Posts Made By: Paul Kammueller

Hi guys, just an FYI I'm out of the moderator pool as of today. Don't read anything into it, really the only reason is I'm not able to keep up with the forum as much as one should to be a moderator. Just don't seem to have time anymore, the last few months other local and civic duties have been taking up more and more of my attention. Will still hang around here, just not a constant presence or overseer or whatever.

Back to your regularly scheduled programming. 8)

Jim Babcock said:
"Gore has held these apocalyptic views about the environment for some time. So why, then, didn't Gore dump his family's large stock holdings in Occidental (Oxy) Petroleum? As executor of his family's trust, over the years Gore has controlled hundreds of thousands of dollars in Oxy stock. Oxy has been mired in controversy over oil drilling in ecologically sensitive areas."

Just because he's an environmentalist doesn't mean he's stupid. Everybody knows that oil and weapons are the only game on Wall Street while republicans run the show.

The article goes on the chastise him for having more than one home. Well duh, he's a rich guy. I guess democrats are supposed to take an oath of poverty now. Pffft. Whatever.

Now for the political questions:
- Does this article and disclosure hurt AlGore's standing with environmentalists?

Environmentalists appreciate having a heavyweight messenger. I would bet they don't particularly care about the messenger's lifestyle, though it appears better than most.

- Will this article and disclosure impact any future political aspirations of AlGore.

I doubt it, even if there are any aspirations.

- Will AlGore change his habits because of this?

Given that the chief criticism of the article seems to be picking nits about not buying enough green energy credits to offset all 3 houses, maybe -- if they're already buying enough to offset the jet's emissions, offsetting 3 households is probably only an extra 0.1% purchase above that. So basically if the purchases for the jet are erring at all on the high side, the houses are probably covered.

All in all, sloppy journalism and logic loose enough to drive a truck through. One of the weaker opinion pieces I've seen from the right.

This one:

- If we hadn't diverted resources from the war on Al-Qaeda to invade Iraq (creating a whole new army of terrorists to fight) they probably would no longer have had the resources to even carry out the attack.

Every time one of these plots surfaces it throws into sharp focus where our priorities should have been all along and what a massive blunder it was to start a new war in Iraq before business was finished in the mountains far to the east. Dictatorships are a red herring, the places where terrorists truly thrive are in weak states, like there has been in Lebanon and like the one we've created in Iraq.

Hats off to the Brits for getting 'em, and to whoever (of whichever party) in the FBI or CIA or whatever who may have been involved as well.

JMHO of course. But I've tripled my oil-related holdings in the last 48 hours after lightening up considerably some weeks back. It looks like a local oversold low point both in the XLE and in several of the underlying commodity charts themselves. Good buying point if the overall uptrend doesn't actually break -- which of course is possible if we tip the world into recession and demand suddenly tanks.

So this half-baked thought crossed my mind today. What if there were a 'Real Life' religion forum? I mean on a world-stage scale, picturing the governing bodies of those religions that have governing bodies sending emissaries to an open forum for relations and negotiations, settling misunderstandings and so forth, complete with period summit meetings and the like.

I realize that different religions view each other as various sorts of 'infidels' and so forth -- but by analogy even nations that have diametrically opposed ideologies don't prevent themselves from having international relations or negotiations. If there were some sort of official high-level 'diplomacy' between multi-national cultural constructs like religions, it could, in principal, by creating a conduit for communication through official religious channels that would prevent more radical elements from gaining legitimacy by inciting action against other religions.

But based on experience in forums like this, do you think it would be more likely to cause some progress in understanding, or would it just make everybody involved want to kill each other more?

OK, it was fun to think about. I'm going back to the real world now where everybody just wants to kill each other.

Anyone care to speculate as to whether the Fed has successfully engineered one, as occurred in 1995?

I will give the Pope credit for extending the invite to muslim clerics, he is going out of his way to make amends. How often has this sort of overture been made in the past?

Akira Okazaki said:
Reuters reported -" French regional daily L'Est Republican, published in Nancy, quoted a document from France's DGSE foreign intelligence service as saying the Saudi secret services were convinced the al Qaeda leader had died of typhoid in Pakistan in late August. "
If this is true, what impact will this have on our November election,...if any?

If it ends up being confirmed, I suppose it lets the prez off the hook for finding OBL. I don't know if it would affect elections here if he died of typhoid, probably would have had a bigger effect had he gotten bombed or shot or captured.

The public is fairly starved for some encouraging news at this point, and if it turns out to be true we at least won't have him mocking us from the mountains of Pakistan anymore while we're tied up in Iraq, and people will have some renewed hope again.

So a week or so ago in the news there was this article about a poll in the U.S. about people's beliefs about God. Turns out most agreed that God exists, but varied greatly on what sort of person He is. The poll ended up identifying four basic god types:

Authoritarian (judgemental and engaged in human affairs)
Benevolent (less judgemental, i.e. forgiving, but engaged)
Critical (judgmental but not engaged)
Distant (niether judgmental nor greatly engaged in human affairs)

What I found interesting were geographic correlations. For instance the South leans strongly toward the Authoritarian god -- in itself not surprising, but why did it turn out so? Critical God is more popular in the east, benevolent in the midwest, and 'Distant God' in the west.

I was wondering if it has to do with historic relationship(s) of the various regions with government. The western states have always been far from the seat of federal power. Is the 'Distant' God popular in this region a subconscious cosmic governance allegory for a literally distant national government (the distance may not mean much today, but it would have had much more significance for most of the nation's history)? Furthermore, is the Authoritarian God in the South a subconscious mirror of the federal union government that brought the South to submission in the Civil War?

Are we always simply re-molding God into our concept of governance based on past experience across generations?

Just for fun, anyone care to throw a fearless forecast out on whether the Dow gets its record close this week? It's been making a run at it, but it is October...