WIP

I think we not be viewing the U.S. as our "shield" in the future, as they become more and more focused on controlling the Arctic. In the decades to come, we are going to see millions of people flooding across the U.S. border as many areas like the Southwest dry out, while permafrost melts up north. It's easy to foresee how Canada gets trampled in the rush northward, as our water, open land, and untapped NNR's in the Arctic, become even more coveted by what's left of the American, Russian and Chinese empires.

Could you elaborate or try to develop that point? Perhaps with a few examples!

Some time back, there was an idiotic thread started in defense of sweatshops as some sort of market solution to production, but after making a quick search I didn't see anything on the forums yet about this sweatshop disaster in Bangladesh -- which cost the lives of more than 100 workers: Bangladesh fire kills 112 at Wal-Mart supplier Garment factory had received 'medium risk' assessment in 2011 Some labour activists have noticed the uncanny resemblance to the Triangle Waistshirt Fire disaster that occurred in New York City over a hundred years ago, and was considered to be the catalyst for the rise of organized labour. Which seems to have fallen back to Dickensian conditions in an era where the heirs of the Walmart fortune own more wealth than the poorest 40% of the U.S. population, while their barely minimum wage employees are payed so poorly, they can qualify for food stamps and Medicaid. I'm not sure what Walmart workers are getting here in Canada...but I can tell you from a few that I know, that Canadian conditions are only marginally better than state-side. I guess we just haven't deregulated and gutted workplace and health laws to U.S. levels....yet! But, over the last 30 years, as the Neoliberal disciples of Milton Friedman have argued for more free trade deals and more deregulation of capital and cheap imported goods, we have ended up where the most pessimistic opponents of free trade feared we would go: a world where capital is free to cross borders unconstrained by laws of any sort, and cut the costs of labour to the lowest common denominator. And lately, that lowest common denominator has been Bangladesh. Here, the pay is so low, the working conditions of people are so dismal, that clothing manufacturers have been motivated to close up their sweatshop operations in China, Indonesia and Vietnam, to make Bangladesh the major textile producer. The Tuesday episode of DemocracyNow features a background story of the reasons why conditions at the factory are so bad, and why Walmart's strategy of deniability cannot extricate their company from creating the system where production falls to the places where it can be done at the cheapest cost: http://www.democracy..._burned_clothes Harold Meyerson of the NY Times also has a good, indepth analysis of the Fire and its greater significance. It's too bad that aside from a brief 'oh yeah, there was a big fire in Bangladesh' reference, most of the mainstream media has already ignored the story and especially what it says about how business is done. On the DemocracyNow telecast, in closing, the Bangladeshi labour activist - Kalpona Akter responded, when asked what U.S. consumers could do to encourage reform: The consumers can play a big role because they are the most powerful player in the supply chain. They can make accountable these brands and make them bound to make change on the ground where workers are making clothes for these Western brands. These consumers group can raise their voice and they should raise their voice and ask these factories — sorry, ask these Western brands that they wanted to know more, more about the working conditions of the workers who are making clothes for them, and also, why to be sure that these workers are paying living wage, these workers are having a better life, better working condition, and safe working place. They can play a really, really vital role, and this is my urge to the U.S. consumers, that, please, be accountable and make responsible to your brands and ask them to make change in the ground. So, what will you buy for Christmas this year? And where will you buy it?

I have no doubts that Israel is the forward base of operations for the U.S. most of the time, but as I've mentioned previously, I'm not a fan of colonial empires to begin with. The U.S. is not going to be able to afford the economic and resource costs of empire for much longer; so these policies are going to change, one way or another.

I've mentioned elsewhere that I think U.S. foreign (including military) policy puts securing access to oil as priority #1, and Israel is a friend, and will support U.S. interests as long as they get what they need and want, so they can be the regional superpower in the Middle East. When it comes to the moves against Iran over the last 5 to 10 years, this might be an example of where Israel's objectives are not in America's interests; since, the risk that Iran could retaliate quick enough to destroy Saudi and Gulf State oil terminals, ships and even oil wells themselves, is quite significant. And, if the Persian Gulf was shut down for any length of time, that would be a disaster for the U.S., Europe and Asia, as oil prices really take off. Israel's oil requirements are much less in comparison. It also needs to be mentioned that a lot of the foot-dragging by the Bush and Obama Administrations regarding Israel's and Saudi Arabia's insistence that the U.S. start the war, just comes out of the fact that America is an empire that stretched itself too far in declaring wars on Iraq and Afghanistan, and forwarding the costs as future debt. Even 2nd term Bush had no taste for yet another war....and that may be why so many of the Neocons were shown the door and Dick Cheney had his role downsized as well.

If you want to go to the extremes of philosophical idealism, we could really be stuck in tubes that take care of our necessary physical requirements, while all of the sensory input reaching our brains is created by a complex supercomputer -- if The Matrix says that's what's really being done, try and prove them wrong! Seriously, maybe idealism has a point that our minds cannot prove anything to be absolutely real...and unfortunately for Rene Descartes, that includes our inner space as well, since modern neuroscience is putting together a portrait of a complex physical machine that generates our sense of conscious awareness, decision-making, and sense of being a permanent self. Studies of brain function - especially abnormal brain function leads to the unsettling conclusion that all of these things are self illusions created so that a complex brain can function in a unified manner. But, when it comes to deciding what is true or likely to be true, all we have to base claims of objectivity on, are predictability and regularity (we can trust gravity until we see something fall upwards), and that objects exist if they are described in the same way by other minds (which we also assume to exist). So, if I look up and see and hear a plane flying overhead, I'm going to assume that I can trust my sensory experience until I meet people who don't see or hear what I am experiencing. And, when it comes to learning about what exists and how things work, the scientific method is proven more reliable than religious revelation.

I only wish politicians cross-referenced their policy decisions with science, instead of religion and political expediency. Maybe we wouldn't have ended up with a cynical Machiavellian politician like Harper, putting a young earth creationist clown in charge of science and technology!

I have heard the evolution "within kinds" offered up before. It's the fallback position that many creationists started taking as the numbers of species who cannot interbreed just got too large. There are estimated to be 350,000 and 400,000 different species of beetles now, in four sub orders. So, offering up an explanation that all species of beetles arose from an original pair might make the job easier....until the question is asked: how did we end up with so many different kinds of beetles today? But, if you've decided to cut loose The Flood, and all of the land animals being taken onboard an ark as allegory, why not offload the rest of the creationism? I noticed a link had already been posted to a Christian site where an author has produced a paper that he claims resolves a lot of the claims about the biblical reference to 'kinds;' may as well see if that satisfies as a way to get religion up to date with science.

I think I might have seen that awhile back too. I guess it is explained as an example of emergence, but it certainly is uncanny order arises out of chaos.

All these playthings put on display over the last few posts, are another reminder that the combined U.S. military forces need to consume as much oil in a year as Sweden.....and, the fact that the U.S. has been a net importer of oil since the first oil crisis of 1973, tells us why U.S. foreign policy is focused first on where the oil is in the rest of the world, and what the U.S. Government needs to do to ensure continued access to that oil.

And those are the costs of empire! Here you are bitching about extremist Muslims all the time, and it was the American foreign policy of supporting the Saud family, starting in the 1930's, which got it all started in the first place. And it was all about exercising control over the oil. But that still doesn't show me how Israel is a friend....especially when they try to incite the U.S. to go to war.

And, I finally got around to watching the video! There's nothing new here that I wasn't already aware of, although I was a little irritated by the speed the narrator was talking at. Why didn't he just slow down and make a 15 minute video instead? It's more likely that theists might pay attention if a guy isn't speaking like he's running an auction or something! Anyway, back to the video. He's presenting the "weak" atheist position - that atheism only describes lack of belief in deity, as opposed to strong atheism, or positive atheism, wherein a few will claim to be able to prove the non-existing of a deity, or that the conditions in which a god is proposed to exist, are logically inconsistent. One thing the video doesn't deal with is that most religions are a combination of a set of doctrinal beliefs and a code of ethics, religious practices, and rituals. I have met more than a few Jews in my life, who are essentially atheists, but still follow the ritual observances of Judaism. Also worth noting is that being an atheist, leaves a void to fill in many aspects of life, and most atheists fill the gap in different ways, depending on their own individual needs and desires. Most atheists have come from some religion or other, and take interest in developing a satisfying naturalistic understanding of the world after they come to a decision that they are not going to find answers in the supernatural realm. But, there are atheists who just decided something like:'I don't believe in anything I can't see myself' and have little or no interest in developing that thought any further. And, if atheism just describes a lack of belief, can or should atheists even bother to try to organize around atheism? My views on almost everything aside from the supernatural are totally at odds with a lot of conventional atheist thinkers...who predominantly are believers in assumption that we have entered an era of endless progress. When we get to absurd levels, we get the technology worshippers like the Transhumanists or the related belief in The Singularity, where the promise of immortality is achieved through scientific means, rather than religious faith. I can't even accept the faith that libertarian atheists have in capitalism and techno-optimism, let alone this stuff.

Or go to one of the zillion threads where it's already the topic of conversation.

Aside from the obvious fact that this is not the Muslim-bashing thread, we should not "keep an eye on the Islamic countries," we should leave them alone and stop trying to control the oil-supplying ones for the benefit of our oil industry. Whatever they're doing in their countries, let them decide how to deal with it themselves and stop meddling!

How much does Israel really cost the U.S.? http://www.ifamericansknew.org/stats/cost_of_israel.html

For all of your condemnation of atheism, I can't help to notice that you are in close alliance with atheists who share your American exceptionalism and animosity towards Muslims. Is this something you learned from Christian teaching?

Yes, the Freedom From Religion foundation in particular, spends way too much time, energy and money on things that are of little or no consequence. And I suspect that a lot of the wealthiest and most powerful religious leaders view that as a benefit, because it's a convenient whipping boy to get their troops to rally against. If FFRF was spending more time investigating church sex and tax scandals, they would be doing something far more productive with their time. Careful how you use that word "WE." My central point is that a lot of atheists...especially the ones who are motivated to join atheist and humanist clubs, are just as inclined to make the common assumption that 'all minds think alike,' which all of the purveyors of various sects and self help cures are prone to do. You do not need religion, and I don't need religion, but it's a mistake to assume that the progress of modern civilization is going to continue on its present track and make the need for religion obsolete. And religion is quite a large grab bag of different things for people to reach for. A few...especially converts, may be joining a religion for doctrinal reasons; but a lot of people, even in the most fundamentalist churches, don't seem to pay a whole lot of attention to the actual messages being preached....I guess that's why so many evangelical preachers feel the need to shout...they may have started going to that evangelical fundamentalist church in spite of the lectures on creationism and why sex is bad...most of the time...they may be there because they were part of a targeted demographic like 30 something parents of young children, and joined. Of course, many of those people end up leaving after their children have grown. I'll grant that fundamentalism is a problem, especially when they start fighting with each other. But, the big change in secular humanism over the last 10 years has been the move away from alliances with religious progressives, towards castigating reform-minded religious folk as being equally delusional and mere enablers of the fundamentalists. I don't see anything of value in this approach, and it will likely end up making little atheist/humanist clubs as the non-religious equivalent to fundamentalist churches...with little capacity to engage or influence others outside the group.

Let me just say that if you never read anything about the Middle East from a non-zionist source, you'll never know the difference between truth, plausible explanation and outright lies....because your post is chock full of them.

What's not being debated by real scientists is that evolutionary changes to plants and animals has led to the present diversity of life on Earth. As I mentioned previously, there were evolutionary theories prior to Darwin that started because of the need for a theory to explain diversity -- especially the geographic diversity of life....and having all of the animals walk out of a boat two-by-two couldn't do the job any more! Aside from the obvious motivation to adhere to religious tradition, the main reason why creationist thinking still persists, is the same reason why belief in spirits, ghosts and enchanted objects still persist: they appeal to our natural intuitions of essentialism...which in the case of plants and animals and people, would lead us to expect that every person and living creature has their own unique inner essence that is timeless and unchanging. And, there is also the natural intuition of assuming that the way things are at present, that's the way things always have been. Critical thinking trumps intuition when it comes to gaining real insight. Back to your agenda-driven source which is so highly motivated to try to knock down or discourage interest in any evolutionary theory; I want to focus on this part of the underlined portion, because they apply the common appeal to ignorance -- something yet to be documented is implied to mean cannot be proven. And notice the choice of adjectives to try to cast a sense of doubt: I haven't read the whole piece, but this statement early on jumped out at me because of the attempt to narrowly frame the debate to try to win an argument. Similar to the common refrain from I.D. theory about the enormous probabilities against a DNA molecule arising from random chemical interactions in amino acids. 'All evolutionary theories must offer an explanation in mechanistic terms of how it should or could have happened in order to be tested." What they are demanding right from the outset is a reductionist explanation, which may or may not even be applicable. The point behind symbiotic theory, multilevel selection theories of E.O. Wilson and David Sloan Wilson is that they are looking for means to transfer information that aren't completely reducible to little mechanistic parts. Among entomologists like the Wilsons, the complex social behaviour and planning displayed by colony insects cannot be explained in reductionist terms, due to the obvious intellectual limitations of an ant, bee or termite's brains. But, yet they somehow divide up labour, perform coordinated actions without any central organization in charge of them. Somehow, it all works together, and most of the reasons why are still a mystery. And, the debates between Sloan Wilson and Neo-Darwinists like Richard Dawkins get way too technical for me to get anything out of them, but the dispute is largely because of colony behaviour that Wilson cannot accept genes as the sole mechanism of evolutionary change. Some of explanations are of emergent phenomena....similar to how a few simple rules enable a giant flock of birds to fly together without bumping in to one-another, and to turn almost in unison - before an actual command to turn could be communicated through the flock....but, just as in explaining how mind arises from brain function, not everyone is satisfied by reductionist explanations! So, you can't pretend every scientist is Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, and that there are no other theories besides creationism.

I hear different, conflicting theories about who is actually in control of the U.S./Israel partnership, but one thing that cannot be denied is that if the supply of arms was cut off by the U.S., it would be the end of Israel projecting military power....these new missiles and planes are expensive! No kidding!

As an atheist, I am disturbed by all of the atheists who trash religion without trying to understand why religious beliefs, rituals and gatherings are important to most people. A lot of activist atheists (especially online) seem to be reckless nihilists who just want to destroy, without thinking about what they would put in its place.

Like they say:"it's easy to cheer for the home team." If you look at a lot of these issues like Israel/Palestine from outside North America....even from European sources, they are far more likely to include some of the necessary context, like who is armed to the teeth and who is not; and did Israel deliberately sabotage opportunities for peace because they (starting with the Likud Governments) got greedy and decided they wanted all of the former Palestine Mandate for themselves. The two nation - type of deals were actually a possibility before all of the West Bank settlements started during the 70's. Even when Anwar Sadat and Jimmy Carter were working together on a deal, Menachem Begin stabbed them in the back and started building new settlements....just like his successor - Netanyahu is doing right now. It's also worth noting that Hamas would never have risen to power if it wasn't secretly supported by the Israeli Government back in the 80's as a means to divide Palestinians, and prevent the PLO from doing what the ANC was in the process of doing in South Africa...one of Israel's few allies at the time btw. So, the thorn in the side they created for Yasser Arafat, turned into a monster that threatens them now. And that's why these issues have to be put into a wider context than who shot first. Hamas may be an adversary that cannot be dealt with in a civil manner now, but if Israel is in an endless struggle with an enemy they have to keep prisoner under occupation, they have themselves to blame also, for deciding to seek advantage several decades ago, rather than offer a plausible peace agreement. Right now, it might be too late to do anything about it, but my position on this issue is why should we be dragged into it by a Prime Minister who genuflects to U.S. foreign policy?

If some group's perspectives are not included, then it is not objective even at the start, in the data-gathering process. Aside from the obvious ones, like the tendency to consider wars and military campaigns the most important things to write down, and the obvious fact that during those wars, the losers don't get the same chance to make their contributions to history, there are other examples Another good example today would be how to consider the native oral histories from people who did not have written languages until modern times. Euro-centric historians just assumed that oral histories are heresay and would not use them; but psychologists who study illiterate people tell us that someone who does not know how to read or write has much greater wrote memory abilities than literate people, who don't have the same need to remember because they can just refer to written notes. So, at least in recent centuries, oral histories appear to be much more accurate than previously expected, and often more accurate about historical events, including natural disasters, than many of the early written records of the time.

Not if creatures A and B had evolved into that symbiotic relationship, which was Lynn Margulis's point about mitochondria in eukaryote cells. The mitochondria began as a fully functioning, separate organism, but found the cooperative relationship working as the energy converting power plant within a more complex cell to be a better option. Symbiosis explained an evolutionary adaptation through cooperation, rather than competition - the constant focus of most biologists.

I lived in an area within close proximity to the Niagara Gorge - where water erosion of the last 12,000 years has revealed alternating layers of sedimentary rock. The lowest layers of the gorge...estimated to be 300 million years old, have a few exposed trilobite fossils....ever see one of them down by the seashore lately? No, and that's because they flourished during a time that has long past in the deep recesses of earth history. If creationism was true, we wouldn't find layer upon layer of sedimentary rock underground, and the fossils revealed would not display plants and animals specific to the geologic eras in which they were layed down.....but they do...hence the problem for young earth creationists trying to explain anything about the world....and that's why they don't bother, and don't want their children pursuing the earth sciences as career goals.