Not saying that this “Nuclear Scientist” was anything other than a money-grubbing fool, but, fools have killed more human beings than Lions.

One point we should all ponder is that much of this violence devolves from the creation of the Muslim Brotherhood by the NAZI SS during WWII. The first leader of the Brotherhood was the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, and, is most prevalent as a coherent Terrorist Organization in Egypt, today. Modern Islamist philosophy is based on the teachings of the SS, and, Anti-Semitism is a founding principle.

Achmedinejad, and everyone who follows him, is steeped in the philosophy of the Muslim Brotherhood, and we can be assured that the ultimate purpose of their Nuclear adventure has few greater purposes than the destruction of Israel. Nuking the “Great Satan” is only Candy to make world conquest easier.

A garrison of maybe 50,000 troops in Kurdistan would probably suffice to prevent the great conflagration you forsee. That would be much safer for our soldiers than making them patrol the streets of Baghdad and Tikrit.

john I,

Listen to yourself. You are applauding a murder.

Don’t vote liberal democrat!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Although really, it isn’t like single people are any better off — right?

Having more than one or two children takes a lot of time and effort that cannot be split with work outside the home. The American government consciously reconfigured its policies and tax code away from supporting families some years ago. To reinvigorate larger families, it will take some long-term, large-scale effort to support those families instead of belittling them.

Theophile

“All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.”

“All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.”

It is foolish to assume that we can know the hearts of others when their most cherished values are directly opposed to ours, and, slanted toward the commandments of a god we cannot comprehend: Allah, son of Sin, Son of Seht, the god of the Crescent Moon.

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/mil_exp_dol_fig_pergdp-expenditures-dollar-figure-per-gdp

To say another way, USA ranks number 45 in spending as a percentage of GDP — about the same as France.

To say that redrawing boundaries will fix anything is a fallacy. Every such suggestion is a complete joke.

There is nothing, naturally speaking, America can do besides watch these regions auto-destruct and millions of innocent men, women, and children perish.

As long as we persist in the belief that we can somehow fix these problems around the world, we will continue to spend 300 to 400 million dollars a day on the operational costs of war and more on our defense budget - the cost of merely maintaing our military force (almost 700 billion dollars per year now) almost more than the rest of the world’s national defense budgets combined, not to mention the human cost in deaths, and have nothing to show for it.

I think the best way to salvage the situation now is to split Iraq into three countries: one for the Shiites, one for the Sunnis, and one for the Kurds. If the Shiite part gets annexed by Iran, so be it. That would at least bring the place some stablility and peace. If Iran suddenly went from an economy 2% the size of America’s to 2.5%, that wouldn’t constitute a threat to our national security. Turkey couldn’t afford to stop the creation of a Kurdistan, since they are trying to become a member of the world community. Several thousand people would have to move to a different part of Baghdad to be in the country run by their co-religionists, but when you have a situation where 1,000 people are dying in a week, drastic measures can be justified.

I wholly agree with his read on the state of conception and birth in the “Civilized” world, and, I’d like to add that it fits the profile of the “End of Golden Ages.”

Two of the markers delineating the end of Civilizations have been declining birth rates (of the Aristocracy and Nobility), and, a simple phrase uttered by the Ladies while protected and pampered behind Walls and surrounded by Foreign Bodyguards (prefaced by a plan to make everyone safe): “The People don’t need weapons, it will only encourage them to foment sedition and rebellion. We have enough weapons to provide all the security they need. After all, We’re Civilized.”

The act of disarming the “People” who fought the wars, and, conquered the land that became the core of that Age is the last act of a dying empire, and, impossible to survive, because there is always an Alexander or Saladin, just over the hill.

I’m torn on the question of how irreversible the damage is. On the one hand, this downturn in birth rates has been fairly dramatic, right? So it seems demographic tendencies can take pretty large swings at times. Why not the other way, too? On the other hand, the “have less kids” poison went down pretty easily. The opposite would probably be harder to stomach. Such candy to the ears of liberals: they could live completely selfish lives and feel virtuous about it! They could pursue their careers and spend all their money on themselves and still look down their noses in contempt on those un-liberated women who were wasting their lives and destroying the planet by raising kids. Growing up, I knew only children who told me loftily that their parents had decided to have only one “for the sake of the earth.” The snub to my family (I have four siblings) was obviously intended, but their parents probably really did tell themselves that… and the fact that this enabled two incomes and plush lifestyles was just the hard price they had to pay for their gift of sterility, their generosity to THE EARTH. Such delightful excuses die hard.

The thing is, though, their reasoning (demographically speaking) wasn’t entirely crazy. Life expectancy has gone way up in the past few centuries, and infant mortality rates dropped way down. If people still had as many kids as they did a century ago, the population really would rise in a hurry… trouble is, people these days seem to want just one child, or none. It’s possible, though, that watching the crumbling of Europe may inspire people to yearn for the family-oriented culture of yesteryear. And if so, the fact that we can successfully bring more newborns to adulthood nowadays, could help to repair the gap relatively quickly. Just a possible ray of hope.