DZJ

Members
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Content

    734

  • Joined

  • Last visited

    Never

  • Feedback

    0%

Everything posted by DZJ

  1. DZJ
    Most meaningless comment ever. Is there anyone alive at the moment for whom that isn't true? EDIT: As regards the article, it seemed reasonable enough to me. British forces in Helmand for instance can probably beat any Taleban forces that decide to fight, although that's rather less than half the problem. Al Qaeda won't be stamped out by force any more than Soviet Communism was, and seems to me that the best we can hope for is maintain sufficient forces to squish any of the enemy who wish to fight, enough intelligence assets to prevent their networks from proliferating and to weed them when they try, and enough support to local neighbours to encourage a political and economic situation that will let Islamic fanaticism wither away.
  2. DZJ
    Alternatively, if there was an open culture you'd just as effectively remove a blackmailer's leverage.
  3. DZJ
    Fat people don't repulse me as such, but greed certainly does. As for what qualifies as 'fat', I'd say public transport is a fairly good yardstick - if your arse is four feet across and mashes your fellow commuters into the windows and doors when you sit down, I'd say there's a fair chance you're a fat bastard.
  4. DZJ
    Sorry, but you seem to be claiming that a coincidence of date means that the two are related. This suggests to me an either a lack knowledge, or willful disregard of basic facts, namely that Britons before the ban were not buying firearms for home/self-defence, nor were they permitted to keep them accessibly for such a purpose anyway. Further, the firearm owning-population of Britain was and remains very small and I think you would struggle to find any proof that this had any impact on burglars before or after the ban. You seem to be applying a common US behaviour (i.e. that firearms are bought for self-defence) to a British context to which it is plainly inappropriate.
  5. DZJ
    Red herring I'm afraid. Defence against burglary was (and is) not an acceptable reason for applying for a firearms licence, and firearms were required to be held in a securely locked gunsafe. And at any rate, the proportion of gun-owning households is so low (and lower in cities) that I doubt very much it ever entered/enters a burglar's calculations.
  6. DZJ
    Not been reading this thread, but have just seen the film, and if there are fat people genuinely offended by this then they have missed the point absolutely spectacularly. (So spectacularly, in fact, that I'd have to assume they were deliberately complaining for the sake of complaining).
  7. DZJ
    A man has been arrested. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/7491122.stm
  8. DZJ
    Of course, the great thing about most American beers is they can be infinitely recycled, what with them tasting the same coming out as going in.....
  9. DZJ
    How do you define 'solve'? Barring an fairly extremely spectacular technological leap I think managing the problem is as much as we can hope for, and even that may take some significant changes in lifestyle.
  10. DZJ
    Fair point, but I'd imagine that no-one batted an eyelid at a few harmless-looking boxcutters a few years back, and these days when it comes to airport security a little bit of irritating/comical paranoia is probably preferable to the alternative.
  11. DZJ
    Security staff implementing a policy (probably formulated by people a long way further up the food chain than them) now qualify as anti-gun nuts? (And a blog post qualifies as 'in the news'?)
  12. DZJ
    If one party is the party of the misguided political correctness, I'd say it's probably safe to call the other the party of misguided patriotism.
  13. DZJ
    From the sound of your extract, common sense.
  14. DZJ
    I think we've plenty of scrubbers already! (Perhaps some could be fired into space....)
  15. DZJ
    I'm not often suprised by news stories, but this one I found absolutely mind-boggling. Though I'm not sure what I find more boggling - the original blogger's moronic stupidity, Dunkin Donuts bowing to the fear of moronic stupidity, or the fact this moronic stupidity is now newsworthy and that now the original stupid moron blogger now has a (small) degree of fame..... (Part of me hopes this will turn out to be ironic exercise by someone trying to point out our McCarthyite paranoia about terrorism, but I'm not optimistic)
  16. DZJ
    Well, look at it the other way. If you've a Spanish-speaking potential workforce going untapped, surely it would be a waste not to get them working, earning money, paying taxes and stimulating the economy. I'd be suprised if that was outweighed by the cost of translating and printing documents.
  17. DZJ
    Communications issues, fair enough. Waste of resources, I'm not so sure. A Spanish-speaking American business can do business more easily with a hell of a lot more people than just the Cubans at a local bakery. It opens the Spanish-speaking world up to easier trade and more profit. I'm not sure exactly how you'd measure the value of bilingualism in a cost-benefit sort of way, but I'd be suprised if it turned out to be a waste.
  18. DZJ
    I'm sure the Native Americans would agree. Populations move and language changes. Always been that way since the dawn of time.
  19. DZJ
    I realise that, but ultimately anything she does or doesn't do as First Lady will be signed off for by the (duly elected) President. Just seems to me that anyone pointing at the wife of a given candidate is simply playing a game of misdirection. (And I agree with your second paragraph).
  20. DZJ
    Watched the first few minutes but saw so many errors of fact I didn't bother finishing it.
  21. DZJ
    Are these three attention-seeking brats keen on personal glory, or are they team players? If the latter, I'd say that you should try and make them understand that part of their duty to the team is to try and encourage the weaker members to work harder and raise their game. If that works, you could ultimately have a team where everyone can play, and you still get to go home with the trophies.
  22. DZJ
    And yet it was vast armies of probably even more simple minded and unsophisticated Russian peasants, in the service of a regime at least as unpleasant as Germany, who did most of the work in destroying that Reich. Funny how history plays out.
  23. DZJ
    This is something I genuinely don't understand about American politics - why do comments by the wife even matter? She isn't the one standing for election, she won't be sworn into office, and she won't have any real political power. Anything that happens under a given president is the president's responsibility and the buck will stop with him. So why even care about what the wife says?
  24. DZJ
    Well, given the current Labour trainwreck of a government, with each bullet in the foot following another, I'm not sure I'd trust them to run a piss up in a brewery. On this question though, while I agree about the great importance of the issue, I'm a bit stuck to think of some better method for settling them.
  25. DZJ
    What, nothing about guns?