Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
Alright, I wonder now if it was said with a sarcastic tone. If so, I didn't consider this before and shame on me. Who in their right mind – in the 19th Century or since – would praise newspaper editors such as this with a serious tone?
Yeah when you really think of it, the Iraq area had a big head start over other civilizations which took the lead over it in terms of development. It seems that the only really advancing Muslim empire that I can think of at the moment was the Ottoman Empire, and that peaked in the 16th Century or so before lingering on in its shell for the next few centuries. This was also interesting from the article:
In January 2003, I argued that toppling Saddam's tyranny in Iraq would do two things: begin the process of fostering political choice (democracy) in the Middle East and bring al-Qaida onto a battlefield not of its choosing.
This is a very positive way of looking at it, an analysis which you couldn't buy these days in the main stream American media. Unfortunately, I wonder if it is more difficult to help instill the desire for democracy in the Middle East than it is to place that choice before them.
Ha! I don't think he actually apologized, although the media at one point framed it like he did. Instead it sounded like he apologized only for bringing up his personal views in a hearing on policy, which I can understand. As far as I know he didn't actually apologize for his views.
I read a book last year called The Sentinal(sp). It was a farfetched conspiracy theory that several generations of Confederate descendents had hidden gold to finance the South rising again. Interesting book but hard to believe
That is an interesting conspiracy theory. Of course theorizing (or flat out making up) motives for historical figures makes for great story lines, as we have seen with the DaVinci Code.
I saw this story in a Drudge link. Pretty cool stuff:Be More Than You Can Be
Heat-resistant. Cold-proof. Tireless. Tomorrow?s soldiers are just like today?s ? only better. Inside the Pentagon?s human enhancement project.
Tells of some interesting DARPA projects that we may see on the battlefield in the near future.
Yes, he was a real person. I believe he was actually Roman by birth, though. I think that there are plenty of stories about Irish immigration to the New World to have many aspects to an Irish discussion. Heck, "Baker" could be Irish for all I know (though it sounds more English).
This movie's had one of the biggest opening weekends of all time. It's interesting how it's appealing to so many people.
This is interesting. I didn't not know about the stacking, but it makes sense – especially where land prices are at a premium. The twenty billion figure may well be right – I was taking a stab with the 6 billion figure. I had previously wondered about how many people have ever lived. I think that the number who have died in wars may be high, but as a percentage of the total it's probably quite low. I do not know the customs of burying people in the East. In the West, I bet that mass graves have come into play at various times. For example, were people who died during the Black Death in Medieval Europe buried in individual lots or mass graves? Or were they burned? Some - perhaps many - cemetaries have probably been lost over time due to the elements or perhaps building by civilizations. Even in the United States we sometimes hear of cemetaries being unearthed during excavations for modern buildings, don't we? If these cemetaries date to perhaps the mid-19th Century, then I can only imagine what it is like in Europe where cemetaries are lost from ages past. The truth of the matter is that we are a people living among the dead, and we sometimes share our spaces.
This evening I read the tidbit in the family history report I had done some years ago. I guess the dugout in the banks of the river were done by my ancestors in the 1860s. Mind you, this is in Central Minnesota, so the weather can get quite cold. I believe that the global Mini Ice Age may have ended by the 1850s, but it's not as if the north became a tropical wonderland after that. Tough living indeed.
It's good to read stories of leaders of the past, even if they're not well-known in our day and age. Sometimes we may think that we cannot get anywhere or become successful because of all that we lack, or because the risk is too great, or because of fear of failure. But then we read about people of the past who did so much with so little and it really puts things into perspective.
I think it created a kind of illustration of how far our society's laws might go before they become overly weighty. We now know that prohibiting alcohol isn't the best answer for a number of reasons, even if the spirit of the law had some good things attached to it. So it does still affect us in our psyche which acknowledges that some laws can be too broad. I don't think that the 18th Amendment was “damaging” to America, at least in any permanent sense.
I feel that Braveheart was among the more accurate. Funny thing is that I've thought that The Patriot was not very accurate, particulary in the depiction of race relations in the movie. Of course in any movie some expert in some field is going to find something wrong with a movie....like where an 1858 model gun is used in a movie that's supposed to take place in 1850...but I think that there's an air about good historical films that avoid obvious air of anachronism from a character or values standpoint. All too many historical films have been ruined for me simply because the characters involved seemed like they could jump out of their own time period and join us in 2007 and feel quite at home.
I think that this all gets into a maddening area – perhaps the madness of war in general. If nations wage war with the goal of killing as many of the enemy as possible, or to achieve objectives with little regard for human life on the other side, then weapons that kill many are better than weapons that kill fewer. Chemical or biological weapons that kill in droves is therefore a logical “advancement” of this warfare mindset. Whether you kill 20 enemy with some mustard gas or 20 enemy with a few hand grenades makes no difference to the dead; the only difference is for the level of difficulty in doing the killing, right?At least the above could - and perhaps was - the kind of thinking that brought us these weapons. My personal view is that war should never be fought for the purpose of killing in the first place, so biological and chemical weapons are not the logical next step in warfare.
Shirley Temple's movie "The Littlest Rebel" is also banned
Lemme guess...she's working for the South during the Civil War?
