I want to see unions pick the ball up now.  'Minority' groups have got to reach a critical mass at some point.  The old boys are going to get too old to keep up with it all.  Every rep on the ground that I talk to (including blokes) is on board with moving equalities forward, it just when you start to talk about the particulars of it that things fall down.

But I am seeing an increasing will to improve.

Ad astra per aspera

(specially Dawkins.. or Craig Venter...ji ji jijji I know I know I am bad)

A pleasure

I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact. Levi-Strauss, Claude

A pleasure

I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact. Levi-Strauss, Claude

ChrisCook:

This

B52 Nukes were headed for Iran: Air Force Refused

is apparently behind the wall on the "Wayne Madsen Report" site.

I don't buy it, any more than I buy some of Seymour Hersh's stuff.

It reeks of a story planted to ramp up the pressure on Iran. But then, I know damn all about Madsen and the stuff he writes.

Johann Hari, 2003

Sometimes, the only way to spread peace is at the barrel of a gun Independent, The (London) - Find Articles

Once Iraqis are certain the Americans will not back off and leave them to the mercy of Saddam, they will explain why they wanted this war. This is not idle speculation: it is already happening. In Safwan this weekend, Iraqis called out to US and British troops: "You're late. What took you so long? God help you become victorious." Another person said: "I want to say hello to Bush, to shake his hand." One woman stated: "For a long time we've been saying: 'Let them come.' Last night we were afraid, but we said: 'Never mind, as long as they get rid of him, as long as they overthrow him, no problem.' " This was reported in one of the most anti- war newspapers in Britain.

Those who still deny all this evidence will know soon enough, once the war is over, what the Iraqi people thought all along. When it emerges - as I strongly believe, based on my experience of the Iraqi exile community and the International Crisis Group's survey of opinion within Iraq - that they wanted this war, will the anti-war movement recant? Will they apologise for appropriating the voice of the Iraqi people and using it for their own ends?

Here he is in 2007

Need Iraq Suffer More If We Pull Out? - CommonDreams.org

The US troops cannot be an agent of anything positive in Iraq, after using chemical weapons in cities, after using torture routinely, after overseeing the deaths of 650,000 Iraqis. Today, 78 per cent of Iraqis say the US presence "is doing more harm than good" and that they should leave. This is hardly surprising: Jeff Englehart, formerly a US soldier in Iraq, said recently: "The general attitude was: a dead Iraqi is just another dead Iraqi."

But how do they get out without leaving behind something even more hellish? To grope for a solution, we must first be honest and clear about the Bush administration's motives.

It is currently trying to force the Iraqi parliament, as its top priority, to pass an oil law that would hand two-thirds of Iraq's oil fields to their friends and paymasters in Big Oil. Ordinary Iraqis see this new plan as crude looting of their wealth, with 63 per cent appalled in a recent poll. Yet the US is suppressing resistance: they leaned on the Ministry of the Interior to use Saddam-era laws to ban the oil worker's trade unions, which have been democratically, peacefully fighting the law.

Only massive public pressure will change this course. So what should we demand they do? Former presidential candidate George McGovern, who fought heroically against the Vietnam War, has worked on a detailed way to leave Iraq that doesn't also leave behind a holocaust. It is mapped out in his book Out of Iraq.

McGovern's plan begins with a simple, stark apology from the US, Britain and other invaders for the catastrophe we have wrought - the opposite of Bush's deranged demands for thanks. There must then be a commitment to dismantle all permanent US bases on Iraqi soil, and to allow Iraqis to own their country's oil - with royalties paid equally to every citizen, in a regular cheque, like they do in Alaska.

The US then needs to convene a regional conference, at which it pledges to pay full-whack for an international stabilisation force to police Iraq, manned exclusively by Muslim countries such as Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, and Jordan. These countries will need all sorts of financial inducements to send troops. Tough. Pay them. McGovern calculates that even at top-rate, this would cost $5.5bn - just 3 per cent of keeping the US forces there for the next two years. Once the police are fellow-Muslims, the often-murderous insurgents will be much more isolated. Al-Qa'ida's tiny presence (estimated by US generals to be fewer than 500 fighters, rendering Bush's claims they will take over the country absurd) will be even more despised. Only troops like this could have the legitimacy needed to stop a genocide.

It's not a perfect plan. People will still die in the fall-out. But it is less lethal than any other option I can see. The present course is too horrific to maintain. In Baghdad today, people have stopped eating fish from the rivers Tigris and Euphrates. The reason? So many dead bodies are being dumped there every day - and being munched by the fish - that Iraqis began to fear they would contract diseases associated with cannibalism. That's the score-card so far: to reduce Iraqis from the horror of Saddamism to physically consuming themselves. Now what was the President saying about gratitude?

My take: He's western, he's comfortably off, he rarely travels where poor people live--though he meets a lot of educated people from places where poor people live--and then he decides what he thinks, and of course he needs to earn a living--but really, he likes a bit of high-falutin' rhetoric and nevermind the bodies involved (sorta what he accuses Che of)...well, that's my take.

I'll add that I wonder (as I wonder with Tony Blair) why he can't just admit (at least to himself) that pontificating on important world affairs isn't where his skills lie.  There's this understandable need to "make things right by telling the truth, at least this time", but it's as if the lesson never gets learned: You don't understand poverty, mate!

Bernhard at moonofalabama has a piece up about this kind of thinking:

http://www.moonofalabama.org/2007/10/darfur-myanmar-.html  

I typed into scroogle "Johann Hari Iraq Mea Culpa" (actually I typed "mia culpa" but...ya know--how could he have missed the...history of american interventions?) and found this:

Johann Hari - Archive

I think in a way the left has been saying: I don't think it's a matter of troops out, or stay the course - I think there is a very simple solution: have a referendum, and just say to the Iraqi people, "Do you want the troops to stay?" Obviously that's not going to happen because the huge factor in this is that the Americans are not motivated by siding with the Iraqi people. And I never though they were. Some of the pro-war left seem to have convinced themselves that the US army is like the armed wing of Amnesty International. I always thought that was ludicrous, but what I should have put a higher premium on at the time was realizing that the fact they were doing this for deeply the wrong reasons was going to have a much bigger effect on what they did afterwards. And given they haven't supported democracy - they have actually tried to destroy it in many places, not least Venezuela in 2001 - and given that only two years before they had tried to destroy a democratic regime with the support of 77% of the Venezuelan people, was it naïve to think there would be anything like democracy in Iraq? That they would tolerate it, on top of some of the largest oil resources in the world?

This is why it's all very well to advocate a referendum but are the Americans going to abandon all that oil after investing all this? Probably not.

Or, as Mark Steel puts it in the first video clip above:

And here's Hari's Mea Culpa:

Johann Hari - Archive

The lamest defence I could offer - one used by many supporters of the war as they slam into reverse gear - is that I still support the principle of invasion, it's just the Bush administration screwed it up. But as one anti-war friend snapped at me when I mooted this argument, "Yeah, who would ever have thought that supporting George Bush in the illegal invasion of an Arab country would go wrong?" She's right: the truth is that there was no pure Platonic ideal of The Perfect Invasion to support, no abstract idea we lent our names to. There was only Bush, with his cluster bombs, depleted uranium, IMF-ed up economic model, bogus rationale and unmistakable stench of petrol, offering his war, his way. (Expecting Tony Blair to use his influence was, it is now clear, a delusion, as he refuses to even frontally condemn the American torture camp at Guantanomo Bay).

The evidence should have been clear to me all along: the Bush administration would produce disaster. Let's look at the major mistakes-cum-crimes. Who would have thought they would unleash widespread torture, with over 10,000 people disappearing without trial into Iraq's secret prisons? Anybody who followed the record of the very same people - from Rumsfeld to Negroponte - in Central America in the 1980s. Who would have thought they would use chemical weapons? Anybody who looked up Bush's stance on chemical weapons treaties (he uses them for toilet paper) or checked Rumsfeld's record of flogging them to tyrants. Who would have thought they would impose shock therapy mass privatisation on the Iraqi economy, sending unemployment soaring to 60 percent - a guarantee of ethnic strife? Anybody who followed the record of the US towards Russia, Argentina, and East Asia. Who could have known that they would cancel all reconstruction funds, when electricity and water supplies are still below even Saddam's standards? Anybody who looked at their domestic policies.

The Bush administration was primarily motivated by a desire to secure strategic access to one of the world's major sources of oil. The 9/11 massacres by Saudi hijackers had reminded them that their favourite client-state - the one run by the torturing House of Saud - was vulnerable to an internal Islamist revolution that would snatch the oil-wells from Haliburton hands. They needed an alternative source of Middle East oil, fast. I obviously found this rationale disgusting, but I deluded myself into thinking it was possible to ride this beast to a better Iraq. Reeling from a visit to Saddam's Iraq, I knew that Iraqis didn't care why their dictator was deposed, they just wanted it done, now. As I thought of the ethnically cleansed Marsh Arabs I had met, reduced to living in a mud hut in the desert, I thought that whatever happens, however it occurs, it will be better. In that immediate rush, I - like most Iraqis - failed to see that the Bush administration's warped motives would lead to a warped occupation. A war for oil would mean that as Baghdad was looted, troops would be sent to guard the oil ministry, not the hospitals - a bleak harbinger of things to come.

But it is easy for me to repent at leisure. Just as the opponents of the war would never have faced Saddam's torture chambers, I am not hiding in my home, rocking and clutching a Kalashnikov. Millions of Iraqis are, and many thousands more did not live to see even that future because of the arguments of people like me.

Here's a fascinating analysis of his reporting my Sourcewatch:

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Johann_Hari

A single quote:

Johann Hari - SourceWatch

We conducted a Lexis-Nexis search of all the articles you have written this year mentioning the words 'Iraq' or 'Iraqi'. This was by no means a scientific study, but it surely did provide strong clues to the focus and tone of your reporting. We found the following numbers of mentions for these words in your commentary on Iraq:

Cancer - 0 mentions Child/infant mortality - 0 Civilian/s - 1 (sanctions effect in 'weakening', 25.8) Depleted Uranium - 0 Disease - 0 Education - 0 Electricity - 0 Hospitals - 0 Iraqi civilian/s - 1 (killed by insurgents, 21.1) Landmines - 0 Malnutrition - 0 Poverty - 0 Schools - 0 Unexploded bombs/ordnance - 0 Unicef - 0 Water - 0

</uber rant>

Don't fight forces, use them R. Buckminster Fuller.

What building was closed to public access 12 years before it (oficcially) existed.

Life should consist in at least fifty percent pure waste of time, and the rest doing what you please.