If you poke around the web enough, you find the authors of the website admitting to having written the manuscript themselves.
I was just trying to carry on the mythos. Like all those university library records that include the Necronomicon and, a certain supposedly translated Floren fairy tale. Always funny when someone goes off trying to get hold of one of these.;)
I have seen the documentary however. It's pretty funny if you like that sort of thing, and just plain weird if you don't.
questionable content (sex, occultism, violence)
Is it still beastiality if the creature is only part mole, crow and ant, but partially decomposed human being? (Am thinking of where the daughters summon a Byakhee because they can't find a suitable boy).
Still, if you ever persuade a theatre to let you stage it and you need a Lavinia Whately, however...:)
The one that had songs with lyrics like:
"Byakhee, Byahee, Fly Me Through Space,
"Take me away, far from this place,"
"Byakhee, Byakhee, now heed my call,"
crescendo
"I've done the spells, I've done them all!"
I've seen it - it's odd. There are recurrant rumours that somebody somewhere is actually going to stage it again!
Other way round, but we're a smart audience. It rather depends what time frame you're talking about doesn't it? If the world ends tomorrow, then maybe there's time to right a few wrongs by any means necessary. But assuming that it doesn't, then how does buying into a system of government where you require money to have a say improve things in the long run? When the problem is someone else, then working within the system can be effective. When the problem is the system itself, then working within the system cannot be effective.
The ends only justify the means if there are acutal ends, otherwise "ends" are just place markers whilst means are the direction. Personally, I see Google just taking a step on a road filled with good intentions.
"Human loyalties" are what matter, and that person who began the thread with "nerd solidarity" was me.
I'm not declaring that the UN should supercede national governments. When I say that national governments can be made redundant, that is not because I'm saying the UN should replace it. I'm saying that in many cases, we have reached such a level of self-organization that nothing need replace it. Don't take my argument to extremes, I don't suppose that if all government vanished tomorrow we'd live in a happy anarchist utopia, but take the example we're talking about: the Internet does not need to be run by a centralised body under the jurisdiction of one government. When the alternative is an open distributed system, then the current situation can only really be regarded as a weakness in the system, both from a technical and a political view point. Putting the control under the UN might mitigate the political risks and reassure people that they are not being held hostage by the US. But it wouldn't remove the risks entirely. Distributed is the way to go.
If this thread has branched now, and we are discussing the UN vs. national governments in general rather than specific to the DNS, then neither is more worthy of your loyalty than simple human loyalty based on choice of who we feel share our goals and priniciples. Loyalty should never be unquestioning. However, you could make the case that the UN is loyalty to a wider spectrum of humanity than is loyalty to a nation state is. As pointed out earlier, people often have much more in common with counterparts in other countries than with the elites of their own country, hence the UN more closely mirrors this. Equally you could make the same case in with the power elites of different nations saying they have more in common with each other than with the general public of their own countries, and substitute the EU, the IMF or OPEC for the UN. Ironically, they are often more ready to accept this viewpoint than the general public.
There should be a good system for countries to negotiate with each other as an open community, rather than endless and secretive dealing between small groups as has been the case historically. Remove the UN and you just need to re-create it with a different name and bereaucracy. It can have a useful role in international courts, treaties and peace-brokering. It is not a replacement for national governments. Managing things for ourselves (like distributed DNS) is the replacement for national governments.
Which come to think of it, is maybe why the UN advocates taking control of the root servers rather than just supporting an open system - it would undermine the whole principle of government. But then again, maybe they're just comprised of people with a weak grasp of the technology which brings us back to my original point - governments (national or international) are not the best people for the job. Give it to the us the community and we'll really take things forward.
If nation states are obsolete where the Internet is concerned, then why is a collection of nation states any less obsolete?
The Internet is a global medium that has no natural divisions along nation state lines. That's why nation states are obsolete in terms of Internet governance. You could apply the same argument to any other global process such as satellite communications or many international businesses. However, this does not mean that nation states don't exist! And they clearly do have interests. Therefore a body that co-ordinates these interests makes sense.
That's true. -1 Hyperbole to Me... He who fights monsters etc. Still, we are complex creatures and we can be members of many different sets. So whilst on one axis brother and sister techiness may not outweigh, for example, common language or social mores across nations, I feel it very often outweighs the individual-government connection. That is to say, if I drew a proportional Venn diagram of us all, there would often be more overlap between techies of different countries than there would be between techies and the governments and corporate elites of their own countries.
And in this discussion, it is the government that is the relevant axis of comparison. Happy to see what you are saying, but I hope you can also see what I am saying. I don't think they are actually incompatible... or at least there is a good degree of overlap on the Venn diagram.;)
"Wow. So if a foreign spy asked you to sell secrets for some cash you would be a taker? No allegiance to country, that being a silly 'old fashioned value.'"
Well it's a hypothetical, because I value my integrity very highly. But if I lived in Nazi Germany I would have few qualms aiding the allies. If I lived in Massacheusetts in 1775, then I would have no problems betraying my British government. The nation does not have the power to tell me where my loyalties lie and is not entitled to them regardless of their actions. It can earn them the same way anyone else does.
Have to leap in here purely because you've misquoted my post and the resulting change of meaning is grotesquely different. I didn't describe the US as a country of technically ignorant people. Those are your words and shame on you. I described the US government and its corporate backers as being tech-ignorant and neophobic. This covers groups like the MPAA/RIAA and those politicians who percieve the Internet as a terrible threat to their powerbase (which it is). These people have little in common with the tech-savvy/. poster. Much the same as the UK government, or the French government, or most other world governments don't. My point was that allowing a government to tell people which group they are loyal to based on accident of birth is to deny any existence of personal responsibility. Techies in the US or the EU have far more in common in both interests and goals, than they do with their respective governments.
You have also misread my post again when you say that I am advocating UN control. I believe US control is a problem because it vests too much power in a single group that cannot be reprimanded if it is misused. My suggestion is that control should be distributed.
In future, please try and read what is actually written, rather than argue against what you expected to hear.
What's with all this "we" business? Unless the poster actually had a founding hand in setting up what became the Internet, then how do they have any more right to it than anyone else? Because they happen to have been born in the same country as people who did? Accident of birth is no ethical basis for distributing non-local resources.
Do the US posters here really feel they have more in common with all other americans than they do with counterpart techies in Europe or Asia or Africa? Which community are you going to give precedence to? The US government that is comprised of tech-ignorant people with vested corporate interests (RIAA / MPAA, Pentagon, et al) and little adventurous spirit, or the IT literate and neophile tech community?
There is no reason why DNS could not be a distributed community effort. We've reached the level where such a thing could be implemented reliably. Hand it over to the techies. No-one will be happy with the means of modern information exchange under the control of one governmental organization no matter how much they tell us that "it's okay - we're the good guys."
People here spouting Fuck Em comments about the UN should ask themselves why they identify so much with their government. Why this sudden rush of Us and Them? Allowing a government to assign your loyalties to you by accident of birth seems a little old fashioned. Most posters at/. have a great deal more in common with each other than we do with our elected politicians and their corporate backers. If we're talking aobut wresting control of the Internet away from ICANN (which despite the name, certainly BUSH considers to be under the control of the US government), then we should be talking about wresting control of it for ourselves. Nation states are obsolete where the Internet is concerned, so please lets drop the sudden surge in Nationalism. The Internet is for all of us.
I've actually read the accepted transcripts of Jeanne's trial and the quote I've taken is definitely not in there, I agree It is commonly attributed to her however.
There's no doubt that there have been variations on it throughout history and I can actually top your Aesop's fables reference with one from Thucydides who says much the same thing (fairly sure he predates Aesop). Just don't ask me to look up an exact line number and phrasing now. Still, I admire Jeanne D'Arc very much and I particularly like the way it is phrased in French - Help Yourself and the Sky will Aid You. Translating it loses the beautiful balance of the phrase though.
I'd say there's an empirical way of testing this. Do the Taiwanese pay taxes to the mainland government, are mainland government laws enforced in Taiwan? No, in both cases. Has Taiwan managed to maintain this state of affairs for a reasonable period of time? Yes. Then Taiwan has earnt its right not to be called a province.
Doesn't stop Google annoying the mainland government by calling it such, but you shouldn't let economics get in the way of the truth.
Have to post just to offset some of the dismissive reviews above. It was really well done, especially the acting the CGI space battles. I'd disagree that the action scenes were weak. They weren't hollywood blockbuster, but that wasn't the point. I'm sure that hand-fight between Pirk and Sherrypie was a pastiche on the terrible Star Trek hand to hand fighting., especially that flying kick.
Sherrypie was doing a brilliant take off of Sheridan - really had the mannerisms down well. Ivanovitsa was also very very good.
I also wont give away the ending, but I like both the twist and that the viewer is allowed to think "Do they really mean that..." without being hit over the head by it.
But the BIOS bootscreen was just perfect. Perfect!
I've only ever seen a few Star Treks (allergy to bad physics and internal inconsistency) but I did love Babylon V and this was an excellent take off. Spectacular for a small private production, really.
If anyone remotely to do with this project is stroking his vanity by reading these posts about the project, here's a suggestion for the project. Don't use a hand-crank, use a foot pedal. Like the old sewing machines, a little treadle is [b]much[/b] more natural to use and you can use it while you work, for hours if need be. Compare size of muscles in your arm with the muscles in your calves. Point made?
Nevertheless, you began this by stating how generous the USA was in its foreign aid. This is not really the case.
Regarding Israel, which you say is the largest single recipient, re-read my post and find that this is what I said. Given that Israel is hardly an impoverished nation and spends a goodly proportion of that aid on importing US weapons, it starts to look like nothing more than a money laundering operation for the Pentagon. Regarding donations to the rest of the Middle East dwarfing the donation to Israel which is 12.5% of the pie, you'll find that the rest of the Middle East gets almost nothing, unless you include Egypt at 9.5%.
Egypt is a frequent ally of the US and 2/3rds of the aid is in the form of military hardware. So I wouldn't worry about not getting anything in return for your aid, the US arms industry does fairly well out of it. The rest of the aid to Egypt does help shore up its economy and so contributes to some stability in the middle east.
I'm not sure how you can interpret the financial sink-hole that is Iraq as being an aid recipient. The money pouring in for "reconstruction" is not being put into the local community but into US contractors. There have been many cases where Iraqi companies are forbidden to tender and undercut the US companies.
I'm not sure how you say its easy for Denmark to be high in donations because of low internal aid. If you mean welfare (in US terms) then Denmark provides a much better social benefit for the deprived or unemployed than the US, along with funding many programs to help people.
Note that nothing I have said contradicts your final point about "giving money to a bum" but if you want to make that case, do it seperately from trying to imply that the US is massively generous in its aid. If you yourself earned $30k per annum then you personally would have donated $30 to those less fortunate than yourself, if the GDP was entirely generated by the public's taxes that is, but which, of course, it isn't.
However, if you want to see some positive outcomes of aid, you could try here and explore the rest of the site too for a lot more details about what aid can do. When properly applied it can changes people's lives.
You may think you're pretty generous as a percentage of GDP, but last I heard, it was 0.1%, i.e. 1/1000 of GDP. Denmark ranks highest at 1.01%, ten times as much. The UK has just increased to 0.7%, seven times as much. European average is, I think, a little below this.
Regarding aid being wasted on tin-pot dictators however, well, I'm not going to comment on that except to say that the largest recipient by far of US foreign aid is Israel. Israel, is not the image that first comes to mind when we think of foreign aid recipients.
Not that the aid isn't a good thing in itself, but in drawing comparisons between US aid and the rest of the world, it should be looked at as a proportion of the wealth. The percentage of GDP given by the US is one of the lowest of the developed countries (Scandinavians are the highest) and you should also bear in mind that this "aid" is most commonly in the form of loans. Making a desperate country agree to a loan can seem a little harsh to some observers.
Gas prices have more than doubled since the US declared an end to major conflict in Iraq, mirroring trends in the world economy. This is very inconsistent with the claim, "we went in it for the oil."
You're right to note that I wasn't arguing that the US went in for oil, but that the world percieves it that way. I've already picked up one Troll mod, but I'm glad someone read my post correctly.
However, I don't think what I've quoted above is evidence that the US didn't go in for the sake of oil. Firstly, lets agree that the US has seized control of the oil. The first things the US army did when ground troops went in was to secure the oil facilities. Likewise, major US oil companies are setting up in Iraq and there is a system of reparations in place under which Iraq must pay for damages caused ("you made us invade, now compensate us!"). Naturally Iraq will be paying this in oil. The figures are in the hundreds of billions of dollars worth.
It's also worth considering for whose benefit the US seized the oil. Not primarily for the US public, but for the corporations. It's hard to deny that US oil companies have made a killing out of this. It's also worth trying to isolate the factors that affect the oil price. You picked a date just after hurricane Katarina that disrupted major oil production facilities off your East coast and jacked up prices by upto $0.70 - quite a lot of the rise you quote.
Secondly, there is a strategic aim in capturing Iraq's oil, which is that it denies the same oil to others (China). It also provides a land route for an oil pipeline to the Eastern European oil-fields, allowing the US to get access to that oil supply and deny it to others (China) as well.
Finally, we shouldn't ascribe competence where it isn't due. A failure does not indicate that no attempt was made. The US is currently up to its neck in shit in Iraq right now and I'd swear this isn't what they intended to happen. Nevertheless, the clearest motivation for the US invasion was oil, with sending a warning to the muslim world and distracting people at home from domestic problems tied for second place.
This isn't so much a problem because people think the US will do this, but because the US has signed international treaties that might be in conflict with what the US military is doing.
I don't disagree with your general point, but the above sentence stood out. I think most citizens of the US think the rest of the World sees them the same way that they see themselves, but this isn't the case. Much of the World [i]does[/i] think the US is capable of deploying biological weapons. They see a nation that has previously sold chemical weapons to others to use, that has previously dropped not one but two nuclear bombs on concentrated population centres and sees none of the idealism of the invasion of Iraq that the US populace has been sold (it's about "freedom and democracy"), but only the US claiming the oil supply for themselves.
Whose point of view is right is open to debate, but unless the american people at least understand how their country's actions appear when stripped of their own justifications, then they'll never understand how their actions are recieved.
Pretty simple. You declare a zone as "militarily active", or some other such pentagon-speak. In go the troops and the robots, and anything moving in there that doesn't carry a friendly radio tag gets shot at. If a "civilian" goes outside or rises off the floor or refuses to have radio-emitting "security restraining devices" hurriedly slapped on him by the soldiers, then he is "resisting" and will become a "active target".
Sorry for all the " ". That tends to happen when a politician is trying not to say they've just commisioned a machine to kill people.
But it seems like before too long we will all have to ride trains and planes in the nude
Close enough. The proposed installation of millimetre wave scanners on the London underground effectively makes you walk naked in front of their security people.
Think they leer at you now? Wait till they have these.
Slashdot Mirror
If you poke around the web enough, you find the authors of the website admitting to having written the manuscript themselves.
I was just trying to carry on the mythos. Like all those university library records that include the Necronomicon and, a certain supposedly translated Floren fairy tale. Always funny when someone goes off trying to get hold of one of these.
I have seen the documentary however. It's pretty funny if you like that sort of thing, and just plain weird if you don't.
questionable content (sex, occultism, violence)
Is it still beastiality if the creature is only part mole, crow and ant, but partially decomposed human being? (Am thinking of where the daughters summon a Byakhee because they can't find a suitable boy).
Still, if you ever persuade a theatre to let you stage it and you need a Lavinia Whately, however...
A Shoggoth on the Roof
The one that had songs with lyrics like:
"Byakhee, Byahee, Fly Me Through Space,
"Take me away, far from this place,"
"Byakhee, Byakhee, now heed my call,"
crescendo
"I've done the spells, I've done them all!"
I've seen it - it's odd. There are recurrant rumours that somebody somewhere is actually going to stage it again!
Don't the means justify the end?
Other way round, but we're a smart audience. It rather depends what time frame you're talking about doesn't it? If the world ends tomorrow, then maybe there's time to right a few wrongs by any means necessary. But assuming that it doesn't, then how does buying into a system of government where you require money to have a say improve things in the long run? When the problem is someone else, then working within the system can be effective. When the problem is the system itself, then working within the system cannot be effective.
The ends only justify the means if there are acutal ends, otherwise "ends" are just place markers whilst means are the direction. Personally, I see Google just taking a step on a road filled with good intentions.
Googley woogley woo!
That's a great description of
"Human loyalties" are what matter, and that person who began the thread with "nerd solidarity" was me.
I'm not declaring that the UN should supercede national governments. When I say that national governments can be made redundant, that is not because I'm saying the UN should replace it. I'm saying that in many cases, we have reached such a level of self-organization that nothing need replace it. Don't take my argument to extremes, I don't suppose that if all government vanished tomorrow we'd live in a happy anarchist utopia, but take the example we're talking about: the Internet does not need to be run by a centralised body under the jurisdiction of one government. When the alternative is an open distributed system, then the current situation can only really be regarded as a weakness in the system, both from a technical and a political view point. Putting the control under the UN might mitigate the political risks and reassure people that they are not being held hostage by the US. But it wouldn't remove the risks entirely. Distributed is the way to go.
If this thread has branched now, and we are discussing the UN vs. national governments in general rather than specific to the DNS, then neither is more worthy of your loyalty than simple human loyalty based on choice of who we feel share our goals and priniciples. Loyalty should never be unquestioning. However, you could make the case that the UN is loyalty to a wider spectrum of humanity than is loyalty to a nation state is. As pointed out earlier, people often have much more in common with counterparts in other countries than with the elites of their own country, hence the UN more closely mirrors this. Equally you could make the same case in with the power elites of different nations saying they have more in common with each other than with the general public of their own countries, and substitute the EU, the IMF or OPEC for the UN. Ironically, they are often more ready to accept this viewpoint than the general public.
There should be a good system for countries to negotiate with each other as an open community, rather than endless and secretive dealing between small groups as has been the case historically. Remove the UN and you just need to re-create it with a different name and bereaucracy. It can have a useful role in international courts, treaties and peace-brokering. It is not a replacement for national governments. Managing things for ourselves (like distributed DNS) is the replacement for national governments.
Which come to think of it, is maybe why the UN advocates taking control of the root servers rather than just supporting an open system - it would undermine the whole principle of government. But then again, maybe they're just comprised of people with a weak grasp of the technology which brings us back to my original point - governments (national or international) are not the best people for the job. Give it to the us the community and we'll really take things forward.
If nation states are obsolete where the Internet is concerned, then why is a collection of nation states any less obsolete?
The Internet is a global medium that has no natural divisions along nation state lines. That's why nation states are obsolete in terms of Internet governance. You could apply the same argument to any other global process such as satellite communications or many international businesses. However, this does not mean that nation states don't exist! And they clearly do have interests. Therefore a body that co-ordinates these interests makes sense.
Nation-states are not obsolete.
That's true. -1 Hyperbole to Me... He who fights monsters etc. Still, we are complex creatures and we can be members of many different sets. So whilst on one axis brother and sister techiness may not outweigh, for example, common language or social mores across nations, I feel it very often outweighs the individual-government connection. That is to say, if I drew a proportional Venn diagram of us all, there would often be more overlap between techies of different countries than there would be between techies and the governments and corporate elites of their own countries.
And in this discussion, it is the government that is the relevant axis of comparison. Happy to see what you are saying, but I hope you can also see what I am saying. I don't think they are actually incompatible... or at least there is a good degree of overlap on the Venn diagram.
"Wow. So if a foreign spy asked you to sell secrets for some cash you would be a taker? No allegiance to country, that being a silly 'old fashioned value.'"
Well it's a hypothetical, because I value my integrity very highly. But if I lived in Nazi Germany I would have few qualms aiding the allies. If I lived in Massacheusetts in 1775, then I would have no problems betraying my British government. The nation does not have the power to tell me where my loyalties lie and is not entitled to them regardless of their actions. It can earn them the same way anyone else does.
What is wrong with that?
Personally, if I was the U. N., I'd be pushing for control of the IETF.
Shhhhhh!
Have to leap in here purely because you've misquoted my post and the resulting change of meaning is grotesquely different. I didn't describe the US as a country of technically ignorant people. Those are your words and shame on you. I described the US government and its corporate backers as being tech-ignorant and neophobic. This covers groups like the MPAA/RIAA and those politicians who percieve the Internet as a terrible threat to their powerbase (which it is). These people have little in common with the tech-savvy
You have also misread my post again when you say that I am advocating UN control. I believe US control is a problem because it vests too much power in a single group that cannot be reprimanded if it is misused. My suggestion is that control should be distributed.
In future, please try and read what is actually written, rather than argue against what you expected to hear.
What's with all this "we" business? Unless the poster actually had a founding hand in setting up what became the Internet, then how do they have any more right to it than anyone else? Because they happen to have been born in the same country as people who did? Accident of birth is no ethical basis for distributing non-local resources.
Do the US posters here really feel they have more in common with all other americans than they do with counterpart techies in Europe or Asia or Africa? Which community are you going to give precedence to? The US government that is comprised of tech-ignorant people with vested corporate interests (RIAA / MPAA, Pentagon, et al) and little adventurous spirit, or the IT literate and neophile tech community?
There is no reason why DNS could not be a distributed community effort. We've reached the level where such a thing could be implemented reliably. Hand it over to the techies. No-one will be happy with the means of modern information exchange under the control of one governmental organization no matter how much they tell us that "it's okay - we're the good guys."
People here spouting Fuck Em comments about the UN should ask themselves why they identify so much with their government. Why this sudden rush of Us and Them? Allowing a government to assign your loyalties to you by accident of birth seems a little old fashioned. Most posters at
I've actually read the accepted transcripts of Jeanne's trial and the quote I've taken is definitely not in there, I agree It is commonly attributed to her however.
There's no doubt that there have been variations on it throughout history and I can actually top your Aesop's fables reference with one from Thucydides who says much the same thing (fairly sure he predates Aesop). Just don't ask me to look up an exact line number and phrasing now. Still, I admire Jeanne D'Arc very much and I particularly like the way it is phrased in French - Help Yourself and the Sky will Aid You. Translating it loses the beautiful balance of the phrase though.
I'd say there's an empirical way of testing this. Do the Taiwanese pay taxes to the mainland government, are mainland government laws enforced in Taiwan? No, in both cases. Has Taiwan managed to maintain this state of affairs for a reasonable period of time? Yes. Then Taiwan has earnt its right not to be called a province.
Doesn't stop Google annoying the mainland government by calling it such, but you shouldn't let economics get in the way of the truth.
Never mind the descriptions - give me the SCREENSHOTS! I want to see how good this quality is.
Have to post just to offset some of the dismissive reviews above. It was really well done, especially the acting the CGI space battles. I'd disagree that the action scenes were weak. They weren't hollywood blockbuster, but that wasn't the point. I'm sure that hand-fight between Pirk and Sherrypie was a pastiche on the terrible Star Trek hand to hand fighting., especially that flying kick.
Sherrypie was doing a brilliant take off of Sheridan - really had the mannerisms down well. Ivanovitsa was also very very good.
I also wont give away the ending, but I like both the twist and that the viewer is allowed to think "Do they really mean that..." without being hit over the head by it.
But the BIOS bootscreen was just perfect. Perfect!
I've only ever seen a few Star Treks (allergy to bad physics and internal inconsistency) but I did love Babylon V and this was an excellent take off. Spectacular for a small private production, really.
If anyone remotely to do with this project is stroking his vanity by reading these posts about the project, here's a suggestion for the project. Don't use a hand-crank, use a foot pedal. Like the old sewing machines, a little treadle is [b]much[/b] more natural to use and you can use it while you work, for hours if need be. Compare size of muscles in your arm with the muscles in your calves. Point made?
This could be a much better selling point.
Nevertheless, you began this by stating how generous the USA was in its foreign aid. This is not really the case.
Regarding Israel, which you say is the largest single recipient, re-read my post and find that this is what I said. Given that Israel is hardly an impoverished nation and spends a goodly proportion of that aid on importing US weapons, it starts to look like nothing more than a money laundering operation for the Pentagon. Regarding donations to the rest of the Middle East dwarfing the donation to Israel which is 12.5% of the pie, you'll find that the rest of the Middle East gets almost nothing, unless you include Egypt at 9.5%.
Egypt is a frequent ally of the US and 2/3rds of the aid is in the form of military hardware. So I wouldn't worry about not getting anything in return for your aid, the US arms industry does fairly well out of it. The rest of the aid to Egypt does help shore up its economy and so contributes to some stability in the middle east.
I'm not sure how you can interpret the financial sink-hole that is Iraq as being an aid recipient. The money pouring in for "reconstruction" is not being put into the local community but into US contractors. There have been many cases where Iraqi companies are forbidden to tender and undercut the US companies.
I'm not sure how you say its easy for Denmark to be high in donations because of low internal aid. If you mean welfare (in US terms) then Denmark provides a much better social benefit for the deprived or unemployed than the US, along with funding many programs to help people.
Note that nothing I have said contradicts your final point about "giving money to a bum" but if you want to make that case, do it seperately from trying to imply that the US is massively generous in its aid. If you yourself earned $30k per annum then you personally would have donated $30 to those less fortunate than yourself, if the GDP was entirely generated by the public's taxes that is, but which, of course, it isn't.
However, if you want to see some positive outcomes of aid, you could try here and explore the rest of the site too for a lot more details about what aid can do. When properly applied it can changes people's lives.
You may think you're pretty generous as a percentage of GDP, but last I heard, it was 0.1%, i.e. 1/1000 of GDP. Denmark ranks highest at 1.01%, ten times as much. The UK has just increased to 0.7%, seven times as much. European average is, I think, a little below this.
Regarding aid being wasted on tin-pot dictators however, well, I'm not going to comment on that except to say that the largest recipient by far of US foreign aid is Israel. Israel, is not the image that first comes to mind when we think of foreign aid recipients.
Not that the aid isn't a good thing in itself, but in drawing comparisons between US aid and the rest of the world, it should be looked at as a proportion of the wealth. The percentage of GDP given by the US is one of the lowest of the developed countries (Scandinavians are the highest) and you should also bear in mind that this "aid" is most commonly in the form of loans. Making a desperate country agree to a loan can seem a little harsh to some observers.
Gas prices have more than doubled since the US declared an end to major conflict in Iraq, mirroring trends in the world economy. This is very inconsistent with the claim, "we went in it for the oil."
You're right to note that I wasn't arguing that the US went in for oil, but that the world percieves it that way. I've already picked up one Troll mod, but I'm glad someone read my post correctly.
However, I don't think what I've quoted above is evidence that the US didn't go in for the sake of oil. Firstly, lets agree that the US has seized control of the oil. The first things the US army did when ground troops went in was to secure the oil facilities. Likewise, major US oil companies are setting up in Iraq and there is a system of reparations in place under which Iraq must pay for damages caused ("you made us invade, now compensate us!"). Naturally Iraq will be paying this in oil. The figures are in the hundreds of billions of dollars worth.
It's also worth considering for whose benefit the US seized the oil. Not primarily for the US public, but for the corporations. It's hard to deny that US oil companies have made a killing out of this. It's also worth trying to isolate the factors that affect the oil price. You picked a date just after hurricane Katarina that disrupted major oil production facilities off your East coast and jacked up prices by upto $0.70 - quite a lot of the rise you quote.
Secondly, there is a strategic aim in capturing Iraq's oil, which is that it denies the same oil to others (China). It also provides a land route for an oil pipeline to the Eastern European oil-fields, allowing the US to get access to that oil supply and deny it to others (China) as well.
Finally, we shouldn't ascribe competence where it isn't due. A failure does not indicate that no attempt was made. The US is currently up to its neck in shit in Iraq right now and I'd swear this isn't what they intended to happen. Nevertheless, the clearest motivation for the US invasion was oil, with sending a warning to the muslim world and distracting people at home from domestic problems tied for second place.
IMHO, naturally.
This isn't so much a problem because people think the US will do this, but because the US has signed international treaties that might be in conflict with what the US military is doing.
I don't disagree with your general point, but the above sentence stood out. I think most citizens of the US think the rest of the World sees them the same way that they see themselves, but this isn't the case. Much of the World [i]does[/i] think the US is capable of deploying biological weapons. They see a nation that has previously sold chemical weapons to others to use, that has previously dropped not one but two nuclear bombs on concentrated population centres and sees none of the idealism of the invasion of Iraq that the US populace has been sold (it's about "freedom and democracy"), but only the US claiming the oil supply for themselves.
Whose point of view is right is open to debate, but unless the american people at least understand how their country's actions appear when stripped of their own justifications, then they'll never understand how their actions are recieved.
Post a link here then, please. It sounds interesting.
If anyone wants to mod it off-topic, blame me and put them on my post.
Pretty simple. You declare a zone as "militarily active", or some other such pentagon-speak. In go the troops and the robots, and anything moving in there that doesn't carry a friendly radio tag gets shot at. If a "civilian" goes outside or rises off the floor or refuses to have radio-emitting "security restraining devices" hurriedly slapped on him by the soldiers, then he is "resisting" and will become a "active target".
Sorry for all the " ". That tends to happen when a politician is trying not to say they've just commisioned a machine to kill people.
I've never seen a pro-vegetarian environmentalist porn-site that quotes both Galileo and Adolf Hitler.
Your site is... original.
But it seems like before too long we will all have to ride trains and planes in the nude
Close enough. The proposed installation of millimetre wave scanners on the London underground effectively makes you walk naked in front of their security people.
Think they leer at you now? Wait till they have these.