CLRV

Whoops, there it is...

No, this is just more of the same sychophantic, jingoistic pro-America cheerleading. The only thing for the sychophants to do now is declare victory and move on.

Ah, but now bush_cheney2004 has gone and taught them the secret of failure mode effects analysis! He may have single-handedly altered the balance of power forever! With that kind of knowledge, anything is possible!

In a spaceship full of components marked "Made In China".

This is a new wrinkle on a very old scenario. Anyone who has attended a demo in the past decade, or has at least payed wakeful attention to the ones that have been going on, know very well that police invariably provoke peaceful demonstrations, the media focuses in on a couple of idiots in anarchy t-shirts busting windows and runs the footage, reporting that "violent" protesters needed to be rounded up by police. Fortunately, thanks to individual access to video cameras and the internet, demonstrators have begun to post THEIR footage clearly showing cops charging lines of peaceful people and other acts of provocation that belie the official story. So the cops have changed their tactics, putting their agents among the demonstrators to provoke the violence that's needed to discount and discredit the protest. Fortunately, that hasn't worked either. As Marge Simpson said, the system may not work but as long as people are all videotaping each other justice will be done.

At any rate, now that the Chinese have been given the precious secret of statistical process control etc. from the illustrious west, what's to stop them?

Arrogance is imagining that things cannot be done unless they are done the way WE do them.

OMG, they don't know about failure mode effects analysis? I don't even go to the bathroom in the morning without doing a failure mode effects analysis first! How the hell have they survived this long?

As much as I enjoy saying "worst xxxx ever" and actually do a creditable voice imitation of the Comic Book Guy, I always try to qualify my opinion of George W. Bush's presidency by saying he's the worst president *in living memory* (Nixon being the runner-up). For all I know, William Howard Taft could have been pound-for-pound a more inept and arrogant fathead. I don't know. I never saw him in action so I cannot say. All I can say is, given the realities of 21st century technology, economics, geopolitics and America's global primacy, Bush has been able to do more serious and widespread damage than any other president in history; not least to the American people and the US Constitution -- a remarkable document worthy of emulation abroad, not emasculation at home. And please don't get the idea I'm rooting for a Chinese takeover. As much as I like Chinese on an individual basis, I also realize that they would make the Americans look like the Swiss. I also share your skepticism that any millenium can belong to any one nation. It's a fairly far-flung premise. Has there been an empire in history that lasted a thousand years? I can't think of one.

I think you might want to prepare yourselves for the unpleasant reality that the sun is setting on the American Empire, such as it has been. Sad but true. Education? Don't be absurd. American drop-out rates are at record levels. The U.S. ranked about 25th in math, 20th in science on 2003 studies. They can't fill the attrition of tech and skill jobs from a retiring Boomer generation, while they work to make immigration harder and harder and thereby increasing the likelihood that skilled immigrants will look elsewhere (Canada, for instance). Individualism? The idea that America (or any country) values individuality as the highest ideal is a cheap myth. Everybody's and individualIST, but they don't like individuals. Perhaps in simpler times it was true, but no modern industrial culture can really afford a population of unpredictables. This is the result of expressing individuality in America today. Try to wear an anti-Bush tshirt within a mile of one of his appearances and you'll see just how much your individuality is cherished. Of course it needn't have been so, but sadly the 1990's happened and the Peace Dividend was squandered. America had won the Cold War; had proven their economic system better than the Russians' once and for all. The Gulf War proved What We Say Goes. What did America do with its place as the sole remaining superpower? America turned inward. They rode out the glorious economic boom convinced of the myth of Infinite Growth. They watched Survivor and Seinfeld. Drunk on cheap gasoline, America's love affair with the S.U.V. had its honeymoon. Did America try to fix some of the things and places around the world that were damaged or even destroyed as a result of the struggle against the Russians? Nope. Somebody had to drop a couple of skyscrapers before America even remembered those places existed, and even today you could go blue in the face trying to convince most of them that one thing has anything to do with the other. By then it was too late anyway. The kleptocrats and carpetbaggers who took over from Clinton saw 9/11 only as a chance to consolidate their own power and funnel more taxpayer money into the pockets of corporate chums. They have beggered the US economy and created a Godzilla-sized debtload. Who is the future? Well...while the European Union is just now getting the kinks out and preparing to dwarf the USA, I think the smart money is on China. Thanks to the financial ineptitude of the Bush administration, the Chinese don't even have to *do* anything to tank the US economy. All they have to do is stop what they're doing now; simply stop accepting those government bonds as IOU's and watch the fun. Education? Chinese kids kick *everybody's* ass, never mind the poor struggling American kids with their evolution-free textbooks. Individuality? The Chinese continue to work towards the necessary freedoms that most people agree are necessary, but they certainly don't have a cult of the individual. They know the value of collaboration as well as competition, something we in the west have lost. That, of course, is speculation. China's authoritarian government may not be ushered out by the next generation. But America ruling the next thousand years? Get real. America is going to have its hands full fighting off the enemies it has made and trying to get its children to pay off the huge debt they've run up out of low-pay, no-benefit service industry jobs. Good luck ruling the world.

Speaking of the Kurds, did anyone notice that 1988, the year of the USA's single greatest arms shipment to Saddam, coincides with the year of the now infamous nerve gas attack on the village of Halabja -- the attack the White House first denied and covered up, then whitewashed? Ah, but it was only .8% when we for some reason spread those numbers over five years. And since the Russians sold more arms to Saddam anyway we can't even consider THAT figure. EVERYBODY knows the Islamic jihad has been giving Russia a get-out-of-jail-free card on all that since then. Russia hasn't seen any blowback for THEIR crimes, have they?so there's no reason to expect the USA would suffer any. No. The USA is an innocent victim. Again.

How about moonbat? I haven't heard that one in ages.

Well I certainly regret the use of the word "install". It wasn't an installation so much as regularly scheduled maintenance. I stand corrected. But really. Tinfoil tinfoil tinfoil. Talk about rubbing shit into the ground. I wonder, Dancie-poo, since ad homenim attacks are so necessary to your discussing these matters, would it be possible for you to stick a crowbar in your imagination and pry loose a new one today?

Why should I believe that site? I could find a site that says Elvis killed JFK. God that is lame. They give a general diss of internet citation in general to avoid addressing a point, then invariably follow up with a net cite of their own pressing THEIR point. Well I've already been told in here Wikipedia is uncool, but if you figure the Russians and others supplying arms to Iraq somehow gets the US off the hook for the weapons THEY laid on him, you go right ahead with that.

As I said, you're quibbling over the semantics of the world "install". I'm not hearing the Halbja and anti-drug money issues discussed. So Saddam had no western help? It was all the Russkies. And what I've insanely termed the "skullduggery of the Cold War" certainly had nothing to do with Soviet activity or weapons sales. Moreover, the Taliban magically appeared out of thin air in 1994. Despite the sources that clearly say they were "one of the mujahideen ("holy warriors" or "freedom fighters") groups that formed during the war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan (1979-89)." Oh yeah. I forgot the Saudis are a bunch of liberals thing. Got it. Guess I've been making it all up. I'm glad I'm dealing with sincere, mature people capable of having a factual discussion without attacking with smartassed crap about how insane the other person is. I'm also sure glad nobody's revising history around here.

Which begs the question of why colonialism keeps raising its head in a discussion of the wars in those nations, and why irresponsible westerners continue to try and pin all the blame on the dirty, scheming, naturally violent Ay-rabs, with we in the west highlighted as innocent victims. But that question is rhetorical, because we all know the answer. More accurately, they did exist as one of the groups who formed the mujahideen, our proxy army that fought the Soviets for us. Afterwards, they were left in power to brutalize and terrorize the population under their religious zealotry with the full support of the west, with weapons and money pouring in right up to May 2001, when they got $43 million from G.W. Bush for their efforts in the War on Drugs, despite the well-known beheadings, amputations, subjugation of women and soccer stadium executions -- things that only became bad after 9/11. Similarly, Saddam rose to power internally but anyone who tries to claim he stayed there on his own is surely revising history. Saddam would have been overthrown half a dozen times without constant influx of money and weapons from the west, despite the now famous rape-rooms, etc. One particularly nauseating example was the Reagan administration's dutiful hushing up of the Halabja massacre. Again, that atrocity only became officially "bad" after Saddam stopped following western orders. Then we were suddenly outraged about it. Hope this little fact lesson helps give you a bit of a ding. Quibble all you want about the semantics of the word "install", but the reality is they were puppets of the west, kept in place for our purposes against the wills and interests of the local people. You and others may not realize it, but you can bet your ass the locals remember and it fuels their fury. And of course those areas aren't points of contention in the middle east today, are they? We must look elsewhere for the root causes. Let's get back to your enlightening "we fight them over there so they won't make our sons into harem attendants over here" theory. That was great.

A.W.'s fence is probably a real beaut. She probably has people stopping on the street to pay her compliments about it.

Prescisely. The present state of the middle east has more to do with the way the victors re-drew the map after WWII and the skullduggery of the Cold War. So naturally, we must discuss the Ottoman Empire, harems and the effects of colonialism.

Oh so that's what we're fighting over there for. Knick-knacks...

Installing the Taliban to fight the Russians for us? Installing Saddam to fight Iran for us? Maintaining the tyrranical rule of the House of Saud lo these many years? Any of this ring a bell?

Which, of course, translates instantly to a complete freedom of responsibility for the things our governments HAVE done over there. Our governments, for which WE are supposedly responsible through this big-ass DEMOCRACY we're always shooting our mouths off about.

...through a mouthful of cookies. I understand.

I don't know, I'm sure. Why have a discussion like this at all? Why did they conduct the study that started it in the first place?

Actually yes, I have heard those things. I've also heard it said that if Marie actually said those words, it was out of a lack of comprehension as to the degree of the peasant's deprivation; that the luxury of her existence made her incapable of understanding that if people ran out of bread they actually couldn't just switch to cake. None of which changes the historical fact that the French aristocracy ground their peasants mercilessly for generations and that this was the fuel for the savage overkill of the Revolution. When you abuse, murder and exploit an entire population, robbing them of their wealth and the fruits of their labours and leaving them nothing to lose, they turn insanely violent against you. So yeah, maybe there is a clue here for figuring out why today's Muslims seem so volotile and prone to overreaction. But I doubt it will sink into the minds of those it would benefit the most.

You realize, don't you, that Marie Antoinette was a member of an aristocracy that was brutally grinding the poor of France into the dirt with the help and blessing of the Christian Church? A woman who said "let them eat cake" when told the poor were starving for lack of bread? If the muslims are the french revolutionaries, what does that make us? Sure you want to continue with this line of analogy? If number is the key for you, you are arguing quantity, not difference.