WIP

Well, maybe there is something we can agree on! The Earth may not care, but since the human race has evolved to a high enough level of knowledge and sophistication, we have an opportunity to prevent man-made disasters, and in the future it may even be possible to alter the Earth's climate cycles to prevent the next natural mass extinction. The dinosaurs had no choice about their fate at the end of the Cretaceous! But we have our fate in our own hands, if we can get past some of the negative aspects of human nature that we developed during our hunter/gatherer days.

The problem as I see it, is that you don't believe it is possible to misinterpret this subjective experience you identify as the Holy Spirit. You likely will agree that it is possible to make cognitive mistakes in studying a problem, or misinterpreting our perceptions, but a subjective experience that feels like it coming from within, is something that people feel they cannot be wrong about. I'll try to be as brief as possible, but I can't explain my take on how trustworthy this sort of evidence is without mentioning the conclusions I've come to about how to understand the mind and interpret personal identity. A good place to start would be with the philosopher/mathematician Rene Descartes, who was troubled by his examination of how much our visual sense could be deceived, and decided that to find the path to real understanding, he would have to start from within, and gradually verify the external world. That's partly why he came up with the famous quote that translates to English as:"I think, therefore I am!" For Descartes, we exist in the manner that we think we exist, as a unified and continuous self. But, in the modern era, the neuroscientists who are unlocking the secrets to how the brain functions, are casting grave doubts on the idea that we can perceive our consciousness any more accurately than we can perceive the outside world! When subjects are wired up with advanced EEG, MRI and new machines that monitor the minute bloodflows between neurons in the brain, they find that conscious experiences can be correlated with different areas of the Cerebral Cortex - the most highly developed area of the brain - but all sorts of different components within the cortex can be utilized, with none of them acting as a control center that would be expected if there was a unified source of personal identity. The alternative to unity or ego theory, is referred to as bundle theory of mind - a series of mental states are gathered together through short-term memory to create a false sense of unity and continuous self identity. It's something of a disturbing picture, that the part of ourselves that seems most real, our feeling of continuous consciousness, may be generated by the brain for functional reasons. But this concept, which began with philosopher David Hume, has gained traction over the years because it can better explain the disorders of unity such as: apparent divided consciousness of patients who had operations to divide the two hemispheres of the cerebral cortex, dissociative disorders (formerly called multiple personality syndrome), and various forms of schizophrenia. For further reading: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciou...nity/#DisUniCon http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/ Now that I've gotten through these questions, the problem I have with a feeling that the Holy Spirit might be talking to me, is one of reliability. The evidence from neuroscience favours the standpoint that there is no intrinsic conscious unity, and it is an internal perceptual illusion created by the brain! With that said, any inner voice or inner experience could be just as unreliable as a misinterpretation by the visual cortex could give us about the external world. Gaining reliable knowledge is going to be best established by the scientific method, which gathers observations, measurements, and empirical information to put together theories that can be refined or discarded if further research or experiments find errors, before arriving at something that's trusted as reliable. There will always remain some subjectivity in the search for truth because human nature makes us prone to personal biases, cognitive errors, influence from trusted advisers and simply because of emotional interference causing us to stubbornly hang on to some improbably beliefs and reject others because of emotional reaction. So, there will never be one belief system that everyone agrees with. The world will continue on with thousands of different religious sects, and millions of different interpretations within them. The trick is to get most everyone to accept a situation where the majority of people have different beliefs. Tyranny, religious wars, genocides etc. often occur when some groups just can't accept living with others who have different sets of beliefs. I mentioned before that I see the requirement to have faith as a precondition to accept a belief before it is proven.

You should know by now you can't bait me with appeals to jingoism! I don't put on rose-coloured glasses to look at any country...........even my own! And you've totally missed the point! I didn't say China, Russia or any other country was going to step into the vacuum left when a collapsing U.S. economy forces the withdrawal from Iraq and base closings around the world! That in itself is the big problem! There is going to be a power vacuum, since although U.S. global power was resented for favouring U.S. economic and political interests, the up and coming powers are regarded as much worse by the rest of the world. That prospect could unleash a number of regional wars. Still living in denial, just like the French! If you're going to break the bank, deplete the military and destroy international prestige for the opportunity to make a regime change, you need some real successes to justify it......not revitalizing the zoo and building a new them park! The refugee crisis is even worse than I realized! There are two million who have fled the country and more than 2 million are displaced or internal refugees. No wonder Baghdad is quieter than it was a few years back! http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/mideast/RL33936.pdf The point the peak oil theorists have been trying to make is that cheap, recoverable oil is running out. Sure there will be oil available; but with more and more analysts troubled about the combination of growing demand and decreasing supplies, that oil is going to be much more expensive........and dirtier also! One of the unpleasant features of the tar sands developments that the Alberta crowd here doesn't like to talk about are the huge quantities of natural gas burned to recover this oil, and the toxic effects its having on land and ground water. If the Western shale deposits in your country are ever developed, you can expect much the same results! Well, the drop in oxygen levels at the end of the Permian Era was a main contributor to killing off 90% of the land animals. Deadly natural cycles have caused a number of mass extinctions in Earth's history, but this time, there are six and a half billion people creating conditions that have already got us started into a man-made mass extinction! I wonder if we'll be joining them: Scientists say wildlife extinction rates are soaring. The die-off, they claim, threatens the planet's web of life or biodiversity which sustains farming, forestry and oceans. At a Paris meeting last week scientists called on world leaders to catalog and save species. One of the speakers was University of Minnesota ecology professor David Tilman. He's known around the world for his research showing the effects of human activity on the environment. http://news.minnesota.publicradio.org/feat...d_biodiversity/

But that's a separate issue! In order to maintain the Jewish character of their nation, they have to suppress Palestinian nationalism and within Israel's borders, they cannot give Israeli Arab citizens the same rights as Jewish citizens. This makes the country an ethnic democracy - perhaps by necessity, but if ethnic cleansing is not an option, the only permanent alternative to this festering sore is to redraw the borders to separate Jewish and Arab populations.

You are blindly adhering to the conservative dogma shovelled out on Fox News, Limbaugh's show (and his assorted minions and copycats), otherwise you would have recognized Obama's attempt to stand by Rev Wright was something that is almost never done in politics - risking an election for personal loyalty! Do you think that Hillary Clinton would have hesitated for a second to throw anyone under the bus who stood between her and the Whitehouse? After Wright's grand tour, where he made it clear that he would do everything in his power to sink Obama's candidacy, there was no choice other than to throw him to the curb! If Obama is dishonest on any subject, it would have to be this religion-crap that political candidates have to go through to get elected! Did you notice that when they had that idiotic "faith and values" debate, Hillary could wax on endlessly about how her faith got her through the embarrassment of Bill's sex scandals( and here I thought it was just greed and ambition), but Obama looked uncomfortable with dumb questions like Tim Russert's "what's your favourite bible verse?" When Barach Obama started working in Chicago's black community, his background of being mixed-race and the child of an East African immigrant who spent his early years in Indonesia - gave him nothing in common with Blacks living in inner-city Chicago. That U.C.C. church gave him a chance to meet community activists, and get plugged in and have a chance to really meet the people. I don't know about the rest of the church, but the problem with Rev. Wright is he is a preacher of "Liberation Theology," the class struggle version of Christianity. For people who feel trapped in poor, rundown, crime-ridden neighbourhoods it's an appealing message: your failures and disappointments in life are no fault of your own! They're all caused by oppression from "whitey" or "the man" or what have you. Since Barach Obama went to university, got his law degree, and quickly rose to the top when he began his political career, his experience is a direct challenge to Wright's social gospel. If a black man can't succeed or be accepted by white America, then how has he become the odds-on favourite for the White House? And that's likely why the Rev started plotting to undermine his campaign. So Rev. Wright had to go, and so should John McCain's "spiritual advises" - John Hagee and Rod Parsley! The religious right has been on parade in recent years, blurring the lines of separation of church and state, advocating foreign wars and restrictive social policies, and virtually taking control of the Republican Party' The Wright debacle provides a reminder that there is a relgious left also, typified by black preachers like Wright, Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, but also existing in a more subtle and insidious form in of strategists like David Kuo and Chris Hedges. If the Republican Party burns to the ground as expected next year, watch for a whole new crowd of "spiritual advisers" to replace Pat Robertson, Hagee, Ralph Reed etc. at the White House and on Capitol Hill.

The cargo cults provide a good illustration of how people make up answers to explain things they don't understand. How do you know you are getting your answers from the creator of the Universe, and everyone else with different gods and/or different dogmas is wrong? Take it with a grain of salt! The authors are stretching to try to interpret the most obscure passages as scientific proofs for the authority of the Bible. If the Bible had useful scientific information that wasn't available at the time, such as the germ theory of disease, that would be significant. Instead, the bible writers understood less about medicine than the Ancient Greeks. And they thought disease is caused by sin and demons, not from infectious agents that we cannot see. Even the health and dietary laws are nothing to brag about! Pigs are unclean according to Mosaic Law, and this is considered as wise advise from a divine authority even though no fowl are on the unclean list, even though the birds that are allowed are more dangerous sources of botulism than pigs are! Now about the first group - can Bible verses be used to prove the writers understood the water cycle when the creation account denies it, saying that it didn't rain before the time of the Flood: Genesis 2:5 And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew: for the LORD God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground. 2:6 But there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground. GEOLOGY They claim Isaiah 40:22 proves knowledge that the Earth is round: 40:22 It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers; that stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in: Jehovah's Witnesses try to use this as proof also, even though it says "circle" not a ball or a sphere. Hebrew has different words for each, why would it use the word for circle unless it was referring to an ancient cosmology the Hebrews shared with the Babylonians and others, which featured a three level universe with heaven as a vaulted ceiling that had an ocean above it and lights suspended from its roof. It doesn't look much like the modern picture of the Cosmos and its foolish to try to stretch the meaning of other verses to make them fit the picture of the Universe we know today! http://www.aarweb.org/syllabus/syllabi/g/g...ommoncosmos.htm And Astronomy! According to these people, these verses are supposed to prove the author of Job knew how big the Universe is! Funny, I don't see any mention of 13.7 billion lightyears in the following verses: JOB 11:7 Canst thou by searching find out God? canst thou find out the Almighty unto perfection? 11:8 It is as high as heaven; what canst thou do? deeper than hell; what canst thou know? 11:9 The measure thereof is longer than the earth, and broader than the sea. 22:12 Is not God in the height of heaven? and behold the height of the stars, how high they are! Isaiah 55:9 For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts. Jeremiah 31:37 Thus saith the LORD; If heaven above can be measured, and the foundations of the earth searched out beneath, I will also cast off all the seed of Israel for all that they have done, saith the LORD. From what I've seen so far, I don't expect to find anything in the Bible predicting the invention of the television, or that they were aware of cavemen and dinosaurs.

I would have answered the poll question if there was a box to check for: "because she has no conscience and is devoid of any ethics!" Just like her husband! I guess that's the "special bond" they share that we here so much about from Clinton supporters. After threatening to nuke Iran to try to show off her new brass balls and risking starting a race war by encouraging rural white voters to vote "race" and reject the black candidate, I hope she is too toxic to be considered for the VP nomination. The Clinton dynasty should be brought to the same end as the Bush's! And I mean a permanent end! I hope we don't end up with Chelsea running for president 20 years from now!

Not that I am aware of! But don't forget, it's easier to get Arabs to rise up against a Jewish occupier than an occupation by outsiders( Egypt, Jordan) who are nevertheless, Muslim Arabs.

I hope that's an attempt at sarcasm, because it's pretty twisted considering the dangerous situation our world is in now! The British Empire was eclipsed at a time when the American Empire was just beginning; and the fascist attempts by Germany and Japan to build empires through conquest had to be stopped by a U.S. and allied effort to save the world from global tyranny. But this time, things could really get bad in the coming years. America is going to have no choice about scaling back its military, just as the Soviet Union had to back in 91, but there is no one in position to fill the role of trusted authority that the U.S. has enjoyed since WWII. Europe can't do it. China is spending billions to become a military power in Asia, but none of China's neighbours, like Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Taiwan etc., trust them or believe they will serve as an honest broker. Before the U.S. suffers a total economic collapse, it could scale back the military to affordable levels, get out of Iraq and regain some international confidence lost by the go-it-alone strategies of the Bush Administration by agreeing to abide by Geneva Convention Rules and refraining from any future attempts at regime change that do not have international support. I'd like to see the numbers for that one! The mass exodus and ethnic cleansing of Baghdad and other Iraqi cities occured after the gift of democracy was given to them. The oil is going to run out sooner or later! And I hope some sources such as Saudi Arabia, are running out now! That's the only thing that will put a stop to the problems of Islamic fanaticism. Environmental devastation . I get a little weary of the continuous spam coming courtesy of oil company-sponsored global warming deniers! They can argue up and down about global temperature data charts, but the increase in CO2 levels can't be disputed: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/...61104084951.htm Increasing CO2 levels in the atmosphere provides more carbon dioxide to be absorbed by the oceans, making them more acidic, while reducing the oxygen levels. The climate systems are complex and poorly understood, but we do know that the last time ocean life was killed off on a large scale, it almost ended life on earth completely! http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/...50223130549.htm

This is all history though! The problem is that Israel was set up as a Jewish state , but had a sizeable population of Arabs who remained after 1948. Since Israel was also created as a representative democracy on a European model, with guarantees of basic rights and freedoms, it never managed to decide how to deal with non-Jewish residents. The Israeli Arabs have been 2nd class citizens right from the beginning; but as long as they were a small minority of the population (10% in 1967), they had little impact on policy decisions. The problem is the Arab population is growing faster than the Jewish population, and then there's all of the Arabs living in occupied territories. The Palestinians would have been easier to reach an agreement with back in the 60's, before this festering wound turned them into a large hostile and subversive population. Unfortunately, I'm afraid Jimmy Carter is right when he says that Israel has become an apartheid state! Carter may have bad ideas about how to fix it, but the status quo can't be sustained forever!

If you check the history books, you'll find that every successful empire doesn't know when to quit, or at least when to stop taking on foreign ventures! And they are the last ones to realize that their glory days are over. It's only been in recent years that France has started getting over their delusions of grandeur, and now the American Empire is on the brink of collapse, and the people who supported military overreach and out of control deficit spending, are the last ones to know! Does this little bit of window-dressing make up for the estimated 100,000 Iraqi dead and more than a million refugees? I'm just thankful that oil has tripled in price since the war started! Now we finally have real incentives to move past the oil economy.

I'm amazed how many believers in the "invisible hand" that manages the free enterprise economy, miss the lesson that you get more of what you subsidize and less of what you tax! Using these principles, if we cut taxes on gasoline, all we are doing is helping to further subsidize a wasteful system that made urban sprawl economically viable! Stop subsidizing the building of new highways and shift the money to urban transit and you may have something workable like the transit systems in Europe! At the same time, eliminate the dodges that allowed SUV's to be classified as trucks so they didn't have to meet tougher emission and mileage regulations on passenger cars. The truck category should be for real trucks used by farmers and tradesmen who actually use work vehicles; not for driving the kids to soccer practise! Any idiot living in a city who buys a Hummer or some similar vehicle that gets about 10 mpg., isn't paying enough for gasoline, and if oil climbs to $200. a barrel, as predicted by analysts at Goldman-Sachs, that ought to provide enough incentive to get these stupid, oversized vehicles off of city streets!

If the Republican Party and conservative opinion-makers in the media had any integrity, there would have been more than a tiny handful like Ron Paul and Bob Barr and even Neofascists like Pat Buchanan, who had the guts to say openly that the emperor has no clothes! Those of us who are old enough to remember, heard this claim by the Democrats back in the early 60's - even before the Vietnam War escalated - that America could stop Communism by going into any country in the world and imposing democracy on a thankful population. It didn't work in Vietnam, and it won't work in any country that opposes foreign domination! For some reason, just because it became a Republican strategy in the late 80's, then it was all of a sudden a good idea according to conservative pundits who have no real core beliefs besides ensuring Republican domination of government!

Nice to have an amusement park and a zoo, but these stories are just cheap propaganda points to try to distract us from the big story: that "regime change" and "building democracy" are unqualified disasters that are ending America's era of global supremacy.

Oh this is rich! This reminds me of when David Duke used to complain there was a Miss Black America Pageant and no Miss "White America." And he was especially indignant when a black girl won Miss America. Needless to say he ignored the fact that many white immigrant communities have their own beauty pagents. And that's not enough for you! What do you need a task force for? If you're a white, middle-aged, male, middle class, heterosexual, fundamentalist, fascist - you're party is in power right now! I stepped away from Christianity a long time ago, and from my POV, you can have our parliamentary system too! I'd rather have a U.S. system that prevents the Executive with a majority government from having total control of the Legislature and Supreme Court nominations. Oh, so you're just upset that the homosexual minority that has existed since time immemorial decided during our more enlightened times that they would rather have the opportunity to enjoy life and not have to live in secrecy, in fear of discovery and reprisal from people like you! A pox on your moralistic Christian standard! This is the false morality of religious hypocrites; and you have a large company of self-hating, closeted homosexuals marching with you, like Ted Haggard, Larry Craig and Fred Phelps. Just like other conservative Christian hypocrites, you are part of the persecuting mob that is trying to claim its rights are impeded because another persecuted minority is escaping from your clutches, and they can't abuse them anymore! Take a page from the Christofascists in the U.S.; since it's harder to bash homosexuals, they are focusing more attention on atheists and Muslims. The appeal to mob-rule puts you in league with communism! Representative democracies set up systems of checks and balances to prevent persecution of minorities. I've got to admit, I never appreciated Liberal rule all that much until Stephen Harper became Prime Minister!

Ignore the snickering from the peanut gallery; Arthur C. Clarke made this point a number of years ago, that a sufficiently advanced alien would seem like a god from our perspective! I think that's where the Star Trek writers got their idea for the character "Q", and those cargo cults that I just finished talking about are also proof that advanced technology is quickly interpreted as supernatural power! That Biocosm Model I mentioned previously is being developed just in case there are aliens "designing" new universes. Who knows how likely this hypothesis is, but the guys who are working out the math for it say that it is possible. There are thousands of different religions, and that makes it pretty hard for one of them to say "we have the right doctrine and everybody else is wrong." Most progressive religions were able to incorporate evolution with their relgious beliefs. DNA analysis of the human genome shows that our genetic code is just slightly at variance with chimpanzees and other primates, and comparison with other genomes that have been charted, follows the same phylogenetic tree of life predicted by paleontologists who studied the fossil record. In other words, there is no plausible scientific basis for trying to hold on to a belief that humans and other creatures were separate creations. This is why the hardline fundamentalists who are determined to hold on to a literal interpretation of Genesis, also want their followers to believe that scientists are evil and part of a satanic conspiracy lead believers away from Christ!

From my point of view, everybody is lost - if you want to define lack of knowledge in these terms. The difference is some of us know we are lost, but are satisfied with leaving the gaps in knowledge open until they can be filled in with plausible explanations - although it is fun to speculate on 11 dimensional multi-universes, or universes created by advanced civilizations!......................................but most people demand answers, and they don't care a great deal about how likely these answers are to being correct. The best example of how easy it is to start a religion and establish dogmas and rituals are the Cargo Cults of the South Pacific. The first were formed around the islanders' ignorance of the ships and technology of British and French mariners travelling through the islands. Their ignorance was replaced with religious dogma that took the place of real understanding. The best one is probably a legacy of the War in the Pacific during WWII, when the John Frum Cult started in the New Hebrides islands. The Navy has no records of an American serviceman actually named "John Frum", and it is likely that the deity of John Frum was created as a composite character based on any number of American sailors or airmen who may have come in contact with the natives. Nevertheless, they created a set of dogmas, prophecies and rituals that included dress resembling military uniforms and marching with wooden rifles. They even created their own "radios" made of coconuts and scrap metal so that the priests could talk to John From and the other air-gods! And inspite of failed prophecies (John Frum was supposed to return to the islands with cargo and take the white missionaries away), the John Frum religion continues to this day. http://www.nthposition.com/thelastcargo.php This is one of the few examples where anthropologists and sociologists have the opportunity to witness the process of establishing a religion, and its parallels with existing established religions make a skeptic question the reliability of the religious approach to understanding. On the big questions, most of us just accept the answers we were given as children and inquire no further. So the fact that my father kept finding things he didn't like about the churches we were in and dragged us off to the next "true religion" was a blessing - if you can pardon the expression. Two of my brothers stayed with the last church they landed in, whereas myself and my eldest brother became skeptics and like the independent vantage-point, unconstrained by dogma. I can't see myself ever jumping in feet first into another religion. Putting all of the different denominations aside, there are at least 1500 different faith-groupings in North America http://www.religioustolerance.org/chr_deno.htm These are divided on core doctrinal issues like authority and inerrancy of the Bible, interpretation of prophecy and Biblical history, and even on something as crucial as the doctrine of salvation: are you saved by faith alone, or by faith combined with good works, or faith accompanied by water baptism, or has your salvation along with the "elect" already been predetermined and out of your hands entirely? The problem is that these divisions on something as crucial as how to get into heaven, means that not everyone who calls themself a Christian gets in. Many, if not the majority of Christians, will be in the same existential boat as everyone else in the world who has the wrong set of beliefs, from atheists and agnostics to all the people who belong to non-Christian religions. And that for me is the biggest stumbling block of religious dogma - reward for the correct belief and punishment for having the wrong belief!

The Temperance Movement was also widespread, and existed as a social movement in the U.S. right from the time the Puritans started setting up colonies in America. During the 19th Century, there were a number of attempts by individual states to ban alcohol - most were rescinded because of corruption and opposition from citizens who wanted the right to choose for themselves whether or not to drink. The ineffectiveness of the state prohibition laws should have been a warning of what would happen with the wider application of prohibition. And likewise today, the advocates for tougher drug laws should have at least taken a look back at how this drama played out when nationwide alcohol prohibition was tried! Notice the uncanny parallels with the following findings from studies done in the 1930's and 40's: One of the great ironies of the prohibition era was the fact, noted by the Wickersham Commission, that women happily took to drink during the experimental decade, and, what is more, did so in public. As the counterpart of the WCTU, the Women's Organization for National Prohibition Reform was founded, stating in its declaration of principles that Prohibition was "wrong in principle" and "disastrous in consequences in the hypocrisy, the corruption, the tragic loss of life and the appalling increase of crime which has attended the abortive attempt to enforce it" (Dobyns, 1940: 107). Drinking at an earlier age was also noted, particularly during the first few years of Prohibition. The superintendents of eight state mental hospitals reported a larger percentage of young patients during Prohibition (1919-1926) than formerly. One of the hospitals noted: "During the past year (1926), an unusually large group of patients who are of high school age were admitted for alcoholic psychosis" (Brown, 1932:176). In determining the age at which an alcoholic forms his drinking habit, it was noted: "The 1920-1923 group were younger than the other groups when the drink habit was formed" (Pollock, 1942: 113). The per capita rate for the Prohibition years is computed to be 1.63 proof gallons. This is 11.64% higher than the Pre-Prohibition rate (Tillitt, 1932: 35). Based on these figures one observer concluded: "And so the drinking which was, in theory, to have been decreased to the vanishing point by Prohibition has, in fact, increased" (Tillitt, 1932: 36). Deaths from Alcoholism. In New York City, from 1900 through 1909, there was an average of 526 deaths annually attributable to alcoholism. From 1910 through 1917, the average number was 619. It plummeted to 183 for the years 1918 through 1922. Thereafter, the figure rose, averaging a new high of 639 for the years 1923 through 1927 (Rice, ed., 1930: 122). Total deaths from alcoholism in the United States show a comparable trend, with the gradual increase resuming somewhat earlier, about 1922 (Brown, 1932: 61, 77; Feldman, 1927: 397; U.S. Department of Commerce, 1924: 55). Notwithstanding the various patterns of regulation, Senator Arthur Capper's words of the 1930's still seem to be correct: We can repeal prohibition, but we cannot repeal the liquor problem (Peterson, 1969: 126). Neither the states nor the population have yet come to grips with the problems of alcoholism and alcohol abuse. Both the monopoly system and the license system are directed at other concerns. They, no more than Prohibition, have been able to control or even alleviate the very real and dire consequences of alcohol use by society. http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/LIBRAR...ies/nc/nc2a.htm Now ofcourse these findings cannot be considered as reliable as modern statistics - especially on alcohol consumption. But a meta-analysis of all of the studies that tried to track liquor production and consumption, indicates that there may have been a drop in the first years of prohibition, but once a network of rum-runners and speakeasys was in operation, consumption started increasing again during Prohibition. Likewise, analyzing the effects of alcoholism is difficult since some cities, like Philadelphia, had much higher rates of arrest for public drunkenness and disorderly conduct than cities like New York; reflecting an obvious bias in enforcement policy. The rates of alcohol-related psychosis vary with each mental hospital, likely because so little was understood about mental illness at the time. One thing that even the prohibition advocates couldn't deny was that making this product illegal, enabled the growth of organized crime rackets that began to flourish and branched off into gambling, drugs and prostitution after Prohibition ended. Some researchers believe that overall, there may have been fewer people consuming alcohol during prohibition, but the ones who were drinking, were consuming more to excess and starting at a younger age than before prohibition! Now, doesn't that paint an uncannily similar picture as our era of drug prohibition! My apologies if I was jumping to conclusions, I didn't say you were a Christian, but I keep hitting the wall with social conservatives on these kind of issues because they want to punish sin regardless of whether or not they have a workable strategy! I'm all for steering people in the right direction, but prohibition and throwing people in prison isn't working out as a very effective way of solving the problem. I hate to say it, but there is also something about risk-taking behaviour in our youth that attracts young people to things that are illegal and/or dangerous. The only reliable deterrent seems to be parents who set a good example at home. No teenager considers their parents to be cool (it's a mistake to even try to be), but they do copy the example set at home - both the good and the bad - so if mom or dad is a drunk or a drug addict, chances are most of their kids will end up with the same problem. And when they have kids, there's a whole new generation of substance-abusers. I don't know how many people I've talked to who lived in denial until their teenage children started coming home drunk and/or high! Then they are finally serious about kicking the habit. Unfortunately, trying to convince their kids to unlearn all of the bad lessons they've taught them over the years is another matter!

Are you forgetting all of the money we spend on drug enforcement and incarceration? Here's an idea: how about spending some of that money used to put drug users in prison on treatment centers for drug addiction. Then you'll have plenty of money left over to spend on welfare. If the present strategy was working to reduce the amount of drug trafficking and drug addiction, I would be all for the present strategy of prohibition. But so far, drug prohibition is working about as well as alcohol prohibition did in the 20's! If the plan isn't working, it's time to try something different. The "enabler" line also betrays the religious perspective that views most of humanity as degenerate, depraved animals who need strict laws and threats of incarceration to prevent them from taking drugs, watching pornography and going to prostitutes. A rational examination of vice crimes like these that don't necessarily affect others, would show that there is always a segment of the population that have compulsive/ addictive personalities and are prone to addiction of all types. A humanist would suggest practical solutions to treat the drug-prone and help them find healthy alternatives. I get the feeling that most people who come at these issues from a religious, social conservative perspective, are more interested in punishing sinners than actually helping people! I know you can't reach everybody! Some people are careless and have no thought for the future, but most addicts would rather put some kind of life together, instead of going into a death-spiral.

Maybe, but why did they move the border then unless there was a possibility that the 11 wells near the border were illegal?

Is there no other way to convince people without using lies and deception? I agree with many of Spurlock's points, (hell, I even agree with some of Michael Moore's ideas), but I can't see alot of value in trying to teach people misinformation. And we may discover that the obesity epidemic is more complex than fried foods and lack of exercise! Some research indicates that growing stress levels combined with lack of sleep, may be contributing factors to unhealthy weight gain. Someone who has been mislead by Supersize Me, will focus all of their attention on diet and exercise, and miss important new information. http://media.www.trumanindex.com/media/sto...y-1117157.shtml From what I hear, the Ben Stein show is just an attack on academia and scientists who work in fields like evolutionary biology in particular. Right now, the hostility towards science that is expressed by religious fundamentalists in the U.S. is approaching the levels in Mulsim countries. The U.S. has the lowest public acceptance of evolutionary theory in the developed world; the U.S. ranks just ahead of Turkey, and would otherwise be in last place! http://digg.com/general_sciences/Public_ac...round_the_world

During my youth, we went from Presbyterian to United Church to Seventh Day Adventist to Jehovah's Witnesses - where I jumped off the merry-go-round. I spent some of my adulthood exploring other "true relgions," and no doubt, my cynicism about the value of organized religion grew out of those experiences. The only real positive feature I can come up with is that many, or at least some churches provide an effective social network for members. Some sociologists believe that the growth of new non-denominational mega-churches, especially in the U.S., is a product of the lack of a sense of community in the new, growing suburbs. The church organizes members into small, intimate groups so they can develop close friendships with people they would otherwise not interract with, and the church provides many services from daycare to youth activities that are lacking. If it wasn't for the ludicruous metaphysical claims of the new religions, they would be perfect! And on that prophecy thing: I was looking for books debunking JW theology, but since many of them were written by mainline Protestant ministers and theologians, they debunked Pre-millenialism as well. Their case was that the prophecies had already been fulfilled in Nero Caesar, the Roman government, etc., and some were radical enough to propose that even 1st century apostles misinterpreted Jesus's meaning of the "Kingdom," since many of the verses indicate the writers believed in a literal 2nd coming before their time on earth came to an end.

It seems you are referring to the nucleosynthesis process that created particles and then the light elements such as hydrogen and helium from the Big Bang. That process is not determined by the size of the Universe, but instead by the critical energy density of the universe that is referred to as "flatness, or uncurved spacetime. If spacetime was positively curved, the universe would have ended in a big crunch before we came along; alternatively, if it was negatively curved, it would have reached heat death before it had a chance to form any elements, or stars and planets. A theory called the Inflation Model, proposed by Alan Guth, that the early universe was thrown into a period of rapid expansion by the brief existence of an antigravity force particle that caused the dense, hot universe to fly apart. Inflation could also explain the homogenized background radiation found throughout the Universe, since this force would have had the opposite effect of gravity - which causes mass to clump together. If correct, Inflation could provide a simple explanation for some features that look to be intentionally designed. Remember, our brains' are set up to deliberately look for patterns and interpret them by the principle of cause and effect. Because of our setup for facial recognition in the visual cortex, we see faces in clouds, on the moon, on Mars and on random objects declared to be holy relics! Primitive people's who have no understanding of the forces in their world, believe that lightning bolts are thrown down from heaven, and either the same or different gods cause wind, rain, the sun to rise and fall, and every other event is viewed as something with a planned purpose. I don't think that good answers have been provided to explain fine tuning, but I would rather leave it in the unsolved category, then to just give it a divine explanation that would not offer a means for further inquiry; just as with the "God did it" explanation of creationism and intelligent design, these kind of explanations are really non-answers in what they give us as information. As previously pointed out, the Universe is expanding, and the most troubling feature from an aesthetic point of view is that the rate of expansion is increasing, making it impossible for the elements of our universe to be drawn back together in either a Big Crunch or an Oscillating Universe that goes through endless cycles of expansion and contraction. Actually, that last one, which is a fundamental part of Hindu interpretation of cosmology, was pretty much blown out of the water by physicists who determined years ago that entropy would take away too much energy to allow the same universe to rebound in another Big Bang. But even if it ends in a crunch and cannot be eternal, as many primitive cosmologies contended, the crunch could still be interpreted as the point of singularity, where physicist Frank Tipler contends an "Omega Point" where an omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent God would resurrect everyone to live forever in an abode which would essentially be the Christian version of heaven............all in the black hole that our collapsed universe would create! My brother gave me Tipler's book:"The Physics of Immortality ten years ago, and I just could not see at as a likely scenario for the distant future, although I couldn't really take apart the argument which is based on advanced mathematics that's completely over my head. In recent interviews, Tipler still won't give up on the idea, and still holds out hope that the expansion will somehow slow down and re-contract. I don't think there is any plausible way for Tipler and other intelligent design believers to deny the implications that an expanding universe is best understood as one of many, and not a lone, individually created, isolated universe. One popular model, the Cyclic Universe, proposes a continuum of many universes that are seeded from the collisions of the three dimensional membranes of ageing universes and continue their expansion by borrowing from the false vacuum energy in between the 3D branes of the 11 dimensional multiverse: http://www.actionbioscience.org/newfrontiers/steinhardt.html and for further information: http://www.physics.princeton.edu/~steinh/dm2004.pdf The main competing theory to explain our universe's origin is called Eternal Inflation, and it was developed by the Inflation guy - Alan Guth. In this revision of the Inflation Model, he incorporated the effects of quantum fluctuations in the spacetime of that tiny, dense universe at the Big Bang. He realized that once the first Big Bang started, the effects of these fluctuations would cause a cascade of an infinite number of universes to be created. And because of the rapid expansion of spacetime in an inflating universe, the following universes would be permanently cut off from each other and exist as isolated "islands" forever separated by the spacetime constant. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaotic_inflation_theory So which model might be the key to understanding the origins of the Universe? I have no idea! I have to read the simplified versions of these models that are devoid of mathematical formulas. Just like everything else in physics and cosmology, I'm depending on the knowledge and ability of their peers to work through the complex math to determine their likelihood. But whichever path leads to real understanding, there is no escaping that both the theories based on String Theory like the Cyclic Model, or the Loop Quantum Gravity model to create a quantum theory of gravity that is used by Alan Guth, Andrei Linde and Alexander Vilenkin to look back before the Big Bang and find "Eternal Inflation" - all point towards our universe being one of an infinite number, and not a one-off event. This allows for explaining fine tuning by using ideas such as natural selection for example! The Cosmological Natural Selection model proposed by Lee Smolin, contends that the universes that have the biggest stars and subsequently produce the most black holes - in turn, create the greatest number of universes. Black Holes are the remnants left behind from Supernova explosions, which create the most heavy elements, like the ones for making carbon-based life. With this idea, Smolin proposes a natural process that would lead to more universes that are also more likely to create life. This would be evolution on the largest scale! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Smolin Even if universes are intelligently designed, that does not necessarily mean that they are made by supernatural forces! Arthur C. Clarke pointed out many years ago that sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial lifeforms would appear to be gods from our perspective, much like the cargo cults in the South Pacific turned British mariners and later, American airplanes into gods and built religions around them. There are intelligently designed universe models that propose advanced, intelligent lifeforms are seeding new universes and are capable of tweaking the physical constants of the new universe to make it more likely to have life. http://www.biocosm.org/

It seems to be all forgotten now, but Saddam did have at least one good excuse for invading Kuwait back in 1990, besides trying to get out of paying the the estimated 14 billion dollars that Iraq borrowed to finance the war with Iran - and that was the continued development of slant-drilling techniques in Kuwaiti oil fields near the Iraq border. The Kuwaitis were pumping out oil on the Iraqi side of the border, and the first Bush Administration was divided on how to respond to the dispute. They didn't want to be tied to closely with the Iraqi dictatorship, but the general policy of the Reagan and Bush Administrations was to favour Iraq as a counter-balance to the Iranian regime. During the last year of the war, when Iran had pushed back the original Iraqi occupation of the southwest part of Iran, the Iranians were on the march, and were close to invading Basra, when the United States interfered in the "tanker war" that involved Iraqi and Iranian boats attacking each other's oil tankers. Because the Iranians had successfully mined the waters around Iraq to the point where they cut off Iraq's access to the Gulf, the U.S. ordered Iran to remove the mines; when they refused, the mines were destroyed, along with Iranian oil platforms in the Gulf and an Iranian passenger jet, and quietly opened the checkbook to pay compensation a few years later, after claiming it was flying in the war zone and was mistaken for an Iranian fighter jet. Should the Bush I Administration have tried to keep its alliance of convenience with Saddam? There are pros and cons to that question, but there is still an unresolved problem from Desert Storm that could lead the eventual permanent Iraqi government to invade Kuwait all over again. You see, the Americans solved the original dispute by redrawing the border between Iraq and Kuwait so that all of the disputed oil wells near the border that were accused of being slant drills, were well within Kuwaiti territory. I wouldn't be surprised if this dispute flares up again in the future, especially since oil is gradually disappearing! But, my number one question is: do the results justify the regime change strategy? it has started Iraq down the road to theocratic government; instead of securing world oil supplies, it has endangered the flow of oil and driven up the costs three-fold; strengthened Iran's position in the MiddleEast; and strengthened the position of AlQaeda and other Islamic groups that can justify their jihads as fighting infidel oppression; alienated allies and potential allies who interpreted the invasion as a naked attempt to control MidEast oil for America's benefit............and there's likely many other problems that have come from the blowback of this plan. Are there any success stories to report..........besides Disneyland Baghdad?

So much for Morgan Spurlocks's dream of becoming the next Michael Moore! I haven't seen it, but it bothered me a little that he used dishonest tactics in Supersize Me, to get the dramatic results he wanted; specifically that he consumed over 5000 calories a day and did not exercise or engage in any physical activity. Why didn't he at least drink a diet coke when he was at McDonald's? Since he's trying to push vegetarianism, it's worth mentioning that consuming 5000 calories from any sources (even plants) is going to make most people fat! It doesn't have to be from McDonald's food to get those results! Since Supersize Me was presented as a scientific experiment, it could be classified as a fraudulent experiment designed from the outset to get the desired results. In that sense, it is similar to the way Michael Moore jerry-rigs his pseudo-documentaries to score political points! Speaking of pseudo-documentaries, I'm happy to see that the heavy fundamentalist church promotion of Ben Stein's mockumentary on the Intelligent Design movement, is sinking like a stone after opening in over three thousand theatres! http://www.rottentomatoes.com/movie/box_of...hp?rank_id=1772