I've always been a champion of 'green' issues and certainly acknowledge their significance on everyday social life. I rhink what I'm trying to say, and didn't make it that clear in my post, is that what I see in political figures like Gore and David Cameron, as well as business leaders such as Richard Branson is opportunism and tokenism - neither of which help any cause.

I watched Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth with an open mind but found the message he put forward constantly compromised by an unnecessary strategy to make us like him personally. Simialrly, when Branson talks of donating huge sums to tackle climate change I can't help but think his motivation is for us to think his Virgin empire is 'nice'.

Global Change has thus become a 'nice' issue. Unfortunately, for it to become anything more it's going to have to start telling a few more 'inconvenient' and uncomfortable truths than the likes of Gore, Cameron and Branson currently seem to be willing to deliver - as those who believe saving the planet means little more than recycling their baked bean cans probably want to hear.

I still feel that there are more troubling issues right now than climate change, but if we are to tackle it, it needs to be done with conviction, rather than as a plea for political and commercial popularity.

And that works out well for you, since, you know, Great Britain is the most censored society in the world. And it's also probably the one with the least amount of privacy.

Yeah, sort of like Alfred Nobel who invented dynamite and then started the Nobel Foundation.


Yes, the most important issue before us is to eliminate the inherent corruption in politics.

Yeah, I have a real fascination with guilt ridden scientists: that sense of intellectual brilliance reaching its logical conclusion in destruction. In that sense Oppenheimer's speech from 1945 remains one of the greatest, and most defining, of the last century.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=n8H7Jibx-c0

What's particularly saddening is how few of those politicians that have themselves been responsible for bringing carnage to the world ever publicly admitted to a similar sense of self-disgust. Their apparant inability to acknowledge those instances where needless death and catastrophy has arisen out of their actions reserves for them a particularly dank corner of hell.


And for that very reason alone, of the three I know which one I'd rather see in charge.

Nobel Peace Prize lost all meaning when they gave one to that unindicted-War Criminal Henry Kissinger, "A massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. Anything that flies on anything that moves."
Because it'd be so much better if the USA had won the counter-insurgency war and imposed its usual style of American-friendly dictatorship (just like the good ol' days in South Korea, Philippines, Indonesia, etc; and the entire regions of South America, Africa and the Middle East!)
There have already been riots in Mexico over the increasing cost of tortillas, a staple food of the poor there, with bio-fuel buying up more of the corn crop that leaves less for food and then Supply & Demand kicks in raising prices. Expect this to get worse as more food crops in poor countries are converted to fuel crops for rich countries.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7026105.stm
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/...cle2697788.ece
http://www.chomsky.info/articles/20070515.htm
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2007...ion/#more-1051
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6481029.stm

Naa thats Burma

Is this anything to do with why a lot food products use oats these days?

Uh, no. My point about Kissinger, and his name making the whole Nobel "Peace" Prize illegitamate, was the same exact one you were making, so we don't even have an argument here. How you could infer from my comments that I was saying the U.S. winning in Viet Nam would have been good, I don't know. It was a completely unjust collonial war from the get go (when we took it over from France, though it was for them too.)

My point was merely that Kissinger basically lost to the North Vietnamese in that they succeeded in driving the U.S. out without their government being overthrown, and oddly that was translated into a Nobel Peace Prize for the butcher we both revile. Truly ridiculous.

I don't think the North Vietnamese leader being honored made any sense either, because as you point out, winning a war is not making peace anymore than losing one. Certainly defending your homeland is more justifiable than invading somebody else's, and it may be an act of Justice, but not Peace.

Personally I'd like to see the end of the award altogether, except in its celebration of contributions through science and the arts, and even then I'm not sure. We increasingly live in a society where any good deed seems worthy of some award or another. Hardly a day goes by now when I don't open the paper to find that somebody has received an award for some pointless endeavour. I'm just waiting for the day when somebody is given an award for most awards received.

Mr. Gore seems to be on his way with his Oscar, Emmy, and Nobel all for stating the obvious.

I have to ask, what makes Kissinger butcher?

Dead-Air, before war with North Vietnam there was the counter-insurgency against the South Vietnamese people, very nasty business, its purpose to do as I explained. (And the whole point in the first place was to stop even the very idea of independent development from spreading through SE Asia, something they handily did when Suharto came to power amidst a blood-bath in 1965)
From what I've read, and in the links I provided, it's the Mexican corn and maize being bought to make Ethanol, leaving less of it for the poor to make food.
counter-insurgency (state-terrorism against a population), wars of aggression, overthrowing governments the USA doesn't like and installing friendly dictatorships (thats why Kissinger rarely travels outside the USA, and even then with firm guarantees on his safety, he is wanted for questioning in dozens of countries in relation to murders committed by dictatorships the USA installed or backed), encouraging other countries into wars of aggression, and so on. If you just want a quick summary of this stuff then try the documentary The Trials of Henry Kissinger, based on the Christopher Hitchens book of the same name (written before he went over to the dark side of course).

not exactly.

tortillas are made with WHITE corn. ethanol with YELLOW (the one that nasty "taco shells" are made of).

as the price of yellow corn increases to meet the demand of ethanol, the price of white corn, which is indexed in mexico to the international price of yellow corn, increases along.

then the government tried to put some price controls on white corn, but it's not enforced by law, so people are charging more anyway.

but then having a price cap would drive producers to grow yellow corn for export, which creates scarcity & makes the price controls untenable.

so mexicans are looking for other staples, but they are not nearly as nutritious as the tortilla, because the process of tortilla making among other thing releases vitamin B.

the result of eating say flour tortillas on a daily basis as opposed to corn is malnutrition.

BUT

this is not simply supply and demand. there are protectionisms in place.

1) mexico did not traditionally let cheaper american corn into its market, but it had to open up with nafta

2) the u.s. don't allow cheaper ethanol from brazilian sugar into its markets, thus driving up the price of corn

complicated, huh?

moreover

3) corn seed imported from the u.s. is genetically manipulated by monsanto et. al., as opposed to the more diverse genetic pool of mexican corn.

it goes on & on. it's more interesting than the x files.

Precisely what I was talking about, good work though with the greater details:cool: