ScottSA

Which is supposed to have no operational meaning..."Supremacy of God" or "Rule of Law"? The whole clause has no operational meaning. In particular, "founded on principles that recognize" has no directiveness to it. So Canada has no operational recognition of the Rule of Law? I take it that this lack of "directiveness" therefore constitutionally allows the government of the day to dispense with rule of law and institute something like...say...rule by fiat, or rule by arbitrary decree? Sorry, I'm just trying to parse your argument here in order to better understand it.

Good to see someone with strategic studies background pipe up here.

Which is supposed to have no operational meaning..."Supremacy of God" or "Rule of Law"? One need not be a theocrat to recognize the supremacy of God...at least in the Christian paradigm; although in the Muslim paradigm it's quite another story.

That explains the vacant stare found on Chretien's face most of the time. He was enthralled by the Cheneyburton death rays and forced to follow blindly where the US led. It's all becoming clearer...

Well, that's another issue entirely. Islam makes no distinction between church and state. Hence "Islamic Law", or Sharia. Islam is a comprehensive religion embracing both politics and state. There is no "render unto Caesar..." in Islam. And remember, this is 2007, not the middle ages.

Canadian Blue, can I suggest something? Why don't we try to avoid each other in debate? I have very little patience for arguing with folks who don't do their homework and just like to argue for the sake of it. Sure I can do even better than that. I can supply literal translations from the 5 major translators of the Koran, or "Q'ran", or "Qu'ran", whichever you prefer. But its all in the realm of public knowledge, as is the contention that the Koran is billed by ALL schools of Islam as the verbatim word of Allah. You're in effect asking me to prove through citation that the new testament is about Jesus, and in the process displaying the lack of knowledge you have on the subject. Let's just go our seperate ways, ok?

Yup. The Cons would like nothing better than to be able to call an election and blame the opposition. I think the 'family obligation' scenario might be a bit transparent though, so it would be hard to use the budget as the trigger, but I suspect Harper will engineer some pretext in the very near future.

Right. Don't forget to wear garlic next time you run into a non-consensual opinion on Global...no, wait...Climate Change.

Well, ok then, lets address that head on. It's conventional for apologists of Islam to cite the old testament as evidence that Christians are a bloodthirsty lot, entirely forgetting that according to Christianity, the new testament supercedes it with a 'new way'. Now, I'm not a biblical scholar, but that seems pretty out front and clear. Nowhere in the new testament is there a call to slay, maim, or otherwise impede unbelievers. Quite the contrary, as I'm sure you'll agree. Yet nary a page of the Koran goes by without some incitement to gory blandishments of the unbeliever. And unlike Christianity, which can use the excuse that it's written by men, the Koran claims the unique distinction of being the word of Allah verbatim...dictated word for word to the ear of Mohammed. So it's hard to simply claim it's been manipulated by men. Dangerous too, since saying so can lead to the seperation of your head from your shoulders in fairly short order.

Naw, you read the synopsis of one guy. If you can't even bring yourself to watch a heretical movie, you surely aren't going to be able to plow through actual scientific reports. Pffft

No, it wouldn't. I would judge the extremists as extremists and judge the moderates as moderates. Two very different religions, just happen to have the same name. The beliefs of a moderate Muslim are as far removed from the extremist Muslims as the beliefs of moderate Christians are removed from those same extremist Muslims. Excellent. Then we shouldn't have attacked Japan for Pearl Harbour, we should have attacked only Japanese pilots attached to aircraft carriers, right? And why did we ever waste all those bombs on germany when we could have simply waited until the Panzer IIIs involved in the attack on Poland went out of service?

Here's a primer on the debate. It's not written by a science fiction writer who happens to be a Harvard trained doctor invited to the Smithsonian Institute to talk about complexity theory, so you needn't fear any lightweight theories. It will help your understanding of the subject if you read it. It might even help you realize that there IS in fact a debate out there. Toodles. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/warming/debate/

What you are doing is taking marginal wide category similarities and stretching them to fit some imagined paradigm. It's like "both Hitler and Bush went to war, therefore the US is Nazi". You have to get into a bit more detail if you want to arrive at these startling conclusions. I suspect that means you need to learn more before talking about it publicly, but you're the one who has to defend your views, not me.

I think we've said all that's productive by now to each other. You have not watched the talk, you haven't read my posts, and you're just repeating yourself now. I'm bored.

Some people believe that Muslims are guilty by association, that just because other muslims are killing people, the moderate muslims should be lumped in with, and judged alongside, the extremists. That doesn't make any sense to me. If a Christian kills an abortion doctor, I do not blame all Christians, and I do not blame Christianity, I blame the person responsible. Same goes with Islam. Well, I think it's a matter of degree. If thousands of Christians were killing abortion doctors on every continent every day, it would become harder and harder to argue that Christianity were a religion of peace, don't you think? If Christians were rioting in the streets and killing people because someone drew a cartoon of Jesus, would that make a difference to your parsing out of violent vs peaceful religions?The fact is that Wahabbism is growing in strength, not coasting or declining. And it's not poverty or ignorance or Bush who is causing that. It's Islam.

Yes there would, because Exxonmobil doesn't like losing money due to environmental regulation's. Corporate profit down in the United States usually is always ahead of the environment. There have been numerous cases of government scientists being censored in order to downplay the role of climate change. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/29/science/...&pagewanted=all http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...0502150_pf.html http://www.jri.org.uk/index.php?option=com...d=137&Itemid=83 As for the Great Global Warming Swindle, I think before you buy into everything in the film you should read this article. http://environment.guardian.co.uk/climatec...2031457,00.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Carbon_Dioxide_400kyr.png http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Climate...Attribution.png No offence, but it's pretty telling that Polynewbie is a climate change denier as well. No offence, but you are merely collecting ad hominem and throwing it at the subject. I can easily run out and collect reciprocating links with all sorts of scientists saying the same thing about the Church of Global Warming. I love the Climate Change "denier" label too. Precious!

If you want to take that cut at it, I agree. But the article cited showed an expert being passed over in favor of lesser qualified but properly opinioned scientists. If the story were an aberration, we might dismiss it as such, but it's not. It's becoming a bit of a groundswell.

You haven't read the bible? "12 If you hear it said about one of the towns the LORD your God is giving you to live in 13 that wicked men have arisen among you and have led the people of their town astray, saying, "Let us go and worship other gods" (gods you have not known), 14 then you must inquire, probe and investigate it thoroughly. And if it is true and it has been proved that this detestable thing has been done among you, 15 you must certainly put to the sword all who live in that town. Destroy it completely, both its people and its livestock. 16 Gather all the plunder of the town into the middle of the public square and completely burn the town and all its plunder as a whole burnt offering to the LORD your God." Deuteronomy 13:12-16 ...and that's just ONE example. Apply Occam's Razor here. Who is killing people in the name of their religion on every continent around the globe every single day in 2007? It doesn't matter what happened in the 11th century or the 17th century; what matters is 2007. Are Christians slaughtering infidels wholesale in huge numbers any day? Are Jews rioting in the streets in the name of Yahweh? Are Hindus beheading infidels Iraq or blowing up trains in India? What about Buddhists? Jains? All the ridiculous attempts to reach some kind of moral equivalence are meaningless really. Islam is not a religion of peace in 2007. There may be peaceful Muslims, but Islam is not peaceful.

Two things. The actual research, and the fact that the "consensus", if it ever existed, is crumbling on various aspects of the GW debate. Certainly the question as to whether GW is effected in the least by man is far from consensus.

Cheap ad hominem. This is drawing a false parallel in order to obscure the real question, which is selection of right-think scientists. Drawing a parallel between that and creationism is like saying Hirler had scientists and therefore science is Nazism. Ridiculous and not worthy of publishing.

One of the conclusions that just about all scientific bodies related to climate accept is that human activity is contributing to global warming. That would be a consensus conclusion. That's clearly not true. In fact if anything it's one of the most hotly disputed elements of the thesis. Part of the problem lies with these kinds of specious appeals to authority. "Scientific Bodies" are political organizations built around the work of individual scientists...sort of like hospital administration is a political organization build around the work of Doctors. As political organizations, their work is not to parse through science with due diligence, but rather to position themselves at the forefront of conclusions that will drive the funding process in the best way. Global Warming is the hottest grant attraction since AIDs, and these "scientific bodies" are slathering at the trough. And why wouldn't they? Consider that homosexuality was considered an aberration by such a "scientific body" at one time. Now it's considered quite normal by that same "scientific body". What changed? The nature of homosexuality? Or the consensus of the scientific body? Which consensus is valid? There is no consensus in the actual science involved, and saying there is over and over doesn't make it so.

These are the stories filtering out only over the last few months. The real shocker will come when the academic grant scandal starts to be revealed. Then the trickle will turn into a flood. But there is an entire industry build around the Church of Global Warming, and it'll continue to insist that "consensus" exists and actually has some meaning in the debate. As distasteful as it is, it'll hurt science in the long run, because this isn't science anymore at all...

You are misnaming an ongoing research project with no confirmed conclusions as "consensus". You are also leaving aside the growing outcry from scientists who allegedly "contributed" to a lot of these studies, claiming they don't agree with the conclusions publicized. Consensus, even if it did have any meaning in the hard sciences, simply doesn't exist. This game has long ago turned into a political football, like AIDs, and there are bucketloads of disinformation swirling around the topic...including the meaningless meme that there is "consensus". If there were even an approximation of consensus, we wouldn't be having this conversation.

About 25%, that is the rise in atmospheric co2 concentration from pre-industrial 280ppm to 382ppm today is virtually all human caused. The "global warming swindle" documentary is an example of distortion of the facts rather than presenting them fairly. Their claim that volcanoes emit more co2 than man for example is BS We have absolutely no way of knowing that any increase in atmospheric CO2 is human made or not. If the oceans are in a cyclical warming phase, they are much more likely the culprits. And remember, we're still talking about 25% of .05%. It's at best negligible. When are we going to evolve to the oxygen crisis, since it's a "greenhouse gas" too, and makes up far far more of the atmosphere than CO2? And both the bristlecone pine and the atmospheric tests on ice core samples show that CO2 is a byproduct of warming trends with a lagtime of 800 years. Talk about a distortion of facts in "An Inconvenient Truth".

It is painfully apparent that you haven't watched even one of the videos. If you had, you wouldn't have said that, because he's speaking about complexity theory, and only peripherally addressing "Climate Change". He, and a lot of people, are quite well qualified to look at the statistics involved, and in fact it was an amateur statician who blew the lid off Mann's hockey stick graph. (It's also notable that in spite of widespread acknowledgment that the graph was completely wrong, the IPCC kept using it for another decade in its reports, but that's another story having to do with poor peer review.) Perhaps it would be a good idea to watch the video before you trot out the ad hominem. It is equally obvious that you know very little about the subject of "climate change" yourself. If Global Warming were happening, the weather would actually get milder, not rougher. That's why the term in usage has changed from "Global Warming" to "Climate Change", so that things like the fact that the US just had the coldest winter in decades ( http://blogs.dailymail.com/donsurber/2007/...pping-the-news/ ) can skip by un-noticed. One of the more hilarious logical gymnastics was when the Bancroft-Arnesen trek to bring attention to GW was called off because one of them got frostbite. They had even brought swimming suits so they could swim through open stretches of the arctic ocean. Their response to the unexpected cold: "They were experiencing temperatures that weren't expected with global warming," Atwood said. "But one of the things we see with global warming is unpredictability." http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070312/ap_on_sc/polar_trek_1 So in effect we can blame EVERYTHING on Global Warming, including frostbite and cold winters. This kind of thing is the height of disingenuity, and the Church of Global Warming seems to have lost all sense of irony.