Inkskipp

Have you ever had to fake a call on your mobile and pretend it's from a girlfriend/boyfriend when you're on public transport?

Not that I'm particularly good looking, but I take the tube (London Underground) every day, and due to the amount of quite silly attention I get whenever I travel from groups of girls/women, I often pretend to answer a call and pretend it's from my girlfriend. The young ladies seem especially predatory these days, and I find that if I don't pretend to be preoccupied, I get a lot of silly flirting from girls/women. Does this happen to you too?

ps: I don't usually mind flirting, but the amount of aggressive "ladette" behaviour has forced me to modify my strategy to deal with girls/women.

There is a very large US fleet on its way to Iran right now. (Not a hoax - it's been partially confirmed by Kuwaitis awaiting its arrival in the Strait of Hormuz who are preparing an "emergency war plan" according to the Kuwait Times). The US Navy will not comment, but there are currently two naval battle groups (2 carrier groups) operating in the Gulf: One is an aircraft carrier group, led by the USS Abraham Lincoln, which carries some 65-fighter aircraft. The other group, headed by the USS Peleliu, maintains a variety of planes and strike helicopters. Qatar also has the largest US marine base outside of Iraq. They are likely to be joined by two further carrier groups - the USS Theodore Roosevelt which just finished exercises in the Atlantic and the USS Ronald Reagan from the 7th Fleet.

Arabic news agency Moheet reported at the end of July that an unnamed American destroyer, accompanied by two Israeli naval vessels travelled through the Suez Canal from the Mediterranean to the Gulf.

The US/Israeli supported invasion of S.Ossetia by Georgia has the Russians presently occupied dealing with the attack on its citizens, and they are likely to be planning a "regime change" in Georgia to get rid of Mikhail Saakashvili back to America. As Russia is preoccupied with its Georgian conflict, it will probably not be able to do anything to help its SCO partner, Iran, when it is invaded by the USA.

The US Presidential election is scheduled on 4th November 2008, so the invasion of Iran has to happen before then to either cancel or affect the outcome. In order to affect it, a date that has been attributed to the hatred of all Muslims has to coincide with the reason for the invasion to, once again, make a false connection between 9/11 and an illegal war.

I've always found those in the acting profession rather embarrassing and strange. This I think has coloured my immersion in the world of films making it difficult for me to invest any real emotion in a form that is in fact fake.

I couldn't understand my friends who confessed to crying watching ET. I couldn't shed a tear for Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan in Sleepless in Seattle. War films just make me angry at the injustice and stupidity of it all, so-called romantic adventures make me laugh - I thought Titanic was hilarious, and as for historical re enactments, I cringe at the inaccuracies. So it surprised me when I saw "Million Dollar Baby" and the floodgates opened. I don't think I can ever watch that film again.

Has any film done the same to you?

A quick search on google typing "anthrax" and "al queda" will give you hundreds of news pages from all the usual alphabet news channels trying to link them together, as well as videos of Cheney, Bush, and Rumsfeld doing the same on youtube.

Bruce Ivins, a GOVERNMENT Army scientist (USAMRIID) apparently committed suicide before he was to be prosecuted for the anthrax attacks on Washington. How many times did you hear that it was al-queda at the beginning? Yet it was an American military scientist.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080801/ap_on_go_ca_st...

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-...

For good reasons or bad, once I started being critical of the US, I had to look at my own UK government & our own society to even things out. The truth is, we must clean our own house first, before we can point out the mess in others with a clear conscience.

We have an epidemic of knife crimes in our streets - the figures are quite frankly astonishing. However, there is no reliable historical data on knife crimes to gauge whether we are highlighting a long term problem, or whether it is a growth. It is, nevertheless a damning indictment on our culture.

An article in the NewStatesman entitled "How Britain Wages War", opened my eyes to the wretched incidences of crimes & injustices, as rare as they are, and the insufferable way in which we handle them. I thought we were the honest, honorable old guard in this stupid illegal war, but that article made me angry and sad. Where's my country?

http://www.newstatesman.com/uk-politics/2008/07/br...

This question has been asked before by somebody else, but it was more than a year ago, and the best answer was woefully inadequate.

I would be interested in reading answers from both the unbelievers and believers of unconditional love, hopefully with some justification for their answers.

Hopefully, I'll get some answers from those I've interacted with recently.

I recently received a message from someone purporting to be a "gay liberal" who writes that I am clearly obsessed with being anti-American and hate Americans because I believe 9/11 was an inside job, and because I wrote the following in an answer:

"I think "foreigners" - especially people like me from a free democracy (UK) - are beginning to boycott US goods and companies because all we see from the outside is a giant moral vacuum exemplified by your rendition protocols, thousands of cases of torture, murder, war profiteering, and fraud on a giant scale (Which was the sale of sub-primes packages to financial institutions around the world). Nobody likes being conned, and nobody likes crooks. We won't be trusting Americans any time soon."

I leave my Q&A open for a reason: I don't want to be dishonest and I am not ashamed of anything I write. I criticize what people DO, not what they are. So Am I?

Adaptability has made us very successful as a species. Language and tool making has given us continuity of knowledge and technology. But what part of our evolutionary journey do you think played a key role in developing intelligence in the first place?

(Just my thoughts: Is empathy a survival trait that triggered intelligence? The need to put oneself in another's position to predict what he might do necessitates reason and logic for accuracy. The ability to hold two or more opposing ideas in one's head also necessitates conflict resolution and reinforcement learning. Empathy is also associated with social groups and cooperation.)

Please answer the following questions as seen in the example below:

e.g: 1: Yes, 2:No, 3:Yes, etc

1. Do you support President Bush?

2. Do you support the invasion & occupation of Iraq?

3. Do you hate anyone who is not a republican?

4. Do you hate other republicans?

5. Do you believe everything from the administration?

6. Do you disbelieve everything in the media?

7. Do you strongly disagree with pro-choice on the abortion issue?

8. Do you think liberalism, socialism, marxism, and nazism are all the same?

9. Are you Christian/Jewish?

10. Does the nation of Israel hold a special significance for you?

11. Do you believe and rejoice in the end-time Christian theology of Armageddon to cleanse the earth?

12. Would you support president Bush to achieve it.?

13. Are you a literal believer in the Bible's creationist proposition?

1-5 Yes's: To be announced.

5-10 Yes's: To be announced.

10+ Yes's: To be announced.

Serious question on society and culture.

There is clear evidence of defaming intelligence, academia, and a general mood of disparaging scientific methodologies in films, tv, and online media from the USA. Clever students are called geeks and nerds, medical research is attacked from religious nuts, science and technology are sometimes blamed for all the world's ills.

Hollywood fiction is preferred over actual history, the etymology of words in the English language is ridiculously quoted and perpetuated (e.g. I recently read that "History" is apparently derived from his and story because it's a male-dominated world!), and religious dogma over-rules scientific evidence. It must be the only country on the planet whose citizens seriously question the evolution of life. Learning a 2nd language is discouraged, and geography is limited to one continent. There are so many examples of perpetuating this culture of ignorance, it's impossible to list. What do you think?