Walsingham

No, because faith has never provided any observable, measurable results. Science has. Faith moves men. End of. That could help justify its usefulness but not its correctness. If Faith can give a man the courage to face death unflinchingly, as it has done on numerous occasions then that makes it pretty damn powerful. I accept that may make it useful, but I do not think it can be discounted, is all I am trying to say. It is real in as much as all our thoughts, dreams, and aspirations become reality through our actions. I suspect that the urge to eliminate the spiritual aspect is as unhealthy as the alternative urge to eliminate the sexual which predated it. Man is more than the big head or the little head, the heart, or the hand.

Only a handful of the world's 200+ countries have nuclear weapons or are seeking to acquire them, most of those do their best to stop other countries from acquiring them, a number of countries have given up nuclear weapons or weapons programmes. Iran doesn't make all that meaningless - and I was careful to say that there were problems and exceptions, but the overall effort has been quite successful, don't you think? I put it to you that if nuclear non-proliferation had been a failure, we would be living in a very different kind of world than the one we have. The same for diseases. Great progress against polio and Guinea worm - held back because some local populations fear vaccines are harmful, but nevertheless a qualified success and tremendous achievement for humanity. I accept your point that non-proliferation has had some success, and so have attempts to eliminate certain diseases. I should also add that I'm not in favour of just quitting without trying on anything involving cooperation. But at the same time your examples illustrate when cooperation will only go so far. When that far isn't far enough our only option is to take an alternative route.

I agree that it's not that you get depressed purely because of bad sleep, eating etc. But as I say I think it would be worthwhile trying to leverage those factors to combat depression. Case in point: I'm sleeping well, eating relatively well, and exercising, but I realised today that my new girl is hiding something from me. This makes me sad. Doing pushups won't fix that.

I realised a while back that I have to accept fights will happen. Mainly because a) I'm pretty insensitive b) I date fiery women c) I enjoy a good fight

It is indeed interesting. I didn't know that about prions. However I was already of teh opinion that replicators evolve and due to my reading on evolutionary algorithms and so on.

Sorry to jump on you, steve, but NEAR elimination of diseases? Nuclear non-proliferation when Iran is doing what it's doing? You've chosen perfect examples of why we don't work, haven't you?

No, because faith has never provided any observable, measurable results. Science has. Faith moves men. End of.

I have to say, after having studied and interviewed the militias that they would be as successful in going up against US Army regulars or even staties as the girl scouts.

Surely doing exorcisms would raise more money?

Im 100% with Krezzie. Assuming that correlation has noting to do with causation is as bad as always assuming it does mean causation. In this case as he put more eloquently than I would have, there are subsidiary reasons to believe causation due to the role of serotonin in depression and the way serotonin appears to be regulated by sleep. Actually I've been thinking for a while that we should try a depression therapy that consists entirely of aerobic exercise, good healthy food, and good sleep.

I'm certainly down with the notion of good overcoming evil. I'm a solid war is inevitable in certain cases, guy; but I'm also of the opinion that war is totally unnecessary in a lot of cases. Kindness can bridge the gap, and reduce the number of wars you fight. Less wars means more concentration of effort, means more wars won. Being raised in a small village I got the small c christian values of vicarage sunday school. Kindness above all.

Our local campaign which I am refereeing has come to a halt due partly to problems reconciling one of teh characters. He is a dwarf who has hooked up with some youngish elves, and they are adventuring in the Border Princes of the Warhammer universe. Problem is that he is a secret devotee of Khaine, god of murder. I have no clue how to play this. Looking for some inspiration I rolled up some starting mutations using the Chaos codexes, and he got 'evil eye' which means he can kill anyone by looking them in the eye. This is kind of cool, and I intend to work it into his story as we go along, with him getting the images of those innocents he kills trapped in his eye. Probably the effects will get stronger the more innocents he kills (not with his eye) growing from unease, to fear, to terror , and finaly insta-death. Now the basic plot is planned around bandit hunting, moving up to couriering, to fighting an orc horde, to fighting zombies etc etc, and maybe some grand political movements. But I don't see how having a murderer on board is going to do anything other than arse things up.

Well, exactly. I've jsut been reading the book Nemesis, which describes the final year of the war against Japan, and I can't imagine anything less evocative of the nobility of the samurai code (besides the prison camps) than that fatal moronic dash to doom, without fighter cover. "In Yamato's gunroom, at sea on the night of 6 April, an ironic voice demanded ' Which country showed the world what aircraft could do by sinking the Prince of Wales?' Her gunnery, never good, failed to down more than a handful of the planes which attacked her. A total waste.

In light of the recent attack on the Danish cartoonist behind one of the 'controversial' Muhammed cartoons, I thought it might be kind on younger members to recap the issue. Offensive to God, according to Al Qaeda Not offensive to God, according to Al Qaeda My own feeling is that being insensitive to strongly held beliefs is unwise, but murdering people who offend you is ****ing childish. I don't care whether it's because you think you're a shaheed, or a gangster, or the Marquis of bloody Saint Germaine. Man up.

I think Copenhagen proves a far more important 'fact' than any proof of global warming. Specifically that human cannot/will not collaborate to solve collective problems. Follow my reasoning: 1. Assume global warming is a result of human collective activity 2. Halting global warming will require an unnatural (that is counterto our normal behaviour) change in that activity 3. Being an unnatural change we would need to implement a control mechanism over our collective activity I assert 4. Such a control mechanism is so utterly inconsistent with current geopolitical realities as to be effictively impossible. Therefore 5. Optimal national/bloc policy must default to a self-interested focus on surviving the impact of global warming, not wasting resources on trying to pre-empt it.

I'm not saying I agree, but I can definitely see why you might feel that way. I probably mentioned this already but I actually met and was tutored for a while by one of the founders of Oxfam. He quit because publicly many years ago saying the charity existed purely to make the financiers feel better. To put his original statement perhaps more clearly he felt Oxfam existed to feed people, not to make sure they were fed. Anyway, that's another matter really. So what have you decided, Tigs?

I think effiiciency needn't be the be all and end all. Sometimes transnational effects are required. For example with child abuse images. A local effort isn't going to deliver on an international trade.

As I understand it teh body needs 'cool down' time to get to stages 3 and 4 of sleep which do you the most good. I'd have thought 2 hours was too short to do any good. The army insist we have a minimum of 4 in an unbroken stretch. But then, with respect for your misfortunes, you do suffer from depression.

Maybe so, but the members may not be aware of it. Personally I found that sleep deprivation and stress/depression coexist in a spiral pattern.

You basically filled in the blanks for me, Pids. Yes it has to be carefully managed. This is the problem. Years ago I did some volunteer work with kids who had cerebal palsy, and later at an orphanage. I found it drawing me in, and I knew I had to make a decision to either throw my entire life that way or continue as planned with my own pre-existing talents. I just couldn't give to people that close to me at weekends and then ignore them all week. Conversely my brother shows another problem, which is that if you help people who are very close then they can come to hate you for seeing them and knowing them at their weakest. A factor I've seen with a couple of people I've helped out of suicidal urges. They're really greatful but they can't bear being near you.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/8435955.stm

I see what you're saying, but giving to people close to you can be very messy. Look at me and my brother.

"If you couldn't buy something, it's probably because it wasn't available due to poor trade relations with the United States or low supply." Yeah. He's a freaking Albert Einstein, alright.

Welll it would be if that's how you spend it!

The Medecine Sans Frontiers guys are very cool as people in my experience. Plus they don't give a **** if a situation is in the news or not, they just go.