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Same case.  A couple of fake Irish passports were used by the hit-team as well.  I'm not aware that Ireland have especially close links to Israel, especially given their usual stance of neutrality on world affairs.  Do you know if Ireland shares any intelligence with Israel Faust?

I'm a bit lost on the debate here, as as far as I see it, nuclear power done right, like France, works well, provides cheap and clean energy with minimal waste, there has not been a terrible nuclear disaster for quite some time now, and you can even re-use the waste to provide tasty add-ons for your army, and unique isotopes for your scientists to play with.

Actually there was a nuclear energy "incident" about once a year in France.  It was discovered nuclear scientists had in fact been manipulating the statistics or outright lying in order to avoid "causing a panic".

This resulted in the black comedy of, when Chernobyl happened, of the rest of Europe destroying food that had been downwind from the fallout and staying inside for a week, while France was portrayed as being entirely unaffected and went about their business normally, until a minor politician questioned this response.  It was then revealed the French scientists obsession with secrecy and protecting the nuclear industry actually extended to even defending Soviet mistakes, and that France should have taken the same kind of actions the rest of Europe had.

I don't know about other countries but the systematic coverup of the French nuclear industry raises worries for me about safety, generally.  If one country can do it, several others can, and probably have.

Could be any number of people, could be any number of ways to clone those passports, especially with a state backer.  Israel, America, various Arab states, even Syria or Iran.  Assassins could be special forces/intelligence or mercenaries for hire.  Israel is number one suspect for obvious reasons, all their denials about the sloppiness of the killers are pure crap (Israel has a way too high opinion of its military and intelligence skills), but Arab states have no love for a tool of Iran, Syria seems to have been flipped into the US camp, or almost there, Iran may want to punish him for some unknown reason, hell even the Russian immigrant community might've wanted him dead.  Hamas control a large arms trade, maybe their groups (which include ex-KGB and Spetsnaz) wanted to expand.

Anyone without security clearance is speculating and anyone with security clearance isnt talking.

Wasnt Bayh one of the most heavily "bi-partisan" invested Senators though?  He talks the talk, sure, but every time he had to walk the walk, he quavered and shacked up with Lieberman and Graham.

Westmoreland was possibly the stupidest man to achieve the rank of General in the 20th century - and yes I am including Field Marshal Haig in that assessment.

I'd add DeGaulle to that list.

In order, I think it goes:

1.  Westmoreland
2.  DeGaulle
3.  Mountbatten (or was he an admiral?  Same thing.)
4.  Haig
5.  Kimmel

I dunno, DeGaulle had some good ideas re: armoured warfare, even though he pinched them from Liddell Hart.  At the very least, his suggestions sent the French High Command into spasms of rage.  Later on in life, he wasn't too wonderful, I would agree, but then, French officers never age well, just look at Napoleon.  Mountbatten would've been hung for Dieppe, under older British admiralty laws, and I can't say it would've been entirely unreasonable to do so. 

I'm sure this list is missing someone, though...

Wait.

Kimmel was this century

Oh, I thought you meant Admiral Kimmel.

Landa was a brilliant character, but you're right, the rest were shallow and two-dimensional in the extreme.  Donny actually had a back story, but it was cut, for some reason.  Stiglitz too was criminally underused in that respect.

I wondered if, in fact, the extreme violence against the Nazis wasn't meant to illustrate some point, something about how people are perfectly alright with brutal acts so long as they are against an Evil Enemy of some sort.  Nazis Are Evil So Its OK To Do Evil Things To Them kind of thing.  It seems to me that Tarantino may be making a point about revenge fantasies with the film, but I don't know him well enough to say for sure if thats the case.

The dialogue was, as usual, fantastic.  Never a fault there.

Westmoreland was possibly the stupidest man to achieve the rank of General in the 20th century - and yes I am including Field Marshal Haig in that assessment.

The Tea Parties were funded and run, at least in the early stages, by FreedomWorks, a conservative non-profit organization who specialize in astroturfing.  Several other groups associated with the incredibly rich and incredibly conservative Koch brothers, who also fund FreedomWorks, are known to be involved with the Tea Partiers as well.

the tea parties were not funded or run by anyone in the early stages.
they were ad hoc things set up by RP supporters in intarweb forums.  i don't know when they became coopted, but i can tell you that for sure...

The earliest Tea Party sites and blogs were set up by the Sam Adams Alliance, a very well funded libertarian organization with links to the Koch family.  Facebook based groups were set up by individuals linked to various rightwing PR firms (or by people who didn't actually exist) and all carried suspiciously similar writing styles.  Some "small" "grassroot" groups like Right.org were able to offer cash prizes in the tens of thousands for their anti-bailout video competition. 

Brendan Steinhauser is the point-man at FreedomWorks, who got the idea for the Tea Parties from Michelle Malkin's blog, in the fall of 2008, and farmed out the grunt work to web designers and activists picked up from the libertarian fringe, including - yes - Ron Paul supporters.  Eric Odom, who is also linked to FreedomWorks and the Koch Family, plays a similar role. 

The Tea Parties were funded and run, at least in the early stages, by FreedomWorks, a conservative non-profit organization who specialize in astroturfing.  Several other groups associated with the incredibly rich and incredibly conservative Koch brothers, who also fund FreedomWorks, are known to be involved with the Tea Partiers as well.

http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/02/13/several_years_ago_i_met/?ref=mp

I love shit like this.

The author also sees what this writer has argued: that American obsession with Afghanistan and an ever-expanding quest to stamp out Islamic insurgencies will "further chip away at the United States' strength, aggravate its strategic adversity, and increasingly narrow the room for maneuvers on other issues."

I thought this might interest you, LMNO

http://encyclopediadramatica.com/My_Immortal#About_the_Author

You probably wont be able to see it at work, but this article seems to suggest that the My Immortal story is in fact not a troll but an attempted srs piece of fiction.

Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/02/man_charged_for_stockpiling_weapons_was_tea_partie.php

The Massachusetts man charged this week with stockpiling weapons after saying he feared an imminent "Armageddon" appears to have been active in the Tea Party movement, and saw Sarah Palin, who he said is on a "righteous 'Mission from God,'" as the only figure capable of averting the destruction of society.

If Sarah Palin is the only person capable of averting the destruction of society, I'd rather have the destruction take place.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article767459.ece

SCIENTISTS have for the first time found evidence that polar bears are drowning because climate change is melting the Arctic ice shelf.

The researchers were startled to find bears having to swim up to 60 miles across open sea to find food. They are being forced into the long voyages because the ice floes from which they feed are melting, becoming smaller and drifting farther apart.

Although polar bears are strong swimmers, they are adapted for swimming close to the shore. Their sea journeys leave them them vulnerable to exhaustion, hypothermia or being swamped by waves.

According to the new research, four bear carcases were found floating in one month in a single patch of sea off the north coast of Alaska, where average summer temperatures have increased by 2-3C degrees since 1950s.

The scientists believe such drownings are becoming widespread across the Arctic, an inevitable consequence of the doubling in the past 20 years of the proportion of polar bears having to swim in open seas.

Which sucks.

More info about Arctic sea ice is available here http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/index.html

Its not really so much a community as a group of people who are happy to play the "I listen to bands so obscure you've never even heard of the genre they play" game.

http://exiledonline.com/royal-tea-partiers-the-heroic-billionaires-struggle-to-overthrow-the-tyranny-of-democracy/

While Tea Party movement followers ran around Nashville last week dressed up in their Paul Revere period costumes, blathering about their heroic struggle against Obama's Islamosocialist tyranny, the right-wing elite that nurtures them, and their paid libertarian ideologues, have been openly advocating the abolition of America's democracy in favor of a free-market junta, because, as they say over and over, voters cannot be trusted to rule themselves.

Here, for example, is how one popular libertarian pundit summed up the attitude: "To be a libertarian in a modern democracy is to say that nearly 300 million Americans are wrong, and a handful of nay-sayers are right." It's a quote so common among the Republican and libertarian vanguard that it's almost irrelevant which one of them said it — I'll get to this guy later, but suffice to know that he's a tenured professor, and sitting pretty in the same billionaire-funded world of think tanks, institutes, and PR machines that launched the Tea Party.

That's the dangerously authoritarian part of the Tea Party that we've forgotten about lately.

It's evident even in Republican Rep. Tom Tancredo's shocking "Jim Crow speech" that kicked off last week's Tea Party Convention — when the out-of-the-closet xenophobe unveiled his Big Idea on how to preserve America's freedom, he wasn't just advocating more bigotry, but also a plan to roll back America's overly-free democracy, replacing it with a rule of elites that uses "civics literary tests" as the justification for denying voting rights to tens of millions of "wrong" Americans, like minorities and people with funny accents.

That's what made the whole period-costume fetish party so surreal: the sight of all these people re-enacting the Founding Fathers revolutionary fight for democracy, while at the same time cheering on a plan that overthrows American democracy and restricts power to a vanguard elite — which presumably includes the kinds of draft-dodging rednecks and bipolar government-parasites like Tancredo.*Most of the gullible rank-and-file fools at the convention who snickered gleefully at Tancredo's "I have a dream ... of denying democratic rights to poor black kids's families and brown kids' families..." speech didn't understand that in all likelihood, they too would have their "irrational" voting rights canceled, because their masters despise them. And they don't even hide it. As incredible as it seems, these Republican and "libertarian" ideologues have been arguing that the real problem in America's democracy is that too many people have voting rights, leaving America at the mercy of "irrational" or dangerous voters who elect the wrong people. They have argued that the only way to save America is by overthrowing this democracy and replacing it with an enlightened, free-market dictatorship.

One reason you don't hear much about this is because most of them zipped up their mouths by the middle of 2008, when there was a real fear of a populist uprising and a new New Deal. But the Republican right-wing elite wasn't always so shy; right up through the financial collapse, many boasted as publicly as possible about their dream of overthrowing the democracy and replacing it with a free-market dictatorship.

There's more at the link