WIP

Oh, he's gone....that's a relief! He seems to be projecting his own fear of death on to people who don't believe in God or immortality. I'm guessing that his own fear of death and uncertainty about immortality is causing him to post manic, irrational screeds about atheism......hope he gets some therapy or finds something to regain his faith in a heavenly reward.....and I hope I haven't just provided him with an incentive to try again with a new screen name!

Specifically, what I'm referring to is the group described as 'Conservative Evangelical.' This segment of evangelicals has been mobilized to fight for conservative social causes (such as stopping abortion and gay rights) in the U.S., and has submerged the traditional Christian concern for social justice to form the alliance with right wing economics. A couple of generations ago, the few fundamentalist activists who pushed religion into the public arena such as William Jennings Bryant, were Democrats, and railed against greed. Bankers and businessmen were suspect because their wealth was assumed to be ill-gotten gains at the expense of people living in poverty. And, more importantly, their devotion to storing up treasures here on Earth was a sign that they did not devote enough attention to treasures in heaven. By the time the Prosperity Gospel and similar themes penetrated fundamentalist thinking, the traditional Christian social gospel was turned upside down: today, the many viewers of Pat Robertson's 700 Club will hear a message that wealth is a sign of God's blessings, and poverty is a sign of judgment or that the person is lazy....amazing how theology can be shaped and twisted when political alliances are formed. Since Harper started out as a political strategist, I doubt that he dipped his toe into the water of social conservatism without checking reams of polling data to determine what messages to use to win the support of religiously-motivated voters. About the differences between Canadian and U.S. evangelicals and fundamentalists, the article mentions the resistance to chest-thumping nationalism that's a constant theme of American politics, but I've noticed a change in Canadian thinking since we've been sucked into the War in Afghanistan. Most of the people who have supported these wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are doubling down rather than admit that we've joined a foreign venture that we knew nothing about going in, and have no exist strategy. Since Harper was elected and began a more aggressive Canadian role there to match the Obama Strategy, questioning the War is an attack on the troops and unpatriotic, just as the U.S. warhawks try to shout down opposition to pulling out. I'm sure this new found Canadian nationalistic chest-thumping is finding its way into the thinking of those conservative church leaders. The most important name in the creation of conservative Christian political activism in the U.S. is missing from that article. Falwell could not have built the Moral Majority on his own. For that he needed the credibility of Francis Schaeffer, who was one of the only major Evangelical leaders of the 70's who did not profit financially from the creation of the Republican Evangelical alliance. A couple of years ago his son - Frank Schaeffer, wrote the book: "Crazy For God" detailing much of the chronology of events that led to the present reality.

I hope you're not just repeating the sage advice of Lush Bimbo: Rush Limbaugh: Don't Touch the Oil Spill 'Ocean will take care of this on its own'

I've been scoffed at for the last year or so every time I mention the Conservative's increasing embrace of the social conservative agenda, but the evidence now is clear that we have the northern outpost of the Republican Party. I've heard it many times that the religious right is not big enough to be a controlling force here in Canada, as it is south of the border, but these people are missing the whole point. When the Republicans started courting evangelicals over 30 years ago, it wasn't for their votes as much as they seen them as the group that could provide the Republican Party with grassroots activists to counter the union-organized activists that the Democratic Party had available. So it doesn't matter how big a segment of the population the theocons are, Harper's Conservatives will throw bones to them like cutting funding for abortion, feminist groups, and gay pride parades, because that's what gets these people motivated to do the groundwork for the party at election time.

It's up to New York City and New Yorkers to decide whether a mosque should or shouldn't be allowed near the bombed out Trade Center, but for the record it should be mentioned that there were a small number of Muslims working at the WTC towers, and they apparently even had a prayer room set up in one of the offices, although I don't recall which tower. And it's not as if there were no Muslim casualties of 9/11. There were apparently several 9/11 victims who likely were Muslims based on their names.

It's already covered by Michael Hardner, except I would also add global poverty to the list because political boundaries don't stop the effects of mass migrations and environmental degradation from reaching our shores. The problems associated with a changing climate cannot be fixed without addressing population growth and clearing rainforests for agriculture. And who gets to evaluate how much effort men, women, blacks, whites put in, or whether they have the skills and experience to do the job? It strains credibility to deny that the old boy network doesn't exist. It's also important to remember that correlation does not prove causation. It's why scientists demand that test results be replicable, and it works in here in social studies as well. For example, about blacks being less likely to finish high school...assuming that's true here in Canada, is that proof that they lack motivation, or are dumb (as implied), or is it that many blacks living in lower class neighborhoods will not have access to the best schools, along with limited access to higher education, and less economic incentives to finish high school. If you're unemployed or working in some menial service job, it doesn't matter a whole lot whether or not you completed high school, and it's going to be harder to show benefits of education...but you are probably against affirmative action programs. In Nigeria, oil has made life better for some, but not for others. So, what else is new. Part of the problem being that Nigeria was not a nation, or had any national movement before colonialism. It is still a collection of hundreds of tribal groups; so if you throw a big pile of cash in the middle...such as proceeds from oil, what do you think will happen? But, can you think of any resource-rich country that is a healthy, stable democracy? For most oil-rich nations on Earth, oil is a curse; so why should Nigeria be any different? No question about it that much of the problems in Nigeria, the rest of Africa and the Third World, have to do with the fact that colonial rule never really ended. The political structures of colonial government may have been replaced with locals, but the economic power in most of the developing world is under the control of large multinational corporations. Chevron and other oil companies pump the oil out of the ground in Nigeria, and receive most of the money.

Why? Because you never bothered to explain what you meant with this cryptic phrase: "Not that that's right, of course, but it is different, and that's my only point. " So how is it different?...'it may not be right, but it's not as bad as killing a non-government worker or some similar bullshit?'..... So what constitutes a "civilian?" Is a factory worker a civilian? And how does becoming a civil servant revoke "civilian" status? And as far as killing innocent children goes, you haven't gone near the Oklahoma City Bombing, which certainly was a mass casualty attack, or the fact that most of the victims were the children in the daycare center on the ground floor. You have underlined the double standard that's playing all over the MSM, where domestic terrorists and their supporters are treated less seriously than the foreign guy with the beard. You won't talk about right wing militias that have been caught in the planning stage, such as this Hutaree Militia in Michigan. If they're white and christian and only target government workers and buildings apparently, I guess terrorist acts are okay.....not that that's right of course! All it takes is electing a black president and there's a 2.5 fold increase in the number of spawning grounds for right wing terrorists: New SPLC Report: "Patriot" Groups, Militias Surge in Number in Past Year

It's bad enough that you categorize an attack on government employees differently than an attack on civilians; I don't think anyone becomes a civil servant should face threats and harassment from crazy rightwing anarchists, and as noted the Oklahoma City Bombing is a prime example of how civilians are going to be killed in any kind of mass casualty attack....but the worst aspect of treating domestic terrorism differently than terrorist attacks by foreigners, is that they seem more familiar and therefore less threatening because they are white and have many of the same grievances that other average white citizens may share. The right wing terrorist plots and successful attacks don't get a fraction of the media attention or resources of the FBI and other police organizations that Arab terrorist plots receive. The situation in the U.S. of allowing right wing militias to run around fully armed and conduct training exercises out in the woods is totally ludicrous. The Hutaree militia members are all out on bail; like I said before, if they had beards and declared themselves to be Muslim converts would any of them been allowed out of jail? Yet it's these whitebread militias that are going to be the greatest danger for civil unrest and terrorism in the U.S.

If I take $10,000 of your money and run off to the casino, am I taking a financial risk? I already posted a link about the payouts that Lehman's top executives walked off with after they drove their firm into bankruptcy that show there are no penalties for failure under the current system. If they destroy their firms or banks, they still get payed off and run off to start another operation the next day. The losers in the collapse of Lehman Bros. were the investors, not the executives or the traders who receive compensation based on the degree of risks they are willing to take with investors' money! TOO BIG TO FAIL. I'm getting sick of the disingenuous argument by proponents of unfettered and unregulated capitalism, that failing financial institutions should be allowed to fail. The greed-motivated traders walk off scott free with all of their bonuses, while investors lose their savings. The responsible solution is to demand that financial institutions change their compensation setup that rewards short term gains and either regulate these new derivatives markets or ban them entirely. Barney Frank became committee chairman in 2007 after the Democrats took over the House. Now, after the financial meltdown, Republicans started a claim that they couldn't get a bill to regulate Fannie and Freddie in 2005 or 2006 because of opposition from Frank and other Democrats even though they controlled Congress and the Whitehouse! Does that even sound remotely plausible considering the way they rammed through bills to continue off budget funding for their wars and the Patriot Act? I saved this for future reference just because of the way history gets reinvented by the continual repetition of lies and half-truths: Three years ago, then-U.S. Rep. Michael Oxley saw cracks creeping through what is now a crumbled financial system. This week, Oxley said it could have been prevented by an ill-fated attempt to regulate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which provide funding for about 75 percent of home mortgages..................... But, Oxley said, it ran into "ideologues" in the White House who wanted to privatize Fannie and Freddie and who opposed a bigger government role. The bill also ran into opposition in the Senate. http://www.thecourier.com/Issues/2008/Sep/28/ar_news_092808_story8.asp?d=092808_story8,2008,Sep,28&c=nn I don't think anyone's saying that Barney FRank was a big help since he got his position on seniority rather than any great understanding of finance, but the new REpublican myth that the real estate bubble and meltdown is all Barney Frank's fault because he stalled a bill to regulate Fannie and Freddie is FoxNews mythology. This Congressman - Oxley, speculated that the resistance or lack of interest in his proposals by the Whitehouse was because they were focused on privatizing these two quasi-government agencies, so they opposed his bill because they didn't want anything that would increase or continue a government role. Damn right they can't be absolved of responsibility! If you noticed the stories I linked about Bush bragging about the success of the CRA, it's obvious that Republicans had no intention of changing it. And again I have to ask why they are not protesting outside of the major banks and financial institutions? It's not just a matter of opposing a bailout; what do they have to say about unbridled capitalism that allows financial traders to create unregulated markets and run off with their winnings even when they lose the savings of their investors? Right here it's worth taking note of the only unifying theme of these teabagger protests: What I think is that people with large sums of money should not be allowed to use them to buy the political influence they desire. Instead the SCOTUS recently decided to complete the theory that corporations have personal rights by deciding that a corporation has a right to freedom of speech, and since corporations speak with money, then any regulations on campaign financing are a violation of a corporations free speech.....or at least according to Antonin Scalia! Now, how much accountability can government have when it's open to the highest bidder? The successful pattern established by the right over the last 30 years has been to do what is most optimal for the people who finance their campaigns and supply golden parachutes after they leave office, while appealing to the fears, hatred and resentment of average citizens. That's how people can be motivated to cheerfully support political parties that work against the average citizen's economic interests, and I think we can expect more of the same in the future since they created a tea party that rallies whites to oppose a black president and changing racial demographics that will make non-whites the majority in a few decades and claims now that they want no regulation, just no future bailouts. I'll bet these people would be singing a different tune about bank bailouts if their savings are at risk.

One difference is that WWII was a war defined with a clear goal in mind. This War On Terror is an endless war, and the changes to personal rights and liberties are not likely to be put back.

Tune in to Hannity or Limbaugh by accident some time; every incident that involves a guy with a beard is the next 9/11. And how do you explain the threats against census workers and federal employees. Remember the building that Tim McVeigh picked as a target in Oklahoma? You see no connection with right wing rhetoric that wants to destroy the federal government! There is a connection between lunatic emotional zenophobic rhetoric and the occasional nut who is inspired by it. Many of these hard right libertarian activists are promoting the position that income tax is unlawful in itself, so random attacks of this type are likely to happen, just as the anti-abortion rhetoric inspires crowds who harass abortion clinic staff and occasionally turn out someone who is willing to pull the trigger. I'll say it again, your country has a greater threat to democracy and public order from within than it has from any foreign terrorist group.

It's worth noting that humans are the only mammals who form heterosexual pair bonds; monogamy is not very common among any mammal species. Our ancestors likely developed pair bonds because of the increasing investment of time and resources needed for child development, and if you take a look at statistics showing half of all marriages end in divorce, it appears that our old instincts are still in us. It's not a serious comment, but regardless I want to make the point that without persecution there doesn't need to be deception. My brother's wife did not know she was Jewish until she was an adult because the family changed their name during WWII and joined the Catholic Church. You could call that deception too, and it wouldn't have been necessary if Hitler and concentration camps hadn't become along. That was the point! George Alan Reckers becomes a pivotal spokesman for a movement that claims gays can be turned straight, and pops up as an expert spokesman during a gay adoption controversy in Florida, while apparently spending his whole life living in denial.

Nobody said they weren't taking risks! That's the whole reason for boom and bust cycles. The point is that they feel free to throw caution to the wind when they are risking other people's money when commercial banking and investment banking were allowed to be merged together. Is that a bad thing? Before the Federal Reserve was created, the banks couldn't be trusted, and if there is a scandal, it is allowing the capital reserve requirements of banks to be lowered. Let's not pretend Wall Street has no influence with Federal Reserve policies. Banks create money out of thin air anyway, since a 3% reserve rate allows it to loan out $97,000 of a $100,000 deposit. And then the $97,000 mortgage is listed as an asset on its balance sheet to be used to leverage other loans. It can apply that reserve policy to that amount, and so on and so forth five or six times on that original deposit of $100,000, according to Federal Reserve regulations. So money is being created by banks out of thin air all the time. Didn't the oil embargo and higher oil prices have something to do with the economic malaise of the 70's? So in two years, Barney was supposed to fix problems and change home ownership guarantees that were approved by the Bush Administration. I didn't read too much about the AFL-CIO sponsored protest on Wall Street, so I don't know who they turned out for the event, but why should that matter? If these teabaggers were really sincere about their occasional condemnations of Wall Street and the bailout, they would have either been there or set up a demonstration of their own on another occasion. Their silence speaks volumes! So keep on blaming the politicians who are on the take from Wall Street, rather than the big money kingpins who buy political influence in the first place. When they were desperate to keep their system going, they turned to Hank Paulsen to bail them out; afterwards they wanted to back to business as usual... so what else is new! It's stupid to talk about blaming politicians for this situation, and pretend that Republicans will act differently when they have control. The only distinct difference I can see between the Democrats and Republicans is that Democrats feel guilty when they are doing the bidding of their corporate benefactors, whereas the Republicans make no apologies for it and make no bones about wanting to weaken government regulatory power further and strengthen the power of corporate citizens. Unless there is real campaign finance reform it doesn't matter much who is elected to office. The same things will happen again and again as long as politicians are allowed to immediately go to work as corporate lobbyists to cash in their political IOU's; and regulators go to work for firms they are supposed to be regulating immediately after leaving the public service.

Since I am going to assume you are trying to make some sort of natural law argument that homosexual behaviour is abnormal, an explanation is needed for why homosexual pairing is so common in many bird species and has been observed in every species of mammals that have been studied in depth. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexual_behavior_in_animals As for being deceptive, if people were not persecuted because of their sexual preferences, there would be no need for deception.

Doesn't it seem that foreign terrorists are the focus of attention? Especially when Homeland Security refuses to use the term "terrorist" to describe some of the homegrown variety, and what about letting Hutaree militia members out on bail! If they were Muslim converts, rather than some band of Christian Reconstructionists, there would be an uproar if they were let out, or read their miranda rights. When it comes to terrorist threats on U.S. soil, there is a greater danger presented by militias who are creating their own private armies, than there is from foreigners.

No, my point is that they are gambling with other people's money, not their own. That's one of the reasons why repealing Glass–Steagall was a bad idea. Commercial banks were free to use depositors money for their bets in newly created derivatives markets. The government role boils down to politicians bought and paid for by banks, insurance companies and hedge fund managers who go to Washington and change the rules to benefit the institutions that fund their re-elections and provide careers in between and/or after their political careers are over. The theory you have bought hook-line-and-sinker is that federal and state governments are telling Wall Street - the institutions that control over 30% of the total U.S. economy - what to do. That is the backwards story provided by corporate apologists who want to carry on with business as usual. I don't recall saying that Wall Street only buys Republicans, but what did the Bush Administration propose doing about Fannie and Freddie during their 8 years...besides bragging about the "highest rate of home ownership in history"? And what of the Republican majority congress from 1994 to 2006 -- was Barney Frank in charge during the Republican era? Not sure which picketers you mean, but now that you mention it why weren't these right wing tea party activists taking part in the protest on Wall Street a few weeks ago? If they were really so opposed to the banking bailout, why are they never seen protesting against their big money benefactors?

Wow! As if we needed more bad news. Some new research I mentioned earlier studying past CO2 levels using a new chemical testing that is supposed to be accurate to within 14 ppm (reducing uncertainty and contradictory analysis of some previous paleoclimate research) shows that for 800,000 years CO2 levels stayed within a narrow range of 180 to 300 ppm., so we have been moving into uncharted territory for the past 100 years. According to that study, CO2 levels were last sustained at a level of 385 ppm 15 million years ago, and the Earth looked much different then than it does now. At present levels it may be impossible to stop the eventual melting of the polar ice caps and force future generations to have to adapt to conditions that our species never had to deal with previously. And if projections that CO2 levels will rise to somewhere between 600 and 900 ppm. in the next century, people living at that time may face a real threat of extinction.

Stopping wars and finding some way to start another Green Revolution is not going to fix the finite world we have to live on. I am inclined to be a pessimist about longterm survival of the human race, since our motivations are focused on short term needs and slowly advancing long term crises go unnoticed. Ending war, and growing more food is not going to fix the most fundamental problem of what kind of place future generations will have to live in.

Let's see...no sign of arm twisting here: A trio of former Washington Mutual officials and a trove of documents on Tuesday portrayed a pattern of breakneck loan-making and alleged fraud at the biggest U.S. bank ever to fail. The 18-month investigation by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs subcommittee found that WaMu's lending operations were rife with fraud, including fabricated loan documents. It concluded that management failed to stem the deception despite internal probes. WaMu's release of toxic mortgage securities into the financial bloodstream contributed to the near-collapse of the system in the fall of 2008, Levin and other senators contended. Levin pressed Killinger and the other former executives on when they became aware of loan fraud at the bank and why they failed to act.Fueled by the housing boom, Washington Mutual's sales to investors of subprime mortgage securities leapt from $2.5 billion in 2000 to $29 billion in 2006. The 119-year-old thrift, with $307 billion in assets, was sold for $1.9 billion to JPMorgan Chase & Co. in a deal brokered by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Killinger said it was "unfair" that Washington Mutual didn't get the benefits of government actions that helped other financial institutions in the days of the crisis in the fall of 2008. He was referring to steps such as a doubling of the limit on deposit insurance to $250,000 and new federal guarantees for bank debt. Between 2003 and 2007 under his tenure, WaMu cut in half its staff in the home loans division and sold 30 percent of its portfolio of loans, Killinger testified. WaMu's pay system rewarded loan officers for the volume of loans they closed on. Extra bonuses even went to loan officers who overcharged borrowers on their loans or levied stiff penalties for prepayment, according to the report of the Senate panel's investigation. WaMu was one of the biggest makers of so-called "option ARM" mortgages. They allowed borrowers to make payments so low that loan debt actually increased every month. In some cases, sales associates in WaMu offices in California fabricated loan documents, cutting and pasting false names on borrowers' bank statements, the panel found. The company's own probe in 2005, three years before the bank collapsed, found that two top producing offices — in Downey and Montebello, Calif. — had levels of fraud exceeding 58 percent and 83 percent of the loans. Employees violated the bank's policies on verifying borrowers' qualifications and reviewing loans. Washington Mutual was criticized over the years by its internal auditors and federal regulators for sloppy lending that resulted in high default rates, according to the report. Violations were so serious that in 2007, Washington Mutual closed its affiliate Long Beach Mortgage Co. as a separate entity and took over its subprime lending operations. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100413/ap_on_bi_ge/us_washington_mutual_investigation So how was the collapse of WaMu the fault of the federal government? Except maybe for the fact that none of the banksters in this company appear to have faced criminal fraud charges or incarcerated. This "let them fail" chit is just a scam played by the right, since their advocacy of deregulation and complete unregulation of new derivative investments has turned the world finance system into a house of cards that will cause the whole thing to crash if a major player goes down. As I recall, the Bush Administration started with your advice when they let WAMU and Lehman Bros. collapse, and when the whole system started to unravel, Hank Paulsen had to rush in with a promise to put up 700 billion dollars as equity to save institutions that had toxic assets. The libertarians and conservatives are just blowing smoke now by claiming that they would have let bad banks fail rather than regulate banking and new derivative investments. The Republicans of the last Congress blinked and had to change their votes against Bush's bailout plan, and they would have to do it again, since nobody can afford to have the whole financial system collapse.

Yes, I remember hearing something about that awhile back. The Amazon is considered to be the number one carbon filter for the planet, and that's why there is so much concern over declining precipitation levels in the Upper Amazon Basin that feeds the giant river. The algae in the world's oceans must also be high on the list of carbon absorption because of algae. But, as more and more large areas of the world's oceans turn into dead zones, as the photosynthesizing algae is replaced with non-oxygen using cyanobacteria, the carbon absorption and oxygen production drops.

Who knows how many would have been killed! But according to bomb making experts this device was not anything on the scale of the car bombs and roadside bombs that go off on regular basis over in Iraq and Pakistan. The bomber bought fertilizer that doesn't ignite and used a propane tank that was tested on a Mythbusters episode two years agowhere the Mythbusters team found you needed to use high explosives to penetrate and detonate the gas inside a propane tank...and even then the resulting explosion, while impressive, is far more concerned with fast-burning flames than the serious damaging percussive power of destructive explosions If the bomber was indeed trained by the Taliban, what were they teaching him? Maybe they sent him off with these plans as a practical joke then! His plane was fueled up and he believed that it would crash through into the building, so his intention was to kill as many IRS staff as possible, not just commit suicide. Why then is a Muslim military psychologist who snaps and goes on a shooting spree, a terrorist incident, while a white, middle aged American man who flies is plane into an office building is not? So the guy he alerted, who flagged down the police gets cards and flowers, congratulations from the mayor and the president, and the first to notice the smoke gets ignored: “I didn’t see the car pull up or notice the driver because I was busy with customers. But when I looked up I saw that smoke appeared to be coming from the car. This would have been around 6.30pm.” “I thought I should call 911, but my English is not very good and I had no credit left on my phone, so I walked over to Lance, who has the T-shirt stall next to mine, and told him. He said we shouldn’t call 911. Immediately he alerted a police officer near by,” said Mr Niasse, who is originally from Senegal and who has been a vendor in Times Square for about eight years. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article7114495.ece My objection is to the cure turning out to be worse than the disease. The threat of foreign terrorism has been a convenient tool for politicians, policy makers and media pundits who have consistently lied and exaggerated the threat of foreign terrorist attacks on U.S. soil for their own benefit, and pose a greater threat to freedom than anything coming in from overseas.

From what I'm seeing of the way most of your media is playing this story, concern over "bleeding hearts" is not the problem. From the information so far, this bomb wouldn't have led to mass casualties even if the bomber got the right type of fertilizer to put in because he used the wrong type of propane tanks...but you won't hear that on CNN or Foxnews. It was an amateurish job if he really was trained by the Taliban! So, building this story up as a potential 9/11 is total crap to begin with. This would have been as successful as a mass casualty attack as the guy who flew his plane into the IRS building...BTW why wasn't that one called a terrorist attack? If his name was Muhammed, I'm sure flying even a small plane into a building would have started all of the wags talking about terrorism. Also, I noticed a story last night about a West African vendor was the first to notice the smoking Nissan Pathfinder, since his stand was closest to the vehicle. But the two guys who called the police are getting all of the attention and accolades, even a phone call from the President. If political correctness is the problem you are claiming it to be, why has most of the media chasing this story ignored the contribution of a Senegalese Muslim immigrant to alerting others of danger? I see more evidence that most mainstream U.S. media is feeding the hysteria that Arabs are coming in to plant bombs, than acting PC. The only politician I heard make a statement warning against hostility towards Pakistanis or other Muslims was Mayor Bloomberg, and he didn't seem to win accolades for admonishing New Yorkers not to target an entire community because of the attempted bombing. Did it occur to you that the employers of illegal immigrants don't want immigration reform, since the lack of proper documentation makes it possible for employers to rip them off and keep workers who will work in substandard conditions?

What neither you nor Shady understand is that we are talking about a complex system when we're dealing with the biosphere, not a pea pod in a tank. The simple fact is that atmospheric CO2 levels have been rising steadily for over a hundred years, so maybe human activity and the occasional volcano are adding too much carbon dioxide to be balanced out through encouraging more plants to grow. If rising CO2 levels were naturally balanced by increased plant growth, atmospheric CO2 levels would not be steadily increasing. This planting plants idea is nothing new, since planting trees is counted as a carbon offset in these proposed cap and trade schemes. But, there are a lot of ecology experts who maintain that it's bullshit, and won't lower CO2 levels one iota. Those peas may grow faster with 1200 ppm carbon dioxide, but if this experiment is tried out here on planet earth, we'll all be dead from a runaway greenhouse effect. And it's worth noting again about the carbon that is absorbed by the oceans has increased ocean acidification by 30%, which is already putting added stress on shellfish and corals. In past eras when CO2 levels went shooting up like they're doing now, the melting of ice at the poles turned oceans anoxic because of the sharp decrease in the ocean conveyor system of currents that oxygenate water. The lack of oxygen kills off normal sea life, while encouraging the growth of cyanobacteria. The mass extinctions of land and sea life that occurred during the Permian-Triassic Extinction was likely largely due to the world's oceans turning into dead zones. Then what would those pea pods do?

I don't know a whole lot about Camille Paglia, except that she gives the appearance of being a shameless self-promoter. Her defense of Sarah Palin in the 2008 election was totally absurd, and likely just designed to get some loving from conservative media. Most of this article doesn't move me one way or another, since I have no post-secondary education and can't judge her criticisms of higher education and academia. But she's declaring that criticisms by feminists and non-whites of Euro-centric culture and history are attempts to promote mediocrity. WTF! What kind of feminist wants to turn the clock back to a time when women weren't allowed in universities and Europe colonized the world for their resources? It would seem that Camille Paglia believes that whatever the power structure of a society is, it should remain that way. She appears to be a defender of those who already have the power....so I wouldn't be surprised to learn that she is a disciple of Ayn Rand. Also, what has she got against critical thinking? That's something that should have a greater role in education, not phased out for memorizing facts. A kid can learn all of the geography and historic dates, but without critical thinking skills, be unable to deconstruct bullshit strawman arguments of the type this woman is building up! And then in the next paragraph it all makes sense: "What is this hysteria over drowning polar bears?" So that's why she doesn't want to encourage critical thinking! She would rather defend those who despoil the planet than take an honest look at the evidence for climate changer herself.

Who knows how much we have to do without. Which is more important: survival, or trying to maintain wealth? There is a lot that can be done if the majority of people take the problem seriously and are willing to make some changes. Shifting taxation away from income to carbon would go a long way to reducing oil consumption and increasing the incentives for nuclear and alternative energy sources. It was already tried up here once, but Canadians either didn't want to change the status quo, or couldn't understand what Stephan Dion was saying! I hope a carbon tax is put on the table again in the near future, rather than this BS cap and trade scam -- that has too many options for cheating and fraudulent claims of carbon offsets.