The premise is flawed. Just because only 2% of works produced nearly a century ago are still commercially viable today doesn't mean this will be the case in the future.
Much of the material we're talking about has literally deteriorated due to the passage of time. No such deterioration takes place in the digital age.
This would essentially create perpetual copyrights.
Now that all the latest games have benchmarking modes, what do we need FutureMark for?
If NVidia wants to do application-specific optimizations that make UT2003 go faster, then that would be great. That's what they should be doing. Those are optimizations that genuinely benefit the user.
SuSE had a decent PPC distribution too. This seems like such a no-brainer... probably the only way you could expect widespread adoption from the Mac crowd.
You are either claiming Saddam was not responsible or not any worse than the US for every act he is commonly accused of.
No, I am claiming that there is no proof that Saddam has done any of the things that Bush Lite says he has done, and that absent that proof, it is a criminal act to invade a sovereign nation the way we have.
And he is not commonly accused of anything. The administration floats bogus accusation after bogus accusation, and the media prints it word-for-word. It is commonly reported only because today's media is shit. I am amazed that they even bother spell-checking the things the Bushlet says.
Ok above you say you are not pro-Saddam, but now you are saying he is no worse than the other leaders in the world. This is implying he is benign.
It's more likely that the other leaders are less reputable than we care to consider.
What is your source of this information?
This was an editoral in The New York Times. It states the case pretty well I'd say. Either you believe this guy, who was in a position to know, or you believe the same people who have been shown to repeatedly lie about all-things-Iraq.
The US nuclear arsenal is not the same thing as chemical weapon use during the Iran-Iraq war or using chemical weapons against the Kurds. For one thing we haven't used them since 1945.
Read that sentence again, and think for a moment.
I would hardly compare US drug policy to Saddam's brutal repression of his own people.
MECHANICSBURG, Pa. -- It was no surprise that President Bush, lacking smoking-gun evidence of Iraq's weapons programs, used his State of the Union address to re-emphasize the moral case for an invasion: ''The dictator who is assembling the world's most dangerous weapons has already used them on whole villages, leaving thousands of his own citizens dead, blind or disfigured.''
The accusation that Iraq has used chemical weapons against its citizens is a familiar part of the debate. The piece of hard evidence most frequently brought up concerns the gassing of Iraqi Kurds at the town of Halabja in March 1988, near the end of the eight-year Iran-Iraq war. President Bush himself has cited Iraq's ''gassing its own people,'' specifically at Halabja, as a reason to topple Saddam Hussein.
But the truth is, all we know for certain is that Kurds were bombarded with poison gas that day at Halabja. We cannot say with any certainty that Iraqi chemical weapons killed the Kurds. This is not the only distortion in the Halabja story.
I am in a position to know because, as the Central Intelligence Agency's senior political analyst on Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war, and as a professor at the Army War College from 1988 to 2000, I was privy to much of the classified material that flowed through Washington having to do with the Persian Gulf. In addition, I headed a 1991 Army investigation into how the Iraqis would fight a war against the United States; the classified version of the report went into great detail on the Halabja affair.
This much about the gassing at Halabja we undoubtedly know: it came about in the course of a battle between Iraqis and Iranians. Iraq used chemical weapons to try to kill Iranians who had seized the town, which is in northern Iraq not far from the Iranian border. The Kurdish civilians who died had the misfortune to be caught up in that exchange. But they were not Iraq's main target.
And the story gets murkier: immediately after the battle the United States Defense Intelligence Agency investigated and produced a classified report, which it circulated within the intelligence community on a need-to-know basis. That study asserted that it was Iranian gas that killed the Kurds, not Iraqi gas.
The agency did find that each side used gas against the other in the battle around Halabja. The condition of the dead Kurds' bodies, however, indicated they had been killed with a blood agent -- that is, a cyanide-based gas -- which Iran was known to use. The Iraqis, who are thought to have used mustard gas in the battle, are not known to have possessed blood agents at the time.
These facts have long been in the public domain but, extraordinarily, as often as the Halabja affair is cited, they are rarely mentioned. A much-discussed article in The New Yorker last March did not make reference to the Defense Intelligence Agency report or consider that Iranian gas might have killed the Kurds. On the rare occasions the report is brought up, there is usually speculation, with no proof, that it was skewed out of American political favoritism toward Iraq in its war against Iran.
I am not trying to rehabilitate the character of Saddam Hussein. He has much to answer for in the area of human rights abuses. But accusing him of gassing his own people at Halabja as an act of genocide is not correct, because as far as the information we have goes, all of the cases where gas was used involved battles. These were tragedies of war. There may be justifications for invading Iraq, but Halabja is not one of them.
In fact, those who really feel that the disaster at Halabja has bearing on today might want to consider a different question: Why was Iran so keen on taking the town? A closer look may shed light on America's impetus to invade Iraq.
We are constantly reminded that Iraq has perhaps the world's largest
You were implying Saddam didn't do anything he was accused of, usually the implication of this sort of argument is the leader in question is quite benign.
No, this isn't correct either. What usually happens is that those on your side of this argument will try to portray those on my side as being pro-Saddam, when nothing could be further from the truth.
There a big different between being benign and being so malignant as to warrant an illegal invasion of a sovereign nation.
That said, he is probably no more despicable than most of the other leaders in the world, including our own GWB. Murdering their citizens, exploiting the natural resources for themselves and their friends, I mean this is hardly news.
And Chomsky isn't just as skewed a source as Fox news?
The Chomsky quote isn't one of content, it is just a apt way of looking at the situation.
The Kurds in question were living within the internationally recognized borders of Iraq which makes them his people by most measures.
And the native Americans were Andrew Jackson's own people.
Or are you saying gassing the Kurds (or the Iranians) was justified?
Again, the best information is that they didn't gas the Kurds. That this was an act performed by the Iranians. You could ask why Iraq was engaged in chemical warfare with Iran, and I suppose that would be a valid point were it not for the fact that we sit in a nation poised ready to incinerate any nation we may choose with our nuclear arsenal. It's hard to condemn others for acts we are only to ready and willing to engage in ourselves.
How exactly is the US killing thousands of people in the war on drugs?
The police execute a few while performing these unconstitutional no-knock raids, often killing innocent civilians in the process. Denying intravenous drug users access to clean needles alone kills a few thousand every year. The mere act of criminalizing drugs causes them to be sold on the black market, where they are adulterated and of unknown dosage, so the policy is in effect responsible for most if not all of the overdose deaths your hear about.
We promote the use of the most deadly and addictive recreational drugs--alcohol and tobacco--while using violence and military force to punish those who use the safest and least addictive drugs, like marijuana.
We deliberately deprive people of choice in medical treatment, causing many to die in the process. Do a web search on Peter McWilliams sometime.
We have also banned research into certain drugs simply because we didn't want to see their illicit status threatened. The best example of this is with marijuana. Read all about it here.
Or you could read the thread I am currently engaged in on another front in this very same topic.
The potential dead from our drug policy is astronomical.
So you are saying Saddam was a great humanitarian and we just don't know it because of the imperialist US propiganda?
See? Now where did I say Saddam was a great humanitarian?
The only reason you put these words in my mouth is because your side is so weak. You cannot argue against the words I use, so you invent words of your own, attribute them to me, and then have at it.
If the Iraqis had intended to blow up the oil wells, they would have. There was no difference between their retreating from Desert Storm and Iraqi Liberty. No advanced technology is required to do blow up an oil field. You hear the enemy approaching, you set a fuse, and you're out of there.
If they were convinced that Saddam was going to engage in scorched earth, why didn't they seize the many dams in Iraq first? This would have cause far more critical infrastructure damage.
No, it's pretty clear I think. Seizing the oil wells from the outset isn't conclusive by itself, but going out of their way to shut off the oil to Syria before the fighting even stopped clearly demonstrates what the war was about. Control over oil.
Um sorry, I'm no GWB fan, but please don't try to claim that Saddam wasn't a cruel dictator.
I don't recall ever trying.
It's interesting though that you felt the need to open your mouth, without having anything of substance to say?
Is your only complaint with my posts over something I never said?
He gassed his own people and Iranians both in violation of the Geneva conventions.
No, he didn't gas his own people. This is a lie. You need to start watching something other than Fox News. And as Noam Chomsky once observed, saying that the Kurds are Saddam Hussein's own people is like saying that the native Americans were Andrew Jackson's own people. It's misleading at best, ridiculous at worst.
He killed thousands of his own people simply because they objected to his rule.
Assuming this is true, how does this differ from America. Have you been following the war on drugs lately?
What about the mass graves where the bodies were found with bullets in the back of their heads?
This was shown to be false. They retracted this story. Again, you need to watch something other than Fox. This was a grave for the dead from the Iraq-Iran war.
Sorry but nobody is going to convince me Saddam was some great humanitarian.
Like Morpheus said, some people just aren't ready to be unplugged.
I guess you have to look past the documents that we recovered from Saddam's ministry of information detailing visits from Al Qaeda's operatives.
Evidence almost nobody is taking seriously. It was just laying there, waiting for the media to discover it, *after* the building it was found in was looted, *after* the building was searched for evidence by our military.
And in any case, the documents are not conclusive at all. It isn't as if we discovered that al Qaeda was training their terrorists in Iraq or anything.
(you are aware that al Qaeda trained their terrorists in Florida, are you not?)
I'll give you that one, we havn't produced any evidence yet outside of a mobile weapon's lab
Not a nuclear lab, and if you read the fine print you'll find that the truck has dual-use potential. No traces of biological or chemical weapons. No violation of international law.
How about the fact that the inspectors found thousand upon thousands of tons of chemical and biological agents and that Saddam has never produced anything saying that he had gotten rid of him?
No such agents were ever found. Documentation, perhaps. Documentation that was valid before Desert Storm.
You expect Iraq to account for *anything* after the month-long bombardment we subjected them to? Do you seriously believe that "you blew them up" isn't likely a honest accounting for most of this stuff?
How about the cites that were absolutely wiped off the face of the earth with chemical weapons?
Chemical weapons that, as it turns out, were deployed by Iran, not Iraq.
What about the mass graves we found not too long ago with 20,000 bodies, all with chemical agents in their corpses?
Um, victims of Iraq's war with Iran? Hello? Why not consider subscribing to a newspaper or something.
Before you spout off about how everything is a fabrication by the Bush administration, try and put some evidence out.
I have. I do. It's out there.
Just because you hate the guy doesn't mean that absolutely every thing he does is wrong.
What's to hate? Just because the guy's grandfather financed the Nazi's during WWII? Or because his dad was another war criminal who trafficked in drugs to the inner-cities of America?
Should I hate the man because he was a coward who pull his daddy's strings to get out of Vietnam, and who then couldn't even manage his cushy Texas Air Force assignment without going AWOL for a full year, but who still has enough hawk in him to spill our children's blood for foolish and selfish goals like the oil in Iraq?
Should I hate the man because the man was (is?) a coke fiend who was too stupid to even manage to lie about it, but who can still see his way clear to incarcerating and murdering everybody else who uses illicit drugs in this country?
Should I hate the man because he promises to rid America of corporate graft, despite the fact that his own fortune was based on felony violations of the law?
Or because he appears to be borderline retarded?
Don't spout off about hating this man without good reason???
If the US Government funds a study it's automagically a lie. If someone else funds it is automagically the truth.
Don't believe me. Read what Johns Hopkins had to say about it. No, screw that, read the UCLA study yourself. Don't accept the spin given it by the media, actually read it for yourself. You'll see that what I am saying is correct.
BTW, the US Government's veracity here is compromised by the fact that they won't permit public institutions to conduct research on marijuana unless that research seeks to discover how marijuana causes harm *and* that study is carefully controlled to preclude the possibility that any benefits are uncovered in the process. This is how they got into trouble in the first place... that first research in 1973 by the Medical College of Virginia was supposed to be about how marijuana suppresses the immune system.
But it's not a magic bullet. There is no magic bullet for cancer, even then best treatments will never save everyone.
Tell me, how do you know this? Will you at least acknowledge that the federal government has banned public research into marijuana, until very recently, in carefully controlled circumstances using marijuana provided by the federal government itself?
Does that seem fair to you?
Does it seem reasonable to say that marijuana is not a cure for cancer when the government virtually prohibits all research to demonstrate otherwise?
And yet I can show you four studies that suggest that it may be a cure, despite the fact that the government has tried its best to suppress this knowledge.
I'm sure in your mind, someone that dies from skin cancer from staying out in the sun too much in Hong Kong died because of US drug policy.
If he could have been treated using a medicine that was known to exist but that was suppressed by the government because it would compromise their ability to control what I put into my body? Absolutely.
Let's take a look at the death tolls you listed here earlier. Using the same logic you just used with the man from Hong Kong, are you then going to say that all those who died from starvation in Russia were killed by Stalin's hand?
Can you understand that while it is very possible that a person could die from starvation under Stalin, it may have been through no overt action on Stalin's part? And that that is completely different from the man in Hong Kong who dies from a cancer for which there may have been a medicine but which was deliberately blocked by the US?
There are crimes of omission, and there are crimes of commission. No doubt Stalin directly caused many of the deaths you attributed to him, but surely there are many he had no role in, because he did not deliberately act to cause them.
Quite unlike here in the good ole U.S. of A., where our government deliberately acted to suppress, ban and destroy evidence of research they knew could save lives.
Marginalizing blacks and hippies was too important to let a few hundred million deaths from cancer get in the way.
Whatever. I have good reason to call this country barbaric. If you want to keep your head in the sand that's fine. Just don't tell me this country is all apple pie and red, white & blue, because that's a huge steaming pile of shit.
America *is* barbaric, and I will continue calling it that until my dying day, or until we stop the madness and end this goddamned war on drugs.
Well since this was the one and only justification given for invading Iraq, you'll forgive the rest of us if we continue to hold that it was an illegal invasion, that all the killing of innocent civilians was unnecessary, and that when now faced with a genuine threat to our security there's a very real risk that the world will treat our warning cries much as the townspeople did the boy who cried wolf.
UCLA says smoking weed leads to lung cancer and that THC supresses anti-tumor immune responses.
Thanks for the link. Were you perhaps referring to this study? The study that was funded by the federal government, i.e., the study where if they don't report what the federal government wants to hear they'll lose their funding? Well that was put to rest by a research at Johns Hopkins Medical School who concluded in effect that no such risk exists. UCLA was doing bogus science. Indeed, if you read their report carefully, you'll note that cancer was never caused by the THC; that they simply thought it would occur based on the higher concentrations of certainl chemicals marijuana smoke shares with tobacco smoke, forgetting the whole time that a marijuana user inhales far, far less smoke than the average tobacco smoker.
Of course they had to say something though. Remember that this came out shortly after Dr. Guzman's work in Madrid.
Criminalizing IV drugs spreads AIDS? Is that like criminalizing cats spreads mice?
No, not at all. According to the logic put forth by our drug policy, heroin is a menace because once addicted the user loses the ability to choose (nevermind the fact that tobacco and alcohol are more addictive than heroin according to the NIDA.) So if these addicts have no choice but to use drugs, the only people with the opportunity to make a choice as to whether they transmit deadly diseases or not are those who stand in the way of these addicts using their drugs safely.
In other words, we know they're going to use heroin, and they want to use heroin safely, but we won't let them. We would rather see them spread deadly diseases than let them use clean syringes.
Like I said. Barbaric.
The fact is that the majority of AIDS/HIV transmission comes from sex and from infected mothers giving birth, not drugs.
The fact is that most people die of natural causes, so it's OK for us to kill? Your logic is rephrehsible.
These "indisputable" facts are easily disputed. There is zero evidence that THC would be a magic cure for the hundreds of cancers.
I've just given you four links that say otherwise.
And there is no way that anyone can blame the US for the 6 million cancer deaths world-wide.
It's our drug policy. And thanks to our economic and military might, we've seen to it that this policy is exported throughout the world. Get put on our list of "uncooperative" nations and watch your economy go into the shithole. Stand accused of aiding or abetting drug traffickers and watch our military kill hundreds if not thousands of your citizens.
And by the way, the figure is closer to 300,000,000. From cancer alone that is. Or at least, that is the number of lives that at best we've recklessly endangered. 30 years * 10,000,000 @ year = 300,000,000.
If it's so indisputable, then the Ministries/Departments/Directorates of Health of the other 200+ nation-states on Earth and the World Health Organization are equally guilty.
Do you read the news at all? We were voted out of the U.N. Committee on Narcotics last year! The world is chomping at the bit to institu
OBVIOUSLY WE WENT INTO IRAQ TO CONTROL THEIR OIL! THE VERY FIRST THING WE WENT AFTER WAS THE OIL WELLS! AND WHAT'S THE FIRST THING WE DID WITH THOSE WELLS??? SHUT OFF THE OIL TO SYRIA!
The president went before the American people and did nothing but lie to justify this war.
The al Qaeda link to Hussein? There was none. It was a lie.
The supposed proof that Saddam was building nuclear weapons? It was a forgery. It was a lie.
The supposed evidence that Saddam was building other WMD's? It was a plagiarized school report over a decade old! It was a lie!
Just like all the lies told about Iraq before. Like the Kuwaiti babies being ripped from their incubators by the Iraqis. It was a lie.
Or the Iraqi troops massed on the border with Saudi Arabia. Another lie.
The basic facts contained within are indisputable:
It is a fact that cancer has killed on the order of a half-million Americans every year since 1973; that America is but one-twentieth of the world's population, so that the death toll from cancer worldwide is very likely ~10,000,000 annually.
It is a fact that at least four separate medical studies have confirmed that the active ingredient in marijuana, THC, is remarkably effective in treating various forms of cancer; in some cases it is so effective as to completely eradicate cancerous tumors.
And it is a fact that the federal government, upon first learning of THC's effectiveness in treating cancer, ordered the research stopped, banned all subsequent public research and attempted to destroy any and all records that any such research had ever taken place.
It really doesn't matter whether THC is the cure for cancer, or not. What matters is that the federal government had every reason to believe that it could be, and yet they shut the door to research and did their very best to keep it a secret.
The potential death toll from this act alone dwarfs those puny numbers you list above. They don't even come close.
Add to that the death toll from our drug policy in general. Consider that ours is a drug policy that promotes the use of the very deadliest and most addictive recreational drugs--alcohol and tobacco--while using violence achieved through military force to punish the use of the very safest and least addictive of all recreational drugs: marijuana.
Or another example, our criminalizing the use of intravenous drugs, knowing full well that needle-borne diseases like AIDS/HIV would spread like wildfire, killing even more people.
I could go on. All the deaths caused by adulteration or unknowable dosage, deaths we know could be erased with a sane drug policy, and yet we choose to keep killing people.
Just a small example of just how barbaric this nation truly is. As your list so ably demonstrates, nobody comes close. They are but pale imitations of the true masters of human carnage: the United States of America.
They need to follow it up with extensive space-based surveillance and ABM/ASAT capabilities.
To say nothing of all the work they have to do in conventional forces.
America the beautful has given way to America the barbaric. If there is to be a future that sees a world at peace, the EU may very be our last, best hope.
Slashdot Mirror
The premise is flawed. Just because only 2% of works produced nearly a century ago are still commercially viable today doesn't mean this will be the case in the future.
Much of the material we're talking about has literally deteriorated due to the passage of time. No such deterioration takes place in the digital age.
This would essentially create perpetual copyrights.
This is a very bad idea.
You think OS X is going to be cheap forever?
Now that all the latest games have benchmarking modes, what do we need FutureMark for?
If NVidia wants to do application-specific optimizations that make UT2003 go faster, then that would be great. That's what they should be doing. Those are optimizations that genuinely benefit the user.
SuSE had a decent PPC distribution too. This seems like such a no-brainer... probably the only way you could expect widespread adoption from the Mac crowd.
Almost any room you put a new Mac in is going to look ugly by comparison.
I want to see the iRoom. With an iDesk, an iLamp, and an iSeat.
Them maybe we talk about awards and such.
Look at the Alien Side Panel. Is it me or does it look like somebody else is doing something "creative" with their hands?
Is this how the alien became blind?
Ironic, if the box is being used to download pr0n, yes?
An excellent example of how two rights make a wrong.
Combine Star Trek with Tolkien and get... ohmigod!!!
Um.. you mean the fact that we were already in a state of war with Iraq (and had been since '90 or '91)
War was never declared.
And by the way, all those violations of Iraq's sovereignty, the so-called incursions into the no-fly zones, those were illegal too.
They didn't violate the terms. There are no WMD's.
Illegal invasion. An America that is on par with Nazi Germany.
Have a nice day/burn in hell.
You are either claiming Saddam was not responsible or not any worse than the US for every act he is commonly accused of.
No, I am claiming that there is no proof that Saddam has done any of the things that Bush Lite says he has done, and that absent that proof, it is a criminal act to invade a sovereign nation the way we have.
And he is not commonly accused of anything. The administration floats bogus accusation after bogus accusation, and the media prints it word-for-word. It is commonly reported only because today's media is shit. I am amazed that they even bother spell-checking the things the Bushlet says.
Ok above you say you are not pro-Saddam, but now you are saying he is no worse than the other leaders in the world. This is implying he is benign.
It's more likely that the other leaders are less reputable than we care to consider.
What is your source of this information?
This was an editoral in The New York Times. It states the case pretty well I'd say. Either you believe this guy, who was in a position to know, or you believe the same people who have been shown to repeatedly lie about all-things-Iraq.
The US nuclear arsenal is not the same thing as chemical weapon use during the Iran-Iraq war or using chemical weapons against the Kurds. For one thing we haven't used them since 1945.
Read that sentence again, and think for a moment.
I would hardly compare US drug policy to Saddam's brutal repression of his own people.
Neither would I.
New York Times
January 31, 2003, Friday
EDITORIAL DESK
A War Crime Or an Act of War?
By Stephen C. Pelletiere ( Op-Ed ) 1128 words
MECHANICSBURG, Pa. -- It was no surprise that President Bush, lacking smoking-gun evidence of Iraq's weapons programs, used his State of the Union address to re-emphasize the moral case for an invasion: ''The dictator who is assembling the world's most dangerous weapons has already used them on whole villages, leaving thousands of his own citizens dead, blind or disfigured.''
The accusation that Iraq has used chemical weapons against its citizens is a familiar part of the debate. The piece of hard evidence most frequently brought up concerns the gassing of Iraqi Kurds at the town of Halabja in March 1988, near the end of the eight-year Iran-Iraq war. President Bush himself has cited Iraq's ''gassing its own people,'' specifically at Halabja, as a reason to topple Saddam Hussein.
But the truth is, all we know for certain is that Kurds were bombarded with poison gas that day at Halabja. We cannot say with any certainty that Iraqi chemical weapons killed the Kurds. This is not the only distortion in the Halabja story.
I am in a position to know because, as the Central Intelligence Agency's senior political analyst on Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war, and as a professor at the Army War College from 1988 to 2000, I was privy to much of the classified material that flowed through Washington having to do with the Persian Gulf. In addition, I headed a 1991 Army investigation into how the Iraqis would fight a war against the United States; the classified version of the report went into great detail on the Halabja affair.
This much about the gassing at Halabja we undoubtedly know: it came about in the course of a battle between Iraqis and Iranians. Iraq used chemical weapons to try to kill Iranians who had seized the town, which is in northern Iraq not far from the Iranian border. The Kurdish civilians who died had the misfortune to be caught up in that exchange. But they were not Iraq's main target.
And the story gets murkier: immediately after the battle the United States Defense Intelligence Agency investigated and produced a classified report, which it circulated within the intelligence community on a need-to-know basis. That study asserted that it was Iranian gas that killed the Kurds, not Iraqi gas.
The agency did find that each side used gas against the other in the battle around Halabja. The condition of the dead Kurds' bodies, however, indicated they had been killed with a blood agent -- that is, a cyanide-based gas -- which Iran was known to use. The Iraqis, who are thought to have used mustard gas in the battle, are not known to have possessed blood agents at the time.
These facts have long been in the public domain but, extraordinarily, as often as the Halabja affair is cited, they are rarely mentioned. A much-discussed article in The New Yorker last March did not make reference to the Defense Intelligence Agency report or consider that Iranian gas might have killed the Kurds. On the rare occasions the report is brought up, there is usually speculation, with no proof, that it was skewed out of American political favoritism toward Iraq in its war against Iran.
I am not trying to rehabilitate the character of Saddam Hussein. He has much to answer for in the area of human rights abuses. But accusing him of gassing his own people at Halabja as an act of genocide is not correct, because as far as the information we have goes, all of the cases where gas was used involved battles. These were tragedies of war. There may be justifications for invading Iraq, but Halabja is not one of them.
In fact, those who really feel that the disaster at Halabja has bearing on today might want to consider a different question: Why was Iran so keen on taking the town? A closer look may shed light on America's impetus to invade Iraq.
We are constantly reminded that Iraq has perhaps the world's largest
You were implying Saddam didn't do anything he was accused of, usually the implication of this sort of argument is the leader in question is quite benign.
No, this isn't correct either. What usually happens is that those on your side of this argument will try to portray those on my side as being pro-Saddam, when nothing could be further from the truth.
There a big different between being benign and being so malignant as to warrant an illegal invasion of a sovereign nation.
That said, he is probably no more despicable than most of the other leaders in the world, including our own GWB. Murdering their citizens, exploiting the natural resources for themselves and their friends, I mean this is hardly news.
And Chomsky isn't just as skewed a source as Fox news?
The Chomsky quote isn't one of content, it is just a apt way of looking at the situation.
The Kurds in question were living within the internationally recognized borders of Iraq which makes them his people by most measures.
And the native Americans were Andrew Jackson's own people.
Or are you saying gassing the Kurds (or the Iranians) was justified?
Again, the best information is that they didn't gas the Kurds. That this was an act performed by the Iranians. You could ask why Iraq was engaged in chemical warfare with Iran, and I suppose that would be a valid point were it not for the fact that we sit in a nation poised ready to incinerate any nation we may choose with our nuclear arsenal. It's hard to condemn others for acts we are only to ready and willing to engage in ourselves.
How exactly is the US killing thousands of people in the war on drugs?
The police execute a few while performing these unconstitutional no-knock raids, often killing innocent civilians in the process. Denying intravenous drug users access to clean needles alone kills a few thousand every year. The mere act of criminalizing drugs causes them to be sold on the black market, where they are adulterated and of unknown dosage, so the policy is in effect responsible for most if not all of the overdose deaths your hear about.
We promote the use of the most deadly and addictive recreational drugs--alcohol and tobacco--while using violence and military force to punish those who use the safest and least addictive drugs, like marijuana.
We deliberately deprive people of choice in medical treatment, causing many to die in the process. Do a web search on Peter McWilliams sometime.
We have also banned research into certain drugs simply because we didn't want to see their illicit status threatened. The best example of this is with marijuana. Read all about it here.
Or you could read the thread I am currently engaged in on another front in this very same topic.
The potential dead from our drug policy is astronomical.
So you are saying Saddam was a great humanitarian and we just don't know it because of the imperialist US propiganda?
See? Now where did I say Saddam was a great humanitarian?
The only reason you put these words in my mouth is because your side is so weak. You cannot argue against the words I use, so you invent words of your own, attribute them to me, and then have at it.
It's pathetic.
I accept your correction.
If the Iraqis had intended to blow up the oil wells, they would have. There was no difference between their retreating from Desert Storm and Iraqi Liberty. No advanced technology is required to do blow up an oil field. You hear the enemy approaching, you set a fuse, and you're out of there.
If they were convinced that Saddam was going to engage in scorched earth, why didn't they seize the many dams in Iraq first? This would have cause far more critical infrastructure damage.
No, it's pretty clear I think. Seizing the oil wells from the outset isn't conclusive by itself, but going out of their way to shut off the oil to Syria before the fighting even stopped clearly demonstrates what the war was about. Control over oil.
You drive an SUV?
Um sorry, I'm no GWB fan, but please don't try to claim that Saddam wasn't a cruel dictator.
I don't recall ever trying.
It's interesting though that you felt the need to open your mouth, without having anything of substance to say?
Is your only complaint with my posts over something I never said?
He gassed his own people and Iranians both in violation of the Geneva conventions.
No, he didn't gas his own people. This is a lie. You need to start watching something other than Fox News. And as Noam Chomsky once observed, saying that the Kurds are Saddam Hussein's own people is like saying that the native Americans were Andrew Jackson's own people. It's misleading at best, ridiculous at worst.
He killed thousands of his own people simply because they objected to his rule.
Assuming this is true, how does this differ from America. Have you been following the war on drugs lately?
What about the mass graves where the bodies were found with bullets in the back of their heads?
This was shown to be false. They retracted this story. Again, you need to watch something other than Fox. This was a grave for the dead from the Iraq-Iran war.
Sorry but nobody is going to convince me Saddam was some great humanitarian.
Like Morpheus said, some people just aren't ready to be unplugged.
I guess you have to look past the documents that we recovered from Saddam's ministry of information detailing visits from Al Qaeda's operatives.
Evidence almost nobody is taking seriously. It was just laying there, waiting for the media to discover it, *after* the building it was found in was looted, *after* the building was searched for evidence by our military.
And in any case, the documents are not conclusive at all. It isn't as if we discovered that al Qaeda was training their terrorists in Iraq or anything.
(you are aware that al Qaeda trained their terrorists in Florida, are you not?)
I'll give you that one, we havn't produced any evidence yet outside of a mobile weapon's lab
Not a nuclear lab, and if you read the fine print you'll find that the truck has dual-use potential. No traces of biological or chemical weapons. No violation of international law.
How about the fact that the inspectors found thousand upon thousands of tons of chemical and biological agents and that Saddam has never produced anything saying that he had gotten rid of him?
No such agents were ever found. Documentation, perhaps. Documentation that was valid before Desert Storm.
You expect Iraq to account for *anything* after the month-long bombardment we subjected them to? Do you seriously believe that "you blew them up" isn't likely a honest accounting for most of this stuff?
How about the cites that were absolutely wiped off the face of the earth with chemical weapons?
Chemical weapons that, as it turns out, were deployed by Iran, not Iraq.
What about the mass graves we found not too long ago with 20,000 bodies, all with chemical agents in their corpses?
Um, victims of Iraq's war with Iran? Hello? Why not consider subscribing to a newspaper or something.
Before you spout off about how everything is a fabrication by the Bush administration, try and put some evidence out.
I have. I do. It's out there.
Just because you hate the guy doesn't mean that absolutely every thing he does is wrong.
What's to hate? Just because the guy's grandfather financed the Nazi's during WWII? Or because his dad was another war criminal who trafficked in drugs to the inner-cities of America?
Should I hate the man because he was a coward who pull his daddy's strings to get out of Vietnam, and who then couldn't even manage his cushy Texas Air Force assignment without going AWOL for a full year, but who still has enough hawk in him to spill our children's blood for foolish and selfish goals like the oil in Iraq?
Should I hate the man because the man was (is?) a coke fiend who was too stupid to even manage to lie about it, but who can still see his way clear to incarcerating and murdering everybody else who uses illicit drugs in this country?
Should I hate the man because he promises to rid America of corporate graft, despite the fact that his own fortune was based on felony violations of the law?
Or because he appears to be borderline retarded?
Don't spout off about hating this man without good reason???
If the US Government funds a study it's automagically a lie. If someone else funds it is automagically the truth.
Don't believe me. Read what Johns Hopkins had to say about it. No, screw that, read the UCLA study yourself. Don't accept the spin given it by the media, actually read it for yourself. You'll see that what I am saying is correct.
BTW, the US Government's veracity here is compromised by the fact that they won't permit public institutions to conduct research on marijuana unless that research seeks to discover how marijuana causes harm *and* that study is carefully controlled to preclude the possibility that any benefits are uncovered in the process. This is how they got into trouble in the first place... that first research in 1973 by the Medical College of Virginia was supposed to be about how marijuana suppresses the immune system.
But it's not a magic bullet. There is no magic bullet for cancer, even then best treatments will never save everyone.
Tell me, how do you know this? Will you at least acknowledge that the federal government has banned public research into marijuana, until very recently, in carefully controlled circumstances using marijuana provided by the federal government itself?
Does that seem fair to you?
Does it seem reasonable to say that marijuana is not a cure for cancer when the government virtually prohibits all research to demonstrate otherwise?
And yet I can show you four studies that suggest that it may be a cure, despite the fact that the government has tried its best to suppress this knowledge.
I'm sure in your mind, someone that dies from skin cancer from staying out in the sun too much in Hong Kong died because of US drug policy.
If he could have been treated using a medicine that was known to exist but that was suppressed by the government because it would compromise their ability to control what I put into my body? Absolutely.
Let's take a look at the death tolls you listed here earlier. Using the same logic you just used with the man from Hong Kong, are you then going to say that all those who died from starvation in Russia were killed by Stalin's hand?
Can you understand that while it is very possible that a person could die from starvation under Stalin, it may have been through no overt action on Stalin's part? And that that is completely different from the man in Hong Kong who dies from a cancer for which there may have been a medicine but which was deliberately blocked by the US?
There are crimes of omission, and there are crimes of commission. No doubt Stalin directly caused many of the deaths you attributed to him, but surely there are many he had no role in, because he did not deliberately act to cause them.
Quite unlike here in the good ole U.S. of A., where our government deliberately acted to suppress, ban and destroy evidence of research they knew could save lives.
Marginalizing blacks and hippies was too important to let a few hundred million deaths from cancer get in the way.
Whatever. I have good reason to call this country barbaric. If you want to keep your head in the sand that's fine. Just don't tell me this country is all apple pie and red, white & blue, because that's a huge steaming pile of shit.
America *is* barbaric, and I will continue calling it that until my dying day, or until we stop the madness and end this goddamned war on drugs.
I don't really care if we find any though.
Well since this was the one and only justification given for invading Iraq, you'll forgive the rest of us if we continue to hold that it was an illegal invasion, that all the killing of innocent civilians was unnecessary, and that when now faced with a genuine threat to our security there's a very real risk that the world will treat our warning cries much as the townspeople did the boy who cried wolf.
And for every study linking THC to stopping cancer there is a study refuting that.
Bullshit. Here are the studies I know of.
Here's a study.
Here's another study.
And another.
And then of course there is Dr. Guzman's work itself.
Now you show us the studies that refuse these.
UCLA says smoking weed leads to lung cancer and that THC supresses anti-tumor immune responses.
Thanks for the link. Were you perhaps referring to this study? The study that was funded by the federal government, i.e., the study where if they don't report what the federal government wants to hear they'll lose their funding? Well that was put to rest by a research at Johns Hopkins Medical School who concluded in effect that no such risk exists. UCLA was doing bogus science. Indeed, if you read their report carefully, you'll note that cancer was never caused by the THC; that they simply thought it would occur based on the higher concentrations of certainl chemicals marijuana smoke shares with tobacco smoke, forgetting the whole time that a marijuana user inhales far, far less smoke than the average tobacco smoker.
Of course they had to say something though. Remember that this came out shortly after Dr. Guzman's work in Madrid.
Criminalizing IV drugs spreads AIDS? Is that like criminalizing cats spreads mice?
No, not at all. According to the logic put forth by our drug policy, heroin is a menace because once addicted the user loses the ability to choose (nevermind the fact that tobacco and alcohol are more addictive than heroin according to the NIDA.) So if these addicts have no choice but to use drugs, the only people with the opportunity to make a choice as to whether they transmit deadly diseases or not are those who stand in the way of these addicts using their drugs safely.
In other words, we know they're going to use heroin, and they want to use heroin safely, but we won't let them. We would rather see them spread deadly diseases than let them use clean syringes.
Like I said. Barbaric.
The fact is that the majority of AIDS/HIV transmission comes from sex and from infected mothers giving birth, not drugs.
The fact is that most people die of natural causes, so it's OK for us to kill? Your logic is rephrehsible.
These "indisputable" facts are easily disputed. There is zero evidence that THC would be a magic cure for the hundreds of cancers.
I've just given you four links that say otherwise.
And there is no way that anyone can blame the US for the 6 million cancer deaths world-wide.
It's our drug policy. And thanks to our economic and military might, we've seen to it that this policy is exported throughout the world. Get put on our list of "uncooperative" nations and watch your economy go into the shithole. Stand accused of aiding or abetting drug traffickers and watch our military kill hundreds if not thousands of your citizens.
And by the way, the figure is closer to 300,000,000. From cancer alone that is. Or at least, that is the number of lives that at best we've recklessly endangered. 30 years * 10,000,000 @ year = 300,000,000.
If it's so indisputable, then the Ministries/Departments/Directorates of Health of the other 200+ nation-states on Earth and the World Health Organization are equally guilty.
Do you read the news at all? We were voted out of the U.N. Committee on Narcotics last year! The world is chomping at the bit to institu
That's why we went to war y'know!
WHERE ARE THEY????
OBVIOUSLY WE WENT INTO IRAQ TO CONTROL THEIR OIL! THE VERY FIRST THING WE WENT AFTER WAS THE OIL WELLS! AND WHAT'S THE FIRST THING WE DID WITH THOSE WELLS??? SHUT OFF THE OIL TO SYRIA!
The president went before the American people and did nothing but lie to justify this war.
Just like all the lies told about Iraq before. Like the Kuwaiti babies being ripped from their incubators by the Iraqis. It was a lie.
Or the Iraqi troops massed on the border with Saudi Arabia. Another lie.
Sell your shit someplace else.
Impressive list of body counts. Of course, you could take the total and it still wouldn't compare with the barbarity of America.
Please read this: http://www.projectcensored.org/publications/2001/
The basic facts contained within are indisputable:
It really doesn't matter whether THC is the cure for cancer, or not. What matters is that the federal government had every reason to believe that it could be, and yet they shut the door to research and did their very best to keep it a secret.
The potential death toll from this act alone dwarfs those puny numbers you list above. They don't even come close.
Add to that the death toll from our drug policy in general. Consider that ours is a drug policy that promotes the use of the very deadliest and most addictive recreational drugs--alcohol and tobacco--while using violence achieved through military force to punish the use of the very safest and least addictive of all recreational drugs: marijuana.
Or another example, our criminalizing the use of intravenous drugs, knowing full well that needle-borne diseases like AIDS/HIV would spread like wildfire, killing even more people.
I could go on. All the deaths caused by adulteration or unknowable dosage, deaths we know could be erased with a sane drug policy, and yet we choose to keep killing people.
Just a small example of just how barbaric this nation truly is. As your list so ably demonstrates, nobody comes close. They are but pale imitations of the true masters of human carnage: the United States of America.
Go Europe!
http://www.projectcensored.org/publications/2001/2 2.html
They need to follow it up with extensive space-based surveillance and ABM/ASAT capabilities.
To say nothing of all the work they have to do in conventional forces.
America the beautful has given way to America the barbaric. If there is to be a future that sees a world at peace, the EU may very be our last, best hope.
Thank you for your support.
Talk about an embedded product!
When will TechTV demonstrate this I wonder?
Bring on Sumi Das!!!
You all died? Where are all the posts?
Does this mean I shouldn't expect anymore karma?