Slashdot Mirror
Trojan Horse Caused A Siberian Explosion
An anonymous reader writes "William Safire of the nytimes [nytimes.com] has an interesting column this week describing how the Soviets purchased bogus computer chips from the West in the 1970's. These chips caused what "was the most monumental non-nuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space." Fascinating story."
For some reason, I can equally imagine something like this happen from the Pentium I FDIV bug, can't you? :)
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
For the tin foil hat crowd, here is a register free link: The Story
In Soviet Russia, computer blows up you !
For a moment I thought you were talking about the recent explosion in Trojan Horses coming from Siberia (ok so its not exactly a trojan and its Russia not Siberia but what the hell ;^)
I rememeber that Russia once developed a base-3 computer called ``Trinity''. I cant find a link on it, but I know that it worked. I cannot imagine how logical operations would work on sutch a thing though.
It just makes for too nice a story. Why should we believe it?
this story has everything. technology, spies, massive explosions, and high ranking government officials dying. it doesn't get much better than this.
They must have planted an agent inside Microsoft...
Now is a time to remember that sometimes our spooks get it right in a big way.
Let's get this straight - Safire is bragging about the Americans blowing up gas pipelines???? I thought that was terrorism, at least if it is in Iraq. Lucky many weren't killed.
Deconstruct the State
...must be already preparing the novel...
Let's cause an explosion that could cause the death of hundreds (if not more), and then gloat about it.
Cold war or not, this is just callous disregard for human life.
Ich werde nie wieder denken
Man is it hard to think of a clever "In Soviet Russia" line on this one!
Instead, according to Reed -- a former Air Force secretary whose fascinating cold war book, "At the Abyss," will be published by Random House next month
:(
So, it's more an ad than anything else, isn't it ?
And the fact that it ended that dramatically just makes me kind of sceptical...
Trolling using another account since 2005.
I just read the article and I obviously dont know the facts outside of the article, but even though nobody was seriously hurt (as said in the article), did the US know that when they got started in this whole fiasco or do you think they would have done it anyways if there was the potential for many (as in hundreds) people to get hurt/killed? If hundreds of people got hurt, it would have been easy to figure out who was behind it and this could have escalated the tension greatly.
1. Supply computer chips to Soviets
2. ??????????*
3. PROFIT!
*KABOOOOM!
Tin foil hat on...
This guy works/worked for the intelligence services. He was/is involved in "disinformation" operations. The intelligences services in the USA and UK are currently under increadible scrutiny for having goofed big-time about Iraq. This guy gets an article published in the NY Times about a very successful operation that helped finish the Cold War. There is no evidence, other than this article, and it can't be proved or disproved.
Draw your own conclusions.
Tinfoil hat time!
I am a believer of momentum and curves.
A risky business, but there were thankfully no (recorded) casualties. It does make you realise that for some things it's a really good idea to look at the code!
Nice, in a way, to see the French and US governments working together too.
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
I mean...really....for someone who frequents a nerd site your deduction and extrapolatory skills are seriously lacking.
Blar.
Oh yeah, this is the country that took over twenty million casualties in WWII and didn't cave, but they toss in the towel from a gas explosion and some computer problems.
Too bad Adolf didn't know that cold wars are so much easier to win than hot ones.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
We have:
Clearly Mr Safire needs to take his medication more regularly._O_
.|< The named which can be named is not the true named
... but stories like this just underscore the existence of American Fascism.
I'm not trolling. I really think this.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
My father was one of developers of top secret soviet chips in 1970's. Many of them were clones of western devices. We had lots of chips, transistors, Fortran listings and special books at home. Most of them were lost because we moved four times in last 24 years.
As far as we (me and my dad) know no chips or computers were purchased from "the West" before 1980's. We developed and manufactured clones of 360, PDP, VAX and others instead. They were software-compatible with Western ones but contained only Soviet (and other Eastern Europe) components.
Later we got VAXen (I remember two of them), Macs (no personal experience) and IBM PC.
wish to develop their own indigenous computer technologies industries instead of simply buying it from us and possibly subjecting themselves to this sort of intergovernmental terrorism? Had this explosion taken place in a populated area the blood would be on our hands.
It goes way beyond issues of economic competition. It's a question of independence, control and security.
Rather like your use of Open Source software.
KFG
I invite people to do a Google search on William Safire and assess for themselves his credbility and impartiality. I'm dubious about the first, but certain that he's not impartial.
The day after it was announced President Bush was setting up an inquiry on why intelligence was so bad over Irag, we get a story on how wonderful the intelligence services are
(ignoring the fact that they did stop the building of any military hardware but a civilian pipeline)
An opinion piece written by a guy who said he used to work down the hall from a guy who said he knew all about this. This sounds more like a review for a book than an actual article. Nothing like a nice post to get all the lemmings whining about loss of life, etc.
slashdot, news for crazed liberal socialist zealots
The trans-siberian natural gas pipeline used technology by a UK company called Serck Controls. In those days, the telemetry computers were 6800 based and I believe they used DEC PDP-11s or more likely (because of export controls), Serck's own computers for running the main control system. I know they were working with a bundle of other western companies, but I thought they had the telemetry system side of it completely.
That old fucker, Safire, has been in the middle of a 4-5 year slide into senility on MTP. Here's the pattern: Russert poses question. Safire switches topic to some feeble discussion of presidential honor and George Bush's actually vast intellect. Russert says something to Broder. Broder gets two words in. Safire interrupts with some half-assed pass at whatever female is on the set using 'obsequiuous' in a sentence, thus being the only English speaker on the planet to do so in 6 weeks. Then he writes an article about how the Soviets couldn't weather a pipeline disaster or some shit and that vindicates Ronald Raygun's presidency through some implied leap of logic.
Remember Ronald Reagan died for your sins.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
Good one. :)
instead, according to Reed -- a former Air Force secretary whose fascinating cold war book, "At the Abyss," will be published by Random House next month.
Sounds just like an advertisement for a new book to me.
"If the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts." -Albert Einstein
Karma? There's a serial modder out there.
The Russians just went broke trying to keep up in an arms race with the combined economies of the US, Western Europe, and Japan.
One wonders if they really believed in their Marxist doctrine that said their triumph was inevitable. Even as MacDonalds opened restaurants in Moscow...
My dad work for Control Data (remember them and their Cyber, the great super computers before Cray left to found his own company?) in the 70s and 80s. At one time the Soviet's bought a computer from them, some several million dollar purchases. A lot of paper work was involved (The US won't just sell these without knowing it won't be used against us...).
The Soviet currency was not a hard currency traded on the open market. That ment control Data got in return cabbages and guns (single shot 12 gauges, great for cheap hunters).
Americans can have military and spy adventures abroad which topple governments, bring U.S.-friendly dictators into power, kill or main thousands, but it's not terrorism unless its another foreign power unleashing it.
Don't you get the underlying double standard yet? Besides which, Safire is a neocon lapdog fuckwit, getting strokes for cheerleading the conquering of other nations.
I know I know, this sounds like a troll, but if anybody still believes the U.S. really had a valid WMD pretense for its party with Death in Iraq, please explain in terms that don't include vague excuses like "it needed to be done" or "Saddam had it coming," because there are plenty of dictators still out there who the U.S. is still cozy with, and Saddam was one whom U.S. danced closely with.
One day (soon hopefully), american Democrats will pull their heads out of their asses and aggressively pursue the Republican's international war crimes the way they pursued the Clinton cigar story.
Big Daddy, Johnny, Burp, Aunt Zelda, Scott, Slurp, Big Momma
why europe needs Gallileo Navigation system and china and India need their independent space and energy programs.
Imagine if they'd created a Beo.. but I really couldn't be ar**ed.
...Probably would have taken out half the galaxy.
AT&ROFLMAO
No one learns of intelligence successes. Least of all the victims/targets.
Wow. A non-impartial columnist. That's a real find you have there, dumbass. Next you'll be telling you sense Michael Moore is a little liberal or Sean Hannity seems to lean slightly to the right.
Anyone who has read Tom Clancy's "Red Storm Rising" knows that the events which kick off the 3rd World War are indeed a Siberean oil line being blown up, thus damaging their oil reserves unrepairably. Knowing Clancy's tendency to discover little details like this, and his incredibly acurate rendering of "What if" I can't say it would supprise me at all if this were a true event. Indeed the funniest thing to me is that Clancy except for a few years of ROTC never served in the military at all. (I believe he was an insurance salesman but I could eb wrong about that detail) When he first published his books the government tried to courtmarshall him only to find he had no military experience.
This is not a sig
How about American Native Indians ?
See the parent:
"but no American administration in living memory has deliberately and systematically exterminated tens of millions of it's own civilians."
everytime my computer crashes I should now think it is just a Russian trying to get even...
All the worms and virii, yep, Russians too...
I better do check on my nuclear bunker in the back yard...
If you read the article, you know there were no known casualties. It's not a very in-depth piece, but I would guess it was planned that way from the beginning. I'm not usually one to defend the CIA or the whole concept of espionage, but I'm damned glad we won the Cold War, and doing so through intelligence activities involving no loss of life is better than through military action with the potential for nuclear war and mutually assured destruction and all that.
Besides, at least it's an example of the CIA doing what it's supposed to do. If I hear one more story about the CIA directly violating their charter by gathering domestic intelligence, well...I guess I'll just hate the CIA even more and not really do anything about it, but that sort of thing really pisses me off.
I found the meaning of life the other day, but I had write-only access.
"Farewell stayed secret because the blast in June 1982, estimated at three kilotons, took place in the Siberian wilderness, with no casualties known."
.
- 1982.html)
I consider this highly unlikely, due to both the lack of information about such an event, and the events that followed shortly after. .
June 18, 1982-
* President Reagan widens a ban on sales of US oil and gas equipment to Russia, which is building a gas pipeline from Siberia to Central Europe.
July 22, 1982-
* France orders French licensees of U.S. firms to honor all contracts for the Siberian gas pipeline.
November 13, 1982-
* President Reagan lifts his ban against the use of U.S. technology for the construction of a natural gas pipeline from Siberia to Western Europe.
So, at the same time this supposed blast occured, Reagan is banning the sale of equipment and technology to the USSR, France is requiring all the contracts to be honored by U.S. companies, and not a damn soul knows that it has either been destroyed, or is about to?
And then, a few short months later Reagan changes his mind, feels bad for the 3 kiloton trojan horse, and decides to make it up by selling them the information they need to rebuild a place we just barely destroyed.
Forgive me if I scoff.
(Source: http://www.cedmagic.com/museum/press/ced-timeline
It must be the UN behind Microsoft!
Basically, the Soviets got suckered because they outsourced the software and chips to US firms.
Doesn't anybody see the similarity between what companies are doing now (with outsourcing) and the Soviet Union did 20 years ago?
And in case you're wondering, this is why Congress is afraid of cyber-terrorism - we literally used computers to kill people in Siberia in the 80's. Perhaps they are scared that the same thing could happen here?
I realize the fears of cyber-terrorism are overblown, but it is a real threat. The threat isn't from outside hackers, but rather, from insiders who plant trojan software programs and sabotage hardware. What would happen if a nuclear power plant computer was programmed to silently vent small quatities of nuclear waste over a period of months or years? By the time it would be noticed, it would be too late to avert disaster.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
I liked the line about the software being "programmed to go haywire", as if that was something you needed to work at. Let's face it, you could have just shipped them anything made by Microsoft, and then sat back and waited for detonation.
From the article:
President Francois Mitterrand of France also opposed the gas pipeline. He took President Reagan aside at a conference in Ottawa on July 19, 1981, to reveal that France had recruited a key K.G.B. officer in Moscow Center. Col. Vladimir Vetrov provided what French intelligence called the Farewell dossier.
This little bit of information is more or less correct. "Farewell" was the code name assigned to Col. Vetrov by his French DGSE (French CIA) handlers.
The next time you are tempted to say that France is not an ally of the USA, just remember that little bit of transatlantic cooperation. I personally think Mitterand was a crook, a thief and a sleazeball -- and I am trying to stay polite, here... But, ultimately, he may have done the right thing here.
But Safire glosses over the saddest part of the Farewell history (emphasis mine):
Vetrov was caught and executed in 1983. A year later, Bill Casey ordered the K.G.B. collection network rolled up, closing the Farewell dossier. [...] Now is a time to remember that sometimes our spooks get it right in a big way.
What Safire does not says is that:
In short: every good intelligence in this story was supplied by the French, and the USA made a mess of it, an important source was killed and years of hard work were wasted.
A little bit like the recent situation with a middle-east country with vast oil reserves, but I digress... You can mod me down now. End of Rant mode.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
I think you're showing your age...
Just what age was the original poster showing, hmmm? Are you saying that people who didn't live through the Cold War are incapable of understanding its meaning? I don't agree with the parent post, either (see below), but I don't dissent by making ad hominem attacks.
I found the meaning of life the other day, but I had write-only access.
"Which one really is the rogue state which uses terrorist means to reach its economic ends?"
Certainly not the U.S. Once you do some research and find out that Noam Chomsky has absolurely no credibility outside of the realm of linguistics, you will know this.
How bout we kill your family, and then we'll laugh at you and call you whiner.
Sound fair?
Seriously calling people lemmings and whiners for being concerned about OTHER HUMAN BEINGS!? What planet are you on?
Yes people die all the time, why is it bad to care?
Even if true, they have ONE explosion and they suddenly suspect ALL the technology they've "stolen" from us?
""The pipeline software that was to run the pumps, turbines and valves was programmed to go haywire," writes Reed, "to reset pump speeds and valve settings to produce pressures far beyond those acceptable to the pipeline joints and welds."
They even "stole" the software?
"But all the software it had stolen for years was suddenly suspect, which stopped or delayed the work of thousands of worried Russian technicians and scientists."
Personally, I would have suspected user error or home-grown sabotage first. But that's probably why I don't work for the KGB.
"Farewell stayed secret because the blast in June 1982, estimated at three kilotons, took place in the Siberian wilderness, with no casualties known."
Something blows up in the wilderness and they suspect stolen US technology was the culprit.
"Now is a time to remember that sometimes our spooks get it right in a big way."
-compare/contrast-
"Col. Vladimir Vetrov provided what French intelligence called the Farewell dossier. It contained documents from the K.G.B. Technology Directorate showing how the Soviets were systematically stealing -- or secretly buying through third parties -- the radar, machine tools and semiconductors to keep the Russians nearly competitive with U.S. military-industrial strength through the 70's. In effect, the U.S. was in an arms race with itself."
So, we have the FRENCH to thank for this success?
That's what they get for outsourcing their software.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
So, how do we know that our current chips don't have something like this in them, in case the CIA wants to shut us down for whatever reason?
I'm just asking. I don't know. Do any of you? Or am I at risk of being in the middle of a massive nefarious plot and have the government smirkingly pull the plug on me, leaving me screaming "Damn You iBook motherboard!!!"
I'm not normally an irrational zealous dickhead, but I figure "When in Rome..."
For those of us that feel the government is not as out to get us as big corporations here is a link to the CIA account of the event.
This is not a sig
If there is some truth in this article Russia will be really pissed off. Expect queries in the russian parlament, diplomatic notes and investigations. Just what everyone need with war on terror and staff...
"How exactly do you prove that something doesn't exist? And what more could Iraq have done besides cooperate fully with weapons inspectors?"
Wait. They did not fully cooperate. They kept balking and stalling at the inspection sites. They even went as far as to kick out the inspectors a few years ago. If they had fully complied, the inspections would have been completed 10 years ago.
"The administration had decided that we would be attacking Iraq . . . the justification part was an afterthought."
No, it decided that it would retaliate against Iraq unless it stopped terrorism and complied with the cease-fire requirements. It gave Iraq plenty of time to comply.
you somehow think only the west did nasty things during the cold war and the soviets hugged trees?
exactly how do you fight someone bent on killing you? you sing campfire songs to him?
nice warped view of history and human nature you have there
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
When I was twelve I also believed that adding 'fucking' to every sentence would make my argument any stronger. Trust me, in 10 years you will also realise that's not true.
http://www.cia.gov/csi/studies/96unclass/farewell. htm
The New York Times does not worry about the defination of the words fact and fiction.
Ask the Kevin....
Why would Russia be pissed? Russia itself was illegitimately occupied and controlled by the USSR: it had to struggle to get free of it.
Boris Jeltsin, one of the leaders who fought to free Russia from the USSR, himself referred to the USSR as an "evil empire".
I thought the Cold War just fizzled away.
contaminate his world view?
Clear, Dark Skies
What did the US do to help win the Cold War? First of all, it's always mentioned in US schools or corporate media how the Russians occupied Eastern Europe with it's armies. What's not mentioned is that the US occupied Western Europe with it's armies. Until 1956 in France, the communist party (PCF) was the most popular party in elections. In Italy the communist party was so popular the US had to result in subterfuge and election tampering to keep Italy from going communist. In fact Italy was the main focus of the Cold War starting with Truman, and as late as 1976 communists were winning over one third of the vote, and coming in The US said it had to do this because of the USSR. The US idle class said they would not have foreign bases if not for the USSR. Yet the USSR collapses and - nothing changes. The US continues with it's military bases and personnel on over half the countries on earth, military spending stays near cold war levels, billions go to Colombia to put down worker movements there, or Israel to pay for the Palestinian occupation. In fact, the US doesn't have the USSR to check it's power any more so it becomes even more bold since it has unilateral power. Nothing could prove the premise of the cold war was a lie like the actions of the US elite post-Cold War, who are making war on the world. Now they say they are against "terrorism" which apparently means anyone who does not like US troops in their country (Osama Bin Laden), and doesn't like having the US idle class take over the land and natural resources and exporting the profits back to the US. It should be noted of course that Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein are old friends of the US elite who armed them during the 1980's, even though they had the same disregard for human life back then as they do now. If they didn't, the US ruling class would have never supported them.
How has this helped American workers? Not at all - blue collar jobs were shipped out for decades, and now white collar jobs are being shipped out. Mexicans and H1-Bs are imported for the jobs that are left. The US economy has been stagnating since the late 1960's (albeit a bump in the late 1990's) with a tepid growth of production while the rest of the world has been catching up - the EU's GDP rivaling the US's and Japan and the Asian tigers as well with China growing 8% a year or so. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average inflation-adjusted hourly wage in the US is below what it was 35 years ago. Hours worked per year by worker have increased in the three-digit level. The economy has been in a sandrap for three years.
I guess Safire is telling us we should stop and think about how "great" it was that "we" "won" the Cold War. That before the decade of rest before the US has gone once again into a permanent warlike state like Orwell describes in 1984, this time a "war on terrorism". I'm sorry, but I look back at things such as Safire boss Nixon's support of the democratically elected government of Chile overthrow, replaced by a bloody tyrant, as a tragedy, not as something to celebrate. And 35 years later US workers are worse off, although the very small wealthy elite on the very top who are perhaps S
Unlike some people who have complained about loss of life, terrorism, etc I actually read the article.
I think at best the story is plausible. Look at in terms of two companies in the same field trying to get the better product out: Both companies are working hard to make their products better, but company A is pulling ahead (noticeably). So someone at Company B decides a little corporate espionage is in order and starts trying to get information and copies of Company A's product to backwards engineer and copy. Company B finds out and, rather than try and crack down (which would just force Company B to find another method of doing the same thing), Company A decides to deliberately make misinformation available. Company B takes said misinformation and unwittingly keeps up their own programs of spying and reverse engineerting, until a blatent error occurs that shows them they have been wasting time and money heading down the wrong trail and will need to go back to where they were several years before and start again from the beginning. Company A, on the other hand, doesn't have the 3 year loss and continues on ahead, widening the distance.
This seems like a good solution to me. If someone is leaching information about your research, deliberately mislead them, it's a lot cheaper than trying to crack down on security even further. If you know who the spies are, use that knowledge.
Now the part where software was mangled in order to cause problems with the pipeline, this also looks plausible and, considering the tensions at the time, a lot safer. Look at it this way: two countries facing off, both creating a larger and larger number of nuclear warheads and other forms of destruction. Instead of a massive killoff, a piece of software is altered to damage a pipeline (loss of money) and throw their last few years of research into question (costing more money and probably quite a few lost jobs).
The people who are crying about the damages of the exploding pipeline should sit down and seriously examine the tradeoffs between that and continued mounting pressures and growing numbers of weapons.
Now while the story sounds good, and it's the kind of thing we (well, some of us) want to hear (hostilities being resolved without bombs or deaths), I don't see enough proof in one article to fully believe it. The fact that this did come from a closed file makes it a little more believeable (those of you that thought this was just a story told to him from the guy down the hall need to RTFA) in that it should be possile to check the story against those files.
I think the story is plausible, but with only one source, and that being someone about to publish a book, I'm wary about believing it without a little more proof. I would like to believe it, but I'll hold off until I either see more articles about it (not connected to this author) or someone publishes the actual files.
--- Sidenote ---
For those of you who will continue to whine that this was an act of terrorism, please go look up the word terrorism and note that the target is to inflict terror. I thought that was pretty clear but obviously the point has missed a few of you who think that blowing something up is terrorism, or even leading someone else to blow up their own thing. The act of blowing something up is not automatically an act of terrorism.
Oh, and if you hate the US so much that you will take any tiny hint of wrongdoing and blow it all out of proportion, move.
Whee signature.
...that the record companies might be reading this article and taking notes?
Here is an article Gus Weiss wrote on the CIA's website that includes some other interesting tidbits. Including the design of the Buran (soviet space shuttle) being a rejected NASA design that was leaked to them as a part of this stuff.
X(7): A program for managing terminal windows. See also screen(1).
What did the US do to help win the Cold War? First of all, it's always mentioned in US schools or corporate media how the Russians occupied Eastern Europe with it's armies. What's not mentioned is that the US occupied Western Europe with it's armies. Until 1956 in France, the communist party (PCF) was the most popular party in elections. In Italy the communist party was so popular the US had to result in subterfuge and election tampering to keep Italy from going communist. In fact Italy was the main focus of the Cold War starting with Truman, and as late as 1976 communists were winning over one third of the vote, and coming in less than 5% behind the Christian Democrats (center-right) in Italy. The US ruling class supported the Spanish dictatorship because resistance continued even after the civil war was lost. Stalin agreed to not interfere with Greece, yet the resistance there to English/US meddling was so great that the US had to militarily take over the country and supprot dictators there as well. Not to mention the dictators and attacks on popular movements the US supported in Latin America, Asia, Africa and so forth.
The US said it had to do this because of the USSR. The US idle class said they would not have foreign bases if not for the USSR. Yet the USSR collapses and - nothing changes. The US continues with it's military bases and personnel on over half the countries on earth, military spending stays near cold war levels, billions go to Colombia to put down worker movements there, or Israel to pay for the Palestinian occupation. In fact, the US doesn't have the USSR to check it's power any more so it becomes even more bold since it has unilateral power. Nothing could prove the premise of the cold war was a lie like the actions of the US elite post-Cold War, who are making war on the world. Now they say they are against "terrorism" which apparently means anyone who does not like US troops in their country (Osama Bin Laden), and doesn't like having the US idle class take over the land and natural resources and exporting the profits back to the US. It should be noted of course that Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein are old friends of the US elite who armed them during the 1980's, even though they had the same disregard for human life back then as they do now. If they didn't, the US ruling class would have never supported them.
How has this helped American workers? Not at all - blue collar jobs were shipped out for decades, and now white collar jobs are being shipped out. Mexicans and H1-Bs are imported for the jobs that are left. The US economy has been stagnating since the late 1960's (albeit a bump in the late 1990's) with a tepid growth of production while the rest of the world has been catching up - the EU's GDP rivaling the US's and Japan and the Asian tigers as well with China growing 8% a year or so. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average inflation-adjusted hourly wage in the US is below what it was 35 years ago. Hours worked per year by worker have increased in the three-digit level. The economy has been in a sandrap for three years.
I guess Safire is telling us we should stop and think about how "great" it was
> The Soviets stole Canadian software to control the operations of the pipeline. The Americans added a trojan horse to the software.
Not precisely true. The Americans sold technology to the Canadians, but wouldn't sell it to the Soviets. Soviet agents posed as Canadian defense contractors to get purchasing rights. The Americans knew they were doing it, and fed poisoned devices to those agents. The agents took the tech home to Russia and BOOM!
Virg
And by 70's, I mean 80's.
Idol Star Astronomer
tens of millions of civilians.Certainly not Native Americans.While treatment of our indigenous population was often cruel and shameful there was no deliberate "extermination"(outside of California where the perpetrators were local settlers).
Now if you classify 16th century Spanish Colonial rule in Meso- and South America as an American Administration you might be closer to the truth.
" all engineered by a mild-mannered economist named Gus Weiss -- helped us win the cold war."
Error: the EPATRIOT condition indicates that a person thinks that their country "won" an unwinnable situation.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
I certainly don't see myself "winning" anything by the collapse of the USSR, with it's 0% unemployment rate and lack of poverty
The USSR had a certain % of unemployment. However, it was illegal to report on it. Poverty was quite rampant in the USSR: with large quantities of people living in hovels, and millions dying of starvation over the course of its existence.
First of all, it's always mentioned in US schools or corporate media how the Russians occupied Eastern Europe with it's armies. What's not mentioned is that the US occupied Western Europe with it's armies
Both were always mentioned. However, it was well known that the Soviet armies in the USSR were an enemy occupying force to keep places like Poland as a Soviet colony, while the Allied forces remaining in Western Europe were to prevent Soviet invasion.
The US idle class said they would not have foreign bases if not for the USSR.
The idle class (the American unemployed) do not speak like this.
billions go to Colombia to put down worker movements there
The movements in Colombia are quite anti-worker.
In fact, the US doesn't have the USSR to check it's power any more so it becomes even more bold since it has unilateral power.
There is no "unilateral power". Even the retaliation against the terrorists in Iraq last year had a coalition of 60+ nations.
and doesn't like having the US idle class take over the land and natural resources and exporting the profits back to the US.
That has not happened for decades. Besides, the unemployed (idle class) are not really involved with this.
". I'm sorry, but I look back at things such as Safire boss Nixon's support of the democratically elected government of Chile overthrow, replaced by a bloody tyrant
You forget the FACT that while Allende was elected, he quickly destroyed democracy and turned Chile into a single-party terror state controlled by the USSR. He invited East German stormstroopers to put down the Chilean people. Allende was the true bloody tyrant. His overthrow is truly something to celebrate.
as there are many out there who are unhappy about their imperialism, as well as their class war against workers at home.
There are no examples of US imperialism post-WW2. "Class War" is also a myth, created by ignorant bigots (similar of mind to those who try to create "race war").
"France should apologize to the U.S. because it sided with Saddam"
You mean that France should apologise to the US because it had the temerity to question our obvious oil-thieving exercise.
"If you're referring to Christianity vs Islam, you're severely mistaken - they both worship the god of Abraham"
No, they do NOT worship the same God. The God of the Christians sent his own Son as a savior. The God of the Muslims did not, but instead has Muhammad as His greatest Prophet.
The two contradict each other.
courtesy of schlockmercenary.com
And the fact is, you're wrong.
The Soviets bought those chips from Canada. They didn't steal them.
You mean that France should apologise to the US because it had the temerity to question our obvious oil-thieving exercise.
Since there wasn't an oil-theiving exercise, that means France had the temerity to lie. After it was bribed by Saddam.... with oil.
I'm sorry, but this isn't really a double standard.
Terrorism, particularly the state-sponsored terrorism as opposed to the usual group of sociopaths like McVeigh and the D.C. snipers (who just need to be caught and it ends) is really a form of warfare. Really.
When for usually domestic politics or for some other reason you want to engage in warfare without massing armies, you send in specialists who engage in random acts of violence: I.E. _TERRORISM_
The USA doesn't direcly send in the usual thugs you see around from other countries. We got instead "Special Forces" who can go in and really muck stuff up. Most of these units are organized along conventional military heirarchies, but don't let that fool you that they march around in parade dress acting like soldiers. These are real mean S.O.B.s that you don't want to even think they are after you. Not only will you be dead if they are, but so will your kids, wife, lovers, pets, animals, plants, and anything ever connected with you. On the other hand, if they are your friend you can rest real easy at night.
The only mistake to note is that terrorism will only be responded to with other terrorism. From my viewpoint, the only reason why Israel doesn't fight back harder in its fight against the seemingly constant terrorist attacks is that they don't (yet) want to take on the entire Arab world simultaneously in one big war. So they tolerate the current situation. The Arab nations don't want to escalate beyond the current terrorism mainly because they don't want to have the USA breathing down their throats if they are that overt. Hence the current stalemate in Israel.
Throughout most of the Cold War between the USSR and the USA there was a series of insurgant groups sponsored by both superpowers. Notable places where this really came to the front included Vietnam, El Salvador, and Afghanistan. Notably in both Vietnam and Afghanistan those terrorists came up against conventional military forces...which had to retreat from both to scale back to terrorists on terrorists.
The mistake of Al-Queida (whatever the current tranliteration spelling... it doesn't always work from Arabic to English) is to assume that an overt terrorist attack on the mainland of the USA is going to be met with a reciprocal terrorist attack on their homes. It shouldn't surprise anybody that after 9/11/2001 that territory was added to the USA (even if it will be given up again, but that is a domestic policy, not anything that really matters what world opinion of the idea of US occupation of Iraq).
If you are discussing this incident in Siberia as an example of a terrorist incident gone bad, you really don't see the whole picture.
BTW, my hometown has essentially been destroyed because of a deliberate Soviet-funded attempt to undermine coporate America. If you want details I can, but it reeks of tinfoil-hat conspiracies until you see what the results have been to a Midwestern small-town in the hartland of America. I do know this has gone both ways. Terrorists come in a good many colors and varieties.
To sum this up, most "Terrorism" is actually formally encouraged and funded by governments trying to get back against (usually) another government. As an American, I don't deny that the USA has also used terrorism against our enemies.
here's a cluebat: if someone intends to murder you, you need to defend yourself
the soviets were bent on destroying the west
what part of that last statement don't you understand?
you are supposed to help the weak and the poor in life, not the guy with the gun pointed at you
do you understand that general concept?
it amazes me, the myopic way some people view human nature and history
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Occasionally our intelligence agencies do their jobs.
(This is important because the intelligence agencies were more correct on the Iraq situation than the Cheney/Rumsfeld homebrew intelligence group established at the Pentagon to spin the intelligence as they saw fit).
Oh - and SafLiar is an idiot.
Penguins are so sensitive to my needs - Lyle Lovett
We give the Soviets bad chips. They give us TETRIS. Productivity drops to ZERO on both sides. Sounds fair to me.
We only have monkeys in the New World.
When did we deliberately exterminate tens of millions of civilians? Try never and pay attention in class sonny.
I couldn't find any info on this "most monumental non-nuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space". I searched Russian sources as well (Russian is my native language). Anybody had more luck with this?
What I've found was the story about Reagan trying to expand technology sanctions against Western companies participating in the construction. This measure was indeed enacted in June 1982.
Here is one interesting link about the pipeline.
As you can see, there is no mention of any disasters, and the project is considered as a major success of the USSR that brought it a significant steady stream of hard currency. This was in fact one of the few Soviet victories during the Cold War.
Well why is Windows 95 or 98 so crash prone?
Why is Windows 2000 and XP and future versions still virus enabled?
Is this an Accident? Is Billy Gates so silly?
Please show me any society which has exterminated tens of millions of it's own civilians and explain what that has to do with communism rather than dictorship governments.
While on the surface this might seem pretty clever, I can hardly imagine a more hare-brained scheme to implement in the midst of the Cold War. You are introducing technology that can induce massive catastrophic failure unpredictably in your enemy's infrastructure (and possibly weapons), without even telling those on your own side who monitor for unusual activity. That borders on begging for someone to start pushing the wrong buttons. The number one rule in a deadly stand-off is not to act unpredictably!
It's like the security tags on clothing.
Bad analogy. It would be like those tags when the software made the harddisc crash or the monitor burn out. Then the software would destroy the computer just as the ink packet destroys the clothes.
If you want an analogy for the blowup of the pipeline try securing clothes with handgranates, oh wait, that doesn't quite match it, how about a little bit of tnt so that the whole block blows up when an item gets stolen. Are you still gonna blame the thief then?
If this story really happened the way it is told than you don't need much sense to see that both sides are to blame and both sides had good reason to shut up about it until this silly journalist brought it up again to brag about it.
Anyone who generalizes about slashdotters is a typical slashdotter.
This is why Brazil, China, Europe, Japan can't trust monopolistic softwares controled by one corporations in one contry.
This motivate every country oveer the world to seek independant software enginering and develop their own operating systems based on open source.
You may find this assertion a troll, but how could non-us trust softwares from Miscrosoft and hardwares from Intel ?
Here you know why China and Japan decided to develop their own CPU and chips as well as their own operating system.
"Please show me any society which has exterminated tens of millions of it's own civilians and explain what that has to do with communism rather than dictorship governments."
The majority, and the worst of, the dictatorship governments have been socialist. I guess that is because socialism is a very effective tool for the ruling class to amass the most power.
Dictator: "Yeah, I own everything and you are my slave. However, it is for your own good."
You forget the FACT that while Allende was elected, he quickly destroyed democracy and turned Chile into a single-party terror state controlled by the USSR. He invited East German stormstroopers to put down the Chilean people. Allende was the true bloody tyrant. His overthrow is truly something to celebrate.
Being war-happy is something I do not understand. First, Allende was not a tyrant and never was. He simply was a good-meaning idealist turned into a loose cannon. He tried to push his ideals too quickly and too straightforward, and things went soon haywire. He never had a single East German stormtrooper (oxymoron, stormtroopers are a Nazi concept) as his aid, but he did have Cuban aides which refused to return home from a visit to Chile and poured more gasoline onto fire. In the end the economy collapsed and military, backed by CIA, arranged a coup.
If Allende was a sickness, Pinoched was too strong a medicine. It was like treating a bent knee by amputation. Pinochet turned Chile into a military dictatorship and ruined Chilean economy furthermore. His politics destroyed the Chilean middle class for good.
There are no examples of US imperialism post-WW2
Iraq, Grenada, Nicaragua, Philippines, Guatemala, Chile, Vietnam, you name it. Granted, often there was a red risk involved, but Vietnam was simply a blunder. US managed to turn Ho Chi Minh, a lukewarm Social Democrat admiring US constitution, into die-hard Communist.
Did Safire get his dates mixed up? There was a huge petroleum gas explosion in the trans-Siberian pipeline in June 1989.
From this site:
Any parallels to contemporary situations are left as an exercise for the reader.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
BOOM!
Sig Follows: "Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." -- Mark Twain
I don't want to spend a lot of time replying, but as one of a minority of slashdot readers who can actually remember 35 years ago, here is a brief summary:
The USSR's "0% unemployment rate and lack of poverty" is like saying that everyone in a prison has plenty of work to do and a place to sleep.
Comparing NATO bases in Western Europe with the Soviet Warsaw pact occupation of Eastern Europe is utterly ludicrous. When the Hungarians in 1956 and the Czechs in 1967 wanted to hold free elections, the Soviets rolled their tanks down the streets as a sign of authority. Do you seriously expect anyone to believe the US did anything remotely comparable in Western Europe?
As for the average inflation-adjusted wage being lower than it was 35 years ago, I can't really say, maybe you have studied government statistics that I have not. In any event, I don't see what it has to do with the cold war.
Yes he was. Specifically:
He annexed large tracts of the Chilean economy to his personal control.
He has his masters in Moscow send in stormtroopers from East Germany to kill the restive Chileans.
His "reforms" made Chile into a one-party state (ensuring him a lifelong dictatorship, if he had retained it.
He simply was a good-meaning idealist turned into a loose cannon
A man of such naked greed who sold his country to the USSR is not "well meaning".
He never had a single East German stormtrooper (oxymoron, stormtroopers are a Nazi concept)
Yes he did, and it is not an oxymoron, as fascism was alive and well in East Germany under Soviet occupation.
If Allende was a sickness, Pinoched was too strong a medicine
True. While Pinochet killed far fewer people that would have died if Allende had been allowed to run rampant, these people should not have died. Pinochet went (almost went to court?) for example for killing enemy foreign agents in his country. He should have deported them instead.
You still have given no examples of US imperialism. Most of what you named in fact were examples of the U.S. helping nations fend off imperialists.
US managed to turn Ho Chi Minh, a lukewarm Social Democrat admiring US constitution, into die-hard Communist.
You are mistaken in this. He was just a few degrees shy of Pol Pot. Even as early as the 1950s, Hi Chi Minh was executing thousands of farmers who were objecting to being put on slave plantations.
In Soviet Russia, computer crashes you!
Evil is the money of all root.
Perhaps Chinese interest in Linux as opposed to Windows makes more sense when viewed in the light of lrojans, software backdoors etc?
In the USA only Congress can declare war. So when the USA was bombing Vietnam, Cambodia, etc. that was a police action or a training exercise or something.
When he said what geeks call a "trojan horse", did he mean greeks?
Col. Vladimir Vetrov provided what French intelligence called the Farewell dossier. It contained documents from the K.G.B. Technology Directorate showing how the Soviets were systematically stealing -- or secretly buying through third parties -- the radar, machine tools and semiconductors to keep the Russians nearly competitive with U.S. military-industrial strength through the 70's. In effect, the U.S. was in an arms race with itself.
Maybe it took Safire thirty years to figure this one out (the guy doesn't seem to be too bright, despite his reputation), but the Soviets themselves were saying it at the time, as were the Europeans. Of course, they didn't put it as "we need to steel technology in order to keep up", they put it as "the US is forcing this arms race upon us".
"The pipeline software that was to run the pumps, turbines and valves was programmed to go haywire," writes Reed, "to reset pump speeds and valve settings to produce pressures far beyond those acceptable to the pipeline joints and welds. The result was the most monumental non-nuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space."
Apart from the scientists and engineers this could have killed, it may also have condemned many civilians to a miserable existence and even killed them. Depriving civilians of heat and energy really is terrorism, whether it is perpertrated by the US or anybody else.
The Soviet Union was not a nice regime. But the end does not justify the means, and it is far from clear whether the downfall of its government and the resulting chaos is making the world safer. These kinds of dirty campaigns may have blowback a century from now, just like US intervention in the Middle East decades ago is hurting us now.
The last chapter of the history of this is not at all written yet. But one thing we can already be certain of: people like Safire, who gloat about such dirty tricks, are morally bankrupt.
For instance, you put a bear trap inside of your living room window and a theif breaks in and gets his leg mangled, you are liable.
just a few things. you say your dad was cloning western devices -- this infers devices were brought in to clone. you say you don't know of chips or computers purchaced from the west before the eighties, but this article centers on chips bought in the eighties. also soviet russia had an internal disinformation system care of stalin that makes the homeland defence fiasco seem like amateurs; i'm not saying your dad is lying, i'm saying misinformation and distrust was rampant on all levels, so it's hard to say just how much he knew at the time was actually true beyond what was in his own hands.
kindly note i'm not dissing you and your dad, just pointing out your points don't quite add up to "No chips from 'the West'". but they're interesting nonetheless. thank you.
and what does it all add up to? heh, not much. we're sure not going to sort out what was really going on a couple of decades ago based on one fantasy article from safire and some posts on slashdot. a hell of a lot of people had been working full time on intrigues for generations at that point.
See what locking into proprietary software gets you? If they had chosen an opensource vendor then they could have reviewed the code and maybe discovered the trojan!
"Thanks to the remote control I have the attention span of a gerbil."
Whether this particular plausible story is tue or not, it does illustrate a very real and fundamental flaw in Soviet strategy. Their system did not generate as many breakthroughs as ours, and they at some point decided that it was a good idea to start obtaining Western science and technology through whatever means, which became a widespread practice.
However, the fundamental problem with copying is that you will ALWAYS be behind. The next problem is that if you don't wnat to get even farther behind, you will not take the time to check and re-test the technology that you obtain, thus leaving yourself open to disinformation, trojan horses, etc.
When the history was actually revealed, it turned out that we were far further ahead of the Soviets in almost all areas than anyone suspected. This was partly because western intelligence services had a bias to interpret their scarce data to elevate the Soviet's capabilities (legitimate caution to avoid being blindsided, bureaucratic impeitive to increase budgets, etc), but there wre also some genuine alarms from misread or misleading data.
My favorite was one I heard from a guy that works in the aerospace industry designing satellite and weapons systems, which I believe occurred in the mid-70s. They apparently got some dispersed radar data inticating that a MIG had taken off from Lybia and flown towards Egypt at an almost insane speed, indicating a huge technology breakthru. This data really got the attention of the right people, and of course the engineers in the classified aerospace programs were challenged to explain and beat this achievement. Some weeks later, they figured out that the plane had crashed, and the data was erroneous. But think of the engineers who had to receive this challenge -- talk about outrageous demands from management!
Who knows what else went on during the cold war, after all, once countries start to enable "big systems failiures" in other countries, perhaps there are all sorts of time bombs waiting out there (chips/software in Nukes)...I can't wait until some current and future nuclear millitary power accidentally causes an explosion which could lead to a small nuclear war somewhere on the planet...I can't wait to end up breathing the resulting nuke fallout that that "arranged accident" could produce...oh, wait a minuite, didn't chernobell result from a cold war experiment gone wrong?
Bush... He takes power in a highly dubious manner. If he won legitimately
Yet he did win legitimately. He won the same way all his predecessors did: he got enough votes in enough states to win the Electoral College.
Get over it. He won. Don't make up lies. Move on.
The whole sordid story care of Cryptome
"dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope"
Just one thing gets me. If America can topple democratic governments
Yet, it hasn't done this since WW2.
Hmmm, so this was rated +1 funny? Evidence of Republical controlled moderators if I ever saw one!
I'm not making up lies. There is serious doubt over the legitimacy of his election
Coincidentally, this doubt existed almost entirely among the 10-20% or so "haters". If the Florida thing had not existed for them to embellish, they wouod have made something else up.
If it had happened in an African country, the international community would have branded it null and void.
Why? It went exactly as it had before (with the exception of the losing side filing frivolous and false court briefings). That is how the electoral system works.
Purely the conflicts of interest present in the election (Jeb et al, down in florida).
OK, if we are going to count out Florida because of Jeb, why not count out the California votes for Gore? Grey Davis was surely as "biased" toward Gore as Jeb was for G.W.
Hey! Throw out all votes that come from states in which the governor is of the same party as a major election participant. Satisfied now?
After all, if he won fairly, why are people up in arms? If it was as legit as some people would make it seem, there would be no problem
There would be the same problem even if he won by 20%. The haters who hate him care not for the reason, they just hate him and think that anyone who is not of the left-wing is not legitimate.
There is sort of deja-vu. A similar % on the right had a problem with Clinton no matter what, during Clinton's regime.
If he won legitimately, he could have done a lot better at proving it.
What does that mean? What does an elected president have to "prove"?
Just take a look at key military technology in the '60s and '70s:
First men in space: Russia (implies better ICBMs)
First operational jetfighter with thrust-vectoring (MIG): Russia
First working long-term space stations: Russia (also used for spying)
First undedectable stealth fighter dedected and shot down by: Russian technology in Yugoslavia (nice done, guys!)
World's most powerfull rocket: Russia (Energija), implies that they could launch a BIG amount of plutonium for a BIG shot.
Most reliable rocket technology: Russia
First figher plane with look-and-lock systems (you look at your enemy and the rockets automatically lock onto that target): Russia (IMHO the MIG25)
Well, sure, USA has a great deal of hightech gadgets lying around, but the Soviets are the guys that actually made them working.
There was also a big fuss about that the USSR stole the space shuttle technology for their Buran shuttle. Actually, the Buran uses a more modern design, has a much higher capacity, better aerodynamics and even can fly completly on automatic (whereas the US shuttle must be landed per joystick).
Sure, the USSR stole *some* technology, but the US wasn't any better. Didn't they steal MIG's whenever they saw a chance, just to try out how to beat them in air combat and integrate russian thruster-design into US fighters?
Look, this thing is totally safe! Built it myself, you know. You just press that button like this and then turn that lev
One day (soon hopefully), american Democrats will pull their heads out of their asses and aggressively pursue the Republican's international war crimes the way they pursued the Clinton cigar story.
Except there are 0 crimes to pursue. This might be a good idea: tilting after windmills might distract the Democrats from doing other destructive things like increasing tax rates.
but if anybody still believes the U.S. really had a valid WMD pretense for its party with Death in Iraq
It was quite valid. It is quite valid. Good that the U.S. went there and removed "Death" from the dance floor.
It doesn't bear good if you start your argument with a statement that is clearly false.
"everyone else's led us to believe"
Aside from the USA and UK, the two countries who were bend on going to war, no other country invoked 'intelligence' that led anyone to believe their still were WMD. In fact, 'everyone else' wanted to let the UN inspectors do their work, to see if any WMD were left.
You seem to have a strange way of distorting the facts.
Seriously read this tripe.Moderated insightful?
Maybe Communism never worked because tens of millions of "counter-revolutionaries" killed wasn't enough maybe you Commies should have tried for billions.
It's not like they didn't try to convince the public thru the media that they were discovering WMD evidence during the aftermath. Remember the uncovering of barrels of 'poision' and "possible chemical weapons?".
Few of these stories had much followup to turn public opinion back. The excitement of the announcements were key to keeping skepticism low. Possibly part of a campaign to build up bits of evidence in peoples mind which balances the equation, Saddam==WMD.
Big Daddy, Johnny, Burp, Aunt Zelda, Scott, Slurp, Big Momma
why the US needs to get back its' manufactuering base esp with concerns to the military.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Religion and rational thought are not mutually exclusive. They're just based on different axioms. It is possible to believe in a god/afterlife/whatever, which is irrational, and still think rationally in relation to how the world works.
Science is based on the axiom that the universe follows, well ... universal rules.
Religions, like Christianity (which is the only one I can speak for - unlike most of the other people commenting here), are based on the axiom that God created the universe and that it has a purpose.
Being axioms (generally accepted principles), there is no proof that they are 'correct' - you simply accept them or doubt them.
There is no rational reason for the universe to exist at all, but clearly it does. Some people say inventing a creator is unnecessary and adds complication with no benefit. Others don't, but rational arguments rooted in science aren't going to 'win', because belief in god is based on a different irrational axiom to the irrational axiom that science is based on.
The story is total crap.
I served in Strat. Int. and I can say with total confidence that -if- such a thing happened heads in the community would roll.
In a time of all out war, yes it would be ok.
But the Cold War was not all out war and such a thing would have been an act of war, and not worth the risk.
The Nixon and Reagan administrations would have been stupid enough to risk GTNW for a feather like that, but nobody else until GB2.
The pipeline was not a proper target for such an action.
Learn your history, but not the USA governments one. The USA tried (and sometimes succeeded) in toppling democratic chosen leaders and install dictators (Pinochet comes to mind as prime example) in their place, way after WW2, and, in fact, continue to do so untill this day, when it suits their needs.
As for the parent poster: the reason WHY they don't plant WMD in iraq is very simple: they (politicians) do not want to risk it.
Fact is, if they did something like that, even when they did their best to conceil it, there would still be at least a handfull of people knowing about it. As the saying goes; for keeping a secret, three is too much. The consequences when it would be found out would be totally devastating, and even a stupid ass-politician like Bush wouldn't want to risk his own carier (and maybe worse) to try to trick the world (including USA citizens) in such a way.
That's why.
Wasn't really hard to figger it out, now, was it?
Here
No GNU has been Hurd during the making of this comment.
This action is clearly a terrorist act of sabotage.
Obviously, CIA does not only not care about their allies' (UK and Germany) interests but also about the potential loss of life.
It could have happened in a town, I guess. And then, what? Huge explosion, 10.000 people killed?
Success? Next thing they tell you is that they were also responsoble for the reactor accident in Chernobil, Ukraina (highly successful, for the region will be contaminated for 1000s of years).
What's the difference between the CIA sabotaging gas pipelines and Al Qaida, say, Hoover Dam?
Are countries that use terrorist methods better than terrorists?
I don't need a signature.
Technology theft was a very big deal back in the 70s and 80s. There were many cases where Soviet chips were direct ripoffs of American designs, even to the point of including non-functional details from the American designs. The KGB and GRU invested huge amounts of effort into stealing Western technology. Stolen Western computer designs also allowed the Soviet Union to steal Western computer software.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I guess then people like Martin Luthor King, Mother Therssa, Ghandi, and Enstien are all idiots comepaired to you.
I will agree that killing for God is inane. Living and sometimes even dieing for your God is not. Since you have declaired that there is no God prove it. If you where as rational and as logical as you would have stated that you have found no proof of Gods and or dieties.
Your statment is based totaly on your faith that there is no God. Your statment that people that believe in god are not rational and are idiots is just as offensive as those that believe that everyone that does not believe the same as they do are not as good as they are. In fact it is the exactly the same.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Rock / Paper / Scissors / Spock / Lizard is properly "law of fives" compliant.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
The primary difference between acts of war and acts terrorism is the target. When al Qaeda destroyed the Twin Towers, that was terrorism. When they crashed into the Pentagon, that was war. Terrorism is the specific targetting of civilians for the purpose of inspiring fear.
:)
That said, certain elements of the US media would do well to remember this distinction. If I hear Fox News calling attacks on military installations in Iraq "terrorism", I'll start suspecting them of bias.
In addition I do not believe this story at all. The whopper "Geting control software with pre arranged datapoints" Who in their right mind would write such code let alone install it.
With data hardwired it most certainly could not be used anywhere else.
This articlwe makes Jason Blair look good.
Help fight continental drift.
"There is no God"
That is a statement of religious faith.
"Religion is the hallmark of human stupidity"
Except for your own religin, right?
"Why can't people think rationally and see there are no deities and no gods whatsoever? "
Because not everyone has your vast incredible perception of all space and time to know this is true.
There was a coal mine once that detonated 8 million pounds, or 4 Kilotons of ANFO in one shot. The Russians registered the blast on siesmographs and thought at first that it might have been nuclear.
what sig?
Here's some info about the fall which killed Gus Weiss:
washinton post article and Nashville Tenessean obit
Notice that Audrey Wolf, mentioned in the latter obit, is Joseph Wilson's literary agent.
Not that that should mean anything...
"Our interests are to see if we can't scale it up to something more exciting," he said.
So they steal our technology, it blows up, and now the Russians somehow have a right to complain? Notice how they didn't.
Take that Commies!
...has some tiny chance of being appropriate.
Actually, they bought the technology and tested it before they used it. It was against our laws for them to buy it, but they paid for it. That's not the same as stealing. And the article clearly states that the software was designed to pass tests and fail in actual operation.
Since this thread is about whether the U.S. cared whether it killed people or not, the fact that it was in the middle of Siberia is only relevant if the terrorists who planned the operation knew it would happen in a place where no one would be killed. They didn't.
This one might actually be right.
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
early computers often worked in decimal (!) at the hardware level. They did this by having different voltages on the lines representing different values, and then reading those voltages.
Getting this right is difficult though because of the hardware involved is slow, complicated and has a tendency to fail. Errors are more difficult to correct and more common...
-
Have you actually done any research on depleted uranium? It's less radioactive than you are--you contain C-14, DU is almost pure U-238, which has no noticable decay over a period relevant to human lifespans.
Media that can be recorded and distributed can be recorded and distributed.
-kfg
And a double-dumbass on the idiots who moderated it up.
Whether the report is true or not, it's certainly evident after a little googling that the Russians had some serious QC issues constructing this pipeline. Which smells suspiciously like sabotage of SOME sort, given the cash cow this thing was supposed to become. I.e., you'd think the incentive would be there to really try to get this thing right.
As for the previous posts doubting the lack technological advancement (or even doubting the Soviet's troubles effectively implementing stolen tech), I say go there and see for yourself. Things may be a little better now, but I was in Moscow and then St. Petersburg in March of 1993. What a sad, sad place.
In our "luxurious" Moscow hotel (The Cosmo), I saw what sort of looked like a TRS-80 clone at a concierge desk on my floor, and I asked the girl sitting behind it all about it. She said they didn't actually use it for anything. "But it looks cool, doesn't it?" she asked.
The sad state of technology I witnessed was almost as depressing as the piles of dirt, curtains of cobwebs, and virtually non-existent security for or basic protection of the treasure trove at the world-famous Hermitage art and antiquities museum in St. Petersburg.
Anyway, here's an excerpt from an interesting article by Warren Norquist appearing in a 2003 issue of the Intelligencer (you can find the complete article here):
SPOILING SOVIET OIL PLANS
After martial law was instituted in Poland, "President Reagan on December 29, 1981 ordered all U.S. firms to break any contracts involving the Siberian dual pipeline and not to enter any new ones." (Shultz, 1993, p. 5) This order also halted a Japanese Soviet oil and gas venture. Gone were four billion dollars in hard currency the Soviets had counted on from 1986 onward. (Schweizer, 1994, p.72).
After first agreeing to honor U.S. sanctions, the Europeans bypassed them with a new interpretation. The U.S. responded in June by "extending the sanctions to include European firms operating under American licenses." The French "minister of industry...threatened to 'requisition' any French companies that did not ship...." (Ibid., p.111)
Reagan responded: any company that used "U.S.-licensed [pipeline] technologies" would be denied U.S. markets. (Ibid., p.124, interview with Robert McFarlane) This led to a compromise by November 13, 1982: "...no new contracts for Soviet gas...strengthen...controls on transfer of strategic items...[start] monitoring financial relations with the Soviet Union and work to harmonize our export credit policies." (Shultz, 1993, p.142)
The pipeline reduced to only one pipe suffered further delays from turbine breakdowns and fires. The two-year delay cost the Soviets over $15 billion and a projected loss from plan of $15 billion in hard currency per year in the 1990's. (Schweizer, 1994, p.216, interview with Roger Robinson) The Siberian Pipeline delay and reduction was a critical turning point in the Cold War because it reduced the currency desperately needed to buy and borrow from the West.
Now we know where the Earth-shattering kaboom went
Typical Saphire piece - look at what we can do when we "get it right" and "no casualties reported." I wonder how many old people died of exposure because their gas heat failed. Espionage when successful has human costs that are never discussed. Where else were the chips used? Chernobyl perhaps?
So, continuing your analogy and making it closer to what actually happened, if Sony knew about these guys selling VCRs that "fell off the back of a truck," and starting going around with their own van and selling VCRs packed with explosives, that would be OK?
If someone steals some software (or buys it under some false pretenses, which is what happened here), that doesn't mean you have the right to do whatever you want to them.
Next thing you know, the RIAA will go around smashing gas pipes in the houses of people whose kids are downloading music.
Now we just build the entire factory in communiest lands to make it easer for them to steal it...
Skull and Bones....
You've gone off the deep-end when you start to rant and rave about a dumb FRAT.
Nothing will change, I guess. John Kerry is also a member of the Illuminati. I have heard that he talks to Elvis daily.
then Bushes I and II, Halliburton, and possibly Israel were all behind Bin-Laden's faith-based detonations.
Yes, it all boils down to those evil Jews. Heil Hitler!
but that'd be redundant.
GWB and Halliburton's employee Chaney were selected (not elected) to occupy chairs in the ...
Election is the way American leaders are selected. GWB and former Halliburton employee Cheney won the election.
Well, if you actually do your homework you will see that the commies are in the lead and pretty far, in fact.
Please show me where the US killed "millions" with their police actions. Yes, there were hundreds of thousands of deaths, but nowhere, even close to the amount of deaths cause by communist of fascist regimes. Even remotely, vaguely close, in fact.
Look at the following very detailed website if actual numbers interest you:
http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/war-list.htm
and
http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/20centry.htm
In Vietnam, the famous bugbear of all the hippies US-caused casualties were greatly outweighed by what the NVA and Vietcong did. But recently during the typical anti-american rage I saked a friend what was the second worse war after WW2. Her answekr? "Vietnam". Why? Because she hates Americans.
Vietnam was by far the most serious police action the US undertook in the 20th century. Only 1.2 million people died DURING THE ENTIRE WAR. Most of them were not caused by the US, nor did the US start the war. That does not excuse them for their intervention, although one might ask what would have happened if they did not intervene. Here's a hint: the North Vietnamese were not going to the South to give them Christmas presents. Nor would Pol Pol have murdered less Cambodians in the DRK period.
The problem is that this is a grey area thing. Lets get this straight: Nobody is lily white. The US is not lily white and no one can excuse some things they did. But they are not pitch dark black either. The problem is that you liberal hippies see anything that is not lily white as being totally evil.
There is a bloody reason people are not executed for stealing a bread but are for murder. The reason is that some crimes are worse than other ones. The world is not a simple angels and devils, black and white thing. If you think it is, welcome to hell.
And just because the US killed hundreds of thousands of people and cannot be excused does not put them or anyone in the West on the same moral level as the communists and the Nazis.
Comprehendo?
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
"In Vietnam, the famous bugbear of all the hippies US-caused casualties were greatly outweighed by what the NVA and Vietcong did."
This is true. After the Americans left, the war casualties kept mounting up. This was because the North Vietnam invaders had to mop up resistance in South Vietnam: they were still at war with pretty much most of the country. They executed civilians who collaborated with South Vietnamese nationalists along the way. Since most of South Vietnam opposed invasion by North Vietnam, the place to this day is ruled like an occupied territory.
Logic levels could have bin -1, 0, and +1.
Gives "Tristate" a new meaning.
Not everyone who criticizes the US lives in the US. Dumbass
Yes, there are people who live outside who hate it as well, almost all because if ignorance (bin Laden thinks that the U.S. has used the H Bomb in war) or outright hatred (Al Quada hating the U.S. because it sticks up for religious freedom).
Haven't they been reading the news? It's a worm, folks. Or a virus. Anything bad is a virus worm. or worm virus. Written by hackers. Who use linux.
Stupid reporters.
(wont somebody please think of the siberians?)
So THAT is the real reason why those cell phones were exploding. So I guess if you start hearing key tones on your cell, it's time to hang up. And here people were worried about cell phone radiation. HA!
...myDoom seems, erm, JUSTIFIED?
How about kook (it's kook spelled BACKWARDS!).
we had a worker's paradise, and we blew it, with a helpful nudge from the West
Were you able to join labor unions? Who owned your home: the dictator (government) or you yourself?
This will be OK with Cheney , as long as the dictatorship gives him a cut of the oil.
If oil was so important, they would have made the sweetheart deal offered years ago by Saddam and had a nice "cut of the oil". But it wasn't: oil was way down on the list of good reasons to rescue Iraq from tyranny.
That's what really ticks me off about athiests, generally speaking. They feel that they're above religion and thus if everyone were like them there wouldn't be religious wars and such. Give me a break! So long as there are humans on this earth, there will be ways of partitioning groups to fight against one another.
Hi! I am a completely random person posting anonymously on an internet forum, but I double-promise you that I used to work in Strat. Int. (You can tell I'm legit because I use a lot of abbreviations and acronyms!) I can say with total confidence that I'm not not fat sweaty nerd who's read too many Tom Clancy novels!
The pipeline was not a proper target for such an action. There, didn't that sound impressive and like I know what I'm talking about? Why should you believe a columnist for the New York Times when there's a fat swea... I mean, a former Strat. Int. operative like me to get your information from!
FORTRAN provides a trinary logic switch where you can test a numeric result for equality to zero and branch on <0, equal to 0, or >0. That's a form of trnary logic. I remember that from when all we had to work with was woodburning computers... kids today have it so easy.
When I took my first computer courses, they waived the phys ed requirement for us 'cuz we all got our exercise hauling around boxes of Holleriths and emptying the bit buckets.
There's a link elsewhere on this thread to ternary logic that uses True, False, and Fail states. Sounds sort of like a built-in, very low level exception handler scheme...
Did you even bother to read the links before replying? The sources they're cacheing, the ones to which I linked, are the mainstream Washington Post (conservative rag), New York Times (liberal rag), and some independent journalists.
You cannot even compare Iraq's totalitarian "socialism" with today's defining examples of socialist states.
The term "socialism" is an unfortunate catch-all for what has become a broad spectrum of political systems, ranging from totalitarian dictatorships (some of these despots supported by the US, such as China) all the way over to "soft" socialist states, such as Norway, Sweden, Finland, Germany, Netherlands, France, Spain, Canada, and last, but not least, The United States of America.
Yes, the USA is a socialist state, by definition, because of its huge social spending policy, and that approximately half its voters belong to a socialist party known as the Democrats.
The other half, Republicans, disavow socialism, but exhibit strong socialistic tendencies by the very fact they accept huge quantities of social pr0k spending each year, on seniors, medical, corporate welfare, etc.
And how, dear AC troll, exactly did the U.S. "reduce" death and destruction? Did you include the twelve years of U.S.-demanded sanctions, which the U.N. estimated killed over 500,000 children alone in your estimation? Did you include the estimated 10,000 civilian deaths in Gulf War II?
How is it that Americans rationalize all this death as somehow being okay? When Saddam orders a few thousand deaths with WMD, it's justification for a unilateral invasion and take-over of a nation. When Bill Clinton and George Bush order up war and sanctions, it's somehow okay. But when a despot, fallen out of favor with the U.S., does it, its major crime. Somebody please explain this to me?
Big Daddy, Johnny, Burp, Aunt Zelda, Scott, Slurp, Big Momma
it wasn't nuclear, you fucktard, read the damn article
It may be more like the recent situation that you let on. France had motives for not wanting Russian petroleum then and they had petro-motives for wanting the status quo in the recent situation.
But loud crap is the best kind :)
in your face
Saddam (or who ever) was wrong for having it put on the top of a n apartment buidling.
Simply because they placed the Antenna on a civilian target on purpose. Similarly moving tanks near mosque and using schools as military storage.
He wanted to raise public outrage enough to where the rest of the Arab Nations, or the world made the United States stop.
And stupid people like you followed his plan perfectly. (To bad the rest of the world didn't.)
Not that if I wasn't Saddam I wouldn't have done the same thing. It just goes to show that Saddam dosen't care about his people.
In civilized nations we have rules against mixing military and civilan infrastructure. Troops don't live among civilians, and we don't have radio antennas belong only to the government on top of civilan houses.
Saddam and his military leaders did all this so people like you whould do exactlly what your doing.
So "You Fail It" IS a valid statement?;-)
Sorry, couldn't resist.
Al Qaeda = US Marines.
WTF ???
This is why you're going back to Vermont and
your organic maple syrup and Vermont Public TV.
au-revoir d00d
The US killed many more people than communists - that's a given. The US techniques of napalming vietnamese towns just shows the pure disregard the US has for civilian life - that's the main reason people around the world vehemently dislike the US.
You seem to have the idea that criticising war, or the US Gov't is criticising America. That's a common misconception present in right-wing America. The goverment isn't the same as the country, and you can stand up to it without being Un-American. Unfortunately, people like you see it as an easy way to come back against those who are talking smack about the US. You think it's a valid argument. It's not. The real americans are those who are standing up to the man, not those bent over (like you). You're happy to sign away your rights because it's convenient for you. You can stay there, waving your little flag, secure in the knowledge you're a Patriotic American. If everyone did that, there'd be no America left. Bush has removed swathes of the constitution, and you're letting him. If you were a real American, you'd stand up to him. You'd rebel.
In the civilised world, people aren't even executed for killing people. Please don't drag the rest of the modern world down with your barbarian practices. Sheesh - it's the 21st century.
Your last point about nazis and communists doesn't even make sense. I'm not bunching the US together with the West - the US is on its own when it comes to insularity, barbarity and ruthlessness.
Another pipeline built in 1981 exploded recently, look at this Source: http://www.svanhovd.no/abstracts/ab_2003/gov_2003/ mnrnews_oct2003.pdf
20.10.2003 Gas explosion in the Perm Region
The State Service for Control of Nature use and Ecological safety started investigations of the
reasons of why a gas explosion happened 17.10.2003 in the Perm region. The diameter of the
damaged pipeline (Permtransgas) is 1420 mm. The irrecoverable natural gas loss is estimated
to 10 million 846 thousand m3 on the 1461st km of the main gas-line Urengoi-Petrovsk. The
pipeline was built in 1981 and taken into use in 1982. Imported materials were used under the
construction.
The story is absolutely true, with just a minor error: the great Siberian explosion didn't take place in June 1982, as described, but in June 1908, over Tunguska river valley.
... the junk mail. As the chip itself was designed in 2005, when no firewall or firefence could stop the spammers, and sent back to 1981, its on-die flash memory was filled with thousands of junk e-mails offering cheap SCO licenses and silicon wafers enlargement. This led to flash controller failure, that was fixed by self-ctrl-alt-deling, but not before the bomb reached 1908.
One more inaccuracy: the purpose of the stolen chips was not to operate a gas pipeline. Instead they contained a secret technology developed by CIA to move back in time and space. The Soviets planned to end the cold war in its roots, by exploding the Los Alamos laboratory in 1945 and stopping the US atomic research altogether.
However, a trojan planted by CIA was supposed to blow up the 1957 Sputnik launch in Baikonur instead. But it never happened, the actual explosion as we all know took place in 1908.
What caused such a huge error? When the coredump was finally located 3000 kms away from explosion site, the reason turned up to be pretty obvious.It was
Nevertheless, everything else this NY Times guy wrote is absolute truth. Despite the fact that after noticing such huge inaccuracies in the reporting no sane person would believe a single word of his.
What oil has been stolen from Iraq? As a matter of fact, please inform the rest of us when the US has stolen anyone's oil? As far as oil interest in Iraq go, the US's plan is to provide them with the ability to sell it on the open market, which is a great situation for them, for the US, and any other country that happens to need energy.
Saying Android is a family of phones is akin to saying Linux is a family of PCs.
No, a Canadian operative bought them from America; the U.S. had no embargo against Canada.
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
(nt)
No, not Einstein, because he wasn't religious. Check out This
I'll quote what it say for you:
Albert Einstein, German born American threoretical physicist (1879-1955).
"It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it." [From a letter Einstein wrote in English, dated 24 March 1954. It is included in Albert Einstein: The Human Side, edited by Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffman, published by Princeton University Press.
"A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death."
1) Why does this story sound like something that should have started out with "Dear Slashdot".
2) Why does "Dear Slashdot" not NEARLY have the ring that "Dear Penthouse" has?
Dear Slashdot,
Today, one of my friends and I were looking though my dad's drawer and we found...
contrasted with
Dear Penthouse,
Today, one of my friends and I were looking though my dad's drawer and we found...
When modding "Informative", please make sure it both has a source and IS actually informative.
(6-hz at double voulme) COLD FIRE
Motorola might have issues with having their trademark associated with a movie about a chip designed to sabotage the systems it is installed in--ingenious plot or not.
Their computers were shit.
For another example, they couldn't build a decent photocopier, so they had to import Xerox machines and have them serviced by foreign Xerox repairmen. Lots of espionage was done through this.
With a little research, you can find hundreds of examples where Russian technology was far behind, and few examples of the reverse situation.
Yes, they kept up in rockets and aircraft. Sometimes, in some areas, the US would be ahead, others, Russia would be ahead. However, as a rule, the US actually deployed superior equipment.
The USA's open society both kept them well ahead in most areas of technology and made it much easier to steal that technology.
If you think the Russians were keeping up in general, then you just don't know what you're talking about.
"but not the strongest reason for going to war"
Alas, it was the strongest reason GIVEN to start the war.
That there were other hidden (real) reasons, that is hardly surprising. As many have pointed out, the main reason was geo-political in nature.
All the rest; WMD, Al Quada connections, etc. were mere excuses to try to validate the war in the eyes of the public.
The CIA actually has a fairly long article (study?) on their website about this incident here
As I understand it, a Ternary System would require less hardware, less circuit complexity, which is definitely worthwhile. So while this isn't a comment on the utility of the abstract logic, it is a comment on the usefulness of the logic to simplify hardware requirements.
Not knowing what I am talking about, I might theorize that perhaps miniatuization efforts might be able to leverage the reduction in hardware complexity. But does a change fom e.g. +1 to -1 actually take longer than a change from +1 to 0?
Alright, sure it's been 50 odd years, but remember, the first nukes were droped deliberately on civilians to achieve the greatest effect. Sound familiar?
And to add. Imagine if those planes flew into the World Trade Centre at 11:00 am. When everyone would be in there working. The death toll would be much much higher.
Of course things have changed since ww2, but most people don't forget. Smart bomb are much much better than carpet bombing, sure, but they still do hit a hospital once in a while.
Meanwhile elsewhere in Russia, forensic scientists investigating the Tunguska Event of 1908 have discovered the remains of what may be a large wooden rabbit near the epicenter of the blast. Dmitri Bedeverov, lead project scientist, stated that this "trojan rabbit" evidence may rule out the competing "holy hand grenade" theory of what may have caused the blast....
I wonder if all that flying saucer technology that the gov copied for space-shuttle tile design will have similar problems......Doh!
Table-ized A.I.
"GTNW" and "GB2"?
Can someone explain ?
I've seen this a dozen times "it wasn't for the oil, because otherwise..."
And yet, the main reason for going to war was a geo-political one (and not the WMD crap as they protrayed it). It's not so much as actually getting x amount of oil for their trouble, but rather having a polictical and military presence in an area that is vital to the economic interests of the USA. En plus, Iraq had been a thorn in the eye of the USA a long time, at least since the failure of the old Bush to get rid of Sadam back in GW1.They just needed to have some emotional impetus and an excuse to go to war.
The first was dilevered by 09/11 and the latter by the so-called WMD Saddam still had.
Yeah, obviously Saffire's piece is a complete fabrication. It's obviously the product of a disinformation campaign or of an age-addled "neocon" brain.
Whatever. Say what you want about Saffire, but he gets some cool scoops every once in a while, no doubt. As for the allegation that Saffire's article is a response to recent criticism of intelligence services regarding the issue of Iraq's weapons programs, I say yes, it probably is, at least to some degree. And why shouldn't it be? Why shouldn't we stick up for the brave hard-working men and women who devote their lives to these noble challenges?
Who knows if the details of the dramatic pipeline explosion are true, but there's plenty of evidence suggesting it is. We know with near certainty that Saffire's exposition of the context is dead-on. The story doesn't even need the explosion to still be damned interesting.
The U.S.S.R. was a hostile foreign power. Do you have such a short memory of history? How about Kruschev (sp?) speaking to the UN - "We will crush you like a rotten apple."
Really, you should get out from behind your liberal blinders once in a while. National defense as a reason for doing something like this would have been quite legitimate at that time.
There's plenty of documentary evidence showing that construction was severely delayed and the scope scaled back considerably due to all kinds of catastrophic events, including fires. The Soviets kept working on it though, despite these setbacks. A 3 kiloton explosion at an isolated section of the pipeline would certainly be a signifcant setback, but that doesn't mean they'd necessarily abandon the project altogether.
So, terrorism conducted by the ---s in order to gain a further foothold on our money is ok by the Safires of the world.
What do we do when the other side does it to us?
"In the 11th century, there was not wellfare to reward the incapible with food and clothing. Thus, many died off before reproductive age."
Indeed, only the elite aristocracy, based on birth-right, was able to have sufficient food and clothing. Basically by suppressing and exploiting all the others, who, indeed, died like flies. And, indeed again, many before the reproductive age (6 out of ten children died before the age of 5, during the middle ages).
Imagine how intelligent those aristocrats must have been! And how stupid those starving lower-class kids!
I bet you are shouting 'hurray for those good ol' days!" right now.
"A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death."
Among others, his error is in assuming these to be mutually exclusive. Brilliant at science, sure. But obviously not the best philosopher or metaphysician.
They just needed to have some emotional impetus and an excuse to go to war
This overlooks the fact that Saddam was in violation of much of the cease-fire terms, and up until the time of the invasion, he was attacking U.S. peacekeepers (also a violation, of course).
The U.S. did not want war. If they did, they would not have given Saddam what amounts to years to comply with quite reasonable cease-fire terms involving non-aggression, returning stolen property to Kuwait, and other matters.
What always bothered me with ternary logic :
:
(and especially with this definition)
What is the value of : FAIL AND (NOT FAIL) ?
NOT FAIL = FAIL (because NOT TRUE =/= NOT FALSE)
FAIL AND TRUE = FAIL (because FALSE AND TRUE =/= TRUE AND TRUE)
FAIL AND FALSE = FALSE (because FALSE AND FALSE = TRUE AND FALSE)
FAIL AND FAIL = FAIL (because FAIL AND FALSE =/= FAIL AND TRUE)
Therefor : FAIL AND (NOT FAIL) = FAIL AND FAIL = FAIL
However : be f(x) = x AND (NOT x)
- f(TRUE) = FALSE
- f(FALSE) = FALSE
-> f(FAIL) = FALSE
Therefor
- FAIL AND (NOT FAIL) = FAIL
- FAIL AND (NOT FAIL) = FALSE
=> Contradiction
So this model is flawed.
And this is the main problem of ALL ternary logic.
Intuitively (and according to your rule !), f(FAIL) should be FALSE
However, any normal definition of the basic operators makes it FAIL.
The problem is that x AND (NOT y) with x = FAIL and y = FAIL should be FAIL, if x = y however, it should be FALSE.
So we'd have to make a difference between "both unknown" and "both unknown, but known to be equal".
This, however, is impossible in pure ternary logic, so it is bound to be counter-intuitive.
Your rule is only useful to construct the thruth tables of the most basic operations, otherwise you may introduce inconsistencies.
I have discovered a truly remarkable proof for my post which this sig is too small to contain.
"Why not help the Soviets with their shopping? Now that we know what they want, we can help them get it." The catch: computer chips would be designed to pass Soviet quality tests and then to fail in operation." :P
*meep*
"The mosquitoes might be bread in other people's yards as well"
Yum! Which side do you butter? Are they good with jam?
Oh well. One man's bakery product is another man's pest.
They replaced the democratic government of Chile with a thug who murdered at least 40,000 people in the first five years of his dictatorship
No, the Allende government was not democratic. By this time, they had outlawed opposition political parties. Also, you exagerate by a factor of 10. Pinochet's execution toll was more like 4,000. A lot less than the bloodbath and purges Allende and the USSR had planned.
He lost the 1980 election because the CIA had thought it a great idea to replace the democracy in Iran with a dictator who the people hated and kicked out twenty years later
Similar is true of the fascist Mossadegh. The Shah held off the advent of the much worse Khomeini reign of terror.
It has consistently failed to provide the US with the intelligence it needed and it has meddled incompetently in other countries affairs, almost always causing a backfire
This happened only rarely. The CIA overall has been quite successful. For example, it aided Central American nationalists during the period of Soviet invasions. As a result, when the USSR fell, the region was democratic and independent (with only Cuba remaining as a banana-republic dictatorship)
"Read Paul Krugman's columns if you want the truth."
Krugman is just another biased idealogue like Safire. The only thing to learn from pundits is what people think. They are not a place to learn "what is what".
You've taken this to a "my biased idealogue is better than your biased idealogue. Nyah Nyah!" argument.
"The next time you are tempted to say that France is not an ally of the USA, just remember that little bit of transatlantic cooperation."
And how long is that little bit of cooperation supposed to last? That was 20-some years ago. Apparently there has been some change in attitude, and like any relationship, the U.S. alliance with France needs to be watched to make sure it is properly maintained - from both sides.
Consider: the three nations balking at the Iraq anti-terror war happen to be those with huge financial interests in Iraq, some of which ran counter to the embargoes imposed by the U.N. This even included sales of night-vision goggles to Iraq...something clearly counter to U.S. interests, and easily falling into the category of "an act of betrayal". With allies like that, we don't need enemies.
Instead of questioning U.S. motives for the Iraq war, some would do well to consider the motives of those who wanted to prevent it.
This dubious article is just a puff-piece for a book about to come out...!
*meep*
I think the article was talking more about the 70s and 80s seeing that they the example given was during the Reagan administration.
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." - Martin Luther King, Jr.
First of all, the reason to go to war because 'he was a dictator and mass-murderer' was something that was more and more used AFTER it became clear that the WMD and the al quada link was utter crap.
Sure, it had been said before, but you know as well as I do, that that wasn't the reason given to justify the war. And the reason this was never portrayed as the main reason, but only as a 'side-reason' was to create some emotional impetus for the war. And this is because no country, not even in europe, would argue that being a dictatorship is on itself enough reason to invade another country.
If one would allow that, then any democracy could unilatery invade and occupy any of the dozens of sovereign nations that have a real or defacto dictatorship (or even simply portrayed as one). This would make the UN charter that recognises the sovereignity of countries and states completely nonsensical and reduce international law and conduct between countries to a farce.
Furthemore, and this is something that annoys me even more, is the total hypocrasy of the USA claiming this is a valid reason to invade another country, when they themselves have and still do support dictaorships, give those 'mass-murderers' the WMDs in the first place, topple democratic elected leaders and replace them by ruthless dictators that kill thousands of civilians...but nevermind all that, as long as the USA benefits (or thinks that it will) from it!!
So, pleaaazzzuhhh, don't come to me with the crap of "he's a dictator and mass-murderer, and thus it's allowed to invade his country". YOU (the USA) gave him the tools, YOU supported him financially, military and even by giving him WMD (and yes, fully aware of what they were used for), YOU still support ruthless dictators that kill their own people, and even topple democratically elected ones, if and when it SUITS YOUR NEEDS.
If aiding and supporting dictators were enough reason to invade a country as well, then any country would, using the same reasoning, have the right to invade the USA.
No, your 'high-moral' ground for excusing the war doesn't fly with me, pal.
topple democratic elected leaders and replace them by ruthless dictators that kill thousands of civilians
This does not happen. It is a fiction made up by Chomsky and swollowed by the gullible.
YOU (the USA) gave him the tools, YOU supported him financially, military and even by giving him WMD
This is such a "partial truth" as to be a lie. The US is WAY down on the list of countries that supplied Saddam, and the U.S. realized its mistake and stopped years ago. The others did not.
If one would allow that, then any democracy could unilatery invade and occupy any of the dozens of sovereign nations
What are you comparing this to? The US retaliation against Iraq was certainly not "unilateral". You are off by at least 6000%. A coalition of 60 is not the same as 1 ("unilateral").
No, your 'high-moral' ground for excusing the war doesn't fly with me, pal.
There was every reason to retaliate against Saddam. The only immorality is found in your pro-Saddam side.
Come on monderators, grow up. You shouldn't be modding stuff down just because you don't agree with it.
Aw crap, ninjas!
"(I'm thinking of Palestinian suicide bombers, here.)"
The Palestinians are operating out of an age-old hateful "kill the Jews" mentality. It has nothing to do with "End the Unjust Occupation". The Palestinian terrorism and pogroms actually pre-date the Occupation. The Occupation was forced as a reaction to the terrorism, and every terrorist attack by the PLO does nothing other than make sure that the Occupation is more thorough and lasts longer.
One would do well to compare this to the Israeli occupation of Egyptian land. Egypt attacked Israel, forcing a retaliation and occupation of Egyptian land. Once Egypt agreed not to attack Israel any more, the occupation ended. The Palestinian government is ignoring this lesson.
You are aware, right, that the Cold War was an information war, and that both sides took massive casualties?
How so? During the course of the cold war, the information sources in the West exploded in their diversity and prolificity.
"Had this explosion taken place in a populated area the blood would be on our hands."
The blood would have been 100% on Soviet hands. You don't end up having problems with booby-trapped stolen property if you don't STEAL it in the first place.
But apparently I'm the only one ...
"The KGB is trying to buy stuff we don't want them to buy. Let's make sure they do get stuff, but that it fails spectacularly. We know this could and probably will cause an explosion or some other disaster, possibly killing thousands. But they're only Soviets."
If people had been killed in that pipeline explosion, it's my opinion that Mr. Casey and his crew would be indictable for MURDER. Manslaughter at the least.
"We know this could and probably will cause an explosion or some other disaster, possibly killing thousands. But they're only Soviets."
If the Soviets did not STEAL it, there would be no problem.
If people had been killed in that pipeline explosion, it's my opinion that Mr. Casey and his crew would be indictable for MURDER
That is just a false opinion. You're not supposed to make things safe for thieves.
That blast occurred OVER the land- it was not a ground/impact explosion.
How often do meteorites explode in the air with multi-Kiloton TNT equiv. force?
My 'pro-sadam'-side?
O, yeah, that's easy, isn't it? Portray all critisism as being 'pro-sadam' so you don't have to think about the possibility I'm actually right.
You are SO brainwashed, it's unbelievable. Never seen that panorama docu (BBC) about Chili, did you? Never saw the docu about the history of Saddam, where it plain as daylight showed CIA-documents that indicated they knew full well what the chemicals were used for by Saddam, but still suggesting to deliver more, because he was fighting big bad foe of the time; Iran?
O, wait, but in your view, that are all 'half-truths' told by 'saddam-supporters", no doubt. How convenient you can filter out all things non-convenient by your own bias.
A colalition of 60? Are you reffering to the second gulfware? Because then you are dreaming, dude. Though it does remind me of the story (don't know if this is true, however), about a latin-american prime minister who saw his country mentioned on the list, even when no1 in his government had even talked to the USA about it, let alone agree with it.
You know as well as I do that portraying the invasion of Iraq as being done by a coalition is a pure scam. It was the USA, period (with some secondary help from UK).
I can hardly believe your statements, really. If you are not a troll, you must be unbelievably naive. But then, most americans seem to be. Since I doubt it's genetic, I suppose it's mainly due to your abhorrent lack of objective media-coverage.
>> Finally, the CIA would have no way of knowing that their goosed up control system would not have found its way into a nuclear plant.
You would need to know the extent and nature of the CIA's penetration of Soviet institutions before you can make such a claim. One reasonable scenario is that relatively few chips were passed to an individual who was able to ensure they were used only in pipeline construction. Or, given the failings of Soviet nuclear plant construction techniques, they might not have worried about it one way or another. A reactor explosion could be plausibly blamed on faulty construction.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
I'm not surprised that you pump out this type of appology for fascism as AC
I don't apologize for fascism. I oppose it all. I just realize that some horrible fascits are worse than others (Hitler worse than Franco, Allende worse than Pinochet). Yes, I oppose all fascists. Even the ones that the CIA opposes.
But lets imagine for a moment that he 'only' murdered 4,000. Was the Nixon administration justified in putting a murderer into power?
No. He would have been justified in kicking a colonial dictator out (Allende), but let Chile choose their own.
There is of course no evidence whatsoever for the claim that Allende was not elected by the people or that he planned any form of coup
He was elected (just like Hitler). He did not need a coup since he was already dictator. What you are ignoring is that he dismantled democracy in Chile. He would not have had to worry about losing an election again.
Mossadegh was no fascist
He certainly was a fascist. He annexed the oil fields to his personal control.
The fact that Stalin died before operation Ajax was not allowed to affect this analysis
Huh? Soviet expansion did not start, or end with Stalin.
The mullahs are the result of operation Ajax, not a justification for it
No, they were not. The Shah, secular whatever his faults, kept their power down.
Noriega and Saddam were both CIA proteges
What are you smoking? Saddam's involvement with the CIA was brief, and long after he put himself in power.
Meddling in Guatelmala, Honduras, Nicaragua led to civil wars.
No, the Soviet invasion of each of these countries (including El Salvador) led to civil war. Once the USSR fell, it was as expected: the wars ended.
Next you will be claiming that the Versailles treaty should have imposed harsher conditions on Germany to prevent the rise of Hitler.
Quite certainly. The Versailles treaty was so full of holes to let this kind of thing happen.
Iraq and Iran show both modes of falure of the CIA strategy.
Iran did have CIA involvement. However, Saddam put himself in power, and the CIA only helped him (along with many others) during a brief part of his long reign.
First of all, the UN were primarely persuaded by the 'proof' delivered by the USA and the UK
(remember Powel with his 'clear case' in the UN?). Which turned out to be fully bogus, and probably to some extend willfully fabricated.
Secondly, almost all countries, exept for warmongering USA and UK, were willing to give time to the inspectors under UN-mandate to deal with the possibility of WMD.
Thirdly, since you seem so keen in invoking the VN-resolutions in a debate concerning whether it was justified to invade Iraq, let's cut the crap and go directly to the point then:
Did the UN agree, let alone support, a war against Iraq?
The answer is no, the UN did NOT consent.
And you know that full well, because that was the reason the USA first wanted to ask for such a resolution (that give the fiat for war), but because they soon realised it would never pass, decided unilaterally to go to war, without the consent of the UN.
I knew people who were the subcontractor for telemetry and control subsystems. There was no canadian software there. And the highest technology chip was the 6800.
Good point. Members of the intelligence community take an oath to never (as in, never) divulge classified information. Maybe Safire's old buddy told him something that's been declassified. Otherwise, he was risking a jail term. Something to think about when we read this kind of stuff in the press.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
1) US Puppet Governments: We've done things similar to this, but not very often. I'm not convinced we ever took out someone who was truly democratic though
"From the right" here. The US in fact did this many times. However, it was pretty much prior to WW2.
As for supporting Saddam, it was probably a mistake. However, those who did this for a brief time did it to prevent Iraq from being annexed by Iran (which by that time was a truly horrific and imperialist place).
3) "Go it alone vs big coallition" We didn't get UN authorization. That's pretty close to going it alone
I disagree. Alone means 1. You are off by the 60 or so other countries.
Still it's striking when most of the permenant members of the UN Security Council are against you.
Look at who these members are. Consider Russia and China, which have had a long reputation of siding with the very worst actors in any such conflict much of the time. These are the ones that think the North Korean dictator is a great guy.
Which turned out to be fully bogus, and probably to some extend willfully fabricated
There is no evidence of faked data. Wishing it were true does not make it so.
Secondly, almost all countries, exept for warmongering USA and UK
There was no warmongering. Now you sound like Wormtongue telling Eomer not to retaliate against attacks.
were willing to give time to the inspectors under UN-mandate to deal with the possibility of WMD.
The inspections were supposed to have ended many years ago. Saddam kept balking, even at one time kicking inspectors out. As early as the beginning of 2003, he was still refusing to grant access to facilities as required in the cease fire.
pass, decided unilaterally to go to war,
Words mean things. Unilateral means one. A coalition of 75 is more than one. Do the math. D'uh. You might learn that 75 is more than 1. But maybe not, you seem to have ignored actual current events.
Weren't proper terrorists? After all, they often gave (sometimes inadequate) warnings to evacuate people.
The pipeline leak/explosion triggered by the trains (yes, there was not one train but two going in opposite directions and passing by each other in the gas-filled basin) was in either May or June of 1989 (or maybe 1988 if I got off-by-one in my calculations). It was not in Siberia either. So it just can't be the one mentioned in the article.
The problem with this is that it is so right in every way.
It does not change the facts:
Saddam was still a terrorist leader attacking other countries
He was in violation of the cease fire that stopped the first Gulf War in many wats
He was attacking British and U.S. peacekeepers, and refused to stop.
He had been given many "alright, this is your last chance" chances to comply with weapons inspectors, and he was still refusing to comply.
Nothing wrong at all with the U.S. and its large coalition solving this problem, especially after having tried diplomatic means (which Saddam had refused) for years.
What it boils down to is that you are making this up without any regard to reality.
If they are the same, are you arguing that "witches" exist? Or that communists and terrorists do not?
"You apply it to anybody who interferes with the way you want the world to run and see how long you can get away with it."
You get away with it as long as you apply the term only to real terrorists. They've done a great job of it so far.
Seriously Franklin Delano Rosenveldt the King of the Jews was the REAL terrorist.He and Rabbi Stalin ganged up to defeat peace-loving Hitler who tried to save the world from JEWISH treachery.
FDR ordered peaceful Japanese -American civilians rounded up in concentration camps while baby-killing well-poisoning JEWS were allowed to roam free raping,molesting,and corrupting Gentile women and children.
I'm sorry that like most Americans you missed the news cast the rest of the world got where half the administration is busy saying (CYA) they have no evidence that Iraq was linked to terrorist groups
There is overwhelming proof of this, and it is incontrovertable. So of course it is believed. The terrorist groups primarily were anti-semitic groups killing Jews in Israel. He was quite proud of his spending here.
Where the scumbags that put and helped that scumbag
Saddam put himself in power years before US involvement.
Yes, they did refuse to cooperate. They interfered with and then outright stopped inspections when they learned the US was planting CIA agents as American inspection team members
This is no reason to refuse inspections. The cease fire agreement did not say "You can refuse inspections if you have some irrelevant complaint with the make-up of the team".
""You'll see elsewhere in this thread I've discussed how striking it was that most of the key members of the Sec. Council were against the war."
Yes. it is striking. Considering how 3 of them (France, Germany, and Russia) were at the time being bribed with big oil IOU's. Another, China, has a reputation of tending to support a dictator the more vicious and illegitimate he is. Syria led by a terrorist Baath regime similar to Iraq's.
With the group stacked with bribed countries and pro-dictator despots defending one of their own....
Btw, I'm comfortable with my position and have logged in. Do you feel your position is so weak as to not want to log in?
You are so weak in your position that you are making such non-sequitur attacks that have nothing to do with the facts at hand.
First off, I might be european, but far from being 'strongly left'. Actually, I'm a liberal (moderate right) guy, so if you think I'm leftish, wait untill you hear a real lefty of my country talk!
1)Yes, you (USA) actually did, and more then once. Did you, or did you not see that docu of the BBC about Chili, Pinochet and the role of Kissinger and the CIA?
2)A "mistake" is rather an euphemism, seeing that it costed many human lives, including the chemical death of civilians; men, women and children. I think, if you know chemicals are used to kill in such a way, but still you keep sending more because it suits your economical needs, something stronger then the word "mistake" is necessary. "Criminal" comes to mind.
Also, I don't get the argument that: "but other countries did it too, so..." So what? Does the fact that others do wrong excuse yourself of the blame? Is it somehow less awfull that you did it, because others did it too?
Such strange reasoning...
3)Well, the UK was pretty much two hands on one belly from the start anyhow. and then you succeeded in forcing, persuading and bribing some other countries (and even in those countries, the public was in vast majority against the war). Politicians, by their very nature, are often susceptible to presure, persuasion and bribery.
So you've mentionned most that, at least in name, joined the famous 'coalition'...what is that; 0.1% of all the countries?
If you look at it OBJECTIVELY, and compare it with the TRUE coalition of GW1, then you must acknowledge it was virtually nothing. Calling it a 'coalition' was only good to, once more, blindfold the world and it's own citizens that the USA wasn't doing this unilaterally("look; others support us!"), while, in effect, everyone knows it was.
4)Moral high ground is on itself not determined by the premise you start with, but rather through the internal contradictions and hypocrisy that is obvious in the reasoning used. In this respect, one can not conclude anything else then conclude the USA has not got the moral ground in this case: they went to war with the reason that Saddam had WMD: he has not. Then they use other reasons such as Al-quada links, though even their own CIA said their was absolutely no proof of that. Then that it was ok because he was a dictator, even though they had and still do support dictators themselves when it suits them. apart from the question whether one has the right to invade a country merely on the grounds that it is a dictatorship (which isn't justified according to UN rules).
So, each freakin time, no 'reason' holds up to any close scrutiny, which makes the reasons what they are: lame excuses.
When you are a hypocrite, you have no moral high ground.
As an (ex-)white-house member himself(!) has written in his book: Bush&co wanted a war from the start, and just looked for an excuse.
We don't count civilian casualties [indymedia.org]
Indymedia doesn't count them either. They just make up stuff for the hell of it: fiction writers masquerading as columnists. In the article linked to, they merely quoted some opinion pieces by political pressure groups (no accurate sources welcome at Indymedia)
Indymedia was the same outfit that claimed that all of the 9-11 hijackers were Jewish Mossad agents. They give ongoing life to the idea that 9-11 was a Jewish plot and Jews were told to leave the World Trade Center. (Sometimes, Indymedia is neo-nazis masquerading as leftists).
"Did you include the twelve years of U.S.-demanded sanctions, which the U.N. estimated killed over 500,000 children alone"
The sanctions killed no-one. Consider this interesting situation. Northern (Kurdish) Iraq was under the exact same sanctions as Saddamite Iraq. However, under the sanctions, infant mortality plummeted and health factors improved compared to when it was Saddam ruled. Key factor: Kurdish Iraq was not run by Saddam any longer. Yet, it was under the same sanctions. The sanctions allowed for a healthy society. Saddam just chose to get in the way and make sure that everything was withheld from the people.
"The sources they're cacheing, the ones to which I linked, are the mainstream Washington Post (conservative rag), New York Times (liberal rag), and some independent journalists."
The Washington Post and NY Times are both left-wing. You might be thinking instead of the Washington TIMES, which is a "conservative rag"
I suppose that's why the vast majority of fox viewers thought that Sadam was involved in 911.
(he wasn't)
It is clear that all you know about the NY times comes from Fox.
It does takes a certian amount of intelligence to read the times.
Oh, Absolutely. I've personally just got a shipment of a dozen of these rare old boxes just in from Chekoslahungary, so check out my new auction here. Here's your chance to own a piece of history...
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
"The liberals are moderate-left."
Maybe in your country, but sure as hell not here.
They are, in their own views and in that of the opposition, moderate right, point. They are officially classified as such too. You have the socialist party, which is moderate left, the liberals; moderate right, the nationalistic party; far (or ultra) right and the communists (ultra left), and then you have still some parties in between, christian orientated and some even seperatist.
It's not a two-way deal as with republicans and democrats as in the USA.
"Allende was a dictator"
EXACTLY my point. And as for the 'communist party'...well, one always finds an excuse if you are looking for one, as the war in Iraq has demonstarted once more. You can stand on your head and shout 'It was to stop those evil commies!" all you want, it doesn't excuse the fact the CIA helped a brutal dicator in his reign of terror, and even supplied training in how to torture people. Since you (or at least some) seem to doubt this ever happened (probably in denial) I'll provide a link: http://www.betterworldlinks.org/book62a.htm
"They had a terrible way of making sure one occured."
No, they grabbed the oportunity when it presented itself.
As for the inspections: maybe it would have helped if the USA didn't put USA spies in the UN-inspectionteams, totally disregarding the rules and perverting the neutrality of the UN inspections? I think NO country would allow inspectors mandated by the UN, but who are in effect spies for national countries.
And, as it turns out, Iraq DID comply with the resolutions after '91; all WMD were destroyed.
I'll provide a link: http://www.betterworldlinks.org/book62a.htm
How about a factual link, and leave the biased political pressure groups aside?
And, as it turns out, Iraq DID comply with the resolutions after '91; all WMD were destroyed.
Actually, there is no evidence of that. All Iraq seems to be able to say is "aw shucks they went away. But we never had them to begin with. But we did destroy them! And we have no idea what happened to them."
I think NO country would allow inspectors mandated by the UN, but who are in effect spies for national countries.
The quite reasonable cease-fire agreement did not have room for such unreasonable requirements. He had no basis to make such silly objections.
I've see the 3/4 step dot-com business plan joke tons of times.. but wonder what the origin is of it.
Anyone know? Thanks.
"Ahh, looks like the Republicans have got mod points again. Exactly what part of the political analysis do they consider to be wrong?"
I read your post completely and contemplated each of your points. They all seem quite valid and interesting. But your first comment, the one quoted above about Republicans, still doesn't make any sense to me.
Could you elaborate on that.
I honestly don't get it.
. Quit playing Monopoly with Bill. Switch to one of many non-Microsoft products today.
The problem is that that this is not what they said that they were going to take care of. Our government either a) lied repeatedly or b) is incompetent
The third option is the real one: They took care of what they said they would take care of, and they told the truth about what they were going to do. In accomplishing it, they showed themselves to be competant.
"The sanctions killed no-one."
You are high on crack, you conservative rag. Care to link any statistics, troll? Infant mortality skyrocketed in the rest of Iraq during the sanctions years. Lack of access to medicines, clean water, basic nutrition.
Kurdistan was not under Hussein's direct control, and had relatively free trade (smuggling) with other nations, especially Turkey. They therefore circumvented the sanctions, which were mostly enforced in international waters, air cargo, and major highways into Iraq.
The Washington Post is a conservative rag by leftist standards. You avoided answering any of my statements with facts or links. What I get for arguing with an AC troll. Time to browse again in +1 territory.
Big Daddy, Johnny, Burp, Aunt Zelda, Scott, Slurp, Big Momma
Measured from the center, the Washington Post is leftist. I think I caught you confusing the Post with the quite-right-wing Washington Times.
[Kurdistan] circumvented the sanctions, which were mostly enforced in international waters, air cargo, and major highways into Iraq.
The point still stands. Saddamite Iraq was also smuggling and circumventing sanctions quite extensively.
Infant mortality skyrocketed in the rest of Iraq during the sanctions years. Lack of access to medicines, clean water, basic nutrition.
Yes, it skyrocketed in Saddamite Iraq, because Saddam withheld the food and medicine.
The sanctions killed no one. The entire system allowed for importation of food and medicine.
That is just an old russian saying. It is applicable to any country though.
:)
What appears to be silliest in the story is the conclusion how stuff like that has 'won' the Cold War.
That war is over not because US pulled some magic tricks. USSR is gone because it simply could not stand. It was rotten and of course, from the head. Incompetence of power is an inevitable byproduct of a tyranny that gets only worse with time and is aggravated by its size. That incompetence ultimately resulted in all the problems USSR had - being one of the most resource rich countries and having been one of the largest agriculture producers in the world back in 1913, it could not feed its population well let alone sustain the technological race or competition on the free market. Eventually not only the government got rotten - the same incompetence dominated industry and academia. When that happens, the regime is doomed. How soon the doom is however uncertain.
Could USSR have kept sticking up longer? Look at Cuba or North Korea... they haven't been around for as long as USSR yet, but they are worse economically than USSR been most of the time. All the US spooks could not bring them down for decades and not for the lack of trying. I suspect short of an Iraqi-style regime change, they will stick until something inside them triggers an unstoppable avalance and then they will crumble like USSR did.
So what really triggered its fall? Mostly it was Gorbachev. He opened up too big a can of worms and could not contain it (unlike chinese commies). When the rest of the power elite realized it is going to fall apart, it was too late.
Now, if Gorbachev was a CIA plant, then of course hats off to the spooks
WHAT attack?? That's just the point, O, Enlightened One, there was NO attack
;-)
Not only was there one, but there were many instances of Saddam's forces attacking peacekeepers in the No Fly Zones.
Of course there were no attacks, Grima, if you exclude actual attacks that occured. Great logic there.
It was the USA and UK that wanted to go to war, without being attacked by Iraq; e.g. warmongering.
I guess it can't have anything to do with the fact that the USA planted spies in the inspectionteams, thereby (once more) disregarding all rules and agreements made with the UN?
No, the cease-fire did not have any such silly restrictions on the inspection team. You are starting to sound like your buddy Saddam.
So, WHY would he have forbidden access?
Don't ask me. I have no idea why he repeatedly forbid access, including kicking out inspectors without letting them finish their job years after 1991.
For gods' sake. If you are going to be pedantic about it, then I will too
Pointing out when someone like you gets so sloppy as to confusing "1" with "75" is not pendantic.
Can you prove that they didn't decided it alone
You can't prove that they did, either.
As for '75', a post earlier it was only 60. Guess the numbers are climbing, huh?
Did you inlcude the names of the countries that, in reality, never were part of the so-called 'coalition' too?
Bush named less than 20 in his "State of the Union" speech. Even 20 is enough to show you very wrong.
This Safire is probably going "cuckoo" surrounded by all those Liberal people at NYT.
In the no-fly-zones conducting aerial surveillance in accordance with U.N. resolutions:
Since 2000, Iraqi forces have fired on U.S. and British pilots 1,600 times.
In 2002, Iraqi forces have fired on U.S. and British pilots 406 times.
I guess in a kooky mind where more than 60 countries are in an alliance (with 34 having "boots on ground" in Iraq) is the unilateral action of one nation, I guess 2400+ attacks supports the idea of "NO ATTACKS!"
Apparently a major and deliberate act of sabotage was committed against their economy. How is this different than if they had sent a team of trained demolition experts to our country to sabotage a pipeline here and create a large non-nuclear explosion? They were certainly our military rival but we were not at war with them and we did not have any more of a moral right to commit acts of sabotage against their economy than did the Al Quaida terrorists to destroy office buildings in NYC. If everyone resorted to using large explosions when they disagreed with something, there would be a lot less discussion, more explosions, and no resolution of disputes.
So, how is it justified calling an attack on a Navy ship a terrorist act?
After the media abuse of the word "terrorist" that surrounded that story, I firmly believe that the word no longer has any meaning, and is ONLY used by persons trying to sway opinion.
Not a non-government force: The UN??
Not an un-declared attack: Bin-Laden called for war on the US long ago.
Not an attack on civilians.
Not an violent action to change political opinion: The US does that all the time.
It seems that there is no definition of terrorism that the US doesn't fall into - except "Anything that somebody we don't like does"
Never never never smoke crack before geometry class!
Stealing technology is still common place even after the Cold War. I remember some articles about US companies acquiring the specs for German Leopard II tank by buying a Spanish supplier. We obviously do not need spies anymore.
The shuttle can't land w/o a computer (think flying brick). And I don't know where you are getting some of this stuff, but the US was waaaaaaaaay ahead is just about every area of military and computer technology at the end of the cold war. Sure, the USSR had many great minds and created a lot of very robust technology (the Mig you mentioned). But how well does a Mig do against an F-15. Hint, not well.
"Not only was there one, but there were many instances of Saddam's forces attacking peacekeepers in the No Fly Zones."
Now I'm sure you are a troll. It's simply TOO farfetched for anyone reasonable to claim the USA went to war because it was ATTACKED, and that those airstrikes were the attacks, and thus the reason and justification for going to war.
Geez. Bugger off, dude.
And the inspectionteam was under UN mandate and supposed to be impartial, and not under a national country. Trying to argument that the USA isn't bound by the UN rules even when they have agreed to them when becomming a permanent member, is so farfetched it can only be arogance that lead you to such a conclusion. Please explain how a neutral inspectionteam is neutral when it has spies reporting? And if you deem that the USA has the right to do so, why did it try to hide the fact that it DID send spies, and claimed it wasn't true. (untill it was later found out it WAS true). Once again, a hypocrisy emerges.
But YOU were the one being pedantic about it. Just ask yourself this: do you actually think, that the USA would not have attacked Iraq, even if no others 'coalitionmembers' had been found.
If you think they would have refrained, how is that to reconcile with the statemnts of Cheney, who literary said the USA was going to war, nomatter what? And with what that other white-house member has written, that the decision to invade Iraq was made in long in advance.
Well, guess you can always stick to your 'that's no proof'...but I'm afraid that that is something you ALWAYS will be claiming. All indications point that the USA had and has decided unilateraly to invade Iraq, with ot without allies, not vice versa.
So, you keep saying 'no proof', if that makes you hapely blind for reality. Ignorance is bliss, no doubt.
"Pointing out when someone like you gets so sloppy as to confusing "1" with "75" is not pendantic."
But it IS pedantic since for normal reasoning people it was clear it wasn't about the exact numbers, but about the intent. If you feel the urge to point out that 1 isn't 75, then you are being pedantic, and then I can equally point out that deciding to go to war is not actually going to war.
And, on the other hand, if you think it was 'sloppy', then it was equally sloppy of you, because 20 isn't 75 either.
And lastly, calling me a buddy of Saddam only shows your lack of real counter-arguments.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/02/opinion/02SAFI.h tml?pagewanted=print
Safire's op ed piece calls to mind the Inslaw Affair, also from the Reagan era. The plaintiff in a lawsuit alleged that the Dept of Justice (DOJ) stole a software app called Promis (Prosecutors Management Information System), case mgmt software for prosecutors developed by the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration and later sold to a private party who improved it. The scheme allegedly worked something like this:
The DOJ would license the software and implement its use
The DOJ would renege on the contract and force the company that owned the software rights into bankruptcy
The DOJ would engineer the liquidation of the bankrupt company and steer the purchase of the software copyright to a "friend"--a sweetheart deal for someone owed a favor and who could be trusted
The "friend" would provide some shady characters--expert hackers--with a copy of the software and they would add a secret "back door" to the code so the CIA would have access to the data and records of anyone using the software
The "friend" and his company would sell the software abroad, keep a cut of the proceeds for his efforts and launder the balance into a secret CIA account in a corrupt bank or S&L
The buyers of the software would invariably copy it and use it widely
The laundered money would be used to fund other projects and the Congress would never have to know about them
Read about it here: http://www.eff.org/Legal/Cases/INSLAW/
Were the Inslaw Affair and the Weiss plot the tip of the iceberg, part of a massive scheme to use software to gain advantage over foreign adversaries? And, if true, how did this foray into hacking affect the attitude of the govt toward "amateur" hackers, rouge coders who may or may not be working for the other side. Is it possible that at least some of the govt reaction to hackers was really motivated by the govt knowing the plots that it had hatched and fearing that the enemy was counterattacking?
thankfully slashdotters aren't taken in by yet more of safire's spook guff. every couple of columns, that prat rehashes some lie that his "intelligence" friends fed him. my favourite remains the czech spook tale that he still flogs as "proof" that the hijackers had iraqi support. safire is a complete idiot. bless the nytimes for providing him a soapbox from which to howl his groteque rants...
REPORT ALL OBSCENE MESSAGES TO YOUR POTSMASTER
"The result was the most monumental non-nuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space."
Until the fires in Iraq War Senior, and possibly Iraq War Junior, but with the Space Shuttles grounded, and journalists embedded, there's not a lot of witnesses, in space or in front of TVs.
These preemptive strikes over oil and gas pipelines sure do make some big explosions. What a waste of all that good plastic feedstock.
--
make install -not war
You conveniently left out all what didn't suited you once again.
;-) invading and occupying another country under false pretences.
But you didn't bother to check the links out, did, you, before demanding "a factual link". And you didn't respond to my question about the sources given neither: do you consider them all to be 'un-factual'? Or simply leftish-biased?
"Yes you can. A negative assertion and a positive one have the same weight: "positiveness" and "negativeness" is merely a quality."
Ok, then please show me how you can prove that you have forgotten something, say, you don't remember the pasword for an encrypted file, but the police doesn't believe you and thinks it has the right to beat you up as long as you don't come up with it. How do you actually 'prove' that you don't remember it, smartass?
"The fact remains that the cease fire did not include room for objecting over silly things that had nothing to do with anything."
The point is, that it's not silly at all, unless you think that foreign spies in your country is a silly matter. And another point is, the inspectionteams were under UN mandate and neutral, and all UN mambers agreed to that, including the USA. So, indeed, it had NO right to pervert the teams by introducing spies. Again, it shows the kind of 'moral high ground' of the USA once more.
"And yet, Hans Blix, acting as a representative of (nazi) Germany, which was allied with Saddam, was an "objective UN guy" when he lied repeatedly about Saddam's compliance with inspections"
Troll.
"I'm surprised that you have not shorted out your keyboard with tears of sadness that your hero Saddam was overthrown for his repeated acts of aggression."
Double troll.
Saddam was a brutal dicator who killed his own people. It does not follow I agree with the USA unilaterally (o, no, wait, that's 1
An astronaut made it into space just 3 weeks after Yuri. I'm still waiting to see Russian footprints on the moon.
First working long-term space stations: Russia (also used for spying)
When you have spy satellites that can tell what change someone is given at a hot dog stand, you don't really need two cosmonauts looking out a window. Eventually Russia lets astronauts into their space station and they see what a dump it is. Later the US decides to let Russia help with the new International space station, but they can't complete what they are supposed to, leading to cost overruns.
First undedectable stealth fighter dedected and shot down by: Russian technology in Yugoslavia (nice done, guys!)
Are we talking about 60's and 70's? Wasn't this in 1999? Shouldn't it be 70's and 80's anyway as that is what the article talked about? In any case, the fighter in yugoslavia was shot down with AA fire, not exactly cutting edge technology. I guess if you fill enough of the sky with flak you will eventually hit something.
World's most powerfull rocket: Russia (Energija), implies that they could launch a BIG amount of plutonium for a BIG shot.
Wouldn't upping the amount of deuterium be better than plutonium? And don't forget, Russia got their nuclear technology from spying on the USA. They probably would have been a decade behind if not for that espionage. Here's a quote about Energia:
The research and development for the Energia Buran began in the mid-1970s. The prime organization for this was NPO Energia headed by Valetin Glushko fresh from his triumph over the N-1 Moon Rocket. His Designer-in-Chief was Boris Gubanov who directly headed the program.
Is that the same N-1 "triumph" that resulted in all four launches ending rather abruptly less than two minutes after takeoff? Reliable rocket technology indeed... Did the Russians develop the Tomahawk cruise missile that can hit a target with high accuracy from hundreds of miles away?
First figher plane with look-and-lock systems (you look at your enemy and the rockets automatically lock onto that target): Russia (IMHO the MIG25)
Wow, cool! Now if a single F14 hadn't just locked onto 6 incoming migs from outside of visual range (40+ miles away) and fired a self-guided missile that can pull over 30gs (impossible to outmaneuver) at each of them...
There was also a big fuss about that the USSR stole the space shuttle technology for their Buran shuttle. Actually, the Buran uses a more modern design, has a much higher capacity, better aerodynamics and even can fly completly on automatic (whereas the US shuttle must be landed per joystick).
And it was only flown once...
Well, sure, USA has a great deal of hightech gadgets lying around, but the Soviets are the guys that actually made them working.
I find it interesting that they would come looking for technology from the west and then have to steal it when it wouldn't be sold to them. Did the west come looking the the USSR for technology?
So typical of the right wing where personnel attacks take the place of intelligent discourse.
A poll by the University of Maryland Found that 80 percent of people who relied on Fox as their primary new source believed that Suddam was supporting Al Qaeda (He was not.) compared with 55 percent who listen to CNN and only 23 percent of NPR listeners. So much for "fair and balanced".
I read a number of different news sources ranging from the Wall Street Journal on the right to Mother Jones and The Progressive on the Left. The New York Times, the Washington Post, along with the LA Times and the Boston Globe seem to be in the middle.
I consider Fox to be more entertainment. Kind of like E or MTV, No real content, just fluff.
Safire is a Nixonite who runs cover for his "intelligence" buddies at every opportunity. At least his epilogue to this story shows his hand, in throwing a bone to his heroes in the covert war business. His success story is 30 years old, dubious, and totally irrelevant to the total fiascos cooked up by his buddies in the modern Bush (/Reagan/Cheney) age. Anyone who knows Bill Casey's career knows that he was head of the SEC when it sabotaged Carter's economy numbers, then Reagan's campaign manager when he sold out the Republicans to Bush's agenda, then directed the theft of Carter's debate briefing books, then succeeded Bush as head of US intelligence with Bush as his boss and covert operations across Central America and Iran as his mission. That's why he's best remembered for "Iran-Contra" - it was the crown of his career.
These clowns are at best fighting the European land war against the Soviets they missed during the 80s, claiming to be prosecuting a terrorwar against Al Queda. At worst, they're running unaccounted covert wars, killing thousands, making billions, off their devil's brew of oil, weapons and drugs. And Safire has the nerve to drag this old Bond yarn out, right when its author evades journalistic investigation by dying. Although an unprofessional journalist, Safire is the only competition for the venial Robert Novak in the fascist mafia advertising biz.
--
make install -not war
"Yeah, that's exactly right: you don't work for the KGB, and have little idea what the paranoia of the Cold War was like, especially among the intelligence community. In any case, what do you think the KGB could say to their bosses? Yeah, we screwed up, and our own billion dollar pipeline created the largest non-nuclear explosion in history, OR those damn capitalist bourgeois pig Americans are responsible!!!! Which explanation will let you keep your life and your job?"
Or the third option of finding some nobody working on the pipeline and blaming him for the explosion. If it even came back to the KGB to be investigated.
The KGB seems to have been very effective. They turned a lot of US citizens. I don't see why they'd have to resort to blaming the US (even if, in this case, it was the US) for an error that might not even be associated with the KGB.
Again, if a pipeline blew, I'd suspect user error first. No matter how paranoid I was. It was rather common for materials to be stolen or replaced with inferior ones.
Anyone who was so paranoid as to suspect the US in such things would not be a very effective spy. He'd be seeing US activity in simple blackouts.
- First space mission training/preparation casulaty: Valentine Bondarenko, 1961.
- First space mission casualty: Vladimir Komarov, Soyuz 1, 1967.
- Worst ever rocket disaster: the Nedelin disaster at Baikonur, October 24, 1960. Over 100 people died.
- Failed to replicate the US's manned moon program.
Your own list has more than a few inaccuracies: This is simply incorrect. Mir went operational in 1986. Skylab was in use in 1973. Energia did not fly until 1987. It was not equiped for the instant launch required for a nuclear exchange. It launched from Baikonur which would have been an early target. Basically it wasn't a weapon. You better back that up. From what I've read the USSR's rocket technology was not at all reliable, although it has become so over time. Take a look at the number of failures that occured during the USSR's moon program. Do some research on the N1 program: 4 failures from 4 launches, including the liftoff failure of #5L which destroyed the launch pad (pictures here. When the US put a man on the moon in 1969 the USSR haven't demonstrated that their 7K-L1 platform can take a cosmonaut around the moon and return him safely and haven't even successfully launched their main luna platform, the N1. Buran flew only once, in 1988. It was a technically superior vehicle to the Space Shuttle, but that is not suprising as it was designed later, with the lessons of the SS program in hand.You said key military technology of the 60's and 70's and then listed a bunch of later achievements. In the 60's and 70's the USSR were clearly behind. At the time it was not obvious but it certainly is now.
This story is full of it! If you are into cold war history, the link to the original text written by Mr. Weiss seems to be a much better source.
The article is a shame for NYT.
The Central Intelligence Agency Directorate of Science and Technology
Human intelligence is Directorate of Operations. Weird tech stuff is under the aegis of the Directorate of Science and Technology, and they do a LOT of it.
"We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in tolerance and free speech." - David Brin
You might think that, but you'd be wrong. Evidence that came out later indicated that much of the so-called "missile-gap" was imaginary.
First undedectable stealth fighter dedected and shot down by: Russian technology in Yugoslavia (nice done, guys!)
I can't believe you are congratulating a communist/fascist force for their success in shooting down the stealth fighter. That simply disgusts me - so I will assume I am misunderstanding you.
And as jgoemat states, "if you fill enough of the sky with flak you will eventually hit something." This reminds me of the circumstances of the soviet interception of Gary Power's U2 - it later came out that they had fired something like 10 missiles at the plane before they hit it, and one of those errant shots brought down a pursuing a MIG!
There was also a big fuss about that the USSR stole the space shuttle technology for their Buran shuttle. Actually, the Buran uses a more modern design, has a much higher capacity, better aerodynamics and even can fly completly on automatic (whereas the US shuttle must be landed per joystick).
Not true. The US shuttle can be landed completely automatically, by software, and it HAS been done. The fact that it routinely is landed manually is due to the fact that American pilots insist on this control, not to any absurd inferiority to soviet technology. At any rate, the fact that the soviets stole such an awful design as the shuttle (and any child can see that the buran is an obvious copy) is testament to their own lack of engineering judgement and sense of technological inferiority.
eikimartinson.com
Singer X goes on stage, singing live. Singer sings note Y offkey. The Pitch Regulator(tm) picks the fault and produces the intended voltage/sound and snaps the note to its intended target, before it gets heard through the stage speakers.
So why can't simple non-oscillating ternary voltages be controlled in realtime? Off, "mid" and "top" when fully defined in specs for a ternary circuit are
The main problem, perhaps, is how many "regulators" ensure reliable coverage of ENTIRE circuits, and/or how much higher the top voltage needs to go to ensure that we have enough 'resolution' to catch bogus voltages and boost or reduce 'em to normal. Your own network repeater, is a voltage regulator.
"Wireless : LAN
The last word in the second line is bogus (no such word in russian) so it could be the author meant something else. Filling that word by context would give more or less 'when you gonna learn that the real thing is better'.
Citizen, it doesn't look like you have an Ultraviolet security clearance...
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
was targetted partly because it's high population. This was discussed on /. last week or so (sorry, no link). Someone had linked to undisclosed military proposals which considered various target cities in Japan during WW2 for the first atom bomb. In the end, yes, the U.S. *did* consider civilian casualties--the wonderful U.S. chose the city with HIGHER civilian casualties to better demoralise the country (terrorism?).
I am simply stating that more intelligence in a time of crisis will help the individual's chances of surviving.
:)
Unfortunately, the bulk of our genes are made up from those that could breed the most. Today, those seem to be the same people on wellfare. Breeding at half the age and twice the rate of those who are educated and strive for more in life.
So, in essence, we are interfering with these people's evolved survival ability. They do not have the intelligence to support themselves, thus nature gifted them with the ability to squirt babies out at an astonishing rate -- since back in the old days, most would have died. Nowadays, these babies get raised on wellfare and learn to spit more babies out at an astonishing rate once they reach reproductive age. Without natural selection, we are doomed to evolve into a species that breeds a lot to survive. Intelligence and positive evolution of the brain is not really going to count towards the bulk of genes being passed on.
being the opportunists they are, jumped all over terrorism as a quick and dirty way to silence dissent
How so? Dissent, if anything, has flourished and increased. Nothing has been silenced.
http://www.fair.org/extra/0210/inspectors.html
There are no examples of any truth at all at FAIR. FAIR is expressly a pro-media bias organization. If it is true, they don't like it.
No more war, please
Thanks to President Bush, and no thanks to the falsely-labelled "anti-war movement", the war of Saddam vs Iraq and the Middle East is winding down very quickly. If the pro-Saddam marchers had their way, he'd still be attacking his neighbors and opening and filling new mass graves.
I consider Fox to be more entertainment. Kind of like E or MTV, No real content, just fluff.
Actually, it is quite fair and balanced. It is a refreshing alternative to the left-wing Ted Turner voice of CNN or the "Official Voice of the Government" NPR. Having watched Fox News a lot, I know they never said Saddam ordered Al Quada. I wonder how cooked or mis-worded that poll was.
compared with 55 percent who listen to CNN and only 23 percent of NPR listeners
Given the antisemitic bias shown by NPR on the issue of terrorism against Israel, I wonder if the other 77% listening to NPR thought that Jews blew up the World Trade Center.
"While we're argueing over the number of countries involved"
There is really no argument about the list's length, other than it is more than large enough to put the lie to the pro-Saddam guys claiming that the US action was "unilateral". Even if the U.S. had just Britain on its side, it would be "bi-lateral" and the unilateral claim would be false.
To paraphrase Uma Turman, it is the spirit of uninhibited innovation that USSR lacked, not the persistence and meticulousness (is that a right word?).
Several people mentioned it already and they are right. None of the hardware/software stolen in the 70-ies was used 'as is'. Hardware was reverse-engineered to the last bit, including peeling off the layers of the microchips to reveal the logic. The logic was validated and reproduced in the clones. Any abnormal piece of logic would inevitably surface. The software was butchered too, including replacement of all literal strings and production of 'design' documents that complied with USSR's own industry conventions/standards (which means all branching logic had to be analyzed).
Yes, the sheer amount of effort required for this has perhaps exceeded that of doing an independent design. But that was of secondary concern for the power elite - doing an 'own thing' requires taking responsibility for the results, which in the USSR's tradition might have meant rather unpleasant consequences. Enough to discourage true innovation on the top and supress it on the bottom.
All that said, I find this story too hard to believe. I knew several people directly involved in oil/gas industry in the 90-ies and they had only started introducing real computerized control systems into the pipelines (using western harware/software, LOL). To blow up in '82, a project of that magnitude would have to be started around '75 (Soviet economy had 5-year planning cycle). Control systems introduced in that period relied largely on analog designs and computers of pre-cloning-era vintage (cloning really took off in mid 70-ies). They were built using plain transistors (no chips), ferrite-solenoid memory, magnetic drums and tapes, punchcards/punchtapes. The one I worked with had 45 bits in a word. It was still on active duty in '93. And that was space field, not just some pipeline...
(i don't really post here, thats why i'm Anonymous Coward, anyway....)
The most important thing people forget is the race between US and USSR for more prestige was legalized theft of people's money. In the US at least some people supported it and voted for it, but in the USSR, it was purely done for no real benefit to anyone and at the expense of everyone. Who cares if russia did a few things better then the US, it was paid for by millions of people who would never see any benefit of these public programs to themselves except for the 'prestige' of their state. This is also true for US governent space(and other) programs, but the results were much more visible in the USSR, especially for the people who didn't live in cities.
"Well, sure, USA has a great deal of hightech gadgets lying around, but the Soviets are the guys that actually made them working"
HAHA.., in the US gadgets are only made if someone has a use for them, in the USSR gadgets were made because of the whims of some party member who decided such things. In the US actual people can afford to purchase such gadgets because they receive payment for their work, in the USSR, the results of your work were stolen by the government and in return you were given a sh*ty apartment, food and basic living conditions, and many many useless space and military programs that surely used a lot of gadgets.
Pentecostal, a Zionist, and a Wahabbist to admit that they all worship the same diety.
They don't, of course. The deities are pretty much exclusive.
Also, "Zionist" typically used in such discussions is an antisemitic pejorative. It would fit in with a question about "A bible-thumper, a Zionist, and a raghead admit..."
Now I'm sure you are a troll. It's simply TOO farfetched for anyone reasonable to claim the USA went to war because it was ATTACKED
There were at least 2,400 ATTACKS by Saddam against the U.S. and Britain. Hard to ignore that number. These were just part of his many ways he violated the cease fire.
And the inspectionteam was under UN mandate and supposed to be impartial, and not under a national country.
It is like you are bending over backwards to add things to the Cease Fire that had nothing to do with anything. There was nothing about alleged spies or not. The Cease Fire did not allow Saddam to stall by attempting to dictate the content of the teams. This was just another example of.... yes... stalling.
Once again, a hypocrisy emerges.
Only yours. You claim to be against Saddam, but you lie and make up stuff about the cease fire agreement to support him again and again.
Just ask yourself this: do you actually think, that the USA would not have attacked Iraq, even if no others 'coalitionmembers' had been found.
If a fish had wheels would you call it a bicycle? Now you are really going out on a limb: your claim of "unilateral" was proven a lie, so now you try to get me to admit something on ALTERNATE HISTORY. I'll answer your question if you right after that answer me if the U.S. would have attacked Saddam if the Klingons had come to his aid.
All indications point that the USA had and has decided unilateraly to invade Iraq, with ot without allies, not vice versa.
Yet it took no unilateral action. There are a zillion "might haves" and "could haves" when you try the diversionary tactic of alternate reality.
If you feel the urge to point out that 1 isn't 75, then you are being pedantic
No, just being accurate to point out that applying "unilateral" to a diverse group of dozens is one whopper of a lie. Normal people see this.
And lastly, calling me a buddy of Saddam only shows your lack of real counter-arguments.
No, it is just an accurate assessment of your repeated lies and false claims to support his side. I am addressing all the arguments. None of the "if this was an alternate reality, what would have happened?" diversion tactics.
Correct. There was no democracy in Chile by the time Pinochet took over.
His rule was an unnecessary bloody one, and quite brutal, but compared to others in Latin America (such as Castro) he was quite mild. In fact, he did little to damage the country during his reigh. The middle class flourished, and reformers like Hayek were even allowed to produce a good working social security system.
He was brutal. He was charged with crimes a few years ago specifically because he ordered the murder of enemy foreign spies of Spanish descent. (instead of deporting them). This was just the tip of the iceburg. However, a system that would have jailed Pinochet for despot crimes while letting Ortega and Castro, who committed much worse, go free, would have been a travesty.
Whatever the figure, none of these deaths cannot be blamed on the U.N. sanctions. Consider these facts:
The sanctions allowed for food and medicine.
Northern Iraq (no Saddam) was under the sanctions. It did not have an infant death/etc problem.
Southern Iraq (under Saddam) was under the sanctions. It did have an infant death/etc problem
----------------
If you look at what Kurdistan (Northern Iraq) and Southern Iraq had in common and had different, you will see what happened and who is to blame.
The only reason Bush is planning a mission to Mars is someone told him the Martians worked for less than Indians
Again it is with the complaints about Indians doing some jobs better than Americans.
We need to reform the H1-B visa system: we need to take off all limits. There is nothing to fear from good productive workers being added to the work force. Hell, let them immigrate outright even.
Outsourcing? No problem there. I have nothing against Indians who do some jobs better than Americans, and that is the typical reason for outsourcing.
Obviously, all our service-people who got cancer and had babies with birth defects after Gulf War I are liars, and deserve NOTHING for their service and suffering.
It is all true. I heard about all these thousands of deaths from Gulf War syndrome being covered up, on Art Bell radio. I wish they had devoted more to the story, but they had to make room for important things like aliens in the contrails and Martians shooting down probes.
I think the U.S. government was using secret Roswell technology in Iraq that year.
Just a few months ago, some fringe kooks had what they themselves billed as a "Hate Bush" convention in California. It appeared to go off without a hitch. I don't think the CIA came in and killed them all, but yet again what do I know. They can cover up anything.
>>First men in space: Russia (implies better ICBMs)
>An astronaut made it into space just 3 weeks after Yuri.
>I'm still waiting to see Russian footprints on the moon.
Yup. This shows how, early on, the sides were closely-matched technologically.
The difference was MEDIA COVERAGE.
With a closed, government-controlled press, the Soviets could afford to take more chances.
Failures would simply be ignored in the newspapers.
That they had larger (read: inferior) nuclear warheads, which required a greater lift capability
--for which they had to make large boosters--gave them an early advantage,
(a Missle Gap) which was soon closed (though our politicians didn't believe it).
The trick of cramming more bodies into a 1-man capsule only worked so long.
The N1, with 43 engines (30 in the 1st stage!) never flew sucessfully.
(OK, one got to 70,000ft before it failed).
gewg_
but when I consider the intangible things that were lost (like being proud of your country and stuff)
What was there to be "proud of" for the USSR? The numerous invasions and conquests and annexations of countries in an ever-expanding evil empire? That is like being proud to be from Nazi Germany.
It is a better place to be proud of now that it is not a ravaging benighted empire. Yes, there is Chechnya, but that is insignificant compared to past invasions.
However, there were some positive accomplishments in the arts, and don't forget the space program. Is this what you are referring to?
It is already 13 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, but people are still worse off than they used to be
I'm not so sure that was the case. How many people are being executed and starved to death these days? The Soviet Union killed 30,000,000+ of its citizens through mass executions, "disappearances", and purposeful famines: averaging to 500,000 a year. It has hard to agree with it being "better off" when that was going on.
I'd be inclined to say that you might not be able to speak for the entire US intelligence community...
It is well know that our good friends the Saudi's were the hijackers. A billionare Saudi was behind it. Funny they call them Arab terriorists, or Muslim Terriorists but never billionare terriosts.
You need to read more carefully. No one said "ordered". The poll indicated that people thought there was a connection between the Iraq and Osama. It was an impression that our un-elected president was more than happy to make to try and justify his war.
I know you think that liberals eat their young. But if you think the right wing spew that comes from Rupert Murdoch's media empire is "Fair and Balanced" you need to get out more. Did you ever wonder what motivated them to adopt that slogan? If it was Fair and balanced, why would they need to hype that?
This is not a new story, although the mention of specific names (and the Mitterand connection) involved is new to me. I read this story 3-4 years ago in the book Victory: The Reagan Administration's Secret Strategy That Hastened the Collapse of the Soviet Union by Peter Schweizer, which is fairly extensively footnoted and on the record. The interviews with the Reagan officials may of course be self-serving, but it seems reasonably well sourced. The tech details, like this Safire piece, are not that informative, but I wouldn't expect them to be really. Used hardback copies are $2 on Amazon.
--LP
A billionare Saudi was behind it. Funny they call them Arab terriorists, or Muslim Terrorists but never billionare terriosts.
The guys like Michael Moore tell me that the terrorists are poor people who have been left with no other option thanks to US corporate hegemony. How can they POSSIBLY be rich?
But if you think the right wing spew that comes from Rupert Murdoch's media empire is "Fair and Balanced" you need to get out more
I have. For one thing, it is moderate, not "right wing". There is nothing right-wing about it, except that they provide right-wing voices in balance with the left-wing ones they provide. I've been out more, indeed, and have sampled more of the diversity of media than you likely have.
Did you ever wonder what motivated them to adopt that slogan?
Yes. They were providing a moderate alternative to the outright left-wing CNN, ABC, etc. They do a pretty good job. The main "Face of the Left" on the show, Colmes, is rather convincing.
Colmes actaully thinks about what he says, and refrains from lies and insults. He makes the Left look much better than venom-spitting cartoons like Carville on the other channels. He even wrote a book defending the Left, which stands alone in a bestseller list filled with hatred, lies, and insults from the likes of Franken and Ivins.
If it was Fair and balanced, why would they need to hype that?
If you've got it, flaunt it.
Here's a question for you: Which media empire was the only one to give Michael Moore his own TV show for a few years? I'll give you a hint: his first name was Rupert.
It was an impression that our un-elected president was more than happy to make to try and justify his war.
He was elected just like the last guy: he won. There you go with the sour-grapes crybaby lie which amounts to "The guy I didn't like won, so there is no WAY he is the REAL president!" I can play that game. Jimmy Carter had big lips. He was unelected!!! He was SELECTED in fact!
The kook fringe has started to disassociate itself with the country as a whole with its idea that they will not accept a President unless they agree with his ideology.
The shoe is on the other foot: there was a similar fringe, on the Right, during the Clinton years that, like the bush-haters, made up stuff about Clinton because they could not POSSIBLY believe that a man like Clinton could be REALLY elected.
Myself, I trust the actual constitutional process. If the guy wins, he is the President.
generally agree with jgoemat and redwizzard, couple comments: The soviets were engaged in a desperate race with Skylab. They lost, but did get a Salyut station up in 1974. Also, re: quality of Russian rocket designs, IIRC, Air & Space magazine had an article on how some of the latest Energomash designs were opened up to Western aerospace firms in the '90s. They were supposedly considered somewhat more advanced that the current Western designs; Russian launch vehicles are often used nowadays in joint launch consortiums with various US aerospace companies. The other thing was, once Eisenhower sent the U2's and the spy satellites over the Soviets, it became clear that Khruschev's boasts about the ICBM's he had were nothing but wild exaggerations, which became known metaphorically as his Potemkin villages... (re: the posting about the Francis Power U2 shootdown, apparently it happened the day Khruschev was making a speech on the May Day military parades. The Soviets kept scrambling fighters and couldn't shoot the plane down until it was well into the USSR; Khruschev was pissed..)
but there is quite a bit of evidence supporting the idea that there was very little human on human violence prior to about 4500 BC. There were no fortifed villiages, and no armor
It's really BC, not BCE. The "BCE" designation (along with the CE designation) was created by intolerant religious bigots.
One theory to explain the beginnings of human on human violence is outlined in the book Saharasia by James DeMeo, Ph.D. of the Orgone Institute
Please do better than this. I know all about Orgone. It is even worse than astrology. It all involves magic blue rays that no one can see. In Orgone Science, you can point a dryer vent at the sky and control the weather. You can put "TB" devices in buckets and get rid of evil spirits in old buildings.
Does DeMeo's theory of history have anything to do with Orgone energy?
"one subtle fact is lost in this story. the soviets were -overtly- attempting to purchase this computer technology for their gas pipeline. the fact that this 'cunning plan' was a success is due, mostly, to the notion that the soviets trusted the united states to allow them to use this technology.
..."
i dunno. that seems like a really stupid enemy to me. maybe one who doesn't know he's really your enemy
The Soviets were famous for their utter contempt for the west and its rapacious greedy corrupt capitalism . And they were envious of its goods and freedoms at the same time. They proclaimed loudly and boastfully that their system would defeat our system with products our greedy capitalists would sell them because the utter corruption in the west was so bad we would do anything for money.
THIS was their ideology.
Then as time went on a few of them began noticing the difference between their beliefs and the evident realities of the west. Gorbachov was STUNNED at all the smiling faces he saw on the streets of the west. He came back to his closed society and asked the Kremlin where are all the citizens in virtual chains straining to get free of their capitalist masters? I saw cheerful happy productive peoples eager to be a part of a society.
War is when the Congress declares a state of war. That last happened December 8, 1945.
This means that our incursions into Korea, Vietnam, Iraq I, Iraq II, and all of Reagean's shenanigans. etc., etc. were all illegal.
Dubya's lying about WMD to get US into a war to avenge his daddy's poor judgement (not taking Baghdad when he had the chance) takes this into a whole new league.
gewg_
It sounds like the intelligence community is attempting to discredit the New York Times BEFORE they start reporting stories on their "intelligence failure".
...and in other news today, the CIA & FBI narrowed down the intelligence failure to the commander in chief.
Soviet Technology
BBC host John Simpson once had a memorable run-in with Soviet officials at Sheremetyevo airport in Moscow:
"...a smiling KGB man put my briefcase containing a filmed interview with dissident Andre Sakharov into a kind of infra-red oven before handing it back to me. The idea was that the interview would be magnetically wiped..."
But? "Soviet technology," Simpson explained, "ensured that the interview was scarcely affected."
Funny how 'the center' is always 'where I am'.
That is true for you. However, it is not true for me. I measure from the center defined by the majority and the middle. Not one of the wings.
There is almost no media left in this country that is left of where the 'center' was defined to be 20 years ago
If anything, much of it is even more to the left, esp. Time Magazine and CNN. 20 years ago, there was no right-wing media (no Limbuagh).
The Washington Post has always been comfortably leftist, with the Washington Times on the right.
It has nothing do to with USian (or being USSRian). It is just looking at the history of the different countries.
And we invaded Czechoslovakia. And Afganistan. Both were not annexed, but occupied to support a friendly regime. An evil empire? Hardly.
You are overlooking a good part of northern Japan, Nicaragua, Cuba, Mongolia, Ethiopia, Armenia, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, the Ukraine, Poland, East Germany, and many other countries that the USSR invaded and annexed. Some were called official parts of the USSR after being conquered (like the 3 Baltics). Others were colonized, but called "independent" just to get a separate U.N. vote.
That bullshit is not even remotely believable.
Yet, it is what happened ever since the day Lenin overthrew a democracy and then ordered his armies to invade several of Russia's neighbors (Armenia, etc) and annex them.
Unless you are a USian, then, of course, you are probably brainwashed enough to believe that USSR was an evil...
No, we were quite well informed about it.
and the US attacking 3 countries just in the last few years is the protector of all that is good in this world.
The "protecter" part is true. Those countries attacked the U.S. and others, so the U.S. retaliated.
The same is actually true of Russia's retaliating for terrorism coming from Chechnya. However, Poland did not attack Russia. Nor did Estonia and most of the others.Yet, the USSR conquered them anyway.
And I was also proud to live in a country, which to a very large extent was driven by a desire to build a better world
The USSR was driven to create a much worse world. After all, it was an empire. Eastern Europe was a hellhole. The colonies set up such as Vietnam and Mongolia were places people fled for their lives from.
a world where people would enjoy freedom from fear, freedom from need and freedom to express themselves. A world of communism
Talk about brainwashed. The "world of communism" has the worst reign of fear and the least freedom (and quite a bit of need: the USSR engineered the Ethiopian famine during the years Ethiopia was a Soviet territory).
Please, stop that averaging. Stalin was crazy and evil
Yet, Stalin ruled the USSR and defined it for so long. Lenin was at least as bad as Stalin. He started the death camps, and established the USSR as an empire.
And if you want to average, let's calculate how many dead Indians and Negros the US averages per year (starting from the Declaration of Independence, of course).
Good point. However, the US regime, thanks to the efforts of those like Dr King and predecessors, did improve over time. The USSR, in contrast, remained the same sort of brutal dictatorship ever since Lenin overthrew the democratic government. Sometimes the dictators killed you more than other times. It only changed under Gorbachev.
If it had never changed, you'd likely be shot for daring to use the Internet.
The book has absolutely nothing to do with Orgone theory. Not everything Reich did was wack.
I read the article. It was peppered with references to magic energy. Sort of blows the credibility of it.
We also supported third world countries and helped many of them (in Asia, Africa and America) on their way to a better future
Nothing could be further from the truth. The USSR was the last of the European colonial powers. It ravaged the Third World in a particularly brutal fashion. There is not a country it didn't make much worse off in the Third World. Many died as they resisted the Soviet colonizers.
In America, the USSR created the last dictatorship (Cuba) and also the Sandinista terrorist junta. Central America was ravaged by war, thanks to the Soviets..and it ended with the USSR ended. Funny you should mention Indians. The Sandinista regime set up by the Soviets attempted to exterminate Indian tribes.
Africa? There are few other colonial atrocities to match the famine the USSR created when it colonized Ethiopia. When Angola freed itself from Portugal, the Soviets took it over, and Angola had to renew its war of independence.
Asia? When the USSR took over much of southeast Asia, people risked their lives to flee in boats. Vietnam, thanks to how the Soviets set it up, has some of the worst human rights abuses and least democracy anywhere (people flee to Thailand for freedom). Don't forget that several Asian nations (Kazakhstan, Mongolia, etc) were occupied Soviet territories during this time.
That excuse (CIA Agents) is a load of bull. Not that the inspectors didn't contain some CIA agents
You have that right. The cease fire agreement did not allow for balking the requirements due to presence of agents. That was not one of the conditions.
Right! Bush hates dictators like Karimov of Uzbekistan.
So Bush should get a large coalition together and overthrow him, right? And because Karimov is a bad guy (unlike Saddam), the protesters will actually support Bush this time, right?
that the Soviets didn't respect the concept of private property in the first place
Sure they did. In the Soviet Union, everything was the private property of the rulers.
They just didn't have any concept of private property or basic rights for the ruled (as they were all slaves on Moscow Massa's plantation anyway).
No proof is possible, No proof is neccessary
Now we know that nearly all these "facts" were wrong.
No, we don't know they are wrong. There was proof of these systems before the war.
Look at this: It took a long time to find Saddam Hussein after the war, despite the facts that we knew he existed before. It is a lot harder to find his terrorist weapons systems (they don't need ventilated spider-holes for one thing).
And yet, despite all this, there is a certain type of person that is completely unwilling to even consider the possibility that our governments have lied to us.
Tell me about it. We had 8 years of Clinton lying about just about everything. Since 2000, we have had a truthful administration for once, and it has been hard to get used to.
The claim is that, as well as the designs for VAXen and the like, the Soviets stole some oil pipeline control software from the Canadians. The West was forewarned with the aid of those cheese-eating surrender monkeys whom Safire and his fellow wingnuts love insulting, the French. Therefore, before the software was stolen, somebody was able to arrange to put a trojan horse in the software that caused the system to malfunction, and, voila, a massive explosion occurred.
Now, it's certainly conceivable for the US to insert a trojan horse in the software. I would find it surprising that such a trojan horse would be enough to cause such a massive explosion on its own, though. Catastrophic failures almost always result out of a complex chain of events happening, and trying to orchestrate that in a system for which you don't have details of how it's going to be configured and is probably going to include a lot of fail-safes sounds awfully difficult to do - and, then again, how did the CIA know they weren't going to kill hundreds in the process of pulling this off?
In any case, the point of the exercise seems to be to make the Soviets of using stolen Western technology. This seems like an awfully cavalier way to go about it, and thus still implausible.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Curse the feminazis and their banning of the Swedish Bikini Team!!!
We hates them and their, "It's politically incorrect."
Politically incorrect my a**!!!!
Comicbook guy: Best. Team. Ever.
Oh, that felt good.
I am not an expert in any of these fields, but reviewing the basic facts...well I think it's just not plausible. No, I think that anyone who posits something so outrageous and fantastical needs to be able to back it up, and to have already consulted experts in the field and be able to answer the inevitable questions that come up. I don't see Safire as having done this. Looks like more hack reporting.
Hrm. That's an interesting observation. Perhaps it might be worth studying this apparent phenomenon systematically.
You read which article, Mr. AC? The Saharasia article I linked to? I just re-read the thing to be sure. Absoletely no references. Nice try, troll.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
brilliantly said.
"Our interests are to see if we can't scale it up to something more exciting," he said.
Yet he also said, "God does not play dice with the universe". I had never seen that letter. Interesting. However I will stand by the others in my list.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
and let us not forget the long standing business relationship between Carlisle group W's daddys business and Bin-Laden construction! First big investor. Hell W has probably MET Osama and had dinner (just supposition no evidence that I am aware of), but one thing is for sure: He did let Bin-Laden relatives fly around the country on and shortly after 911 as they gathered themselves together and left the country!
Mother Theresa is known also as the Wicked Witch of Calcutta. She vehemently opposed birth control and contraceptives, creating even more misery in the already miserable stlums.
Martin Luther King might have been a great man, but so was Malcolm X. Violence works just as well as non-violence. It isn't the means you use, but what you achieve. Freedom is never given but always fought.
Gandhi was a double-dealing sonnawabitsh who openly was in cahoots with Hitler and plotted with the Japanese against the Western democracies during WWII. Needless to say, it isn't by chance the Germans called them Aryan Race. Gandhi very well knew what Aryan means - that created basis on his Nazi sympaties. India mysticism was rampant in Germany already in the late 1800s.
Einstein never believed in a personal God. He used God as a metaphora.
What comes to the burden of proof, the burden is on the claimant of the existence. Non-existence does not need to be separately proven. You claim there is God - prove it. I just lack the faith on any gods or goddesses or elves or fairies.
"Hard to ignore that number. These were just part of his many ways he violated the cease fire."
Then you can equally not ignore the times the US airplanes went outside their zone attacking targets that were never mandated by the UN. I'm sure you'll come up with a lot of excuses again why they absolutely HAD to do it, but the fact remains, both parties attacked targets outside the permitted area.
But all this has actually nothing to do with the actual topic, and you skillfully side-stepped it (again): are you such a fool, that you claim the USA had the right to invade a country because of these attacks? Then why didn't Bush make that his main argument? I tell you why; because he knew fully well that not one person, exept the utter village-idiot would actually buy such a nonsensical reason. That argument doesn't pass musterd, it's that simple.
"Only yours"
How so? If it's ok that they put spies in the teams, as you silly ninkenpoop claim, then there is no need to conceil or deny that they did so. If you don't see that as a contradiction, it's only because you are heavily biased (and probably a troll as well).
"I'll answer your question if you right after that answer me if the U.S. would have attacked Saddam if the Klingons had come to his aid."
Yes, they most certainly would have, since they decided it unilaterally.
Your turn.
"Yet it took no unilateral action."
Ah yes, but remember your pedantic behaviour, and my equally pedantic answer to that? I said the USA *decided* unilaterally to go to war.
"No, just being accurate to point out that applying "unilateral" to a diverse group of dozens is one whopper of a lie. Normal people see this."
Only if you think that it changed something in essence. But I suspect such nuances are wasted on you. With the same reasoning I could bribe or force people to applaud after I make a speech, and then claim I'm adored. And if somebody said I was the only one supportive of the speech, I could then say: 'that's a lie: look, there are not 1, or 2, but at least 60 persons applauding me'.
And that's being pedantic, because in essence, it doesn't change anything about the pragmatic reality. Neither is making the semantic claim that 'unliteral' means '1', and that there were more then 1 names on the list. and what is the essence? That the USA was the instigator and driving force behind the war, and they they used their political and economic leverage to force or persuade a bunch of other countries to sign up so it looked a bit better, and nitwits like you could say: 'but thet *didn't* go unilaterally, because that means '1'".
Normal people see this.
"No, it is just an accurate assessment "
No, it's just an ad hominem attack, so you'll excuse me if I start using the same technique.
Your post gives the feeling that you blame the CIA only for the US politics since the end of WW2.
But of course all this overthrowing of (nascent) democracies and support of fascist dictators, that has been going on for so long, was a full part of the US policies in the context of the cold war.
This very deliberate policy was not decided by CIA executives. It was not only accepted, but also actively decided and supported by the various presidents of that time. (and while the context has changed, I don't get the impression that the rest has changed much, but that's getting even more off-topic).
Your theory is ridiculous.
As my example of the aristocracy during the middle ages shows; having enough food and clothing has nothing to do with intelligence.
I could as well say (and in fact, with more certitude) that being born in priviliged circumstances gives you a head-start in life.
Thus, even if the aristocracy was genetically stupid and had less intelligence then the average slave, they still would have had better food and clothing.
"So, in essence, we are interfering with these people's evolved survival ability."
You *are* an elitist superior-feeling dude, aren't you? "with *these* people"...as opposed to...you? How convenient you can divide people into 'haves' and 'have nots' and blame the lack of intelligence of the have nots to explain why they have less food and clothing.
And btw, humans, as a species, have always 'interfered' with the classical darwinian concept, since we molded nature to our needs, instead of vice versa. (Not that we ever got out of darwinian principles, and we never will). But claiming that intelligence will inherently rise if 'low-class' people die more is simply ridiculous, because the fact that they are "low class" (I suppose you are going to be the judge on that?) has seldom to do with genetically based intelligence on itself, but because they are victims of a system that makes the rich richer and the poor poorer.
Intelligence, just as every other ability, has to be nurtured to blossom fully. When the environment doesn't suit this nurturing, one might have the impression 'they' are more stupid and that it's genetically based, but in reality they are not and it's because of social inequalities (if not rightout exploitation) that they are poor, not out of a genetic predisposition of being less intelligent
Though you try to use reason (at least that's more then that anon.coward USA-patriot-zealot), you still use euphemisms to excuse the USA. Sure, it no easy thing, and sure Saddam was a murderous dictator, and sure he let his own people starve while making palaces.
It doesn't dissolve the blame and guilt of the USA, however.
When you say: he's a monster, because he gassed people, you forget to mention that the USA had given the chemicals (and NO, the fact that others did it too does not absolve you). Furthermore, as is proven by CIA-documents, they knew full well what they were used for, but still continued to supply him. the reason was, that he was fighting big bad foe Iran at the time, and that suited their needs, so they didn't care if he gassed civilians.
You seem to be keen on calling this a 'mistake', or 'an old man falling asleep' and other euphisms to diminuish the responsability of the USA, but fact is that they are almost as criminal as Saddam. (Unless you really deem giving WMD to a tyran, fully aware what he does with it, is a minor mistake?)
And he kicked out the inspection-teams. Well, it didn't actually help that they put spies in those teams, contrary to the UN rules of neutrality, did it?
If you want Iraq to play by the rules, one could expect the USA to play by the rules as well. Neither of them did, but you can't put all the blame on Iraq and dilute your own responsability in it (as you have the tendency to do).
So, to answer your question of what you should have done:
You should have disarmed Saddam, searched and destroyed the WMD and controlled the influx of food/medicins/oil back when you had won the first GW.
Instead, you completely messed up that time, didn't disarm him, but demanded he didafterwards, accused him of not destroying his WMD, while you could have made it sure he did back then, villify him because he got kicked out inspectorteams, while back then you you had to power to investigate yourself and he couldn't have kicked out, let him starve thousands of children and blame it on the sanctions, while you could have had much wider control back then, etc.
Face it; you (USA) should have done your job properly in GW1, and not excuse yourself with rethorical questions after you messed up and let the most promising times to deal with these problems pass bye.
What!!! Iran 1953, Chile 1973
Allende's Chile was not democratic. By the time he was overthrown, he had transformed it into a single-party dictatorship.
US knew it would have lost the elections,
In the Vietnams, the U.S. was not up for election. Ho would have likely lost in the South; to this day Ho is to the Vietnamnese like Hitler is to Jews.
I'm not sure what you mean by "Down With Jews", but there's a very good humanitarian argument against genocide
The protesters were pro-genocide.
The Supreme Court ignored the Constitution and its established method of the transition of power
The majority in the Supreme Court followed the Constitution. They ensured that the actual winner in the election was the one who was inaugurated. They made sure that the right person (the winner) was sworn in. They did this be making sure the actual vote count stood, and resisted attempts at umpty-ump multiple recounts which amounted to a dice game.
With such a thin margin of victory, there was a chance that there could POSSIBLY a count in which Gore won. However, the votes had already been counted a few times, and Gore lost.
After the Supreme Court decision, the vote Gore wanted was done. He lost this too. Then a thorough after-the-fact recount of all votes in all counties was done. Guess what? Gore lost this too.
He wanted to "roll the dice" again and again and again...
This phrase means nothing in Russian. They just translated every English word to Russian but not the whole phrase. I doubt that somebody understood that phrase.
There is no "corporatized model". USA democracy is described as "representative". Corporations have little role, and don't even have a vote.
"For your information, many people don't consider the US system to be particularly democratic"
It is as democratic as any other system out there. The USA belongs to the group of countries that is "most democratic"
Each of these countries has problems:
The U.S. has the electoral college system. It usually makes no difference at all, but it can. There are also recent laws that ban criticizing political candidates at certain times.
In the UK, an unelected hereditary monarch has power. This power usually goes unused, but it is there.
Norway automatically places legislators in positions of power based on their gender, without regard to democratic popularity.
Many countries have government-funded and government-controlled candidate selection processes ("public funding").
However, when you get right down to it, the differences in "which one is more democratic?" are very minor.
Vietnam merely wanted to modernise without being taken advantage of colonially
If this were true, Ho would not have sold his country to a major colonial power. It certainly was taken advantage of: at one time during the mid-1970s, the USSR extracted 200,000 slaves from its Southeast Asian colony to toil in eastern Siberia.
The Vietnams remained Soviet colonies until 1989. They never really freed themselves, and remain governed by the Soviet-imposed colonial rulers, even though the USSR itself is long gone.
If they had "Stuck with France", they would have likely been independent by 1969....20 years earlier. France by that time had tended to shuck off its colonial possessions. Instead, they still suffer under one of the worst governments in the world, that imposed by the USSR.
"Modernization" is questionable. The main economic change in this largely rural area was to force people into slave farms ("the killing fields"). The Soviets were just doing here what they had done in the Ukraine in the 1930s.
Written before the war.
http://sqft87.pisem.net/tiger/iraq.html
Tigers respect lions, elephants and hippos. Maggots respect no one. (C) S. Dovlatov
As for the draft board position, a Democrat has called for the draft in congress
If he is so keen on it, lets see HIM go back to the front lines in combat.
As long as there are volunteers, there is no need for forced military service.
I look at it as more material for the "Slashdot moderation is dominated by stupid liberals" page.
Who else would mod up that post ?
Smart liberals: Unlike the poster, can correctly identify usage of royal "we", will not mod it up.
Smart conservatives: can correctly identify usage of royal "we", and are not inclined to moderate up liberal posts anyway.
Stupid conservatives: can not correctly identify usage of royal "we", but are not inclined to moderate up liberal posts.
Stupid liberals: can not correctly identify usage of royal "we", moderate up posts which support their own political biases.
Slashdot does not have a liberal bias, it has a stupid liberal bias.
Democrats tend to be more likely to have served in the military, and it seems Republicans are more likely to send in the military.
Hmmm? JFK started the US involvement in the Vietnam War. Remember what FDR did after Pearl Harbor.
Clinton had US troops invade two parts of the former Yugoslavia. This is usually forgotten.
Did they shoot it down or did it malfunctiion?
It wasn't the first one we lost. We've lost I think two others to various malfunctions, one of them at an airshow. Ouch! You can even get footage of it crashing into a forest.
Five shells? That's not WMD. Five thousand shells would be
...used to process hydrogen for military weather balloons. Of course Fox didn't report on that so much.
A nuclear warhead is only one shell, so I guess that is not a WMD either.
Yet, that is where I found out about it.
Yes, Clinton was a slimeball, but I don't see how he dismantled the Constitution
The only dent Bush has put in the constitution is McCain/Feingold, which in some circumstances outlaws speech if it is about political matters. Bad as Bush is to sign this, his Democratic opponents and Clinton would have signed it even faster if they had the chance.
You truly believe that, for example, there were spontaneous cheering crowds of Iraqis on the strees when our tanks pulled down that statue of Saddam?
This actually happened. The crowd, however, was fewer than 100. The celebration was dampened because the Iraqis still thought the Saddamites would shoot them for doing this.
Fact is, if there were any terrorists hiding in Iraq
The biggest terrorist there was caught hinding in a spider-hole.
Read some of the letters in the Stars and Stripes and you'll hear plenty of griping about current conditions.
So much for "muzzled and censored"
Thanks for the memories, Saddam
Big Daddy, Johnny, Burp, Aunt Zelda, Scott, Slurp, Big Momma
"Shock and awe" was aimed at Saddam's army. Nothing terrorist about it.
You then followed with some blatant racism of your own against Muslims
How ignorant can you get? Islam is not a race. Islam is embraced by people of all races. However, poll after poll shows that there is a strong anti-semitic bias among the majority of Muslims. While I do not judge all Muslims based on this, it is clear that there is a problem.
We got half a million (bigger than Vietnam War protests) people marching nation-wide against the Iraqi war.
Thankfully, those who were informed about the matters (the Australian government) ignored the braying of this ignorant and hateful minority.... no matter how loud they screamed.
And yeah, we had attacks on synagogues too, but they were in a minority and hopefully won't spread.
It goes hand in hand: the marching for Saddam and the hatred of Jews. As Saddam was, until Bush stopped him, the leader in antisemitism.
If you scroll up, you'll see that my argument is, simply, five shells of mustard gas "aren't the droids we're looking for."
So, does Iraq have nukes, WMD's or droids? Is a nuke a droid? Is a droid a WMD???
Wow, you're still pretending Clinton dismantled the constitution, when in fact, by your own words, it is Bush who has done so.
McCain/Feingold was the worst attack on the First Amendment in ages. Bush signed it. Bad Bush. However, every serious Democratic candidate would gadly sign it as well. As would have Clinton.
Sharon, the "butcher of Haifa" has been indicted by the war crimes tribunal in the Hague
They might as well locate this court in Australia, because in this instance, it hops and has a pocket.
Pursuing terrorists who happen to be Jewish is not antisemitic
Pursuing people who are not terrorists, and falsely labelling them terrorists because they are Jewish is quite antisemitic. That is where the irrational hatred of Israelis and Jews comes from.
I don't think I'm racist, but let's say I am. So what? Does that mean my arguments are automatically invalid? That's bullshit.
No, it is FACT. If you have irrational hatred of people of certain ethnic groups, and you start to argue against them, of course the arguments are false.
if your choices are Fox, which is incedibly biased
Fox, overall, is quite centrist. C-Span provides much analysis. I have rarely seen it showing Congress. It does do that, but it seems to do other things much of the time.
Journalism is more than opinion; it involves some degree of research, and it's also dispassionate
It never is. The bias of the observer/reporter can be reduced, but it can never be eliminated.
Please, remove your head from your ass
You don't have facts on your side, so you use lame insults.
Sharon, the "butcher of Haifa" has been indicted...
Interesting phrase. Place in quotes, it comes across like a title. However, this title turns up on no search engines. Along the way, however, I did find references to the Palestinian government bus-bombing people in Haifa.
Perhaps the false "Butcher of Haifa" accusation is found only in neo-nazi rags that are printed only in Hectograph, and are never found in other media.
Iraq is now a free country, indeed. You have to be a partisan sicko to whine and lie about it like Saddam's fourth column does here.
If a left-winger like Clinton had liberated Iraq, they'd be defending it. In fact, Clinton invaded three Balkan nations, NONE of which ever made any threats against the United States. No complaint here, nope, of course....
"OK, Governor Dean. We're going to do what it takes to make you happy. We're going to put Saddam right back on his throne."
So you admit they were purchased, then.
There is plenty of proof that Allende's Chile was a newborn Soviet colony; a nascent totalitarian dictatorship. Too look for quotes, I looked for left-wing sites (rather than do the self-serving thing you have done: presenting quotes and links from sites with my own bias):
..... a reference to how Allende was turning the place into a military fascist state all by himself, with no help from Pinochet. There are other references on the sites about him disarming peasant/worker groups (getting sheep ready for the slaughter).
From the "World Socialist Web Site". No Pinochet apologists they.
"Allende, who headed a Popular Unity coalition dominated by his own Socialist Party and the Stalinist Communist Party."
Where there is Stalinism, there is no democracy.
"Yet it was Allende's government that betrayed the Chilean working class and delivered it into the hands of the military junta."
"Thirdly, like Allende before him, Lagos is increasingly resting on the military"
From "Flag Blackened.Net", which is also very far-left:
"For I have no doubts that if the Chilean Marxist experiment had ended in civil war, as it appeared to most observers at the time, it would have been an even greater tragedy or, had it ended as the totalitarian society it pointed to, it would have lasted much longer and would have brought Chileans much more suffering than Pinochet's ugly but temporary dictatorship"
From Val.Dorta.com. Not sure if this is a leftist site, but it appears to be:
"The Stalinist parties of the West and the "socialist" states quite rightly view the defeat of Allende as their defeat: he was one of their own"
-------
Clearly, it was in the interest of democracy and against imperialism when the U.S. helped overthrow Allende. However, it was not in the interest of democracy when the U.S. supported Pinochet.
As for Iran, even Wikipedia mentions Mossadegh's close alliance with Soviet agents working in Iran. Other sites detail the strong support for the Soviet agents in Iran for Mossadegh. The USSR always tended to avoid supporting anyone other than their own puppets.
It is so hard to find evidence of the U.S. going against anyone other than the real bad guys. Even the ones who were "Democratically elected" were Soviet puppet tyrants who were working to see that no election would ever threaten their power.
Guatemala is another example. Che Guevara himself (no right-winger!) detailed how Arbenz/etc had turned Guatemala into a single-party, non-democratic state.
but even still the Soviets made remarkable progress in virtually all areas of human endeavor
They made remarkable progress in refining tyranny and oppression, exceeded by very few. The regime was nothing but savage and brutal. When Lenin overthrew a fledgling democracy, he set Russian progress back.
but please understand that if you base the entire economy on planning, there are bound to be countless "inefficiencies".
Absolutely. When, as in the USSR, the dictators control the economy to their own personal ends, there will be inefficiencies, and things won't satisfy most of the people most of the time (as the people end up having no say in it at all).
Have you lived in Soviet Union? Have you lived in post-Soviet Russia? I did and still do
It is kind of ironic. The terribly oppressive fascist Soviet Union of old would have sent you away or killed you for speaking out against the government. The current, much more free and humane, government that you hate so much now is letting you say all you want.
As far as people who lived in the USSR go, it is better to trust the word of perceptive people like Solzhinytzen and Sakharav, rather than those who happily submit when a fascist Politburo says "I'll crush you and impoverish you. But it is to make you happy!".
Definition of fascism:
"A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism." This fits the USSR perfecty. The regime from Lenin through Gorbachev was the longest lived fascist regime in history.
[Yes, racism applies. Lenin started it by exterminating the 60,000 Polish civilians in Vladivostok. Stalin targeted several ethnic groups for elimination of significant reduction. Others through Gorbachev made sure non-Russians tended to have less rights than Russians.]
The "indict sharon" thing is all an antisemitic scam that can be traced back to Syria. It is run by a law firm in Lebanon, a country that is tightly controlled by its Syrian occupiers. Anything that happens politically there is at the will of the current strongman of Syria, who has long had an "invade Israel and exterminate the Israelis" view. Nice try, but we already know that Bashar el Assad has an irrational hatred of Jewish people.
Martin Luther King might have been a great man, but so was Malcolm X. Violence works just as well as non-violence. It isn't the means you use, but what you achieve. Freedom is never given but always fought.
....
Malcolm X was most famous for being a violent-minded racist. If things had gone the way he wanted then, there would have been an ethnically pure "Black" separate homeland created in the United States.... the creation of which would have required genocide and institutional racism such as had not been seen in the U.S. in the 20th century.
Malcolm, however, grew out of his racism and violence, and he even grew out of the kook "Nation of Islam". This mature Malcolm is not recalled very often.
What comes to the burden of proof, the burden is on the claimant of the existence.
The burden is on anyone making a claim.
Non-existence does not need to be separately proven
Only if it is being separately claimed.
You claim there is God - prove it
I did not make such a claim. However, you claimed there is no God. Prove it.
I just lack the faith on any gods or goddesses
= translation: you have a strong religious faith in their nonexistence.
The only way to avoid being religious, or making faith assertions is to take the Agnostic route. They, unlike the Atheists and Theists, don't rest their faith on wild unprovable claims.
Interesting comments by many who obviously have never been in Russia or any of the CIS states. The USSR hasn't existed for a long time. Russia is a fabulous country from what I've seen of it (geeze, it spans 7 timezones!).
There are basically three classes of people - the Rich, the normal and the out-of-work poor. The latter constitutes a significant part of the population which, is very sad.
The people are very proud but bothered by the current state of affairs there. But, they are probably more interested in politics than Americans are. They really know and understand their history and the present. They've lived through hell with Stalin and yet continue on.
So please don't slam Russia unless you've been there. It is very obvious that most of the statements about Russia or the old USSR are by people who don't know what they're writing about.
Banjo - The more I know about Windoze, the more I love *nix
"CIA Factbook 2002 (US):"Since 1975, practically all the gains in household income have gone to the top 20% of households"
I'd like to see the context of this. Are they talking about total amount of money?
Of course, if someone makes $400,000 a year, a 3% increase in their income is going to be a lot more money than someone making $20,000 and has a 10% increase.
Taken by itself, it does not say a thing about "most people are not better of today than in 1975". Only a marxist imagination could interpret it as that.
Israel = "the Jews" like Italy = "the Catholics", and Skull & Bones = a "frat", as any logic would demonstrate. But I guess that's why you, Anonymous ignoramus Coward, didn't graduate from Yale (just guessing). Common sense and evidence exculpate "Israel", no matter how demented Sharon's fascism elsewhere, from complicity in the bin Laden planebombings. There's plenty of evidence pointing at the blood on the hands of Bush Sr & Jr, and only a fool would exonerate Cheney's Halliburton from any wrongdoing anywhere, unless there's solid evidence that they were busy screwing someone else to death.
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make install -not war
from complicity in the bin Laden planebombings. There's plenty of evidence pointing at the blood on the hands of Bush Sr & Jr
... no matter how demented Sharon's fascism elsewhere...
So it wasn't the Jews who blew up the World Trade Center, it was "Bush Sr and Bush Jr"?
You probably do not realise that there have been no Presidents with that name. G W Bush, having a different name from his father, is not a Jr.
Sharon, a fascist? Israel's economy is a socialist one, and Israel does not elect fascists.
In a cruel irony, Anonymous clueless Coward, the Nazis combined nationalism and socialism (hence their name in German, "Nazi"), to organize their definitive fascist rule through terror and force. Sharon is not as fascist as Hitler, of course, or even Mussolini, or Hirohito, or many others, possibly including Bush Jr. But he too rules Israel through terror and force, manipulating the Knesset and population with his perpetual war.
Don't give me that hairsplitting about the "W." vs. the "H. W." - I don't care what Barbara calls them. You're not going to get me to call the monkey in chief "Dubya", or the old spook "Poppy", or any of the other cute names for these crooks. Senior and Junior suit them just fine.
If you're able to ignore all the culpability of Bush Jr in allowing a window for bin Laden's planebombs, you've got some kind of agenda that deprioritizes America's security. And if you've forgotten who trained bin Laden in Afghanistan, I remind you that Bush Sr ran the CIA, then moved up to command a variety of covert operations as President VP "under" Reagan, while creating that monster.
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make install -not war