News & Events - June 2007

There are a lot of macho and aggresive comments on here about Islam and Iraq and terrorists and so on....

This weekend we are remembering the Falklands war and I heard yesterday that Britain lost 255 service personel during the war, but that 300 ex soldiers have since commited suicide because of what they went through there.

Should we challenge some of the gung ho nonsense we see written on this site?

2007-06-17 05:47:18 · 14 answers · asked by Anonymous in Current Events

I have seen a lotof people showing no sympathy for Denise Fergus (formerly Denise Bulger), whose toddler was murdered in a horrible manner. The majority of people seem to support the poor woman, but there has always been an element of dissent, which has surprised me. Why do so many people take this attitude?

Background info: http://www.guardian.co.uk/bulger/

2007-06-17 05:27:23 · 37 answers · asked by Anonymous in Current Events

It was suppose to have become extinct in the 1880"s*. I saw one in Brookville Pa. drinking from a stream in the early 60"s*. There have been reports of them in Clinton, Potter, Bedford, Tioga Counties and other Counties in Pa.*Have you seen any or found signs of them like hair, blood,feces, foot prints? Pictures or Videos*...

2007-06-17 03:44:32 · 1 answers · asked by dca2003311@yahoo.com 7 in Other - News & Events

My friend is a marine and he's going to Iraq on September. I'm really worried :(

2007-06-17 01:34:54 · 10 answers · asked by Anonymous in Current Events

I have my own feelings about the McCanns...but this question is PURELY about the publicity surrounding poor Maddie.
While no body has been found...there HAS to be hope (however small) that she may be found.
However...I cant help feeling all this publicity isnt helping...indeed if SOMEONE does have her...what chance have they got to give her back? They know what the consequences would be...and with the whole world watching??

Do you think its time to lay off and let it die down a tad....after all...who DOESNT know what Maddie looks like? Even just for a week or two.....then let the campaign continue at full force. This also includes all the Sky News updates for Maddie.

Maybe if it dies off...and the reporters and such go away...if someone has her...they may have the decency to return her while they are not under the gaze of the Public.

What do you think?

2007-06-17 00:25:49 · 14 answers · asked by cherryveba 2 in Media & Journalism

Will this guy's chickens ever come home to roost?

2007-06-16 23:58:23 · 4 answers · asked by Dr Watson (UK) 5 in Current Events

like how the Jews did

2007-06-16 22:49:12 · 9 answers · asked by Anonymous in Current Events

2007-06-16 22:12:36 · 8 answers · asked by Anonymous in Media & Journalism

2007-06-16 21:45:04 · 7 answers · asked by Anonymous in Current Events

http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,2101677,00.html

2007-06-16 20:33:26 · 5 answers · asked by m i 5 in Current Events

Or even a right-winger? Plz, help I have no clue

2007-06-16 19:57:25 · 4 answers · asked by Anonymous in Current Events

Elaborate the best you can please. I am clueless. Like a dog without a bone! lol

2007-06-16 19:57:21 · 4 answers · asked by Anonymous in Current Events

2007-06-16 17:25:22 · 13 answers · asked by caffeinatedmom2 4 in Current Events

like water, electricity, and gas.

2007-06-16 17:06:34 · 8 answers · asked by Lee Edward 1 in Current Events

do you think the goverment should bring this service back again,?It will bring violence down on the streets,kids who were old enough to go to national service would have plenty to do,a wage,and may be a trade when the time is up, I myself think this would solve a lot of problems, do anyone else agree with me?

2007-06-16 17:05:16 · 31 answers · asked by Anonymous in Other - News & Events

My mother one day told me that Phil Collins killed his mother and she heard it off the news some time ago. Has any one heard this? Are there any websites you can find this on? Is she just crazy? Maybe she was murdered and he was just a suspect? What happened?

2007-06-16 16:52:46 · 8 answers · asked by Carolyn 2 in Media & Journalism

2007-06-16 16:49:03 · 18 answers · asked by Anonymous in Media & Journalism

Why the state goes to war is not a mystery – at least the general reasons are not mysterious. War is an excuse for spending money on its friends. It can punish enemies that are not going with the program. It intimidates other states tempted to go their own way. It can pave the way for commercial interests linked to the state. The regime that makes and wins a war gets written up in the history books. So the reasons are the same now as in the ancient world: power, money, glory.
Why the bourgeoisie back war is another matter. It is self-evidently not in their interest. The government gains power at their expense. It spends their money and runs up debt that is paid out of taxes and inflation. It fosters the creation of permanent enemies abroad who then work to diminish our security at home. It leads to the violation of privacy and civil liberty.
War is incompatible with a government that leaves people alone to develop their lives in an atmosphere of freedom.
Nonetheless, war with moral themes – we are the good guys working for God and they are the bad guys doing the devil's work – tends to attract a massive amount of middle class support. People believe the lies, and, once exposed, they defend the right of the state to lie. People who are otherwise outraged by murder find themselves celebrating the same on a mass industrial scale. People who harbor no hatred toward foreigners find themselves attaching ghastly monikers to whole classes of foreign peoples. Regular middle class people, who otherwise struggle to eke out a flourishing life in this vale of tears, feel hatred well up within them and confuse it for honor, bravery, courage, and valor.
Why? Nationalism is one answer. To be at war is to feel at one with something much larger than oneself, to be a part of a grand historical project. They have absorbed the civic religion from childhood – Boston tea, cherry trees, log cabins, Chevrolet – but it mostly has no living presence in their minds until the state pushes the war button, and then all the nationalist emotions well up within them.
Nationalism is usually associated with attachment to a particular set of state managers that you think can somehow lead the country in a particular direction of which you approve. So the nationalism of the Iraq war was mostly a Republican Party phenomenon. All Democrats are suspected as being insufficiently loyal, of feeling sympathy for The Enemy, or defending such ideas as civil liberty at a time when the nation needs unity more than ever.
You could tell a Republican nationalist during this last war because the words peace and liberty were always said with a sneer, as if they didn't matter at all. Even the Constitution came in for a pounding from these people. Bush did all he could to consolidate decision-making power unto himself, and even strongly suggested that he was acting on God's orders as Commander in Chief, and his religious constitutionalist supporters went right along with it. They were willing to break as many eggs as necessary to make the war omelet. I've got an archive of a thousand hate mails to prove it.
But nationalism is not the only basis for bourgeois support for war. Long-time war correspondent Chris Hedges, in his great book War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning (First Anchor, 2003) argues that war operates as a kind of canvas on which every member of the middle and working class can paint his or her own picture. Whatever personal frustrations exist in your life, however powerless you feel, war works as a kind of narcotic. It provides a means for people to feel temporarily powerful and important, as if they are part of some big episode in history. War then becomes for people a kind of lurching attempt to taste immortality. War gives their lives meaning.
War is the devil's sacrament. It promises to bind us not with God but with the nation state. It grants not life but death. It provides not liberty but slavery. It lives not on truth but on lies, and these lies are themselves said to be worthy of defense. It exalts evil and puts down the good. It is promiscuous in encouraging an orgy of sin, not self-restraint and thought. It is irrational and bloody and vicious and appalling. And it claims to be the highest achievement of man.
It is worse than mass insanity. It is mass wallowing in evil.
And then it is over. People oddly forget what took place. The rose wilts and the thorns grow but people go on with their lives. War no longer inspires. War news becomes uninteresting. All those arguments with friends and family – what were they about anyway? All that killing and expense and death – let's just avert our eyes from it all. Maybe in a few years, once the war is out of the news forever and the country we smashed recovers some modicum of civilization, we can revisit the event and proclaim it glorious. But for now, let's just say it never happened.
That seems to be just about where people stand these days with the Iraq War. Iraq is a mess, hundreds of thousands are killed and maimed, billions of dollars are missing, the debt is astronomical, and the world seethes in hatred toward the conquering empire. And what does the warmongering middle class have to say for itself? Pretty much what you might expect: nothing.
People have long accused the great liberal tradition of a dogmatic attachment to peace. It would appear that this is precisely what is necessary in order to preserve the freedom necessary for all of us to find true meaning in our lives.
Do we reject war and all its works? We do reject them.
-------
Lew Rockwell
Mises.com

2007-06-16 16:36:25 · 3 answers · asked by MIkE ALEGRIA 1 in Other - News & Events

Was disbarment enough for his role in the Duke LAX case, or does he deserve more? If so, what does he deserve? What about the accuser?

2007-06-16 16:35:05 · 5 answers · asked by David b 2 in Current Events

This is old news, but I was curious as to what people think about Mary Bell.

For anyone who doesn't know, Bell killed a 3 year old child in 1968 when she herself was 11. Bell's mother, a prostitute, tried to murder her 4 times when she was a kid and regularly 'rented' her to customers, which was obviously seen as a cause of her diagnosed psychopathy. She was rehabilitated and freed, and is now 50.

Several years ago the press found her, Bell was released from custody in 1980 and was granted anonymity to start a new life with her daughter, born in 1984. This daughter did not know of her mother's past until Bell's location was discovered by reporters: she and her mother had to leave their house with bed sheets over their heads. The daughter's anonymity was originally protected until she reached the age of 18. However, on May 21, 2003, Bell won a High Court battle to have her own anonymity and that of her daughter extended for life.

2007-06-16 16:07:46 · 5 answers · asked by 99tzm 3 in Media & Journalism

This is old news, but I was curious as to what people think about Mary Bell.

For anyone who doesn't know, Bell killed a 3 year old child in 1968 when she herself was 11. Bell's mother, a prostitute, tried to murder her 4 times when she was a kid and regularly 'rented' her to customers, which was obviously seen as a cause of her diagnosed psychopathy. She was rehabilitated and freed, and is now 50.

Several years ago the press found her, Bell was released from custody in 1980 and was granted anonymity to start a new life with her daughter, born in 1984. This daughter did not know of her mother's past until Bell's location was discovered by reporters: she and her mother had to leave their house with bed sheets over their heads. The daughter's anonymity was originally protected until she reached the age of 18. However, on May 21, 2003, Bell won a High Court battle to have her own anonymity and that of her daughter extended for life.

2007-06-16 16:04:49 · 27 answers · asked by 99tzm 3 in Current Events

2007-06-16 16:01:37 · 9 answers · asked by Lee Edward 1 in Current Events

Watch this full video clip ITS NOT A POPUP!!!
http://youtube.com/watch?v=vx35zMyFJ94

2007-06-16 15:28:06 · 7 answers · asked by Anonymous in Media & Journalism

I do not mean yes I support them bring them home, I want the war to end cry. DUH we All want the war to end, but sometimes you have to fight for what is right. Do you stand behind your troops, by being an American, by knowing the Pledge, by sending notes of love, or coffee or whatever you can to your soldiers do You?

2007-06-16 14:57:48 · 13 answers · asked by Anonymous in Current Events

Peasl help me

2007-06-16 13:46:56 · 16 answers · asked by Phillip W 1 in Other - News & Events

2007-06-16 13:43:18 · 25 answers · asked by Anonymous in Other - News & Events

is their a templet

2007-06-16 13:04:22 · 4 answers · asked by Anonymous in Media & Journalism

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/06/14/national/main2927061.shtml

2007-06-16 13:04:21 · 8 answers · asked by Anonymous in Media & Journalism

2007-06-16 12:45:38 · 3 answers · asked by lprjohnny 2 in Media & Journalism

i am a sad scottish 40 year old i laugh at jokes directed at my self and my race why are some people so sensitive that they feel so offended

2007-06-16 12:35:56 · 22 answers · asked by Anonymous in Current Events