gdp's Comments

Daily Camera.com: : Brave new pot world: Ongoing study of teen usage is right on - Boulder Daily Camera

Fri, 20 Dec 2013 01:58:57 +0000

You're right. Here's the graph, from a recently released federal report: <img src="http://sullydish.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/marijuana-use.png?w=580" width="400" height="400"> http://www.monitoringthefuture.org/pubs/monograph... Sure, the pot today is stronger, but people use what they need to use to get to the level of 'high' they need, so it's kind of like pointing out that vodka is stronger than beer. No one stops after, say, six shot glasses of beer, any more than they sit down to drink six12 ounce bottles of vodka. They drink, or smoke, until they're at the desired level of buzz, in 1977 or today. The other interesting bit is this - tobacco and binge alcohol use are way down among this crowd over that period, too, much more than marijuana. According to the same report, both are just over half what they were around 1980 among 12th graders. I'd say that far lower alcohol and tobacco use, and steady but lower-than-thirty-years-ago pot use, is on balance real progress.

Daily Camera.com: : Traveling U.S. 36 between Louisville, Boulder to be a cramped affair in 2014 - Boulder Daily Camera

Tue, 10 Dec 2013 13:57:20 +0000

If our needs change unpredictably for this road say 20 or 30 years out, are we locked in to the contract with this private group? Have we done the same thing we did for the Brazilian investors who get to veto any nearby high-speed roads that might take traffic from E-470? If computer-linked car 'trains' can speed through, in a few years, for example? 50 years is a long time to pretend everything is going to stay just as we forecast it today.

Daily Camera.com: : Dick Regan: When enough is enough with guns - Boulder Daily Camera

Fri, 6 Dec 2013 23:45:50 +0000

Morse was elected in an election in which 70.8% of Coloradans voted. He was recalled in an election in which 11% of those in his district voted.

Daily Camera.com: : Mike Taylor: COGA has no legal standing in fracking cases - Boulder Daily Camera

Fri, 6 Dec 2013 23:19:42 +0000

The ACLU doesn't sue on its own behalf, it finds people who have been injured by whoever and offers them legal help in suing.

Daily Camera.com: : Judy Weiss: Climate change -- Early warning system may be too late - Boulder Daily Camera

Fri, 6 Dec 2013 21:54:58 +0000

Imagine if our grandparents had had the same attitude towards the Nazi conquest of Europe. Not my problem, let the kids deal with it.

Daily Camera.com: : Judy Weiss: Climate change -- Early warning system may be too late - Boulder Daily Camera

Fri, 6 Dec 2013 07:16:31 +0000

Only if you're Catholic, not Protestant, because Catholics believe good works without sincere belief will add to your credit, while real Lutherans and other hard-edged Protestants believe that only pure belief, regardless of your crimes and sins, can save you. For the real hard cases, it's predestined whether you will be saved or not, not a thing you can do about it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sola_fide

Daily Camera.com: : Judy Weiss: Climate change -- Early warning system may be too late - Boulder Daily Camera

Fri, 6 Dec 2013 07:02:24 +0000

The only thing that discusses is hurricanes, not CO2 or global temperatures or droughts or floods or sea ice or winter storms or ocean acidification or desertification or any of the many other climate events that are set to change in one direction or another. I don't know anything about hurricanes, haven't lived near a seacoast, and while I think the climate models say they'll increase in strength, dramatically after a while, I don't think the models have claimed a consensus that they'll necessarily increase in frequency with rising CO2., so I think your attorney is slaying another straw man. And I certainly don't know - nor does he, at least as far as he discusses in the article - whether the changes or lack of changes observed are statistically significant or statistically noise. Bottom line: I don't see a need to waste my time reading a Colombian attorney writing way outside his area of expertise, printed in a tabloid newspaper published by a biased publisher, when I have real scientific journals available instead. If you give credence to that kind of opinion, rather than actual scientists, that's the tiny bubble. I notice you didn't defend what he said OR his credentials, either one, just disliked that I pointed out that it wasn't exactly peer reviewed science.

Daily Camera.com: : Judy Weiss: Climate change -- Early warning system may be too late - Boulder Daily Camera

Fri, 6 Dec 2013 06:55:20 +0000

Sure, but it doesn't happen this fast when it's due to natural causes, and the world's ecosystems have enough time to adapt when natural cycles spin up. The only things that change the world's climate this fast are enormous meteors (the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event that killed off the dinosaurs), similarly enormous volcanoes but those effects are temporary, and humans, currently on track to more than double atmospheric CO2 in 150 years, C)2 that will take at least hundreds of thousands of years to naturally come back down out of the atmosphere and be re-buried by the same process that laid down the oil and coal in the first place. At least try to go to real scientific sources, not paid propaganda ones, for your info. Here's a good place to start, a new report issued just Tuesday. http://news.sciencemag.org/climate/2013/12/abrupt...

Daily Camera.com: : Judy Weiss: Climate change -- Early warning system may be too late - Boulder Daily Camera

Fri, 6 Dec 2013 06:52:32 +0000

We have to do what we can without tanking world economic growth. Which will be complex. The faster we start, the less drastic the action we eventually have to take. The longer we do nothing, the more the world's ecosystem, and the humans who depend on it - our grandkids - will suffer. The first place to start would be to replace other taxes with a revenue neutral carbon tax, so the world's engineers and businessmen can do the most cost-effective actions first. It's possible to design such a tax to take into account carbon-intensive products produced elsewhere and imported, like aluminum or concrete, so it will have a beneficial effect even in places where such taxes aren't imposed, though that would require a change in the GATT, I understand.

Daily Camera.com: : Judy Weiss: Climate change -- Early warning system may be too late - Boulder Daily Camera

Fri, 6 Dec 2013 05:24:38 +0000

Right. You read the New Murdoch Post for your science news, posting columns by Colombian attorneys. I'll stick to Nature and Science and other actual science journals, with articles written by actual scientists. .

Daily Camera.com: : Judy Weiss: Climate change -- Early warning system may be too late - Boulder Daily Camera

Fri, 6 Dec 2013 05:12:31 +0000

One year? Seriously? In a related story, as described in Scientifically Illiterate (SI) Magazine, it's cold outside today, so the climate must have abruptly changed to global cooling. Or it's a silly single data point. If you'd done the same graph from 2011-2012, it'd be just about as dramatic the other way. How about a time-lapse video of the mass of the sea ice from 1979 to last year? Because it's not only the area that matters, it's the thickness too. Both are shrinking over time. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embed...

Daily Camera.com: : Judy Weiss: Climate change -- Early warning system may be too late - Boulder Daily Camera

Fri, 6 Dec 2013 05:11:36 +0000

Why, exactly? If you look at the 1980s average, the 1990s average, the 2000s average, and the individual years more recently, each year they're less. Anything global that happens this quickly is something whole ecosystems can't adapt to without massive extinctions.

Daily Camera.com: : Judy Weiss: Climate change -- Early warning system may be too late - Boulder Daily Camera

Fri, 6 Dec 2013 05:09:35 +0000

Since the seals also crawl out of the ocean to give birth, to rest, and to avoid sharks, not so much for them either.

Daily Camera.com: : Boulder Canyon closed after roll-over accident involving propane tanker - Boulder Daily Camera

Fri, 6 Dec 2013 00:55:55 +0000

Did some sailboat racing (J/24s) on Lake Michigan off Chicago. Mostly as beef-on-the-beam, admittedly, just enough to observe what the good sailors did. Then the boat owning couple got pregnant.... http://www.jboats.com/j24-one-design-sailboat

Daily Camera.com: : Judy Weiss: Climate change -- Early warning system may be too late - Boulder Daily Camera

Fri, 6 Dec 2013 00:51:48 +0000

Not so great for polar bears on the ice floes, though.

Daily Camera.com: : Virtual Editorial Board: Recall elections and appointments - Boulder Daily Camera

Thu, 5 Dec 2013 22:26:18 +0000

We elected our current state reps in an election in which 70.8% of Coloradans voted. In the recent recall elections, like John Morse's, fewer than 20% of the voters in his district voted. These recall elections are nothing but an effort to replace the verdict of a majority of Coloradans with a passionate small minority's verdict.

Daily Camera.com: : Judy Weiss: Climate change -- Early warning system may be too late - Boulder Daily Camera

Thu, 5 Dec 2013 22:21:40 +0000

Reality check. This data is from the National Research Council report released just Tuesday: <img src="http://images.nationalgeographic.com/wpf/media-content/photos/000/740/cache/74036_990x742-cb1386092380.jpg"> http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/12/1...

Daily Camera.com: : Boulder Canyon closed after roll-over accident involving propane tanker - Boulder Daily Camera

Tue, 3 Dec 2013 22:50:29 +0000

Thanks. I had no idea the story had changed. Comity lives in the DC forums, among some anyway, I guess, even if it's dead in Washington.

Daily Camera.com: : An outbreak of lawlessness - Boulder Daily Camera

Tue, 3 Dec 2013 22:34:08 +0000

How about a debate between the top two Republicans in the Senate today - and their 2005 selves:

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Thursday "It reminds [the American people] of the power grab. It reminds them of the way Democrats set up one set of rules for themselves and another for everybody else. ... Once again, Senate Democrats are threatening to break the rules of the Senate in order to change the rules of the Senate." Then-Senate Majority Whip Mitch McConnell, May 2005 "The majority in the Senate is prepared to restore the Senate's traditions and precedence to ensure that regardless of party, any president's judicial nominees, after full and fair debate, receive a simple up-or-down vote on the Senate floor. It's time to move away from ... advise and obstruct and get back to advise and consent." Senate Minority Whip John Cornyn in a statement, Thursday "The Democrats' attempt to pivot at a time when we should be focused on protecting the American people from dropped health care coverage makes their true motives clear. They will do anything to take the attention off the failure that is Obamacare, even if it means breaking the rules of the Senate in a raw exercise of partisan political power." Sen. John Cornyn in a New York Times letter to the editor, March 2005 "You disparage the Republicans' view that 51 votes should be enough for judicial confirmation. Yet the 51-vote rule is a consistent Senate tradition. By calling for an end to filibusters, the Senate is simply contemplating restoring its traditions by traditional methods you disparage as 'nuclear.' "

http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2013/11/2... The context is this: the Dems were filibustering some judges, and the Repubs threatened to eliminate the filibuster rule in 2005 by majority vote to get the judges through. A week or so later, the Dems agreed not to use the filibuster more than very rarely, letting all the current judges through plus a lot more, so the Repubs didn't eliminate the filibuster. This time, the Repubs didn't stop using the filibuster, they used it to a level never seen before, so the Dems had to change that rule.

Daily Camera.com: : An outbreak of lawlessness - Boulder Daily Camera

Tue, 3 Dec 2013 13:32:50 +0000

The Dems never got close to the level of obstruction the Repubs have demonstrated. They talked about it, but backed down. Read that first sentence again. False equivalence is exactly the word - pretending the Dems ever obstructed Dubya's nominations even a third as much is exactly that, false equivalence.