Admission to the Marilyn Manson Institute of Atheistic Scholarship, home of Walter Map, distinguished chair Atheistic Reaction Formation. Read a little Nietzche, get a lot of ego, get down tonight!

Sliming me does not improve your position.

I'll take your resort to ad hominem attacks, on the other hand, as a signal that you've capitulated.

Thanks for conceding the debate. I appreciate that.

All who look upon the data turn to stone.

That's why I'm careful to review such data through a mirror, darkly. Either that or hire a graduate assistant.

My thing on Fermi-Dirac statistics turned a few people into stone too a few years ago, but that was because it was just so boring.

Fortunately the effect was temporary and everybody recovered.

Okay, it was more than a few years ago.

Perhaps that makes me somewhat of a sadist.

Quite aside from your other bad qualities. Maybe you should list them for us.

For the most part, yes, I believe that the current standards within the scientific community make it much harder for cranks like Banks to enjoy the prominence they have in the past.

Pons and Fleischmann notwithstanding.

No sense of humor, Walt?

Hardly. I've enjoyed myself immensely at your expense.

Thus, the difference is that in science we can easily pick out the cranks and weirdos because they make claims or pursue studies beyond the bounds of their trained disciplines. In religion, however, the umbrella of church doctrine protects all the theological cranks from exposure.

To it's credit, the church did at long last accept Copernicus and absolve Galileo. Way late though, so maybe just partial credit.

The church has accepted the Big Bang theory, although Hawking has suggested that this is because the Vatican doesn't really understand it.

Still no sign of God or heaven anywhere. Maybe we could get coordinates from a reinterpretation of the Apocrypha. But I doubt it.

It's quite possible to build an electrostatic confinement fusion reactor that will actually produce fusion neutrons in your home workshop.

Do you know of anybody who has actually gotten the thing to work as advertised?

Me neither. I do know of people who have given up trying, though. Not that this amounts to any 'proof' that it can't work, but that might simply amount to attempting to prove a negative. It would be interesting if it did, because then we could go on to coming up with an explanation for why it does.

In the meantime, we're left with explanations for why it shouldn't, mostly involving a lack of sufficiently strong coupling mechanisms between chemical processes and nuclear processes.

Quite right, but the fusor isn't the same research that Pons and Fleishmann did. As I said, it doesn't work as advertised, it's inelegant in the extreme, and doesn't seem amenable to power generation.

It's not that engineering curiosities can't be interesting, but at this point that's all it is, and maybe all it will ever be. I believe one of the American auto manufacturers funded research for it several years ago but it turned out to be unpromising.

We have a perfectly good fusion reactor available already. We'd probably be better off figuring out how to use it properly.

Got under your skin, didn't I?

Me:

Personal attacks, false characterizations of peoples arguments, lying, straw men arguments, logical fallacies.....

Is that all you got?

You:

For you? Its all you merit

Thanks for conceding the controversy. I appreciate that.

You're entitled to believe what you like, no matter how ambivalent to facts and reasoning.

This is a discussion of religion, after all, is it not?

It's true that I'm an atheist. What you don't know is precisely which god I'm an atheist about.

Would you care to guess? For all you know, I could be an atheist about all of them.

A battle Bush's EPA can't win

Bush doesn't have to demolish environmental regulations completely in order to 'win'. All he really needs to do is put environmentalism back so that his corporate constituents can do some polluting and make a few extra bucks, until he's gone and the laws can be reconstituted in a few years. In the meantime the polluters have plenty of time to have at it.

That's something of a victory for them all by itself.

And inaction on the part of automakers will pretty much guarantee the continuation of their disasterous slide as the world changes around them and they fail to keep pace.

That's the long-term tragedy here. Foreign makers are eating our lunch because the no-longer-so-Big_Three want to hit home runs, rather than aim for sustainable profitability by keeping up with the rest of the industry. They're laming themselves, and us, by failing to embrace environmental efficiency as a competitive advantage.

However, neither Bush nor his supporters care about next year. They aim to grab as much as they can for as long as they can, come hell or high water.

Of that we can be certain.

I guess what you really mean is, "the Government should sterilize poor people because they breed to much". that is the dirty little secret of the bleeding heart "liberal" when it talks about "too many people". What do you want to do? Sterilize people? One child policies like China?

No need to be so extreme.

It may be sufficient for most people to voluntary restrict themselves to two children at most. That may be enough to stabilize the population and bring it down gradually, without creating seriously negative social and demographic distortions.

One thing is certain: if human civilization does not voluntarily control its population, circumstances will eventually do it harshly, and in a manner that may not be controllable.

Planetary resources are finite, limited, and fragile, and humankind has been reproducing like a bacterial culture that's outgrowing its petri dish. We are already seeing massive die-offs in Africa and Asia, and it's a foregone conclusion that those die-offs will spread in the future.

You're prohibited from stalking other posters, and I'll be issuing a complaint.