FlaSoxxJim

Third longest for me. Second was the brief eternity spent trying to get out of Alpine Valley after a Grateful Dead show back in the mid 80s. Worst/longest traffic jam was 10 hours to make the tipical 90 minute trip to Oldando when we and the rest of the Florida east coast were running away from Hurricane Floyd in 1999. For Frances this year we learned our lesson (?) and waited until the first strong feeder bands hit and most of the sane people had already left, so we had the roads to ourselves. For Jeanne we said screw it, boarded up with us and our hurricane provisions inside, got/stayed just the right amount of drunk, and rode it out.

To the rest of the industrialized world, minus us and Australia. 90 day from ratification, the treaty will come into force. Within a year I anticipate a treaty member nation will determine that the US' continued greenhouse emmission rates are a detriment to their trade in one way or another and we'llk have WTO threatening us with sanctions unless we voluntarily tag along with Kyoto. In retrospect, cutting back to -5% of 1990 emmissions viv a vis Kyoto 2 (version 1 put it at -12%) sill probably seem a lot less painful.

It's enough to make you wake up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night, ain't it?

It fell victim to the tragedy of the commons, as it always does.

Thast does put things in perspective, doesn't it. At least we can be seen as reaching out to the Iraqis -- well, at least the insurgents, who were probably running low on explosives until the Keystone Cops were charged with minding the shop.

Bush and, more importantly, Cheney and Rove, jettisoning some of the PNAC heart of darkness? Only if they felt some incredible pressure from to do so I'd assume.

National Association for the Advancement of Crack Products?

The telephone issue is even more problematic than in the past. An NPR piece last week noted that cell phones are largely ignored by the pollsters because tthere is not a readily accessible centralized database of cell phone listings. There is a growing number of people - mostly young profesionals - who have entirely done away with their land lines and are just using cells. So any traditional polling practice that misses these segments is apt to give a skewed view of public opinion.

The two 60 Minutes programs are produced and written by completely different staffs. I assume they are as highly protective of their stories as any similar group and are not in the habit of giving away material. And this story did break on the news. My assumption is that a better-researched back story would have aired on 60 Minutes.

A big problem certainly exists in a lot of places. On the left side, as you note there is a potential for over-registration. A lot of that is due to the fact that thecollege age campaign workers are paid by the number of registrants they sign up, so there is the temptation to double- and triple registrants. The problem on the right this year is democratic registrations simply being tossed or torn up rather than turned in, abd there have been several instances of this as well. Here's where the provisional ballot issue becomes a problem. These people had a legal right to be registered, thought they were registered, and only find out they are not on polling day. Their only recourse (hollow as it is) is to vote with a provisional ballot in the hope that their illegally preempted voting rights will be restored.

Yep, it's a huge left wing conspiracy. 60 Minutes is waiting until SUNDAY to air a piece, of all the f***ing nerve.... Oh, wait, you mean 60 Minutes only airs on Sundays...? Nevermind...

We must have been posting at the same time - I agree with your assessment.

Yeah, I don't care to rehash any details either, but I recall people being very incensed that there was anything less than total reverence and admiration for the man after he died. My reference to that thread was out of convenience, and could have as easily pointed to people getting bent out of shape when people call Michael Moore a douche, or Ruch Limbaugh, or... People in the public eye are going to have vocal detractors, and it's silly to get outraged - or feign outrage - when 'your guy' (whoever he is) gets shreeded by somebody else. As for the 'Buck Bush' thing - Not only is that not even close to being a hate-filled slogan, I don't even think the "f***" word play is the primary intent. Buck him, get him out of office - it's good alliteration and there is a cowboy reference in there alluding perhaps to the transparency of the man who's "all hat and no horse" according to the real Texas cowboys.

OK, now I'm lost PA. I'll reread to figure out where I 'messed up.'

Whoah.. Re nobody coming down on Kip for the douche bag comment - the President is a public figure, and he and all other figures in the public eye get that and worse on non-significant corners of the web like this all the time. You cannot equate calling Bush, Kerry, Reagan, Clinton, Sean Penn... or whoever a f***ing douche to doing the same to a private individual in the course of what is supposed to be a civil debate. I don't know if you were around for the various Reagan threads here after his death, but some folks were outraged when others called Reagan, another public figure, whatever equivalent to f***ing douche they happened to use at the time. Just as often it is Kerry, Clinton, or whoever, and just as often someone else is getting bent out of shape over it. It's stupid all around – these are public figures and people are going to say what they want to about them. It is entirely different when it is a personal attack between individuals, and I don't think I need to draw that out any further. as for calling me (apparently) a f***ing douche for not reigning in Kip's comments about the President, but putting it in the old green font so then it's "just a joke" in a passive-aggressive BS kind of way... I have yet to lose any sleep over anything anybody has called me online, so whatever. At the same time, If anybody use invectives and personal attacks on another poster (not our douchebag President) during the course of an exchange, they should not be surprised if they caught flack for it. As for your health care jab being in green – sure, but the tone is condescending more than sarcastic/ironic – a "shut up Canuck, and go wait in line two days for your eyeglasses" kind of tone. Still, I think the your comment AND the tone are absolutely fine in this forum. Kip didn't quite follow the line of thought and I opined that there are a lot of people who would take a topheavy and somewhat innefficient healthcares system with universal coverage and minimal out of pocket expense over a topheavy and equally innefficient system that allows 20% of its citizens to go without and forces the rest to endure costs that are spiraling out of control.

After weeks of getting called with annoying pre-recorded GOP phone messages on the other end (my pennance for having been long registered as an Independent and thus a potential swing voter no doubt), I got a pre-recorded Clinton call yesterday. It was prretty cool picking up the phone and hearing, "Hi, this is President Bill Clinton, and I want to talk to you about why this election is so important..." He even got me to volunteer to drive people to the polls on Tuesday!

It's a comment from the Bizzaro World suggesting that the state of American health care is better than Canadian health care. I'd say there are at least 45 million Americasns who would strongly disagree. That's about 1 in 5, and that's the number of Americans with no health care coverage. Who needs %$#&*% socialized health care and universal access for every citizen anyway! It would be ironic if Canada bails us out of our flu shot shortage and then we still don't let Canadian prescription drugs in because of 'concern over their safety,' no?

Thing is, I don't think the taboo, the social strictures that still hold homosexuality in contempt, have worn off. The 'and now here we are' is more telling from the pro gay rights side of the aisle. All these years, and still it is Oscar Wylde's "Love that dared not speak its name." People are not hired, are fired, are not elected to political office, are ridiculed, beaten, killed... for being gay, so 'and now here we are' doesn't seem all that different from where we have been for a the last few centuries.

Pinning the catholic scandal and the AIDS epidemic on the 'problem' of homosexuality is as flawed an argument as me suggesting religion is evil because it is the leading cause of war and death at the hands of others. Don't resort to easy, cliched arguments and neither will I. As for the brother/sister question, it is just as flawed because the central issue is not reproductive, it is the adherance to societal mores versus the wanton breaking of sociatal taboos. Why don't we have a sexual relationships with our menopausal mothers? It seems a fine setup - no risk of unwanted pregnancy AND it's a heterosexual relationship so we aren't cheezing off God and His followers. Well, of course we don't do that because it violates long-held societal taboos. Ditto for brother/sister, brother/brother, etc... Interestingly, anthropologists will suggest that the initial emergence of such taboos actuually did have a reproductive basis. When relatives did mate and have children, there was a price to pay in terms of inbreeding and loss of hybrid vigor - the offspring were often F'd up, so the practice eventually became taboo.

A lot of divergent evolution since we parted ways a few million years ago. We look a lot less like a sponge, precisely because the evolutionary line that spawned us parted ways with that spawning sponges even further back.

Asking for unassailable proof from an incomplete fossil record is a classic Creation "Science" tactic. Sadly, the fossil record is incomplete - in places woefully so. As for the "I didn't come from no monkey" quip - we've been here before. No evolutionnary biologist ever said modern man evolved from monkeys. rather, all modern advanced primates evolved from a common ancestry, with each each branch splitting off off of an ancestral trunk at a different point in time. I'm actually more amazed there is as much intact fossil record as ther is because it's really hard for organic material to fossilize and it doesn't happen very often. That said, with each new tool scientists come up with... comparative homology, cladistics, biological clocks, comparative proteomics, comparative genomics... the evidence in support of Neodarwinian evolution and descent from shared ancestry becomes stronger rather than weaker. Fossils are actually one of the weaker sources of evidence these days - but they're sooo b****in' anyway so it's alright. As for negating God's Hand in creation - it's not the concern of science. God's Hand is an untestable, and thus falls outside the realm of science by definition. God's Hand does fall within the realm of philosophy, however, so please (sincerely please) answer this. How can a rational person take seriously the suggestion that we were preordained to be given dominion over the "fish of the sea" (first appeared ca. 408 mybp) and the "birds of he air" (first appeared ca. 208 mybp) when we pretty much just showed up in tthe last million years or so? It seems the fish and birds and all other beasts were doing quie well before we came along to steward them. The whole dominion deal harkens back to the antiquated notions of man cast in God's likeness, during that first hectic week in Genesis (when Peter Gabriel was still with them, natch), under the firmament, at the center of the universe...

As far as the rhetorical query as to whether we trump raddishes on a scale of worth, yes of course we do. As far as the more fundamental question regarding the issue of "human exceptionalism" (I very much like that term, by the way), well yes, with approproate caveats I do reject it. Certainly we cannot be deemed exceptional by how long we have existed on earth. The average duration of a species (and continued existence is the only real biological measure for success) is 5 million years, according to recent best estimates. Really well designed species - sharks, turtles, etc, have been around for orders of magnitude longer than that. The genus Homo has well under a million years under its belt. That, scant sliver of time in which we have existed as a species, compared to the total time in which life as existed on the planet (4+ billion years) should put things in perspective - should underscore the absurdity (sp?) of a notion that a Divine Agent set the universe in motion (14+ billion years ago), and it has all come down to this hiccup in time where we're on the scene. It was a lot easier to be the center of God's universe when folks bought into the 7-day rush job, all of life blinking into being on the same day and the world literally being th center of the universe. Given the realities that we're really such Johnny-come-latelys tto the party, to suggest that we are given dominion over the fishes and fowl yada yada that preceded us for HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF YEARS... well, let's just say that is a discussion best left to Sunday School, rather than being seriously considered. Certainly we cannot be deemed exceptional by the content of our raw genetic material. We're 99+% chimpanzeem, as PA himself had noted here severl months ago I think. Where we DO measure off the charts is in the intangible manifestations of those genes. Our gene products allow us to do things no species has ever done before. It is truly incredible and yes there is a cognitive quantum leap between us and our closest DNA relatives. But what iis that exceptionalism worth? Is it worth national-scale deforestation, global warming, and an antrhopogenic (human-induced) mass extinction rate greater than even the great extinction events of the K-T (when the dino's bought it), or the even larger Permean extinction event well before that? When we are ggone - having smarted ourselves out of esistence - and when we've taken maybbe half the planet's biodiversity with us in our gluttony and waste and ignorance - what will that exceptionalism be worth?

Well dang, that sounds like a good time. Enjoy, i wish I was there. There's an uncanny Beatle band that they have at EPCOT's England exhibit. I swear they are animatrons the way they have the mannerisms down, but they also have the chops to sound the part as well as look it. The hilight of a Disney trip for me these days is catching a set with my almost 7 year old little girl who (and I can't imagine why) is already a huge Beatlehead.

Throwing in that line (as a way to restate and reenforce your contention that homosexuality is an "abnormality") doesn't change your thesis assertion that you figure it either has to be the mother f***ing up and taking some gay-making drug into her body, or it is the parents f***ing it up somewhhere by creating a gay-making environment and subjecting thier child to it.