dorbie

The vertical component of velocity is almost zero whether jumping from an aircraft or a balloon (assuming the vehicle's not ascending or descending). With an aircraft you have an initial forward velocity, you take that momentum out the door with you. So while you're on the "hill" you still have airflow and a degree of control, if you arch you'll tend to fall stable, and every skydiver should know that you initially stabilize oriented in the direction of the flying aircraft until your vertical velocity builds. Due to the initial airspeed, resistance & aerodynamics I'd expect an aircraft jump actually gives you slightly more fall time in the first few hundred feet if you fly on the hill, but the difference is probably negligable. The real issue is the initial air flow on the hill that gives you the control to fall stable. Exiting an aircraft you usually don't have an appreciation of your angular momentum on exit, your body position and the forces of air usually dominate anything you do. If you jump from a stable platform at zero air speed your initial orientation and angular momentum are a significant factor. If you exit a baloon on your side or with a slight tumble you will stay on your side or keep tumbling unless you know how to counter that acrobatically. You may not know how to correct for it until you've been falling for several seconds and can start to use the airflow to fly your body.

So Newsweak and everyone else on the left can do whatever the hell they like because you accuse Bush of lying, yet again? Instead of dealing with the accusation or any missdeeds just trott out the same hackneyed accusation and move on with impunity. We had an election after the invasion, get over it and quit excusing treachery with finger pointing.

Now Newsweak[yes "ea"] appears to be blaming the Department of Defense for not censoring them . http://www.drudgereport.com/flash3mi.htm Isikoff actually said this: So they have the sheer gall to imply that it's as much the administration's fault that when they lied about the administration's activities there were bad consequences. This has to be the flimsiest fig leaf in publishing history. They publish a damaging lie about the executive branch, it leads to riots & death and they say the executive branch shares the blame for not foreseeing the consequences of THEIR lie. The source on this is suspicious too, with Newsweak possibly intentionally saying this was someone in the administration when it wasn't. And while we're on the subject, how about some mea culpa from those who did the most to provoke this and did the rioting and killing. Newsweak wrote this crap but the folks pointing their bloodied fingers at them are the ones most culpable in the devastation, including the asshole cricketer Imran Khan who just built a political platform on the corpses of his countrymen. When will they apologize for their actions or do they get a free pass yet again for being officially handicapped as the nut jobs in any rational discourse?

You end up with a mountain of evidence vs a crumb when you censor one side of the debate. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/05/01/wglob01.xml Moreover when journals grossly misrepresent the body of work that's already out there in a one sided survey and then refuse to publish any counterpoint because the view has been posted on an obscure website they're guilty of unabashed manipulation, politically correct pandering and rank dishonesty. On the original topic it has even been suggested that global dimming may counter warming through increased albedo but that's just one model. Years ago the physicist Freeman Dyson has actually proposed seeding the atmosphere with reflective particulates effectively forcing global dimming and mitigating the greenhouse effect.

Is that a confession?

So no one has the right to burn a flag in your space - agreed. What if a person burns a flag in their own space or public space (with a permit and obedience to all safety statutes); do you have the right to be offended? The act of burning the flag is intended to offend. What are you talking about right to be offended? He's not conducting an intellectual exercise in constitutional law. When rights meets physics, physics wins, it's as simple as that. To paraphrase an old saying, don't bring constitutional amendment to a fist fight.

Your post is a serious affront. On religious beliefs. The pic of an American you paint here: dude, that's weird somehow. 19 assholes hijacking 4 jets and murdering nearly 3000 people in the name of Allah is a serious affront to religious beliefs. The Spanish inquisition was an affront, the burning of Giordano Bruno was an affront. Does Christopher Hitchins affront you because he expresses a similar view about Christianity and religion in general? It's a legitimate view based on sound observations. Many people think religion is a bad thing, doubly so when it is dominated in places by militant radicals. If you're affronted by a view that thinks that one religion or multiple religions are bad maybe you should learn to cope with the affront and tollerate the viewpoint.

Nah, it's pure entertainment, especially when they can't even make a flag that looks right. Anything with a bit of pink white & blue seems to suffice. But spare a thought for the poor and downtrodden, being a radical flag^H^H^H^H^Hcrayoned paper tube burning activist is not without risks: http://www.factsofisrael.com/blog/archives/000636.html Dunno about you but my heart bleeds. I would shed a tear for her family, but it appears that's where she got her severe dysfunction from: http://www.commondreams.org/news2005/0315-21.htm http://chicago.indymedia.org/newswire/display/56104/index.php

Eye of teh beholder. What about the Atlanta Braves? I really dunno, it would seem pretty bizarre to me if it were offensive. A team name is chosen to differentiate and imbue a team's image with the honorable characteristics of the chosen icon. You don't call a team the Atlanta Turds, because inherent in the choice of a name implies unspoken respect and aspiration to the image. It's not an insult, and grasps at whatever regional cultural identity is available.

We don't get to see the outcome if we'd lived a naive existence 'playing nice' for decades, but I suspect it would not be the rosy one you assume. Just pointing to things you don't like and blaming one group for what you see as negative outcomes is hardly a reasonable way to evaluate history. Many ugly deals and damnable partnerships of expediency have been made because we don't control nor foresee the outcome of every regional power struggle. We make the best of a bad situation a lot of the time. Maybe we're in a half decent place today with many other far more negative outcomes averted after years of struggle. I wouldn't swap a single historical deal for your boy scout ideals if it meant (for example) risking living today with a Soviet controlled pan-Arabian Caliphate governed from Tehran.

The uproar was understandable because of Bush's poor choice of word and the historical connotations. That doesn't mean your contrived interpretation was the prevailing one, it certainly wasn't. Claiming this is me vs the rest of the world is a cheap tactic that conscripts a few too many people to your Bush's Holy War theory.

You don't have 100 points, just a single archaic interpretation of a commonly used word. A word that in my lifetime I've only seen to mean holy war in a very specific historical context. All other countless times in a contemporary context it has meant a struggle. That you actually seriously claim that Bush meant "holy war" says it all really, it's utterly ludicrous, so you use the fact that he's Christian and has rightly called terrorism evil and it's supporters evil to justify a your claim.

So your excuse is you're irrelevant? Separation of church and state does not exclude people of faith from serving.

You seek to redefine language on your own terms, it won't fly. Sure Bush is a man of professed faith and has called a few despotic regimes an axis of evil, at the same time he's drawn a distinction between the regime and the people. None of this bolsters your very serious attempt to claim he intended the word Crusade to mean holy war. He was talking explicitly about a struggle/war against terrorism in the large and a new kind of evil as he called it. He's right terrorism is evil and we should crusade against it and wage war upon those who espouse and support it.

So is the fight against cancer or environmentalism a holy war? http://www.cheshirect.org/aboutcheshire/crusadeforcancer.html http://www.figu.org/us/overpopulation/crusade/1.htm http://www.ohiocitizen.org/campaigns/wti/question.htm The only time you hear crusade used to describe a holy war is in an historical context, and now apparently exclusively when GWB uses the word (however ineptly).

It depends on who's doing the translating. An accurate translation would reflect the correct use of the word. It's absolutely relevant how an American dictionary defines the word because everyone who speaks English on both sides of the Atlantic understood that this was his intended use of the word.

What I in fact explained was why your intentional misinterpretation of his remarks is so contemtible. Even in light of such an explanation you still deceive yourself about their nature. There is a perfectly clear and legitimate use of the word crusade, it's a bit like the word Jihad in that respect. That you refuse to aknowledge this and focus on the misinterpretation of a single word in a spontaneous remark, since withdrawn, merely demonstrates the contrast between the low standards to which you hold your own remarks compared to the standards with which you judge the remarks of others. There's no need for pity. Despite your initial cryptic post it seems I understood you perfectly and your claim I missed your point was just bluster.

Perhaps your point was too obtuse, you're always free to elucidate. http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=crusade Definition 3 is the appropriate and obvious reference for Bush's comment when he was speaking plain English. Of course when you're concerned about rousing a rabble of Quran thumping, flag burning zealots then you have to worry about contrived interpretations using definitions 1 & 2. No serious observer would actually claim that was Bush's intent. His comment was inept but using any interpretation other than 3 after having time for serious reflection is certainly worse that Bush's linguistic transgression.

Yeah looks like Bush really fucked up when he described his jaunt in the Middle East as a "crusade". Wanna guess what that translates as? Yea, this is the first time a crowd of Muslims have rioted and gone on a murdering rampage. And they've never burned American flags before. It mutst be Bush's fault. Newsweek are blameless in this and the festering disaster of the Middle East is just a neocon lie, just put on your left wing hat and blame Bush.

All those flags burned and no desecration afterall. Don't get mad, get even, go buy a Quran and flush it down the nearest latrine.

Are you referring to the fucking morons at Newsweek or the fucking morons that believe something and just because it's written in Newsweek?

*** The only way we are going to "get" Bin Laden is to go into Pakistan along the border with Afganistan. This will in effect constitute an invasion of a foreign country(I can hear the screams now). http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/asiapcf/05/13/alqaeda.killing/index.html

Your crazy straw man idea not mine. Considering Pakistan has caught several of the senior Al Qaeda targets including the one I mentioned, invasion is not the only option. Capturing him would have mainly symbolic value. It may never happen but keeping the pressure on him and his band of scum is something we should keep up. That necessarily means using proxies in Pakistan but it's working after a fashion. I don't doubt that the US and UK have people collaborating in Pakistan right now.

We've been capturing and killing enough of his close associates to show that this isn't the case. If Kerry had been elected you'd be proclaiming that the capture of Abu Faraj al-Libbi demonstrated how Bush had been slacking and now we're refocusing on Al Qaeda. Instead it doesn't fit your anti-Bush picture so you just ignore it, promulgating the rubbish that we don't care about Osama Bin Laden.

If the motivation was oil we'd have let the UN lift the sanctions and opened the spigot. Nobody thought that a war with Iraq would stabilize the dollar going in either. I think the real reason was geopolitics and ties to terrorist affiliate organizations, including a pattern of interest in WMD. Making a democratic sandwitch of Iran was an ambitious goal but the long term alternative of letting the region fester would have been disasterous. Time will tell if it pays off.