Posts Made By: Ron Zick

Jason,
Do you know of anyone or group that has done or is doing research on the effect of methane being slowly oxidized in the polar oceans and it's effect on ocean temperatures? Seems like this could be a significant component to the ocean temperature increases. It also would imply that there could be a huge cascade effect.

Lee,
I would like to remind everyone that as a resident of Illinois, that this is basically how things are done here. Remember the accusations around our ex-governor attempting to sell Obama's vacant senate seat? Our beloved ex-governor is still waiting trail and buy the looks of things, there's a good chance that he'll walk. Seems at though some important evidence was misplaced and a lot of legal gymnastics.

I'm not implying that Obama is the mastermind behind this kind of politics but remember how things work here in his home state.

David,
The article was a decent read and I appreciated the time line but it did seem slanted towards the pro-mosque side which I would expect.

The article leaves me with two questions; Why is the project being referred to as The Cordoba House and is the opening 9/11 date bogus or real or is it being changed?

Lee,
I think what one of the big problems with our elected officials is the criteria that we as a voting population use to select our candidates. Sarah Palin case in point, we judge her as being undereducated, unpolished, and basically inexperienced. All of these accusations have a degree of truth however let's look at the characteristics of most elected officials.
They have years of public speaking and stage presence, a team of speech writers and handlers, and a team of market research people polling the electorate to monitor our reactions to the candidates persona.

Where has this present criteria got us. The electable candidates are so well practiced in speech and stage presence that it is truly difficult to pickup on tells when they are lying to us. I don't think that they even know when they are lying. Their qualification of experience also usually means that they have had to make backroom deals with special interest groups and the political parties themselves to attain the position that they have. The market research people quite literally make the candidates into chameleons making them fit into almost every situation. We as the voting public are being sold an image with usually very little or even no substance.

We have been on this path for quite some time now. The advent of television really did revolutionize how we perceive candidates. Nixon-Kennedy debates is a case in point. Nixon was said to win the debate itself but Kennedy won hands down on stage presence and appearance and this was a key point in propelling him into the Whitehouse.

What I think we need to be looking for in candidates are lives that are full of honesty, integrity, commonsense, and an extremely strong desire to do the right thing even when popular opinion is against them. I would also like to have them actually have had a real job in the real world, pay their bills from their paycheck after all the taxes are deducted, dealt with public service bureaucrats, and just basically have lived an average life like the majority of us. I'm tired of elitists.

If Palin had actually run for President in 2008 and won, do you think that we would be worse off today then our current situation?

I'm not proud of what the GOP did for us while Bush was in the Whitehouse but the Democrats have not done a bit better and in many ways have done us worse. I truly believe that a candidate from either party that had a lot of commonsense, had integrity and honesty, and other wise just a plain average smuck would have done much better than our current administration.

William,
I would have to agree with you. I think part of the issue of nothingness has to do with the matter of observational position. For us living in the created universe with it's rules, properties ,and physical laws, would be by definition nothingness before the moment of creation.

From a God observational position, this would not be true, especially since most of us here would define God as without limits,i.e. eternal,omnipresent,omniscient, all powerful,holy.

The account of creation in Genesis is in my opinion, an account purely from and for the created's observational position and benefit.

This discussion, I believe, is one of the reasons that so many of the things mentioned in Ezekiel are so difficult to comprehend from an earthly materialist viewpoint. We are trying to explain and describe "everything" from a quasi 4 dimensional universe and in those limiting terms and experiences and yet from a Christian world view we see "everything" as being more uber-hyper-dimensional then what we experience.

Dave,
It is interesting to look back at history and see how the status quo in science has treated the new ideas guys. Men like Pasteur, Lister, and that Aussy doctor who won a Nobel prize in medicine for discovering that most stomach ulcers were caused by a bacteria. I remember very vividly how the medical establishment booed the poor guy when he first released his study. It took close to 20 yrs. for his study to become accepted.

The egos, political power, and dollars really get in the way of discovering the truth.

To paraphrase Niels Bohr, "New ideas only become acceptable when the holders of the old ideas die off."

Lee,
This story is getting an immense amount of press. We need to step back and analyze what the facts really are.

1. This is the first study that was done over a large geographic area.

2. This study was performed and funded by a "Green Group".

3. There has not been any explanation or description of exactly how the samples were drawn and how or which lab did the testing.

4. There is no correlation between how each city sampled got it's water and the test results. Many of the cities listed get their water from mountain sources. Others are from shallow wells and yet others are from deep aquifers.

5. Hexavalent chromium is not just an industrial contaminent, it also occurs naturally.

6. The testing limit apparently was at approximately 1 ppb. Since no one has stated which lab did the testing and exactly what their test threshold limits are and exactly what procedures were used to do these tests, the data could be very skewed. The levels they were testing for could easily have been caused by bad sampling or even contaminated sample bottles.

I am not trying to ignore or gloss over the possibility of the seriousness of the issue but without any data on the sampling used, we cannot mathematically have valid data at 1ppb with one sample. Most of the cities had levels which I wouldn't even worry about but if I lived in Norman Ok., I would want to have a battery of tests done to verify the actual levels.

This article does irritate me from the standpoint that it using a lot of fear tactics and not much real data. It gives me the impression that someone is positioning themselves for a bunch of funding for a problem that might or might not exist. Unless your living next to the backdoor of a plating company that is dumping it's waste into the ground, the worry from the article will in all likelihood shorten your life expectancy more than low level exposure.

Dave,
I'm starting to see a replay of the Carter-Iran situation. Not to imply that I want to be an interventionist, but we are allowing a power vacuum to be created without any real governmental solution in the wings. Islamic governments have had a long history in oscillating between anarchy and totalitarianism and at very sudden speeds. Even though the Egyptian military is pro-western leaning, no one knows how loyal and for how long the current situation will stay as it is.

Unless there is some sort of intervention by an outsider, I see the formation of an Islamic theocracy as a given. I'm afraid the Egyptian people are trading one dictator for a worse one.

Mubarak was a dictator but he did not have the worst human rights record of the Middle East. It appears from the news feeds that the underlying issue has been economic in nature. No matter who takes up the reigns, economic issues a very difficult to fix and take a significant passage of time to see any appreciable progress. This in itself creates a revolutionary environment in which citizens are requested and often willing to "make sacrifices" for the home land i.e. give up freedoms.

Jim,
One thing I have universally noticed as a group dynamic in meetings with large sums of money on the table is what I would call a "Monopoly" complex, as in the Parker Bros. game. Major purchases and decisions are treated as if there are no repercussions from a bad deal. The "Monopoly Money" has no real value so intrinsic worth is ignored. A gambling fever like euphoria over takes them and the group thinks they are invincible.

It seems that when normal thinking people get beyond their depth or comfort level they stop using common sense. Group think kicks in and suddenly everyone is raving about how great the "Emperors" new clothes look. Nobody wants to look ignorant or stupid so they all nod in agreement no matter how dangerous or idiotic the idea is. Everyone is afraid to declare that the "Emperor" is naked.

Whenever I hear grandiose plans in these meeting situations, I immediately become skeptical. If any deal is so good how come someone much smarter than me or the group has not already come up with this idea already.

A con man's most potent tool is human greed which we are all susceptible to. Unfortunately people in the political arena, because of the public platform, are also placed in a situation of being tempted by pride and arrogance. You combine pride, arrogance and greed and you get exactly what we are seeing.

Unfortunately the tax payer is stuck picking up the tab but now reality is suddenly dawning, the taxpayers are broke.

Sorry to hear about the mess in your town. Unfortunately, your town is not alone. The recession has been quite good at exposing all of the smoke and mirrors that were being used by municipalities and politicians.

I didn't know you were in local 150. I thought you were in one of the more southern locals.