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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RetiredNow who wrote (275760)	2/21/2006 7:05:14 AM
From: Road Walker	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572025

re: More relevant is can we cut oil completely out of the cycle of energy creation and energy use. If we can, then we're off the oil. Ethanol can be distilled from cellulosic plant materials. No oil needed. We don't need to completely "get off oil", remember we produce about 35%-40% of our needs (declining). If we could cut our consumption, short term (5 years) by 30% the price of oil would plummet and there would be a glut. We would still be a net importer, but it would no longer be an "issue". Then we could more casually work towards independence. It's really an easy problem to solve... just take all the incentives we give to the oil companies and use those dollars to in cent efficiency instead. John

To: RetiredNow who wrote (275760)	2/21/2006 1:51:37 PM
From: tejek	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 1572025

Oops. These are Muslims pretending to be Christians just to confuse you. Pay them no mind. Everyone knows Christians are non violent and some of the nicest people you would ever chance to meet. ;-) Anti-Muslim riot in Nigeria turns deadly By DULUE MBACHU ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER LAGOS, Nigeria -- Christian mobs rampaged through a southern Nigerian city Tuesday, burning mosques and killing several people in an outbreak of anti-Muslim violence that followed deadly protests against caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad over the weekend. Residents and witnesses in the southern, predominantly Christian city of Onitsha said several Muslims with origins in the north were beaten to death by mobs which also burned two mosques there. "The mosque at the main market has been burnt and I've counted at least six dead bodies on the streets," Izzy Uzor, an Onitsha resident and businessman, told The Associated Press by telephone. "The whole town is in a frenzy and people are running in all directions." The violence appeared to be in reprisal for anti-Christian violence Saturday in the mostly Muslim northern city of Maiduguri in which thousands of Muslims protesting caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad attacked Christians and burned churches, killing at least 18 people. Another Onitsha resident, Isotonu Achor, said one badly beaten Muslim man ran into his office from the streets to escape the violence. "There is blood all over him and I'm scared they'll come for him here. If he doesn't get urgent treatment he will die," Achor said. Police and government officials were not immediately available for comment. Nigeria, Africa's most populous country of more than 130 million people, is roughly divided between a predominantly Muslim north and a mainly Christian south. Thousands of people have died in religious violence in Nigeria since 2000. Saturday's protest over the cartoons of Prophet Muhammad in Maiduguri marked the first violent demonstrations over the issue in Nigeria. Police say at least 18 people, most of them Christians, died, and 30 churches were burned down. The Christian Association of Nigeria said at least 50 people were killed in the violence. The cartoons, which first appeared in a Danish newspaper in September, have set off sometimes violent protests around the world. One caricature shows Muhammad wearing a bomb-shaped turban with an ignited fuse. Islam widely holds that representations of Muhammad are banned for fear they could lead to idolatry. A Danish newspaper first printed the caricatures in September. Other newspapers, mostly in Europe, have reprinted the pictures, asserting their news value and the right to freedom of expression. seattlepi.nwsource.com

To: RetiredNow who wrote (275760)	2/22/2006 6:52:52 AM
From: Road Walker	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1572025

Empty Pockets, Angry Minds By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN MUMBAI, India I have no doubt that the Danish cartoons mocking the Prophet Muhammad have caused real offense to many Muslims. I'm glad my newspaper didn't publish them. But there is something in the worldwide Muslim reaction to these cartoons that is excessive, and suggests that something else is at work in this story. It's time we talked about it. To understand this Danish affair, you can't just read Samuel Huntington's classic, "The Clash of Civilizations." You also need to read Karl Marx, because this explosion of Muslim rage is not just about some Western insult. It's also about an Eastern failure. It is about the failure of many Muslim countries to build economies that prepare young people for modernity — and all the insult, humiliation and frustration that has produced. Today's world has become so wired together, so flattened, that you can't avoid seeing just where you stand on the planet — just where the caravan is and just how far ahead or behind you are. In this flat world you get your humiliation fiber-optically, at 56K or via broadband, whether you're in the Muslim suburbs of Paris or Kabul. Today, Muslim youth are enraged by cartoons in Denmark. Earlier, it was a Newsweek story about a desecrated Koran. Why? When you're already feeling left behind, even the tiniest insult from afar goes to the very core of your being — because your skin is so thin. India is the second-largest Muslim country in the world, but the cartoon protests here, unlike those in Pakistan, have been largely peaceful. One reason for the difference is surely that Indian Muslims are empowered and live in a flourishing democracy. India's richest man is a Muslim software entrepreneur. But so many young Arabs and Muslims live in nations that have deprived them of any chance to realize their full potential. The Middle East Media Research Institute, called Memri, just published an analysis of the latest employment figures issued by the U.N.'s International Labor Office. The I.L.O. study, Memri reported, found that "the Middle East and North Africa stand out as the region with the highest rate of unemployment in the world": 13.2 percent. That is worse than in sub-Saharan Africa. While G.D.P. in the Middle East-North Africa region registered an annual increase of 5.5 percent from 1993 to 2003, productivity, the measure of how efficiently these resources were used, increased by only about 0.1 percent annually — better than only one region, sub-Saharan Africa. The Arab world is the only area in the world where productivity did not increase with G.D.P. growth. That's because so much of the G.D.P. growth in this region was driven by oil revenues, not by educating workers to do new things with new technologies. Nearly 60 percent of the Arab world is under the age of 25. With limited job growth to absorb them, the I.L.O. estimates, the region is spinning out about 500,000 more unemployed people each year. At a time when India and China are focused on getting their children to be more scientific, innovative thinkers, educational standards in much of the Muslim world — particularly when it comes to science and critical inquiry — are not keeping pace. Pervez Hoodbhoy, a professor of nuclear physics at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, Pakistan, bluntly wrote the following in Global Agenda 2006, the journal of the recent Davos World Economic Forum: "Pakistan's public (and all but a handful of private) universities are intellectual rubble, their degrees of little consequence. ... According to the Pakistan Council for Science and Technology, Pakistanis have succeeded in registering only eight patents internationally in 57 years. ... "[Today] you seldom encounter a Muslim name in scientific journals. Muslim contributions to pure and applied science — measured in terms of discoveries, publications, patents and processes — are marginal. ... The harsh truth is that science and Islam parted ways many centuries ago. In a nutshell, the Muslim experience consists of a golden age of science from the ninth to the 14th centuries, subsequent collapse, modest rebirth in the 19th century, and a profound reversal from science and modernity, beginning in the last decades of the 20th century. This reversal appears, if anything, to be gaining speed." No wonder so many young people in this part of the world are unprepared, and therefore easily enraged, as they encounter modernity. And no wonder backward religious leaders and dictators in places like Syria and Iran — who have miserably failed their youth — are so quick to turn their young people's anger against an insulting cartoon and away from themselves and the rot they have wrought.