaaaay!!!

"Democrasy depends on an informed electorate." Don't remember which one of the Founding Fathers said that (or almost that), but it seems to have been =deliberately= 'forgotten' a while back. Why does the general public have no clue what's going on, or believe 'fairy tales' that any -thinking- person would outright laugh at? Because they're being selectively fed -only- what the corporations want people to know .. and steadfastly denied access to information that might make the public get all 'uppity'. Luckily, I speak a number of languages besides English, so I can find out what else is going on and/or what another view of a situation is .. .. but far too many 'gud Amaircuns' can barely speak/read =English=!! And the American media, not just Faux News, hasn't done a damn thing to help matters, at all!

Quote hartmann: If I had had a problem with a government bureaucracy, like the Veterans Administration or the Social Security Administration, I could have called my senator or my congressman and they would have given hell to those agencies on behalf of me.

Maybe Thom Hartmann has some clout but I doubt the common citizen does. I worked at Social Security headquarters, a long time ago, and had access to the letters that people would write in to their congressmen concerning Social Security and after the Congress person's aides scan the letters, they are sent to be archived at SS headquarters..photographed and put on microfilm strips...that would be put into cartridges and could be retrieved and viewed on a screen. Hard copies could be made from the microstrips. It was all computer controlled...all those microstrip readers. There were certainly a lot of strange letters! There's a lot of nutty people, that's for sure! One guy thought he had the cure for several different diseases...by drinking one's own urine.

Anyway, congress people never read those letters unless an aide flags them to be read...which is never...unless they see some political gain in it. Think about it...how can congress people read or assess all those forms of communication? Even with their aides or computers doing most of the work?

Now, they most likely have scanners that look for certain keywords and then just tally up all the letters/emails that mention them. That turns issues into numbers... percentages. And if the congress people get anything it is a brief assessment as to the priorities... what percentage of people believe in certain major issues. Occasionally, the aides might pick out a communication that the congress person can use to benefit him/herself politically...just for show.

Here's a comment from a person who worked the same kind of job as the Comcast guy:

Quote commenter on The Young Turks:
I've worked that line before for a few months. People wanting to switch away from their phone services. At the beginning of the call, once the caller makes it clear they want to leave, you need to hit a big red button icon in the top left of the screen, which flags it up on the supervisor's monitor. They then can listen in, and if you don't convince them to stay with the company, you get a 'failure point' more than five in a day, you lose your staff achievement benefit. Lose 10 in a day, you can be put on an official reprimand. On your third one of those, you can and mostly likely will be fired.

Staff achievement benefits are things like, getting to cut work early on a friday, going on staff nights out etc (I've even been asked to leave a resteraunt by my boss because I happened to go to the same one they had for the night out).

Final straw for me came when Orange had a problem with account hacking and we had a flurry of people calling to cancel. I 'lost' a client on the monday, a business client worth a lot of money, and my supervisor kept walking past and spitting at me. By wednesday I had my third official reprimand, but was spared a sacking because so did all 108 others in my pool. I then requested to be sacked anyway because the company was a shitty place to work and I was sick of being treated like a mindless mechanism.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yI4heYwNzdo

It's the bosses who put pressure on the employees to keep people from stopping service. The Comcast guy, as annoying as he was, sounded desperate...like he was going to lose his job if he didn't get the customer to stay with Comcast. I suspect this is the same everywhere...all the companies do it. Not everyone records their calls and puts them on YouTube...maybe they should.

Here's 8 minutes of the 30 minute call, Ryan hadn't recorded the first 22 minutes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awV9PeX8eEA

These companies like Comcast and AT&T UVerse are nearly monopolies (in that we have very little choice of alternatives) and should be broken up like Bell Telephone was. I believe they have dishonest and deceiving marketing practices and the top brass in those companies need to be raked over the coals and put in jail. But we're going to need someone with more fortitude and honesty than the current people in our government and legal and law enforcement system.

I'll second that, Aliceinwonderland!!!

MMmmNACHOS: Have you been shopping on the Darknet again? ;-} People can buy anything they want, pretty much, on the Darknet. With bitcoin and a post office box with a fake name some people are buying all kinds of recreational things.

I whipped out my Tails live thumb drive and went to the Darknet using TOR to hide my trail and identity and saw all kinds of illegal drugs for sale. I'm not into illegal drugs, myself, so I have no desire to buy any.

White Rabbit!

Gary Brumback ~ Personally my idea of bringing about the necessary changes would be to abolish Capitalism as we know it. The ideal way to do that is with a grass roots campaign that embraces Democratic Socialism. There is already a group in place to do just that. Democratic Socialists of America:

http://www.dsausa.org/

(While you're there don't forget to sign the petition asking Bernie Sanders to run for President in 2016)

Sven -- You did not counter my examples of how the industries that you say do not pay for their waste disposal do.

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I do not need to. My initial point, still to be acknowledged, was that Thom was incorrect to say the the fossil fuel industry is 'the only one'.
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Since almost everyone on this blog disagrees with you, I think the burden of proof is in your court.

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Have you conducted a poll or simply gone from the couple of users who have commented? Perhaps we could say 97% of people here disagree me with - not because there is any basis in that figure, but what the hell. (Wouldn't that be joyously appropriate?!)

I have no problem with people disagreeing with me, but anyone doing so is disagreeing with the facts I reference, and not because I say they are facts but because they are facts. Facts they can check for themselves - and people who disagree with clearly stated and referenced facts are called something very disagreeable by the warmist camp.
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A boat load of money was spent to discredit Mann whose only sin was to plot the hockey stick. I think there is significant evidence that there is more money from the ancient sunlight guys. Of course, each of us just saying it doesn't prove much.

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Mann discredited himself with his fraud of a hockey stick. It could be said he was simply incompetent, but that does not make his mistake any less notable. (My lack of competence in the same field has no bearing on his incompetence).

That hockey stick graph was everywhere and did much to influence the debate - see the laughably inaccurate and embarrassingly bad An Inconvenient Truth, for an example of the damage it caused.

Mann also said last year that one month had been the warmest the Earth had ever seen, which was just absurd.

Agreed, though that the money and funding issue is best left. There are clear differences in finding, grants, etc.
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Sven wrote:
You want another fact? In the last 20 years of increasing anthropogenic CO2 emmissions global temperatures have not risen.
How can you say that? The aughts were the hottest decade on record. I think 2012 was the hottest year on record. Prof Mullen has shown a chart where the temp, as signal estimated from the "noisy" measuremenst, is continuously increasing. There are blips, years like 1998, where the temp is significantly lower, However, Prof Mullen shows how each of these events correlate to such things as decreasing solar activity.

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I can say this (and should have said *average global surface temperatures* have not risen) because the acknowledged experts in the field state it as so. Experts on both sides of the divide.

The IPCC acknowledges the hiatus or pause in warming in terms of global average surface air temperatures. The NOAA States that the contiguous US states have seen cooling in the last decade. The HADCET data set shows that the UK has seen a cooling trend in Winter & Summer average means in the last 20 years.

And if lower temps in 1998 were caused by lower solar activity, would this not suggest that CO2 levels were not the main driver or controlling influence on temperatures? Especially given ever increasing emissions?
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I think if we can just quit using ancient sunlight are global capture of energy will go away or at least be acceptable (CO2 < 350).

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I don't get what you are trying to say here, beyond hoping for a stable climate, but we have been extremely lucky in the last few thousand years and more that the climate has remained so steady - we cannot expect it to last, nor should we. Change is a necessary function in chaotic systems.

Why is CO2 of 400ppm or 450ppm not acceptable? The benefits to vegetation are obvious. Climate forcing of CO2 has been shown to lessen with increased concentrations. We would be far better off replanting and greening our environment to take advantage of the increased CO2, surely? The benefits would outweigh any risks, especially if temps continue in the hiatus or ever so slightly increase.
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Even if the burden of proof is in your court, here is a picture from my court:

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-5rI01qK0m0w/U5WReqJGp-I/AAAAAAAANdw/I8eVTxsLof...

The methane level looks like a 10 sigma (sample standard deviation) event to me.

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The burden of proof is not in my court, be resides in the realm of facts and evidence - facts easily available to anyone who would care to look.
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