WIP

Who says accepting requests for interviews is trolling? I've heard her interviewed at least a couple of different times this year - once on the CBC Radio show - The Current, and even on the Australian ABC Radio show - Religion. She's probably restricting interviews to the shows that she can tell her story and make her case....so that pretty much eliminates all soundbite sensationalist commercial media like CNN etc.. From what I recall, she didn't begin her ministry as an atheist, it was by examination of evidence for God that she started becoming a skeptic, and then realized she was an atheist. That is how the path towards atheism happens to a lot of us! As for the question: I'm a former United Church member and I don't believe "supernatural" phenomena of all kinds represents anything more than placeholders for the things we don't have answers to yet. So, I don't have a vested interest in what goes on in the United Church today, except to say that when I left, a big part of the reason was because the Church was paralyzed by divisions between more liberal urban churches and the conservative country churches, and trying to aim right down the middle with fuzzy, non-committal advice and directions for the Church to follow. Even at the local level, I have no idea whether our minister actually believed in God or a literal interpretation of the Church Creed....he didn't seem to do it with great enthusiasm....it was just something he would preach about when he had to! After years of fumbling with the issue, they finally made a decision to recognize gay church members, and have ceremonies for gay relationships, so I can't see why recognizing atheists...even behind the podium would be a big deal, as long as the minister follows Church principles and can do the job of ministering to the flock....but, then again, I'm on the outside looking in now! It's worth noting that modern western religions that have arisen as a way to compartmentalize a community's spiritual beliefs and ritual ceremonies away from practical everyday life, still mostly made up of two parts: 1. A set of metaphysical beliefs that are shared and even enforced under the threat of expulsion. And 2. A set of guiding principles of conduct and social rules to follow. As a liberal Protestant Church, the United Church is kind of light on both parts, so that may have encouraged the falling away of many younger members. I can think of one religion: Unitarian Universalist, which doesn't have a shared set of doctrinal beliefs for everyone to follow...even the existence of God! So, if Greta Vosper was a UU minister, she could just take a place with the other atheist ministers in the UU Church. It will be interesting to see if the United Church goes in the Unitarian Universalist direction, since both churches in the amalgamated church started out much more conservative and then started liberalizing over time, ending up without doctrinal baggage by the 1960's, when they decided their shared principles were enough to justify amalgamation. Maybe United and Anglican and what's left of other mainline Protestant churches might consider going the same route!

Is this despicable misogynistic crap supposed to be funny?

These are mostly because of decisions made which we have no say in! Who's going to sew a pair of pants when you can just throw them away and buy a new $10.00 pair made by slave labour in Bangladesh or Sri Lanka? That's the grand design of modern captains of industry to give us the throwaway society, rather than make most of what we need locally.

Oh shut up! You probably never read past the headline of your story yesterday: So, if your side trip relates at all to this issue, it's that the "man" having the baby is not the biological father of the child (as in the seahorse example), who has no say in whether to have the baby or not.

Red herring! White lives have always mattered more, as police are less likely to stop, arrest and shoot whites than blacks.

To me, that's why Harper's apologists don't get to just do the lament about falling oil prices! He was the one who banked on oil at $100 a barrel when he started his strategy of big tarsands and pipeline expansions. If it didn't work out for him, that says lots about his economic leadership abilities we hear so much of from rightwing sources!

And yet somehow, in spite of their burdens, those rich are getting richer while everyone else stands in place or falls further behind! if you want to be part of a livable community, you better recognize that dog-eat-dog values won't achieve it! In countries with the highest gaps between rich and poor, like Columbia, South Africa, Russia, as quick examples, rich people drive specially adapted cars with security systems, move about with armed guards, and live in fear of their children being kidnapped and held hostage. And, it's not the superrich who are most at risk of crime in dystopian societies. It's the upper middle class, who can afford nice homes...but not nice enough to be completely shielded from robbers and burglars, and have to drive through and work in urban centers. Nobody gets to keep all their money and live worry free.

If the Sandra Bland case was an isolated example, we wouldn't be discussing it. Add all the rest of the examples of police abuse and misconduct, and that's why there's a BlackLivesMatter movement.

We used to be good at adapting to change! In the time before 10,000 years ago, when everyone was a hunter/gatherer and was not able to exercise much control over available food supplies, other than look for other things to eat in fresh locations, then we had to be very good at adapting to changing weather and climate conditions...though genetic evidence of a population bottleneck about 70,000 years ago which reduced the likely total human population to about two to three thousand, indicates that the human race almost went extinct because of the only supervolcano event in the history of modern humans. What we are now, are mostly civilized drones who have no idea what to do when the power goes out! Are we really that resourceful today? Is our globalized civilization...dependent on extended trade links, with few locally sustainable communities, a resourceful global civilization that will survive a changing climate, unprecedented population levels, declining resources? We will all find out! But my suspicions are that any survivors will be the kinds of people who are truly adaptable and resourceful, and lucky enough to live in the right places.

That's right, and one of the big reasons why some philosophers who are AI skeptics, believe we many actually be no closer to creating a truly conscious artificial intelligence than we were 20 or 30 years ago. Speed and processing power can't make up for the fact that neurons are more complicated and have more options than an integrated circuit.

We are all aware of that, but when they can't agree on a decision together, then it's up to the woman to decide whether or not to stop a pregnancy early.

Thanks, and it's quite a diversion to pull up an example of a trans-man (I think it's called) who used to be a woman and still has female reproductive organs. So, that man was actually the mother of the child (not the father) and it's still women who are having the babies when it's all said and done.

I guess we can only be thankful that you're not a mad scientist in possession of a doomsday machine

I've heard everyone from Rush Limbaugh to Pat Buchanan try to shield themselves with butchered versions of that Jesse Jackson quote, so my spidey senses raise whenever it pops up to claim blacks are just naturally savage and violent. If we lived in a society where blacks had the opportunities to discriminate and marginalize whites, I might take it seriously, but we all know which way this river flows! In our world, whenever someone is white and charged with a serious crime (like the serial killers and mass executioners) their race is never featured front and center. As in this Dylan Roof in South Carolina, who was described as a "disturbed youth" on CNN and Foxnews. If he was black, they would have applied some subtle dogwhistle phrase to identify his race with the crime, just as he would have been called a terrorist if he was a Muslim....especially if he had a beard! The statistics don't tell us how blacks are denied opportunities for advancement and police are deliberately tasked with harassing young blacks who venture out of their neighbourhoods, or that blacks are many times more likely to be charged, convicted and incarcerated for offenses that are considered minor penalties by middle class whites...such as possession of marijuana. You don't get out much if you think outlaw bikers are the only white gangs! What burns me is kids driving around looking to harass and assault random strangers for no reason or purpose. At least when it comes to minorities, like the Somalis you don't like...I've had no problems with kids from African, Middle Eastern and other Asian backgrounds in the immediate area where I live; but since you mention it, and I still go out on foot to the local store late at night, I will note that about 12 years ago, I had an encounter where I was ambushed by what turned out to be a four Somalis (only one in the country legally at the time). I was near an unlighted section of park near home that I knew really well, so I made a run for it in the dark..two tried to chase me but didn't get close, the car came around to the other side to try to cut me off...but by that time they realized that it would be too risky to try to attack me in a well-lighted area with traffic, and might get noticed. So they left and I called police and gave my report. And as it turned out, the gang had been mostly attacking lone victims walking into to bank ATM machines, and they were apprehended a week later...and the three that had overstayed student visa's by several months are back in Somalia today...if they're still alive. So, I'm not pollyannish about the subject; just realistic about what I should and should not use as my benchmark for determining risks. After all is said and done, I am not going to accept the dangerous ideology that some races are better than others, regardless of how it is introduced or supported! This kind of attitude denies all people of colour their humanity and allows others to brutalize and exploit them.

How about if we just say he was lucky! He became so unpopular in 72, that he was only allowed to govern because the lacklustre Tories and their lacklustre leader- Robert Stanfield did not want to make an attempt to go the Governor General to ask to form a government...even though the PC's had a one seat majority over the Liberals! By 1980, Trudeau had spruced up his appearance and was looking like his old Trudeaumania days. I'm sure Trudeau would not have survived in the social media atmosphere of today. When he came along in 68, he was different than any kind of political candidate anyone had seen before, and he grabbed the large, young block of baby-boomers without even having to try! It's a different world today.

And we can thank Harper's grand design of turning Canada into a petrostate for the big collapse in manufacturing. Every other nation that becomes dependent on oil or on resource extraction in general, ends up dependent on resource exports. The same pattern appears to have happened in Australia, where a couple of Conservative governments put all their eggs into shipping coal and iron ore to China; and now that China's economic bubble has gone bust, so has Australia's! And just like Canada, Australia has allowed their manufacturing sector to wither on the vine and is now more dependent on imports of most manufactured goods.

Hopefully this one can be wrapped up soon, since I didn't even realize we were on a politics thread when I started posting: You mean: either we use everything up now as fast as possible or bury it all in the ground and never touch it again. What I'm asking for is the simple recognition of people who will come after us and inherit this Earth. That would mean not using renewables at unsustainable levels, and cutting our over-use of non-renewable resources, so that something will be left behind 1000 or 10,0000 years from now, in case all of the Star Trek predictions and crap about leaving this world and settling other planets doesn't come to fruition. How about organizing our economies along different lines that don't depend on jacking up consumer expectations to drive demand on a lot of products that even most of the buyers can't explain why they need them. Consumer deman-driven capitalism has increased the rates of industrial production more than 100 times what they were at the beginning of the 20th century....much greater than the rate of population increase since then. Birth rates are declining everywhere except in the places where women are not allowed access to abortion and birth control...making pregnancy mandatory...the penalty for having sex and getting married. It's a problem that could take care of itself, if there's enough time. I haven't been on a plane in 10 years! But, trying to shame environmentally-conscious travelers with this argument is a red herring, because the declines in conventional petroleum reserves has led to shortages and higher prices for aviation fuels....so it's another problem that will take care of itself, as fewer and fewer people in the future will be able to afford to fly. And it would be nice if the infrastructure for high speed rail was built before that time....but that would take some rational planning for the future! Aside from the obvious high risks of adding more carbon to the atmosphere, fossil fuels vary by grade and content. Oil from Venezuela is not the same as light crude from Libya (the #1 reason for regime change) and kerogen (shale oil) is totally different than bitumen, so they require different types of refineries and don't all produce the same products. Conventional nuclear is dangerous, costly to maintain, and even exacts a high carbon footprint during construction because of the huge concrete containment buildings that have to be constructed. Thorium reactors have been promised for decades, but complications in breeding fuels and operating proposed thorium reactors has meant that the thorium breakthrough is only at the test stage even now. Sort of like the fusion reactors I've been hearing about at least since I was a teenager. A better idea would be the Generation three and four nuclear reactors, which can burn at higher temperatures and leave fewer waste products (able to use plutonium and other nuclear wastes). The Gen. IV reactors would...in theory...provide all the benefits of fusion....if they are practical and work as promised. Another proposal some nuclear engineers want to explore are called Small Modular Reactors. SMR's are basically conventional reactors that function on a smaller scale than the big utility reactors we have today. Big advantage would be having almost no risk of meltdowns, since they do not require pressurized, circulating cooling systems that might break down. The big stumbling block for SMR's appears to be regulatory, since licensing and other costs of nuclear reactors does not distinguish between large and small....making the incentive to build them as big as possible to get the greatest profit advantage. Although there might be other drawbacks to SMR's that its proponents aren't telling us about yet. The advocates for new technologies of all kinds tend to try to hide the negative sides as long as possible. What I'd really like to know is why didn't renewable energy sources like wind, solar and tidal power make your list? James Hansen has had a track record for over 25 years of making bold predictions that are beyond the more conservative predictions released by committees...such as for the IPCC reports, and he has the habit of being Right! While the rest of the conservative establishment, which has refrained from trying to incorporate positive feedbacks in their prediction models, have been the ones who are wrong and their reports are usually already obsolete by the time they are handed off to the IPCC governors. 25 years ago, the first IPCC Report was worried about loss of Arctic sea ice by the end of this century. Now, it looks like we'll be lucky if we don't see blue ocean events before the end of this decade. Hansen's point about the Eemian was that there was a period of warming and rapid loss of ice in the Arctic, at a time when CO2 never rose above 300ppm, and temperatures never above 2 C baseline. One of the great misconceptions the researchers have left in the public reading their reports, is that they almost never use a timeframe longer than this century. What about after the year 2100? The carbon that has been added to the atmosphere will be there for at least another 1000 years even if we stopped adding more today. The 400 level we are reaching right now has delivered most of its heat so far to the world's oceans, and the high CO2 levels will keep adding more heat in the centuries to come. I think we've covered this before....that the 2C benchmark was a political decision right from the start, since there was no way to stop at 1 degree (the original redline 25 to 30 years ago) and politicians could pretend it was some sort of carbon bank...where we can x amount of carbon to the atmosphere before we have to stop/ rather than the way it is actually described in the scientific models - as an indicator of increasing the percentage likelihood of positive feedbacks like permafrost and methane clathrate release removing our ability to have any control over carbon increases in the future.

I'm not questioning his integrity or even his objectives; I'm talking about Joe Clark the political strategist..who either had a tin ear or a tin head! A couple of federal elections ago, a similar thing happened to Stephan Dion, who believed he had a strong case to propose a national carbon tax, and overrode his advisers concerns that the Conservatives would sandbag him with that issue. And, for his troubles, not only did he have to deal with Harper and his petroleum lobby, he also got stabbed in the back by the NDP, which criticized the carbon tax proposal and offered up the same mealy-mouthed solution as the Conservatives - cap and trade. All he had for allies was the Green Party....and that was never going to be enough to turn around a mostly complacent, uneducated public. These sorts of plays and having been a member of four major political parties during my lifetime makes me somewhat cynical about politics...but on with the show! Pick the best of a bad litter I suppose.

Couple or not, women are the ones who have to deal directly with nine months of pregnancy and giving birth to a baby, so it's up to the unexpectedly pregnant half of that couple, to have the choice of whether to take the drug/or not.

Seems like you are really reaching in this last few posts to find some scenario to justify restricting this drug.

HEY! LOOK AT ME! I'M AN EVEN BIGGER JACKASS THAN DONALD TRUMP!

Actually, the abstract of the study in that pubmed link is a study comparing 28 female ultramarathoners with male competitors, and notes the narrowing gap between men's and women's times as the distances increase. This is especially significant for those of us who are older and well remember the times before women were allowed to run in marathons and track&field athletics competitions restricted female events were limited to 3000 meters. It was just taken as a given by the men who started the modern olympics movement and amateur sporting, that women's bodies were too delicate to withstand the stresses of such competitions. That study which points to greater fatigue resistance among the 28 women studied, shows that the exact opposite is true! Even among men, it's known that ultra-competitors in running, swimming, triathalons etc. have to hold a much higher body fat ratio than competitors at shorter distances. I haven't checked around, but I would think that the average higher body fat ratio for women would provide some advantage in these competitions. There might also be an issue of pain tolerance, where in a lot of studies, men don't do so well compared to women! When it comes to running middle and long distances, a physically gifted runner can turn into a washout who is never able to reach an elite level of competition if he can't stay focused and keep calm when his body is telling him to stop or slow down. I've never tried an ultramarathon, but I would imagine that dealing with pain and discomfort over a long period of time is a significant factor, and it would be interesting to add that to a gender study of ultra-athletes. One point that hasn't come up that I'm sure will be a factor before larger numbers of young women show up competing in long distance races is that many hours of training are required to prepare for competition. The public safety issue can become a factor...especially in urban areas, because a woman out running or jogging alone is going to be noticed...and possibly noticed by the wrong sort of person! When I was still active in a local running club, most of the women who were active and putting in high mileage, didn't go out even in the day time, without at least one running buddy. That might be a big problem for anyone putting in the long hours preparing for ultramarathons.

"Erzberg Rodeo!" That's a question I certainly cannot answer, not knowing anything about the challenges and skills needed for competition. But, there have been concerns in other sports where an elite female athlete has no serious competition among her peers and wants to compete against men (like golf), that the women's competitions will be adversely affected.