Henry Payne for February 26, 2014

Ya, but while you and your kids are unemployed, living in poverty and dodging bullets, you can sleep well knowing that your great great great great great great great grandkids(if alive) will not have slightly warmer temps.

Maybe if Detroit had made smaller, more efficient cars sooner, we’d have a better environment and a more economically viable Detroit. Destroying the atmosphere isn’t the only way Big Dumb Business harms us all.

You should stop complementing the man.

Isn’t DRUG marketing a demand and supply free market concept?The runaway pharmaceutical business is doing more harm.

How many are aware the company that produces a “drug” to reduce bone loss, could not sell enough to make it profitable, so they developed a bone density test and pushed it to Drs..Now they are making lots of profit on the “drug”.

Ionizer, then let me spell it out to you. Calling John Kerry an idiot is an insult to idiots. He can also be labeled a liar (see his Winter Soldier testimony as but one example of doing so under oath).To call John Kerry an idiot is to complement him. He is far more stupid and disingenious, not to mention perpetually wrong and a liar, than that.

I confess to not reading every post every day. But the ones I did read were pretty universal in their condemnation of the unions in general, and were pretty gleeful that the union was defeated.

And if I’m not mistaken, this is the second time you have put the word “evil” in my mouth in the last week. I do not assume that if one apple in the bunch is bad, all apples must be destroyed. Please refrain from saying that I said something I did not. Thanks in advance.

I get it. Be concerned about “now”, the hell with later.

I never mentioned Soros. In this specific instance, the big push came from Corker and the Koch Brothers.

Anyone who has money can influence things. More important, those who do not have it have no influence. That is not my preference. It is what is. Soros does the same thing; I get that. But, to my knowledge, Soros had nothing to do with this particular incident, and Corker and the Koch Brothers did not go out of their way to hide their influence.

I hear you, and I appreciate your reasoned reply. My point is that generalizations can obscure the truth. Not every Republican is hard-right fix-the-government-by-destroying-it whackos. Not every Democrat is hard-left-give-out-tax-money-to-the-undeserving bleeding-hearts. (To be sure, those people exist. Just saying they are not the majority.) Making those assumptions (including saying that something is “the current lib position”) helps to increase animosity that is way too prevalent to start with. Why does it have to be us vs. them? Can’t we all be Americans who love our country, even if we disagree?

I don’t fit what you describe as a “lib”, Although I find many conservative tenets abhorrent, I agree with others. I am sure we could find examples that would ring true with you, as well.

I guess my point is that we get nowhere by saying “unions always good, management always bad” or vice versa. Every circumstance is different in some way. When we approach with “My way is always right, and your way is always wrong”, we all lose.

For example, I don’t agree with the Duck Dynasty guy, but he has every right to say what he thinks. Whether his show deserves to stay on the air has nothing to do with what any of us thinks; it has to do with the contract he signed with the network.

I think management should have the right to run its business the way it wants; they should only be restricted when others are hurt either by commission or omission.

You have every right to throw your fist. But that right ends at my face. Right, left, independent; this still applies.

@DRCanuckHidingbehindANewNameCuzHeGotBanned So… millions are staving to death in California…. What color is the sky on your world?

If Global Warming is scientific, why does it need to be a political cause? What does it need things like that petition we heard the other day against Charles Krauthammer’s column?And isn’t it obvious that it’s politically advantageous to the left?

CBC news had a story last night about the decline of shell-fish off the coast of British Columbia — because of ocean acidification, which is caused by CO2. But the story didn’t say why there’s more CO2. The point of the story was the economic impact — the shell-fish plants have been laying off workers and closing down.

I said, “Why is it that resistance to science is located in a particular part of the political spectrum?”You said, “I don’t know. Why are libs so afraid of contrary evidence?”For months now I’ve been asking those who don’t believe that the climate is changing to post their arguments and links to reputable scientific papers or good popularizations. So far I have received almost nothing in reply. Churchhillwasright sent a big list of 600 items which were useless. The best so far was a reference to Dr. Roy Spencer, who did publish a paper on cloud cover some years back in a peer-reviewed journal; but his paper has been pretty thoroughly critiqued. So if you have contrary evidence please post it. I would be very happy to be convinced that there is no global climate change.

Weeeel, I don’t think so. It was ionizer who said, “Why are libs so afraid of contrary evidence.” I’m asking him to state his contrary evidence. I’m not afraid of it, I just haven’t seen any of it. As for proving that something doesn’t exist, that’s also not quite what we’re talking about. A bunch of scientists have said, “We have evidence that the climate is changing, and furthermore, we have evidence that people are partly responsible.” Many scientists believe that the case has been proved “beyond a reasonable doubt.” If some others think that’s wrong, okay, but now the deniers should state their evidence and their argument.

I don’t expect to change anyone’s mind, but I can use these discussions to test and challenge myself. If I can’t reply to the skepticism, then I should change my mind. And I’m willing to change my mind. But I need some good evidence and a good argument. So far the evidence and argument on the skeptical side hasn’t been persuasive, but I am open to read and consider any serious discussion of the issues.

I understand your position on “proof”, but I suspect that it’s unnecessarily modest, because it’s based on an unnecessarily narrow view of what counts as “proof”. Sometimes the most strict view of proof — the mathematical view — is taken to be what proof really is. But there could be different kinds of proof in different situations. Different activities could have different understandings of what constitutes proof. (Here I’m somewhat influenced by some of the ordinary language philosophers, by the way.) In a criminal court the standard is “proof beyond a reasonable doubt”. Mathematicians might not consider a proof in court to meet their standards, but why should the standards of mathematics apply in a court? To say “proof beyond a reasonable doubt” is to say two things: first, there is such a thing as judicial proof, that’s the way we use the language; and second, this proof is not beyond any doubt, just beyond a reasonable doubt. An unreasonable person could doubt the verdict, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been proved beyond a reasonable doubt. In civil cases, there is a lower standard of proof. The word proof derives from the Latin “probo”, which means “to test” — a related word is “to probe”. So in a sense, proof consists of testing. At a certain point, even if you haven’t given a mathematical, axiomatic, proof of some proposition, you have tested it enough so that any further test is a waste of time. At that point you can reasonably say that the proposition has been proved, that is, sufficiently tested.+On a different point, people sometimes say that you can’t prove a negative. I don’t think that’s true. I think you can prove that there is no such critter as Pegasus here now — that is, a full-sized horse with wings that is big enough to fly with a person riding on its back. Maybe I’m wrong, but that seems reasonable to me.