ScottSA

Maybe he was racing to get to Jenna's kegger? Jenna's kegger was legal. I knowe it's a small distinction to a liberal, but there it is... You've just demonstrated how foreign the concept of friendly ribbing has become to morose conservatives. You've just demonstrated exactly the same thing...

Apparently you are wrong. It is to me. So, you have no objection to the rape of your sister then? Or should it be negotiated first? Perhaps you can counter with an offer of simply pulling her pants down? What you are doing here is flaunting your inability to distinguish between analogy and reality. The concepts are the same, and your inablity to transfer the analogy to concrete example is a startling failure for someone billing himself as at least moderately intelligent. But hey...we can't all be smart I guerss...

First, learn to spell. It's fay-vor, not, fay-vower.Next, the problem is not that we in the US cannot take criticism. It's that the US is constantly the foil against which all things Canadian are compared, usually unfavorably to the US. It's almost reflexive. Many posters just cannot help themselves. Ahem...the queen's English says it's "favour." I know it doesn't have the sleekness of Americanisms like "U-pick" and "hi-light," but it is after all the English spoken by the folks who taught ya'll everything ya know 'bout English, so castigating Canadians for spelling properly is bad bad behaviour.

Maybe he was racing to get to Jenna's kegger? Jenna's kegger was legal. I knowe it's a small distinction to a liberal, but there it is...

The following is not from Waco. It's not a sect of peculiar people scorned and marginalized by the rest of mainstream society. It has nothing to do with "Israel" or "poverty" or "Palestine." It's not about colonization or Iraq or anything else the west did. It's Islam, plain and simple. It's something taking place across the globe, and the detritus of it is washing up on our shores, whether we like it or not. The sooner we stop making up euphemisms for it or pretending its the same thing as abortion clinic bombings, and indulging in fantasies about Islam being a "religion of peace," the sooner we'll be able to address the problem. Addressing the problem is not likely to be easy, or nice, or fair, but the alternative is unthinkable. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/worl...icle2042156.ece

Here's someone who thinks we ought to think some things are negotiable...quite entertaining too... http://www.snappedshot.com/archives/976-Is...dy-Roundup.html

Margrace is like the archtypical crotchety old fuddy duddy who peeks out her window all day and periodically shrieks "hey you whippersnappers! Get off my lawn!" Either that or one half of the Monty Python skit: "...why, when we were young we were lucky to have the price of a cup o' tea..."

Rue, it's all very well to climb on a soapbox and preach that not all Muslims are alike, and it's no doubt true. But in a very real sense, it's irrelevant. We could exchange the term 'German' for 'Muslim' and your post would closely resemble the hegemonic opinion in Britain right up to around 1936 or 37. In fact, one could make the same distinctions between Nazis, if one returned to the 1920s and looked at the schisms within the Nazi Party itself. Before the war, people could afford to indulge in those niceties, and it was emminently civilized to make those kinds of distinctions, but 4 years later, with rivers of blood running from both sides, it just didn't matter anymore. We can afford to make those distinctions between Muslims now too, and we can afford for the president and Prime Minister to hotfoot it to the nearest mosque to grovel every time a bomb goes off in Britain, but how many attacks will we put up with before we start to take a different view of things? Islamic terrorists are Islamic. They are Islamic because they are doing what the Koran says they ought to do. The Koran is quite explicit about what Muslims ought to do to the unbeliever and how Muslims should use their lives to bring the world under the domination of Islam. The Koran does not resemble the New testament in any way...Jesus didn't rape women, sack caravans, behead enemies and carry on like Genghis Khan, claiming God told him to do it, but that's precisely what Mohammed did. Moderate Muslims are not believers in the "real, peaceloving" Islam, because there simply isn't one...that's what so many in the west have such a hard time understanding. Moderate Muslims are not "good" Muslims, they are actually bad Muslims who don't want to go to jail. In that sense there is even less distinction between Muslims than there is between Germans and Nazis. The goal of both "moderate" Muslims and terrorists is the same thing...Cair and Cair-Can and the CIC all want the same thing as the terrorists...to spread Sharia and to bring Islam to domination...no-one even pretends otherwise. And make no mistake...allegedly "moderate" groups play off the acts of terrorists as a matter of course...that's why they are far more interested in trying to influence western foreign policy than in condemning terrorism. The play off the fears of the useful fools in the west who blame foreign policy for the attacks.

1. Canada does not have "separation of Church and State". Please supply a citation for this alleged 'separation' in Canadian law. 2. Christian terrorists murdering doctors in the USA obviously don't count. And they are a lot closer to me than the suicide bombers you speak of. 3. How about those good Christian boys out there in Wyoming that beat Matthew Sheppard to death for sport? 4. And how about that American McVie character? Or PETA fanatics? There's home-grown terrorists of a type that poses a major danger to my personal safety and security. Much more so than suicide bombers on the other side of the planet. Plenty of superstitious violence lying around to choose from. I find Islam-bashing a bit too selective for my tastes. This kind of moral equivalency is such utter nonsense I can't believe you say it with a straight face. Hundreds of people a day are killed by Muslims all over the world on every continent, and the murderers cheered on by significant portions of Islam all over the world including your own country, and you single out a couple Christian freaks and claim they are putting you in more danger? Is this a form of insanity that is sweeping across the west? A willfull blindness?

If we're gonna get all Canuck here, the proper spelling is "eh."

This kind of startrekism is I'm afraid the product of living in a fat, free, far-from-the-bone society, where these kinds of sophomoric and childish dreams can be indulged in. The romanticization of poverty and peasantry can only be understood by those who have never been within 1000 miles of grinding poverty. Not the "poverty" of Canadian welfare, in which one can only afford one tv (without cable) and an older car, but the grinding poverty of the third world, in which working in a sweatshop is a much sought-after step up in life from picking through a local dump, and where one can expect to someday sit and watch one's parents, and quite likely kids, die of a curable desease, because they can't afford the drugs to heal them. The romanticization of tribalism can only be understood by someone who has never been within a 1000 miles of a third world race riot or tribal warfare euphemistically refered to as "civil war." But I spose as long as people are willing to continue putting their lives on the line to keep your sorry ass safe, you'll continue to be able to indulge in make believe fantasies like this.

What a great blog! Thanks.

That isn't actually a reason. The little ice age is defined as a period of cooler temperatures, so all you are effectively saying is that the reason the temp has risen so much in the last 100 years is because it's risen. Quite right. The cooler temperatures ended, obviously leading to warmer temperatures. The fact that the cooler temperatures of the Little Ice Age are defined as "cooler" is because the temperatures prior to it were warmer. Disinformation surrounding the Little Ice Age is rampant, but certainly in Europe, at least, temperatures were considerably warmer than they are today.

Bemused giggles. The analogy was unserious and I treated it accordingly. And it seems that not only do you make up things about what I believe in, you also like to make up things about why I post what I post. You are on a roll. Please don't stop. It does provide some mild form of entertainment. The analogy was meant to show you that some things are non-negotiable. Apparently you agree that some things are non-negotiable. Do you feel that democracy is negotiable? Do you feel that your way of life is negotiable?

One man's correct is another man's confusion. I'm confused. Can we change the thread title to: "Can we spend days debating the elements of thread titles, and how they perhaps ought to have a table of contents, or some alternate method of ensuring that after a quick glance at the title/table of contents, we'll know whether we want to go to all the enormous trouble of clicking on the link?"

It is obviously part of a problem with their culture/society as the whole issue of burkas etc. boils down to the sexual issue. From what I've read it is not required by the Koran but is the work of some sexually frustrated morons. Burkas are not explicitely required by the Koran, but the sexual frustration is. I just don't see sexuality as a viable argument, though. Sexually repressive morays exist in many societies, and those societies don't blow things up on a regular basis. Thugs in Harlem no doubt boink everything that moves, and they're still thugs. No doubt the sexuality thesis is a psychoanalyst's dream come true, but I just don't think it flies.

Theories abound, ranging from this one, to the idea that the overabundance of young males in Islam account for the trouble. But none of these ideas single out Islam itself, or try to understand what Islam really is. Lots of religions are sexually repressed; most forms of Christianity prefer pre-marital celibacy and many sects actually practise what they preach; but Christianity is not indulging in a rash of beheadings on an unimaginable scale. Go here (link) and scroll down to see the scale of the ongoing death toll...and even that is under reported. Yound men may account for the rash of attacks in this generation, but they don't account for over 1500 years of bloodshed and gore that just gets worse and worse as time goes on. We are not yet ready to objectively examine the precepts of Islam, prefering instead to pretend that Jihadists have somehow different beliefs than ordinary "peaceloving" Muslims do. They don't. We're still attempting to assume that Islam is in favor of peace just like we are. We're still attempting to assume that everyone prefers a state of freedom to a state of order, just like we do. Some of us are even trying to scrape up lame equivalencies between the behaviour of Islam and the behaviour of Christianity in the 20th century...a completely farcical endeavor. Someday we'll actually start looking at what Mohammed said instead of what Cair and the CIC says he said. Then we'll know why Islam is Islam.

You mean stable energy supplies are important for the west? No...surely not!

Boreal forests in Greenland? Too cool. I'm going to open Vernon's first banana plantation! Bring on global warming!

The Muslim Brotherhood for Beginners By Jeffrey Breinholt ... The question of whether Western governments should embrace or eschew the Muslim Brotherhood is a hot topic right now in foreign policy circles, as a result of several articles and at least one televised documentary. This issue is also informed by some geopolitical developments. ... I vote in favour of "embrace". No doubt about it. Engagement and recognition is always a good policy in such situations. Engagement, of and in itself, reduces tensions and acts to improve communications and can act to improve relations over time. Engagement between any two parties always causes them to 'move toward' a middle ground between them. No matter how you want to approach this "hot topic" or according to whatever bias you may have, engagement is always a good tactic for the stronger side since they always have the most to lose (by definition of being the stronger party). Would that it worked that way. If I show up on your doorstep and announce that I'd like to rape your sister, are you in favor of negotiation? If I show up on your doorstep and announce that I'd like to set up a church on your front lawn, and that oh, by the way, I'm going to eventually want your house too, are you in favor of negotiation? Would you be in favor of "reducing tensions" and having "peaceful dialogue?" Assuming the answers to these questions is "no," then why, when someone shows up and announces that they are going to destroy your form of government and supplant it with a theocracy, force your sister and everyone else in your family to abide by the laws created in 5th century Arabia and redeveloped by a 6th century psychopath, do you want to negotiate? This relativist tendency in the west to assume, out of hand, that the "middle way" between two points is automatically the best is insane. Even worse is the neo-liberal tendency to adopt "peace" as the ultimate good. It's not. Sometimes compromise is foolish and dangerous, and sometimes peace is the very last thing one ought to be striving for. You say we're the stronger side? Where's the strength? Following your prescription is ensuring that our side has no strength at all.

1 The discussion was about the legality of the war, not a subjective "ought" argument destined to go round in circles forever. You do know there's a difference, right? 2 I don't have to provide my credentials before telling you how the system works and what constitutes "legal" within it. Since you're enamoured of "common sense," one would have thought you'd try to produce a conviction instead of a legal opinion. Here are the facts: a ) The legal opinion Hollus presented is just that: an opinion. It carries no more weight than the legal opinion I presented, concluding the exact opposite. b ) The only body universally recognized as qualified to render convictions between states in the international arena is the UNSC, through a UNSC resolution. c ) No UNSC resolution condemning in any way the US for invading Iraq exists.

There are two ways to do this: 1) Use data from surrounding stations to identify problematic stations. This assumes that the surrounding stations do not have a similar bias. 2) Treat all stations in a certain category (i.e. urban or rural) as less trusted and use the data from the trusted stations to adjust the data from the less trusted stations. This assumes the rural stations have not been compromised. Data from bad stations would not affect the results if the assumptions used to 'remove the artifacts' are basically correct. That is why the people doing the survey need to focus their effort more and demonstrate that the assumptions used to correct the data are not valid. It is not enough to show that many stations are reporting bad data. You have no idea what you are talking about.IF THE INITIAL DATA IS COMPROMISED.THEN ANYTHING DOWN THE ROAD WITH THAT DATA WILL NEVER BE FULLY RECONCILED. That is exactly right. the GW hypothesis is a multistage, multivariant hypothesis, and each subsequent stage must magnify every error made in the previous stage, yet riverwind and his buddies are talking about arbitrarly massaging the data at the very first stage! I have never seen a worse case of reaching an a priori conclusion and then just making up input to ensure an output. Even with rock solid data it's unlikely that an acceptable margin of error could be reached by the time they start plugging data into climate models themselves designed to reach an a priori conclusion.

What utter tripe. Not only is it as foolishly untrue as arguing that 911 wouldn't have happened if not for Iraq, but exactly what is your point...that we ought to stay out of all foriegn engagements because the enemy might shoot back? WTF is wrong with people who think this is a viable argument?

On the basis of one creationist who attacks "other forms of creationism" you label me a non-creationist, even though the sentence you use as evidence quite explicitely says precisely the opposite? Good one. Now, are you going to argue that the Pope is not a creationist?

Lol...if the NDP had caught wind of this before the Tories did, Hiti would be outraged at the "corruption" involved in this moonlighting.