I'd much rather just see continued incremental improvements in sealed batteries to go IN the camera/rig, and perhaps have a nice powerful fuel-cell powered batter charger on the side. Something I can used for all sorts of batteries. I don't like the idea of chemicals sloshing around near my optics, thank you very much.
Actually, the fact that it ever even worked (parachuting usable film down for retrieval) is pretty astonishing, really. That was some pretty cool stuff, back in the day.
Satellite imagery used to parachute to earth when the film was all used up. This was when reconnaissance satellites were first developed, and before CCDs were invented.
I know. That's my point. It's been, gosh... at least a few years since we did it that way!
They were specifically trying to hide the opening ceremonies as they appeared in reality
I hate to break it to you, but those people who were flying in the air above the stadium floor? They were on wires. I know this is shocking to your sensibilties, that a show that was entirely about art, entertainment, and visual message, but involve... art! Yeesh.
Indeed. The NBC commentator specifically said, as the footage was being shown, that the event's producers were using a cinematic interlude to convey the concept of the fireworks. The actual firewoks WERE going off at the same time, and in much the same way... but there was simply no way to be sure they could show it well on TV - since it was impossible to predict the weather or other cirumstances. So, they showed a CGI illustration for the people watching TV. The weren't hiding anything, they came right out and SAID what they were doing.
That would be hard evidence of all the (domestic) spying that went on.
Right, because they could have flown the U.S.S. Michelle Obama (a special UFO-technology-based ship that the Evil Republicans have been hiding at Area 51) up to the wrongly-orbited sattelite, and... what? Retrieved the film? Any "domestic spying" done from orbit comes in the form data hauled down to earth... you know, satellite imagery? You're a few decades late for the satellite itself to have evidence of something like that. Anything worth talking about is on disk drives and tapes right here on the ground.
And while it is morally debateable I think we would have been much better off had we sent in a team (with invisibility cloak or not) to off Saddam than invade.
Well, the problem is that you'd also have to have offed his two incredibly odious and evil sons, all of his other family members, and the top 100 or so military and security people in his regime... otherwise the regime would still have survived, but only after more bloody conflict, and you'd still have in place the regime that invaded Kuwait and never abided by any of its getting-kicked-back-out agreements. And if you DID eliminate the regime with a couple hundred more or less simultaneous magic bullets, you'd have had the same power vacuum that Iran is still seeking to jump into via various attempts at fueling civil war - though that's finally settling down. In short, it might actually have been worse.
You mean, like the organizations that people form in order to clearly express their interests to lawmakers? The AARP? The NRA? The NEA? The EFF? Those are groups made of people that get together in order to be more organized. Does it make more sense for lawmakers to have to actually field and parse communication from 300,000,000 million people... hundreds of thousands or millions of which, at any given time, are basically saying the exact same thing? It's a signal to noise issue. Interest groups raise the S/N.
I can't see why China would even care about the U.S. ecomony
Because the US is one of the largest economies in the world? And... you do realize they also do this to Germany, France, Brazil, the UK, and everyone else, too, right?
Pure FUD
Wrong. In the past three months I've encountered some increasingly sophisticated attacks on web servers, all in the name of getting specific scripts in front of very specific visiting users, all so that their browsers will run off to a laundry list of Chinese IP addresses and slurp up Trojan-installing malware that in turn sniffs keystrokes and piles up local files system objects into ZIP files that are then sent to OTHER Chinese IP addresses. This is not script kiddies screwing around, and the very deliberate targeting of people in the defense, engineering, and law enforcement areas is not blind luck.
The restraining order is for the real person, not the persona.
Yeah... but how do you GET the restraining order when the person in question has fraudulently set up a fake identity? That's the whole point of anonymity, though, isn't it? It spares you from people holding you accountable for what you say or do.
As such, the dems are plain and simply caught between a rock and a hard place. Cut funding, they look bad. Continue spending, they look bad.
So, what do they have to lose? They look even worse for doing nothing. Their approval rating is 14%. How can "looking bad" be any worse? They can stop by not earmarking billions of dollars in pork, and by not blocking simple votes on essential issues while simultaneuously spending millions of taxpayer dollars on things like congressional hearings into whether or not highly paid entertainers (baseball players) are using muscle-building steroids. The only reason they don't have any political capital to spend on "looking bad" over something as simple as spending less on entitlement programs to buy votes is that they don't have any OTHER redeeming actions to bank on. Pelosi can't speak with moral authority on anything because she's so busy twisting herself in the wind pandering to her most monied contributors.
Republican politicians know their constituency; people like you have short memories, no sense of history, and will vote 'em right back in to rob us all over again.
OK, so how do you explain the fact that the Democrats, who run both houses of congress and who are completely in control of budgeting and spending and the raising of money, have no interest in reigning in spending? The president DOESN'T MAKE THE BUDGET. He only signs it after both houses of congress do what they want to it. So, you've got Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid completely able to set the legislative agenda, and able to block/promote up/down votes on anything they choose (see Pelosi's refusla to allow voting on the issue of offshore drilling, for example - she, personally, is stopping the congress for even voting on the subject). The country cannot raise, allocate, or spend a dollar that congress doesn't control. Is the complaint that Pelosi is so spineless that she won't ever contradict the President's wishes? She does that all the time - reflexively, on almost every topic. She doesn't want to spend less money - it's as simple as that.
Actually, the troll rating is a perfectly reasonable spanking for whoever thinks that - with the 10,000th telling - that that joke or any variation on it is even remotely amusing. You know, sort of like typing a fake dialog where Al Gore claims to have invented perchlorate, or says that it exists on Mars because of man-made global warming, blah blah. You know, funny like imagining that Barack Obama would refer to this as "soil change that we can believe in." It was a troll, or close enough. But it sure wasn't satire, in any meaningful way. Just childish ranting.
Bush's actions shows his lack of reason, intelligence, logic, lack of understanding of the rudiments of the scientific method...
Which is worse... that Bill Clinton ALSO goes to church and believes in a All Powerful Magic Invisible Friend, or that he was also lying about that?
But more to the point, what about Obama? He says that his personal relationship with an All Powerful Magic Invisible Friend is the most important thing that shapes his world view and his code of ethics. Someone without a lifelong background in weightly intellectual pursuits and science can probably come by his church-going honestly (especially if that social structure helped get them out from an admitted drinking problem when he was young). But what's the excuse for the guy that's happily going along with the huge media spin that he's The Smartest Guy Ever, and the voice of hip, young, reason? He's superstitious, thinks gays shouldn't be married, and was comfortable having his children's world view shaped in a church that preaches about how, among other things, the US government is infecting black people with AIDS on purpose... until, of course, the world caught on that that was here he was going every Sunday for 20 years. Who cares whether or not he personally bought that line of BS power-through-victimhood. The point is that he lacked the reason, logic, and intellectual integrity to stand up against is - let alone take his family away from it - until he was shamed into doing so.
So, whatever problem you have with Bush you ALSO have with Obama, right? Or are you a hypocrite?
the border search exception applies to searches, not seizures
The thing is that this is NOT a seizure. It's a search that takes a long time because some people have hundreds of gigs of encrypted data on their portable storage.
If you had a tube of rolled up hard copy missile schematics on you, and they took it in to the next room while looking at it, kept it for 10 minutes, and then gave it back to you, would that be a seizure? How about 5 minutes? 30 seconds? 30 days?
If you get it back, it's not a seizure. No more than your international freight, held up in customs for a week while they check it for illegal fruit or meat, is "seized" while it's being inspected.
The issue here is what is a reasonable expectation for how long it would take someone to inspect documents that aren't in plain text in the form of notes in folder, but are instead deeply encrypted, riding along with a hundred thousand other files in a device that's crossing the border. What IS reasonable, in that regard? If the time it takes to do the search is by definition unreasonable, then you need to argue that the ability to do searches at border crossings is, itself, unreasonable.
Yes. They should also do the same for American athletes due to the illegal invasion and occupation of a sovereign nation.
Which one was that? I guess you're referring to the one that was invaded when its regime invaded Kuwait, and which never, even for one day, ever honored any of the agreements that were signed in order to affect a cease-fire in that conflict and to maintain that regime's power. You mean that one? The one that violated a steady stream of UN sanctions, each of which called for consequences exactly like what happened? That one? The one that violated the UN mandated no-fly zones by continually - for years - firing on the coalition aircraft enforcing them? That one? You're using the word "illegal," but I don't think it means what you think it means.
Clearly, for some reason, you preferred to have Saddam slaughtering hundreds of thousands of people from outside of his Tikriti tribe, and are mysteriously glad that he refused to disclose what happened to the tons of VX gas he had stockpiled, and are amused that he kicked the UN inspectors out after never allowing them to freely operate as agreed. Clearly you're frustrated that the long range missles (which he agreed to stop building after he was kicked out of Kuwait) that he continued to buy from North Korea and work on, and deploy, right up through 2003, never got to be used on the people you actually hate (who is it you were hoping he'd use those on, anyway... Iran? Israel? Kuwait? The Saudis?).
Obviously you're upset that you never got a chance to get your own piece of the ripped-off hundreds of millions that Saddam was skimming from the UN's Oil For Food program so that he could rebuild military infrastructure in direct violation of the terms he agreed to in order to cease the destruction of his regime following Kuwait. I'm sure you're upset that he could no longer send cash to Hamas and Hezbollah, or have photo-ops while making large cash payments to the families of bombers. You were obviously a big fan of his actually illegal behavior, so I'm sure that's heartbreaking for you.
Or is your comment all about the fact that the UN is still working on a renewal of the mandate that currently authorizes the presence of the coalition troops in Iraq? Yes, that's due for renewal. Are you saying that since a mandate that's still in effect is going to expire, that operating in that country before it expires is somehow in violation of that mandate now? How does that work, exactly? Is your driver's license current? Well, it's going to expire at some point, so I guess that makes you illegal, huh? No Olympic Games for you, mister.
sovereign nation
Saddam violated the sovereignty of his neighbor by sending huge colums of tanks and soldiers across the border, killing those trying to defend it, and staking a claim to that country as his own. When you iniate a conflict like that (as he did, to expand Iraq's territory by violently annexing Kuwait), you waive your own claim to sovreignty. Just as a murderer waives any claim to his own life. So he was pushed back from Kuwait, militarily, and given the opportunity to maintain his regime if, and only if he met a very clear series of UN-authored standards. He failed to meet all of them, continued campaigns of mass murder, stole billions in aid from the mouths of his own people, routinely tried to shoot down aircraft patrolling where he'd been busy with gassings, mass graves and tribal starvation programs, and continued to smuggle in exactly the same long range weapons he swore he would not. So, the only thing that would have provided Saddam with a claim on sovreignty (his compliance with the terms of his surrender following Kuwait), he chose not to do. He gave up his sovreignty. Period.
Which obviously disappoints you, since you really loved the guy. It's a shame you can't find it in you to love the population of Iraq, who no longer have to worry about his sons' goon squads putting pare
What other power do they have over China at this point? It's not like the IOC can impose sanctions on China, can it?
Of course they have power. They can rule that China's athletes cannot compete in the games. They made exactly such a politics-based ruling against the 7-person team from Iraq just last week. They've since changed their minds, and now TWO athletes from Iraq will be allowed to compete. The IOC's membership is aggressively anti-American (which is funny, considering that the largest share of the money from games-sponsoring and IOC-funding companies comes from the US), and play all sorts of games like this at the committee level. Police states like China get no grief from the IOC, but the US has no voting seat on the IOC's executive committee. In the same meeting during which the IOC decided to kill off baseball and softball from the games two years ago, the US was voted off of the executive committee. The IOC's president, in Belgium, appears not to have minded Iraq's previous Olympic committee chair (Uday Hussein, who had athletes beaten - and worse - for not winning games), but considers the fragile new Iraqi government too shaky, and too supported by the US, to put forth a team to his liking... though North Korea, of course, is fine, and countries like China which actively lie about their ICO-related policies in order to get the games in their country can just hum along and get what they want.
Since China is being caught having lied about a central issue around which their obtaining of the games was focused, it seems appropriate for the IOC to threaten ruling out their own national team's participation. I can't think of a single better use of the IOC's capricious authority, but it would at least hit China where it hurts, and show the world that messing with reporters' use of the internet is typical policy there - and in direct contradiction to China's contingent-upon-getting-the-games promise of exactly the opposite.
Saw them in Asiago, Cittadella, Marostica, Vicenza, Sirmione (along Lake Garda), Asolo, and even in Verona. They're not dead yet! My wife was NOT amused.
That's right. I don't care how many bidets there are in Paris. Have you ever used (read: squatted over!) a public hole-in-the-floor toilet in someplace like Italy? No wonder they do such a brisk trade in new shoes in Milan. Honestly. Yeesh!
There is a perceived "outrage" over him uttering this views; but calling upon God is the basis for most political campaigns
No question. The current Democrat contender (Obama) seems to be a lot more focused on earning his campaign Magical Thinking Street Cred than is his Republican oppoonent. It's an odd twist, that way. However: in those cases, all of the religious talk is essentially a short-hand way of describing one's basic idealogy, or cultural frame of reference when it comes to notions about right and wrong, justice, etc. That someone uses a silly superstition as a stand-in for a well reasoned personal code of ethics that, ultimately, manifests itself in pretty much the same way on most matters anyway... that makes it less of an issue for a politician.
On the other hand: someone who actually has "scientist" in their job description, but who makes lots of wildly science-free claims about the nature of the universe and visiting aliens... that's another matter. And yes, I include religious-minded scientists in that group, not just UFO-loony former astronauts who also claim that ESP cured their cancer.
But to say that this is simply old age and senility is unkind and inaccurate.
Actually, to the contrary. It's kind to offer him a physiological excuse for embracing irrational, foolish notions that don't hold up to critical thinking or any sort of scrutiny. That he's been a fool in this regard most of life is unkind (given his position) to everyone else. Allowing the world to write this off as a symptom of his age is a face-saving kindness. What's UNKIND is trying ever so hard to let him off the hook for a lifetime of such nonsense... that doesn't do anyone any favors.
He landed on the moon. He has actually been in space, unlike you or me.
I haven't been aboard ship at the north pole, either, though some people have. Does that make such a person's claim that there is a giant underwater city full of sapient leech-people controlling our planet's magnetic field any more credible? Physically going somewhere that fewer people have seen personally doesn't - in the least - make completely unsubstantiated, evidence-less, silly-on-the-face-of-them claims any more credible. To the contrary, actually. He's being entirely un-scientific about this, which is very unbecoming to a former scientist.
Nope, that's it. I'm just pitching a fit over that thing, right there. But it's probably the 10th time I've seen it today, in print, in e-mails, and in numerous discussion threads. Just gets under my skin, since it suggests that, as usual, people don't actually think about what they're typing. It's not just a typo - it's right up there with people who say "I could care less about..." when they actually mean the exact opposite. It's just laziness and thoughtless communication, that's all.
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I'd much rather just see continued incremental improvements in sealed batteries to go IN the camera/rig, and perhaps have a nice powerful fuel-cell powered batter charger on the side. Something I can used for all sorts of batteries. I don't like the idea of chemicals sloshing around near my optics, thank you very much.
Actually, the fact that it ever even worked (parachuting usable film down for retrieval) is pretty astonishing, really. That was some pretty cool stuff, back in the day.
Satellite imagery used to parachute to earth when the film was all used up. This was when reconnaissance satellites were first developed, and before CCDs were invented.
I know. That's my point. It's been, gosh... at least a few years since we did it that way!
They were specifically trying to hide the opening ceremonies as they appeared in reality
I hate to break it to you, but those people who were flying in the air above the stadium floor? They were on wires. I know this is shocking to your sensibilties, that a show that was entirely about art, entertainment, and visual message, but involve... art! Yeesh.
Indeed. The NBC commentator specifically said, as the footage was being shown, that the event's producers were using a cinematic interlude to convey the concept of the fireworks. The actual firewoks WERE going off at the same time, and in much the same way... but there was simply no way to be sure they could show it well on TV - since it was impossible to predict the weather or other cirumstances. So, they showed a CGI illustration for the people watching TV. The weren't hiding anything, they came right out and SAID what they were doing.
That would be hard evidence of all the (domestic) spying that went on.
Right, because they could have flown the U.S.S. Michelle Obama (a special UFO-technology-based ship that the Evil Republicans have been hiding at Area 51) up to the wrongly-orbited sattelite, and... what? Retrieved the film? Any "domestic spying" done from orbit comes in the form data hauled down to earth... you know, satellite imagery? You're a few decades late for the satellite itself to have evidence of something like that. Anything worth talking about is on disk drives and tapes right here on the ground.
And while it is morally debateable I think we would have been much better off had we sent in a team (with invisibility cloak or not) to off Saddam than invade.
Well, the problem is that you'd also have to have offed his two incredibly odious and evil sons, all of his other family members, and the top 100 or so military and security people in his regime... otherwise the regime would still have survived, but only after more bloody conflict, and you'd still have in place the regime that invaded Kuwait and never abided by any of its getting-kicked-back-out agreements. And if you DID eliminate the regime with a couple hundred more or less simultaneous magic bullets, you'd have had the same power vacuum that Iran is still seeking to jump into via various attempts at fueling civil war - though that's finally settling down. In short, it might actually have been worse.
various organizations
... hundreds of thousands or millions of which, at any given time, are basically saying the exact same thing? It's a signal to noise issue. Interest groups raise the S/N.
You mean, like the organizations that people form in order to clearly express their interests to lawmakers? The AARP? The NRA? The NEA? The EFF? Those are groups made of people that get together in order to be more organized. Does it make more sense for lawmakers to have to actually field and parse communication from 300,000,000 million people
Ah, you read the World of Warcraft forums too?
Actually... no. Never been there! Never even seen someone playing the game, come to think of it. Too many other time-using things in life, it seems.
I can't see why China would even care about the U.S. ecomony
Because the US is one of the largest economies in the world? And... you do realize they also do this to Germany, France, Brazil, the UK, and everyone else, too, right?
Pure FUD
Wrong. In the past three months I've encountered some increasingly sophisticated attacks on web servers, all in the name of getting specific scripts in front of very specific visiting users, all so that their browsers will run off to a laundry list of Chinese IP addresses and slurp up Trojan-installing malware that in turn sniffs keystrokes and piles up local files system objects into ZIP files that are then sent to OTHER Chinese IP addresses. This is not script kiddies screwing around, and the very deliberate targeting of people in the defense, engineering, and law enforcement areas is not blind luck.
The restraining order is for the real person, not the persona.
Yeah... but how do you GET the restraining order when the person in question has fraudulently set up a fake identity? That's the whole point of anonymity, though, isn't it? It spares you from people holding you accountable for what you say or do.
As such, the dems are plain and simply caught between a rock and a hard place. Cut funding, they look bad. Continue spending, they look bad.
So, what do they have to lose? They look even worse for doing nothing. Their approval rating is 14%. How can "looking bad" be any worse? They can stop by not earmarking billions of dollars in pork, and by not blocking simple votes on essential issues while simultaneuously spending millions of taxpayer dollars on things like congressional hearings into whether or not highly paid entertainers (baseball players) are using muscle-building steroids. The only reason they don't have any political capital to spend on "looking bad" over something as simple as spending less on entitlement programs to buy votes is that they don't have any OTHER redeeming actions to bank on. Pelosi can't speak with moral authority on anything because she's so busy twisting herself in the wind pandering to her most monied contributors.
Republican politicians know their constituency; people like you have short memories, no sense of history, and will vote 'em right back in to rob us all over again.
OK, so how do you explain the fact that the Democrats, who run both houses of congress and who are completely in control of budgeting and spending and the raising of money, have no interest in reigning in spending? The president DOESN'T MAKE THE BUDGET. He only signs it after both houses of congress do what they want to it. So, you've got Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid completely able to set the legislative agenda, and able to block/promote up/down votes on anything they choose (see Pelosi's refusla to allow voting on the issue of offshore drilling, for example - she, personally, is stopping the congress for even voting on the subject). The country cannot raise, allocate, or spend a dollar that congress doesn't control. Is the complaint that Pelosi is so spineless that she won't ever contradict the President's wishes? She does that all the time - reflexively, on almost every topic. She doesn't want to spend less money - it's as simple as that.
Actually, the troll rating is a perfectly reasonable spanking for whoever thinks that - with the 10,000th telling - that that joke or any variation on it is even remotely amusing. You know, sort of like typing a fake dialog where Al Gore claims to have invented perchlorate, or says that it exists on Mars because of man-made global warming, blah blah. You know, funny like imagining that Barack Obama would refer to this as "soil change that we can believe in." It was a troll, or close enough. But it sure wasn't satire, in any meaningful way. Just childish ranting.
Bush's actions shows his lack of reason, intelligence, logic, lack of understanding of the rudiments of the scientific method...
... until, of course, the world caught on that that was here he was going every Sunday for 20 years. Who cares whether or not he personally bought that line of BS power-through-victimhood. The point is that he lacked the reason, logic, and intellectual integrity to stand up against is - let alone take his family away from it - until he was shamed into doing so.
Which is worse... that Bill Clinton ALSO goes to church and believes in a All Powerful Magic Invisible Friend, or that he was also lying about that?
But more to the point, what about Obama? He says that his personal relationship with an All Powerful Magic Invisible Friend is the most important thing that shapes his world view and his code of ethics. Someone without a lifelong background in weightly intellectual pursuits and science can probably come by his church-going honestly (especially if that social structure helped get them out from an admitted drinking problem when he was young). But what's the excuse for the guy that's happily going along with the huge media spin that he's The Smartest Guy Ever, and the voice of hip, young, reason? He's superstitious, thinks gays shouldn't be married, and was comfortable having his children's world view shaped in a church that preaches about how, among other things, the US government is infecting black people with AIDS on purpose
So, whatever problem you have with Bush you ALSO have with Obama, right? Or are you a hypocrite?
the border search exception applies to searches, not seizures
The thing is that this is NOT a seizure. It's a search that takes a long time because some people have hundreds of gigs of encrypted data on their portable storage.
If you had a tube of rolled up hard copy missile schematics on you, and they took it in to the next room while looking at it, kept it for 10 minutes, and then gave it back to you, would that be a seizure? How about 5 minutes? 30 seconds? 30 days?
If you get it back, it's not a seizure. No more than your international freight, held up in customs for a week while they check it for illegal fruit or meat, is "seized" while it's being inspected.
The issue here is what is a reasonable expectation for how long it would take someone to inspect documents that aren't in plain text in the form of notes in folder, but are instead deeply encrypted, riding along with a hundred thousand other files in a device that's crossing the border. What IS reasonable, in that regard? If the time it takes to do the search is by definition unreasonable, then you need to argue that the ability to do searches at border crossings is, itself, unreasonable.
Yes. They should also do the same for American athletes due to the illegal invasion and occupation of a sovereign nation.
Which one was that? I guess you're referring to the one that was invaded when its regime invaded Kuwait, and which never, even for one day, ever honored any of the agreements that were signed in order to affect a cease-fire in that conflict and to maintain that regime's power. You mean that one? The one that violated a steady stream of UN sanctions, each of which called for consequences exactly like what happened? That one? The one that violated the UN mandated no-fly zones by continually - for years - firing on the coalition aircraft enforcing them? That one? You're using the word "illegal," but I don't think it means what you think it means.
Clearly, for some reason, you preferred to have Saddam slaughtering hundreds of thousands of people from outside of his Tikriti tribe, and are mysteriously glad that he refused to disclose what happened to the tons of VX gas he had stockpiled, and are amused that he kicked the UN inspectors out after never allowing them to freely operate as agreed. Clearly you're frustrated that the long range missles (which he agreed to stop building after he was kicked out of Kuwait) that he continued to buy from North Korea and work on, and deploy, right up through 2003, never got to be used on the people you actually hate (who is it you were hoping he'd use those on, anyway... Iran? Israel? Kuwait? The Saudis?).
Obviously you're upset that you never got a chance to get your own piece of the ripped-off hundreds of millions that Saddam was skimming from the UN's Oil For Food program so that he could rebuild military infrastructure in direct violation of the terms he agreed to in order to cease the destruction of his regime following Kuwait. I'm sure you're upset that he could no longer send cash to Hamas and Hezbollah, or have photo-ops while making large cash payments to the families of bombers. You were obviously a big fan of his actually illegal behavior, so I'm sure that's heartbreaking for you.
Or is your comment all about the fact that the UN is still working on a renewal of the mandate that currently authorizes the presence of the coalition troops in Iraq? Yes, that's due for renewal. Are you saying that since a mandate that's still in effect is going to expire, that operating in that country before it expires is somehow in violation of that mandate now? How does that work, exactly? Is your driver's license current? Well, it's going to expire at some point, so I guess that makes you illegal, huh? No Olympic Games for you, mister.
sovereign nation
Saddam violated the sovereignty of his neighbor by sending huge colums of tanks and soldiers across the border, killing those trying to defend it, and staking a claim to that country as his own. When you iniate a conflict like that (as he did, to expand Iraq's territory by violently annexing Kuwait), you waive your own claim to sovreignty. Just as a murderer waives any claim to his own life. So he was pushed back from Kuwait, militarily, and given the opportunity to maintain his regime if, and only if he met a very clear series of UN-authored standards. He failed to meet all of them, continued campaigns of mass murder, stole billions in aid from the mouths of his own people, routinely tried to shoot down aircraft patrolling where he'd been busy with gassings, mass graves and tribal starvation programs, and continued to smuggle in exactly the same long range weapons he swore he would not. So, the only thing that would have provided Saddam with a claim on sovreignty (his compliance with the terms of his surrender following Kuwait), he chose not to do. He gave up his sovreignty. Period.
Which obviously disappoints you, since you really loved the guy. It's a shame you can't find it in you to love the population of Iraq, who no longer have to worry about his sons' goon squads putting pare
What other power do they have over China at this point? It's not like the IOC can impose sanctions on China, can it?
... though North Korea, of course, is fine, and countries like China which actively lie about their ICO-related policies in order to get the games in their country can just hum along and get what they want.
Of course they have power. They can rule that China's athletes cannot compete in the games. They made exactly such a politics-based ruling against the 7-person team from Iraq just last week. They've since changed their minds, and now TWO athletes from Iraq will be allowed to compete. The IOC's membership is aggressively anti-American (which is funny, considering that the largest share of the money from games-sponsoring and IOC-funding companies comes from the US), and play all sorts of games like this at the committee level. Police states like China get no grief from the IOC, but the US has no voting seat on the IOC's executive committee. In the same meeting during which the IOC decided to kill off baseball and softball from the games two years ago, the US was voted off of the executive committee. The IOC's president, in Belgium, appears not to have minded Iraq's previous Olympic committee chair (Uday Hussein, who had athletes beaten - and worse - for not winning games), but considers the fragile new Iraqi government too shaky, and too supported by the US, to put forth a team to his liking
Since China is being caught having lied about a central issue around which their obtaining of the games was focused, it seems appropriate for the IOC to threaten ruling out their own national team's participation. I can't think of a single better use of the IOC's capricious authority, but it would at least hit China where it hurts, and show the world that messing with reporters' use of the internet is typical policy there - and in direct contradiction to China's contingent-upon-getting-the-games promise of exactly the opposite.
Saw them in Asiago, Cittadella, Marostica, Vicenza, Sirmione (along Lake Garda), Asolo, and even in Verona. They're not dead yet! My wife was NOT amused.
No, I haven't. Perhaps that's because when I went to Italy, it was the 21st century.
... six months ago.
Huh. I encountered at least a dozen of these in public facilities, restaurants, and hotels throughout northern Italy
Semi-first world countries?
That's right. I don't care how many bidets there are in Paris. Have you ever used (read: squatted over!) a public hole-in-the-floor toilet in someplace like Italy? No wonder they do such a brisk trade in new shoes in Milan. Honestly. Yeesh!
There is a perceived "outrage" over him uttering this views; but calling upon God is the basis for most political campaigns
No question. The current Democrat contender (Obama) seems to be a lot more focused on earning his campaign Magical Thinking Street Cred than is his Republican oppoonent. It's an odd twist, that way. However: in those cases, all of the religious talk is essentially a short-hand way of describing one's basic idealogy, or cultural frame of reference when it comes to notions about right and wrong, justice, etc. That someone uses a silly superstition as a stand-in for a well reasoned personal code of ethics that, ultimately, manifests itself in pretty much the same way on most matters anyway... that makes it less of an issue for a politician.
On the other hand: someone who actually has "scientist" in their job description, but who makes lots of wildly science-free claims about the nature of the universe and visiting aliens... that's another matter. And yes, I include religious-minded scientists in that group, not just UFO-loony former astronauts who also claim that ESP cured their cancer.
But to say that this is simply old age and senility is unkind and inaccurate.
Actually, to the contrary. It's kind to offer him a physiological excuse for embracing irrational, foolish notions that don't hold up to critical thinking or any sort of scrutiny. That he's been a fool in this regard most of life is unkind (given his position) to everyone else. Allowing the world to write this off as a symptom of his age is a face-saving kindness. What's UNKIND is trying ever so hard to let him off the hook for a lifetime of such nonsense... that doesn't do anyone any favors.
He landed on the moon. He has actually been in space, unlike you or me.
I haven't been aboard ship at the north pole, either, though some people have. Does that make such a person's claim that there is a giant underwater city full of sapient leech-people controlling our planet's magnetic field any more credible? Physically going somewhere that fewer people have seen personally doesn't - in the least - make completely unsubstantiated, evidence-less, silly-on-the-face-of-them claims any more credible. To the contrary, actually. He's being entirely un-scientific about this, which is very unbecoming to a former scientist.
Nope, that's it. I'm just pitching a fit over that thing, right there. But it's probably the 10th time I've seen it today, in print, in e-mails, and in numerous discussion threads. Just gets under my skin, since it suggests that, as usual, people don't actually think about what they're typing. It's not just a typo - it's right up there with people who say "I could care less about..." when they actually mean the exact opposite. It's just laziness and thoughtless communication, that's all.