MonteZuma

Iran has plenty of oil. The most economical thing for them to do is make electricity with that. I don't think solar technology is sufficently advanced to replace traditional power generation (oil, coal, nuclear).

A ) Yeah. Iran has had nuclear ambitions for a long time. But Bush hasn't exactly done much (using diplomacy) to dissuade them from recommencing their programme. Hence the need to ramp up the threats and bring the world closer to another conflict - with Iran and with Islam - again. B ) As nutty as they may be, annihilation of Iran isn't on their agenda. That that is what will happen if they use a nuke against Israel or (probably) any other nation, especially those that are friendly to the west. Aside from defense, they also want nukes because they want to be a seen to be an important world power. Iran isn't as backward as many people think.

That's a relief. I'd be more worried if they confirmed that your 100000000000 trillion year old penis was the 'creator'.

Thinking about this, how would we all feel if a fatwa was issued calling for Paine's death, because he posted this cartoon here? Burning flags and emb!@#$%^&*ies and threatening people just because they are European is outrageous. The recent events are demonstrating that it is not racist or discriminatory or prejudiced to !@#$%^&*ociate Islam with violence. It is simply fact. Islamic leaders should speak out more vocally against this crap.

I don't think the cartoons were racist. Clearly though, they were offensive to muslims. I think this sums it up: The muslim response to this is way out of proportion to what was done. Muslims will always be stereotyped as violent and unreasonable people if they allow so many of their followers to react in such an uncivilised way. Freedom of speech means that sometimes some people are gonna be offended. Civilised people don't react with threats of violence or other forms of retribution against innocent people. The problem is, the Islamic world seems to attach a different value to the value of free speech and religious piety than we do in the western world.

To summarise what would otherwise be a long and quote-box ridden post, because I disagree with every paragraph you've written, let me try bullet points... * The region is not pacified at all. There have always been areas of relative calm. * Getting rid of Saddam certainly has not eased Irans fears. They till want nukes. They didn't need them to defend themselves from Saddam. He has been a lame duck since 1991. They need nukes to defend against Israel and the US. * The US didn't leave Vietnam because of the NVA. They left because the American public were not commited. * The US government was not commited to Somalia because no-one cared. It was a folly. * Saddam and the Sunnis ruled Iraq despite their minority status. What makes you think a similar thing could not happen again? In any case, they don't need to rule the country to keep it in a state of total disarray. * Who cares what Saddam thinks? Ultimately, it is what the UN and the Security Council thinks that is important. * Yes. Of course WE should obey the rule of law. If we don't we are uncivilised. * http://www.icj-cij.org/ and http://www.un.org/Docs/sc/ * http://www.icj-cij.org/ and http://www.un.org/Docs/sc/ * There are more than three countries in the axis of evil. Not all were named. You need to use your brain to figure out who Bush meant. Reread the speech.

No. Life evolved in such a way that the core processes required to sustain the organism are almost always preserved through reproduction. Why? So? It evolved. That is my point. Maybe it didn't need to be present in the very earliest and simplest forms of life - which didn't have beaks, bones, feathers, skin, brains, blood, nervous system, eyes, etc, etc, etc. Birds are highly evolved. In the case of quails and ducks, the error correcting portions of the code worked. They allowed the beaks to grow on living animals rather than cause abortion. Btw, I think the case with the birds was that cells were transplanted. I don't think the geenetic code was changed. However the experiment did explain how genetic variation can lead to non-fatal changes. The code does not need to specify every step involved in s!@#$%^&*ching on a different kind of beak. The code is so resilient that it will s!@#$%^&*ch on virtually any kind of beak. It wasn't without error. If it was without error it never would have evolved. If it made too many errors it would have become extinct. Whatever 'it' was. Why do you insist that DNA could not have evolved from something simpler? It is possible that Earth only had RNA 'life' at one time.

You need to do better than that. I could post some links to left-wing blogs that say the opposite. Fwiw, I clicked the first link in the second blog (ie Interpol) and this pops up: "The International Crime Statistics are only available to authorised police users". I clicked the second link, and learned this: "However, robberies, house burglaries and thefts of and from vehicles (in the UK) showed falls - of seven, four and six per cent respectively. Overall crime rates remained "unchanged". There were 1,526,000 crimes recorded in the second quarter of this year, compared with 1,463,000 in the previous three months." and "Hazel Blears, the Home Office minister, said: "The risk of a fatal shooting in England is still one of the lowest in the world but every crime involving a firearm is a serious concern."" and "Experts agree that few high-quality, military guns and ammunition are being used. More than 70 per cent of weapons seized by Operation Trident, run by the Met squad tackling gun crime in the black community, have been modified from air guns, blank firers or previously de-activated weapons." and "The figures show that since November last year there have been year-on-year reductions in the number of firearms incidents." Heh. And that was the type of information this guy used to prove his point that the UK is much more dangerous than the US. The fact that you can only come up with a couple of biased blogs to support your argument says something.

If that is his goal, he has failed miserably. Iran are scared because of GWBs 'axis of evil' remark and probably plan to build a nuclear weapon to defend themselves. Iraq is a quagmire, with no sign yet of it having an ability to defend itself from insurgents and Hamas has a stronghold in 'Palestine'. GWB has done nothing to pacify the region. It got them out of Vietnam - and Somalia. I disagree - 100% What will stop the world from decending into some less civilised state is the rule of law. Not the rule of war. (wow. I should give a speech at the UN using that as my slogan) The American public doesn't like seeing a waste of American life. Al Qaida was irrelevant to Iraq before the invasion. Even though GWB stirred up the hornest nest, I think the biggest threat to Iraqi democracy is still from local factions rather than Al Qaida. The difference between Hamas and Al Qaida is that Hamas is a gr!@#$%^&* roots organisation that, despite its terrorist activities, invests a large proportion of its income into community-building activities. Hamas's primary focus is Israel. Al Qaida's ambitions and interests are more global - that is why Al Qaida is a bigger threat to you and me and the western world. I disagree. Democratically elected or not, all of the western world is opposed to Hamas. To say that Israel is not getting the aid it needs strikes me as a little odd. Israel would have collapsed long ago without continued support from the US - and others. Maybe some people in the west are distracted, but for the terrorists, this isn't just about money, this is about religion, en!@#$%^&*lement and self-determination. If this is true, then Iran, North Korea, China and any other 'evil empire' "should be allowed to go on the offensive, or at very least draw the line where it is and leave it there". This is ridiculous.

No it doesn't. Proof of the fact that you can vary the code without chaos is evident in the diversity of life on earth today. Well yeah, but so? I guess that is why we don't often have 1% error. If we did we would be extinct and we wouldn't be having this discussion. Life is complex and resilient and reproduction is, for the most part, reliable and predictable. If it wasn't, life would not have gotten this far. Your point is? But it doesn't have to be perfect. If it was perfect we would not have random mutations and evolution. Scientists have successfully produced living duck-billed quails and quail-beaked ducks by transplanting genetic material from one species to the other. This can happen because life is robust. The code is resilient enough to make up for errors/mutations. If it wasn't so resilient, life would not have evolved. This is not evidence of an intelligent designer. This is evidence of natural selection.

Got links? I've got no time to read books How did he confirm the cause-effect link? Maybe the crime rate went up because of other reasons? For example, in 1998 and 2002 the method for recording crime in England and Wales were changed. Both changes resulted in an increase in the number of crimes recorded. Certain offences, such as minor violent crime, were more affected by these changes than others. Present some links or quotes and I'll have fun shooting them down in flames - pardon the pun.

Probably not. But poorly planned western interventions can make things worse. They don't need to. All they need to do is drain public support. Maybe. I'm not sure that Hamas is a greater threat to peace/security in the western world than Al Qaida. Hamas is certainly a greater threat to Israel. But Israel (with the usual US support) can take care of that.

What are your sources? I would be surprised if violent crime rates in western Europe are higher than in the US. I also doubt that many rapists brandish a gun (even in the US) - maybe not even a knife. When it comes to gun crime, I think rape is irrelevant.

The first life form might have been something completely unlike anything 'living' today. Just as we have life forms that straddle the boundary between plants and animals, at some time in the past we may have had life forms that straddled the boundary between a complex chemical reaction and 'life' (which is not much more than a series of very complex chemical reactions). The logic here is flawed. You seem to think that the only relevant force is gravity. But as we see in nature all the time, things do self-!@#$%^&*emble. Storm clouds, volcanos, snow flakes, raindrops and hailstones, ice or salt crystals, beaches and sand dunes. etc etc etc etc etc. 'Facilitated variation' is a new theory that seems to explain how complexity and diversity evolve from humble beginnings. The basic premise is that evolution is not entirely random. Whilst mutations are random, variation cannot be random because variation depends on the modification of something that already exists. We aren't throwing up a random pile of sticks. Essentially we are gradually building and rearranging a pile all the time. No it isn't. What is your definition of 'perfect' and 'order'. To use the standard argument to this, why do men have nipples and why do we all have an appendix? Life isn't perfect. Life is just the most complex thing in the universe.

I disagree. If you reduce the number of legal guns in circulation, you will also reduce the number of guns available to criminals. You can say the same thing about the borders around Europe/Eastern Europe, and yet gun ownership and gun crime are much lower in Europe. The US isn't a 'special' case. In any case, most weapons that cross the USA/Mexico border are moving south. 95% of weapons confiscated from suspected criminals in Mexico were first sold legally in the United States. It is much harder to obtain a firearm in Mexico than it is in the US. Therefore reducing the availabiliy of guns in the US will have the secondary effect of lowering gun crime in Mexico. Your argument seems to be that gun control won't work because it is too hard to keep ALL guns out of the hands of criminals. The aim of stricter gun control laws is not to achieve 100% success, but to reduce crime and death. I'm yet to hear a logical argument that can be supported by evidence suggesting that less legal guns means more crime victims. It just doesn't make sense when you know that most illegal weapons started life as legal weapons.

In post 9/11 USA, how do you propose that Mr and Mrs Joe Average will illegally import firearms?

Around the world, many countries with strict gun laws have lower rates of crime, especially violent crime, than do countries that have much fewer gun control laws. Clearly it is not crucial that individuals have guns to protect themselves. There are better ways.

Yeah. I agree with Ducky, except that I believe that we don't need to have Tasar guns in public hands either. The best way to protect yourself from home invaders is to do stuff like lock your doors and windows, install a back-to-base alarm - and have home contents insurance. Is it worth having a gun battle to protect your new plasma tv? At the commnunity level, there needs to be adequate social services and policing. If you feel unsafe in your home, I would ask the government to do something about that. Adding more guns to the system is counterproductive.

The Brits did not underestimate the terrorist threat. Iraq is not and was not a source of Al Qaida terrorists. I'm not so sure. I believe that a continued high level of vigilence in the US combined with calm in the middle east would lower the terrorist threat. As for the 'we will be fine' comment. If it helps you sleep at night, that's great. But every city in the world is vulnerable to a London-style attack, especially large, cosmopolitan cities. Terrorists and guerilla(sp?) fighters have never been strong enough to defeat the US military. No fighting force in the world is. But they are still very capable of wearing down the resolve of the US public and governement to continue to wage a futile war or maintain an occupation force. Vietnam-style.

Bin Laden isn't losing. What he is doing is trying to manipulate public opinion and make the US appear unreasonable. In some parts of the world his manipulation will probably help his cause. I think time has shown that Bin Laden is a very skillful leader of Al Qaida. He has played the US and some other countries like puppets and increased the level of tension between Islamic countries and the west. This is !@#$%^&*y and obviously wrong. Do you really think a London-style attack could never happen in any US city at any time? The fact that this is a so-called 'time of war' is irrelevant. The US has gotten this far without a homeland attack due to a combination of luck, intelligence gathering and border control. But the US has been 'touched' many times outside of the US, especially in Iraq. Media interest has waned, but opinion polls in the US and other countries with 'pro war' governments show that support for the war in Iraq is at an all-time low. I think you overestimate the power of the Kurds. I think most insurgents in Iraq are not from Al Qaida. They are local resistance fighters (mainly Sunnis) that sympathise with Al Qaida. They are not out of weapons, soldiers or support. Their measly infrastructure has been damaged though - mainly communications. Is this a serious question? Do terrorist groups need amb!@#$%^&*adors before they can 'negotiate'? In any case, I'm surprised you're taking this 'peace offer' so seriously. Every educated thinking person (including you) in the free world knows it is propaganda.

I gotta say, I agree with sever and think that you don't understand the 2nd law of thermodynamics. As I said earlier, your views on entropy seem to me to be a philosophical generalisation. From a scientific point of view, entropy is a measure of the dispersal or degradation of energy in a closed system (such as the solar system). Earth and especially human settlements on Earth are open systems, with a constant input of low entropy energy from the sun (which includes fossil fuels which are essentially storages of solar energy) - and geothermal energy. In the solar system though, there is only a limited amount of low entropy energy. Eventually it will run out. Humans and other life forms are not making any significant difference. The amount of energy transformation that we are involved with is insignificant compared to the amount of energy transformation by the sun. The only evidence that you have to support this idea is that you do not know how it could have evolved. Not good enough in science class, but a wonderful topic for philosophy class. There is certainty in mathematics. The uncertainty is whether or not the equation holds true in every situation in time throughout the universe (or other universes for that matter). But I take your point. Then the Vatican is wrong (ie it isnt a scientific theory). As far as I know, ID is primarily an American political and religious issue that is of little interest anywhere else in the world.

No it doesn't. The best that science can do is reduce uncertainty. From a sociological point of view, science can actually increase uncertainty by adding complexity or challenging norms - but that's another story. No it doesn't. Look up self organisation and self !@#$%^&*embly. The birth of a child does not contradict the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics (or entropy if you want to call it that). As far as entropy is concerned, the increasing organisation of molecules and cells in a developing embryo or fetus is more than compensated for by the increasing entropy of small molecules. People are open biological systems that feed from the environment and dump waste into it. Entropy is transferred to the environment surrounding the person. The 'law of entropy' refers only to closed systems. People on their lonesome are not closed systems. They are part of a larger system - the solar system. Entropy in the solar system is increasing daily. The Earth has had a steady supply of low entropy energy for billions of years. Come back to this forum in 10 billion years and you will find that the level of entropy in the solar system has increased substantially. The timescales that you are using to justify your ideas are inappropriate. Yep. That pretty much sums it up. I believe that ID is a philosophical notion with no scientific foundation. It ranks up there with the idea that nothing that we experience really exists - it is all just a dream. Its a logical (though highly improbable) idea that can neither be proven nor disproven using science. Keep ID out of science and keep it in philosophy where it belongs. Nice post.

If a person draws conclusions from an idea that cannot be tested, then that person is probably being unscientific. For example, the leading scientific theorey about the extinction of dinosaurs involves the Earth being his with a big meteor. There is a lot of evidence supporting this claim, but in order to do an experiment we would have to find a planet full of dinosaurs and slam an asteroid into it.That theory has been tested with experiments many times. An experiment might involve measuring the age of rocks and recording their chemical composition. Another experiment might involve looking for possible impact sites. Another might involve looking at evidence of climate change and another might involve computer simulations that give an indication of what might have happened to the Earth's climate following an big impact. These are all experiments. You do not need to create an exact copy of an event to to experimentally test a theory. Intelligent design does have a similar experiment. We would need a planet covered in a lot of primordial chemicals, wait about 50 billion years and check to see if a lifeform spawned out of it. Since that is cleary impossible, the scientific thing to do is rely on the evidence.This is not a test of intelligent design. This is a test of the currently accepted scientific theory. I'm not so sure that this kind of experiment is impossible. Scientists have been mixing chemicals together and drawing large scale conclusions for centuries. Relying on observations rather than experimentation does not make the theorey any less scientific.Agreed. But recording observations in a systematic way to test a theory actually can be a scientific experiment. I'd also like to point out that evolution itself is also a religious theoreyNo. It isn't. There are simpler forms of life than paramecium. Bacteria or virii (for example) are not evidence of ID. The 'gap' between no life and life is also not evidence of ID. As far as Earth goes, there is also the theory that life came from outer space, but I agree that that also leaves the origin question unanswered. Yep. there is a gap in knowledge. Not necessarilly. Your ideas on entropy are a philosophical generalisation. Self organisation and self !@#$%^&*embly (in chemistry and biology) do not contradict the 'law of entropy'. The Earth was not a gl!@#$%^&* of water with no inputs other than ambient heat. Even if you are correct and the 'chances of success' are much less than 0.01%, there could still be billions of planets with life in the universe. LOL. Where did you pull the 99.99% certainty figure? What empirical evidence do you have for that? A gap in knowledge is not evidence of a creator.

Heh. That was an unfortunate mistake. You can't blame the Iranians for being uptight about it. Having said that, they probably do want nuclear weapons and the world should probably make sure that they don't get them. Is it possible to build a 'docile' nuclear reactor that is good for making energy, but not good for making weapons?

No It is creating a fuss because ID is being presented as a scientific theory (or even a scientific fact) that has support from conventional scientific research. It hasn't. Why? Philosophy and science go hand in hand. In some ways, religion and science simply reflect different different philosophical paradigms. Heh. You couldn't be more wrong. He was a major contributor to Encyclopedia, or a systematic dictionary of the sciences, arts, and crafts. Probably the greatest encyclopedia of its time. He wrote the much of the science sections. He did. Type "Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers" (ie as a phrase/string) into Google and you get 25,000 hits. No. And who says we don't fit into the natural world around us? Didn't your God initially create everything in the world to serve man? And then he added a few nasties as punishment for breaking his rules. The bible says we fit in perfectly. Then again...so does quantum physics. You couldn't be any 'wronger'. Jesus Christ was probably a great philosopher. I think GW Bush described Christ as his favourite political philosopher.