crwtom

who is advocating this? The current options in the discussion are - modest*) increases of troop levels. - approx steady state of troop level without time limit or well defined withdrawl conditions (other than "victory") - plans that give time tables or other markers for successive troop reduction or relocation over the course of months or years. - some combination of the above The pros and cons have been and are still being beaten to death both on SC and in DC. Cheers, T *) modest in comparison with what the Powell doctrine would have demanded (which was completely scrapped at the beginning of the war) or modest in comparison with the vacuum created by disbandment of the Iraqi army in 2003. ******************************************************************* Fear causes hesitation, and hesitation will cause your worst fears to come true

four years is not a short time - long term ramifications have already evolved and "history" is already in the process of being written. ... and it doesn't look pretty .... Cheers, T ******************************************************************* Fear causes hesitation, and hesitation will cause your worst fears to come true

aka - colored, mildly carbonated water with chemical foam stabilizers. US industrial brew (Miller, Coors, etc) is for people who don't really like the taste of beer, but who like to pee a lot. Cheers, T ******************************************************************* Fear causes hesitation, and hesitation will cause your worst fears to come true

most would agree that teaching should enter salary as well as P&T decisions. the big problem is how to measure classroom performance. If you only rely on student evaluations many will not give them a lot of credibility and, in absence of other data, largely disregard the teaching record due to lack of useful information. Other methods are peer evaluations which may have their own crdeibility problems (but usually generate good feedback). The best measure would be the overall perfomance of students in a class compared to other lecturers. As a large course coordinator I'm actually tracking relative performances of parallel lecture sections (which take the same exams) to see if there are problems with some lecturers. So at least within a small group of lecturers I can tell you who is doing a great, OK, or bad job relative to his/her peer lecturers in regrard to test performance. Anecdotally, this performance is largely uncorrelated to student satisfactions expressed in student evaluations - I have encountered pretty much any combination of the two indicators. Cheers, T ******************************************************************* Fear causes hesitation, and hesitation will cause your worst fears to come true

Asshat. Where are the moderators when you need them? mh . there are these 4 year old toddlers that first spit at you and then, when you only raise your voice, run away and cry for mommy Cheers, T ******************************************************************* Fear causes hesitation, and hesitation will cause your worst fears to come true

... there certainly is a pressure in this direction. University administrators like to make connections between tutition revenue and student evaluations. And there is little doubt that the latter are very much correlated to spoon-feed teaching styles, soft work loads, and high grades. Cheers, T ******************************************************************* Fear causes hesitation, and hesitation will cause your worst fears to come true

can't find any evidence in there ... only that he has difficulty thinking about something ... at 81 Cheers, T ******************************************************************* Fear causes hesitation, and hesitation will cause your worst fears to come true

so what "evidence" did he find that he couldn't find in the previous 81 years? Cheers, T ******************************************************************* Fear causes hesitation, and hesitation will cause your worst fears to come true

seems to confirm that the main cause of religious phanatsy is the fear of death - which tends to become greater the more imminent the event is. Cheers, T ******************************************************************* Fear causes hesitation, and hesitation will cause your worst fears to come true

... you forgot to say fuck to Anglo-Saxon Heritage Day ******************************************************************* Fear causes hesitation, and hesitation will cause your worst fears to come true

That would be supportive of some research on Correlation between Homophobia and Latent Homosexuality Cheers, T ******************************************************************* Fear causes hesitation, and hesitation will cause your worst fears to come true

outrageous!! - you're still using internet explorer. Get firefox! Cheers, T ******************************************************************* Fear causes hesitation, and hesitation will cause your worst fears to come true

McCain might be in a world of trouble. He was one of the very few to openly endores troop surges. The dangerous thing for him - he got them now. So if the surge goes south and many more body bags come home it will not only GWB's head in the noose but also McCain's. Cheers, T ******************************************************************* Fear causes hesitation, and hesitation will cause your worst fears to come true

in the polls? -- GW Bush had 90% in the polls once .. Cheers, T ******************************************************************* Fear causes hesitation, and hesitation will cause your worst fears to come true

when he pushed for an emergeny extension of his term until April 2002 - with the excuse to secure funding from Pataki - the NY State Assembly told him to get lost. Gives you an idea where his place is in the food chain. I suppose he also had to withdraw from a homeland security nomination out of fear of what will surface in senate hearings. His proposal for replacement was a disaster as well. And if Giuliani why not Bloomberg too - he dealt with the 9/11 fallout for much longer time than Giuliani. His contribution is the reconstruction of the city and not being around during the destruction being witness to gaps in the cities emegency systems. (plus he his management record is at least as good as that of Giuliani and he has only a fraction of the scandals to answer for that Giuliani has) Just being in office on 9-11-01 is not an indicator of competence as we should have learned now. Cheers, T ******************************************************************* Fear causes hesitation, and hesitation will cause your worst fears to come true

agree with that - mostly because the repubs have been turning every social issue into an ideological/moralistic circus rather than finding workable solution, plus their party is in greater disarray and disorientation then that of the dems. But none of the above are any of my first choices. For pres you need someone who demonstrated skill in governance as a chief executive with a practical outview. Ideology is easily concocted with dangerous and toxic consequences as we experienced in the last 6 years, and I'm guessing a majority in the US is weary of it. Moderate and successful governors such as Warner or Richardson seem to have the most appeal. Of course, just being a governor with moderate appeal is not a guarantee. That's what Bush ran as in 2000, and he turned out to be more ideological and less skilled in a governance than anyone could have expected, once he was under the influence PNAC ideologoues, religious moralists, a Stanford cold war political dean, and a paranoid WMD prophet as VP. For VP you probably want to someone who could complement with foreign policy and national security experience in level headed and non-ideological way. Biden looks like good guy for that among the presently named contenders. Cheers, T ******************************************************************* Fear causes hesitation, and hesitation will cause your worst fears to come true

Indeed - recent presidents were next-in-line executives. That is, governors or vice-presidents. If you reduce the field of conceivable contenders to this profile the playing field suddenly looks quite different. For example Dems: Gore, Richardson, Vilsack, Warner Reps: J Bush, Gilmore, Huckabee, Pataki, Romney, Thompson So you may still expect a lot of movement in the presidential race in the next 18 months. Cheers, T ******************************************************************* Fear causes hesitation, and hesitation will cause your worst fears to come true

so you consider the shooting of their own satellite as an attack on the US and a prelude to further terrorist and war action of China? Believe me - the real threat of China to the western world is not military - it'll be the fact that they are on the rise to become the hugest economy the world. Cheers, T ******************************************************************* Fear causes hesitation, and hesitation will cause your worst fears to come true

yup - though they tend to be more subtle - this was a pretty crass departure from reality. ******************************************************************* Fear causes hesitation, and hesitation will cause your worst fears to come true

Well yes - at this point everything is seen from a violently sectarian point of view. No matter that it was a mass murderer or that the death was quick or that there was a (arguable fair) trial - the way it's looked at: A Sunni was killed and his body desecrated by Shiites ... time for revenge. You can argue what you want but this is how civil war works. Cheers, T ******************************************************************* Fear causes hesitation, and hesitation will cause your worst fears to come true

That actually made it a watchable speech for me - the smirk at the end of each sentence, no matter if it he talks about war escalation or mass murder, has been so unbearable I could never watch a speech of his for more than a few seconds. (... may be they just put some botox in his cheeks for this speech) Some people said he looked scared - which I think is a good sign. This could mean that some minimal sense of reality has settled in in the white house. All the cockyness and "confidence" you saw before was obviously the product from a complete detachment from the gravity and reality of the situtation. Cheers, T ******************************************************************* Fear causes hesitation, and hesitation will cause your worst fears to come true

i never told a guy called "god" to believe in me - don't know anyone by that name and don't care what he might think. Chees, T ******************************************************************* Fear causes hesitation, and hesitation will cause your worst fears to come true

well that is you - but others do actually take some morbid fascination in the contortion of the human mind. If someone tells me about the pink elephants he carries around in his pockets I will ask him about what kind of alternate universe he sees when he looks out to the other end of his ice box. The phenomenology of psychological disorders from your garden variety axiety to autism, the obsessive-compulsive or the halluzinating state is of interest to most who want to know about their own kind - if you see the human mind carried to its extremes it gives you also a better idea how it works in the "normal" range. You'll witness in many examples the human minds defense mechanisms against overwhelming threat by creating other realities that sedate and sustain minimal functionality and survival. Now look at evolution of species, particularly evolution of intellect. Humans are the first to have a sufficiently developped intellect that can think far ahead into the future. This suddenly creates a new philosophical problem that no species had to deal with before - i.e. we can think (at least abstractly) beyond our death - when we will, in reality, not be able to think anymore because we're rotting in a box six feet under. The threat of death, even of latent, becomes continous & permanent. You mix this up with adaptive psychological behavior yo're bound to see some interesting phenomenon of the human mind - a latent and continuous defense mechanism. So yeah - it can be very interesting to explore this now and then by instigating some theological argument. More intersting though where adaptive behavior will evolve into in regard to this "dilemma" in the next few thousand years. The emergence of religion on the evolutionary time scale as an adaptive mechanism may be noe more than a temporary fashion. Cheers, T ******************************************************************* Fear causes hesitation, and hesitation will cause your worst fears to come true

Atheists barely ever clash with other atheists. However, religious people clash with each other quite violently even if their difference in believes are as nuanced as they are arbitrary. There is only one plain vanilla atheism and we all get along just fine. Cheers, T ******************************************************************* Fear causes hesitation, and hesitation will cause your worst fears to come true

how do you "hate" a delusion. At best you pity the ones subjected to it. Cheers, T ******************************************************************* Fear causes hesitation, and hesitation will cause your worst fears to come true