dorbie

A fun read: http://www.washingtontimes.com/op-ed/tblankley.htm This op-ed on Rumsfeld will go stale in about a week as Blankley's column is updated.

Direct style? Direct style of what, avoiding any and all accountability for his actions and those of his subordinates? Direct style of avoiding questions by embarking upon meandering and vague answers devoid of any meaning and usually ending by posing the question back to the originator? I don't expect him to be infallible but he's a darned sight better than those criticising him who quickly forget their pre-war horror stories where they predicted every possible boogey man, many of which were planned for misdirecting resources as they didn't materialize (the massive refugee crisis that never happened for example). Nobody has a crystal ball and opinions in an organization like the Pentagon are diverse. Some of us like Rumsfeld's style, often these questions are inane or transparent political exercises. He treats the press and their often politically motivated questions appropriately and sometimes it's a joy to watch Rumsfeld state the obvious candidly. I'm perplexed by accusations of evasiveness when it comes to Rumsfeld especially when compared to your typical D.C. fare, he's one of the most direct people in a press conference. He doesn't play the press game on their terms with the answer they often want to hear. I get the impression with other officials in all sorts of administrations including this one that there's an insincere veneer over everything. That the answers are part of the political game and with Rumsfeld I get that a lot less, he's brutally direct at times and it's refreshing, and of course it drives his opponents nuts. Just because you don't like the answer because he hasn't couched it in terms palettable to your opposing view doesn't mean he has been evasive.

Yep, it's starting to look like a full-blown old-fashioned Salem witch hunt. There is a certain irony in that comparrison.

Or if one doesn't try to put a a pro America spin on things. I'm not minimizing America's contributions. But I'm not going to exaggerate them, either. Fair enough, but we haven't even touched on American largesse after WWII and the unprecedented reconstruction of societies previously bent on the conquest of America & its allies.

I'm European, does my opinion count? I hold America in very high esteem. The fact is that opinion in Europe is heterogeneous. There are many opinions both at the individual level and at the national level. Those who pretend that their one opinion reflects all of Europe are just drunk on their own cool-aid. The views expressed in European media further obscure the facts on individual opinion and reinforce a self perception of this monoculture of America bashing. I'm ashamed of some of my European brethren. The complete lack of any sense of history and the cultural snobbery and elitism of the profoundly ignorant is not something to be proud of. Just because a European grows up in a town with a sandstone building or two doesn't make them culturally superior. European amnesia on recent history and America's largesse is disturbing and entirely their fault. As Europeans visit memorials to the massacre of millions of innocents and the loss of millions more on the battlefields of Europe they tend to lament the whole sorry matter as if some kind of madness that overtook humanity when the truth is far more instructive. Wars are not merely moments of passing insanity in the feckless actions of mankind. Sometimes going to war is the lesser of two evils and it's Europe that should be ashamed of turning its back on America as America once again shoulders most of the burden of doing Europe's dirty work for it. 400,000 dead Americans in in WW1 and II and some European elitist has the temerity to point the finger at the US when the survivors and the families of the fallen aren't even in their graves to spin at the outrage. Can I say that your post was not only poignant but well written and thought out...thank you for your opinion and for voicing it so eloquently...

Or, another way of looking at it would be that America sat back and watched, and at times profited from, the rise of the Third Reich, until additional intervention was necessary to save our own skin. We were reluctant teammates at best, from a strictly political standpoint. It would be if you were clueless about history. Japan bombed Pearl Harbour for a reason, and the only reason Britain survived the Battle of Britain and avoided Operation Sealion was American supplies and cooperation during her worst hours, something that infuriated the Germans during both wars. Meanwhile America tooled up and instigated the Manhattan Project and many others. Some Americans were certainly isolationist, not surprising after Europe screwed up the peace over America's objections at Versailles, still others were flat out German supporters like Lindbergh, but the leadership and planning was there.

You're absolutely right. It's still time for Rumsfeld to go. That's better.

It's blood in the water. Every little thing now is a tasty morsel because the press have become part of the story. Contrasting the claims of Bush cleansing his Cabinet with complaints of Rumsfeld staying is just delicious, there's a LOT of disappointment that he's been retained especially after Ashcroft is gone. You should realize that the press despise Rumsfeld even more than the rest of the left dislike Ashcroft because he has a direct style that exposes their tactics at press conferences. There is a narcissism in all of this. The press see themselves bringing Rumsfeld down now. The litany of stories being written now have more to do with the fact that other press stories have been written than Rumsfeld's performance. Everything is amplified and used as a call for resignation and as an excuse to list the other partisan gripes about Rumsfeld. I'd have more respect for the folks on the left if it weren't for the "it's time for Rumsfeld to go" nonsense from people who've ALWAYS wanted him to go. It's just hillarious. Who are you kidding?

I'm European, does my opinion count? I hold America in very high esteem. The fact is that opinion in Europe is heterogeneous. There are many opinions both at the individual level and at the national level. Those who pretend that their one opinion reflects all of Europe are just drunk on their own cool-aid. The views expressed in European media further obscure the facts on individual opinion and reinforce a self perception of this monoculture of America bashing. I'm ashamed of some of my European brethren. The complete lack of any sense of history and the cultural snobbery and elitism of the profoundly ignorant is not something to be proud of. Just because a European grows up in a town with a sandstone building or two doesn't make them culturally superior. European amnesia on recent history and America's largesse is disturbing and entirely their fault. As Europeans visit memorials to the massacre of millions of innocents and the loss of millions more on the battlefields of Europe they tend to lament the whole sorry matter as if some kind of madness that overtook humanity when the truth is far more instructive. Wars are not merely moments of passing insanity in the feckless actions of mankind. Sometimes going to war is the lesser of two evils and it's Europe that should be ashamed of turning its back on America as America once again shoulders most of the burden of doing Europe's dirty work for it. 400,000 dead Americans in in WW1 and II and some European elitist has the temerity to point the finger at the US when the survivors and the families of the fallen aren't even in their graves to spin at the outrage.

That's pretty funny - MS will send out Dev Kits on Mac?? Don't forget to add time to allow the factories time to retool for a new product. And IBM was talking today that the Cell chip won't even start to get fabricated until late 2005 (the PS3 cpu). That's not merely a rumour. An XBOX2 dev kit is a Dual Processor G5 Apple system. Microsoft bought a LOT of them. IBM is making a custom 3 CPU chip based on the G5 core to power XBOX2. ATI are making the graphics chip and I think the early dev kits have Radeon 9800 Pro graphics cards in them. AFAIK the actual date for XBOX2 is end of 2005. When Microsoft starts making real units the dev kits will quickly transition to the real thing. The G5 systems are not the same as the XBOX2 design but they have a common instruction set for a lot of stuff. The XBOX2 has some unique and interesting architectural features and some additional vector instructions on the G5 cores. It won't just be a modified PC like the XBOX. Game companies are developing XBOX2 games on dual CPU G5 Apple systems TODAY, in anticipation of the launch. Console launches are always like this, early dev kit doesn't match teh target hardware but lead times on games mean you have to improvise.

The XBOX2 will probably be out end of next year before PS3. I'd wait on that but the new batch of consoles will probably sell for about 2.5 times the price of a current generation when they launch, so your decision should factor that in.

I have personal experience of a repressed memory that caused me some discomfort that I couldn't understand at the time. It was the wierdest darned thing. Even as I finally recalled it (on my own no therapy or other external influence) my mind had associated it subconsciously with a different event. When I recalled the second event and realized there was a discrepancy, (didn't quite match my memory of it when I thought over it carefully) I managed to finally remember the original 'trauma' and just laughed with relief. It was actually a relatively trivial event, not some big deal you might associate with repressed memory but it did teach me just what wierd tricks your mind can get up to. I'm not even sure if the original memory was ever actually repressed (I suppose it meets the definition) but the connection I had made between two events was hidden I even understand why I had made the connection. It is amazing how your mind works and it was actually pretty enlightening to experience something like this.

Stuntman?

I got one as an option with the vehicle. It's excellent and stores the entire US on a replaceable DVD. I can't really recommend it since it's not available as a separate unit but in-vehicle GPS navigation rocks. It is excellent that it has the entire USA on board, no need for worries about coverage. The only quirk is that to counter accuracy issues (not just with the vehicle location but also with the map vector data which can never be perfect) it does a snap to road thing based on pathing information etc. If you miss a junction is can show you heading off on another road until you exceed the error tollerance which seems to be a few tens of meters.

Perhaps he could pass on some lessons in static friction and rocket nozzle placement to the unfortunate experimenter in anal rocketry before he makes another attempt. Seriously, just because some guy does this and doesn't burn his ass doesn't mean any fool can, but that should already be self evident.

Some fo the "cool kids" I know are playing WoW and for some stupid reason mine had been backordered for weeks. Pissed me off. Anyway, it arrived today and I've spent the greater portion of this morning installing it and downloading the current patch. Can't wait to get it up and running -- probably within the next hour or so. Learn "l33t spe4k" and gaming acronyms from Battle.net as fast as you can or you won't be able to communicate in game. I tried WoW for about 2 days. Lost interest pretty fast. But, I have all my MMO background in the Everquest worlds. Blizzard has a winner on it's hands with WoW. I don't know about it's staying power though. Maybe a year.. less.. who knows. I do know Everquest has a long history and Everquest 2 will be around long after Worlds of Warcraft has squeezed it's last nickle from the servers. I disagree about the players. It all depends on the server that you are on I guess. The one I play on I haven't seen a lick of leet speak from people. No leet speak on my server, there are some common abbreviations. Like IF for IronForge and SW for Stormwind, g for gold s for silver, but you pick those up easy. I'm not on a PvP server, maybe they're different, definitely too much aggro for my liking on those.

Yep, WoW for me too, way too many hours on that thing. It's a very impressive game. It's a huge world and they've really fleshed it out. So much stuff in there, despite the fact it's your basic powergaming monster fest it's just enjoyable seeing the massive amount of creative work that's gone into this game. The first time you get on a griffon ride between Stormwind and Ironforge your jaw just drops at the scale of things and the consistency, there's no level warping or hidden transitions, it's just all there, truly a remarkable technical and artistic creation, then you look at the map and realize you've only flown over a relatively small fraction of ONE continent.

We're still evolving, we just changed the selection criteria. Your second part is a case in point.

A key part of the radiation exposure calculations you posted when comparing to worker dosage is a comparrison of volume. The exposure calculations are based on exposure per volume. This paper bumps up the exposure value for an individual by considering the locality of radiation exposure as limited to a region around the particle of a tenth of a millionth of one cubic centimeters or 0.00000015g of flesh where the alpha particles are expected to be absorbed. It then extrapolates this up to exposure limits considered dangerous as they apply to the whole body. While I'm not saying these local exposures shouldn't be considered differently this is a *very* dubious way of treating them when you compare to safety levels as they apply to full body exposure. It makes the comparrison useless and merely verifys my own results w.r.t. the sorts of levels of radiation you get from particulates.

Yes but was it random, were they showing symptoms or did they suspect exposure?

P.S. if those test subjects that were used had some kind of pathology that correlated with the results I might be persuaded, however if all 9 for example had some ailment and 4 tested +ve what does that tell you? Why were these particular individuals chosen? How does a random sample compare? These are the kinds of studies that have been conducted with returning vets and nothing found to link DU. It doesn't seem that difficult to ask these kinds of questions and do the tests when considering the safety of a weapon system.

It's saddenning to read this kind of report. Analogies to radioactive bombs and payloads by the 'Nagasaki' are only designed to confound and terrify. It aslo makes it virtually impossible to assess if the report is even remotely accurate even on it's own terms. The Nagasaki bomb was actually Plutonium not Uranium about 8kg of 90% pure Pu-239. So the comparrison being made is certainly obtuse. (edit: maybe it was cleaner and so makes for an impressive number). The Hiroshima bomb was of course highly enriched Uranium which is predominantly U-235. There was about 60kg of Uranium in it but some of that may have been tamper/jacket I don't know, it would fission with the escaping neutrons increasing yield and 60kg seems high just for the pit. Since the US is dropping DU munitions it makes the natural Uranium in the kids surprising. Uranium isotopes are chemically identical and difficult to separate hence the extensive and elaborate enrichment programs. You don't contaminate kids with DU and get natural Uranium. It's quite clear on this point so they must be testing this with some kind of mass spectrometer and know what they're seeing (?). One could make comparrisons of radioactive yield from the Mount St. Hellens erruption that would dwarf anything dropped in all the conflicts combined. It might make about as much sense.

Thanks, but the issue was over no cutaway and pull though, at what alti? Say you had a main collapse at 650 ft for whatever reason. At some point you're going to want to avoid cutting away. It was stated that this altitude at which you don't cut away should not change reguardless of gear. Others have already stated they'd *always* cutaway, in my game of fantasy skydive that would be a bad idea at certain altitudes, but that would depend on the gear, but reality has a way of shattering these kinds of fantasies.

This is a misrepresentation of my position. Just because I don't subscribe to one unproven theory for gulf war syndrome does not mean I think troops are malingerers. Infact I have mentioned in this thread that there are numerous theories about gulf war syndrome. If we acted on everyone's pet theory over gulf war syndrome without evidence we'd be banning everything from vaccines to diet coke. If you're going to keep misrepresenting my position then perhaps you could explain to me how someone with your credentials could be apparently unaware of the isotope ratios in DU and that the half live of U-235 was 710 million years? Were you just unaware when you accused me of deliberately misleading everyone here or was it another cynical attempt to discredit any opposition using the flimsiest of pretexts? That's got to be pretty embarrassing, I mean U-235 isn't even 1% of natural Uranium and you accused me of dishonesty for not factoring it in DU. Not everything I've written underestimates the biological effects. I hear a lot of overblown hype and I'm the only person in this thread to do any *estimate* at all with any real numbers and as you know those numbers are still in the right ballpark. It doesn't significantly underestimate anything, it brings a reasonable estimate to bear on overblown claims w.r.t. the exposure discussed. Why you object to that and attack me for it is beyond me. I mean argue over the effects of the numbers by all means, argue that the quantities may be larger, but geeze dude attacking me for producing the numbers when they're a pretty darned good estimate is hardly the act of someone confident in their position. What do you want people to do? Ban DU without considering the evidence of the remarkably low radioactivity? If the quantities are higher fine, but claims that these miniscule quantities are fatal deserve scrutiny and I'm the only person in this thread to bring any scrutiny to bear. Your reaction to estimates of radiological activity speaks to your bias not mine.