Benjamins Yarn

Going to burn both ends of the candle with this subject on the smoking ban in public places.

The government have already taken away our parental rights where a prison sentence hangs over our heads if we chastise our children with a smack.
Children today get away with murder and why you may well ask? The reason is because the government knows best.

Kids are resorting to blackmailing mum and dad with threats of social service involvement. By doing this parents are forced into submission to allow the kids to do as they please.

Sorry this is one parent that would fight to the death to protect her family, but also one who is willing to do time if under threat from her own flesh and blood. What happened to the days when a clip round the ear solved any unruly behaviour?

Let us compare our generation to that of today when no such government ruling was enforced. I rest my case.

Give us back our parental role as nature intended to deal with our kid’s in our own way. I do not condone any abuse or beating of a child but one hell of a good hiding made us think twice before doing wrong a second time.

Why so many rebellious riots are going on in the world to today is, because governments know what’s best. These political powers enforce new laws and expect the nation to sit back and accept.

We have a lot of educated people out there who know when they are being fleeced. Then you have the ordinary few like me that are not fully aware of the government’s sneaky moves to take their hard earned cash. Prepare your self all governing bodies because people are getting wiser when they see the food on their tables rationed. .

Now we have the non smoking ban in public places put into force. Top priorities are restaurants cafes where food is served, which is definitely a justified move and one that I am 100% in favour of.

There is not an ounce of doubt in my mind that smoking is a very serious health risk. This is a medical issue of importance that has to be addressed, but once again members of parliament have not thought this through. An even bigger health matter may be on their hands by this imposed law.

Have they gave any consideration to the people who’s lives are going to be affected where there livelihood is at stake, all because they provide a socialising atmosphere where smokers and non smokers alike gather through their own choice.

Take the food from their mouths then face the consequences of an epidemic of anger.

A major health risk can escalate out of this ban if smokers go to war

I myself am a non smoker but there are things I enjoy in life and should they be taken from me then I am afraid I would not be very pleased.

What right do our government have to dictate to us what is right and wrong, Moses did that when he handed down the Ten Commandments.

Hypocrites of the system still preach with what they think they know is best. Well it has to end. What is good for the goose is good for the gander. Are all these rules laid out for the nation, adhered to by the enforcers? I don’t think so.

Remember the lords saying. He who is without sin cast the first stone. Well if the Muppets in the house of parliament can hold their hand up to this, then I gladly give up my rights if they say so.

They say in some parts of the world a heart attack has never been heard of. Want to make your own choices in life then you need to get out of the rat race. Luck be with you at www.pick3today.com

On April 8, 2003, in a testimony before the Senate Steel Caucus, industry executives urged legislators to ignore the future decision of a World Trade Organization appeals panel, widely expected to uphold an earlier preliminary ruling that U.S.-imposed steel tariffs flouted international trade law.

Several senators called on the United States to withdraw from the multilateral body. Wilbur Ross, chairman of International Steel Group, blamed the burgeoning balance of payments deficit on the rulings and regulations of the WTO.

According to Steve Seidenberg in the National Law Journal, defiance of the WTO is a growing trend. Gary Horlick of the Washington DC law firm, Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering, reckons that one in seven judgments rendered by the WTO’s dispute mechanisms have been hitherto ignored.

Nor is the USA alone in its transgressions.

Ten polities - including the European Union and Canada - are serial violators. The WTO cannot enforce its decrees. It can only grant complainants permission to retaliate by imposing their own tariffs on products imported from the unrepentant country. This is a blunt and ineffective instrument. Experts warn of a return to unilateralism with the entire edifice of multilateral trade law discredited.

Revamping the dispute settlement rules is one item on the agenda of the current phase of trade negotiations, dubbed, in a November 2001 WTO Ministerial Conference, the Doha “Development” Round. Like the rest of the itinerary, it is going nowhere fast.

Alarmed by a looming and unrealistic deadline on May 31, 2003 the Chairman of the Dispute Settlement Body (DSB), Peter Balas, proposed to first concentrate on a framework document, followed by a draft text. But, as James Wolfensohn, the former President of the World Bank, observed, with everyone preoccupied with Baghdad, Doha - arguably far more crucial to the global economy - is sidelined.

This is unfortunate - and ominous. The 146 members of the WTO - the newest one being Macedonia - failed to agree on the future shape of farm trade by the stipulated deadline of March 31, 2003. The goalposts were then moved again and again with a deadline conference in December 2005. The September 2003 Ministerial Conference convenes in Cancun, Mexico was an abysmal failure.

In the meantime, the multilateral regime which bolstered international trade in the past 10 years, is being supplanted by a patchwork of bilateral and regional treaties, albeit subject to WTO rules. Scholars disagree whether, in the absence of a global compact, these are preferable to the status quo. But everyone accepts that international rules are the best option.

But divisions run deep.

India - an important player and the unofficial spokesperson for the “less privileged” club - joined Cuba, Egypt, Malaysia, Dominican Republic, Honduras and Jamaica in demanding “special and differential developing country provisions”. With Indonesia, Malaysia, Mauritius, Egypt, Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda and Zimbabwe, it insists on preferential market access for the group’s non-agricultural goods.

The developing countries regard the previous Uruguay Round as a rip-off perpetrated by the club of developed and industrialized countries at the expense of the indigent. They have sworn not be led down the garden path again. Hence their furious resistance to demands to expand the negotiations to include such issues as animal welfare, food safety and labeling and the protection of geographical trade names. They see these as thinly veiled attempts to introduce trade restraints through the backdoor.

Instead, they want to concentrate on their main exports - agricultural produce and textiles - on tariff reductions and preferences, special treatment for certain products and safeguard provisions. Some of them want rich-world farm and export subsidies - totaling more than $300 billion a year - dramatically reduced, or even eliminated altogether. Export credits and state-owned trading enterprises are also contentious topics. The atmosphere is so dour that no one even broaches industrial tariffs and anti-dumping.

Poor countries are especially incensed at the United States for having torpedoed an agreement to grant poor countries access to generic drugs to fight AIDS and other diseases - and at the European Union for postponing any serious tweaking of its egregious Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) to 2013.

The United States - faced with inane European subventions - raised its own farm support by a whopping four fifths in May 2003. Yet, it is still far below EU largesse. America is also the prime driver - together with the Cairns group of agricultural exporters (including Canada, New Zealand, Australia and Brazil) - of a bold initiative to cut subsidies down to 5 percent of production, to slash tariffs to 25 percent and to abolish all export-related aid.

Japan, insensitively, is trying to reduce its rice import quota. Together with Norway, India, the EU and South Korea - known as the “friends of multifunctionality” - it is championing an unworkable “linear” formula by which countries should cut subsidies and tariffs equally, irrespective of prevailing levels of farm aid. Even so, the EU would like to slash subsidies by no more than 45 to 55 percent and tariffs by less than 36 percent, as per the WTO’s Agreement on Agriculture.

Nor is the camp of developing countries either homogeneous or cohesive. African and Caribbean nations enjoy preferential access to markets in the EU and the United States. Others - notably India - are terrified of the inevitable onslaught of efficient competition following farm liberalization. But no country, rich or poor, seems to be preparing its agricultural sector to cope with the impact of a successful Doha round.

Time is running out. The term of Pascal Lamy, the EU’s capable trade commissioner, ended in 2004 and he was replaced by Peter Mandelson. President George Bush’s fast track negotiating authority expires in 2007, if he makes it that far. As The Economist warns, the “peace clause”, yielded by the Uruguay Round, elapsed on December 31, 2003. While in force, it prevented a deluge of farm-related litigation from erupting on the scene. A trickle is already evident: Brazil has sued both the USA and the EU over cotton and sugar subsidies, respectively. Textile wars erupted between China and both the EU and the USA and were settled by inconclusive short-term agreements.

The crisis at the WTO is part of a global transition from the multilateralism that characterized the Cold War - to unilateralism or, rather, bilateralism. The breakdown of consensus-based alliances strains international institutions and laws. National - or supranational - interests emerge as renewed sources of legitimacy. While the United States may be blamed for the demise of political multilateralism - it is the EU that is largely responsible for the collapse of the international economic order.

The Doha Development Agenda falls prey to these geopolitical upheavals as it tries to tackle the most prickly issues. In a presentation in March 2003 to the 3rd International Temperate Rice Conference in Punte del Este, Uruguay, Dan Horovitz, of the Theodore Goddard law firm in Brussels, reminded the participants how uncertain the outcomes are:

“Whereas the average non-agricultural worldwide tariff is 4 percent, the average tariff imposed by developed countries on agricultural products is 40 percent, with peaks as high as 500 percent … The new Round’s negotiations are of paramount importance for the very viability and credibility of the WTO system. A failure to provide for proper solutions to the problems of the global agricultural trade would have particularly devastating results not only for trade in agriculture, but for the current trading system as a whole.”

Sam Vaknin ( samvak.tripod.com ) is the author of Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited and After the Rain - How the West Lost the East. He served as a columnist for Global Politician, Central Europe Review, PopMatters, Bellaonline, and eBookWeb, a United Press International (UPI) Senior Business Correspondent, and the editor of mental health and Central East Europe categories in The Open Directory and Suite101.

Until recently, he served as the Economic Advisor to the Government of Macedonia.

Visit Sam’s Web site at samvak.tripod.com

At first glance it’s hard to imagine how the proliferation of human activity upon the environment has been a major factor in climate change given that climate change alone is nothing new. Over two million years the earth’s history has seen enormous changes. Indeed, in the last ten thousand years the warming and cooling of the earth has been on a larger scale that what we see today.

The climate is however very changeable these days. Getting the politics right has been half the fight. Unfortunately, the right policy has been held at bay partially by having the right knowledge of what’s happening to the climate. The climate changes we see today are the result of only a century and a half of study, peanuts in comparison the huge shifts over the earths history.

The recent UN Climate Change Conference sought to put in place a policy to take over the Kyoto protocol. At its core were some recently publicised results:

1. The warming trend on the earth’s surface has been taking place since the early part of the twentieth century. The last ten years have been the warmest of that millennium.

2. There have been rapid signs of melting the Arctic circle. The sea ice there has fallen by around eight percent over thirty years.

3. The old inconsistency in the data between the temperature rise in the atmosphere and on the planets surface seems to have levelled out. They appear to rise in parallel.

4. The Scripps Institute of Oceanography in California noted that the ocean has been warming at different depths for over 65 years. These results match the predictions that warming has been induced more by greenhouse gases that as a result of small changes in the suns heat output.

5. There has been an observed and recorded link between the sea surface temperature and the frequency and intensity of tropical storms, typhoons and hurricanes.

6. The existing computer models of the change in ocean currents, in particular in the North Atlantic, are correct.

There are however still some unknowns. For example the solar hypothesis is now known to be a lesser contributor, the miniscule changes in the suns heat output over its eleven year sunspot cycle is adding to the mix. Also, the aerosol emissions from sulphurous fuel promote the formation of clouds, and as a consequence the sunlight reflected from the earths surface increases, effectively opposing the greenhouse gas effect.

Some even argue for the benefits of global warming, which include for example the opening up of new shipping lanes in the artic as the ice recedes, new oil drilling opportunities and longer harvest periods in Canada and Russia.

It seems climate change is inevitable and the small economic ideas such as banning coal subsidies bear little fruit as a means of curbing the problem. More than ever, political will must be demonstrated at first to show to industry and populations that it is even an issue. More importantly perhaps, the will of the politicians must be met with achievable methods from the technological and scientific community.

Professor Socolow is leading the way with what he calls “stabilisation wedges”. On a graph of climate change, the space between the trend line and the stability line is known as the “stabilisation triangle’. By dividing these triangles into wedges and assigning realistic goals to each wedge the massive problem is given a usable and effective solution.

The goals to assign to the wedges range from greater overall efficiencies, the decarbonisation of electricity, fuel displacement by low carbon electricity, methane management, and natural carbon sinks.

By further subdividing each wedge into sub wedges, such as decarbonised electricity being subdivided into nuclear power, renewable energy, natural gas as an alternative to coal, and the storage of carbon dioxide - these problems are confounded into what everyone has been looking for. A short list of solutions that together will balance the problem.

It seems the technology for all this exists. It is merely in need of refinement. For example the management of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels could be dealt with through further carbon sequestration. A couple of power plants already employ this particular technique to good effect. The carbon dioxide is extracted at the source and is injected into porous rocks deep underground to prevent it escaping into the atmosphere.

Steam reformation is another technique. It is, in essence, a pre-emptive technique that reacts the fuel used with water to yield hydrogen. The hydrogen output is burnt to create electricity.

Of all the possibilities of reworking and inventing technologies, perhaps the best idea is the oldest idea. Replanting programmes. The idea of photosynthesis to combine carbon dioxide with water and sunlight is a relatively cheap and exponential idea and would be hugely effective.

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The ACLU has championed many causes since it was founded in 1920 by Mr. Roger Baldwin. Some of the most notable causes or rulings the ACLU supported have to do with abortion rights, homosexual and lesbian rights and removal of prayer from the public schools. Some of its most notable positions were of lesser significance but created much more press because they bordered on the frivolous and were more a nuisance than a legitimate cause. They adopted positions against bible studies and prayer groups in public schools and the removal of manger scenes in public during the Christmas season. Can’t you hear the voices of many grateful Americans in a resounding…gee thanks?

Not to be mistaken for something that actually qualifies as the protection of our civil liberties is the new battlefield conjured up by the ACLU in Las Cruces, New Mexico. The three crosses adorning the city logo is a point of pride and history for the residents there but for the ACLU, they have given cause for it to rear its head and wield the battle axe. It has resulted in making “what ever happened to common sense” being the most oft used phrase in internet blogging history. But wait, it doesn’t stop there.

The latest fit the ACLU has begun; concerns prayer offered by the U.S. military’s chaplains. In short the ACLU thinks it should be stopped. Whew! That’s good thinking. I don’t know about you but the last thing I would want to have happen to me just before I went to battle for my country is to have my country tell me I couldn’t go to God in prayer. In particular they are trying to stop chaplains from praying in the name of Jesus Christ. In a volunteer force made up of mostly Christian men and women isn’t that an infringement of their religious freedom? In fact it is more than that.

The constitution says “Congress shall make no laws touching religion, or to infringe the rights of conscience.” What genius does it take to see that the ACLU is actually crying “unconstitutional” while they are proposing laws that are clearly unconstitutional? Don’t want to be crass but perhaps the ACLU lawyers and aides should all take a day off to watch Forrest Gump together. If I remember correctly the most often repeated line in that movie is, “stupid is, as stupid does”

Diametrically opposite the ACLU is the newly formed but no less formidable, ACLJ. The American Center for Law and Justice founded in 1990 is headed by Jay Sekulow who is the ACLJ’s Chief Counsel. He is a well respected advocate for constitutional freedoms and has argued many cases before the U.S, Supreme Court.

The Center for Law and Justice has successfully argued cases and supported positions in other cases which resulted in an impressive list of good common sense decisions and rulings. A short list of the accomplishments of the ACLJ is as follows.

• A guarantee for minors who want to be involved in the political process by protecting their free speech rights in political affairs.

• Rulings to protect the constitutional rights of religious groups to obtain equal access to public facilities.

• Protection for the free speech rights of pro-life demonstrators

• The right for public school students to form and participate in religious organizations such as Bible clubs.

The ACLJ is currently on the radio waves daily soliciting signatures for a petition to stop the ban on prayer by the military chaplains. The response is said to be very powerful at the least. Upwards of ten thousand people a day are asking to have their names added to the petitions.

It is shameful that Americans must pound away to ward off organizations like the ACLU whose agenda looks like it originated in la-la land. The constitution is under attack by those who feign that they are working to protect it. After all this is America and they have a constitutional right to mess with the constitution. Let’s not mess with their right to do that, but lets hope and pray (if they don’t stop us) that they don’t prevail.

The Bible tells the believer to respect the rulings and laws provided by the secular rulers because the powers that be, are all ordained of God. Romans 13:1. Almost all bible believing Christians take this mandate seriously and endeavor to be law abiding citizens. You would think that this respect for secular law would hold things in balance between those who believe in the Bible and revere the constitution and groups like the ACLU, but it does not. The ACLU seems bent on removing all reference and allusion to God on any level. What would the result be if they were successful in this plight? I choose to let the Bible answer that question.

And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient; Romans 1:28

Rev Bresciani is the author of two Christian books. He has authored many articles both online and in print. Visit the website at www.americanprophet.org