of impotent anti-Noams trying in vain to make a dent in the discussion.

my personal way of viewing the world is that there are many threads loosely bound together, each of us holding to various degrees to these threads. Occasionally, one person or group is able to wield influence over a thread, but the general tenor of any time is a voyage of inertia, punctuated by occasional inflection points, where a disaster or opportunity presents a new chance to change the influence of certain threads.

there are many threads to the arguments that surround this torture issue.

- regardless of what beliefs this country was founded on, this was a country founded on a new continent ripe to be exploited by many for its resources, and many alpha types are driven by the promise of profit, not the promise to improve the Indians' lives, for example.

- likewise, there have long been hawks and doves in government, those who want the US to remain insular, and those who want expansionism

- there are two parties, many times criticizing the other side for things that have been done by the criticizers themselves. this is just politics, so Democrats will criticize Republicans for things Democrats also once engaged in.

- most of the populace is just trying to get by, concerned about world opinion only from the standpoint of how it might impact future opportunity for themselves and for the country.

- this country plays up to the idea of being a shining city on a hill, as NC said most predominant empires do, yet the reality is that any country will do what it has to to protect itself, to grow its influence, to expand its resources, in ways that are allowed by opinion or coerced into acceptance by others, if possible

- the intelligence organizations are very good at practicing ways in which to influence events in ways that are at least tacitly acceptable to the populace (an idea I first read in Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent)

- 9/11 WAS known about before, and by many in government, in strange places such as the Mayor's office in San Francisco for instance. Talk all summer of 2001 was of a coming event. Willie Brown had specific intel.

- 9/11 was a strange event in that many threads point to intimate government knowledge and encouragement, such as the extensive electrical work that a Bush family member performed on the towers the week before. Another thread: more war games took place the morning of 9/11 in the NYC area than EVER in history. Al Qaeda is commonly known to be a CIA creation, the BASE, created apparently to congeal those in the Arab world into a single spot so they can be brought out into the open for Western intel to spot. The CIA connected buying and selling of airline stocks. The announcement on 9/10 by Rummy that $2.3 TRILLION was missing from the Pentagon, the movement of FEMA into the NYC area the NIGHT BEFORE. The threads in this cluster go on forever, it seems.

- The Princeton random number generator project, where computers around the world generate random numbers and are correllated against each other, seem to become 'less random' during times of collective human mental stress, such as happened on the morning of 9/11. This alone is queer enough, implying some sort of collective conscious force field girding the Earth and influencing all matter and energy. Moreso, the decrease in randomness occurs NOT after the population finds out about a disaster, but hours BEFORE. For a planned event such as 9/11, this means that the human condition apparently seems to collectively reside on a sea of consciousness which we all tap and that seems to influence us more than we can influence it. The towering mountain of conscious concern hours PRIOR to the 9/11 event was a radar blip that had long been planned by many, unbenownst to them, as a place to meet and to perform an atrocity. The 'mountain' in other words, is somehow discerned in the minds and imaginations of people who aspire to influence history, which in those sinister peoples' minds is then something to just go do, to prepare to climb that mountain and to then do it. We are all but insects on a surface of something much deeper than we can comprehend. History is predictable with the correct tools and the correct perspective. My personal belief on this is that the sun and its electromagnetic and gravity output, which takes eons to emerge from within center of the sun, has something to do with this ability for others (gods, aliens, wise sages with looking glasses) looking in to be able to say, for instance, that there will be THREE anti-Christs, in Christian terms.

first off, someone else said it, Mars does not make real chocolate, more like brown hydrogenated wax bars with some cocoa so they can call it chocolate.

second, chocolate is a harder sell to women than to men, (I know, I was shocked when I read the stats too). Men apparently buy more and better quality chocolate and consume more chocolate than do women.

third, the ad is embarrassing now, because it implies women will not buy something unless it comes with a special prize at the end, which belittles women, who try hard to actually do more than be pneumatic dollies, even if self actuated.

fourth, the ad will be MORE embarrassing years from now, fortunately for Mars more than for women, but it will be looked at as that women are less than men because it takes such blatant salesmanship to get women to move onto a product.

Can you imagine a chocolate marketed to men called a Pleasure Stick? of course not, it is utterly ridiculous. Women are hypersexual, omnisexual, and insatiable. Men are just neutral eunuchs, forever aspiring to be more than that.

The sexuality does not permeate men's lives, like it does with women, making women seem shallow.