That is an undeniable truth people forget or can't fathom, if OBL's most loyal Christian sympathyzer were to approach him his head would be used for kick ball in record time. I have been in many places where the people smile, take our food, sell us things but down deep they would rather see us dead. No sugar coating needed.

Following your thesis, the best way to have defeated the Axis Powers would have been to leave them alone. I believe it is a safe assumption that leaving them alone would have brought peace alright, on their terms.

There is nothing today that approaches Sparta at it's zenith. I would suggest that the only nation that ever came close to Sparta was the Roman Republic. Both nations were slave-based economy and social structure. Both exalted military prowess and honors as the pinnacle of achievement, followed by a series of honored positions in the religious and government hierarchy. The Spartan government and social structure was wildly different from Rome and was so strange that I believe only extreme military discipline could make it work.

The Romans rarely instituted annihilation. I guess Carthage would be the most notable case. They were almost never reluctant to execute folks. As they gained power their reluctance diminished. One of the most successful methods they used to "pacify" a village was through decimation. They would line-up all of the males of military age and older and march down the line executed every tenth man. No exception and no arranging the line for anybody's benefit. Decimation scared villagers into submission. Also during the Gallic Wars, Julius Caesar would support the weaker princeling against the stronger adjacent principality. The resulted in a weak princeling dependent upon Caesar's legions to maintain their limited sovereignty, which Caesar would yank of the princeling failed to follow Caesars edicts.

In other words, the lessons of history are not useful on the microscopic scale since historical events are locked in the circumstances of that moment. In fact, over-reliance on lessons from history to guide the present will, by definition, remove from the table any innovation. This is the "conservative" way.

Bot

Don't know why you worry about what the world is doing or not doing. Everybody has their reasons for doing this or not doing that. If you think France, Russia and China are good enough to lead us morally, you are on some pretty good stuff. Please share. Like us, they could care less what happens as long as they are benifiting from it. The people who do something are doing it because they believe it will benifit them and those who don't are not doing anything because it is the best corse for THEM. It has nothing to do with world stability or whirlled peace.

Unfortunately, regime change or anything in this world is with a short expiration stamp. IOW, what is good yesterday may not be good today. You cannot make any long range plans, no matter what you say. Take our situation. Just because they are in sync with Bush Sr, doesn't translate to Clinton going along with it nor does it even translate to Bush Jr going along with it. What more over there where regimes change which can happen?

Where did you get the idea that I thought we are SB champs of the world? Did I ever say that?

I know what a metaphore is. Do you? I don't think you recognized my metaphore since you made the above statement.

ok, I give. I can't think of the name of the movie, Payback???????

Conspiracy Theory?

WORD BRO!!!

OK, for a moment I will play devil's advocate. Hell, I am a lawyer and I am trained to speak out of both sides of my mouth (kids, don't try this at home).

Aklim, what IF we tried to be better than Russia and China and all of those other countries and actually acted out of purely good motives, w/o regards to our personal good.

Other nations have believed they were unstoppable militarily until a coalition of weaker nations put a stop to their ambitions.

I don't say the Russians and/or Chinese have any moral superiority to us. I will say that out opinions of our moral superiority are flawed. Some of the assumptions here about how we could effect the changes we want if we'd just stop being wussies and and instead sprinkle nukes about to show we're serious are delusional, IMHO.

From what I recall from history, the majority of empires, nations, etc... that suffered the defeats you speak of suffered from internal rot within the country well before the military defeat.

Then we would be trying to play according to a set of rules that nobody follows. Probably lead us down the toilet. We shouldn't just go with a set of rules and hope people follow it. See what the rules are and work with that.

Yes, what of it?

Our opinions of moral superiority? Surely you jest. That is is just a sham. No better or worse than anyone else. It is to let people go to sleep feeling wonderful about themselves. Moral superiority is just a sham. The suicide bombers and their recruiters also tell them the moral superiority of their actions. Even Hitler told the SS of the morality of their actions. Bottom line, moral superiority is just a couple of words to motivate. Remember the funny story of the Hezbollah rocket blowing up 2 arab kids in Isreal? I thought it was ironic. However, Hezbollah told the father that the kids died martyrs. Bet it makes him feel better.

Did I say sprinkle nukes? I believe in using them but carefully. Not to be confused with just sprinkling like you believe. However, not just as a sabre rattling tool which is getting old either. It's like the ant issue you were talking about. Do I like to use ant powder to kill them? Nope. My dogs might sniff around there and it can't be good for them. However, when it gets to the point where the tree is dying, I will use the powder and keep the dogs away.

They probably had our equivalent of useful idiots, fellow travelers, misguided Dems, Chuckles Rangel, self-loathers, people with claims to the moral high ground ("let's make nice-nice with the Visigoths...") etc., etc.

Every side claims to have the moral high ground. It is just a scam to make the people feel like they are part of an item larger than themselves. Moral high ground is like the used car salesman telling you that he probably won't make that much money from the sale and the car is worth more than he is really asking for. In fact, with that low a price, his commission will be so low his kids will starve and have no shoes to go to skool.

Nothing lasts for forever anyways. It has to end sooner or later.

Or maybe like the rhetoric coming from the White House. Did you see the one from Rove saying that researchers “have far more promise from adult stem cells than from embryonic stem cells"? I know it has nothing to do with this thread, but good grief. Is there anything these people won't say?

We can only hope, we can only hope....

Of course they won't say what they don't believe in. What they believe in depends on who is voting them in.

I disagree with you Aklim.

I think that there people in politics who truly believe what they say, or b elieve in what they say, regardless of what the voters are doing or saying.

For example, regardless of what the most erudite, wise and well-educated writers here may wish to believe, George Bush and company actually believe what they say and he/tehy act upon their beliefs.

If Bush had the voters in mind, or his popularity to think about, he would have claimed victory after Afghanistan and never bothered with Iraq.

Same thing is true for Ronald Reagan.

On the other hand, there are politicos like Bill Clinton, who are more adept at riding the waves of public opinion. Like a good surfer, they know how to pick the right wave, climb on the board and ride it to the beach (sorry about the surfing analogy, my duaghter went surfing today and I tagged along to go bike riding along the beach).

I never cared for Bill Clinton because, among other things, because he has no guiding principles, except whatever works for him. Remember when Clinton developed a reputation for being more Republican than the Republicans themselves?

there's this article http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/302/5648/1223 and there was another one in JAMA not to long ago showing success using adult stem cells. Would you share what medical treatments are available using embryonic stem cells?

Why are you singling out Rove in this subject, Clinton signed the Dickey Amendment in 1995 prohibiting use of appropriated funds to create human embryos for research purposes.

Regardless, why would you single out 1 of 3 sources of stem cells as the only or the best source of future treatments? Especially when more success has been shown in the other two sources.

Rhetoric may at times have truth to it.

Now back to our regularly scheduled thread

Gotta love it when science shines a light on partisan politics.

Rove is the favorite boogey man of the knee-jerk, always anti-Bush liberal idealogues. What would they do w/o him?

Perhaps so. However, just because more success has been shown in the other 2 sources doesn't mean success won't be shown here. It might mean we haven't found it yet and not that it isn't there. We should explore it and see where it leads freely without the church getting involved in it.

Whoa, that's a relief. Thank god we've got no internal rot here...

You think you're just taking my analogy one step further, fleshing out the metaphor as it were.

Feels more like mixing metaphors to me because you're using it differently. My point is there are so many of them and they've been emerging from warfare for so long that no matter how you kill them, they will come back. You're going with thinking you can ramp up the force and then you'll kill them for sure.

Doesn't say much to me, sorry.

It's definitly a touchy subject and one worthy of it's own thread. Whatever side you are on you must admit that it is morally offensive to many, many people to use an live embryo for medical treatment.

It's akin to having two equal tracts of land one is an indian burial ground the other isn't. Why build on the burial ground when the other is fine? Or I guess it would be 3 tracts of land rather than two.

So, lets move the conversation here.

I guess I meant that there's not a damn thing your military can do for you if a significant portion of your country is overly self-critical or non-caring about the country or feels that traditionally the enemy of the country does a better job than the their country, i.e. lack of pride and respect (yet no one wants to move to the other country for some reason????).

No I'm talking internal rot like people being so in love with pleasure that they eat too much, too sugary, and too stupidly while collecting an amazing array of labor saving devices, many of which society will then have to devote money and land in order to get rid of to make room for the new labor saving devices. Oh man, obesity is in, fat is where it's at!

Friends, can't walk any more cause you've been a couch potato for so long that you're damn near an invalid?? We - el - ell, just give us a call at the Scooter Store (r) and we'll fix it so taxpayers will buy you your very own full time MOTORIZED WHEEL CHAIR. And for the rest of you, do you really want to do all that walking while playing golf? Try any one of our fine line of golf-carts. Going to the Beach? Hey there, Tab Hunter, be a hit with the ladies on your new Jet Ski. Why bother actually swimming in that pristine lake when you can be skimming across its surface at to 45 mph!! That's right!! You don't want to miss out on that!

I sort of stopped following the news and now I'm a bit lost. Is the fighting slowly starting to cease or is it getting worse?

While I agree with you to some extent I'm a big fan of many labour saving devices. I think the things you mention tend to let people forget what the value is in our country and the importance and relative rarity of freedom.

Dude get some oxygen or something because you're about to hyperventilate. My family's here. If I move to another country, I reduce my opportunities to see them drastically. Besides, I don't want to move. It's a dumb and way over-used challenge anyway.

You seem to think that action is always better than inaction. In Falujah, oh boy, we wiped out insurgents -- yeah and we also gained about 100K new sworn enemies for life, people many of whom had been more or less on the fence about hositility towards America.

You're not critical enough. You're wedded to the proud ceremony of the ranks and the unshakable certainty that you're doing the utterly right thing. Apparently incapable of considering that American military might could be used to disadvantage.

Some are definitely advantageous. Primitive people's joints wore out at 40 because of the non-stop hard work. We need to find a better balance. Some people do quite well with it, many others don't. I know when I've lived in a setting where I could replace a lot of driving with walking or biking instead, my health benefitted. And that's to say nothing of the reduced use of fossil fuels.

Well, you can offer your head to them and make it quicker.

Get a grip, pal. We went over to their countries with ambitious plans about 100 times more than they to us -- 1,000 times more, maybe.

They invade my country, my state, I'll repel them. I can only imagine many Iraqis feel the same way. Love 'em or hate 'em, why are you surprised they are trying to repel what they see as an invader?

Well, you can first see if it can be done or not. Why shift to the other 2 tracts just because they show promise without investigating the 3rd tract. Remember those oil wells in the 70s that were "dry"? Today they are pumping oil out of them. How is this so? Well, back then, technology wasn't ready to do it. Why lose sight of a possibility?

Well, if you want to talk about that, you need to address the issue of cradle to grave. You cannot have it both ways. Do you want the C2G approach or not.

Going on the Jet Ski is totally different from swimming. So, do you do anything other than work, eat and sleep? Sure hope not since you are so down on leisure activities and insist that we swim, walk, etc, etc. Don't want to be wasting our resources instead of working physically, do you?

I hope you do realize that it didn't start from 2000, right? Please tell me you don't believe that they themselves don't do other stuff like this except on a smaller scale. however, if we did it, it would be a bad thing. They do it? No problem. Got Double Standard? I think that even the Iraqis realize that we cannot maintain a presence there for all eternity. However, they are unhappy because the insurgents are blowing up whatever we are trying to rebuild. As soon as we get it stabilized, we will be out of there. Just like Afghanistan. However, if it does get stabilized, that would be bad news for the muslims, right? So, they cause trouble because it turns the population against us and knowing what we are, they know that we will not have the stomache to do what we have to do to make it happen.

Don't make it too complicated. Kids don't do as much physical play as they did when I was a kid, and I didn't do as much as my dad. My dad was tougher, stronger than I.

Kids would be better off running or swimming than riding an ATV or Jet Ski, safer too, and would clearly use less fossil fuel. We've gone nuts.

OK. So kids of today have gone nuts. Fair enough. You didn't do as much as your dad. I guess by his standards, you too have gone nuts, right? Why is it ok for you and not the kids of today? IOW, why are you conveniently drawing the line past your generation?

Also, let me tell you something about me. I didn't have a Jetski till lately and certainly no ATVs. Guess what, I hated running and swam occassionally. Now I still hate running and do swim occassionally. IOW, no change. Also, when I went on a 4 day ATV ride, all things being the same, I actually lost 5 lbs. There is a lot of activity in ATV riding, in case you didn't know. Just because the ATV is there doesn't mean the kids will not run and swim as much as they want and just because it isn't there, doesn't mean they will. I didn't have either and was never that physical.

Even thought that maybe, just maybe, people ride ATVs and Jetskis because it is more fun than just plain running and swimming?

You reminded me of a friend of mine who was a russian jew. His country, the USSR, really was an unfriendly place for him to live. He was a PhD yet unable to get a job because he was jewish. In short his governement and his country were actually oppresive and unfriendly and it's leadership actually had many of the qualities you currently assign to our leaders. This was at a time when the USSR was thinking along the same lines that you accuse this country of doing now; i.e. imperilaism, or in this case worldwide communism, and militaristic might. Joe felt so strongly that this was wrong that he took his wife and kids and left the rest of his family in the Soviet Union - brother, uncles, aunts, cousins and so on; his parents had already died in WWII. Moral of the story; if it really gets that bad you and many others will leave regardless of family connections. You don't know bad, because here it isn't. Quite the opposite.

You seem to attribute to me many thoughts and feelings than I in actuality don't have. I do support what we did and are doing in Iraq. I think the military actions in Bosnia were a mistake. I did not ridicule President Clinton for this while it was occuring. I see some successes and some failures in Vietnam and Korea. WWII was worth fighting as is militant Islam, there's not much difference between the Nazis and the Mullahs except that women had many more rights under the Nazis and society in general had more freedom. It is a world war and militant Islam is the enemy. I will support whatever we and our allies need to do to win this war. I will hate much of it as we do it as I do what is happening in Beirut - but I see the neccesity. I will do my part in this because it is the right thing to do, just as fighting the Axis was 70 years ago. This will be a longer fight.

Anyhoo, enough of a late night ramble, I have to go to work in the AM.

Sign off.

There is always Terminix...it works real well for getting rid of bugs. :D

Your friend Joe reminds me of my family. My father was unable to continue his business in communist Cuba, i.e., the Workers' Paradise. He saw the writing ont he wall and was willing to leave his immediate family behind in Cuba, so that my mother, brother and myself had a chance at a better life here in the US. My mother left her family behind too. It must have bene painful, but they did what they had to do so that we would not have to live under the thumb of a communist puppet.

I am glad that there are people like you and who think like you do. Our country is better off for it.

A lot of the reason I protest what I feel are serious mistakes in national direction and policy is because I AM aware of the protections and general high civility we enjoy here and I don't want this nation to fall to smash in a little over 200 years.

Some people like to challenge vocal critics like me to run for office or shut up. Lemme see, Ben Franklin never held elective office, I'm pretty sure, and he was perhaps the most influential founding father, certainly top 5.

Our elected leaders are always going to be a small fraction of our total population. If only past, current, or futurre elected leaders were allowed to exercise free speech, we'd be what, an oligarchy, an ultimate meritocracy/aristocracy?

I dunno, the label doesn't matter.

It is ending. Nothing lasts for forever. As things go, we have had a decent run.

It depends on what you are critical of. For instance, if you want to argue that you don't agree with X's stand on Roe v Wade, I can agree with you or disagree with you. However, if you want to say that Bush is an idiot, well, show us how much better you are or STFU. Being critical of a decision is one thing. However, if you want to say you are better than Clinton, Show me! Think you are better than Bush? Show me. Other than that, you are little more than a big mouthed windbag. While I don't agree with Bush on Stem Cells and Roe v Wade and his giving amnesty to Mexicans, among other things, I also acknowledge he has done some things I agree with. However, I do not really believe I can run the country better than he can so I am not going to challenge him on that. The difference is subtle.

Very wise...all we ever do here, regardless of political POV is mental masturbation....

Speak for yourself, why don't you!! :mad:

I do masturbation whether it is mental or not. Just because you are only capable of mental masturbation doesn't mean that is my limit. :D :silly:

Stop and clean up your keyboard...your keys seem to be sticking....you pervert....:D :D

Hey!! I resemble that remark!! :D :D :silly:

So, in your opinion, each person should use himself as the standard by which our leaders are to be measured? Unless someone can demonstrate superiority to our leaders, that person should keep quiet? I am a mere self-loathing Hollywood liberal (or some such nonsense, BENZ LGB can tell you which label to apply) and I could never dream of running the country, but I can see that W is in way over his head.

What is ending?

Aklim, good to see that your sense of humor is still intact...

Not like the pompous, self-appointed, arbiters of what is supposedly wrong with this country and its leaders...real easy to sit on the side and blather on about what is wrong with the country...not so easy to actually have to do something about it.

Reminds me of the recent remarks by that ass-wipe Kerry...according to him if he was president there would have been no problem with Hezbollah...he would have "destroyed them." The cojones-less candidate trying to talk tough. It was almost too funny.

Oh Brother....