I understand that the militants were simply looking for an excuse - anything would have done - simply because you weren't on ``their team.'' Morally right up there with the opinion of the Papal Nuncio at the massacre of Beziers (30,000 dead in one day, half of them Catholics): ``Kill them all, the Lord knows them that are his.'' However:
Even before the "fundamentalists" took over, my family (Zoroastrian and Catholics) and many others were persecuted for their faith, the cloths they wore, the food they ate (they kill people for drinking wine or eating ham ).
I'm not entirely sure of the answer to this: is there anything in either Zoroastrianism or Catholicism which requires yout to eat pigs, drink fermented beverages, or wear certain kinds of clothes? You could make a case for fish on Fridays, but is there any reason that you must risk trichinosis, alcoholism and probably also being shot?
I'm filled with hate for ALL muslims and all Gods, my parents are not and didn't teach it to me.
Actually, your hate would logically be directed at organisations claiming to have authority from one diety or another, when they patently don't. The Q'ran requires Muslims to treat ``the people of the book'' (ie Jews and Christians) gently. The so-called fundamentalists ignore this plain, fundamental instruction; they don't even treat their own people gently. Clearly, they are not who they claim to be, they are not genuine fundamentalists.
It's just another case of blind, stupid our-side vs their-side bullying and you can put in pretty much any set of opposing names you like: Protestant/Catholic (Ireland), Atheist/Diest (USSR, China), White/Black (Rhodesia, RSA), Islander/Chinese (Indonesia), Hutu/Tutsi (Rwanda) and so on.
However, for each bullying asshole, there are hundreds of reasonable human beings, swept along in the flow. Don't write them off, or the militant idiots will have achieved their goal for you.
why then didn't the terrorists go after General Dynamics, Lockheed, Ratheon, or another US company which develops and sells these weapons? Why are they killing a bunch of bankers and stock brokers instead of the guys who developed the F16?
They went after the people who finance these developments, and finance their use against innocents as well as outraged third-world maniacs. And like the US in Iraq, never mind the collateral damage.
Doesn't it strike you as significant that several times as many more or less innocent bystanders are killed every day, directly and indirectly, by US involvement in the affairs of other nations, as were killed in one day in New York?
I would like to question the reason such testing is necessary in the first place.
Japanese culture of a century ago would have selected for small feet in their girls. This may have had interesting developmental consequences, given that the genes for characteristic features are very often multi-purpose and spread around the DNA. Hitler would have murdered Einstein in utero or sooner, given the chance. There are a lot of consequences to un-natural selection of which we are not yet aware. Even if we are fully aware of the consequences, can people be relied upon to base their kill/keep decisions on rational grounds?
And no, we are not right to lifer's. We are liberal, UU's and pro-choice.
I'm also pro-choice. IMHO, the child concerned should be consulted and given a choice before anything drastic is done to or with him/her. Can you pick any physiological marker during a child's in utero development at which the child stops being ``a blob'' and starts being ``human?''
these two infants can still be terminated if their families think they will be seriously burdened by having to raise defective, high maintenance offspring.
Consider this:
A man was walking along a beach one day, a beach littered with dying starfish, washed ashore in last night's storm.
He met a little girl who was carefully picking up startfish and slinging them back into the sea.
Looking along the beach at the millions and millions of starfish, he asked, ``Little girl, why do you bother? There are millions of them! What you're doing won't make any difference.''
Slinging another starfish into the sea, she replied ``It did to that one.''
The problem is not for the parents, the problem is for the children who were murdered. I'm pro-choice: I think that the children should be consulted and given their rightful choice before anything drastic is done to them.
Babies have survived ``miscarriage'' at less than 18 weeks and grown up to be healthy adults. Babies as young as 8 weeks from conception have demonstrated some awareness of invasive abortion procedures, and made what any sane observer would classify as attempts to live. A baby is a baby from the start, not a blob.
Before anyone trots out that fish-stage recapitulation crap, remember that it has been known to be a fraud for over 100 years but is still used as an excuse to murder children today. Why? Why lie?
My sweet and cheerful little Downes-syndrome niece, Joey - now 11 but with a mental age somewhere near 5 or 6 - would be dead if my sister wasn't pro-choice like me. Maybe you would be dead too, if someone had decided that the odds of you being Downes were too great.
It's not ``terminated,'' Coward, it's killed. Are you interchangeable? Can I kill you if I don't like you, and make a replacement, no worries? Are you sure?
...of New Jersey group, so say the reciepts brought up for the subsequent war-crimes trial,
donated directly and indirectly to the election funds of Hitler, his party and several other prominent candidates
suppressed research on artificial fuels in the US (by means of patenting it all and refusing licenses - sound familiar?) while promoting and even funding it in Germany up to and during the early stages of war - without this the Wermacht (sp? I'm not German, sorry) wouldn't have had enough fuel to do anything; and
expedited the pre-war transfer of large amounts of war-critical material, particularly scarce metals and chemicals, from the USA to Germany.
Many other big names were and presumably are involved in such deals.
I have been on 9 international missions in my career, EVERY SINGLE ONE being directed by the states, who wont use their own staff because they are not as well trained. (as they have explained to the oz military on numerous occasions.)
Sad but true. I've talked to vets of many wars, and often the story is that the Oz (or Brit, Rhodesian, name it) infantry would take a hill, give it to the Yanks, and then have to take it back again the next day. It often got so routine that both Oz and enemy soldiers would leave their gear on the contested hill - and share stuff - because they knew they'd be back for it next day.
I've also heard - from the horses' mouths - of times when Oz (or insert-name) troops and enemy would be involved in a firefight, a Yank group would approach, and both sets of combatants would go to ground until the group was well clear because the Yanks were just too damn dangerous to be near, bombing and strafing everything in sight if they got nervous.
OTOH, if you wanted something absolutely carbonized, you called in a Yank firestrike and stood well, well back.
you may have the planes but china would eat you alive if it came down to soldier vs. soldier.
The upshot is: in a real war, I predict that the USA would pound the pooh out of China from a long distance and then lose most of their troops in the cleanup. The obvious tactical approach would be to not have a cleanup. )-:
don't knock your aussie ass over by patting yourself on the back too hard
You missed the references to Russia and China? Shall we dwell on stuff like the Harrier jets from Britain? Or some of the incredible space stuff that Japan have been up to, on a shoestring budget? To quote Son of Naked Vicar on ballet dancers, ``Our poofs'll beat your poofs any day!'' The point is not that Oz is great (hey, I like it), but that everybody has their strong points, their own individual greatnesses. To hear many (far from all) citizens of the USA speak, you'd think that everything worthwhile happened in North America, except for some of the really cold bits.
the only reason you (or any other "first world" nation) doesn't (apparently) "meddle" in the affairs of other nations is because you know you have the u.s. to do it for you.
You've got that ass-backwards, as the previous respondent pointed out. The real reason is that the politicians we haven't jailed are too lily-livered to do much of anything. Indonesia sneezes, they whimper and grovel.
it does so when it (and it's allies'...ahem-australia-ahem) interests are at stake
Unfortunately for this argument, the interests are almost always corporate, and it often comes out in the wash (alas, too late) that the interests were more or less deliberately put at stake, or the official reasons are covering a lot of dirty dealings of one form or another.
This gives the majority of Americans a very bad name in other countries. Which is a shame, because many, many Americans are helpful, humble, honest people.
Does anyone have any objection to facial recognition systems at customs?
Yes, lots of them. Starting with the huge number of false positives generated by existing systems and the hell that the victims go through (and sometimes the legal minefield that the FRS operators tread). Moving on to the possibility of wearing masks to falsely incriminate people and/or disguise terrorists, technology which the terrorists have and most other people do not.
The answer is not in more security. One answer would be to stop meddling in other people's politics. Another would be to think about the fact that Israeli airliners basically don't get hijacked because the hijacker would be dead before they finished their first threat.
Gatorman: you need Monty Python
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I've seen it jump $100,000 in an hour (thanks to my $10 I'm sure) with over 25,000 donations so far, very promising. No where else on Earth could you find support like this.
Monty Python's The Meaning of Life has the Grim Reaper claiming this:
You ####ing Americans are all the ###ing same - it's listen-to-me this and let-me-tell-you that...
Here in Perth, Western Australia, our annual charity Telethon regularly collects significantly more than is pledged. Western Australia sent firefighters East on ASh Wednesday. Australia sent many firefighters to the USA to help with the last lot of big fires. We even help people like Indonesia, who aren't exactly reknowned for returning the favour.
Yes, America is powerful and often helpful. But the arrogance in assuming that `we are the best in the world at XXX' for practically everything is one of the factors which allows the USA to continue to fiddle with the politics of other countries, and occasionally to inflict damage on them beside which WTC looks like an act of street vandalism. Pull your head in. All of you.
The other risk in being `the best' is that you stop trying to be the best (`I have arrived') and you stop checking that you're doing The Right Thing(tm) (`I can do no wrong').
For the record, Texas fits many times into Western Australia, the shire of Meekatharra is bigger than Texas, and so are several of our cattle stations. America may build big planes like C5A Starlifters, but Australia's Jindalee OTH radar can see them taking off and landing from here and Russia builds bigger helicopters than you. China can see your `stealth' planes OTH as well. For $Oz2M, Australia developed the HoveRoc, a missile which hovers and pretends to be a destroyer, and produced four of them. It was so good from Day One that the USA (in exercises) had to fly over and look to see which was the real destroyer! For $70M, the USA got one prototype tethered rocket to hover. And so on.
The USA is not the biggest, it is not the best, and it is not the most charitable. It is big, it is often good, and it is generous, and it is welcome to take a place among the nations on those terms. Just don't give everyone else this `best in the world' drivel.
PS: Gatorman, it's not you alone, you were just the last straw on this camel's back.
American businesses essentially funded the Bolshevik revolution
Could you elaborate on this? It sounds rather counterproductive of them.
Ford subsequently sold heaps of vehicles (and factories) into the USSR, General Electric got to wire much of the place. That ain't counterproductive, and they weren't alone. During WW2, German-occupied French Ford factories were routinely producing parts and selling them to the Reich for use in captured Ford vehicles made and/or sold in Russia.
split jerusalem in parts of equal size and put in under un control
It's been a long-cherished desire for the Pope to control Jerusalem. The EEC/UC would back him (EEC == Europe Entirely Catholic) too. This is unlikely to be the excuse he needs, but wait... there's probably more...
Several cameras at the doors (all angles) and a couple of concealed remote-control instant-acting dart guns would be a better idea, plus a R/C slug-thrower carefully limited to not putting holes in the aircraft's skin.
...and if you think that's funny, come visit me here in sunny Western Australia and I'll show you just how hard Wandoo wood is. If you know Jarrah, try twice as dense. PNG has stuff locally called Ironwood which is even harder. It eats steel sawblades (a sharp high-tensile saw might get three, maybe four inches into a log before it gets too blunt to cut anything). This kind of stuff is dead easy to conceal in other plastic/wooden innocuous-looking items such as walking sticks. There is no defense against it.
The defense should be in the people. If a hijacker was stupid enough to stand up in an Israeli aircraft, he would be dead before he took ten steps.
Germany, Japan and, to a lesser extent, Britain and Italy, were lifted out of the debris of war by the Americans who poured in billions of dollars and forgave other billions in debts.
Americans in general are generous and helpful (although they do tend to approach this with a we-know-better-than-you attitude), almost as helpful as ``us'' Australians* but the same cannot be said for all American businesses.
You might think that I was talking about Microsoft, but I'm talking about companies like General Electric and Standard Oil, who made World War II possible by funding and supporting Reich war-related research and stockpiling. This is not an isolated incident. Given that the terrorists hit a business centre (and apparently tried for another stock exchange as well), rather than entirely political targets there may be a connection.
Your history is spoon-fed. You need some roughage in your diet.
* who invited the Indonesian Army to joint exercises in Australia, gave them a copy of The Bush Tucker Book, did everything short of laying out a red carpet embossed ``Welcome to South Irian.''
What about middle-east political sites hosted in the US? Let's nuke ourselves!
Also... if it's so vulnerable, why haven't you attacked them yourself? Are you a coward or just incompetent?
Finally, what are you hoping to achieve? More civilian suffering? More collateral damage? More excuses for nasties to attack the USA? Try this alternative: get a life.
Apparently the copy that hit the stands a few days ago contains a picture of the WTC exploding.
Regular psychics? One told a relative of mine to expect a long life. Same relative was run over and killed on the way home from the psychic's studio.
That about sums it up for 99% of them. The other 1% are even more of a worry, the sources of their occasionally-unbelievably-accurate information are highly dangerous.
First, know that I have no sympathy for the attackers or any of the people behind them, and although definitely non-violent by nature, would kill any one of them with my bare hands if it would help to reduce the damage. The needs of any one of the many killed or maimed outweigh the needs of one dickhead who thinks he knows how to fix problems by hurting and killing innocent people.
When it comes to killing, no one knows how to do it better than Americans, this they will learn.
Yes, I believe it's called ``scorched earth.'' But success with other than overwhemling firepower is harder to come by.
Think about the fact that these assholes attacked the WTC before the Pentagon. Think about it long and hard. Why?
Think about the stupid anti-terrorism rules that the USA already has. Think about how much those rules intrude into the lives of Americans, and how little they've done to stop this wretched act of terrorism.
Think about the BATF filling someone's house with flammable gas and blowing it up, murdering hundreds of poeple inside. Think about the observation that when the Oklahoma building was blown up from the inside with multiple charges, the BATF offices just happened to be empty, but a day-care centre was left full of children.
Use your collective brains! You speak of the people behind this, but what if the people behind it were really Americans, as happened during World War II? Hitler's Reich would have been impossible without much US finanace and other intervention (e.g. suppression of alternative fuel research in USA by means of patents, promotion of same research in Germany). Pearl Harbour would have been impossible without a great deal of prior US strategy to basically force the Japanese to do something. Don't be a puppet again!
If your reaction is typical of a US citizen, well, welcome back to the Dark Ages: goodbye, personal freedom (in the name of ``greater common good''); goodbye safety, particularly for any minority; hello, police state; hello fear; hello uncertainty. And this: hello, unfettered control of the world's single most powerful military force.
Time to look at history, carefully, before you repeat it.
What we need is to quit passing laws that protect a business model. There is no inherent right to profit.
For at least a century, these same businesses or their forebears have been funding (one way or another) the development of increasingly business-centric wars. American businesses essentially funded the Bolshevik revolution, and without the prolonged and earnest intervention of some Wall Street big names like Farben, Ford and General Electric, Adolph Hitler's Third Reich wouldn't have got as far as the taxiway.
If world wars are a routine achievement, what hope do you think mere copyright has in comparison?
With a century of momentum and billions of dollars behind them, how are you or I going to stop them?
Our `inalienable rights' may as well be alien rights in the face of such blatant and powerful violations of them.
Currently downloading bcast-200c-5mdk.src.rpm from a Mandrake Cooker mirror. I plan to put up a sourceforge site named hev-E (High End Video Editor) and get the package owned by a two dollar company that the sharks can amuse themselves with if they're that stupid. I hope that the founders of Broadcast 2000 feel safe about contributing to that from time to time.
``Would she still like me if I was one of the guys who follow the camels around to pick up after them, or a lawyer, or something?'' - King Xerxes (a zucchini) from the VeggieTales version of Esther
For genuine truth-in-advertising there should also be others in the series with titles like `how to tart up rubbish and get it out the door by deadline' and `managing your wont-fix list'.
I know from personal experience that if I'm not motivated by anything more than just getting the job done, then I won't produce the same quality code that I would have under favorable circumstances. Not due to time constraints, but because there's no motivation for me to do anything more than the bare minimum.
Actually, allowing science to limit religion is the dangerous one, since scientists have religious beliefs including Atheism.
Alternatively, passing religious laws and then selectively enforcing them - which history shows happening often - usually results in seven-figure bloodshed (think Crusades, both World Wars, Reign of Terror...).
Irresponsibly cutting taxes and using it to blatently curry favor with the Nascar sect of American society.
Cutting taxes I like. Cutting taxes for any reason is a welcome novelty. Any government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take away everything you have. Playing favourites with the remains is not such a good idea.
Environmental destruction in favor of short-term corporate gains (Alaska, Kyoto).
Not at all surprising, if you assume that Big Business 0wns Bush.
Doing his best to restart the good 'ol cold war (ABM treaty breaking, trying to isolate China).
Not at all surprising considering that Dubyah is in the pocket of big industry, and that both sides of the cold war were largely funded (directly and indirectly) by the USA for the nett benefit of certain large US corporations (read Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler sometime).
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not entirely sure of the answer to this: is there anything in either Zoroastrianism or Catholicism which requires yout to eat pigs, drink fermented beverages, or wear certain kinds of clothes? You could make a case for fish on Fridays, but is there any reason that you must risk trichinosis, alcoholism and probably also being shot?
Actually, your hate would logically be directed at organisations claiming to have authority from one diety or another, when they patently don't. The Q'ran requires Muslims to treat ``the people of the book'' (ie Jews and Christians) gently. The so-called fundamentalists ignore this plain, fundamental instruction; they don't even treat their own people gently. Clearly, they are not who they claim to be, they are not genuine fundamentalists.
It's just another case of blind, stupid our-side vs their-side bullying and you can put in pretty much any set of opposing names you like: Protestant/Catholic (Ireland), Atheist/Diest (USSR, China), White/Black (Rhodesia, RSA), Islander/Chinese (Indonesia), Hutu/Tutsi (Rwanda) and so on.
However, for each bullying asshole, there are hundreds of reasonable human beings, swept along in the flow. Don't write them off, or the militant idiots will have achieved their goal for you.
They went after the people who finance these developments, and finance their use against innocents as well as outraged third-world maniacs. And like the US in Iraq, never mind the collateral damage.
Doesn't it strike you as significant that several times as many more or less innocent bystanders are killed every day, directly and indirectly, by US involvement in the affairs of other nations, as were killed in one day in New York?
Japanese culture of a century ago would have selected for small feet in their girls. This may have had interesting developmental consequences, given that the genes for characteristic features are very often multi-purpose and spread around the DNA. Hitler would have murdered Einstein in utero or sooner, given the chance. There are a lot of consequences to un-natural selection of which we are not yet aware. Even if we are fully aware of the consequences, can people be relied upon to base their kill/keep decisions on rational grounds?
I'm also pro-choice. IMHO, the child concerned should be consulted and given a choice before anything drastic is done to or with him/her. Can you pick any physiological marker during a child's in utero development at which the child stops being ``a blob'' and starts being ``human?''
Consider this:
The problem is not for the parents, the problem is for the children who were murdered. I'm pro-choice: I think that the children should be consulted and given their rightful choice before anything drastic is done to them.
Babies have survived ``miscarriage'' at less than 18 weeks and grown up to be healthy adults. Babies as young as 8 weeks from conception have demonstrated some awareness of invasive abortion procedures, and made what any sane observer would classify as attempts to live. A baby is a baby from the start, not a blob.
Before anyone trots out that fish-stage recapitulation crap, remember that it has been known to be a fraud for over 100 years but is still used as an excuse to murder children today. Why? Why lie?
My sweet and cheerful little Downes-syndrome niece, Joey - now 11 but with a mental age somewhere near 5 or 6 - would be dead if my sister wasn't pro-choice like me. Maybe you would be dead too, if someone had decided that the odds of you being Downes were too great.
It's not ``terminated,'' Coward, it's killed. Are you interchangeable? Can I kill you if I don't like you, and make a replacement, no worries? Are you sure?
Many other big names were and presumably are involved in such deals.
Sad but true. I've talked to vets of many wars, and often the story is that the Oz (or Brit, Rhodesian, name it) infantry would take a hill, give it to the Yanks, and then have to take it back again the next day. It often got so routine that both Oz and enemy soldiers would leave their gear on the contested hill - and share stuff - because they knew they'd be back for it next day.
I've also heard - from the horses' mouths - of times when Oz (or insert-name) troops and enemy would be involved in a firefight, a Yank group would approach, and both sets of combatants would go to ground until the group was well clear because the Yanks were just too damn dangerous to be near, bombing and strafing everything in sight if they got nervous.
OTOH, if you wanted something absolutely carbonized, you called in a Yank firestrike and stood well, well back.
The upshot is: in a real war, I predict that the USA would pound the pooh out of China from a long distance and then lose most of their troops in the cleanup. The obvious tactical approach would be to not have a cleanup. )-:
You missed the references to Russia and China? Shall we dwell on stuff like the Harrier jets from Britain? Or some of the incredible space stuff that Japan have been up to, on a shoestring budget? To quote Son of Naked Vicar on ballet dancers, ``Our poofs'll beat your poofs any day!'' The point is not that Oz is great (hey, I like it), but that everybody has their strong points, their own individual greatnesses. To hear many (far from all) citizens of the USA speak, you'd think that everything worthwhile happened in North America, except for some of the really cold bits.
You've got that ass-backwards, as the previous respondent pointed out. The real reason is that the politicians we haven't jailed are too lily-livered to do much of anything. Indonesia sneezes, they whimper and grovel.
Unfortunately for this argument, the interests are almost always corporate, and it often comes out in the wash (alas, too late) that the interests were more or less deliberately put at stake, or the official reasons are covering a lot of dirty dealings of one form or another.
This gives the majority of Americans a very bad name in other countries. Which is a shame, because many, many Americans are helpful, humble, honest people.
I personally know a very pretty 55kg (110lb) flight attendant who could stuff your feet into your ears before you could blink.
``It's not the size of the [subject] in the fight, but the size of the fight in the [subject] that counts.''
Good evening, passengers, this is your captain speaking, we are about to touch down at... ooh, why has the windscreen suddenly gone blue?
Cracker paradise. You too can run Jumbos and WBJ's around major airports armed only with a cracking toolkit and a pointing device?
Yes, lots of them. Starting with the huge number of false positives generated by existing systems and the hell that the victims go through (and sometimes the legal minefield that the FRS operators tread). Moving on to the possibility of wearing masks to falsely incriminate people and/or disguise terrorists, technology which the terrorists have and most other people do not.
The answer is not in more security. One answer would be to stop meddling in other people's politics. Another would be to think about the fact that Israeli airliners basically don't get hijacked because the hijacker would be dead before they finished their first threat.
Monty Python's The Meaning of Life has the Grim Reaper claiming this:
Here in Perth, Western Australia, our annual charity Telethon regularly collects significantly more than is pledged. Western Australia sent firefighters East on ASh Wednesday. Australia sent many firefighters to the USA to help with the last lot of big fires. We even help people like Indonesia, who aren't exactly reknowned for returning the favour.
Yes, America is powerful and often helpful. But the arrogance in assuming that `we are the best in the world at XXX' for practically everything is one of the factors which allows the USA to continue to fiddle with the politics of other countries, and occasionally to inflict damage on them beside which WTC looks like an act of street vandalism. Pull your head in. All of you.
The other risk in being `the best' is that you stop trying to be the best (`I have arrived') and you stop checking that you're doing The Right Thing(tm) (`I can do no wrong').
For the record, Texas fits many times into Western Australia, the shire of Meekatharra is bigger than Texas, and so are several of our cattle stations. America may build big planes like C5A Starlifters, but Australia's Jindalee OTH radar can see them taking off and landing from here and Russia builds bigger helicopters than you. China can see your `stealth' planes OTH as well. For $Oz2M, Australia developed the HoveRoc, a missile which hovers and pretends to be a destroyer, and produced four of them. It was so good from Day One that the USA (in exercises) had to fly over and look to see which was the real destroyer! For $70M, the USA got one prototype tethered rocket to hover. And so on.
The USA is not the biggest, it is not the best, and it is not the most charitable. It is big, it is often good, and it is generous, and it is welcome to take a place among the nations on those terms. Just don't give everyone else this `best in the world' drivel.
PS: Gatorman, it's not you alone, you were just the last straw on this camel's back.
Yes. That's a security feature. (-:
However, if you really want win32 apps, and in a cage even, try Win4Lin, although sometimes WINE is good enough.
Ford subsequently sold heaps of vehicles (and factories) into the USSR, General Electric got to wire much of the place. That ain't counterproductive, and they weren't alone. During WW2, German-occupied French Ford factories were routinely producing parts and selling them to the Reich for use in captured Ford vehicles made and/or sold in Russia.
It's been a long-cherished desire for the Pope to control Jerusalem. The EEC/UC would back him (EEC == Europe Entirely Catholic) too. This is unlikely to be the excuse he needs, but wait... there's probably more...
Several cameras at the doors (all angles) and a couple of concealed remote-control instant-acting dart guns would be a better idea, plus a R/C slug-thrower carefully limited to not putting holes in the aircraft's skin.
...and if you think that's funny, come visit me here in sunny Western Australia and I'll show you just how hard Wandoo wood is. If you know Jarrah, try twice as dense. PNG has stuff locally called Ironwood which is even harder. It eats steel sawblades (a sharp high-tensile saw might get three, maybe four inches into a log before it gets too blunt to cut anything). This kind of stuff is dead easy to conceal in other plastic/wooden innocuous-looking items such as walking sticks. There is no defense against it.
The defense should be in the people. If a hijacker was stupid enough to stand up in an Israeli aircraft, he would be dead before he took ten steps.
Americans in general are generous and helpful (although they do tend to approach this with a we-know-better-than-you attitude), almost as helpful as ``us'' Australians* but the same cannot be said for all American businesses.
You might think that I was talking about Microsoft, but I'm talking about companies like General Electric and Standard Oil, who made World War II possible by funding and supporting Reich war-related research and stockpiling. This is not an isolated incident. Given that the terrorists hit a business centre (and apparently tried for another stock exchange as well), rather than entirely political targets there may be a connection.
Your history is spoon-fed. You need some roughage in your diet.
* who invited the Indonesian Army to joint exercises in Australia, gave them a copy of The Bush Tucker Book, did everything short of laying out a red carpet embossed ``Welcome to South Irian.''
What about middle-east political sites hosted in the US? Let's nuke ourselves!
Also... if it's so vulnerable, why haven't you attacked them yourself? Are you a coward or just incompetent?
Finally, what are you hoping to achieve? More civilian suffering? More collateral damage? More excuses for nasties to attack the USA? Try this alternative: get a life.
Apparently the copy that hit the stands a few days ago contains a picture of the WTC exploding.
Regular psychics? One told a relative of mine to expect a long life. Same relative was run over and killed on the way home from the psychic's studio.
That about sums it up for 99% of them. The other 1% are even more of a worry, the sources of their occasionally-unbelievably-accurate information are highly dangerous.
Yes, I believe it's called ``scorched earth.'' But success with other than overwhemling firepower is harder to come by.
Think about the fact that these assholes attacked the WTC before the Pentagon. Think about it long and hard. Why?
Think about the stupid anti-terrorism rules that the USA already has. Think about how much those rules intrude into the lives of Americans, and how little they've done to stop this wretched act of terrorism.
Think about the BATF filling someone's house with flammable gas and blowing it up, murdering hundreds of poeple inside. Think about the observation that when the Oklahoma building was blown up from the inside with multiple charges, the BATF offices just happened to be empty, but a day-care centre was left full of children.
Use your collective brains! You speak of the people behind this, but what if the people behind it were really Americans, as happened during World War II? Hitler's Reich would have been impossible without much US finanace and other intervention (e.g. suppression of alternative fuel research in USA by means of patents, promotion of same research in Germany). Pearl Harbour would have been impossible without a great deal of prior US strategy to basically force the Japanese to do something. Don't be a puppet again!
If your reaction is typical of a US citizen, well, welcome back to the Dark Ages: goodbye, personal freedom (in the name of ``greater common good''); goodbye safety, particularly for any minority; hello, police state; hello fear; hello uncertainty. And this: hello, unfettered control of the world's single most powerful military force.
Time to look at history, carefully, before you repeat it.
T h i n k !
For at least a century, these same businesses or their forebears have been funding (one way or another) the development of increasingly business-centric wars. American businesses essentially funded the Bolshevik revolution, and without the prolonged and earnest intervention of some Wall Street big names like Farben, Ford and General Electric, Adolph Hitler's Third Reich wouldn't have got as far as the taxiway.
If world wars are a routine achievement, what hope do you think mere copyright has in comparison?
With a century of momentum and billions of dollars behind them, how are you or I going to stop them?
Our `inalienable rights' may as well be alien rights in the face of such blatant and powerful violations of them.
``Would she still like me if I was one of the guys who follow the camels around to pick up after them, or a lawyer, or something?'' - King Xerxes (a zucchini) from the VeggieTales version of Esther
For genuine truth-in-advertising there should also be others in the series with titles like `how to tart up rubbish and get it out the door by deadline' and `managing your wont-fix list'.
I second that, wholeheartedly.
Actually, allowing science to limit religion is the dangerous one, since scientists have religious beliefs including Atheism.
Alternatively, passing religious laws and then selectively enforcing them - which history shows happening often - usually results in seven-figure bloodshed (think Crusades, both World Wars, Reign of Terror...).
Cutting taxes I like. Cutting taxes for any reason is a welcome novelty. Any government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take away everything you have. Playing favourites with the remains is not such a good idea.
Not at all surprising, if you assume that Big Business 0wns Bush.
Not at all surprising considering that Dubyah is in the pocket of big industry, and that both sides of the cold war were largely funded (directly and indirectly) by the USA for the nett benefit of certain large US corporations (read Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler sometime).