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Who knew there was so much money to be made selling fear? Rupert Murdoch, that's who.

Flyingsaucesir 8 May 5
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Both sides are selling fear.

CNN has been milking "Trump is a scary monster" for more than 5 years now.

BD66 Level 8 May 5, 2022

So has every other reputable news outlet. And they're not wrong! πŸ˜‚

@Flyingsaucesir It's impossible to try to undue the amount of brainwashing you have experienced.

@BD66 Do you have an actual argument to present? Or are you just going to continue with schoolyard taunts?

@Flyingsaucesir Arguing with you is a complete waste of time. My time would be better spent finding a remote Appalachian church and trying to convince them to quit dancing with rattlesnakes.

@BD66 Still not willing to engage on the substance? Okay, I accept your surrender.

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The number one cause of global warming in the world is overpopulation. It doesn’t make any sense to have a drastic green new deal program to cut co2 emissions while we have an open border.

We don't have an open border

Immigration is not a cause of climate change (though climate change is a cause of immigration).

Climate change is caused by burning fossil fuels.

We have the green technology to replace fossil fuels; all we need to do is implement them.

This implementation will have to happen fast, so a top-down approach is required to get it going. We need to be on a "war footing," making an all-out effort. The Green New Deal would be a good start.

Its true that overpopulation is a problem. Especially if their cars are propelled by internal combustion engines.

We can harvest all the energy we need from solar, wind, geothermal, and tidal sources.

We can use electrolysis to split water molecules, and store all the energy we need in the form of hydrogen gas.

We can convert the hydrogen gas back into electricity with fuel cells, which can be scaled to run anything from a passenger car to a home to a heavy truck to a factory.

@Flyingsaucesir People who don’t think more immigration doesn’t contribute to increased overpopulation are quite delusional. If we don’t have an open border why is illegal immigration at all time highs??

@Flyingsaucesir Hell Biden sent out an invitation to illegal immigrants when he said he would stop construction of the border wall immediately and evidently they got the message!

[news.yahoo.com]

@Trajan61 Hey bra, the world is overpopulated.

And if it were not for immigration, the USA would have negative population growth. Think about how that would affect the economy....an economy that depends entirely on growth.

And if it were not for immigrants, you wouldn't be able to buy a freshly butchered chicken or a head of lettuce at the grocery store. Come on, man!

By the way, you and I are both descended from immigrants. And our people were not the first ones to populate this continent.

Where is it written in our Constitution that there should not be immigration? Nowhere. The founding fathers knew better.

@Trajan61 The wall concept is deeply flawed. It simply won't work. To get over a 30-foot wall, you only need a 31-foot ladder. Or you can tunnel under it. Or cut a hole in it. Or use jaws of life to pry an opening in the bars.

And then there are the engineering challenges. Some of the terrain is incredibly steep and/or inaccessible. It would be a costly and ineffective boondoggle.

And then there are the legal issues. Are you in favor of the government seizing people's private land to build this wall? I bet if it was going through your ranch you would bitch like hell.

And then there are the ecological problems that a wall would provoke. Interruption of animals migration patterns, interruption of natural water courses.

Yeah, the wall is a stupid idea, but Trump never intended to build it anyway. That's why he pardoned the guy (Bannon) who stole the money that was supposed to go to wall construction.

(Bannon was convicted by a jury of his peers. AND in accepting Trump's pardon, he admitted guilt.)

The wall was never more than a rhetorical device for ginning up fear of "the Great Replacement," a boneheaded myth designed to garner white votes.

@Flyingsaucesir I don’t think the world can substain continuous population growth. If the population continues to expand its going to cause lots of problrms

@Trajan61 There is no doubt that continued growth is unsustainable. Fresh water is already becoming a scarce resource. The question is, how to curb the growth? Every study shows that when income and education levels rise, birth rates fall. So creating a world where people have clear pathways to affluence, doing away with the structures that promote gross income inequality, is part of the solution to a sustainable future. Of course, any discussion of sustainability must include implementation of a complete green energy infrastructure. And that part has to happen first. If we cross the tipping points that we are already so dangerously close to, and the natural feedback loops in the climate system kick in, and climate change (let's call it what it really is: global warming) spins out of control, then all bets are off.

@Flyingsaucesir Hungary and Israel both have walls and they work quite well.

@Trajan61 You sure about that? How many people have been killed in Jerusalem in the last few weeks?

@Flyingsaucesir We could start by slowing immigration. And if we want to be green we need to start building nuclear power plants for reliable 24-7 power. Windmills and solar are to unreliable to depend on for continuous power.

@Trajan61 I think nuclear can, will, and should be part of the solution. But there are big drawbacks to nuclear: high cost, disposal of spent fuel, carbon footprint from massive cement structures, risk of radioactive leaks, vulnerability to both physical and cyber terrorist attack,...Not that some of these problems can't be mitigated. But rather than put our eggs in a centralized basket, we would be better off with a distributed system. That way it becomes impossible to knock out the whole grid, or even a large part of it.

Hydrogen will be a key ingredient in the green energy future. You can collect from intermittent sources like solar and wind and store excess energy as hydrogen gas. It is completely renewable, and will never, ever run out because it comes from water and goes back to water. The process or cracking water to produce hydrogen (electrolysis) is well understood and ready to go. For vehicles, hydrogen has the advantage of being light weight. And you can fill up a hydrogen tank in only minutes, instead of waiting hours or days to charge a battery. And batteries eventually wear out and have to be disposed of. The process for recycling lithium batteries has not been perfected. Its difficult and expensive, and there is no reason to think it will ever be cheap and easy. Hydrogen requires no recycling. In using it, you produce pure water, the original source material.

@Trajan61 PS: Immigration is always going to take place. Human beings are parapatetic. And it is arguably a good thing. It enriches culture. It mixes up the gene pool. And it can be managed. We actually do a pretty good job of regulating immigration into the United States. Considering how many people want to get in versus how many do get in. What we CAN do and OUGHT to do is slow the birth rate world wide.

@Flyingsaucesir Kind of hard to control the birth rate in other countries but we can damn well limit who we let in. Some immigration is fine but what we are experiencing now Is ridiculous.

@Trajan61 Yes, I agree; it wouldn't hurt to slow it down.

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Murdoch has been so successful at this that many others now pick up on scary monsters and try to get you to believe all they say. In fact, "inconvenient facts" has been introduced to replace "alternate facts." In my areas of learning this is still called lying.

It is not lying if they believe it. I think they genuinely do. They believe in the Christian god and that liberalism leads to a degradation and complete destruction of society. When a group tells Dems who they are, for over 150 years, we should listen and fight that battle. Not just deny that their position is accurate by saying "No it's not." That's what we have in America; a battle of words in which they say god demands and we say that's a lie. Our argument is losing precisely because their belief in that god is not a lie.

Dems need to quickly get their act together and win the war against god. As I've said, I don't see Atheism as doing that but that's the constituency we're putting our eggs in. I think we're just as dumb as they are.

@rainmanjr I don't say that The People are lying; I say that Don Cheato, Huckster Tucker, A. Jones, R. Stone, R. Giuliani, K. McCarthy, Moscow Mitch, and other high and mighty assholes are lying, and the people who believe them are fools.

@Flyingsaucesir They may be fools but they will die on their cross. I think they truly believe in that cross (we call such people zealots) and that's what has, once again, come to a head. Go to war against their cross or let's just give it up and go home.

@rainmanjr I don't think the overturning of Roe v Wade presages the Apocalypse. It's not good, to be sure, but we can work around it. And it may in fact cause quite a backlash and spur many fence-sitters to finally come out and vote. Stay tuned.

@Flyingsaucesir That's exactly what I'm saying but what happens to women isn't an apocalypse for me. I've provided a solution and that's all I can do. Staying tuned is up to Zen.

@rainmanjr "Go to war..." What does that mean? If we start shooting Christians, we lower ourselves to their level.

I prefer to work within the constructs of electoral democracy and rule of law.

@Flyingsaucesir Political war (of the kind waged by Q).

@rainmanjr Okay, win the war of ideas πŸ‘

The Democraps are master at lying.

@Flyingsaucesir Hopefully it will remain legal in most states but I’m not to optimistic about it remaining legal in Oklahoma.

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