Posts by Paul Campbell
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and of course Hitler finds out the binLaden is dead
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true - it would probably take a Republican to do it though
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Busytown: What was lost, in reply to Jolisa,
Ah yes. The other thing that's goddam American about our boys. Still no draft -- will there ever be one again, or is it politically impossible at this point? Although with enlisted soldiers being deployed multiple times, you have to wonder if it will become necessary.
who knows - in 2003/4 all bets were off.
Mind you my family exists because my inlaws moved their entire family to NZ to get my partner's elder brother out of the reach of the US Vietnam draft.
While at the same time I spent most of my teenage years scared that the RSA would get their way and the govt would start drafting us for Vietnam (rather than drafting us for the reserves) - they canceled the draft ballot in NZ 6 months before I became eligible - it didn't stop 5 years of teenage angst - I didn't want my son growing up with that uncertainty hanging over him
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Hard News: You know what ..., in reply to richard,
I saw a lot of Americans today (as I do every day -- just walking past in the street) and not a one of them was chanting U-S-A. I have to say that taking the telegenic reaction of a relative handful of people in a country of 300 million (and who can blame an American for feeling some degree of satisfaction at this news) and drawing some overarching conclusion has a name -- and it is not a pretty one.
That same argument applies to every crowd of muslims burning an american flag to celebrate OBL's latest bombing that Fox shows too - neither is representative of the overarching bulk of the populace of any of these countries - but they're equally ugly representations of the extremes in those countries - until the larger populations of the US and Muslim countries stand up to their extremists that's who will represent them.
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Thanks - I lived thru it all on the (US) West Coast - that day when everything stopped, watching it over and over again switching from channel to channel then off to work after the second one came down -and they sent us home from work because they thought the bridges might be unsafe ("but I live on the other side of the damned bridge"), flying the first day the airports opened again - my kids were 7 and 9 - they saw it all and were scared.
And then marching with them against the Iraq war, probably the same day you did- in SF's almost never ending march of 700,000 people, they couldn't get people out of the BART trains fast enough so they were still coming up as they were getting on the trains to go home at the other end.
And then a few years later deciding to come home to NZ, at least partly because we didn't want to pay for the war and our son was now 13 and draft age wasn't that far away
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Hard News: You know what ..., in reply to Bart Janssen,
Senior military personnel are quite well known for saying things that are not the truth. Sometimes it's even their job. I am significantly less concerned about his role than I am about successive political leaders, but not surprised.
Well does he know when to stop, what if he decides that as GG there are things we're just no supposed to know? Hopefully when we finally set up our parliamentary republic we'll start to hold public hearings a bit like the US Senate's supreme court justice confirmations - there are difficult questions that need to be asked here and answered in public
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Hard News: You know what ..., in reply to Lucy Stewart,
I guess my point was that OBL/AQ as a threat was bubbling away in the news through much of the 90's - probably the real problem was that Entertainment Tonight and Leno weren't covering them
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It's probably more interesting for Osama's DNA because his father had many wives - whether or not he and his sister share a common mother would have some impact on how useful her DNA would be
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Jolisa: I don't know - I was living in the US at the time - OBL had been talked about in the media for a while, his name wasn't a new one - after all he was Reagan's golden boy fighting the russians in Afghanistan, funded by the US - the fact that he'd turned against the US was not news
There had been the 1993 WTC attack, various attacks in the middle east, Sudan - the first Iraq war had happened under Bush 1 (with hundreds of thousands of us marching in the street against it!) - if you listened to NPR, watched public television you knew that AQ existed and had the US in its sights
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