WIP

I wouldn't mind hearing more about it; from what I heard, listening to a recorded lecture, it might not necessarily be because of Jupiter, but without asteroid or comet debris coming through, inner, rocky planets close to the sun, would not retain enough light elements during the evolution of a solar system like ours to have water or a significant atmosphere. Jupiter's most important function seems to be this vacuum cleaner effect, where it sucks in alot of space debris that might otherwise find its way to Earth. Part of the Rare Earth Hypothesis is the conjecture that such a planet is necessary to keep an inner planet that is a suitable candidate for complex life free from continual asteroid bombardments. I'm going to have to scratch that one until I can find the source. I can't find it in my documents, and all I found yesterday online were articles on how nebular clouds form solar systems; I'm not finding what I'm looking for, and I'm not sure whether the point about our solar system migrating outward was based on rigorous study. I'm assuming that the astrophysicist who made this point, had reasons why he feels heavy elements are not normally going to be in great abundance in the Galactic Habitable Zone, but I don't know what it was based on and assumed that there was some supporting evidence for it. I recall reading many places that the first generation of giant stars provided most of the heavy elements in the Universe. Is there a question about how evenly they're distributed within galaxies such as our own? Would a solar system forming closer to the galactic center be in a denser region of space, with greater opportunities to absorb heavy elements from the remains of supernovas, than one coming together further out in a more outlying region of the galaxy? I notice the abstract covers the formation of accretion discs, and argues that planets could form around each star without being interfered with by the binary companion. Maybe I need pictures for an example like this, because I'm still wondering whether a second sun is going to make close passes and irradiate planets circling the other star. I heard that arsenic life was badly misrepresented in the press conference sponsored by NASA: Doubts Brew About NASA’s New Arsenic Life. Nevertheless, the main point made by the Rare Earth Hypothesis is that simple one-celled life can live under much greater environmental extremes than more complex, multicellular organisms. There is evidence for bacteria on Earth as far back as 3.7 billion years ago, yet it takes almost another 2 billion years before the Earth is ready for more complex life forms. So, it might be easy to find life elsewhere in the Universe; but the big question will be - can we find worlds that are perfectly arranged to support an abundance of complex multicellular life which could give rise to intelligent life?

Are you just carping about welfare mothers, or are you going to advocate cutting off support?

At the time, my job went south to Alabama when the auto upholstery factory I was working it, packed up and moved south in search of cheaper labour. Eventually they moved production to Mexico, and if they're still in business, they're probably in China or Indonesia. So, I can understand how auto workers in Michigan felt when production was shifted to Ontario and Quebec to take advantage of our lower dollar and cheaper benefits courtesy of government health insurance.

Whoever this "Charles Price" is, what happens when he becomes the next big-time evangelist to be taken down in a sex scandal?

Great! I'll buy him a ticket. It's not hypocrisy to have a different moral position on when the rights of a fetus should interfere with the personal rights of the woman who has the real-life task of pregnancy and childbirth. And most people are sensible enough to realize this even after 40 years or so of constant bombardment of propaganda from a number of churches and church-sponsored organizations.

And isn't this the same guy who's often pushing religious crap on other threads? How does the Christian Right square that circle of New Testament ethics...especially the outright socialism among the disciples described in the Book of Acts...with their worship of greed and accumulated wealth? And, like you said, they're running the world now. Here we are living in a time when artificial persons (corporations) have taken on all of the rights of real living persons, plus immortality, the ability to swallow up smaller corporations to get larger, and move our jobs out of the country, while they import the same product back into Canada and the U.S., and self-deluded fools who call themselves conservatives or libertarians want to throw the doors open further and totally dismantle all government oversight of corporate power, along with social programs! The rise of corporate power has coincided with the decline in income of 98% of the population; yet it seems like there are more than 2% out there who want to do even more for our corporate masters at our expense!

And I'm not! So, when can I expect him to make good on his trip to Switzerland? So the only arrow in the quiver of the conservative moral relativist is abortion! I have my beliefs on when a fetus is far enough along to justify state intervention into a woman's personal rights....and I want to underline that fact that every rightwing loon who starts waving the bloody shirt about abortion, is talking about government intervention....but what you call a baby (everything from fertilized egg up) is not what I define as a baby, so there's no point to starting yet another abortion debate on the subject. The only reason why you mention abortion is because you have no doubt noticed how important it is among the crazy religious brethren of the conservative movement; I can't believe, based on your lack of concern for children dying in third world countries, or living in poverty at home, that you really give a !@#$ about the abortion issue on a personal level.

That's for sure. It's been awhile since there has been any mention of the fact that the only reason why the Tucson Shooter was able to kill and maim so many people, was because his gun had a magazine that carried 30 bullets. Part of the assault weapons ban was a restriction on gun clips to a maximum of 10 bullets; and it was allowed to expire in 2004. So, now that Democratic and Republican politicians are so concerned about their safety, why aren't they discussing gun control measures that the vast majority of Americans want returned? Even the majority of NRA members support the ban on the 30 bullet magazine....but then again, the NRA gets most of its money from weapons manufacturers, not gun owners!

Well, now what it is is a failing empire, and I don't give automatic, unquestioned support to any leader, regardless of nation or ideology....but then, maybe I was never meant to be part of the conservative movement to begin with, since I'm not an authoritarian. If they are found guilty of warcrimes, they should! Same goes with executives of Canadian-based corporations like Talisman, that have been actively supporting regimes such as Sudan's, which was guilty of mass genocide.....but then, I'm not a moral relativist. And you've got this backwards also! Children do not come into this world with a built-in concern for others. They have to be taught this, along with learning through simple trial and error, the problems associated with being selfish. It's more likely that these self-absorbed corporate leaders and megalomaniac politicians that you worship, are the ones who are childish, since they have no core principles....and realpolitik is just a more sophisticated and pleasant sounding phrase than nihilist.

That change could have come 30 years earlier at least if America wasn't bankrolling a regime that brutally suppressed its population. That might be an actual rebuttal if I ever title a thread "our Prime Minister is right" or "Michael Ignatieff is right."

This movie came out around the time I was noticing a takeover of sorts of conservative media, forums and message boards in the U.S. by the religious right. The first time I joined a discussion forum was Ann Coulter's chat forum after released her foray into god-talk - "Godless" in June 2006...in which she came out as a creationist. You couldn't even find the word "God" or "evolution" mentioned before in most of her columns and books, and all of a sudden she's trying to talk like an evangelical. Since then, we have learned that the anti-evolution crap in that book was ghost-written by guys at the Discovery Institute, and she wasn't even a member of any church at the time of writing....so why did she, and some of the more sensible, reasoned voices on the right start sounding like loony evangelicals about five or six years ago? I presume it has something to do with the fact that they foresaw the Religious Right becoming the dominant special interest in Republican politics, and wanted to get on the gravy side before it was too late. By the time Jesus Camp came out, Coulter's forum had become overrun with Jesus-talk and abortion, so they declared it to be a smear campaign against their movement. Anyone who disagreed was pretty much sandbagged and either left or was forced out. Many rightwingers like to lump all Muslims together when they talk about a suicide attack or a public stoning going on somewhere in the Muslim World, but the same logic could apply when considering the crazy Jesus Camp. These people aren't a "tiny minority of extremists" either! Their camp was part of an organization sanctioned by the National Association of Evangelicals.....remember Ted Haggard's appearance? They were just a little bit more upfront about their narrow ideology and their goal of raising an army of "Christian warriors."

Pretty damn hypocritical I'd say! Especially since U.S. conservatives are using terms such as "constitutional republic" and representative republic to describe their own nation, since they are in actual fact authoritarians....not believers in democracy. Democracy is a catch-phrase to use to justify invading a foreign country. Conservatives have no interest in real democracy at home, or among allied puppet states because democracies may do things their leaders don't approve of....such as begin legal proceedings to bring war crimes charges against George Bush and Dick Cheney! Let's see your hero go to Switzerland and find out what sort of reception he will get....if he's such a decider. I guess using the phrase "Economics trumps virtue." as a byline, means you have no standard to make moral judgments in the first place; so anyone would be wasting effort trying to explain to you the hypocrisy of deliberately suppressing democratic movements in support of puppet dictators and in the Saudi's case - puppet kings. Before you started a thread titled "Bush was right" you should have checked around to see what Bush, Cheney, McCain, Romney, or any other leading Republican was saying. Why didn't you start this thread before Mubarak was forced to resign?

Even you should be able to detect the pure hypocrisy here, since Bush, nor any other American president had any interest in seeing democracy land in Egypt or any other MiddleEastern state. And the fact that America has worked behind the scenes using the CIA to overthrow democratically elected governments in Central America (hiring narco-traffickers to do the dirty work), so how much credibility does Bush or any other modern American president have talking about democracy?

I'll give you one point of concern: there is a hell of a lot more money involved in running for office (even in Canada, judging by Conservative pre-campaign advertising) than there was years ago. The politicians are owned by their corporate benefactors, and if the majority of people are disappointed by how their chosen candidate acts after assuming office, the joke is on them! Reforming politics cannot get off the ground until something is done about taking back some of the extraordinary advantages that corporations have gained in recent decades. The political system works by everyone having an equal vote, whereas the business system gives the majority of votes to whoever owns the majority of shares; these two systems are naturally at odds with each other, and allowing corporations to grow in size, wealth, and legal rights, has dramatically degraded the wealth and rights of the average citizen. Let's see if he's able to pull it off again! Right now, the progressive left in the United States is badly divided between those who decided early that Obama was a sellout....Thom Hartmann and Cenk Uygur, come to mind, and there has been a steady trickle of disillusioned leftwing pundits and bloggers over the last two years, vs. the professional left, which would consist of Center For American Progress, Daily Kos, some liberal radio hosts like Stephanie Miller etc. who are still telling their people that they must remain steadfast, even as their candidate is cutting home-heating subsidies to the poor, because liberals must unite behind the best of two bad options. Let's see how many young people are burning up the internet this time around! There is a rumour that the Obama Campaign is going to try to raise an unprecedented one billion dollars for 2012. That explains the continued sucking up to corporate interests and bashing the poor; but if Obama is re-elected in 2012, it will likely be because of the increasing incompetency and divisions on the right, rather than any real grassroots campaign to keep Obama in Office. You know, you really ought to pay attention to why the most aggressive Christian Evangelicals...who believe everyone who is not "saved" through the blood of Jesus Christ goes to hell....and that includes Jews, would have so much concern, and want to do so much for Israel. These Christian Zionists have done a lot of the bankrolling for building new settlements on the West Bank and other occupied territories. I can think of one reason, and one reason only why there is even such a thing as a Christian Zionist Movement: they believe that an aggressive Israel is fulfilling Bible Prophecy. But, to fulfill all of the prophecy, Israel has to be invaded during the End Times and have one third of its population killed...I guess this presumes that the two thirds survivors convert to Christianity when Jesus all of a sudden appears! Personally, these are not the kind of allies I would want having too much influence over what's going on in my country! Many Israeli liberals and moderates point out the Christian Right as a major stumbling block to any attempt to reach a peace agreement, since they support the most radical Israeli groups and Likud politicians like Netanyahu, are deliberately playing to them to keep sending money and keep leaning on the U.S. Government to support whatever policies the Israeli Government comes up with. One thing we have to be concerned about in Canada, is that our economic and foreign policy is tied up with U.S. Policy, and the empire-building that Eisenhower warned against is reaching the point of collapse. Many empires in the past have collapsed under an unsustainable debtload, the United States looks like it will soon join the club....and where does this leave Canada?

I think most people would be better off if they would come to terms with the nature of our existence instead of creating fantasies about living forever. I'm not convinced that a lot of people even believe it that strongly....otherwise they wouldn't have to keep working so hard to try to convince themselves of it! Modern understanding of brain function informs us that the brain is responsible for everything we attribute to having a mind...there simply is no room for an immaterial soul to have any function or purpose. Consciousness is better understood as a process, than as a thing. The best explanation for animals having a capacity for consciousness is that it enables planning coordinated action, and from inputs received from the proprioceptor system, we develop a sense of concern and ownership for our bodyparts, which extends to a wish to preserve our existence forever if possible! Most people who have time to prepare for eventual death are able to come to terms and be at peace with themselves...and it makes no difference whether they believe in immortality or not...at some point they learn to let go, and it can often be more difficult at first for the people who claim to believe in souls and heaven, than it is for naturalists who make an earlier start at getting accustomed to the temporary nature of being alive.

In a nutshell, the reason why this case of reverse racism has little, if any merit is because racism practiced by a majority that is in control of most of the wealth, along with the levers of political power, is much more of an existential threat than the racism practiced by a disenfranchised minority....and the same answer applies to whatever example of reverse racism you find. What I find extraordinary, is that these American rightwingers point at the isolation and hostility of Arab and Muslim minorities in Europe, without even bothering to examine the cultural baggage, such as how these immigrants from Africa and the Middle East were viewed and taken advantage of when Europe started bringing in immigrants for cheap labour back in the 60's. A non-white can never be a Frenchman in the eyes of most French...regardless of the bullshit Sarkozy comes up with...same goes in Germany, Holland, Belgium, and in the case I am a little familiar with - England and Scotland. My Scottish relatives didn't start hurling abuse and randomly assaulting South Asians when they first arrived in Glasgow because they were Muslims...they had no idea what religion they were; all they knew was that they were wogs and pakis. So, why can't American conservative observers learn these simple facts of modern European history? They should at least be curious as to why Muslim communities in Canada and the United States are more prosperous and integrated into the larger communities than Muslims in Europe. You would think that would be enough to go on for them to at least be curious why Europe has such strained relations with their Muslim immigrants today.

I didn't have time to post a comment on your thread about the small planet discoveries; but my thinking on this is that a rocky, earth-sized planet is not enough to make it a candidate for life....or at least for complex life. In Peter Ward/Donald Brownlee's book - Rare Earth, they throw a little cold water on the belief in a Universe teeming with life, by pointing out all of the extraordinary coincidences that have had to occur to make life possible on this planet. One being that not only is the Earth in the right place to be in a habitable zone around our Sun, but early in the formation of the Solar System, Jupiter and other gas giant planets had to pitch lots of water-bearing comets and asteroids at us to provide the water that make up our oceans. Otherwise, we wouldn't have the water that makes life necessary, because our Earth was too close to the Sun to have a significant amount of water. Other coincidences are that our Solar System began in an orbit much closer to the galactic center, and then, for reasons unknown migrated outward to its present location. Solar systems that form in the Galactic Habitable Zone do not have the heavy elements necessary for organic chemistry...and life. Ward and Brownlee get some flak from the extraterrestrial life positivists like Seth Shostak for discounting binary and multiple star solar systems that make up the majority of solar systems, as candidates for life. Their argument is that the extra stars make planetary orbits too volatile....I don't know enough about the physics involved to decide who's right here. They also cross off tidally locked planets, like that one that caused all of the excitement last year. I think they have a strong case here since a tidally locked world would have such a limited zone where life would even be possible, even after consider the extreme winds that theorists say would be buffeting such planets, if they contain atmospheres. But, when it's all said and done, I'm totally baffled why creationists prefer a vast, empty universe to a star trek universe with lots of life! If there is a creator making living creatures, why just one planet in a universe more than 13.7 billion light years across? The creationist stories are based on mythology created about three thousand years ago that envisioned a flat, circular Earth with a metal ceiling suspending stars from it....and above that was where God and the angels lived. Trying to place that square peg into the round hole of what's been learned from modern astrophysics requires some extraordinary mental gymnastics I suppose.

The legal system is just one more example of why the notion of a level playing field is a total fiction. Money buys the best education, the best tax shelters, a home in the best neighbourhood, and as noted - money also buys the most optimal court settlement. If you have the money, you can afford to hire an army of lawyers to keep the courts busy.

You could be right; but people in the public eye should be a little more careful about where they get their ideas from.

Here come the Neocons with their false equivalency! How about the duty of Canada, the U.S. and Israel to allow Egypt to become a democracy instead of any continued efforts to try to maintain their strategy of propping up the local despot? Oh, and why is that? For your information, the Colonial Empires never left Africa....or Latin America, or Asia etc.. The only difference today is that instead of installing political colonial governments, the standard operating procedure is to install the useful despot, who will keep the populace in order providing he gets generous kickbacks from the multinational corporations that remove natural resources to be shipped off to Western markets. If Africa is largely bereft of competent self-governments, the invisible hand of globalization is a large reason why. Just as with Egypt and Tunisia, the prime objective of U.S. foreign policy is to support stable, reliable regimes regardless of how they deal with the locals. Excused by who? Strawman alert! Are you whining because Israel is criticized for expanding settlements in territories gained through warfare, and the U.S. is criticized for indescriminately killing civilians, using torture, extraordinary rendition, and other human rights abuses? Or are you claiming that suicide bombings don't receive condemnation? The hypocrisy is on your side. We are taking a hit courtesy of the oil/gas/coal lobby, which collects billions in capital cost allowance and other tax incentives, while making sure that any money spent for alternative energy development gets labeled as an unproductive burden on taxpayers. Right now, China is buying up new technology for wind power, and advanced solar cells, and when we have to shift to alternative energy, we will have to buy that from China also, thanks to your friends in the oil industry! He's opposing Kyoto because he's a lapdog of the tar sands interests, and he's shifted the traditional Canadian Mid East position from honest broker to lapdog for whatever the Israeli Government wants to do. Both criticisms are more than justified.

Look up "pluripotent" and add the ability to reproduce indefinitely, and you'll have your answer why adult stem cell research is limited in comparison. And "aborted babies" was the biggest bullshit red-herring story that the anti-science mob concocted in the last ten years. Fertility clinics across the U.S. have (as of three years ago) more than half a million frozen fertilized eggs that are left over after the best eggs are chosen for baby-making. But the imbeciles who believe these frozen embryos are babies, refused to allow these eggs (most of which will not develop) to be used for stem cell research. So, they get left indefinitely in cold storage and end up useless for any purpose.

If we're going to have a special section for great guitar solos, here's my nomination: Steve Hackett of Genesis; this must have been from when he went solo in the late 70's. The band here features John Wetton on bass - who played in many prog rock bands from King Crimson to Asia, and Genesis's touring drummer - Chester Thompson....don't know who the other guys are....doesn't matter! This vid is taken from Hackett's guitar solo in the middle of Firth Of Fifth: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xW_7YyKawbw&feature=related

Why is Dawkins running around using this line like it's his idea? I've heard him use that many times since he first went on the publicity tour for the God Delusion; and I've never heard him give an attribution to someone else.

She never answers any of my questions, why should you feel special?

I love the RudePundit. You call his stuff vile, while you read the crap that Ann Coulter spews forth. Coulter would probably love to use profanity also, but Human Events and other places that feature her columns probably have rules against such things. But, you can use RudePundit's language as an excuse to avoid the fact that his sources are verified!