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The "in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations" clause is used twice in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, namely:

• Article 14:
  1. Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.
  2. This right may not be invoked in the case of prosecutions genuinely arising from non-political crimes or from acts contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.
• Article 29:
  1. Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible.
  2. In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society.
  3. These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.

In short, you do not have right to political asylum in Argentina just because you happen to be a Nazi criminal of war, nor can you be drafted to gas Jews. Ssorry for the double invocation of Goodwin's law, but just after the war that's probably the sort of people they were thinking about.

As for the "purposes and principles of the United Nations", these are not just the swaying opinion of the secretary general of the day, but they are clearly written in the first chapter of the Charter of the United Nations, that sum up to pacifism, freedom, antiracism, and lots of lofty ideals.

Just to get back in topic, see principle number 7:

Nothing contained in the present Charter shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state or shall require the Members to submit such matters to settlement under the present Charter; but this principle shall not prejudice the application of enforcement measures under Chapter VII.

So, the broadcasting treaty may actually be violating the UN's principles and be thusly busted, as broadcasting laws seem an unnecessary intrusion that has nothing to do with peacekeeping. Chapter VII, in case you wondered, is about "Action with respect to threats to the peace, breaches of the peace, and acts of aggression", nothing to do with broadcasting rights.

The "in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations" clause is used twice in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, namely:

• Article 14:
  1. Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.
  2. This right may not be invoked in the case of prosecutions genuinely arising from non-political crimes or from acts contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.
• Article 29:
  1. Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible.
  2. In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society.
  3. These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.

In short, you do not have right to political asylum in Argentina just because you happen to be a Nazi criminal of war, nor can you be drafted to gas Jews. Ssorry for the double invocation of Goodwin's law, but just after the war that's probably the sort of people they were thinking about.

As for the "purposes and principles of the United Nations", these are not just the swaying opinion of the secretary general of the day, but they are clearly written in the first chapter of the Charter of the United Nations, that sum up to pacifism, freedom, antiracism, and lots of lofty ideals.

Just to get back in topic, see principle number 7:

Nothing contained in the present Charter shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state or shall require the Members to submit such matters to settlement under the present Charter; but this principle shall not prejudice the application of enforcement measures under Chapter VII.

So, the broadcasting treaty may actually be violating the UN's principles and be thusly busted, as broadcasting laws seem an unnecessary intrusion that has nothing to do with peacekeeping. Chapter VII, in case you wondered, is about "Action with respect to threats to the peace, breaches of the peace, and acts of aggression", nothing to do with broadcasting rights.

But in the default state, there is no legal doctrine, no Constitution, no real society. If you are unable to protect yourself and establish rights for yourself physically, then you get eaten by lions or clubbed to death by Thog who lives in the cave next door. The entire point of society - and government, its organized manifestation - is that rights which you cannot protect for yourself are created and defended for you.

Without society, you can climb up on a rock and declare your right to free speech, but if I don't like what you're saying and I decide to kill you because of it, then ultimately, you were gravely mistaken. Society creates the right to free speech and grants it to you by defending you physically from any disapproval and wrath I might have.

And yes, even "basic human rights" are meaningless without a society to defend them for you. Universal declarations of human rights may look good on paper, but they mean nothing to millions of Sudanese whose society failed them, for example.

(3) These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.

In other words, you have rights only when we like how you're using them. I wish I was making it up, but it's in the official text.

The sooner we abolish the UN, the better. If its "peacekeeping operations" and the standard procedures of its international court are any indication, it'd be an organization matched in its evil toward decent people around the world only by its bitter and vicious incompetence. And please, spare me the bullshit about them being hampered by member states. If they can barely ever get anything right with only occassionally being asked to keep the peace, just imagine what their bureaucrats would be like when tasked with doing it as the official, one world body.

Try here.

Nobody cares about poor people now, why should they care about their future.

I mean how many people on Slashdot know what is going on in Africa right now? Like Chad, where fresh French troops were deployed this week to bolster the ranks of the French troops already there to stem off a rebellion. Anyone know who the rebels are or what they want? Anyone cares? Chad belongs to Sub-Saharan Africa, which is the poorest region in the world. How many could place Chad on a map?

Somalia got some attention back in the 90s. It still is a so called failed state. I dunno if many know what that term even means.

And I consider Slashdot to be an educated crowd. So much for the Western World.

Nobody gives a shit about poor people in other countries. Best example: http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/
Those goals were drawn up in 2000 and when 9/11 came up they were completely off the agenda. Though I don't know if 9/11 is to blame. Maybe they would have been taken off the agenda anyways.

So if you want to make people in Western countries care about climate change you should maybe mention the billions upon billions that natural disasters will cost. Money always gets attention.

Access to information is.

Article 19.

http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html

Um, where does one begin? Well, I imagine most people would argue that free speech is a basic human right; it's certainly included in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, which China itself signed up to:

http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html

"Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers."

It doesn't appear to mention drug or guns in there. (Or indeed, titties and/or beer).

P.

Iraq has on the whole cooperated rather well so far with UNMOVIC in this field. The most important point to make is that access has been provided to all sites we have wanted to inspect and with one exception it has been prompt. We have further had great help in building up the infrastructure of our office in Baghdad and the field office in Mosul. Arrangements and services for our plane and our helicopters have been good. The environment has been workable.

Here's a source on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty: http://www.un.org/Depts/dda/WMD/treaty/ It's the fact that we're not disarming AND invading soverign countries that is inspiring the likes of N. Korea and Iran to develop weapons. Anyway, the central tenant of missile defense, that partial protection will make us safer, is patently false. The reason the antibalistic missile treaty was signed in the first place was because both sides realized that a partially-effective shield was inherently unstabilizing. The arms race was bad enough without a shield inspire extra nuke-building. As for N. Korea... what a joke. They don't have missiles that can hit us now anyway, and with a shield up, guess what, a suitcase bomb will suffice. If you follow missile defense history you see fudged and failed tests, and congressional support for manufacture in home states. It's been a series of back-scratchings that have cost the taxpayers over 150 billion to date. And the damn prototype can't hit a known launch in ideal conditions, traveling slower than ICBMs, siloutted by the sun, with a homing device inside. If that isn't a complete failure, what is? I know, it's still a prototype you say. However, it isn't a problem of technology, but one of physics. It is simply 1000 times easier to design countermeasures than to design against unknown countermeasures. Hell, a mylar balloon like the shiny ones in the supermarket look identical to missiles in outer space (the mid-course trajectory of an ICBM), and would certainly foil the system if it could even hit what it was aiming at. I'm sorry, but NMD is not like the lightbulb, because the lightbulb isn't trying to stop you from lighting it. This has very little to do with left vs right and way more to do with a cozy relationship between congressmen and military contractors. But you just go and believe that the stupid liberals are the problem.

Any sources? We are currently #6 in Carbon Dioxide production per capita. And Canada is barely trailing us.
http://unstats.un.org/unsd//environment/air_greenh ouse_emissions.htm I will concede, the trends in the US are not good. The UK is doing a much better job of improving. In the next 10 years I could see us no longer being a leader in renewable resource usage. THAT is a problem.

Citizens of the US: It's time to make your government take actions to stop global warming. You, the US, are the biggest contributor to global warming. In spite of this fact, the US does nothing. Join the EU and the rest of the world.

I'm going to ignore your silly troll, that got modded up, and provide some truth admist the $EMOTION-mongering:

Here is the data (mostly from 2002): Greenhouse gas emissions. As a point of information, while the US totally dominates total greenhouse emissions, we aren't #1 per capita, we are just #6. We are behind Paraguay, Luxembourg, Jamacia, Belize, and Australia. And before Canada gets all high and mighty, we are at 23.35, and you are at 23.11. And, for the record, the US has done alot to cut back on its GHG emissions, despite the fact that it is not part of Kyoto. Therefore, the quote "In spite of this fact, the US does nothing." is catagorically false. You may decide we haven't done enough, and I'd probably agree.

You have no right to damage the Earth! It's not yours.

Tell that to Luxembourg. Har har.

And the Constitution and the Geneva Convention don't protect illegal combatants.

Did the UN or any other international body ever decree that the right to post blogs bitching about your government is a fundamental right belonging to all people?

Yes.

I'm sorry I don't see what is wrong with obeying the laws of a country in which you do business.

Nothing is wrong with that, per se. The problem people have is that the laws of China are generally regarded as evil.. therefore complying with those laws can be construed as "doing evil", in direct opposition to Google's motto that people have naievely eaten up. I don't fault them for playing by the rules where they operate, but I do fault them for operating where the rules require them to do things they claim they won't do. Either way, I'm not at all surprised.

Remember, IBM was only obeying German laws.

Freedom of speech is generally regarded as a universal human right. In the grand scheme of things, there are very few things that you cannot say in the US.

no, but they did veto the amendments (proposed by China IIRC) to add the right to foo and shelter.

If it was about oil then how come we aren't taking it? Why was it turned over to Iraq again and very quickly? We purchase oil from there before and after the war and in roughly the same amounts. Face it, your believing a lie. Do you deny the French were taking money from the OIL for food program? Take a look here - http://www.un.org/apps/news/infocusRel.asp?infocus ID=97&Body=Oil-for-Food&Body1=inquiry . Maybe you haven't heard of Bosnia - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/1469896.st m . It was a UN action in the 1990s and the US participated. The justification was mainly genocide. Maybe you are in denial about Saddam? Here, get to know him - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saddam_Hussein . Here is a short list of resolutions that he has violated - http://www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/iraq/decade/sect 2.html . Every one of them you can look up for yourself at the UN site if you don't believe it. Perhaps it is that you don't believe the world has been at war for many millenia - that would be ignorance of history that is inexcuseable.

More like it, you think you know more than you really do and by the way I'm probably old enough to be at least your father if not your grandfather. I keep telling young people about stuff like this, they don't believe me and then they make the mistake I told them about. Happens over and over again. Amusing when they admit I was right when caught. The truly stupid (stupid as in a stupor, not as in dumb) continue to deny that I'm right, especially in the face of facts like I have shown you above. Up to now I wouldn't say that you're stupid or even dumb, you're learning. The choice is yours now that I have shown you the undeniable facts. You can't even say I'm deluded because I used sources that can't even be disputed. some people call this "those stubborn facts again."

Maybe it would also help to mention that Iraq was a haven for terrorists. Dozens of them were arrested right after we captured Baghdad including this guy wanted for over a decade - http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/04/15/sprj.irq .abbas.arrested/ . Here is yet another article on others - http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=092503F

Even today Hilary Clinton won't say it was a mistake for her to vote to go to war. It took a lot to get Sen. Kerry to say it was, he voted to go to war too. Both know it was the right thing to do and yes - had nothing to do with oil or even bad intelligence. Kerry simply thought he could get elected by being anti-war so he went for the propaganda. He had nothing else to offer (don't believe that? What else was he about then? Without looking or googling). I remember people like you when Carter and then Clinton came to power. They said we would never be at war with them in power and both took military action. I can remember Kennedy too, however that is another discussion. Take the red pill and read what I sent you or take the blue pill and continue to be ignorant. Hopefully you will take the red pill and wake up.

We are hugely off topic here. Sorry /. Please forgive us.
I'll leave you with this thought. Regardless of if you think I'm right, deluded, whatever, please keep your mind open and consider both sides. Both sides tell you the truth sometimes and both sides tell yo

The UN Population preditions (PDF alert) project 9.22 billion by 2100. The .78 billion is less than 10 but still enough of a fudge to significantly bias the article toward the author's FUD-driven perspective.

Iran may or may not attempt to get nuclear weapons, it's sure understandable that they want. However, Iran is allowed to use nuclear energy for peaceful purposes as signatories to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. But in the same treaty those states that have nuclear weapons are required to dispose of them, so USA is breaking that treaty.

Before spewing your nonsense, you might want to execute a little operation fact check. Under the NNPF, the United States is one of five nations permitted to own nuclear weapons. It is not required to "dispose of them", as you claim.

Furthermore, there is a process by which a nation can prove it's "peaceful purposes" clause of the treaty, and Iran is not following those procedures. It must be in agreement with the IAEA in order to pursue nuclear technologies for "peaceful" purposes... If you'd like the full link to the treaty, I'd ask you pay special attention to Article III, which specifically refutes your claim about Iran.

Non-nuclear-weapon States Party to the Treaty shall conclude agreements with the International Atomic Energy Agency to meet the requirements of this Article either individually or together with other States in accordance with the Statute of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

So strike 1 on USA, and strike 2 on Iran...

> Kyoto mandates a reduction of CO2 emissions below the level of 1990
> In 1990 the French nukes were already operating for more than a decade.
> How could they further reduce emissions when their effect is included in the baseline?

My point is that nuclear power plants are not sufficient to solve the greenhouse-gas emission problem, nor they are the sole solution for grid-electricity producing devices. My point is to ask people saying that "nuke plants will solve the problem" to have some reality check in France (where, as a sidenote, the nuclear-produced part of the electricity produced in France regularly climbed for the last 30 years).

>> crap ("nuke is the solution for greenhouse gas reduction")

> What's wrong here?

Writing the solution is wrong. It is, at best, a partial solution. Please check my previous comment.

And even on this field (grid-power) nuclear plants are not the best way because one has to extract then ship the nuclear fuel. And to do that one needs to burn gasoline, therefore emit CO2...

> Could you be missing the difference between "reduction" and "elimination"?

Nope, and this is not the point.

> Would you care to explain how a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions is a bad thing

It's not a bad thing, but the "nuclear plants solve the problem" stance is bullshit.

> or how nuke plants emit greenhouse gases anyway?

One has to extract then ship the nuclear fuel. And to do that one needs to burn gasoline. But this is only a side-effect, I'm OK to say that nuclear plants use do nearly not emit greenhouse gas. Other, less dangerous, approaches can do it (please read the already referenced comment).

>> "the Chernobyl disaster killed 4000 persons"

> Another 4000 are estimated to die from cancer

I disagree. Your data came from a pro-nuke (UIC) comment on a flawed communiqué from pro-nuke agencies (IAEA...) which is not signed by anyone and is presented as an excerpt from a scientific report which is, in turn, only in draft stage and without any peer review nor clearly stated authors (i.e. this is not a scientific result). In fact this is plain BS. Please take a look at this analysis and let me know. This is an abstract, the complete document is in French (sorry about that) but some non-French speaking people found it somewhat easy to grasp as it often quotes English documents.

Among other information (read the complete anlysis) please check this "Nuclear News" (very serious and pro-nuke publication) article about it (page 46). Among numerous critics you will find that the main responsible for the "health" report (WHO's Dr Repacholi), said "The scientists did not want to include numbers for predicted deaths, but public relations officials had wanted them in the summary". Isn't it clear enough?

The "4000 deaths" commnuiqué is not science but plain disinformation.

An official ONU report from 1995 (the real United Nations "General Assembly", not another IAEA document posing at it) states:

-=-=-=- SNIP -=-=-=-=-

[ LIQUIDATORS, who cleaned the disaster zone ]

20. These men, drawn mainly from the then Soviet army [ ... ] In the time since, these people have dispersed across the former Soviet Union. Much of the registering and tracing of their whereabouts is highly inaccurate, in part because of the break-up of the Soviet Union and subsequent socio- economic changes. There is even uncertainty as to ho

The rate of growth is already slowing. UN Report

"I don't think that Churchill or FDR spent much time worrying about legacy, yet history counts them as great men."

Churchill cared so much about his legacy that he wrote a 6 volume memoir of his actions during the war, modestly entitled "The Second World War." It's good reading, but make no mistake about its purpose. From start to finish it's an apologia for his every action during that time.

And when talking about Roosevelts, I'm more prone to remember Eleanor Roosevelt as the modest one. This is a woman who, in the dark days of segregation, drove through southern towns with a pistol on the seat beside her, to address groups like the NAACP. When a bunch of up uptight matrons refused to allow a black soprano to perform at Constitution Hall in Washington, she arranged to have the concert at the Lincoln Memorial. 70,000 people attended.

Eleanor Roosevelt was also the driving force behind one of the most important documents since Hammurabi - the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Churchill and Roosevelt were both extremely dynamic personalities who knew exactly how to present themselves to the public, and whose private faces were sometimes strikingly different from their public ones. That said, they both made important - critical, even - contributions to world history.

Saddam kicked the UN inspectors out whenever they thought they were going to find anything. By the time they were ever able to search a building, the Iraqis had had months of time to remove anything that had been there. There were articles about that just about every month in the news, both online and on paper.

OK, first I'll put on my tin-foil hat for just a second. Yes, there were always reports about this by the news organizations. When do you think such news organizations get thier best ratings and circulation? Thats right when they are talking about how the US military is blowing the crap out of stuff or better yet when they can show it live. OK, tin-foil hat coming back off now ;-)

Hey, I'm not saying we should have just walked away from Iraq and ignored it, I'm asking why invade and kill so many people (US and Iraqi)? Here (again) is something that wasn't nearly as widely reported on. Leading up to the war, UN inspectors were actually getting great cooperation from Iraq. I don't think there can be any exact time estimates, but many at the time were saying if this level of cooperation remained the inspectors could have finished inspections and issued final reports in perhaps as little as 6 months. Yes, this cooperation in response to the pending US invasion and all the related pressure that caused, but that just show Saddam would respond to this pressure. Why invade when you know you can get what you want by the mere threat and presense of your troops? Keep the troops there to keep the pressure on and let the inspectors finish the job. If Saddam gets out of hand you can then use force to put more pressue on him. Preferably force with as little leathality as possible like the limited air strikes you mention. Then as a last resort if all else fails you always can invade if absolutly requried.

But why invade when we did? They made some lame attempts to tie it to terrorisim, which were dimissed. We now know the intelligence about WMD was sketchy at best and the more we the public find out the more its hard to believe those in the know really belived it themselves. We'd gotten a favorable response from Iraq in working with inspectors to verify all this reguardless. So why invade when we did? I'm left with Bush's own statements about wanting to attempt to turn Iraq into a democracy which might spread through the regin. In that light he couldn't allow inspections to continue for fear they may find Iraq didn't have any WMD and thus remove his last excuse to invade and try his democracy in the mid-east experiement. I don't find that a compelling reason for war. Even if it all works out just like Bush hopes, I don't think the ends justify the means.

BTW, thought I'd pick apart your post (even though it is irrelevant to my point about need to worry about US use of GPS).

kept up a pretense of having WMD for over ten years

If by "kept up pretense of having WMD" you mean he repeatedly stated he had gotten rid of all the WMD the US gave him and Iraq no longer has any WMD then you may have a point.

and it was Hussein's unwillingness to submit to the UN resolutions to open up his former WMD plants, etc. for inspection that triggered the invasion.

The best rebuttal to this has to be the UN Quarterly report on weapon inspections just before the invasion. Have a read. Not saying Saddam never had some fun screwing with the inspectors, but if the threat of invasion was enough to get him to stop and all this was going forward so well, why invade?

Had the prior Iraqi regime complied without even the months long final warning process (let alone the ten plus years prior), no bombs, tanks, or other assorted objects that go boom would have ever been needed.

According to your own president, this isn't true. Even though they now know there was no WMD, the invasion was still needed because some day Saddam might have decided to maybe make more WMD.

Exactly like Americans.

You think American is xenophobic? Hell, American is the U.N. compared to Japan. American was founded by immigrants.

You want to talk about fair, an American outputs more than 7 times the amount of CO2 than a Chinese citizen (figures from 2002).

The Kyoto Protocol was an attempt to show the developing world that developed countries were able to small steps towards reducing their own consumption, as a sign of good faith. Kyoto was never the end-game, it was merely an easy first step (with minimal economic loss, indeed many argue it will bring economic gains in R&D). You instead are arguing that the poorer countries on this earth, who are still trying to bootstrap themselves into the industrial revolution should make the first step instead.

I'll tell you what isn't fair. That some people on this earth is screwing up the world in an unsustainable manner that will ruin it for everyone's children. Not committing to Kyoto or something similar will hurt the economy more in the long-run. And rather than a planned process as we reduce our oil consumption, it will cause panic and chaos as the Oil Crisis in the 1970's did.

The whole world hates spam, UN anti spam efforts

There are no UN Resolutions explicitly authorizing either US or NATO military action in the former Yugoslovia as there were with the recent Iraq War (key phrase "serious consequences" - diplo-doubletalk for WAR)

23 Sept. 1998: UN Security Council Resolution 1199 does not authorize military action ... the Iraq War phrase "serious consequences" is missing

24 Mar. 1999: The Kosovo air war begins.

Three-months elapse

10 Jun. 1999: After NATO's unilateral not authorized by the UN attack of Serbia, the UN kinda gets around to authorizing what has already happened as things are winding down dead UN link ... alternate link

20 Jun. 1999: The Kosovo air war ends

FICTION - "We are *done* in Kosovo." Visit the US Army Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo *today* as in like *not* done

TRUTH - "We have had no combat fatalities in Kosovo. We are done and the war is over. Service people have died, but not because of enemy combatants and insurgents"

Having never deployed any ground troops to the combat zone there were no US combat deaths.

partial FICTION - "Clinton never lied to the American people, and never relied on cooked up intelligence to sell the war. We went in to stop genocide and get rid of the bad guy. We did just that."

If "Bush Lied" on Iraq then so did these characters, Clinton included. Rather funny to see what Clinton & Co said about Iraq & Saddam. Reads identical to what Bush2 was saying.

I will not dwell upon the domestic aspects of Clinton lying or otherwise although "[Clinton] admitted that he had made false statements under oath [lying] about his relationship with the former White House intern [in the context of a sexual harassment lawsuit] and surrendered his law license for five years" CBS News

There are no UN Resolutions explicitly authorizing either US or NATO military action in the former Yugoslovia as there were with the recent Iraq War (key phrase "serious consequences" - diplo-doubletalk for WAR)

23 Sept. 1998: UN Security Council Resolution 1199 does not authorize military action ... the Iraq War phrase "serious consequences" is missing

24 Mar. 1999: The Kosovo air war begins.

Three-months elapse

10 Jun. 1999: After NATO's unilateral not authorized by the UN attack of Serbia, the UN kinda gets around to authorizing what has already happened as things are winding down dead UN link ... alternate link

20 Jun. 1999: The Kosovo air war ends

FICTION - "We are *done* in Kosovo." Visit the US Army Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo *today* as in like *not* done

TRUTH - "We have had no combat fatalities in Kosovo. We are done and the war is over. Service people have died, but not because of enemy combatants and insurgents"

Having never deployed any ground troops to the combat zone there were no US combat deaths.

partial FICTION - "Clinton never lied to the American people, and never relied on cooked up intelligence to sell the war. We went in to stop genocide and get rid of the bad guy. We did just that."

If "Bush Lied" on Iraq then so did these characters, Clinton included. Rather funny to see what Clinton & Co said about Iraq & Saddam. Reads identical to what Bush2 was saying.

I will not dwell upon the domestic aspects of Clinton lying or otherwise although "[Clinton] admitted that he had made false statements under oath [lying] about his relationship with the former White House intern [in the context of a sexual harassment lawsuit] and surrendered his law license for five years" CBS News

There are no UN Resolutions explicitly authorizing either US or NATO military action in the former Yugoslovia as there were with the recent Iraq War (key phrase "serious consequences" - diplo-doubletalk for WAR)

23 Sept. 1998: UN Security Council Resolution 1199 does not authorize military action ... the Iraq War phrase "serious consequences" is missing

24 Mar. 1999: The Kosovo air war begins.

Three-months elapse

10 Jun. 1999: After NATO's unilateral not authorized by the UN attack of Serbia, the UN kinda gets around to authorizing what has already happened as things are winding down dead UN link ... alternate link

20 Jun. 1999: The Kosovo air war ends

FICTION - "We are *done* in Kosovo." Visit the US Army Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo *today* as in like *not* done

TRUTH - "We have had no combat fatalities in Kosovo. We are done and the war is over. Service people have died, but not because of enemy combatants and insurgents"

Having never deployed any ground troops to the combat zone there were no US combat deaths.

partial FICTION - "Clinton never lied to the American people, and never relied on cooked up intelligence to sell the war. We went in to stop genocide and get rid of the bad guy. We did just that."

If "Bush Lied" on Iraq then so did these characters, Clinton included. Rather funny to see what Clinton & Co said about Iraq & Saddam. Reads identical to what Bush2 was saying.

I will not dwell upon the domestic aspects of Clinton lying or otherwise although "[Clinton] admitted that he had made false statements under oath [lying] about his relationship with the former White House intern [in the context of a sexual harassment lawsuit] and surrendered his law license for five years" CBS News

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

Universal Declaration of Human Rights: http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html

Article 12.

            No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

http://esa.un.org/unpp/

Last I read, the world population was a little less than that.... http://esa.un.org/unup/p2k0data.asp

In places like Hong Kong that had no publically funded schools for the longest time, realities like that never turned out to be true. Also, what the hell are you saying - would you promote robbing banks at gunpoint to for paying for childrens education too?

Apparently someone's never been to SE asia- for every educated person, there's 10 illiterates.

Economic pressures are great because you don't have to mandate any laws, the price of the commodity forces a change in the market.
This is great? A "change in the market" may mean that people that need water do without - like the 1 billion or so people in the world who do not have sufficient water. (http://www.un.org/events/water/brochure.htm)

Water is not just another commodity, it is essential for life and if left to "market forces" (which in practise has meant politicans giving sweetheart deals to investors to privatize water supplies) the public gets screwed. This is exactly what happened in the city of Atlanta (they are now taking back control of their water system).

So while a "change in the market" in the United States may mean that people get ripped off, it may be the difference between life and death in other countries. People who don't have water aren't likely to suffer "market forces" lightly, they are more likely to riot until the situation is fixed (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochabamba_protests_ of_2000)

When dealing with scarcity essential to life, the best solution is rationing - not the market. This is why when countries go to war and they need oil, iron, etc... it is procured directly with little complaint from the bulk of the public.

The UN has a huge positive effect on the world. Examples:

• They feed 104 million people a year in 80 countries. They feed people in war zones, natural disaster situations, health emergencies, and just plain poor countries.
• There were 17 million asylum-seekers, refugees and the like in 2004 who got help from UNHCR. They both help refugees directly and work to ensure that governments meet their responsibilities to these displacees.
• UNICEF. The UN protects children, everything from immunisation, education, protection against exploitation, AIDS prevention, etc.
• The UN has 16 active peacekeeping missions right now, in places like Sierra Leone, Kosovo, Lebanon, Liberia and Burundi. Make no mistake: in most of those places if the UN weren't there, no one else but the marauders would be and the peace or relative peace being kept would have disintegrated long ago.
• The UN is the leader when it comes to the global battle against HIV/AIDS. Between the World Health Organization, UNAIDS, and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria the UN is at the heart of every aspect of dealing with the epidemic, from heightening awareness to raising funds to making sure appropriate programs for prevention and treatment are implemented.
• Were it not for the UN, an awful lot of suffering around the world would go even less noticed and addressed than it does today. Landmine victims, Marburg fever and cholera sufferers, child soldiers, modern-day slaves, lepers and thousands of other populations beleagured by one or another either visible or obscure plight have a place to turn at the UN.

It strikes me that, of the people who are wholly negative of the UN, the vasty majority are from the USA. It's not surprising, given that the UN are criticising the USA for blocking their torture investigations at the moment.

I don't think you'll find anybody claiming that the UN is a perfect organisation. But only trolls and ignorant people could claim that the UN is not worth supporting.

OK,Bush was wrong about the WMD's being in Iraq, but did Sadam show the world that he disposed of the WMD's according to UN Resolution 699?

I've never seen an analysis of the environmental impact of producing a hybrid vs. producing a non-hybrid, but I'd imagine that, given the higher cost, the production is less environmentally friendly.

America signed the UN charter. The UN charter considers it a crime to go to war except in imminent self-defence, or when authorised by the UN security council.

America signed the UN charter. The UN charter considers it a crime to go to war except in imminent self-defence, or when authorised by the UN security council.

Protocol IV on Blinding Laser Weapons prohibits the use of laser weapons specifically designed, as their sole combat function or as one of their combat functions, to cause permanent blindness to unenhanced vision, that is to the naked eye or to the eye with corrective eyesight devices. The High Contracting Parties shall not transfer such weapons to any State or non-State entity.

I just happened to be finishing up an excellent, if a little dated, book on Laser Weapons called 'Laser Weapons - The Dawn of a New Military Age' Its out of print, but if you can find it, I highly recommend it. Co-authored by a military Major General and a Biomedical Engineering professor specializing in eye injuries, etc.

One thing that is NOT in TFA, is this key fact about Low Energy Laser weapons:

It is not possible to only flash blind a person with a laser for a sufficient time in broad daylight without simultaneously causing permanent changes to his eyes. Temproary flash blinding by a laser is only possible when eyes are more or less adapted to darkness.

The key point here is that a laser weapon like this will only be 'safe' on the targets at night. During the day it won't work.

If you really want to poke around and see whats out there, both experimental and deployed, try some of these searches (and since most stuff related to laser weapons is still highly classified, take what you read with a grain of salt):

• HELEX
• LDS - Laser Dazzle Sight
• C-CLAW/RoadRunner
• StingRay
• Cameo Bluejay
• Coronet Prince
• DAZER
• COBRA

These are programs primarily from the late 1980's and 1990's, but it gives you an idea what they were looking at back then and some may still be in R&D today. Systems like Stingray and LDS were deployed at some point or came very close to it.

One thing most people don't realize is that High Energy Laser weapons (HEL) like proposed for SDI, etc, are VERY difficult to deploy and run into serious problems with atmospheric distortion and interference (lookup Laser Thermal Blooming on Google - its a neat effect) But Low Energy Laser (LEL) weapons can easily blind soldiers, destroy optics, and destory sensitive sensors on vehicles, aircraft, and missles, and aren't as severely impacted by the environment like HEL weapons are. Plus they are CHEAP to build and the technology is widely available - thus the weapons aren't limited to the G-8. If you think terrorists haven't considered using LELs you're kidding yourself. They may not have the dramatic effect - but imagine the psychological impact on a society (think DC Sniper) if numerous people started going blind just walking down the street. Why do you think the FAA freaked out so badly when people pointed handheld laser pointers at landing aircraft. I have a Class IIIa laser on my desk I bought for $50 - how hard would it

The UN is more than a "forum for international discourse". It's also an umbrella for a number of functional and distinctly non-political international organizations. A good example is the ITU, another is the UPU. You never think about it, but you _can_ call any country on the phone or send snail mail there, and these systems are coordinated/governed by organizations that (AFAIK) never makes headlines. My guess is some think the Internet should be governed like this, and I can't see why not. It does sound a bit weird that a company would do this instead.

UN organizational chart
ITU

On the other hand, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, an international treaty to which the US is a signatory, specifically applies to "all people in all nations", and does not restrict itself whatsoever to governmental agencies. If we are to accept that free speech is a fundamental human right, rather than a government granted privilege, we do have a duty to protect against any suppression of it, be that suppression from the government, an angry mob, an employer, or a school.

Well, some people have their own hydrogen-generating machines. Of course, these run on electricity; see, the generation of hydrogen costs more energy than the hydrogen contains - that is, it has an EROEI (energy returned on energy invested) less than one. Whatever you're processing to make hydrogen, you have to use up energy to get the reaction happening. Even if you wanted to do this, every home in the industrialised world would need a hydrogen-generating machine that ran on electricity - the manufacturing of which would cost enormous amounts of energy and materials, even if it worked at generating energy.

In some places, hydrogen is generated in big power plants and delivered "on tap" to your home or office. This might sound dangerous, but then again, people had gas stoves once, until natural gas production peaked and the price tripled overnight. Again, you'd need to retro-fit an enormous amount of infrastructure in which to deliver the hydrogen - the laying of which would cost enormous amounts of energy and materials, even if it worked at generating energy.

In any case, we need to do something. I mean, we've got all these gadgets - the manufacturing of which cost us enormous amounts of energy and materials - and they're all powered by billions of hydrogen fuel cells - the manufacturing of which cost us enormous amounts of energy and materials. Even though the average electronic device consumes ten times its weight in fossil fuels during its manufacture, and even though the generation of hydrogen costs twice as much energy as the resulting hydrogen contains, people still bought into this sham in droves, believing that it's better for the environment.

In reality, it's made the problem more widespread because we demand more energy than ever before, and it hasn't solved anything because we haven't really found a new source of energy with which to replace fossil fuels. Made me think twice about buying that hybrid car, too.

You try telling people this was a bad idea, though. They'll look up from their plates of raw vegetables and mugs of rain water, and tell you to keep your big mouth shut.

According to Article 19 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html the freedom of speech is a universal human right. It shouldn't matter whether the violation is committed by a private company or a government -- it's not less of a violation because of that.

Also, freedom of speech is not a human right

The UN seems to disagree:

Article 19: Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

The US has ratified the ICCHR though in this case that doesn't mean much. Many international lawyers argue that even though the declaration is not binding, it could constitute international common law.

Personally, to think that a school could regulate after hours activities on pain of expulsion is completely alien to me. Some rights cannot be contracted away (i.e. indentured servitude is no more, no matter what any contract says) this IMNSHO is one of them.

i think this nonprofit organization has had its eye on the TLDs for a while. would it make the internet "fair" again?

For the record, I'm from EU area and I used to work for the UN in East-Africa. I know they have made serious mistakes, but what is the alternative? http://www.un.org/aboutun/achieve.htm Read some UN history and tell me some organisation that has done better... Most of people that I have met in the UN do belive in the UN. Of course there are people that have and will use the UN for their on benefits, but...

would America (and by america i mean the right wing and left wing traitors to the constitution) like it if say China controlled major aspects of the internet? how about North Korea?

No, and that is kind of the point. No, the US does not want two nations famous for their censorship of the Internet to have any more control then they already do.

Oh... what is this fine gem from the UN? http://unpan1.un.org/intradoc/groups/public/docume nts/APCITY/UNPAN016881.pdf
Is this China asking for more control over the Internet?

And lookie here.
http://www.wgig.org/docs/WGIGREPORT.doc
The original report on Internet governance. Hrm, who signed this merry little report... China, Cuba, Egypt, Russia, and Saudi Arabia to name a few. Now, I now the US is the great Satan and all, but do you really want those nations to dictate internet governance? Me personally? I'll pass and take my chances with the nation that has seemed to have done a marvelous job keeping their hands completely off of ICANN.