Public Enquiry Project

Suicide U.: Iran registers volunteers for martyrdom

Suicide U.: Iran registers volunteers for martyrdom

SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM
Friday, May 28, 2004
LONDON — Iran has established what could be the first training center for Islamic suicide attackers.

Iranian sources and media asserted that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps has established a center to train suicide attackers throughout the world. The sources identified the center as the World Islamic Martyrs and Fighters Staff Headquarters.

The eThe facility was said to have been established by the IRGC's intelligence service, responsible for the sponsorship and support of Islamic insurgency groups linked to Teheran. The groups have included Hamas, Hizbullah, Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command.

xistence of the center was first reported on May 26 by the state-operated Iranian Student News Agency, Middle East Newsline reported. On Friday, a similar version was published by the London-based daily A-Sharq Al Awsat in an article by Iranian analyst Ali Nouri

Zadeh...http://www.worldtribune.com/worldtribune/breaking_3.html

My friend, the thoughtful futurist, MAX MORE suggests how to face the dangers and opportunities coming in our technological future

http://www.maxmore.com/proactionary.htm

The Proactionary Principle

Version 1.0

The Proactionary Principle was authored by Max More, based in large part on Extropy Institute’s Vital Progress Summit I, 2004 and the Keynote statements and Summit participants’ discussions. The keynote participants were Ronald Bailey, Robert A. Freitas, Jr., Aubrey de Grey, Ray Kurzweil, Max More, Christine Peterson, Michael Shapiro, Gregory Stock, Natasha Vita-More, Roy Walford. The Summit was also supported by Marvin Minsky, Lee Silver, Michael West and by everyone who contributed their time and intelligence to the proceedings.

The Proactionary Principle

People’s freedom to innovate technologically is highly valuable, even critical, to humanity. This implies several imperatives when restrictive measures are proposed: Assess risks and opportunities according to available science, not popular perception. Account for both the costs of the restrictions themselves, and those of opportunities foregone. Favor measures that are proportionate to the probability and magnitude of impacts, and that have a high expectation value. Protect people’s freedom to experiment, innovate, and progress.

Unpacking the Proactionary Principle

Looking deeper into the Principle, we arrive at these factors to take into account:

People’s freedom to innovate technologically is valuable to humanity. The burden of proof therefore belongs to those who propose restrictive measures. All proposed measures should be closely scrutinized.
Evaluate risk according to available science, not popular perception, and allow for common reasoning biases.
Give precedence to ameliorating known and proven threats to human health and environmental quality over acting against hypothetical risks.
Treat technological risks on the same basis as natural risks; avoid underweighting natural risks and overweighting human-technological risks. Fully account for the benefits of technological advances.
Estimate the lost opportunities of abandoning a technology, and take into account the costs and risks of substituting other credible options, carefully considering widely distributed effects and follow-on effects.
Consider restrictive measures only if the potential impact of an activity has both significant probability and severity. In such cases, if the activity also generates benefits, discount the impacts according to the feasibility of adapting to the adverse effects. If measures to limit technological advance do appear justified, ensure that the extent of those measures is proportionate to the extent of the probable effects.
When choosing among measures to restrict technological innovation, prioritize decision criteria as follows: Give priority to risks to human and other intelligent life over risks to other species; give non-lethal threats to human health priority over threats limited to the environment (within reasonable limits); give priority to immediate threats over distant threats; prefer the measure with the highest expectation value by giving priority to more certain over less certain threats, and to irreversible or persistent impacts over transient impacts...

... The Essence of the Proactionary Principle

If the precautionary principle had been widely applied in the past, technological and cultural progress would have ground to a halt. Human suffering would have persisted without relief, and life would have remained poor, nasty, brutish, and short: No chlorination and no pathogen-free water; no electricity generation or transmission; no X-rays; no travel beyond the range of walking.

Most activities involving technology will have undesired effects as well as desirable ones. Whereas the precautionary principle is often used to take an absolutist stand against an activity, the Proactionary Principle allows for handling mixed effects through compensation and remediation instead of prohibition. The Proactionary Principle recognizes that nature is not always kind, that improving our world is both natural and essential for humanity, and that stagnation is not a realistic or worthy option.

The Proactionary Principle stands for the proactive pursuit of progress. Being proactive involves not only anticipating before acting, but learning by acting. When technological progress is halted, people lose an essential freedom and the accompanying opportunities to learn through diverse experiments. We already suffer from an undeveloped capacity for rational decision making. Prohibiting technological change will only stunt that capacity further. Continuing needs to alleviate global human suffering and desires to achieve human flourishing should make obvious the folly of stifling our freedom to learn

Let a thousand flowers bloom! By all means, inspect the flowers for signs of infestation and weed as necessary. But don’t cut off the hands of those who spread the seeds of the future.

Sid Bmenthal disses Pres. Bush

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1225600,00.html

The Bush orthodoxy is in shreds

A series of investigations has shattered neocon self-belief

Sidney Blumenthal
Thursday May 27, 2004
The Guardian

At a conservative thinktank in downtown Washington, and across the Potomac at the Pentagon, FBI agents have begun paying quiet calls on prominent neoconservatives, who are being interviewed in an investigation of potential espionage, according to intelligence sources. Who gave Ahmed Chalabi classified information about the plans of the US government and military?
The Iraqi neocon favourite, tipped to lead his liberated country post-invasion, has been identified by the CIA and Defence Intelligence Agency as an Iranian double-agent, passing secrets to that citadel of the "axis of evil" for decades. All the while the neocons cosseted, promoted and arranged for more than $30m in Pentagon payments to the George Washington manque of Iraq. In return, he fed them a steady diet of disinformation and in the run-up to the war sent various exiles to nine nations' intelligence agencies to spread falsehoods about weapons of mass destruction. If the administration had wanted other material to provide a rationale for invasion, no doubt that would have been fabricated. Either Chalabi perpetrated the greatest con since the Trojan horse, or he was the agent of influence for the most successful intelligence operation conducted by Iran, or both.

Could it be that Abu Ghraid is a pretext to..

http://www.anncoulter.org/

Tit For Tet
May 26, 2004

Abu Ghraib is the new Tet offensive. By lying about the Tet offensive during the Vietnam War, the media managed to persuade Americans we were losing the war, which demoralized the nation and caused us to lose the war. And people say reporters are lazy.

The immediate consequence of the media's lies was a 25 percent drop in support for the war. The long-term consequence for America was 12 years in the desert until Ronald Reagan came in and saved the country.

Now liberals are using their control of the media to persuade the public that we are losing the war in Iraq. Communist dictators may have been ruthless murderers bent on world domination, but they displayed a certain degree of rationality. America may not be able to wait out 12 years of Democrat pusillanimity now that we're dealing with Islamic lunatics who slaughter civilians in suicide missions while chanting "Allah Akbar!"

Thank God, it's about time

Spammer Sentenced to 7 Years in Prison


http://apnews.myway.com/article/20040528/D82RIUHO0.html

May 28, 8:23 AM (ET)

By CAROLYN THOMPSON

(AP) Howard Carmack is escorted from the courtroom after being sentenced to 3 1/2 to 7 years in prison...
Full Image

BUFFALO, N.Y. (AP) - A man who sent 850 million junk e-mails through accounts he opened with stolen identities was sentenced to up to seven years in prison on Thursday.

Atlanta-based Internet service provider Earthlink Inc. said it hoped the sentence and an earlier $16.4 million civil judgment against Howard Carmack will deter other spammers.

"Before spammers send one more spam e-mail, we think they should remember that what happened to Howard Carmack can happen to them," said Karen Casion, Earthlink's assistant general counsel.

Jurors sentenced Carmack to seven years for convictions in March of forgery, identity theft and falsifying business records. He must serve a minimum 3 1/2 years.

Earthlink said Carmack ran 343 illegal e-mail accounts under false names from 2002 until his arrest last May, using them to send unsolicited e-mail ads for things like get-rich-quick schemes and sexual enhancers.

Carmack told the judge he believed the case against him was overblown, saying there were no victims. "I obviously regret this whole involvement," he said.

Carmack was convicted of defrauding EarthLink and eight men from New York, Ohio and Washington, D.C. Last May, the company won a $16.4 million civil judgment against Carmack.

Dick Morris on why the US must be THE WORLD'S FIREFIGHTER

Dick in a moment of brilliance.

Adrian

http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/21556.htm

THE WORLD'S FIREFIGHTER

By DICK MORRIS
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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May 26, 2004 --

THE horrific human, financial and polit ical cost of the occupation of Iraq sug gests a need to review our nation's role in the post-9/11 world: The United States can't be the world's policeman — but must be the world's firefighter.

President Bush has been quite right to articulate the need for pre-emptive action to stop terrorists from getting sufficient traction and weaponry to attack the United States. To wait for an attack to respond would be to court disaster.

He also grasps, as President Bill Clinton did not and John Kerry does not, that military action to eliminate terror-sponsoring and terror-harboring nations' capacity of to commit mayhem is vital. Clinton treated terrorism as a crime. Kerry would devolve the War on Terror into a DEA-style effort — not a real war, but police activity devoted to stalking and arresting members of terror gangs while leaving uncurbed the nations whose sponsorship makes them truly threatening...

Over 500 hits today

EEHAH!

Our politics must evolve from semantic warfare to cooperative enquiry if we are to survive the 21st Century.

Humanity is in grave risk in the coming century from our own creations. I believe that we are at a pivotal inflection point in the history of our species wherein our greatest accomplishments can very easily destroy us all. And I don’t mean just the horrible weapons we’ve developed, although they are definitely foremost among the many threats of this nascent century.

Let me lay out the threats we face:

1 – The existence of a vigorous and brilliant terrorist organization that seeks as its’ primary goal the murdering of millions of infidels makes the following technological threats even more worrisome.

2 – Our wonderful biotechnology that can ease our suffering and extend our lives can also destroy us all, either in a lab accident or in the hands of murderous terrorists.

3 – Our developing abilities in nanotechnology can also kill us in the same way.

4 – Before this century is half over our machines will wake up and be smarter and more dangerous than we are. The way things are going with internet based process control technologies, our entire economy will be under the control of the machines when they wake up. This will probably happen “by accident” as self awareness will emerge spontaneously from our increasingly larger and more powerful neural networks.

5 – Global warming, accelerated by our activities, can destroy many of our cities and much of our agriculture.

All of these developments can kill us all… but they don’t have to. We must summon the will, resources and methodologies necessary to control these events and defend our species. Unfortunately, our current political structure characterized by hateful, mean-spirited, gotcha semantic warfare conducted by ideologues of very narrow perspective will never be able to do the most important job humanity ever faced.

We must evolve from semantic warfare driven by a lust for power to a cooperative enquiry model more suited to finding effective solutions to the serious problems this new century will throw at us.

I am truly disgusted by the ignorant nastiness that characterizes this important election season. Here are a few things I know are indisputable:

1 – You can only see what you’re looking at.

2 – You need at least two widely different points of view to truly understand anything.

3 – What we know is less than one percent of what there is to know.

4 – What we know we don’t know is a little more than what we know.

5 – What we don’t know we don’t know is well over ninety-nine percent of what there is to know.

This Public Enquiry Project of mine is my effort to get the brains of the Left and Right to work together for our shared purpose and stop trying to kill each other with silly semantic warfare based in high school debate team gotcha tactics.

We have everything to lose and everything to gain.

WILL YOU PLEASE HELP ME.

Adrian

My neighbor and buddy Normie, sent this

SOCIAL SECURITY:

Franklin Roosevelt, a Democrat, introduced the Social Security (FICA) Program. He promised:

1.) That participation in the Program would be completely voluntary,

2.) That the participants would only have to pay 1% of the first $1,400 of their annual incomes into the Program,

3.) That the money the participants elected to put into the Program would be deductible from their ncome for tax purposes each year,

4.) That the money the would be put into the independent "Trust Fund" rather than into the General perating fund, and therefore, would only be used to fund the Social Security Retirement Program, and no
other Government program, and,

5.) That the annuity payments to the retirees would never be taxed as income.

Since many of us have paid into FICA for years and are now receiving a Social Security check every month -- and then finding that we are getting taxed on 85% of the money we paid to the Federal government to "put away," you may be interested in the following:

Q: Which Political Party took Social Security from the independent "Trust" fund and put it into the General fund so that Congress could spend it?

A: It was Lyndon Johnson and the Democratically-controlled House and Senate.

Q: Which Political Party eliminated the income tax deduction for Social Security (FICA) withholding?

A: The Democratic Party.

Q: Which Political Party started taxing Social Security annuities?

A: The Democratic Party, with Al Gore casting the "tie-breaking" deciding vote as President of the Senate, while he was Vice President of the U.S.

Q: Which Political Party decided to start giving annuity payments to immigrants?

A: That's right! Jimmy Carter and the Democratic Party. Immigrants moved into this country, and at age 65, began to receive SSI Social Security payments! The Democratic Party gave these payments to them, even though they never paid a dime into it!

Then, after doing all this lying and thieving and violation of the original contract (FICA), the Democrats turn around and tell you that the Republicans want to take your Social Security away!

And the worst part about it is, uninformed citizens believe it!

Perhaps we are asking the wrong questions during this 2004 election year!

If enough people receive this, maybe a seed of awareness will be planted and maybe good changes will evolve.

Prof Delong shows how little he and Paul Krugman know about economics

Should Ken Mehlman Really Be Boasting About Employment? Paul Krugman's Take
http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2004_archives/000898.html

Paul Krugman writes about the employment situation:

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Delusions of Triumph: Republicans, we hear, are frustrated by polls showing that the public has a poor opinion of George Bush's economic leadership. In their view, the good news about Mr. Bush's economic triumphs is being drowned out by the bad news from Iraq.... But is the economic news really that good? No. While the recent economic performance is better than in the administration's first three years, it isn't at all exceptional by historical standards. And after those three terrible years, the economy has a lot of ground to make up...