"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle." ~ 
Any world is an illusion, but within illusion, another world, a better world, seems possible. In the material world, the one we think is real, the divide between the 'left' and 'right' is an artificial one. This divide serves to keep us separate from each other and prevents us from seeing clearly that we in fact have shared interests and a common enemy. A better way to approach economy, politics, culture and society would be to take note of the ways in which our societies are divided horizontally: the interests of the few (the elite) and the many (ordinary people). The elite wants to oppress and exploit the rest of us. In a material sense, they are our enemy. They are working to establish a One World Company, aka a totalitarian New World Order. World government is the last thing ordinary people need. We need free and open communities with equal rights for everyone and a profound respect for the many differences between us. We want freedom rather than security. We want peace, not war. Above all else, we want truth, dignity and justice. ~ The Editor
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Bob Carter
The bell tolls for the IPCC
It is a fine day, and God is obviously in his heaven.
I am standing on the helicopter deck of the famous science-drilling ship JOIDES Resolution. The snow-capped mountains of South Island, New Zealand, glisten gently along the far western horizon. A majestic rolling, royal blue swell strokes the sides of the ship. Its origins lie deep in the Southern Ocean, and its crests are ruffled into a maze of small waves, ripples and white patches of gently breaking foam by today’s northeasterly breeze.
I feel like Admiral Jellicoe reviewing the Home Fleet on the Solent in 1907, for behind the ship bobs a flotilla of a thousand or more albatrosses, mollymawks and cape pigeons, most preening, courting, sleeping with heads tucked in or just lollygagging around in the sunshine, some few doing aerial acrobatics apparently for no other reason than the sheer zest of living; when and how this great mass of birds feeds remains mysterious to me, but generally their life out here seems to be, what else, a breeze. And that the stern flotilla is of seabirds rather than warships is particularly appropriate, for JR, as she is affectionately known to those aboard, is a research flagship for the environmental and earth sciences rather than for any navy.
It is a privilege and a pleasure to be here. The group of 50 scientists and technicians on board are drawn from the best in the world, and from the many country members of the International Drilling Program (IODP). They are supremely good at their highly skilled jobs, as are the ship’s and drilling crews. For a research proposal to be allocated a drilling leg on JR - which lasts 2 months and costs about US $15 million to conduct - the science involved has to survive the most rigorous international peer-review, at which stage many drilling proposals fail.
