You cannot call the Queen or King of England by their last name...

...because "Regina" or "Rex" is much more posh than "Saxe-Coburg-Gotha"?

From Wikipedia:
Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor

So why nor call her Lizzy, Lilibet or Mrs. Windsor? I don't see anything wrong there.

---

Gruesse vom Saenger

For questions about Boinc look in the BOINC-Wiki

You cannot call the Queen or King of England by their last name...

...because "Regina" or "Rex" is much more posh than "Saxe-Coburg-Gotha"?

From Wikipedia:
Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor

So why nor call her Lizzy, Lilibet or Mrs. Windsor? I don't see anything wrong there.

aka Battenburg

---

Account frozen...

I say "bring on the tumbrils"!

---

The D.E.V.I.L. Act and the Disconnected American

by Dennis Grover

Being 60 years old and having an occasional "senior moment" is not unsettling; being 60 years old and watching 30-year-olds experience them in rapid succession, is.

It’s a sad observation, but any adult American capable of thought must acknowledge the phenomena of disconnect between what is obviously right in front of someone and their inability to decipher what they see or hear. You see it in traffic, schools, social events, courtrooms, personal relationships, family, friends and the workplace.

Frustrations come to those of us who see, process and respond to an event, but find ourselves in the midst of a herd seeing the same event but waiting for an official explanation of the obvious. The frustration increases when the herd is offered an interpretation and common sense defying narration stating that what they saw wasn’t what they saw. It reaches a level of stupefying proportions when the herd member who believes that what is right in front of them isn’t right in front of them responds to you with venomous accusations, character judgments and a propaganda-induced labeling process that is generally 180 degrees out of whack from reality.

Now the herd has bought into the "P.A.T.R.I.O.T" act after the anointed media hummed a few bars incorrectly. Thinkers who have actually read it and became aware that the P.A.T.R.I.O.T. act is not a Patriot act, find themselves labeled terrorists. How in the hell did this condition manifest in the United American States? Was it simply destiny that smart people became ignorant (and in some cases stupid) or was it a planned assault on a great nation plagued with apathy in order to take control of their wealth and dignity?

Personally, I believe that ignorance is a result of laziness. Stupidity comes from ignoring ignorance. If a plan to create massive passives were to be implemented, what would it look like?

With the ability to reach into the depths of the English language as far as the authors of the U.S.A. P.A.T.R.I.O.T. act did, (Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism) I came up with "Dudes Envisioning Villagers Inviting Looting" or the D.E.V.I.L. act. I perceive its inception and implementation to look something like this:

We, the D.E.V.I.L., declare that the Constitutional Republic that now flourishes in America be gradually transformed into a corporate dictatorship through a slowly implemented scheme of education manipulation, medication, mind controls and lies. We pledge to do this with the uninformed consent of the American people. We will take their lives, their fortunes and leave them no sacred honor.

We will teach their children to honor the state and the officials we select.

We will revise history and demonize their founders.

We will replace their wealth with a fiat currency.

We will teach them to live in fear of their police, their governments and their neighbors.

We will impose a tax on everything they do and create.

We will create a legal system to replace their justice system and administer it with mindless whores.

We will poison their water with fluoride, chlorine and any other toxic substance we need to get rid of.

We will poison their food with chemical preservatives.

We will addict them to aspartame and pharmaceutical drugs.

We will villianize all natural health supplements, proponents and remedies.

We will fill their mouths with mercury.

We will fill their skies with streaks of chemicals.

We will license every right they have by convincing them that they are privileges.

We will burn their churches, bomb and/or fly planes into buildings whenever the people appear to not be obliged to our agendas.

We will make medications and then create illnesses for them.

We will promote hate by taking from one group and giving to another..

We will impose our lack of morality on every phase of their communication.

We will restrict their communication unless it fits our plan.

We will take their guns.

We will fabricate wars on drugs, poverty, terrorism and sanity.

We will pollute their air to generate power and lie about it.

We will instill our will in every crevice of their lives from their church to their bedroom.

We will teach them that skin pigmentation and gender is directly related to intelligence and rights, which will surely create racism and division.

We will create the illusion that they choose their own leaders and therefore what they get is what they have chosen.

We will make enough laws to be sure that everything is illegal.

We will have our chosen judges make their own laws.

We will retain ownership of all of their "private" property without their knowledge.

When they challenge us in court we will cut out their tongues, then tell them to defend themselves.

We will bankrupt their country and then lie about it.

We will create new "rights" for some groups to further internal divisiveness.

We will remove any reference to God from our schools and our buildings.

We will vaccinate them against everything we can dream up and put any damn thing we want directly into their bodies.

We will drive all American ingenuity and productivity to other countries.

We will destroy the family farm, family business and family structure.

We will own their children, their thoughts and their production.

While there is much more we will do, this is a great start to creating a nation of dumbed-down slaves who feed themselves.

Knowing that the D.E.V.I.L. Act created this situation, the Disconnected American should come as no surprise to anyone. On the other hand, however, I believe it is possible for those who are not too far-gone to re-connect. All that is required is to verify the D.E.V.I.L. plan and take steps to eliminate it from your own personal life. You alone cannot change or save the nation, but you alone can save yourself, which carries the bonus of saving the nation. If you don’t see it, you cannot act on it and will remain ignorant. If you see it and don’t act on it you are it.

The massive passives and their civil rights are created by the D.E.V.I.L. God creates real Americans and their unalienable rights. Which are you?

Dennis Grover is the author of Knowledge Equals Freedom and the Host of the syndicated cable access TV program With Liberty and Justice for All

The massive passives and their civil rights are created by the D.E.V.I.L. God creates real Americans and their unalienable rights. Which are you?

Dennis Grover is the author of Knowledge Equals Freedom and the Host of the syndicated cable access TV program With Liberty and Justice for All/

Sounds like the current Republican congress and administration.

---

Account frozen...

Artists remove Austria sex poster

Controversial billboards depicting Queen Elizabeth II, George W Bush and Jacques Chirac have been removed in Austria.

The posters, part of a public art project, showed three people in masks of the public figures apparently having sex.

---

"I'm trying to maintain a shred of dignity in this world." - Me

Labor unions for the 21st century

GEORGE F. WILL
THE WASHINGTON POST

December 29, 2005

In one of the biggest successes in the history of organized labor in the South, the 4,700 janitors working for Houston's four largest cleaning companies recently joined the Service Employees International Union. The janitors, mostly immigrants, currently earn an average of $5.30 an hour – 15 cents over the minimum wage – without health care benefits. The mobilization of the janitors is one sign of why Andy Stern, head of SEIU, is today's most important – perhaps the only really important – labor leader.

Stern was an Ivy League graduate when he went to his first union meeting. He went, he says, because pizza was being served. The class struggle, like God, moves in mysterious ways.

He – Stern, not God – has come a long way. Last year he was the principal architect of the secession of the SEIU and six other unions from the AFL-CIO. The seven, now called the Change to Win Federation, were primarily motivated by the AFL-CIO's sluggish recruitment of new members. The seven have more than 5.4 million members, making the group a credible rival to the more than 9-million-member AFL-CIO.

But to what end? In the 1930s, organized labor's function was, Stern says, "rounding off the rough edges of industrialism." In 1939, the year war erupted in Europe and America's rearmament started to end the Depression, there were 1,350,000 American college students, but there were more people than that in just two blue-collar industries, railroading (988,000) and mining soft coal (388,300). By 1968, railway workers and coal miners combined totaled only 715,900, but college students numbered 6,900,000.

Today only 12.5 percent of the work force is unionized, down from the peak of 35.5 in 1945. With 36.4 percent of the public sector unionized, and only 7.9 percent of the private sector, soon – perhaps next year – a majority of union members will be government employees. Given Americans' skepticism about government, Stern understands the perils of labor becoming perceived as government organized as an interest group that lobbies itself. "The public sector," he says, sounding almost like a crypto-conservative, "is not the wealth-generating part of our economy."

But he is no conservative. "The economy," he says, "on an aggregated basis, is doing fine – the problem is distribution." Hence the solution is not just, or even primarily, government, which, Stern says, "does a really bad job of distribution over the long run."

He aims to convince nonunion workers "that Ronald Reagan was wrong – that wealth does not trickle down." And that "Bill Clinton also was wrong" in saying high-tech employment is the wave of the future. A large (19 percent) and growing portion of the work force is in services and, Stern says, "When you're involved with customers, you can't have a class struggle." Instead, unions, such as those that train employees for some Las Vegas hotels, have to rethink the way they add value to the economy.

In 1972, when liberalism hitched its wagon to George McGovern's presidential candidacy, George Meany, head of the AFL-CIO, made his preference clear by not endorsing McGovern and by playing golf with President Nixon. The next year, Stern, then 23, fresh from the University of Pennsylvania and overflowing with enthusiasm for liberal causes, became a unionized social worker and soon was head of a SEIU local.

Today Stern thinks globally. He has been to China five times and believes few Americans comprehend the scale of that nation's potential challenge to America's economic supremacy. Intel Corp., he says, sponsors science fairs around the world for students heading to college. Last year 66,000 young Americans participated in the local fairs that select finalists. In China, 6 million participated.

A world with global flows of trade and capital, and with global employers, needs, Stern says, global unions. If Stern could organize China, that nation's comparative trade advantages would be reduced. The National Association of Manufacturers might want to pay his way to go there.

Stern would, of course, rather bury Republicans than praise them, but his Democratic allies cannot do the former until they pay attention to him doing the latter, which he does, if only up to a point. This point:

Democrats, he says, think presidential elections are like the quiz show "College Bowl." They think it is important to put forward someone like Al Gore or John Kerry who can demonstrate mastery of minutia. Republicans understand that presidential elections are like "American Idol": It is best to put forward someone people actually like.

Stern has the theory right, but his application of it needs some work. In 2003, he endorsed Howard Dean.

Annan's tantrum - Angry response shows need for U.N. reform

UNION-TRIBUNE EDITORIAL

December 30, 2005

The spring scrum over President Bush's nomination of blustery John Bolton to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations was largely but not wholly partisan. Many people, including some Republicans, doubted the wisdom of naming a U.N. envoy who held the world body in such open disdain. But what was striking was how many Democrats didn't just dislike Bolton's style; they considered his calls for U.N. reform to be overwrought. California Sen. Barbara Boxer led this pack, expressing horror at Bolton's view of the United Nations as bloated, ineffective and corrupt.

In the wake of U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan's embarrassing and revealing dust-up with a British journalist last week, we wonder what Boxer and her pals would say now. Annan's tantrum over one tough question – and, more broadly, his resentment of media coverage of his complacent U.N. stewardship – illustrates both the extent of the U.N.'s rot and why it will never reform without external pressure.

The tiff began when James Bone of The London Times asked Annan at a press conference about a Mercedes that Annan's son Kojo had purchased in his father's name in order to receive a diplomatic discount and tax break of more than $20,000. The scam was disclosed in Paul Volcker's report earlier this year on the U.N.'s scandalous handling of the Iraqi oil-for-food program, which degenerated into a multibillion-dollar morass of graft and bribery. Among its many troubling findings, the report chronicled Kojo Annan's employment by a Swiss firm that won a lucrative U.N. contract for work in Iraq.

Rather than answer Bone's question, Annan berated the reporter as an "overgrown schoolboy" and called him an "embarrassment" to his profession. While Annan's tone was unusual, his thrust was the same as it has been for months: decrying the media for their investigatory zeal. But the problem for Annan is that the Volcker report raised as many questions as it answered, and that he continues to act in ways that invite new questions.

It's not just Annan's refusal to acknowledge that his son used his status in shady, appalling ways. It's that the Volcker report that Annan implies is a vindication of his purity actually showed him to be an impediment to the inquiry, displaying the sort of memory of convenience that one expects of a fraud defendant, not the head of the United Nations. Just what was in the files that Annan's former chief of staff shredded?

Meanwhile, U.N. officials show little interest in helping authorities bring Benon Sevan, the bribe-taking former head of the oil-for-food program, to justice.

No wonder Bone and other journalists have so many pointed questions for the secretary-general. He has so much to answer for.

And no wonder Bolton insists that the next secretary-general – Annan's term ends Dec. 31, 2006 – must be a tough administrator committed to reform, not an Annan acolyte. It is time for change at the United Nations – profound change. If Boxer and other U.N. apologists don't like it, tough luck.

---

Account frozen...

A widespread failure of governance

DAVID IGNATIUS
THE WASHINGTON POST

December 31, 2005

At year-end, I usually like to offer readers a lighthearted collection of imaginary headlines, but 2005 somehow didn't seem very funny. This past year was in many ways an annus horribilis for America and the world. Political and natural disasters seemed to proliferate, beyond the power of governments or leaders to manage them effectively.

The United States was a prime example of this global failure of governance. If we had a parliamentary system, George Bush's government might well have fallen in 2005. The administration struggled to cope with rising dissent on Iraq, on its response to Hurricane Katrina, even on its signature issue of the war on terrorism. Republicans in Congress, sensing Bush's unpopularity, began running for cover.

Bush seemed to be groping toward the center by autumn, avoiding extremes in his Iraq policy and his nominations for the Supreme Court and the Federal Reserve. But some of his choices alienated the right without building any base of trust among moderates. What kept Bush afloat was his basic affability – that shoulder-shrugging, "Look folks, I'm trying," kind of ordinariness that leads people either to like him or loathe him.

A measure of the Democrats' disarray in 2005 was that if the Bush government had fallen in our hypothetical parliamentary system, it would almost certainly have been replaced by another GOP government, headed by a moderate conservative such as Sen. John McCain. The lack of a coherent Democratic alternative was part of what gave 2005 its grim, no-exit feeling. Not only is the current administration failing to solve problems, it's hard to imagine the other team doing much better.

In Europe, there was a similar sense of political paralysis. A grandiose but empty European constitution was rejected by voters in France and the Netherlands and eventually scrapped. The episode symbolized the failure of political leaders to explain coherently what sort of entity the European Union will be, beyond such slogans as "ever deeper, ever wider." As in America, Europe conveyed an image of political leaders failing to cope – caught between inexorable forces of change and voters who want life to stay the same.

Coping with globalization was a no-brainer for leaders in Russia and China. They opted for authoritarian rule – leavened with goodies from the international marketplace. It was hard to know what was more depressing – the contempt of Russian and Chinese leaders for democracy, or the willingness of their publics (and the rest of the world's leaders) to play along.

The most frightening symbol of dysfunctional government this year was Iraq. Despite a stirring election in January, the new Iraqi government – burdened with a hated American occupation and vicious sectarian tension – failed to thrive. Indeed, over the past year, Iraq seemed to be becoming more of a mafia state, with each party, sect and tribe fighting for its share of what's left of the ruined economy.

At year-end, there was hope that Iraq's feuding politicians had become so exhausted that – despite another polarizing election in December – they might cobble together a government of national unity, blessed by Shiite Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and Sunni Muslim clerics. In practice, this grand coalition might emulate the warlords' council approach in Afghanistan. That would be progress. But for years to come, Iraq is likely to remain a source of instability and terror.

It was a bad year, finally, for the people who are paid to make sense of things – the unhumble and increasingly unloved scribes in my business of journalism. Newspaper circulation was plummeting, network television lost its anchors, literally and figuratively, and new media seemed to be feeding on popular anger at the Mainstream Media and its claims of impartiality.

At the center of some of the year's biggest stories stood the media itself – trying to balance codes of professional ethics against demands of citizenship. The New York Times lionized Judith Miller for going to jail to protect her sources from a grand jury investigation, but when her key source turned out to be Vice President Dick Cheney's top aide, the cheering stopped and Miller lost her job. Top editors of the Times and The Washington Post tried to act responsibly by discussing explosive intelligence stories with the White House before publication, and then were vilified by the left for publishing too little and by the right for publishing anything at all.

Maybe the lesson of 2005 was the same for the media as for the politicians: Hang on tight to your values, and don't be afraid to let that passion animate your work; be careful about making promises you can't or shouldn't keep; don't try to please everyone, or you may end up pleasing nobody at all.

All things are possible on Jan. 1

JOAN RYAN
THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

December 31, 2005

Jan. 1 is the tomorrow we avoid all year, as in "I'll start my diet tomorrow" or "I'll think about finding a job tomorrow." On Jan. 1, the jig is up.

Which is a good thing. If it were not for Jan. 1, we'd have to rely on our own good character to break bad habits and start good ones.

The architects of the modern calendar seemed to understand that relying on ourselves was not a workable plan. They seemed to know that initiative and will power were not as abundant in the human soul as, say, the powers of rationalization that let you purchase a Dunkin' Donuts "family pack" to brighten the morning of your office mates and, OK, since the box is right there by your desk, you might just treat yourself to a cruller or three.

So they made sure there were, at reasonable intervals, endings and beginnings – the end of one year, the beginning of another. And they scheduled the end and the beginning at exactly the right time. The creators of the calendar anticipated that, in the days after Christmas, we would look up from pushing the last broken fragments of cookies into our mouths, brush the crumbs from our shirts, take stock of our hung-over, hefty selves and need, as desperately as we have ever needed anything, to declare a do-over.

The great gift of Jan. 1 is that it doesn't matter how piggy and slothful and irresponsible we have been the previous 365 days, how many Oreos, Frappuccinos, double-stuffed pizzas or martinis we have consumed, or how many trips to the gym gave way instead to naps. We shove all that behind us (and what a behind it has become) and, with just the turn of the calendar from Dec. 31 to Jan. 1, we get to turn the page on ourselves, too. We get to believe that the character flaws that have delivered us to this same sorry state every year can be piled at the curb and carted away with the empty Champagne bottles.

Some need the do-overs this year more than others. If the runaway bride had it all to do over again, she might have chosen to, I don't know, have a discussion with her fiance before staging a "24"-style kidnapping.

Tom Cruise might wish he hadn't been so – what's the word? – brainless (but kind of funny in a creepy way) in holding forth with the "Today" show's Matt Lauer on the history of psychiatry. Lauer handled the interview with the patience of a white-coated attendant handing out meds. But his own do-over might be that he would have asked how Cruise managed to fit medical school in between making "Mission Impossible" movies and kissing Katie Holmes for photographers.

Somebody in the White House might have wished they had known George Bush was actually serious when, during the search for a Supreme Court nominee, he said that of all the judges and lawyers and really smart people in the United States, the best choice was the head of the search committee itself, his own good friend Harriet Miers.

Somebody also might have warned Bush against gushing about Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Mike Brown while cameras showed dead bodies floating in the New Orleans floodwaters. Brown, for his part, probably wishes he had spent as much time figuring out what to do about the flood as he spent figuring out what to wear during interviews about it.

This year can't end fast enough for two local filmmakers whose productions attracted the kind of bold-headline publicity that money can't buy. The San Francisco 49ers public relations guy and a tech-savvy San Francisco police officer surely wish they had heeded the lessons of Richard Nixon: Tapes and information intended solely for "in-house" consumption don't always stay that way.

And speaking of which: Bob Woodward might wish he had accepted the offer of Mark Felt's family to reveal the identity of Deep Throat together. Instead, a San Francisco lawyer on the pages of Vanity Fair scooped him and The Washington Post.

As for myself, I wish I had made more frequent visits to the gym I joined in September and to which I continue to pay monthly dues. I figure it has cost me about $20 per minute on the elliptical machine. But that was 2005. The coming year will be different. This will be the One, the life-changing year. I will learn to love root vegetables and mixed greens. I will set People aside until I have read The New Yorker. I will do curls and crunches. I will find out what's in my garage. I will plant.

This year, I'm going to get it right. I can wipe the slate clean and start over. Jan. 1 is the tomorrow I can no longer postpone or avoid. And so as I sit here writing these hopeful words, I am thinking what surely all of us are on this last day before the new year:

It is not tomorrow yet.

Just how smart are the experts?

ELLEN GOODMAN
THE BOSTON GLOBE

January 2, 2006

This is the week when wise men bearing gifts are replaced by wise guys bearing lists. The news is full of the Best and Worst, the Ins and Outs, the Screw-ups and Fess-ups of 2005, not to mention the Predictions for 2006.

We have long followed the tradition by cleaning our slate of old mistakes in preparation for a fresh crop. This annual project is aided and abetted by vigilant readers, the sort who are quick to remind us that the world was created in six days, not seven – on the seventh day He rested – and that Vermonters do so eat pickles with their maple syrup.

But this year our mistakes seemed piddling compared to the whoppers made in the name of Katrina and Iraq, Harriet Miers and Judith Miller. Who are we to ask forgiveness when the president again denies any mistakes and declares, "This has been a year of strong progress toward a freer, more peaceful world, and a prosperous America." (Hold the champagne. Who needs bubbly when you're in a bubble?)

Thus, for assorted reasons we break from our Media Culpa awards to take a jaundiced overview of the entire field of experts, those whose punditry and predictions are now preparing you for 2006.

Our guide in this is Philip E. Tetlock, author of "Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?" Tetlock, a Berkeley business school psychologist, has become an expert on experts by following 284 men and women who make their living offering commentary and advice on political and economic trends. Over 20 years, he tracked 82,361 forecasts on specific matters such as the fall of the Soviet Union and the election of 2000.

The bottom line is that experts are no better at making predictions than dart-throwing monkeys or (not to be confused) careful readers of this newspaper. Experts are overly confident, choose evidence that supports what they already believe, and are loath to remember, let alone admit, when they're wrong.

Lest this support what you already believe about experts, the more interesting part of Tetlock's research is not about what people think but about how they think. He divided experts by psychology rather than politics, using those anthropomorphic creatures described in Isaiah Berlin's famous essay: the hedgehog and the fox.

The closed-minded hedgehogs are those who know "one big thing" and relate everything to that single, central vision. The open-minded foxes "know many little things" and accept ambiguity and contradictions.

Expert hedgehogs come in blue and red, left and right, but when things go awry – whether it's the Iraq war or the war on poverty – they are likely to go on believing they had the right idea but the wrong timing, or that they were blindsided by events. The foxes, on the other hand, are more likely to rethink the whole story.

As Tetlock writes, "Once many hedgehogs boarded a train of thought, they let it run full throttle in one policy direction for extended stretches, with minimal braking for obstacles that foxes took as signs they were on the wrong track."

It's no surprise that foxes are better at forecasting than hedgehogs. But the media roundtables and think tank conferences and wise guy lists are dominated by folks who speak the simple, decisive language of sound bites. Indeed, the quickest way to avoid cable show combat is to tell a booker desperately searching for someone to talk about the death penalty or the Patriot Act that "I have mixed feelings about that."

The end result is that the voices we hear most are not conservative or liberal. They are hedgehogs: think Bill O'Reilly and Michael Moore. No foxes need apply (even, or especially, on Fox).

In some ways, Tetlock's entire meta-analysis – graphs, academic-speak and all – can be boiled down to a favorite phrase my father would use to describe a colleague: Often wrong but never in doubt. In our media world, the more certain the expert, the more celebrated. And yet the more celebrated, the more likely he or she is to be wrong.

How then do we cultivate good judgment? Most Americans are probably hybrid creatures. In a fox-like moment, Tetlock advises that we listen to our own ambivalence as "we struggle to strike the right balance between preserving our existing worldview and rethinking core assumptions." Not a bad new year's resolution for a parent or even a president.

Meanwhile, those of us who would like to see politics depolarized might begin by keeping score on political experts and pundits the way we do on weathermen and stock analysts. So, welcome to 2006. Predictions are in the air. Anyone ready to make the first predictions on those predictions?

America's nuclear ticking bomb

By Jorge Hirsch

Hirsch is a professor of physics at the University of California San Diego. He is one of the originators of the physicists' petition on nuclear weapons policies started at the UCSD.

January 3, 2006

New U.S. policies for the use of nuclear weapons were formulated in the administration document "Nuclear Posture Review" of 2001 and became more sharply defined through a Pentagon draft document "Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations."

They envision the use of nuclear weapons against adversary underground installations, against adversaries using or intending to use weapons of mass destruction against U.S. forces and for rapid and favorable war termination on U.S. terms. Implementation of these policies, whose drafters occupy the upper echelons of the Bush administration today, could be precipitated in the near future by events unfolding in the Persian Gulf.

Iran's nuclear program has become a central theme in Israel's electoral campaign, with former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu openly advocating a pre-emptive attack against Iran's nuclear installations, and his main rival, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, explicitly not ruling out that possibility. Given the U.S. presence in Iraq and its close alliance with Israel, the United States would necessarily become militarily involved in the aftermath of such an Israeli attack.

Russia and China have sided with Iran in that it is legally entitled under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to enrich uranium for nonmilitary purposes. The United States adamantly opposes Iran's restarting of any uranium-enrichment-related activities and is pushing for Iran to be referred to the U.N. Security Council for sanctions. The United States has explicitly not ruled out its own military option against Iran and has recently exercised that option against a state (Iraq) suspected of having weapons of mass destruction and of sponsoring terrorism. Iran certainly falls in that category.

If only conventional bombs are used in an unprovoked U.S. or Israeli aerial attack against Iran's facilities, Iran is likely to retaliate with missiles against coalition forces in Iraq and against Israel, as well as possibly a ground invasion of southern Iraq, that the 150,000 U.S. troops in Iraq would not be able to withstand. Iranian missiles could potentially contain chemical warheads, and it certainly would be impossible to rule out such possibility. Iran has signed and ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention (in 1993 and 1997 respectively), however it is still likely to have supplies, as determined by the U.S. State Department in August 2005.

Early use by the United States of low-yield nuclear bombs with better bunker-busting ability than conventional bombs targeting Iranian nuclear, chemical and missile installations would be consistent with the new U.S. nuclear weapons doctrine and could be argued to be necessary to protect the lives of 150,000 U.S. soldiers in Iraq and of Israeli citizens. It would also send a clear message to Iran that any response would be answered by a far more devastating nuclear attack, thus potentially saving both American and Iranian lives.

However, the nuclear threshold is a line of no return. Once the United States uses a nuclear weapon against a nonnuclear adversary, the 182 countries that are signatories of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty will rightly feel at risk, and many of them will rush to develop their own nuclear deterrent while they can. A new world with many more nuclear countries, and a high risk of any regional conflict exploding into all-out nuclear war, will be the consequence.

The scientific community (which created nuclear weapons) is alarmed over the new U.S. nuclear weapons policies. A petition to reverse these policies launched by physicists at the University of California San Diego has gathered over 1,500 physicists' signatures including eight Nobel laureates and many prominent members of the U.S. scientific establishment (http://physics.ucsd.edu/petition/). Scientists object strongly to the concept of WMD, that lumps together nuclear weapons with other "weapons of mass destruction" and blurs the sharp line that separates immensely more destructive nuclear weapons from all other weapons.

An escalating nuclear war could lead to the destruction of civilization. There is no fundamental difference between small nuclear bombs and large ones, nor between nuclear bombs targeting underground installations versus those targeting cities or armies.

The nuclear weapons "taboo" has served humanity well over the past 60 years. If the use of nuclear weapons against nonnuclear countries is part of the military doctrine and planning of the United States, there will come a time when their use becomes unavoidable because no alternatives will have been planned for, as in the scenario described above.

These policies should not be implemented. All U.S. citizens should participate in a national debate on these dangerous policies that will hopefully lead to their repudiation and reversal before it is too late.

The nuclear weapons "taboo" has served humanity well over the past 60 years. If the use of nuclear weapons against nonnuclear countries is part of the military doctrine and planning of the United States, there will come a time when their use becomes unavoidable because no alternatives will have been planned for, as in the scenario described above.

Jorge doesn't seem to know much about the SIOP or military planning. The DoD has been war gaming countries in the Middle East since before WWII. While certainly that includes all manner of nuclear options, it also includes all manner of non-nuclear options.

It's no different from the NATO/US planning against a Soviet invasion through the the Fulda Gap in Germany. That planning included all manner of scenarios, from the most minor encounters to full nuclear war. That planning doesn't consist solely of "Eh, we'll just use nukes."

---

Cordially,
Rush

elrushbo2@theobviousgmail.com
Remove the obvious...

---

Account frozen...

However, the nuclear threshold is a line of no return. Once the United States uses a nuclear weapon against a nonnuclear adversary, the 182 countries that are signatories of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty will rightly feel at risk, and many of them will rush to develop their own nuclear deterrent while they can. A new world with many more nuclear countries, and a high risk of any regional conflict exploding into all-out nuclear war, will be the consequence.

This paragraph misses the entire point of contention between the US and Iran. The US asserts that Iran is developing nuclear weapons. Iran asserts that it engaged in peaceful research. The US counters that Iran must then allow intrusive IAEA inspections to prove what it says, and Iran balked. Iran is the one in violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, taking them out of the "non-nuclear" category. It would serve as a reminder to other potential nuclear powers that:

1) Nations must comply with the treaties they sign.
2) Nations must prove that they are complying.
3) Failure to comply and prove compliance is not a viable option.

The US signed several arms control treaties with extremely intrusive inspection regimes, so this is not a case of "do what I say, not what I do."

---

No animals were harmed in the making of the above post... much.

Back on the Belt Way...

---

Account frozen...