Moonlight Graham

Making a deal 101: When 2 sides can't agree on something, then compromise. This healthcare reform is a very divided issue. If he proposes exactly what he wants, Congress will likely vote it down. I think Obama knows that he may need to make some compromises to the plan so that it can actually get passed & into law. Better to get a plan through that has some of the improvements you want than to get nothing done at all.

Left-wing or right-wing, there's a lot of sex-thristy men out there who cheat on their significant others. Men are men, and unfortunately a % of them are scum. (this is coming from a man, so i know )

I'm not a the biggest CPC fan, but the strategies the CPC are using against The Liberals & Ignatieff (questioning Iggy's residency in Canada, and his support for the coalition) IMO are good ones because they will likely work & because they are valid issues.

Yes. Check the newspapers from the last, oh, couple hundred years. HAHAHAHAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! You're kidding me, right? I guess you don`t read the newspapers. How many Westerners have killed Muslims vs Muslims killed Westerners? Who is militarily occupying their countries, who is bombing their people AS WE SPEAK. You are a flat-out racist xenophobe.

lictor, What exactly does this thread accomplish? You want to convince other people to despise Islam and Muslims like you do? You solve nothing with these threads and only encourage hatred and ignorance. People who think like you are what's wrong with this world.

Ditto.

Your comments are just as hateful and ignorant as the guy in that video.

We can start with what Kyoto set out. Get emissions down to pre-1990 levels. But it's not about some arbitrary number. Humans should be trying to behave in a manner that is at least somewhat in balance with their environment. We need to act in ways which do not do significant harm the planet, because we are only harming ourselves. When we chuck pollution into the air, water, and ground we only end up breathing, drinking, and eating it eventually. Logic says keep that crap out of my body. As previously stated, his was just a estimate of the worst-case scenario, not what is most likely. Stephen Hawking is a scientific and mathematical genius. When it comes these matters, he's going to be right a heck of a lot more often than anybody on these boards.

I just have to further mention that thoughts like this going through a person's brain makes me embarrassed to be of the same species as you. Seriously, can you be more stereotypical?

This is one of the silliest thing i've ever heard. You need to meet more gay people.

Or we could just call it "marriage" and be done with it.

If marriage is just a label then let's just allow them all to have it. Maybe if you were raised by 2 gay people you wouldn't be such a close-minded poo-poo head.

A lot of people are stupid, ignorant, close-minded, and bigoted. What can i say, welcome to planet earth.

I don't see how a national military isn't socialist. It is owned and controlled by the state. Who cares if militaries are almost always state-owned and run, they are still state-owned and run. And private military entities working on a national level do exist. Blackwater is a private company hired by the U.S. gov to defend national interests militarily.

Ted may have had what seemed to be a troubled past, but i say he was one of the damn luckiest of all the Kennedy's. Mary Jo Kopechne probably saved his life! He went to have a nice long life instead of a bullet to the head. RIP Ted, say hi to Marylin for me.

By warming the planet through man-made means (mostly the burning of fossil fuels), and seeing mostly negative impacts so far on the environment, i find it reasonable to hypothesize that it is much more likely there will be a overall negative impact than a positive one. It would be extremely difficult, or at least take a long time, to stop global warming entirely. But it's a reasonable goal to think that we can at least slow down the rate of warming and/or minimize the amount of warming. Last i heard, the earth has warmed about 7/10ths or 8/10ths of a degree. They say a warming of 2 degrees will be irreversible & have dramatic impact. Humans can improve the situation simply by changing some of our daily habits. You don't find it reasonable to assume your 2 points above, so what makes it reasonable to predict such a massive statement? I don't think we'd last too long on Jupiter. Stick us on any other planet in the solar system and we'd be dead, Mars a possible exception. Not a single living cell has been discovered surviving on any other planet, tough to assume we'd be a special case. In the documentary "The 11th Hour", Stephen Hawking says the worst-case scenario for global warming on earth would be all ice melting, massive amounts of CO2 on the seabed being released, and earth eventually having a similar climate as Venus, which has a surface temperature of 250 degrees. He argues that humans could not survive in a climate like that. I tend to agree since plant-life would be gone, therefore no oxygen. Even if we could survive in that climate, who would want to?

I think right now is one of the most exciting times in music. The absolute sheer amount of music (of all genres) out there right now available to the average person is certainly unprecedented in human history thanks to the internet. Several years ago i thought rock was dead as every band on the radio sounded like a Knickelback ripoff. It was depressing. But now with MySpace, internet radio, and the huge surge in Indie music popularity, i've discovered an amazing number of really good musicians & continue to do so constantly. It's almost overwhelming how much good music is out there right now if you're just willing to look around a bit. I can ask friends who their favorite musicians are and odds are good i've never heard of half of them. The power of record companies has weakened drastically, and now virtually anybody can record their own music at a fairly high quality with just a computer and a small bit of equipment, and stick it on the internet through Myspace or Youtube etc. i think it's wonderful that record companies, marketers, and MTV/radio stations no longer have such control over what kind of music people listen to.

Excellent response. Humans are a part of nature, obviously, and are therefore `natural`. However, humans are unique to any other living thing on the planet given our level intelligence and heightened state of awareness/consciousness. What we do greatly affects the environment, and we have a choice on how we affect it. If we blew up most of the earth in an atomic war that would be as "natural" as us deciding to dismantle all nukes and eat oatmeal in mud huts. Life would survive either way, but we have a choice. I think what is ultimately best for the health & survival of humans is also best for the earth and the environment. Dismantling nukes rather than testing them, keeping our waters clean, avoiding using chemicals that make us sick etc. etc.....these are all best for humans as a species and human health & economy on a long-term basis. At the same time, they are also best for the rest of the environment. Sure if we pollute our waters and air, we can always adapt by creating water and air filter facilities and take pills that negate most of the effects, but that would be wasting a lot of money, resources, and brainpower and ultimately humans would still live longer and healthier by just keeping the water and air clean and natural. IMO, the less destructive and pervasive to the environment humans are, the best it is for everyone and everything. If we allow man-made global warming to persist, humans will no doubt ultimately suffer greatly from the effects in ways we have even yet to calculate.

I love this quote from the movie "The Matrix". Agent Smith talking to Neo (i think): It's damn true. Humans pretty much suck.

I'm not too worried about man adapting. Don't you care about other animals, plants, ecosystems etc. getting f'ed up?

I find it hilarious when some people can't grasp the concept that humans can affect the climate and/or environment in a major way with their actions. Do these dolts not remember what happened to the ozone layer? We've messed that up pretty good with the CFC's we were throwing in the air, and our response has scientists predicting an eventual total recovery of the ozone sometime after the middle of this century.

I disagree. I think both bands are very intelligent and get their message out there pretty clear without dumbing it down. Some of politcal music fav's: "If I Was A Tidal Wave" by Matthew Good: "Black Helicopter" by Matthew Good (great line: "Hey Sammy ain't ya heard, only killers call killing "progress"): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWkP4dOiosY "The Unthinking Majority" by Serj Tankian: "Let's Impeach The President" by Neil Young: "World On Fire" by Sarah McLachlan: And 2 amazing videos/songs by Rage Against The Machine: "Sleep Now In The Fire" (directed by Michael Moore) (also directed by Michael Moore i believe)

I disagree. It's not about unpredictable violent extremes in weather. These events have always happened. You can't blame Katrina or the floods or tornadoes simply on global warming, it's extremely hard to determine absolutely if any isolated individual weather events had anything to do with global warming. Global warming is about the consistent trend of the earth warming at an unnatural rate due mostly to greenhouse gas emissions, and its effects on the environment. I freakin' hate it when we have a cool, wet summer or a snowy winter and automatically people blame it on global warming. If i made an abnormally rank fart some people would blame that on global warming too.

Until the U.S. adopts a public system of healthcare (which could be never lol), Canada should try a more 2-tier system. Canada's health care suffers from being isolated neighbours to the US, which obviously has a much more capitalist health care system. It's no secret that many of Canada's doctors, surgeons, nurses etc. have fled to the US for better pay (hard to blame them!). This has greatly weakened our system. I don't blame the US, or Canadian doctors/nurses, it's just the way it is. If Canada happened to be situated in europe however, our system would almost certainly improve. I think we need a 2-tier system to at least try to compete a bit more with US salaries. We should also have plans where we offer to pay some or all of doctors/nurses university/college tuition if they graduate, dependent on them staying in Canada to work.

That's gold. Gotta love obsessive blind partisanship.