Photoshop

Obviously done to distract people from the fake moon rock and the missing tapes.

REPLY: I won’t try to argue with you since you are hopelessly entrenched in your position. But at the same time, since I think your position is based one of rationalized propaganda, and your mission is to spread it, I’m going to close this thread.

Bottom line: We went to the moon, men walked on the moon, and left instruments there including corner reflectors which with a narrow beam laser can easily be discerned from the Russian ones. Choose to believe it or not, but I won’t have you spreading disinformation here. – Anthony

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/adrianmichaels/100007897/was-hollands-moon-rock-the-only-thing-that-was-faked/

This coming just a couple months after NASA ‘lost’ the moon landing tapes.

As far as the previously mentioned reflectors, note that the Russians also placed reflectors on the Moon, however they never claimed that they sent men to the Moon.

REPLY: Hah the Telegraph blogger didn’t even cite a source. Apparently you missed this…

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31966131/ns/technology_and_science-space/

For stubborn folks who still believe the Apollo astronauts never landed on the moon, NASA has new images — definitive proof — that clearly show the Apollo 11 lander that carried the first astronauts to the lunar surface 40 years ago.

The images were taken by NASA’s first lunar scout in more than a decade, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. They show the Eagle lunar lander at Tranquility Base, where Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on July 20, 1969. They were snapped between July 11 and 15 of this month and released by NASA on Friday.

Here are the images direct from NASA, enjoy your cognitive dissonance.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LRO/multimedia/lroimages/apollosites.html

Then your mother-in-law is the clever one I referred to. She has the senior water rights. I was referring to those individuals in Colorado who wish to gather the water of the Poudre because they do not have water rights senior enough to guarantee the success of their crops. In a wet year, such as this year, there’s probably enough water around to bring in everyone’s crop. Not so in a dry year.

Congratulations to your mother-in-law. I wouldn’t sell the water rights either until I had the right price.

I was familiar with the Republican River deal and was impressed with how the state had to buy the water rights to satisfy the claims. That is as it should be. If a developer wants to put more homes up somewhere here in Colorado, that person should go to the marketplace and purchase the rights.

If the developer doesn’t have the money, or the water rights are too expensive for the project, I guess the project doesn’t go.

Some projects have gotten started without long term sources of reliable water. Parker, Colorado is dependent on aquifers that will eventually go dry. I don’t know what they’re going to do. I do know someone there was raising objections to Shell Oil’s purchase of some water rights up on the Yampa.

But that is the free market in operation. If someone else is willing to pay more for something than you are, you’re not going to get it.

As they say in the West, whiskey is for drinking and water is for fighting.

That’s an interesting article. My conclusion (and I read for a living) is that Gavin is looking for an escape route.

Let’s hope he can keep it scientific and it doesn’t spill over to his private life. That’s a very rough road he’s on.

I agree with you however, as the finacial crash of 1929 (And to use a line from the “Austin Powers” movies by Michael Cane…”I hate anyone intollerant of other people’s cultures, and the Dutch!” I bundle the Scots and French in there too, and I have Scottish ancestry) fully illustrates *most* people, or rather sheeple, *are* stupid. And politicians fully make that work for them.

I see New Zealand (As NZ was the first country to “allow” women the vote) to be the “shining light” in the AGW “debate” (That Al Gore won’t have) and lead the world down the path of sensibility since they have abandoned an ETS (Not a surprise given the nature of the industry there). But then I think, they’ve had 10 years of pinko, lefty liberal BS policies and an education system so dummed down even the PM of “Great Britain” would be proud (The “Great” Scottish g*t he is).

Now this is either a bit disingenious or naive, Jack. My mother-in-law irrigates her land from the Republican river with the most senior (1889) water rights in the State of Nebraska. On the Colorado side, (the water is obtained just below Wray, Co.) the State of Colorado purchased about 2000 acre/rights for $20,000,000 ($10,000/acre) to fulfill their part of the Tri-state compact (Kansas sued CO and NEB for taking too much water). Don’t tell me it would have been clever to purchase some. She will sell her’s when the price is right. However, NEB doesn’t have the population or money to pay the big $$$$.

GA (16:55:34) : The basic worldview of the CoR is that modern industrial society is destroying the earth and (to use their words) “our only hope is to transform humanity into an interdependent global sustainable community, based on reverence and respect for the Earth.”

Thanks GA, I’ll start to read more about this stuff. I’d come across The State of the World Forum which is a more recent thing, and involves similar names coming from various places from politics to spirituality. You can see on the State of the World’s website that they are calling on Obama to use AGW as the issue for America to unite the world.

Jim Garrison is the Chairman of the forum, and I heard an interview he did with a famous american philosopher, Ken Wilber. Now Wilber has produced perhaps the most comprehensive map of the world’s philosophies, psychologies, cultures, and worldviews. It necessarily includes maps of ecology as well as maps of spiritual traditions. You sorta have to read this stuff, as the breadth and depth of the subject matter, whilst still saying something useful and insightful, is hard to believe. Anyway, the point of this is that Wilber is well versed in how to talk to those who have a worldview that we need to unite globally, and perhaps even spiritually. His magnus opus “Sex, Ecology, Spirituality”, begins with a framework that points out the ways in which holistic systems theorists in ecology, are not nearly as holistic as they at first appear.

Anyway, so Ken and Jim are having a chat, and Jim is all like, we have all these problems in the world and we need someone to lead forward and really make history and lead us to major changes. Ken doesn’t disagree with this, but quite diplomatically, he reminds Jim that whilst it is true that individuals can and do make history, progress, if it is genuinely new progress, is unforeseeable, unpredictable, and uncontrollable. I mean, if the innovation was easily foreseen, it wouldn’t be new, it would just be more of the same. So whilst it is true that the world has in the past gone through some major and dramatic shifts and developments, these happen chaotically and can just as easily lead to breakdown as they do breakthrough.

CodeTech, S.A. is a prime example, where they destroyed a system that had some really fundamentally evil components, but nobody knew how to put the system back together again. I entirely agree. One of the many models from psychology that Wilber has referred to, is a model called Spiral Dynamics by Don Beck and Chris Cowan. You can go back to the beginning of the Iraq war, and find interviews with Don Beck where he talks about the plan to bring democracy to Iraq. From the point of view of Beck and Cowan’s model, Iraq was very obviously a mostly feudal society, which made it unsuitable for democracy. The reason is, for elections to work, everyone has to accept the winner, but in a feudal society, a tribe only accepts its own tribe as a winner. Blood ties are humanity’s oldest form of social organisation, and many parts of the world still work like that. It was entirely predictable that Iraq wasn’t going to turn into a well run democracy, if like Beck you’d spent years studying how individuals and cultures develop their complex values and social systems.

Long before Iraq, Don Beck did a lot of work in S.A., trying to smooth out the transition to post-apartheid, and his analysis of the situation was that the whites were basically operating with one social structure, and the blacks were operating at another, and there wasn’t a system in between linking the two systems and providing a way for those in one culture to move into the other culture. Bridges were needed to be built for a couple of generations, but instead the system was torn down and not even law and order survived. (Bear in mind this is my take on their work).

I’m sure many can agree that the world faces problems. But my feeling about complex systems is, DON’T MESS WITH THEM.

Incidentally, in my own mind, looking at Beck and Cowan’s model, there is indeed a structure of culture that they identified that is indeed truly global and united, however, that structure is not one that anything more than 0.5% of the people can activate in their own personal psychology. I mean, their research shows that there just aren’t enough people in the world able to live that way. In other words, a united humanity is still way off in our future, and not something we can impose anytime soon. See S.A. and Iraq for what happens when we try to impose something for which the system isn’t ready.

Excessive drought plagues much of the Western US to the point where water rationing is inevitable, with the golf courses and suburban sprawl winning out to the farmers in the Central Valley of California, a nationwide, if not worldwide “breadbasket” agricultural region.

socialcritic,

Your posting is loaded with factual errors. I will address only one of them, the quote about ‘Excessive drought plagues much of the Western US’.

Here is Denver, we depend on spring runoff for our water supply. A few years ago, we did, in fact, have a serious drought. This was caused by a few years of below normal precipitation in conjunction with a large population influx.

During this drought, we even had a spate of forest fires, including the Hayman fire, started by a forest service employee, who claimed to be burning a letter from an ex-lover or husband or whatever. Some irony in that.

Anyway, the Denver Water Board started asking people to please cut back on the watering. Not just for those dry years, but to make long term commitments in cutting back by xeriscaping, smaller lawns, etc.

It worked. Water demand dropped rapidly.

It worked so well, Denver Water Board had to increase our water rates to stay solvent.

Now, this year, we are way ahead of normal in precipitation. So much so, the Denver Water Board is complaining about not selling enough water. The Colorado River is running at twice the normal rate for this time of year.

See http://nwis.waterdata.usgs.gov/nwis/uv?09085100

Yet, our local climatologists keep claiming we are in a drought.

Why?

If there is no problem with the local climate, there is no need for a local climatologist.

Now there are still people out here who want to build another dam, this time up on the Poudre River. These are the same bunch that wanted more water for development. There are also some farmers who want to keep their operations going, who weren’t clever enough to obtain the senior water rights others already had.

I think, and this is just my opinion, we have enough people in Colorado. If more want to come, they’ll have to get along on less water. It might mean some people will have to change lifestyles and careers. Perhaps the market is telling dry land farmers they will have to go somewhere else to grow food.

Free markets, free choices. How can it get any better?

If there’s not enough water going downstream to Arizona and California, I guess they’ll have to get it somewhere else, or do without swimming pools and golf courses or growing food. Their choice.

The West has always been on the dry side. Always will. When you have too many people, there is going to be a ‘drought’, even though there was never a drought before.

The ‘drought’ is caused by too many people living a life style that cannot be supported in a dry part of the world; not by global warming as your post suggests.

Oh, and fish excrete carbonate pellets in the fish poo at a (newly discovered) very high rate. In:

Does this mean I can claim to be saving the planet by releasing the fish I catch?

I’m sure they believe they are doing good… there’s been a whole cultural movement since the 60s that wants more cooperation, more egalitarianism, more sensitive caring and community, is anti-technology and wants more soft feeling and care.

more drugs, more ruined, empty personal lives, more failed communal lifestyles…

But that movement is not the last word in the progress of wisdom. Researchers are finding that the latest generation is already starting to see the problems caused by the 60s culture, and are reacting against it, just like the 60s culture was reacting against the problems of the existing world, the problems of corporations, chemical pollution, nuclear war, institutionalized racism, and so on.

I believe extreme environmentalism (putting nature ahead of human needs) reached its peak in 2008. AGW is environmentalism’s Vietnam.

When the hippies sitting in fields in the 60s became the institutional leaders, politicians, and heads of academic and scientific organizations in the 90s, that generation and its worldview had already reached its peak, and was already on the way out.

As Exxon has shown, scientists can be corrupted, so we must never listen to any scientists that is receiving any funding.

Benjamin Franklin.

To get into a vehicle that you know is about to attempt to take you to the moon!!

Keep in mind, the vehicle you ride to the moon is made of millions of carefully integrated mechanical, electrical, and chemical parts; each manufactured by the low bidder.

There is no perfect system as long as mankind is a part of it. I’m just tired of seeing our Constitution trampled, Patrick. I do indeed see a repeat pattern of history as you mentioned. To get this back on topic, Buzz said (according to the Telegraph)“If it’s warming now, it may cool off later. I’m not in favour of just taking short-term isolated situations and depleting our resources to keep our climate just the way it is today.”

If I read that correctly, Buzz does not think it is wise for us to throw money (that we do not have) at a problem (that may not exist). I hope we have agreement there.