WIP

This special relationship is based on the assumption that Israel is just like us: western and democratic; and both of these assumptions do not match events in Israel over the last 30 years or so. The western, secular community of Israelis is shrinking, while the Orthodox, religious fanatic segment is growing in size and power: Israel's Jewish Divide Living with the enemy Extant tensions regularly break out into full kulturkampf struggles in cities and towns throughout the country where ultra-Orthodox, Orthodox and seculars live side by side, often with little to no social contact. These struggles usually start with efforts by ultra-Orthodox movements to open a synagogue or educational facility in a previously secular or less religiously stringent neighborhood - usually through the surreptitious exercise of power in local government coalitions to obtain budgets and permits. In some cases this leads local neighborhood groups, often comprising residents of varying degrees of religiosity, to band together in usually losing efforts to force the local government to rescind permissions and prevent what they fear will be the movement of ultra-Orthodox into their area. Their fear is that 'Haredisation' will depress apartment prices; force shifts in public inter-sex cohabitation; impact women's freedom of dress; and color the public observance of holidays and the Sabbath. In Jerusalem, the number of secular neighborhoods has shrunk markedly in recent years as the ultra-Orthodox population (22 percent of the populace) continues to grow. Young seculars continue to flee the increasingly religious and socio-economically stagnant city, which is now Israel's poorest. However, kulturkampf struggles are also occurring in largely religious cities such as Bet Shemesh, where ultra-Orthodox and Orthodox residents are increasingly squaring off, and intra-Haredi violence appears to be on the rise. In June 2008 a US immigrant was admitted to hospital after he was savagely beaten by a mob of fellow Haredim, and street signs have reportedly emerged in the city warning women to dress modestly - a precursor to 'modesty patrol' attacks in other cities. That last paragraph reminds me of all of the freedom loving rightwingers here gloating about what the religious police are doing in Iran or Saudi Arabia etc.. Does this sound like a society just like ours? Poll highlights Israel’s religious divide Tensions betweens secular and ultra-orthodox Jews far outstrip left-right divisions as a source of concern to Jewish Israelis, according to a new survey. The poll published this week by Hiddush, an organisation promoting religious freedom and diversity in Israel, said 70 percent are opposed to the introduction of new religious legislation in Israel, where the Orthodox Rabbinate governs many aspects of people’s personal lives. Rabbi Uri Regev, Director of Hiddush, said “the poll’s results demonstrate the vast gap between the wish of the public for freedom of religion and the government.” Although the great majority of Jewish Israelis are not Orthodox they may only marry in Orthodox Jewish services. There are no civil courts for marriage or divorce, so many couples are obliged to go abroad in order to legalise their union or dissolve it. Mixed marriages are forbidden. More than 300,000 immigrants not considered Jewish by the Orthodox Rabbinate cannot be married or divorced in Israel, nor can they be buried in public religious cemeteries when they die. There is only one public civil/secular burial plot in Israel. In 2009 the budget for religious services for the Jewish population was 96 percent of total funding, although religious minorities (including Moslems, Christians, Druze, Baha’i and others) comprise slightly more than 20 percent of the population. A “Protection of Holy Places” law prohibits women praying at the Western Wall in Jerusalem. Police detained a 25-year-old medical student praying there last November and banned her from visiting the wall for 15 days. Gender-segregated buses spark controversy in Israel Hundreds demonstrate in Jerusalem against sex segregation on buses. Religious-Secular Divide, Tugging at Israel’s Heart Are American Jews fooled by this sort of argument from Western equivalence: Luntz’s task was to figure out what had gone wrong. When he probed the students’ views of Israel, he hit up against some firm beliefs. First, “they reserve the right to question the Israeli position.” These young Jews, Luntz explained, “resist anything they see as ‘group think.’” They want an “open and frank” discussion of Israel and its flaws. Second, “young Jews desperately want peace.” When Luntz showed them a series of ads, one of the most popular was entitled “Proof that Israel Wants Peace,” and listed offers by various Israeli governments to withdraw from conquered land. Third, “some empathize with the plight of the Palestinians.” When Luntz displayed ads depicting Palestinians as violent and hateful, several focus group participants criticized them as stereotypical and unfair, citing their own Muslim friends. Most of the students, in other words, were liberals, broadly defined. They had imbibed some of the defining values of American Jewish political culture: a belief in open debate, a skepticism about military force, a commitment to human rights. And in their innocence, they did not realize that they were supposed to shed those values when it came to Israel. The only kind of Zionism they found attractive was a Zionism that recognized Palestinians as deserving of dignity and capable of peace, and they were quite willing to condemn an Israeli government that did not share those beliefs. Luntz did not grasp the irony. The only kind of Zionism they found attractive was the kind that the American Jewish establishment has been working against for most of their lives. Morally, American Zionism is in a downward spiral. If the leaders of groups like AIPAC and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations do not change course, they will wake up one day to find a younger, Orthodox-dominated, Zionist leadership whose naked hostility to Arabs and Palestinians scares even them, and a mass of secular American Jews who range from apathetic to appalled. Saving liberal Zionism in the United States—so that American Jews can help save liberal Zionism in Israel—is the great American Jewish challenge of our age. And it starts where Luntz’s students wanted it to start: by talking frankly about Israel’s current government, by no longer averting our eyes. But in Israel today, this humane, universalistic Zionism does not wield power. You don’t have to be paranoid to see the connection between Lieberman’s current views and his former ones. The more you strip Israeli Arabs of legal protection, and the more you accuse them of treason, the more thinkable a policy of expulsion becomes. Lieberman’s American defenders often note that in theory he supports a Palestinian state. What they usually fail to mention is that for him, a two-state solution means redrawing Israel’s border so that a large chunk of Israeli Arabs find themselves exiled to another country, without their consent. Israeli governments come and go, but the Netanyahu coalition is the product of frightening, long-term trends in Israeli society: an ultra-Orthodox population that is increasing dramatically, a settler movement that is growing more radical and more entrenched in the Israeli bureaucracy and army, and a Russian immigrant community that is particularly prone to anti-Arab racism. In 2009, a poll by the Israel Democracy Institute found that 53 percent of Jewish Israelis (and 77 percent of recent immigrants from the former USSR) support encouraging Arabs to leave the country. Attitudes are worst among Israel’s young. When Israeli high schools held mock elections last year, Lieberman won. This March, a poll found that 56 percent of Jewish Israeli high school students—and more than 80 percent of religious Jewish high school students—would deny Israeli Arabs the right to be elected to the Knesset. An education ministry official called the survey “a huge warning signal in light of the strengthening trends of extremist views among the youth.” beinart_2-061010.jpg The result is a terrible irony. In theory, mainstream American Jewish organizations still hew to a liberal vision of Zionism. On its website, AIPAC celebrates Israel’s commitment to “free speech and minority rights.” The Conference of Presidents declares that “Israel and the United States share political, moral and intellectual values including democracy, freedom, security and peace.” These groups would never say, as do some in Netanyahu’s coalition, that Israeli Arabs don’t deserve full citizenship and West Bank Palestinians don’t deserve human rights. But in practice, by defending virtually anything any Israeli government does, they make themselves intellectual bodyguards for Israeli leaders who threaten the very liberal values they profess to admire. All of which raises an uncomfortable question. If American Jewish groups claim that Israel’s overseas human rights critics are motivated by anti- Israeli, if not anti-Semitic, bias, what does that say about Israel’s domestic human rights critics? The implication is clear: they must be guilty of self-hatred, if not treason. American Jewish leaders don’t generally say that, of course, but their allies in the Netanyahu government do. In the American Jewish establishment today, the language of liberal Zionism—with its idioms of human rights, equal citizenship, and territorial compromise—has been drained of meaning. It remains the lingua franca in part for generational reasons, because many older American Zionists still see themselves as liberals of a sort. They vote Democratic; they are unmoved by biblical claims to the West Bank; they see average Palestinians as decent people betrayed by bad leaders; and they are secular. They don’t want Jewish organizations to criticize Israel from the left, but neither do they want them to be agents of the Israeli right. Because they marry earlier, intermarry less, and have more children, Orthodox Jews are growing rapidly as a share of the American Jewish population. According to a 2006 American Jewish Committee (AJC) survey, while Orthodox Jews make up only 12 percent of American Jewry over the age of sixty, they constitute 34 percent between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four. For America’s Zionist organizations, these Orthodox youngsters are a potential bonanza. In their yeshivas they learn devotion to Israel from an early age; they generally spend a year of religious study there after high school, and often know friends or relatives who have immigrated to Israel. The same AJC study found that while only 16 percent of non-Orthodox adult Jews under the age of forty feel “very close to Israel,” among the Orthodox the figure is 79 percent. As secular Jews drift away from America’s Zionist institutions, their Orthodox counterparts will likely step into the breach. The Orthodox “are still interested in parochial Jewish concerns,” explains Samuel Heilman, a sociologist at the City University of New York. “They are among the last ones who stayed in the Jewish house, so they now control the lights.” But it is this very parochialism—a deep commitment to Jewish concerns, which often outweighs more universal ones—that gives Orthodox Jewish Zionism a distinctly illiberal cast. The 2006 AJC poll found that while 60 percent of non-Orthodox American Jews under the age of forty support a Palestinian state, that figure drops to 25 percent among the Orthodox. In 2009, when Brandeis University’s Theodore Sasson asked American Jewish focus groups about Israel, he found Orthodox participants much less supportive of dismantling settlements as part of a peace deal. Even more tellingly, Reform, Conservative, and unaffiliated Jews tended to believe that average Palestinians wanted peace, but had been ill-served by their leaders. Orthodox Jews, by contrast, were more likely to see the Palestinian people as the enemy, and to deny that ordinary Palestinians shared any common interests or values with ordinary Israelis or Jews.

I was talking timescales longer than 800,000 years...which is a mere blip in comparison with the age of the Earth. Looks like some pretty wide zigs and zags on that graph, and all of those ups and downs showed a slide of a few degrees...but I'm not a statistician. My original point comes from a mathematician (whose name I do not recall) who played a large role in developing chaos and complexity studies, and made the point in a talk I heard that ice core data, such as you linked, shows no median temperature for the planet, and also concluded that our biosphere is a chaotic system that appears to have natural cycles until sudden collapse....needless to say, he was a critic of the Gaia Hypothesis. No! The volcanic activity that caused the great extinctions was not volcanoes blowing up; those sorts of things happen on a random basis. The volcanic activity associated with the Permian/Triassic Extinction was the gradual formation of flood basalt plains in Siberia -- The Siberian Traps....a process that took at least 100,000 years up to a million years. Likewise a flood basalt was formed in India 63 million years ago, and should be considered to be at least as significant cause of the Cretaceous/Tertiary Extinction as the asteroid hitting the Yucatan at the time. Do you accept this argument when it comes to the claims of people like Frank Tipler regarding the physical laws of the universe being so perfect they are proof of a creator?

That is the real standard operating procedure! Every special interest group that takes aim at scientific evidence they don't like, looks for every perceived anomaly to submit as their own evidence. We can see this strategy from creationists down there at the Creation Museum in Kentucky, deniers of the dangers of 2nd hand tobacco smoke, DDT, global warming etc.. It's the world of 'the exception proves the rule.'

For every video you can find at newsbusters or AIM about some liberal saying something nasty, we have dozens of videos of rightwings brandishing weapons, threatening to kill Democratic leaders, planting bombs...like the backpack explosives found on the route of the MLK Day march in Seattle......there is so much rightwing threats of violence and using their guns to get their way that most go unmentioned now. At some point, the left may have to fight back against rightwing thugs who use violence and threats of violence and intimidation to get their way.....and making their corporate paymasters at Tea Party Express very happy!

Thanks to whoever revived this thread. Every so often, it's good to take stock of what we believe and whether our political and social beliefs have changed over the years. The reason why the majority start to move from left to right in their mid-20's is likely (all things being equal) that these are the years when we have become independent, are establishing or trying to establish careers...and noticing progressive taxation on income for the first time, and by the time we're 30, we're usually married and starting families....nothing like having toddlers running around to make you paranoid about security, morality, education etc. -- all issues that will tend to drive someone to wanting independence to earn income, but government to provide security....and there you go...you got your average rightwinger in a nutshell! Now that I'm in my 50's, I have noticed a pronounced shift left....even further left than I was in my youth! I have even shifted leftward since joining this board almost three years ago. I can identify a number of external trends that have soured my opinions of neo-liberal economics and neo-conservative foreign policy....mostly they've been total shams! The promises of Hayek, Friedman and supply side economics have fallen flat in the last 30 years as the wealth gap has reached third world levels, the claims that economic liberalism would lead to political liberalism have evaporated ( China, Chile under Pinochet), and their great advice about business deregulation now leaves us with international banking near collapse and corporations that have assumed effective control from elected politicians. And what can you say about the neo-conservatives these days! The remaining neocons won't even admit who they are, let alone the claims that they made for advancing U.S. hegemony and regime overthrow. But, the big one for me is the environment. The combination of overpopulation, dwindling fresh water levels and other resource, plus the now incontrovertible evidence that we are terraforming the environment to lead to a future extinction that will include our descendants if we continue on our present course. And when it comes to how economics affects environmental policy, I'm viewing our whole capitalist economic system as something that, for all the stuff it provides, may be something that we can no longer live with, since capitalism as it is configured today cannot exist in a finite world, where population and resource usage are not able to continue growing. I've asked rightwingers many times to explain to me how an economic system dependent on continuous growth can be meshed with finite space and resources, I'm not hearing anything useful....just the occasional promise of future technological breakthroughs that will maintain a peak population of 9 billion that want first world lifestyles......I'm not convinced, and that's why I am a leftist radical searching for something better than what we've got now. Also, as I got older and my children grew up, I learned that they will turn out alright if they've got their priorities straight....so, I'm not even fractionally as conservative as I was about drugs, sex, homosexuality, or any other hot-button issue that brings out the religious right. Of course, in the end, maybe I was never cut out for being a conservative to begin with. If there is a clear distinction between liberal and conservative, religious or secular, it is dependent on how one fits the authoritarian profile that psychologist Robert Altemyer identifies in his work: The Authoritarians (free online pdf) It doesn't mean that every conservative is an authoritarian, or every liberal is a freethinker, but in the West, authoritarians are going to line up with conservative politicos, and non-authoritarians find their arguments ludicrous on most issues. Altemeyer is describing authoritarian followers of a movement, as opposed to "social dominators," the people who tend to be movement leaders...who are invariably amoral, self-serving opportunists that do not accept authority easily themselves, but love to wield it over others, and do not often share the fears, desires, and hatreds of their followers, but know how to use them. On the other hand, the authoritarian follower is looking to be led by someone who will provide simple answers that placate his fears, resentments, hatreds etc. And since they are more likely than not to come from fundamentalist backgrounds, the proto-fascist leader will make sure that he mixes religion in with his appeals to this sort of follower. Add a heavy dose of nationalism and racism and voila...you've got a fascist movement just waiting to spring up when things get bad. So, maybe after 9-11, I was willing to take the stuff I was reading from anti-Muslim neocons seriously. But, after a little time and a little reading, and finding one lie and misrepresentation layered over another, I wasn't willing to buy this bullshit any longer! So, as Altemeyer points out in his book, there are some of us who would have a liberal profile and be drawn in to authoritarian thought during times of danger or stress. But once things return to normal, we can't follow this way of thinking. But, I know many others who have never changed their opinions on anything over the last ten years.

During the development of religion, it seems that distinction between natural and supernatural doesn't occur until natural forces are discovered that govern how things happen in the natural world. I agree that there is no conflict to having a supernatural creator, as long as it doesn't step in to the natural world....god in the gaps etc. Most people who are able to harmonize accepting scientific evidence with a personal God, do it by separating the two, like using a mystical or non-objective way of understanding God. After my own long, acrimonious break from traditional religion, I have no desire to incorporate God or divinity in my life, but I'm all for it if others feel they just have some intuition that God is there guiding the Universe. According to some smart philosophers who've pondered over how God would interact with the physical a lot more than I have, the problem with a supernatural God who is beyond space-time, is how he would be capable of interacting with creatures like us, who are bound by constraints of space and time. How would God even be aware of the passage of time inside his universe? Evolution doesn't posit how living creatures started from organic chemistry, but inserting creation here at the beginning could create the need for future backtracking if and when the processes of abiogenesis are better understood through science. I mentioned previously.....may have been on the other god thread, that early Christian scientists like Newton, Kepler and Descartes, get the blame for unintentionally starting the fight between science and religion, when they turned their growing understanding of the Cosmos and its physical laws, to looking for scientific proof of God....and ever since then, whenever another domino falls and a mystery is explained by new scientific theories, the god of science retreats further into the gaps. There were many churchmen of the time who objected to scientists proving God because they seen faith as something that doesn't exist without some degree of uncertainty. If the early scientists were successful, they would have eliminated the need to believe in God based on faith rather than empirical evidence.

Oh come on! You can't really believe this is about national security. We can just follow the U.S. example to learn that this is about the MONEY....specifically the money to be made by arms manufacturers who are awarded big, lucrative defense contracts after greasing the palms of greedy, immoral politicians. What this story really means is that the Harper Government has now copied every aspect of the Republican strategy in the U.S.

Why bother trying to debate the merits of science when you aren't even willing to do a search to learn what basic scientific terms mean? A law differs from a scientific theory in that it does not posit a mechanism or explanation of phenomena: it is merely a distillation of the results of repeated observation. As such, a law is limited in applicability to circumstances resembling those already observed, and is often found to be false when extrapolated. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_law It's like having a science/religion debate with Sarah Palin or Michelle Bachman

What news coverage were you watching? Foxnews! Right from the time these pro-mubarak mobs entered the city square on camels and horseback, they have engaged in violence against the peaceful pro-democracy demonstrators. They have been caught on video throwing molotov cocktails and rocks from nearby buildings; they have beaten, in one case - stabbed, Egyptian and foreign reporters, and are now threatening to kill them if they don't get out. There are no reports of journalists being attacked by pro-democracy demonstrators, and even the crowd demographics betray the fact that the mubarak supporters are a typical fascist mob -- motivated by promises of money, jobs, or are members of the secret police, which has been proven from confiscated ID cards. They are also uniformly male and came in brandishing homemade weapons, while the pro-democracy demonstrators included a broad cross-section of the public, with large numbers of women, older people, and even children in the first few days. Making a claim that mubarak supporters have been peaceful is an outright lie to fit pre-existing ideological needs.

And what comes after calling people barbarians? Once you objectify an adversary as non-human, then it's morally permissible to just go ahead and kill them....which is the ultimate aim of fascist-inspired conservative foreign policy.

I don't know if you were around pre-internet days, but one I had a regular subscription to for years was OMNI, a magazine created by science fiction writer Ben Bova, that included coverage of science stories along with 2 or 3 SF short stories in each issue. Back in the late 80's, editor in chief - Bova, wrote a relatively long short story back in the days before there was any focus on global warming. In that story, when the nations of the world (led by the United States) are confronted with the kind of reports they started receiving 20 years ago, there is a massive, international Marshall Plan created to convert the world economies from oil, gas and coal, to sustainable energy sources. His story concentrates on the process of how it could be achieved through the existing technology of the day......but, as we are all aware, the political will was totally lacking, and Ben Bova's story turned out to be fantasy, rather than science fiction! Back in the early 90's, there were a gathering number of scientists who started concluding that human impact was changing the climate, and action was needed soon to prevent catastrophic climate change. Even science fiction writers 25 or 30 years ago, would have figured that everyone would at least be in agreement once the changes started happening, but no one foresaw that the oil companies would create the equivalents of "Baghdad Bobs" to keep the state of confusion going, even at a time when the poles are melting and changing the weather down here. Last year, I picked up Gwynn Dyer's book: Climate Wars, which was written during the Bush Administration, and details how officials within the Administration and various departments were totally at odds with the official line from the President and Republican cohorts. I started thinking of a conclusion that's not exactly spelled out in the book: top Government officials and corporate leaders are accounting for the effects of catastrophic climate change, and in the process of writing off most of the Third World. If they know the threat is real, but would rather do nothing about it, I'm assuming that they still believe they can fall back to safe locations and save themselves and selected supporters while most of the Earth is convulsed with famines, wars and disease.

Maybe rightwingers just aren't capable of seeing issues from other perspectives than their own interests, but let's imagine that you're an Egyptian who has grown up under the Mubarak Regime, and have to deal with food shortages and 40% unemployment your entire life; yet for some reason, you believe the average Egyptian should give a crap about Israel's security! If the close relationship the Mubarak Regime has with Israel causes blowback, and a similar situation as Iran in 1979, that's the price you pay when you try to manipulate entire nations as pawns on a chessboard. I've never paid a great deal of attention to what Israel is, and is not doing, but I am sick of the Harper Government's changing of Canada's historic position of working for peace, to one that offers unqualified support for whatever Israeli governments want to do. If they want to plant their flag and takeover most of the West Bank, why the hell is our Government supporting them? As Israel has progressed from its beginnings as a secular Jewish state, to one dominated by Orthodox Jews, real democracy is disappearing there. It's time for the West to start to realize that the real demographic bomb for Israel is not Palestinian Arabs, but importing Orthodox Jews from around the world, which are breeding like rabbits, and calling every settlement they build 'holy land' that must stay Jewish forever. Israel will eventually turn into a Jewish theocracy, and no longer resemble a free, democratic state. There has always been an inherent contradiction between having a Jewish state and a democratic state. This contradiction was submerged for the first few decades because the Arab population was small enough to allow them full participation without worrying about losing that Jewish character. But, as the Arab population has grown, the restrictions have increased on the non-Jewish population. If Israel wants to build a state for every Jew in the world to go to, and correspondingly push out everyone who is not Jewish, then they should have to stand or fall by that choice. It's stupid for the West to be dragged into blanket support for Israel because of the powerful Jewish Lobby and idiot Christian Zionists, who want to foment a big war because the dumbasses think it will fulfill end-time prophecy.....I have to mention them because I think Harper's playing of the Israel card has more to do with appealing to Christian fundamentalists than it does to sucking up to Ezra Levant & co.

And before that you said: "And I can give you reports published by Tobacco companies that show cigarette have no link to cancer. " Which is true; tobacco companies were the ones that got this strategy started by funding research that provided the results they wanted........and since you mentioned them, do you believe the cigarette-sponsored studies? If not, why do you take the word of oil-funded climate research at face value? And we all know how greedy insurance companies are....except for American rightwingers apparently....who want to leave them in control of their health services. But, greed aside, many insurance companies are dropping flood and disaster insurance from regions that are becoming increasingly high risk. Why would they be dropping business that's economically viable? (since you're telling me that the costs of natural disasters are not really increasing) And where is this scientific consensus? The real scientists I've read, either believe there is a strong relationship between climate change and increasingly unstable weather, or are still non-committal; so where is this majority of scientists who say there's no relationship? If I'm going to go against the consensus of opinion on this issue, it would be on the opposite side that you are choosing (to minimize the risks). If there are mistakes in the IPCC and other reports, it has consistently been to underestimate the damage...not to exaggerate it as you contend.

On the contrary, there is no equilibrium that Earth's ecosystems to some sort of average. Throughout Earth history, you can find no trends of temperatures returning to some sort of average range...same with CO2 and oxygen levels; they can move up or down over the ages, but there is no magical Gaia force to return everything to equilibrium. A predator/prey relationship is not the same as climatic cycles. There have been periods in Earth's history when the entire planet was locked in ice; where were the forces to return things to equilibrium? Same thing when excessive volcanism ramped up temperatures and almost destroyed all life on Earth. The only thing that returned it to "equilibrium" was the cessation of volcanic activity. That's it...."we're still here!" Maybe you didn't hear about it, but at least one of the major extinctions -- Permian/Triassic, came pretty damn close to spiraling in to a death cycle that almost wiped out our ancestors.....but if they became extinct, we wouldn't be here to gloat about still being here.

It's about time to stick a fork in that bullshit argument of U.S. benevolence to Egypt! F.A.Q. on U.S. Aid to Egypt: Where Does the Money Go—And Who Decides How It’s Spent? According to the State Department, U.S. military aid to Egypt totals over $1.3 billion annually [5] in a stream of funding known as Foreign Military Financing. And who benefits from the 1.3 billion Egypt receives for military spending? Obviously the aid benefits Egypt’s military and whatever government it supports, which has so far been Mubarak’s. Egypt can purchase this equipment either through the U.S. military or directly from U.S. defense contractors, and it can do so on credit. The other group that benefits from this aid arrangement is U.S. defense contractors [11]. As we reported with Sunlight Foundation, contractors including BAE Systems, General Dynamics, General Electric, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin have all done business [12] with the Egyptian government through relationships facilitated by high-powered DC lobbyists. So, guess who's lobbyists will be banging on the doors in Washington if they actually did cut off military aid? But, wait a minute! Doesn't the U.S. send economic aid? U.S. economic aid to Egypt has declined over the years, but is generally in the hundreds of millions annually. Some of this aid also comes back to benefit the U.S. through programs such as the Commodity Import Program [5]. Under that program, the U.S. gives Egypt millions in economic aid to import U.S. goods. The State Department, on its website, describes it as “one of the largest and most popular USAID programs.” It seems that both the military and the economic aid sent to Egypt has a strong self-serving aspect to it. Also worth consideration are the intangibles, such as unqualified support for U.S. policy in the Middle East, and special arrangements such as giving U.S. naval ships the front of the line priority when transiting the Suez Canal. So, who really has the most to lose if these ties were cut? You and the other warhawks, and the celebrity warhawks on Foxnews and elsewhere, seem to think the U.S. has some right to run every country in the world to serve its own interests. But the days of U.S. Empire imposing its will on the world is coming to an end, one way or another.

If an expert is dishonest and shifts their arguments, then their word is no good. They are similar to the "scientists" that creationist groups use, who do no real scientific research, and make different claims depending on who there audience is. The Discovery Institute boys: Behe, Dembski and Wells, have a different story to tell when they have an opportunity to speak before Congress, or to a university crowd, then they do when they go to some church in podunkville. The scientists who have public profiles and write books for the general reader, try as best as they can to educate the public; but the disinformation scientists are only there to reinforce arguments, and they make no effort in their books to explain how their "science" works to the average reader. It's the literary equivalent of a shell game.

Of course you could! Because the tobacco companies like RJ Reynolds, were the ones who started the denial industry. Many of their scientists began denying the effects of smoking, and moved on to deny harms of 2nd hand smoke, and ended up with denying global warming. Others started trying to support the case that missile technology could be developed to safely destroy thousands of incoming ICBM's (Star Wars), and then moved on to the next rightwing cause -- the oil and coal-funded campaign to deny climate change. But, if you can't even accept the evidence for the harms of tobacco, no wonder you can't see evidence that pumping carbon in the air is changing the climate! Bullshit! You've got the sides in reverse. You are the anti-vaxxer in this example, because it's your side that denies the clear consensus of scientific evidence to accept the wisdom of a handful of hired cranks....just like the anti-vaxxers had one expert of note - Andrew Wakefield, who has now been totally discredited since his published research has been discovered to be based on fraudulent use of data.

It has been pointed out for years now, that the increase in global warming means increasingly erratic weather changes, and until all of the snow and ice in the Arctic is gone, that means storms with greater intensity. Extreme cold weather does not usually include big snowfalls. Most snowstorms occur within 10 degrees of the freezing mark. Further on the weird, warm weather in the Arctic, two proposals to explain the recent regional effects may differ on the exact process, but agree that the ultimate source is the rapid warming of the Arctic: Justin Gillis, reprinted from New York Times Yet, while people in Atlanta learn to shovel snow, the weather 2,000 miles to the north has been freakishly warm the past two winters. Temperatures in northeastern Canada and Greenland ran as much as 15 or 20 degrees above normal in December. Bays and lakes have been slow to freeze. Iqaluit, capital of the remote Canadian territory of Nunavut, had to cancel its New Year's snowmobile parade. Deputy Mayor David Ell said people in the region had been looking with envy at snowbound American and European cities. "People are saying, 'That's where all our snow is going!' " he said. Since satellites began tracking it in 1979, ice on the Arctic Ocean's surface in the bellwether month of September has declined by more than 30 percent. It is the most striking change in the terrain of the planet in recent decades, and a major question is whether it is starting to affect broad weather patterns. Ice reflects sunlight, and scientists say the loss of ice is causing the Arctic Ocean to absorb more heat in the summer. A handful of scientists note that extra heat is a possible culprit in the recent harsh winters in Europe and the United States. Their theories involve a fast-moving river of air called the jet stream that circles the Northern Hemisphere. During many winters, a strong pressure difference between the polar region and the middle latitudes channels the jet stream into a tight circle, or vortex, around the North Pole, effectively containing frigid air at the top of the world. "It's like a fence," said Michelle L'Heureux, a researcher in Camp Springs, Md., with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). When that pressure difference diminishes, however, the jet stream weakens and meanders southward, bringing warm air into the Arctic and cold air into the mid-latitudes — exactly what has happened the past two winters. The effect sometimes is compared with leaving a refrigerator door open, with cold air flooding the kitchen even as warm air enters the refrigerator. This has happened intermittently for many decades. Still, the polar vortex usually doesn't weaken as much as it has lately. One index related to the vortex hit its lowest wintertime value last winter since record-keeping began in 1865, and it was quite low again in December. James Overland, a climate scientist with NOAA in Seattle, has proposed that the extra warmth in the Arctic Ocean could be heating the atmosphere enough to make it less dense, causing air pressure over the Arctic to be closer to that of the middle latitudes. "The added heat works against having a strong polar vortex," he said. But Overland acknowledges his idea needs further research. Judah Cohen, director of seasonal forecasting at a company called Atmospheric and Environmental Research in Lexington, Mass., has spotted what he believes is a link between increasing snow in Siberia and the weakening of the polar vortex. His theory: The extra snow is creating a dense, cold air mass over northern Asia in late fall, setting off a complex chain of cause and effect that ultimately perturbs the vortex. He is publishing seasonal forecasts based on his work, supported by the National Science Foundation. Those forecasts correctly predicted the recent harsh winters in the mid-latitudes. But Cohen acknowledges, as does Overland, that some of his ideas need further research. While mainstream researchers are sure that greenhouse gases released by humans are warming Earth, they acknowledge being on shakier ground in trying to predict regional effects of that change. It is entirely possible, they say, that some regions will cool temporarily, because of disruption of the atmospheric and oceanic circulation, even as Earth warms overall. If the ice is less than half of what it was 50 years ago, and has declined by 30% since 1979 as noted above, it's not handwaving! It's ludicrous to say that rising water temperatures and collapsing icesheets has no effect on the weather elsewhere. What happens when the ice is gone? We hear often from deniers that there have been times in the past when there were no icecaps...millions of years ago...but the periods of prolonged Arctic warming are accompanied by a shutdown of the ocean conveyor system, which results in anoxic oceans, declining oxygen levels in the atmosphere, incinerated plant and animal life in the equatorial regions, and what's left of land-life clinging for survival near the poles....but, for some reason, I'm supposed to believe that human civilization will just keep humming along with 7 billion people in tow!

You're right, but I don't think that technology led to a war on science. When I read this crazy thread I started thinking back to about a year ago when I read that the conservative wiki - Conservapedia, has started adding articles that have advanced the attack on evolutionary theory to include ones that try to debunk general relativity and quantum mechanics as 'unchristian.' The technologies provided by 20th century physics is acceptable (they don't object to using these devices), yet they want to dumb down their followers from learning anything about physics as well as biology! One of the big surprises for me, when I started reading about the history of science, is that most theologians and church leaders of the past, did not like the concept of trying to prove and learn about God through scientific discovery. They felt that stories and events in the Bible were of no value to the average Christian if they couldn't be applied to the individual as an allegory of personal struggles (the whole story of endtimes and judgment were re-interpreted as referring to the death, salvation or damnation of the individual). Religion is about receiving knowledge through revelation, whereas science is about building a base of understanding from the ground up. That, in itself is a good reason why any believers should be wary of smudging the boundaries and trying to use their religions to make scientific claims. The problem today of the "god in the gaps," has more to do with Newton, Kepler, Descartes, and a whole host of Christian scientists that thought they could find something in nature that was so amazing, that it couldn't be explained through natural methods. And this has started a process where fundamentalists look for gaps to prove the limits of science, and end up either having to reject science or reject their religious understanding if new scientific discoveries find a way to explain the natural processes occurring in that gap. A lot of people....maybe even a majority of people, are going to go by their intuitions about the world we live in and assume it's designed with a purpose; where some will conclude that if there's no evidence of design or designer, there's no point to just assuming one exists. Personally, I'm more concerned with how people apply their beliefs than what they actually are.

Just once, I would like someone who still buys all of this rightwing clash-of-civilizations crap to explain why both Christians and Jews were able to live in many nations after the Muslims arrived until very recent times. But for the record, one church getting blown up, in a region of the world where explosives don't seem to be in short supply, does not = Christian persecution. Maybe you weren't aware that there were crowds of Muslim neighbours who formed rings around Coptic churches in many Egyptian cities after the bombing, because that's not the story that gets carried on Foxnews or CNN. The Copts still make up 10% of the population, and are an active part of this uprising against Mubarak. If anyone should know what the odds of a secular revolution turning into a theocracy, I would say the people on the ground who live there, know more about the nature of the Muslim Brotherhood and their likelihood of forming a government, than Glenn Beck does!

Really! How much concern did you have for Egypt "evolving" into a democracy over the last 35 or so years of it being turned into an American client dictatorship? This is the problem of running foreign policy by the dictum of what's best for Israel. The Wikileaks revelations related to Egypt, Yemen, Tunisia, and other Arab dictatorships have shone a little light on how much America cares about encouraging democracy elsewhere. In Egypt's case, there's no damn way that the U.S. wanted democracy there, because the Mubarak Regime could be counted on to back U.S. and Israeli policy goals in the region, like the Gaza Blockade for example; or Egypt being on the shortlist of client states that allowed secret renditions, where prisoners could be taken to be illegally tortured....you can't get a real democratic country to go along with these kind of policies! That's why, for decades, American foreign policy strategists have focused on the policy of encouraging strongmen who play ball, and many times helping them repress and put down democratic movements within their countries. If the Obama Administration is smart enough to cut bait, and let Mubarak fall, then that would prove they've at least learned to let go of their lackeys when it's a hopeless cause. I'm not sure if anyone still remembers the events of the time, but when the Shah of Iran was facing growing unrest for more than a decade, Jimmy Carter kept trying to prop up the Shah and keep him in power. When the end was near, they tried to engineer a phony reform government led by one Shapour Baktiar.....who lasted all of about 5 seconds, and if anything, convinced the mobs their only option was to rally behind Khomeini's movement, since Baktiar had until then, been part of the opposition coalition. Similar treachery in Egypt would likely be the road to an Islamic theocracy led by the Muslim Brotherhood.

Stephen Hawking: God was not needed to create the Universe The Big Bang was the result of the inevitable laws of physics and did not need God to spark the creation of the Universe, Stephen Hawking has concluded. U.K. Telegraph

Isn't it amazing that fundies who are at war with science see nothing wrong with using the technology made available by scientific progress. Anyone who's at war with science should follow it through and give up their computers, GPS, cell phones, cars, fly in airplanes.....in short, go back to the horse and buggy like the Mennonites. And, the latest homily in that Chick Tract doesn't even follow the science of their own Bible, since the writers of the Old Testament believed that cold and darkness were distinct physical properties, not the absence of heat and light.

We've already established that there are Arctic oscillations; but those charts do not prove that there is no connection between warming northern oceans, declining sea ice and land-based glaciers, and changing weather....which is what you are asking me to accept with your nonchalant attitude about the rising greenhouse gas levels and the disappearing Arctic environment. The opening post link mentions the incredibly unusual weather up there in recent years: Surface temperatures in parts of the Arctic have been 21 degrees C above normal for more than a month in recent weeks. and that Inuit hunters cannot go out on ice flows because ice is so thin: "It's impossible for many people in parts of the eastern Arctic to safely get on the ice to hunt much-needed food for their families - for the second winter in a row," Phillips said in a report. And what's especially crucial is that the changes are accelerating, and happening much quicker than predicted....not failing to materialize: The warming and melting of the Arctic is happening much faster than expected and new data reveals that huge volumes of warmer water from the North Atlantic are now flowing into and warming up the Arctic Ocean, researchers reported Friday in the journal Science. Now, if skeptics are really sincere about trying to focus on the science, why are they trying to assume that errors in climate models mean no global warming? Here we are gathering more and more evidence from multiple sources that the IPCC and other organizations have been too conservative with their estimates; likely by failing to factor in the positive feedback effects of melting permafrost, warmer oceans and the dropping albedo of the Arctic. Why are they instead trying to feed the public confusion caused by bad snowstorms, when even this effect can be explained by the data gathered regarding declining Arctic ice: The result: the Arctic stays warm and mid-latitude regions become colder and receive more snow for much of the winter. Last December was the coldest south Florida has experienced in more than a century of record-keeping. It's not alarmist to yell FIRE when there is a fire! It's incompetence and criminal negligence to deny clearly present dangers.

So, warning of ecological disaster is "alarmist" but making up crap like your favourite rightwingers: Beck and Limbaugh do every day is perfectly acceptable -- The Acceptable Insanity of Right Wing Rhetoric