python said:please state your own theory/scenario/libretto even if the lizards you seem to be concerned about did not cloud your supposedly superior brain ?
blutto said:....couple of on target comments from Andy Borowitz..
"Unfortunately, we live in a world where saying "Children should not be killed" can lead to a bitter political argument."
...and...
"Now that I know "children should not be killed" is such a hot-button statement
I'm going back to my old standby:
I like kittens. "
.... if you have some spare time maybe spend a few moments on Andy's facebook site...much fun and giggles...
https://www.facebook.com/andyborowitz
Cheers
rhubroma said:This was translated in la Repubblica yesterday and I found the English version. So I just throw this out there to add fuel to the fire of the Crimea debate.
As much as I don't like US and Western market imperialism, it can't be denied that what Vladimir Putin represents is a type of XIX century authoritarianism and chauvinism of which the modern world needs be wary.
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/118790/after-malaysia-flight-17-we-should-call-putin-shameless-thug
If the Russian government hopes to prevent war with Washington, which is likely to be the final war for life on earth, the Russian government needs to act now and end the problem in Ukraine by accepting the separatist provinces’ request to be reunited with Russia. Once S.2277 passes, Russia cannot retrieve the situation without confronting militarily the US, because Ukraine will have been declared an American ally.
Putin’s bet was reasonable and responsible, but Europe has failed him. If Putin does not use Russian power to bring an end to the problem with which Washington has presented him in Ukraine while he still can, Washington’s next step will be to unleash its hundreds of NGOs inside Russia to denounce Putin as a traitor for abandoning the Russian populations in the former Russian provinces that Soviet leaders thoughtlessly attached to Ukraine.
RetroActive said:I think Paul Craig Roberts needs a hug...
Merckx index said:Roberts is a real piece of work. A former Reagan cabinet member and WSJ editor who has apparently flipped to the complete opposite end of the spectrum (providing more evidence that the spectrum is more a circle than a straight line). He seems to believe the U.S. government perpetrated 9/11, and he even suggested, though stopped short of saying so explicitly, that he was sympathetic to a conspiracy view of the Boston Marathon bombing. Though he didn’t go as far as some, who posted on this forum last year, claiming that the bombing was fake and no one was hurt, he suggests the government might have used Tsarnaev.
Given that he has such paranoid fantasies, I have trouble taking seriously anything else he says, though given his background, he's in a good position to know how the government operates. He’s sort of like an anti-doping advocate who might have some good points, but whose credibility is destroyed by his claims that the UCI gives secret, “Nazi frogmen” injections to riders it wants to bust.
Here's an article rebutting five Israelis claims about their justification for shelling Gaza.
The claims:
1) Israel is exercising its right to self-defense.
2) Israel pulled out of Gaza in 2005.
3) This Israeli operation, among others, was caused by rocket fire from Gaza.
4) Israel avoids civilian casualties, but Hamas aims to kill civilians.
5) Hamas hides its weapons in homes, mosques and schools and uses human shields.
And Israeli spokesman Mark Regev gets grilled here.
great piece, thanks.Merckx index said:Here's an article rebutting five Israelis claims about their justification for shelling Gaza.
Merckx index said:More than thirty years ago I became convinced there was only one solution to the Israeli-Arab conflict. What I came up with I’m sure was not original—it’s pretty obvious, actually—but I don’t know if it’s ever been suggested in the media, for reasons that are also pretty obvious, unfortunately.
I would have the State of Israel move lock, stock and barrel out of the Mideast, to another area of the world. The best location, I think, would be the American Southwest. There is lots of sparsely populated land in southern Arizona and New Mexico (the entire land area of Israel could fit in a strip less than 30 miles wide along the Arizona-Mexico border). While it’s arid desert, the climate and terrain is actually quite similar to the current area where Israel exists. Though it would take some technological innovation, and the ability to access water in an area where that resource is scarce and often subjected to competing interests, I have little doubt the Israelis could make this desert bloom.
This is such a win-win situation for both parties involved. Israel would find itself surrounded not by hostile neighbors vowing to annihilate it, but by it’s biggest and staunchest supporter on one side, and a militarily weak country on the other. There would be border problems, but nothing remotely as bad as what Israel deals with now.
The U.S. would be an even bigger winner. America would get: 1) some much needed cash from the sale of the land, and transfer of title and authority to another nation; 2) a buffer state between it and Mexico (illegal immigrants attempting to cross the Mexican border in this area would become Israel’s problem, and after decades being surrounded by Arab countries, and dealing with resentful Palestinian refugees, I think the Israelis would find this problem a piece of cake); and 3) the biggest plus, America would become an instant hero to Arabs all over the world for eliminating their biggest headache.
The biggest sticking point, of course, is the Israelis’ insistence that they have a right to their ancestral homeland. I think they have to take a very hard look at their future, which promises nothing but more conflict, more wars, more death, and ask themselves if trading a Biblical myth that has been transcended by most educated Westerners isn’t worth the promise of real safety and security. The notion that Jews need a state at all in order to survive as an ethnic group is debatable; that they need this state to be located in an area where they lived thousands of years ago is the product of a long antiquated world view. If I may be allowed to stereotype, with all its oversimplifications, I have long viewed the Jews as a unique mixture of utterly practical and irredeemably mystical. The practical side needs to win this debate.
There are other concerns. When I floated this idea to some of my Jewish friends, some argued that living on former U.S. land wasn’t necessarily very secure. Just because the U.S. strongly supports Israel now doesn’t mean it would in fifty, one hundred or more years. Jews have learned to think in terms of the very long term. And the U.S. would presumably demand some tough preconditions for such a move, such as Israel’s giving up all nuclear weapons, which would make Israel utterly dependent on America's good will. But U.S. support is vital to Israel as it exists now, and if the Israelis don’t feel they can count on it for the long run, I don’t see how they can feel much safer where they are now. If they insist on having their own state, they will have to depend on forming stable alliances with their neighbors. Right now, and far into the future, the U.S. looks like a far better bet. The substantial Jewish population in America who are loyal to Israel would make this a unique situation in which they would be de facto if not legally citizens of both countries, and in a position to mediate any conflicts between the two countries.
I also don’t think the problem of dealing with Americans currently living in this area is intractable. They could be given the choice of having their land and homes bought out, and moving further north, or perhaps staying put as American citizens given permanent residency in the new state of Israel. Who knows the new job opportunities that might arise?
There is also the problem of moving an entire nation from one area in the world to another, distant location. But thanks to the substantial Jewish population in America, the move doesn’t have to take place suddenly and quickly. The new state could be developed gradually, with local institutions developed that had allegiance to the Israeli government in its current location, while the transfer of both people and power occurred gradually. When the original state of Israel was established, Jews from all over the world uprooted themselves to move to it. I don’t see why the current population can’t do the same, given enough time.
I know this will never happen, but it’s not impossible in any logical or physical sense. It’s a matter of a people saying, enough is enough, we don’t have to live in a state of war for the rest of our lives.
Merckx index said:The biggest sticking point, of course, is the Israelis’ insistence that they have a right to their ancestral homeland. I think they have to take a very hard look at their future, which promises nothing but more conflict, more wars, more death, and ask themselves if trading a Biblical myth that has been transcended by most educated Westerners isn’t worth the promise of real safety and security.
rhubroma said:It is, however, precisely this sticking point and the nostaglia for "paradise lost" that overides any pragmatic concerns for security and compromise. Israel thus only exists within a specific territorial reality, outside of which its very notion disintigrates. Otherwise there would be no need to regain the lost homeland.
blutto said:....can anyone confirm the above?...
Cheers
Amsterhammer said:'Donetsk People's Rep.' 'Deputy Prime Minister' has just announced that the 'PM' is in Moscow for talks, and that the Ukrainian army has taken the area of the crash site. This news not yet confirmed.
python said:various confirmed and unconfirmed news from the donetsk peoples republic:
-a friend from germany emailed that he read an article by the su-25 chief designer that the downing of the airliner by his plane is of low probability...
this author (quite reasonably imo) comes to the same conclusion after analyzing the various tactical/technical issues. this settles my personal opinion on improbability of the air-to-air missile.
I have said many critical things about Judaism. Let me remind you that parts of Hebrew Bible—books like Leviticus and Exodus and Deuteronomy—are the most repellent, the most sickeningly unethical documents to be found in any religion. They’re worse than the Koran. They’re worse than any part of the New Testament. But the truth is, most Jews recognize this and don’t take these texts seriously. It’s simply a fact that most Jews and most Israelis are not guided by scripture—and that’s a very good thing.
Of course, there are some who are. There are religious extremists among Jews. Now, I consider these people to be truly dangerous, and their religious beliefs are as divisive and as unwarranted as the beliefs of devout Muslims. But there are far fewer such people.
Whatever terrible things the Israelis have done, it is also true to say that they have used more restraint in their fighting against the Palestinians than we—the Americans, or Western Europeans—have used in any of our wars. They have endured more worldwide public scrutiny than any other society has ever had to while defending itself against aggressors. The Israelis simply are held to a different standard. And the condemnation leveled at them by the rest of the world is completely out of proportion to what they have actually done. [Note: I was not saying that because they are more careful than we have been at our most careless, the Israelis are above criticism. War crimes are war crimes.]
And this gets to the heart of the moral difference between Israel and her enemies. And this is something I discussed in The End of Faith. To see this moral difference, you have to ask what each side would do if they had the power to do it.
What would the Jews do to the Palestinians if they could do anything they wanted? Well, we know the answer to that question, because they can do more or less anything they want. The Israeli army could kill everyone in Gaza tomorrow. So what does that mean? Well, it means that, when they drop a bomb on a beach and kill four Palestinian children, as happened last week, this is almost certainly an accident. They’re not targeting children…
What do we know of the Palestinians? What would the Palestinians do to the Jews in Israel if the power imbalance were reversed? Well, they have told us what they would do. For some reason, Israel’s critics just don’t want to believe the worst about a group like Hamas, even when it declares the worst of itself. We’ve already had a Holocaust and several other genocides in the 20th century. People are capable of committing genocide. When they tell us they intend to commit genocide, we should listen. There is every reason to believe that the Palestinians would kill all the Jews in Israel if they could. Would every Palestinian support genocide? Of course not. But vast numbers of them—and of Muslims throughout the world—would. Needless to say, the Palestinians in general, not just Hamas, have a history of targeting innocent noncombatants in the most shocking ways possible. They’ve blown themselves up on buses and in restaurants. They’ve massacred teenagers. They’ve murdered Olympic athletes. They now shoot rockets indiscriminately into civilian areas.
What do groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda and even Hamas want? They want to impose their religious views on the rest of humanity. They want to stifle every freedom that decent, educated, secular people care about. This is not a trivial difference. And yet judging from the level of condemnation that Israel now receives, you would think the difference ran the other way.
This kind of confusion puts all of us in danger. This is the great story of our time. For the rest of our lives, and the lives of our children, we are going to be confronted by people who don’t want to live peacefully in a secular, pluralistic world, because they are desperate to get to Paradise, and they are willing to destroy the very possibility of human happiness along the way. The truth is, we are all living in Israel. It’s just that some of us haven’t realized it yet.
blutto said:...good article, thanks for that...
....yeah I had earlier came to that conclusion after looking at the SU25 specs ( which is designed for ground support and thus has a very limited ceiling ) but then there is the description of the incident by Russian authorities which talks about an air-to-air missile with a range of 12km which if used by a SU25 could conceivably have been the weapon that took down MH17...
...that being said I really not leaning one way or the other save that I am not absolutely discounting the information provided by the Russians ( and I'm absolutely believing it either....and because of long standing serious believability issues with the other side I'm not believing them either...until they provide some tangible proof or statement beyond Operation Backpedal.... )....
...yup curiouser and curiouser...
Cheers
