Just a thought. Who is reporting on these casualties? Ever notice that Israeli bombs only kill old women and children, and usually they are crippled orphans. Hmmm just a thought. I guess the cities in Lebanon are filled with nothing but crippled women and children it seems. :confused:


Lets just say that its to Hezbollah's benifit if lots of women and children are killed, I almost wonder if a lot of these deaths are not staged by them. IE lets collect a few bodies and throw them in for when the western reporters show up.

Entirely possible.

For them, and every other Islamic terrorist organization, it is standard operating procedure to hide their weapons, and themselves, in heavily-populated civilian areas.

Of course this has the strategic advantage of allowing them to blend in to the general population...

But more importantly, it also ensures that there will always be plenty of grisly civilian casualties that can be blamed on their enemy (namely us, and Israel), which inevitably gives them a huge advantage in the "other" war that is going on: The Worldwide Propaganda War.

The high rate of civilian casualties in all of these conflicts is THEIR fault (Hezbolla, Al Queda, Hamas, etc.), and theirs alone. NOT ours.

Mike

Unless a body is in a uniform or has military identification or a weapon in-hand it is a civilian.

Ahh so even if said body had an RPG on there person before they died? Hmmm. About what I thought.

For those who see the beam in another's eye, and fail to see the mote in their own eye (this refers to the pusillanimous comment a while back ago). Or for those who feel superior enough to refer to others, sarcastically, as "mental giants."

There is no "i" on ordnance.

From the folks at Wiki:

The military term ordnance should not be confused with the civil term ordinance.

Ordnance is a general term for a quantity of military equipment, usually specifying the ammunition for artillery, bombs, or other large weapons.

Just doing my bit to spread out a little education.

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,,19955774-5007220,00.html

Yep...that's about it.

It may also explain their high birth rates...just making more fungible "propaganda" posters.

If I had a choice to be blown up by an Islamic :eek: or proslthelitized to by a born again jebus freek :mad: , I would probalbly go with Ishtar.....

:rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes:

I submit that they are BOTH worthy of the same fate: My boot in their a$$.

Mike

Difference is one you are still alive...the other you are dead, or shred to pieces.

Saturday morning, after returning from the beach some jehovah witnesses came by my house while I was unloading gear from the car.

I politely told them to leave me alone, and they politely left.

I still have all my limbs, there is no bomb damage to my house and no one is dead.

I vote against Ishtar...but hell, that's just me.

Yeah, I've heard some discussion of that before, how if there's even one exception, there's no rule. Certainly in hard science that would be the case. When talking about hard to quantify human behavior, I could see it meaning that the one case where the "rule" didn't apply was so rare and such an unusual circumstance, that one can say, 'well you see what it took to go outside the norm.'

In this case, there were what, 300,000 or so international troops (my number could be way off), a big international coalition in place in Iraq, so Israel could be fairly certain that the problem was being addressed, and addressed in such a manner as to cause them the least grief and/or blowback. So yielding to our request was not such a hard choice.

Easy for us to say from this distance. After the civil war and Israeli occupation, Lebanon was not a strong govt. Here comes Hezbollah into the vacuum with more services than anyone else was providing.

You can't ignore human nature in these lofty assessments of what people ought or ought not to do. The people were starving, with dirty water. Who's going to turn down help in that situation. So Hezbollah gets in the door.

Bot, to answer your question about that hoary cliche: "the exception that proves the rule," here is what "The Straight Dope" has to say about it:

Dear Cecil:

I've heard the following expression from people all over the country and on television. It makes absolutely no sense:

"That's the exception that proves the rule."

Is this a bastardization of some other phrase? If not, what does it mean? --Lorraine N., East Weymouth, Massachusetts

Dear Lorraine:

Don't you get it? The whole point of this saying is that it doesn't make sense. It's what you say to confound your enemies when your argument has been shot out from under you by some pesky counterexample. From the point of view of advancing the debate it's about one jump ahead of "yo mama," but it beats standing there with your mouth open.

To be sure, a few scholarly types have tried to make excuses for "The exception proves the rule," as the quotation books usually phrase it. They say it comes from the medieval Latin aphorism Exceptio probat regulam. Probat means "prove" in the sense of "test," as in "proving ground" or "the proof is in the pudding." So "the exception proves the rule" means a close look at exceptions helps us determine a rule's validity.

If Latinists understand it that way, however, they're pretty much alone. I've looked up citations of this saying dating back to 1664, and in every case it was used in the brain-dead manner we're accustomed to today--that is, to suggest that non-conforming cases, by the mere fact of their existence, somehow confirm or support a generalization. Obviously they do nothing of the kind. We like to think proverbs become proverbial because they're true; this one is an exception. It certainly doesn't prove the rule.

EXCEPTIONAL STUPIDITY

Dear Cecil:

I was surprised to see the question in your column about the exception proving the rule because I had always assumed the saying came from the "rule" that "there's an exception to every rule." Thus the mere existence of an exception to a rule proves the validity of the rule. No? --V.M., Berkeley, California

Dear V.:

No. If all it takes for a rule to be valid is that it have an exception, every rule would be valid--except, of course, rules without exceptions. Obviously not an argument you want to take very far.

EXCEPTIONAL STUPIDITY, PART TWO

Dear Cecil:

Your reply to the question, "What does `that's the exception that proves the rule' mean?" was not quite right. The quote refers to a logician's axiom: that which can never be false can likewise never be true. If a statement cannot be admitted ever to be false, then it is a concealed tautology, i.e., a dogma. An instance of a proposition's not-being-the-case serves to affirm its existential validity, assuming it does not commit a violation of the rules of logic. Both logical validity AND existential verification are required for one to justly assert that such-and-such is true ... --Max L., Santa Barbara, California

Cecil replies:

You're talking about "falsifiability," Max. If no conceivable evidence could prove a given statement false, then the statement is meaningless. For example, if a psychic comes out with predictions so vague they can't possibly be proven wrong, then the predictions are baloney. Note, however, that contrary evidence merely has to be conceivable. If contrary evidence actually exists, the statement is more than falsifiable, it's false. To put it as clearly as I can, THE EXISTENCE OF AN EXCEPTION DOES NOT VALIDATE THE FREAKING RULE! Quite the opposite. But anybody who can sling around phrases like "existential validity" deserves credit for trying.

From: http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a3_201.html

You can draw your own conclusions.

Now that makes sense.

B

PS I love the "Straight Dope" explanation, above.

Gracias....:D