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Agree partly but for the most part thats a gross over simplification. 1) Yes and no, any foreign invading army is invariably considered BAD regardless of its true intentions (which frankly we all were lied to about anyways). Its not simply about prosperity, its about the US favouring regimes that favour them regardless of it being good for the people. Thats what governments and people do (you scratch my back i'll scratch yours etc) but on the flip side its easier to blame ones problem on the foreign cause (no matter how minor a part they played) then admitting to ones own mistakes and that holds true for America as well as the Muslim world (9/11 providing ample evidence of that on the american end). 2) that may be true about bin laden but not his followers, most of his followers believe in the palestinian cause, ditto for chechnya, kashmir , what happened in bosnia etc. Check this out - Guardian story about a hijacker from 9/11. If it was only about saudi arabia 90%+ of his followers would vanish, people largely dont give that much of a shit about it in the sense that the country itself is a mess and its the rulers fault , long live monarchy ...

Excerpt from Bin Laden's letter to America.

(Q2) As for the second question that we want to answer: What are we calling you to, and what do we want from you?

(1) The first thing that we are calling you to is Islam.

(2) The second thing we call you to, is to stop your oppression, lies, immorality and debauchery that has spread among you.

(a) We call you to be a people of manners, principles, honour, and purity; to reject the immoral acts of fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling's, and trading with interest.

We call you to all of this that you may be freed from that which you have become caught up in; that you may be freed from the deceptive lies that you are a great nation, that your leaders spread amongst you to conceal from you the despicable state to which you have reached.

(b) It is saddening to tell you that you are the worst civilization witnessed by the history of mankind:

(i) You are the nation who, rather than ruling by the Shariah of Allah in its Constitution and Laws, choose to invent your own laws as you will and desire. You separate religion from your policies, contradicting the pure nature which affirms Absolute Authority to the Lord and your Creator. You flee from the embarrassing question posed to you: How is it possible for Allah the Almighty to create His creation, grant them power over all the creatures and land, grant them all the amenities of life, and then deny them that which they are most in need of: knowledge of the laws which govern their lives?

(ii) You are the nation that permits Usury, which has been forbidden by all the religions. Yet you build your economy and investments on Usury. As a result of this, in all its different forms and guises, the Jews have taken control of your economy, through which they have then taken control of your media, and now control all aspects of your life making you their servants and achieving their aims at your expense; precisely what Benjamin Franklin warned you against.

(iii) You are a nation that permits the production, trading and usage of intoxicants. You also permit drugs, and only forbid the trade of them, even though your nation is the largest consumer of them.

(iv) You are a nation that permits acts of immorality, and you consider them to be pillars of personal freedom. You have continued to sink down this abyss from level to level until incest has spread amongst you, in the face of which neither your sense of honour nor your laws object.

Who can forget your President Clinton's immoral acts committed in the official Oval office? After that you did not even bring him to account, other than that he 'made a mistake', after which everything passed with no punishment. Is there a worse kind of event for which your name will go down in history and remembered by nations?

(v) You are a nation that permits gambling in its all forms. The companies practice this as well, resulting in the investments becoming active and the criminals becoming rich.

(vi) You are a nation that exploits women like consumer products or advertising tools calling upon customers to purchase them. You use women to serve pas

However Israel secret agents have tried to get New Zealand passports http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,2763,1262 362,00.html so it's not to hard to imagine other terrorists trying to do the same thing.

I also travel to the US frequently for work (and have a strong connection to 9/11) and have informed my company that I will no longer travel there until things change.

I have no desire to participate in your exercise of mass delusion and harassment. There are plenty of more interesting countries in the world for me to spend my time (and money) in.

German lab wins linear collider contest

Particle physicists have chosen to base the proposed International Linear Collider on superconducting technology developed by an international collaboration centred on the DESY lab in Germany. The superconducting approach was chosen by an international panel ahead of a rival technology developed at Stanford in the US and the KEK lab in Japan. The eagerly-awaited decision was announced at the International Conference on High Energy Physics in Beijing today.

The 30-km-long International Linear Collider (ILC) will collide electrons and positrons together at energies of at least 500 billion electron volts. Particle physicists will use the ILC to make detailed studies of the Higgs boson and any other new particles, such as supersymmetric particles, that might be discovered at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). It is envisaged that the ILC will turn on by around the middle of the next decade, about eight years after the start up of the LHC, which is currently being built at CERN in Geneva.

Is this the answer to God, the universe and all that?

Physicists plan £3bn experiment in a 20-mile long tunnel

They call it the God particle: a mysterious sub-atomic fragment that permeates the entire universe and explains how everything is the way it is. Nobody has ever seen the God particle; some say it doesn't exist but, in the ultimate leap of faith, physicists across the world are preparing to build one of the most ambitious and expensive science experiments the world has ever seen to try to find it.

ITER Impasse Illustrates Challenge of Site Selection

...indeed, site selection is often a thorny matter, even for scientific projects not as costly or international as ITER or the next-generation linear collider.

(Q2) As for the second question that we want to answer: What are we calling you to, and what do we want from you?

(1) The first thing that we are calling you to is Islam.
(2) The second thing we call you to, is to stop your oppression, lies, immorality and debauchery that has spread among you.

(a) We call you to be a people of manners, principles, honour, and purity; to reject the immoral acts of fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling's, and trading with interest.

We call you to all of this that you may be freed from that which you have become caught up in; that you may be freed from the deceptive lies that you are a great nation, that your leaders spread amongst you to conceal from you the despicable state to which you have reached.

(b) It is saddening to tell you that you are the worst civilization witnessed by the history of mankind:

(i) You are the nation who, rather than ruling by the Shariah of Allah in its Constitution and Laws, choose to invent your own laws as you will and desire. You separate religion from your policies, contradicting the pure nature which affirms Absolute Authority to the Lord and your Creator. You flee from the embarrassing question posed to you: How is it possible for Allah the Almighty to create His creation, grant them power over all the creatures and land, grant them all the amenities of life, and then deny them that which they are most in need of: knowledge of the laws which govern their lives?

(ii) You are the nation that permits Usury, which has been forbidden by all the religions. Yet you build your economy and investments on Usury. As a result of this, in all its different forms and guises, the Jews have taken control of your economy, through which they have then taken control of your media, and now control all aspects of your life making you their servants and achieving their aims at your expense; precisely what Benjamin Franklin warned you against.

(iii) You are a nation that permits the production, trading and usage of intoxicants. You also permit drugs, and only forbid the trade of them, even though your nation is the largest consumer of them.

(iv) You are a nation that permits acts of immorality, and you consider them to be pillars of personal freedom. You have continued to sink down this abyss from level to level until incest has spread amongst you, in the face of which neither your sense of honour nor your laws object.

Who can forget your President Clinton's immoral acts committed in the official Oval office? After that you did not even bring him to account, other than that he 'made a mistake', after which everything passed with no punishment. Is there a worse kind of event for which your name will go down in history and remembered by nations?

(v) You are a nation that permits gambling in its all forms. The companies practice this as well, resulting in the investments becoming active and the criminal

• The current population of the US,
• The base of the Taliban and al-Qa'ida,
• A question about the Euro (I can't believe ANY Europeans could've possibly got this wrong),
• A question about Kashmir,
• The location of the US on a world map (the Russians, Japanese, Mexicans, Italians, and Swedish all did better at locating their own countries),

I wouldn't expect the average person to know the answer to some of the questions (for example, the question on El Nino), but the ones above are real howlers. I think part of the problem is the 'tabloid culture' that exists (on this side of the Atlantic, anyway). People need to stop reading toilet paper and start reading real newspapers.

And just for the record, I got 18 out of 20. I guessed the religion question wrong and incorrectly stated that China and Russia both have populations of over a billion.

Are you referring to the UK & USA-backed dictator of Uzbekistan, Islam Karimov?

Sure. Maybe maybe maybe. But after 10 years of dickering around, we got Sept. 11, and we just weren't in the mood to dicker around anymore.

And you have heard by now that Iraq had nothing to do with September 11'th, right? The administration whipped up our nation into a furor, linked Al Quaeda and Saddam, and then turned the anger towards Iraq, and all their blustering and "intelligence" turned out to be a load of crap. And even before we're done with Iraq we're talking about invading Syria if they don't comply with our demands, where's the evidence that Syria is so damned guilty?

Again, sure. But we're talking about the situation *before* the U.S. invaded. We only know about the nuclear situation in hindsight, and here's the kicker: WE WOULDN'T KNOW THAT NOW IF WE HADN'T INVADED TO BEGIN WITH.

It's sad when you can justify the invasion of another country against all advice from most of the international community like that. Oh, we know now that we invaded that they don't have nukes, 'sall good!

As for the rest of your post, you make a perfect example of the type of American who thinks that what's good for America is good for the world, and if they can't realize it, well then sucks to be you. We have no right to take out Saddam halfway accross the world when he is in no way a direct and immediate threat to our country, if Saddam does something, there's nothing stopping us from going in there and taking the bastard out, but as long as he minds his own business, we have no business there. We're not the world police man. Maybe we should start gathering reliable intelligence rather than relying on what Bush and Cheney decide to say today. Then we could actually get the rest of the world backing us because we can prove it.

I'm not saying Saddam was a nice guy, or that taking him out of power was not ultimately a bad thing, I'm only saying the methods that we utilized were EXTREMELY unnecessary. The war was a devastation of Iraq's already considerably weakened forces (Remember the first war? I'm sure Iraq had already amassed at least as much power as they had previously), and now it's just squabbling with a bunch of terrorists, putting our troops into a quandary. Operation Shock and Awe was a huge joke as well, hey let's fling tons and tons of missles into a populated urban area, they're guided and things never malfunction! Like half those missles were necessary?

In any case, you're doing what I've seen too many doctors do: you're avoiding dealing with issues you have no patience for, and doing so by stereotyping some of your patience as wackos. I guess it's OK for Rush Limbaugh to do that with Liberals, but a physician has no business with that kind of intellectual laziness.

Finally, you need to educate yourself on the whole mind-body thing. A perfectly sane person can think themselves into all kinds of immunological difficulties. There's plenty of stuff in the literature about people who get hayfever from being around artificial flowers.

And then there's me and cigarette smoke. I get the nastiest headaches from the slightest whif. Not suprising, since my skin tests for tobacco produce whelts the size of raisins. But then why do I get these same headaches from watching Bogart movies?

According to this article it's not legal. Certainly the artists aren't getting anything out of your downloading.

Media controversies about game violence are said to be bad for the industry, but they often seem to be good for game sales. Manhunt sales surged following highly critical media attention when it was believed the game contributed to a nasty teen-on-teen murder in the UK. It turns out the media accounts were mostly wrong off-base (the cops said it was related to drugs and theft), but by then the game had been mentioned in news stories around the world. No game maker wants to see their work implicated in a violent tragedy. But game publishers know what presses the media's buttons, and I think some of them count on that to generate buzz about a game. GTA San Andreas is a good example, as the NY Times is already writing about it.

No, no - call them "Moonies", to honor the great Reverend! He is the messiah, after all - he was crowned as such in a Senate office building, so it must be true!

China sells organs of slain convicts

No.

Guardian Unlimited | Style guide:
president lc except in title: President Bush, but George Bush, the US president.

Here's the one about mass graves in Iraq:
PM admits graves claim 'untrue'

This helps explain your thoughts

There are no rules as to how quotes have to be used, there are no rules anymore period. Either you fight to save your rights, or you will loose them. This was true before, but the pace of attrition was slower. Now, they are moving as quickly as possible to completely enslave the entire population of the west. Read this as an example of how fast and far the changes are being made.

People like you, who follow rules like sheep are a large part of the problem. You will sit down following unwritten rules and etiquitte guidelines while people are being executed. You will beleive any guarantee that is given to you. You are the first to put your fingerprint on the scanner because it is convenient, or because you need some document, license, certificaion or access.

Wake up. Smell the burning gasoline and buy a clue, before its too late.

The problem with that particular line of reasoning is that if you're not a terrorist there's no guarantee that you won't be fingered if the system thinks you're a terrorist. Fingerprint scanning - like all forms of identification - is imperfect, and like all imperfect systems its prone to false positives as well as false negatives.

It's not whether you are a terrorist or not, it's whether the system identifies you as a terrorist.

As an example: a case in south africa not so long ago, a British man was held for 21 days by South African authorities at the request of the FBI, because they mistakenly believed they "had their man". Imagine now that a system as falsely trusted as fingerprint scanning marks you - an innocent man - as a terrorist - the current bogey man. Your stay in a holding cell could well be beyond 21 days!

Of course, this is overlooking the fact that it would appear that these scanners are not likely to be linked to any central database!

Actually the situation in the UK is very much (from school upwards) that only Biology is an acceptable/attractive science for women, probably because Medicine and the related fields are seen as nurturing.

Girls are steered or scared away from Physics and Chemistry because of the reliance of Maths (another reason) and general Science, Technology and Engineering fields - the medical-related aside - all suffer as a result.

The irony is that the success of women in Medicine is now being questioned! http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,127 4299,00.html

The bottom line... that's what people who don't want accountability always focus on. Not on the numbers that got you to the bottom line. People who want accountability want to know how you GOT that bottom line.

Regarding Kerry and his service, I'll stick with McCain's opinion- Kerry served honorably and no dirty trick is going to change that. There are some sick people out there. He volunteered for combat, I don't particularly care about the shiny objects bestowed upon him after the fact. But tell me, do you think the people who give out medals are that stupid?

Bush's administration lied about certainty and specificity. Bush's State of the Union address identified specific quantities of specific substances, and Rumsfeld announced their location. You don't do those sort of things when you're not sure. All the others were emboldened by the administration's confidence in those findings, and rightly so; you'd expect the executive branch to have the best access to intelligence. When people raised doubts they were told "trust us, we know what we're doing". Well, Fool me once, shame on you, as they say.

And I defy you to come up with any methodology by which you can show that more civilians would be dead if Saddam were still in power than as a result of the war. As a conservative estimate over 11,000 civilians have been killed directly as a result of this war. So far we only know about 5000 or so from Saddam's reign, and it seems that many of these were from the insurgency after the first Gulf War that the US encouraged but failed to support. Furthermore, it's not clear at all that Allawi is going to be any better. You may recall that this is why we didn't take out Saddam the first time- it was judged that Saddam was a known quantity, and humbled at that- it was not clear that we could easily do better. This alone does not show that the war wasn't justified, but it does show that your thinking is very lazy.

As for the bombing strategy, duh you use different tactics in different places and if they aren't useful then you evaluate your chances of success and the cost of the conflict in the specific case. 900+ American soldiers dead and over 10,000 Iraqis dead so Allawi can demonstrate even faster Due Process than Texas under Bush.

Why do you want to talk about Michael Moore so badly? Quit trying to change the subject.

Here's a recap of our discussion of Bush's AWOL:

Me: Bush was AWOL, here's the facts that prove it.
You: That site is partisan.
Me: That doesn't change the facts it contains.
You: MICHAEL MOORE MICHAEL MOORE!
Me: WTF?

Can't believe I'm wasting my time on you. In a sense you win- there goes 15 minutes I'll never get back and no one who cares will ever read this.

Um. Those links you cited - that's like citing Fox News to back up a right wing viewpoint. So frankly, I'd trust them about as much as I'd trust Fox. They're nice if you merely want to back up the view you've formed already, but if you are capable of viewing things in colours other than black and white, not exactly helpful. But, if you'd like a website, try The Guardian - it has quite a lot in its archives on Kosovo.

So why not have a spliff before work, then? :P

Courtesy of BBC

"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we," George Bush told an audience of military brass and Pentagon chiefs. "They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."

Curmudgeonly as always,
Kilgore Trout

Say this story in the Guardian:
[Guardian.co.uk]

"Last month Tim Hancock, agent for the Terry Nation estate, alleged that the BBC had tried to commission a cartoon series about gay Daleks for BBC Three. "We want to protect the integrity of the brand," he said."

Oh exterrrrrrr-minate darrrr-lings! What the hell would they be, limp plunger-ed?

In that case, you better post the whole memo.

Far simpler to refer to the Washington Post analysis I posted.

The short version is: *Any* action done with the goal of defense of USA *cannot* be considered torture.

The slighly longer version is: Torture now means acts performed with the specific intent and knowledge that they will cause life-long irreparable harm to the victim, and that the victim actually suffers said harm. Acts which might otherwise be considered torture, but are done with the purpose of extracting information vital to the national defense, are exempted.

But Terry Jones, of Monty Python fame, has already cracked this egg.

RSS as in RSS 2.0 stands for Really Simple Syndication, while when the R in RSS stands for RDF, we're talking Semantic Web.

So, if you had mentioned the two in the wrong fora at the wrong points in time, it would invariably have set off a huge flamewar...

What resulted from the flamewar was a fork, and Atom was created. Now, it doesn't seem to me Atom is a Semantic Web application either, and I probably lost many points here....

There seems to be some peace possibilities though.

Anyway, the funny thing I meant to point out was that one could inadvertly spark a flamewar by just saying the wrong things yet meaning nothing bad about it...

In many European countries, in an accident between a car and a bicycle, the driver of the car is presumed to be at fault no matter what.

Personally, I think that's an excellent idea. Though I know most Americans won't believe what they're reading.

This has been a particularly rough month for biologists as we also lost the great Ed Lewis, Nobel prize winner and father of the homeobox.

Probably, the submitter intended irony, but failed to convince

No. He couldn't have intended irony.
Read this: The final irony
He probably tried sarcasm.

I said nothing about Moore and there was nothing in his movie that was new to people who get their news from sources other than Fox News. I'm always puzzled that people are learning all this stuff for the first time from Moore's movie. The international media have been covering it for ages.

And no, phone companies will not refund any of it; they did not even do so in cases where rogue diallers were installed on people's phone lines.

If you refuse to pay they can't make you.

As for the Parties as a whole, in a recent bill to allow states to set their own rules for Medical Marijuana, only 10% of Republican Reps voted in favor of it, while nearly two thirds of Democrats did. While we need to flush the bad third of Dems out, most of them chose the sane option. They aren't the same, one Party is salvageable, whilst the Republicans are wholly controlled by an evil, backward, sect of Puritanical monsters.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,126869 0,00.html/

http://www.cannabis.net/presidentialpot.html/

http://www.maryjanesgarden.com/legalization_of_mar ijuana.php/

IT'S FUCKING FLASH ANIMATION. Free advertising by starting an astroturf campaign to "figure out what went wrong". Here's a hint of what went wrong - Slashdot no longer reads its submissions with a critital eye.

It's as bad as Acclaim's pigeons, their "Name your kid Turok" marketing shit, and who can forget their tombstone advertisements?

It's time to wake up, Slashdot, and not get duped by these obvious ploys for free advertisement.

Here is a nice story from the Guardian that might clue you in a little bit.

Oh, co-workers who correct colleagues on points of grammar and/or spelling are, in fact, annoying.

The UN inspectors were not kicked out. They were told to leave by the US because the US was about to unleash holy hell on Iraq.

Don't worry. We'll have ID cards soon, then everything will be fine again.

No, that's the first step. When all cars are satellite [GPS+GSM] tracked, you'll need the ID card to start the car (making sure you aren't drunk, are the rightful owner, and have appropiate insurance, tax, MOT etc), and to use public transport. Then we'll be safe. Think of the terrorists it'll stop! Think of the evil paediatricians we'll be able stop, THINK OF THE CHIlDREN!!!

Remember, if you have nothing to hide, you've nothing to fear.

There is one thing that can't be outsourced. Culture.

Don't be so sure. People are surprisingly quick to adopt the cultures of others.

That happens to be one of Radical Islams greatest fears: cultural imperialism. Our ideas about freedom have been called "Murderous Germs".

From an article about the origins of fundamentalist Islam:

In his essay "Between Yesterday and Today," Banna [founder of the Muslim Brotherhood] wrote that the colonialist Europeans had expropriated the resources of the Islamic lands and corrupted them with "their murderous germs":

"They imported their half-naked women into these regions, together with
their liquors, their theaters, their dance halls, their amusements, their
stories, their newspapers, their novels, their whims, their silly games, and
their vices. . . . The day must come when the castles of this materialistic
civilization will be laid low upon the heads of their inhabitants. "

The Brotherhood's slogan was, and remains, "God is our objective; the Koran
is our constitution; the prophet is our leader; struggle is our way; and
death for the sake of God is the highest of our aspirations."


Or how about Osama's Letter to America:

(2) The second thing we call you to, is to stop your oppression, lies, immorality and debauchery that has spread among you.

(a) We call you to be a people of manners, principles, honour, and purity; to reject the immoral acts of fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling's, and trading with interest.

[snip]

(iv) You are a nation that permits acts of immorality, and you consider them to be pillars of personal freedom. You have continued to sink down this abyss from level to level until incest has spread amongst you, in the face of which neither your sense of honour nor your laws object.

[snip]

Who can forget your President Clinton's immoral acts committed in the official Oval office? After that you did not even bring him to account, other than that he 'made a mistake', after which everything passed with no punishment. Is there a worse kind of event for which your name will go down in history and remembered by nations?

If culture couldn't be outsourced, terrorists would have must less to be angry about.

(Q2) As for the second question that we want to answer: What are we calling you to, and what do we want from you?

(1) The first thing that we are calling you to is Islam.

(a) The religion of the Unification of God; of freedom from associating partners with Him, and rejection of this; of complete love of Him, the Exalted; of complete submission to His Laws; and of the discarding of all the opinions, orders, theories and religions which contradict with the religion He sent down to His Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him). Islam is the religion of all the prophets, and makes no distinction between them - peace be upon them all.

It is to this religion that we call you; the seal of all the previous religions. It is the religion of Unification of God, sincerity, the best of manners, righteousness, mercy, honour, purity, and piety. It is the religion of showing kindness to others, establishing justice between them, granting them their rights, and defending the oppressed and the persecuted. It is the religion of enjoining the good and forbidding the evil with the hand, tongue and heart. It is the religion of Jihad in the way of Allah so that Allah's Word and religion reign Supreme. And it is the religion of unity and agreement on the obedience to Allah, and total equality between all people, without regarding their colour, sex, or language.

(b) It is the religion whose book - the Quran - will remained preserved and unchanged, after the other Divine books and messages have been changed. The Quran is the miracle until the Day of Judgment. Allah has challenged anyone to bring a book like the Quran or even ten verses like it.

(2) The second thing we call you to, is to stop your oppression, lies, immorality and debauchery that has spread among you.

(a) We call you to be a people of manners, principles, honour, and purity; to reject the immoral acts of fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling's, and trading with interest.

We call you to all of this that you may be freed from that which you have become caught up in; that you may be freed from the deceptive lies that you are a great nation, that your leaders spread amongst you to conceal from you the despicable state to which you have reached.

(b) It is saddening to tell you that you are the worst civilization witnessed by the history of mankind:

(i) You are the nation who, rather than ruling by the Shariah of Allah in its Constitution and Laws, choose to invent your own laws as you will and desire. You separate religion from your policies, contradicting the pure nature which affirms Absolute Authority to the Lord and your Creator. You flee from the embarrassing question posed to you: How is it possible for Allah the Almighty to crea

Where I live in city-centre Liverpool (England) there are CCTV cameras on all the main streets. If I walk out of my house, I'm on camera, and if I walk into the town centre nearly every step of the way I'm on camera. The aim is to have around 240 cameras around the city centre monitoring millions of square metres as part for the Liverpool CitySafe Initiative.

And you know what? When I'm walking back from town at night I'm extremely glad of it. When you've been assaulted and most of your friends who live nearby have been mugged then perhaps you'll understand why. I'm normally extremely libertarian in my views but when you and your partners safety are in question then it sadly pays to be pragmatic. The Guardian newspaper featured an interesting article on CCTV in Liverpool and it's privacy implications, but the fact remains that surveys show that 93% of people are in favour. It works, too, because crime has been cut quite dramatically as part of the initiative.

Of course, were are more accustomed to CCTV cameras in Britain. We have the highest ratio of CCTV cameras per population of any country - something like 4m (or one for every 13 people). There are traffic cameras on many roads capable of snapping speeding drivers or those that jump red lights. It is estimated that each person in Britain is caught on camera 300 times a day. The implications are worrying, and the situation needs to be carefully monitored, but when I'm walking back from the pub at night I can't help but feel a little more reassured.

Do you know the actual difference in figures between English and French as second langauges? They are HUGE. Just take a look at this Eurobarometer survey. Although this is confined to the EU, it does give a useful indication of how the situation is reflected in the world.

French used to be a very influential language but this has declined significantly over the past few decades. There is no ifs or buts about it - English FAR surpases the importance of French in the international community.

French maybe the dominant language of European institutes you stated, but this certainly doesn't apply all around the EU.

I'm sure French is useful to know, but it frankly, there isn't much point in learning it if you already know English unless you plan on spending much time in a French country.

haha, i'm no bible thumper, those are just the ones i could remember off the top of my head.

Yep... they're the ones that leap to mind when one thinks about the commandments. I suspect that this is because they're the ones that the people who are bible thumpers talk about the most. After all, they wouldn't want the commandments to seem at all unreasonable, would they? :)

Have YOU ever read the bible? Ever read leviticus? Believe me there is very little ambiguity as to what is to be done and not done.

Absolutely! I love Leviticus. It's a great book for pointing out how comically ridiculous the bible is.

Protestants and catholics shouldn't even be mentionned as they don't follow the bible, only the parts they pick and choose.

I've never met a christian who didn't follow just the parts of the bible that they pick and choose. Ever try to punish a christian for wearing clothing woven of two kinds of material? They get all huffy and offended! But it's right there in my old friend Leviticus and they just ignore it. Absolutely shameful. Yet many of them have no trouble quoting other parts of Leviticus and expecting people to care.

Do not confuse the bible with the slew of churches out there that have their own agenda.

The bible is just a book. It can't harm anyone directly (unless you hit them with it; it does tend to be rather thick). Churches, on the other hand, are often harmful.

It's pathetic how many people call themselves protestant/catholic as if it's an ethnic group and not a religion.

I suspect that to many people their religion is more important than their ethnic group. It's just a categorization and frankly I appreciate the warning. :)

that even our American friends wouldn't mind one? Not having to tick the Mrs/Mr/Dr/Ms box is nice.

But I worry about the whole honours system because it's outdated, outmoded and even unwanted in some cases.

My wish for TBL is that he refuse the award. Seriously. Why accept an award from a monarch seeking justification for her burden on taxpayers? As long as she brings in more in tourism than she spends, then no problem, but don't legitimise her privilege by accepting token medals and titles from her.

You sound like someone who goes spouting off without knowing the facts of the matter. According to the Seattle Times, Bobby's passport was revoked without his knowledge before its expiration date.

When you consider that the US government itself massively violated the UN sanctions by shipping arms to the Bosnian Muslim separatists, Fischer certainly seems to have a moral leg to stand on if not a legal one.

And while Bobby was just playing a chess match, the Feds were shipping huge amounts of arms to their favorite players in the region, the separatist Bosnian Muslims. As the Guardian newspaper in England documented :

...the Pentagon had incurred debts to Islamist groups and their Middle Eastern sponsors. By 1993 these groups, many supported by Iran and Saudi Arabia, were anxious to help Bosnian Muslims fighting in the former Yugoslavia and called in their debts with the Americans. Bill Clinton and the Pentagon were keen to be seen as creditworthy and repaid in the form of an Iran-Contra style operation - in flagrant violation of the UN security council arms embargo against all combatants in the former Yugoslavia.

The result was a vast secret conduit of weapons smuggling though Croatia. This was arranged by the clandestine agencies of the US, Turkey and Iran... Initially aircraft from Iran Air were used, but as the volume increased they were joined by a mysterious fleet of black C-130 Hercules aircraft.

Just as the trial of Slobodan Milosevic is exposing the fact that most of the claims used to justify the US's Kosovo war were bogus, maybe poor Fischer's inevitable trial will expose the lies told to justify the Bosnian war.

Now that it's been revealed that al-Qaeda members were fighting for the Bosnian Muslims, maybe the USA will acknowledge their mistaken policy, apologize to poor Bobby, and let him go.

Yeah, right. Being an Empire means never having to say you're sorry.

First of all, to say that "Yugoslavia" caused the Bosnian war is as meaningless as saying that the United States caused the (U.S.) Civil War.

The Bosnian war started because some leaders of the Bosnian Muslims-- who as a people had historically been pro-Yugoslav-- wanted to secede from Yugoslavia and start their own Islamic state, and to impose Islamic law on all the people living there-- including the ethnic Serbs and Croats who made up a majority of the population. This was all detailed in their president Izetbegovic's "Islamic Declaration". Along with taking advantage of all the usual Muslim suspects-- including Osama's right-hand man al-Harbi-- who flocked there to fight the jihad, the Bosnian president also recreated a WWII-era SS Division to help in the fight.

A history lesson, since falcon5768 and probably others need it: hundreds of thousands of Serbian civilians were murdered in concentration camps during WWII, when they were on the Allied side while the Bosnians and Croats were allied with the Nazis. Memories are long in that part of the world, and Islamic law is not much fun either-- so is it any wonder that not just Serbs but moderate Muslims like took up arms to prevent the secession of Bosnia, or at least keep their own land out from under the thumb of Izetbegovic and his cronies?

I am confused why you say that the Bosnian war "DID kill US and UN troops". What US or UN troops were in the region? And as for the "mass slaughter" of Muslims at Srebrenica, the story is now starting to leak out that it's not so clear-cut as that-- most of the bodies have never shown up, and many of the dead turned out to be the troops of Muslim warlord Nasr Oric, who would use the UN-protected "safe areas" as a base from which to launch raids involving beheadings of prisoners... sound familiar?

The most laughable part of your post (and, by extension, the US's case against Bobby Fischer) is when you go on about how the sanctions were meant to prevent the world from contributing to the war. Of course, as the Guardian newspaper in England documented (much later after it was no longer inconvenient for the facts to come out), the US government was violating the embargo all along:

...the Pentagon had incurred debts to Islamist groups and their Middle Eastern sponsors. By 1993 these groups, many supported by Iran and Saudi Arabia, were anxious to help Bosnian Muslims fighting in the former Yugoslavia and called in their debts with the Americans. Bill Clinton and the Pentagon were keen to be seen as creditworthy and repaid in the form of an Iran-Contra style operation - in flagrant violation of the UN security council arms embargo against all combatants in the former Yugoslavia.

The result was a vast secret conduit of weapons smuggling though Croatia. This was arranged by the clandestine agencies of the US, Turkey and Iran...

The reason you, and so many other people, hold this inaccurate and deluded view of the Bosnian war, is attributable mostly to the really top-notch propaganda war waged in the U.S. and U.K. media, making the Bosnian Muslims out to be the wonderful, multicultural good guys and the Serbs the baddies. It doesn't matter that so much of the lies have now been exposed-- like

So would you be willing to drive 66 miles? 6 miles? 0.6 miles?

I gave up on my search for these articles due to this barrier.

And was this barrier ($3, you later say) more than fuel and parking, not to mention time spent driving to a nearby library? Heck, it's less than return subway fare in NYC. By your reasoning, unless you can walk to the nearest public library and find it, it's not worth having.

But while doing research about NEPA I find that The Scranton Times has a much better free searchable archive of information than does the The Times Leader which requires you to pay to visit their archive. Wonder who gets my visits?

Well, in your case, the answer seems obvious, but I'd pay for quality and reputation when I have to. I don't subscribe to the New York Times online (I don't think they're worth it) but I do subscribe to the Independent, and if the Guardian charged for archived material, I'd pay them too (I do pay for their crossword, in fact). And rest assured I'm not alone.

...was to it easier for him to booze at the Baja Beach Club in Barcelona.

In Chicago if a cop sees you with a handgun (or something that looks like a handgun, like maybe a cell phone) you are running the risk of being shot.

Think that's bad? In the UK, a man was shot dead by police because he was taking a newly-repaired
table leg home and someone mistook it for a shotgun. More details here.

Of course as long as you're part of the Bush administration, you can swear all you want. As long as it's at a democratic.