Yeah, fuck it. Next time we have a Falujah situation we'll just drop some new and improved fuel-air explosives and take the whole town out. I mean, if you're going to have bad propaganda, why not earn the rep that goes with it?
It's good that you mentioned Fallujah. What happened there? Most Americans knew nothing before the Blackwater contractors were killed in March 2004. However, the real problem goes back a year before that.
The damage the city had avoided during the initial invasion, was negated by damage from looters, who took advantage of the collapse of Saddam's regime to help themselves. The looters targeted former government sites, the 'Dreamland' compound and the nearby military bases, who stripped buildings of anything of value including floor tiles, window frames, and door frames. Aggravating this situation was the proximity of Fallujah to the infamous Abu G'raib prison, where Saddam, in one of his last acts, had released all prisoners. While many prisoners of the Ba'athist regime may have been political opponents, this act freed both political prisoners and criminal prisoners alike.
Citizens of Al Fallujah had to defend their own homes and property from these looters and criminals in the absence of peace-keeping authorities. The new mayor of the city--Taha Bidaywi Hamed, selected by local tribal leaders--was staunchly pro-American. When the U.S. Army entered the town in April 2003, they positioned themselves at the vacated Ba'ath Party headquarters--an action that erased some goodwill, especially when many in the city had been hoping the U.S. Army would stay outside of the relatively calm city. A Fallujah Protection Force composed of local Iraqis was set up by the U.S.-led occupants to help fight the rising resistance.
On the evening of April 28, 2003, a crowd of 200 people defied a curfew imposed by the Americans and gathered outside a secondary school used as a military HQ to demand its reopening. Soldiers from the 82nd Airborne stationed on the roof of the building opened fire on the crowd resulting in the deaths of 15 civilians and the wounding of 53. The events leading up to the event are disputed, with American forces claiming they were responding to gunfire from the crowd, while the Iraqis deny this version, although conceding rocks were thrown at the troops. A protest against the killings two days later was also fired upon by US troops resulting in two more deaths.
The shootings created widespread anger against the occupation. Over the next year, various Sunni rebel groups, including foreign terrorists aligned to al-Qaeda, entrenched themselves in the city, using it as a command base and a symbol of defiance against the multinational forces and the interim Iraqi government, to whom sovereignty was returned in July 2004.
If the CO of those troops had possessed a teensy bit of tactical sense and diplomatic ability, Fallujah, all of it, would have never happened. Cooking kids, or even cooking hardened terrorists, would not have solved the underlying problem.
Has it occurred to you that maybe soldiers don't enjoy shooting people and that they'd like a few tools in between "let them pelt us to death with rocks while a suicide bomber sneaks up" and "kill everybody"?
On a tactical note, why are they there to be pelted by those nasty rocks? Additionally, AC, why aren't the soldiers in their vehicle, with rocks bouncing harmlessly off of the armor and/or bulletproof glass? Why are they even in that part of the world? Maybe you haven't thought this clever plan all the way through, in which case you're well-prepared to join the Bush Administration.
Future AQ recruiting video, using footage from Iraq: Cold-hearted armed and armored U.S. troops in armored vehicles cooking screaming Arab children with a heat ray.
What you call "giving the populace the chance to vote", others call "giving the populace of another country the chance to die" and "underfunding the schools in our country to pay for a war somewhere else" and "causing children to die because their parents are part of the wrong religious sect". Or was the civil war in Iraq worse before we invaded?
"There's no proof of global warming! It's all natural cycles! Nothing we do could possibly actually affect the world. We don't know enough about the world to know for certain."
"And so, of course, we're going to cut funding to anybody who might learn enough about the world to be able to know for certain. If we don't know about it, it isn't happening!"
Here's what I can't figure out. Okay, so maybe global warming is completely natural. Maybe the world moves in cycles of warming and cooling, completely naturally. Maybe humans have no say in the process. I will grant that it is a possibility.
So how, exactly, does it being a natural phenomenon help us when the ocean levels rise several meters, flooding many coastal cities in the US and drowning entire island nations? So humans aren't responsible for it, how will that help us when the permafrosts in Canada, Alaska, and Russia melt, dramatically increasing the warming? How will it help when the weather change dramatically increases severe weather? Picture several Hurricaine Katrinas, and don't just think about the effect it had on a poorly designed and planned coastal city, think about the effect it had on the rest of the area, and on other Gulf states. Global warming also means bad news for the fishing industry, increased forest fires and more severe forest fires, and even an extension of the favorable zones for insects that carry malaria. Global warming makes you more likely to get malaria.
Seems to me like the smart thing to do about global warming would be to stop bulls**tting and saying "Oh, no, it's a natural cycle, don't worry about it, it's not really happening", and instead try to figure out ways for our species to survive. Otherwise we're f**ked. We might be f**ked anyway, but at least we'd be doing something about it. Seriously, the "head in the sand" types are ticking me off, there is clear visible measurable evidence that the global sea level is on the rise, but they just don't care. Weak.
He made something that looks sweet, sounds great, and is comfortable. He made it look like a set from a popular sci-fi series, while remaining practical about it. And he only spent about 15,000 on everything in that room. That might seem like a lot, but for a complete home theater, with all the trimmings, that's not a bad deal. He had the money, he used his spare time, he's got a wife and kids (and isn't some looney isolated social reject nerd), and he decided to do something pretty incredible. Good show.
I use Ventrilo with my guild. Between my wife, my buddy's wife, and other women in the guild, there's at least a couple dozen in my guild.
Course, with a pretty much unlimited number of characters, half my chars are male and half my chars are females, and my wife has about the same split. In my case, it's because I like having something pretty to look at, and I prefer the female models for a couple of the races. As a result, I assume female chars are probably men, but possibly women. Most night elves females are played by men, but most dwarf females are played by women.
I'm moving in March, I shut my internet off this month and cancelled my WoW account. I'll get back into it in June or July once I'm settled in and once the BC initial release insanity has cooled down a bit. My raiding guild misses me, but I was straight up burned out.
Obviously the investigators noticed the similarity between these two usernames. How is this explained; are we to assume that the 'hacker' retrieved Matt's own Yahoo screen name, and registered one extremely similar to throw off investigators? This just seems odd to me.
You can search Yahoo for usernames that are in a given location and meet given criteria, such as gender and age and whatnot. Once you find somebody who meets the criteria you give, it's a simple matter to create a similar UID. It'd take maybe 5 minutes, and it would be free, and it would give you an additional layer of confusion, camoflage, and obfuscation to keep the cops from finding you and to put more blame on the patsy.
Is anybody under the illusion that Cheney wouldn't go down with Bush? I'm not. When Nixon went down, his VP went first, and Nixon wound up being replaced by his appointed VP, Ford.
Seriously folks, it's not like there isn't historical precedent for a crook president leaving the White House with his crook VP. Cheney is as dirty as Bush is, they'd both be going down. In fact, a smarter move would be to take down Cheney first.
Non: Prepare to be destroyed, Superman! (flies toward Superman, who throws a cellophane "S" off his chest which wraps around him, knocking him to the ground) What was that?
Superman: Yeah, take that, you jerk.
Non: That was a minor inconvenience.
Superman: Yeah, well, that's the idea. Slowed you down.
Non: I'll say. Ow.
Superman: Didn't see that coming, did you?
Non: No.
Superman: Yeah, well, you know, take that.
Everyone keeps talking about Bush like he is some evil, snickering sociopath, sitting in his dark cave-like office, cackling at his new diabolical plan to become ruler of the world.
Actually, that's how I picture Cheney. Bush is an evil snickering sociopath, fully and literally, but he's a moron figurehead who resembles the idiot token president in Vonnegut's Player Piano far more then he resemble Palpatine. Cheney, on the other hand, can't appear in a TV interview without being hunched over with a sinister leer on his twisted visage.
As for fear, I don't think Bush has it. I think he is incapable of fear. He has no experience with it. He doesn't understand it. At what point in his privileged and protected existence has he ever had a reason to be afraid?
Bush keeps pulling BS powers out of his ass based solely on letting him do whatever he wants to do at any given time.
"Hmm... I want to eavesdrop on phone calls, but as the law is written now, I can't. Fortunately, I can use my Presidential Wiretapping Power to authorize warrantless wiretapping!" "Hmm... I want to torture prisoners to get information that, while not accurate, will support my foreign policy goals. But it's against US and international law. Aha! Super Secret Presidential Rendition Powers!"
And so on. Somebody really needs to tell Bush he can't go to Superdickery.com anymore.
1. Then it will have to be free. 2. It can't require a home of record.
If you're going to use this for "verified voting", and require people to use it to vote, you can't charge people to vote and you can't require a voter to live somewhere because then you're restricting voting rights to land-owners. Harper v Virginia Board of Elections asserted that "a State violates the Equal Protection Clause ((of the 14th Amendment)) . . . whenever it makes the affluence of the voter or payment of any fee an electoral standard. Voter qualifications have no relation to wealth nor to paying or not paying this or any other tax."
As such, using a national ID card for voting, unless it is free, is un-Constitutional.
I realize that you're against a national ID card same as I am, just making a legal point about using it for voting.
I, as a Democrat, have an absolute lack of support for that moron shrew's run for president in 2008. Who am I referring to? Can't say for sure, but it rhymes with Cillary Hinton. New York can keep her. Last thing we need is a few more years of "I know better then you" nanny-statism, be it from a pawn for the Religious Right or a DLC stooge.
I watched every aired episode when it aired, and had a time when the World Series pre-empted my promised episode of Firefly. I remember the episodes being shown out of order thanks to Fox. I remember being pissed off when it just randomly got cancelled.
He's spent all the time since then/trying/ to 'treat the burn', to fix the physical problem that came from disobeying the rule.
Isn't he omnipotent? "Hey, I'm God, the burn's healed. And there will be much rejoicing."
Oh, wait, we have to treat the burn ourselves or decided to have it treated ourselves because otherwise it won't have any meaning? Buddy, if I'm burning, just treat the frakking burn. The Christian god's neediness when it comes to forcing people to love and worship him only further convinces me that if he's real, I don't want anything to do with him.
Christian God says: "Love me or burn! It's your choice to love me, and worship me, but if you don't I'll send you straight to hell. You're supposed to be thankful to me for providing you with a way out of the cleverly designed damnation trap I allowed you to fall into, I designed a system where the only way you could be saved for falling into my trap is through blood sacrifice. Now, either you're going to appreciate that, or you're going to this nasty painful place I designed for people who don't see how neat I am, where they are punished with eternal torture. Don't you see the love?"
Slashdot Mirror
It's good that you mentioned Fallujah. What happened there? Most Americans knew nothing before the Blackwater contractors were killed in March 2004. However, the real problem goes back a year before that.
If the CO of those troops had possessed a teensy bit of tactical sense and diplomatic ability, Fallujah, all of it, would have never happened. Cooking kids, or even cooking hardened terrorists, would not have solved the underlying problem.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070125/ap_on_re_us/s
Nope.
On a tactical note, why are they there to be pelted by those nasty rocks? Additionally, AC, why aren't the soldiers in their vehicle, with rocks bouncing harmlessly off of the armor and/or bulletproof glass? Why are they even in that part of the world? Maybe you haven't thought this clever plan all the way through, in which case you're well-prepared to join the Bush Administration.
Future AQ recruiting video, using footage from Iraq:
Cold-hearted armed and armored U.S. troops in armored vehicles cooking screaming Arab children with a heat ray.
Brilliant.
Different race and religion, same as has been making "that guy" the enemy of "these guys" since we came out of the trees and started forming tribes.
Neither does SecState Rice.
What you call "giving the populace the chance to vote", others call "giving the populace of another country the chance to die" and "underfunding the schools in our country to pay for a war somewhere else" and "causing children to die because their parents are part of the wrong religious sect". Or was the civil war in Iraq worse before we invaded?
"There's no proof of global warming! It's all natural cycles! Nothing we do could possibly actually affect the world. We don't know enough about the world to know for certain."
"And so, of course, we're going to cut funding to anybody who might learn enough about the world to be able to know for certain. If we don't know about it, it isn't happening!"
Here's what I can't figure out. Okay, so maybe global warming is completely natural. Maybe the world moves in cycles of warming and cooling, completely naturally. Maybe humans have no say in the process. I will grant that it is a possibility.
So how, exactly, does it being a natural phenomenon help us when the ocean levels rise several meters, flooding many coastal cities in the US and drowning entire island nations? So humans aren't responsible for it, how will that help us when the permafrosts in Canada, Alaska, and Russia melt, dramatically increasing the warming? How will it help when the weather change dramatically increases severe weather? Picture several Hurricaine Katrinas, and don't just think about the effect it had on a poorly designed and planned coastal city, think about the effect it had on the rest of the area, and on other Gulf states. Global warming also means bad news for the fishing industry, increased forest fires and more severe forest fires, and even an extension of the favorable zones for insects that carry malaria. Global warming makes you more likely to get malaria.
Seems to me like the smart thing to do about global warming would be to stop bulls**tting and saying "Oh, no, it's a natural cycle, don't worry about it, it's not really happening", and instead try to figure out ways for our species to survive. Otherwise we're f**ked. We might be f**ked anyway, but at least we'd be doing something about it. Seriously, the "head in the sand" types are ticking me off, there is clear visible measurable evidence that the global sea level is on the rise, but they just don't care. Weak.
He made something that looks sweet, sounds great, and is comfortable. He made it look like a set from a popular sci-fi series, while remaining practical about it. And he only spent about 15,000 on everything in that room. That might seem like a lot, but for a complete home theater, with all the trimmings, that's not a bad deal. He had the money, he used his spare time, he's got a wife and kids (and isn't some looney isolated social reject nerd), and he decided to do something pretty incredible.
Good show.
I use Ventrilo with my guild. Between my wife, my buddy's wife, and other women in the guild, there's at least a couple dozen in my guild.
Course, with a pretty much unlimited number of characters, half my chars are male and half my chars are females, and my wife has about the same split. In my case, it's because I like having something pretty to look at, and I prefer the female models for a couple of the races. As a result, I assume female chars are probably men, but possibly women. Most night elves females are played by men, but most dwarf females are played by women.
I'm moving in March, I shut my internet off this month and cancelled my WoW account. I'll get back into it in June or July once I'm settled in and once the BC initial release insanity has cooled down a bit. My raiding guild misses me, but I was straight up burned out.
You can search Yahoo for usernames that are in a given location and meet given criteria, such as gender and age and whatnot. Once you find somebody who meets the criteria you give, it's a simple matter to create a similar UID. It'd take maybe 5 minutes, and it would be free, and it would give you an additional layer of confusion, camoflage, and obfuscation to keep the cops from finding you and to put more blame on the patsy.
Not too unlikely.
Apparently one man's affront is another man's atrocity.
Is anybody under the illusion that Cheney wouldn't go down with Bush? I'm not. When Nixon went down, his VP went first, and Nixon wound up being replaced by his appointed VP, Ford.
Seriously folks, it's not like there isn't historical precedent for a crook president leaving the White House with his crook VP. Cheney is as dirty as Bush is, they'd both be going down. In fact, a smarter move would be to take down Cheney first.
Actually, that's how I picture Cheney. Bush is an evil snickering sociopath, fully and literally, but he's a moron figurehead who resembles the idiot token president in Vonnegut's Player Piano far more then he resemble Palpatine. Cheney, on the other hand, can't appear in a TV interview without being hunched over with a sinister leer on his twisted visage.
As for fear, I don't think Bush has it. I think he is incapable of fear. He has no experience with it. He doesn't understand it. At what point in his privileged and protected existence has he ever had a reason to be afraid?
Bush keeps pulling BS powers out of his ass based solely on letting him do whatever he wants to do at any given time.
"Hmm... I want to eavesdrop on phone calls, but as the law is written now, I can't. Fortunately, I can use my Presidential Wiretapping Power to authorize warrantless wiretapping!"
"Hmm... I want to torture prisoners to get information that, while not accurate, will support my foreign policy goals. But it's against US and international law. Aha! Super Secret Presidential Rendition Powers!"
And so on. Somebody really needs to tell Bush he can't go to Superdickery.com anymore.
That sounds like a conversation between Brothers of the Sacred Grove.
*It's a Fables reference
**Not the XBox Fables, the Vertigo Fables
***Except Brothers of the Sacred Grove would kill all of the insolent meat puppets.
Two things:
1. Then it will have to be free.
2. It can't require a home of record.
If you're going to use this for "verified voting", and require people to use it to vote, you can't charge people to vote and you can't require a voter to live somewhere because then you're restricting voting rights to land-owners. Harper v Virginia Board of Elections asserted that "a State violates the Equal Protection Clause ((of the 14th Amendment)) . . . whenever it makes the affluence of the voter or payment of any fee an electoral standard. Voter qualifications have no relation to wealth nor to paying or not paying this or any other tax."
As such, using a national ID card for voting, unless it is free, is un-Constitutional.
I realize that you're against a national ID card same as I am, just making a legal point about using it for voting.
I guess since Santorum is out of work ATM, he's gotten a Slashdot UID.
I, as a Democrat, have an absolute lack of support for that moron shrew's run for president in 2008. Who am I referring to? Can't say for sure, but it rhymes with Cillary Hinton. New York can keep her. Last thing we need is a few more years of "I know better then you" nanny-statism, be it from a pawn for the Religious Right or a DLC stooge.
He chusheng zajiao de zanghuo!
And I'm relatively certain you can get away with cheating on Dozer's wife.
I'd be avoiding her more because she was an essence-consuming deity from a higher plane.
I watched every aired episode when it aired, and had a time when the World Series pre-empted my promised episode of Firefly. I remember the episodes being shown out of order thanks to Fox. I remember being pissed off when it just randomly got cancelled.
Chances are she'd get "transfered". To "another school". In Cuba.
I've had it slice my hands more then a few time. I shouldn't get cut trying to open a pack of headphones. Fricking ridiculous.
Isn't he omnipotent? "Hey, I'm God, the burn's healed. And there will be much rejoicing."
Oh, wait, we have to treat the burn ourselves or decided to have it treated ourselves because otherwise it won't have any meaning? Buddy, if I'm burning, just treat the frakking burn. The Christian god's neediness when it comes to forcing people to love and worship him only further convinces me that if he's real, I don't want anything to do with him.
Christian God says: "Love me or burn! It's your choice to love me, and worship me, but if you don't I'll send you straight to hell. You're supposed to be thankful to me for providing you with a way out of the cleverly designed damnation trap I allowed you to fall into, I designed a system where the only way you could be saved for falling into my trap is through blood sacrifice. Now, either you're going to appreciate that, or you're going to this nasty painful place I designed for people who don't see how neat I am, where they are punished with eternal torture. Don't you see the love?"
I really don't.