Artful Dodger:

> Homosexual couples cannot, and never will be able to do what hetrosexual couples can do: create children.

Science has changed that.  I read sometime ago about artificial sperm.  a scientist took the DNA out of an animal's sperm and introduced the DNA of a female into it.  Then he used that sperm to ferlize the egg of a different female.  Not only that, but scientists have taken egg cells and removed all DNA from them, then introduced another sample of DNA and made the egg become a fertilized embrio.  Science is changing reproductive limitations, whether we like it or not.  There are serious ethical questions about these reproductive technologies, but they are there and in the future anybody will be able to have children, regardless of sexual orientation.  What happens then?  It is a difficult question.

Perhaps we could see the problem from another side.  If instead of sexual orientation, we used race or religion as a determinant for marriage, would we feel the same?  "Christians will have marriage, but Jews will have a civil union."  "Caucasians will have marriage, but African Blacks will have a civil union."  If we were to do this, would we be discriminating against a minority?  Obviously.  By the same token, the current law discrimates against homosexuals.  The only reason why the law remains is because the majority of the population supports the traditional definition of marriage.  In essence, it is a law that represents the will of the majority, and discriminates against the minority.  One of the tenets of modern democracy is respect for minority rights.

Czuch:

>  there are people born hard wired to be sexually attracted to children,
can anyone explain to me
>  how that is really any different than being
hard wired to be sexually attracted to someone of the same sex?

Isn't age of consent a factor?  Adult homosexuals are old enough to make a decision about what they want in their lives.  Children do not have the knowledge or experience to make that decision.

I think that ultimately it comes to whether people are free to do what they want or not.  If a homosexual couple wants to marry, it is their choice as free individuals.

Homophobic people are insecure.  They think that if homosexuals marry, it somehow diminishes heterosexual marriage.  "There is no way my heterosexual marriage is in the same league as the marriage among homosexuals."  It is all fear and insecurity.  Homophobic people hide that fear behind the veil of morality.  It can be Christian morality, or morality imposed by the state.  It is much easier to say that "marriage should be as defined in the Bible" rather than "I fear homosexuals and I fear that we are becoming like them."  Those that protest the hardest against homosexuality are often those that fear it the most, and in some cases they are homosexuals who hide their true nature out of fear and shame.

>  I am not sure why the government is in the marriage business in the first place?

It has to do with money and property mostly.  For example, in the US there are 1138 statutes in the law concerning marriage rights and responsibilities and the vast majority of them have to do with property, division of assets, survivor benefits, etc.  Governments around the world have passed marriage legislation to clarify how all that money and property should be distributed, divided, managed or inherited.  This is true also of legal codes outside of modern governments.  Much of the Bible's and the Koran's law on marriage is related to property.

(V):

For those of you who don't know, here is some info:

Dead Peasant's Insurance

Like much of the insurance business, it is mostly a scam (no offense to those of you who work in that industry.)  It looks like either a way to get tax breaks, or a way for companies to get richer.  The assumption is that a key employee is expensive to replace.  Then companies can declare the cost of the insurance against income taxes.  If the employee dies the company gets the money, not the family.  It sounds like free money for a company.  If the employee is alive the company gets the tax break, if the employee dies the company gets the insurance money.  It is a win/win for the company.  A good scam!

Ferris Bueller:

>  There is something to be said for discouraging hate speech & symbols, but where do u draw those lines?

I think that while extremist racists have their freedoms of scpeech protected by the Constitution, there are limits imposed on what they can do.

Here in Canada we had a famous case in 1984.  James Keegstra was the town mayor and a school teacher in Eckville, Alberta.  He taught his social studies students that the holocaust was a fraud and that Jews were greedy, power-hungry, destructive, treacherous, etc.  Keegstra was saying that Jews inveted the Holocaust to gain sympathy.

He was charged with hate crimes for willfully promoting hatred against an identifiable group.  He tried to have the charge quashed because he said that the charge infringed upon his right to freedom of speech.  The Supreme Court denied his claim and he was fined $5000 (a joke) and given a 1 year suspended sentence which he served doing community work.

The case was a landmark case and later other Aryan Nations and KKK members in Canada found themselves in trouble with the law.

Where do we draw the line?  I think the line is clear.  Anything that promotes hatred or racism is against the spirit of the Constitution.  Freedom of speech does not mean freedom to hate.

Bernice:

>  There is a lot of hard feelings between these races...so you have black hating black.

We also have to remember Rwanda and the Hutus killing over 1 million Tutsis.  Ethnic genocide is still going on in Congo where the same racial hatred that we saw in Rwanda is still tearing apart Sub-saharan Africa.

Artful Dodger:

>  The British left the slave trade kicking and screaming.

Is there a country that didn't?  I think all countries that had slaves were very reluctant to give up the slave trade.  In the end slavery was a very inefficient economic system.  Capitalism superseded slavery because slavery is not very profitable.  People might think that free labour is profitable but in the long run it fails because if people have no salaries, can they buy anything?  Karl Marx (I hate quoting the guy) pointed out in Capital that capitalism required as a prerequisite a freely mobile labour force.  The British parliament passed the Slavery Trade Act of 1807 to stop the trading of slaves by British merchant ships, and then they passed the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 to completely abolish slavery in the British Empire.

Another interesting thing was slavery in France.  They abolished slavery in 1894, then reinstated slavery in 1804.  They finally abolished slavery in 1848.  They had to do it twice!

Saudi Arabia abolished slavery in 1962, kind of late for one of our favorite alies.

Then some countries never abolished slavery and still have slaves.  In Congo the Pigmy people are kept as slaves in the homes of the wealthy.  The Congolese call it a "time-honoured tradition".  Some countries like Sudan still have a thriving slave trade.  There is also sexual slavery in many countries.  It is estimated that today as many as 29 million people are slaves.

I think we should impose capital punishment on slave traders, and make it a crime against humanity.  But then, we should do the same with illegal weapons traficking too.

For those who don't know, Bill AB 1176 is a bill that was passed unanimously in the State of California Legislative Assembly and Senate.  This bill would
have granted the Port of San Francisco expanded financing to
redevelop a former shipyard into a new neighbourhood known as Pier 70.

This bill was sponsored by Tom Ammiano, a Democrat assemblyman.  Earlier in the year Ammiano had heckled Arnorld Schwarzenegger at an event in San Francisco.  Then on Oct. 12 Schwarzenneger vetoed the bill and sent the letter that Pedro posted below.  When Ammiano's camp complained about the word spelled by the letters that Pedro highlighted in red, Schwarzennegers spokesman said "My goodness!  What a coincidence!" 

Ferris Bueller:

I was trying to get Sen. Thurmond's psychology.  On the one hand he was openly against the Civil Rights Act, and on the other he had a daughter with an African American woman.  It is a deep contradiction in the man because he cared for his daughter (if we believe what his family has said).  Thurmond had the distinction of being the only senator to serve in the Senate at the age of 100.  He saw the entire 20th century unfold.

I see him (and the likes of Sen. Robert Byrd) as a transition in American politics from the racist politics of seggregation to our modern era.  Those men spanned two eras in politics from before to after the civil rights movements.  After this "old guard" in the senate leaves office then we will see some changes in the way laws and government are conducted.  These "old warriors" have a lot of political clout and are very influential.  Something interesting will be who replaces them and what changes in government take place.

GTCharlie:

I found an interesting document on illegal immigration in the US:

The Impact of Unauthorized Immigrants on the Budgets of State and Local Governments

It was prepared by the Congressional Budget Office.

According to the document, there are between 11.5 and 12 million illegal immigrants in the United States.  Of those approximately 6 to 7 million entered legally and then overstayed their visitor or work visas.  90% of illegal immigrants live in six states:  California, Florida, Texas, New York, New Jersey and Illinois.  Recently there is a trend for the illegal immigrant population to spread into other states.  In most states illegal immigrants make up a very small fraction of the population except in California where they make up 8% of the total population.  Approximately 1.8 million illegal immigrants are children under the age of 18.

There are 7.2 million illegal immigrants employed in the agricultural, construction and service industries.  Illegal immigrants have a lower unemployment rate than the rest of the population.  In 2007 illegal immigrant men experienced a 4.6% unemployment rate as opposed to 6.5% of the rest of the population.  Among women unemployment for illegals was 5.2% as opposed to 8.2% for women in the rest of the population.

The IRS estimates that approximately 6 million illegal immigrants file income tax returns each year.  Other researchers estimate that between 50 and 75% of illegal immigrants pay federal, state and local taxes.  The Social Security Admonistration (SSA) estimates that about half of all ilegal immigrants pay social security taxes.

"Researchers from the Urban Institute, the Migration Policy Institute, the Pew Hispanic Center, and the Center for Immigration Studies have assumed a 55 percent compliance rate for income, Social Security, and Medicare taxes."

"the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at the University of California at San Diego conducted a survey of unauthorized immigrants and found that, in 2006, 75 percent had taxes withheld from their paychecks, filed tax
returns, or both."

This was an eye opener for me.  I used to think that most illegals payed little or no taxes.

In 1982 the Supreme Court ruled that it was illegal for any state to esclude children from receiving an education based on the childern's immigration status.  As a result most of the children of illegal immigrants receive an education.  In 2006 there were approximately 53 million schoolchildren in the US.  Approximately 4% of those children are illegal immigrants.  This has increased the budgetary stress on the educational system.

Illegal immigrants are less likely to have health insurance and they are more likely to rely on emergency room and public clinic services.  Since federal laws require some health services to be provided regardless of ability to pay or immigration status, many illegal immigrants receive healthcare services without being able to compensate for them.  (This is no surprise and a big part of the current healthcare debate is due to this.)

"According to a report commissioned by the United States/Mexico Border Counties Coalition, in 2000, county governments that share a border with Mexico incurred almost $190 million in costs for providing uncompensated care to unauthorized immigrants; that figure represented about one-quarter of all uncompensated health costs incurred by those governments in that year."

That means that about 25% of uncompensated healthcare is due to illegal immigrants.  (I thought it would be a higher percentage.  Nevertheless, 25% is a lot.)

Some studies estimate that immigrants cost more than they contribute to the tax system; for example:

"Recent estimates indicate that annual costs for unauthorized immigrants in Colorado were between $217 million and $225 million for education, Medicaid, and corrections.42 By comparison, taxes collected from unauthorized immigrants at both the state and local levels amounted to an estimated $159 million to $194 million annually."

"Another report—prepared by the state comptroller of Texas—estimated that, in 2006, the state collected $424 million more in revenue from unauthorized immigrants than it spent to provide education, health care, and law enforcement activities for that population. However, the state estimated that local governments incurred $1.4 billion in uncompensated costs for health care and law enforcement."

Overall, it seems to me that healthcare and education of illegal immigrants cost a lot, more than is offset by the taxes paid by illegal immigrants.  If only 50% of illegal immigrants are paying taxes, then the solution is to liberalize policy so that those people pay their fair share along with everybody else.  a good question is, would it be politcally possible to do so?  I think that the American public would not accept the legalization of 12 million immigrants so easily.

Ferris Bueller:

This episode in Senator Thurmond's life is interesting to me.  I can imagine that he was conflicted about it through most of his life.

From what I read (the Internet is not always reliable) Storm Thurmond had an illegitimate daughter with Carrie Butler in 1925.  At the time Carrie Butler (an African-American woman) was working as a maid in the Thurmond family home.  Storm Thurmond was 22 and Carrie Butler was 16.  Their daughter, Essie Mae Washington-Williams, was supported by Thurmond through much of her life.  Thurmond paid for her college education and in 1946 she graduated in business from South Carolina State University.  Later she went on to get a master's degree in education and became a teacher in Califormia in the 1960's.

Thurmond fiercely campaigned for seggragation and against the Civil Rights Act of 1957.  When his daughter approached him about it, he apparently brushed off her complaints.  I think he must have been conflicted about it for much of his life.  If one believes Senator Thurmond's family claims, he loved his daughter and cared for and supported her.  She was born when he was very young, before he became a politician.

I would not be surprised if his support of seggregation came as a result of his own sense of shame over having had a relationship with an African American woman, and wanting to maintain some sense of the master-slave mentality.  Before slavery was abolished it was not uncommon for owners of slaves to father children with their African female slaves.  In the culture of slavery such relationships were considered unacceptable, but they happened nevertheless.

Thurmond did moderate his views later in life.  I think that once the Civil Rights Act was passed, he did not need to maintain the same dogged fight for seggregation, or some pretense of it.

After Senator Thurmond died in 2003 his daughter publicly revealed her parentage.  His daughter claimed that she did not reveal it during his lifetime because it was not of any advantage to her or to her father and that she had kept silent out of love and respect for her father.  At first those who supported Thurmond spoke out against her.  Joe Wilson was one of them.  He said that he doubted that she was telling the truth and that she was trying to diminish Senator Thrumond's legacy.  After Thrumond's family acknowledged the truth, Wilson was forced to publicly apologize.

To me, if there is a reason why racism and seggregation are bad, it is a story like this.  The fact that a father and a daughter had to spend their entire lives away from each other, merely exchanging money.  All because of skin color.  It is one of the destructive things that racism does.  It divides human beings and turns them into something they should never be.

I don't know if Joe Wilson is a racist, but when it comes to other people family life, it is better to be silent.  If wilson made a mistake here, it was to pass judgement blindly.  I wonder if his objection would have been the same if Thurmond's daughter had been Caucasian.

GTCharlie:

The point I tried to make in my post about Joe Wilson is that people have labeled him a racist based on circumstantial evidence, not solid evidence.  Guilt by association is not proof.  Like I pointed at the end, he has received money from the health sector, and so have many other politicians.  I think Joe Wilson's outburst comes from a belief that the health sector as it is today is fine and it does not need change.  Receiving money from the health sector is not corruption but rather a reflection of his beliefs.

Joe Wilson's true mistake was refusing to apologize on the floor of the House.  His outburst was uncalled for, specially in front of the whole country and the whole world.  It showed disrespect for the Presidency and for the House of Representatives.  What would have happened if somebody had yelled "You lie!" when George W. Bush was giving one of his big speeches about the war in Iraq?  As a politician Joe Wilson should have acted less with his heart and more with his mind.  I think Barack Obama understands this and it is why he refused to press the issue.  It was other people who turned the issue into accusations of racism.

GTCharlie:

Robert Byrd was a member of the KKK and he opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  Of course, in this day and age he has tried (or pretended) to moderate his views.  He became a senator in 1959.  He was born in 1917.  That makes him 92 years old.  Something is very wrong when a man can remain in office for 50 years and into his ripe old age.

Well, senate reform is another topic, and a difficult one because it would involve a major rewriting of the constitution.  Here in Canada it is not much better.  Senators stay there until there are cobwebs on their dried up old bones!

Artful Dodger:

>  Rep. Joe Wilson’s “You lie” outburst and how one senator called the remark racist

This is a tricky one.  Barack Obama (through the White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs) said that he did not believe that Wilson's comment was the result of racism.  Wilson later apologized rather informally to the president.  Democrats wanted him to apologize in the open floor of the House, but Wilson and the Republican caucus refused.  Since Wilson refused to apologize formally in the House of Representatives, he angered many Democrats and that is where the accusation of racism comes from.

Is Addison Graves Wilson Sr. (aka Joe Wilson) a racist?  In his case we are talking about guilt by association.  Wilson is associated with people who have been accused or were well known for being racist.  Joe Wilson worked as an aide to Senator Strom Thurmond.

Sen. Thurmond was one of the strongest supporters of seggregation and in 1957 he led the biggest fillibuster in US History.  He successfully blocked passing the Civil Rights Act of 1957.  For most of his life Thurmond defended his seggregationist views although later in life he moderated his views on race and even hired an African American aide.  He also fathered an illegitimate son with his African American maid.  It seems that Thurmond started as a hardened seggregationisn in South Carolina, but moderated his position later on.

Joe Wilson is also a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV).  This is an organization of male descendants of soldiers or sailors who served the Confederate States of America during the Civil War.  The SCV's mission is "preserving the history and legacy of Confederate heroes, so future generations can understand the motives that animated the Southern Cause."  Although the SCV has openly opposed the KKK, accusations against its members have surfaced over the years.  Those accusations include racism, revival of seggregation, and white supremacism.

A good question is whether Wilson can be accused of being a racist for having worked for a seggregationist and his being a member of the SCV.  The evidence is circumstantial at best.  Guilt by association is not proof, but it does make people think.  Jimmy Carter and Bill Cosby have called Wilson a racist, while Donna Edwards, an African American congresswoman, disagree.

What worries me about Joe Wilson is his campaign funding.  According to OpenSecrets.org, over his career he has received $251,196 from health professionals, $89,650 from pharmaceutical companies and $68,250 from hospitals and nursing homes.  The Health sector has been his biggest contributor over the years.  There is also a further $117,533 from lobbyist, and who knows who they work for.

http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/industries.php?cycle=Career&cid=N00024809&type=I

His track record is not different from other politicians who are influenced by other sectors of the economy.  However, it could explain some of the motivation behind his outburst during Obama's speech.

Artful Dodger:

>  What's tossed about these days as racism doesn't even come close.

In our modern era we have watered racism down so much that it doesn't even exist any more.  From now on all human beings are equal and everyone has the same rights and priviledges.  We should throw a big party in the streets and celebrate the end of human inequality!     

Bwild:
Made in the USA:  Nova, Nature, Front Line, Independend Lens, Austin City Limits, This Old House, New Yankee Workshop, and many others.
Made in the UK:  Mysteries (Sherlock Holmes, Morse, Inspector Lewis, Midsommer Murders, etc, etc.  Lots of them), commedy (Are You Being Served?, Keeping Up Appearances, The Last of the Summer Wine, Red Dwarf, Monty Python, Jeeves and Wooster, etc, etc.  Lots of them too), theatre (Shakespeare's plays, period pieces from Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, the Bronte Sisters, etc, etc.)
Made in Canada:  The Red Green Show
There is also children's programming, educational programming, art, music, dance, etc.  PBS is 24 hours of the highest quality television you can see anywhere, and not a single ad to be seen.  Without a question PBS is the best anywhere.

Something that makes me curious is how commercial programming runs without ads.  Commercial programming can be good too.  I saw Rome and 24 on DVD.  Rome was great.  It flows perfectly without ads.  24 was so so.  It had this clock coming in to telegraph the ad breaks.  I have never seen CSI without ads.  I imagine that it must flow better without ads.

Snoopy:

>  its outdated in this day and age the BBC should do what the other stations do and allow
>  adverts to make there money

It sounds to me like the BBC operates out of public money and for that reason it is free of commercial advertising.  Canada and the US see a lot of BBC programs through both local stations as well as BBC international broadcasts such as the BBC World Service.  Here in Canada we get some of the best BBC programming and those Canadians who watch BBC shows have a very high opinion of them.  The BBC has a reputation for quality, artistry and entertainment.

In Canada we have the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) which initally was modelled after the BBC.  The CBC allows commercial advertising and viewership has reduced over the years as more and more advertising intruded into the programming.  I think the CBC does not have the capital to compete with private broadcasters, so it relies in a mix of government funding and advertising revenue.  In terms of programming quality the CBC suffers from not enough funding for production.  Low funding means lower prodcution values and for that reason it is difficult for them to attract more viewers.

In the United States there is the Public Broadcasting System (PBS).  It broadcasts very high quality television without commercial advertising.  They operate with a mixture of government funding, donations from private foundations and donations from viewers.  While they struggle to maintain the capital needed to operate, they broadcast television programs produced in the US, the UK, Australia, Canada and other countries around the world.  Of the different public systems, I will say that the American PBS is the best although now Canada has a similar channel called the Knowledge Network, which offers similar programming under a similar model.

All I will say is that if BBC programming came full of adverts, then people would probably lose interest soon.  BBC shows are produced and meant to be seen without adverts.  It is different from commercial broadcasters who write scripts in 7-8 minute segments with 2-4 minutes of adverts in between.  If the BBC were to commercialize itself, then its shows would change to a model similar to that of commercial television.  I think the high quality of programming that the BBC is reputed for would go down the drain.

Bwild: 
  For sure Hussein deserves the Nobel prize, maybe even the presidency.  Unfortunately all he got was a couple of blue ribbons.  Maybe they should have changed his name to something less scary to the voting public. 

Czuch:

>  I dont mind it as a prescribed drug, I am sure it much safer than many other prescribed drugs,
>  and others that are legal too. but I dont want you and me growing it and selling legally to someone
>  with a prescription either.

I think this will always be a problem with recreational drugs.  Alcohol is available to anyone over 18 (or 21, depending on where you live).  The same is true with tobacco.

I think that people should get an alcohol consumer license.  If people drink responsibly, then they have earned the right to enjoy their alcohol.  If somebody is found driving or operating machinery under the influence of alcohol, or causing a domestic disturbance, or falling into addiction (alcoholism), then they should lose their alcohol license temporarily or permanently depending on the case.  We have this with driving licenses and drunk drivers lose their licenses, but not their ability to buy alcohol.  If a person has no alcohol license, then it would be illegal for them to purchase products containing alcohol.  A similar license then could be in place for other substances, like tobacco, marihuana, etc.  Of course there would be great opposition to this from breweries, distilleries, vineyard owners, etc.  Controlling the product they sell is not in their best interest.

Marihuana as a prescription drug would probably be like other prescription drugs that are abused for reasons other than the medically prescribed reason.  A good example is insulin.  If you are a diabetic your life depends on insulin injections and proper control of dosages and timing of the injections.  This is the medically correct way to use insulin.  If you are not diabetic, does it make sense to take insulin?  Of course not, because it is dangerous and it could potentially kill you.  However, there are people who abuse insulin.  Bodybuilders inject themselves with insulin in the hopes of forcing nutrients into their muscle cells so that their muscles can grow bigger.  It is a common practice in bodybuilding and some of the people who abuse insulin this way build big muscles at the expense of serious health problems later in life.  It is not illegal to possess insulin.  I never heard of anyone going to jail for having insulin vials in their possession.

Marihuana as a prescription drug would probably be the same.  People who need to take advantage of its analgesic and atininflammatory effects will use it for medically correct reasons.  Then there will be those who will abuse it as a recreational drug.  The government can try to control the supply of any drug, but when people are determined to use and abuse a drug there is nothing the government can do, whether that drug is legal or not. 

rod03801:

> as far as I know, there isn't a test to tell if you are CURRENTLY under the influence of marijuana

Recently here there were complaints from some members of the public because the police has developed a new form of breathlizer test.  In the previous testing procedure the police could check only for alcohol in the blood as measured when a person blew air from the lungs into the bre3athilizer machine.  The police couldnot test for other drugs because testing for them would require a urine sample and a suspect could refuse to provide a sample.  However, a new breathalizer machine allows for testing for other drugs such as marihuana and cocaine.  Initially privacy advocacy groups complained, but the vast majority of the public is in favour of the new testing system.  People driving under the influence of several drugs can now be charged.

Marihuana is a sedative and analgesic.  It will take away your pain, and it will also impair short term memory and concentration.  I think that if the police could test people involved in traffic accidents for marihuana use then we would find that it does play a role in many accidents out there.  As with all recreational drugs, there are side effects not only to those who directly use them, but also to those people around them.  If marihuana and hashish were to become legal, then I would expect the police to prosecute anyone driving or using machinery under its influence, just as we do with alcohol.

Jim Dandy:

The following chart was published in Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rational_scale_to_assess_the_harm_of_drugs_(mean_physical_harm_and_mean_dependence).svg

Apparently it was published in The Lancet, a medical journal published in the UK. The article can be found here, if you have a subscription to the journal.

http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0140-6736(07)60464-4

The actual abstract can be read here:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17382831

It is very interesting. They used a "nine-category matrix of harm, with an expert delphic procedure, to assess the harms of a range of illicit drugs in an evidence-based fashion". They generated a chart to correlate dependence and physical harm. Two groups of experts independently assessed the data. (Read the abstract)

In that chart cannabis is causes less dependence and less harm than tobacco or alcohol. Tobacco causes almost as much dependence as cocaine, but it is less harmful than cocaine. The worst drug is heroin. I think that the medical profession is working towards a better understanding of what drugs effects are and how that can be applied in a regulatory system.

I just got an interesting spam in my e-mail. It was from Amazon. An ad for a book called "The Great War and Modern Memory". It is a book about WWI. There are other books in the spam too, about WWII and the American Civil War. It is interesting because I have never bought books from Amazon. Could it be that they caught my IP address when I was searching Yahoo, Google or Wikipedia for information on the posts I put here earlier? I am hoping it is just a coincidence!

Czuch:

> I dont personally believe that pot is a "soft" drug

I think by "soft" people would mean a drug that does not cause aggresive or euphoric behaviour, hallucinations or total sedation. Marihuana is a sedative and because of that people who smoke it "mellow out". It has side effects, like all drugs. Anybody who thinks it is healthy to smoke marihuana is stupid. There is nothing healthy about any drug.

I think the inhaler was developed to keep THC as a controlled substance. An inhaler would deliver 9-delta-tetrahydrocannabinol (9-d-THC) which is one of over 400 compounds found in marihuana. Pharmaceutical companies can make a lot of money out this.

As a chemist, I can say that I have mixed feelings about the current state of the law. On the one side, it breaks my heart to see people go to jail for drug offenses. On the other side I know how harmful these things are and whether strict control or deregulation is better depends on who is compiling statistics. Statistics on deregulation and crime incidence are not always reliable.

I do find interesting that the powerful tobacco and alcohol lobbies have kept tobacco and alcohol as legal drugs. The US had prohibition and it led to alcohol smuggling and organized crime in the 1920s. Canada tried to decrease tobacco consumption by steeply raising the "sin" tax on tobacco. It led to cigarrette smugling from the US and a rise in the tobacco black market in the 1990s. If tobacco and alcohol are a measure of what happens when drugs are legal, then high "sin" taxes and public education on drug consumption might seem the way to go with some of the less harmful drugs.

Some drugs are so mild that people don't even see them as drugs. For example, caffeine. It would be funny if Starbucks went out of business because caffeine suddenly became illegal!

Czuch:

> Yes, so why here, like California, do we let private people grow the stuff and sell it for prescription???

Several pharmaceutical manufacturers are working on tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) inhalers similar to the inhalers used to treat asthma. There are already THC tablets on the market. I think the unwillingness to decriminalize marihuana comes from its potential economic benefit to pharmaceutical companies. You can make a lot more money selling inhalers and tablets than you can make letting people grow a plant in their garden.

GTCharlie:

> Stalin was also an evil man

Of course. The reason why the Allies were reluctant to let the USSR become an ally is because Stalin was a cruel dictator. Unfortunately Stalin had risen to power in the aftermath of Lenin's death. The all-out war declared by the Whites radicalized the communist party and gave Stalin the opening he needed to enforce his dictatorial brand of communism and the command economy system. If Lenin had not died things would have been different because Lenin had a more balanced view. Western Europe was not ready to make any openings to communists. It took the Great Depression, WW II and the Cold War for both communists and capitalist to abandon some of their more radical policies towards one another.

We also have to remember that prior to WW II values were different. Welfare Capitalism did not exist. The idea that western culture was meant to uphold freedom and democracy as its main tenets was born out of the WW II and the Cold War. Prior to WW II western culture lived for imperialism. Pursuing great empires was the main driving force behind western economies. Imperialism as evil is a concept that was born out of WW II and the great destruction caused by the empires trying to gain power over each other.

Today we see imperialism as bad and democracy as good, but it is hard to believe that only 70 years ago western culture would rather send millions to their deaths than uphold those values.

GTCharlie:

> It seems you have a different view of Western intentions

I do, because the west had shown its hatred of the Soviet Union from early on.

The "Whites", the counterrevolutionary movement that tried to restore the Russian monarchy, were made up not only of Russians but also of soldiers from Japan, Britain, Canada, France, Italy, United States, Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Australia, Greece, Turkey, China, Romania, Rstonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Finland and Czechoslovakia. The Russian Civil War was fought from 1917 to 1923 and all those countries put aside their differences and sent troops to try to drive the communists out of Russia. There were 2,400,000 Russians, 155,000 Allies and hundreds of thousands from the Central Powers fighting on the side of the Whites. The war left about 15 million people dead, of those 13 million were civiliands. The desire to destroy communism was manifest from early on and the superpowers failed to destroy the Soviet Union because they compted among themselves for wealth and power.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Civil_War

On Nov. 26, 1936 Germany and Japan signed the Anti-Comintern Pact, a pact designed to destroy international communism and the USSR. Italy joined the pact 1 year later. The "Axis" (a name adopted in 1941) was born out of anticommunist hatred.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Comintern_Pact

On Sep. 30, 1938 Germany, the UK, France and Italy signed the Munich Agreement (notice that the US was no involved at this point). This agreement gave Germany control of the Sudentenland, an area in Czechoslovakia with a large proportion of Ethnic Germans. On Oct 10, 1938 Germany occupied the Sudetenland.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munich_Agreement

At this point I will say that the Allies (UK and France) were hoping that Hitler would abandon his claims over Alsace-Lorraine in France and concentrate on moving east on a path towards the Soviet Union. This was the appeasement that pleased the allies. Since Hitler was a sworn enemy of communism, the logical thinking was that Hitler would much rather go to war with the USSR than with the Allies.

The Allies underestimated Hitler and Stalin, and the unthinkable occurred. Germany and the USSR signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact on Aug. 24, 1939. In this pact Germany and the USSR aggreed to divide Eastern and Central Europe and to remain neutral in case of a third party decalring war on either country. In Sep. 1939 Germany and the USSR invaded Poland and divided the land between the two.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov-Ribbentrop_Pact

WW II started on Sep. 1, 1939 when Germany invaded Poland and the UK and France declared war against Germany. The hopes that Hitler and Stalin would declare war on each other were dashed. The Alies undestimated Hitler and overestimated his hatred of the USSR.

Why would Stalin and Hitler sign this treaty? Everyone knew that those two hated each other and Germany had openly signed the Anti-Commintern Pact. They needed to build up their armies and secure strategic territory before going to war. Hitler wanted Norway and its iron ore trade, and Romania and its oilfields. Stalin wanted Finland, Bessarabia and the Baltic States. They knew that war was unavoidable, but they played for time.

After Hitler defeated France and invaded Norway, he turned on the UK. Hitler was overconfident and thought that the Luftwaffe would effectively defeat the RAF, but the UK had a secret weapon called the RADAR. Radar made the Luftwaffe ineffective and Hitler decided to abandon the plan to invade the UK and decided to invade the USSR instead. It was then that Winston Churchill asked Stalin to become allies, and this did not happen until June of 1941. It took the defeat of France, Belgium and the Netherlands to make the Allies abandon its hatred of communism and decide to coordinate their efforts with the USSR.

After the war ended, the most of same powers that had once been members of the White Movement became NATO in 1949, with Germany joining in 1955. It took the defeat of Germany and the loss of Eastern and Central Europe to make former competing empires put aside their differences and work together in a unified anticommunist front. My view of western objectives during WWII might not be entirely correct, but at least it does explain why Hitler was appeased rather than crushed.

Morse:

Earlier this month we discussed the subject of "appeasement".  You can do a search of the board using the small form above the messages.  In that topic we discussed why appeasement happened and the different interpretations of it.

I think that WW II was unavoidable both in Europe and in Asia.  WW I was a resolution of conflicts that had started going back to the 19th century (and perhaps earlier than that).  Germans wanted to have an empire of their own much like France and England had.  The problem was tht the world had already been "divided" among the superpowers.  For Germany this meant that the only part of the world that they could potentially conquer was Eastern Europe.

In WW I Germany fought against Russia and nearly defeated it until the Czar fell from power and the new Communist government (under Lenin) surrendered and declared peace with Germany.  At the time Germany took control of several areas under the Czar's control.  For example, the Ukraine, Finland, etc.  However, Germany was no able to effectively control those lands and eventually lost them as the German economy sank into a deep recession in the 1920s.

When Hitler came to power he was determined to destroy what he called the "jew bolsheviks".  Hitler went on to incite antisemitism, hatred of the Roma (what we call Gypsies) and hatred of Slavs.  At the same time Stalin despised Hitler's fascism and how Hitler moved in to use the state to solidify the power of German capilatist monopolies.  The conflict between Stalin and Hitler was unavoidable.  They both knew it and signed their non-aggression pact to buy time before going to war.

Western superpowers knew this, and they "appeased" Hitler and gave him control of Poland and Czechoslovakia.  Their hope being that Hitler would attack the Soviet Union and in that way find the "living space" that the Third Reich wanted.  They probably thought that if Hitler was busy destroying the Soviet Union, he would stay away from France and England.  The superpowers hated the Soviet Union too, so appeasement was favorable to them.  This gave Hitler the impetus he needed to attack the Soviet Union and at the same time build his army to attack France and England.

On the Eastern front Japan had invaded China, Korea, Vietnam and other parts of Asia.  The Communist parties in those countries were determined to drive out the Japanese and these communist parties had the support of the Soviet Union.  The Japanese also hated the Soviet Union and were determined to build their empire by invading the Soviet Union from the East.  They also saw the opening of the hostilities between Germany and the Soviet Union as an opportunity to "divide and conquer" the Soviet Union by attacking in two fronts.  The Communist parties in occupied Asian countries declared war on Japan too and that meant that the conflict spread itself over all of eastern Asia.

Western superpowers were willing to tolerate attacks on the Soviet Union because they hated communists.  However, they were not willing to tolerate attacks against themselves.  When Hitler decided to invade France and Japan bombed Pearl Harbour, the conflict became truly a world war, and it was unavoidable because both Germany and Japan were determined to build their empires.

(V):
I remember some 12 years ago China was critized on human rights ground because they executed 67 drug dealers.  The attitude of the Chinese government was one of eradication through the highest applicable legal penalty.  It worked to some extent although China still has problems with drugs, like most other countries around the world.  Their tough approach would probably be acceptable to some people who see no other way out other than extermination.

In many countries drug-related offenses cause a huge drain in the economy.  In the US about 80% of the people in the corrections system were incarcerated due to drug-related offenses.  That means that about 4 million people are there due to drugs and the cost of incacerating them is huge.  It hasn't worked because drugs are still a big problem in the streets.  Here in Canada the situation is the same and drugs are everywhere.

The Netherlands legalized some of the "softer" drugs like marihuana and hashish.  It seems to have worked for them, but politically their approach would not be acceptable to other countries.

I think that it is a losing battle.  The only way it will end is when poverty is eliminated both at the source of the drugs where poor farmers plant drug crops to survive, and at the destination where demand is fuelled by poverty.  This has to be accompanied with legalization of some drugs, and stronger penalties for trafficking others.  Marihuana, hashish, and LSD are not as destructive as cocaine and the amphetamines.  I think that penalties for possession have to change depending on the drug.  We see some of this here in Canada where possession of small amounts of marihuana has become tolerated by the law.  It might not solve the marihuana problem, but it has certainly kept a lot of people out of jail and out of descending into a life of crime.

(V):

The use of performance enhancing substances in the military goes back a long time through history.

The Greeks talked of theis soldiers and athletes using small amounts of strychnine mixed with egg whites as a way to increase their strength.  Strychnine acts as a stimulant and increases the strength of muscular contractions.  That practice continued until the early 20th century when amphetamines were discovered by German chemists.

During WW II all sides of the war used amphetamines.  Reputedly British troops consumed 72 millions tablets during the war.  Both the RAF and the US Air Force gave amphetamines to their pilots during long missions.  German troops used amphetamines and testosterone to increase strength and aggression.  Amphetamine use has been blamed for many "friendly fire incidents" into our modern era.

Cocaine abuse has been a terrible thing too.  Cocaines has been very common in Africa among those people using child soldiers.  Rebels in Sierra Leone and Angola would give cocaine to children, then make those children use axes to chop off people's arms and legs.  Cocaine abuse has also been broadly implicated in the wars in Congo and the genocide in Rwanda.

Today special forces around the world use amphetamines, cocaine, and other stimulants to increase strength and alertness.  They also use steroids, growth hormone and IGF-1 to increase strength, and EPO to increase endurance.  This has led to some horrific things happening.  There was a case of a Russian soldier who had his legs and genitals amputated during a hazing ritual and drug abuse among the soldiers was  major cause of the tragedy.

I am a chemist and I despise the drug abuse.  I think our governments turn a blind eye to many forms of drug abuse because it is politically convenient and because government officials themselves are making money out of drug trafficking.

gogul

>  To get people to work, to make them indeed "function", all the families comunities etc you need to bust the wall street
>  our standards of agriculture are getting better
>This industrialisation not only went a little too far, it's waaay out of hand.

You make very good points in your last two posts.  Poverty and drugs go together, and so do money and drugs.  In reality the drug business is being fuelled by several factors.

On one side we have big demand fro drugs from the wealthier industrialized nations.  This demands comes from all segments of society from the rich to the poor.  Drugs among the poor are the worst problem because drugs make poverty even worse.  Poor people use drugs to escape from a bad life, and that life gets worse as a result.  It is a problem that feeds on iself.

The other side of the problem is the supply side.  Most of the growing of plants for drugs is done by some of the poorest farmers and peasants in the world.  These people grow coca, poppies and other crops because drug crops make more money than food crops.  A farmer growing corn will starve to death, but a farmer growing coca can at least make just enough to feed his children.

What does all this have to do with Wall Street (or other financial centres in the world)?  Agricultural conglomerates (like Monsanto, DuPont, etc.) make billions of dollars by controlling the supply of seed, fertilizers and pesticides.  These companies make money by overpricing essential supplies that farmers need.  In wealthier industrialized nations farmers might be able to get by, but in developing nations farmers can barely break even between the cost of production and the income they get from cash crops.  At the same time big grain producers in the US, Canada and Europe dump massive amounts of grain at lower prices and that means that small farmers in developing nations can't compete.  So poor farmers get a double pronged attack on their livelihoods.  Expensive supplies and external competition means that their cash crops are worthless, so they turn to growing drug crops out of desperation.

The end result has been that at no time in history have there been so many human beings suffering from hunger.  In 2006 there were 850 million people who did not have enough food to eat.  With the massive rise in oil in 2007 and 2008 the cost of grain increased between 80% and 300% in developing nations.  As a result now nearly 2 billion human beings do not have enough to eat.  That is about 30% of the population of our planet.  Ironically, advances in agricultural technology also mean that never in history has humanity produced so much food.  We have enough food to feed everyone, but we insist in pursuing agriculture for profit and that is leaving 30% of our planet without enough to eat.

The same can be said for industrialization.  We live in the most productive time in history.  Never in history has humanity produced so many consumer goods, yet 1/3 of humanity lives in poverty and misery.  The reason is simple.  Poverty means cheap labour, and cheap labour means mass production at a low cost.  Who makes the profit?  Wall Street (and other) billionaires.

Bernice:

>  vouchers for FOOD

Here in Canada the government tried vouchers for food, but drug addicts desperate for cash were selling them cheaply.  The government has tried a system that seems to work better.  They use a pre-loaded debit card (similar to a credit card).  They can use to buy things, but they can never extract cash from it, and the card is non-transferable.  That has stopped some of the cheating and wasting of state funds.  It is not perfect, but it seems the best solution so far.

Czuch:

>  if you are taking from the state, then the state has the right to test you for drug use and other "intrusions"

I entirely agree with you on this.  People who use drugs and receive social assistance often leave their kids starving on account of their addiction.  I think that drug testing should be mandatory in cases where a social worker suspects that somebody is using social assistance money to buy alcohol, cigarrettes or drugs.  I think that there should also be a mandatory ban of social assistance recepients from casinos and other forms of gambling.  I think casinos should be required by law to turn away people receiving social assistance.  In practice it might be difficult to implement such a law, but the problem is that people addicted to gambling will go and bet away their kids' welfare.

The issue of addiction and social assistance is complex.  I think that if the state imposes mandatory testing, then there should also be readily available addiction recovery programs.  If somebody who wants social assistance tests positive for drugs or gambling, then a mandatory drug or gambling recovery program should be a condition for recieving social assistance as well as strict monitoring of the person's expenses.

The whole objective of social assistance programs is to ensure that the children of low income families receive all the basic needs so as to avoid unnnecessary hardship on low income children.  If that is the case, then drug testing and mandatory recovery programs should be part of the social programs aimed at helping low income families.  People might argue that it is "intrusive" or "inconstitutional", but the welfare of children should take precendence.

Some of the arguments against these programs are also done on a "cost" basis.  People will argue that it is expensive to treat addicts.  However, it would seem to me that in the long run it would cost less to provide treatment rather than see all that tax money wasted away on drugs, plus the economic cost of dysfunctional families unable to work or contribute to society.

Snoopy:

In reponse to this:

>  why should any decent hard working person have to pay for someone else child to
>  have the same has theyve had to work hard for.

We can make the same argument for a lot of things.  Why pay for somebody else's healthcare?  Why should my money pay for somebody else's education?  Why should my tax dollars be used to buy food for the poor?  They can get jobs and pay for everything themselves.

The thinking probably is that in our modern world a child without a computer is at a disadvantage because computers are supposed to be educational tools.  The logic behind this might be to give low income families an opportunity to get something that they could not afford otherwise.  In that way their children would not be at a disadvantage at school.

Let's say that instead of computers they had said:  "We will give people vouchers to buy books if they find jobs".  Would the reaction be the same?  Probably those who object to it would not object as much, and those who would receive the voucher would not have been so happy about it.

We know that computers are more than educational tools.  They are also toys, and weapons.  They can be abused, like everything else.

Will there be abuse under a program like this?  For sure, in the same way that there is abuse in anything to do with giving people money.

There are people here who get a divorce so a woman can claim income support for a single parent.  Then later the government finds out that the ex-husband has become the woman's "roomate"!

Money always brings out the worst in people.

gogul

Here is a quote about Guantanamo which I found interesting:

"After the Cuban Revolution of 1959, which brought Fidel Castro to power, then-President Dwight Eisenhower insisted the status of the base remained unchanged, despite Cuban objections.

In 1934 the Avery Porko treaty reaffirming the lease granted Cuba and its trading partners free access through the bay; modified the lease payment from $2,000 in U.S. gold coins per year, to the 1934 equivalent value of $4,085 in U.S. dollars; and made the lease permanent unless both governments agreed to break it, or the U.S. abandoned the base property.  Since the Cuban Revolution, the government under Fidel Castro has cashed only one of the rent checks from the U.S. government, and only because of "confusion" in 1959 in the heady early days of the leftist revolution, according to Castro. The remaining uncashed checks made out to "Treasurer General of the Republic" (a title that ceased to exist after the revolution) are kept in Castro's office stuffed into a desk drawer.  The United States argues that the cashing of the single check signifies Havana's ratification of the lease — and that ratification by the new government renders moot any questions about violations of sovereignty and illegal military occupation.  It is countered, however, that the 1903 and 1934 lease agreements were imposed on Cuba under duress and are unequal treaties, no longer compatible with modern international law, and voidable ex nunc pursuant to articles 60, 62, and 64 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties.  However, Article 4 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties prohibits retroactive application of said Convention to already existing treaties, such as the ones concluded between the US and Cuba in 1903 and 1934."

Imagine that, the US occupies Guantanamo Bay for $4,085 per year, under a treaty signed under duress over 100 years ago.  The Us has been lucky that Cuba has few allies in the security council at the UN.  Well, at some point the US will have to give up that land.

The real problem today is the relocation of the prisoners.  They cannot be brought to American soil because if they did that the prisoners would be entitled to due process under the law.  In order to close the Gitmo detainment camp the Obama administration has to find a place to put those prisoners.  Many countries have asked the prisoners to be repatriated, but the American government refuses to that because in other countries those prisoners would be given due process under the law and the press would have access to them.  Those prisoners could disclose conditions at the camp.

People don't directly realize this but the Obama administration declassified many of the documents describing torture and abuse of prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan and Gitmo.  I think the rationale is that if the US government comes clean now then nobody will be surprised when those prisoners are released and talk about their experiences.

Well, it is likely that the Guatanamo detention camp will close next year, if not by the end of this year.  The military base itself will never close because it is strategically too importat.  Cubans will have to continue living next to an American military base that the US got from the first Cuban president, a president that Theordore Roosevelt imposed on the Island.

Artful Dodger:

>  One Obama offical said that the award is an acknowledgement of Obama's
likely accomplishments.
>  In other words, Obama has done nothing to
deserve this award, but it's likely he will deserve it in the future.

I think we have to remember that President Obama did not ask for the award and he himself said that he had done nothing to deserve it.  If we are going to put blame, we should do it on the people who nominated him, and the committee that awarded it.  Those people did a diservice to the president and put him in a position in which people blame him for doing nothing.  Those that support the president are trying to excuse or justify the prize but in reality all that the Nobel committee did is make things harder for the president.  Now everyone expects him to do something to deserve the prize, and considering what he is facing it is not likely that things will go on his favor.  He faces opposition both at home and abroad.  It is unlikely that the Republican opposition will accept major reductions in the nuclear arsenal.  Israel will continue building settlements and oppressing Palestinians.  Hamaz and Hezbollah will continue to carry out attacks against Israel.  Afghanistan will continue being a nightmare zone run by extremists.  Iraq will continue to be torn by sectarian violence and hatred of the US.  Iran and North Korea are not going to give up their nuclear ambitions.  It will go on and on because those bent on doing harm enjoy war and killing.  The president is only one man against an unreasonable world.  He should never have had to inherit Iraq, yet he did.  It is why Republicans were quite willing to lose the election, because they knew that whoever was elected would have to deal with all the crap.  Now the Nobel committee wants Obama to fix it all and gives him the prize, not hoping that he will suceed, but hoping to put more pressure on him.

GTCharlie:

>  I  see no mention of  those evil Americans actually helping the Soviets

I think it was not a matter of good or evil in the the sense of the US doing wrong on purpose.  The American govenment at the time was not sure of how to commit to the war.  It took the attack on Pearl Harbor to move the American government to stop turning a blind eye to those who traded with the enemy.  Those who helped Hitler (in the US, England and France) acted because they thought that Hitler was doing a good thing in destroying the Soviet Union.  By the winter of 1941 Hitler's eastern front was falling apart and as it became obvious that he would fail then those that supported him started withdrawing their support and losing their power base.  Notice that the Lend-Lease agreement came into effect in 1941, and the Trading with the Enemy Act in 1942.  1941 was the key year.  It crystallized full American commitment to the Alies.

American help was essential in helping the Soviet Union to stop Hitler.  The Soviets lost between 19 and 23 million citizens, and nearly 2/3 of their industrial production.  Perhaps Hitler would have failed sooner and killed a lot less people without the help of those that supported his war machine, particularly Sweden.  Sweden, a country that declared itself neutral, sustained that war machine by providing it with the steel to manufacture tanks, battleships and other war machinery.

Hitler and Stalin signed a non-aggression pact, and divided Poland and Czechoslovakia.  They did it to stall for time because neither one of them was ready for war.  However, they both knew that war was unavoidable.  Of course, those that traded with them and sold them weapons and materials made a lot of money.  War is like that.  Those that supply the armies make the money.  The real victims were the Czech, Slovak and Polish civilians who died as Hitler and Stalin sent their armies to divide those countries and make "buffer zones" out of them.

Artful Dodger:

> Hitler could have been stopped early if the governments weren't so wimpy about war.

There are three interpretations of the appeasement policy that Neville Chamberlain followed prior to the war.  For those who don't know much about it, here is a link.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeasement

One interpretation is like yours.  Neville Chamberlain was weak and he should have declared war immediately.

The second interpretation is that Neville Chamberlain thought that Hitler was not big a threat and appeasing him would simply make him give up his imperialistic ambitions because Poland and Czechoslovakia were more than enough land for the Third Reich to expand.

The third interpretation is more realistic.  England had to make war preparations prior to engaging Hitler's Third Reich.  Since England, France and the US were not ready for war, they were stalling for time and giving Hitler Czechoslovakia and Poland meant that they could prepare prior to entering a full scale war.

All of these three interpretations have validity to some extent.

There is a fourth interpretation, and the one I believe.  Hitler was given control of Poland and Czechoslovakia because Hitler was promising to do the one thing that all the western superpowers wanted.  England and France traded economically with Germany until the start of the war, and the US traded with Hitler until 1942 when the Trading with the Enemy Act was enforced.  Until then, America's most powerful families were doing business with Germany and the American government never talks about this.  What is it that Hitler was going to do?  What was Hitler going to accomplish?  Hitler was promising to destroy the Soviet Union and all western superpowers wanted that.  It is why Americans traded with Hitler until 1942.  It is why New York was the main banking conduit for the Nazis and why Switzerland and Sweden were some of the main industrial suppliers of the Third Reich.  Specially Sweden, which provided about 50% of Germany's steel during the war.  They appeased Hitler because they hated communists more than they hated Nazis.  It was a simple as that.

This interpretation is never talked about in history books because it would imply that the Allies actually wanted Hitler to succeed.  In this interpretation western superpowers are not heroic defenders of freedom, but accomplices in war crimes that left as many as 23 million soviets dead.  Nobody likes this interpretation, so nobody talks about it.

Artful Dodger

I think all of the comments you posted were good, except for Mr. Barret's.

"I'm not sure what the international community loved best; his waffling
on Afghanistan,"

He has called for a troop buildup in Afghanistan.  I don't think Obama waffled there (to waffle means to be evasive).  He has been clear in his objective of escalating the offensive against the Taliban.  I suppose it is not as peaceful as Mr. Nobel would like!

"pulling defense missiles out of Eastern Europe,"

He has pulled back from the strategic missile defense system.  Meaning that the missile shield in Eastern Europe is on hold.  This is a peaceful thing, because if he hadn't done that the Russians had already made it clear that they would start building up their nuclear arsenal again and that they would pull out of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.  The Bush administration was playing an extremely dangerous game in pursuing that missile shield system.  It threatened a new nuclear arms race.  Obama had no choice there.  The way the American economy is now, the US couldn't handle an arms race of the kind we saw during the Cold War.  I think it was this and that UN speech about nuclear disarmament that gave Obama the prize.

"turning
his back on freedom fighters in Honduras,"

The man who wrote this is rather ignorant about Latin America.  A Fascist dictator takes power by coup d'etat and he calls the man and his henchmen freedom fighters?  I would say what really did it for me is the Honduras comment.  Mr.
Barrett nees to study a little about fascism in Latin America and
understand why every country in Latin America condemned the fascist
Micheletti taking over power by force.

"coddling Castro"

When?  If promoting a thaw in a freeze of relations going back 50 years is coddling, then what was the point of warming up to China so we could buy cheap good from them?  It sounds hypocritical to me that it is OK to buy cheap goods from communist China, while at the same time we hate Cuba.  Either we hate communists or not.  Hypocritical convenience seems alive everywhere.

"siding with
Palestinians against Israel"

When?

"or almost getting tough on Iran"

Obama has been anything but tough on Iran!  For that matter Bush himself was not that tough on Iran.

Well, Obama getting the Nobel Peace Prize is like a runner at the Olympic games getting the gold medal before he ran the race.  They would give the guy the medal because everyone is expecting him to succeed.

I will say that the most decent recepient of the Nobel Prize was Jean Paul Sartre.  When he was offered the prize he refused it, because he knew fully well that it was all about bourgeois politics.  During the Cold War half of the Nobel prizes were awarded on purely political grounds.  The ones in economics are a joke.  All that they ever praised was free market economics and how to get rich without any regard for the poor.  Economics as a barren science that has no concern with the human consequences of the acquisition of wealth.  Black, Scholes and Friedman come to mind.

The prize going to Obama feels like nothing more than helping the man build his reputation.  From what I have seen, he gave this speech at the UN in which he talked about a nuclear-free world when he knew fully well that the US will NEVER give up its monopoly of military might.  His speech felt more like a political move to put pressure on Iran and North Korea.  He called for multi-party talks between Israel and Palestine, but is unwilling to take an impartial approach and stop the western slant in Israel's favour.  Maybe I am out of touch with the news, but is there anything that really promotes world peace other than trying to fix the diplomatic mess that the Bush administration left behind?  If fixing the previous administration's diplomatic mess qualifies, then he deserves it.

According to the Nobel committee "Obama has as President created a new climate in international politics"

Anybody other than the Bush Necons could achieve that.  A monkey in a suit could do more for world peace than Bush and his clique ever did, that is for sure!

Well, now they have raised the bar on Obama and the expectations will be great.  Whether he can deliver is up to Congress in the end because there is nothing much he can do without the aproval of America's  elected representatives, and as we saw with healthcare, the Republicans will try their best to derail his efforts.

All I can say is that if Henry Kissinger deserved the Nobel Peace Prize, then Obama for sure deserves it too.  At some point Ronald Reagan was nominated.  I am sure he deserved one too.  After all, the Nobel Prizes are as much about politics and reputation as they are about achievement.

The UN is hosting a video contest.

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=CB987F15ABB65F79

It is being sponsored by George Clooney since he became a United Nations Ambassador for Peace in January of 2008.  For those interested here is the description of the contest.

Video Contest: If you had the opportunity to speak to the world leaders, what would you say?

Well,
here is your chance. Use your voice as a global citizen and tell these
leaders in a short video what you think needs to be done to make this
world a better and safer place. Be a Citizen Ambassador to the UN.

Guidelines:
1. Create your own video, no more than 3 minute duration, focusing on the subject of the contest.
2. Add English subtitles to videos in other languages.
3. Upload the video to your YouTube account.
4. Add it as a REPLY VIDEO to the video you are watching right now.
5. Deadline for submissions: 10 October 2009

Selection process:
1. The best 5 video entries will be selected by a committee based on compelling content, originality and creativity.
2.
The finalists will be designated Citizen Ambassadors, and will be
invited to United Nations Headquarters in New York on the occasion of
the 64th UN Day.
3. They will take a special guided tour of UN
Headquarters, have their photo taken with Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon
and receive VIP seating at the UN Day Concert, to be held on Friday 23
October 2009.

So go on, speak to the world. This is your chance to be a Citizen Ambassador to the UN.

(V):

I think price fixing is a lot more common than the government or the business sector is willing to admit. It is not just energy but telephone, cable and cellular services. The prices are so similar that competition is basicly dead. The government turns a blind eye because it is politically and economically convenient, and private companies have greased enough hands to know that their cartels and monopolies are safe.

In some cases the government actually interferes with competition to save companies unable to compete. Here in North America car manufacturers get huge breaks from the government. Both the Canadian and American governments have imposed big tariffs against foreign auto makers to make sure that the local makers can compete. It is why European, Japanese and Korean cars are more expensive than American models. The government actually forms part of the price fixing and protectionistic schemes. In spite of that North American car makers have failed miserably and the governments here have given them money to keep them afloat.

Chinese, Indian and French car makers can't even sell their cars here. The government prohibits sale of those cars on "safety" concerns but the truth is that a $5000 car would spell the end of North American car makers. Canada makes an electrical car called the ZENN (Zero Emmisions No Noise, http://www.zenncars.com/). This is a fully electrical car. The Canadian government went so far as to protect the oil industry and the car makers by not allowing the sale of that vehicle in Canada. It has taken years of complaints from the public for the government here to allow the car to be sold.

If true competition existed, many companies would go under. In modern captalism competition is acceptable only when it is convenient tot he big monopolies and the elite that runs the capitalist system.

(V):

Two days ago I saw Stephen Colbert in the Colbert Report. He trashed Washington politicians badly. He implied that politicians and the healthcare lobby are together "in the closet". He said that they should have some "pride" and "come out of the closed". It was hilarious, and he really got to the point.

(V):

> I do expect a total 'no trade' will just force Mugabe into black market selling and buying

It is just as Saddam Hussein. Sanctions brough great suffering to the people of Iraq. It is estimated that about 1 million people died because Iraq could not buy adequate food or medicine for its people. The Oil for Food Program was corrupt and instead of helping it was just reinforcing Saddam's power. Black marketeers made a killing in Iraq, just as they do in Africa now. Sanctions are a political and economic failure. Mugabe will stay there as long as the people he rules refuse to depose him. Using force to depose him would just turn that country into another Iraq, and nobody wants that.

(V):

> As for the master and slave classes, Nietzsche's arguments are a bit flawed
> and does not fully explain Judaic/Christain/Muslim concepts.

That is true. Nietzche wasnot able to explain everything fully, but I am not sure if that was his intent. I think that he merely tried to explain some general trends in western ethics and morality. He never saw the 20th century and how western society evolved. However, I think he makes valid points on how it is that people can do terrible things in the name of higher principles. He saw that contradiction in western society.

> you underestimate that people living in wealth don't share the same degree of
> compassion

This is true to a great extent, but we cannot so easily make a broad generalization of this nature. I am not a student of philosophy, but the German philosopher Friederich Nietzsche came very close to unravelling the nature of western principles of morality. What our western society sees and good and evil.

among the many things that he wrote on the subject the main work would be "On the Genealogy of Morals".

Synopsis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Genealogy_of_Morality
Full text: http://records.viu.ca/~johnstoi/Nietzsche/genealogytofc.htm

In this work Nietzche argued that western principles of good and bad come down from a Greek view of good and evil. He wrote that our concept of good is born out of a contradiction.

On the one hand, we have good as seen by the "master" class: good is wealth, health, nobility, strength and power (like the ancient Greek heroes); while bad is poverty, weakness, disease and the pathetic (what the Greeks saw as the afflictions and curses of humanity).

On the other hand, we have good as seen by the "slave" class: good is charity, piety, restraint, meekness, and subservience (as represented in the values of Judeo-Christian religions); while bad is cruelty, selfishness, greed, indulgency, and aggression (those defects that would curse a human being into Hell). This "slave" morality arose in response to the "master" morality and has become central to Judeo-Christian morality.

In "Beyond Good and Evil" Nietzche further argued that the powerful put themselves beyond this concepts of good and evil by using their wealth and power in their own favor.

Synopsis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_Good_and_Evil
Full Text: http://www.allphilosophers.com/nietzsche/nindex.html

It explains why our world is so full of contradictions. Consider John D. Rcokefeller, the man who became (and still is) the richest man in history. On the one hand he went to build the biggest monopoly in history and threw the police to workers that went on strike in his companies. On the other hand he gave $1 billion to charity. There is a clear contradiction. Bad to his workers, but charitable to the poor. His pursuit of wealth gave him a "master" morality, while at the same time he could not abandon those "Christian" principles of "slave" morality.

We see this with other very wealth multimillionaires. That clear contradiction of principles. We also see it in our wars. Good Christians (or Moslems, Jews, Hindus, etc.) will go to war, kill thousands, and then wash their hands of responsibility on the name of higher principles of "good". They sleep soundly knowing that they will go to Heaven because "good" is on their side.

(V):

Some people don't know this, but it is possible to bet money that a certain political even will happen. In this "futures markets" people can bet on whether a certain event will occurr and they get paid according to whether their prediction was right or not.

https://www.intrade.com/

Initially these people wanted to allow betting on terrorist attack, assasinations and other other catastrophic events.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Policy_Analysis_Market

If the people at Darpa had had their way, today people could bet on assassinations or presidents around the world. The congressmen who came out against this aberration did the right thing. Can you imagine people betting money on whether some prominent individual would be killed?

Bwild:

> Photon torpedoes

plus Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock and the Orion slave dancing girl

Last Thursday the UN Security Council adopted a resolution aiming to create a nuclear-free world. President Obama announced it at the UN Summit in New York.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kL98h6zebY&feature=fvw

This news went mostly unnoticed, even though they concern all of us, regardless of where we live or what political thinking we follow.

It seems to me like an extremely difficult thing to achieve. There would have to be something like the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in place, and it would require signing and ratification by all member states of the UN.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprehensive_Nuclear-Test-Ban_Treaty

http://www.ctbto.org/

At the present time Iran has signed the treaty but not ratified it. North Korea, Pakistan and India have not signed it. The Us and Israel have signed it, but not ratified it. China dn Russia have signed it and ratified it. It is meaningless since the treaty does not come into force until all member states both sign and ratify the treaty.

Barack Obama said during his electoral campaign that he would attempt to convince the Senate to ratify the treaty once he became elected.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=nuclear-testing-is-an-acceptable-risk

I think it will be difficult for him to convince law makers and the Ameican public that ratifying the treaty is in the best interests of the US. I think the political sentiment is that the US needs to keep the option of testing open. Specially in light of the testing done during the Bush administration. Reliable bunker-busting nuclear missiles was one of the objectives in nuclear weapons research done by the US during the last 10 years.

Those countries (like Iran and North Korea) attempting to get nuclear weapons are likely to reject the treaty. So will countries that use nuclear weapons as a deterrent against their neighbors (Pakistan, India, Israel).

I think that if President Obama can convince the Senate, then the treaty will be more acceptable to many countries that are refusing to ratify the treaty. I would be curious to think whether any of you think we could achieve a nuclear-free world. What would it take? Should the nuclear superpowers make the first steps and solid commitments? Or should the countries with nuclear ambitions give up their pursuit of nuclear weapons first?

Artful Dodger:

I agree with you in that competition would force companies to shape up. An inefficient, poorly manged company would fail, at least in theory. In practice mismangamengt can be resilient and survive, but that is not the point. I just wonder the not-for-profit insurers can compete with the capital of insurers that operate strictly for profit. I imagine that if they are efficient and preperly capitalized they have a fighting chance.

I think that the inability of insurers to sell across state lines is probably a throwback to decentralization of government. Since different states operate under different laws, some insurers could operate in a different way depending on which state they are based on. To allow insurers to operate across state lines would require all states to harmonize their legislation and to many state legislators that might feel like big federal government intruding on local legislation.

At the same time, companies operating in some states might feel that they lose thier monopolistic legal advantage if companies from other states can suddenly compete against them. They will lobby to keep the law as it is.

It is a complex problem. If the solution were simple this debate would have ended decades ago. Countries like Canada came up with a workable public healthcare system in the 1950s and 1960s because they did not have to deal with the legal complexity of harminizing the law across 50 states.

I think that ultimately the US will find a solution that is uniquely proper to American reality itself. Somewhere in all this the US will find its balance between the public and the private sector. Perhaps the sense of urgency comes from 2010, the years in which people born in 1945 turn 65 years old. Economists see this as the start of the baby boomer generation reaching retirement age, and the pressures on the healthcare and pension systems will be great. 2010-2020 will be the years that will define whether the private sector can truly cope with high demand for healthcare services being met at low, stable prices.

Artful Dodger:

> The government is a far worse option.

I think we would have to be very naive if we think that the private sector is free from corruption. Historically, the private sector has existed for one and only one purpose: profit.

Health insurance companies did not go into that business to give away free health care. They went into that line because it makes them a lot of money. If that business were not profitable, they would have left it long ago.

Money has one effect on people. It can bring the worst out of them. If at some point private health insurers make the wrong business decisions, they could find themselves going bankrupt. When that happens million of people could face being without healthcare and just as with banks, the government (that is taxpayers) will be called in to bail them out.

To me it is not a matter of "if" it will happen but a matter of "when". Health insurance companies are financial institutions, just like banks. They deal with billions of dollars and they hedge positions against the financial markets, just like banks do.

I am convinced that the United States (and the rest of the world) will have to learn the lesson the hard way, just as we have done with banks. Maybe my views are too negative, but considering that the collpase of the banking system has happened several times in the past, I am led to believe that we as human beings repeat the mistakes over and over.

It will take the failure of a big insurer, and people lining up outside their offices demanding for services that the company will not be able to provide because they squandered their customers money out of greed and unwise investments. Is it unthinkable? As unthinkable as Enron collapsing, or the biggest banks in the world begging the Federal Reserve to give them billions of dollars to bail them out.

Is the government any better? That is a good question. Capitalist governments insist on contracting out services, and that makes things more expensive because the contractors called on to provide those services skin taxpayers alive. Then, where there is big money there is big corruption, and government employees can be just as greedy and stupid as anybody else.

Is there a solution? I think that if the government is not able to create a reliable public healthcare system, then there have to strict checks on what healthcare insurance companies do because if those companies fail their customers could find themselves with no coverage at all, and no government system to fall back on. Probably a hybrid system has to be in place, with government and private insurers working together. Unfortunately, at the present time greed is in the way of better judgement and the political environment is in favor of private insurance.

Over the next ten years millions of baby boomers will retire and enter the later stages of life. The pressure on private health insurers will become enourmous as the baby boomer generation ages in big numbers and the cost of providing services skyrockets. At some point the cost will exceed the profits that these companies make from their external invesments. Then these companies will start failing one after the other because for insurance to work, profits have to exceed costs.