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Hey...I tend to agree. The myth that the "majority of scientists say global warming is real and directly tied into carbon emissions" seems to be based on a single study comparing a large group of abstracts listed on the ISI databank for 1993 to 2003.

There was an attempt to refute that study - but it appears to have been rejected for publication -

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/ne ws/2005/05/01/wglob01.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/05/01/ ixworld.html

Now while the Telegrpah may be a right-leaning publication, I think a bit of skepticism may be needed here, it's interesting to read the study and all the correspondence around it:

http://www.staff.livjm.ac.uk/spsbpeis/Sciencelette r.htm

Cheers.

K

It's just not true - the belief that the majority of climate researchers agree that humanity is to blame for the rise in global temperatures is also 'hotly' debated. Check out this - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/ne ws/2005/05/01/wglob01.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/05/01/ ixworld.html And then the actual letter stating that oft quoted study is quite flawed: http://www.staff.livjm.ac.uk/spsbpeis/Sciencelette r.htm "RESULTS The results of my analysis contradict Oreskes' findings and essentially falsify her study: Of all 1117 abstracts, only 13 (or 1%) explicitly endorse the 'consensus view'." Global warming may be occurring, but is it humanities fault?

Hey, I just don't think debate should be stifled because people have preconcieved notions - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/ne ws/2005/05/01/wglob01.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/05/01/ ixworld.html "Leading scientific journals 'are censoring debate on global warming' By Robert Matthews (Filed: 01/05/2005) Two of the world's leading scientific journals have come under fire from researchers for refusing to publish papers which challenge fashionable wisdom over global warming. A British authority on natural catastrophes who disputed whether climatologists really agree that the Earth is getting warmer because of human activity, says his work was rejected by the American publication, Science, on the flimsiest of grounds. A separate team of climate scientists, which was regularly used by Science and the journal Nature to review papers on the progress of global warming, said it was dropped after attempting to publish its own research which raised doubts over the issue."

The general belief in *America* and its allied *governments*. Not among the American antiwar populace nor the European general populace. If you had kept up on the European press at the time, you'd be bloody well aware of this simple fact.

You grossly overstate the general population's opinion (confusing a vocal minority with the mainstream), as evidenced by a lead anti-war spokesperson and one of Sadaam's "defenders" (in UN SC context) and business partners, Vladimir Putin:

"Russian President Putin said on February 9, 2003, that the main task facing the international community was ascertaining whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMD), not a regime change in Iraq"
http://cns.miis.edu/pubs/week/030217.htm

"Mr Putin said it was impossible to know whether the people who possessed weapons of mass destruction had been killed or whether they had just gone into hiding. "Perhaps their plan is to transfer these weapons to terrorist organisations," he said. "We simply do not know. Until we get answers to these questions we cannot feel safe and secure.""
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=%2F

Look, if you're not going to read, don't bother to reply and waste my time. The article was about what the Air Force told the CIA before the bloody war

Actually the article was very illustrative of your cherry picking of "evidence" and tendencies to overstate. Pre-war there were merely doubts as to an operation chemical delivery system. Post-invasion there was confirmation that the adapted jets were configured for recon. I guess this leads us to your other tendancy, misrepresentaion. My point was always that he had far more capable aircraft than the one you fixated on, I was never limited to chem/bio. You attempt to rebut a point no one was making. Furthermore common sense would show that a well designed chem/bio delivery system is not really required. While a special purpose design would be more effective improvisation is still quite deadly, as Japan demonstrated in WW2. Using your illogic one would have to dismiss improvised suicide attack aircraft (convention fighters and such) and only focus on the special purpose designs. Things are far more complicated than you suggest. The special purpose design may be needed to attack troops in the field but an improvised solution (regular jet packed with chem/bio materials) would not have much trouble hitting a town or large scale encampment and wreaking havoc.

I've noticed something: throughout your posts, you keep mixing up the concepts of "unlikely existance" and "certain in the absense of". European governements, European populace, and much of the American antiwar populace seriously doubted the existance of such weapons. That's why we wanted the inspections: to *verify* and *certify* Iraq as WMD-free.

I'll ignore your misrepresentation of my position and try to simplify it for you. At the time the general belief was that he is probably hiding something not that he probably rid himself of his WMD. For example, Putin's comments do not support your "seriously doubted" assertion:

"Russian President Putin said on February 9, 2003, that the main task facing the international community was ascertaining whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMD), not a regime change in Iraq" http://cns.miis.edu/pubs/week/030217.htm [miis.edu]

"Mr Putin said it was impossible to know whether the people who possessed weapons of mass destruction had been killed or whether they had just gone into hiding. "Perhaps their plan is to transfer these weapons to terrorist organisations," he said. "We simply do not know. Until we get answers to these questions we cannot feel safe and secure."" http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=%2F news%2F2003%2F04%2F30%2Fwput30.xml [telegraph.co.uk]

Did you not bloody well read the links that I gave you that I prepared *BEFORE THE WAR*? How can you call something that I prepared before the war "revisionist"?

The focus on the absense of WMD and the downplaying of concerns that most people shared prior to the invasion is part of a revisionist movement. Whether or not you held these beliefs before or after the invasion is not relevant. Those beliefs have a widely used label, get used to the label.

I've probably read more pages of IAEA, UNSCOM, and UNMOVIC documents in the past four years than you've read newspaper pages.

You cherry pick citations, for example your post just focused on nuclear where conveniently a large infrastructure is required, and ignore the overall WMD concerns. The Putin quote above clearly demonstrates the overall concern of the time. This is why your position is not one of thorough analysis. You can't start with a belief and go looking for evidence that supports it and ignore evidence that does not. Well, in science you can't, it politics it is standard procedure.

According to Robert Boyd (mirror), The Air Force's senior intelligence analyst:

Odd that you would provide a link that proves my point, that the modest aircraft you described was not the whole of the Iraqi aerial drone program, that there was evidence of the adaptation of jets. The article also reinforces my overall argument by relying heavily on post-invasion information.

Look, I've provided two links from reputable sources on what the Russian intelligence agencies thought. The count is 2 me, 0 you. Time for you to catch up, instead of saying "I saw Putin say..."

It may have only been an offhand comment on TV, but I saw it.

Your own citations prove my point that at the time of the invasion no one knew whether or not Sadaam had WMD:
"Russian President Putin said on February 9, 2003, that the main task facing the international community was ascertaining whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMD), not a regime change in Iraq"
http://cns.miis.edu/pubs/week/030217.htm

Also proving my point that no one knew Iraq was WMD-free until long after the invasion, including Russia:
"Mr Putin said it was impossible to know whether the people who possessed weapons of mass destruction had been killed or whether they had just gone into hiding. "Perhaps their plan is to transfer these weapons to terrorist organisations," he said. "We simply do not know. Until we get answers to these questions we cannot feel safe and secure.""
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=%2F news%2F2003%2F04%2F30%2Fwput30.xml

While googling I found this interesting little bit:
"After Sept. 11, 2001, and before the start of the military operation in Iraq, the Russian special services, the intelligence service, received information that officials from Saddam's regime were preparing terrorist attacks in the United States and outside it against the U.S. military and other interests," Putin said, according to RIA Novosti, the Russian news agency.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A530 96-2004Jun18.html

The US and British were falsely accused of this Falsely? Time after time they spouted bogus information, and were told by the rest of the world that it was nonsense.

Again, you use creative editing to misrepresent what I said, you conveniently omit "intelligence was under pressure to conform their analysis to current political positions". The false accusation was not, as you misrepresent, that US and UK intel was wrong. The false accusation was that US and UK intel falsified reports to serve their political masters. US and UK investigations, 3 in the UK, have debunked that myth.

How the heck can you possibly claim that I'm revising my own beliefs, when you don't even know me?

My claim is that the notions that you advance are revisionist. If you were certain Iraq had no WMD prior to the invasion then you were pretty much alone, even anti-war states like Russia were not so sure. You would seem to be merely be a closed minded individual who turned out to be correct not through analysis but by luck, a fluke of history. Unless of course you had better intel resources in Iraq than the Russians.

"Adapting an old Mig, with the aid of duct tape"
No, no, no. Not "adapting an old Mig"

Again misrepresentation of my point. Sure the one aircraft you offer may not be impressive but that was not Sadaams entire inventory. I recall in-flight video of a drone that was not the aircraft you describe, the aircraft was clearly jet powered. My point that drones can be easily created from obsolete aircraft stands. That said, your redicule of wooden wings and a wooden propeller strongly suggests that you are way out of your league. I suggest you do a little research on aircraft such as the British Mosquito of the 1940s.

They (Saddam's terrorists) already had attacked, and were attacking still. Your claim makes no sense. The "attacks" you mention were retaliation for attacks against Americans which had already occured.

Prior to the invasion, when did "Saddam's terrorists" attack the US? If you're going to say 9/11, your so dellusional, but it wouldn't be your fault. You would have just been taken by a orchestrated, and immediately discredited, lie.

How many lies must be told to defend Saddam? There is nothing true about this. Iraq refused to document such destruction of the weapons. They were still blocking inspections up until the US large-scale retaliation. If they were eager to end the embargo, they would have welcomed inspections. [...] There would have been no second "war". if he had bothered to comply.

The irony of course is that in the end he did in fact comply.

I attended a forum with UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter. He said that Saddam's regime was a bunch of liars, but even a liar can eventually tell the truth. He told of the story about the search for some sort of proscribed ballistic missles, which he said was typical of his dealings with Iraq.

The inspectors would first ask the Iraqis to prove they were in compliance. The Iraqis would say they were, and then drive the inspectors out into the desert to show them the destroyed missles. The inspectors would then take an inventory of all the identifyable parts and take notes of the part and serial numbers. These parts would then me matched to specific shipments.

This investigation would show that these parts came in lots of 100, but there were only enough parts at the site for 10 missles. The Iraqis would then be confronted with this. After some stalling, the Iraqis would eventually state that they "honestly thought" they destroyed all the missles, but were mistaken, but have since destroyed the remaining 90 missles. The inspectors would go out to the desert, examine the remains, and positively 85 missles. There would be a pile of parts that could make 5 missles, but they couldn't be positively identified with any particular missle. He said that if the Iraqis weren't lying so much, the inspectors would have listed these parts as 5 missles, and sign off. But the Iraqis were liars. They lied all the time. Given their track record, they could have been lying then. So the inspectors wouldn't sign off. And so begins one of the many tragedies in the lead up to the invasion. The intellegence services believed that the Iraqis had 5 missles, but they actually didn't, and there was no way the Iraqis to prove otherwise.

While you attempt to sugar-coat it, you do mention Saddam's terrorist actions to try to exterminate the Jews.

First, he didn't "try to exterminate the Jews." He was thug, dictator, and a murder, but didn't do that. There's plenty of attrocities to attribute to him, without make some up.

In keeping with "tell any lie in order to prop up Saddam and make Bush look bad", [...]This is quite typical. None of the arguments used in support of Saddam Hussein and his aggression have any validity.

Listen jackass. No one supports/supported Saddam Hussein. Many, and now a majority, believe it was the wrong war, at the wrong time, against the wrong people, executed without a plan, and on slim-to-no rationale.

Try and wrap your mind around this: Someone can say, "That guy is a son-of-a-bitch, but he's not the son-of-a-bitch we're looking for. Remember what you said before? We want to get him! We are at war, but not with guy! You let the most wanted men in the world escape not just once but

This post can be found at http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=1984

No longer will Dick Cheney have to pay visits to Langley, Virginia and lean on CIA analysts to produce the kind of intelligence a Veep might need; not now that the President has his man, Republican loyalist Porter J. Goss, heading up the Agency, and a second term in hand. Of course, the CIA was already highly politicized in the first Bush term. Run by George Tenet (accurately dubbed "a political apparatchik" by Toronto Sun columnist Eric Margolis), throughout most of the last four years, it proved a servile agency despite possessing perfectly clear-eyed analysts who knew the truth about Iraq and wanted to pass it on.

But not, it seemed, servile enough. Unhappy with the intelligence pickings from the CIA, the Bush administration turned to its loveably, unreliable then-"friend," Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi, for the sort of intelligence that could actually be used to terrify a nation into war -- you know, all those weapons of mass destruction in Saddam's hands, all those ties between Saddam and al-Qaeda -- and then Douglas Feith, the number three man in the Pentagon, created the Office of Special Plans to "search for information on Iraq's hostile intentions or links to terrorists." It cherry-picked intelligence from Chalabi and others and passed it up the line to those eager to speak of mushroom clouds going off over American cities.

Such a complicated process, though. Now, former Republican congressman as well as ex-CIA agent and spy-recruiter Goss will bring no less loyal political aides from the House and elsewhere into the Agency's leadership and so simplify matters in a second Bush term. Already, before November 2, Goss's CIA was working hard to suppress crucial 9/11 information, as Los Angeles Times columnist Robert Scheer reported. The CIA will now be but another, ever expanding militarized arm of an administration that will already control Congress (hence no possibility of serious oversight over the Agency), significant parts of our courts and justice system, a media machine, a political machine, a religious machine, a majority of the state governments in our federalist system, and sizeable hunks of the government bureaucracy. The President, in other words, will have his own intelligence arm and secret army at his beck and interventionist call for the next four years, and no one around to take a peek. The ultimate check on the administration was the electorate and it just failed. (Oh, let's not forget that there will at least be angry CIA agents and others still stuck in this highly politicized system, feeling betrayed, and as things begin to go truly off the tracks, leaking like mad.)

Of course, this administration has long been intent on putting much of what it does not only beyond all oversight, but utterly out of sight. After September 11, they put extraordinary effort and legal thought into creating an offshore mini-gulag, beyond the courts, beyond prying eyes, a torture-system beholden only to the President of the United States in his role as commander-in-chief. The CIA was put in charge of the most secret aspects of this system and, as the part of the government best tooled in the arts of offshore interrogation, from Abu Ghraib to a

He was a bit off, but it is still impressive. £1 out of every £8 spent in a british shop is at tescos (According to the telegraph its now 1 in every £7.70).

However, science and philosophy/ethics and politics are increasingly overlapping (Is the earth flat? Does the sun revolve around the earth? how beneficial might stem-cell research be? When does life start (to the extent that science can give any clues)? Has the environment definitely started warming up lately? Is environmental warming caused by humans, or is it a natural unavoidable cycle? Is planting trees good or sometimes bad? Could drilling in ANWR possibly remotely have a neutral effect on the environment?) In this overlap, the president's opinion DOES matter.

Actually, The Daily Telegraph has the highest circulation of daily broadsheets in the UK by quite a ways.

Their figures here.

Another twist on the same issue are chimera's. There are people living in the world today that are the result of two embryo's that merged into a single entity. Reference What happened to the "second soul"? Is the resulting embryo guilty of murder?

-FL

I clearly remember a study that showed that using a hands-free kit increases the radiation to your brain four-fold. The wire from the phone acts as an antennae and channels the radiation direct to your brain. The following URL seems to refer to that study.

http://www.creative-science.org.uk/phonearts.html

but then again this next link half way down the page, says that some of these issues have been addressed by a copper shield or by channelling the sound to the ear through a short tube.

http://www.opinion.telegraph.co.uk/health/main.jht ml?xml=/health/2005/01/19/hfone19.xml

I don't trust phones but I always forget and leave it in my trouser pocket - next to my nuts... uh oh.

Peace and love,
Synk

It's always funny to see uninformed, ignorant Americans making such rash remarks over the United Nations or over other "small insignificant countries".

If we're to get this world into any kind of peaceful place for future generations, it's through an international forum where every member, no matter how small or large, should have equal voice. The UN is the ideal place for that.

Well actually, it was later discovered that there was in fact an attempt to purchase uranium:

http://www.bostonphoenix.com/boston/news_features/ this_just_in/documents/03979276.asp

Also, David Kay, the head of the hunt for WMD's in Iraq believed they were moved to Syria:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/ne ws/2004/01/25/wirq25.xml

No, really: internet traffic really is doubling every six months!
It is!
No, please don't call my bluff!
What are those cuffs about?
Screw you all! SCREW YOU ALL!

In the UK, Levi's used Haendel's Sarabande from his Suite in D minor for an ad back in 2002/2003. The piece was relatively unknown by the general public, but as a result of the ad the largest classical radio station kept getting huge number of requests for it for months, many of them just for "that song from the Levi's ad", and whenever they'd play it, they'd refer to Levi's as well.

To this day I'd expect most people in the UK who recognise it to think of the Levi's ad and most of them likely won't know where the music is from.

All Levi's would have had to do to capitalise of that was to - in at least some of the advertising slots - include a URL that hinted that you could get the music there, and they'd have a great opportunity to both spread it and to get people to watch more of their promotional material.

Add to that tagging the music with the URL and a mention of Levi's and the ad, and put the ad itself for download on the same site and they'd get a significant boost over the ad by itself - in cases like this, where the ad was actually very good by itself, you might even find a significant number of people would like to see the ad again.

(For an interesting take on this particular ad before it started running, see this article in the Telegraph)

The BBC's guidelines state that its credibility is undermined by the "careless use of words which carry emotional or value judgments".

I agree with this point of view. "Bombers" is an accurate way to describe them. They may also be "terrorists", but this does carry an emotional implication as well. It's a little quirky, but I can see the point of simply reporting events rather than making judgements. It's something the media in general seriously lacks.

Even granting such a thing exists, which I do not, how is this relevant to my point about the radical Islamists harboring grievances that are five centuries old? Do you think discussions or appeasement have any place when dealing with such people? In their words, "We are not trying to negotiate with you. We are trying to destroy you."

out of over 1 billion muslim worldwide, how many are terrorists?

Of course they are not all terrorists. However, the incidence is surely much greater than among Irishmen or Montanans, intolerably high in my opinion. Sorry the rest of the Religion of Peace has to suffer for the actions of a few, but that is not my concern.

What percentage would you tolerate before agreeing that allowing further Muslim immigration into the West is a mistake? 1%? 10%? 50%? Everybody needs to ask themselves this question before calling me a racist.

It's a difference of degree and not of kind. Suppose you knew that 50% of Muslim immigrants were planning to set off bombs in the Tube, but you couldn't really tell which 50%. Would your precious liberal multi-cultural pieties make you meekly accept this? I don't think so.

Thomas Friedman made the same point in the New York Times just the other day. The time is coming when the nations of the West will make no distinction between peaceful Muslims and the head-choppers. All of them will be quarantined to their own countries.

-ccm

Reminds me of Martha Stewart:

"The narcissism extends to the animal kingdom, too. Her farm is colour-coded: buildings are grey; animals are black. But her black Friesian draft horses have an annoying habit of becoming more colourful in the sun.

"Last summer, they got really red, and I didn't like that. So they go out and run around in the fields at night and stay out of the sun in the day."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/ar ts/2005/07/07/ftmartha07.xml&sSheet=/arts/2005/07/ 07/ixartright.html

You mean, relatives killed by Salafist/Wahabi terrorists that aren't from Iraq? Turn against them: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;jsessio nid=V200CY1JBFIR1QFIQMFSM54AVCBQ0JVC?xml=/news/200 5/07/04/wirq04.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/07/04/ixworld .html

The true terrorists would have no freedom fighter status in which to cloak themselves, and the nationalist insurgents would likely turn against the terrorists.

Yes. Not an organized conspiracy where they get together in dark corners and plot things out, but a common need for acceptance and funding.

Or that the journals Nature and Science are deliberatly attacking/suppresing climate scientist that have other evidence than what is published in the major science journals of the world?

Uh, yes. This was covered on Slashdot not too long ago, too.

It's not the same thing.

Whatever the effects of the Iraq war, the ideas behind it - liberating people from crypto Fascist dicator where more noble than the ideas behind Nazi or Imperial Japanese expansionism.

Not that I agree with area bombing like Dresden or Nagasaki, no matter how the people being bombed voted.

Interestingly enough, I worked in Germany for a while and I met a *German* guy who tried to defend what the Russians did in East Prussia to me when I worked there on the grounds that the people deserved it because they voted for Hitler. We actually had quite a serious argument about it. Pretty chilling experience.

A more inappropriate use of money is donating money to africa. £200 billion of aid has been stolen by African "Chiefs" over the last 40 years. The same amount the west has give to africa in the same amount of time.

When India becomes expensive they'll (by definition) have money and want to buy stuff too. Perhaps we should be thinking about what they might want to buy.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/ne ws/2005/02/12/wind12.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/02/12/i xworld.html

Radiation (i.e atomic, not just like any old radiation) is different to what a lot of people think. Chernobyl is now a nature park and you can go on a guided tour Article and Article

As well as walking round the erie cities themselves.

Oh no?

There is some interesting information on this topic at Telegraph:

Asked in 1965 what might tempt him to sell out, Dylan replied: "Ladies undergarments".

That's true, but we were talking about Mainland China. If that's a legitimate government, then so is Mugabe's, and so was Phol Pot's.

Don't make the mistake of assuming that just because a government is recognised by other governments, it's a legitimate government in a civilised country. Today, the only member of the international diplomatic community which stands up and says that Mugabe is an insane, evil dictator is Mugabe himself. What a pity that no one's listening.

Like it or not, the PRC is a legitimate nation-state.

No, it's not legitimate. China is a nation, or a state, in the same sense that California or Papua New Guinea are. Unlike California or Papua New Guinea, there is no legitimate government there, just a bunch of brutal, murderous, uncivilised thugs.

The whole Bad Wolf thing has been particularly entertaining. They're even making comparisons to Pynchon in the UK.

Beg, buy, borrow or steal it. Whatever, just make sure you watch it!

The age limit for buying a knife will rise from 16 to 18. Anyone selling a knife to someone under 18 faces up to six months in jail and a fine of up to £5,000. Couples who marry under 18 or students on catering courses will have to ask adults to buy knives for them.

Giving head teachers the power to search children they suspect of having weapons in schools was criticised by teachers unions, which said that school staff must not be expected to search teenagers for knives.

Interestingly enough, a lot of people aren't happy about the fact it could cost each person £93 (approximately $168) for a card which will do little to resolve the very issues it claims to be required for.

Who can stop the rise and rise of China? The communists, of course
By Mark Steyn
(Filed: 12/06/2005)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml= /opinion/2005/06/12/do1203.xml

Seventy years ago, in the days of Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan, when the inscrutable Oriental had a powerful grip on Occidental culture, Erle Stanley Gardner wrote en passant in the course of a short story: "The Chinese of wealth always builds his house with a cunning simulation of external poverty. In the Orient one may look in vain for mansions, unless one has the entrée to private homes. The street entrances always give the impression of congestion and poverty, and the lines of architecture are carefully carried out so that no glimpse of the mansion itself is visible over the forbidding false front of what appears to be a squalid hovel."

Well, the mansion's pretty much out in the open now. Confucius say: If you got it, flaunt it, baby. China is the preferred vacation destination for middle-class Britons; western businessmen return cooing with admiration over the quality of the WiFi in the lobby Starbucks of their Guangzhou hotels; glittering skylines ascend ever higher from the coastal cities as fleets of BMWs cruise the upscale boutiques in the streets below.

The assumption that this will be the "Asian century" is so universal that Jacques Chirac (borrowing from Harold Macmillan vis-à-vis JFK) now promotes himself as Greece to Beijing's Rome, and the marginally less deranged of The Guardian's many Euro-fantasists excuse the EU's sclerosis on the grounds that no one could possibly compete with the unstoppable rise of a Chinese behemoth that by mid-century will have squashed America like the cockroach she is.

Even in the US, the cry is heard: Go east, young man! "If I were a young journalist today, figuring out where I should go to make my career, I would go to China," said Philip Bennett, the Washington Post's managing editor, in a fawning interview with the People's Daily in Beijing a few weeks back. "I think China is the best place in the world to be an American journalist right now."

Really? Tell it to Zhao Yan of the New York Times' Beijing bureau, who was arrested last September and has been held without trial ever since.

What we're seeing is an inversion of what Erle Stanley Gardner observed: a cunning simulation of external wealth and power that is, in fact, a forbidding false front for a state that remains a squalid hovel. Zhao of the Times is not alone in his fate: China jails more journalists than any other country in the world. Ching Cheong, a correspondent for the Straits Times of Singapore, disappeared in April while seeking copies of unpublished interviews with Zhao Ziyang, the Communist Party general secretary, who fell from favour after declining to support the Tiananmen Square massacre. And, if that's how the regime treats representatives of leading global publications, you can imagine what "the best place in the world" to be a journalist is like for the local boys.

China is (to borrow the formulation they used when they swallowed Hong Kong) "One Country, Two Systems". On the one hand, there's the China the world gushes over - the economic powerhouse that makes just about everything in your house. On the other, there's the largely unreconstructed official China - a regime that, while no longer as zealously ideological as it once was, nevertheless clings to the old techniques beloved of paranoid totalitarianism: lie and bluster in public, arrest and torture in private. China is the Security Council member most actively promoting inaction on Darfur, where (in the most significant long-range military deployment in five centuries), it has 4,000 troops protecting its oil interests. Kim Jong-Il of North Korea is an international threat only because Beijing licenses him as a provocateur with which to torment Washington and T

De Soto disavows the credo of die-hard capitalism in The Mystery of Capital. His specific helpful idea is integrating the mainstream economy with the black market - the purpose being to strip down the barriers that make capitalism a rich man's club. If you've been following what Robert Mugabe is doing this week in Zimbabwe, that's exactly what De Soto is fighting against: oppression of the urban poor.

Being forced to operate in the extralegal sector disadvantages the poor. They are stuck behind a glass barrier that keeps them from capitalizing on their businesses and property. De Soto compares such strictures to the mercantilism that motivated the French Revolution.

The thing that makes his book compelling to me is that he's from the Third World himself and that he spent years in Peru, Egypt, Haiti, Mexico, and the Philippines studying what's really going on at the ground level. I recommended the book to you because De Soto specifically mentions the economics of Brazilian favelas.

I'll ignore the anti-religious flamebait and move on to point out that the same pressures which cause one group of scientists to fudge data may exist across an entire field.

Read this Slashdot article. In the second linked article, on the forth page, the scientist who initially got a furor started about the effects of cell phones on DNA states:

Lai says there have been about 200 studies on the biological effects of cell-phone-related radiation. If you put all the ones that say there is a biological effect on one side and those that say there is no effect on the other, you'd have two piles roughly equal in size. The research splits about 50-50.

"That, in and of itself, is alarming," Lai says. But it's not the whole story. If you divide up the same 200 studies by who sponsored the research, the numbers change.

"When you look at the non-industry sponsored research, it's about three to one-three out of every four papers shows an effect," Lai says. "Then, if you look at the industry-funded research, it's almost opposite-only one out of every four papers shows an effect."

The problem, he adds, is that there is no longer funding available in the United States that isn't attached to the industry. Lai, for one, refuses to take any more industry money.

"There are too many strings attached," he maintains. "Everyone uses the analogy of the tobacco industry and what happened there. It's like letting the fox watch the henhouse." While the FDA administers cell phone radiation studies, the money comes from the industry, he adds.

The problem may be that many people reproduce the results but many other people don't. Sometimes a powerful moneyed interest throws up all sorts of funding into research with strings attached to deliberately muddy the waters. As long as there are contradicting studies, those very people's lobbyists can say, "But look! Scientists can't all come to the same conclusion on the issue! Clearly there's more to it than what your scientists are saying!"

You see this in global warming research. You see this in research on the effects of cell phones and high-tension power lines on people. You see this in research about the toxicity of industrial chemicals. You see this in pharmaceutical research on drugs like Vioxx and Celebrex. We saw this with tobacco's effects on health. As long as tainted money is the only source of money for science, results will be reproduceably deceptive. This is a tool of modern industry to prevent the public from learning facts that would get in the way of their agenda.

This is effecting the people of our nation, and it's helping to shape policy in our government. The EPA has not made coal power plant treat mercury as a pollutant to clean up to meet standards set by the Clean Air Act. A senior White House environment official (and former American Petroleum Institute lobbyist) has been caught deleting findings from environmental science reports. There is a concerted effort right now to hide the truth from the American people to avoid hurting the profits of certain wealthy people in power, and science is losing.

I'm not suprised you missed the article. Probably we night owls were the only ones intelligent enough to read it.

And it turns out, because of propositions such as the above, the Bush government is one major PR disaster and every government that associates itself too closely with him get lambasted in election days (Spain, UK, Italy, ...)

Nice how you fail to mention Australia in your list, the most obvious counter-example. Georgia seems to not consider Bush's administration a "PR disaster" either.

Also, if I recall, Blair *won* in the UK (admittedly not by much, but that certainly wasn't the result the anti-US crowd wanted). And Spain? Come on...If anything it shows how easily Spain's elections (and electorate) can be swayed by terrorist attacks.

And hey, at least they're having elections in Iraq and Afghanistan now...

You guys (and girls) set the standard and us Brits can only hope to keep up. However I'm sure our next generation will raise the bar still further. 3 Daughters aged 12 14 16 all pregant. mother blames school

We're doomed aren't we ?

Of course china is gonna be worried about this sort of thing.

After all a Boeing plane bought by the chinese goverment for presidential uses, was found to be bugged.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/ne ws/2002/01/20/wjet20.xml

Looks like the same guy as in one of the previous postings. New Speak (debuggin, naturaly, codding, "Its good", alot, achive, programing, definantly, debuging, "stand point", untill, freepascal) is double plus ungood for the brain. In other news: http://telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2 005/05/15/nspell15.xml&sSheet=/portal/2005/05/15/i xportal.html

Sorry, couldn't resist.

New Speak (codding, preferreading) is double plus ungood for the brain... In other news: http://telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2 005/05/15/nspell15.xml&sSheet=/portal/2005/05/15/i xportal.html

Two weeks ago, 28 men from the battalion took part in a rout of Iraqi gunmen who had been terrorising the Route 6 motorway which links Al Amarah to Basra. The troops had been ordered to rescue two vehicles and their occupants from the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, which was ambushed by a group of 50 Iraqis.

The battle, one of three separate attacks against British troops in the area on the same day, ended when the soldiers fixed bayonets and stormed a series of enemy positions dug-in by the road-side. About 30 Iraqis were killed, 12 were captured and a further dozen are believed to have fled from the battlefield.

After the action, Capt Justin Barry, a military spokesman, said: "The fighters engaged were basically terrorists and gangsters - people who are out to destabilise the area, drive out the Coalition and suck as much out of Iraq as they can.

"But at the end of the day, we got the better of them. The Princess of Wales's Royal Regiment were engaged in very heavy hand-to-hand fighting and bayonets were fixed. There's a great sense of satisfaction among the men with the way this turned out."

This wondering miles off topic but I thought I'd point out that British forces used bayonets during the Falklands war of 1982. Also the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders killed 30 Shia militia men during a bayonet charge in Iraq last year (mentioned about half-way down this article), though this is obviously not standard practice.

1. Evidence will certainly appear exaggerated when you see projections which (although I am not a meteorologist) feature predictions that do not at first appear mathematically sound. It's difficult to seem unbiased with cases like journals suppressing dissenting opinion on global warming. It's hard to present yourself as even-minded when you attract support for your cause with slogans like "save the planet."

The IPCC does an outstanding job of researching it, but too few listen to reason and most of the rest content themselves with predicting the end of the world based on incomplete data, and demand that actions be taken which are likely to be either ineffective or excessively costly.

2. There are scientifically literate people on both sides of the equation. The Cooler Heads Coalition, while hardly unbiased, demonstrates that in its selection of articles.

There is some truth in that. But people have to try. Because if you don't try nothing happens and stupid, ridiculous and often socially divisive laws are forced onto people.

Some people have mentioned the UK under your post, when the then UK Home secretary (Blunkett) went mad one day and started cooking up crazy ideas about giving the postman, the milkman and the food standards agency the right to read your email and inspect your internet and mobile phone communicatons there was an uproar and many including myself did write to several MPs at the time. I am glad I did.

Blunkett backtracked later on and acknowledged the stupid bungle he had made. Ok maybe that wasn't down to people faxing and emailing and more the media scorn poured on his idea but it is still good to be part of something like that, and these things are always worth fighting for.

You mean the same 9/11 terrorists the FBI listed? Haven't 7 of them been found to be alive? Some of them as legitimate airline pilots? link link 2 read the correction box

Does air pollution help in the fight against global warming?
Maybe the earth is getting hotter due to the sun getting hotter.
Maybe I'll bump up my Sun Screen UV Factor and buy a darker pair of Oakley's next time a clean air act is passed.

"Note that we only have this guy's word for why he was rejected. "

No, we have copies of the actual messages sent back and forth between Reiser and Science, which have been validated by the Telegraph (among others) for their news story on the topic of journal censorship of similar views.