WIP

I am interested in knowing what this guy has said in the interim 16 years. I used to do my share of gay-bashing when I thought like these people. Since the time I have changed my outlook, I have gone out of my way to speak up for those that I previously made crass comments about. This politician who puts on a suit and a civil demeanour in public doesn't appear to have anything to say in defense of gays, and I'm betting that he has just been more discreet about expressing his real thoughts about them. The rednecks at least tell you what they are really thinking and they are the kind of guys who made me give up on the conservative movement. I was a member of the Reform Party when it was first organizing in Ontario, and I didn't catch on to a lot of the racist, anti-French, sexist, homophobic jokes and comments I was hearing. Most of the people were older than me, so I just brushed it off as comments from a bunch of cranky old farts since most of the people were grey haired retirees. It struck me a couple of years ago when I ventured on to some popular American conservative forums that the yahoos are the ones who are telling it like it is while their polished and proper leaders use code words that outsiders don't clue into the real meaning of: like "illegal immigrants - the substitute for dirty Mexicans taking over our country, and "defense of marriage" - those queers better stay celibate, "blacks need to take advantage of the opportunities offered by this great nation" - blacks are too stupid to crawl their way out of the ghetto..........................the political, media and religious leaders of the conservatives use the code words, but the rank and file say what's really on their minds!

That's right, the JudeoChristian tradition of man having dominion over the earth played some role in the plundering of natural resources and ecological disasters that plague the world today. But religion is always re-interpreted to suit the times. Look what the Americans have done with the Christian tradition that favoured the poor and condemned the rich as benefactors of an evil system run by the god of this world, namely the Devil. If you watch the most prominent American preachers, you would think their bible says "blessed are the rich!" In the same manner, some Christians are re-inventing their religion to make it respect the earth. More power to them!

Education was dirt cheap back in the 70's when I was in school. In fact, it was too cheap. In 76, I took a break from my job in a machine shop to take a General Business- Accounting program. The tuition was only $295.00 for both semesters; and that was the problem! It was just a glorified high school with a bunch of kids who couldn't get jobs and were made to stay in school by their parents, so they wouldn't hang around the house all day. We were informed by a straight-talking instructor in the first month that if any of us had a serious intention of seeking a career in accounting, we needed to quit and save our money for university, so that we would be eligible to write the C.A. exam and be more than minimum wage book-keepers. So, I decided I would be better off going back to working with my hands. I agree with you that today, the cost of education is too high, but if staying in school becomes too cheap, colleges and universities will be filled with a bunch of educated bums who end up going back to their restaurant and clerk jobs after they graduate.

Being normal means allowing people to live their own lives in the manner that works best for them! And before you get started on deviance, don't give me the crap about bestiality......you know very well that there has always been a minority of every population that has a same-sex orientation. And there is an even larger group that is bisexual to some degree. Your way of forcing people to try to conform to the way of the majority has been tried for thousands of years. Homosexuals have been killed, abused, reviled, ridiculed, driven to suicide, and forced to practise their "sin" privately until modern times. Has it worked? The claim by fundamentalists of all stripes that homosexuality is a "choice" and therefore a sin committed by their own free will has been repudiated every time one of your conservative Christian closeted gays comes crashing out of the closet! James Dobson's Operation Exodus was a good case in point when their former leader was seen leaving a gay bar and forced to resign by the fundies in charge. http://www.exgaywatch.com/wp/2008/03/exodu...-alan-chambers/ And FYI, if you ever have a change of heart and move past your knee-jerk need to bash homosexuals, you may be surprised how many people you know, both family and friends are gay and were afraid to tell you!

Is Harper trying to hide something? He's always struck me as being more than a little effeminate, and the U.S. experience of recently outed gay politicians seems to indicate that they are highly placed in the Republican Party and evangelistic conservative churches. Isn't it odd how often the worst persecutors of homosexuals often turn out to be self-hating homosexuals themselves who have been brainwashed into self-loathing and crave acceptance from the mob by persecuting their own kind? In the States, Mr. "wide stance" Larry Craig apparently had one of the most anti-gay voting records in Congress! If you've ever watched a clip of "God hates fags" preacher Fred Phelps in action, you can't overlook the fact that his style of preaching, not to mention his obsession with this particular sin looks like he's a religious fanatic trying to buy his way to heaven by persecuting other homosexuals! Canada could use a gay blogger like this one in Washington who outs all of the gay Republicans in Washington, who would rather support their persecutors than demand equal rights and equal treatment under the law. If he included all of the in-the-closet gay evangelists and conservative pundits, the list would be about ten pages long: the LIST Operating since July of 2004, telling you the truth about hypocrisy in the gov't. US Representatives Rep. Ed Schrock (VA) Rep. David Dreier (CA) Rep. James McCrery (LA) Rep. Mark Foley (FL) US Senators Sen Larry Craig (ID) Senior GOP Staff Jay Timmons, NRSC Dan Gurley, RNC Jay Banning, RNC Brian Walton, NRSC, RNC Senior Senate Staffers Robert Traynham, Santorum Jonathan Tolman, Inhofe Kirk Fordham, Martinez Dirk Smith, Lott John Reid, Allen Paul Unger, Allen Linus Catignani, Frist Senior House Staffers Jim Conzelman, Oxley Lee Cohen, Hart Robert O'Conner, King Pete Meachum, Brown-Waite Bush Staff Israel Hernandez Jeff Berkowitz Local Officials Vincent Gentile, NYC Helene Weinstein, NYS Assembly The rest... Ed Koch, NYC Mayor Jennifer Helms-Knox, Judge Armstrong Williams, Radio host Matt Drudge, Headline writer Steve Kreseski, MD Gov. Chip DiPaula, MD Gov. Lee LaHaye, CWA Richard Grennell, U.N. John Schlafley, Eagle Forum http://www.blogactive.com/

And do you see how your countrymen have been manipulated by that appeal to patriotic nationalism? Remember, nationalism is an emotional response, not a rational decision! So when a nation is inspired to go to war and a weak-kneed Congress is cowed into giving the President a blank cheque to carry out foreign wars because they are afraid of appearing unpatriotic, then flag-waving patriotic feelings lead to dangerous impulsive decisions! How long will America be able to do the chest-thumping "we're no. !" The 20th Century was the Age of America as the dominant worldpower. America's greatness was largely based on an economy built around oil and gas energy and related manufacturing. America is losing its manufacturing base and every year since 1973, it has had to import oil from foreign sources. Most of the world's oil is in chaotic and hostile nations, so that imported oil is going to keep on getting more expensive, and we are likely going to see a dangerous 21st Century where low cost manufacturing and an emphasis on science and engineering make China and India the next world powers. And part of America's demise will be brought about by a nation that values lawyers more than scientists. Fundamentalist hostility to science is a contributing factor in the decline. And scary times are ahead: Freeman believes this trend could soon threaten American technological competitiveness, especially as large developing countries like China and India harness their growing scientific and engineering expertise to their enormous, low-wage labor forces. The outsourcing of technical jobs, he warns, foreshadows the displacements American workers will likely face in coming years. The source of America’s vulnerability, Freeman argues, lies in numbers. In 1970 more than half of the world’s science and engineering doctorates came from American universities, but now other countries have caught up. In 2001 the European Union (EU) granted 40 percent more science and engineering Ph.D.s than the United States, and by 2010 will produce nearly twice as many. China’s gains are even more striking. In 1975 the number of Chinese doctorates was negligible; but by 2003, the country had graduated 13,000 Ph.D.s — 70 percent of them in science and engineering. China is expected to surpass the United States in numbers of science and engineering doctorates by 2010. At the college level, statistics show a waning interest among U.S. students in science-related careers; in 2000, only 17 percent of all bachelor degrees in the United States were in natural sciences and engineering, compared to a world average of 27 percent and a Chinese average of 52 percent. http://harvardmagazine.com/2005/11/overseas-insourcing.html Well then, what's holding up regime change in Zimbabwe? For starters, there's no oil and the U.S. Military has been stretched to the breaking point, so there is nothing left to offer regime change there or in higher security priorities like Iran, North Korea or Pakistan. This one has broke the bank and a nation drowning in debt will have no choice but to make a strategic retreat from global commitments. And that's why amending the Constitution is so difficult. Remember what happened to the Equal Rights Amendment - it was sailing along and considered a sure thing until it stalled out three states short of ratification. But it's the judges who interpret the law. Are faith-based initiatives constitutional? Not according to every independent legal analyst who's looked at this pandering to fundamentalists by the Bush Administration; but the SCOTUS is in no hurry to hear any of the constitutional challenges to this state-sponsoring of approved religious organizations. Most Christians don't learn enough about their own creeds to explain them to others even if they want to! In a way, this is what keeps the peace in a multi-faith society. The true believers who are really into their religion are the ones who start the arguments. Replacement theology is not part of Christian Zionism or premillenialist interpretations of prophecy. This is the traditional Catholic and Protestant understanding that the covenant with Israel ended when a new covenant was established when the Christian Church began, and that's why the Catholic Church and the mainline Protestant churches were historically hostile to Jews and only started reforming their antisemitic practises after the Holocaust. Right, but you should have some awareness of the motives of your allies. The Christian Zionists who buy the Late Great Planet Earth and all of those Left Behind books see Israel going up in flames in the apocalyptic Battle of Armageddon. And they are against virtually all plans to redraw Israeli boundaries and attempt peace agreements, so they support the Israeli politicians who refuse to consider land-for-peace deals. In America, acceptance of Jews didn't really take hold until after the modern state of Israel was interpreted as an important fulfillment of bible prophecy and increased the acceptance of Dispensationalism. Well then, you are not much different than the neoconservatives you criticize! Cheerleaders are not always good friends! Friends have to say when they believe you are making mistakes. And the rush to war has precipitated the decline of the American Empire and will clear the stage for China and other actors to fight for global supremacy. Considering the fact that Canada is dependent on the U.S. economy and depends on the U.S. for defense, the 21st Century is going to be bad for us too. Most Canadians who you interpret as being antiAmerican just wish that America had been smart enough to start moving away from an oil-based economy instead of enriching Arabian robber-barons and starting wars to try to secure foreign oil supplies.

I was going to drop out the global warming debate since it seems to be impossible to resolve facts with all of the competing climate models, graphs and statistics being bandied about, but Matt Drudge pulled me back in again. Drudgereport is still my homepage and he usually is one step ahead of the media pack, but yesterday his banner headline was a report claiming that 1998 was the warmest year on record, and it turns out that this report was sponsored by the World Bank, which has jumped into the climate change debate and is being accused of trying to hijack the debate by environmental groups: http://www.reuters.com/article/environment...K28941120080404 The Energysmart blog points out a simple fact of statistics: that one year does not establish a trend. And even taking a 10 year average is not accepted by the experts, since natural weather effects like La Nina and El Nino can have signifiicant effects on a year to year basis: First, in climate science, 10 years does not make a trend. You need at least 30 years to establish what the baseline should be. So looking at a graph of only 10 years does little to tell us anything. What was it like before? Well gee, notice this graph starts at a temperature high point of 1998, which was in part due to El Niño that year. How convenient of them to start at the outlier. http://energysmart.wordpress.com/2008/03/2...l-temperatures/ And, according to NASA, 2005 was the warmest year on record: http://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/environme...05_warmest.html So, I'm back at square one! There is money and vested interests on both sides who want to misuse statistics. One thing is for sure, somebody is lying!

Yes! Yes it is as a matter of fact. There is a thin line between patriotism and nationalism. The wdespread belief in the doctrine of American Exceptionalism was used by Neoconservatives and their ideological allies to try to ensure American supremacism in global affairs after the demise of the Soviet Union. With the Bush Administration, this nationalistic arrogance reached the breaking point when they decided that America could step in and impose regime change anywhere they wished regardless of what allies, adversaries and neighbouring states wanted. And trying to topple governments is one thing, but the backstory that's gone virtually unnoticed behind the Iraq and Afganistan wars, is that since the fall of the Soviet Union, the U.S. has tried to turn former Soviet republics into client states. Especially the ones with oil reserves. America is trying to develop the oil fields in Kazahkstan, Azerbaijan, and Uzbekistan and create a secure zone to build pipelines and make it available for the U.S. market. With all of the talk about the dangers of radical Islam, don't you find it strange that the U.S. would resume an adversarial relationship with the only major non-Muslim state in Central Asia? It seems to indicate that these wars are more about oil and other natural resources than they are about fighting Bin Laden or Al Qaeda! I did mention that smart kids from fundamentalist families are encouraged to practise law rather than seek careers in scientific fields, so your friends in law school aren't that unusual. The Christian colleges like O.R.U., Pat Robertson's Regent University and this new Patrick Henry University that was created for home-schooled fundamentalist kids have little else besides theology and law. Considering that their patrons are trying to rewrite the U.S. constitution and get their people on the SCOTUS, I guess it's not surprising that they are so keenly interested in law degrees! And, the exception doesn't prove the rule! In general, the more educated a person is, the less superstitious and religious they are. People in my social group, who have little or no post-secondary education, are usually the most religious and the most likely to believe in phenomena like ghosts, UFO's and astrology - so I am an exception from the other side. When I was younger, I joined the local chapter of the Royal Astronomical Society primarily because very few of the people I interact with on a daily basis are interested in anything connected with science. And I noticed quickly that I was the only member of the local chapter working a blue-collar job. Almost everyone else was either a teacher or a student, or a professional with some sort of degree. I'm afraid your people have only been valued since the dispensational interpretation of scripture became a dominant force in America. This doctrine of successive and separate covenants recognizes the covenant with Israel as still in effect - at least for observing Jews. You may have noticed that mainstream Protestant and Catholic theology which follows the traditional interpretation of Supersessionalism, or Replacement Theology, teach that all of the covenants with Israel were scrapped and re-applied to the Church - and that's why traditional Christianity was so ruthless in trying to eradicate the Jews. Practising Jews were a threat to the legitimacy of Christian theology. Now, back to those pre-millenialists: you might want to reconsider how good this friendship between Christian Zionism and Judaism really is. Last year, John Hagee, one of the leading Christian Zionists, got rapped by almost all of his televangelist compatriots for stating that Jews could be saved through keeping the Mosaic Law. Most Christian Zionists may believe God still has a covenant with Israel, but when pushed, they have to concede that Jews need to convert in order to be saved. They see the modern state of Israel as a fulfillment of prophecy, but if you read the popular books on prophecy interpretation you'll soon find out that they see Israel destroyed in the battle of Armageddon, with two thirds of the people massacred and the only survivors being the ones who finally convert to Christianity. So rather than being friends of the Jews, the Christian Zionists want the Jews gathered together in Israel so that they can be sacrificed in the upcoming WWIII and fulfill their interpretation of prophecy. Some friends! They have financed and supported the most radical Zionist groups who build settlements in occupied territories that are difficult for the state of Israel to defend. They are fanning the flames of war in the MiddleEast, and they will see the destruction of Israel as the Battle of Armageddon and climb up on their roofs to await the 2nd Coming of Jesus! http://www.theocracywatch.org/christian_zionism.htm Here they are: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/10/03/...ain524268.shtml http://www.cfoic.com/ http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4951.htm My mother is from Michigan and I had dual citizenship until I decided I was staying in Canada. All of my relatives on my mother's side live in the U.S., so I am tuned in to what goes on in America.

From what I am observing of this new fundamentalist Christianity that has become a controlling political force in the U.S., I would argue that Christianity is regressing to a more primitive state, and it's just a matter of time before the barbarism returns. America has created a Christian ethos that combines religion with nationalistic values of patriotism, prosperity, and even white nationalism. The most influential Christian leaders in the U.S. are teaching their flocks to distrust science and all knowledge that doesn't fit with their Christian worldview. So even the smart kids from good Christian families go to bible colleges or even law school, rather than become biologists, geologists, physicists, neuroscientists etc., where they will be contaminated with the teaching of evolution. Fundamentalist Islam and fundamentalist Christianity have many common objectives such as a belief that they have the exclusive religion for worshipping God, and eventually, everyone in the world must convert to the one true faith. It's not hard to see how this is a recipe for never-ending war. There are two strains of dangerous theologies coming from U.S. style Christianity: one is Dominionism, that teaches Christians that they must take the entire world for Christ before the 2nd Coming and all of the apocalyptic prophecies are fulfilled; and the other is Premillenialism, which teaches that the Apocalypse, Rapture and 2nd Coming will occur very soon, and believers can do nothing to avert nuclear war, ecological disasters and famines that will soon kill off three quarters of the world's population. But the believers are encouraged to see all bad news as a good thing because it is interpreted as another sign that Judgement Day will soon arrive. I saw this first-hand when the Israeli-Hezbollah war was going on - all of the premillenial Christians on the conservative forum I was in, were all excited about it and hoping it would blow up into a full scale MiddleEast war that would be the sign that the end times had arrived. All you need is a few people with irrational apocalyptic beliefs in charge of nuclear weapons and it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy; except that just like all previous failed predictions about the 2nd Coming, Jesus won't be flying down to save us from annihilation this time either. If we're going to save the world from disaster, we have to do it ourselves. And that makes it hard to plan a strategy of dealing with Islam. If it is possible to reform Islam so that Muslims can accept secular values, it's not going to happen when the church leaders in America and Europe are trying to revive Christian nationalism and playing on the fears of being overrun by Islam. One question that can't be answered right now is how many of the world's Muslims really want to live under Islamic government, where religion dominates all aspects of life and you can be beaten by the religious police squad for not attending the mosque, shaving your beard or in the case of women - not being completely shrouded in a black sackcloth. But any reform movements so far are being hamstrung by the War in Iraq and rhetoric about converting Muslims to Christianity.

You're forgetting that those radio shows were performed before a live audience. I had the privilege of seeing them perform when I was in Lethbridge in 78. They were by far, better than any other improv comedy act including the grossly over-rated Second City. And unlike Second City and the tools that moved on to Saturday Night Live, the Air Farce did not make city life and America their focus of attention. They made the effort to play the small towns across Canada that had little else to watch besides Junior A hockey! Like I said, they were all getting up in years when they finally got their shot on T.V., and for some reason, Dave Broadfoot, the guy who created the most iconic Air Farce characters, quit the troupe and only did occasional guest appearances when the T.V. show started. The T.V. show would have been stronger if he stayed with it, but it was still better than the punks who would rather try to be clever instead of funny, like Kids In The Hall and This Hour Has 22 Minutes! Long live the Royal Canadian Air Farce!

The problem was that the brain trust at the CBC took more than 20 years before they gave them a shot at television. By the time they got started in the 90's, they were already getting old. They should have pulled the plug when John Morgan retired, the newer cast members never really fit in.

I'm not going to make excuses for terrorists, but some mention has to be made of the fact that terrorism is a common form of asymmetrical warfare. The Iraqi insurgents don't have the weapons to take the Americans on directly, so they place landmines and roadside bombs to attack armoured convoys. Since religion plays such a key role in the Bush Whitehouse and the military, Christian nationalism created the doctrine of American Exceptionalism that has led the U.S. on a disastrous mission of global domination, and has inspired a lot of the anti-american resentment that's expressed all over the world.

The Jim Pedan editorial makes a lot of unsubstantiated claims about the weather during the middle ages based on anecdotal reports from Europe. The Medieval Warm Period was a time of warm weather around 800-1300 AD during the European Medieval period. Initial research on the MWP and the following Little Ice Age (LIA) was largely done in Europe, where the phenomenon was most obvious and clearly documented. It was initially believed that the temperature changes were global [2]. However, this view has been questioned; the 2001 IPCC report summarises this research, saying "…current evidence does not support globally synchronous periods of anomalous cold or warmth over this time frame, and the conventional terms of 'Little Ice Age' and 'Medieval Warm Period' appear to have limited utility in describing trends in hemispheric or global mean temperature changes in past centuries".[3] The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) states that the "idea of a global or hemispheric "Medieval Warm Period" that was warmer than today however, has turned out to be incorrect" and that what those "records that do exist show is that there was no multi-century periods when global or hemispheric temperatures were the same or warmer than in the 20th century".[2] Indeed, global temperature records taken from ice cores, tree rings, and lake deposits, have shown that the Earth was actually slightly cooler (by 0.03 degrees Celsius) during the 'Medieval Warm Period' than in the early- and mid-20th century.[4] Palaeoclimatologists developing region-specific climate reconstructions of past centuries conventionally label their coldest interval as "LIA" and their warmest interval as the "MWP".[5][6] Others follow the convention and when a significant climate event is found in the "LIA" or "MWP" time frames, associate their events to the period. Some "MWP" events are thus wet events or cold events rather than strictly warm events, particularly in central Antarctica where climate patterns opposite to the North Atlantic area have been noticed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_warm_period http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/globalwarming/medieval.html So, who are we supposed to believe? The global warming skeptics pull out charts to make a case that the earth was warmer during the middle ages, but the NOAA and IPCC reports show the average temps are higher now than at any period in the last 2000 years.

Christianity in the U.S. is becoming less moderate and increasingly strident in an effort to control politics and culture. And there are apocalyptic preachers who are preaching that the end-time struggle is between Christianity and Islam (it used to be communism), so we may live to see Christianity become as aggressive and belligerent as Islam.

Leave it to Ray Comfort to point out the downside of living for the next life. Why look after this world when you can escape it all when you die? Ray believes the apocalypse is coming and he will be raptured away to heaven, so he's not going to worry about how many trees get cut down. The truth is that this world is the only one we can prove exists, so it would make more sense if believers in an afterlife valued this one a little more and didn't take it for granted.

So this is some sort of utilitarian argument! It's okay to take the law into your own hands as long as you only kill a few abortion doctors, nurses and clinic support staff. And I don't want to go to far down the abortion road, but you guys keep talking about abortion doctors as if they are the only ones who have been killed! And take note of the fact that the numbers would have been much higher if the aggressors were successful in all of their attacks: Since 1993, seven clinic workers – including three doctors, two clinic employees, a clinic escort, and a security guard – have been murdered in the United States.1 Seventeen attempted murders have also occurred since 1991.2 In fact, opponents of choice have directed more than 5,600 reported acts of violence against abortion providers since 1977, including bombings, arsons, death threats, kidnappings, and assaults, as well as more than 132,000 reported acts of disruption, including bomb threats and harassing calls.3 http://www.prochoiceamerica.org/assets/fil...on-Violence.pdf The common thread between pro-life activists and Islamic extremists is that each side has propagandists who advocate and try to incite mob violence. The mullahs who whip up the crowds in Palestine know that not every member of their congregation is going to become a jihad warrior, but they can count on a few joining terrorist training camps. Many churches get their crowds worked up with a doctrine that a fertilized egg is a human being with a soul, and stopping embryos and fetuses from coming to term is the same as murder. After a few sermons about the "holocaust of the unborn", some are moved to join groups like Operation Rescue, which protests at abortion clinics but officially denies connection to criminal acts committed against clinics. When a member of Operation Rescue is fully convinced by the rhetoric, that abortion doctors are murderers and no one is doing anything about it, they may be moved to take action, such as James Kopp - the killer of Dr. Bernard Slepian. And ofcourse Operation Rescue denies culpability because the assailant acted alone.........even though he was answering the call to take action against the murderers of unborn fetuses. The activists who incite violence, hide in the shadows and call these random acts of violence carried out by a tiny minority of extremists. To me, that sounds like the same pattern of thinking regardless of what the numbers are. Remember, with the ramped up rhetoric coming out of right wing churches that demonize everyone they consider unchristian, those numbers can only go up.

I used to hear these we're-still-not-as-bad-as-they-are arguments all the time when I was on an American conservative forum. Is it all a matter of numbers? As long as Muslims kill lots of people, it's okay to kill a few abortion doctors and nurses!

I became a little pessimistic about the odds of Islam being modernized when I read a little factoid in a biography of Sayyid Qutb, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood and the inspiration for many Islamic fundamentalists. Qutb came from a wealthy Egyptian family and lived in the United States during the late 1940's. It appears that he was offended by materialism, individual freedom, the "licentiousness" of American women and the "animal-like" mixing of the sexes! And this was in 1940, I guess he really would have blown a gasket if he stayed in America through the 60's and the sexual revolution! Qutb's successors don't appear to be any more open to modernizing their religion. But there are Christian nationalists who are trying to emulate Islam's growing power and influence. It's fascinating that the organizers of Jesus Camp would cite Hamas and Hezbollah training camps as an excuse to brainwash children into becoming the Christian version of jihad warriors.

That wasn't your post that I was responding to, I hadn't gotten around to it yet. I got held up by a recent published study about the Permian Extinction that cast doubt on a key prediction that hydrogen sulfide gas emitted by cyanobacteria in the stagnant oceans destroyed the ozone layer. Although David Beerling's computer simulations, published in National Geographic, maintains that both CO2 and methane levels were exceptionally high, and hydrogen sulfide levels in the oceans may have been high enough to poison the oceans. So it still would appear that the Great Dying was caused by the results of volcanic activity. Other scientists mentioned in the article say that something else must have caused the ozone levels to collapse, since unshielded ultraviolet light is considered to be the best explanation of mutated plant pollens found in rock samples from this period. So the general conditions may be agreed upon, but there is not enough information to establish the chain of events that occurred during the extinction. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/20...tinction_2.html So, the exact chain of events may still be up in the air, but the P/T Extinction still looks like the work of volcanic activity from the breakup of the Pangea supercontinent or the Siberian Traps. A thin layer of iridium found in 251 million year old rocks may be the residue of a large asteroid/comet impact, but most geologists rule it out as being large enough to have had a major impact on the earth's climate. http://www.geocities.com/goarana669/permianextinction.html

This is why a lot of people who believe there is a strong case for man-made climate change are pessimistic about the odds of a political solution. Kyoto wasn't worth the paper it was written on because India and China did not have to meet emission targets to get them to sign on to the deal. What good is this strategy if CO2 and methane emissions from "developing" nations are allowed to grow out of control?

Ward wasn't jumping on anybody's bandwagon when he started thinking that the P/T Extinction had an earthbound cause and was not caused by an asteroid or comet. When he started his investigation of late Permian rock layers and found evidence of sulphite-producing bacteria, he was looking for signs of an iridium layer that would serve as a telltale sign of a major impact. Since he was working for Luis and Walter Alvarez, who proposed the theory that the K/T Extinction was caused by an asteroid, he had to go against his bosses at the time, since they wanted him to look for evidence of an impact, not an extinction caused by climate change.

And as long as there is cheap gas and oil, there won't be any significant attempts to develope alternative energy sources!

I'll focus on this point since the others are going nowhere. If it was matter of wealth and cheap energy, Saudi Arabia would have the lowest birth rates in the world! Certainly living conditions in the developed world play a part in reducing family size - I can say from personal experience that there's no financial incentive to have children unless you're on welfare. But in the third world, the main factors are infant mortality and birth control. Once infant mortality rates begin to drop with access to medicine and clean drinking water, women start wanting to have fewer children. But if they're in Catholic and Muslim countries that put up the roadblocks to birth control and abortion, they have no choice over how many children to have and the birth rates continue to climb.

Listen to the man talk! His speeches over the last ten years are nothing but droning generalizations! He has never given the impression of having any grasp of complex policy issues and his political career is solely based on his war record - and that's not enough to make him a good president. America has already payed a heavy price for putting one dimwit in power, I doubt they'd be stupid enough to do it again! Well, if there was one glimmer of hope for John McCain and the Republicans, it's going up in smoke right now as the Surge Strategy collapses in the face of sectarian fighting between Shiite militias. The only reason McCain won the Republican nomination was because the drop in violence made him look like a genius for being first in line to advocate this strategy. I doubt McCain was well enough informed to be aware that the only reason it was working at all because the U.S. was buying off Sunni and Shiite militias to keep the peace. The ironic twist is that they supported the Iranian-backed Badr Brigades who make up most of the Iraqi security forces attacking Sadr's militia. http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/JC28Ak03.html How long did they expect this scam operation to work? Probably just long enough to get through the next election! But with things heating up in Iraq at a time when the U.S. has no choice but to start drawing down troop levels, McCain's only road to the presidency has been taken out also.

Sure, there's nothing new in his film, but the most important story about Wilder's film is how governments in Europe, Australia, (Canada will probably be soon to follow), are joining in the condemnations of his film; and the second most important story is the dog that's not barking - all of the recent newswire stories about Wilder's and condemnations of him, never mention that several Islamic groups are calling for his murder and Wilders is under 24 hour police protection. It's pretty hard for Western apologists to make a case that his film is alarmist and Islam is a religion of peace when they are actively trying to kill him! And since Dutch film-maker Theo Van Gogh was murdered for making a documentary for Ayan Hirsi Ali, the threats have to be taken seriously. Islamic and Arab leaders denounced a Dutch film Saturday that portrays Islam as a ticking time bomb aimed at the West, demanding international laws to prevent insults to religions. http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hvjTyyT...jX5pEgD8VNDF8G0 Considering how far European politicians are willing to bend over to appease their Muslim minorities, I wonder if they will give in this time to the Muslim World's demands for international blasphemy laws?