Originally Posted by Peter Gibbons

Originally Posted by Sabinus Invictus

I was speaking of how each major power saw it's own role during the last 4T, whether or not said view was right. As Britain and France were primarily interested in holding on to their colonial empires and their pre-4T pre-eminence in world affairs, they would most certainly qualify under my definition as 'status quo powers'.

In the case of the Axis, they saw themselves as 'agents of change' in that they were seeking to topple the old international order by force - to their own advantage. However, as you did above, it is easy to give the lie to such claims on their part, simply by looking at how they went about the matter, and what their ideological basis for acting was.

The interesting thing about both the United States and the Soviet Union is that during the entire first part of the 4T (until 1941, in fact), both pursued their concepts of meaningful social change in a very introspective (dare I say 'isolationist'?) way which led both to all but turn their backs on world affairs, except in their respective 'near abroads' - until they were each attacked, thus gaining carte blanche (at least in their own eyes) to spread their respective concepts of how to change and reform any and every society within their respective reach - including the defeated 'false change agents' and the old status quo powers, who's part in the final 4T victory was Pyrrhic in nature.

Great summation!

Thanks.

BTW, congrats on the new arrival.

Originally Posted by Sabinus Invictus

Originally Posted by Peter Gibbons

Originally Posted by Sabinus Invictus

I was speaking of how each major power saw it's own role during the last 4T, whether or not said view was right. As Britain and France were primarily interested in holding on to their colonial empires and their pre-4T pre-eminence in world affairs, they would most certainly qualify under my definition as 'status quo powers'.

In the case of the Axis, they saw themselves as 'agents of change' in that they were seeking to topple the old international order by force - to their own advantage. However, as you did above, it is easy to give the lie to such claims on their part, simply by looking at how they went about the matter, and what their ideological basis for acting was.

The interesting thing about both the United States and the Soviet Union is that during the entire first part of the 4T (until 1941, in fact), both pursued their concepts of meaningful social change in a very introspective (dare I say 'isolationist'?) way which led both to all but turn their backs on world affairs, except in their respective 'near abroads' - until they were each attacked, thus gaining carte blanche (at least in their own eyes) to spread their respective concepts of how to change and reform any and every society within their respective reach - including the defeated 'false change agents' and the old status quo powers, who's part in the final 4T victory was Pyrrhic in nature.

Great summation!

Thanks.

BTW, congrats on the new arrival.

Thanks, but we're still T minus 3.5 months. Pretty exciting stuff though! My wife and I and the boy (who's now 4) just came back from a week and a half in Maui. A much needed vacation. The boy had a blast! Being back at work is SUCH a bummer.

Sowing the Whirlwind™

Hunger by our own hand. :arrow: :arrow: :arrow:

Originally Posted by Mr. Paul Brown in the [i

Guardian[/i](UK)]The cross-fertilisation between GM oilseed rape, a brassica, and a distantly related plant, charlock, had been discounted as virtually impossible by scientists with the environment department. It was found during a follow up to the government's three-year trials of GM crops which ended two years ago.

I like that virtually. :arrow: :arrow: :arrow:

Originally Posted by Bob Butler 54

Originally Posted by Kiff 1961

Originally Posted by Bob Butler 54

A paper was written before World War I saying that. No one believed the author. They fought the World Wars anyway.

:oops: My ignorance is showing here. What paper was that, and where can I read it?

Ach... I remember reading about the paper, I think it was in Barbara Tuchman's Guns of August, covering the beginning of World War I. Alas, I cannot remember off hand the name of author or article. If I'm in the mood over the next couple of days, I'll skim the book.

Bob,

I obtained a copy of Tuchman's book, and in the first chapter she mentions The Great Illusion by Norman Angell. This sounds like the work you were discussing above.

Originally Posted by Kiff 1961

Bob,

I obtained a copy of Tuchman's book, and in the first chapter she mentions The Great Illusion by Norman Angell. This sounds like the work you were discussing above.

Looks Like BYU put up a few key paragraphs from the introduction and conclusion.
http://www.lib.byu.edu/~rdh/wwi/1914m/illusion.html

Originally Posted by Norman Angell

What are the fundamental motives that explain the present rivalry of armaments in Europe, notably the Anglo-German ? Each nation pleads the need for defence; but this implies that someone is likely to attack, and has therefore a presumed interest in so doing. What are the motives which each State thus fears its neighbors may obey?

They are based on the universal assumption that a nation, in order to find outlets for expanding population and increasing industry, or simply to ensure the best conditions possible for its people, is necessarily pushed to territorial expansion and the exercise of political force against others.... It is assumed that a nation's relative prosperity is broadly determined by its political power; that nations being competing units, advantage in the last resort goes to the possessor of preponderant military force, the weaker goes to the wall, as in the other forms of the struggle for life.

The author challenges this whole doctrine. He attempts to show that it belongs to a stage of development out of which we have passed that the commerce and industry of a people no longer depend upon the expansion of its political frontiers; that a nation's political and economic frontiers do not now necessarily coincide; that military power is socially and economically futile, and can have no relation to the prosperity of the people exercising it; that it is impossible for one nation to seize by force the wealth or trade of another -- to enrich itself by subjugating, or imposing its will by force on another; that in short, war, even when victorious, can no longer achieve those aims for which people strive....

Conquest in the modern world is a process of multiplying by x, and then obtaining the original figure by dividing by x. For a modern nation to add to its territory no more adds to the wealth of the people of such nation than it would add to the wealth of Londoners if the City of London were to annex the county of Hertford.

The fight for ideals can no longer take the form of fight between nations, because the lines of division on moral questions are within the nations themselves and intersect the political frontiers. There is no modern State which is completely Catholic or Protestant, or liberal or autocratic, or aristocratic or democratic, or socialist or individualist; the moral and spiritual struggles of the modern world go on between citizens of the same State in unconscious intellectual cooperation with corresponding groups in other states, not between the public powers of rival States.

War has no longer the justification that it makes for the survival of the fittest; it involves the survival of the less fit. The idea that the struggle between nations is a part of the evolutionary law of man's advance involves a profound misreading of the biological analogy.

The warlike nations do not inherit the earth; they represent the decaying human element....

Are we, in blind obedience to primitive instincts and old prejudices, enslaved by the old catchwords and that curious indolence which makes the revision of old ideas unpleasant, to duplicate indefinitely on the political and economic side a condition from which we have liberated ourselves on the religious side? Are we to continue to struggle, as so many good men struggled in the first dozen centuries of Christendom -- spilling oceans of blood, wasting mountains of treasure -- to achieve what is at bottom a logical absurdity, to accomplish something which, when accomplished, can avail us nothing, and which, if it could avail us anything, would condemn the nations of the world to never-ending bloodshed a nd the constant defeat of all those aims which men, in their sober hours, know to be alone worthy of sustained endeavor?

A quick search of my book collection didn't turn up my copy of Guns of August, but the above reflects my memory of what Tuchman said about it. He doesn't touch heavily on what I consider the key point. Modern weapons in modern wars tend to be directed more at the civilian population and industrial infrastructure, and cost heavily in terms of percentage of population. The cost of conflict in blood and treasure is less apt to be worth any potential reward. This seems clearly true when two major powers armed with weapons of mass destruction consider taking each other on. It is less clearly true when a major power considers taking on a much smaller but oil rich country.

Norman Angell won a Nobel Peace Prize for The Great Illusion. The presentation speech also provides a good summary of the work.

http://nobelprize.org/peace/laureates/1933/press.html

There seem to be two views of his work. Some say he predicted that war had become impossible because it was no longer cost effective, and that he was proved wrong by World War I. This is a mischaracterization. He didn't say war was impossible, just that it was futile, not cost effective, and did no one any good, not even the winner. From that perspective, World War I proved him correct.

He also suggested that reparations did the winner no good. He suggested that the need to pay reparations would stimulate the economy of the loser, that the forced seizure of goods would only idle manufacturers in the victor country. I'm not enough of an economist to judge that aspect of his book, but suddenly the lack of reparations after World War II and even the Marshal Plan might be looked on in a different light. Whether he was right or wrong in that, he was taken seriously. Can nation building stimulate the economy?

But these economic theories apply to war for profit, not war to maintain culture, or war to get rid of a foreign elite ruling class, or war to destroy terrorist training camps.

I guess the moral of the story is that fear will trump greed (or rational self-interest, if you wish) under certain conditions (which are all too common).

Originally Posted by Peter Gibbons

I guess the moral of the story is that fear will trump greed (or rational self-interest, if you wish) under certain conditions (which are all too common).

MOST DEFINITELY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Originally Posted by Bob Butler

But these economic theories apply to war for profit, not war to maintain culture, or war to get rid of a foreign elite ruling class, or war to destroy terrorist training camps.

Originally Posted by Peter Gibbons

I guess the moral of the story is that fear will trump greed (or rational self-interest, if you wish) under certain conditions (which are all too common).

I'm not sure, if one's country is perceived as undergoing externally forced culture change, is ruled by foreign elites, or is attacked by foreign terrorists, that war is less in one's apparent rational self-interest than if one covets thy neighbor's oil fields, or wishes oil sold on the dollar rather than the Euro.

It used to be traditional to demonize the enemy in propaganda characterizing them as evil. These days, projecting them as insane, fundamentalist or irrational might be more common. I find it fairly easy to see most of the modern factions advocating violence as believing in rational self interest. While emotion and values are no doubt involved, I would not say those advocating violence are not devoid of reason.

Just a nitpick.

Originally Posted by Bob Butler 54

Originally Posted by Bob Butler

But these economic theories apply to war for profit, not war to maintain culture, or war to get rid of a foreign elite ruling class, or war to destroy terrorist training camps.

Originally Posted by Peter Gibbons

I guess the moral of the story is that fear will trump greed (or rational self-interest, if you wish) under certain conditions (which are all too common).

I'm not sure, if one's country is perceived as undergoing externally forced culture change, is ruled by foreign elites, or is attacked by foreign terrorists, that war is less in one's apparent rational self-interest than if one covets thy neighbor's oil fields, or wishes oil sold on the dollar rather than the Euro.

It used to be traditional to demonize the enemy in propaganda characterizing them as evil. These days, projecting them as insane, fundamentalist or irrational might be more common. I find it fairly easy to see most of the modern factions advocating violence as believing in rational self interest. While emotion and values are no doubt involved, I would not say those advocating violence are not devoid of reason.

Just a nitpick.

I what I meant was the argument against war was rather cogent in a Big Picture sense yet the little picture seems to trump it quite often.

This is either one hell of a story or one hell of a hoax. If it is true, look for a "pre-emptive strike" on Iran very quickly. Either way, you will likely NEVER hear about it in the establishment media in this country...that is, unless the Bush people's string-pullers have finally decided to discard them. Either a fabulous 3T-style hoax or an outstanding 4T pivotal event.

http://www.tomflocco.com/modules.php...8a512e8847d141


BUSH AND CHENEY INDICTED

A Chicago grand jury has indicted the President and Vice-President of the United States along with multiple high officials in the Bush administration

Chicago -- August 2, 2005 -- TomFlocco.com -- U.S. federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's Chicago grand jury has issued perjury and obstruction of justice indictments to the following members of the Bush Administration: President George W. Bush, Vice-President Richard Cheney, Bush Chief of Staff Andrew Card, Cheney Chief of Staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, former Attorney General John Ashcroft, imprisoned New York Times reporter Judith Miller and former Senior Cheney advisor Mary Matalin.

There were no indications given as to whether the President and his top staff members would appear publicly before cameras at the grand jury proceedings, given the gravity of the charges.

Besides the Valerie Plame CIA leak case, the Fitzgerald probe is reportedly far-reaching and expanding much deeper into past White House criminal acts involving Bush-Clinton drug money laundering in Mena, Arkansas to White House involvement in 9.11; but also for sending America's young people to their deaths or to be maimed in Iraq and Afghanistan under false pretenses.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair was indicted for obstruction of justice and is reportedly consulting with members of Parliament and legal aides regarding how to avoid appearing in the U.S.A. for interrogation before Fitzgerald in Chicago.

The revelations emanated from sources close to the grand jury who spoke with federal whistleblower Thomas Heneghen in California who said White House Senior Advisor to the President Karl Rove was also indicted for perjury and was reportedly involved with Mary Matalin in a major Bush administration document shredding operation to cover-up evidence.

Heneghen had reported over ten days ago on a TruthRadio.com broadcast [Every Monday and Tuesday evening from 8-9 pm EST--www.truthradio.com--special briefing on Wednesday evening August 3 at 8 pm EST]] that his sources close to the grand jury said former Secretary of State Colin Powell had been subpoenaed and had testified against President Bush, telling the citizen panel that the President had taken the United States to war based upon lies--a capital crime involving treason under the United States Code.

Heneghen also reported a week ago that Gonzalez and Card had been subpoened and that Tony Blair had defied his subpoena after the response time limit had expired.

Sources close to the investigation report that members of the House, Senate, 9.11 Commission and other members of the media are also under investigation as potential targets by a grand jury regarding obstruction of justice and other oversight failures linked to the 9.11 attacks--indicating that citizen panelists working with Fitzgerald may be seeking a wholesale cleansing of what many have said is a crime-wracked White House and Congress.

Also last Monday, the whistleblower reported that Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts was planning to obstruct justice by calling Fitzgerald for Senate hearings to question the prosecutor's motives for the far-reaching investigation.

This, giving rise to questions as to whether Roberts and other Republican legislators--some now under secret investigation--would join President Bush in seeking to fire Fitzgerald in the same manner that President Nixon had fired Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox in order to obstruct justice and cut off further investigations into White House crimes.

Two weeks ago Heneghen said he had talked to sources just ten minutes prior to French and U.S. intelligence agents intercepting British intelligence agents who were attempting to bomb the subway underneath the Dirksen Federal Building where Fitzgerald was presiding over grand jury hearings.

Serious questions can also be raised as to whether intelligence forces linked to President Bush and Tony Blair had participated in a failed attempt to scuttle the Fitzgerald probe by literally blowing it up--at a time when UK reports reveal that military-grade explosives were used to blow up the London subway on July 7.

Sources say the alleged Chicago subway bombing attempt has been attributed to an underground and closeted enmity involving warring intelligence and military factions within the United States government.

Moreover, reports indicate that the disturbance occurred at the same time that the Chicago Tribune and local web blogs had reported that the subway had been evacuated for 45-50 minutes regarding a "suspicious package" late on Monday afternoon, July 18.

Also confirming the under-the-radar-screen hostilities involving agents loyal to the administration and others who are disturbed about the cover-up of government involvement in the 9.11 attacks was a recent contact made with this writer by a major New York media outlet which called seeking "names of those who could confirm its own reports of warring factions within the government which were threatening the safety of U.S. citizens."

developing.....please link or copy--and distribute widely.
_________________
TomFlocco

Stonewall,

This would indeed by HUGE if true, and would be just the type of thing that could trigger a 4T cascade under current saecular conditions. I quickly checked Drudge, CNN, and HuffPo to see if anything was breaking but could not find anything. This Tom Flocco guy does seem to have an agenda (to say the least) but that doesn't mean he didn't scoop everybody.

I guess we'll find out soon enough if this is a hoax.

If it's not, then how about this in 2006?

Originally Posted by Peter Gibbons

Stonewall,

This would indeed by HUGE if true, and would be just the type of thing that could trigger a 4T cascade under current saecular conditions. I quickly checked Drudge, CNN, and HuffPo to see if anything was breaking but could not find anything. This Tom Flocco guy does seem to have an agenda (to say the least) but that doesn't mean he didn't scoop everybody.

I guess we'll find out soon enough if this is a hoax.

Flocco is reliable, but I do not know about his source. It could be the standard disinfo/misinfo setup associated with the Bush people. Then again, it could be for real. Even if it is true, one would not expect the establishment media to cover it, so long as they can avoid doing so. The establishment media has been the faithful propaganda organ of this Bush administration since the day the brain damaged puppet, Junior, was trotted out to announce his candidacy in 1999. Just look at their monumental success in making the non-existent "al-Qaeda," an irrefutably documented fabrication of the CIA, a household bogeyman. This country in its present Bushian/Luciferian propagandistic state is a laugh a minute.

Originally Posted by Seadog '66

Originally Posted by Peter Gibbons

Stonewall,

This would indeed by HUGE if true, and would be just the type of thing that could trigger a 4T cascade under current saecular conditions. I quickly checked Drudge, CNN, and HuffPo to see if anything was breaking but could not find anything. This Tom Flocco guy does seem to have an agenda (to say the least) but that doesn't mean he didn't scoop everybody.

I guess we'll find out soon enough if this is a hoax.

Flocco is reliable, but I do not know about his source. It could be the standard disinfo/misinfo setup associated with the Bush people. Then again, it could be for real. Even if it is true, one would not expect the establishment media to cover it, so long as they can avoid doing so. The establishment media has been the faithful propaganda organ of this Bush administration since the day the brain damaged puppet, Junior, was trotted out to announce his candidacy in 1999. Just look at their monumental success in making the non-existent "al-Qaeda," an irrefutably documented fabrication of the CIA, a household bogeyman. This country in its present Bushian/Luciferian propagandistic state is a laugh a minute.

I smell Karl Rove's scent all over this. It's similar to the Dan Rather thing, where the story is discreditted by discreditting the source. I would look for evidence of backroom arm twisting of Fitzgerald or an excuse to can him. Good for Bush, Rove and the rest in either case.

... or Tom could have been hitting the bong a bit too much.

Flocco is a late-night talk radio kook. How utterly desperate you people are at globing on to anything that might smell of rats in the WH. Sheesh, ever heard of that good-old fashioned method of regime change?

It's called an election.

p.s. There's one going on now in Cincy. Seems you libs are all excited too. That's Red as Red state goes. Looks like a liberal Democrat, who won't call himself a liberal or a Democrat, might win it! Stay tuned, you just might not need the Jeff Rense/Stoney Flocco method after all!

Originally Posted by Peter Gibbons

This would indeed by HUGE if true, and would be just the type of thing that could trigger a 4T cascade under current saecular conditions.

For whatever it is worth, I still say we entered 4T around 2000/2001 consistent with Mike A.'s timeline. And I find the "perception split" across society fascinating. Either you perceive that an abnormal, unnaccountable acceleration of events commenced around 2000 or you do not. People from all walks of life, all socio-economic classes, all fill-in-the-blank demographic categories that you find on the street discern that something has been seriously wrong/managed/controlled since around 2000 in a way (or to a degree) that was not true earlier, while their neighbors remain completely oblivious to any such "change." It is fascinating. But this should be this country's last 4T which might naturally make it unlike any previous 4T anyway (in terms of perception).

Think back to where everything was in the cyberworld in 1995. Back then, and up to about the Dot.Com crash, the worldview of the internet revolved around cyber-commerce. The Internet was the new technology to turn geeks into millionaires overnight.

After the crash, and up until today, the Internet as a social/civic web gained prominence. It is now seen as a grass-roots, participatory medium, where ordinary people can collaborate on building a new society. This seems to reflect a shift from a 3T to a 4T mindset in regards to this new technology.

The author projects how the Internet might change in 2015. Now seemingly reflecting a later period in the Crisis Era, the Internet becomes a sort of meta-operating system, a highly organized network that is becoming a collective mind.

We Are the Web
The Netscape IPO wasn't really about dot-commerce. At its heart was a new cultural force based on mass collaboration. Blogs, Wikipedia, open source, peer-to-peer - behold the power of the people.
By Kevin Kelly

Ten years ago, Netscape's explosive IPO ignited huge piles of money. The brilliant flash revealed what had been invisible only a moment before: the World Wide Web. As Eric Schmidt (then at Sun, now at Google) noted, the day before the IPO, nothing about the Web; the day after, everything.

Computing pioneer Vannevar Bush outlined the Web's core idea - hyperlinked pages - in 1945, but the first person to try to build out the concept was a freethinker named Ted Nelson who envisioned his own scheme in 1965. However, he had little success connecting digital bits on a useful scale, and his efforts were known only to an isolated group of disciples. Few of the hackers writing code for the emerging Web in the 1990s knew about Nelson or his hyperlinked dream machine.

At the suggestion of a computer-savvy friend, I got in touch with Nelson in 1984, a decade before Netscape. We met in a dark dockside bar in Sausalito, California. He was renting a houseboat nearby and had the air of someone with time on his hands. Folded notes erupted from his pockets, and long strips of paper slipped from overstuffed notebooks. Wearing a ballpoint pen on a string around his neck, he told me - way too earnestly for a bar at 4 o'clock in the afternoon - about his scheme for organizing all the knowledge of humanity. Salvation lay in cutting up 3 x 5 cards, of which he had plenty.

Although Nelson was polite, charming, and smooth, I was too slow for his fast talk. But I got an aha! from his marvelous notion of hypertext. He was certain that every document in the world should be a footnote to some other document, and computers could make the links between them visible and permanent. But that was just the beginning! Scribbling on index cards, he sketched out complicated notions of transferring authorship back to creators and tracking payments as readers hopped along networks of documents, what he called the docuverse. He spoke of "transclusion" and "intertwingularity" as he described the grand utopian benefits of his embedded structure. It was going to save the world from stupidity.

I believed him. Despite his quirks, it was clear to me that a hyperlinked world was inevitable - someday. But looking back now, after 10 years of living online, what surprises me about the genesis of the Web is how much was missing from Vannevar Bush's vision, Nelson's docuverse, and my own expectations. We all missed the big story. The revolution launched by Netscape's IPO was only marginally about hypertext and human knowledge. At its heart was a new kind of participation that has since developed into an emerging culture based on sharing. And the ways of participating unleashed by hyperlinks are creating a new type of thinking - part human and part machine - found nowhere else on the planet or in history.

Not only did we fail to imagine what the Web would become, we still don't see it today! We are blind to the miracle it has blossomed into. And as a result of ignoring what the Web really is, we are likely to miss what it will grow into over the next 10 years. Any hope of discerning the state of the Web in 2015 requires that we own up to how wrong we were 10 years ago.

1995
Before the Netscape browser illuminated the Web, the Internet did not exist for most people. If it was acknowledged at all, it was mischaracterized as either corporate email (as exciting as a necktie) or a clubhouse for adolescent males (read: pimply nerds). It was hard to use. On the Internet, even dogs had to type. Who wanted to waste time on something so boring?

The memories of an early enthusiast like myself can be unreliable, so I recently spent a few weeks reading stacks of old magazines and newspapers. Any promising new invention will have its naysayers, and the bigger the promises, the louder the nays. It's not hard to find smart people saying stupid things about the Internet on the morning of its birth. In late 1994, Time magazine explained why the Internet would never go mainstream: "It was not designed for doing commerce, and it does not gracefully accommodate new arrivals." Newsweek put the doubts more bluntly in a February 1995 headline: "THE INTERNET? BAH!" The article was written by astrophysicist and Net maven Cliff Stoll, who captured the prevailing skepticism of virtual communities and online shopping with one word: "baloney."

This dismissive attitude pervaded a meeting I had with the top leaders of ABC in 1989. I was there to make a presentation to the corner office crowd about this "Internet stuff." To their credit, they realized something was happening. Still, nothing I could tell them would convince them that the Internet was not marginal, not just typing, and, most emphatically, not just teenage boys. Stephen Weiswasser, a senior VP, delivered the ultimate putdown: "The Internet will be the CB radio of the '90s," he told me, a charge he later repeated to the press. Weiswasser summed up ABC's argument for ignoring the new medium: "You aren't going to turn passive consumers into active trollers on the Internet."

I was shown the door. But I offered one tip before I left. "Look," I said. "I happen to know that the address www.abc.com has not been registered. Go down to your basement, find your most technical computer guy, and have him register www.abc.com immediately. Don't even think about it. It will be a good thing to do." They thanked me vacantly. I checked a week later. The domain was still unregistered.

While it is easy to smile at the dodos in TV land, they were not the only ones who had trouble imagining an alternative to couch potatoes. Wired did, too. When I examine issues of Wired from before the Netscape IPO (issues that I proudly edited), I am surprised to see them touting a future of high production-value content - 5,000 always-on channels and virtual reality, with a side order of email sprinkled with bits of the Library of Congress. In fact, Wired offered a vision nearly identical to that of Internet wannabes in the broadcast, publishing, software, and movie industries: basically, TV that worked. The question was who would program the box. Wired looked forward to a constellation of new media upstarts like Nintendo and Yahoo!, not old-media dinosaurs like ABC.

Problem was, content was expensive to produce, and 5,000 channels of it would be 5,000 times as costly. No company was rich enough, no industry large enough, to carry off such an enterprise. The great telecom companies, which were supposed to wire up the digital revolution, were paralyzed by the uncertainties of funding the Net. In June 1994, David Quinn of British Telecom admitted to a conference of software publishers, "I'm not sure how you'd make money out of it."

The immense sums of money supposedly required to fill the Net with content sent many technocritics into a tizzy. They were deeply concerned that cyberspace would become cyburbia - privately owned and operated. Writing in Electronic Engineering Times in 1995, Jeff Johnson worried: "Ideally, individuals and small businesses would use the information highway to communicate, but it is more likely that the information highway will be controlled by Fortune 500 companies in 10 years." The impact would be more than commercial. "Speech in cyberspace will not be free if we allow big business to control every square inch of the Net," wrote Andrew Shapiro in The Nation in July 1995.

The fear of commercialization was strongest among hardcore programmers: the coders, Unix weenies, TCP/IP fans, and selfless volunteer IT folk who kept the ad hoc network running. The major administrators thought of their work as noble, a gift to humanity. They saw the Internet as an open commons, not to be undone by greed or commercialization. It's hard to believe now, but until 1991, commercial enterprise on the Internet was strictly prohibited. Even then, the rules favored public institutions and forbade "extensive use for private or personal business."

In the mid-1980s, when I was involved in the WELL, an early nonprofit online system, we struggled to connect it to the emerging Internet but were thwarted, in part, by the "acceptable use" policy of the National Science Foundation (which ran the Internet backbone). In the eyes of the NSF, the Internet was funded for research, not commerce. At first this restriction wasn't a problem for online services, because most providers, the WELL included, were isolated from one another. Paying customers could send email within the system - but not outside it. In 1987, the WELL fudged a way to forward outside email through the Net without confronting the acceptable use policy, which our organization's own techies were reluctant to break. The NSF rule reflected a lingering sentiment that the Internet would be devalued, if not trashed, by opening it up to commercial interests. Spam was already a problem (one every week!).

This attitude prevailed even in the offices of Wired. In 1994, during the first design meetings for Wired's embryonic Web site, HotWired, programmers were upset that the innovation we were cooking up - what are now called clickthrough ad banners - subverted the great social potential of this new territory. The Web was hardly out of diapers, and already they were being asked to blight it with billboards and commercials. Only in May 1995, after the NSF finally opened the floodgates to ecommerce, did the geek elite begin to relax.

Three months later, Netscape's public offering took off, and in a blink a world of DIY possibilities was born. Suddenly it became clear that ordinary people could create material anyone with a connection could view. The burgeoning online audience no longer needed ABC for content. Netscape's stock peaked at $75 on its first day of trading, and the world gasped in awe. Was this insanity, or the start of something new?

2005
The scope of the Web today is hard to fathom. The total number of Web pages, including those that are dynamically created upon request and document files available through links, exceeds 600 billion. That's 100 pages per person alive.

How could we create so much, so fast, so well? In fewer than 4,000 days, we have encoded half a trillion versions of our collective story and put them in front of 1 billion people, or one-sixth of the world's population. That remarkable achievement was not in anyone's 10-year plan.

The accretion of tiny marvels can numb us to the arrival of the stupendous. Today, at any Net terminal, you can get: an amazing variety of music and video, an evolving encyclopedia, weather forecasts, help wanted ads, satellite images of anyplace on Earth, up-to-the-minute news from around the globe, tax forms, TV guides, road maps with driving directions, real-time stock quotes, telephone numbers, real estate listings with virtual walk-throughs, pictures of just about anything, sports scores, places to buy almost anything, records of political contributions, library catalogs, appliance manuals, live traffic reports, archives to major newspapers - all wrapped up in an interactive index that really works.

This view is spookily godlike. You can switch your gaze of a spot in the world from map to satellite to 3-D just by clicking. Recall the past? It's there. Or listen to the daily complaints and travails of almost anyone who blogs (and doesn't everyone?). I doubt angels have a better view of humanity.

Why aren't we more amazed by this fullness? Kings of old would have gone to war to win such abilities. Only small children would have dreamed such a magic window could be real. I have reviewed the expectations of waking adults and wise experts, and I can affirm that this comprehensive wealth of material, available on demand and free of charge, was not in anyone's scenario. Ten years ago, anyone silly enough to trumpet the above list as a vision of the near future would have been confronted by the evidence: There wasn't enough money in all the investment firms in the entire world to fund such a cornucopia. The success of the Web at this scale was impossible.

But if we have learned anything in the past decade, it is the plausibility of the impossible.

Take eBay. In some 4,000 days, eBay has gone from marginal Bay Area experiment in community markets to the most profitable spinoff of hypertext. At any one moment, 50 million auctions race through the site. An estimated half a million folks make their living selling through Internet auctions. Ten years ago I heard skeptics swear nobody would ever buy a car on the Web. Last year eBay Motors sold $11 billion worth of vehicles. EBay's 2001 auction of a $4.9 million private jet would have shocked anyone in 1995 - and still smells implausible today.

Nowhere in Ted Nelson's convoluted sketches of hypertext transclusion did the fantasy of a global flea market appear. Especially as the ultimate business model! He hoped to franchise his Xanadu hypertext systems in the physical world at the scale of a copy shop or café - you would go to a store to do your hypertexting. Xanadu would take a cut of the action.

Instead, we have an open global flea market that handles 1.4 billion auctions every year and operates from your bedroom. Users do most of the work; they photograph, catalog, post, and manage their own auctions. And they police themselves; while eBay and other auction sites do call in the authorities to arrest serial abusers, the chief method of ensuring fairness is a system of user-generated ratings. Three billion feedback comments can work wonders.

What we all failed to see was how much of this new world would be manufactured by users, not corporate interests. Amazon.com customers rushed with surprising speed and intelligence to write the reviews that made the site's long-tail selection usable. Owners of Adobe, Apple, and most major software products offer help and advice on the developer's forum Web pages, serving as high-quality customer support for new buyers. And in the greatest leverage of the common user, Google turns traffic and link patterns generated by 2 billion searches a month into the organizing intelligence for a new economy. This bottom-up takeover was not in anyone's 10-year vision.

No Web phenomenon is more confounding than blogging. Everything media experts knew about audiences - and they knew a lot - confirmed the focus group belief that audiences would never get off their butts and start making their own entertainment. Everyone knew writing and reading were dead; music was too much trouble to make when you could sit back and listen; video production was simply out of reach of amateurs. Blogs and other participant media would never happen, or if they happened they would not draw an audience, or if they drew an audience they would not matter. What a shock, then, to witness the near-instantaneous rise of 50 million blogs, with a new one appearing every two seconds. There - another new blog! One more person doing what AOL and ABC - and almost everyone else - expected only AOL and ABC to be doing. These user-created channels make no sense economically. Where are the time, energy, and resources coming from?

The audience.

I run a blog about cool tools. I write it for my own delight and for the benefit of friends. The Web extends my passion to a far wider group for no extra cost or effort. In this way, my site is part of a vast and growing gift economy, a visible underground of valuable creations - text, music, film, software, tools, and services - all given away for free. This gift economy fuels an abundance of choices. It spurs the grateful to reciprocate. It permits easy modification and reuse, and thus promotes consumers into producers.

The open source software movement is another example. Key ingredients of collaborative programming - swapping code, updating instantly, recruiting globally - didn't work on a large scale until the Web was woven. Then software became something you could join, either as a beta tester or as a coder on an open source project. The clever "view source" browser option let the average Web surfer in on the act. And anyone could rustle up a link - which, it turns out, is the most powerful invention of the decade.

Linking unleashes involvement and interactivity at levels once thought unfashionable or impossible. It transforms reading into navigating and enlarges small actions into powerful forces. For instance, hyperlinks made it much easier to create a seamless, scrolling street map of every town. They made it easier for people to refer to those maps. And hyperlinks made it possible for almost anyone to annotate, amend, and improve any map embedded in the Web. Cartography has gone from spectator art to participatory democracy.

The electricity of participation nudges ordinary folks to invest huge hunks of energy and time into making free encyclopedias, creating public tutorials for changing a flat tire, or cataloging the votes in the Senate. More and more of the Web runs in this mode. One study found that only 40 percent of the Web is commercial. The rest runs on duty or passion.

Coming out of the industrial age, when mass-produced goods outclassed anything you could make yourself, this sudden tilt toward consumer involvement is a complete Lazarus move: "We thought that died long ago." The deep enthusiasm for making things, for interacting more deeply than just choosing options, is the great force not reckoned 10 years ago. This impulse for participation has upended the economy and is steadily turning the sphere of social networking - smart mobs, hive minds, and collaborative action - into the main event.

When a company opens its databases to users, as Amazon, Google, and eBay have done with their Web services, it is encouraging participation at new levels. The corporation's data becomes part of the commons and an invitation to participate. People who take advantage of these capabilities are no longer customers; they're the company's developers, vendors, skunk works, and fan base.

A little over a decade ago, a phone survey by Macworld asked a few hundred people what they thought would be worth $10 per month on the information superhighway. The participants started with uplifting services: educational courses, reference books, electronic voting, and library information. The bottom of the list ended with sports statistics, role-playing games, gambling, and dating. Ten years later what folks actually use the Internet for is inverted. According to a 2004 Stanford study, people use the Internet for (in order): playing games, "just surfing," shopping the list ends with responsible activities like politics and banking. (Some even admitted to porn.) Remember, shopping wasn't supposed to happen. Where's Cliff Stoll, the guy who said the Internet was baloney and online catalogs humbug? He has a little online store where he sells handcrafted Klein bottles.

The public's fantasy, revealed in that 1994 survey, began reasonably with the conventional notions of a downloadable world. These assumptions were wired into the infrastructure. The bandwidth on cable and phone lines was asymmetrical: Download rates far exceeded upload rates. The dogma of the age held that ordinary people had no need to upload; they were consumers, not producers. Fast-forward to today, and the poster child of the new Internet regime is BitTorrent. The brilliance of BitTorrent is in its exploitation of near-symmetrical communication rates. Users upload stuff while they are downloading. It assumes participation, not mere consumption. Our communication infrastructure has taken only the first steps in this great shift from audience to participants, but that is where it will go in the next decade.

With the steady advance of new ways to share, the Web has embedded itself into every class, occupation, and region. Indeed, people's anxiety about the Internet being out of the mainstream seems quaint now. In part because of the ease of creation and dissemination, online culture is the culture. Likewise, the worry about the Internet being 100 percent male was entirely misplaced. Everyone missed the party celebrating the 2002 flip-point when women online first outnumbered men. Today, 52 percent of netizens are female. And, of course, the Internet is not and has never been a teenage realm. In 2005, the average user is a bone-creaking 41 years old.

What could be a better mark of irreversible acceptance than adoption by the Amish? I was visiting some Amish farmers recently. They fit the archetype perfectly: straw hats, scraggly beards, wives with bonnets, no electricity, no phones or TVs, horse and buggy outside. They have an undeserved reputation for resisting all technology, when actually they are just very late adopters. Still, I was amazed to hear them mention their Web sites.

"Amish Web sites?" I asked.

"For advertising our family business. We weld barbecue grills in our shop."

"Yes, but "

"Oh, we use the Internet terminal at the public library. And Yahoo!"

I knew then the battle was over.

2015
The Web continues to evolve from a world ruled by mass media and mass audiences to one ruled by messy media and messy participation. How far can this frenzy of creativity go? Encouraged by Web-enabled sales, 175,000 books were published and more than 30,000 music albums were released in the US last year. At the same time, 14 million blogs launched worldwide. All these numbers are escalating. A simple extrapolation suggests that in the near future, everyone alive will (on average) write a song, author a book, make a video, craft a weblog, and code a program. This idea is less outrageous than the notion 150 years ago that someday everyone would write a letter or take a photograph.

What happens when the data flow is asymmetrical - but in favor of creators? What happens when everyone is uploading far more than they download? If everyone is busy making, altering, mixing, and mashing, who will have time to sit back and veg out? Who will be a consumer?

No one. And that's just fine. A world where production outpaces consumption should not be sustainable; that's a lesson from Economics 101. But online, where many ideas that don't work in theory succeed in practice, the audience increasingly doesn't matter. What matters is the network of social creation, the community of collaborative interaction that futurist Alvin Toffler called prosumption. As with blogging and BitTorrent, prosumers produce and consume at once. The producers are the audience, the act of making is the act of watching, and every link is both a point of departure and a destination.

But if a roiling mess of participation is all we think the Web will become, we are likely to miss the big news, again. The experts are certainly missing it. The Pew Internet & American Life Project surveyed more than 1,200 professionals in 2004, asking them to predict the Net's next decade. One scenario earned agreement from two-thirds of the respondents: "As computing devices become embedded in everything from clothes to appliances to cars to phones, these networked devices will allow greater surveillance by governments and businesses." Another was affirmed by one-third: "By 2014, use of the Internet will increase the size of people's social networks far beyond what has traditionally been the case."

These are safe bets, but they fail to capture the Web's disruptive trajectory. The real transformation under way is more akin to what Sun's John Gage had in mind in 1988 when he famously said, "The network is the computer." He was talking about the company's vision of the thin-client desktop, but his phrase neatly sums up the destiny of the Web: As the OS for a megacomputer that encompasses the Internet, all its services, all peripheral chips and affiliated devices from scanners to satellites, and the billions of human minds entangled in this global network. This gargantuan Machine already exists in a primitive form. In the coming decade, it will evolve into an integral extension not only of our senses and bodies but our minds.

Today, the Machine acts like a very large computer with top-level functions that operate at approximately the clock speed of an early PC. It processes 1 million emails each second, which essentially means network email runs at 1 megahertz. Same with Web searches. Instant messaging runs at 100 kilohertz, SMS at 1 kilohertz. The Machine's total external RAM is about 200 terabytes. In any one second, 10 terabits can be coursing through its backbone, and each year it generates nearly 20 exabytes of data. Its distributed "chip" spans 1 billion active PCs, which is approximately the number of transistors in one PC.

This planet-sized computer is comparable in complexity to a human brain. Both the brain and the Web have hundreds of billions of neurons (or Web pages). Each biological neuron sprouts synaptic links to thousands of other neurons, while each Web page branches into dozens of hyperlinks. That adds up to a trillion "synapses" between the static pages on the Web. The human brain has about 100 times that number - but brains are not doubling in size every few years. The Machine is.

Since each of its "transistors" is itself a personal computer with a billion transistors running lower functions, the Machine is fractal. In total, it harnesses a quintillion transistors, expanding its complexity beyond that of a biological brain. It has already surpassed the 20-petahertz threshold for potential intelligence as calculated by Ray Kurzweil. For this reason some researchers pursuing artificial intelligence have switched their bets to the Net as the computer most likely to think first. Danny Hillis, a computer scientist who once claimed he wanted to make an AI "that would be proud of me," has invented massively parallel supercomputers in part to advance us in that direction. He now believes the first real AI will emerge not in a stand-alone supercomputer like IBM's proposed 23-teraflop Blue Brain, but in the vast digital tangle of the global Machine.

In 10 years, the system will contain hundreds of millions of miles of fiber-optic neurons linking the billions of ant-smart chips embedded into manufactured products, buried in environmental sensors, staring out from satellite cameras, guiding cars, and saturating our world with enough complexity to begin to learn. We will live inside this thing.

Today the nascent Machine routes packets around disturbances in its lines; by 2015 it will anticipate disturbances and avoid them. It will have a robust immune system, weeding spam from its trunk lines, eliminating viruses and denial-of-service attacks the moment they are launched, and dissuading malefactors from injuring it again. The patterns of the Machine's internal workings will be so complex they won't be repeatable; you won't always get the same answer to a given question. It will take intuition to maximize what the global network has to offer. The most obvious development birthed by this platform will be the absorption of routine. The Machine will take on anything we do more than twice. It will be the Anticipation Machine.

One great advantage the Machine holds in this regard: It's always on. It is very hard to learn if you keep getting turned off, which is the fate of most computers. AI researchers rejoice when an adaptive learning program runs for days without crashing. The fetal Machine has been running continuously for at least 10 years (30 if you want to be picky). I am aware of no other machine - of any type - that has run that long with zero downtime. While portions may spin down due to power outages or cascading infections, the entire thing is unlikely to go quiet in the coming decade. It will be the most reliable gadget we have.

And the most universal. By 2015, desktop operating systems will be largely irrelevant. The Web will be the only OS worth coding for. It won't matter what device you use, as long as it runs on the Web OS. You will reach the same distributed computer whether you log on via phone, PDA, laptop, or HDTV.

In the 1990s, the big players called that convergence. They peddled the image of multiple kinds of signals entering our lives through one box - a box they hoped to control. By 2015 this image will be turned inside out. In reality, each device is a differently shaped window that peers into the global computer. Nothing converges. The Machine is an unbounded thing that will take a billion windows to glimpse even part of. It is what you'll see on the other side of any screen.

And who will write the software that makes this contraption useful and productive? We will. In fact, we're already doing it, each of us, every day. When we post and then tag pictures on the community photo album Flickr, we are teaching the Machine to give names to images. The thickening links between caption and picture form a neural net that can learn. Think of the 100 billion times per day humans click on a Web page as a way of teaching the Machine what we think is important. Each time we forge a link between words, we teach it an idea. Wikipedia encourages its citizen authors to link each fact in an article to a reference citation. Over time, a Wikipedia article becomes totally underlined in blue as ideas are cross-referenced. That massive cross-referencing is how brains think and remember. It is how neural nets answer questions. It is how our global skin of neurons will adapt autonomously and acquire a higher level of knowledge.

The human brain has no department full of programming cells that configure the mind. Rather, brain cells program themselves simply by being used. Likewise, our questions program the Machine to answer questions. We think we are merely wasting time when we surf mindlessly or blog an item, but each time we click a link we strengthen a node somewhere in the Web OS, thereby programming the Machine by using it.

What will most surprise us is how dependent we will be on what the Machine knows - about us and about what we want to know. We already find it easier to Google something a second or third time rather than remember it ourselves. The more we teach this megacomputer, the more it will assume responsibility for our knowing. It will become our memory. Then it will become our identity. In 2015 many people, when divorced from the Machine, won't feel like themselves - as if they'd had a lobotomy.

Legend has it that Ted Nelson invented Xanadu as a remedy for his poor memory and attention deficit disorder. In this light, the Web as memory bank should be no surprise. Still, the birth of a machine that subsumes all other machines so that in effect there is only one Machine, which penetrates our lives to such a degree that it becomes essential to our identity - this will be full of surprises. Especially since it is only the beginning.

There is only one time in the history of each planet when its inhabitants first wire up its innumerable parts to make one large Machine. Later that Machine may run faster, but there is only one time when it is born.

You and I are alive at this moment.

We should marvel, but people alive at such times usually don't. Every few centuries, the steady march of change meets a discontinuity, and history hinges on that moment. We look back on those pivotal eras and wonder what it would have been like to be alive then. Confucius, Zoroaster, Buddha, and the latter Jewish patriarchs lived in the same historical era, an inflection point known as the axial age of religion. Few world religions were born after this time. Similarly, the great personalities converging upon the American Revolution and the geniuses who commingled during the invention of modern science in the 17th century mark additional axial phases in the short history of our civilization.

Three thousand years from now, when keen minds review the past, I believe that our ancient time, here at the cusp of the third millennium, will be seen as another such era. In the years roughly coincidental with the Netscape IPO, humans began animating inert objects with tiny slivers of intelligence, connecting them into a global field, and linking their own minds into a single thing. This will be recognized as the largest, most complex, and most surprising event on the planet. Weaving nerves out of glass and radio waves, our species began wiring up all regions, all processes, all facts and notions into a grand network. From this embryonic neural net was born a collaborative interface for our civilization, a sensing, cognitive device with power that exceeded any previous invention. The Machine provided a new way of thinking (perfect search, total recall) and a new mind for an old species. It was the Beginning.

In retrospect, the Netscape IPO was a puny rocket to herald such a moment. The product and the company quickly withered into irrelevance, and the excessive exuberance of its IPO was downright tame compared with the dotcoms that followed. First moments are often like that. After the hysteria has died down, after the millions of dollars have been gained and lost, after the strands of mind, once achingly isolated, have started to come together - the only thing we can say is: Our Machine is born. It's on.

Originally Posted by Marx & Lennon

Originally Posted by Seadog '66

Originally Posted by Peter Gibbons

Stonewall,

This would indeed by HUGE if true, and would be just the type of thing that could trigger a 4T cascade under current saecular conditions. I quickly checked Drudge, CNN, and HuffPo to see if anything was breaking but could not find anything. This Tom Flocco guy does seem to have an agenda (to say the least) but that doesn't mean he didn't scoop everybody.

I guess we'll find out soon enough if this is a hoax.

Flocco is reliable, but I do not know about his source. It could be the standard disinfo/misinfo setup associated with the Bush people. Then again, it could be for real. Even if it is true, one would not expect the establishment media to cover it, so long as they can avoid doing so. The establishment media has been the faithful propaganda organ of this Bush administration since the day the brain damaged puppet, Junior, was trotted out to announce his candidacy in 1999. Just look at their monumental success in making the non-existent "al-Qaeda," an irrefutably documented fabrication of the CIA, a household bogeyman. This country in its present Bushian/Luciferian propagandistic state is a laugh a minute.

I smell Karl Rove's scent all over this. It's similar to the Dan Rather thing, where the story is discreditted by discreditting the source.

That would indeed be standard operating procedure for the Bush people.

Originally Posted by Devil's Advocate

p.s. There's one going on now in Cincy. Seems you libs are all excited too. That's Red as Red state goes. Looks like a liberal Democrat, who won't call himself a liberal or a Democrat, might win it! Stay tuned, you just might not need the Jeff Rense/Stoney Flocco method after all!

How could the good people of rural southern Ohio vote for a liberal Democrat? Surely they can't be fooled that easily. :shock:

Originally Posted by Peter Gibbons

Stonewall,

This would indeed by HUGE if true, and would be just the type of thing that could trigger a 4T cascade under current saecular conditions. I quickly checked Drudge, CNN, and HuffPo to see if anything was breaking but could not find anything. This Tom Flocco guy does seem to have an agenda (to say the least) but that doesn't mean he didn't scoop everybody.

I guess we'll find out soon enough if this is a hoax.

Just Googled 'chicago subway bomb mi6'. The story is flying all over the fringe internet. Domians such as abovetopsecret, godlikeproductions, letsroll911, xiaodongpeople, tomflocco, biblebelievers, fourwinds10, freedomisforeverybody are repeating the story. What I'm not seeing is domains such as cnn, msnbc, reuters, bbc, boston.com, or anything vaguely resembling main line.

Not sure how things will come out, but the story seems to be too big already for the major feeds not to try to confirm. At that point, assuming any truth, the government would have to decide whether to lie, which could get risky. While the Bush administration has been handling the media fairly effectively to this point, give the media sharks a scent of blood in the water and the dynamics could change. If a story this big were real, being the first and most aggressive to break it would be worth ticking off the White House.

But it feels like an urban legend / false story to me, at least the subway bomb part of it.

Originally Posted by Kiff 1961

Originally Posted by Devil's Advocate

p.s. There's one going on now in Cincy. Seems you libs are all excited too. That's Red as Red state goes. Looks like a liberal Democrat, who won't call himself a liberal or a Democrat, might win it! Stay tuned, you just might not need the Jeff Rense/Stoney Flocco method after all!

How could the good people of rural southern Ohio vote for a liberal Democrat? Surely they can't be fooled that easily. :shock:

Oh, he meant the liberal ex-Marine and Iraq War vet.

Yes, he's a Bush-bashing liberal "Hack job," who ran as a conservative.

Like the military vet, John Kerry, and the Bush-hugging Senator Tom Daschle, this guy lost, too. No bellwether, this election.

Originally Posted by Devil's Advocate

Like the military vet, John Kerry, and the Bush-hugging Senator Tom Daschle, this guy lost, too. No bellwether, this election.

Oh no. Just as women are not about to see any rollback of their rights in Iraq, he won.

Originally Posted by Bob Butler 54

Just Googled 'chicago subway bomb mi6'. The story is flying all over the fringe internet. Domians such as abovetopsecret, godlikeproductions, letsroll911, xiaodongpeople, tomflocco, biblebelievers, fourwinds10, freedomisforeverybody are repeating the story. What I'm not seeing is domains such as cnn, msnbc, reuters, bbc, boston.com, or anything vaguely resembling main line.

Not sure how things will come out, but the story seems to be too big already for the major feeds not to try to confirm. At that point, assuming any truth, the government would have to decide whether to lie, which could get risky. While the Bush administration has been handling the media fairly effectively to this point, give the media sharks a scent of blood in the water and the dynamics could change. If a story this big were real, being the first and most aggressive to break it would be worth ticking off the White House.

But it feels like an urban legend / false story to me, at least the subway bomb part of it.

If it were to be picked up by anybody, it would be the foreign press since the establishment media in this country has operated as an effective propaganda organ for the Bush administration all along (notably the same establishment media which tore Reagan to shreds daily...but then Reaganism was and is the antithesis of the top-down establishment control the Bush Regierung represents, despite the ever-present absurd claims to the contrary in this "Age of Bush"). But if any such indictments are under seal, then even the foreign press would have a hard time picking up the story. Surely, at some point in the future, any such indictments would have to be released publicly. That is the point at which any media, foreign or otherwise, might pick it up.

If there is indeed any truth to these indictments, then we may see the fictitious "al-Qaeda" bogeyman under former Bush business partner (in a world of 6 billion people) Osama bin Laden hauled out one more time and blamed for some upcoming domestic catastrophe(s). The sites you mention cite the upcoming 60th anniversary of Hiroshima on 6 August (that's this Saturday, folks). Even WorldNetDaily is running some article about the double significance of the date in terms of Islamic dating. It is suggested that someplace(s) in the US may experience on that date what Hiroshima experienced precisely 60 years earlier. If something of this kind does happen on that date, I would particularly hate to be anywhere near Chicago if indeed there is any truth to these indictments since that would be the Bush people's most effective means of getting rid of such a pesky annoyance altogether. Let's just hope and pray that nothing of the kind happens on 6 August or any other date.

Originally Posted by Devil's Advocate

Yes, he's a Bush-bashing liberal "Hack job," who ran as a conservative.

Like the military vet, John Kerry, and the Bush-hugging Senator Tom Daschle, this guy lost, too. No bellwether, this election.

Although Hackett only lost by four points, it appears, compared to the last Democratic candidate, who lost by 44. This, in one of the most Red counties north of the Mason-Dixon line.

Originally Posted by Kiff 1961

Originally Posted by Devil's Advocate

Yes, he's a Bush-bashing liberal "Hack job," who ran as a conservative.

Like the military vet, John Kerry, and the Bush-hugging Senator Tom Daschle, this guy lost, too. No bellwether, this election.

Although Hackett only lost by four points, it appears, compared to the last Democratic candidate, who lost by 44. This, in one of the most Red counties north of the Mason-Dixon line.

H-m-m-m. Best to not confuse DA's vitriol by offering reason. Like oil and poetry, the two are inconsequential to one another.