Rev Blair

Why would we corner them? The reality is that their culture is being undermined every day and eventually they won't have a corner to be cornered in. Talk to some people from Iran some day. Women wear the minimum required by law...a small hat, calf-length skirt etc. if they choose. They look a lot like women did here in the 1950s. They work too. The pro-democracy movement, which would be much further along if it wasn't for us in the west, is growing every day. Some of that is driven by an extremely vibrant press. Sure they have to deal with censorship and sometimes they go to jail, but the reality is that the press in Iran plays the role of the fourth estate much more vibrantly than the corporate-owned press in North America does. They have resisted attempts to shut them down. The Iranian people might live under an oppressive regime, but there is a growing middle class and that middle class isn't terribly happy with being led by a bunch of religious fanatics. A lot of them remember what happened in the 1950s when they tossed the Brits out though, and how the US installed and propped up the Shah. They understand that Khomeini built his power base at least partially on the fact that the US didn't want real democracy in Iran. Worse yet, a lot of them feel that, as bad as things are there now, things were worse under the Shah. That leaves the religious leadership and their sock puppets on the political side on pretty shaky ground. They will disappear eventually if we just sit and wait. We can exert some quiet pressure through the international community, but to go storming in making threats isn't going to work. The one thing that will bring a halt to the slow growth of the democracy movement in Iran is attacking the country or even backing them into a corner. Leave them alone...they are contained and they understand that they are contained. I think he's likely more religious than he lets on. I have some experience with coke fiend alcoholics who cured their addictions by finding one god or another. They fall back on magical thinking pretty quickly when under stress, but learn to hide it among secularists just like they used to hide their addictions in polite company. Still, we know about the prayer meetings in the White House. We know that he's invited other world leaders to kneel and pray with him. We know how faith-based initiatives have proliferated under him. We know how stem cell research has been hurt. We know the global gag order is back on. We know that he said that god wanted him to be president. Think about some of the less-considered implications of that as well. Just using global warming as an example.... How can somebody who believes the earth is 6,000 years old believe in global warming? The greenhouse theory is deeply entwined with evolutionary theory, after all. I don't know if Bush is capable of understanding that, but the fundamentalist preachers who pray with him in the White House are. So he's getting bad advice from two sides...his oil company buddies and his preachers.

That's very true, gerrymandering would become meaningless at that point. It would give you 6,000 people sitting in the House though, plus their staffs. That's a lot of salaries. Plus you'll have to draft a whole lot more unpaid pages and volunteers, and most of them get at least some of their living expenses covered in one way or another. Then there are all of the incidental costs...office space, travel costs, expense account bourbon. It would drive the cost of elections through the roof too. I'm not convinced the people of the US are going to want to pick up the tab for that. The mechanics of holding a vote of representatives would be nightmarish too. Every one of them would have a right to speak if they wanted, so contentious issues would bring the whole body to a standstill. Then just calling the rollcall for a vote would become so unwieldy that it would collapse under its own weight. I am a big believer in representation by population, with checks and balances added later to achieve representation of the people instead of the special interests and to ensure some semblance of parity between the regions. I just think you need a better plan than the one you've presented.

As long as the limit doesn't lead to gerrymandering, it doesn't really matter. The important thing is that Congressional districts reflect the population that lives there. The problem is that when districts are redrawn, there's some very partisan wrangling that occurs to try to give the party in control an edge. There's a whole whack of gerrymandering that goes on. If you think you guys have trouble though, you should have a look at the Canadian system. Representation by population is a huge joke here and our Senate is even funnier.

Still not responding to any of my points about Iran then? Oh well.

Pangloss, I have to say that I find the way you've misrepresented me by selective is a fair bit less than honest. I say that Bush is disliked and give examples related to a CNN poll that shows him to have a higher disapproval rating than anybody else...including Nixon when he resigned. That would make him the most disliked. I didn't say that he was the least liked...that's quite a different thing. Even Ted Nugent has fans, after all. You choose to selectively quote me, then quote a different part of the article. I also gave the example of how the US and Bush are regarded outside of the US. You accuse me of just attacking Bush, but in the meantime, you've ignored the parts of my posts specifically related to Iran. You say I'm partisan. Well, so what? This is the politics section, after all. That doesn't mean that there aren't reasons for my partisanship...why I prefer Kucinich over Obama, Obama over McCain, and Nader over all all of them. It could just be that I've listened to what each of them has to say and have followed the situation in Iran and the Middle East for a very long time now. Let's face it, if it wasn't for the US and, to a lesser extent, Britain, Iran would quite likely have some form of democracy right now. If it wasn't for the way things were divvied up after WWI, the Middle East would be a very different place right now. If the US would have backed pro-democracy demonstrators in Iran when the Shaw was running the country, Khomeini never would have succeeded in taking those hostages. Those are past mistakes though. We're dealing with the mistake presently being made. Do you think the US can win a war against Iran? Have you looked at Iraq lately? Iran is in much better shape than Iraq was. Do you really think the world will back you attacking Iran? I have some pretty serious doubts about that. Do you really think the American people will back it? I doubt that too. Do you really think Iran is anywhere close to having usable nukes? As I said before, there is no evidence of that. Do you think the Iranian leaders don't know that the world won't tolerate them making a first strike...especially against Israel? Are you saying that detente never happened? Are you saying that the only country ever to use nukes gets to decide what other country gets to possess nukes? Are you saying that Iran, which hasn't started a war since their dust up with Iraq a few decades ago and would be contained by larger powers whether it had nukes or not, is less trustworthy than the US...that started a war with Iraq in this decade...or Israel...that has started several wars and bombed peacekeepers in Lebanon not all that long ago. I'm not very happy with your debating tactics or your tone, Pangloss. I haven't seen you present a lot of facts about Iran at all, and your argument thus far has basically been that Iran is full of suicide bombers and we can't trust Muslims. Perhaps you could explain your position a little more clearly, because from here it's starting to look like that old "my country right or wrong" jingoism that the US is so famous for.

Oh, it's crossed my mind, but if you actually look at who the suicide bombers are, they aren't the ones running things. The suicide bombers are young, powerless people who get talked into things by their higher-ups. The Ayotollahs an Imams aren't going to risk their own asses, and starting a nuclear war does exactly that. It's not a double standard, it's acknowledging that there is little likely to change in the Middle East and that all nations have the same rights as all other nations. You should keep in mind that while we worry about the US going backwards, Nations like Iran can't really get anymore backwards. Oh? How many times has he ended a speech with "God bless America?" Given his religious leanings and the influence of fundamentalists in the Republican Party, do you really think he's invoking the vague god of your deist founding fathers? I doubt it. What about his propensity for mixing religion and politics? Faith-based programs for everything. Park guides offering creationism as an alternate "theory" for the formation of the Grand Canyon. Yeah, this is an administration that believes in the separation of church and state. The man holds prayer meetings in the Oval Office when he should be working. He's been quoted as saying that he thinks god wants him to be president. http://www.pollingreport.com/BushJob.htm http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/03/19/bush.poll/ http://www.onenewsnow.com/Printer.aspx?id=103284 And that's without getting into how unpopular the US has become around the world under Bush's leadership. A poll that was in the news about a year ago had the US at its lowest popularity since polling began...that's after reaching approval ratings under Clinton that hadn't been seen since WWII. It's a fairly widely held opinion. Bush's lack of intelligence has been pretty well documented. So has his religiousity. Nice try though. Again, nice try. Perhaps I should ask you to prove that Iran wants nuclear weapons and isn't just trying to produce electricity, as they claim to be doing. I don't believe that either, of course, but the fact is that there is no substantial evidence that Iran has a workable nuclear weapons program. The last time Bush went down this road, the international community pointed out that he was trumping up evidence where there was none. Iran wants nukes because its enemies have nukes. It is very afraid of Israel and the US, and is sitting right beside occupied Iraq. The other big power in the area is Saudi Arabia, led by a regime that is kept in power largely because of its connections to the US. There's also political power in having nukes in that part of the world. The leaders of Pakistan saw their approval ratings rise dramatically when they announced having nukes. They might not be elected, but the leaders of Iran do have an image problem among their people. There's another part to that as well. If the US...and you have precious little backing around the world...starts blowing things up in Iran, it will also boost the popularity of the Iranian leaders. They can point back to the Shaw and say, "See, they don't want us running things for ourselves."

We're right around five bucks a gallon right now, and Canada is more similar to the US, both culturally and taxation-perception wise, than Europe is. Five bucks a gallon hasn't made much difference here. There's been some shift away from gas guzzlers and into smaller cars, but not even as much as we saw in the 1970s...at least so far. Mostly we just complain, then dig out our wallets.

http://www.cansolair.com/ These work well if you have a southern exposure you can attach them too. You can buy one of these for a couple of grand or make your own. The aluminum tubes are just pop or beer cans joined together and painted with heat-absorbing black paint. There are manifolds at the top and bottom that can be made from slightly larger aluminum. Mount the whole thing in a wooden box (be sure to caulk the seams) with a lexan cover. To attach it to your house, you'll want to drill on hole just above baseboard level and one near the ceiling. It works on convection and is independent of your existing heating system, so you don't need electrical connections and so on. If you want to attach a fan though, a small 12v DC fan connected to a thermostat can be installed.

No, it's not. It's a post saying very clearly that mutually assured destruction tends to keep people from nuking each other. It doesn't really matter what George Bush says...he's a failed president, the most disliked in US history. He was an idiot before he got elected, and he hasn't gotten any smarter since. He's a religious fanatic who believes some bizarre things. He's a war monger who believes you can solve complex problems with bombs. He's a lot like the leaders of Iran, but not as smart. All that and he never used his vast arsenal of nukes in his war for the oil companies. Why? Because he's not the only one who has them and to do so would have risked retaliation from Russia and China, who also want control of oil. It's kind of crude and stupid, but detente works. Before Gorbachev came to power in the USSR, the common thinking was that we'd all be living in holes sooner or later. Leaders of nuclear powers recognized that even if their side won, they would lose though, so they sat down and talked instead. Oh, they fought their dirty little proxy wars and suffered delusions of adequacy, but they never used their nukes and actually signed treaties to reduce their arsenals. I really don't see the problem with Iran joining that little club. They aren't going to nuke Israel. They aren't going to nuke occupied Iraq. They aren't going to nuke India. To do so would bring nukes down on them.

First of all, Iran's leaders are a lot of things, but they aren't stupid. They know if they were to use nukes other than in self defense (and likely even then) their country would be a smoking hole in the ground before they could ask Allah to kiss their asses goodbye. Second of all, they are no more or less entitled to nuclear technology than the US, Russia, China, Israel, India, Pakistan, France, England, both Koreas and whoever else is in the club. George Bush isn't any more sane, or any less prone to blowing things up because of bizarre religious beliefs, than the Ayotollahs are. Third of all, we in the west have supplied nuclear technology to Iran's enemies. Why should they be prohibited from participating in the regional arms race? I have a heavy belief in detente, not having been blown to a radioactive crisp in my forty-odd years. I don't like it much...I'd prefer to put all these old bastards who run stuff into a cage with a pack of rabid werewolves during a full moon...but I do have to admit that I'm not dead.

A little late, perhaps, but never noticed the thread before. I gave away a beautiful Schneider that would have been perfect for you. That was a couple of years ago. I gave away three actually...I had an 80 and a 120 too. All on Besseler lens boards that could have been cut to fit most purposes (lots of room). I'd suggest talking to some photography clubs etc. though, maybe a small commercial studio or lab too. Those lenses were fantastic, and common. As darkrooms disappeared, they lost their value. That's the case with a lot of photographic equipment. I know a man who has converted two 8x10 large format cameras into end tables. They were worth a small fortune new, and now you can't give them away.

It's not new, but dealing with that variable is becoming more and more critical, I think. Science is becoming ever more instrumental in public policy, yet most of the people I come into contact with...many of them with university educations...have a grasp of science that was barely adequate at the beginning of the last century.

There's also the green energy you buy from Canada. Manitoba, Quebec, and BC provide a lot of your energy from hydro dams. They reduce output during off-peak hours, but can increase it with no additional emission should there be a place to send it. A simple decision to use the lowest emissions services first, then bring the dirtier sources on-line as needed would reduce emissions further. Then there's the matter of all cars not needing full recharging every night. You may only have to plug in for an hour, depending how far you travelled the previous day. Another variable is weather. Currently we heat our vehicles with waste heat from the engine...it costs us nothing. Electric heat is generally produced by running current through a resistant wire, which sucks a lot of energy. Batteries also don't work very well in cold weather, so there will be some loss there. I think electric vehicles are part of a larger solution, and I think that they are leaner than gasoline vehicles, but I've yet to see anything that takes all of the variables into account, especially when it comes to regional variations.

Well, that is part of why I said arguably. The other part is that it's far from clear what a stable population should be. I tend not to listen to economists much though...they are too often wrong about their own field and believe to much in the doctrine of infinite growth with finite resources in a finite system. You are also assuming that more people will become educated as the population increases. There is little or no evidence supporting that however. In fact the most heavily populated areas of he world have some the poorest educational records while more sparsely populated areas have higher levels of education.

Arguably, the technology is the root cause of our over-population though, and that over-population is the cause of most of our modern problems. That pretty much matches my holstein analogy as well, although I'm not sure the mechanism is exactly the same. In both cases, it's sexual selection though...although in the holstein the selection is generally done for them through artificial insemination. But the human selection for blonde hair and blue eyes is being interfered with through the mingling of populations, hair dye, and contact lenses. There's also fashion...if brunettes and/or red heads become stylish, we will sexually select for them. Then there's the matter of people having fewer kids, so the genes having less chance to be passed on.

Most people don't understand the peer review process though, so it is basically meaningless to them. Instead you run into responses like, "People have always believed in ghosts," or, "Thousands of people have had abduction experiences." Sorry. by "hard" I mean easier to provide evidence for. You can do a chemistry experiment under highly controlled circumstances. That's a lot more difficult to achieve in the social sciences. The theories of the social sciences tend to be tested in full public view as well, and are much more prone to political interference. I don't mean to belittle the social sciences here. They have caused crime rates to drop overall, explained a lot of our behaviours, given us an overview of societal development etc. Their failures, or perceived failures due to politicization or uncontrollable outside factors like funding, are very public though. Then we run into things like advertising and political science. I've got a pretty good working knowledge of both, and neither are a science. They have scientific aspects to them...especially sociological ones...and depend on science...especially statistical analysis...to judge their success. "Political science" isn't science though. It's closer to black magic. You start with the outcome. "We need to win votes to institute our policies." Those policies may or may not be what the politicians feel are good for the people, or what the people want, but they are the desired outcome. You move to the thesis, "We can win votes with this message." That message may or may not match the agenda you really want in place. Then you bring in the scientists and the writers...two very different things. The scientists tell you how to convince people, the writers work on language that will do the convincing. Then you gauge reaction to all that and massage everything. If it works and you win power, then you begin incrementally implementing your real agenda...usually while trying to keep large chunks of it out of the press...all the while trying to stay in power. You determine the desired outcome first, and manipulate the data and experiments to fit. It ain't science, but it is a lot of fun. It is, all too often, the manipulation of science, especially the soft sciences.

Because there was a minimal mingling of populations. A lot of Europeans carry the recessive gene. I think maybe I wasn't clear enough. That's exactly how recessive traits work. The blonde gene is recessive, but it is relatively common in European populations, so there are a fair number of blonde Europeans. It is very uncommon in non-European populations though. So as the populations intermingle the trait expressed by the recessive gene doesn't exhibit as often. Blondes, not people with recessive the gene, but people with blonde hair, become less and common. It's okay though, we have hair dye. It's kind of like dairy cows. Holsteins are basically a super-cow. They produce milk like mad. Cross-breed them with beef cattle though, and that milk-producing capability disappears in a hurry.

No. There is no burden on me to prove that god doesn't exist, just as there is no burden on me to prove that giant inter-dimensional lizard people aren't running the world's government. There is a burden on believers to provide evidence and a burden on non-believers to refute that evidence. For instance you can claim that Moses talked to god, but I can refute that by pointing out that there is no physical evidence of Moses' existence, no third party evidence of Moses' existence, and a high probability that shaman/priests/seers during the era when Moses allegedly existed were very likely gobbling plants that made them hallucinate. There is still a very remote possibility that your god exists, of course, and there is a slightly better possibility that Moses existed. There's also a possibility that this smoke in my mouth is magic and will make me healthy and even immortal. The same can be done for claims of Jesus. There is no physical evidence of his existence, the bone box having been shown to be a fraud. There is no third party confirmation of his existence, the only such record brought forth having been shown to be a fraud. There is no reason to think that, even if he did exist, he was the son of god, there being no evidence of virgin birth, miracles, or the resurrection. Again, there is still a remote possibility that your Yaweh dude exists and hired the Holy Ghost to boff Mary and the result was Jesus, but it isn't any greater a possibility than the ghost of Hunter Thompson showing up in my living room to drink Wild Turkey and help me recover the rhythm I misplaced six hours ago, leaving me stuck on the same damned paragraph for most of the day. We've found no evidence of talking snakes, trumpets loud enough to destroy walls, or even a significant Jewish contribution to the building of pyramids. We have no evidence of a worldwide flood, people being turned into pillars of salt, or giants walking the earth. In short, the Bible...the only evidence you have of a Judeo/Christian/Muslim god...the religious writings of those faiths...seems to make less sense and have less facts in it than the average Stephen King novel. Does that prove there is no god? Nope. It shows that there is no solid evidence of your god though...that the entire story is extremely unlikely at best. Since this isn't math, a proof would be falsifiable evidence solid enough not to be easily falsified. Show me a video of god. Show me evidence of a miracle. Show me why a god has to exist at all. There are casts of Sasquatch's footprints. There are hair samples that don't match existing DNA records. There are recordings of weird screams...in fact that alone could be construed of evidence that Tom Waits is a Sasquatch. There are no casts of god's footprints though, no odd hair samples, and I've never heard anybody claim that Tom Waits is god...although listening to "Sixteen Shells" really loud can give one visions. How many anti-choice agnostics have you met? Anti-choice atheists? The main opposition to to fundamentalist interference in political and scientific matters has come from those who believe in separation of church and state. Their faith, or lack thereof, is irrelevant. Nonsense. There are scientific ethicists. Some have religious beliefs, others don't. The appointment of fundamentalists, who reject much of science and treat science with suspicion or outright derision, to judge ethical considerations within is science is ridiculous. I suggest you read the book. If you think you have already done so, then I suggest you try again because you obviously missed a lot of it.

No, Reaper, it up to the people claiming that there is a god to provide valid evidence of its existence. We can then falsify that evidence. Consider the purported writings of the Roman historian (can't remember his name, sorry) that allegedly provided third-party evidence of Jesus' existence. The papers were falsified, however, shown to be a fraud. It is the religious who are making the claim, the burden is on them to provide the supporting evidence. They have failed to do so.

I don't think atheists, strong or weak or someplace in between, are using science to bolster their beliefs though. I think the theists have made claims and need to prove those claims, or retreat from the public sphere. What claims have atheists made? That there is no evidence of deities. If you actually read Dawkins, he's very clear on that. He puts it to a scale. He uses examples of probability. He goes out of his way to point out that he can't say that there is no god, just that the existence of a god is extremely unlikely.

I have a friend who married a woman from Seattle. The rules are actually quite stringent and the US immigration people seem to think everybody is a criminal. Exactly. Some people don't like gays. They get all freaked out by people of the same gender having sex, often because of the type of sex they are thought to have. Personally I get freaked out by a lot of people having sex, no matter what their gender or what type of sex they engage in. We are, when you consider the general population, a fairly ungainly species. What other people do, or look like while doing it, is none of my concern though.

It's nihilism for certain. That's more a philosophy than a mental state though.

But the misconstruation of the idea is pedantry. The theists have made a claim that is not falsifiable, but they they are saying that their claim is valid, or at least that we must lend it validity, because we can't falsify it. That is pedantry.

I like my women like my oil...sweet, light and crude. Where ever you go, there you are. And so is some guy trying to sell you stuff. Not all Conservatives are stupid, but you'd never know it by talking to them.

Isn't it? It's been a while, but my memories are of it kind of cleaning out the pipes. Not an escape, but a willingness to let go a little bit for a short time. To see things from a different perspective. There isn't anything rational about what you think and see when on those drugs though, just weirdness.