The US, UN & Iraq III

Tartarin - you quote without attribution Aristotle, but read "Slate"? On the off chance - unlikely but possible - that you really are engaged on a search for historical truth you might want to drop the methodology in "Slate" and try Thucydides:
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`As to the accounts given of themselves by the several parties in speeches, either on the eve of war or when they were already engaged, it would be hard to reproduce the exact language used, whether I heard it myself or it was reported to me by others. The speeches as they stand represent what, in my opinion was most necessary to be said by the several speakers about the matter in question at the moment, and I have kept as closely as possible to the general sense of what was really said. Of the events--what actually was done in the war, I have thought fit not to write from any chance information, nor yet according to any notion of my own, but to record those at which I was present, or where I heard of from others, with the greatest possible accuracy of investigation. To discover these facts was laborious, because those who were present at the various events differed in their reports of the same occurrences, according to the state of their memories or as they sympathized with one side or the other.'

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The book is called "Peloponnesian War" in case you misplaced it <G>

This is a few lines from a post of timber's earlier today:




What an incredibly sad comment.

Here in North Carolina, dog-fighting is illegal but widespread. In a newspaper story about six months ago, an undercover reporter watched as two dog handlers set their dogs (these dogs are often stolen) against each other. The audience cheered as one dog tore the other dog to pieces. It was apparent to the reporter that the the lesser dog didn't have a change as the stronger of the two dispatched his opponent with quick efficiency.

Anybody,

Totally off Topic but speaking of editing posts:

I am sure others as well as myself have noticed when using MS WORD to spell check and correct punctuation I sometimes insert a MS Word quotation mark or apostrophe in Word and then cut and paste the text into the A2K message window and forget to change it into the A2K quotation mark which is then translated into that weird string such as ‘ then I feel obligated to go back for an edit, very frustrating (but perhaps unimportant).

Apparently there is more than one ASCII code for some punctuation marks. Is there any way A2K can accept these foreign punctuation ACSII codes and make their use transparent to the user? Can I do anything?

JM

A question about the museum and library lootings and destruction. Who had the keys they say were held by several perpetrators? As the evidence points more and more to a planned, organized heist, how did they gain access? And who actually took what? The plunder of a beaten country throughout history has been common, but it is a little unreal to think of all those Iraqis just going in willy-nilly with keys they found in the streets. There's too much that doesn't add up. The story of the rescue of Jessica Lynch has changed. No bullet holes, the rescue not the way it was first claimed.

This iraqi war has begun to assume the dimensions of the Grenada expedition, when we saved all those medical students from the commies. Tartarin, I have long thought this would be a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, except this was a real loss of life, a real destruction of a country, and the reward comes up now in the awarding of the filthily huge reconstruction contract to the Bechtel group. Not that there was ever any doubt. Bechtel was being talked about in the beginning.

What disturbs me so much about all of this - and from reading this thread - is that we are so obviously a nation of selfish, greedy people. Any humanitarian mention comes in only as a grudging second thought. If anybody wants to start a lucrative business now, start making crowns. Won't be long till we start measuring head sizes for Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove - a whole passel of them.

"Crown" is a somewhat self-serving measurement there, Ms. MamaJuana >>

"......Won't be long till we start measuring head sizes for Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove - a whole passel of them......"

>> since there's no guarantee that those looped cords would start getting passed from the feet up and so never make it past your lower circumference - and did anybody mention "greedy"? <G>

Tart
As requested
Oil, Food and a Whole Lot of Questions
By CLAUDIA ROSETT
Before United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan extends
the oil-for-food operation in Iraq, he needs to open the
books.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/18/opinion/18ROSE.html?th

Dyslexia wrote:

The demonstrators poured out of Friday prayers in Baghdad mosques chanting anti-American slogans and calling for an Islamic state to replace Saddam's toppled government.

Gee -- is it possible they were doing more than praying INSIDE that mosque?

By CLAUDIA ROSETT
Before United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan extends
the oil-for-food operation in Iraq, he needs to open the
books.

Damn good idea----a full audit of the UN accounting practices and data regarding Iraq for the past 13 years and a full public disclosure of the results of that audit.

What if it's worse than Enron?

Don't think so, JamesMorrison, but before posting, there is a preview box somewhat below the text box. Select it and see what it is going to look like. You can't edit within that box. You will have to go the the original.

Kara, It seems that lives not affecting our family or friends are not as valuable to some. Unfortunate. Some of us consider all life has value. c.i.

JM, that's a common problem with cut-and-pasting from MS Word-formatted documents. Its not so much ASCII as proprietary MS Word characters. Notepad cut-and-pastes more cleanly, but it doesn't offer the word-processing power of Word. Its a trade-off. A clumsy workaround is to compose in Word, cut-and-paste to Notepad, then "Save As" without Word's formatting, then cut-and-paste the unformatted text from notepad to the destination website. Clumsy. As no doubt evident from my many typos and frequent edits, I usually just start clacking away right in the Quick Reply box ... more or less "shooting from the hip", so to speak; I even manually type my quotes, hotlinks and image redireects. That's lazy, I know, but its just one among many of my bad habbits, and causes me little concern. I know I should at least use "Preview" and "Spellcheck", but often I just don't have the patience to do so.

I'd go for an audit at the UN -- among other things it would uncover how little of our debt we've been paying down. But I'd like to match it with an audit of the Pentagon -- every budget, including the hidden ones. It would set this nation on its ear. The combined weight loss from panic persperation throughout this administration (and previous ones) would almost match the sum of mispent public monies and would turn the D.C. area back into a swamp overnight.

JM, Timber already answered your question almost completely, just the one addition:


This is what I do in such cases, but in my experience you can skip the "save as" step. Just pasting your text from Word into Notepad already turns all the quotation marks, for example, that Word automatically turns into special curved ones (which the board doesnt recognize) back into normal ones again. Thus just pasting your text into Notepad and from there into the board's message composition window should already solve most of your problem. Additionally you can take a brief look at how the text pastes into Notepad before you copy/paste it on, and see if there are any little black boxes where a letter or diacritical mark should be - dashes for example do pose a problem - and only if there are, do the "save as" step as well.

I usually type my answers in the board message composition window but longer posts I write in Notepad - also to avoid losing my whole post if IE freezes or shuts down.

Thanks all who replied about the punctuation thing.
I've tried about all of those combos.
I usually compose in the quick reply box, cut and paste to word for spell check only then cut and paste the result into a "postreply" box to be able to add any "special effects" then copy read final copy. Problem is when I have another thought to add which results in more text, which has to be transported back to Word for spell check... and around I go, oh well.

Thanks again,

JM

James

http://www.textpad.com/


small, fast, easy and comes with a spel cheker ..... try it free

This thread has been quite wide-ranging in the subject matter addressed. Thus I'll seek pre-forgiveness on adding in two pieces with relevance to the treatment of members of the military by those above them.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/2954729.stm
http://www.seattleweekly.com/features/0315/news-anderson.php

More on the topic... The Twilight of Tyrants http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/103/focus/The_twilight_of_tyrantsP.shtml

Kara -- You've found an image which sums up my feeling about the "winners". The owner of the surviving dog thinks of himself as a winner and doesn't see that playing a game which forces two dogs to fight to the death not only destroys at least one dog but also destroys the owners' humanity and that of their community. A no-win/no-win ending.

I'm afraid I see the self-proclaimed "winners" in this "war" as much the same. Whether the language is cool or hot, impassioned or rational, the supporters of the war who talk about our country as a winner live in an increasingly uncivilized and dehumanized world similar to that of the dogfighters, a sub-world into which they would evidently like to pull the rest of us.

Karl Rove is described in a review in the latest NYRB as a relentless competitor, overrunning all others no matter what the cost (including his wife), a master of dirty tricks, and -- this was the most interesting to me -- a man of unbridled and generalized anger. When he and his boss get together -- and his boss is also a man of unbridled anger -- watch out! He is the author of what some are calling "foreign policy by snit" -- resentful, always on the lookout for someone to "pay back." The followers instantly pick up on this game and excoriate the UN, France and Germany: anyone who doesn't agree with us must be evil, must be taught a lesson, paid back. We know -- and we're going to have to face once again in the run-up to the next election -- that this group is dangerous and relentless and that (as evidenced in their policies and their followers) without moral grounding -- in fact scornful of that sissy stuff.

Official, weapons-grade nastiness seeps through the rhetoric in many of the posts supporting the war -- a kind of Whatsa Matta Wit You attitude in which (much like Hitler) there's a great deal of sentimentality about human life when needed but very little understanding or compassion. As with Hitler, there's the inevitable racial component. Armchair warriors glow with the excitement. The dog fight, snarl by snarl, bite by bite, is lovingly rehashed. "Our dog," blood still visible on the hair along his jaw, is a hero. His superior force is ennobled; the dying dog is weak and silly.

Never occurs to them, once they have the winning dog, that the "win" is the final, awful step in a wholly unconscionable undertaking.

With respect - what Tartarin wrote is utter drivel.

Hitler loved dogs.

Never heard of such terrible events as Kara describes happening anywhere in Europe; Germany in particular has a constitutional amendment prohibiting all forms of cruelty to animals.