SSgt Viljuri

According to Russia, they are not waging a war against Georgia, they are doing some peace keeping with live rounds. And if current Russia is democratic, so were Mussolini's fascists state in Italy then. Which democratic states have been at war with each other? Democracy is something more than just a word, for example, "People's democracy" is not necessarily a democracy, rather a one-party dictatorship. Even if these states favored the word "democratic". This can't be that hard, can it?

For a contemporary Norse symbol, I recommend a stylized drawing about cod. By doing so, she can convey a subtextual message of sorts: "It smells like a fish", implying "eating" possibilities for menfolk.

Culpability? Probably the blame can be attributed to many directions, a part of it can be traced back to the Sudetenland scenario (namely to the Teutonic hordes, giving the contemporary Russians too many good ideas how to create incidents with their neighbors), maybe a bit to the Hungarian uprising (the US is to blame if they give false assurances in a lax manner) and surely the nationalistic chauvinism is in play too (both by the Russians and the Georgians). Then again, market prices of oil were in decline, did our Russian friends feel they don't want to sell their oil too cheaply? Or did the Georgians feel they can make a sneak attack and restore their national integrity, current enclaves being by and large designer creations by the Russian intelligence services in the early 1990's?

Bigduke6, any comments or are you too busy at the moment? :mad: Not to claim that there's anything funny about this.

And they provide what? It is not possible to hit even a barn door with those if basic electronic and other countermeasures are applied. As even the Georgians are well aware...

Dunno, but somehow, someway the title for this thread looks to be very suggestive.

Her Majesty's realms have had quite an ambivalent history with piracy, sometimes going well beyond classical British sounding ideas like "fair game". For these reasons, I would recommended instituting keelhauling as a just and proportional punishment for those pirates that surrender themselves alive to the Royal officials.

Although I don't have any axes to grind what comes to the NYT (appears to be an arch-typical postmodernist hatchery for do-gooders), it is quite interesting to note that the same mag with supposedly "impeccable journalistic standards" has fathered such journalistic talent as him. Given that there were many Americans and other nationals emigrating to the "Soviet Paradise", at least partly because of such shameless propaganda and falsehoods reported by the NYT, the paper seems to have blood on their hands, morally speaking. Not that different to some contemporary phenomena, interestingly enough.

Dang. I thought that we could practically circumvent those "Yankee, go home" protests by reactivating the "Hell On Wheels" as an occupation force! :confused: About the outside of the United States part: In many countries with somewhat lesser popular cultural exhibits, like those situated in Scandinavia, most people "know" more about the States than they actually know about their own countries, if a little bit of exaggeration is allowed. So distinction between the Northeners and the Southeners is a part of common narrative even this close of the European Arctic Regions.

In order to add much needed regional flavor, especially what comes to the Ozzies and Kiwis (and maybe Yorkshire), we should have a special "sheeplove" emoticon available, so that we could refer all things and persons "antipodean" in a short, effective and concise manner. There are PC and not so-PC versions available, so family friendliness is not an issue here.

What puzzles me greatly, is this somewhat totalitarian sounding and profoundly erroneous notion that it would somehow perfectly okay for news people and photographers to violate privacy and common decency, let alone their contractual obligations, as long as it serves the purposes of citizen activists, Internet Brigades or what ever form shared interests take on this issue and others? Freedom of press is not an absolute, not even in the US. Rights, basic or derived, do conflict with each other. These conflicts can not be resolved based on how highly someone values himself or how great salaries news media people command (talking about money wrongly spent), nor this can be solved based on how much somebody hates GWB or the Iraq War and how much he wants to vent his feelings about it! Somehow this discussion has been mostly about non-issues.

For once, I agree with the Norwegian. Must be the first time ever! However, when talking about a mid-prized consumer range, my personal preference includes these as well: OBH Nordica. Works quite well with quality coffees, like él Presidente.

Southern gentlemen don't necessarily agree about that, Elmar, whether with a wildly bolding stature or not.

What fecking truth? You can't handle the truth! As Fox Mulder once famously said, the truth is out there. News propaganda reaches sometimes another level of existence, but is it closer to truth? Drinking Kool-Aid will not help in this or other issues, let alone bring the truth any closer. Clearly professional news people are the second incarnation of the Pharisees.

And professional media is not in a role of money changers here? Who is doing the dying, who is trying to profit financially? At least we could make a good guess who are the pharisees in this case, and we might have a hunch about the presiding Papal authority too! Not that there are too many holy persons in the region.

This was an embedded reporter, who had voluntarily signed a contract and was otherwise under a courtesy of a military organization. He was not your Iraqi freelancer doing his stuff on his own. Simply put, this reporter fella could not use his discretion freely, as there where limits of what kind of "cooperation" the Marines were agreed to provide him. Pacta sunt servanda. Surely this young reporter dude is not a whisteblower of any kind, people do know Marines and local Iraqis are not toon superheroes (dunno about the Marines themselves), and get hurt in a combat against the local insurgents and because of terrorist attacks. Due to unfortunate terrorist action, he got an opportunity to shoot lots of graphic content, which included dead bodies of the Marines. An opportunity to score big for personal benefit or a wide ranging common policy issue? Who cares. Too bad he signed that waiver. What would Jesus do?

Mr. Bigduke seems to involve himself more in hyberboles and strawmen than debating the actual issue here. It's irrelevant what many journalists groupthink amongst themselves and whether they are doing a great job or not, peace be upon them. Somehow this discussion resembles doing drugs. Even if a puff or two would make your ordinary liberal/libertarian activist feel like a million social security checks/a 24 carat gold bullion, this alone is not enough to disregard the law altogether. In a sense, some journalists are acting like they are above the society, above the common man, as if they were in a God-given mission to educate the masses. To prepare an Omelette, the way how you break the eggs does matter!

It's not about the trust, it's about "checks and balances" and the "rule of law". How about murder victims? Should we have detailed pictorial reports about every possible gruesome crime, for the common good? The public does have a right to "know", doesn't it? The truth is out "there", or isn't it? From this perspective, it is easy to see the scenario is wrecked from the beginning. There's a conflict of interest, a legitimate race between different objects of legal protection (i.e. between right to privacy against corporation's right to print money... er, I meant papers), which can not be settled based on how journalists (~ dupes) themselves feel about their self-worth. A somewhat wider perspective is needed. No, I'm not saying anything to that direction. I am saying that exploitation of the dead marines for purely personal or even common gain (let's admit this, okay?) should not be among the options what a decent human being would do. Obviously, the journalist in question didn't feel that way and the Marines reacted correspondingly. He did sign a waiver, didn't he? He knowingly broke his contractual obligations for opportunistic reasons, damn the ethics or what not. Nobel Peace Prize, Pulitzer Prize, Academy Award, Hero of the Sorbonne University Award or what ever was almost reachable. Mostly you're arguing about different topic. We can endlessly talk about politics and what went wrong, we are living in free countries. Even in (ex-)soviet block it has always been possible to criticize the US and conduct of her armed forces, from conflict to conflict, odd or not. Do we need real-life illustrations or reality TV-p*rn to do it?

Pretty rich to claim anything about doctored images as (liberal) western media is filled with them, for example AFP is very famous to use every possible Pallywood et al produced image available to further its revenues. The truth is, nobody is interested what some cocky journalist does or thinks. Morally, they are acting in a similar role as those who scavenged the dead on battlefields of the past. Better send those vultures home, an overblown feeling of baseless self-importance is not helping these fellas at all. These picture takers or text spellers are not intellectuals, they are not scientists, they are not artists, they are just yellow liquid, which fills our heads and prevents us from thinking clearly.

Is it because these brutes think they would look thinner in black? With matching handbags to hurl, perhaps?

They can hire extras locally, if some of their main characters die during the shoot. Obviously, local talent would fit better in nondescript Hobbit roles, but given synergies what filming at actual Middle Earth settings gives to the filming crew, they can set up a searching party of some sort for locating some talent (or missing items) if a need arises. Some characters or at least their direct descendants are still alive at this age of ours, having a ball while being working professionals, probably blending with the local populace, being involved with almost excessive sheep and goat herding habits. Or Hobbits.

IMHO, in an asymmetrical conflict, there's no need to endanger even marines for such cheap political points. Even if it would make anti-war protesting easier, if all gore and splatter would be openly on display on every media. Social porn is for mast*rb*t*rs, and its connections to legitimate forms of political expression and free speech are not as clear cut as political activists are trying to claim, on all sides of the aisle. Thankfully right to privacy and basic human dignity is sometimes respected, even if media is increasingly becoming the most powerful source of power, as it can manipulate public perspectives at its will. For its own the financial gain, mostly.

That must be a new Guinness World Record! Then again, you antipodes have other peculiar conventions as well, like winter and summer inversed, so maybe you have somewhat non-standard weekly almanacs in use, or is it beer related?

Yes, it's subjective and there are other aesthetic pursuits as well, like arts, music, literature and what ever. Work and hobbies can give higher delights too, as what comes to sheep husbandry. Kind of like a double whammy for Kiwis and Ozzies, not forgetting Yorkshiremen. There's however something objective about body of knowledge, despite what the postmodernist say. Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are.

Not mention we already know, that it didn't go wrong! Wonderful, isn't it? :eek: Although this side is model dependent, but how cares...