As for global warming, I imagine that the cavemen who saw the glaciers retreating from much of Europe and North America sat around their fires and complained how global warming was going to screw up the mammoth hunt. The fact is, the climate changes. We’ll deal with it.

According to the report (and the summary of findings in the executive summary, which you can easily access through the above link, is only 5 pages) the only real “consensus” is that temperatures right now are higher than they have been for about 4 centuries, as opposed to the several millenia claimed previously. Since the “Little Ice Age” ended about 1850, what we essentially know is that temperatures in the last century are higher than during the little ice age (which is, ahem, why they call it an ice age.) The report says we know little about temperatures before 1600 and almost nothing before 900 (when we think we know temperatures were about the same as now—query about mass extinctions, coastal inundations etc. circa 900.) This is very big stuff, and it absolutely obliterates the claim that “most scientists” (this is the NAS) are in consensus about the GW alarmists claims. This isn’t some lone dissident out there, this is the NAS. The report itself is a consensus report, and shows they ain’t got jack, as someone above commented.

Also, read the same blogger’s commentary (or listen yourself) on the available sound transcripts of the conference relating to the report. It reveals that the “hockey stick” is now toast, among other gems. Big stuff, I think, for those interested.

From WAPO.
“At a recent White House reception for freshman members of Congress, Virginia’s newest senator tried to avoid President Bush. Democrat James Webb declined to stand in a presidential receiving line or to have his picture taken with the man he had often criticized on the stump this fall. But it wasn’t long before Bush found him.
“How’s your boy?” Bush asked, referring to Webb’s son, a Marine serving in Iraq.
“I’d like to get them out of Iraq, Mr. President,” Webb responded, echoing a campaign theme.
“That’s not what I asked you,” Bush said. “How’s your boy?”
“That’s between me and my boy, Mr. President,” Webb said coldly, ending the conversation on the State Floor of the East Wing of the White House.”

This is from a retired military general?

Never been able to figure that one out. You mean if Pilate, or a few Jews, or Mel Gibson, hadn’t unjustly killed Jesus, then his life would have been pointless, and no one would be able to get into heaven?

If so, God bless Pilate, and Judas, too.

I thought the point of his life was his very, very difficult message about how we need to live our lives.

While Christians try to educate me on that one, here’s something I’ve never gotten straight from the Jews: if someone on a streetcorner in Brooklyn calling himself a “Jew for Jesus” is an nothing more than an oxymoronic (and moronic) ex-Jew, why aren’t Leonard Cohen, Allen Ginsberg, and the zillions of Jewish American hippies like my dad who embraced one eastern religion or another in the sixties similarly ostracized?

BTW, global warming appears to be real, much to the inevitable chagrin of the Arab oil oligarchs that I thought everyone here hated.