Wednesday, November 03, 2004
START GROOMING EDWARDS
Simple but Effective
Why you keep losing to this idiot.
By William Saletan, SLATE
Updated Wednesday, Nov. 3, 2004, at 12:05 AM PT
12:01 a.m. PT: Sigh. I really didn't want to have to write this.
George W. Bush is going to win re-election. Yeah, the lawyers will haggle about Ohio. But this time, Democrats don't have the popular vote on their side. Bush does.
If you're a Bush supporter, this is no surprise. You love him, so why shouldn't everybody else?
But if you're dissatisfied with Bush—or if, like me, you think he's been the worst president in memory—you have a lot of explaining to do. Why don't a majority of voters agree with us? How has Bush pulled it off?
I think this is the answer: Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity.
Bush is a very simple man. You may think that makes him a bad president, as I do, but lots of people don't—and there are more of them than there are of us. If you don't believe me, take a look at those numbers on your TV screen.
Think about the simplicity of everything Bush says and does. He gives the same speech every time. His sentences are short and clear. "Government must do a few things and do them well," he says. True to his word, he has spent his political capital on a few big ideas: tax cuts, terrorism, Iraq. Even his electoral strategy tonight was powerfully simple: Win Florida, win Ohio, and nothing else matters. All those lesser states—Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, New Hampshire—don't matter if Bush reels in the big ones.
This is what so many people like about Bush's approach to terrorism. They forgive his marginal and not-so-marginal screw-ups, because they can see that fundamentally, he "gets it." They forgive his mismanagement of Iraq, because they see that his heart and will are in the right place. And while they may be unhappy about their economic circumstances, they don't hold that against him. What you and I see as unreflectiveness, they see as transparency. They trust him.
Now look at your candidate, John Kerry. What quality has he most lacked? Not courage—he proved that in Vietnam. Not will—he proved that in Iowa. Not brains—he proved that in the debates. What Kerry lacked was simplicity. Bush had one message; Kerry had dozens. Bush had one issue; Kerry had scores. Bush ended his sentences when you expected him to say more; Kerry went on and on, adding one prepositional phrase after another, until nobody could remember what he was talking about. Now Bush has two big states that mean everything, and Kerry has a bunch of little ones that add up to nothing.
If you're a Democrat, here's my advice. Do what the Republicans did in 1998. Get simple. Find a compelling salesman and get him ready to run for president in 2008. Put aside your quibbles about preparation, stature, expertise, nuance, and all that other hyper-sophisticated garbage that caused you to nominate Kerry. You already have legions of people with preparation, stature, expertise, and nuance ready to staff the executive branch of the federal government. You don't need one of them to be president. You just need somebody to win the White House and appoint them to his administration. And that will require all the simplicity, salesmanship, and easygoing humanity they don't have.
The good news is, that person is already available. His name is John Edwards. If you have any doubt about his electability, just read the exit polls from the 2004 Democratic primaries. If you don't think he's ready to be president—if you don't think he has the right credentials, the right gravitas, the right subtlety of thought—ask yourself whether these are the same things you find wanting in George W. Bush. Because evidently a majority of the voting population of the United States doesn't share your concern. They seem to be attracted to a candidate with a simple message, a clear focus, and a human touch. You might want to consider their views, since they're the ones who will decide whether you're sitting here again four years from now, wondering what went wrong.
In 1998 and 1999, Republicans cleared the field for George W. Bush. Members of Congress and other major officeholders threw their weight behind him to make sure he got the nomination. They united because their previous presidential nominee, a clumsy veteran senator, had gone down to defeat. They were facing eight years out of power, and they were hungry.
Do what they did. Give Edwards a job that will position him to run for president again in a couple of years. Clear the field of Hillary Clinton and any other well-meaning liberal who can't connect with people outside those islands of blue on your electoral map. Because you're going to get a simple president again next time, whether you like it or not. The only question is whether that president will be from your party or the other one.Wednesday, November 03, 2004
KERRY WIMPS OUT
9:30 am: "Kerry camp: 'We can wait' Democrats send Edwards out to address supporters, says they'll wait for all Ohio votes to be counted."
11:00 am: "Kerry Calls Bush to Concede Election".
Skull-N-Bones solidarity wins.
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We will either destroy ourselves, or not. Either way, it will be exceedingly painful.
I myself am simply removing myself and my loved ones as much as possible from the impact. Them durned revenoors wanna come onto mah land, I'll let ol' betsy do mah talkin'.Wednesday, November 03, 2004
WE'RE MELTING, MELTING! WHAT A WORLD, WHAT A WORLD.....
And yet it melts
The Guardian (UK)
Some people still think the world is flat. Others firmly believe that the sun rotates around the earth. In spite of all the evidence to the contrary, they cling to their opinions based on the naive realism of what they can see with their own eyes and nothing else. In children or most adults, such beliefs are quaint or merely cranky at worst. But there is a class of events that too many people, and too many otherwise sensible people in positions of authority, refuse to see: climate change. True, the facts of global warming and its consequences are large, complex, slow-moving and depressing, and addressing it threatens to be expensive and difficult. But the evidence of climate change continues to move heavily towards the need to stop its causes. As with discredited ideas that the earth is at the centre of the universe or is flat, there will always be some who disagree. But climate change deniers, for all their easy scepticism and Popperesque deployment of arguments, cannot be allowed to outweigh the very real evidence that the world is in danger.
The latest profound signs of global warming come from the frozen Arctic. Involving hundreds of scientists and six indigenous communities, the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment draws on a comprehensive survey carried out over four years in the eight countries that abut the North Pole. It reveals a catalogue of evidence that should prompt the most hardened sceptics to think again - especially those who argue that natural causes and variations are being mistaken for human-made climate change. The report, commissioned by the Arctic Council, states baldly that "human influences, resulting primarily from increased emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, have now become the dominant factor". The Arctic, it goes on, "is now experiencing some of the most rapid and severe climate change on earth" - twice as fast as previously estimated.
There are a number of disturbing aspects to this report - not least the accusation by some European researchers involved that its publication was being delayed until after the US election to spare the blushes of the Bush administration. But the report's evidence speaks for itself: the Arctic's icecap is melting at an unprecedented rate, while the giant ice sheets of Greenland are under threat. But the most worrying aspect is the report's suggestion that at the current rate of warming, there may be no ice at all in the Arctic come the summer of 2070 - effectively killing one of the world's most distinctive and rich ecosystems.
What happens now? Given the weight and scope of evidence, the report's conclusions that rapid efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions would slow down the pace of climate change must be followed. The international community has an early opportunity to make use of this report, when foreign ministers of the Arctic border nations - including the United States - meet in Iceland later this month. But until the US agrees to re-enter the negotiating process under which the Kyoto protocol was drawn up, there is little to be expected from the world's biggest polluter in making the sorts of cuts that would be required. There are other things that can be done to at least lessen the impact on the Arctic itself, such as cutting back on overfishing in the region - one of the factors that "threaten to overwhelm the adaptive capacity" of the Arctic's environment. In more direct terms, there are high hopes that today's conference in Berlin - being opened by the Queen, another convert to the cause of climate change - will charge the UK with an effective strategy for tackling greenhouse gas emissions. If we take this threat seriously we must face the hard facts that our patterns of energy usage and sources must change. The Arctic may be disappearing, but global warming will not.
Special report
Graphics
Interactive
Guide to drilling for oil in the Arctic
Calculate your personal carbon count
Key resources
Bjorn Lomborg: Are we doing the right thing?
Useful links
UN framework convention on climate change
Wednesday, November 03, 2004
NECK-A-NECK WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM MY FRIENDS...
Friends like republican-owned Sequoia and Diebold, and brother Jeb as governor of a key battleground state that (surprise!) uses those paper-trail-less machines and ended up in Dubya's columns? Did anyone else notice, all throughout the tallying of the "popular vote", that Bush was consistently ahead by about 4% of the vote? How strange - whether the count was 5 million or 50 million, Bush was always steadily ahead by about 4%. So, about those Republican-owned electronic voting machines with no paper trails, the ones where we all just take it on faith that the votes are being correctly tallied and there's no sneaky geek monkeybusiness going on in the millions of lines of programming code. How hard could it be to introduce a few characters into the subroutines to quietly change a vote every so often? Not like people were not complaining of 'malfunctions' where their votes for Kerry kept mysteriously reverting to votes for Bush, it was on the news...
Oh, I'm sorry - am I just being a whiny paranoid liberal pussie again?
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Electronic Voting Machine Woes Reported
By RACHEL KONRAD, AP Technology Writer
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. - Voters nationwide reported some 1,100 problems with electronic voting machines on Tuesday, including trouble choosing their intended candidates.
The e-voting glitches reported to the Election Protection Coalition, an umbrella group of volunteer poll monitors that set up a telephone hotline, included malfunctions blamed on everything from power outages to incompetent poll workers.
But there were also several dozen voters in six states — particularly Democrats in Florida — who said the wrong candidates appeared on their touch-screen machine's checkout screen, the coalition said.
In many cases, voters said they intended to select John Kerry (news - web sites) but when the computer asked them to verify the choice it showed them instead opting for President Bush (news - web sites), the group said.
Ralph G. Neas, president of People for the American Way Foundation, which helped form the coalition, called the summary screen problem "troubling but anecdotal."
He and other voting rights advocates said the disproportionate number of Democrats reporting such problems was probably due to higher awareness of voter protection coalitions.
"Overall, the problems of outright voter intimidation and suppression have not been as great as in the past," Neas said.
But the reports did highlight computer scientists' concerns about touch screens, which they say are prone to tampering and unreliable unless they produce paper records for recounts.
Roberta Harvey, 57, of Clearwater, Fla., said she had tried at least a half dozen times to select Kerry-Edwards when she voted Tuesday at Northwood Presbyterian Church.
After 10 minutes trying to change her selection, the Pinellas County resident said she called a poll worker and got a wet-wipe napkin to clean the touch screen as well as a pencil so she could use its eraser-end instead of her finger. Harvey said it took about 10 attempts to select Kerry before and a summary screen confirmed her intended selection.
Election officials in several Florida counties where voters complained about such problems did not return calls Tuesday night.
A spokesoman for the company that makes the touch-screen machines used in Pinellas, Palm Beach and two other Florida counties, Alfie Charles of Sequoia Voting Systems Inc., said the machines' monitors may need to be recalibrated periodically.
The most likely reason the summary screen showed wrong candidates was because voters pushed the wrong part of the touch screen in the first place, Charles said.
He said poll workers are trained to perform the recalibration whenever a voter says the touch screen isn't sensitive enough.
"Voters will vote quickly and they'll notice that they made an error when they get to the review screen. The review screen is doing exactly what it needs to do — notifying voters what selections are about to be recorded," Charles said. "On a paper ballot, you don't get a second chance to make sure you voted for whom you intended, and it's a strong point in favor of these machines."
The Election Protection Coalition received a total of 32 reports of touch-screen voters who selected one candidate only to have another show up on the summary screen, Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a coalition member.
David Dill, a Stanford University computer scientist whose Verified Voting Foundation also belongs to the coalition, said he wouldn't "prejudge and say the election is going smoothly just because we have a small number of incident reports out of the total population.
"It's not going to be until the dust clears probably tomorrow that we have even an approximate idea of what happened," Dill added.
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"Troubling but anecdotal".Tuesday, November 02, 2004
REFERENDUM ON THE MAN
Bush gives me a bad personal feeling, a visceral reaction. There's a natural-born streak of mean in that boy that I just can't get past.
Kerry I don't care about, but he doesn't scare me.
I'm hoping America, like me, is tired of being scared.
Tuesday, November 02, 2004
HELLO?
Tuesday, November 02, 2004
THE FUNDAMENTAL ISSUE
BY ERIC JACKSON
One of the basic American constitutional values is that a person has a right to believe whatever she or he wants, and may freely express these beliefs.
Never entirely accepted in the United States --- fractious society that it is --- this idea, insisted upon by the Jeffersonians and enshrined in the First Amendment to the US Constitution, has spread over much of the world and nowadays provides the principal litmus test that distinguishes free and unfree countries.
Most important, and most controversial then and now, was the bit about religion.
No official state religion? In the US you have always had a fringe that would declare a Christian theocracy, but most Americans are afraid of people who think like that and the popular culture mocks them.
No prohibition of the free exercise of religion? Whether it's the Jews or the Jehovah's Witnesses, the Moonies or the Mormons, the Nation of Islam or Islam in general, the Quakers or the ghost dancers, American history is replete with attempts to suppress particular religions. However, these efforts have largely failed to thrive.
Why?
Because the United States is a nation of immigrants, the early generations of which contained a high proportion of refugees from religious wars and sectarian persecutions. Because many of the founders of the American republic were freemasons, heirs to the tradition of tolerance that arose when the gory atrocities of the Crusades and the realities of doing business in Jerusalem led the bankers for those Christian holy wars, the Knights Templar, to conclude that a good Muslim or a good Jew was as good as a good Catholic.
Freedom of religion and the prohibition of an official government theology were put into the Bill of Rights because the American people didn't want any part of crusades or jihads or holy inquisitions.
But now the president of the United States has declared a crusade, a Christian holy war to the death against the world's billion-strong Muslim community. It's a fundamental break with American traditions. It's a policy error that if continued would mean at least a generation of war on many fronts, which the United States is far from certain to win.
Wait a minute, you may protest. Just because George W. Bush declared a "crusade" doesn't mean that he meant it that way.
The problem is, he had the best educated and most expensive team of advisors in the world, people who know very well what the concept "crusade" means to Muslims and to many Christians as well, and he still used that word. And then to emphasize the point, he ordered a "pre-emptive war" against a mainly Muslim country. He ordered the use of torture against Muslims who had committed no offense. As part of that mistreatment, troops under his command went well out of their way to insult Islam.
Do not call W's attitude "fundamentalist Christian." There is no such thing as a fundamentalist Christian Republican. Jerry Falwell, Ralph Reed, Pat Robertson, John Ashcroft et al say that every word of the Bible is the inerrant word of God which must be obeyed, but many of them actually discount the authority of the bit about not bearing false witness and not a one of them supports the institution of the jubilee found in chapter 25 of the Book of Leviticus. There is nothing the least bit Christian in Bush's call for a new crusade.
The fundamental policy issue in dispute in this year's US election is whether Western Civilization will be dragged by George W. Bush and his gang of fanatics on the one hand, and Osama bin Laden and his gang of fanatics on the other, into an immense conflagration with Islamic Civilization.
Yes, Osama called a holy war against us first, because he considered the presence of American troops on the Arabian Peninsula to be a profane insult against Islam. But the United States could have reached out to the great majority of the world's Muslims to isolate Osama bin Laden instead of driving them into the jihadis' arms by declaring a crusade.
The fundamental administrative issue in dispute in this year's US election is George W. Bush's dogmatism. He was told by honest and conscientious men and women in the intelligence agencies that Iraq, grim as it was under Saddam Hussein's dictatorship, posed no immediate military threat to anyone. The people who tendered that accurate assessment were treated as if they were disloyal. He was told by honest and conscientious military commanders that his Iraq war plans were flawed because they didn't include enough troops to maintain order and turn the country's water, electricity and phones back on with reasonable promptness. The people who tendered that accurate assessment were treated as cowards. He was told by honest and conscientious long-time friends of the United States that an occupation of Iraq would prompt ferocious and prolonged resistance. The people who tendered that accurate assessment were treated as enemies.
And now the United States is estranged from its old friends, while more and more young Muslims are rallying to Osama bin Laden's perverse cause.
The need to confront and defeat al Qaeda is not in dispute in the contest between Bush and Kerry. The choice is about how this will be done: Bush's reckless American charge toward Armageddon, or Kerry's more deliberate and international approach to the problem.
Eric Jackson is the editor of The Panama News in the Republic of Panama where thousands of Americans still reside. He can be reached at editor@thepanamanews.com
Artist Paul Lachine's website is: http://www.newsart.com/pa/personal/lachine.htmTuesday, November 02, 2004
TODAY'S BIG STORY: THE FATE OF THE WORLD
Monday, November 01, 2004
SERIOUSLY INTERESTING THOUGHTS ON THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PORN
On 2002-11-25 05:53:00 PST ***** wrote:
>> On Sun, 24 Nov 2002 18:34:41 EDT, ******* wrote:>
> PS: I don't know if "Details" has a Web site, so I just typed this in.
> It's kind of interesting- I've met at least one porn stud type who has
> done a lot of gay porn and a bunch of straight porn with his wife, all
> the while married with a wife and multiple kids. He insisted he was
> and is 100% straight. It's kind of odd, but I guess that is the point
> of the article.
Most scholars of sexuality argue that there are about 45 or 50 different aspects to sexual orientation. Only one is genital sexual attraction(e.g., what most people think of as "sex"). With this matrix of aspects --each one of which has an infinte number of points along the scale of 0 (no attraction) to 10 (complete attraction) -- it's easy to see that there aren't just three sexualities (gay, straight, bi), but an infinite variety .Of course, holding that model of sexuality in one's head is impossible. Human beings just can't do that. Human beings simplify, and one of the most common models used is the gay-bi-straight continuum. That doesn'ta llow for what's commonly known as straight-trade (guys who consider themselves heterosexual but have sex with men).
There is, however, another thing to consider here. Society's general homophobic attitude easily transforms otherwise libertine, sex-positive people into self-loathing homophobes. (Michel Foucault, call your office.)One of the great judgment calls people make in their lives is whether the straight-trade guy who wants to fuck your mouth is really straight-trade or if he's just a fucked-up bisexual or gay boy who can't bring himself to admit the "horrible" truth about himself. Much of the argument in gay porn, I think, goes that these guys in gay porn are just fucked-up gay or bi boys.
> More puzzling is that Tim would actually TYPE this long the article in
> by hand if I take that sentence you wrote above at face value.
> Assuming that the article isn't online, haven't you ever heard of a
> scanner and OCR (optical character recognition)?! Crimony man, what a
> drag!
100 wpm, Jim. 100 wpm. And according to the male strippers here in DC,the best hands on the East Coast. :)
> It's funny- there is not really an analogous gay-for-pay phenomenon in
> g/g porn, which is what I kind of specialize in. It certainly happens
> but it's never mentioned much or marketed that way. Most of the girls
> are actively bisexual or at least curious or open-minded and don't
> have a big issue with doing some g/g scenes. Women's sexuality is
> generally more fluid than men anyway, so I guess it's just not seen as
> any big deal if a girl does some sex acts supposedly against her
> nature. I personally find it kind of a thrill when I get some girls
> who supposedly aren't bi to do g/g scenes, but I've never heard anyone
> else express the same. Maybe I'm just a bit warped because I'm
> constantly coaxing teen girls into eating pussy for the first time :-)
Well, let me toss out a hypothesis (and play a little devil's advocate here):Part of the "reason" for women to "exist" is that they are "there to be fucked." (No, I'm not going to pull a Patrick Riley "women are there to procreate" rant! :) ) Men fuck; women are fucked. As the S&M fetishists know, sex is often about power. It's about who's fucking who. Men re-establish their "power" and "role" in society (sic) by fucking women. The "normal order of things" is re-established, re-affirmed, re-negotiated -- especially in this post-feminist, Susan Faludi-esque landscape. Hence,straight porn flourishes as women are shown to be "just objects" for men to fuck. Straight porn flourishes as women are "forced" to do things that they don't want to do (such as swallow cum, take cum on their face, get fucked in the ass, get gang-banged, be slutty...oh, and yes, eat pussy.)
Indeed, straight porn thrives as much on the breaking of taboos (sex for pleasure, "dirty" sex, anal sex, etc.) as it does the reinforcement of them(men rule, women don't*). Break the taboos too much, and there's no thrill any more. (So you need to search for new taboos to break -- rape, S&M,etc. Which is why porn slides ever-downward into the abyss of near-misogyny.) Reinforce the taboo -- men rule, women don't -- and you keep the thrill.
It may be unstated, but the reason (IMHO) why there is so much g/g action in straight porn is that it breaks the taboo of homosexuality but reinforces the taboo of "men rule" (e.g., the man running he porn film "forces" the girls to break the taboo). Marketing a"lez-for-pay" idea would miss the whole point. In gay porn, there aren't any social norms to break. Gay relationships and gay sex are outside the norm, by definition. There aren't socially-supported and reinforced gay social institutions or gay social norms for gay men to break. The thrill of gay sex IS gay sex -- not that one gay man tops or another bottoms. (Indeed, the gay sexual revolution was built primarily on the rule that everyone should do everything; to paraphrase St. Paul, "In gay sex, there is no top, no bottom, no straight or trade." :) ) T
he invisible is visible; the "love that dare not speak its name" comes out shouting as it exits the closet. But there are lingering side-effects from the closet just the same. The gay porn purchasing audience (as compared to the renting audience) is much older, much wealthier, more obese -- and prone to suffer lingering feelings of self-loathing -- than the gay community at large. This older generation drives how gay porn is made. (Ask any gay porn retailer the average age of their customers purchasing videos. "60" is a pretty common response.)
So not only does the typical gay porn star look like a pre-pubescent little boy (with a more-than-man-sized cock between his legs), but he's straight. He's the high man on the status pole (e.g., NOT gay). He's the guy who used to beat you up in the 7th grade. He's the guy who sneered, "You throw like a GIRL!" during dodge-ball. He's the guy who played football, was voted prom king, and whom your parents said you should be more like. He's the straight man. The man society approves of. The man society lauds. The man society lavishes praise on. And if you can only just get him to show you a LITTLE BIT of approval -- just a TINY bit of patronizing, condescending, loathsome approval -- then all will be right with the world. You won't be the hated faggot any more. You'll be part of the "in" crowd. The golden boy not only will have approved of you, accepted you (in a tiny,teeny, miniscule way).
BUT -- the golden (straight) boy will have done so in the most powerful way possible: Sexually. He would have come down from his sexual Olympus (for sex is what divides "us" from "them") and touched the sniveling, wimpy, weak queer with his golden penis. The chasm of sexuality between straight and gay would have been bridged. Even as the straight-trade man spits venom ("you like that big cock, huh faggot?") and degrades you ("want this big fuck-pole to split you in two, queer? you wanna choke on this huge horse-cock of mine?"), he accepts you. (Negative attention is better than no attention at all.) And in accepting the gay man, the straight-trade man is placed even higher on the pedestal than he was before.
So it is no small wonder that gay porn goes to great lengths to market performers as straight. (In fact, many gay models lie to the public in interviews, claiming to be straight when they are not. The goal is to promote a public image of heterosexuality in order to play off that self-loathing but revering attitude among gay porn's purchasing public.)I realize this is a pitiful overstatement. To say the least! But there's the grain of truth in this.
* -- I fully recognize that in the REAL world of porn, behind the scenes,women rule. Women turn men down. Women are paid more, much more. Women only do what they want; men rarely get to say "no" to a sex act. But on screen, men rule. Women never turn men down. Men get off. Men get serviced. Men don't get degraded, women do.Sunday, October 31, 2004
DAYS BEFORE THE ELECTION, A LITTLE HISTORICAL REFRESHER
Bush planned Iraq 'regime change' before becoming President
By Neil Mackay, Sunday Herald, 15 September 2002
A SECRET blueprint for US global domination reveals that President Bush and his cabinet were planning a premeditated attack on Iraq to secure 'regime change' even before he took power in January 2001.
The blueprint, uncovered by the Sunday Herald, for the creation of a 'global Pax Americana' was drawn up for Dick Cheney (now vice- president), Donald Rumsfeld (defence secretary), Paul Wolfowitz (Rumsfeld's deputy), George W Bush's younger brother Jeb and Lewis Libby (Cheney's chief of staff). The document, entitled Rebuilding America's Defences: Strategies, Forces And Resources For A New Century, was written in September 2000 by the neo-conservative think-tank Project for the New American Century (PNAC).
The plan shows Bush's cabinet intended to take military control of the Gulf region whether or not Saddam Hussein was in power. It says: 'The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.'
The PNAC document supports a 'blueprint for maintaining global US pre-eminence, precluding the rise of a great power rival, and shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests'.
This 'American grand strategy' must be advanced for 'as far into the future as possible', the report says. It also calls for the US to 'fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theatre wars' as a 'core mission'.
The report describes American armed forces abroad as 'the cavalry on the new American frontier'. The PNAC blueprint supports an earlier document written by Wolfowitz and Libby that said the US must 'discourage advanced industrial nations from challenging our leadership or even aspiring to a larger regional or global role'.
The PNAC report also:
l refers to key allies such as the UK as 'the most effective and efficient means of exercising American global leadership';
l describes peace-keeping missions as 'demanding American political leadership rather than that of the United Nations';
l reveals worries in the administration that Europe could rival the USA;
l says 'even should Saddam pass from the scene' bases in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait will remain permanently -- despite domestic opposition in the Gulf regimes to the stationing of US troops -- as 'Iran may well prove as large a threat to US interests as Iraq has';
l spotlights China for 'regime change' saying 'it is time to increase the presence of American forces in southeast Asia'. This, it says, may lead to 'American and allied power providing the spur to the process of democratisation in China';
l calls for the creation of 'US Space Forces', to dominate space, and the total control of cyberspace to prevent 'enemies' using the internet against the US;
l hints that, despite threatening war against Iraq for developing weapons of mass destruction, the US may consider developing biological weapons -- which the nation has banned -- in decades to come. It says: 'New methods of attack -- electronic, 'non-lethal', biological -- will be more widely available ... combat likely will take place in new dimensions, in space, cyberspace, and perhaps the world of microbes ... advanced forms of biological warfare that can 'target' specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool';
l and pinpoints North Korea, Libya, Syria and Iran as dangerous regimes and says their existence justifies the creation of a 'world-wide command-and-control system'.
Tam Dalyell, the Labour MP, father of the House of Commons and one of the leading rebel voices against war with Iraq, said: 'This is garbage from right-wing think-tanks stuffed with chicken-hawks -- men who have never seen the horror of war but are in love with the idea of war. Men like Cheney, who were draft-dodgers in the Vietnam war.
'This is a blueprint for US world domination -- a new world order of their making. These are the thought processes of fantasist Americans who want to control the world. I am appalled that a British Labour Prime Minister should have got into bed with a crew which has this moral standing.'
Web report: Iraq