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Iraq
Dec 29, 2003 0:44:01 GMT -5
Post by abisai on Dec 29, 2003 0:44:01 GMT -5
You guys are sure bold. Not that there is anything wrong with that you darn Americanos. Go home Yankee. See, us Southern folk have more humility after having gotten a full ass whoopin' from the US of A a ways back our damn selves. MY two cents: UN HQ in NYC was done I'd say since it was safer there than anywhere else in the world. At least US always had pretense of objectivity too apart from these other continents with millenia of blood feuds and so on. US always been the "right arm" of it, doing the hard work of kicking arse. No doubt. We have never ever been a good peacekeeping force though, and the UN has some good troops for lame police missions like that, dudes from all over that serve as sentries for peace. Musharif is villified within his ranks for internal disputes, villified within and abroad for support of US, and only has had the backing of some guns and US. Now the US is basically moving on and he is turning over the guns metaphorically. Suicide? Genius? Time will tell. I like the balls it took to do it. I thought it very shrewd of him to immediately play ball with the US too, knowing damn well he held numerous terrorist camps inside his borders. For my money, the US cares more about democracy outside its borders that within. But for all our money, they are damn good at what they do. No doubt. Thing is, there is this long history of basically hedging back and forth between support of dictators in a long and winding road towards increased democracy abroad. Look at Japan, they are still unable to field their own army, fifty years later. But the US does deal with monarchs and dictators and always has. Saudi Arabia is very top-down, in our favor, since the general population hates us more than we hate say the Taliban. I guess international politics demands this to some degree.
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Iraq
Dec 29, 2003 1:15:47 GMT -5
Post by abisai on Dec 29, 2003 1:15:47 GMT -5
Two innane tidbits from the Dave Buckley news service: Heard on NPR, cannot find link anywhere on Internet. 1. Canada has decided to set a goal of surpassing the GDP of the USA by 2015 (per capita it HAS to be), by outperforming us by 1.5% a year. Thank NAFTA, a recent slump in the US, and some real idiots in Canada for believing this mumbo-jumbo. They want to accomplish it via increased education and better employment across the board. I'll be rooting, since I want US to do this too, but not holding my breath for it to work to the extent they are predicting. www.csmonitor.com/2003/1229/p02s01-usju.html2. WMD in Texas, some wacko gets caught red-handed. My opinion is that it would be better to pull all funding of anything to do with Israel and put those billions into US education and the INS. Anyways, this is an interesting story about this guy that didn't yet hit mainstream media.
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Iraq
Dec 30, 2003 3:16:08 GMT -5
Post by Rob G on Dec 30, 2003 3:16:08 GMT -5
Buck wrote "Thing is, there is this long history of basically hedging back and forth between support of dictators in a long and winding road towards increased democracy abroad."
Yeah man, I figure theres only 2 ways to go about doing shit. Either be rightious and good and do not deal with anyone shady. Or take the position of "The end justifies the means".
I dont mind either but we need to stick with one. This is one of the problems with switching administrations once every 4-8 years.
When we lose our credibility all we have left is our all omnipotence.
Maybe this is why god works in mysterious ways. It takes to god damn long to explian what your trying to accomplish.
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Iraq
Jan 8, 2004 16:52:31 GMT -5
Post by The Nasinator on Jan 8, 2004 16:52:31 GMT -5
Well the international scene has been looking interesting as of late. First Musharaff gets together with Vajparef (spelled something like that) and they agree to stop all hostilities on Kashmir. Well, Musharaff decided to stop funding the insurgents on the Indian side of Kashmir but it basically amounts to the same thing. Peace between Pakistan and India? Maybe this Musharaff guy did a good thing in seizing power. So far he seems on the up and up. Bringing peace and stability to a very volatile situation is a good thing in my book, especially between two nations who have nuclear capability and are right next to each other. Jeez, they could throw the nuclear warheads at each other.
The other thing that is good news is Khaddafi. He opens his borders to UN inspection and now he is trying to make peace with Israel! Holy cow! This guy has done a complete turn around. I think it was a combination of his age, seeing how his country is completely stifling its economy, its oil production is down 2/3’s because it can’t get any investment or new equipment and it has to pay all the families of the plane it bombed like millions of dollars the country just doesn’t have.
Check this out, Iraq keeps having power failures every day, citizens have to wait on long lines for gas for their cars for hours, and the infrastructure is taking a long time to turn around. Wanna know why? According to the NY Times, a predominately liberal newspaper but nonetheless a good source of info, the citizens of Iraq continue bombing and sabotaging their own oil pipelines, buying up the little bit of gas that is available and going to sell it in Kuwait or Jordan where they can get a huge mark-up on it. Gas costs like 12 cents in Iraq but like 50 cents in Kuwait and Jordan. (Don’t quote me on these gas prices). So when anyone complains about why it’s taking coalition forces so long to rebuild and get power restored, we can take some blame but the Iraqi’s have to share in some of that blame too.
It’s a wacky world.
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Iraq
Jan 8, 2004 18:31:05 GMT -5
Post by Rob g on Jan 8, 2004 18:31:05 GMT -5
My dad always said Kadafi was mad smart. Now i think hes right. Theres a reckoning coming. And Kadafi is making sure hes on the right side of the fence.
Clever basterd.
I'm not a huge fan o0f george bush. But i did back the war. And i gotta say thsi is the kind of cooperation you get when you crush an entire nation on TV for the world see.
Sometime you gotta beat the shat out of somebody with your big stick before you can walk softly.
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Iraq
Jan 14, 2004 10:49:56 GMT -5
Post by Ringleader1 on Jan 14, 2004 10:49:56 GMT -5
Mussaraff, is getting the same treatment as the former Soviet Union, the middle East and China. You either conform or you get economicaly strong armed into doing what we want in the long run. We will not stop until we squash anyone with economic, political or social beliefs different than ours. In the word of the 60 gunner in full metal jacket "better you than Me". All F**king sand N*ggers must die.
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Iraq
Jan 14, 2004 14:25:41 GMT -5
Post by Rob G on Jan 14, 2004 14:25:41 GMT -5
"The dead know only one thing... It is better to be alive"
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Iraq
Jan 14, 2004 20:34:37 GMT -5
Post by abisai on Jan 14, 2004 20:34:37 GMT -5
China never conformed.
ANyways, for my money, throw the decision-makers in a room and don't let them out until they agree. I despise the drawn out plays of international politics.
Back to Iraq: I keep trying to get updated top-55 list and cannot come up with it. I think that they don't care about it anymore, after Hussein captured. Plus, they have new lists: Syria, North Korea, Iran, Mars.... hhahaha
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Iraq
Jan 15, 2004 0:51:46 GMT -5
Post by Rob G on Jan 15, 2004 0:51:46 GMT -5
President bush proposes we spend a billion dollars to send a man to mars. I would spend 2 billion to send that clown to mars.
No for real though i suspect we will land a man on mars. New intel tells us that there may be weapons of mass destruction there.
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Iraq
Jan 15, 2004 9:12:11 GMT -5
Post by The Nasinator on Jan 15, 2004 9:12:11 GMT -5
;D Ha ha ha ha yha ha ha ;D Martian weapons of mass destruction! Buck is correct. China never conformed. They have implemented capitalism in some of its major cities to experiment with it. So far they have found that surprisingly, capitalism makes a lot of money for the people and their government. Go figure. I don’t know about this space exploration thing. I’m all for the whole idea that as a human race we need to explore and expand our knowledge and boundaries, especially when it can benefit us in unexpected ways, but that’s a tremendous amount of money NASA is going to spend. Maybe the government should use it to bail out social security so we can all get paid to sit around a table and play D&D when we’re 70 and get paid for it!
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Iraq
Jan 15, 2004 21:01:09 GMT -5
Post by abisai on Jan 15, 2004 21:01:09 GMT -5
Hear hear, more dice for the geezers!!!! And some fine wine while we're at it!
I'm all for the innovations from space exploration, that is groovy. Plus I just am interested by knowledge for knowledge sake. As a national policy, it is lunacy however, serving only to drain the economy. If they would guarantee every piece and particle was purchased 100% from American businesses, I would be happier. Maybe they do this, who knows. I guess when you consider the additional funding of 1 billion dollars as being called basically chump change and the budget of 87 billion as insufficient, it all seems overwhelming. I can't get my head around why it costs that much money to weld steel together and attach a super engine to it. I keep wondering how many cars can be built for a billion dollars. Or for that matter, teacher raises & textbooks & adequate facilities. Ramble ramble, point made.
Funny thing is the Mars missions have a seed of absolute crazy talk underneath them. Mars being about half the size of Earth it is theorized it "aged" as a planet twice as fast (something about rotation) and suffered a similar global warming effect and lost its entire atmosphere as a result. It also may have developed earlier. Here's the rub. Sometimes rocks and crap travel between the planets as they are small and planets gravity is like cheese alone in a room with the Box. And the craziest thought is that some of these bore primitive lifeforms of bacteria and monocellular (or whatever pre-cellular is) "things". This could be the source of life on this planet. All -pun intended- out of this world stuff (insert studio groans here). But, they do have rocks from Mars that landed on Earth, so that part is fine by me, but space travel on a rock seems like it would be hard for things to survive. Anyways, it would be good if they could determine strategies for combating global warming from this exploration. The waterways are a main focus for this reason, but the sizzle they sell is the life on Mars. As usual, I expect the answer to remain inconclusive. They have found "things" in rocks from Mars before that are either the evidence geological mineral reactions or rudimentary forms of life. Most scientists would go with the mineral theory. Except for the wackos. But science is really a long history of the biggest wackos out there.
Blah blah, when I was at ND in ARCHEOLOGY, I wrote a paper about all this stuff. Literally the explorations ongoing now and were theorized and projected way back then. I was proud to pull of such a cross-disciplinary project. When we announced our projects in class, the prof laughed and asked me to state my real project. "No, I am really covering the search for life on Mars." All inspired by Discvoer magazine.
I am one huge dork. I don't mind sharing this though, since anyone reading this knew that already.
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Iraq
Feb 14, 2004 21:08:03 GMT -5
Post by abisai on Feb 14, 2004 21:08:03 GMT -5
I'm reading Carl Sagan (Cosmos & Contact) book called Pale Blue Dot. It covers projects he did for NASA and is very interesting. Two things of note I thought I'd share: 1. He claims - very strongly - the NASA space race began for militaristic goals. The thought being that the same technology used to send little men to the moon could deliver nuclear bombs to other nations better than airplanes could. Made me wonder if GW wanted to go to man Mars could have similar intentions, but I could not think of a thing they could get out of it that would help the military. 2. Sagan also mentions that cluorofluorocarbons (CFCs) that deteriorate the atmosphere and are being phased out of as many products as possible were discovered by guys working with atmopsheric conditions on Venus in projects related to that. His point was basically that the Venus probes had unforeseen consequences for technology here on Earth and that this was a very good thing that we all benefitted from. Knowledge is good. ;D
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Iraq
Feb 15, 2004 0:49:48 GMT -5
Post by Rob G on Feb 15, 2004 0:49:48 GMT -5
I've heard Sagan out this before aswell. Hes mad smart It sounds like the government was sneakily using space exploration to a militaristic ends. But i bet it was more like nasa made its proposal so that it would seem it would yeild military benifits. It always seems nasa has to sell their soul for funding. For me i love space and all that. But basically it costs SOOOOO much money to do anything it just aint worth it. However the russians might have the right idea. Tey still use the same type capsules used in the 60's. It costs us nearly a billion dollars to do a fix up on a shuttle. It costs them 1 million to put a guy in space. And strangely for all their old wack technology they have never had an accident.
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Iraq
Feb 15, 2004 2:14:49 GMT -5
Post by abisai on Feb 15, 2004 2:14:49 GMT -5
Yeah man, he is really vehement about it too. As if he knows something about how it went down and just cannot explicitly state the case. I guess as it was JFK no one is allowed negative things to say about it? His perspective outlined was more "let's make a super ballistic program expenditure and attach this man on moon idea to get it approved" than guys who made NASA pitching militaristic ideas. Too many chefs in the kitchen. With such a massive project, there are thousands of jobs, which is great, but literally hundreds of managers and communication gaps. There is seriously a business case study about the Challenger disaster. Some engineers claimed a potential hazard. But the trip was heavily promoted and upper management did not want to lose out on hype with delays that might not prove necessary. Alas, any error on take-offs or landings are entire losses and that is what happened. I think the Russians just fly a lot less often and are more careful about perfecting safety? That or they are a race of warriors cloned from Martian aliens. Who knows what the hell they do over there! You'd think by now there would be an international force, but there is nothing. Even the International Space Station is basically abandoned on all parts I believe. Could be wrong, but I thought US caught flack for promoting, directing, then backing out of this thing after there were already projects started in space. Again, too many chefs in that kitchen, no doubt. It'll all get real interesting when the Chinese get into space. They are the only other nation with so much as a whiff of super-power potential and this could make the be perceived as a threat by the Pentagon. I keep waiting for that Chinese Democracy CD by Axel Rose to drop so that we can all know what to expect in the 21st century.
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Iraq
Mar 6, 2004 9:50:56 GMT -5
Post by YEAH OOOUH on Mar 6, 2004 9:50:56 GMT -5
YEAH BABY BUSH FINALLY GOT SMART. HES PULLING TROOPS OUT OF IRAQ.
BUT HES REPLACING THEM WITH 2/3 OF OUR RESERVES.
THEN HES GOING TO SEND SOME FROM IRAQ TO HAITI.
MORE AMERICANS DEAD OVER THERE AND THERE AND THERE MEANS MORE FUCKING IMMIGRANTS THEY ARE GOING TO LET IN HERE.
THANKS BUSH BUT LET ME ASK YOU BEING SO CLOSE TO MEXICO(HIS HOMETOWN IN TEXAS) HOW MANY IMMIGRANTS LIVE IN YOUR TOWN.
MAYBE 2 AND THOSE ARE THE CARTELL LEADERS THAT GIVE YOU CAMPAIGN CONTIBUTIONS.
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