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.