Monte Carlo

Read the ending summary for n00bs online... SPOILAZ Sounds not unlike the ending of life on mars / ashes to ashes.

I have never seen a single episode of Lost but find myself mildly interested by the hype. To that end could somebody please summarize all six seasons in Haiku format for me please?

Not a very scientific claim. We need to re-run this scenario with pirates to test the validity of this hypothesis.

What do you mean, 'debating' a second beer you wimp? Get on with it, pull yourself together :: mutters ::

Insanity is perhaps the wrong word and I expressed myself poorly. I mean a mindset difficult for us to imagine, say over five hundred years of life where for most of it you are relatively healthy and fit. Your perspective on life is going to shift immensely, isn't it? Your potential for advanced personal development is only matched by your potential for advanced personal depravity. Add to this the resentment of the short-lived majority. Discrimination and, ultimately, political violence seems inevitable. A sense of entitlement, ennui and self-defence might well lead the four-hundred year old billionaire with a close circle of powerful political friends to think....

This is why I was wondering about the big deal with regards to HUAC. Subsequent evidence vindicated the principle and concerns, if not methods, of the initiative. The idea that the USSR was not trying to infiltrate and undermine Western democracies is naive.

With respect, I disagree. Such long lifespans, in my mind, might well lead to a sense of ennui that borders on the insane, a sense of moral detachment whereby those living 'the lifespans of the poor' are effectively an untermensch. They might well think: why suffer sharing this potential eternal eden with vermin?

Hyperbole and strawman arguments in a perfect tango. I'm not arguing about moral relativism, which is what you are describing in extremis. I'm arguing about an opposing point of view. "Dropping bombs on civilian population centres is wrong." This is groupthink. Hiroshima looks different if your grandfather was a marine. Dresden looks different if your grandparents lived through the Blitz (that's me). If you are a Sunni Muslim in Fallujah in 2004/2005 then the Iraq war looks a bit different I guess. You drop bombs in a war of national survival to achieve strategic aims --- yes you vaporise tens of thousands of civilians so your own people don't die. Look at that, it's freaking horrible. Teaching why rational people came to that decision is a fell responsibility. You have to try to see if both ways. And all you can manage is.... Auschwitz. Mechanized slaughter based on racial hatred. Please, there is a baseline. What is the alternative argument there? There isn't one. It's the morality of the clinically insane.

The desirable standard of 'a liberal education' means just that, as others have described above. Liberal in the sense that (a) you respect the oppsing view whilst retaining the right to shoot it full of holes if you can (b) the idea that, generally, you play the ball not the man © if you play the man as opposed to the ball then there's a good reason for it (d) not taking the information provided to you on trust isn't disrespectful, it's mandatory, (e) remember, only because Dave in your English class is a bit thick doesn't mean anything - he might be a ninja in science / maths / sports so show the guy some respect and help him if he wants it, and lastly (f) provide some evidence for your assertions. If you achieve that, as per Hurlie's rather reassuring personal standards, then you can present anything to a class of young people with no worries whatsoever. I see no reason why a class of 14-15 year olds, properly educated, couldn't shoot down in flames creationism, intelligence design, kabala, scientology or any other wacky stuff you want to throw at them. Hell, I want my kids to do that. Cheers MC

The entire raison d'etre of the United States of America is that those states enjoy a considerable level of freedom from Federal government, including education. I can't see the USA accepting a centrally imposed cirriculum, no more than they would penal policy or anything else. And why should they? I wouldn't trust Dubya nor Obama with that.

A small, super-rich clique of the international elite will be able to enjoy extreme longevity. They will then create a genetic weapon that will kill all the folks who aren't like them, except for a small-ish slave caste to bury the bodies and do all the menial work. It will be like Conquistadors taking flu to the New World. Then they will have the entire planet as their eternal playground, served by advanced technologies to satsify their every whim. This doesn't strike me as a remotely outlandish theory.

Of course you'd teach religion, but in a third party way --- not as some sort of universal truth. As an admirer of the French I've long envied their robust and unapologetic secularism.

@ Calax. You've just proved my point. Dresden is a 'bad' thing, you are buying into the now-default revisionism on the subject. Group-think. How about Dresden as a good thing? Dresden as a strategic target? Dresden as logical payback for the "9/11 every week for a year" that was the unprovoked Blitz on London? Dresden as a part of the sad but irreducibly sensible way to destroy Nazism? Kids need to understand alternative POV. Intelligent Design? It's utter bollocks. But I'd be comfortable with it being taught as long as it's balanced out, I'd quote Voltaire but it's a bit of a cliche. Religion doesn't make sense to me yet it is still taught, personally I'd go all French on the issue and ban religion from schools full stop. But that's just me.

Depends on the teacher. I vividly remember history lessons at my London comprehensive school in the early 80's, the teacher was a raving, foaming at the mouth Trot. He couldn't help himself as taught the subject through an undiluted Marxist prism. He was also a kindly and decent enough man and a passionate teacher. I rather liked him but even then I felt at a visceral level he was utterly wrong. Now, he was never challenged by colleagues about what was, indutably, indoctrination. Mainly because, I suspect, the staff room was a bit like the Third International and it was the early 80's after all. Nowadays? Well, the hair-shirt Marxism of yore has been replaced by the Frankfurt variety and the teaching profession is now dominated by the politically-correct 'soft left'. But they are still culturally left-wing and I suspect the USA is similar. Maybe Hurlie will enlighten us. My kids are taught some appalling left-wing bollocks at school at quite a tender age. I am biding my time before I go to have a chat without coffee with the teachers, it might be a year or two yet. But I am pretty sure that there is an in-built left wing bias (I won't say liberal, because the pejorative connotations the word has developed do no justice to what liberalism really is) in schools. Now, that doesn't mean that I want my child to be brought up on a diet of little Englander, jingoistic BS. I want him to hear all the competing views, left, right and otherwise. What I don't want is the insipid, politically correct groupthink that seems to pass for educational theory and doctrine in modern schools. Like I said in my earlier post about the HUAC - teach the arguments and counter-arguments, let the kids make their own minds up and learn to critically evaluate information. Cheers MC

An interesting article from the ever-readable Christopher Meyer, ex-UK ambassador to Germany and the USA. Here he discusses the German attitude to the Euro in the late 90's, i.e. as an overtly political vehicle for closer integration. Helmut Kohl saw the internal contradictions and the threat to the German economy but was driven, like Adenauer before him, the banish the spectre of war (and selling this as a way for Germany to be top-dog nation within a united Europe without resorting to arms... dontcha love politicians). Now the whole thing is unravelling, I feel sorry for the German man in the street who has been let down by mealy-mouthed coalition governments and Euro-fantasists.

I would happily live for five hundred years if I could. I have no wish to die, I want to see the future in all it's hideous, mushroom-clouded horror.

^ Dammit, man, you're a genius!

Does this mean that they can grow me a new foot? My old one is giving me no end of grief.

Yeah, and now you can pay online you won't have to fill up a wheelbarrow with banknotes to pay for a loaf of bread

Let me do that for you - you can't have one currency and twenty-odd different monetary policies, just like you can't have an automobile moving in the same direction with twenty-odd steering wheels.

Moose, the German propensity to do this a couple of times every hundred years or so has caused Europe no end of trouble . Hopefully they'll stick to worrying about Germany from now on.

The culture wars in America over stuff like religion and abortion are quaint. They reaffirm the hegemony of capitalism - all the big arguments have been won. What's left, in the hinterlands of American politics, is this kulturkampf over education and civil partnerships. In really screwed-up societies people fight civil wars over big issues, not internet spats over little ones.

This is the beginning of the end --- already there is talk of the Northern European countries creating a twin-track currency (i.e. Germany and Benelux + Austria). The Northern European countries and economies are drastically different from the South, but the likes of Greece and Portugal were let in for reasons of political expediency. Now Chancellor Merkel has created a self-defeating turnip-ghost by banning short-selling, and speculators smell blood. Like I say, this is the beginning of the end. Why should hard-working, prudent Germans subsidise the openly corrupt and profligate Greek economic system? Answer = it shouldn't. Roll back the EU to the 1970s (i.e. the EEC) when free trade helped the struggling economies of the day. As a Briton I could be smug and say the devaluation of Sterling has been tough but it allowed us to rescue our economy, unlike those bound in the Euro. But a massive amount of our trade is with Europe so our fate is bound to theirs. The Euro was a folly. I wish economic apocalypse on no nation, but in the case of the Euro the political machinations of arrogant, economically illiterate old men looking to do deals is leaving a bitter legacy.

Why are you such a big fan of the EU living in, er, Australia? Unelected, unaccountable and unstoppable the EU isn't very popular with those of us living under it. As for the Euro, the current crisis was predicted ten years ago. When political dogma bashes economic reality then you get the mess we're in. I reiterate - the Euro was designed specifically as an integrationist tool. The EU was forged by men scarred by memories of WW2. It was a noble aspiration but has become a joke. In the UK we've had no popular vote on it since 1974 when we were asked if we should join a free trade agreement. The sooner it collapses, the better.

:: Yawns ::