If Iraq has 100 billion barrels of oil, and if oil is in the $50 to $100 per barrel range, then the prize is $5 to $10 trillion dollars.

If the cost of occupation is $200 billion per year, and if a 10-year occupation is needed to pump out the oil, the cost of the prize is $2 trillion. - Tony Smith

That’s cynical! America of course isn’t stealing the oil, it does pay for it. On the other hand, it is clearly fighting wars in countries where not fighting them would increase the instability of oil prices. Lots of dictatorships run by blood-thirsty tyrants in certain countries have escaped Saddam’s fate. On the other hand, Iraq did do some fairly horrific things in the 80s under Saddam, such as making and using mustard gas and three types of nerve gas on the Iranians and the Kurds. It’s really a pity that Iraq wasn’t sorted out after the First Gulf War when it invaded Kuwait. It was 9/11 that sealed Saddam’s fate: Iraq seemed simply too dangerous. By the time politicians do decide to go to war with the Iranians, they’ll have a good supply of atomic weapons and missile systems. If Iran could produce small atomic weapons for covert or terrorist attacks by ships or aircraft, it would be unthinkable to risk a conflict, which would be worse than Vietnam in political consequences.

The risk of attacking Iran is that Iran may have been supplied by Russia and China (rivals of the USA with respect to mid-east oil) with missiles capable of sinking USA navy ships and damaging USA ground bases in the area.

If Iran does mount a significant counter-attack, then the issue arises as to how far the USA is willing to escalate towards WWIII.

Who will Russia and China side with? Does that depend on the economic consequences? (i.e. how much money their leaders are willing to invest in such a war, and whether they will profit from trade after the war). President Putin announced that he was re-targetting his missiles on Europe because of the ABM radar system being installed in the Czech Republic. Last year Moscow spies used Po-210 to murder Litvinenko in London (contaminating many others who were in the restaurant at the same time, and probably reducing their lifespan).

All this stuff may come to a head during the summer of 2007, but the level of USA political debate about the situation is (in my opinion) at an abysmally low level.

Maybe voters don’t really love to hear it discussed (a political hot potato). The consensus behind the ‘Doomsday Clock’ suggests no imminent danger.

It might be worth checking out this TED talk.

I like to think of this in the following way (I guess this is similar to what Modal Realists say…). The neural network in your head executes a program. That program defines a virtual world in which the things you experience are real objective events.

I’ve discussed this a bit on my blog…

That is not the question. Tumors in cancer patients are human, and are alive. Therefore, tumors are human life. Is it therefore murder to excise and dispose of a tumor?

I fear that his decision-making may be worse than that, i.e., based on:

1 - money, which trumps everything else;

2 - if money is a neutral factor, then follow Rove’s counting of numbers in voting blocks.

Maybe there is no big-money pharmaceutical lobby for stem-cell research (as long as the drug companies get lots of money for “scientific advances in regenerative medicine”),
so
2-Rove vote counting controls, and
Rove’s counting of Christian fundmentalist block votes, and Rove’s counting of pro-stem-cell voters as being relatively soft on that issue, dictates Bush’s position.

Therefore, Bush’s position is in fact reason-based (as set out above),
with
science indeed being considered irrelevant and “complex debate” being obsolete in today’s sound-bite-news USA with respect to almost all voters.

For an example where 1-money controls, you need look no further than Iraq and Iran.

If Iraq has 100 billion barrells of oil, and if oil is in the $50 to $100 per barrel range, then the prize is $5 to $10 trillion dollars.
If the cost of occupation is $200 billion per year, and if a 10-year occupation is needed to pump out the oil, the cost of the prize is $2 trillion.

If Iran is the primary source of instability in occupation of Iraq, then attacking Iran to get rid of that source of instability may be necessary to win the prize, and even if the attack costs the USA $1 trillion or so, the prize is still so big that it is worth the effort (particularly if the USA can thereby seize Iranian oil in the amount of several tens of billions of barrels).

The risk of attacking Iran is that Iran may have been supplied by Russia and China (rivals of the USA with respect to mid-east oil) with missiles capable of sinking USA navy ships and damaging USA ground bases in the area.

If Iran does mount a significant counter-attack, then the issue arises as to how far the USA is willing to escalate towards WWIII.

All this stuff may come to a head during the summer of 2007, but the level of USA political debate about the situation is (in my opinion) at an abysmally low level.

Tony Smith

PS - Please note that the above reason-based picture of Bush-type decision-making considers human life and suffering to be irrelevant (particularly if most of the dead and miserable are not USA voters, or can be marginalized in the minds of the majority of voters as being volunteer soldiers from social groups distinct from those of that majority).
Also,
I am not advocating the above as what I would do if I were ruler, but I do recognize that it is in fact rational and reason-based, even if it may not be good or desirable.

PPS - It is interesting that Terrence McKenna’s timewave predicts some sort of major event around 24 August 2007,
and
that the last previous major event it predicted was 4 November 2003 which was the time at which Iraqi opposition to USA occupation began using weapons capable of shooting down USA helicopters.
The one before that was around 9/11.
All these events were after McKenna’s death in April 2000.

Any objective stance on the benefit/harm done to individual persons or humanity as a whole as a result of stem cell research can only conclude that stem cell research is a good and proper thing to do.

I’m not sure I get the gist of your point.

I will say this; I don’t particularly see a reason to view the problem from anything but a human perspective. We aren’t here to make the planet livable for dinosaurs, or for bunny rabbits, but for ourselves. Yes, this is detached, arrogant, selfish and humanist, but it is, essentially, the metric by which we will be judging regardless.

It is curious you use the term ‘ecobalance’, as though there is a static balance into which we once fit and do no longer. I don’t really believe this to be true; at least, one cannot expect to grow as a race without changing the balance. Hopefully for the better; but that is the crux of the problem.

Torture is ok; the preemptive invasion of another country is good; gutting our Constitution is justifiable; and on and on and on. Why would anyone with the brains of a gerbil listen to Bush tell us about right and wrong?

uh huh… try killing-off the human race and see what the ecobalance that we **contributing members** arose from and **belong to** does to stop you.

Speaking of, detatched human arrogance.

If I pull a trigger, is that wrong? I would argue that, in and of itself; no. It’s just a trigger. Wait! Is it attached to a gun? Well, that makes me uneasy, but pulling it is still not a problem - the gun has no defined ammunition in it. Lets say it does, though - now is it wrong? Well, we’re definitely treading into dangerous water here because it’s just a short hop to having someone in front of the barrel, and we know that killing someone is wrong.

Why do we know that? Because it’s a consequence we’ve learned to avoid in the past - killing (generally) creates more problems than it solves. Murder is bad. But if murder is bad, does it therefore stand to reason that pulling a trigger is bad?

Only in the situation in which the chain of events would lead to murder.

My point is this; what we should be discussing is what consequences we want to avoid. Bush is clearly attempting to avoid a consequence wherein blastocysts are harvested willy-nilly without regard to their humanity for the use in science. This no doubt springs from the same idea that using a human for science, without regard for that human, is wrong. No one wants to be arbitrarily vivisected. Many people object to Bush making this decision because he fails to make reasonable decisions in other arenas; for instance, he opposes birth control.

Why is that unreasonable? Because many people see the natural consequence to that is overpopulation, reduced living standards for all, and in the extreme cases starvation and war - more death. We know death to be bad, especially at scale. If a person thinks that these things are reasonable, we are justified in thinking them perhaps not well qualified to make other decisions. Regardless of personal nuance, understanding and intelligence, Bush’s policies have been consistently without nuance, understanding or intelligence.

What is the consequence of using blastocysts already slated for destruction? First, scientific progress. Second, a feeling that is coupled with that that they are somehow an ‘asset’ and not a ‘human’. Which is probably true, but debatable. What we’re really worried about, with that feeling, is that other more human things will lose their humanity. But here’s the rub; we can either choose to act on this thing that is not human, that will be destroyed, or we can wallow in what will one day be looked back on as a dark age. If we can reasonably say that the consequence is not inherently immoral, we can reasonably say that the action is moral. There are no immoral consequences here, only some icky feelings.

Don’t forget, “natural human intuition”… because there are a number of more-centralized atheists who don’t buy into the meaningless, purposeless, random, chaotic nihilistic bullshit hype, that the reactionary left has enthusiastically adopted in spite of much evidence to the contrary.

Or is that what an “Enlightenment philosopher” is?

There is a very good reason why Germany isn’t too keen on using embryos, you know…

Godwin’s law in action.

I recall that standard question that demonstrates the change in perspective with age/experience in humans, where a scenario involving some poor bloke who couldn’t afford certain medication had to steal it to save his daughter’s life- is presented and kids of different age groups are asked to rate his actions.
The younger ones would rate it as wrong coz’ it’s “morally bad to steal”. But we would value the larger motive.

Our brains by design sympathize with the deer fallen prey to a Lion, or a bee being eaten by a Mantis (are Mantises carnivores?). But the bee is obluvious to the unnecessary pain it caused by stinging a kid who fetched the ball from under the hive. All it wished was to protect the queen (an evolutionary instinct).

I would go so far as to say morality is absolute enough for me and some alein evolved under a different natural selection process to agree upon. It just works (here and for now) as far as self-preservation is concerned (a la selfish gene). What most people mean by “grey area” is probably the multitude of larger motives difficult for most to conceive without a thourough understanding of the works.
And as for taking a stand: I’m for stem cell research.

Jason Dick: a sperm or an egg or a seed or whatever does not and will not ever develop into a human being, not even “potentially”. If you’re so keen on equating a blastocyst with a sperm or an egg you might just as wel equate it to the chair you’re (probably) sitting on - that won’t develop into much either.

Admittedly, a blastocyst outside the womb won’t get very far either, but neither would a 6 month old embryo, and neither would you if someone threw you in a vacuum chamber (or in outer space).

I do not oppose stem cell research. I oppose those who think they can divide humanity in those who are allowed to live and those who are not. There is a very good reason why Germany isn’t too keen on using embryos, you know …