WIP

Here's why we should be concerned about animals (and plants for that matter), and the impact we are making on the natural environment: just because we are smart enough to build cities and re-engineer our habitats to our liking, doesn't mean that we have conquered nature, or even understand the climate and ecological cycles that keep the planet habitable. In fact, a mass extinction cycle - something that has happened many times in Earth's history - is already well under way: A new scientific report has warned that climate change could lead to the extinction of a million of the world's species as soon as 2050. and In 2003 the World Conservation Union's Red List said more than 12,000 species (out of 40,000 assessed) faced some extinction risk, including: * one bird in eight * 13% of the world's flowering plants * a quarter of all mammals. Our pillage of the natural world has been likened to burning down the medieval libraries of Europe, before we had even bothered to catalogue their contents. Many species keep us alive, purifying water, fixing nitrogen, recycling nutrients and waste, and pollinating crops. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3667300.stm In other words, those jobs won't be worth a whole hell of a lot if we are soon to join the extinction list.

It's their own people! I would have expected them to have more concern for their own civilians than their enemies do! But these are people made insane by a religion that glorifies death and martyrdom. I question whether they see death as a bad thing, when they have celebrations when suicide bombers blow themselves up, along with Israeli civilians.

There is no such thing as "partial birth" abortion. That was just a propaganda device invented by the Religious Right to make a greater emotional impact than Late Term Abortion or Third Trimester Abortion. It's similar to calling estate taxes the "Death Tax." Demagogues love appealing to people's emotions, rather than their sense of fairness and reason. Anyway, if you're for a ban on abortions after week 20, what do you have to say to women who are told by their doctors that the fetus they are carrying has severe birth defects? Many of which aren't detectable until around week 24. I contributed half the genes for my children too, but I didn't have to walk around pregnant for nine months! And that's why most men with a sense of fairness prefer to give the woman as much authority as possible on deciding whether to take a pregnancy to full term and have the baby. I'm old enough to remember the good old days! The Feminist Movement came along out of necessity. Like it or not, societies don't progress until they abandon the old patriarchal misogyny of the past (take a look at the problems in the Muslim World if you don't believe me) and move towards equality between men and women. And if you have any daughters, you want them to grow up in a society where they can achieve anything their brothers are capable of doing, rather than hoping that they marry a rich man to live a comfortable life. Extreme feminism as a threat, pales in comparison to patriarchy and misogyny. Not everyone is fooled by trying to cloak the abortion debate in religious language with the claim of saving lives of the unborn. It is nothing more than a naked attempt to take away the reproductive control that women now have, and return it to men, usually old men, who want to keep their women pregnant, so that they can run public life all to themselves again, and return society to church-dominated feudalism.

I'll give you one! Why the hell should hedge fund investments qualify for private equity tax breaks? They've been used for leveraged buyouts in stocks and commodities, and some of these new financial products that we never heard of until the market bubble went bust. Not only were these tax breaks wasted, they added no economic value and just lined the pockets of super-rich investors. If Barack Obama is making any mistakes, it is being too cautious and middle of the road, instead of making the moves that will need to be done -- such as nationalizing the banks. Most of the largest 20 U.S. banks are insolvent by any independent analysis, why keep the slow bleed of TARP money going to the CEO's who rolled the dice and lost? You're hoping that Barack Obama will resemble LBJ, since your worse nightmare is that he stops worrying about bringing Republicans on board and makes the steps necessary to rebuild an economy that benefits everyone, not just the wealthiest 1%.

Well, at least he gave a better impression than Bobby Jindal! Even Republican pundits are heaping scorn on him for his sorry-assed excuse for a rebuttal! One month on the job and you, Limbaugh and FoxNews are calling Obama a failure if he doesn't fix every disaster created by deregulation and doubling the U.S. national debt through a combined strategy of tax cuts (mainly for the already wealthy, priviledged class) and increased government spending....especially on foreign wars! The conservative strategy has left the United States in a position that England was in after WWII -- facing the real prospect that U.S. economic and military dominance has come to an end. It's time for conservatives to retool their ideology, not their message! All thanks to the Republican strategy that inflated the bubble, rather than deal with budget deficits and trade deficits. The good times of the Bush Years were all payed for on borrowed money.

And that's what makes it so hard to take these stories of massacres seriously! There's no real respect for innocent life when hospitals and schools are used for military command centers, and making rockets and munitions. When Hamas leaders refused to allow in Egyptian doctors into Gaza, or send injured civilians to Egyptian hospitals, it was obvious that saving lives was not one of their priorities! That said, I hope the talk of expanding settlements, and setting up more checkpoints in the West Bank is just part of a bargaining strategy for future negotiations, and not a desire to annex occupied territories. Ariel Sharon gave up on Gaza, and wanted a withdrawal from most of the West Bank because maintaining the status quo would mean the end of having a Jewish-majority state.

Exactly! And the unwanted baby that the mother was forced to bear, is more likely to grow up to be Hitler than Obama.

..The re-editing process makes wiki articles more reliable. The first article posted on a topic may reflect the biases of that person. The ability for others to fact-check their work makes wikipedia out-perform Encyclopedia Britannica and its staff of payed editors and research assistants....it's the evolution process in action. The wikipedia approach is so successful that Britannica has thrown in the towel and will allow a user-edit feature on its own online encyclopedia.....the fat lady is warming up in the bullpen!

I see nothing wrong with creating a new abortion law, but it's not the Pro Choice side that's holding it up! It's those so called pro lifers who demand a total ban on abortion or nothing! Since they are aware that severely restricting third trimester abortion will take away their main propaganda argument against abortion -- no more bloody pictures of dead fetuses to parade around on their marches. A dead zygote just doesn't bring the donations in for the cause. We've been up and down this issue on this forum many times and the only thing that surprised me is finding that many Canadian women who seek third trimester abortions have to go to the U.S. to have it done. All that bullshit about Canada being an abortion wild wild west as portrayed in the anti abortion propaganda, doesn't match the realities of actually getting it done, since there are fewer and fewer abortion providers in Canada as the years go by. Women living in many rural areas, away from major metropolitan centers have poor access to abortion in real life. As for the murdering babies crapola: Third-trimester abortions are not generally available. For instance, in Quebec, there is currently no doctor who will perform a third-term abortion unless the health of the woman is in great peril or there is a genetic disorder. Currently the province sends women who seek to have third-term abortions performed to the United States. Quebec is currently actively looking to hire a doctor to do third-term abortions, but has not been successful as of October 2004. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_in_C...ess_by_province And that's why many women in the land with no abortion law, end up having to go to the United States for a late term abortion, that ironically may have been performed at an earlier stage of pregnancy if the services were available.

Wow! I should have known you would take this off to the Twilight Zone......frozen frontal lobes??? I'd ask for an explanation, but maybe it's better to leave it alone. - It's not an issue of choice! We are what we are. Comparison studies of the human genome with the DNA blueprints of chimpanzees, mice, dolphins, orangutans, sea urchins, cows, honey bees, and several other animals have been sequenced. As expected, the results show us very close to chimpanzees and orangutans, since we branched off from a common ancestor relatively recently in evolutionary history. We share less in common with the other animal groups that we branched off from at earlier stages in the history of life. http://www.hgsc.bcm.tmc.edu/projects/ So, you may be entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own truth! If you want to deny that humans are animals, it's as valid a statement as saying that the Earth is flat. Is this a side effect of that brain-freezing you mentioned earlier? The term was coined by Karl Von Linne (Carolus Linnaeus), who created the animal classification system 250 years ago that we use today.

Well then, is it possible she meant unwed mothers? I'm surprised to see you mocking other people for their choice of words. In a world with more than 6.5 billion people, we need more recreational sex and less creational sex! Well, I think you got the meaning of their message right -- but does one exceptional success story justify their Continuity and Potentiality arguments that every fertilized egg has a right to be brought to term? Setting aside the problem that the embryo's potential can't be realized without denying the host (the pregnant woman) any role in the decision-making process -- the odds of an unplanned, unwanted pregnancy of a young woman with little or no education, growing up to be President is much less than the child growing up to be a serial killer. Like it or not, Morgenthaler is probably right that legalized abortion reduced the crime rates, since unwanted children brought into this world are more likely to be resented children who end up in group homes.

Except that humans and chimpanzees share the same engine (like other mammals). The difference is in the size -- specifically the Prefrontal lobes of the Cortex, where neuroscientists believe that our executive thinking is performed -- according to studies correlated with brain scan data. The Prefrontal lobes make up about 26% of the Cerebral Cortex in humans, about 17 to 19 % in Great Apes like chimpanzees and gorillas, 7% in dogs, 3% in cats......and those ratios coincide with the intellectual capabilities of these animals when tested. The point I was trying to get across to Oleg is that the traditional view of humans being something different and superior to animals has been taken apart piece by piece since the time of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace realized that we are part of the Animal Kingdom also, and are only separated and advanced because of the overdevelopment of one area of the brain. The old archaic worldview of being created by a man-like God who gave us dominion over the Earth, to do with it whatever the hell we like, is a major reason why this world is in the mess it is in today. A more humble approach of recognizing that we break the laws of nature at our own peril and trying to maintain ourselves in a way that is sustainable for the long term future, would serve us much better if we hope our descendents have a future to look forward to.

So I noticed! It is no different than all of those stupid ads for the lotteries that lead the suckers on to keep buying more tickets. They want people to ignore the odds and dream of being the lucky lottery winner. I also don't think this ad campaign should be separated from the Church's overall strategy of banning abortion and birth control worldwide, and the role they have played in removing overpopulation from political discussion in the U.S. and at the U.N. with the help of their Muslim allies. How much real concern are they showing for life when they want more people on a planet with finite resources. If the majority of people keep sharing their indifference to this crisis, the entire human race will join the extinction list in a couple of centuries......so much for pro life!

Who said they were human? The point is there is no great divide between humans and animals! We are only slightly more advanced than the Great Apes -- the only things that are uniquely human are our language and mathematical abilities. The Cerebral Cortex of our ancestors kept growing larger back when we were small, upright walking hominids that had just started venturing out onto the grasslands of East Africa about 3 million years ago. Since those hominids were physically weak and slow compared to other animals on the Savannah, intelligence and resourcefulness became our key to survival. So our brains grew to the point where our accumulation of knowledge has enabled us to live comfortable lives and change the environment to our liking -- inside, we are still upright walking apes and not a great deal different from the chimpanzees. Genomic analysis shows that we are close cousins who branched off from a common ancestor less than 6 million years ago. So give the Chimpanzees and Gorillas the respect we should give our cousins.......let them have enough suitable habitats where they can live in the wild, without being threatened with extinction.......the last thing they should be is somebody's pets. And the horror story that started this thread illustrates a good reason why....chimpanzees can be aggressive when they reach adulthood, and they are several times stronger than the average man -- so keeping a chimp as a pet is playing with fire. Wow! That is a weird story! So why did your wife become emotionally dependent on the dog? Seems like you're blaming the dog for your own failings. And how many people have turned to cannabalism in similar situations? Are you going to blame a dog or a cat who is trapped in a house with a dead owner for eating the only food available?

So, how many logical fallacies can the Catholic Church load into one ad? The biggie being arguing for a general principle based on one (and only ONE) specific example. One child from a broken home, abandoned by his father, grows up to be president, therefore we must force every single mother who's baby-daddy has skipped town to carry her pregnancy to term! She may likely be young, still in school, and if she doesn't have family to turn to for help raising the child, she will not be able to further her education and will raise that child in poverty. The young pregnant woman who doesn't have her head in the clouds knows that the odds of success are not good, and may want to exercise her choice of terminating the pregnancy, rather than going through the ordeal and becoming a single mother on welfare, just to keep the Catholic Church happy! ...........But wait! Your baby may grow up to be the president! Maybe it's time for rational, thinking people to go on the offensive against this church that is trying to make a global overpopulation problem even worse with their endless "be fruitful and multiply" messages. All over the world, the Pope and Church hierarchy, are doing everything in their power to obstruct birth control and family planning in the Third World countries where food and clean water are in short supply. Overpopulation is the underlying problem behind environmental and global security threats, and now it's time to tell this Church to shove their propaganda and stop interfering with government initiatives to deal with this issue that has hardly been discussed in the political arena in about 30 years. http://www.population-security.org/issue_b.htm

So, it's more than a literacy problem then!

Since you don't consider a shrinking middle class to be a problem, there's not much to talk about. There's no point to arguing these issues with someone who wants a return to feudalism. The first reason should be obvious -- an American recession becomes a Canadian recession just because of how intertwined our economy is with the U.S. economy. In my area, most of our industrial production goes state-side, so when U.S. orders dry up, plants start cutting shifts, laying off employees, and some may close down completely if things don't turn around in a year or so. And, I've mentioned previously that I have more family living in the U.S. than in Canada, so I hear first hand about how bad things are getting in the states where they live.

True, there are a lot of pet owners, like my mother, who anthropomorphize their dogs and cats and attribute capabilities that are beyond their abilities. But, there are far more dog owners, especially, who make no attempt to learn even a little about the dog's behaviour -- otherwise they wouldn't be so baffled when their dogs are hyper and unruly after being left at home all day. Cats can be fun pets too, if you start out with the understanding that you can't train them or do a whole lot to modify their behaviour; they are no different than their wild, feral cousins, and to get along with cats, you have to make the compromises. We feel a close bond with dogs because of what we have in common: both humans and dogs are pack animals, and we started domesticating dogs over 10,000 years ago. Animal behaviourists are learning that dogs are complex enough to have a full set of emotional responses, even ones like envy and jealousy, that we previously believed were uniquely human. That's not saying that they think like humans; they obviously don't share our cognitive and reasoning abilities, but knowing that they have complex emotional needs, like us, should be enough for the dog owner to starting thinking of them as animal companions, rather than inert pets that just need food, water and a place to go to the bathroom. Now when it comes to other primates like chimpanzees, gorillas, bonobos etc. -- they share everything we consider uniquely human, aside from conceptual skills like mathematical ability, so they should never be turned into someone's pet in the first place!

More foreclosures, more vacant homes = less new home construction; and we are being told that there is no economic recovery without a housing recovery. Well, from what we've been told, home ownership is the pathway to building equity towards retirement, paying for children's education etc. for the average person. But I am aware of the latest propaganda coming from the rightwing tak radio, specifically Limbaugh, that America has too many home owners who can't afford and can't look after their own homes....and presumably he and his Republican allies want more of them in that renting underclass. What I don't understand is if this is true, why is it that Canada is not in this situation yet even though our rates of home ownership are both at 68%. Whatever he was working on, he didn't have any actual executive authority until a month ago! Whatever that's supposed to mean, it doesn't answer my question of why Republican logic dictates that it is right to bail out the banks, but do nothing for the people who signed on to mortgage contracts that are fraudulent. Many leftwing conspiracy theorists have insisted for years that Republican strategists want to eliminate the middle class, and have just a small wealthy class and a vast underclass.........their actions lately certainly show no interest in saving the middle class. And that is certainly not a comforting thought. The financial meltdown may be some similarities with the Great Depression, but today there is so much debt at all levels of government, consumers, business, it's hard to see how an economic recovery can start to kick in. Hey! I don't know how this is going to work....especially with all the debts and unfunded liabilities that never get factored in, but what other options are there besides doing nothing?

No harm done! It's just that I can't always figure out what you are trying to get across. Convoluted is usually used to describe a statement or explanation that is unnecessarily complicated or intricate; it can sometimes imply that someone is being intentionally deceptive, but that's not what I meant.

It's worth noting that the foreclosure crisis may have started with people suckered into subprime loans that never should have been legal in the first place, but it has moved far beyond that, with the sudden spike in unemployment. Many people that are losing their jobs are also in danger of falling behind on their mortgage payments and losing their homes. This article in USA Today, says that one out of nine U.S. homes is sitting vacant, although it doesn't indicate how many of them would be caused by foreclosure evictions as opposed to a glut of unsold new units. Nevertheless, a vacancy rate that high will cause a further decline of property values in those neighbourhoods, since vacant homes are prone to arson, vandalism, or being taken over by squatters. That's something all of those self-centered fools should be thinking about in that NY Times article. Several months? What month are we in now? Because he wasn't inaugurated until Jan. 20th. Could you explain to me why "honest Americans" will gladly extend a 700 billion dollar line of credit to buy worthless crap from banks and insurance companies rather than use the money to offer fair mortgage terms to people that were victimized by these institutions? Can anyone be taken seriously who claims that they know how to fix the system and revive the economy? I've been reading statements from sources as varied as Paul Volcker and George Soros, who say that the collapse of the World financial system is unprecedended.......that even the Great Depression doesn't provide any clues in stopping the slide and reviving commerce and industrial production. I've been hoping stimulus plans here and in the U.S. will work since the alternative is just to keep letting market forces cannibalize what's left of wealth. But I can't say I'm optimistic about the U.S. situation, since the stimulus seems to be dwarfed by cutbacks in spending at state and local levels of government, that have to cut spending, raise taxes and layoff employees...........sure hope it works though! What good are the opinions of a man who should be on trial now?

As usual, most of your stupid, inane comments have nothing to do with the points made, and that last one is a no brainer -- who wouldn't stay in Canada now, since it's your debt-ridden country that's dragging us down! In case you didn't notice, our banks aren't insolvent, and these scam mortgages that Countrywide and other mortgage brokers had suckered people in to, wouldn't even have been legal up here to begin with. It was just one part of a fraudulent scheme of deregulated banking and unregulated hedge funds that gave an illusion of prosperity during the Bush years. And like all bubbles, it eventually has to burst and reveal its true worth............which seems to be next to worthless right now.

I don't think I got the same impression you did about those "ordinary people" who added their comments. My thinking is that they are selfish, greedy bastards for just being jealous if they think someone else has received help to avert disaster! Is this what it means to be a conservative, or a libertarian? Not giving a shit about anyone else's hardships and blaming them if they got suckered into an interest-only mortgage or one with escalator payments -- things that no honest person would ever have agreed should have been legal in the first place! Every time one of these homes is foreclosed, the owners are evicted, and have to hope they can afford some sort of rental unit for their family. They aren't likely to find anything in the same neighbourhood, so in almost every case of a family with children having their homes foreclosed, the children are uprooted from the neighbourhood, and have to say goodbye to all of their friends and be placed in a strange new school. It's hard enough to do this with school-age children when you are able to plan a move to a new community -- in my case, we still go back to Niagara Falls once or twice a month to touch base with old friends when we visit family. A bankrupt family that has had their house foreclosed will not likely have that opportunity. From what I've read of the home-foreclosure crisis in the U.S., a very significant number are happening in predominantly black neighbourhoods, so I wonder if unspoken racism doesn't lurk underneath some of the attitudes expressed here and continually on rightwing radio. Even if it isn't, it reveals that a lot of people are only motivated by personal greed and accumulation of wealth. But there is a price to pay for practicing Social Darwinism -- the increasing income gap, and the disappearance of a middle class will lead to growing crime rates. In the U.S. right now, the wealthy, like Limbaugh, Hannity, and their billionaire business buddies have to live in gated communities and have security guards to protect them. In many Third World countries, the rich are afraid to send their children to school because of kidnappers who will hold their children for ransom. They have to send them to private schools in safe havens like Canada. Is this the kind of world wealthy investors and the wannabes like "Joe the Plumber" want to live in? Maybe it sucks to have to give money to people who don't seem to have a lot on the ball -- but the alternative that economic libertarians are pushing us towards, is a world of a few rich and a vast poor class with nothing in the middle. And the rich will have to become as authoritarian as the Third World dictatorships to protect themselves and their money from an impoverished underclass that despises them............I would say putting up with a social safety net and income redistribution is a small price to pay to maintain some level of social harmony.

To be honest, I really wonder whether the debtload at all levels of government, business and industry, and even consumer debt, can be solved.....other than by a long, steady decline in per capita income. But no politician is allowed to be gloomy and pessimistic, even if it's the truth.

Thanks, I know about the ignore feature, though I've never used it -- even against a former member who shall remain nameless. Oleg seems to be sincere in his convoluted ideas; it just gets a little frustrating seeing the same points recycled over and over again, with no attempt to defend them when they are challenged.