regfootball

I, like just about everyone else, goes through a period of time where you question the beliefs that were taught to you from birth. I spent about 7 years of my life from age 18 or so and did not go to church. I studied college coursework that was designed to question all your fundamantal beliefs and discuss the whys and why nots. I even wrote a position paper questioning many fundamental points on the Catholic religion. I basically determined that there was something to the notion of faith and religion, in my own way, and by my own litmus test. I saw far too many examples which led my in my heart to believe that a God or higher power etc. did exist. Some humans like to think they have absolute control over their own existence. Such fricking hogwash. We have the power to think and make decisions and act for ourselves to some degree. But its rdiciulous to suggest we determine our fates 100% completely. Its how we respond to the daily challenges before us, and how we incorporate our faith and beliefs into that, that determines how we become stronger inside. So no, its not always a case of 'daddy said so'. It's more often a case of 'oh, now I do see what everyone is talking about' because you see it through example. Its whether you choose to interpet it a certain way or not.

first off this isn't soley directed at any one person it just seemd like a good post to tack on a repsonse to. the whole point to a concept like 'faith' is that you believe based upon what is in your heart and what you feel deeply. Faith is not something that is 'proved'. In fact, if you even have to feel the holes in the hand, you've already rejected the concept of faith (Christianity used as one example here). What's great about evolution is that is it jumps on that hard to reason concept of faith and goes the other direction of 'proof'. Science being the polar opposite of faith sets it up as the perfect way to go if faith does not exist in your mind. Of course, science as a fact that is proved is a complete and utter f-king joke. We can say some bone they dug up is 100 million years old but honestly, is the person still around that dug that bone? Can you even prove 100% there was a Roman empire? Maybe all the stories of the Roman Empire were complete and utter bull$h!! So in an odd way, what is preached sceintifically has to packaged in a way that if you believe all that, being spoonfed what they tell you like toyota spoon feeds a PR piece, then you could be perceived to be just as big a lemming as a Consumer Reports banger. After all, you are only regurgitating what someone told you to think. It's not like any of us proved any of the popular scientific theories OURSELVES. So, you gotta have....er......FAITH, (in science) to believe them. Cuz, like I said, we have no f-ing clue how long the Paleozoic lasted. It's all CONJECTURE! It reminds of all those super annoying 'The camry is the BEST CAR' commercials out there right now. Someone told you it was the best car, so its gotta be true, right? I so wanna punch and beat up that smug little prick on those camry commercials. And as usual, we all take sides with the extreme and never really GET that the true answer may be somewhere between the sides, and may even be such a complex solution that our pathetic stupid human minds could never fathom. Seriously, we are just crude animals with a little bit more smarts than your average dog. We (presumably) have lived millions of years and we still have child molesters and wife beaters. we still kill and hurt others. We choose to destroy each other sometimes instead of building each other up. We'd prefer to play slot machines rather than solve world hunger. So really, for us stupid ass humans to presume we know ANYTHING about ANYTHING makes me laugh my ass off to no end. If we really had been around for billions of years, we'd have it all figured out by now, presumably? For humans to think they are the cream of the crop and that there is no higher power, is ludicrous. With all the bad things that happen in the world, I obtain my faith from seeing all the acts of kindness and charity and humanity that happen every day. these are all things that would not exist if we did not have faith or something to believe in. Things such as helping others after a disaster....or a friend who consoles you when a loved one dies, or the young teen who takes time out of their schedule to give a ride to an older woman so she can go to the grocery store to get her food. You see, there is no humanity in 'science'. i do not believe we are absent of humanity. Our humanity and grace is granted to us and shown to us as an example by 'someone else'. We live in that example because of spiritual belief. There is no scientific component to grace and humanity. You can argue that there is no faith or religion. But you can never prove global warming OR global cooling, or that the world is flat. But you can prove that each and every day, despite all the ugliness we bear with our wrongdoings, that there is a force of humanity that exists to lift us all up. THAT IS THE ONLY THING you can prove. There is something there. How you celebrate it or express it is open to interpretation and has many different versions. Sometimes those versions collide. nothing is perfect. Some feel the wealth of it and some do not feel it at all. Humans are not perfect. Our manuals of living are different a lot of the time. We are not omnipotent, and shouldn't assume we have capacity to explain it all in such silly humanly simplistic ways such as evolution. Our hardest daily task in life every day is coming to grips with our own imperfection, and managing the imperfections of others who dabble in our lives. Its too hard to ever reach personal perfection, so why even bother to sum it up in scientific reasons? To have an expectation that the others in our lives are perfect and never do us wrong is unfair, untrue and self centered. Everyone has the same difficult road we must live upon. It plays out differently for each of us, however. Like I said, the real answer is likely in between hard core creationism and evolution and probably unfathomably complex and interdependent. We honestly cannot prove any of it because we in no way are all knowing. There is never enough in the knowledge of generation to generation that is transferred in tact as proof that allows us to piece together our story ourselves. And we are lowly unrefined animals to begin with that if left to our own urges would all wipe each other off the face of the earth. Another problem I have with the concept of pure evolution is that it dismisses us of our souls. interpet 'souls' however you want. Evolution in pure form really assumes us as a merely a statistic or a physical carbon based example devoid of feelings and emotion and SELF, when in reality our physical bodies are merely shelters for what we truly are deep inside in a non physical way. I have never seen anything in evolution that addresses the non physical being that we truly are. That is the part that religion and faith does address. had to spout off. not preaching, just had to say some stuff. i don't espouse any one religion or anything, it just upsets me when it seems as though a lot of people out in the world today equate science and humans as having all the answers and knowledge. We really have very little of it. i would also invite anyone who dismisses faith of any kind to contemplate a few things I maybe said and at least consider the that their lives could be more satisfying and more at ease if they explore the possibility of some kind of faith in their lives. Not all faiths and religions are out to discredit us, or tell us we are bad, or are judgemental about who we are as a person. Faith is not always about dogma and absolutes. Seek out the things about spirtuality that can build up your soul. Don't dwell on and only focus on how it impacts you or us in a negative way all the time. That's pretty unfair to do that. You might as well read CR and buy a Camry because its the best car if you don't at least allow yourself to find your direction yourself first. It's like each of us expecting that our parents were perfect or something (which is surely never true!).

china will own us someday. enjoy it now while you can. there will be no sipping latte's when chairman Yao takes over.

HP makes great notebooks. lightscribe on a notebook is cool. congrats.

our computer situations are so similar right now it's scary. i have a near death computer, which is running like hell. I have built all my computers in the past. this time, i don't want to deal with that. I too must decide laptop or desktop or both. i really want apples but my pocketbook cannot swing two new apples with good specs. so i may be forced to settle again for a windows box. my computer has been shutting down on its own twice daily on average for quite awhile now. My two hard drives are basically completely full. The computer is 3 1/2 years old so it is ready to be replaced. Its so hosed up I can't rip to itunes nor can i even burn cd's or dvd's without it shutting down or locking up, or just refusing to do it. o-max has a couple laptops i might bite on this week and save up a bit longer for an apple desktop later....or splurge now on a cheap laptop and desktop. but i would like something that won't be out of spec in one year. they have an acer laptop for 599 this week and couple nice HP's including one with 17" and lightscribe and 2gb of ram for 1049. CC has a decent compaq desktop for about 500 this week but it lacks many A/V features I want. but it has 250gb hdd and vista and lightscribe, which would do me for now i guess. some laptops now have bluetooth and even a few with HDMI out (which would hook up nicely to my new plasma tv). Computers. They suck.

when the $h! comes down and the US population is FORCED to pay huge prices for gas and supplies run low, we'll be really motivated to fight for what is available and also you'll see serious efficiency measures kick in, and aternative sources of transport. Flybrian is correct, some want to legislate the car into a mass transit form. Truth is, they can justify it by saying, 'the public pays for your roads so if you want to drive, this is what you can have'. A 140hp camaro. LOL. this will kill a musclecar revival if it goes through. But to me this is nothing more than pre 2008 election posturing. you hear lots of rhetoric from people saying 'we need to drastically improve mpg' but the truth is, if you made them drive a $h!box car to get twice the mileage, they would try to avoid it too. Richardhead Dorgan was quoted in the article, but chances are the two days a year he is at home in north dakota and the rest of the time he is being carted around in washington, he's pprobably in some sort of gas guzzler....not a prius.

pointless with the v8 available. the alum v8 wieghs about the same as the iron block v6. no extra supercharger is needed to get better power. the SC v6 was a pleasing motor for many, but they seemed to abondon it when they stuffed the v8 in there.

ann is a c--nt, but why do i always think of the phrase 'reverse cowgirl' and 'DP' when i hear her name? goes to show you how much i value her 'mind'.

you already have the diesel tanks on the farm for your implements so its logical to want to use it in your pickups also, out of convenience, possibly. I remember when i was a kid, we'd drive to GF and columbia mall for xmas shopping with the electra diesel and when it was like 20-30 below during the day, you would have to leave the car running while you shop, otherwise it would freeze up. Modern diesels do lots better in the cold I hear, though. the farm belt was one place where GM diesel cars sold exceptionally well in the past. We knew lots of people who had the v8 diesels of the 80's. I seem to recall you'd look in the church parking lot on sundays and half the GM cars were diesels. GM could really clean up on diesel sales in farm states i feel.

The reality is the forces that led to this are many. Our bloated economic structure, massive overhead and red tape and regulations, and gross overpayment of our executives, managers, and laborers (compared to other countries), our expensive health care system, and finally the apathy and unwillingness of our public to preserve a national economy. I am sure some think its ok to have the chinese build all our $h! and then the privileged few can sit in the skyscrapers with their overpaid marketing, management, and other 'let's have a meeting and then do lunch' kind of jobs. They can easily justify that. "My job is great, why do we want to keep $h!ty manufacturing jobs here?" they reason that America can become the hub of all those kinds of 'big shooter' decision making mover and shaker type fo jobs and that there will always be plenty of those type of jobs for those that 'pay their dues' i.e. dress well, go to the right stylistm and screw the boss and get promoted. Or those that feel one or two MBA's make them golden. It still behooves us to preserve technical and manufacturing jobs, though. And those jobs have to pay well. And we cannot resort to valuing those jobs to equal what the third worlders get, that doesn't help us as a country. So those in charge ship the jobs overseas because its the easy thing to do. So the movers and shakers assume no one will get lost in losing those jobs and their our economy will create new niches where everyone will access to a decent paid job. If not, they can always be the ones to make our mochas in the coffee shop. If they aren't good enough to work the system to get a 'cool job' then those people must not be worth $h!. Let em work in the coffee shop. There is no effort by our business leaders to advance our American economic health or provide opportunities for a great cross section of our citizens. Its their mandate to simply spin the business to get those stock prices up, and react to market whims. Its too hard to do that, and build everyone's personal wealth and social standing. It's easier for a few to benefit and leave the scraps for everyone else. I doubt its ever been different than any other time in our history. It's just disturbing because our gap culturally and economically in the country is getting wider every day and no one seems to give a flying f@#k about the long term damage that is unfolding right before our eyes. A good start would be a new president and a focus on something besides a war that is draining the lifeblood of our people. There's too many other tangents to go off on right now. This is about as pessimistic a time as I have ever seen that i can recall in our country. I do know this, its time some business leaders and politicians in this country step up to the plate and try to focus on our country for a change. Even if it means foregoing cheap $h! and labor from everywhere else. We've got to make it more attractive to make people 'keep it local' just a bit more often in this country.

pickups are one of those segments where if gas rises, sales fall but the demand remains the same over time. It just gets delayed or pent up until gas drops again. Gas dropped so people said, 'ok i can buy that truck now'. its cyclical. in America, the demand for trucks is always there. You can't replace the function of a pickup. Oh wait, unless you buy a ridgeline. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! not. even then, a ridgeline, like all honda trucks and SUV's, get horsecrap mileage.

just as i figured. the californians + 5 would never let it happen. They'd like to think they promote progress, but stifling the sale of cars that get 40% better mpg hardly seems like progress to me. because its all about CA, you know.

I'm leasing for the first time. It came down to, do I want to BUY a small Cobalt of lease my 500 limited? Figured I try it. We'll see how it goes. The Cobalt would only be worth 2-3 grand in 5 years.

toyota sure knows how to blow blow blow. where can i get some of that.

LMAO. i think coulter realized the $$$$ value of being a 'shock' lector, and now probably is just cashing in on her own self phenomenon. She doesn't care who she pisses off in the process.

i'm gonna be sick. how much dough does toyota have to buy press like this?

C/D that's what diesels do.

cnn what a trip she is.......man she has no clue

biz, many buyers already do act in their own self interest. i know many self important females who buy Lexus and such that best match their handbag.

fk the dealers. they should bring the statesman over. buick would benefit from this rwd addition. that said....it goes to show you the support that exists for fwd at buick. my take is buick should have both and the cars are different flavored enough to coexist. the lucerne is not really a luxury car. i think of the lucerne as more a spiffy lesabre replacement whereby the statesman has more of that presence to it that a flagship needs. the cars could coexist together. the dealers are fricking stupid. dealers are lazy stupid and behind the times.

width ford edge - 75.8 in equinox - 71.4 in that about 4 inches you could probably use i suppose

show some love, IT'S GOT LIGHTED CUPHOLDERS FOR CHRISSAKES!!!!!!!!!!!!

"OH, THE A5 IS SO MUCH BETTER...." not this car rocks

near 40 mpg in combined driving.

every time we see another article on detroit bitching about fuel economy standards, it just adds fuel to the fire for the imports to increase the public perception that detroit = fuel hogs and japan = fuel sippers. why doesn't detroit GET that yet? They need to stem all this type of publicity. I'd rather see publicity about how GM ford etc are taking bold moves ahem, to tackle these issues head on, in real or 'fluffy' PR induced ways. Its amazing we as a country will survive Bush but NONE of the upcoming alternatives is any better. Hilary makes me vomit. I am not against raising the fuel tax if the proceeds go to developing alternate energy streams and they make a bit of a dent oin our consumption. There are some things GM can do to really address this stuff. Keep developing new engines with top technology for one. Things like direct injection and improved electronics can help more and more over time. Lower the weight of your vehicles. Aluminum, hello? They just test a Jag XK in R/T and the sucker got 19 combined mpg. Not bad for a luxury coupe. If GM could offset weight increases due to other things, with aluminum in some vehicles, that would help a lot. I DFC if aluminum is harder to produce and more expensive, over time they will figure out how to reduce that cost. maybe not as cheap as steel, but you get the idea. Some cars should be offered as diesel. A diesel CTS would absolutely rock. If it get combined near 40mpg like a 3 series does, well, can you imagine the image boost you would get? Too bad the econweenies and californians are out to destroy any type of diesel movement in this country. Some vehicle lines could still stand to move to more efficient platforms. We should be able to buy a Suburban sized vehicle on a unit body chassis that would be just as durable for most drivers (i.e. soccer moms), and could save 500 pounds of slug. Throw in a nice 6 cylinder diesel (and hyrbid) with that unibody type suburban and we would see nice increases in fuel economy. Even though it may be tough to meet that politician posturing increase they 'want', at least keep nose to the grindstone working on all sorts of ways to make real progressive gains across all your products.