Brown knows an attack on Iran is coming soon that’s why they are getting out of Iraq as soon as possible.

Britain is preparing to hand over control of Basra to the Iraqi army as early as next month, sparking renewed claims from the US that the British are preparing to “cut and run”, according to a report in the Sunday Times newspaper.
The Iraqi army is on course to take control of Basra province by the autumn with October seen as the earliest point at which it would be ready, the report says, citing British government officials.
British prime minister Gordon Brown is expected to announce the withdrawal in a statement to the House of Commons when MPs return from the summer break.
The report suggests US commanders in Baghdad have accepted that British troops are on their way out of Iraq and this had prompted criticism from US military commentators.

Link

Posted by: Cloned Poster | Sep 2 2007 12:24 utc | 3

The Truth Gets Vicious When You Corner It:
Thanks for reminding me of THAT sixth sense (which I first learned of via the moon many of them ago).
However, both you and I know that little annie sprinkle was referring to the psi-factor. AKA the pseudo-science of parapsychology:

It studies certain reported but unsubstantiated events (such as ESP, psychokinesis, dowsing, prophecy) that have no presently known explanation. Like all other sciences, it develops theories to explain these claimed events and attempts to test those theories by experimentation. See also science.
However, unlike in other sciences, none of the parapsychologists’ experiments have both shown positive results and have been replicated by independent researchers. Even the Guinness Book of Records, listing the single most astonishing performance in ESP, apologizes and reports that the episode fails to meet even their standards. Data in some important basic parapsychological experiments that yielded apparently positive results have been shown to be falsified——though parapsychology is not alone in this respect.
Some students of paranormal matters say that such claims cannot be examined rationally. If that is the case, then their studies do not belong with science, but in the same category as flat-Earth theories and perpetual-motion machines, none of which can have the slightest importance to anyone except, perhaps, students of abnormal psychology or editors of the sensational press.
Psychologist Dr. David Marks, who has done extensive investigation of the parapsychologists’ work, has said:
Parascience has so far failed to produce a single repeatable finding and, until it does, will continue to be viewed as an incoherent collection of belief systems steeped in fantasy, illusion and error.
The U.S. National Research Council in 1988 concluded a well-funded two-year study by a special committee and published a report, Enhancing Human Performance, which concluded:
The committee finds no scientific justification from research conducted over a period of 130 years, for the existence of parapsychological phenomena. In the committee’s view, the best scientific evidence does not justify the conclusion that ESP——that is, gathering information about objects or thoughts without the intervention of known sensory mechanisms——exists. Nor does scientific evidence offer support for the existence of psychokinesis——that is, the influence of thoughts upon objects without the intervention of known physical processes.
Nonethele$$, cour$e$ in parap$ychology are offered in more than two hundred college$ and univer$itie$ in the United $tate$ alone, and degree$ in parap$ychology are offered at $everal $chool$, in particular at John F. Kennedy Univer$ity in Orinda, California. Their Graduate $chool of Con$ciou$ne$$ $tudie$ offers a parap$ychology ma$ter of $cience degree.

Your – That is why I, and many others, are both atheist and increasingly vocal about it: the time has come when we can no longer trust believers with control of the world. It’s just too dangerous. We should, in fact, have started earlier. The minute nuclear weapons were invented, belief became too dangerous to leave unattended. – is bang on and lets not forget the huge amounts of public money, time, effort and energy wasted on this piffle:
The UK has just spent about $22M(US) upgrading a homeopathic centre. How many beds, nurses or diagnostic imaging machines would that amount have provided for?
The Channel Islands have been sucking their aquifer dry and now, big surprise, sea-water is replacing it. Authorities meet and experts are consulted to address the crisis. Drastic conservation methods are logically proposed. One of the authorities has faith in the paranormal and belief in the free market system. Convincing the others of their closed mindedness, he brings in a dowser that claims to be able to divine (via quantum vibrations no doubt) the location of vast underground fresh water rivers flowing from France. Drilling ensues in the locations specified by the “scientist” with his stick in his hand. Predictably, nothing is found.
Ontario, Canada is about to be overrun by publicly funded religious schools…
Welcome to Anno Domini 911

Posted by: jcairo | Sep 2 2007 14:28 utc | 5

Thanks Sam – Poor little boots feels sorry for himself. I couldn’t get past that. Fucking murderer.
[this is getting to be a habit]

Posted by: beq | Sep 2 2007 14:55 utc | 7

Starts off with a good laught …
Tony Karon Mearshimer, Walt and the Erudite Hysteria of David Remnick

First, an illustrative anecdote: A little over a year ago, Iraq’s prime minister Nuri al-Maliki arrived in Washington and addressed Congress. The event was supposed to be a booster for the elected Iraqi leadership, showing U.S. support for the new government. But at the time, Israel was pummeling Beirut in response to Hizballah’s capture of two Israeli soldiers, so U.S. legislators naively tried — and failed — to get Maliki to condemn Hizballah. And, revealing the extent to which Washington is encased in a bubble when it comes to matters involving Israel in the Middle East, Senators Chuck Schumer, Harry Reid and Dick Durbin wrote Maliki a letter saying the following: “Your failure to condemn Hezbollah’s aggression and recognize Israel’s right to defend itself raise serious questions about whether Iraq under your leadership can play a constructive role in resolving the current crisis and bringing stability to the Middle East.”
…
Like the tech-bubble and real estate-bubble, Washington’s “Israel bubble” is unhealthy and dangerous — in fact, it not only jeopardizes U.S. interests throughout the region and beyond (..), but it is also exceedingly bad for Israel: Particularly over the past decade, the U.S. has essentially enabled Israeli behavior so self-destructive that it may have already precluded any chance of it being able to live at peace with its neighbors.
…
M&W share with Jimmy Carter that ability to call forth a rather unfortunate habit among sections of America’s liberal punditocracy, in which sharp and fundamental criticisms of Israel must be discredited and squashed, even at the cost of the cool reason for which the pundits in question are usually known. To put it unkindly, when Israel is under the spotlight, many liberal commentators feel compelled to embarrass themselves in its defense.
…

Posted by: b | Sep 2 2007 15:46 utc | 9

jcairo: Suggest you read “there is a river” by Thomas Sugrue. Interesting.

Posted by: Ben | Sep 2 2007 20:23 utc | 11

Hey Ben, ah yes the story of Edgar Cayce a photographer who as a child began to hear voices and see visions.

In common with most of the divinely inspired mystics, Cayce also dabbled in prophecy. In 1934 he declared that Poseidia (which he said was a portion of Atlantis) would be the first part of that fabled continent to rise again from the Atlantic. “Expect it in 1968 or 1969,” he told his fans. Poseidia, his imaginary creation, did not rise, nor have any of his other prophecies been fulfilled.
But there is always hope. In his 1934 predictions, he declared in an “update on earth changes”:
The earth will be broken up in the western portion of America. The greater portion of Japan must go into the sea. The upper portion of Europe will be changed as in the twinkling of an eye. Land will appear off the east coast of America. There will be the upheavals in the Arctic and in the Antarctic that will make for the eruption of volcanoes in the Torrid areas, and there will be the shifting then of the poles——so that where there have been those of a frigid or semi-tropical [sic] will become the more tropical, and moss and fern will grow. And these will begin in those periods in ’58 to ’98.
As of this date, those events have failed to occur. How could that be?

Posted by: jcairo | Sep 2 2007 20:47 utc | 13

To quote Steven Wright again:
“there’s a lot of bad ideas out there, that haven’t been discovered yet”.

Posted by: anna missed | Sep 2 2007 21:38 utc | 15

For the record, the Lebanese Army finally took over Nahr al-Bared today in a dramatic crushing final finish in which 39 of the fighters were killed, along with 3 soldiers. The final stand involved a desperate breakout attempt in which some of the militants were aided by others arriving in cars from outside the camp, causing the army to conclude:

The planning and use of outside personnel in Sunday morning’s operation signals that Fatah al-Islam can still function despite the end of the Nahr al-Bared battle, Hanna warned.
“This kind of operation needs broader capabilities,” he said. “It was well-prepared from inside and outside. They have to have communication and they have to have a certain knowledge or tactical information about what is going on outside Nahr al-Bared. There must be some people who planned for his escape from the camp.
“Was it only Shaker al-Abssi? I doubt it. This is not Abssi only. He is not Napoleon.
“From the outside they still have some committed people. There must be some more Lebanese or some more regional players involved.”

That does not bode too well for the future, but we shall see.
And from this link, we learn:

Tens of thousands of people who used to live in Nahr al-Bared were forced to flee to safety in May.
But there remains little for them to return to after 100 days of shelling.

Notice how all the coverage of this does not relate to the buildings that were destroyed as if they had any value to anyone? As if they were peoples’ homes? As if they did not hold history, memories, possessions, and so on? None of the articles I have seen have related to this destruction with anything but the most blase of tones, as if it is a foregone conclusion that the camp would of course have had to have been destroyed under these circumstances, and no one had any attachment to those structures that were razed.
But… Nahr al-Bared is the oldest Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon. It was one of the first refugee camps established there in 1948. Another image from that time can be seen here. In the interest of preserving history, I replicate here a passage from Ilan Pappe’s book that describes the series of events that initially drove its residents to seek refuge there:

…In February 1948 Jewish troops had perpetrated a massacre in the village of Sa’sa that ended in the killing of fifteen villagers, including five children. Sa’sa is located on the main road to Mount Myarun (today Meron), the highest mountain peak in Palestine. After it had been occupied, the soldiers of Brigade Seven ran amok, firing randomly at anyone in the houses and on the streets. Besides the fifteen villagers killed, they left behind them a large number of wounded. The troops then demolished all the houses, apart from a few that the members of Kibbutz Sasa, built on the ruins of the village, took over for themselves after the forced eviction of their original owners. The chronicle of what happened in Sa’sa in 1948 cannot easily be constructed from the archival material, but there is a highly active community of survivors bent on preserving their testimonies for posterity. Most of the refugees live in Nahr al-Bared, a refugee camp near Tripoli, Lebanon; some are in Rashidiyya camp near Tyre…. A smaller dommunity also resides in the Ayn Hilwa refugee canmp in southern Lebanon… (p. 183).

You can learn more about Sa’sa here, including the fact that “Sa’sa’ is one of the very old villages in Palestine. The numerous caves (including old graves and carvings) that surround the village date back to the Bronze Age and some manuscripts show that Sa’sa’ was built during the time of the Roman Emperor – HADRIAN.”
News reports notwithstanding, people from Nahr al-Barid are attached to their camp homes and yearning to return.
I am trying to honor them by bringing a little of their narrative to life in this post, to counter the faceless treatment of “thousands of displaced people who are just looking on dispassionately as their homes of 60 years are reduced to rubble” that appears in the media.

Posted by: Bea | Sep 2 2007 21:52 utc | 17

I don’t want realism. I want magic! Yes, yes, magic. I try to give that to people. I do misrepresent things. I don’t tell truths. I tell what ought to be truth.
Blanche DuBois, from ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ (1951)

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Sep 2 2007 22:09 utc | 19

Oops, I meant to post this link to the list of Palestinian refugee camps not the other one.

Posted by: Bea | Sep 2 2007 22:17 utc | 21

jcairo little annie sprinkle
can somebody give this dickhead a silver star?

Posted by: annie | Sep 2 2007 22:43 utc | 23

Bea, not that it’s important, but when describing the year of a winter, they use the year it started in December. So both are right; the winter of 1948 would include December of 1948 and Jan, Feb of 1949 as well. As I said, it’s not an important thingie, just trivia. But it’s a travesty that these camps are still in operation.

Posted by: Ensley | Sep 2 2007 23:23 utc | 25

Thanks Ensley, that clears it up. I try to be accurate when I report things but in this case it was confusing.

Posted by: Bea | Sep 2 2007 23:28 utc | 27

i’m outta here guys, it’s been a slice

Posted by: annie | Sep 2 2007 23:33 utc | 29

Bill Lind on “progress” in Iraq and some insight into the post conflict tendency for war to continue, or what I’ve always considered a generational “addiction” to war (on part of the afflicted or occupied):

The third story, “Children Doing Battle in Iraq” from the August 27 Los Angeles Times, points to further long-term disorder in Iraq:
Child fighters, once a rare presence on Iraq’s battlefields, are playing a significant and growing role in kidnappings, killings and roadside bombings in the country, U.S. military officials say.
Boys, some as young as 11, now outnumber foreign fighters at U.S. detention camps in Iraq. Since March, their numbers have risen to 800 from 100…
The rise of child fighters will eventually make the Iraq conflict more gruesome, said Peter W. Singer, a Brookings Institution expert on child fighters.
He said militant leaders often treat children as a cheap commodity, and peace will be less attainable because “conflict entrepreneurs” now have an established and pliable fighting force in their communities.
As we have seen in Africa, when children become fighters at an early age, they provide a pool of men who for at least a generation cannot do anything but fight. It is difficult to “de-program” them into peaceful citizens. In turn, this leads to what we might call “supply-side war,” war driven largely by the presence of men who want to fight. This kind of half-war, half-brigandage swarmed over Europe during the interval between the end of the Middle Ages and the rise of the state. After Westphalia, the state put an end to it by rounding up the brigands and hanging them. In Iraq, where the fictional state cannot even round up kilowatts, supply-side war suggests that disorder will be rampant, and a state non-existent, for quite some time.

Like other examples, post war Vietnam’s war with China and Cambodia, or Afghanistan’s civil war post USSR – Conflict in post U.S. occupation of Iraq and possibly Afghanistan will no doubt be labeled and blamed in the rubric of their savagery or as slothrop might chime, their blood lust sectarianism – as opposed to the logical outcome put into motion by generational occupation.

Posted by: anna missed | Sep 2 2007 23:39 utc | 31

having read the ’emerald city’ about the occupation of iraq on sxlothrops counsel – am left empty with the staggering conceits of man – especially of american man
it is a good read – lot of stuff we have talked about here but really – you would be hard going to write the scenes of the sordid tragedy as it was & is being played out in iraq – teh little rifts between the coalition of the willing – bringing another doese of humour we do not need

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Sep 2 2007 23:55 utc | 33

Someone either seriously needs a drink, or an AA meeting..
or a banning. That was waaaaaaay over the line there.

Posted by: Anonymous | Sep 3 2007 0:40 utc | 35

@ 35. Agreed.

Posted by: beq | Sep 3 2007 0:50 utc | 37

yes, SidneyG, how humane of ‘them’ to declare me alcoholic and offer AA because i responded in kind to one of the favourite echoes

Posted by: jcairo | Sep 3 2007 1:07 utc | 39

hat is to say. this world is in a fucking mess. we do not have to reproduce that mess here. nor do we need to comprimise. on the contrary – struglle with each other – profits everyone if the basis of that struggle is the researrch for answers, for meaning – fro an understanding of what the fuck is happening in the world the bush cheny junta have bequeathed us
tho i have going through my head for the last week the image that john pilger gives of his interview with john bolton where bolton’s toupée keeps on falling down. this nietzschean warrior with a hairpiece just about sums up their state of simulacras

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Sep 3 2007 1:46 utc | 41

so where’s rick lately? does anyone recall where this whole conversation started? about faith, religion.. etc.
some people may believe that religion came before faith (TGVWYC)
Religious beliefs are made to suffice two urges:
– to give sense to live
– to take away fear of death
As worse life is as bigger are these urges.
i had the audacity to state that i thought the idea of god (without mentioning whether i had any faith or not)
for i believe
(r’gaip)friend rick, i think most of us including yourself understand that the spiritual question is implicity a private one & what is critiqued here are the political manipulation of what are intensely intimate thoughts
i also think religion could not have ever become such an important part of mankind had there not been a natural inclination towards this belief. i do not this is =born of merely stupidity, or gluliblemess. i think it is because of peoples experience, what they percieve to be real. i gave for example my own experiences. for this i was mocked, snarked, insulted. which i ignored and di not respond until i was soecifically requested to explain, to PROVE myself.
It is down to you to prove this. It is not for me or anyone else to disprove your claim. So, how well did you do when I challenged you?
i again tried w/an extensive explanation which was responded to w/more snark and insult. 3 times you said ‘i knew you were going to say this, or ‘drag science into this’
it is irrelevant to prove something like this. it is a fact that many people DO have faith, many many people.
it is rude and insulting to degrade people for their experience. obviously many people have taken advantage of this faith hence.. religion.
truth get vicious… If I had a wish about faith, I’d wish that fewer people believed in a higher power, because it’s always used as a justification for the sort of human suffering which it is within human power to prevent.
belief in a higher power, (or as i prefer to comprehend ‘other power’ or one nor discovered, not higher, not one divorced from science.. but it is irrelevant what i believe) is a prerequisite for for anyone taking advantage of this faith to create religion.
i made numerous efforts to explain this each time being met by this rude challenge. don’t you realize it is an insult to attack someones belief system in this way. not just mine, any person of faith on these forums.
you royally pissed me off before i called you a little shit. you didn’t drop it there or keep it on the dsame thread, you ragged it onto the next thread, where i proceeded to link to your snark on the other thread and ask you to get off my back.
and here we are again, 3 threads now! for what. so you can PROVE to me what an idiot i am.
really. your snark and insults are rude! don’t play the victim here. i can easily find 10 snarky rude comments on that thread before i finally stood up for my self and called you out on your rudeness. where is rick?
is this a religious forum. is anyone who believes in anything that has yet to be proven scientific fact have to stay in some little shut up box here in moon. is this a god free zone.
is it? it is irrelevant whether i believe or not.
malooga
Nobody is saying you can’t have personal faith… hell, I do myself… but I draw the line at using it to promote public policy or justify an obscene status quo
so whats the word guys. do we get called out for our personal beliefs whether they be a child and dragons, me and my premonitions, or rick and god.
are we to be slandered? because if that is acceptable gere. it is the wrong place for me.

Posted by: annie | Sep 3 2007 2:12 utc | 43

A follow up to b real’s post (83) in the “OT 07-59” thread:
U.S. House Africom Hearing
And the resulting consequences:
China’s Influence Spreads Around World
Of course we wouldn’t want reality to get in the way of ideals now would we?

Posted by: Sam | Sep 3 2007 2:32 utc | 45

sam – there are forecasts that the beijing consensus will replace the washington consensus as the center of global power shifts to asia & that the next phase of modern globalization will be that of asianization rather than americanization. africa is one of the geopolitical chessboards on which the west will attempt to contain east. however it plays out, africans, pawns in the middle, will take the blunt end of it.

Posted by: b real | Sep 3 2007 2:56 utc | 47

b real:
there are forecasts that the beijing consensus will replace the washington consensus as the center of global power shifts
With America under Bush contiuously shooting itself in the foot I’m sure it will come to pass. Doing his best to get the World to hate America and shovelling hundreds of billions of dollars into the coffers of it’s competitors via high oil prices, as a result of the Iraq invasion, will guarantee it. It’s not just Asia and Africa but South America too. Where else to turn from gunboat diplomacy than China? The fact that the true believers can’t see this is most disturbing. Over the last 6 years the World has experienced the largest growth since the WWII and isn’t coming from America. Even with the asset bubble the growth was only 3 percent and that too is unwinding.
There is a worldwide rebellion going on and nobody in the beltway seems to notice. Russia and China support the troops being bogged down in Iraq and these people look at it as a good thing. Heaven help us.

Posted by: Sam | Sep 3 2007 3:27 utc | 49

@annie:
If you’re still checking back for replies after declaring that you’re leaving, then either you don’t really want to go or else you’re just writing for effect. I doubt the latter because you haven’t been acting like that. So do what you want to do, regardless of what that may be, but don’t get angry at jcairo — either he’s a troll, in which case getting mad at him just makes him happy, or he’s serious, in which case getting angry doesn’t really help the discussion.
@jcairo:
I don’t understand what you hope to accomplish by offering annie personal insults. If annie is so unimportant that she doesn’t deserve your respect, then it doesn’t matter what she believes, so why do you bother even responding to her? And if her belief is important enough to merit an argument, even if only because faith is an enabler for evil whackjobs in society, then please keep in mind that you won’t change her mind by ridiculing her personally. Furthermore, observation suggests that the people on this board are not likely to respect someone who resorts to invective. (Unless there are a lot of immature lurkers around here.)
I’m also a little curious about why you responded on this thread to a post of mine from another thread; it made things a bit hard to follow.

Posted by: The Truth Gets Vicious When You Corner It | Sep 3 2007 3:43 utc | 51

R’Giap said: “we are & should be tough with each other but respectfully” (#40)
Um… no. Unless you were using the royal “we”, folk here have most certainly not been “respectful” with one another. While you, R’Giap, have always maintained a fairly respectful discourse during disagreements, that has not been the case for everyone. I frequent a few discussion boards, and it has been here at MoA that I have experienced the two single lowest blows in my entire online experience. Becoming persona non grata, as I have, is almost a kindness compared to some of the tactics used by some regular posters here.
That having been said, jcairo, you have carried this argument over from one open thread to the next with no continuity. It appears personally motivated and monomaniacal. If it is your intention to favorably sway people’s opinions, you should consider these factors. You are beginning to appear hysterical, which does your argument no service. If it is your intention to be skew the noise to signal ratio during a conversation, then please carry on as you have. Your current approach appears to be trollish; designed only to provoke indignant responses for their own sake (and free-associating with someone’s name is, frankly, the level of discourse I would expect from a third grader… it’s not even a good troll).
If you are arguing against psychic phenomena, please keep your argument germane to that. If you are just attacking annie, don’t expect a lot of folk to come rushing over to lend you support as if this were an elementary school playground.

Posted by: Monolycus | Sep 3 2007 3:58 utc | 53

Okay,as this is an open thread, I invite all MOA inhabitants to freely comment on any instances in their lives that might be connected to esp. Clairivoyance{gee,that looks so french,lol.} precognostication,remote viewing,telekinesis, even(gasp!QUEL HORREUR!}levitation.
I am asking that this be limited to personal observation or self experiance.
I shall lead off. I have been a low-grade empath all my life, which led me to shun crowds and people,and made me develop a sort of personal armor called “callousness.” It is one thing to feel empathy for another human being, or animal ,or any sentient life force that is feeling physical or psychological pain, to having their actual pain visited upon you. Oddly enough , I now have a high threshold as far as physical pain, but I think I am even more suseptible to psychological-psychic pain . Possibly due to the increase of all Life on this planet being subjected to death and horror. So much for being an empath. I did not ask for this ability.
Now, on to precognition…
To this day, from my teens, I have always on at least a weekly basis while I have been working, or at play, or what have you, had pop in my mind apropos of nothing at all a frigging movie!Yes that’s right ,a movie. I could be driving a nail, or running a saw and as I am totally focused on my job, a stupid movie that I have not seen in years pops in my mind, and lo and behold! It is either on the telly that same night or the next night. Bear in mind that I don’t watch television. Well, some Jon Stewart, as that is all I have patience for.
I wish that I could pull up the numbers for the lottery,but it does not work like that.The sight comes and goes as it wills. I cannot will it to my sevice. I have had “feelings” to call my mom, now deceased, only to find out when I called that she had been”thinking about me”. The same is true of my three sisters.
I warrant that these things have hapenned to all of you in one form or another.
We have lost our vestigal monkey tail.
Some things take their place.

Posted by: possum | Sep 3 2007 4:16 utc | 55

From BradBlog, via one of my old favorite blogs, You Will Anyway, more news on the theft of the 2000 election keeps dribbling out. The comments are good too. Seems Dan Rather is pissed about having his (undeserved) reputation trashed, and so finds himself having to do some real reporting. Good thing, that — should happened to more of those prima donnas.

Posted by: Malooga | Sep 3 2007 4:30 utc | 57

@Malooga: so, when can we call do-overs? or, does someone wake up at the end of the season and it turns out the last 7 years were just a bad dream? Maybe we could back up to before the Reagan years? Eisenhower tried to warn us in 1954:

Now it is true that I believe this country is following a dangerous trend when it permits too great a degree of centralization of governmental functions. I oppose this–in some instances the fight is a rather desperate one. But to attain any success it is quite clear that the Federal government cannot avoid or escape responsibilities which the mass of the people firmly believe should be undertaken by it. The political processes of our country are such that if a rule of reason is not applied in this effort, we will lose everything–even to a possible and drastic change in the Constitution. This is what I mean by my constant insistence upon “moderation” in government. Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas.5 Their number is negligible and they are stupid.

Posted by: catlady | Sep 3 2007 4:51 utc | 59

I keep tellin you guys/gals…
God’s away on business …lol

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Sep 3 2007 5:01 utc | 61

Ahh,Catlady
you warm the cockles of my heart. Sometimes it is so easy for people to give answers. You on the other hand post the correct questions.

Posted by: possum | Sep 3 2007 5:30 utc | 63

I’ve experienced enough of these, what ever you call it, precognition! to know that it exists – at least for me personally. I’ve never considered these events as a function either faith or belief (mental) or some physiological mechanic (physical) but rather the product of some other plane of experience, that like possum, I cannot either elicit, control, reproduce, or prove. Therefore, I see no reason to seek substantiation for it in either the physical sciences, philosophy, or theology. Even though all the above would testify to some level or degree of its possible existence i.e. physics,metaphysics,& religion. But by the same token, I also see no reason to deny it its existence, especially since I’ve had very definite (profound even) experiences of it.
At some point though it would be good if we can acknowledge that the language of objective truth, science, while in fact a truncated and limited by design, language used to crop off and delineate the extranious human “sense” from the description of the “reference” – as Gottlob Frege might put it – is actually never entirely free of it (its sense) remaining in fact, quite dependent upon it. Otherwise there would be no evolution of it possible. Or if scientific description/proof were genuinely/ultimately definitive it would be a closed system (like mathematics) capable of referencing only itself.
“Sense” then like “reference” are two interdependent (Frege again) parts to any description and run a parallel to the traditional mind/body, physical/spiritual split. The problems arise when one side of equation seeks to define out of the equation the other. Religion (for one) tries to define out reference while science hopes to remove sense. As I see it both are integral and interdependent, after all if matter(reference) is neither created nor destroyed why not sense (consciousness/spirit)?

Posted by: anna missed | Sep 3 2007 6:12 utc | 65

wolfie.. sorry! i suppose it is not much excuse to say how frazzled i was when i made that mistake. this is all very embarrassing. i value this community so much. there are so many things you (and others too) say i don’t respond to..too many thoughts and words and posts to respond to… i would really like to move thru this because this argument/embarrassment is not worth me slamming a forever door. thank you all and lets carry on and i’m sorry for my volatility and lack of composure.

Posted by: annie | Sep 3 2007 6:42 utc | 67

@anna missed:
As I see it both are integral and interdependent, after all if matter(reference) is neither created nor destroyed why not sense (consciousness/spirit)?
For the simple reason that sense can be demonstrated to be dependent on not just matter but on the configuration of matter. A sufficiently skilled and unethical brain surgeon could alter your consciousness/personality, or even remove it entirely, while leaving you alive.
Do you think there’s a laboratory somewhere, where there are a bunch of old bald guys in white coats saying “today will be the day we finally abolish the spirit!” and then they cackle and go off to experiment? Of course not. The breakdown of consciousness to a physical phenomenon is something that arises incidentally, as a result of trying to help people with brain damage.

Posted by: The Truth Gets Vicious When You Corner It | Sep 3 2007 6:48 utc | 69

@Anna missed
I just realized that I sounded very snarky. That was not my intent.I will admit to a degree of frustration because of reading what I felt was a lot of academic dancing around the pin, instead of adressing what is actually on the pin.
You have my apology.
Please tell your truth ,so as to encourage others to do the same.
We are NOT freaks.

Posted by: possum | Sep 3 2007 7:03 utc | 71

Ah yes, catlady, do-overs. I will get to that when I discuss reincarnation;-)
On to the substance of the disagreement.
jcairo, I’m surprised that you have picked the moniker of a character who absolutely lusted after the irrational mystical black bird, the stuff, as they say, that dreams are made of.
I did not comment on this thread because a reasonable response would have been too complex an undertaking for me at the time. So briefly, I guess I come down in the middle of this argument, but with many caveats.
Let’s talk a little bit about science and medicine.
Yes, I do feel that science is important, as is verifiability and repeatability, but science is so young and so in much in development, and the premises upon which it is currently built are so incomplete, and so influenced by the drive for profit, that, if our species survives, we will one day look at how limited our knowledge was and laugh, just as we laugh at the medieval practices of blood-letting and treating all manner of ills with mercury and lead compounds.
Speaking of which, while Europeans were engaging in those barbaric and deadly practices, China was treating patients with acupuncture with far better results. I believe that you are not qualified to judge whether acupuncture is “scientific” or not, as you know nothing about it, and so you are clearly wrong there.
To be brief about a topic which I could give a doctoral dissertation on, there are many paradigms of disease and health. Originally, disease was thought, in the Judeo-Christian mind, to arise from sin (An attitude we have not completely shaken judging by our response to AIDS). At one point we believed in evil spirits, or bad humours as causing disease. Then Pasteur stole his ideas on Germ Theory from Bechamp and we had a new paradigm for what causes illness. Later we discovered viruses and parasites and fungal forms. With the return of interest in natural foods, came the theory that toxins and poisons can be causing disease. A newer metaphor is seeing man as a symbiotic creature who simply cannot live without the trillions of beneficial bacteria in his gut which fixes and helps absorb many of the vitamins and nutrients necessary for health. There are newer theories which believe that disease forms are not causative but symptomatic, and can change from pleomorphic, to fungal, to viral forms at different stages. We are just discovering how many of the chemicals we put into our food and our environment, as those in plastics, can have disruptive effects on our not yet fully understood subtle chemical messaging system within our bodies: our glandular system, which in turn control the development and functioning of our organs. Our emotions can also effect our resistance to disease and illness. So there are many theories of what can cause illness.
Now which of these is causing our illness? Clearly, the treatment would be different depending upon the cause. Can we even tell at this point; does science know enough? For the average consumer and the average doctor, these are not even issues; give the person some antibiotics and send them home. If they come back, send them to a specialist who looks only at a part of the body.
There are also different ways to treat sickness. In Western medicine, we are enamored of three particularly barbaric methods almost exclusively: chemicals, radiation, and cutting body parts off (surgery). They all provide maximum labor and profits for the providers, while often providing very questionable benefits for the patient. In any event, this is what is known as allopathic medicine, the symptoms are treated, but not the underlying cause. Tumors are merely symptoms of cancer, they do not explain why they grew in the first place, and so-called modern cancer treatment, of which my sister is an expert and earns almost $1/2M/yr., does not address this. Money goes into finding new miracle drugs, not asking ourselves why the cancer rates have increased ten-fold in the last century, and then changing those conditions to prevent cancers.
So, despite our proclaimed veneration of science, we are not often sure what causes a disease and therefore we use methods which do no directly address that cause, but seem to work somewhat, some percentage of the time, and we call this science! If a leg falls off of our chair, we can try using the chair with only three legs as a stool, or we can nail a two -by-four to the seat, or we can use duct tape on the leg. That is the state of the great science we so venerate. We don’t yet understand why the leg fell off the chair, but we are full of McGuyver solutions.
So our “rational” science uses methods which have no relation to the disease state: cutting off body parts. We also insist on viewing parts of the body in isolation. That may work for a car, where the alternator needs replacing, for you can have a car without an alternator, but it is simply insane in the case of a human being — you can’t just replace all of the piping! Our science is filled with voodoo. We can assay the blood quantitatively, but it is considered the height of madness to look at that blood qualitatively — are the cells healthy? Western science identifies thirteen different levels of systems, like circulatory or skeletal, within the body. But, since we have no idea what life is or what causes it, it is very possible that there are more subtle systems which we are unaware of as yet.
In any event, there are other ways to treat illness. Herbs have been used for centuries, but it is only in the last twenty years that Western (primarily European) medicine has accepted this. It is our science which has to catch up with nature, not visa-versa. And even when it almost does, it still wants to see the herb as a drug and find the one part which works, rather than accept that there may be many subtle interactions even within the compounds of one plant, much less the extremely complicated multi-plant compounding systems used in western and oriental herbology .
I’m not going to catalog the hundreds of methods of treating disease, but I would like to touch briefly upon some energetic methods. There are many of these types of systems — acupuncture, shiatsu, reflexology, zero-point — to name a few, and the interesting thing is that they use different theoretical models of what is going on in the body, just as Indian ayurveda uses different models in its herbology from Chinese systems, or American Indian systems. Does this mean that they are mere superstition? Of course not!
Just as there are many paradigms — which are only our best theories at this point in time — of what causes disease, there are also many theories of what may alleviate or cure disease.
To someone who hasn’t studied these different modalities and the theoretical paradigms they are each based upon, like homeopathy, or Bach flowers, or chi gong, it may sound like nonsense. But if we really educate ourselves we will find that these systems often work very well, with very low levels of side effects.
And they are no more nonsense than the theory that our brains are not making enough serotonin and 50% of our population needs some form of SSRIs to function on a daily basis. Or that science has identified some hundred plus new mental disorders within the past forty years, all needing different treatments and medications. Or nonsense like the new “syndromes” which seem to be discovered by science every single week now: nervous leg syndrome, social anxiety syndrome, DKos eternal hope syndrome — each of which can be cured by some new scientific miracle drug.
In the end, it is we who create science, not science who creates us. And we are a very disturbed, unbalanced group of humans these days — we are creating an imbalanced and disturbed science. A science, you might say, with its own Cultural Hegemony, its own system of unexplored beliefs and prejudices, and clearly a science in which man seeks dominion over the world, not a science in which man seeks his place within the world.
When you speak of Science, you speak of the Scientific Method — that we can verify things with our senses, not by faith. But while I see snow, an Inuit sees 200 different types of snow. This is the core of the problem. To create a right Science, i must first work on myself and my senses. We have created a Science that sees Nuclear reactions and laser weapons, not one which sees the intricate connections of the web of life.
So, finally, we return to faith. This is not a Science I can put much faith in to save me. I must use my faith to save myself, so that I can then help develop a science which will help me stay saved.

Posted by: Malooga | Sep 3 2007 7:33 utc | 73

Truth,
Depends on what you mean by alive, personal identity, and consciousness. Stephen Hawking might disagree. My point is that how to account for mental life, the scientific minded seem to view it as a kind of spontaneous generation given the proper preconditions. Doesn’t quite jive from the full accountability perspective.

Posted by: anna missed | Sep 3 2007 7:59 utc | 75

The Vulcans really thought they were going to take over the whole world. And what’s more, they thought it would be easy.
They have failed as spectacularly as is possible in that goal — they’re getting pennies on their dollars. Who to blame? Hamas, Hizzbullah, N.K.? How about blaming Bush and themselves, the whole lot.
But, then again, they were never known for their introspection.

Posted by: Malooga | Sep 3 2007 8:19 utc | 77

Malooga, you gonna let singlewolfie have credit for #73? Well said–I’ll bet the long version is something! Thank you.

Posted by: catlady | Sep 3 2007 8:34 utc | 79

A new-age girlfriend once told me that she could “not relate” to sciencebecause it was so methodical, dry, tedious and devoid of feeling and intuition.
Well, in that respect, she is right. But then again, science is supposed to be tedious and methodical. I don’t want to read a medical journal in which a doctor describes a new surgical method as “you just sort of snip around at one of those veins or arteries or whatever until it feels right!”
To turn my question around: how many things were there that science could’t explain just a hundred years ago? Like how genetic traits are passed on fron one generation to the next or where the sun derives its source of energy or why I always get a ringin in my ears whenever the wife waxes the floor…
But there are some things that scienceis not intended to answer, like why we are here and what purpose fulfil in creation.
Those questions are worth of pondering, but not as part of a science curriculum.
PS: why are we even responding to that prick with all the personal jabs?

Posted by: ralphieboy | Sep 3 2007 9:28 utc | 81

@annie (#67)
Nothing to apologise for. I knew it was an honest mistake and I also knew from my own experiences how frazzled one can get when the dogpiles start up. No worries, that was my basic message.
I’m not trying to grapple over “credit”, it’s just that I have felt marginalised from this site since November 2006. When someone does address something I said and then attributes it elsewhere, I know (rationally) that it was an oversight that comes from having an “M” name. Sometimes, however, my rational side is not the one I lead with. That’s not always a bad thing, mind you, since we’re discussing “premonitions” and sundry. Irrationally going with my gut is the only thing that has kept me from serious trouble in the past.

Posted by: Monolycus | Sep 3 2007 10:07 utc | 83

For those who think they don’t give a damn about the British Premier Football League, this diatribe
from Craig Murray might change your mind, and give rise to some speculation about correlations between ownership of major sports franchises and political criminality.

Posted by: Hannah K. O’Luthon | Sep 3 2007 10:29 utc | 85

For those who think they don’t give a damn about the British Premier Football League, this diatribe
from Craig Murray might change your mind, and give rise to some speculation about correlations between ownership of major sports franchises and political criminality.

Posted by: Hannah K. O’Luthon | Sep 3 2007 10:43 utc | 87

HKO’L,
The WAPO article reminds me of the golden days of American manufacturing: times when a higher education or qualification was optional.
Well into the 70’s, you could take up a factory job after quitting high school, and if you stuck at it long enough, you’d have enough seniority to enjoy a comforable wage.
I remember a graduating senior from the class of 1974 explaining to me that he could go pursue a degree in engineering and start at $15,000 per year or just go work in the coke plant for $12,000, and that he had opted for the latter.
Those days, and those jobs are long gone. Those without education and training are being increasingly left behind. Education is no longer an option, it is a necessity if you don’t want to stuck in a series of temporary, poor-paying jobs for the rest of your career.

Posted by: ralphieboy | Sep 3 2007 12:30 utc | 89

Don’t mean to change the topic but I wanted to share this piece, which does a fairly good job of laying out all the issues involved in the upcoming Lebanese election for President. This is also the all-important larger political context for the Nahr al-Bared battle that we’ve all been following as a relatively isolated event. I’ll return to that in a moment.
I think it’s important to keep an eye on Lebanon since developments there are of a piece with the larger efforts the US is making in Palestine, Iraq, Syria, and the region generally. It is one piece of the puzzle, but a piece that for some reason is very important to the Bush administration, so important that they allowed Israel to unleash a highly destructive war against it last year and they passed an executive order threatening anyone who opposes “democracy” there (ie, the current Siniora administration) with having their US funds frozen and being barred from entry into the US. So these presidential elections, since they are a linchpin upon which the stability of the entire political system in Lebanon could stand or fall, are very important indeed to watch.
In Lebanon, the President has significant power; it is not just a figurehead position. Per Wikipedia, the president authorizes laws passed by the Parliament, issues supplementary regulations to ensure the execution of laws, and negotiates and ratifies treaties.

Sheikh Naim Qasem, deputy secretary- general of Hizbullah, told Al-Hayat the government of Prime Minister Fouad Al-Siniora could not stay on if no president were elected. “The opposition might find itself obligated to form a government that would fill in the governmental vacuum,” he said, adding that the opposition was “serious in looking for other solutions for the problem if no agreement is reached about the national unity government.”
In that event, Saad-Ghorayeb said, either Lahoud would hand power over to army chief Michel Suleiman — effectively a military coup — or the opposition would announce a rival government.
At heart is a broader struggle between US plans to disarm the Iranian-backed Hizbullah after Israel failed to do so in last summer’s war and the Shia guerrillas’ determination to retain “the weapons of resistance”.

I believe the reason that Lebanon is, at this juncture, so important to the US is the enormous infrastructure, military strength, and popular support that Hizbullah has managed to build all across the south of the country, which is Israel’s northern border, and which effectively extends the reach of Iran all the way to Syria. The other reason Lebanon is important to the U.S. is that Syria has traditionally been a huge influence there, and the U.S. is all about rolling back and containing or eliminating the Syrian influence in the country (and in the region generally). So although Lebanon is a very small and negligible presence in the region, its role as a piece in the larger puzzle mosaic of the region is, at this moment in history, highly significant.
Now, why is Nahr al-Bared important to Lebanese national politics, specifically the issue of the presidency? Well, as the article spells out, under the sectarian/confessional Lebanese political system (based on the demographic balance in the country in 1932), the president must be a Maronite Christian (just as other key positions are slated for other groups, for example, the Prime Minister should be a Sunni Muslim). Michel Suleiman, the present head of the army, is one of the few plausible candidates for president, and the Nahr al-Bared battle has apparently boosted his popularity in the country considerably. I don’t know how the U.S. views the various candidates or which one they favor, but I will try to find out.
So the long and the short of it is, in addition to all the ways we can see Nahr al-Bared being politically significant (for example, as an effort to sow internal Palestinian division, as an effort to pave the way for a new air base, etc), we must also add to the list that it has been highly significant to the internal power struggle that has been going on in Lebanon for control of the government since the 2006 war and before. Because it has fundamentally changed the longstanding rules of the game about the relationship between the Lebanese army and the Palestinian refugee camps in the country, and because it has boosted the power of an important candidate for the presidency, which in itself is an important part of the ongoing struggle between forces that want to preserve the old sectarian system (which allocates more power to Christians in the country than many feel they should have, given their present, considerably reduced, demographic weight), and forces (including Hizbullah) that want to modernize and potentially de-sectarianize the government system, redistributing power in accordance with current demographic reality. The current demographic reality is unknown, since no Lebanese government has been willing to undertake a new census since 1932, given the explosiveness of the issue.
I don’t know much more than this about the issue, but if anyone else on here knows more about internal Lebanese politics, please enlighten us further.

Posted by: Bea | Sep 3 2007 13:38 utc | 91

Interesting interview with the former Iraqi Ambassador to the US

~Snip
“Enough with these mystifications ! The Americans are not fighting al-Qaeda in Iraq, they are waging war against the Iraqis. There are only a few, very few followers of al-Qaeda in Iraq. The Americans themselves acknowledged that the number of Islamist foreign combatants in the country is irrelevant. The American forces are committing crimes and they’re looking out for a justification of these crimes declaring they’re fighting al-Qaeda.
~Snip
I foresee a very bleak future for my country. On the short term, I predict a division of the state into three or four entities: a Kurdish one, another one in the south, on behalf of which the Americans will reach an agreement with Iran, which, in turn, will become the point of reference for the southern entity, then a third one, a Sunni entity, which will encompass the area between Mosul and the Anbar province, in addition to a central entity with Baghdad and parts of the Diyala and the Babel provinces. We’ll have the fragmentation of Iraq”.
How might Turkey react to the creation of an independent Kurdish entity ?
“There’s every reason to believe Turkey might take recourse to force. A referendum in Kirkuk (planned for this autumn) is a time-bomb capable of devastating the region. Turkey will never grant its Kurdish population self-determination, as Saddam Hussein did”.
Do you predict the presence of permanent US military bases in Iraq?
“There’s no doubt about that.”
~Snip
The recent American approach setting the Iraqi government goals to be achieved within a prescribed time schedule, can it work out as a method ?
“There’s nothing functioning in Iraq now. Four years into the occupation, there’s no authority to govern the country. Not even the so-called guaranteed security zones are really safe and governed. Chaos engulfs everything. They’re trying to administer some anaesthetic pills to public opinion declaring that they’re in the process of getting things under control step by step. But reality is quite different”.
~Snip
The commander of the American forces, David Petraeus, says the fight against the guerrilla might go on even for decades.
“Of course it will. Because what he has in mind is probably the time-limit for exploitation of Iraqi oil. According to what is within our knowledge, oil extraction in Iraq will go on for at least five more decades. That’s what Petraeus is hinting at. It will be necessary to go on fighting and to keep a military presence on the territory until the last drop of oil will be extracted”.

Posted by: Bea | Sep 3 2007 14:08 utc | 93

Palestinian leader Abbas dismisses government employees appointed by Hamas and announces a new electoral law that observers say could effectively exclude Hamas from participating in future elections.

Posted by: Bea | Sep 3 2007 14:14 utc | 95

Palestinian leader Abbas dismisses government employees appointed by Hamas and announces a new electoral law that observers say could effectively exclude Hamas from participating in future elections.

Posted by: Bea | Sep 3 2007 14:34 utc | 97

@R’Giap
No, I never did get any apology from the parties responsible… and wouldn’t accept one at this late date, anyhow. I was merely told off for not being a good sport about it. Doesn’t matter. I’ve learned what needed to be learned from all that and haven’t put myself out there to the same degree since. Hard feelings aplenty on my end which affect a total of me. Go on about your business.
@annie
A great man shared a proverb with me during a time like this: “What does an oak care if a pig rubs against it?” Thought I’d share.

Posted by: Monolycus | Sep 3 2007 14:44 utc | 99