http://www.cpc.noaa.gov/products/predictio...nge/fxus05.html

ALSO SEE:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBxh4-rjvNI

Ok, but there isn't any point to all this cold weather if we don't get any real snow.

My feeling on winter: ALL or NOTHING

I want arctic conditions or to skip over winter completely. Wimpy winters are just annoying.

is this a global warming thread?

It better be.

ALL threads must be global warming threads!

Actually, it's a mandolin thread.

man doodlin thread

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5U67PVvO7WI

ummm...
not for us.....actually says a warmer than normal winter.

Temp Map

nice mandolin though.

Ha! You checked!

I hate that we own Alaska and Hawaii - they're so stupid, just sitting out there in the middle of nowhere. I'm sure their weird weather throws off what would've been a nice, tidy national average for us lower forty-eighters. Let's make them secede.

Or let's annex Iraq to balance them out.

We need to start drilling for oil up in Alaska so shitholes like Iraq, Iran, and Saudi Arabia might one day be devoid of "American Interests" and we can just let them rot the way their societies are designed to.

I always loved that particular performance of "Mandolin Wind" by the way. Wood and Stewart at the best they'd ever be again. Awesome.

Fixed it.

no way - those are the 2 prettiest states in the union. most of the rest of this country is butt ugly...

A stark, apologist's oversimplification of Western influence and presence in that region of the world after WWI and up until now.

Nuthin' simple about Neo-imperialism, me fine bucko.

http://academic.evergreen.edu/g/grossmaz/interventions.html

It's an oversimplification, but Western influence and presence in that region since WWI has left a big footprint (like the invention of Iraq, for instance).

I don't think you can really explain Islamism (or whatever folks are calling neo-medieval Islamic radicalism this afternoon) without reference to the Western footprint in the Middle East; it's backward looking, sure, but the conditions of its origin (a recent origin) are as much shaped by Western tendencies as was the widespread Arab nationalism of about a century ago.

(And by "Western influence," I obviously mean global warming.)

The Jews!
http://history.missouristate.edu/maps/Amer...e1865/meoil.jpg

The Western footprint(s) in the region have of course been profoundly provocative in terms of giving the nationalist and islamists something to pose their reactionary movements in opposition to ... and perhaps, arguably, have been as much catalyst as they have post starting point influence.

There's plenty of blame to go around in every concieveable direction there.

I just get a little annoyed when a dimmeno (or similar person who probably knows better) postulates that the current absolute mess that is the region happens to be the sole result of some mythical "neo-imperialist" agenda, rather than a complex, interwoven series of circumstances, bad decisions by leadership (on all sides) and EuroAmericanMiddleEasternTurkicPersian et al commercial interests, which are at this point (thanks to all the above) inextricably tied to common and individual political interests and thus lead to conflict and extremism (again, on all sides).

HOLD YOUR HOSSES, OLD PAINT!

I wasn't just talking about the Middle East.

This link:
http://academic.evergreen.edu/g/grossmaz/interventions.html

...is only a partial list of United States military interventions.

I would never be so foolish as to maintain that some of them weren't justified.

But when I was studying under Professor Robert Laffey (whose specialty happens to be the Middle East--he's now at Suffolk) he took special pains to emphasize the role of our cold war incursions into Iran and Guatemala and the role they played in geo-politics.

Neo-imperialism, Laffey explained, is a "soft" version of classic imperialism, in which influence over a country's internal affairs trumps access to cheap labor and natural resources. Spheres of influence, and like that.

I don't see anything in the current expansion of United States hegemony that proves him wrong.

See:
http://globalpolicy.org/unitedstates/unpol...4ushegemony.htm
http://www.globalpolicy.org/empire/tables/tablesindex.htm

That chart not accurate--Brit. intel M5, not just CIA, led instalation of Shah, for instance

London has always hated arabs

Liberal bluebloods gave us Vietnam and most of the pointless agressions

these 'histories' blindly blame the U.S right

dimenno = dinosaur leftist

Ah-ah-ah.

Study your history, my paleoconservative pal.

Ike got us into Vietnam, not JFK.

The Bay of Pigs was Ike's plan, not Kennedy's.

And Cold War liberals were stolidly anti-communist.

Take off the fascist sunglasses and join with the light.

I saw squirrels gathering acorns. That means it's going to be a long winter...

Well there, dimmy ... nothing like broadening an initial argument to include a veritable amalgam of topics and circumstances unrelated to the original.

I'm glad that you would at least "never be so foolish as to maintain that some of them weren't justified", especially those that occurred in our own hemisphere at certain points and during times in which it was a stated policy of ours to prevent the European governments from establishing further hegemony in our neck of the woods. The Pax Americana was to a degree a viable and worthy concept, and certainly bore us both many fruits and multiple consequences over the years.

I would coversely never be so foolish as to imagine that our government hasn't all too often been all too quick to jump in where American interests were dubious, and even non existent. For example .... So what if Vietnam becomes Maoist (which it did anyway) and the Korean peninsula before it does the same (which The South of it did not, thanks in part to a lot of dead American and other nations' soldiers) ? Both of these are prime historical examples (to me) where the blood and treasure we spent were never equalled by any true benefit to our nation at home.

I hate American military-political intervention with a passion, when it occurs without clear and truly defined attachment to the well being and prosperity of our own people. I think the tendency for it to become policy-then-action has as much to do with well meaning interventionists in Washington as it does money grubbing corporate scum who so cynically use the American flag as a fig leaf to cover their own true motives of cheap labor and unexploited resources.

My orginal point was that all this, while true in varying degrees around the world, and at certain points in history, does not absolve Middle Eastern governments, and the people in the region of having in so many ways designed their own current states of affair.

As I said above, there's plenty of blame to go around, and to say that all the world's troubles can be pinned on "neo-imperialism", rather than an amalgamation of this, and geopolitics, and who-one-which-war, and to a degree the quality of a given populus/popular will in a given region is a base oversimplification of such matters.

You clearly hate America.

Now let's go drill some oil, and displace a few million caribou (again with the imperialism) up North so we can get back to talking baseball, shall we ?

By the way, there's quite a bit of historically inaccurate data on that there page. Alot of it even seems to be intentionally skewed to make a point.

Not than an acedemic type would ever indulge in historical fiction (cough cough ... WARD CHURCHILL ... ahem... cough COUGH) and complete fabrication in order to serve some sort of ethnic or political bias.

The term Neo-imperialism is just a convenient form of shorthand for an interventionist f'n policy. Never evenimplied it was the cause of "all the world's troubles".

And I never said the Middle Easterners didn't to some extent bring their troubles down upon themselves.

Pointing out historic facts does not equal treason, unless you live in a totalitarian regime in which such arrant "revisionism" is frowned upon by some central committee.

I have a deep and abiding respect for America and its democratic institutions.

But:
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/t...jeff157225.html

More like fiction based on fact.

Sure, it's skewed.

But this passage is pretty bloody spot on:

One of the most dangerous ideas of the 20th century was that "people like us" could not commit atrocities against civilians.

German and Japanese citizens believed it, but their militaries slaughtered millions of people.
British and French citizens believed it, but their militaries fought brutal colonial wars in Africa and Asia.
Russian citizens believed it, but their armies murdered civilians in Afghanistan, Chechnya, and elsewhere.
Israeli citizens believed it, but their army mowed down Palestinians and Lebanese.
Arabs believed it, but suicide bombers and hijackers targeted U.S. and Israeli civilians.
U.S. citizens believed it, but their military killed hundreds of thousands in Vietnam, Iraq, and elsewhere.

But see, this is all broad-brush painting over of historically unrelated circumstances in some academic attempt to thread it all together for the (I would say) purpose of establishing an ideological premise in what looks like a larger argument for complete pacifism.

If one wishes to have a philosophical debate about what in human nature allows for violence as a means of conflict resolution, then one needs to recognize that it hasn't and doesn't all flow from a singular causal source (i.e. bad men doing bad things, becuase violence is always bad no matter the cause, purpose, or outcome). There's all kinds of things that lead to armed conflict ... be it a knife fight on the mean streets of Detriot over drug money, or a large scale war between mutiple parties ... some of which have no vested interest in the origin or outcome other than the fact that they are bound by short sighted and ridiculous common defense treaties (see: WWI) ... and on and on.

But this Dr. Zoltan (heh) Grossman seems to be indulging in an intentionally obtuse analysis of all these in an attempt to make a larger (or smaller ?) point.

I bet you dollars to donuts all his students need do to get a passing grade is to tell him what he'd like to hear (agree with him) in an essay or whatever, regardless of any factual basis or historical validity.

I'm hoping for a warm January so I can do some winter camping.

I think if we're going to go imperialist, we should go all the way. Colonize Iraq. Send hundreds of thousands of Americans in to take over the oil infrastructure and build American strongholds to drive the Arabs into the desert. Screw trying to make Iraq safe for Iraqis. Make it a state.

"There is no piece of turf so small that it cannot be fought over."--Richard Smoley

Can't yuh see? Can't yuh see what Potter's tryin' tuh do?

Potter tried to divide working people--exactly what dimenno's brand of ny times al gore/al sharpton liberalism does every single day.

You're not implying that the GOP & Fox news bring the working class together in harmonious union, are you?

Yr question is simplistic

pottersville = boston phoenix ads/inner cities controlled by Democrat machines

ads??
how do ads control anything unless you're a total sheep?
(no shortage of them on either side)

I'm sorry, t&s, I hate to be rude and like that, but...are you on crack?

Last time I checked, the Democrats were a lot more like George Bailey than Old Man Potter.

Democrats are for strong unions. Democrats have been lobbying for some form of guaranteed health care.
Democrats blocked attempts to privitize social security.

The Republicans are the ones who are exacerbating the class divide, in countless ways.

By sending your beloved working class to war.

By indulging in the kind of rhetoric designed to keep people frightened and ignorant of what's really going on.

By kowtowing to radical lobbying groups such as the Dobson-ite fundamentalists and the NRA.

And worst of all, by selling this fucking country down to river to corporate creeps of the variety that would make Satan himself involuntarily cringe.

I don't read newspapers. I don't listen to ranting righteous radio talk-show bloviators. I don't watch pathetically skewed TV news coverage of any sort. To keep informed, I go to the same stuff that reporters and pundits and anchormen do. I regularly read political magazines in a spectrum from The American Conservative, the American Spectator, The Weekly Standard, National Review, and The American Enterprise, all the way to The New Republic, Harpers, The Atlantic, The Washington Monthly, In These Times, The Nation, and Z.

So don't try to brand me, my friend. I don't march to the sort of lockstep you'd like to fancy I do.

Yes! I can't wait! Loads of snow and subzero temperatures! If you don't like it, move to Florida.

I didn't feel so cold then.

^S'funny, I'm fatter than I was in 1993, so I don't seem to feel the cold as much.

Coldest winter I remember was '81. But it might have just been a trick of the mind.

I like the sound of that.

Extremes mean borders beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism in
art and in politics, is a veiled longing for death.--Milan Kundera

At least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human
malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity,
idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or
political idols.--Aldous Huxley

Fanaticism consists of redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your
aim.--George Santayana

Political extremism involves two prime ingredients: an excessively simple
diagnosis of the world's ills, and a conviction that there are identifiable
villains back of it all.--John W. Gardner

Extremes meet and there is no better example than the haughtiness of
humility.--Ralph Waldo Emerson

I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.
--Thomas Jefferson

This is for non technical users? Can I get the George Bush, cliff notes version. BTW, why is this a political thread now.

These things happen....

This is a bit more up-to-date.
http://www.cpc.noaa.gov/

Lots of good weather sites out there. Try this:
http://www.wunderground.com/

There we go, thanks. I'm moving back to Boston in a month. Looking forward to being back, but not the cold (I'm from Texas, ya know).