You may have a problem due to mental illness, perhaps anger management problems. You may want to seek profession care before it results in major life issues.
There are many rebel factions, but the vast majority of the fighters are Syrian. They would like to not be subjected to the brutal Syrian Baathist government dictatorship, which is backed by Iran. Do you think that is bad? Suppose it turned out they could manage to form a democratic government like Iraq's?
Also, what about the name "Information Dominance Center"? Creepy and pathetic at the same time; it sounds like BDSM-style slash-fic based on TRON. Bring in the Logic Probe!
For context you're thinking sex when you should be thinking war. Parlez-vous français?*
The difference between your son and his pony versus al Qaida and their goals is that they are willing to kill large number of people to get what they want. They have destabilized multiple countries and posed a genuine threat to the governments.
In one sense it really doesn't matter if they are going to win or not, but rather that they will continue to fight, and kill, and destabilize.
Your claim that, " al-Qaida has virtually no ability to strike the West with any force" is proved false by the terrorist attacks in London and Madrid, not to mention the Bali bombing, that occurred after 9/11. The British intelligence services are very concerned about the threat there. There have been many more attempts that could have caused mass casualties, including in the US. In the US there have been multiple attempts to use vehicle bombs to attack various cities, including audiences at public events. It's a minor miracle that none of the big bomb plots have succeeded. However, there is the Fort Hood attack, misleading labeled "workplace violence," and the recent Boston Marathon bombing.
I give you credit for tackling the material, but I don't think you've quite got a grip on all the implications.
There is very little in the way of ties between the US and al Qaida from that time.
The additional spending on the actual wars is a minor percentage of the budget for the Department of Defense. Defense spending in the US is dwarfed by social welfare spending (Social Security, Welfare, Medicare, Medicaid, etc.).* We were going bankrupt anyway, the wars have had little effect on it. The political class in power in the legislature blocked attempts at reform that might have at least eased, if not resolved, the social welfare spending problem, which is huge. They also blocked reform that might have prevented the housing bubble which is still creating havoc. Fighting terrorism isn't going to bankrupt us, retirement and healthcare are. It will sped along by mismanagement of the economy which is destroying the tax base.
* If you decide to look into this for yourself, make sure you look at all spending - discretionary and mandatory. Various organizations will only show just the discretionary budget to distort the relative amount of defense spending.
If people can acknowledge that al Qaida poses a threat, and are trying to do everything they can to harm us, and all it takes is a symbolic condemnation of the US government as "terrorists," I suppose that is a start back towards sanity. We'll just treat it as a crutch.
For what it is worth to you, al Qaida and the Taliban fighting in Syria constitute a minor percentage of the rebel forces. If we were going to work with them at all it would have been much better to have done it several years ago, before it became a real draw for the Islamists. I suppose that would have been too much to hope for.
And what purpose is that other than to satisfy the delusions of grandeur of the people running the place and the people holding the purse strings?
The stated purpose: to act as a command center. I'm reasonably certain nobody there believed they were in space, expected to go to space, or that the Klingons would show up.
That might be tolerable in a corporate environment, but not a government one. This is pure, unadulterated waste. "Selling" isn't part of the mission.
If the layout is functional, and the costs weren't extravagant in building it, why do you care? I image it couldn't have been that expensive since people build that sort of thing as a hobby. Or does it offend your sensibilities as an interior decorator?
Every senior manager in government has to be ready to explain their mission, including to Congress, and how the availability of resources impacts their mission.
Instead of living in fear, many people are living in denial. Your statement, "quit being dicks on the international stage and stop being involved in political coups" has nothing to do with al Qaida's goals. Nothing. Bin Laden's first demand in his letter of America was that the US convert to Islam. The second was, in short, to replace the Constitution with Sharia law. It looks like you are projecting your political beliefs instead of observing what it is that they actually want. That is a recipe for failure, a recipe for disaster. It is more of the same: Westerners not listening to third world peoples, and their goals - a complaint I expect you would recognize. They are aggressive imperialists that want to turn the clock back 1,000 years to when their civilization was powerful, and directly threatened Europe with conquest, not some randomly aggrieved anti-colonialists.
That's an interesting insight. In Star Trek the "red shirts" are members of the same crew as the rest of the people wearing other shirt colors. I'm not sure that I can think of many cases where the "red shirts" were killed by their own crew, I believe it was almost entirely killing done by the enemy. That enemy was often unseen until it killed a red shirt, and then threatened or attempted to kill the rest.
Well, just a reminder that there really is an enemy out there (not the NSA), and now they are activating their cloaks. Is it solely to escape, or to strike by surprise? I guess as red shirts we'll eventually find out.
Computer: Beep Beep! Warning! A Level 1 Data Breach is currently in progress. Failure to resolve data breach could result in loss of all hands by space dock.
Syria and Iraq both got their first chemical weapons from Egypt, and then went on to manufacture their own. Egypt got their first weapons from the Soviet Union.
Straw man? Hardly. It is fairly common to see people advocate for the normalization of aspects of pedophilia and their interests on Slashdot, and there is an undercurrent of it in society.
Nor is there a right to trample over the rights of everyone to get a very few...
Fair enough. But uncritically accepting whatever content is in a passage aping a respected literary form is a way to end up in an absurd position. "First they came for the pedophiles...." indeed.
Sorry to hear it. If you're keeping them it might be worth checking with a cobbler to see if they can be stretched, or maybe try it yourself. There is a tool that can be used for that. It gets inserted into the shoe and it spreads out to stretch it. You might be able to stretch it enough to make a difference. Of course there are some risks to trying it.
Anyway, good luck, and hopefully things never get this bad for you.;)
It's not completely clear from your reply if you're just going off the web catalog or if you've ever actually been to one of their store to have your foot measured and see the styles. I can tell you that the style I wear looks like it has a fairly pointy toe on the web, but the actual shoe doesn't. I recommend that you actually go to one of the stores and have your foot measured. Red Wing does make up to 16E, and it may be that you need an E width for their shoes/boots. Sadly the choices have narrowed considerably by the time you get to that size. You can see what they have available in different sizes and widths with the shoe finder at the link below. You probably just want to filter by size first, and maybe width. I wouldn't be surprised if it ends up being a special order. If they measure you first, before the order, I would expect it to fit. Of course new shoes / boots often need a "break in" period before they reach their full potential.
... Last week, the ACLU was in federal court, arguing that a Miami-Dade County school board broke the law by removing from its school libraries a book entitled Vamos a Cuba (Let’s Visit Cuba), which offers a strangely luminous view of life in Castro’s island “paradise.” A federal judge has already ruled that the book be returned to the shelves until the case can play out in court.
The school board’s beef isn’t with what is on the pages, but with what isn’t. Parents filed complaints after finding the book to be devoid of any mention of the oppressive regime instituted by Fidel Castro nearly 50 years ago. Instead, its pages are filled with breezy commentaries on how Cubans enjoy chicken with rice (under the country’s subsidized ration plan, the average Cuban is allotted a whopping 8 ounces per month) and boating as a leisure activity (“boating” being a rather ironic term for the fragile, homemade rafts so many launch out onto the ocean, in desperate bids to escape the regime).
The book’s cover, available in both English and Spanish versions, is adorned with beaming children dressed in the uniform of the Pioneers, the Communist youth organization that Cuban children are required to join. They look like Cuban Bobbsey Twins.
Obviously, the Miami children targeted for this book have never been told that questioning the Cuban government is likely to lead to imprisonment that milk is far too expensive for most on the island to purchase that access to everyday activities like surfing the Internet is not only severely limited, but closely monitored by the government for any shred of dissent against Castro and his cronies.
Absent from the pages of Vamos a Cuba is any mention of the ruthless 20-year prison sentences levied on Cuban poets and journalists and priests who failed to fawn over their fearless leader. Instead, the book depicts Cubans as living as freely as they please.
I think that is a more substantial concern that you let on.
I'm not even going to follow the second link.
I think I can understand why you might find it disagreeable.
Other documents released in the 1990s by KGB defector Vasili Mitrokhin show the American Communist Party was under the Moscow’s direct control until 1989.
“These guys were advocating a regime that arguably was the biggest mass murderer in all of human history,” Kengor said. “Where is the moral authority in that?”
Kengor told The Daily Caller he found numerous other documents in the Soviet Comintern archives that also show a close relationship between the Communist Party and the ACLU.
These documents corroborate rumors that have circulated about the ACLU’s founders and early leaders dating back to the 1920s.
The ACLU would not comment on Kengor’s research, but the ACLU’s official history describes its founders as a “small group of idealists” who began the organization amid the “Palmer Raids” of late 1919 and early 1920 against “so-called radicals”.
“The problem here is what is being left out of the narrative,” Kengor said. “Palmer, who was attorney general to Woodrow Wilson, the great progressive’s progressive, understood, as did the Wilson administration, that many of these radicals were American communists who were literally devoted to the overthrow of the U.S. government and its replacement with a ‘Soviet-American republic.’
“American communists actually stated such things in their proclamations, documents, and fliers.”
Slashdot Mirror
You can think that, but you're wrong. Nobody pays me to post. I post my own views.
You may have a problem due to mental illness, perhaps anger management problems. You may want to seek profession care before it results in major life issues.
There are many rebel factions, but the vast majority of the fighters are Syrian. They would like to not be subjected to the brutal Syrian Baathist government dictatorship, which is backed by Iran. Do you think that is bad? Suppose it turned out they could manage to form a democratic government like Iraq's?
A., are you bitter that the Soviet Union disintegrated and Communism failed in Europe?
It killed off their stand up comedy though. It must be 200 or 300 years since they assimilated a joke since going to cubes.
Spending taxpayer dollars for a fancy NOC that is not even supposed to exist is just shitting on the citizens.
I must have missed that. What makes you think it's not supposed to exist?
Do you think everything they do is, "just shitting on the citizens"?
There is a drink that could help you with that problem. It's called the "hurry up." It's made with 7-Up and prune juice.
Also, what about the name "Information Dominance Center"? Creepy and pathetic at the same time; it sounds like BDSM-style slash-fic based on TRON. Bring in the Logic Probe!
For context you're thinking sex when you should be thinking war. Parlez-vous français?*
The difference between your son and his pony versus al Qaida and their goals is that they are willing to kill large number of people to get what they want. They have destabilized multiple countries and posed a genuine threat to the governments.
In one sense it really doesn't matter if they are going to win or not, but rather that they will continue to fight, and kill, and destabilize.
Your claim that, " al-Qaida has virtually no ability to strike the West with any force" is proved false by the terrorist attacks in London and Madrid, not to mention the Bali bombing, that occurred after 9/11. The British intelligence services are very concerned about the threat there. There have been many more attempts that could have caused mass casualties, including in the US. In the US there have been multiple attempts to use vehicle bombs to attack various cities, including audiences at public events. It's a minor miracle that none of the big bomb plots have succeeded. However, there is the Fort Hood attack, misleading labeled "workplace violence," and the recent Boston Marathon bombing.
I give you credit for tackling the material, but I don't think you've quite got a grip on all the implications.
There is very little in the way of ties between the US and al Qaida from that time.
The additional spending on the actual wars is a minor percentage of the budget for the Department of Defense. Defense spending in the US is dwarfed by social welfare spending (Social Security, Welfare, Medicare, Medicaid, etc.).* We were going bankrupt anyway, the wars have had little effect on it. The political class in power in the legislature blocked attempts at reform that might have at least eased, if not resolved, the social welfare spending problem, which is huge. They also blocked reform that might have prevented the housing bubble which is still creating havoc. Fighting terrorism isn't going to bankrupt us, retirement and healthcare are. It will sped along by mismanagement of the economy which is destroying the tax base.
* If you decide to look into this for yourself, make sure you look at all spending - discretionary and mandatory. Various organizations will only show just the discretionary budget to distort the relative amount of defense spending.
If people can acknowledge that al Qaida poses a threat, and are trying to do everything they can to harm us, and all it takes is a symbolic condemnation of the US government as "terrorists," I suppose that is a start back towards sanity. We'll just treat it as a crutch.
For what it is worth to you, al Qaida and the Taliban fighting in Syria constitute a minor percentage of the rebel forces. If we were going to work with them at all it would have been much better to have done it several years ago, before it became a real draw for the Islamists. I suppose that would have been too much to hope for.
And what purpose is that other than to satisfy the delusions of grandeur of the people running the place and the people holding the purse strings?
The stated purpose: to act as a command center. I'm reasonably certain nobody there believed they were in space, expected to go to space, or that the Klingons would show up.
That might be tolerable in a corporate environment, but not a government one. This is pure, unadulterated waste. "Selling" isn't part of the mission.
If the layout is functional, and the costs weren't extravagant in building it, why do you care? I image it couldn't have been that expensive since people build that sort of thing as a hobby. Or does it offend your sensibilities as an interior decorator?
Every senior manager in government has to be ready to explain their mission, including to Congress, and how the availability of resources impacts their mission.
Your entire post seems to be an instance of what you list as "Flaw 4." Based on your own standards I think we can take your post as nonsense.
Instead of living in fear, many people are living in denial. Your statement, "quit being dicks on the international stage and stop being involved in political coups" has nothing to do with al Qaida's goals. Nothing. Bin Laden's first demand in his letter of America was that the US convert to Islam. The second was, in short, to replace the Constitution with Sharia law. It looks like you are projecting your political beliefs instead of observing what it is that they actually want. That is a recipe for failure, a recipe for disaster. It is more of the same: Westerners not listening to third world peoples, and their goals - a complaint I expect you would recognize. They are aggressive imperialists that want to turn the clock back 1,000 years to when their civilization was powerful, and directly threatened Europe with conquest, not some randomly aggrieved anti-colonialists.
The Future of Terrorism: What al-Qaida Really Wants
Claiming that an enemy that has managed to kill 3,000 people in a single day "isn't a threat" isn't rational, it isn't fear, it's denial.
How apropos. A False Comparison Between Terror Deaths and Bathtub Deaths
We ALL wear red shirts.
That's an interesting insight. In Star Trek the "red shirts" are members of the same crew as the rest of the people wearing other shirt colors. I'm not sure that I can think of many cases where the "red shirts" were killed by their own crew, I believe it was almost entirely killing done by the enemy. That enemy was often unseen until it killed a red shirt, and then threatened or attempted to kill the rest.
Well, just a reminder that there really is an enemy out there (not the NSA), and now they are activating their cloaks. Is it solely to escape, or to strike by surprise? I guess as red shirts we'll eventually find out.
Computer: Beep Beep! Warning! A Level 1 Data Breach is currently in progress. Failure to resolve data breach could result in loss of all hands by space dock.
This reminds me of this project: Potential Energy (formerly The Darfur Stoves Project)
Popular Mechanics covered it in this article: Low-Tech Stove Saves Lives in Sudan's Darfur Region
Nuke them from orbit. It's the only way.
They were going to bomb the military and innocent civilians,
Which "innocent civilians"?
Syria and Iraq both got their first chemical weapons from Egypt, and then went on to manufacture their own. Egypt got their first weapons from the Soviet Union.
Straw man? Hardly. It is fairly common to see people advocate for the normalization of aspects of pedophilia and their interests on Slashdot, and there is an undercurrent of it in society.
Nor is there a right to trample over the rights of everyone to get a very few...
Fair enough. But uncritically accepting whatever content is in a passage aping a respected literary form is a way to end up in an absurd position. "First they came for the pedophiles...." indeed.
Sorry to hear it. If you're keeping them it might be worth checking with a cobbler to see if they can be stretched, or maybe try it yourself. There is a tool that can be used for that. It gets inserted into the shoe and it spreads out to stretch it. You might be able to stretch it enough to make a difference. Of course there are some risks to trying it.
Anyway, good luck, and hopefully things never get this bad for you. ;)
It's not completely clear from your reply if you're just going off the web catalog or if you've ever actually been to one of their store to have your foot measured and see the styles. I can tell you that the style I wear looks like it has a fairly pointy toe on the web, but the actual shoe doesn't. I recommend that you actually go to one of the stores and have your foot measured. Red Wing does make up to 16E, and it may be that you need an E width for their shoes/boots. Sadly the choices have narrowed considerably by the time you get to that size. You can see what they have available in different sizes and widths with the shoe finder at the link below. You probably just want to filter by size first, and maybe width. I wouldn't be surprised if it ends up being a special order. If they measure you first, before the order, I would expect it to fit. Of course new shoes / boots often need a "break in" period before they reach their full potential.
http://www.redwingshoes.com/red-wing-shoe-finder
For whatever it is worth to you, I've been happy with every pair I've bought, and I had several of them resoled.
Good luck, and have a great weekend.
From the article at the first link:
... Last week, the ACLU was in federal court, arguing that a Miami-Dade County school board broke the law by removing from its school libraries a book entitled Vamos a Cuba (Let’s Visit Cuba), which offers a strangely luminous view of life in Castro’s island “paradise.” A federal judge has already ruled that the book be returned to the shelves until the case can play out in court.
The school board’s beef isn’t with what is on the pages, but with what isn’t. Parents filed complaints after finding the book to be devoid of any mention of the oppressive regime instituted by Fidel Castro nearly 50 years ago. Instead, its pages are filled with breezy commentaries on how Cubans enjoy chicken with rice (under the country’s subsidized ration plan, the average Cuban is allotted a whopping 8 ounces per month) and boating as a leisure activity (“boating” being a rather ironic term for the fragile, homemade rafts so many launch out onto the ocean, in desperate bids to escape the regime).
The book’s cover, available in both English and Spanish versions, is adorned with beaming children dressed in the uniform of the Pioneers, the Communist youth organization that Cuban children are required to join. They look like Cuban Bobbsey Twins.
Obviously, the Miami children targeted for this book have never been told that questioning the Cuban government is likely to lead to imprisonment that milk is far too expensive for most on the island to purchase that access to everyday activities like surfing the Internet is not only severely limited, but closely monitored by the government for any shred of dissent against Castro and his cronies.
Absent from the pages of Vamos a Cuba is any mention of the ruthless 20-year prison sentences levied on Cuban poets and journalists and priests who failed to fawn over their fearless leader. Instead, the book depicts Cubans as living as freely as they please.
I think that is a more substantial concern that you let on.
I'm not even going to follow the second link.
I think I can understand why you might find it disagreeable.
The ACLU’s untold Stalinist heritage
Other documents released in the 1990s by KGB defector Vasili Mitrokhin show the American Communist Party was under the Moscow’s direct control until 1989.
“These guys were advocating a regime that arguably was the biggest mass murderer in all of human history,” Kengor said. “Where is the moral authority in that?”
Kengor told The Daily Caller he found numerous other documents in the Soviet Comintern archives that also show a close relationship between the Communist Party and the ACLU.
These documents corroborate rumors that have circulated about the ACLU’s founders and early leaders dating back to the 1920s.
The ACLU would not comment on Kengor’s research, but the ACLU’s official history describes its founders as a “small group of idealists” who began the organization amid the “Palmer Raids” of late 1919 and early 1920 against “so-called radicals”.
“The problem here is what is being left out of the narrative,” Kengor said. “Palmer, who was attorney general to Woodrow Wilson, the great progressive’s progressive, understood, as did the Wilson administration, that many of these radicals were American communists who were literally devoted to the overthrow of the U.S. government and its replacement with a ‘Soviet-American republic.’
“American communists actually stated such things in their proclamations, documents, and fliers.”