I'm afraid this is going to be a rather long catch up post. Sorry.
Charles Tupper
/m4813 - When you walk down the street with a huge pit bull, the number of people who bother you may drop to zero and the pit bull may never have to even growl at anybody. Does that make the security value of the dog zero?
/m4860 - By act of Congress, the US was committed to Iraqi regime change in 1998 and the policy was never changed. It was all quite out in the open.
/m4868 - It's true that embryonic cells are pluripotent. What is not established is that, for practical treatments, pluripotency is an advantage. It is assumed to be an advantage by embryonic stem cell proponents but that assumes that there is no such thing as excess plasticity, that the tumor problems are easier to lick than others. I say fund what seems to be providing results and don't waste too much money on a morally dubious area of research that seems to specialize in dead ends and dry holes.
This is not to say that there won't be dead ends in adult stem cell therapy. All research has them but you go with what's working and right now, that's adult stem cell research.
Mack
/m4815 - The whole mercantilist thing was a semi-neo-dadaist experiment in teasing PenGun. It was demonstrating the absurdity of really holding those opinions as a canadian.
/m4883 - Actually, from what I can tell, the reporting on the Abu Ghraib investigations got as much press as most UCMJ actions do. There's an initial release to the press that there's a problem under investigation, a period of silence while the prosecutors get their ducks in a row, releases regarding arrests, proceedings, and finally results. What happened was that the pictures came out during that period of investigatory silence and all hell broke loose.
A story "breaks" at first report, not months later when sensationalism becomes possible due to pictorial evidence. I'm reminded of an old newspaper story "you provide the picture, I'll provide the war".
PenGun
/m4818 - By your count, neither the US nor the USSR much had a space program but Germany had one in two countries. You can make the argument (and some have) but it's generally considered a big stretch.
/m4819 - You're not in Apple's market. You're in the small to mid-sized business market that doesn't care about standardization and vendor lock-in. The amount of money you save in hardware is generally eclipsed by the fees you can extract in vendor lock-in maintenance contracts.
Your criticism of Apple should reflect that it's part of a wider disdain for all name brands. Until I scratched the surface that was not evident at all.
/m4829 - Long before Nicholas Berg, the muslims were circulating footage of beheaded russians and no doubt they still do. Please do not forget, it is the US that is restraining Russia in Chechnya. Putin has no love for violent muslim fanatics.
/m4845 - The emir of Qatar would get a quick visit and Al Jazeera would either become very cooperative or disappear entirely. You're talking about scenarios where we're losing millions of lives. There would be very little tolerance even for delay in cooperation.
/m4849 - Once you lose cities the rules change or governments change. A government that cannot find our enemies won't last if we're losing cities. Capitulation won't be an option either after the first few assassinations (grieving family members taking out Congressmen would be a huge problem).
The position that genocide is impossible runs smack up against a very practical question. In a highly armed nation that has lost millions to attack, what sort of government could survive a non-genocidal response when no other option gets at the bad guys and more millions will die? I submit that no government could survive it and therefore genocide will be on the table. This is why we desperately never want to get to that point.
/m4858 - If there were orders refused, we would have at least one trial by now. So far there are none to my knowledge. Would you care to back up your libel of the US Marines as being prepared to shoot their officers?
/m4896 - You seem grossly uninformed as to what "beat" reporters do. They take all the pap from the PR office and they follow up all the leads to see whether anything is a real story or not. That's their job. It always has been. Some basic FOIA releases should have been demanded for all UCMJ investigations if it wasn't clear what was going on from the text of the original release.
/m4948 - I think you are engaged in a gross flight of fancy that everybody needs to get a tribunal to determine status. Organizations that clearly do not fall under the protection of the conventions are not covered by the conventions. That's the bottom line. The fact that some people have been released because they were picked up accidentally is prima facie evidence that there is some process in place to sort out errors and send those people home.
Kevin Smith
/m4825 - There's a great deal that has to be changed in our war fighting methods. It's our first non-westphalian war ever and for Europe, the first the peoples of that continent have had in more than three centuries. We might end up having to change our constitution over it. We should shoehorn as much as possible into the current structure. Revitalizing Letters is one promising avenue but we're nowhere near ready to use them today.
/m4870 - I don't think that any Department is in firm control in Iraq. Whether Chalabi *was* burned is still in doubt, much less answering the question of *who* burned him. Is it all just a deep plot to give him street cred for the January elections? When we're old men, the papers should get declassified.
Roger_D
/m4871 - No, I have long ago become disillusioned with mainstream media. But a lot of people are not there yet. I believe we're getting close to a tipping point where it simply will be a mark of foolishness to admit exclusive reliance on "mainstream" sources, much as celebrating New Year's day on April 1 became a foolish custom and thus, April fools.
Hank
/m4893 - The ignorance of apostolic christians to variations on their own traditions is almost legendary.
/m4902 - Thank you
RGlasel
/m4904 - I'm a great fan of Henri Coanda and his jet which flew in 1910. No jet works today without the use of the Coanda principle but you can't really trace back any jet to HC's 1910 effort. I don't know enough about the Arrow to be sure about the subject but I think it's at least possible that whatever similarities are coincidental.
/m4916 - I think we're operating at different levels of analysis. I agree with what you say about certain koranic interpretations but underneath it all, the koranic interpretations matter a damn because the Koran is supposedly the only monotheistic holy book without a history. It is this point, that the Koran *hasn't* been agreed to by scholars but is the unchanged Word of God, that comprises an awful lot of Islam's appeal, especially the rigid variants that the jihadists subscribe to.
Bill S
/m4922 - Watching Al Jazeera and surfing the net may get them angrier and angrier but this just provides an impulse to action. The strictly interpreted, "unchanging" Koran is what provides the direction. A Koran that has a history, even a minor one, would provide entire new vistas for action and ways to get out of some of the traps that the islamic world now finds itself in.
