2013-05-19T16:15:34-04:00 James Bloodworth http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/author/index.php?author=james-bloodworth Copyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for James Bloodworth Good old fashioned elbow grease. tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.2257127 2012-12-09T19:00:00-05:00 2013-02-08T05:12:01-05:00

James Bloodworth http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-bloodworth/
The move is predicated on the notion that tobacco companies "deliberately deceived the American public about the health effects of smoking".

The president of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids described it as a "vitally important step" that would require the tobacco companies to "finally tell the truth is a small price to pay for the devastating consequences of their wrongdoing".

And the judge appears to have a solid case. For years smoking was portrayed by big tobacco as an enjoyable, even glamorous habit, and the harm it was doing to customers was ignored, downplayed, and finally, when the lawsuits began to pile up, grudgingly acknowledged.

Even though the industry did finally admit that smoking was addictive and damaging to health, it continues to spend money fighting against campaigns aimed at warning people of the dangers of cigarette smoke; as well as on initiatives which seek to "counteract the 'denormalisation' of tobacco".

It isn't only the tobacco industry which is looking anxiously towards the courts, however. Researchers in the US have begun to argue that corporations which produce junk food are the new big tobacco. They claim that, like the tobacco companies before them, corporate food giants are portraying themselves as reputable companies who take their social responsibilities seriously, when in reality they care little about the spiralling 'obesity epidemic' they are in large part responsible for creating.

"It took five decades after the initial studies linking tobacco and cancer for effective public health policies to be put in place, with enormous cost to human health. Must we wait five decades to respond to the similar effects of Big Food?" a report published earlier this year in the influential PLOS journal asked.

In a not unrelated development, this side of the Atlantic a European consortium is investigating whether or not such a thing as food addiction exists; and if so, whether it should be recognised at a clinical level alongside addictions to drugs and alcohol. Speaking of alcohol, it was also reported last week that researchers at King's College London believe they have found the gene which makes people binge drink. Lead researcher Professor Gunter Schumann said people were inclined to "seek out situations which fulfil their sense of reward and make them happy, so if your brain is wired to find alcohol rewarding, you will seek it out".

If there is any message we might take from all of this it's a reassuringly absolving one: it isn't your fault. If you happen to be overweight and if your liver is shot from too many sambucas, not to worry, it isn't your doing and those whose doing it is will soon be brought to task.

In the case big tobacco, those who've suffered a deterioration in their health because of smoking do have a strong case: the tobacco industry did lie to them, and in doing so it behaved abominably. It would take a particularly cold heart to argue that smokers who were oblivious to the harm they were doing to themselves are responsible for their later ill health. Personal responsibility is after all compromised somewhat when the choice a person makes is built on a foundation of sand.

That said, pointing the finger of blame at others for our obesity, or for the consequences of our nights out on the sauce, or because the burgers in McDonalds are a little too appetising, or because junk food is too cheap to begin with (as if that's a bad thing!), is to hide from reality - people are aware that being overweight is unhealthy and carry on regardless. Why? Because doing unhealthy things often feels very, very good.

Were it not for the fact that the NHS is facing a looming disaster, it wouldn't matter. But as it was reported on Monday, the NHS is facing a funding shortfall of £54billion by 2021/22. Even if proposed efficiency savings are implemented, the health service still faces a potential financial black hole of £34billion. Researchers predict that if current trends continue, up to 48% of men and 43% of women in the UK could be obese by 2030, which translates as a £2billion per year cost to pay for obesity-related diseases.

Pointing the finger of blame at others for our poor health is rapidly becoming a way to deflect attention from the fact that the very idea of a health service is incompatible with modern lifestyles. The NHS is rightly viewed as a national treasure, and the politicians who meddle with it do so at their peril. But we seem to have forgotten that healthcare has a cost attached, and that we are responsible to each other if not to ourselves for maintaining at least a modicum of good health.

Blaming the food industry for making you fat is a bit like blaming Hooters because your husband likes breasts. It may be comforting to curse the corporate giants as you reach for another chocolate digestive, but it's attitudes like this that will end up destroying the NHS.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1885336 2012-09-17T19:00:00-04:00 2012-11-17T05:12:01-05:00

James Bloodworth http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-bloodworth/
To call the film a piece of third-rate dross would be too lenient. Aesthetically the film is patently awful, and features a cast who can't act and a set that jumps and bumps around the screen when it most definitely shouldn't. The film also mocks and insults Islam. It portrays the prophet Muhammad as a philanderer and a child molester who gets a kick out of massacring non-believers. The fact that it's badly acted seems to make it even viler, for some reason.

The content of the film is beside the point, however. If you believe in free expression you must defend the rights of filmmakers to make such films. Unfortunately a small minority of extremists in Egypt, Libya and Yemen have used the film as a pretext for assaulting American and Israeli embassies and a number of people have been killed, proving that the apparent sanctity of divine revelation trumps any concern for human life for a small number of the pious.

Instead of unreservedly condemning the violence and defending free expression, however, a number of Western commentators have sunk into a swamp of half-baked liberalism that appears to believe only in the necessity of committing cultural suicide as hastily as possible. One example was Robert Fisk who, writing in the Independent, claimed the people who "set the Middle East on fire" were those who produced the film, rather than those who lit the matches. As well as disenfranchising the vast majority of Muslims who, when they learned that Islam had been ridiculed in this way, didn't go out and violently assault the first American they came across, this line of argument sidesteps the fact that monotheism has historically responded violently when it has encountered criticism. All the more reason to criticise, comrades!

It also gives ammunition to the forces of the far-right, who will gleefully welcome the proposition that Muslims are too thin-skinned to live alongside free expression, when in reality this applies only to a small number of fanatics.

In a society where ideas are exchanged freely, anyone who is not a sociopath will at times take offense. The idea that people can ever be sheltered from hurt feelings is, I hope to everyone reading this, an absurdity that only makes sense if one wants to live in a society resembling that of Nineteen Eighty Four. Bullies who use violence to silence critics of religion should never be appeased by socialists. The idea that free speech is being "abused" whenever someone actually tests it should also be seen for the idiotic fallacy that it is. The freedom of religious and political groups to proselytise is intrinsically connected to the right of the apolitical and non-religious to blaspheme.

In much of the region affected by the protests religion has historically propped up some of the most misogynistic, homophobic and reactionary forces. Take away the right to ridicule and mock authority, textual authority in this instance, and everything else is detail, including the right of the Muslim working class to satirise and ridicule its rulers.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1708870 2012-07-27T05:14:23-04:00 2012-09-26T05:12:33-04:00

James Bloodworth http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-bloodworth/
A member of parliament since 1970, the so-called "Beast of Bolsover" is one of a dying breed of working-class MPs. Born in 1932 to a Derbyshire mining family, Skinner was the third of nine children and an exceptionally bright youngster. Passing the 11-plus at nine-and-a-half, he went to grammar school aged 10 before turning down the chance of a university education to work down the pit - first at the Parkhouse colliery near Clay Cross then at Glapwell colliery near Chesterfield.

Dennis Skinner's upbringing is the stuff of a Ken Loach novel: a childhood spent playing on the coal heaps of Derbyshire while at home his trade-unionist father Edward versed him in the politics of the class struggle. Skinner senior, a miner, was sacked during the strike of 1926 before being re-employed in the late Thirties when war was in the offing. He was sacked again in the Fifties when, as the miners' delegate, he told the manager "a few things" the workers felt about his stewardship of the pit. He was issued an ultimatum to apologise or face the sack. "Apologise?" Edward Skinner replied, "It would be like putting me head in t'oven."

Not long afterwards Dennis was elected miners' delegate in place of his father. In 1964, aged 33, he became the youngest ever president of Derbyshire National Union of Miners. Had things turned out differently it could have been Skinner, rather than Author Scargill, who led the miners' strike against Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s.

Instead, in 1969 the miners decided they wanted Skinner as Labour Party candidate for the rock solid seat of Bolsover. "I never put my name forward," Skinner says, making it clear it was them who made the decision and not him. On being elected to parliament in 1970, however, Skinner continued turning up every morning to work at the pit. "I didn't know when Parliament started to pay my wages," he was later reported as saying.

One of Dennis Skinner's defining characteristics is his abrasive manner with those on the opposite side of the House. Never one to pull punches, he has a reputation among some MPs as a showman or "a knockabout turn," as one Labour MP disparagingly put it. He has also been known to overstep the mark at times with his jibes - resulting in several expulsions from the House; in 2005 he was asked to leave the chamber after accusing George Osborne of doing cocaine.

Many MPs like to drink and socialise together in the House of Commons bar after debates. Skinner has little time for such niceties with the Tories and their "pathetic liberal" allies. He makes the irrefutable point that if a miner can't drink and work, nor should an MP. Skinner himself has an assiduous attendance record in the House of Commons. The only time he has failed to attend in all his years as an MP was when he was in hospital having triple heart bypass surgery in 2003.

Regularly referred to as "incorruptible", Skinner was accused by the Sunday Telegraph in 2009 of making false expenses claims. Recalling how he got a call from the Telegraph's office asking probing questions, he explained. "I told them I had the lowest expenses in the House and the best voting record, but they wanted to know about £3,500 for alterations to my bathroom and kitchen and £800 for a sofa bed." Dennis was cleared of any wrong doing after it emerged that alterations to his flat had been carried out on doctor's orders after his heart bypass. "I've bought my flat myself and never charged a penny of it to the taxpayers," he said. "I have worked out that I am living in London on £27 a day while David Cameron is claiming a damn sight more for his big house in Oxford."

Still a crowd puller, like Tony Benn before him Dennis Skinner is one of the few MPs people will still bother turning out to see. The problem is that like Benn he also risks becoming something of a national treasure - and being liked was never something his politics were about. Unapologetic about his treatment of Tories in the Commons, he once told a reporter to "forget it" when asked if he would ever change his abrasive ways. "There are only so many things you can do in life," he said. "And if you think I'm going to spend my waking hours thinking about some decency in some Tory or other, you can forget it."

Visiting a corner shop in a quiet suburb of Bolsover about six months ago, I asked some local workmen on their lunch break what they thought of the veteran MP. "I disagree with Skinner on virtually everything under the sun," said one of the men. "But politics is a better place with people like him involved". The shop's owner also piped in. "He's very popular in Bolsover. I've lived here for 20-odd years and he will only stop being MP for the area when he steps down or dies," he said. "There is absolutely no chance of him ever losing an election."

When he does eventually leave the House of Commons the entire chamber will be worse off without this worker's son made good - perched in his trademark tweed jacket on the front corner of the Labour benches, belligerently arguing a point when others have long given up the ghost. In an age when the integrity of MPs is repeatedly called into question, even those who loathe the politics of Dennis Skinner will admit, grudgingly of course, that he possesses the stuff in droves.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1520929 2012-05-17T07:56:36-04:00 2012-07-17T05:12:20-04:00

James Bloodworth http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-bloodworth/
There has been ample evidence for some time detailing the massacre of over 7,000 Muslims in Srebrenica during the summer of 1995, as well as Mr Mladic's hand in it. There is, in fact, more evidence of this particular genocide than most other crimes against humanity that occurred during the 20th century. An international tribunal, established by the UN, has already convicted one Bosnian Serb general of aiding and abetting the massacre in Srebrenica; and it looks set to convict another.

And yet for some, whether a genocide has taken place or not seems to me to be almost entirely dependent on the political persuasion of those doing the killing. In this case, what seems to trump all other considerations is an otherworldly "anti-imperialism". As a consequence, telling truth often morphs into attributing blame for every event to one power in particular - the United States. If that isn't possible, then events themselves must be downplayed, skirted around, or even dismissed completely as propaganda.

One of the works released by a prominant "progressive" writer in the years following the genocide that attempted to play down Serb atrocities was Diana Johnstone's Fools' Crusade. In the years since it was published, the work has been thoroughly discredited by many. British historian and expert on the Bosnian war Marko Attila Hoare described the book as "little more than a polemic in defence of the Serb-nationalist record during the wars of the 1990s - and an ill-informed one at that." "In short, she is an armchair Balkan amateur-enthusiast, and her book is of the sort that could be written from any office in Western Europe with access to the internet," he said. It is worth revisiting, however, due to the reaction it elicited at the time from a number of prominent Left-wing figures. Many of these people have never been held to account for the extent to which they tried to pin the blame for the Srebrenica on everyone apart from the perpetrators.

Noam Chomsky, the celebrated American radical professor, together with a clutch of others including British author Tariq Ali, signed an open letter to the Swedish magazine Ordfront defending Johnstone's works after the magazine was hit with a flurry of complaints following their publication of an interview with Johnstone - an interview in which she downplayed the genocide in Bosnia. The letter, signed by Chomsky, read: "We regard Johnstone's Fools' Crusade as an outstanding work, dissenting from the mainstream view but doing so by an appeal to fact and reason, in a great tradition."

Again, the response of Professor Chomsky in this instance should be put in the context of the wider reaction of certain sections of the Left to Western intervention in general - no matter that intervention in this case happened altogether too late. The method of Chomsky and his acolytes seems to be: select an action taken by the West - whether in Kosovo, Rwanda, or Libya (or in this case, belatedly in Bosnia and Herzegovina) - invert the role of perpetrator and victim, and form a conclusion which lays the blame for every atrocity at the door of Western intervention or a Western ally in the region. If this means downplaying attrocities committed by those opposed to Western forces, then so be it.

Chomsky himself even went so far as to say of Johnstone's book that "She argues and, in fact, clearly demonstrates that a good deal of what has been charged [in Srebrenica] has no basis in fact, and much of it is pure fabrication."

Asked later whether he regretted supporting those who said that the Srebrenica massacre was exaggerated, Chomsky said his only regret was that he "didn't do it strongly enough".

In this vein too was the response of the American academic and other long-time Chomsky associate Edward Herman. On Kosovo Herman, wrote John Feffer in Foreign Policy in Focus, "manages to construct an alternative universe in which Serbian military forces only acted in defence, Slobodan Milosevic was a benevolent Gorbachev figure, and the international legal community functioned as some kind of adjunct to NATO".

Chomsky was as reluctant to distance himself from Herman as he had previously been from Johnstone. Not only did he defend Herman's right to challenge genocide, but he consistently praised Herman's body of work.

To some observers, it may appear as if it is not Herman and Johnstone's right to free speech that Chomsky is defending, but rather their particular worldviews.

It is not only Chomsky's friends who implicate him, however. Chomsky himself, when referring to the Srebrenica massacre, continues to place the word genocide in quotes, despite the fact that, as mentioned earlier, an international tribunal has convicted a Bosnian Serb general of aiding and abetting genocide.

If anything, the reaction of a number of prominent Left-wing intellectuals to the Srebrenica genocide was a taster of things to come. On the back of 9/11, anti-Americanism began to trump any concern for the lives of other human beings in many so-called radical circles. The primary motivation became a deep hatred of the west for many of these people, rather than a sense of solidarity with the oppressed. The main thrust of this movement is an "anti-imperialism" espoused from the comfort of a warm bed with a full stomach in a liberal democracy.

Now that another of Slobodan Milosevic's murderous generals is in the dock, it seems a fitting time for the Left to admit it got it wrong on Srebrenica.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1454971 2012-04-29T19:00:00-04:00 2012-06-29T05:12:01-04:00

James Bloodworth http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-bloodworth/
An outfit that most of us thought had disappeared in the 1980s has re-emerged due to splits that are currently ravaging the British National Party (BNP).

All being well of course, NF candidates will take a thorough battering at the polls next month. Fortunately, the economic crisis that began in 2008 has not yet been marked by the racial tensions that characterised large economic crises of the past.

And yet, were a far-Right government ever to win power in Britain - and never get too complacent, for a Searchlight poll last February found a staggeringly high number of voters who said they would be prepared to vote for party of the far-Right if it renounced violence - what might it do in its first year of power?

This is pure speculation of course, but interesting all the same, I think.

Isolationism

Recent wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya are often simplified into a Left/Right question: if you are on the Left you were against them, if you are on the Right you supported them. This is crude and misleading. In the tradition of isolationism, the British far-Right is concerned with foreigners only when they directly threaten the national interest. This includes foreigners dying at the hands of barbaric regimes.

The far-Right believes barbarism to be a product of uncivilised peoples or cultures which cannot exist in this country unless imported from the outside. A far-Right government would see its role only as the protector of the British people from this perceived threat.

The first year in power of a far-right government would most probably see a withdrawal from NATO, an exit from the European Union and an end to all overseas aid spending. Foreign massacres would be dismissed as "savagery". Actual military spending, however, would be doubled.

Which leads me neatly on to...

The worship of monarchy and the armed forces

One of the problems a government of this sort would have is that although the British people like pomp and ceremony, they don't much go in for compulsory pomp and ceremony. People of the Left recoil at widespread enthusiasm for the Royal Family, while forgetting that a good deal of it is based on little more than a detestation of the political class. The Royals are quite obviously establishment figures - they are the establishment - but when set against politicians there is a widespread belief that they are somehow less a part of the ruling class than Parliament is. Such a dynamic only works, however, so long as the monarchy is not viewed as an extension of the government.

With regard to the military, huge hostility would be whipped-up, with the aid of the media, towards any figure who publicly criticised military spending or the increasing deployment of troops to quell internal unrest and break strikes. Such people would be branded "unpatriotic" and denounced as Communists. Several military figures would probably enter the Cabinet within the first year of government.

The economy

Initial nationalisations would see elements of the far-Left align themselves with the new government in the manner of previous alliances with "anti-imperialist" movements abroad. A renegade former Labour MP is perhaps the most prominent Left-spokesperson for the new regime, playing up the Government's anti-American credentials while ignoring the widespread suppression of minority rights.

During unrest the army is drafted in. This is incredibly popular until the children of the middle classes feel the brunt of it. They are protesting at the general decline in living standards brought about by UN sanctions imposed for Britain's treatment of religious minorities. Great fanfare is now made in the press about the "great British tradition of protest".

The minimum wage is abolished along with the right to strike. State intervention in the economy increases albeit unaccompanied by any understanding, let alone indictment, of capitalism as a system. The living standard of workers falls while foreign investment is scared away.

Immigration

All immigration from "culturally foreign" countries - a catch-all term conveniently catching almost all non-whites -is brought to an end. Large numbers of people leave the country, including thousands of white Britains with non-white spouses. Discrimination against non-whites is not enshrined in law but institutional racism is ignored. Racial theorists are regularly given a voice in the media and an atmosphere of general hostility is whipped-up towards Muslims in particular.

A distinction is created in the public mind between 'good' and 'bad' minorities on an arbitrary basis. Wealthy non-white businessmen occasionally line-up alongside the Government to denounce recent immigrants, who they describe as work-shy and lazy.

The government imposes quotas for white players on English Premier League football teams.

Culture

The BBC is told to impose a strict limit on the number of non-white people in its soap operas. LGBT characters are categorically banned. There is a new trend toward jingoist documentary making and revisionism about the British Empire. Most BBC programming harks back to a world that no longer exists and probably never did. The most popular TV entertainment show is Top Gear.

Widespread rioting and looting of Muslim areas breaks out when England are knocked out of the football World Cup by Iran. The government, backed by a formerly prominent member of Ukip, labels all Arabs 'cheats', not realising that Iran is not in fact an Arab country.

An attempt to severely limit abortion causes a split in the Cabinet as some members see it as a potentially effective way of controlling the poor. Homosexuality is outlawed and an attempt is made to re-introduce Victorian sexual morals. The attempt fails when half the cabinet are found to have been having affairs and the wife of a working class minister is found to have once posed in Escort Readers' Wives.

In London, Saturday mornings see uniformed Right-wing militias parading in Hyde Park. The militias are regularly purged due to widespread homosexual activity. Animal rights charities report an increase in donations and the most recent census indicates an unprecedented rise in the number of vegetarians.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1415994 2012-04-10T16:38:41-04:00 2012-06-10T05:12:01-04:00

James Bloodworth http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-bloodworth/
Those states with nuclear weapons are upgrading, replenishing and replacing their stocks, while those without them are increasingly weighing up the benefits of joining this elite (or I should say notorious) club of nations.

We may still occasionally kick up a fuss about the gradual subversion of the idea of a nuclear-free world, but bolstered by the fact that nuclear weapons were never used during the Cold War, realist political theorists have successfully popularised the idea that the more states that possess the bomb, the less likely war becomes. Like the car or the internet, we have come to accept nuclear weapons as an everyday part of civilisation.

And yet, if you have never felt the fear that previous generations had, that a mad man, or a mad regime, would one day acquire a nuclear weapon, you are about to. A dictatorship that held on to power three years ago by butchering and raping its citizenry is rapidly approaching the point where it will have the capability to build a bomb. According to the latest United Nations inspection, Iran has produced enough 20 per cent-enriched uranium in a single year to fuel its one nuclear research reactor for 15 years. Strange behaviour, you might think, for a regime that solemnly maintains it has no desire to build a nuclear weapon. Elsewhere, however, the regime's proxies are less concerned with keeping up appearances. In Lebanon the flags of Hezbollah are decorated with the symbol of a mushroom cloud; while the theocracy's more zealous newspapers have already begun to gloat over the potential a nuclear Iran would have to bully its Arab neighbours.

It is difficult to pinpoint exactly when lots of people in the West became comfortable with the prospect of an Iranian bomb. On the political left, it might even be accurate to say there is a greater clamber to condemn the prospect of the West disarming Iran than there is to argue against the theocracy being allowed to build a nuclear bomb.

Those weighing up the potential of a nuclear Iran in the hackneyed language of mutually assured destruction (MAD), however, or viewing developments only in terms of "Western hypocrisy", would do well to remember just how close we came to nuclear annihilation during the so-called "balance of terror" that governed the previous century. To those who believe that nuclear war today is unlikely, I feel compelled to point out that this is not, in any sense, enough. Any one of the following "incidents" should have rid us of the glib notion, based on feeble evidence, that the potential for worldwide nuclear war is confined to the realms of science fiction:

• During a meeting with Robert McNamara to mark the 30th anniversary of the Cuban missile crisis, Fidel Castro told the former United States Secretary of Defence that "of course" he was aware that the Soviet missiles situated in Cuba were nuclear-armed. "That's precisely why I urged Khrushchev to launch them," remarked Castro. Asked what he thought the consequences for Cuba would have been had Khrushchev heeded his advice, Castro said the island would have been "totally destroyed in the exchange", and added that McNamara would have "done the same" were he in the Cuban President's position.



• On 26 September 1983, Stanislav Petrov, the officer in charge of monitoring the Soviet Union's satellites over the US, intercepted a message indicating the launch of Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles from American bases. Soviet Premier Yuri Andropov believed at the time that the US was preparing an all-out first strike nuclear attack, and in anticipation had implemented a "launch at warning" order, which meant Soviet retaliation no longer required the usual confirmation of an enemy attack. Upon receiving the system alert, Petrov hesitated, and after five long minutes decided that the launch reports must be false. Petrov later told journalists his decision that the US had not started an all-out nuclear war was based partly on a guess.



• In 1979, British and American computer systems malfunctioned, and indicated that the Soviets had launched a massive nuclear attack. Fighter jets across the West were scrambled and emergency preparations for retaliation were made. Six minutes later the all-clear was sounded. The error occurred after a junior Canadian military officer put a tape simulating a Soviet attack into the wrong computer.

It hardly needs pointing out that the West has a huge stockpile of nuclear weapons. It is also quite true that one cannot preach non-proliferation, nor expect it, while simultaneously building up one's own lethal nuclear arsenal. That being said, I have not heard any plausible explanation as to why an Iranian bomb would increase the likelihood of the West getting rid of its nuclear weapons. Considering the fact that a nuclear-armed Iran would have broken every undertaking it has ever made to the European Union, to the International Atomic Energy Agency and to the United Nations, a more probable outcome is that a further nail would be driven into the coffin of non-proliferation, potentially consigning the cause, along with the League of Nations, to the history books. This would not simply be bad for Israel, as some on the more extreme fringes might wish, but would be an unimaginable disaster for all of us, including millions more who have not yet been born.

Those nostalgic for the old "balance of power", or practiced in a toy-town "anti-imperialism" that trumps a consideration for the lives of actual human beings, ought to at least have an idea of the potential consequences of what it is they are so blasé about. ]]>