Xanthro: Suffering is a uniquely human feeling. Animals do not worry about whether other animals are suffering.

Ballsee: It's fairly shocking to read these kind of clearly anthropocentric statements from someone who is otherwise a fairly intelligent person. They seem to derive from a person who may never actually have spent any time at all with other animals, or in fact may never have actually seen one, even on TV. Darwin once remarked that the suffering of the lower animals was almost more than he could bear.

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Am I anthropocentric? Absolutetly. The problem is too many humans apply human traits and feelings to animals instead of accepting animals for what their own unique traits.

I've spent far more time among animals, domestic and wild than probably 99% of the members on this board.

We cannot prove Animals worry about anything, much less

about other animals. While some primates seem to worry about members of their own group, I'm talking about animals worrying about differnt animals.

Snakes don't worry over the state of their food, that's eaten alive, neither do lions, tigers or any predators.

Think about Darwin's statement, as it proves rather disproves my point. It is Darwin worrying about the suffering of the lower animals, not the other animals inflicting the damage that causes the suffering.

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Ballsee: How is it that Xantrho knows, and knows rather emphatically, what animals may or may not "worry" about? The arrogrance of human beings seems inexhaustabile.

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Spend time with animals and not just domestic ones and you'll come to the same conclusion. Animals viewed from human standards are often cruel and mean. To say that animals worry about causing suffering in other animals would also require that we accept that animals are evil, as they willing inflict horrible deaths upon each other.

Animals aren't evil, they have no such emotions, and it's wrong and dangerous to apply human standards to animals.

Eric Theodore Cartman = "A husband and wife who are open to conception happening at any time have a far different kind of intimacy than another couple using condoms or pills."

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Do you think about what you write before you post?

By definition you've just stated that couples who cannot have children are inherently less intimate than a couple that can breed. Rape can equal conception, it's not exactly an intimacy that most would desire, yet based on your thinking it's above that of a loving couple who cannot have children.

Your thinking perpetuates the tired old adage that a woman who cannot have children is not really a woman, and it objectives women because it equates their worth in a relationship to nothing more than a means of procreation.

Women are not defined by the ability to conceive, thinking such regulates them as animals, livestock and to be treated as such. Perhaps that is how you really feel, and it’s not lack of thinking that produced such an inane passage, but actual belief that women are animals.

You can't say a heart transplant patient lives on average of 7 years, and he had one six years ago, and thus he has only a year to live.

That fails first grade logic.

Really, does this idiot think that because the average life expectancy of a female is 78 that every women over that age is a member of the walking dead?

The reason for only a average 7 year age for heart transplants is because so many die or reject the organ in the beginning of the program.

Based on this stupidity alone, he shouldn't be allowed to be a dog catcher, much less a member of the House.

People who know nothing about nuclear power shouldn't comment on it unless it is to ask for clarification.

"The building of reactors, the mining and refinement of uranium, the management of the waste products- all require vast amounts of energy."

Tiny amounts of energy in compared to the power produced. No energy production will require no energy, because that violates the laws of physics. What matters is the net ratio of power produced to power used in production.

"And the generation of nuclear power itself is not 'carbon neutral'- it may perhaps spew a bit less CO2 into the atmosphere than a coal powered plant, but it spews too."

What, CO2 from insects killed by heat? Just what CO2 production are you talking about, because it exists only in fantasy.

"And never mind the safety and security issues inherent in nuclear power generation. "

What safety issues would those be? More people in the US died this year in the production of coal than have died in the history of US nuclear power production.

Nuclear energy is inherently safer than any kind of combustion.

"No matter how we look at it, or how deep our faith that science and technology can and will solve all problems we cannot and will not figure out how to get something for nothing."

While sacrifice is noble, simply dismissing technologies because one does not understand them is not noble, it's called ignorance. Energy policy should not be built on ignorance.

Far too many "Greens" are anti-nuclear energy because they are ignorant of the process and unwilling to learn. That's inexcusable.

We need to make the DLC radioactive," Kos wrote in August 2005. "No calls for a truce will be brooked."

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Right there is why Repulicans will win in 2008.

Too many Democrats have an all or nothing approach to politics that guarantee the more unity party will win regardless of platform.

From the backing of Nadar in 2000 to current battles over carbon monoxide emmissions, the left is intent of getting everything or nothing, and so it gets stuck with nothing.

There has been one Democrat President in the last 26 years, and that person was part of the DLC. At this point we could have our own 40 years of wandering in the desert.