In 1901, huge numbers of people died from disease and infections that are cured today but there are many areas where medicine does poorly. People still die. Biochemistry is enormously complex - there no easy way to reach in and treat a joint or a cancer or a brain without damaging or changing other things. The criteria for a successful drug is that it be 10% better than a placebo.

The mistake is assuming that because conventional medicine may fail to improve life other treatments must be better. Better sterile protocols will stop infections in hospitals not distance healing. Alternative medicine feeds on the apples/oranges comparison: traditional medicine has known limitations and side effects, alternatives do not - not because they work - but because they are mostly untested or at least unknown to the user. Everyone uses conventional medicine and we know that it will fail for everyone eventually - we all die. This doesn't mean alternative medicine is better. Would the public feel the same way if everyone tried accupuncture or homeopathy for their appendicitis or pneumonia and then tried traditional medicine?

Nutritional supplements are explicitly excluded in American law from requiring proof of effect. But do you really want to rely on 1000 year old medicine - Do you really think we are made of air, earth, fire and water (acupuncture?) Do you really think water remembers something (homeopathy?) We need better alternative medicine but we don't need this ancient crap that fails when really tested.

We need to keep looking and testing but we need to discard the stuff that doesn't work.

Obama's lip service to human rights without real action is like voicemail hell where "your call is very important to us, .....just not right now.... or enough to pay for a real person" Just like corporations trade off lost business and annoyed customers against the cost of actually answering calls, the Obama administration needs to be taught that the costs of not answering the call can be more than they want to pay.

OnTheBeat said: "... did CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, PBS, or anyone else (besides FOX) report that Obama just cut funding to the Iranian Pro-Democracy Movement that the Bush administartion had established and, as was obvious from their elections recently, was making headway? Just curious. Does kind of send a message to the young Iranians where the support they have from this president..."

Try, just try, to imagine that Iranians are like us, they have their own sense of country, they resent foreign interference as much as they resent their own oppression. What makes you think the recent democracy movement has anything to do with a small amount of US CIA money? For years, the conservative factions in Iran could point at the American threat to their security (The US invaded Iraq..) to justify suppression of internal dissent. Are you going to claim the American revolution happened because France supported us? How do you think Americans would have felt if France had tried to cause a revolution in America? Remember, George Washington quite happily fought against France in the French and Indian war.

This same ignorance and blindness to what people actually feel in other countries led to the Bush, FOX and general media cluelessness as to Iraq. The ruling Sunni's under Saddam were like the ruling Protestants in Ireland, despised and hated by a majority of the oppressed (Shias/Catholics.) How could anyone who took even a few minutes to learn about the country fail to understand that civil war inevitable after an invasion? How could anyone have believed that Saddam would have funded religious extremists of the opposite religious faction - Shia religious fanatics being a group who hated Saddam and would not care whether they died attacking him. Rational people he could cow, fantatics were a real danger to him. Religion under Saddam was severely curtailed - the reason women had the highest freedom in Iraq of all of the Arab countries.

Who remembers that we invaded Iraq to "kick some ass" about 9/11, only to later become "nation builders" and "liberators" after the WMD and 9/11 lies fell apart. It's pretty hard to be a nation builder while kicking ass. Yet our media seamlessly slid from one to the other.

One last thing, as demonstrated by Obama's election, FOX may get 3 Million viewers but there are 300 Million people in this country.

When Hasan joined the military about 20 years ago, possibly to pay for his medical school, we were tussling with Libya and fighting over Iran/Contra. However, we had not yet invaded Iraq, precipitated a civil war and the slaughter of tens of thousands, and had not yet decided that Arabs were worthy of torture and indefinite detention without trial. Hasan grew up in the U.S. I expect his loyalties did not start out divided.

I still don't understand how this country could so thoroughly wrap itself in a metaphorical flag of freedom while so readily abandoning morality, freedom and the rule of law.

As the quoted emails say: all the requested data is available in raw form, the models are described in the papers. Mcintyre can damn well do his own work and either try to reproduce the models as described and show they do or do not reproduce the results shown in the papers or he can go stuff himself. Better yet he can try to generate his own model and describe and justify in print what it predicts and show that the model acccurately represents the existing earth data. If he can make a model that gets the physics right so it reproduces the past and at the same time demonstrates that increasing CO2 does not indicate continuing and future earth warming, he can become famous as the Einstein that showed everybody wrong. Until then he's just an annoying hack.

If he wants to restrict himself to particular proxy temperature methods, he is free to create and publish his own analysis of the data. It's just real work, maybe he should try doing some.