WIP

I wouldn't ban hunting, but the sport seems to be dying out anyway because it is just becoming too expensive, too restrictive with regulations, to make it worthwhile. Younger people are not bothering to take up the sport. Personally, the yardstick I would use would have to do with the treatment of the animal, rather than the age. The reasons why hunters wouldn't be allowed to kill fawns or bear cubs would likely have more to do with the negative consequences it would have on the population. But the first reason cited for the seal hunt is usually overpopulation of seals. If it's just a matter of culling the herd, they could go out and shoot seals. But, because the object of the game is to retrieve a pelt that is still a valuable commodity for some stupid reason, the sealers are so concerned with retrieving a seal pup's pelt, that they would rather skin a baby seal alive then do too much damage to the pelt and lose money. They do as little clubbing as possible, before performing the "blinking eye test" which is supposed to be required before skinning. If the pup doesn't blink during a brief amount of time, then the sealer can start skinning. Several years ago, an independent panel of veterinarians selected by a federal government study, found that up to 40% of the seals were skinned alive! And that's why I feel that this industry should be shut down and become a relic of the past. He wasn't the only one! And the fact that it took an animal rights group with hidden cameras to reveal this grotesque spectacle, shows that the employer was also culpable whether or not charges are filed. Personally, I haven't been a vegetarian long enough to start lecturing people about their food choices; but after learning about the ugly inside story of modern factory farming that provides cheap meat and dairy products for the consumer, I would argue that these operations that keep these selectively bred animals in cramped, overcrowded conditions should be shut down for the environmental problems they've created, as well as mass-scale animal abuse. If people want to eat meat and enjoy dairy products, the animals should at least be guaranteed the quality of life they used to have on the average farm several decades ago. That would mean a big drop in output and resulting increase in meat and dairy prices, but in the meantime these costs are being kept artificially low and cannot be sustained indefinitely into the future.

A reasoned argument in favour of seal hunting can be undone by a gut level emotional reaction to those pictures, and that's likely why it bothers Argus so much....otherwise he probably wouldn't have mentioned it. It's not a lot different than the reaction most people feel if they get a close look at any beef, poultry or pig processing operation. Most modern city people can't stomach seeing how their food is made. When I was young and desperate for a job, I took a job as a poultry catcher at chicken processing plant. I never went back after the first day...even though I never considered chickens to be cute! I'm not saying the average farmer or meat-processing plant worker is a psychopath; most people working in these industries have made it work by making a sharp distinction between animals and humans. City people only come in close contact with their pets, so killing animals is going to be more difficult. But it has been noted in a number of published works over the years that dangerous psychopaths start with animals before moving on to people. They can carry out their evil intentions on animals and practice what they may later do to humans. This ugly little story that was exposed by a hidden camera shows a vile psychopath getting his kicks torturing cows in his place of work. He was fired...but only after the video exposed him and the company http://www.newser.com/story/90245/horrific-video-lands-farm-worker-in-jail.html (Newser) – An Ohio dairy farm worker was charged with 12 counts of animal cruelty yesterday, after an animal rights group released an undercover video showing him and other dairy workers viciously beating cows with crowbars and stabbing them with pitchforks. Billy Joe Gregg is currently in jail awaiting arraignment, and faces almost three years in prison if convicted on all counts, the AP reports. Killing animals may not make someone a psychopathic murderer, but it is the first rung on the ladder, and a hobby that these vile people are allowed to engage in because of industries that depend on mass slaughter of animals to put meat and dairy products on most people's dinner table. I still think most people on both sides of the seal issue have a strong reaction to the videos and pictures. The pro-sealing side are angered because of the way the pictures make them feel, and the anti-sealing side try to distance themselves from it in the belief that it weakens a logical argument against sealing. It is what it is! As a sidenote on that "emotional and hysterical" thing. We all have emotions, but rather than argue that you are coldly rational you need to ask some men if they are using that charge either deliberately or unconsciously against an opinion because it's coming from a woman. Seriously, it seems to come up more often against women, so there's likely either intentional or unintentional bias when the hysterical charge is put out there.

If we go back to Theodore Herzl and the original modern Zionist Movement, they were very secular in their justification of forming a Jewish state. I haven't read a great deal of their writing, but it comes across that they were using scripture for historical rights to the land, rather than some sort of divine right that exists in many minds today. The Arabs who lived in that area before the fall of the Ottoman Empire did not have a national identity as Palestinian...but the same could be said for most Arabs living under Turkish control. Identity was more closely connected with tribe and the cities they lived in, or were near to. But that started changing after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, and the biggest error in judgment made by a succession of Israeli governments, was the denial of a Palestinian identity. It started coming together around the same time that other Arab nationalist movements were trying to create their own nation-states. I remember Golda Meir telling Anwar Sadat that there was no such thing as a "Palestinian." If they thought the problem would go away...it didn't! Another major blunder was thinking that a good strategy to use against the PLO was to encourage the formation of radical Islamic groups....which ended up turning into Hamas - an enemy that can't be negotiated with. All water under the bridge I suppose! Right now, finding a peaceful settlement between a Hamas-dominated Palestine and Orthodox Jewish-dominated Israel looks pretty close to impossible. But even if the hardliners have resolved themselves to an unending state of war, Israel is going to lose control through population demographics unless they try to raise the stakes higher and force Palestinians out.

It's a waste of time talking to these people, because they refuse to address the threat of homegrown fanaticism that is justified by Christianity. Five or six years ago, when I agreed with virtually every conservative position, it was the growth of Christian Identity and other Christian nationalist movements that started me thinking that the Christian equivalents of Al Qaeda were being spawned at home. Groups motivated by racial supremacy and extreme nationalism are quick to identify themselves as Christian and appeal to scripture for justification of their goals, so should we be surprised that the same appeals to religious justification are made on the other side. If the anti-Muslim supporters believe all of their own rhetoric, then they also believe that Islam is inherently evil and incorrigible, and anyone connected to that religion cannot be trusted. The obvious implications are that they are advocating for total war against all Muslims. Most rational thinking people realize that is a suicidal strategy in this day and age, and that's why the fomenters of this ideology fall back to the position that they are just fighting Islamofascism. But there doesn't seem to be any Muslim who passes for "moderate" on the Neocon scale. So, we can expect an unending cascade of every bad news story about Muslims, along with complete silence on the Christian connection to militia movements and growing Orthodox Jewish fanaticism in Israel, which makes a peaceful settlement close to impossible.

Big difference between the Green Zone and the mosque proposed in New York. The Green Zone was imposed and intended as a base of continued U.S. military control, whatever an elected Iraqi government decides to do. The mosque does not have any effect on U.S. sovereignty. Most Americans (or Canadians) don't seem to feel a lot of empathy for the hundreds of thousands killed and millions displaced in Iraq, so likewise 9/11 is not going to be one of their big concerns. I recall that there was a march in Tehran in the immediate days after 9/11, that expressed sympathy for America...but all that has changed over the last nine years. Today, the regime change advocates there don't have a lot of good things to say about the USA.

Thanks. Just trying to turn the temperature down a little. I suspect that many of those who are opposing the mosque would object to it under any circumstances, not just because it's two blocks away from WTC. Here's an interesting little story from Wisconsin, where there is vocal opposition to the permit approval to build a mosque, which has elicited comments like: "Welcoming a mosque to my hometown, while our nation is at war with Islamic Fascists is like welcoming the Chapter of Hitler Youth to organize here in the states while our soldiers were giving their lives to end the Nazi Regime in Europe," http://www.thenorthwestern.com/article/20100509/OSH0602/5090316/Commentary-Objections-to-Sheboygan-mosque-is-extreme-position

Isn't that the problem with the Aliyah? Too many Jews who's ancestors lived there at one time, want to move in, and new ways keep having to be found to move Arabs out. In my family's example, the ties to the homeland were considered lost after the first generation, but if every German descendant decided that they have a birthright to move back to Prussia, then what would happen to Poles who have moved into the area since 1918, and also the Russians and Lithuanians etc. who moved into former Polish territory after the Soviet Union arbitrarily changed their boundaries after 1945?

Thanks, but that doesn't make me feel any better to know that most Democratic politicians are also bought and paid for! That's why many important issues, like the bloody antiwar movement are almost invisible. Protesters against Iraq, Afghanistan, and the billions plowed into the Military Industrial Complex, cannot find any political advocates except for ones that are treated as novelties, like Dennis Kucinich. Since this mess in the Gulf became the hot issue, we've learned that BP has hired almost as many Democrats as Republicans on their boards, and as consultants; and they, and other oil companies, give the orders to government regulators like the Minerals Management Service. We are living in an age of Oligarchy, and the political dramas between two competing political parties are not much more than theatre to appease the majority and make them think they have a real say in events that shape our lives. When push comes to shove, as this BP example is demonstrating, the corporation is going to decide what they have to do to stop the leak, what dispersing chemicals to use, and how much they should pay in reparations to areas affected by the oil damage. And this will be guided by their PR efforts to repair company image, not because of what politicians or so called government watchdogs have to say.

Find me a hot issue today these days that isn't emotionally charged! That's still no excuse for hurling abuse at someone with a different viewpoint. If someone sees things differently and feels a strong emotional attachment to their beliefs, well....well, it's just going to take a little more work on your part to win them over. Unless of course, your purpose is to hurl abuse at people you don't agree with. Fact is the reason why the sealing industry became the first target of animal rights activists is because of the awareness that baby seals are cute, and pictures of hunters clubbing them over the head and leaving a bloody mess on the ice flows would cause outrage and resonate with the audience they were trying to reach....and of course, bring in lots of donations! Personally, I have mixed feelings about this industry. It doesn't serve a whole lot of economic purpose anymore, and I would consider anyone who either enjoys or feels no guilt about killing baby animals to be a potential criminal, or at least an antisocial misfit. But, on the other hand, there are far worse animal abuse situations involving both domestic and wild animals that cannot get the proper public awareness, because they are not as cute as baby seals!

Factory farming and industrial meat production is bad enough in my view, and I don't hunt...although no hunter is legally allowed to conduct themselves in this sort of manner: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/22/julio-aparicio-gored-in-t_n_585941.html this is a particularly gory series of pictures and video clips making the rounds about a Spanish matador who was gored through the throat by a bull yesterday, and after two emergency operations, is listed in critical condition...the bull was killed by the other matadors. Should I be concerned over the life of a man who makes his living by torturing and killing animals? Julio Aparicio had a choice about going into the bullfighting ring, the bull did not! All he probably wanted to do was eat some grass and hump some cows...though probably not in that order; but instead he's put in a crate and pluncked into the bullfighting ring to deal with some douche with a red cape that sticks spears in his back before killing him. So the matador's luck ran out this time...c'est la vie.

Your totally missing the point, since I am not discussing government policy, but instead how Harper is building a dedicated base for his party. I'm not sure why conservatives didn't notice the Republican example before, but they sure do now -- and according to recent EKOS polling, the Conservatives have the most highly motivated base of the three major parties. During my former life as a conservative, the difficulty in motivating fiscal conservatives and libertarian thinkers, was driven home to me when I worked for the re-election of my local MPP during Mike Harris's re-election as Ontario Premier. Harris won a return majority, and my MPP was re-elected, but the results were much closer than polling data indicated that they should have been; since the 30% cut in provincial income tax was fully in effect and very popular; economic numbers were all good -- unemployment was down, the deficit was being reduced quicker than scheduled, and consumer confidence was at an all time high...and yet we couldn't get more than a handful of volunteers to man the phones and put up lawn signs. Mike Harris was focused on fiscal conservatism and did not want his MPP's to get distracted with social issues. He flat out refused a request to invoke the Not Withstanding Clause to override a Supreme Court decision regarding same-sex work benefits. But Stephen Harper has learned that even if all goes well, money issues do not energize the base -- this can be done more effectively by getting the people who are on a crusade to protect "unborn" babies or defend the sanctity of marriage....and that in a nutshell is why Harper and other provincial conservatives, like Ontario's new P.C. leader Tim Hudak are playing this card and turning our conservative parties into the Republican Party's northern division.

One thought! How many Germans are living in East Prussia? My grandparents on my mother's side, left that area after WWI when the Polish Corridor was created, and more left after the Soviet Union changed the borders....and that`s another point to consider, since the changing of the borders after WWII gave Russia much more Polish territory than the parcel of former German territory that was given to Poland. You see how complicated this could become! It wouldn`t merely involve the changing of borders between two countries -- three nations would have to agree to put everything back to the way it was before....and once again, how many Germans are living there now?

No, the judicial system also has a responsibility to restrict efforts of an accused rapist's lawyer to put the victim on trial. Historically, this was a well-worn technique by defense lawyers, and a big part of the reason why fewer rape cases went to trial years ago. There was no such thing as a "date rape" trial, since the victim was familiar with the accused, and that fact would be used to impugn the girl's reputation. It's a big mistake to assume that culture progresses in a linear direction. Part of the anti-feminist backlash has been a pushback in many regions against rules created to protect the victim from being put on trial by the defense attorney. Reactionary forces want to turn the clock back to some mythical 1950's, so don't assume that we can't go back to the time when good girls didn't allow themselves to get into situations where they might be raped, and take the risk of going to trial and having their reputations ruined.

This is something I am trying to come to grips with, since our sense of mind and ego is an illusion generated by brain activity. But if we did construct an exact physical replica of someone's brain, would the pattern of brain activity be something that could be transferred elsewhere, such as some artificial neural network? The transporter machine on Star Trek, would be another example. When Captain Kirk tells Scotty to "beam me up," the information from all of the particles in Kirk's body is used to create an exact physical replica on the Enterprize; but does the transported Kirk have the same subjective identity as the Kirk on the planet with green-skinned women? Or is he just a perfect copy? I'm not so sure that I can buy into this idea that our consciousness can be downloaded onto a computer, since that would imply that our sense of subjectivity is also downloadable. Even though neurons die and are replaced, and the particles that make up our cells are expelled and replaced with new material every ten years or so (from what I heard), our minds are still embodied and dependent on the physical brain activity interacting with our nervous system and our bodies in order to be consciously aware.

Back to the thread opener for a moment, it appears that the new artificial life isn't completely unique, since it was sequenced from a copy of an existing natural bacteria. But it is a synthetic copy nevertheless; so now they can tinker around and create a unique genome and make completely new forms of life....I guess that's the scary part! This will be the ultimate in genetic engineering, since they can control all of the parameters for the cell's development. It could be used for beneficial purposes such as creating new medicines and food crops, or someone is almost certainly to take a look at the biowarfare capabilities. Imagine a new anthrax that's 100% lethal, but expires in 72 hours, so that all an infantry has to do is go in three days later and collect the dead bodies! At the Edge Reality Club, Freeman Dyson observes that once the genome of a bacteria cell can be synthesized, there's nothing standing in the way of moving on to more complex strands of DNA and creating Neanderthals, mammoths, or the tasmanian wolf(although he sees a problem in finding host cells to obtain that DNA code). I'm surprised he didn't mention dinosaurs too, because the first thing I thought of was Jurassic Park: Will the new techniques described in the paper allow us to bring extinct species back to life? Here are three examples of three possible stages after the production of a bacterial cell: 1. generating a human, i.e. a Neanderthal; 2. generating a woolly mammoth; 3. generating a tasmanian wolf. Generating a Neanderthal, giving the recent mapping, seems to be feasible, but it will raise ethical hackles. Don't hold your breath waiting for someone to try it. Generating a woolly mammoth will not be an ethical problem but it also seems feasible by using an elephant's placenta: inject mammoth DNA into a modern elephant egg from which elephant DNA has been removed, then import the elephant egg into an elephant. A real challenge will be to generate a truly extinct species such as a Tasmanian wolf for which no host cells exist.

Okay, this is getting a little too repetitive. All I can say is that empathy is something people have in varying degrees. Either they have it, or they don't. But how much empathy are you expecting from this Imam Rauf? Here's a recent statement from him to his people: The Imam building an Islamic community center near Ground Zero urged congregants Friday to "remain cool, calm and collected" in the face of a recent backlash against them. "We must be Muslims who go out into the world and show our best selves," Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf said at the future home of the Cordoba House at 45 Park Place. "There is less room for error," he said. "We must fight those who are against us with peace and our assurance that we have peace in our hearts." Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2010/05/22/2010-05-22_keep_your_faith_sez_wtc_imam_tells_followers_to_stay_calm.html#ixzz0ogcMa6S6 The overwhelmingly negative comments below the article indicate to me that it's New Yorkers who are lacking in empathy, and attempting to apply collective blame to all Muslims. Unfortunately the corporate-sponsored media that most Americans get their news from, has only presented a one-sided version of history and world events. I wouldn't justify any terrorist attacks, but most Americans remain blissfully unaware of the state-sponsored terrorism that's carried out by this and previous U.S. governments. Thanks to a navel-gazing media, most Americans are unaware of what goes on in the rest of the world, except for wars that directly involve U.S. troops. This lack of awareness has allowed a succession of U.S. administrations to act like dictators on the foreign stage. From what I've heard from former refugees in Central American countries such as Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua, The Reagan Administration in particular, deliberately gave the go-ahead to their puppet dictators to launch death squads against disenfranchised indigenous majority under the guise of "fighting communism." The reasons why Arabs, rather than Latinos have fought back with extreme tactics like flying civilian aircraft into buildings, can be partially attributed to religion -- promising great rewards for martyrdom and expanding the definition of jihad. But the reaction against European and then American colonialism is also cultural, because they still haven't come to terms with losing their position of world domination (at least in the Mid East) to Europe, let alone America. What's scary now is that the USA is being overtaken and will not be an empire much longer. But the rhetoric coming out of the extreme right is doubling down on American Exceptionalism rather than preparing itself for loss of empire like England did after WWII. The political center and the conventional left, as represented by the Obama Administration, is not willing to deal with the problem at any level. They are continuing to try to project military power, increasing the committment to ruinous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and still trying to use what's left of their ability to intimidate through economic leverage. But if the left is living in denial, the right has completely lost their marbles, and are fomenting conspiracy theories to explain everything that threatens continued U.S. domination today. It appears that the incendiary rhetoric of the religious right and so called libertarians, is starting to bear fruit. The Southern Poverty Law Center has reported a two and half fold surge in the number of "patriot" militias forming in the U.S. during the last two years. Some of their extreme rhetoric is beginning to bear fruit, with the Hutaree Militia in Michigan planning terrorist attacks (why are they out on bail btw?); in Jacksonville Florida on the 12th, a pipe bombing of an Islamic Center is under investigation (why isn't this case given the attention of the Time Square attempted bombing?); and in Little Rock, Arkansas, a father and son who were part of a white nationalist group were gunned down after they shot and killed two policemen at a traffic stop. The threat of domestic terrorism is growing and will easily eclipse whatever wanders in from Saudi Arabia. America is going to become a source of terrorism, rather than a victim of terrorism. I'm not condemning people for feeling a site is sacred...that's the reason why we have graveyards for example; but feelings of sacred value attached to objects have to be factored in to the feelings on this issue. The feeling that WTC should in some manner be a sacred site is part of feelings of essentialism. Lives may have been lost, but those lives are no longer there to scrutinize what the living are doing at the former Trade Center. Many people talk to loved ones when they visit their gravesite; they realize the person has died, and if they believe in immortality, they don't believe that they are in the grave, listening to them, but at some level they still connect the physical remains of the person with a feeling that they are listening to them. No doubt this feeling exists on a large scale at the former Trade Center site. A feeling that some objects have essential sacred value has a flip side in that others who are viewed negatively are viewed as possessing essential evil qualities. It is the reason why high caste Hindus won't allow Untouchables to touch them or handle objects that they use. A book by psychologist - Bruce Hood, that I read recently, noted that most of the homes of notorious serial killers in the U.S. and England have to be torn down because they can't find buyers even far below market value. The houses are viewed as evil, even if they are completely restored. In this example, there haven't been any logical, rational reasons for contending that a mosque can't be built close to the site. I believe that a lot of people view Muslims as collectively evil and having them in proximity to the WTC contaminates a sacred site. I'm not objecting to sacred attachment to WTC, just the refusal to put these feelings in perspective, and recognize that they should not be part of an unnecessarily aggressive and hostile response to Muslims in New York.

You haven't mentioned credit default swaps here, which is how they were hedging their bets in the first place. The last numbers I heard for the value of Wall Street investment banks and brokerages was five trillion dollars. No one knows what the potential worth of these CDS IOU's are, but the best guestimates are that it could be as high as 600 trillion dollars! Now, what happens if there is another run on AIG similar to the one that started the clamoring for the bank bailout a year and a half ago? From what I read of the Magnetar Trade, which although being a relatively small player, ended up bringing down Merrill Lynch, CDO's averaging a billion dollars were created for them. The real estate experts thought that the subprime market was going to go down in 2005, but it was investors like Magnetar that were hedging their bets with credit default swaps which kept money pouring in for subprime mortgages. Don't forget, this wasn't all about the Fed creating credit out of thin air! A lot of the investors were coming in from overseas; influenced by the continuing rise in the subprime market and many foreign banks such as Deuschebank and the Bank of Scotland, also went to AIG to purchase credit default swaps as a hedge against losses. According to an as of yet unverified account of the backroom dealings - Hank Paulsen's former bosses at Goldman Sachs dropped by to Fed Chairman's office to tell him that he needed to provide AIG with the guarantees necessary to pay off some of those credit default swap obligations. And of course Goldman served their own interests since they cashed in more than any other institution. What it all boils down to is allowing a brand new market to be created in derivatives investments, and giving in to Wall Street to allow them to "self regulate," and we know how well that went! While they were making obscene amounts of money, it was free enterprize and small government, once things went bad, the story became banks "too big to fail" and all of a sudden the losses became everybody's problem. Same as the oil industry, they want free enterprize for profits and socialism for losses.

I'm afraid I don't see any space between blocking the construction of the mosque and asking the Muslims there to voluntarily refrain from building it. To me it is just hair-splitting because you are asking all Muslims to assume collective guilt for 9/11 when you make this sort of request. It's one thing to ask Muslims to condemn terrorism or to work for peace, but to expect all Muslims who have no connection to supporters of violent jihad, to agree to accepting blame is not a reasonable request to make in the first place. Should all Americans assume collective guilt for the illegal invasion of Iraq and the subsequent deaths of as many as one million Iraqi citizens and the mass exodus of refugees? I would be willing to bet that a lot of Iraqis see the Green Zone as an abomination! We have an obligation to discern the truth as best we can from the information available. Many of us who were enthusiastic supporters of War On Terror and the Bush Administration at first, started re-thinking our support when fraud was discovered, predictions fell flat, and five different reasons were advanced for starting the war in the first place. It also hasn't been lost on some of us that Christian fundamentalists have seized upon Islamophobia to advance their own agenda...attempting to build a case that secularism will be overrun by Muslim encroachment...so we all have to support Christian Nationalism rather than oppose all attempts to create theocracy. We can't turn back the clock to the way things were before, what happened, happened, and a building that was damaged because it was grazed on approach by one of the planes that targeted WTC still does not make it part of the WTC complex. If you're referring to this Imam Rauf, maybe you linked the wrong article previously, because I didn't find anything extremist about him on that page. Who's going to do a means test of worshipers attending a mosque to see if they are moderate or not...and who defines what a moderate is anyway? The catch 22 is that taking a hard line does not encourage moderation. Some times it's necessary to take a firm stand, but we have to do it when needed, not for phony outrage ginned up by Worldnetdaily. I don't think you need to apologize for things you have no control over. If you supported a bad government policy and had a change of heart, maybe an apology is in order; but you have no control over leaders you do not support, and the most you can offer is to speak out and advocate against them and their policies. I think I just did that as a matter of fact, and I haven't called you any names, and it's something I try to refrain from doing anyway, since we all have our own vantage point to see the world, and good people can draw the wrong conclusions. What I mean is that I am not seeing a fire behind all of this smoke. I've noticed scanning the search terms that there are a lot of groups using this story to create controversy. I can understand a desire for a memorial on the WTC site, but I think we have to be careful how far we go when attaching sacred value to ground zero. Our feelings that objects have sacred or even sentimental value is not based on objective reasoning, but on our intuitive, subjective sense, which can lead us to making the wrong conclusions. If WTC becomes defiled because people who practice the same religion as the terrorists have established a house of worship nearby, then it's possible that the sacred attachment to this place needs to be reigned in a little.

I already put my answer on the Tea Party thread here, but I think the crucial point is not whether or not Rand Paul is a racist, but what options his ideology would have if confronted by racism. He gave private business the option of violating the Civil Rights Act in his interview with Rachel Maddow, now he and his advisers are trying to spin their way out of the ditch created by his political ideology of government so small that it is the equivalent of anarchy.

What's apparent here in this thread is that there are too many people who can be stampeded out of fear and resentment to support odious characters for protection. That's why America is stuck in two quagmires (Canada is now stuck in one of them)and freely abandoning civil rights. There has been no coherent argument for trying to block the building of a mosque two blocks away from the WTC; just outrage and indignation. Yet these people would toss every freedom overboard to protect us against Muslim encroachment. I believe Benjamin Franklin said something like 'those that trade freedom for security deserve neither.' That's why this mentality leads to fascism if it isn't stopped.

No, it was just a matter of time before one of the labs working on this problem, found the right combination of complex protein molecules to be completely independent, self-replicating organisms. They've solved parts of this puzzle previously, but the really exciting aspects are the implications for Abiogenesis - studying how life evolves from self-organizing amino acids. No one knows the exact pathway that organic molecules organized into chains of amino acids that eventually led to DNA-based life today, but the mostly likely explanation is that an RNA World pre-existed the development of DNA. When self-replicating RNA molecules evolved into the first DNA, it was likely because of its durability for chemical storage. There has only been one form of DNA life that we are aware of. But there were likely a multitude of RNA combinations that developed and perished before DNA came along.

Like many other aspects of evolution, such as diet, locomotion etc., we are not perfectly adapted for monogamy...at least not in the sense that pigeons are! Our higher thinking executive brain rationalizes that adultery carries too much risk, but our limbic brain that makes decisions on impulse and desires says "go for it." Some people reason their way out of trouble, some don't...and the fact that 50% of marriages end in divorce (many because of infidelity) demonstrate that we're not that good at maintaining monogamous relationships. As a side note, this latest political scandal involving another Republican lawmaker having an affair (but it's a woman this time) add to the theme of the opening post: people who try to be something they're not, and only cause anguish for themselves and others. A comedian who's name I can't recall, replied when questioned about David Vitter's prostitution scandal that Republicans can survive sex scandals as long as it's not with a live boy or a dead girl...and since it involves a live girl, he might skate through and keep his job. Republican lawmaker Mark Souder, who pushed aggressively on the abstinence education agenda...that has resulted in higher teen pregnancy and STD rates, is seen in this video extolling the virtues of abstinence...unfortunately so is his mistress, Tracy Jackson....how ironic! There's no point to complaining that gay men are promiscuous or form transient relationships (lesbians have lower STD rates than heterosexual women) if a legal opportunity isn't available for them to have their interests protected in any long term relationship.

Yikes! Rand Paul crashed and burned on the Rachel Maddow Showlast night! In fairness to a new politician, this is why politicians speak soundbite and never answer hard questions they haven't discussed previously with aides. No doubt that his teabaggers will be outraged by what that big, scary lesbian did to him. Nevertheless, Rand Paul defended private business's right to discriminate that was alluded to in an interview he did with the editorial board of some podunk newspaper in Kentucky that did not follow up on the question. You would think that in the intervening weeks, somebody would have gotten to Paul and told him to have an answer ready next time a civil rights question came along...especially before returning to the Rachel Maddow Show! Instead he kept digging deeper and deeper. Now he's got himself into one hell of a ditch to try to get himself out of. Paul's fault is not racism I suspect -- the worst racists cover their tracks in careful language. The problem is this stupid, blind adherence to libertarian doctrine that government is bad and should do less and less. There are likely many other issues, such as the Gulf Oil Spill or the Banking Crisis, where lack of proper regulation has led to disaster, and a doctrinaire libertarian is going to come across looking like a fool! For what it's worth, his old man has enjoyed a mostly free ride by the left for being anti-war, and his views on civil rights are the same, but never were put under scrutiny. Since Rand is taken more seriously, his crazy ideas are going to get a lot more attention. One thing that gets me about the Republican or Tea Party libertarians, is that they believe in absolute economic freedom, but on social issues, the only thing they're libertarian about is carrying guns! Paul and other teabaggers support government surveillance under the excuse of fighting terrorism, and all of a sudden support mandatory federal identification cards as long as it only applies to Mexicans.

Exactly! She was wearing shorts and a t-shirt at that exotic dance contest. The Miss California - Carrie Prejean (who's 15 minutes appear to have expired) had topless photos, a bootleg sex video, plus she was skipping pageant-organized events to speak at Christian Right events where she became the celebrity of the hour for condemning homosexuals. Not much of a comparison.

That's the story I was waiting for. What I didn't expect is the reaction of conservatives and fundamentalist Christians who are always proclaiming their concern for the lives of women in Muslim societies. I would have expected the right wing media to be celebrating this development.....but, I was wrong.