WIP

Definitely not, since alcohol would have been the fuel that provides the cash cow which allows the building of Wahabbi mosques and madrassahs all over the world. This idiotic statement may be the first indication that the Saudis are getting nervous that declining oil reserves and high prices have finally provided the motivation for the Western industrialized nations to get serious about ending dependence on oil and move to renewable energy. Ever since the collapse of oil prices during the 80's, the Saudis have tried to keep prices low enough to kill off alternative energy developments. If the Bush Administration had spent the money devoted to securing access to oil in the MiddleEast and Central Asia instead on a Marshall Plan to end oil dependence, it would have drained the swamp figuratively speaking, since MidEast oil provides the money for terrorist groups and the promotion of Islamism around the world.

Yes, John Paul was smoothy at the PR game. Since Cardinal Ratzinger was in charge of doctrine at the time, it seems obvious that they were kindred spirits when it came to ideology. No doubt they have a dilemma on their hands. But the reason why the liberalization of the Anglican and other protestant churches has weakened them is because the parishioners have witnessed a steady retreat from a position of absolute certainty to one of equivocation and compromise, and then they start wondering if the church dogma has anything of value, or it will all be eventually revised. They wouldn't have had this problem is they had began from a more modest position of metaphysical knowledge. The Unitarian/Universalist churches are thriving, even though they have no absolute creed that members have to accept. Organized religions are usually a combination of metaphysical doctrines and moral codes, and the U/U's decided along time ago to unify around moral principles rather than doctrinal beliefs, so they did not have to go through the internal turmoil that the Anglicans have, when they started ordaining women and recognizing same-sex partnerships. But the Catholic Church has too many claims of special knowledge and a special relationship with the creator of the Universe to allow this sort of liberalization. So, I think that they fear the loss of credibility by liberalizing, more than they fear losing members by abandoning reforms and clinging to tradition.

And its not as if it is going to develop on its own! The development of the embryo/fetus is totally dependent on nourishment taken from the mother's body, who has to carry it around for nine months! Once again, by declaring that the we mark the beginning of human life at the point of successful fertilization of the egg, and give it right to life, you are also ruling that the women who bring the children into this world have NO RIGHTS in the matter. You can't make declarations about right to life without also making fetal rights superior to an adult woman's rights of privacy to determine whether or not her body should be used to bring new life into the world. You'll have to explain that one! And when things go wrong, abortion should be an option in the early stages of pregnancy, before brain development and properties that we identify as human begin to occur. There are some girls, especially from broken homes, who don't think beyond their immediate needs, but there are also many situations where teenage girls from religious families have this sort of "accident" after having the abstinence doctrine drummed into their heads. Instead of being pragmatic and making sure they use contraception and safe sex methods if they are thinking of engaging in sexual activity, they are totally unprepared -- so when the dam breaks, and a flood of hormones takes over, they end up having sex with no protection of any kind -- and along comes baby! So, should a teenage girl have to drop out of school, try to marry the baby-daddy, become a single, unwed mother etc. because we have to make sure that every fertilized egg is brought to term? This is something that mother nature doesn't practice BTW. Best estimates are that 60 to 80 percent of all fertilized eggs are spontaneously aborted, or miscarried by the mother, because nature doesn't want every possible life to be realized -- only the ones that are fit enough to survive. So most abortions occur naturally, and yet the Catholic Church and other anti-abortion groups have little or nothing to say about prenatal health or other steps that could be taken to prevent "natural" abortions. That's inconvenience alright! And I would argue that it is the sort of inconvenience that a man can't really grasp on a personal level -- I guess that's why Judith Jarvis Thompson created her example of "The Violinist," -- to give the average guy a little food for thought of what it might be like to have your life put on hold for the higher purpose of saving a life. My position is still that this sort of right to life dialed back to a stage when the life has no human qualities does not merit violating the freedoms of the woman who will be stuck with carrying this life around for the next nine months and possibly raising it to adulthood after giving birth. All find and dandy if that's what she chooses to do! But I've seen enough bitter, frustrated single mothers to come to the conclusion that it is better for a child to be born into a family that wants a baby and has prepared for raising the child in a loving home.

We've been down this road before....probably right on this thread, but in legal terms, Canada presently has no abortion law. Nevertheless, it has also been noted that many Canadian women seeking third trimester abortions, which are usually sought when there are birth defects or the mother's health is at risk, end up having to go to the U.S. to have a late abortion. Since 2004, the Federal Government hasn't been keeping records on Canadian women going to the states for abortions, but the Wikipedia article on Abortion in Canada, which was cited a zillion times, noted that in Quebec, there were no hospitals equipped to perform this procedure which is more risky than an earlier stage abortion. Do you see the irony? In the country with no abortion law it is more difficult to get a late term abortion than it is in the land where abortion is a continual front-burner political issue! Is it possible that conservatives would rather have abortion as a political issue than actually do anything about it? For what it's worth, in both Canada and the United States, third trimester abortions are rare and are a very small minority of the total abortions performed

I hope you realize what you're asking for! If it's any consolation, deciding when a person is brain-dead, at the other end of the life cycle, is just as contentious as this issue. Deciding when to give a fetus the moral status of being human, has been argued by bioethicists and philosophers for decades now. I think the consensus would gather around the Third Trimester, when the nervous system and brain have developed enough so that the fetus can survive outside the mother's womb. Most of the secular (non-soul) arguments for applying that standard early on during the zygote stage revolve around arguments of potentiality -- that the new clump of cells has a unique hybrid DNA strand to create a new person. The problem with this definition, is that there is nothing at this stage that makes us uniquely human - no brain, no nervous system, no beginning of consciousness - only potential for becoming human. But that potential depends on many environmental factors. Michael Gazzaniga, a neuroscientist who was a member of the President's Council on Bioethics, compares this argument to saying your local Home Depot store has 300 houses, just because it may have enough building materials to make 300 houses. And you are about as likely to get pregnant as I am? But what about the women who get pregnant - do they get to have a say in making this decision? Erring in favour of the fetus means that the prospective mother is held hostage for nine months, not to mention the ordeal of delivery. Does a fetal right to life trump the pregnant woman's freedom to make decisions over something that has such a great effect on her body? Protecting this life would be easier if it wasn't for that fact that it is contingent life, dependent on the mother, so it can't be considered to have a life of its own till it is at least at the stage where it would survive outside of the womb. I posted this previously by Judith Jarvis Thomson: A Defense of Abortion who uses the example of finding yourself waking up in a hospital bed wired up with intravenous tubes to a man in the adjacent bed. You are informed that he is a famous concert violinist who will die unless he remains attached to you for sustenance for the next nine months. If you want to save a life, you'll put up with the inconvenience and allow him to live off of you for the duration -- but, are you morally obligated to do so? If we're comparing the The Violinist though problem to abortion, we might judge that if the person decided on day one, or even after a few days or weeks to pull the plug and walk out of the hospital, that they were free to do so. But if the person remained through most of the duration of the procedure, and waited until the violinist was almost ready to live on his own, then most people would consider it reprehensible to pull the plug. And in the case of abortion, many people who don't buy into the "protecting the unborn" claptrap, will nevertheless believe that when a fetus is developing the qualities that are identifiably human, then the mother's personal rights have to give way to the right to life, unless there are medical issues affecting the mother or the fetus that would make a late term abortion necessary. Again, I don't buy the equal rights argument in this setting since we are not the ones who get pregnant and have the babies! The prospective father does not have the burden of pregnancy, so he should not have the right to overrule whatever decision the woman wants to make, either to have an abortion, or to have the baby.

I don't think you'll be hearing back from him. It appears that Mr. bombast has left the building. I am hearing much the same thing nowadays. It seems that the Vatican wants a more conservative, doctrinaire church, even at the cost of shrinking further by losing liberal and moderate members. My wife hardly goes to Mass anymore because the sermons are getting more strident in their condemnations of Catholics that are divorced, are in mixed marriages, and using unauthorized methods of birth control -- not to mention all of the abortion sermons. I hope you still feel like sticking around awhile, even if it's too late to do battle with C.

Evangelical Christianity - what we consider today to be the base of the Religious Right, used to be very left wing and anti-big business until after WWII, when all forms of socialism became entangled with communism. Up till the Depression, the most prominent radio evangelists were castigating the rich, and at least claiming to speak on behalf of the poor and downtrodden. There may have been a shift towards the blessed are the rich sentiment expressed by today's TV evangelists anyway, when what's often referred to as the "Prosperity Gospel" started to take hold -- which preaches that wealth is a blessing from God, rather than the ill-gotten gains of greedy men in league with the ruler of this world - the Devil.

And that is effectively a total ban on abortion! Even the anti abortion groups will not go that far out on a limb to refuse abortions to women in cases such as Ectopic Pregnancies, where carrying the fetus to term could be fatal. Catholics will pull out Aquinas's Principle of Double Effects, for theologically justifying aborting a fetus stuck in the mother's fallopian tubes. They claim that this theological principle will allow a Catholic doctor to give the need to save the mother's life higher priority than that of the fetus, so the death of the fetus would be ruled as an unfortunate secondary effect of saving the mother's life. The problem is that in real life, there have been cases where Catholic hospitals in New York, have refused to remove an ectopic pregnancy, and the woman had to be rushed off to a non-catholic hospital for a life-saving operation. If the Church ran all the hospitals, they would have died as a result of ideology based on medieval superstition. The biggest player in the anti-abortion movement (the Catholic Church) is also against birth control and almost all forms of contraception including condoms. The movement as a whole pushes ineffective abstinence education programs that end up with more teenage pregnancies and therefore more pregnant girls seeking abortions. The strategy of the anti abortion movement to harass and make access to abortion more difficult, only results in creating the need for more late term abortions -- which is the stage that most people consider a fetus to be given consideration for having its own rights. Yes, and they also have no logical basis for considering a fertilized egg to be determined to be a person. Until an embryo is past two weeks old, it can divide (creating two persons), and in rare cases, two fraternal twins can fuse together and grow as one fetus (Chimera) with two different DNA strands that grow as one fetus and then become a person who may possess two different blood types, unmatching fingerprints and hair colours and patterns, and in some rare cases, male and female sexual organs, otherwise known as a hermaphrodite. So do these possibilities mean that the embryo doesn't become a person till it is two weeks old? Even if we use that stage, it has no brain, no nervous system, no mental activity, or anything that we regard as human qualities. Well, first off, I should point out that I am not a woman. I am a married, middleaged father of three who recognizes that I, as a man, did not have to go through the ordeals of pregnancy, labour and delivery, so I don't accept your notion that the prospective father of a child has equal footing with the mother, since his life is not encumbered or inconvenienced by the birth process.

Sure people will eat anything that's available! I recall that in the North Korean famine, a few years ago, there were stories about people eating rats, boiling tree bark, digging up roots...just trying to eat whatever was available.....but it won't be enough to feed the whole world, and as more forests are burned away and more wildlife devoured as a response to famine; it will only delay the inevitable, not stop it. Many global policy strategists are concerned that famine caused by the shift in climate we are now experiencing, will soon lead to mass migrations and eventually open warfare -- Mass migrations and war: Dire climate scenario Where are we going to get all the fish from to replace the beef industry? The price of beef and chicken is going to keep increasong as grain prices go up and water supplies become scarce. But, have you seen the price of fish lately? The fisheries started collapsing years ago.

It was in JFK's budget proposal for 1964. The tax cuts are attributed to Kennedy for that reason; they were not Johnson's ideas, he just tabled the budget that had been drafted by the Kennedy Administration. And the War was still a minor venture until later that year when Johnson was able to escalate the War after getting the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. So you're wrong! They did not occur at the same time: President Kennedy proposed a tax cut lowering the top marginal rate by 20%, from 91% to 71%, which was enacted in February 1964 by Lyndon Johnson. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Society At Kennedy's death, there were 16,000 American military advisors in Vietnam. Johnson expanded their numbers and roles following the Gulf of Tonkin Incident (less than three weeks after the Republican Convention of 1964, which had nominated Barry Goldwater for President). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyndon_Johnson#Vietnam_War No, they sold the loans, and now that they are in default, the taxpayers are left with the bill. You are splitting hairs to try to salvage what's left of Dubya's reputation! Scale has to be taken into consideration here. Would you consider the Panama Invasion to be a war? It makes a big difference when the war becomes a multi-trillion dollar venture combined with major tax cuts.

They are both undeclared wars for that matter. You can determine what constitutes a major war by the level of commitment that's demanded of the nation by the president. When JFK checked out, there were still less than 12,000 U.S. service men in Vietnam, which certainly would not have had a major economic impact -- thus the point about cutting taxes during wartime. An argument could have been made that the top marginal tax rates during Eisenhower, were too high, and encouraged fraud and corruption by executives trying to shelter their income; but Bush's tax cuts only served to make the filthy rich even filthier rich, and encourage the investment bubbles that artificially inflated equity and real estate values. Bush wanted Iraq to be considered a war when it was to his benefit. The American Public was not asked to make any commitment to the War aside from spending money. There was no draft, so no one had to serve if they didn't want to, and even though the cost of the Iraq War (which may be over 3 trillion dollars when it is wrapped up) played a major part in the doubling of the National Debt during the Bush Years, no economic sacrifices were asked. The bill was just charged forward to future generations of Americans to pay for.

Which doesn't make any sense! I thought you were co-opting the prolife term for late term abortions. What does it mean to partially ban abortion? Is that for women who are just a little pregnant? Which means you want to ban abortion, not partially ban abortion, since you would only allow abortion during extraordinary circumstances, presumably when the mother's life is in danger......but I better not jump to any conclusions and try to guess what line of reasoning you are applying here. Yes, I know all about how technology and modernization changed the nature of work, and made more work available for women, but it's not as if the church leaders and social conservatives weren't trying to put the brakes on to societal change. Back when I was young, the media was saturated with debates over whether "women (specifically mothers) should work outside the home. And technology aside, an authoritarian religious system can still prevent women from entering the workforce.....Saudi Arabia for example. And Christian fundamentalist spokesmen who give us the family values song and dance would like to turn the clock back here as well. But, this isn't all about work! It's also about controlling the reproductive choices of women. When contraception is freely available, family size decreases dramatically. Authoritarian religious and political systems want as little interference from women as possible, since they tend to support better health and social policies at the expense of military spending. And what better way to keep them away from meddling in politics than to ban birth control and abortion, and keep them busy having babies. If you're arguing the pro life cause, you have no standing to demand that the woman have an abortion and save you the expense of child support. On the other hand, trying to stop a woman from having an abortion and carry a pregnancy to term, has already been tested in court and denied, since the sperm donor doesn't have to serve as host to a developing embryo and fetus for nine months. This is where privacy rights come in, since the prospective mother might have other ideas about how to spend the next nine months. Talk of fairness and equality in this scenario does not apply since the baby daddy has no similar restrictions on his personal freedom, nor does he have to go through the ordeal of childbirth. Just make sure to use condoms if you don't want to get hit up for child support.

Don't tell me that you're going to use the excuse that black community leaders use about inner city drug problems: it's the white man's fault for making the drugs available! That seems to be what's working here, and it could explain why conservatives are always in a lather about stopping pornography...........but if it really happened, they would be trolling around the blackmarket to get their porn fix!

Was that a typo by the guy doing the children's aid hatchet job, or was "87 years old" his actual age? Because, if that's accurate, this senior citizen offender grew up at a time when child protective services barely existed, and were much different than today.

This is a very poor analogy. It's a good thing you're not in charge of scientific testing, since you have offered no insight into the condition of these children when they were put under foster-care in the first place. Let me save you some of the trouble, since my eldest son works as a counselor/attendant at a group home for teenage boys, and many of them aren't wanted by their birth parents and were rejected by foster parents because they may have been prone to violent behaviour and/or were mentally ill. Lost in your attack on the CAS, is the smear job you are doing on foster parents, who take unwanted children into their homes and receive minimal compensation for their troubles. Just citing cases where kids in foster care were abused does a disservice to all of those who do what is an otherwise almost thankless volunteer job that nobody else wants. Anyway, the boys who end up at the group home where my son works are chronic cases already, that have to be watched almost 24/7, and I suspect that's why many group home managers may be tempted to load them up on ritalin or other drugs to keep them sedated and easier to manage. That's not saying it's a good thing, but if you want optimal care for teenagers that are nearing adulthood, it's going to cost money, and social service budgets are the first ones to be squeezed by politicians looking to cut budgets. Anyway, I haven't noticed anywhere in your anti-CAS comments where you offer your solution to the problem, other than leave them with the parents to be murdered. What is your solution?

8 of Top 10 Porn-Consuming States Voted Republican in 2008 Presidential Election according to this survey reported on the ABC News website: Those states that do consume the most porn tend to be more conservative and religious than states with lower levels of consumption, the study finds. "Some of the people who are most outraged turn out to be consumers of the very things they claimed to be outraged by," Edelman says. So, all the Porn Industry has to do to guarantee market share is to keep funding televangelists, teenage abstinence education programs, and conservative churches that teach all sex is sinful unless it's for making babies.....within the sanctity of marriage of course! The biggest consumer, Utah, averaged 5.47 adult content subscriptions per 1000 home broadband users; Montana bought the least with 1.92 per 1000. "The differences here are not so stark," Edelman says. Number 10 on the list was West Virginia at 2.94 subscriptions per 1000, while number 41, Michigan, averaged 2.32. Eight of the top 10 pornography consuming states gave their electoral votes to John McCain in last year's presidential election – Florida and Hawaii were the exceptions. While six out of the lowest 10 favoured Barack Obama. Old-Fashioned Values Church-goers bought less online porn on Sundays – a 1% increase in a postal code's religious attendance was associated with a 0.1% drop in subscriptions that day. However, expenditures on other days of the week brought them in line with the rest of the country, Edelman finds. Hilarious! God might see you go online and look at porn on Sunday, but it's okay during the rest of the week. Residents of 27 states that passed laws banning gay marriages boasted 11% more porn subscribers than states that don't explicitly restrict gay marriage. I'll be willing to wager that they'll find that the anti-gay states have a higher number of gay porn subscribers also. "One natural hypothesis is something like repression: if you're told you can't have this, then you want it more," Edelman says. I think he hit the nail on the head there! Guilt, shame, repression, and threats of divine wrath don't make people happy and well-adjusted -- it only creates secret sinners who live secret lives and likely grovel for forgiveness before an all-knowing god, on a regular basis, instead of accepting that their sexual desires are natural and that treating them as a positive thing is the best way to prevent unhealthy sexual obsessions.

Reactionaries like to pretend that there are a whole lot of unnecessary laws and government services that never should have existed. But the alternative would be that we would still be that many people would still live lives of misery that inspired Charles Dickens's novels over a century ago. Sure there are CAS abuses, and people unjustly accused of physical and/or sexual abuse; but how come I've never had a CAS social worker interviewing my kids or have been questioned by police over this sort of issue, if it's so common? Many of the false charges and allegations seem to be connected with messy divorces, and I know of at least one case personally of a man who was falsely accused by his ex-wife of sexual abuse, likely because she wanted to cut off visitations and move the children along with her and her new boyfriend out of province. Since a physical examination of the child revealed no signs of abuse, his ex had to admit to lying about the allegations and ended up losing primary custody to avoid a counter-suit. This page from Religious Tolerance.org on problems with overzealous social workers trying to protect children notes that "in almost all other incidences where children were removed from communal settings, families have later been reunited after no evidence of sexual abuse was found." Also mentioned are the problems many hippie-dippie new age pagans ran into when conventional neighbours interpreted their wicca and neopagan religious mumbo jumbo as evidence that they were practicing satanic rituals. The Satanic Ritual Abuse scare has been discredited and revealed as a hoax, so it's not likely that anyone has been falsely accused of practicing satanic rituals on their children in the last 20 years. The scandals involving daycare workers falsely accused of sexual abuse ten to twenty years ago, revealed that psychologists and police investigators need to apply different interrogation techniques with young children than they would with adults, since children are more suggestible, and can be easily led to make false statements by an interviewer who asks repetitive and leading questions. New studies of normative sexual behaviour of children has revealed that children will sometimes show curiosity about members of the opposite sex on their own, without being subjected to any kind of interference by an adult. This should have been obvious to any child psychologist who was able to recall trying to play doctor with neighbourhood girls, but for many years, the accepted wisdom of psychology was that children had no sexual curiosity on their own.........so, now they know better, and are much less likely to falsely accuse parents or guardians if their child gets caught playing a game of "I'll show you mine, if you show me yours," with another child in the neighbourhood. So, maybe there have been problems with social workers made mistakes and took children away from parents because of false allegations, but it does appear that they are learning to use better psychological profiling and interviewing techniques; and since budget cutbacks have hit social agencies hard during the last ten years (at least here in Ontario), it strains credibility to believe that there is a vast army of CAS workers on a mission to destroy families and put children into foster care and group homes. It is much more likely that falling budgets for the needs of children and families in crisis, are instead putting more and more children at risk of being left in abusive homes because the social agencies have fewer resources, and have to concentrate on the more obvious and aggregious cases of abuse.

I was already aware that JFK had cut what had been a very high top income tax rate of the Eisenhower Administration, but when he was assassinated, the U.S. only had about 11 to 12,000 soldiers supporting the South Vietnamese government. It certainly didn't qualify as a major war until LBJ escalated the War by mobilizing over half a million U.S. soldiers at its peak. I wasn't aware that Johnson cut taxes; I thought he increased taxes, along with spending on domestic projects and the military.

The almighty dollar trumps animal welfare just as quickly as environmental issues apparently. There is an alternative though. Quit eating meat, or at least make some serious cutbacks in consumption of meat and animal products, since a large share of the health problems North Americans are suffering from are either directly or indirectly related to consuming too much meat. And since the livestock industries have a large environmental impact, there would be environmental reasons for cutting meat consumption as well.

I think I know what kind of plants you're referring to, but on a serious note, it struck me that of all the stories about the threat of extinction of mammals, reptiles, birds, insects, amphibians etc. this was one of the few references to plant extinctions I've come across, even though it only stands to reason that if there has been a sharp increase in animals being added to endangered species lists, then there must be a similar decline in diversity in the plant world.

All worth repeating, since study after study that has been done all over the world shows the same lessons about the effects of spanking and corporal punishment on children: depending on their personalities, the children will either respond in an aggressive manner, and grow up to be brutalizers themselves, or if they tend to be quiet, fearful children, they will become more fearful and withdrawn. Both conditions I would argue are desired by authoritarian thinkers, like the ones who dominate conservative and religious right policy-making. Authoritarians don't want a society of independent men and women -- instead they desire a structured, well ordered society, where people don't object or question lessons learned -- instead they want a few future leaders (the abusers of tomorrow) and a large class of followers, who are so beaten down by verbal and physical abuse, that they will just follow orders without much question, or even giving much thought to whether things could be different, let alone better! We hear from the Christian Right endlessly, that the family should not be interfered with by government, and it's not an accident that they also advocate a return to the old patriarchal ways of the man being the head of the household. He can be the little pissant dictator in his own home, and act as the proxy for both the Church and the State authorities, and make it easier for them to exert the power they desire over larger issues of society.

Now you're getting it! A charitable evaluation would be that Republicans were either careless, or unable to negotiate the spending cuts needed to balance their budgets. Both Reagan, the hero of the Republican Party, and George Bush, the man who's name could not be mentioned at the recent CPAC Conference, were following a deliberate strategy to create massive deficits, and destroy the Welfare State by making it impossible to fund any social spending, especially replacing HMO's with government health insurance. The only government spending that the Republicans feel are worth keeping are generous farm subsidy payments and ofcourse military spending, which can be guaranteed the lions share of the federal budget by scaremongering terrorism or the Chinese. Back in Dec. of 1981, the recently fired budget director for the Reagan Administration - David Stockman, gave this interview to the Atlantic, where he made known his contempt for Administration officials who worried excessively about deficits, and were unable to see the opportunity presented to force the Democratically controlled House, and the liberal Republican controlled Senate to make drastic cuts in domestic spending. His dream was later brought to fruition ironically by the tagteam of Clinton/Gingrich in the 90's. It has been mentioned numerous times already that George Bush is the first president to drastically cut taxes during wartime (if undeclared war). When the country rallied around their president for leadership, he didn't tell them that he would have to increase taxes, bring in rationing, or even start a war bonds campaign -- no, he just said SPEND your money -- even if you don't have it presumably, since many Americans had to max out their credit cards and take out equity loans against their homes to do their patriotic duty and keep the consumer economy going during a period that would have otherwise been a recession.

No kidding it's historically Liberal turf! For those of us who have watched federal politics for several decades, it hasn't escaped our notice that the Liberal strategy for determining policy positions is for the leader to: wet index finger, raise it in the air, and determine which way the wind is blowing. In other words, the Liberal Party historically has had NO core principles other than getting in power, and maintaining that grasp on power for as long as possible. If the public mood shifts to the Left, as it did during the Trudeau Era, the Liberal Party will match virtually every promise that the NDP comes up with; if the public mood turns against increased taxation and government spending, as it did during the 80's, Jean Chretien changes his public image as a leftwing Liberal, and outflanks the PC's, to make massive cuts in federal spending and provincial transfer payments to balance the Federal Budget. Now, it appears that the great lesson learned by the Liberal Party is that advocating real solutions to difficult issues loses elections -- since Ignatieff is now repudiating the Carbon Tax proposal of Stephan Dion, and claiming that he can be an advocate for the environment and the Alberta Oil Sands projects, all at the same time. In a way, I guess you can, since talk is cheap, and even George Bush could make speeches about his concern for the environment. I doubt this new Western initiative will fool many people in Alberta; it's more likely that Ignatieff wants to present the image of running a national campaign to the rest of the country. It's a shame that most Albertans see the tar sands as their economic salvation, since 80% of the stock in tar sands projects is owned by American shareholders; they'll get most of the money if these projects continue, and Alberta will be left with a toxic waste dump to clean up after they're gone....and I wonder if we'll later learn that Ignatieff himself, is a shareholder in one or more of the oil companies who have a stake in developing dirty oil.

While I was out, DOP and Dancer provided even more links than I was aware of to stories about Hamas leaders preventing and delaying efforts to treat civilians during the latest conflict. You responded with lame excuses about "disorganization" and some incoherent point about medical protocols. Now, you are blaming Israel for the Hamas decision to block medical evacuations to Egypt through the Rafa Gate. You are just going to continue to make excuses for the fact that you hold the Israelis to a higher standard than the Palestinians. Actually, it doesn't seem like you are holding the Pallies to any standard, like every vile action can be blamed on what the Israelis are doing.

Nonsense! Since we have many times too many people on Earth to go back to our "agrarian origins." To be factually correct, our origins are as hunter/gatherers, not farmers -- and we certainly have way too many people to go back and live in the forests, anymore than sending 90% of the population back to the farms. Now, I'm not a vegan, but I think they have a valid point that the livestock industries that supply most of our meat are a huge waste of natural resources. From the last numbers I heard on the subject, the most efficient factory farms still need ten pounds of feed to make one pound of meat. And livestock requires huge amounts of water -- a subject that is going to need more attention in the future, since most regions of the world are already facing water shortages. Actually, most of the world has mixed economies, but this still depends on continued economic growth; and that presents an ecological problem even if the world's population can be stabilized, since economic growth means using more natural resources. Right now, every government in the world is trying to figure out how to restart the economic growth engine -- in the longterm, there are limits to both economic and population growth, since the planet isn't going to grow larger to accommodate human desires. But if anything, veganism would be a step in the right direction. Nevertheless, a mass migration away from using animal products would