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[Montague]

The us can only glassify less than 1% of the earth, the worlds total combined arms can glassify about 2%. The area that can be rendered temporarilly lethal to human life is somewhere between 5% and 8% even if you include conventional arms.

Where'd you get those stats? That doesn't sound right at all.

The USA "only" has 8,500 strategic warheads. Average yeild is about 1 megaton. Enough to hit every city on earth with a population greater then 150,000 or more, twice over, but hardly enough to actually glass the entire surface of the earth.

[Jackrabbit]

I think this is what he was referencing. It's not hugely relevant to the thread, but thanks for bringing it up, I learned something.

This is interesting and hilarious:
"Non-propagandizing scientists recently havecalculated that the climatic and other environmental effects of even an all-out nuclear war would be much less severe than the catastrophic effects repeatedly publicized by popular astronomer Carl Sagan and his fellow activist scientists, and by all the involved Soviet scientists."

"Goddamn sellout Sagan! I was a scientist before it was cool."

[darkrider2]

The us can only glassify less than 1% of the earth, the worlds total combined arms can glassify about 2%. The area that can be rendered temporarilly lethal to human life is somewhere between 5% and 8% even if you include conventional arms.

Where'd you get those stats? That doesn't sound right at all.

The USA "only" has 8,500 strategic warheads. Average yeild is about 1 megaton. Enough to hit every city on earth with a population greater then 150,000 or more, twice over, but hardly enough to actually glass the entire surface of the earth.

We're not trying hard enough.

But nuclear winter can still wipe out society, actually glassing the dirt under our feet is really moot by comparison.

[Leafsnail]

There's always that one person who tries to play down the dangers of nuclear war.  I guess Nikov needed replacing.

[Nadaka]

There's always that one person who tries to play down the dangers of nuclear war.  I guess Nikov needed replacing.

I don't really understand, the dangers of nuclear war have been vastly overstated to the point where people believe untrue things like "far more than enough firepower to glassify the entire surface". Why does being a realist mean I "play down the dangers of nuclear war"?

[darkrider2]

There's always that one person who tries to play down the dangers of nuclear war.  I guess Nikov needed replacing.

I don't really understand, the dangers of nuclear war have been vastly overstated to the point where people believe untrue things like "far more than enough firepower to glassify the entire surface". Why does being a realist mean I "play down the dangers of nuclear war"?

Reality is overrated!!!

[Leafsnail]

I'd say "glassify" is an acceptable hyperbole for killing a vast number of people and screwing everything up, really.

[Nadaka]

I'd say "glassify" is an acceptable hyperbole for killing a vast number of people and screwing everything up, really.

I don't think it is acceptable. Killing off up to a quarter of the worlds human population and causing massive social and economic damage is bad, but it doesn't glassify the surface of an entire planet. It would barely even disturb the climate of earth at all.

[Owlbread]

I don't think the issue is turning 1% of the earth's surface into glass (along with everything on it), it's the fallout that would ensue if the Americans had an out-and-out nuclear war with another country. Wouldn't it create a nuclear cloud that would shift across landmasses and plunge at least a continent into a nuclear winter until the cloud shifts?

[Tilla]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=-AnuDkXlX0o Representative Guiterrez rips into Newt Gingrich's attacks on the supplemental nutrition program - that is, the food stamps for poor starving americans - and tears him a new asshole.

[Frumple]

Wait, wait, what? Gingrich was attacking the food stamp programs? One of the few things between millions of americans being forced to either steal for their supper or outright starve?

... I'm guessing he's a proponent for privatized prisons, then? or just... man, I don't know. I can appreciate idealogical purity (when it's not pants-on-head nonfunctional utopianism) but there's some aspects of our welfare systems that we can't afford to remove right now; it'd completely fuck up our country by completely disenfranchising significant swaths of our population. States wouldn't survive that level of destabilization, especially right now.

How is Gingrich defending that position? Or is it just one of those throwaway party position things no real thought is being put in to (Besides what volume to scream it at, that is.)?

[RedKing]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=-AnuDkXlX0o Representative Guiterrez rips into Newt Gingrich's attacks on the supplemental nutrition program - that is, the food stamps for poor starving americans - and tears him a new asshole.

No mean feat, as Gingrich's entire body is an asshole.

Perhaps smelling blood in the water, some prominent conservative pundits such as Rush Limbaugh and Charles Krauthammer have recently broken from Team Romney, writing some scathing editorials and pinning the "flip-flopper" tag on him for his previous decision as Governor of Massachusetts to force Catholic health services to provide contraception, in compliance with state law--the same sort of decision that Obama recently made at the Federal level which has the Right howling about religious freedom, and which Romney (of course) has taken to excoriating as another reason why Obama sux and Romney is teh d00d.

[KaelGotDwarves]

Not to mention that Newt's on record for calling food stamps a black problem. But don't you point it out as racist, you racist race-baiting racists you.

[Frumple]

I'd rather just call it wrong. Know more whites on food stamps than I do other skin phenotypes.

Of course, the population of non-Caucasians in the town I'm living in last census (I bothered checking, so it might been the one before last) was like five (okay, maybe ten) but yeah.

Also a lot of elderly on food stamps. Guess it's an old person problem, too, ageists.

Still wondering how the hell the guy expects massive destabilization to not occur when you've suddenly got millions with no ability to access food.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

On the bright side, he'd get impeached very quickly when his stupid initiatives started to make the nation tear apart at the seams. And if it didn't get him impeached, oh well, I'd just have to fast-track the People's Democratic Republic of Greater Carolina by a few decades.