.... Western Civilization is influenced by the Orient in countless ways..... The Greeks imitated the Persians and....

Don truly says it all; as long as one culture interacts with another there are no new ideas... we adapt and coopt modifying to our own purposes and ends. Someone else will come along and use our ideas (for better or worse) to their own ends somewhere up the road.History, geography and culture; in the words of the jingle from a 60's sitcom... "It's about time, it's about space, it's about the human race."

If we combine the three types… the weareer would probably see the following:

http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_2290192.htmlMight need to merge with this outfit, eh?

Almost forgot Edward T. Hall and Marvin Harris; they each give great insight into how we (the human animal) thinks about things and solves problems.W.

Something I hope to get from my studies is how this GWOT isn't a religious war. It may very well be one, and is viewed as one by the radical sects, but I have this crazy idea about how to "psyop" the opponent, and/or the people they are trying to intimidate, into thinking it's not.   There are a lot of ties between Chritianity/Islam/Judaism that could be"exploited"(for lack of a better word) not just for our advantage or best interests, but for peace.

1) To radical fundamentalists of any stripe is is always a religious war; seems odd that what we put on TV has that much sway on their religion... must be pretty weak foundation if reality TV is wrecking it, IMHO.2) In order to convince anyone that what's going on isn't religious we just keep saying "it's about the freedom of culture and that they can just ignore our culture and let us do what we do and we will extend them the same freedom"... sadly it seems they will no more allow us to continue to portray "reality" that they consider a corruption than we can fore go trying to export our style of democracy which they can not begin to understand.3) Yes! The common ties of the three major western religions... when do we get over "my God is better than your God and has shown us the right way" and realize "my God is your God" and what he showed us all those years ago has and is so often been co-opted by men that want power and don't really care if they have to re-interpret (manufacture) God's word to get their point across. This is the down side of free will; we are free to re-interpret God's word as we will.Just my two cents....Wally

Does anyone know what the British think of the Revolutionary War and the independence that we fought for? .... 

You're opening up a can of worms here. ... Salutory Neglect which allowed them to have commerce with England's rivals... rum runners were notorious for not paying England her share ...where the sovereign resided... sovereignty had passed hands to Parliament after the Glorious Revolution of 1688.  ...colonists squawked that they were not fairly represented in Parliament, thus they decried "No taxation without representation!" but ...were "virtually represented" by members of Parliament not elected in their districts.  ... crux of the matter remains that the colonists refused to submit to Parliament's interpretation and the Declaration of Independence was actually an appeal to the King to reinstate his authority over Parliament, but when it was realized that this wasn't going to happen, the colonists finally decided total independence was the only solution. 😀

I a word yes; according to a friend from England the major points were (and are to many still):a) asking for treatment that was greater than for the rest of England (that is the direct representation) plus we had left because we didn't want to be treated like all the other Englishmen... so now we want to, sort of, on our terms;b) tax issue; we actually paid less per capita than folks in England and were complaining about the increase to pay for the French and Indian War. We thought it Englands duty to provide that service;c) we were costing them more than they could recoup in trade and taxes;Okay, let's review this from their (English) view... a group of malcontents moves to escape the rules of the land... they have a spat with the folks in theri new neighborhood and we bail them out and then aren't will to help pay (at a reduced rate) the freight on this saving of their bacon as we somehow had a duty to do this. Then they (colonies) ask to be treated as the rest of England but different because they have the same rights but more so because we (Eng) ignored them for awhile and they sort of changed the rules in their favor.Yup... from their point of view we were just not worth the effort to finish the job. Many there think they pulled out when they did thinking that we would never survive and they could drop by latter and pick up the pieces... to tell the truth it almost worked out that way. We did, however, find away to get united enough to hold it together.Question is can we do it again or are we coming apart over the issues of the day? Immigration, war on terror, disappearing civil rights and liberties, government by and for the people, education (or what masquerades as education, the NCLB testing frenzy)... the list goes on.What say you all?Wally

... from an ethics perspective.  It's my understanding that it would not be right to kill Hitler ... he had not yet done these atrocities you can't punish him, even if you know he was going to do them later on.  ...it's an interesting ethical decision to ponder.

So is this one; we developed the atomic bomb, a device that we think can save many thousands of lives, on both sides, and shorten the war if we use it and get Japan to surrender sooner... by the above logic we shouldn't use it because we don't know for sure that Japan will fight on (costing those lives) if we don't use the bomb and so, otherwise innocent people will die. This was the crux of a debate I witnessed years ago between a fellow that was the tail-gunner on the plane that escorted the Enola Gay on her trip to Hiroshima (anti-bomb) and a fellow that was an aide to on of the higher-ups on the invasion project andactually saw the mock-ups of the invasion, quite by accident (pro-bomb)... how many of us wouldn't be us if the bomb hadn't been used?WallyPS

As he would be from the future he would know; if Hitler lives it is his fault.W

+1. Wally