I can't open it.

Seems to work from Luxembourg:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_7501000/7501443.stm

Kafka,

Thanks for the link. I used to think Dominic Lawson was merely brain-dead -- but judging from this discussion with Professor Guillebaud he's even worse. He's a lunatic.

If only the lunatics were at the fringe rather than at the centre!

P.S.

The Optimum Population Trust's site is here:

http://www.optimumpopulation.org/

It has an excellent journal, with some first-rate articles on energy issues:

http://www.optimumpopulation.org/opt.journal.html

Of course there is no absolute right for anything. Rights are agreements put in place by societies and exist because we are able to use concepts and communicate them with language.

Agreements that are backed by force or consequences we call "the law."

Agreements that are widely held but can be ignored or broken without significant consequence are called "norms" or "culture."

Agreements that people feel particularly strongly about we call "rights."

Asserted agreements (i.e. they may or may not qualify in the above categories yet) are called "morality" or "ethics."

This notion that all our morals, rights, ethics, etc. are at their core just agreements set up by societies doesn't sit well with some people, and they will argue that there truly is some such thing outside of the concept (again, articulated via language). But it's quite easy to see that our whole way of relating to the world is through a filter of cognition provided by language. Take away language and the concepts disappear, as does much of what we think of as "reality."

The short way of saying that is: it's all made up.

Note that I am not saying that we don't want these agreements or that I'm against these agreements or any such nonsense. I'm merely pointing out that humans inhabit a world of agreements. The corollary to that is that people generally don't realize that it's all made up, and then proceed to take life all together too seriously, in my view.

-André

You can access it outside of the UK. I am listening to this very interview in the BBC News Podcast at this very moment.