Sorry if this is totally UK based - UT

In the grim weeks before what seems likely to be the second Gulf war, nothing is so depressing and debilitating as the sense of political impotence that overwhelms so many people.
The case for the war put by the governments on both sides of the Atlantic is pathetic, the dossier produced by the prime minister almost ridiculous. But the men behind the case and the dossier seem impervious to argument.

More people in Britain are against the war than for it, but in parliament our allegedly democratic representatives seem a million miles from the people they pretend to represent. Only a handful of MPs, not much more than a tenth of them, even voted for an adjournment motion to register their opposition.

Press and television are heavily loaded in favour of the conflict. There are warmongers on every side, even liberal warmongers. So what is left for the majority?

Must we meekly stand aside while the infectious martial spirit takes hold, and leer resignedly at the television as the scene shifts from real people arguing the case for or against war to generals and admirals poring over maps and debating military tactics? Isn’t it inevitable that the war will happen anyway, and therefore that there’s nothing we can do about it?

Looking back over the wars in which our government has been engaged over recent years, the picture is bleakly similar. A poll shortly before the Falklands war showed most people against the project. That majority vanished as the victorious task force took Port Stanley.

There was considerable opposition to the first Gulf war when it started and to the proposed war in the Balkans in 1999. That too evaporated in rapid victories for the allies. But the older campaigners among us remember another war, to which when it started there seemed little or no opposition.

The war led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands if not millions of people, many of them children and civilians. As the slaughter mounted, so did the opposition to it. This was the US war in Vietnam in the 1960s and early 1970s.

Arguments of protesters’ impotence that seem so powerful today also applied during the Vietnam war. The chief culprits were the US government. Our Labour government, under Harold Wilson, sided unequivocally with the US government. Wilson himself grovelled and wheedled at the feet of the US president, Lyndon Johnson, and was duly rewarded by the president with the title “a modern Churchill”.

Because Labour was in government, most Labour MPs stayed silent, and the Tories and Liberals meekly fell into line. Lots of people felt increasingly indignant at the slaughter in Vietnam.

But after all, parliament and the media seemed almost impenetrable. In a by-election in Hull in 1966, Guardian writer Richard Gott stood on an anti-war platform, and lost his deposit. What, after all, was the point of voicing that opposition, let alone doing anything about it?

The opposition grew slowly. It was initially relegated to pubs and clubs. The unquenchable radical, Adrian Mitchell, enthused many thousands of people with his immortal poem Don’t Tell Me Lies About Vietnam.

And in 1967 and 1968 the anti-war movement took to the streets. The two enormous demonstrations of March and October 1968 were called not by a political party nor even by recognised organisations such as CND.

The Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, at its root, was no more than a tiny group of what were denounced in the Tory press as “splitters and sectarians”. One Tory MP described the demonstrators as “scum from abroad”.

Any of the hundreds of thousands of people who went on those demonstrations will still remember them. The exuberance was overwhelming, infectious. “We are all foreign scum!” screamed one of the banners. I remember hearing Tariq Ali speaking in Trafalgar Square and my admiration for the clarity of his arguments and the melodious defiance of his tone.

The demonstrations made a difference. They altered the popular mood. All three of the diarists in the Labour government at the time, Crossman, Castle and Benn, though none of them left the government, all referred rather testily to the impact of the demonstrations.

Wilson’s support for the Vietnam war continued, but his credibility among young people vanished. It was his and his foreign secretaries’ stand on the Vietnam war confirmed him as a creep and a twister.

Above all, the strength of feeling on the question that the demonstrations proved convinced Wilson that he must curtail his instincts to send British troops to their deaths in Vietnam. Though his verbal enthusiasm for the war never faded, no British lives were lost.

Many of these conditions apply today even more than they did in 1968. The government’s case is even weaker, the popular hostility to it even stronger. The anti-war demonstrations, called by a numerically small coalition of anti-war forces, have been big enough to shock the government, but not yet to change its course.

Saturday’s demonstration needs to be seen in that context. Tariq Ali will be speaking, for a start. There is a point at which no elected government can continue to defy the will of the people, and that point can be reached by mass demonstration of the strength of popular feeling. That is why marching on Saturday is so crucial.

Paul Foot

Where do you go to get the news?

Here are some News sites to browse. I have divided each link into geographic area:

From the UK

Voice of America

Central European review

Oz News. The Sydney Morning Herald

Middle East times

Asia. Respected DAWN, the paper form Pakistan

All Africa.

Today’s the day that Parliment has a picnic. And every one who gives Mr Blair a sweet gets a copy of the dossier. Yippeee!!

Blair: we have the evidence

Bunkers make Saddam a difficult target
Even if leader could be found, air strike would fail, sceptics say

US snubs conciliatory Schröder

Catch the terrorists first, Gore tells Bush

This Letter. I like it. I dont care much, but I did enjoyed reading it. Now you must too, or Ill kick your cat in the ear with my Nike Air Jerusalem training sandals. Letter, this letter, was printed in the Telegraph, Sept 16th.

A man living a few streets away from me, Mr S Addam, keeps petrol in his shed, possibly to fuel a lawnmower. My neighbours and I have requested that he let us look in his shed, because we’re afraid he is going to burn our houses down. Regrettably, he wont let us.
A few years back, we helped Mr Addam beat up another neighbour and poison his dogs. That neighbour, Mr I R Toller, deserved everything he got, because he had thrown the previous occupant, Mr Shah, out of his house.
Not long ago, after helping Mr Addam for many years, we caught him sitting in a friends conservatory. We threw him out, confined him to his house, broke his lawnmower and stopped the milkman making deliveries. Also, he once poisoned his own dogs - though the local Police thought, at the time. that it might have been Mr Toller’s work. We live in a complicated village. I hope you will agree that future village gossip will judge us harshly if we do not hastily pop round and burn Mr Addam’s house.

Tim Conroy

You know the situation. Someone has told you something you want to know more about and within a few minutes you have gotten yourself up to speed on it. You did it through the use of the Internet. A combination of search engines and helpful websites have educated you on that topic.

You are an information god. And having been an information god for so long you begin to notice that you simply know more about a wide range of issues than virtually anyone else. When an information god wants to know how much money they need for a down payment on a house, they quickly find tools on the net to do the calculations. When an information god wants to know more on some political topic they can scan blogs to find what the consensus is and find out information not found in the general media. When an information god wants to know the lowest price on something, they know how to find it on the net quickly and effectively. When an information god wants to know more about an illness or a medication, they know how to find not only the official details on a given drug and documented treatments but individual experiences from around the world to form an educated opinion on what to do.

An information god feels both very social and isolated at the same time. It’s social in that they communicate with hundreds if not thousands of people from all over the world. If they want to talk about the finer points of the American civil war, they can talk about it with amongst the most educated and knowledgeable people on that topic around. But they don’t get to talk to them face to face, it’s all by computer. And it’s isolating because it becomes increasingly tedious to have meangingful discussions with information mortals face to face.

It’s like playing a sport or a video game with someone who’s never played. Information gods rarely debate things like abortion: “Yes, I will say this and now you will say this to which I will say this and then you will say this but then I’ll say this..” Information gods already know the whole drill, they’ve seen it thousands of times for many years. Having a political discussion is equally problematic because you already know the issues involved and quite likely all the other points of view and it’s pointless to try to get an information mortal up to speed. “Bush should have finished Saddam off when he had the chance…” “Well no, it’s not quite so simple, you see the UN resoltuions….oh what’s the point.”

As time goes on, information gods not only become increasingly knowledgeable on a wide range of things, but they get better and more efficient at finding out new things. And they become very effective at sifting through the bullshit and the real information that is on the net.

Not feeling well? An information god is apt to quickly narrow down what they most likely have, find prescribed treatments and then decide whether it’s worth going to the doctor to have them prescribe the medicine you have already determined you need or whether it’s just quicker (and cheaper) to order what you need on-line. An old high school friend exagerrates their success in an email? An information god pulls up where they live and then gets a recent satellite photo of their house down to seeing the exact trailer they’re in. Someone trying to sell you magazine subscriptions over the phone for a “great price”? The information god, armed with his wireless internet connection quickly finds the going rate on magazine subscriptions and then finds out how to effectively block future telemarketers from calling. Your yard getting some dead patches? The information god can (without any prior knowledge about yard care) find out the problem (grubs) and the cheapest most effective solution for them within minutes. Have a friend learning French? An information god can quickly take anything needed and translate to and from French (and even knows how to word it so that it is translated properly).

And so it goes on.

The gap between information gods and information mortals grows wider every day. The tools for gathering information gets better. The amount of data available grows. And the experience they have in finding it and using it increases. It almost makes you wonder what life will be like in a decade or so when the information gods are armed with wireless connections that go off of voice recognition to find and retrieve information. When those devices are able to whisper right into their ears the information they need on demand, any time, anywhere. There truly will be gods walking amongst men.

Brad Wardell

I hadn’t realised it until I started brain dumping in here just how much I had let the media get at me. Today I found what a relief it was not to take everything the media does personally and to treat it with the contempt and some respect it deserves. Ahhh the golden age of radio!
Sometimes it is not always possible to change our situation. I have found there is greater treasure in learning to live in this world but not be part of it. Have you noticed how impatient we all are? If we set goals are we more likely to give up on them because they take too long? Let’s just get it over and done with? (If you see what I mean :) )
One day someone will come up with seemingly all the right answers and we will all breathe a sigh of relief. At last someone to sort it all out! But I am wary of a quick fix these days just to suit our impatient natures. No action would require patience from all of us in some situations. But it might just save lives.
White Rose.

HE SAID : “It is actually easier for me not to bother myself. Afterall, I have a job, money, a pension pot. I can buy the things I want if I want to. Either I save or I drop myself into the never-never with a loan or credit card. Thats okay, as long as I carry on doing what Im doing. All will be fine.
So, why do I see myself doing other things that I could only achieve by leaving this comfort zone. More to the point, why do I want to change all this?”

SHE SAID : “And then I remembered. I had to study and apply myself, make an effort and stay motivated in order to get to this point where I am now comfortable. But the here and now doesnt feed my soul anymore.”

I had a vision. It wasnt to save the world either :-)
I like this world, just not the people in it. Well, thats not wholely true. Anyway, I had this vision. I saw myself achieving a level of success that I thought, was attainable given the facts I had to hand. In order to achieve this vision I set myself goals. These goals were small. They were little deviations from the routine day I participated in. One of them was to make an effort to take a detour home so that I could pick up the application form I needed to apply for what it was I wanted to do. I already recognised what I would need to do to achieve my vision and that it was my goal to reasearch my subject. Not too difficult, especially as I had a slight interest in it. So, little goals. Big vision.
I know this isnt groundbreaking stuff Im writing, but it dawned on me how easily I had forgotten to do something about the situation I was in. I knew I wasnt happy about myself, even though I had no reason to change it. But I identified that I would rather be this than that and lept into it. Yes, I had doubts. Yes, it could have failed and I would be stuck. But, it didnt and I am the only person who got me here. What did I learn? I learnt that I am better off here and happier doing this. Had I found the opposite, I would have another vision and set goals for that too.

(Im sure them know this is for them. Sorry if it doesnt make sense)

Rolling yourself into a ball? Why I ask? And I ask that politely.

I would rather the worst than teetering on the edge. I hate no action more than inaction and indecision. Knowledge wont teach application and stupidity has glimpses of genius. Oh, how I ramble.