That’s probably because the airport is too backed up as it is and a third runway is needed to thin the congestion, as well as prepare for future traffic demands.

behiker, they expect to stop all aviation, not just jam the gears. It’s like here in the Twin Cities. The eco-nuts deliberately refused to add road lanes to the beltway causing huge traffic jams over time. This is supposed to force you onto public transport. “You will comply!” They are nothing more than deluded fascists (I think that’s may be redundant).

On February 25th, 2008 at 10:05 pm, Barry F. said:

We must be close to the same neck of the woods, Watcher. The might walk in but they will have to be carried out.

I wonder if that would leave a carbon footprint?

Nah — as long as you do not embalm them, they make pretty good fertilizer. If you use a wood chipper, you can usually fertilize your whole garden with just one of them. Just spread them in a thin layer, and then make sure you turn the soil, or the aroma will make your eyes water in a few days. See? Recycling can be good for the environment and good for your soul.

Agree with you that the FFL are a formidable force. With any luck, Sarkozy may unleash them where they are needed.

2. This may be the time to pay back that “solid” we owe the Japanese.

Seven years ago the USS Greeneville sank a Japanese fishing vessel, the Ehime Maru off Hawaii. I say we give the Japanese navy a shot at the Steve Irwin.

This doesn’t do much to reassure passengers regarding the state of security at British airports: Four activists from environmental campaigners Greenpeace breached security at London Heathrow to stage a protest on top of a jet against the airport’s pl…

My first encounter with this particular kind of fantasy occurred when I was in college in the late sixties. A friend of mine and I got into a heated argument. Although we were both opposed to the Vietnam War, we discovered that we differed considerably on what counted as permissible forms of anti-war protest. To me the point of such protest was simple — to turn people against the war. Hence anything that was counterproductive to this purpose was politically irresponsible and should be severely censured. My friend thought otherwise; in fact, he was planning to join what by all accounts was to be a massively disruptive demonstration in Washington, and which in fact became one.

My friend did not disagree with me as to the likely counterproductive effects of such a demonstration. Instead, he argued that this simply did not matter. His answer was that even if it was counterproductive, even if it turned people against war protesters, indeed even if it made them more likely to support the continuation of the war, he would still participate in the demonstration and he would do so for one simple reason — because it was, in his words, good for his soul.

What I saw as a political act was not, for my friend, any such thing. It was not aimed at altering the minds of other people or persuading them to act differently. Its whole point was what it did for him.

And what it did for him was to provide him with a fantasy — a fantasy, namely, of taking part in the revolutionary struggle of the oppressed against their oppressors. By participating in a violent anti-war demonstration, he was in no sense aiming at coercing conformity with his view — for that would still have been a political objective. Instead, he took his part in order to confirm his ideological fantasy of marching on the right side of history, of feeling himself among the elect few who stood with the angels of historical inevitability. Thus, when he lay down in front of hapless commuters on the bridges over the Potomac, he had no interest in changing the minds of these commuters, no concern over whether they became angry at the protesters or not. They were there merely as props, as so many supernumeraries in his private psychodrama. The protest for him was not politics, but theater; and the significance of his role lay not in the political ends his actions might achieve, but rather in their symbolic value as ritual. In short, he was acting out a fantasy.

It was not your garden-variety fantasy of life as a sexual athlete or a racecar driver, but in it, he nonetheless made himself out as a hero — a hero of the revolutionary struggle. The components of his fantasy — and that of many young intellectuals at that time — were compounded purely of ideological ingredients, smatterings of Marx and Mao, a little Fanon and perhaps a dash of Herbert Marcuse.

I think a lot of these “activists” are out of the same mold, it’s just that they are acting out a slightly different fantasy. Heroes Of The Cause, just a different cause.

I agree with you about items 2 and 3, anti- airport-runway and animal-testing zealots.

His view is, “The dolphins are getting caught in the tuna nets! Yeah, what about all the TUNA getting caught in the tuna nets?!”

That may not be an exact quote. But, I am too tired to put the DVD in right now and get it word for word. I guess the tuna aren’t cute enough for them.

On February 25th, 2008 at 5:11 pm, sausage said:

Saving the planet by any means necessary. Laws and lives be damned.
Some would say not unlike the invasion of Iraq then….International law and lives be damned…

Do you even think about how things are going to sound, before you blurt them out, sausage?

folks in the “voluntary human extinction” movement.

I like that, EQ! LOL