Other - News & Events - June 2007

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

Peasl help me

2007-06-16 13:46:56 · 16 answers · asked by Phillip W 1

2007-06-16 13:43:18 · 25 answers · asked by Anonymous

2007-06-16 06:43:54 · 10 answers · asked by skateboardboi 5

Ginger colonies for example.

2007-06-16 01:21:55 · 36 answers · asked by Anonymous

Stop wondering why the McCanns left their children and instead thought how much the world is going downhill? Where have all these peadophiles come from, when my parents were young they left all their doors open and everyone played in the street and there was no fear of anything like this.
What is happening to the human race?

2007-06-15 23:00:10 · 26 answers · asked by Anonymous

Former top Russian spy Oleg Gordievsky rubs shoulders with cricketer Ian Botham, author Salman Rushdie and actor Barry Humphries in the Queen's birthday honours list, published on Saturday.


Gordievsky, a KGB Colonel who became the highest ranking defector in the Cold War when he first started spying for and later escaped to Britain, becomes a Companion of the Most Distinguished Order of St Michael and St George.

His citation for the award, usually reserved for top diplomats, is for services to the security of the United Kingdom.

The award comes as relations between Britain and Russia are under strain over the murder in London last year with radioactive Polonium 210 of another former Russian spy, Alexander Litvinenko, who accused Moscow of ordering his death.

2007-06-15 22:27:02 · 15 answers · asked by mike4nick 3

the police did a search yesterday, and i haven't heard anything about the McCanns thoughts/feelings in all this, apart from the anger that was shown in regards to the letter.

2007-06-15 20:53:17 · 12 answers · asked by michelle l 4

My mum was born into a wealthy family, she didnt do well at school, she didnt need to. She married my Dad from a poor family. My dad struggled through uni, not cos he wasnt clever but his parents wanted him to earn money. My Dad wanted the best for me, and I then married a man from a very poor background. (History repeating) My hubby is a copper, and I am a qualified Nurse.
I have a working class upbringing and our roots as a family are half and half. Thats why I hate comments such as Waynetta Slobb used in the Maddie thing.

2007-06-15 12:58:42 · 19 answers · asked by babyshambles 5

For want of a better phrase.
My girl really thought a man took you because he wanted a child.
I told her at 9 that some men take girls knickers off. What else can I do?
Make it rosy, or make it too truthfull?

2007-06-15 12:29:52 · 12 answers · asked by babyshambles 5

I am appaulled by answers on this site regarding this case. I am a mother and nothing could ever be worst than losing your child. I will no criticise the parents, condemn them. They are doign their utmost to keep her name in the public domain. Someone must have seen something. No matter how small, how insignificant you feel it is, it could be a clue to finding her. I appeal to you all that anyone there in the complex, look at photos, think back to events. No matter how small it is report it. Without your help they may never ever find her.

I also appeal to whover has taken her to please return her. That little girl is innocent, lovely and special and will be so frightened. Pleaes please return her safely.

As for anyone on here who is writing poisounous replies, you are htoughless and cruel.

2007-06-15 12:25:55 · 21 answers · asked by boo 1

I have a construction company / lumber store that is going to be putting a float in a parade. the theme of the parade is "celebrating our city's golden anniversary" the construction company has been around for about 42 years. Does anyone have any ideas for decorating our float that would tie into this theme? I am desperate.

2007-06-15 11:32:37 · 2 answers · asked by Anonymous

or is the nanny state getting carried away

2007-06-15 10:24:17 · 20 answers · asked by Anonymous

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070614/od_nm/germany_squirrel_dc

What is going on here? This squirrel Attacked 3 humans on its ramage in germany? What happen to our peace treaty with the squirrels?

2007-06-15 10:04:57 · 6 answers · asked by Mike 6

Curiously, all news outlets are biased in some way. I often wonder if people rely on them for info?

2007-06-15 09:40:43 · 5 answers · asked by Anonymous

http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/meast/10/11/iraq.deaths/

Do you feel guilty about it as an American?

2007-06-15 08:40:58 · 6 answers · asked by Shoe 3

I Was On the Global Warming Gravy Train
By David Evans
5/28/2007

I devoted six years to carbon accounting, building models for the Australian government to estimate carbon emissions from land use change and forestry. When I started that job in 1999 the evidence that carbon emissions caused global warming seemed pretty conclusive, but since then new evidence has weakened that case. I am now skeptical.
In the late 1990s, this was the evidence suggesting that carbon emissions caused global warming:
1. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, proved in a laboratory a century ago.
2. Global warming has been occurring for a century and concentrations of atmospheric carbon have been rising for a century. Correlation is not causation, but in a rough sense it looked like a fit.
3. Ice core data, starting with the first cores from Vostok in 1985, allowed us to measure temperature and atmospheric carbon going back hundreds of thousands of years, through several dramatic global warming and cooling events. To the temporal resolution then available (data points more than a thousand years apart), atmospheric carbon and temperature moved in lockstep: they rose and fell together. Talk about a smoking gun!
4. There were no other credible causes of global warming.
This evidence was not conclusive, but why wait until we are absolutely certain when we apparently need to act now? So the idea that carbon emissions were causing global warming passed from the scientific community into the political realm. Research increased, bureaucracies were formed, international committees met, and eventually the Kyoto protocol was signed in 1997 to curb carbon emissions.
The political realm in turn fed money back into the scientific community. By the late 1990s, lots of jobs depended on the idea that carbon emissions caused global warming. Many of them were bureaucratic, but there were a lot of science jobs created too.
I was on that gravy train, making a high wage in a science job that would not have existed if we didn't believe carbon emissions caused global warming. And so were lots of people around me; there were international conferences full of such people. We had political support, the ear of government, big budgets. We felt fairly important and useful (I did anyway). It was great. We were working to save the planet!
But starting in about 2000, the last three of the four pieces of evidence above fell away. Using the same point numbers as above:
2. Better data shows that from 1940 to 1975 the earth cooled while atmospheric carbon increased. That 35 year non-correlation might eventually be explained by global dimming, only discovered in about 2003.
3. The temporal resolution of the ice core data improved. By 2004 we knew that in past warming events, the temperature increases generally started about 800 years before the rises in atmospheric carbon. Causality does not run in the direction I had assumed in 1999 — it runs the opposite way!
It took several hundred years of warming for the oceans to give off more of their carbon. This proves that there is a cause of global warming other than atmospheric carbon. And while it is possible that rising atmospheric carbon in these past warmings then went on to cause more warming ("amplification" of the initial warming), the ice core data neither proves nor disproves this hypothesis.
4. There is now a credible alternative suspect. In October 2006 Henrik Svensmark showed experimentally that cosmic rays cause cloud formation. Clouds have a net cooling effect, but for the last three decades there have been fewer clouds than normal because the sun's magnetic field, which shields us from cosmic rays, has been stronger than usual. So the earth heated up. It's too early to judge what fraction of global warming is caused by cosmic rays.

There is now no observational evidence that global warming is caused by carbon emissions. You would think that in over 20 years of intense investigation we would have found something. For example, greenhouse warming due to carbon emissions should warm the upper atmosphere faster than the lower atmosphere — but until 2006 the data showed the opposite, and thus that the greenhouse effect was not occurring! In 2006 better data allowed that the effect might be occurring, except in the tropics.
The only current "evidence" for blaming carbon emissions are scientific models (and the fact that there are few contradictory observations). Historically, science has not progressed by calculations and models, but by repeatable observations. Some theories held by science authorities have turned out to be spectacularly wrong: heavier-than-air flight is impossible, the sun orbits the earth, etc. For excellent reasons, we have much more confidence in observations by several independent parties than in models produced by a small set of related parties!
Let's return to the interaction between science and politics. By 2000 the political system had responded to the strong scientific case that carbon emissions caused global warming by creating thousands of bureaucratic and science jobs aimed at more research and at curbing carbon emissions.
But after 2000 the case against carbon emissions gradually got weaker. Future evidence might strengthen or further weaken it. At what stage of the weakening should the science community alert the political system that carbon emissions might not be the main cause of global warming?
None of the new evidence actually says that carbon emissions are definitely not the cause of global warming, there are lots of good science jobs potentially at stake, and if the scientific message wavers then it might be difficult to later recapture the attention of the political system. What has happened is that most research efforts since 1990 have assumed that carbon emissions were the cause, and the alternatives get much less research or political attention.
Unfortunately politics and science have become even more entangled. Climate change has become a partisan political issue, so positions become more entrenched. Politicians and the public prefer simple and less-nuanced messages. At the moment the political climate strongly blames carbon emissions, to the point of silencing critics.
The integrity of the scientific community will win out in the end, following the evidence wherever it leads. But in the meantime, the effect of the political climate is that most people are overestimating the evidence that carbon emissions are the main cause of global warming.
I recently bet $6,000 that the rate of global warming would slow in the next two decades. Carbon emissions might be the dominant cause of global warming, but I reckon that probability to be 20% rather than the 90% the IPCC estimates.
I worry that politics could seriously distort the science. Suppose that carbon taxes are widely enacted, but that the rate of global warming increase starts to decline by 2015. The political system might pressure scientists to provide justifications for the taxes.
Imagine the following scenario. Carbon emissions cause some warming, maybe 0.05C/decade. But the current warming rate of 0.20C/decade is mainly due to some natural cause, which in 15 years has run its course and reverses. So by 2025 global temperatures start dropping. In the meantime, on the basis of models from a small group of climate scientists but with no observational evidence (because the small warming due to carbon emissions is masked by the larger natural warming), the world has dutifully paid an enormous cost to curb carbon emissions.
Politicians, expressing the anger and apparent futility of all the unnecessary poverty and effort, lead the lynching of the high priests with their opaque models. Ironically, because carbon emissions are raising the temperature baseline around which natural variability occurs, carbon emissions might need curbing after all. Maybe. The current situation is characterized by a lack of observational evidence, so no one knows yet.
Some people take strong rhetorical positions on global warming. But the cause of global warming is not just another political issue, subject to endless debate and distortions. The cause of global warming is an issue that falls into the realm of science, because it is falsifiable. No amount of human posturing will affect what the cause is. It just physically is there, and after sufficient research and time we will know what it is.
________________________________________
David Evans, a mathematician, and a computer and electrical engineer, is head of Science Speak

2007-06-15 07:18:59 · 5 answers · asked by MIkE ALEGRIA 1

Robin Hood terrorised and stole from (rich) townspeople. This is the same as Al-Qaeda stealing from Halliburton. Does this not make him a terrorist?

2007-06-15 06:03:02 · 22 answers · asked by skullpicker 3

A footballer is getting married today at Blenheim Palace and the whole wedding will cost £1,000,000. Assuming they stay married for 60 years then it will still cost £320.51 per week.

2007-06-15 06:01:53 · 21 answers · asked by Jim 5

2007-06-15 05:48:51 · 2 answers · asked by Anonymous

I heard on the news she did for driving and drinking...

2007-06-15 04:12:18 · 43 answers · asked by pwittyfwower2 3

It's an interesting story for sure but why doesn't the world care about the thousands of kids that go missing all the time. Why don't they care about the kids that die of hunger? This one little girl from a rich white family blasted across the media has caught the attention of all the soap opera fans. While your neighbor beats his kid every night you sit and worry about someone on the other side of the world only because the news people knew that you were like this. More news just after this word from our sponsors. Pepsi. McDonalds. The Enquirer. Sony Music. Back to the show. blah blah blah.

Please don't be offended by what I say. If follwoing this story is the way you relax after work then you deserve to relax. But if you really care about children, don't you think there are better ways to help this child and so many others out there?

2007-06-14 22:35:22 · 6 answers · asked by Beertha 2

Police are expected to continue questioning Michael Barrymore later following his arrest on suspicion of murder.

Stuart Lubbock was found dead in the swimming pool at the entertainer's Essex home in 2001.

Two other men, believed to be Justin Merritt and Jonathan Kenny, are also being held. All three suspects are also being questioned about allegations of sexual assault.

Mr Lubbock's father Terry, has fought a long campaign for justice for his son and has been critical of previous investigations.

The 62-year-old said: "I am really pleased. It feels like it is the end of a long struggle. I've been in limbo for the past six years. My life has been on hold. I will never get those six years back again. Why has it taken so long?

"I have had so many disappointments over the past six years. This could be another one. I am waiting for the jackpot. I am waiting with bated breath."

2007-06-14 22:30:24 · 27 answers · asked by mike4nick 3

Some jerk pulled out of his driveway in front of me.. I honked at him and he gave me the finger. I almost peed my pants laughing. I was in grammar school last time I got the finger. hahahaha

2007-06-14 17:40:58 · 27 answers · asked by Mister Bald 5

Somebody told me she died but I cant find anything online to support it.

2007-06-14 16:52:11 · 4 answers · asked by Shannon W 1

If you are holding her against her will you must let her go now !She has a right to live her life and be happy free her now.

2007-06-14 11:14:54 · 7 answers · asked by Lindsay Jane 6

Pertinent questions must be asked , & this one doesn't come
from Berlin .

2007-06-14 08:37:07 · 17 answers · asked by Anonymous

He's that guy from Extreme Home Makeovers who got a DUI last year.

2007-06-14 07:35:16 · 7 answers · asked by Anonymous

Odd thing is that everyone is outraged by the fact that the train warning weren't working and not the fact that a bunch of 13 and 14 year olds stole a car and were racing at 3 am? Shouldn't the focus be on the fact that these teenagers shouldn't have been out a 3 am racing in a stolen car and not the fact that they got hit by a train? The parents are blaming the railroad rather than themselves. Isn't this crazy?

2007-06-14 06:04:53 · 12 answers · asked by reallyfedup 5

Dear Fellow Askers and Answerer's,

I'm off to pastures new and just wanted to thank those of you who took the trouble to answer my questions, star my questions and pick me as their 'Best Answerer', that particularly made me day :), it has up until now been fun and I will miss some of your wit and wisdom.

For those of you who may wonder why I am going?, well I don't think this will suprise you at all - the whole McCann debate and the way those for and against the family are treating one another at the moment, it deeply saddens me and quite frankly makes my blood run cold. I simply no longer wish to be associated with a site that allows this to go on.

I have found another site very similar that allows me to ask my usual tedious questions and where people are actually polite and supportive of one another.

And yes, I know I didn't need to read the stuff that upset me, I just couldn't believe what I was reading!!!!!!!!!!

Love to you all XX

2007-06-14 01:26:08 · 23 answers · asked by Suzy 2