Is George W Bush a complete moron ?

[clapstyx]

It does not seem to make sense to spend billions of dollars worth of various resources in order to get to a barren place like Mars when the finance is more urgently required here on Earth to balance the ratio of CO2 emission to sequestration. Is it just me or does this guy need his head read ?

 

The benefits to humanity will surely be much greater to spend the money on expanding the size of the global forest and so buying us some time to work out an equitable way to reign in the level of economic output (and the consequential emissions). Only once we have overcome the challenges on Earth that are critical to our perpetual survival should we even be thinking about locations elsewhere in the solar system. Clearly we dont have enough forests to stabilise the climate and rapidly absorb the CO2 that the American consumerist culture has generated and I would have thought it incumbent upon him as a leader (if not a world leader) to deal with these issues as a priority given his position of elevated responsibility.

[Boerseun]

Didn't you hear?

 

NASA found a few drops of oil on Mars! One of the latest photos taken by 'Opportunity' also shows a McDonald's under construction near a pretty big crater-rim.

[questor]

while Bush may not have his priorities in order, what will you do about China and India revving up their consumer engines? what will you do about the population explosion? these are the real problems, not Bush.

[C1ay]

The benefits to humanity will surely be much greater to spend the money on expanding the size of the global forest and so buying us some time to work out an equitable way to reign in the level of economic output (and the consequential emissions).

Don't just spout 'what', spout 'how' as well. The U.S. itself is not a temperate forest region so expanding the global forest in the U.S. is not an efficient proposal. Even if the U.S. planted all of it's open space with plant life it does not have the optimal climate to support it. Countries that are temperate forest regions with better climates are busy harvesting more forest than they're renewing. Are you suggesting that we force these countries to reverese this process?

 

Countries like China and India are busy ramping up their industrial processes and their consumption of fossil fuels as well. They also don't have optimal regions for offsetting their consumption through forestation. Compounding the problem in all of these countries is their location on the globe. Each has regions far enough north to consume large quantities of heating fuel in the winter and regions far enough south to consume huge amounts of energy for air conditioning in the summer. With population growth and growing commercialism these consumption rates will soar far faster than any forest could be regrown to offset them.

 

At some point mankind's consumption will exceed that which the planet can supply or recover from. Should we wait until then with trying to learn how to branch out into space? That may be too late....

[questor]

space is not the answer. we must deal with the problem here on earth. forests can grow back, but mining of minerals and changing the earths topography can lead to permanent weather changes. it is man's nature not to

alter his exploitation of the earth until forced to do so by calamitous circumstances. the only chance we have is to control the earth's population, we may already have too many people on earth to sustain over the next 500 years. we are not in balance with the earth's ability to regenerate and there is no evidence that anyone is aware or cares.

this is not Geoge Bush's problem, it is everyones problem. if you want to be an activist, be active about something that makes sense.

[Pyrotex]

while Bush may not have his priorities in order, what will you do about China and India revving up their consumer engines? what will you do about the population explosion? these are the real problems, not Bush.

What will WE do?

Who speaks for WE? Who manifests our country's policy?

George W. Bush.

So, "what will you do about..." becomes "what will GWB do about..."

 

Is he a total moron? No. Of course not. GWB has a decent IQ (I have been told). He is only inept whenever he is trying to speak without a well-rehearsed script.

 

GWB's deficiencies are not about stupidity or even priorities. It is about ideology and insularity. As the philosopher in my sig once said, "the map is not the territory". The concept or explanation we have for the reality around us is not the reality itself, just an approximation.

 

Ideology is where you are so "in love" with your map, that you insist that it IS reality. That your map describes everything worth describing and nothing else matters. So you ignore the evidence that reality does not always fit your nice clean map with its straight lines and perfect boundaries.

 

Insularity is where you surround yourself with folks who "believe in" the same map, and never engage in a meaningful conversation with anyone outside your little circle of friends. You don't want to even hear about evidence that your map is anything but perfect. Besides which, if anything goes wrong, God will step in and take care of it, right????

 

That's the problem.

[Boerseun]

There are one of two options:

 

Either he is a complete dork,

or

he is not a complete dork.

 

The catch is that he's an elected dork (or not). Elected by popular vote, with universal suffrage.

 

Now, if he is an elected dork, what does that say about US society?

 

He is the picture seen when the United Stated holds a collective mirror up to its face.

[Tarantism]

Now, if he is an elected dork, what does that say about US society?

 

were all dorks.:lol:

[Pyrotex]

were all dorks.:lol:

 

Speak for MYSELF, Tartan!!

 

I RESEMBLE that remark!!

[InfiniteNow]

Dubbya is certainly not a moron. Do I agree with each of his decisions? By no means. Do I think the issues he faces each day are easy? If I did, I'd be wrong.

 

Currently, human population growth seems analoguous to a virus sprending across the planet (our host). We are growing and eating and growing and using and growing and throwing away... Oil is but one (although large) part of the equation. We need a major societal shift in our thinking.

 

Where does change begin? With each of us. We have to educate ourselves and those around us to make better choices. We need new ideas and solutions, and we need to share them with everyone around us so the collective input will generate even better ideas and solutions. We need our reptilian brains to catch up to our mathematical abstractions in the evolution of our species and our society.

 

It will take more than one human at the top to make the change. However, if that one human were a true leader with a vision that made sense to all, whose belief was supported with evidence and facts and intelligence, then others would follow. However, let me ask you, why should I care if a gay couple gets married when we are destroying our home... a home we share with EVERY other life form that you have EVER heard of in ALL of history?

 

We are but a "Pale Blue Dot" <Carl Sagan> in "a moat of dust in one tiny corner of the universe..." but it's our dot, and it's all we have.

[Tarantism]

Speak for MYSELF, Tartan!!

 

I RESEMBLE that remark!!

 

:) :lol: :hyper: :) :lol: :) :D ;) :lol: :) :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol:

 

i certainly am a dork................for not leaving this country sooner!:lol:

[Southtown]

Politicians who aren't morons don't live very long.

 

Will common sense ever be profitable, or will it always require sacrifices?

[TheFaithfulStone]

It does not seem to make sense to spend billions of dollars worth of various resources in order to get to a barren place like Mars when the finance is more urgently required here on Earth to balance the ratio of CO2 emission to sequestration. Is it just me or does this guy need his head read ?

 

To paraphrase - blah blah blah, don't spend money on space.

 

This is a common argument put forth by people who want money spent on their pet projects and see some little trickling of the federal government going to space as an affront to their short-sighted sensibilties.

 

The exploration of space is the most important thing any human nation will ever do. I'll quote Buzz Aldrin, which won't convice you, but I'll do it anyway

 

"We can continue to try and clean up the gutters all over the world and spend all of our resources looking at just the dirty spots and trying to make them clean. Or we can lift our eyes up and look into the skies and move forward in an evolutionary way."

 

Here is some news for you. There will always be poor people, there will always be drug addicts, we will always treat our environment badly, there will always wars, and dictators, and bad people who want to do bad things to other people. There will always be important medical research that needs to be done.

 

None of those things are as important as getting off this rock, because if we don't do it we are all going to die. There is no argument to this point. If we don't expand into space, we are all doomed. Even if by some miracle we all manage to survive for the next five billion years, even then, the sun will turn into a red giant, consume the planet and kill us all. If we don't get hit by a comet next week, we will within the next few thousand years and civilization will be wiped out.

 

Maybe not you. Maybe not your grandchildren, or your great-great grandchildren, but someday, your descendents will all die and there will be no-one left to remember how we lived. Not expanding into space, not surviving as a species is immoral in every sense of the word - you name something, and it is destroyed by our lack of action. Beauty, truth, life - everything we value will be burned up and destroyed if we don't act to save it!

 

Now for some H.G. Wells - "The choice is simple. The universe or nothing."

And there you go - Life or Death. Take your pick.

 

"Wait until we fix all the problems here!" you're going to say (I know you are.) Well - we are never going to fix all the problems here. You've made the perfect the enemy of the good. Yeah, yeah, yeah, the problem may be insurrmountably difficult. But so was the journey across the Bering Straight, or World War II, or the American Revolution (or the War in Iraq) Everything worth doing is hard.

 

But to say, "But space is so EXPENSIVE, and HARD, and theres so much ELSE to DO...."

 

Well that's just cowardice of the first degree.

 

TFS

[my button has been pressed]

 

oh yes... GWB is not a moron, he's just a self-interested liar.

[Pyrotex]

To paraphrase - blah blah blah, don't spend money on space.

 

...The exploration of space is the most important thing any human nation will ever do. ....

I was going to say all that.

You beat me to it.

:lol:

[dad2bkmj]

It does not seem to make sense to spend billions of dollars worth of various resources in order to get to a barren place like Mars when the finance is more urgently required here on Earth to balance the ratio of CO2 emission to sequestration. Is it just me or does this guy need his head read ?

 

The benefits to humanity will surely be much greater to spend the money on expanding the size of the global forest and so buying us some time to work out an equitable way to reign in the level of economic output (and the consequential emissions). Only once we have overcome the challenges on Earth that are critical to our perpetual survival should we even be thinking about locations elsewhere in the solar system. Clearly we dont have enough forests to stabilise the climate and rapidly absorb the CO2 that the American consumerist culture has generated and I would have thought it incumbent upon him as a leader (if not a world leader) to deal with these issues as a priority given his position of elevated responsibility.

i'm not a scientist, i work in the heating and air business, my problem is i get a $50,000 fine if i let 5 lbs. of refrigerant out, but from what i understand everytime they launch the shuttle the stuff they cool the liq. o2 is dumped into the air, which amounts to hundreds of pounds of stuff that is not good for the atmosphere, or worse then if everybody in the country went outside and let go of a whole can of hairspray at the same time. no, i don't think i sould dump refrigerant in the air, but i think the goverment shuold use that money to clean up its own act, being its one of the largest poluters in the world.

[clapstyx]

All of what you have said there is true as far as I can tell (except the bit about his IQ..of that I have some real doubts..and some of his virtues and ideals are quite questionable as well if I might be so bold as to say that in an open forum).

 

Its also true that most people would just shout from the sidelines ..either at the players or the umpire (which I hope we will not get to the point of if we continue the analogy) and yet few people truly take the field.

 

In an effort to address all of your comments simultaneously I will put up part of a solution (the complete solution touches on all the other societal issues and even some more esoterical ones but that would make for a very long post).

 

Lets say we were serious about reducing the rate of environmental consumption. That seems to be an important part of the solution equation does it not ? The ideal way would be to do it so that it doesnt jolt the economy out of alignment. If consumption is to be decreased I think it would be more compatible with most of our ideals to do it through a free market mechanism rather than by a socialist / communist mechanism ie controlled by the state.

 

The free market already has the answer but we have not allowed it to evolve to its own theoretical ideals. Free market economics has at its foundation a presumption of "full information" so that the wisest possible decision can be made in regards to the allocation of scarce resources.

 

The one essential piece of information that the consumer does not have is a measure of environmental cost to measure how much resources were actually used and whether that was worth it or represents good value / good use. This means that the wisdom of the decision making process is shackled to a position of ignorance.

 

One solution to this is to place on each item a measure of environmental cost. The most primitive and readily implementable form of this is the ratio between the weight of all resources used throughout the production chain to create the product as against its final weight. The input resources would be measured in their original environmental state. The consumer in possession of this knowledge can then (as their concern for the future of the world escalates) choose products which have a lower environmental cost if they think its appropriate. This will probably mean that "junk items" which use a lot of resources but give little marginal value or benefit will begin to be avoided.

 

Under pur present pardigm the cost of living will accelerate as resources become more scarce and this will drive their exploitation to higher levels because it will be financially profitable to do so.

 

Under the above strategy fewer resources will be used in meanignless production and the cost of raw materials will therefore stabilise and (so long as population growth is not too great) fall, making more essential items cheaper. When we live in a world where we realise that resources are a finite commodity many of the products we presently make sell and buy will be considered a waste of otherwise important resources. It is much better to put a measure like this in place now and allow the consumer to have the capacity to make better decisions relative to the state of the planet then to keep everybody in the dark. Sure people might look at a ream of paper and see by its ratio that the resource use magnification factor is 92 times but at least we will be living in a true reality, knowing more fully the consequences of our actions and responding accordingly as we seek to become more resourceful for our own sakes.

 

This will no doubt annoy China because much of their production is useless rubbish in the grand scheme of things. It will also annoy the companies that supply them energy in the form of coal etc because demand will fall. But the bottom line is that annual resource consumption needs to be equated to the rate of replenishment or every economy will hit a dramatic brick wall. We might still hit it anyway but we wont hit it with so much velocity and it will give us time to restructure our habits and time to work out new solutions to old problems. Paper consumption for instance could be quickly reduced if paper was designed so that it could be wiped clean and reused..whiteboard paper that works in a laser printer.

 

If George Bush was smart he would adopt a policy stance that was designed to stabilise economic growth to a static level..manage it at that level for a couple of years and then allow it to begin to shrink. Perpetual economic growth is a dead end street..we are already consuming faster than the world can cope with and the sad fact is it has to be reduced. If we dont plan the reduction the pain will be much greater than if it just grinds to a halt and we start fighting over what resources remain.

[CraigD]

According to www.algore-2000.org (archive), and confirmed by several independent sources, George W Bush scored 566 verbal, 640 math on his SATs. This would place him in roughly the 50 and 70 percentiles, respectively. To my knowledge, Bush was either never tested to obtain a Stanford-Binet IQ score, or this score is not publicly known.

 

By comparison, Al Gore scored 625 / 730, placing him in the 80 and 95 percentiles. He is said to have a SB IQ of 134, which would be 99+ percentile, however adult SB IQs are notoriously poorly administered, and of questionable statistical validity.

 

So, based on best evidence, G.W.Bush is of about average intelligence – neither a moron, nor particularly smart. He is almost certainly less smart than his opponent in the 2000 US presidential elections, proving the common wisdom that elections are not intelligence contests.