shinRaiden

Heh-heh, we have CEO's here in the US that have cleared over a quarter of these personally, and others in the top 3 for damage done to the corp. Very small potatoes, except that we're arguing about the distribution of those small potatoes.

And I echo denoir in saying it got bottled up in proceedure for who knows how long. I wasn't linking or relating Carter and Bin Laden. I'm just noting the irony of Carter handing a mess of to Reagan to deal with. Remember, we aided dubious folks in Afganistan against the Soviets, and Iraq against Iran, and Lebanon was just a mess. That policy, going back theoretically to the Monroe Doctrine, has only begun to serious reconsidered in the late end of Clinton's administration. If you go back to the briefing I posted, it was a private transcript that was kept private, until the news agency asked the White House for permission to release it, not the other way around. Furthermore, it states that the top brass in the Bush Administration didn't finish up getting their nominations confirmed, and transitioned into office, and thus have the legal opportunity to do diddley squat until midsummer. Additionally, Clarke said that the Sept. 4th document did not reach the White House until Sept. 10th. These six day's are not Bush's fault, it's the agencies that a) didn't think it was serious or b) didn't know what to do with it, that didn't tell him that it was a priority. As for Ambsr. Wilson's wife, he's a political climber who used the connections he had in the DC beauracracy to get himself a vacation to a place where he was in cahoots with the locals. She deserves to get bounced on corruption charges, regardless of your political opinion of him. Clarke's biggest problem is that he can't keep his story straight when brown-nosing folks. Either he was feeding the Clintons bogus crap, or BS'ing Bush, or lying to the media. It's a different story, at different times, to different people. When that is credibly cleaned up, then I'll listen to the results. Wait a sec... isn't that called hindsight? Or historical revisionism.

1979: Tehran Embassy 1983: Beirut USMC barracks Yeah, different groups, but it set the precedent. The handling has been confused at best until now.

Ok, if we say that 20 out of 100,000 guys in the US jisatsu themselves yearly, and use this same ~280 million, and assume that women never commit suicide, that makes for 28000 suicides a year. Therefore, you're 50x more likely to commit suicide in the US than die of a combat or non-combat injury in Iraq, and ~11-22x more likely to commit suicide in 2001 than to have died on 9/11. Therefore, let's go to Iraq, as it's safer there.

Transcript of private press briefing from Clarke - Aug 2002

I know it's a bad thing to make jokes about this but, that's funny Tex. Thanks. haaretzdaily

They said it, not me... jpocst.com

Considering that these charges were compiled long after the fact by people who stand to gain politically by their advancement, I'm betting on the snowballs. Rep. Waxman is most certainly not a republican. Rep. Waxman's Webpage Full text with linkage to bill authorizing force against Iraq, with declarations: H.J.Res.114 - Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002 People who tagged their name to the supporters: Cosponsors House vote record on HR 114: Rep. Waxman voted for HR.114 Senate vote record on the same: Senate vote record Legislation from the 2nd session of the 107th Congress about Iraq Iraq, Republic of Full committe report on HR 114: Committee on International Relations report 107-721 Public law 105-235 signed by Pres. Clinton, cited by 107th HR 114: 105-235

Jpost copy Haaretz copy

So that's what happened to the rolling pin... *THWACK* Yeouch!

Strictly tactically, all politics aside, why are tanks going in? The operations involved going up against heavier weaponry than ordinary infantry can return or repel. I could spin Bernadotte's numbers by saying that perhaps the palestinians are being more hesitent about the practicality or blowing themselves up, or they're starting to run out of suckers, or their money's running out. By the way, is Mossad actually behind the operations, or is it the Shin Bet? If it's Mossad instead, is this seperation politically or practically motivated? Also, who was the PM who let Yassin out? That might explain a few things as well.

Actually, Media Player is a bundled (for now) product with Windows. Does anybody else remember the good old days when IE 2.0 came on a single floppy? IE was yet another Mosaic port/hack built as a seperate app to compete with Netscape. To increase market share, MS tossed it in the Windows distribution and Office as an independent goodie. Netscape and AOL complained that MS was abusing prevailing user apathy, and that users being too lazy to remove IE and load Netscape would constitute an unfair advantage for MS. When the courts were told that IE was functionally independent, it was widely believed that that would be in violation of a previous anti-trust settlement to not bundle any non-OS apps. Therefore, MS moved several key libraries into IE, and changed several of the central GUI libraries to make Windows dependent on IE. Therefore they were able to successfully argue that IE was a critical part of the OS, and removal would cripple the OS. MS now has various options: 1) Pay the extortion money. This is better discussed in the "War on terror" thread. 2) Fight it in the courts. Good luck, MS likely won't have nearly the influence$ it had in the U$. 3) Announce that due to the unprofitable business climate in Europe, terminate all Europeon business, development, and licensing. 4) Try an SCO, and announce that all the EU's documents made with Office are now MS IP, and that this current usage constitutes license violations, and sue for triple damages. 5) Recode XP and Media Player for XP Reloaded by moving all the graphics and media libraries off into Media Player, and halting work on Longhorn's text console.

Now why would it be exceeded... you know they're not hosting addons at this time...

Ok, that explains things now. I must have missed the connection earlier. Congratulations that they were not harmed. I was in Japan during 9/11. Yeah, it was on the TV and made the papers for a week or so, but unless you were fixiated on foriegn press (which I was not), it was over and old news fairly quick. A couple weeks later, when that jet crashed due to mech. failure in Long Island, somebody on the street came up to me and said "gee, that's too bad" in a "I couldn't give a rip" fashion. Yeah, he was probably drunk, but my first thought was "what are you thinking?! It's just like... whait... you don't see Pearl the same way we do..." Grandpa was a sub driver at Pearl, and decided to chill on base rather than party on the Nebraska with buddies. He hadn't met Grandma yet. We may disagree on motivations and tactics and politics, but I do appreciate your determination and enthusiasm. I personally believe that the whole master plan in the ME actually hinges on Iraq. If people are given the oppotunity to taste liberty in their own land, it could take away half the cause and fuel of terrorism. The other half of course is the vitirol thrown by the imams to incite the hordes for their political and financial gain. In Japan, the government and the US occupation systematicly shattered the state religions, and the effects on the society is still there today. That was not the case in Korea or Taiwan. Do I believe that there was some degree of ignorance or misleading in the ramp up to Iraq? Quite possibley. However, I think it is far better to find out Saddam might not have actually had the capability to build some of the WMD's, than to see the flash somewhere. Also, I doubt that there would have been much public support in a primary cause of bringing freedom to Iraq. For all the foriegn people who have died that America might be free, there is a lot of apathy towards returning the favor.

Of course. Now, if you view the Palestinians as an independent people already, their leaders would have the same traditional diplomatic rights as do others. But was Yassin a diplomatic member of the PA? The title of 'leader' covers Arafat and his guys, but did it extend to Yassin? Or, if you choose to view Hamas as an isolated gang of thugs, it's no more than dealing with John Gotti. Except, that John Gotti went willingly because he figgured that he could play the system, and they didn't have anti-tank weapons. However, did Yassin actually push a big red button, or just encourage others to push it of their own free will? Anybody remember another wheelchair-bound guy by the name of Leon Klinghoffer? At least Yassin died quickly.

Having done field service for my previous employer for a certain large uber-OEM mentioned previously, you really should get the 3year complete-care warranty. Touching anything, changing it to anything other than "as-is", your results are dubious. That is, if you can figure out how to get the blasted things open. 'Lots' of things are warranty service, IF you know what they are. If you don't know how to DIY, buy from a local reputable DIY shop. That way, your system is repairable. BTW, more and more OEM's are putting the windows distribution on a hidden partition, and not giving you the cd's. Guess what happens if your hardrive goes south? IF it's covered under warranty, expect up to a week before a new drive comes, and it will be blank without that hidden partition unless it's within the first 3 days. So you'll need the CD's, which if you can pry them out of their cold dead hands will cost you ~$30, plus S&H, and take 6~8 weeks.

Shark in a can = spammage?

Since GW2 was obviously wrong, where is the "Free Saddam" crowd? Why all the attention on the people in Guantanamo, but no calls for Saddam's liberty and return? Yeah, it may look bad in the papers, but isn't that the right thing to do now? @Walker, d00d, when was the last time you had a vacation? You've been wound up higher than who knows what. Don't go blow up like Howard Dean. You're brighter than that. I'm not knocking what you have to say, but you can be less uptight about it. It doesn't really matter if Gore had won, and people will still die regardless of whether Bush or Kerry or Nader or Lyndon Larush wins. Yelling and screaming and stamping their feet is what folks do at the mosh pit. Janet Reno's disco dance and Al Gore's Macarena were terror enough in and of themselves.

Since Hamas wants things restored to pre-May '48, there are two options: 1) Zion in Uganda, or wherever someone is willing to donate land and cover relocation expenses for several million people 2) Eradicate any non-muslim non-palestinians between the river and the sea. Either way, it's not going to be cheap. Which is harder to ignore, 'people worthy to be killed' or 'non-humans to be liquidated'?

The palestinians who I spoke with on their streets, at their work, on their buses. Their TV's are tuned to US satelite TV, they wear nike's and Adidias, their dream is to come to America, get a job, and get rich. But the parents' attitudes have started to waver with the filth we rain on their head with our tivo pr0n. Yeah, we've (America, not just the Clinton's, although they made a great poster couple) we've crapped on their dreams, although you could argue that they built a house of cards idioticly on dreams of whims. The Israelis who I spoke with were hesitent about Oslo, but they looked to the US for leadership. The commission testimony so far that I've caught has been not much more than the banter of symantics, talking points, and stumping quips from both sides of the bench. Does anyone else remember the Italian PM saying we got the WMD (in the singular sense, not plural)? If we are going to restore Saddam to power, (as would be the only just thing to do if we inappropiately removed him) shouldn't we continue to refurbish the country to make up for the damage? We could give him money without taking oil-for-food vouchers as humble reparations. We probably should stop building schools too, until we get a chance to put the baathist curriculam back in place. Unfortunately, we can't bring back his sons, so to compensate maybe we could start a draft of US women 18~25. Let's see, 365days a year, times the 3~5 a night that Uday kidnapped, that would be about 1095~1825 a year. To compensate for Qusay, we should probably donate the Stryker brigade, and the 1st Cav to create the backbone of the NeoRepublican Gaurd. Now we'll fix our little moral delimma real nice, and we can feel good about ourselves while the streets run red.

Update. I replaced my A7N8X-DLX rev 2.0 with a A7N8X-E. And... same result. I went back and ran a heavy run of Memtest86 on each stick in each slot ramped up to 2.8v on the DDR lines. No problems at all, and I've run the two sticks at 200mhz before on another system. Additional searching suggests that the problem may be more memory related, rather than AGP, or maybe there were more power issues. Another forum suggested that the Nforce2 chipsets have weak drive on the memory as well on larger dual channel amounts of RAM. The BSOD's in XP seem to suggest this based on the stop codes being the dear old "PGF in non-paged area". So to summarize, I upped the power supply to a solid 530w, replaced the mobo for an AGP slot power issue, memtest86-ed both sticks of 512mb PC3200, and still bsod's constant at 200mhz. 166mhz does seem to be a bit more stable. @JnH: Look online for used ones. You can get it way cheaper than that.

Bernadotte hit on a key point here that is how the local social organizations have corrupted themselves. In the west, medicine and social services have been an outreach historically of the churches. The heavy organization and structure allowed for local and international, as well as fraternal organizations to service the welfare needs of the populace. Only recently has there been a significant growth in civic organizations and medical providers in the west and in Asia. In the ME though, any organization that Islam had in the early Caliphate declined under the Ottoman Sultanate, and finally shattered under the various Europeon mandates. Today, local organizations such as the Waq'f own the village mosques, manage the imams and schools, and handle the distribution of alms to the needy. Iirc, a muslim should assist the poor directly, but there are various fatwahs authorizing the the direction of the alms funds to the foundations for better distribuition and pooled projects. In most places, the village foundation is independent of those in other cities. The rich towns do nicely, the poor not as well. Now what happened is a number of these foundations, following the ravings of the fringe clerics, decided to put their money where their mouth was, and have been funding projects not quite in line of benefit to humanity. Bin Laden got a number of his clerics to issue fatwahs authorizing alms that were supposed to be used for orphans and hospices and the poor and ill to be redirected to his Muhajdeen in Afganistan. That still continued after the Soviets lost the headless-goat game. The money continued to flow in for the development of 'schools' for the training of poor muslim kids. If they'd checked the curriculam, they would have found an 'interesting' PE and engineering program instead. If the social organizations would get cleaned up, and the corruption dealt with, that would be going a long ways to really helping folks out. But that's a pretty tall order.

Interesting that they mention concern over a repeat of Desert One, not remembering another little arrest raid on their own watch, a little job in Mogadishu. Did they ever stop to think "Ok, it didn't work last time, lets fix it and do what we need to so that it will work this time"? Where's the pro-active take-charge attitude?

Has anybody else here talked with the people on the street in the ME? Whether their opinion is right or wrong you can argue about it all you want, but the people on both sides of the fence that I spoke with in early 2000 (PRE-W time) said that while their dream of freedom and wealth was their dream of America, the personal life of Bill Clinton cast such a spectre across that dream that they were more disgusted than disappointed in us trashing their dreams. How much of the economic factors, oil prices, and trade deficit fodder is due to the flucuating currency exchange market? I saw a report that currency adjustments alone were at least a significant double-digit portion of revenues from large manufacturing and industrial concerns in the US. And what of deliberate meddling in the markets out of political spite? Where was Clarke on 9/12? He sure types slow. He's been around since Reagan era. His grand idea to deal Qhaddafi was to make sonic booms with SR71's and make a pretend invasion with rafts washing ashore. Even if you think the reports backing him up are the holy writ, what about where he admits that Clinton shelved the plans to let Bush handle it after the election? That may be a reasonable arguement, but why did Clarke wait FOUR YEARS and stand by counting bodies waiting for another election to spring this? In case everyone forgot, there is a investigative commission working on both administrations right now, Ms. Albright and Sec. Powell both testify today. If this were a criminal case, Clarke could be hauled in for jury tampering or the judge declare a mistrial, REGARDLESS of how you feel about the matter. Right or wrong, Clarke is ultimately going to give out information that is in his best interest. The commision is obliged to at least pretend to be interested in the common welfare. If the commision decides that he's relevant, or reliable, they have the liberty to summon him.

@Balschoiw I wouldn't be suprised if Sharon said "Hey George, I got an idea I'd like to run by you..." and W responded with "Don't tell me, I rather see it in the papers. Just clean up your own mess." Does Arik the Buldozer really care what anybody else thinks? What nobody has been really discussing is how the Mossad discovered that the Ashdod bombers TUNNELED under the Gaza fence, the prototype for the new fence. That has been kept very low key in the US media, and the Israeli papers as far as I've seen. If that is seriously substaniated, that could be the undoing of the whole fence adventure. The fence is designed to be a wall of seperation, but if it leaks like the chinese and magnoigt and seigfried walls did before, Arik's repeat voters could get real cranky real fast. A lot of folks are holding their breath hoping against hope that it works, that they'll finally be able to sleep at night in their little bubble, but if it should pop, I wonder what Israel would do internally.