I'm usually quite good at spotting spoofs. I mean ...

'If humans are special, invested with a soul by our Creator, along with the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, then why should we sacrifice even a minute of that pursuit worrying about the inferior species?'

... that has to be ironic or sarcastic or whatever, right? Why not just add that the Rapture's coming soon, so who cares what happens down here?

And 'greenhouse gas emissions are poised to turn the earth into a barely habitable planet ... concern over the earth is elitist, something people can afford to spend their time on when every other need is met'.

... well, my 'needs' include living somewhere 'habitable'.

When environmentalists say 'save the Earth', they mean 'as we know it, and can sustain human civilisation'. I'd agree that a lot of the narrative becomes abstracted and apocalyptic and engenders hopelessness.

I'd also agree that conservation (that's the word he's looking for, not 'conservative' - I know he was going for a joke, but, y'know, it wasn't ever going to be a good one) is important.

Perhaps we do need to work on a second strand of environmentalist narrative. One that appeals more to the rugged individualist than the recycling and rationing and hemp underwear that a lot of Green Party types are advocating. There is a problem with international co-operation ... but the problem is that a lot of Americans can't see those words without reading 'global socialism is trying to drag America down'.

You don't have to get sad at the thought of dying polar bears to realize that, say, people use too many plastic bottles and plastic bags. I'd hope that seeing what it does to marine life ... http://www.mindfully.org/Plastic/Ocean/Pacific-Garbage-Patch27oct02.htm ... wouldn't leave you completely cold, but just purely selfishly, it's not sensible to buy a plastic bottle with a few sips of water shipped from a thousand miles away.

This isn't an abstract debate. Whether it was 'global warming' or not, the Darfur situation was caused by a changing climate (go on - break the habit of a lifetime and look it up). Most scientists who aren't paid to say otherwise agree that the oceans are getting warmer and warmer oceans mean more Katrinas.

The 'triage' thing is not the solution, it's the opposite of the solution. The way to solve this problem is to start thinking more than a year or two ahead. To buy things built to last, to think a little more about what they're made from. If we don't know enough about the natural processes *find out*.

Just about every aspect of the creation of the Star Wars movie has been painstakingly documented and analysed. So when people make claims, they're easy enough to test.

So ... Carrie Fisher didn't 'write the dialogue' for The Empire Strikes Back, although she and Harrison Ford did (like virtually every other actor on every other movie) work through some dialogue changes with the director. She's *since* had a career as a script doctor, which Fisher says started with work on Hook.

The 'Kershner's the real genius' thing just doesn't work. For a start, Kershner is the visionary talent behind those great movies Never Say Never Again and Robocop 2. For another, Lucas ended up doing a lot of the directing when production fell behind and the budget soared (all the Yoda stuff is Lucas, for example - there's film of him directing, no sign of Kershner, on the making of DVD).

The idea that Lucas was only coincidentally involved in the good bits of Star Wars is very common, but also very, very silly. He did less for Empire Strikes Back than any of the other Star Wars movies, but even there he certainly did more than Peter Jackson did on any of the Lord of the Rings movies (where he worked from someone else's script based on someone else's book, contracting out the special effects). If you like Empire Strikes Back, you like George Lucas' work.

... and the new benchmark for irony is that the very same fans who complain that Peter Jackson is nothing like Lucas and the LotR movies are so much more sophisticated than Star Wars are already moaning about *their* prequel trilogy.

Yeah. Tom Stoppard wrote the final draft of Revenge of the Sith.

Oops, I just sank your battleship.

If he's found a bigger medium for circulating information than the internet, he should probably patent it.

The context of Myers doing this was that a college student had taken a consecrated wafer from a church and faced death threats. Catholic organizations have said that it was a worse crime than rape and murder.

It isn't. Catholics are free to believe any crazy nonsense they want to - no-one is stopping them, no-one is trying to stop them. Their belief in magic biscuits is actually one of the *least* offensive things they believe.

Theists the world over are crying 'persecution' and conning governments into giving them *additional* rights to the rest of us. Allowing them to kill their kids because prayer counts as religious treatments, beat them if they call it exorcising demons, hush up child abuse if its done by a priest, allow men to rape thirteen year old girls if it's done in their cult's compound.

Non-Catholics have the right to say that Catholics believe silly things.