It's funny; it's about science, but also a lot about people's feelings/perspectives.

Here's on take on it:

"Partisan conservatives pooh-pooh peak oil (and human-caused climate change) because they think that to concede that these challenges are real and must be confronted is to acknowledge that greed is not always good, and that free market capitalism must be restrained, or at least tinkered with substantially. Peak oil and climate change are fronts in the culture wars, and to some conservatives, watching the price of oil rise as the Arctic ice melts, it might feel like being in Germany at the close of World War II, with the Russians advancing on one front while U.S.-led forces come from the other. The propositions that cheap oil is running out and the world is getting hotter -- as a result of our own activities -- threaten a whole way of life. The very idea that dirty Gaia-worshipping hippies might be right is absolute anathema.

Given that many on the left also see peak oil and climate change as cultural battlefields, as weapons with which to assault enemies whose values they politically and aesthetically oppose (see James Kunstler), it's no wonder that some conservatives are fighting back like caged rats, or that they want to blame speculators for oil prices, or biased scientists for climate change.

Of course, it doesn't have to be this way. Sensible people could agree..."

http://www.salon.com/tech/htww/2008/05/12/peak_oil_culture_wars/index.html

"Most researchers would agree that while the original hockey stick can – and has – been improved in a number of ways, it was not far off the mark."

http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/climate-change/dn11646

Again, are you worried that Gore was selective/innacurate, or are you actually saying that the whole things is overblown and we should just breathe a big old sigh of relief?

Scientists have some pretty serious theories, too, about the timing of massive volcanic eruptions and dinosaur extinctions based at least in part on observations of global temperature and CO2 in the atmosphere.

Lots of creationists have it in for carbon dating, too...

climate change could (it's good to be careful, but this an informed and reasoned conjecture) mean increased thunderstorms, blizzards, flooding, and tornadoes

"the normal range of human behaviour"

gosh, what are the perameters for this? and who decided?

Earlier on this string I mentioned Hrdy, whose work also deals extensively with primate infanticide, which is when a male will kill infants so that its mother will stop nursing and return to being sexually receptive. then he mates with her.

it's pretty cold. the selfish gene, dawkins would likely say.

ever hear the saying "beat you like a red-headed step child"? luckily infanticide is relatively rare in people, but the concept/impulse isn't foreign...

good thing we're capable of so much good stuff, too!

i was thinking satire, too...

religion is a way of thinking and being in the world, and this observation wears the garb of new agey stuff it's popular to mock, but hell, people like pageantry.

if you leave out the mysticism that makes you so jittery, this is a sort of personality type endorsement

-Obama has charisma that people are drawn to

-he is the kind of leader who inspires people rather frightens

even if you don't believe in concepts like spiritual growth, there might be something to trying to climb Maslow's ladder to self-actualization

religion is an awful lot about pyschology anyway

but there are many things we don't understand in the world

the placebo effect

quantum nonlocality

no i'm not selling crystals, i'm just dismayed that in our sondbyte/culture war world everyone's so quick to jam others into categories and dismiss their ideas out of hand, and so reluctant to look beneath the flashy surface of things

and given his economically progressive, socially inclusive platform, would he have had a "problem" with the woman vote?

or the working class rural white vote?

ditto with issues and platform

seems like human nature lots of women would want to vote in a woman and the same for black/white people people. some degree of polarizationed isn't that surprising.

but this? wow.

it's almost as though someone went around inventing these self-fulfilling "problems."

no, not the Repubs, but someone seeking to reap the benefits of the expensive, smeary work they'd already been doing ("Obama is a Muslim" propoganda campaigns, for instance) by triangulating.

passing obervation: all those belittling, "early" calls for Clinton to leave the race corresponded with her "kitchen sink" spectacle/strategy.

Yes, it's time to move on, but let's not rewrite history.

for Clinton and Obama to saddle up and ride the country together, promoting unity, promoting Democratic (and American) values to all different sections of the country

I liked the funky tunes, too.

it's pretty out there

but yeah, there's a pretty big difference between several days of driving and a 6 hr flight...

Go Dems!