WIP

No, atheists aren't necessarily antitheists -- which is the actual belief position you are describing. And atheists are not necessarily anti-religious; it just happens that most people who join an organization based on disbelief in God and religion, are more likely to see religion as overwhelmingly harmful, than atheists who don't belong to atheist organizations.

Try looking north: Dr. Overland discussed the remarkable winter of 2009 – 2010, which brought record snowstorms to Europe and the U.S. East Coast, along with the coldest temperatures in 25 years, but also brought the warmest winter on record to Canada and much of the Arctic. He demonstrated that the Arctic is normally dominated by low pressure in winter, and a “Polar Vortex” of counter-clockwise circulating winds develops surrounding the North Pole. However, during the winter of 2009-2010, high pressure replaced low pressure over the Arctic, and the Polar Vortex weakened and even reversed at times, with a clockwise flow of air replacing the usual counter-clockwise flow of air around the pole. This unusual flow pattern allowed cold air to spill southwards and be replaced by warm air moving poleward. This pattern is kind of like leaving the refrigerator door ajar--the refrigerator warms up, but all of the cold air spills out into the house. http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=1710&tstamp= Higher pressure surfaces above the North Pole, due to the warmer temperatures associated with greatly reduced sea ice, are thought to impact large scale wind patterns over the Northern Hemisphere. Climate models show these connections with cold air moving south, producing low pressure areas and unusually cold winters in the eastern U.S. and eastern Asia, and cooler than usual weather in late winter from Europe to the Far East1,2,3,4,5 (Figure 1, below). This would be only one factor among many influencing U.S. and Eurasian weather. How do we think we know this? Severe winters in eastern US and E. Asia are related by teleconnections to changes in atmospheric pressure and winds following loss of Arctic sea ice How does Arctic ice loss impact the climate system? As the earth warms, the warming is amplified in the Arctic. More sea ice melts in the summertime, and with more open water, heat from the sun is absorbed in the ocean. With the warmer Arctic, winter freezeup is delayed, resulting in thinner wintertime ice. The heat absorbed into the ocean in summertime is released to the atmosphere in the fall, warming the atmosphere and changing the atmospheric pressure surfaces over the pole. This dome of warm air and elevated atmospheric pressure surfaces over the pole changes the Arctic atmospheric wind patterns, allowing outbreaks of cold Arctic air to the south. Europe and East Asia have more severe winter storms Observational evidence shows that the recent significant cold anomalies over the Far East in early winter and cold temperature anomalies from Europe to Far East in late winter are associated with the decrease of the Arctic sea-ice cover in the preceding summer-to-autumn seasons. Computer simulation of unusually high pressure area over regions without sea ice and unusually low pressure areas over Eastern Asia in December. United States has more severe winter storms Preliminary results from numerical computer simulations indicate that the significant cold anomalies over the eastern US in winter are associated with the decrease of the Arctic sea-ice cover in the preceding summer-to-autumn seasons Although there is considerable year to year variability, as summer Arctic open water area increases over the next decades, an increasing influence of loss of summer sea ice on northern hemisphere wind patters can be anticipated, with resultant impacts on northern hemisphere weather. http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/future/impacts.html

If you actually read about that story, you'd know that there was universal condemnation of the Lancet for publishing Andrew Wakefield's study linking vaccines to autism. Don't pretend this was ever treated as accepted medical advice. The only idiots who were promotion Wakefield were Jenny McCarthy, and similar anti-vaccine crusaders. Australia has done nothing on climate change; for much the same reason that we are doing nothing. In Canada's case it's dirty tar sands oil, and for Australia, it's there coal exports.

And, it just can't be done......well, certainly not for very long. It seems we are already taking 25% more from the earth than can be replenished naturally: Currently the 6.8 billion of us are consuming about 25% more resources than Earth is producing – during any given time period. For example, in the past twelve months we have consumed the resources that it took the planet about fifteen months to produce. We are consuming our resource base.

Exactly. It all comes down to the money.....the $200 million+ that the oil companies have spread around to sow confusion and doubt, and stymie any efforts to take action. Seven out of the ten largest corporations in the world today are oil companies. No small wonder that they would rather drive the world to extinction than part with billions in profits.

You got to be kidding? Science is about what can be observed and demonstrated, and repeated in other test results. It has nothing to do with this free enterprize crap! Well, you're the one who should be happy here! Research departments at major universities are becoming more and more coopted by corporations who are looking for "useful" theories, instead of doing what science is supposed to be for: discovery and pushing back the shadows of ignorance and superstition. But, I get the picture that the only useful science to you is whatever can be used to make crap. Science has other purposes than as a foundation for engineering. Is CAGW a typing error, or has something been added to AGW? Now I can see why you are so hostile to science. This is just like creationist tactics -- 'it's only a theory.' We may have already reached the point where doing nothing has become more expensive than phasing out fossil fuels: The Statistics Every year climate change is attributable for the deaths of over 300,000 people, seriously affects a further 325 million people, and causes economic losses of US$125 billion.1 Four billion people are vulnerable to the effects of climate change and 500-600 million people – around 10% of the planet’s human population – are at extreme risk.2,3 Already 26 million people have been displaced as a direct result of climate change,4 by 2050, this number could grow to 200 million people.5 The most recent (2007) Assessment Report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) found that weather patterns have become more extreme, with more frequent and more intense rainfall events, more intense heat waves and prolonged droughts; the timing and location of rainfall has altered.6 Weather-related disasters (storms, hurricanes, floods, heat waves and droughts) have more than doubled in number over the last 20 years.7 There are now over 400 weather-related disasters per year and almost 90 million people require immediate assistance as a result; projections suggest that by 2030, this figure could be as high as 350 million.8 http://costsofclimatechange.org/index.html Some fun facts to consider as damage from Australia's flooding is now estimated over $14 billion.

How NRA Works To Limit ATF’s Gun-Tracing Powers Wednesday, October 27th, 2010 3:42 am The National Tracing Center in Martinsburg, W.Va., is the only place in the nation authorized to trace gun sales, says the Washington Post in the third in a series. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives staffers make phone calls and pore over handwritten records to track down gun owners. The government is prohibited from putting gun ownership records into an easily accessible format, such as a searchable computer database. The National Rifle Association has successfully blocked computerization, arguing against any national registry of firearm ownership. Does this make any sense gun nuts? The NRA and Gun Owners of America have lobbied to prevent any law enforcement from tracing an illegal gun to the original purchaser, or the gun shop where the gun was purchased from. To do so, requires having a small staff in Virginia wade through mountains of paper records, so only the highest priority traces can be followed up on. Concerns about government regulation of gun ownership have limited the resources available to the ATF, led to strict regulatory restrictions, and left the agency without leadership. The agency has about the same number of agents it had nearly four decades ago: 2,500. It inspects only a small fraction of the nation’s 60,000 retail gun dealers, taking as much as eight years between visits to stores. ATF cannot require dealers to conduct a physical inventory to determine whether any guns have been lost or stolen. “We’re a political football,” said James Cavanaugh, who recently retired as special agent in charge of the ATF’s Nashville office after a 30-year career. Link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/25/AR2010102505823.html?hpid=topnew And America's high numbers of gun crimes is not just their problem, since thousands of easily purchased guns in the U.S. find their way into the pipeline of illegal firearms that enter Canada and Mexico! Canada first: The large number of unregistered, restricted firearms recovered by police indicates that firearms are being smuggled and illegally imported into Canada (e.g., Axon and Moyer, 1994: xiii: Department of Justice Canada, 1995: 12). The 1997 Annual Report on Organized Crime by the Criminal Intelligence Service Canada suggests that the United States is the source of most legal and illegal firearms in Canada. According to that report, "it is relatively easy for Canadians to acquire firearms in the United States either through an American accomplice or ‘straw’ purchaser, or directly by themselves. (...) Firearms are smuggled into Canada through normal ports of entry and the numerous unmanned border crossings" (CSIS, 1997: 15). However, the true extent of the problem is unknown and cannot presently be estimated. According to the same CSIS report, firearm couriers are not necessarily habitual criminals. The smuggling of firearms into the country appears to involve individuals or small groups moving shipments containing between three and 12 firearms (Ibidem). The consultations conducted by the Firearm Smuggling Work Group (Department of Justice Canada, 1995) revealed how little systematic information actually exists on smuggling activities. In Canada, offenders may obtain illegal firearms from the millions of firearms that can be legally purchased or owned in the United States, but are either prohibited or restricted in this country. http://canada.justice.gc.ca/eng/pi/rs/rep-rap/1998/wd98_4-dt98_4/p9.html#a92 Is the Flow of U.S. Weapons to Mexican Drug Cartels Increasing Under Obama? Still, ATF’s agents are already hard at work trying to trace the origin of the Higueras arsenal. Mexican officials have said the training camp was being run by Los Zetas, a ruthless paramilitary army of drug traffickers that was originally founded by renegade operatives of the Mexican special forces. The group is believed to have played a major part in the wave of violence that has killed 22,000 people since President Calderon declared war on the cartels in Dec. 2006. http://www.newsweek.com/blogs/declassified/2010/05/17/is-the-flow-of-u-s-weapons-to-mexican-drug-cartels-increasing-under-obama.html

Reality: Advocates of gun rights often argue that in World War II Japan was deterred from invading the U.S. mainland by a fear of American citizens with guns in their closets. They frequently quote Japan’s Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto as saying: "You cannot invade mainland United States. There would be a rifle behind each blade of grass." http://factcheck.org/2009/05/misquoting-yamamoto/

The issue of what's wrong with talk radio starts with the relaxation of laws that concentration of ownership in local markets. The end result is the situation in the U.S. where five media conglomerates own most of the a.m. talkradio stations across America....this is what made national syndication possible....not the imagined talents of Rush Limbaugh! Anyway, this report from Center for American Progress illustrates that in a country where 30% self-identify as conservatives, more than 90% of the talk on U.S. radio is conservative propaganda: As this report will document in detail, conservative talk radio undeniably dominates the format: * Our analysis in the spring of 2007 of the 257 news/talk stations owned by the top five commercial station owners reveals that 91 percent of the total weekday talk radio programming is conservative, and 9 percent is progressive. * Each weekday, 2,570 hours and 15 minutes of conservative talk are broadcast on these stations compared to 254 hours of progressive talk— 10 times as much conservative talk as progressive talk. * A separate analysis of all of the news/talk stations in the top 10 radio markets reveals that 76 percent of the programming in these markets is conservative and 24 percent is progressive, although programming is more balanced in markets such as New York and Chicago. And, it's not big money returns that drive conservative talk radio. Limbaugh is a money-loser in many media markets, but his value is for propaganda purposes to his bosses. They consider money lost in conservative radio to be no different than all the money they pay out to conservative think tanks or for product advertising. Rupert Murdoch lost almost half a billion dollars on Foxnews before they started turning a profit. No media mogul would be sinking that kind of money into a liberal news network.

I've had to stop watching coverage of this story on the MSM over the last two days because I'm getting so sick of the false equivalency of newsreaders saying both sides need to tone down the rhetoric. The violent rhetoric has been cascading ever since the 2008 election, and Repubs realized that Dubya left them with a snowball's chance in hell of staying in power. Through Foxnews and rightwing radio, they've been fomenting fake outrage ever since; and refused to dial it back on previous occasions: Right-Wing Media Ridiculed And Dismissed Concerns About Violent Rhetoric Beck Mocked Rep. Patrick Kennedy's Concerns About Violent Rhetoric. Hannity Claimed That Town Hall Protesters Just Have "Passion" And That "The Only People That Are Yelling And Calling Names" Are Democrats Limbaugh Claimed Sen. McCaskill Town Hall Was "Civil" And Said "There Is Nothing To Apologize About." Beck Guest Host Pat Gray Mocked Media Concerned With Protesters Carrying Guns To Obama Events: "Oh, The Humanity! A Gun!" ....worth noting regarding that story, that today Repub Peter King is said to be planning to introduce a gun control bill to keep anyone with a gun at least 1000 feet away from candidates and politicians. Now that they realize they could get shot to, their all for gun control.....to protect politicians! Limbaugh Mocked Those Who Warned Of "Rising Militia Groups, Rising Hate Crimes, White Supremacists, Worried About Doing Harm To Obama" Right-Wing Media Mocked Pelosi's Condemnation of Violent Rhetoric And, if you want more, just go to this page at Mediamatters The disingenuous, lazy and cowardly claims that "both sides do it" by CNN and other MSM talking heads just makes me totally sick. I expect to see wall to wall propaganda on Foxnews; but the honest truth is that all of the other networks and major newspapers are hardly any better.

Wrong! Someone is going to go out of their way to break in to your home if it becomes known on the street that you have guns and/or drugs.

Well, he's being true to his ideology of wanting to go back in time to 1776. However, if he doesn't believe there are inalienable rights for women, someone should have asked him if he has the same opinion on the abolition of slavery.

5 to 4 is not exactly a ringing endorsement. On the contrary, it's a further indication that Democrats were too slack in allowing Republicans to get rightwing conservative activists on the Supreme Court.

Is there a real difference between gods and magic, or are you just splitting hairs? Magic tricks are stock and trade of psychics, psychic healers, faith healers, clairvoyants etc. In primitive societies, someone wielding magic is the same as having godlike powers. And I think that is the kind of magic that Clarke was referring to. Since you're fond of A.C. Clarke quotes, this one seems to indicate that he sees our future as taking on the godlike role of creators: It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God - but to create him. http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/a/arthur_c_clarke.html Apparently, it was Michael Schermer who gave us: "Any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial intelligence is indistinguishable from God." http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2010/11/the-weekend-debate-any-sufficiently-advanced-extraterrestrial-intelligence-is-indistinguishable-from.html You seem to have missed the point that I'm not trying to apply definitions of how believers think of the creator, nor am I making a case that believers need to abandon their beliefs in God. Gardner is using the rules of Supersymmetry String Theory to postulate his vision of intelligent creators of new universes. Using this framework, the creators are attached to the 3-brane dimensions of the universe they live in, and have no physical connection to the new universe they have seeded. They do not have any way of contacting or gaining any information from the new universe they have created. Any intelligent life that evolves in the newly created universe is left to ponder its origins, and create mythologies about the identity and the nature of their creator.

So, tell me again why it was so important for the Bush Administration to allow that Clinton Era bill limiting gun magazines to 10 rounds, to sunset, so that we could end up with incidents like this one on Saturday?

I was referring to the concept of libertarian or contra-causal free will, that has been the core of JudeoChristian tradition for thousands of years. Contra-causal literally means to be free from a chain of causation; as if the soul of the free individual is itself a prime mover, just like the creator of the Universe. But, that certainly isn't how theologians or church leaders would like their understanding of free will described. Determinism does not mean the same thing as predestination. Our free will cannot be predetermined, but it is dependent on brain function interacting with the body and the environment. The source of confusion comes from the fact that we have a sensation of having a mind that's free to direct the body, when in fact, subjects who are wired up to brain scanning machines demonstrate repeatedly that an identifiable activity in the cortex, referred to as a readiness response, preceeds the subject's awareness of having made a simple decision.

Many years ago, Arthur C. Clarke pointed out that a sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial life form would be indistinguishable from gods. Even when it comes to creating universes (if multiverse theories are right) it could be possible for sufficiently advanced creatures to create universes through manipulating false vacuum fluctuations in spacetime. This far out concept is proposed by James Gardner, who put together a Biocosm Hypothesis to explain how universes could become increasingly fine-tuned for the development of organic life. It would make the God does/does not exist debate irrelevant if universes could be created by highly advanced creatures.

Thanks for the tip. I'll have to check them out also. I didn't even realize before searching, that there was a Quaker congregation in my hometown. I've gone to a number of Sunday services at the Unitarian Church, whenever I feel like getting up on Sunday morning. I thought about joining, and I've donated some money and even taken part in some of their volunteer work; but I was hoping my wife would take an interest, since she's complained all these years that she has to go to her church by herself most of the time. Yeah, I'm not sure myself if I would have completely abandoned Christianity if I hadn't become so sick of being forced to go along with dogma that I knew was BS. After I left though, I didn't see a point to going back later in life to one of the more moderate versions of the same beliefs.

I guess I lost track of this thread! Oh well, better late than never. But, it would be a mistake to assume that people with a religious outlook are trying to answer the same questions as someone looking for scientific answers as to how things work, or how they are made. I'm not into spirituality myself, and I don't know what people are talking about when they say they "feel the presence of God in their lives" or something else that's described as experiencing the divine. These aren't experiences that I've felt or understand, except that it's something that some people say they would be lost without. There's another issue besides evolution that will fuel the next war between science and religion...if enough people are paying attention to it: the growing understanding of brain function from neuroscientific research -- which is explaining more and more facets of the mind and mental experiences as the products of brain function. It not only is eliminating any room for immaterial souls to exist as disembodied minds; but it is also taking away the notion that there is any capacity for free will that is not pre-determined by the physical processes of the brain.

Didn't you notice that was in brackets? Why not deal with the points instead?

Yes, but many libertarians seem to be comfortable with reducing the numbers of police, along with all of the other government services they deem as unnecessary. In some stories I've been hearing lately on budget-cutting issues; many southern and mid-western towns and cities have been laying off police, along with teachers, disbanding transit service etc. The response from the right is just to have a gun in your home to provide your own protection.

Palin won't even admit now that the symbol was of a gunsight. Her aides are claiming it is just a generic symbol, that is also used by surveyors....although I don't know what significance "don't retreat, reload" would have to a surveyor! Do you have a source for Dem congressman shooting at Obamacare? All I can find is Democrats who stated that they would vote against it. And, it was just one movie...that I never heard of, and I wonder how many people actually saw it! Maybe it could have inspired assassination attempts if anyone actually paid attention to it. But, when it comes to a whole host of rightwing activists and media, we're talking about a steady onslaught of dehumanizing and violent rhetoric. Before this congresswoman was shot, along with the six others that were killed, there have been a number of violent assaults and murders that have been inspired by rightwing rhetoric. It was inevitable that this sort of incident would occur. And, I've made the point before and I'll say it again, the right has the added burden here that they have taken upon themselves by chipping away at responsible gun control laws. Even if you believe that private citizens should have the right to own handguns (which I don't even agree with from the outset), some of the modest reforms, such as bans on assault weapons, and most crucial for this incident: a ban on gun magazines that carry more than 10 bullets, was allowed to sunset during the Bush Years. So, whovever or whatever inspired this guy to walk up to that event and start shooting -- he would not have been able to fire off more than 30 shots if that modest reform had either been extended, or signed into law permanently.

Except that the gun lobby has a financial interest in creating a climate where everyone has to own a gun. This is also part of the logic of rightwing libertarians and anarchists, who think that, instead of having police, all we need is an armed citizenry. What kind of freedom do you have if you have to worry about being shot every time you go to the store or step out in public?

So, everybody should be armed, so they can start shooting whenever someone hears a gun go off? This sounds similar to Archie Bunker's solution to hijacking airplanes on an All In The Family episode back in the 70's:"all we need to do is hand out guns to all of the passengers before they board the plane.

But, what percentage of the population makes over 80 thou per year? I made close to 70k last year (net income) and I know I don't feel rich providing for a family with one income. It may come down to making the best of bad options. One thing that may help with this problem of inactivity, is that daycare providers have more options to keep the kids active than a babysitter, who's motivations would probably be to keep young children as quiet as possible so they can watch TV or something.