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Isn't that what Israel did?

Nope! You got it wrong.
Israel didn't just "grow up" and withdrew. It's just a matter of balancing the costs and benefits. You may wanna read this interview (from 2000) to get a feel of what was really happening. http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?Sectio nID=22&ItemID=10656

• That the West is supporting corrupt dictatorships when convenient
• That the West is a decadent, post-capitalist, imperialist society desirous of world domination
• That the NATO is aggressive and wants to expand to the borders of USSR (now Russia)
• That the Western radio and television are a mindless infotainment (pot/kettle here)
• That Leonard Peltier is a political prisoner, among others
• That Move bombing was an act of government-perpetrated domestic terrorism
• That the US police is armed, dangerous and may shoot first
• That black americans were an oppressed underclass until the middle of 20th century, and that racism is still alive and well among people in some states.
• That the West props up the apartheid regime in South Africa
• That the West props up Israel and pays for its wars
• That Israel is unfair to Palestinians
• That the West destabilized Afghanistan to to make it a thorn in USSR's side
• That the Vietnam war was a horrendous crime, despite what US Presidents said at the time
• That the West wants military supremacy over everyone else, and may use nuclear weapons for aggressive purposes
• That the US economy is a colossus on clay legs, supported only by mountains of green paper and by fear of global economic collapse (countries started replacing dollars with gold and euros only after 2000)
• ... and many other pure propaganda stories like that.

For example in Africa or in Mexico or in ...

It can't end, because it never started. It doesn't even make sense to talk about being at war with "Terror" when Terror is just an abstract concept.

The first war on terror or the second? I'm getting confused.

War on Terror

The opinion of Kofi Annan, and probably the majority of the Assembly, if it ever came to a fair vote, is that the US and its coalition, acted illegally.

Much of the political manouvers in Iraq since the invasion has been concerned with trying to make sure that the early rules imposed by the occupation (especially foreign ownership laws, banking laws etc) will survive a challenge to the legitimacy of the occupation. Some of the conflict over the constitution was exactly over that: there are various clauses that are designed to ensure that contracts signed by the CPA, especially, long term (30 year!) supply contracts with the government, are binding on the Iraqi government.

For documentation, see, for example, this zmag article, or Baghdad Year Zero (Harpers). Plenty of other stuff around too, if you look.

> Illegal according to what law? You know that when they are attacking other countries they are not required to obey the laws in that country.

Invading another country, when not in self-defense, is a war crime ("supreme crime"),
by the Geneva conventions, and USA has signed those and are bound by them. War crimes
carries the death penality in USA. As an invader you are also required to follow
local laws, with some exceptions. Of course, the invader may make new laws, but they
may be illegal as well. Instituting new laws in order to loot Iraq is not legal, and
you might have noticed oil companies reluctance to invest there...

Notice how the Bush Administration tries to avoid beeing persecuted for war crimes:

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID =10038

The civil rights movement did use guns, as did suffrage, just not by the general population. The threat of government force through police actions was an important factor.

It was more than a threat. Fred Hampton was excuted in his sleep.

That said, I only concede on the fine linguistics part.

The very idea of universal grammar is that Language (the function) is part of what makes us human, and the learning of one specific language is finding structures and sounds (words) that are appropriate to make use of the function. But that doesn't mean a language itself has no influence on those who use. As a matter of fact, if a language doesn't have a way to express a concept, you simply can't think naturally about it. Just look at the inuit language which has something like 40 words that translate has 'ice'. I wouldn't be able to differentiate 40 kinds of ice.

Newtalk as Orwell defined is, like you said, a fiction. You can safely look at it as an exageration (but remember, before he was brainwashed/broken, Winston Smith thought it was crasy), but it doesn't mean there's nothing similar happening right now.

If you look at it with a politico-historical eye, things become quite different. What I stated in my previous post is exactly what has been happening for the last 20-30 years within the field of politics and economics.

You say not to cite Chomsky, obviously you misunderstood me: Chomsky the linguist is interesting, but Chomsky the political activist who applies his linguistic skills to the analysis of the political field has the real significance here. He describes exactly what the realworld 'newtalk' is. But don't take my word for it, go look at the source (ther are others, but I don't the time to look them up):

http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/talks/9103-media-contr ol.html

I'll agree on one thing, it probably can't work forever, but it's been very efficient in delaying any real change in the way the 'Powers that be' work.

Background: I'm 42 and live in a pretty damn small rural city (75,000 people). That eliminates some of a big city's risk but not sicko abductions of kids and teens, which have always been around here in numbers enough to merit attention (a classmate of mine disappeared in '79 (one of several to disappear, whose remains were found years later by hunters and hikers). So, while I grew up in a similar relaxed era, I'm biased a bit but I think you're right and I've seen numbers to confirm your suspicion:

Stats I can google up and have read say the USA has a hundred thousand abductions per year. Just 600 of them are taken by strangers, according to ChildFind. 200 kids per year are abducted and killed by strangers. THE VAST MAJORITY OF ABDUCTIONS ARE NOT BY STRANGERS. They're custody-related.

At a conservative googling of 100k per year, abductions would be worrisome (that's 1 per couple thousand people, or 1 per 500 kids, assuming kids are 25% of the population). But at 1 in a million odds? For this, you're gonna deprive a kid from the outdoors and friends and such!? Heck, that's miniscule compared to the risk a kid faces from drowning, falling off a bike, being the one-in-several-hundred that dies tragically in high school (car wreck, suicide, drinking-related, etc).

We got a handbill several weeks ago (I forget from what official agency) that said 'Don't Talk to Strangers' isn't working. The focus needs to be on avoiding adults that act unusually, warning kids what an inappropriately-acting adult (friend of the family or otherwise) will say or do, who is more trustworthy, and how to run/holler/resist/tattle when an adult acts inappropriately.

So, I (absurdist that I am) take my guidance from Crush, the Sea Turtle in 'Finding Nemo'-- I try to reign in my irrational urge to overprotect, I look for reasonable opportunities to let my kids have more freedom, and my wife and I try to keep the kids outside as much as possible. If I had the time, I'd be subtly lobbying other parents in the neighborhood to do the same.

(links, including a nice geek-friendly Bruce Schneier... though I'd say you should look for something by Oprah if convincing your wife is the goal)

http://www.childfindofamerica.org/Information.htm
http://www.jfox.neu.edu/The_boogeyman_in_the_green _car.htm
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/06/talk ing_to_stra.html
http://www.zmag.org/Sustainers/Content/2002-09/04p eters.cfm
http://www.childfindofamerica.org/prevention.htm

Oh, and my kids are too young for chemistry sets, but I bought one for my young-teen nephews on ebay. $40 for the same one we played with in '75, complete with a bunsen burner, meltable sulphur powder, iron and magnesium shavings, test tubes, and a dozen compounds that'd poison anyone dumb enough to ingest 'em. 40-some bottles of reagents... awesome.

There's another country in the middle east that has that kind of discriminatory laws though

I recommend this book, for your "actual history" fix.

Quite humorous. Let us examine perhaps the first historical assertion made by Mr. Chomsky: "The fall of Granada in 1492, ending eight centuries of Moorish sovereignty, allowed the Spanish Inquisition to extend its barbaric sway."
What Mr. Chomsky forgets to mention is that the Moors were Muslim soldiers who had conquered and ruled most of Spain by force (link: "In 711 AD, the Moors invaded Visigoth Christian Spain. Under their leader, a Berber general named Tariq ibn-Ziyad, they brought most of Spain under Islamic rule in an eight-year campaign."). Their defeat ("loss of sovereignty") was a victory for the forces of anti-colonialism, and if Mr. Chomsky was truly anti-colonial instead of anti-Western, he would have hailed the reconquest of Grenada with exuberance.

Thanks the the American public "education" "system," the typical, illiterate American would be completely unaware of Mr. Chomsky's lies of omission or his peculiar framing of the situation, and due to their gullibility would accept his dubious statements at face value. On the other hand, had Americans been taught actual history (instead of the politically motivated drivel exemplified by Mr. Chomsky's work), as well as some critical thinking skills, as I orignially suggested, they would have been capable of thinking for themselves and most would have rejected Mr. Chomsky's peculiar interpretation of the events. Of course, as things stand at the moment, the typical, illiterate American cannot locate Europe on a map, let alone Spain; to expect the typical American to have any knowledge of the history of Spain, or of the Islamic Conquests of every civilization except for China (though they did try during the Tang dynasty) and some parts of Northern Europe would extremely unreasonable.

P.S. The rest of the "book" you linked to is fully of such historical distoritions, lies by omission, pseudo-philosophy, peculiar unsubstantiated assertions, and name dropping, all without any semblance of historical context whatsoever. I truly hope you did not "learn" "history" from it.
P.P.S. Ever hears of Battle of Tours, arguably the most important event in history? No? I wonder why. What about the Siege of Vienna. Still no? I really wonder why...

:)

Viewing the trailer requires Quicktime. If your browser does not support embedded files you can dowload the .mov directly here.

It falls to me to tell them they are doing so, that they with their own actions are giving certain large companies more power. When you send someone a ".doc' file, a "Word' file, or an audio or video file in RealPlayer or Quicktime format, you are actually pressuring someone to give up their freedom. Perhaps because I constantly have to bring this up, people believe I don't have a sense of proportion.

Sometimes people take for granted that I will participate in those activities with them. Thus, when I webcast a speech, I have to ask which format it is going to be webcast in. I am not going to go along with a webcast of my speech about freedom that you have to give up your freedom in order to hear or watch. Once I put my coat over a camera before giving my speech, when I learned it was webcasting in RealPlayer format. [emph mine]

For computers, the period from development to commercially viable sales was about 30 years (depending on how you count). For the internet, it was also about 30 years within the state system before it was handed over, by a process that remains obscure, to private corporations.

And it's not a matter of public companies going private. IBM was a private corporation when it was making use of the government-funded MIT and Harvard computers, in government-funded labs (or fully government labs), to learn how to move from punched cards to electronic computers, and by the time it was going off on its own in the 60s, most of its production was for government agencies. Public support takes many different forms: funding, grants, government labs, procurement, etc. There are plenty of details in print. I reviewed some of Alan Greenspan's fantasies on this in a chapter of "Rogue States," dealing with the interesting history of transistors, technically "private" but in fact developed at public expense -- the only illustration he gave of the "entrepreneurial initiative" and "consumer choice" that drives the economy; the others were textbook cases of R&D within the public sector. -- http://blogs.zmag.org/ee_links/public_expense_priv ate_profit

Rather different from Iraq, which had attacked Iran and Kuwait without provocation.

Oh, really? The war began when Iraq invaded Iran on 22 September 1980 following a long history of border disputes, the calling of the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime and secret encouragement by the US administration (Jimmy Carter, conveyed through Saudi Arabia) who was embroiled in a dispute with the new regime in Iran. There was nothing unprovoked about it. Stop it already.

"This whole story is a waste of space. It doesn't even mention Ponies."

Wrong. The submitter is raising a very important problem: Corporatism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism or State Capitalism in the USA (aka fascism, or rather it's economic basis as demonstrated by Mussolini).

Further reading:
Meanwhile, a study of the National Academy of Sciences and Engineering proposed a $5 billion quasi-governmental company "to channel federal money into private applied research": publicly-funded research that will yield private profit . Another report, entitled The Government Role in Civilian Technology: Building a New Alliance, calls for new efforts to extend "the close and longstanding" government-industry relationship that has "helped to establish the commercial biotechnology industry." It recommends a government-funded "Civilian Technology Corporation" to assist US industry to commercialize technology by encouraging "cooperative R&D ventures in pre-commercial areas." The ventures will be "cooperative" -- with the public paying the costs -- up to the point of product development. At that point costs change to profits, and the public hands the enterprise over to private industry. -- http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/year/year-c04-s06.html

To me, nuke is an obvious choice.

Wow.. so much verbal masturbation, egotistical musings... self-love, the all natural opiate. You, Michael Albert, and perhaps Chomsky to close the deal, would probably have the most enlightening chat amongst you all... by the time you're done, one will suffocate from all the chest thumping, the other one just be bruised from it, or hey, maybe even possibly pissed all over each other with joy over who expressed higher intellectualism and 'forward looking' prophetic statements on why capitalism sucks, and socialism is better, or "ParEcon" (a veiled socialist/communist paradigm) is the next step...

I understand your drive for higher state of being, but what I think you don't understand is that everyone who ever tried it over the last umpteenth thousand years failed, and along the way slaughtered millions of people on the account of them "not understanding" the leader...

http://www.zmag.org/ZMag/articles/mar01bender.htm

Well, you wouldn't accumulate money per se because for each planning period - barring emergencies or special considerations - you would only consume what you had planned to consume for the planning period. However, you could opt to plan to consume less than you are entitled to consume during a given period so as to consume more in a later period and this would effectively be similar to savings. However, you wouldn't have much need for truly huge savings as one does in a capitalist economy because basic human necessities and most likely even the average consumption level would continue to be provided for you after you were no longer able to work due to illness or age.

Taxes don't really play a role in a parecon because taxes are a means to pay for government employees and/or a means to redistrubute wealth (whether for good or ill). In a parecon, a government employee is payed in the same way that any other person is, i.e. a system of democratic planning through negotiations between workers councils and consumers councils. There is no need for a redistribution of wealth because in a parecon, everyone consumes roughly the same amount of the pie that society produces with small variations stemming from how much effort a person wishes to put forth.

The mechanics of parecon and how it differs from a capitalist (mixed or otherwise) economy (like the US) or a centrally planned economy (like the old Soviet Union) are too complicated for a detailed discussion here that would do them justice, but if you are interested you can find a wealth of information on the web here: http://www.zmag.org/parecon/indexnew.htm

Actually, the reaction to "The Last Temptation of Christ" was a bit more than just picketing. Martin Scorsese recieved death threats and theatres that scheduled the film recieved bomb threats. Granted, no actual bombings occurred, but that might have been from lack of know-how rather than anything.

Also, when Terrance McNally's play "Corpus Christi" was booked for the Manhattan Theatre club, threats on McNally's life and a plot to firebomb the theatre forced cancellation of the play.

http://www.zmag.org/parecon/indexnew.htm

You borrowed $314 billion from foreign investors, and my buddy from Cuba will love this one, because you have borrowed $52.5 billion from Communist China. You have borrowed $122 billion from Japan. We now owe $1.3 trillion to foreign nations and investors, including $122 billion to Communist China. Tell me you are proud of that. Tell me the Republican majority is proud that we owe $122 billion to China and that $50 billion a year of American tax dollars go to pay interest on what we owe just to foreigners like the Communist Chinese.

Now in 2006, politicians are spending quicker than ever and the amount of debt China holds has gone up a bit

Currently, China is holding $769 billion, the vast majority of its foreign exchange reserves.

So for politicians rambling on about how US corporations are falling into line to please the Chinese, the fact that in order to keep these loans coming in the Government must be friendly to this communist country and still not recognize the democratic Taiwan.

There are bigger structural problems in the USA right now - an alarming statistic is that the average american household has $8k - $10k in credit card debt. This is incredible.

And yet the vast majority of Russia lives in poverty.

It's good they've built a better mouse. That's what the people need. *note sarcasm*

Anyone find any numbers on what these "zig-zagging" missiles cost to develop? Anyone else sick of seeing countries burn money on defense while their people starve?

What it's come down to is simply Fruedian penis...err...missile envy.

The current administration does exactly that, and it's well documented. Some time ago there was even published a letter signed by 48 Nobel Laurates very concerned abouth Bush science policy. Government researcher has been pressurised not to publish results that the administration does not like:

In other government agencies, such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Fish & Wildlife Service, many scientists say they have been pressured to cook their findings to support pre-approved conclusions. Political appointees are being seeded deeper into these agencies as well as the National Institutes of Health where they can more closely monitor and restrict government and government-funded scientists' work.

Use Google a bit, and you'll find more disturbing facts.

I don't know anybody who really thought Saddam had WMDs. In both the US and the UK the security services made their doubts known and were unceremeniously told to shut up.

One particular doubter in the UK civil service dept. concerned died under very mysterious circumstances after publicly revealing that the UK govt. had deliberately "sexed up" the dossier presented to Parliament as justification for viewing Iraq as a threat.

Under the old Goebbels diktat that you only need to keep repeating a lie in order to get away with it, the official line remains that "we were told they had WMDs!". However every single piece of justification offered in support of this idea has was disproved long ago. We know for an absolute fact that both the Whitehouse and 10 Downing Street knew very well that after a decade of sanctions and aerial bombardment, Saddam Hussein had no teeth and was acknowledged by both the UN and US seurity services as completely containable. That war was fought over resources, as will be all the wars to be fought over the coming century and you will know I am telling the truth when it becomes apparent that the US' readiness to go to war is strangely linked to opportunities for profit, strategic military location etc. etc.

To read about the secret session in the oval office poring over the oil map of Iraaq, read "It's the Crude, Dude - War, Big Oil and the Fight for the Planet"
by Linda McQuaig. There is a relevant extract quoted verbatim in numerous places around the web, eg. http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?Sectio nID=15&ItemID=6314

First RMS steps in it by saying nobody should use any non-free software (http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?Secti onID=13&ItemID=9350), and if they are working on a task that requires non-free software they should just not do the task ... then 2 paragraphs later he admits to using Unix to develop GNU, but says that was OK because he was only using it to stamp out "evil".

And now we have the founder of Wikipedia editing his own bio 18 times, despite strongly worded discouragement of that type of activity. And better yet, he is using some of these edits to rewrite the history of Wikipedia. I think I will have to tell my kids to steer clear of using Wikipedia as a source for any future school work.

Now, ordinarily I would let these relatively minor transgressions pass, but the fact is, these two folks are very quick to position their movements as "good versus evil". If you are so quick to sing your own virtues, you had better be above reproach, and clearly neither of these gentlemen are.

I have found a nice text in the archives of ZNet about the definition and historical role of fascism, highly recomended:
http://www.zmag.org/ZMag/articles/barparenti.htm

That BBS doesn't appear to be linked to znet apart from in content.
Could you please supply or create a direct link from the http://www.zmag.org/weluser.htm website for everyones convenience.

Privacy aware folks should tread carefully before registering information to an unknown source.
(But you all knew that of course...)

Time also named former Presidents George Bush and Bill Clinton as "Partners of the Year" for their humanitarian efforts after the Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina, and the unlikely friendship that developed from that work.

Unlikely friendship??? Someone hand me a hanky. Gotta love applauding Bush for Katrina. It ain't as ironic as giving Kissenger the Peace prize, but it's gettting there. And Bono??? Bono???
The guy may be well meaning and all, but by allowing politicians to exploit him, he essentially allows them to look good while they make the problems of Africa worse. Him and Bobby Geldof were complete tools at the last G8, allowing Blair to look like he wanted to help Africa, when all they did was continue the same IMF policies of handouts in exchange for selling off of resources to the west. And Bono does it over and over again.

Free markets are efficient. Monopolies are the exact opposite of a free market. One of the roles of the State is to intervene to prevent monopolies.

It's also one of the State roles to regulate so-called "free markets". Many think that the stock exchange is an example of a "free market", but it's actually very regulated (insider trading laws, as one of many examples). So to say that free markets are efficient, one must first define by what one mean by a free market. By changing the definition of what constitutes a free market, you may get any result you want about it's effiency.

For some very strange reason some people think that a so called "free market solution" is always best (a solution looking for a problem). Actually, unregulated "free market" can have a devasting effect on the people and the economy : Russia and the Crisis of Neoliberalism(1999)

Neoliberalism is the contemporary incarnation of the old ideology that asserts the superiority of an unregulated or "free market" capitalist system. Just when that wave of free market enthusiasm seemed to be waning, it received a powerful boost from the demise of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991. The Soviet demise was interpreted as the final vindication of free market theory, or neoliberalism as it has come to be called. Right-wing theorists had always insisted that public intervention in the market, whether reformist or radical, inevitably led to despotism, with Soviet political repression held out as the living proof.

....The result of the neoliberal experiment in Russia has been nearly seven years of economic devastation on a scale unseen anywhere else in peacetime in this century.

...The majority of Russia's population has been impoverished by the neoliberal experiment.

from the article i posted:

[Theodore] Roosevelt also once said, "I don't go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn't like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth."

i think we should try and look and many interpretations, and not just get stuck on the ones that say everything is peachy-keen and no american ever did anything wrong. This is part of critical thinking. we shouldn't need to blindly accept every favourable interpretation. it's our duty to seek out and learn about the parts of history that most people turn a blind eye to.

-doviende

here's another quote from it, which references your response:

But when one brings into historical discussions any facts and interpretations that contest the celebratory story and make people uncomfortable -- such as the genocide of indigenous people as the foundational act in the creation of the United States -- suddenly the value of history drops precipitously and one is asked, "Why do you insist on dwelling on the past?"

and i particularly like this one:

Obscuring bitter truths about historical crimes helps perpetuate the fantasy of American benevolence, which makes it easier to sell contemporary imperial adventures -- such as the invasion and occupation of Iraq -- as another benevolent action.

but sure, there are lots of times when we should celebrate friendship and family...let's just not make it into a fantastical fairy tale about a 'glorious' past.

-doviende

"Some aspects of the conventional story are true enough. But it's also true that by 1637 Massachusetts Gov. John Winthrop was proclaiming a thanksgiving for the successful massacre of hundreds of Pequot Indian men, women and children, part of the long and bloody process of opening up additional land to the English invaders."

here's another part of it i found interesting:

Any attempt to complicate this story guarantees hostility from mainstream culture. After raising the barbarism of America's much-revered founding fathers in a lecture, I was once accused of trying to "humble our proud nation" and "undermine young people's faith in our country."

Yes, of course -- that is exactly what I would hope to achieve. We should practice the virtue of humility and avoid the excessive pride that can, when combined with great power, lead to great abuses of power.

-doviende

What they should and what they do are different things. The US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is the same one that advocates use of torture, and claims that the Geneva Conventions are "obsolete". With an US Attorney General that is all too willing to violate human rights, no one should be surprised that he now propose harsher laws.

From U.S.-Held Prisoners Transferred Abroad Subjected to Torture

Between The Lines: Alberto Gonzalez was just confirmed as the new U.S. attorney general. What message does it send to the world about America's tolerance toward torture and future policies that are liable to come out of the Bush administration regarding torture?

Michael Ratner: Well, it's incredibly distressing. I mean, Alberto Gonzalez not only was the one who penned, authored and was responsible for the memo that called the interrogation practices or protections of the Geneva Conventions "obsolete" and other provisions, "quaint." He was the one who said that Geneva should not apply to people picked up, and the humane provisions of Geneva should not apply. He is the one who was also involved in the famous memo from (Assistant Attorney General Jay S.) Bybee that defined torture so narrowly that everything you saw at Abu Ghraib would not be considered torture. And who still today insists that non-citizens, and I want to stress this, non-citizens held outside the United States are not protected from cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment -- which is our lawyers' word for essentially inhumane treatment, just a shade underneath torture. So that's the man who has been confirmed.

The big question is whether there remains enough of a spark of Freedom...

Why don't you take a holiday in western Europe some day to see what it is actually like here. Personally I recommend Paris, but there are lovely cities in every country.

Ofcourse humans, err sorry... non-white humans are a different story altogether http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?Sectio nID=15&ItemID=3966

hey see a nation that has previously sold chemical weapons to others to use,

Cite?

Precursors and dual-use technology are not the same thing as chemical weapons. The same thing applies to bacterial cultures and biological weapons.

USA sold chemical/bacteriological weapons and technology to Saddam during the Iran-Iraq war. You might have noticed that such weapons was used, including on Iraqi civil population by Saddam himself.

Go search http://www.zmag.org/ for articles about this.

The war on free speech is ongoing, as can be seen in U.S.BARS ROBERT FISK FROM ENTERING COUNTRY :

The internationally renowned correspodent for The Independent -- the great British journalist Robert Fisk -- has been banned from entering the United States. Fisk has been covering war zones for decades, but is above all known for his incisive reporting from the Middle East for more than 20 years. His critical coverage of the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, and the continuing occupation that has followed it, has repeatedly exposed U.S. and British government disinformation campaigns. He also has exposed how the bulk of the press reports from Iraq have been "hotel journalism" -- a phrase Fisk coined.

You forgot about Israel, which is the MOST functional democracy in the middle east, parliament and all. Both Jews and Arabs have full voting rights in Israel.

If you create a nuclear weapon, you should not sell it to North Korea. If you create a tank, selling it to Iran surely would not increase your merits in the western societies.

Do you mean kinda like like how Donald Rumsfeld sold WDMs and US-made Helicopters to Saddam?

For the benefit of those that sadly believes what you wrote, here are some choise citations from Robin Cook's 'Ethical' Foreign Policy :

Kenny is presumably unaware that president Truman's chief of staff, admiral William D. Leahy, wrote that using the "barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons". He lamented that the US government "had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages". (Quoted, Anthony Gregory, 'Targeting Civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki,' August 6, 2004, http://www.fff.org/comment/com0408b.asp)

The US Strategic Bombing Survey, which interviewed 700 Japanese military and political officials after the war, came to this conclusion:

"Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated." (Quoted, Howard Zinn, The Zinn Reader, Seven Stories, 1997, p.350)

In 1963, former US president Dwight Eisenhower told Newsweek that "the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing". (Gregory, op. cit)

Brigadier general Carter Clarke, the military intelligence officer in charge of preparing intercepted Japanese cables for president Truman and his advisors, commented:

"...when we didn't need to do it, and we knew we didn't need to do it, and they knew that we knew we didn't need to do it, we used them as an experiment for two atomic bombs." (Gregory, ibid)

Check out the old "anarchists" at ZNet, who logically talk about the various traps when you wish to counterreact to state-capitalism. Here's some audio talks, and a discussion of the various economic systems.

Being an Anarcho -Syndicalist after flirting with such ideas as Anarcho-Individualism.

I chose Chomsky over Peacock.

Take a look at http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?Sectio nID=41&ItemID=8336 "It is the people who tolerate the government, which in turn tolerates opposition within the framework determined by the constituted authorities," Marcuse wrote. "Tolerance toward that which is radically evil now appears as good because it serves the cohesion of the whole on the road to affluence or more affluence. The toleration of the systematic moronization of children and adults alike by publicity and propaganda, the release of destructiveness in aggressive driving, the recruitment for and training of special forces, the important and benevolent tolerance toward outright deception in merchandising, waste, and planned obsolescence are not distortions and aberrations, they are the essence of a system which fosters tolerance as a means for perpetuating the struggle for existence and suppressing the alternatives...."

Be afraid. Be very afraid. Be British and very very very very very afraid:

Noam Chomsky

The western world is in its worst decadence since the Medieval times...

umm, in whose words? you are again citing examples to paint an entire population. england has seen more terrorism from the IRA and irgun than from muslims. should they banish all the irish and jews? your hypthetical questions are utterly ridiculous. and your boy friedman is also a racist http://zmagsite.zmag.org/Nov2003/herman1103.html it seems you want to be racist, and cite other racists to bolster your arguements to justify it.

Bush want's to extend the arms race into space, and quite simply ignore existing treaties

Got any evidence to back that up, or are you just talking from your ass? (I'll give you a clue: You're talking out of your ass.)

May I suggest that only watching Fox "News" does not give you the best fundament for making informed opinions about the world at large?

Google is a nice tool for searching a quality site (I'm sure other sites have quelity too) :

Bush Space Plans :

In order to technologically leapfrog the space program to global "control and domination," a new agreement has been signed by NASA, U.S. Strategic Command, the NRO, and the Air Force Space Command to mesh their efforts together. Thus, we witness the takeover of the U.S. space program by military and weapons corporations.

Nuclear Proliferation Threat of Global Nuclear Weapons Proliferation Met by U.S. Development of New Atomic Arms and Militarization of Space

America plans to actually dominate space, and space is a global commons according to the United Nations law. It belongs to all of us, not just 5 percent of the earth's population. So, this is an absolute violation of international law. It could in fact trigger a nuclear war, as could the National Missile Defense plans, because Russia and China have both said, "If you build a missile defense system against our missiles -- which are targeted on you, we'll just build thousands more hydrogen bombs, so we can supersaturate your system."

As for ignoring treaty obligations, a google for "rumsfeld+geneva+convention+torture" should give some interesting quotes (like, "Geneva Convention is irrelevant").

As Neil Postman wrote, and you confirm

Americans are the best entertained and the least informed people in the world.

Bush want's to extend the arms race into space, and quite simply ignore existing treaties

Got any evidence to back that up, or are you just talking from your ass? (I'll give you a clue: You're talking out of your ass.)

May I suggest that only watching Fox "News" does not give you the best fundament for making informed opinions about the world at large?

Google is a nice tool for searching a quality site (I'm sure other sites have quelity too) :

Bush Space Plans :

In order to technologically leapfrog the space program to global "control and domination," a new agreement has been signed by NASA, U.S. Strategic Command, the NRO, and the Air Force Space Command to mesh their efforts together. Thus, we witness the takeover of the U.S. space program by military and weapons corporations.

Nuclear Proliferation Threat of Global Nuclear Weapons Proliferation Met by U.S. Development of New Atomic Arms and Militarization of Space

America plans to actually dominate space, and space is a global commons according to the United Nations law. It belongs to all of us, not just 5 percent of the earth's population. So, this is an absolute violation of international law. It could in fact trigger a nuclear war, as could the National Missile Defense plans, because Russia and China have both said, "If you build a missile defense system against our missiles -- which are targeted on you, we'll just build thousands more hydrogen bombs, so we can supersaturate your system."

As for ignoring treaty obligations, a google for "rumsfeld+geneva+convention+torture" should give some interesting quotes (like, "Geneva Convention is irrelevant").

As Neil Postman wrote, and you confirm

Americans are the best entertained and the least informed people in the world.

IMO, Americans have a much better "just do it" approach to life/work and tend to value personal freedom. Europeans OTOH are more focussed on social values, society is more hierarchical and people tend to have a higher regard for style. Britain is halfway between the two.

As social upwards mobility goes, you'll have better chance of this in Europe than in USA, according to Rags to Rags, Riches to Riches : The American Dream is More Livable in the Old World :

Hey, guess what: the social class into which you are born matters a lot when it comes to where you stand on the American socioeconomic ladder. It matters more in the United States, the supposed land of upward mobility, than it does in Europe. The American Dream of "rags to riches" is less livable in America than it is in the aristocratic Old World that America rejected when its founding document proclaimed that "All Men Are Created Equal."

If you don't believe me, check out the front page of the capitalist Wall Street Journal two weeks ago. In an article titled "As Rich-Poor Gap Widens in the U.S., Class Mobility Stalls: Those on Bottom Rung Enjoy Better Odds in Europe" (May 13th), Journal reporter David Wessel notes that recent scholarship does NOT bear out "the notion that the US is...a meritocracy where smarts and ambition matter more than parenthood and class." In reality, Wessel finds, the odds that a child born into poverty will climb into the middle or upper class are slighter in the U.S. than they are in "class bound Europe." According to the latest and best research, the Journal reports, the U.S. and its junior partner England are "the least mobile societies" among the world's "rich countries." France and Germany "are somewhat more mobile than the U.S.; Canada and the Nordic countries are much more so."