I agree with a lot of what you said, except for Iraq and the UN
I don't think Saddam was really spending all that much (if any) in support of terror against the United States. If you have proof, I'd love to see it. Otherwise, your argument is nothing but FUD.
You're wrong about the UN. The UN was created by the United States to promote US foreign policy. This is a historical fact that you seem to be unaware of. If the UN ignores world problems, it is precisely becuase the US wants them ignored. Try and find an example to the contrary.
The US targets civilians all the time. We've blown up suspected terrorists while they sleep, in their aparmtent building, with their entire family.
Of course the Pentagon would tell you that the target was the terrorist, not the civilians, and they'd technically be correct. Similarly, I think you'll find the attacks of the insurgents are not directed at civilians per se. Is the Iraqi National Guard a civilian entity? How about a police force which serves hand-in-hand with the foreign occupiers?
How about blowing up the military checkpoint at the entrance to the Green Zone? That seems like a legitimate military target to me.
How about blowing up a communications tower and transportation hub and center of commerce? Something like the World Trade Center. That too is a legitimate military target; at the Pentagon it's what they'd call a "dual use" facility. It serves both civilian and military/strategic functions. And therefore it's as legitimate a target as was the Yugoslav TV building or the bridge carrying the train full of civilians away from the fighting in Belgrade. Both of which we destroyed and killed civilians in doing so.
If Iraq was a haven for terrorists, it's because we provided that haven. Remember the No-Fly Zones? Those made it impossible for Saddam to go into the north and the south and clear out the terrorists using airpower (which is the safe and effective way to kill people, as we all know.) He would have had to send in ground troops.
Because of the No-Fly Zones Iraq *became* a terrorist haven. The United States created (and indeed wanted) terrorism in Iraq. The hope was that they might overthrow Saddam. Looks like they had a different goal. Oops.
Bush has tortured (abu ghraib). Bush has imprisoned (hundreds in America after 9/11). Some of those tortured have died (abu ghraib), that makes Bush a murderer. And lastly, many have been banished, many more have been deined entry to the US. (Cat Stevens probably the most famous).
I guess the difference is that Bush hasn't done these things to stay in power. He's done it as part of an open-ended undeclared war.
Is Bush a thug or not?
Saddam was a "bad leader," sure. Name one leader in the middle east who isn't. Hell even Ariel Shraon has done all the thug business you mentioned.
I believe that I don't really give a fuck how bad a leader Saddam was, he was never a threat, and this whole war is just an attempt to remake the hegemony of the middle east in our image.
I might even support the war if it were sold to me that way, but the lies of the neocons are just too much to stomach.
If the elections next month are a complete fiasco, will you change your tune? What would it take for you to realize that Iraq is a mess, it's not getting better, it's getting worse every day.
A year ago there weren't car bombs every day. A year ago the number of US casualties wasn't going up every month.
Actually I think you are forgetting one ally the US has in the Iraq war that I would suspect is footing a higher bill in lives in this war... That ally would be the Iraqi people.... YOU FORGOT POLAND!
SO what you're saying is, after he invaded Kuwait, he was unacceptable as a leader of the Iraqi people. Then why not just take him out? Why make Iraq suffer for the next dozen years with a leader you steadfastly refuse to deal with?
And who the fuck are you to decide that a leader can't be a crook? That a country can't spend all their money on the military? Do you even know what military spending is in America? Hint: it's 20 times more than any other country on the planet.
Complied with International pressure? You mean the way the US has complied with international pressure on the land mine ban, and Kyoto?
At best you're extremely hypocritical to apply all these "conditions" to Iraq but not to your own government.
Also it's very misguided to blame the Baath party for anything that happened in Iraq. Bueraucrats were doing their job. Iraq's problems came from the top down, not from the "average joe" just trying to hold down a decent job, which REQUIRES joining the Baath party.
De-Baathification is of the biggest reasons Iraq is such a mess. Fire all the bueraucrats, and lo and behold, nothing works anymore. Shocker!
It's more like $2 billion to Egypt, and the reason they hate us is because our "foreign aid" goes to propping up their military dictatorship. Same for Pakistan. Same for Saudi Arabia, except it's not a military dictatorship we're propping up, it's the House of Saud.
Do you even know what you're talking about? I think not. Foreign aid is mostly military aid. It's corporate welfare at it's finest. We give these countries billions, with the stipulation that they will spend the money on military equipment from the USA.
I dunno, after the Challenger blew up, Reagan basically told the whole country "sorry, we'll have a State Of The Union speech next year."
Turns out the keynote speaker was feeding the fish off Florida.
I realize that NASA has set the bar for success pretty low with the Shuttle program (I could try to phrase that better but why bother) but still, you know, the interceptor didn't make it off the launchpad when the motherfucking ICBM was inbound. There's no way that's good.
But the vast majority of the work going on in Iraq is on things like the electricity grid and the water network, infrastructures that crumbled under Saddam's woeful misrule.
Don't look now, but the electricity grid and the water network and the rest of Iraq would have been working just fine if we hadn't levied crippling economic sanctions on Iraq after we bombed those very same systems in 1991.
Saddam... decided he would rather spend the country's treasury on war with... the United States
I see now the beauty of your logic. When Saddam spends his money on wars, rather than infrastructure improvements, that's foolish. But when Bush spends the country's treasury on war with Iraq, a few months after an "impossible" blackout shuts down the East Coast, that's the right thing to do.
You've been drinking the neocon Kool Aid, Twirlip.
Foreign aid is a black hole. The only reason we still bother with it is because...well, even if it produces no tangible benefits for us, it's still the right thing to do.
But we still need aircraft carriers and interceptor missiles.
I would rather see some slashdot reasonable alternatives to pursuing this technology that is other than wishful thinking and a can't-we-all-just-get-along mantra.
Not pursuing this technology had been the course of action for much of the Cold War. The Anti Ballistic Missile or ABM Treaty basically said that neither side would try to "solve" the totality of destruction guaranteed by Mutually Assured Destruction.
With the Soviets out of the picture, the USA has decided they might as well go ahead and build their missile shield, since there's really noone who can tell them not to.
Let's look at the end state. Where the USA still has all its nuclear weapons, and no threat of Mutually Assured Destruction should they decide to use nukes.
This technology represnets an escalation of the threat presented by the United States. It does nothing to reduce the threat from any area of the globe, since Mutually Assured Destruction surely holds for Iran, North Korea, or heck even India and France.
Star Wars is not a defensive system. Is it an enabling technology for a workable, winnable nuclear war system.
"Congratuations! Your civilization has invented Star Wars. You are now free to nuke other countries with impunity."
So to answer your question, we were all getting along, but that wasn't a superior enough position for the United States, the Republican Party, and Neoconservatives, in increasing order.
It's going to be another arms race. The USA spends the next ten years deploying this system, which only ensures that adversaries will try to have their ICBMs ready in nine years.
Personally, I hope the defense project fails... otherwise Canada will be forced to disagree again with American policy. I'm sure there'll be economic consequences.
Yeah, your dollar might go back down to what it was five years ago.;)
Don't worry, with NAFTA we Americans are pretty much guaranteed to get everything we ever want from Canada, which is electricity, natural gas, trees (but not too many), and a little bit of mad cow disease thrown in, just to keep things evil.
The part where the shutdown was described as automatic, the part where it was described as of unknown origin, and the part where it was described as a failure: None of these was accurately reported.
So you're saying they deliberately and knowingly shut it down, and this is to be viewed as a success.
I could go for "it could have been a lot worse" but (pardon my triple negative) I'm not seeing how this fails to be a failure.
I'm pretty sure it was Windows 95, and the 20-some-odd floppies required to do a clean install, that had people buying CD-ROM drives. The fact that the floppies were guaranteed to fail on disk 6, 7, or 8 after you used them a few times didn't hurt either;)
I mean, I'm sure there are a few people out there who bought a CD-ROM drive just to play Wing Commander III, this is the same small yet profitable sliver of the market which buys GeForce 6800s to play DOOM III. But for the mass market, it was Windows 95 that led the consumer, grumbling, to the realm of the 2x Mitsumi.
Are the Falklands Islands (or Maldives if you prefer) really that bright? They appear to be the most light-polluted spot in South America and that just seems odd to me. Perhaps it is an optical illusion of the projection used in the map.
I think the general consensus is that climate change is inevitable, but that humans are making it happen sooner than it would, if we just let nature run its course.
Your commentary about the herds of cattle is laughable -- cows exist because of mankind, they have practically no survival skills and wouldn't be here without us.
You mention a natural source of sulfur dioxide, which is implicated in acid rain but not so much in global warming. Is there an equivalent natural mechanism to make irrelevant the levels of CO2 or NOx emissions we are producing? And could there be a "sink" for natural emissions, yet no equivalent mitigating factor on the man-made side to offset all our output?
I'm not sure who else you could "blame" for the degradation of the atmosphere. When, due to a century of steelmaking, the snow turns brown in Pittsburgh, then they clean up their act and the snow turns white again, are you suggesting there's no correlation between those events? Last I checked there aren't any steel mills in the wild.
I was a kid when the Rubik's Cube came out. Our neighbor was a topologist. He went out and bought the cube, and presented it to his wife to have her scramble it. Then it sat, unmolested, on the coffee table for many nights while the topologist figured out the necessary moves to solve the puzzle.
It took him lots of pages on a legal pad but he did solve it. After about two weeks as I recall.
I, being a kid, bought the "How To Solve The Rubik's Cube" book on the family vacation and was solving the cube in under a minute shortly thereafter. I've long since forgotten the patterns, but I bet the topologist could still solve it.
The only pure GeForce 6800 (not GT or Ultra) with DDR3 is a kludge. It sounds like you want a GeForce 6800GT.
Asus makes some card with "9999" in the name which is the only card I am aware of with a GeForce 6800 processor (not GT, regular, with 12 pipelines and 5 shaders) which is on a board with 256 MB DDR3 memory. And for the price of it, you're better off getting a for-real 6800GT, 16 pipelines and 6 shaders, and the same 256 MB DDR3.
How big are your tits? I might consider marriage if all that's needed to keep you happy is cutting edge computer gear. Unlike the jewelery and flowers most women want, I would benefit too:)
By the way I have the Zalman 5.1 surround headphones and they are alright. Nothing great but they get the job done.
Is just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Reading your sig, and reading about how you are making DVD backups for your presumably TV-addicted two year old, I can't help wonder if there might be a correlation.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with a lot of what you said, except for Iraq and the UN
I don't think Saddam was really spending all that much (if any) in support of terror against the United States. If you have proof, I'd love to see it. Otherwise, your argument is nothing but FUD.
You're wrong about the UN. The UN was created by the United States to promote US foreign policy. This is a historical fact that you seem to be unaware of. If the UN ignores world problems, it is precisely becuase the US wants them ignored. Try and find an example to the contrary.
The US targets civilians all the time. We've blown up suspected terrorists while they sleep, in their aparmtent building, with their entire family.
Of course the Pentagon would tell you that the target was the terrorist, not the civilians, and they'd technically be correct. Similarly, I think you'll find the attacks of the insurgents are not directed at civilians per se. Is the Iraqi National Guard a civilian entity? How about a police force which serves hand-in-hand with the foreign occupiers?
How about blowing up the military checkpoint at the entrance to the Green Zone? That seems like a legitimate military target to me.
How about blowing up a communications tower and transportation hub and center of commerce? Something like the World Trade Center. That too is a legitimate military target; at the Pentagon it's what they'd call a "dual use" facility. It serves both civilian and military/strategic functions. And therefore it's as legitimate a target as was the Yugoslav TV building or the bridge carrying the train full of civilians away from the fighting in Belgrade. Both of which we destroyed and killed civilians in doing so.
If Iraq was a haven for terrorists, it's because we provided that haven. Remember the No-Fly Zones? Those made it impossible for Saddam to go into the north and the south and clear out the terrorists using airpower (which is the safe and effective way to kill people, as we all know.) He would have had to send in ground troops.
Because of the No-Fly Zones Iraq *became* a terrorist haven. The United States created (and indeed wanted) terrorism in Iraq. The hope was that they might overthrow Saddam. Looks like they had a different goal. Oops.
Bush has tortured (abu ghraib). Bush has imprisoned (hundreds in America after 9/11). Some of those tortured have died (abu ghraib), that makes Bush a murderer. And lastly, many have been banished, many more have been deined entry to the US. (Cat Stevens probably the most famous).
I guess the difference is that Bush hasn't done these things to stay in power. He's done it as part of an open-ended undeclared war.
Is Bush a thug or not?
Saddam was a "bad leader," sure. Name one leader in the middle east who isn't. Hell even Ariel Shraon has done all the thug business you mentioned.
I believe that I don't really give a fuck how bad a leader Saddam was, he was never a threat, and this whole war is just an attempt to remake the hegemony of the middle east in our image.
I might even support the war if it were sold to me that way, but the lies of the neocons are just too much to stomach.
If the elections next month are a complete fiasco, will you change your tune? What would it take for you to realize that Iraq is a mess, it's not getting better, it's getting worse every day.
A year ago there weren't car bombs every day. A year ago the number of US casualties wasn't going up every month.
Actually I think you are forgetting one ally the US has in the Iraq war that I would suspect is footing a higher bill in lives in this war... That ally would be the Iraqi people....
YOU FORGOT POLAND!
SO what you're saying is, after he invaded Kuwait, he was unacceptable as a leader of the Iraqi people. Then why not just take him out? Why make Iraq suffer for the next dozen years with a leader you steadfastly refuse to deal with?
And who the fuck are you to decide that a leader can't be a crook? That a country can't spend all their money on the military? Do you even know what military spending is in America? Hint: it's 20 times more than any other country on the planet.
Complied with International pressure? You mean the way the US has complied with international pressure on the land mine ban, and Kyoto?
At best you're extremely hypocritical to apply all these "conditions" to Iraq but not to your own government.
Also it's very misguided to blame the Baath party for anything that happened in Iraq. Bueraucrats were doing their job. Iraq's problems came from the top down, not from the "average joe" just trying to hold down a decent job, which REQUIRES joining the Baath party.
De-Baathification is of the biggest reasons Iraq is such a mess. Fire all the bueraucrats, and lo and behold, nothing works anymore. Shocker!
It's more like $2 billion to Egypt, and the reason they hate us is because our "foreign aid" goes to propping up their military dictatorship. Same for Pakistan. Same for Saudi Arabia, except it's not a military dictatorship we're propping up, it's the House of Saud.
Do you even know what you're talking about? I think not. Foreign aid is mostly military aid. It's corporate welfare at it's finest. We give these countries billions, with the stipulation that they will spend the money on military equipment from the USA.
Whatever, I'd rather be the victim of a non-violent crime than a violent crime.
Scenario A: My bike gets stolen
Scenario B: My bike gets stolen and I get my teeth kicked in.
Which would you prefer?
I dunno, after the Challenger blew up, Reagan basically told the whole country "sorry, we'll have a State Of The Union speech next year."
Turns out the keynote speaker was feeding the fish off Florida.
I realize that NASA has set the bar for success pretty low with the Shuttle program (I could try to phrase that better but why bother) but still, you know, the interceptor didn't make it off the launchpad when the motherfucking ICBM was inbound. There's no way that's good.
But the vast majority of the work going on in Iraq is on things like the electricity grid and the water network, infrastructures that crumbled under Saddam's woeful misrule.
... decided he would rather spend the country's treasury on war with ... the United States
Don't look now, but the electricity grid and the water network and the rest of Iraq would have been working just fine if we hadn't levied crippling economic sanctions on Iraq after we bombed those very same systems in 1991.
Saddam
I see now the beauty of your logic. When Saddam spends his money on wars, rather than infrastructure improvements, that's foolish. But when Bush spends the country's treasury on war with Iraq, a few months after an "impossible" blackout shuts down the East Coast, that's the right thing to do.
You've been drinking the neocon Kool Aid, Twirlip.
Well said.
You have an extra "have" in your sig, by the way.
Foreign aid is a black hole. The only reason we still bother with it is because ...well, even if it produces no tangible benefits for us, it's still the right thing to do.
But we still need aircraft carriers and interceptor missiles.
Foreign Aid, 2003: $15 Billion
Military Budget, 2004: $399 Billion
Which one of these is a black hole again?
I would rather see some slashdot reasonable alternatives to pursuing this technology that is other than wishful thinking and a can't-we-all-just-get-along mantra.
Not pursuing this technology had been the course of action for much of the Cold War. The Anti Ballistic Missile or ABM Treaty basically said that neither side would try to "solve" the totality of destruction guaranteed by Mutually Assured Destruction.
With the Soviets out of the picture, the USA has decided they might as well go ahead and build their missile shield, since there's really noone who can tell them not to.
Let's look at the end state. Where the USA still has all its nuclear weapons, and no threat of Mutually Assured Destruction should they decide to use nukes.
This technology represnets an escalation of the threat presented by the United States. It does nothing to reduce the threat from any area of the globe, since Mutually Assured Destruction surely holds for Iran, North Korea, or heck even India and France.
Star Wars is not a defensive system. Is it an enabling technology for a workable, winnable nuclear war system.
"Congratuations! Your civilization has invented Star Wars. You are now free to nuke other countries with impunity."
So to answer your question, we were all getting along, but that wasn't a superior enough position for the United States, the Republican Party, and Neoconservatives, in increasing order.
It's going to be another arms race. The USA spends the next ten years deploying this system, which only ensures that adversaries will try to have their ICBMs ready in nine years.
Personally, I hope the defense project fails... otherwise Canada will be forced to disagree again with American policy. I'm sure there'll be economic consequences.
;)
Yeah, your dollar might go back down to what it was five years ago.
Don't worry, with NAFTA we Americans are pretty much guaranteed to get everything we ever want from Canada, which is electricity, natural gas, trees (but not too many), and a little bit of mad cow disease thrown in, just to keep things evil.
The part where the shutdown was described as automatic, the part where it was described as of unknown origin, and the part where it was described as a failure: None of these was accurately reported.
So you're saying they deliberately and knowingly shut it down, and this is to be viewed as a success.
I could go for "it could have been a lot worse" but (pardon my triple negative) I'm not seeing how this fails to be a failure.
I'm pretty sure it was Windows 95, and the 20-some-odd floppies required to do a clean install, that had people buying CD-ROM drives. The fact that the floppies were guaranteed to fail on disk 6, 7, or 8 after you used them a few times didn't hurt either ;)
I mean, I'm sure there are a few people out there who bought a CD-ROM drive just to play Wing Commander III, this is the same small yet profitable sliver of the market which buys GeForce 6800s to play DOOM III. But for the mass market, it was Windows 95 that led the consumer, grumbling, to the realm of the 2x Mitsumi.
I have a question about the map you linked to
d o_ ridotto0p25.gif
http://www.inquinamentoluminoso.it/download/mon
Are the Falklands Islands (or Maldives if you prefer) really that bright? They appear to be the most light-polluted spot in South America and that just seems odd to me. Perhaps it is an optical illusion of the projection used in the map.
I think the general consensus is that climate change is inevitable, but that humans are making it happen sooner than it would, if we just let nature run its course.
Your commentary about the herds of cattle is laughable -- cows exist because of mankind, they have practically no survival skills and wouldn't be here without us.
You mention a natural source of sulfur dioxide, which is implicated in acid rain but not so much in global warming. Is there an equivalent natural mechanism to make irrelevant the levels of CO2 or NOx emissions we are producing? And could there be a "sink" for natural emissions, yet no equivalent mitigating factor on the man-made side to offset all our output?
I'm not sure who else you could "blame" for the degradation of the atmosphere. When, due to a century of steelmaking, the snow turns brown in Pittsburgh, then they clean up their act and the snow turns white again, are you suggesting there's no correlation between those events? Last I checked there aren't any steel mills in the wild.
Ah, that's it. Campi. I knew campii looked a little off. radius > radii | campus > campi. Thanks.
Youu're 50% on grammar but you flunked the math.
(The Rubik's Cube has not two but three axes.)
Furhtermore, the existence of thousands of University campii throughout the world leads me to believe you might benefit from attending one.
Or derive the solution...
I was a kid when the Rubik's Cube came out. Our neighbor was a topologist. He went out and bought the cube, and presented it to his wife to have her scramble it. Then it sat, unmolested, on the coffee table for many nights while the topologist figured out the necessary moves to solve the puzzle.
It took him lots of pages on a legal pad but he did solve it. After about two weeks as I recall.
I, being a kid, bought the "How To Solve The Rubik's Cube" book on the family vacation and was solving the cube in under a minute shortly thereafter. I've long since forgotten the patterns, but I bet the topologist could still solve it.
The only pure GeForce 6800 (not GT or Ultra) with DDR3 is a kludge. It sounds like you want a GeForce 6800GT.
:)
Asus makes some card with "9999" in the name which is the only card I am aware of with a GeForce 6800 processor (not GT, regular, with 12 pipelines and 5 shaders) which is on a board with 256 MB DDR3 memory. And for the price of it, you're better off getting a for-real 6800GT, 16 pipelines and 6 shaders, and the same 256 MB DDR3.
How big are your tits? I might consider marriage if all that's needed to keep you happy is cutting edge computer gear. Unlike the jewelery and flowers most women want, I would benefit too
By the way I have the Zalman 5.1 surround headphones and they are alright. Nothing great but they get the job done.
Why do people take comments personally when they're meant for someone else?
Is just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Reading your sig, and reading about how you are making DVD backups for your presumably TV-addicted two year old, I can't help wonder if there might be a correlation.
I hear this device doesn't run on conventional batteries at all but is actually powered by Crystite!