Comments Posted By Bill Arnold
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DEMS NEW INDUSTRIAL STRATEGY: MANUFACTURING SCANDAL
So get off your fake moral high horses and stop pretending that you are shocked, simply shocked that politics is played with US Attorneys’ offices. If we had heard similar outrage about political interference in federal cases in the decade preceding Bush, you would be on much firmer ground to criticize what is happening now.
Comment Posted By Bill Arnold On 14.03.2007 @ 15:21
The assertions are that this is about a reluctance to engage in politically-motivated less-than-substantial investigations of the members of the opposition party. So - refresh my memory; what were the politically motivated investigations of members of the Republican party in 1993-2000?
STRANGER THAN FICTION: DOES 24 INSPIRE REAL LIFE TORTURE?
I was recently talking with a Chinese employee of a large multinational, and was more than a little surprised when he said he and friends watched 24 regularly. (They somehow get it from the internet.) I don't know how common outside-US 24 viewership is, but American shows do have a lot of influence/viewership outside the US.
Comment Posted By Bill Arnold On 11.02.2007 @ 02:43
Do you have something against marmosets? A 1985 paper suggests that marmoset intelligence had previously been underestimated, or in the words of the authors, "Optimal foraging theory is less likely to be an overestimate of animals' mental capacities than previous studies are an underestimate."
Comment Posted By Bill Arnold On 8.02.2007 @ 14:15
If 10 nuclear bombs detonated on American soil, there would still be a landmass between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and mapmakers would still probably refer to it as “America.â€
But what exactly would “America†look like? Nothing you or I would recognize I assure you.
This (10 nuclear bombs is way over the top, but 1 might not be) is the only terrorist threat that matters in the short/medium run. (Long term, engineered biological weapons are scarier).
So, our priority should be to prevent it from happening, and to prevent nuclear proliferation in general from happening because one never knows who might take over a nuclear-armed country, e.g. Pakistan.Unfortunately, this is not the #1 international priority of this administration (or the last several for that matter). Lack of seriousness about the real threats is the main reason I don't generally believe the adminstration rhetoric about threats.
I guarantee it will be easy for the Bell’s of the world to say, after the first nuke destroys an American city, that the terrorists are not an existential threat, that in the grand scheme of things, what’s one little city when compared to getting the rest of the world upset with us...
Comment Posted By Bill Arnold On 29.01.2007 @ 20:12
Do you seriously assert this? My take is that it would take 1 to 2 city-destroying nuclear terrorism incidents in the US to pretty much end civilization as we know it, and not just in America either. It should not be allowed to happen.
DEMOCRATS SAY THE DARNDEST THINGS (PART 5,197)
A bare majority of Democrats (51%) want the United States military to prevail on the field of battle. Now if I were to posit a logical fallacy, I could say that since 49% of Democrats want the military to fail,
Comment Posted By Bill Arnold On 20.01.2007 @ 00:37
The raw numbers on this one are 51/34/15, not 51/49. And not-success does not mean failure - our president, you'll recall, said in an interview "We're not winning, we're not losing,..." Regardless, as a Democrat I'm disturbed by these numbers.
I want them out because I think we accomplished what we set out to do (get rid of Hussein and whatever WMDs there were), because I don’t want American military lives lost because the Iraqis don’t like one another, because I don’t think Bush has any chance of ever changing that dynamic, and because I view the proper role of our military as protecting America and not babysitting crazies halfway around the world.
Betcha there are 10s of millions of Democrats who agree with this paragraph. I do, mostly, though I didn't agree that the original goal was a correct one. (My judgement at the time was that Saddam had no WMDs except maybe some leftover chemical weapons, and perhaps a biological weapons research program, that he didn't get along with militant jihadists and was unlikely to share weapons with them due to probable blowback, and that a forced regime removal would result in a Shia/Sunni civil war, with Kurds in the north causing trouble with Turkey. At least the later hasn't happened.)The Democrats, on the other hand, could care less about our military. They don’t like those who serve, they don’t mourn the loss of those who serve.
Comment Posted By Bill Arnold On 20.01.2007 @ 00:18
This sort of statement is one reason why I distrust the political judgement of people on the right. The percentage of military haters and generally of pacifists is certainly higher among Democrats than among Republicans - Republicans reject both military hating and pacifism. As a blanket statement, it's just incorrect IMO. (Do you have numerical evidence otherwise?)
And that was based on things going relatively smoothly. What could go wrong?
Comment Posted By Bill Arnold On 13.01.2007 @ 18:48
One presumes that there are active efforts to "enhance" Murphy's Law's effect on the Iranian program. Every failure will be possibly blamed on Western intelligence agencies. I wouldn't want to be a worker/scientist in the Iranian program, even disregarding the possibility of Western military attack.
WE REALLY ARE A VERY, VERY, CLEVER, SPECIES
Just an aside - the first time I felt truly, teary-eyed proud-to-be-a-human was when the panoramic photo(s) from the first Mars rover (sojourner) returned to Earth from several light-minutes away.
Comment Posted By Bill Arnold On 10.01.2007 @ 19:35
CIA: "PAY NO ATTENTION TO THOSE MULLAHS BEHIND THE CURTAIN"
Conversely, the Iranians need to understand that we were stupid enough to invade Iraq, and we're stupid enough to bomb their nuclear facilities.
(Change stupid to whatever adjective you prefer.)Agreed that the "We Must Bomb Iran Now" crowd is getting way to much serious attention.
Comment Posted By Bill Arnold On 20.11.2006 @ 20:25
I DARE YOU TO MAKE ME A DEMOCRAT
SSHiell - Any and all communication sources are fair game and there does not need to be any court allowance in order to do the surveillance, use the information for arrest, or even use the information for trial.
Comment Posted By Bill Arnold On 14.11.2006 @ 17:30
Is it really the case that wiretap evidence is admissible as evidence in UK courts, or are you saying something weaker here? My understanding (however IANAL) is that the UK has a rule against use of wiretap-based evidence in court.
