John McCain is an ill-tempered, foul-mouthed, scandal-associated, habitually error-prone, flip-flopping, ego-driven, condescending, thoroughly reactionary, misnamed "maverick" who enjoys singing "Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran," is crazily bellicose enough to go to permanent war against the rest of humanity, and may well be in the beginning stage of Alzheimer's.

Other than that, he's okay...

In a 1998 interview, Osama bin Laden — the terrorist organizer of 9/11 who still roams free — listed as one of his many grievances against the U.S. that Americans “have stolen $36 trillion from Muslims” by purchasing oil from Persian Gulf countries at low prices. The real price of a barrel of oil should be $144, bin Laden demanded.

Ten years ago today, the price of a barrel of oil was just $11. Heading into this holiday weekend, the price of a barrel of oil rested at $144 — a thirteen-fold increase.

One month after 9/11, the New York Times wrote of possible “nightmare” scenarios that would deliver bin Laden’s goal. Neela Banerjee warned that among the “misguided decisions” that would put oil supplies at risk would be “that the United States attacks Iraq.”

Why the London literati is lapping up a play about sexist, smoking, foul-mouthed British squaddies in Iraq.

...the show acquires a further twist, with the men seen through the eyes of the slightly camp character researching the play. He is ridiculed as a molly-coddled ‘poof’ in contrast to these hardy, heterosexual men. And through him the play embodies another question. Why are the liberal middle-classes so fascinated by men they would normally revile as sexist, homophobic, monosyllabic bullies? Men who are very unlikely to eat five a day, so much as to smoke 40.

The answer is surely that they represent something intensely ‘real’ to the safe, sedentary neurosis of middle-class life. The extremity of their experience, of killing and being killed in Iraq. fills in the void left by a cosy life not fully lived. These men’s experience seems somehow more ‘authentic’. As such, they become vehicles for sordid fantasies of vicarious heroism which is also how they are treated in less explicit, more sanitised ways by the media. No wonder these men all seem so angry - consumers of porn they find themselves acting out the pornographic fantasies of others.

Today we mourn the loss of 19,240 men who died on the first day of the battle of the Somme. Following an eight day bombardment with 1.7 million shells, and seventeen mines exploded under the German front line, 750,000 troops set out across No Man’s land at 7.30 am on that fateful day... It reminds us how much blood and treasure in the past commitment to Europe has cost us, when the world’s oceans beckoned to a better future elsewhere for an island trading maritime nation.

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Which inmates on death row will eventually be executed? Many never make the final journey from prison cell to execution chamber - but nobody really understands who will be spared.

Until now. A new computer system can predict which death row prisoners will live and which will be killed - with chilling accuracy. And its dispassionate analysis has confirmed suspicions that the people most likely to be executed are those who have had the least schooling, rather than those who have committed the most heinous crimes.