Walsingham

I can see where you're coming from Numbers, but I'm not budging just yet. Libya may not have a capability to lob missiles at Florida, but it has the ability to attack shipping and aviation in the mediterranean, and a proven willingness to sponsor international terrorism. Although arguably the latter may have only increased in likelihood thanks to the attacks. The notion that attacks on aviation, where US citizens are at risk, constitute a clear and present danger dates at least as far back as the 1989 avianca bombing. Which lead to the deployment of US special forces and secret surveillance equipment into Colombia. EDIT: Jacob Zuma is now calling for regime change to be ruled out, and an end to attacks which might harm civilians. Which essentially means no attacks on ground targets. Again, this is precisely what I predicted. The international community is quite content for this to turn into a civil war provided the 'holy' concept of non intervention is obeyed. Although to be fair, one wonders if this isn't a good thing as someone might ask why we don't do something about the war in DR Congo.

What makes you think he doesn't?

I've got agree with mkreku on this one. Kim Jong rules the bonkers roost.

I'd have thought that by now most foaming loons would have learned to avoid the tautological inefficiency of calling America 'Nazi', and just adopted the word 'american' as meaning something worse than Nazi. Pro-tip there, loons.

I don't know why I'm bothering to point this out, but he does: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/President_of_..._affairs_powers A country which had to wait for its legislature to decide on action in the event of threats to its security would last about as long as it took for its neighbours to cease laughing hysterically. BTW, when you say sock puppet, are we talking a home made one, or a fancy Sesame Street one? EDIT: A colleague informs me that a good example of what happens when a state relies on its legislature to make war is early Poland in its era as a republic. You may not have heard of this before, which is probably attributable to early Poland being systematically minced by its neighbours.

That is indeed a great video. There's something genuinely grotesque about flourescent lit rooms and the anonymous spaces we build high in the air. To combine that with moths is inspired.

Great week for work, last week. Hoping this one will be as good, and nursing a hangover from yesterday's celebration. Why in God's name do I insist on drinking hobgoblin beer when I know it gives me a head like a waste paper basket the next day? Note: that is beer of the brand name hobgoblin. Last week wasn't excellent because I was able to make transdimensional contact with some fantasy world and stole a lot of their booze.

Surely apathetic loafing is non-violent. Lots of people do that for what they 'believe in'.

I love obyknven. She's like an agitprop otter, all twisty and clearly a bit beastly, yet somehow playful at the same time.

Said this would happen, in response to Krez earlier. Never seriously expected this so soon. All that anyone seems to want is enough military action so we can say we're being tough, irrespective of the fact it won't do the rebels any bloody good.

We had a discussion a while back about crime, punishment and reoffending a while back, but we didn't have great figures to work with, and it came down to figures in the balance of what was appropriate. Recently released figures This seems far too high to my mind. Indeed, the concept of rehabilitation as it stands seems completely incorrect.

Pretty weak, Greaso.

I was watching the news th other day and listening to people who had worked to avert the Windscale nuclear reactor disaster in the UK way back when. Most interesting of all, it seems that, pressed for labour the police went into the local cinema and volunteers/volunteered (not clear how voluntary) the back two rows to come into the plant and PUSH OUT THE FUEL RODS USING SCAFFOLDING POLES. I can't find any mention of how many of these civilians died subsequently. However, it seems to me that they deserve a bloody statue!

Personally I think that working within any large organisation (>4 employees) sucks ass. No responsibility, never any sense of quality and precious little urgency. Of course, ask me again in ten years when I want somewhere quiet to sit and flatulate...

Glenn Beck and gibberish goes together like beef and mustard, why bother even reading it? Mmmmmm... beef and mustard... damnit, why isn't it dinner time?

May I suggest that you quietly but efficiently go into the street and hand the cat to a stranger?

I think it was more that the levies were not built properly, and thus didn't hold. I'm pretty sure they anticipated the storm surge, or there wouldn't be levies in the first place. Again, just because it's obvious doesn't mean that it had been officially considered. I think you'd enjoy reading the journal I mentioned, WoD. Have a browse through a couple of editions.

Probably true. But there's a lot of others I could think of... soldier, actor, nurse, Volourn...

Do you think that's a word of mouth thing, or advertising lead?

LC, that top one is just wrong. Not one to go in the newspapers back in the NCR.

I've been forcing myself to think about nice fluffy things and how good my life is before going to sleep and - presumably - as consequence have been sleeping better with less weird dreams. Hardly rocket science, but amazed how long it took me to work it out.

As an aside, what's this gibberish about Glenn Beck blaming mankind's wrongdoing for the quake?

I apologise if I gave the impression that I have inside info on the cause of failure. I'm working from the same open sources as you are. However, it seems we've isolated the disagreement to the question of whether the ancillary damage would have occurred with a lesser quake. That's a matter of opinion, in this forum, so I'm content to let it rest.

You know - linking to store entry of an audio book dealing with Greek-Persian wars dose not make a strong case for prevalence of Spartan pederasty. Maybe so, but leaving aside friends who studied classics at Cambridge - who I can't very well reference - that's where I heard it first.

As Numbers points out, Japan cannot realistically rely on anything else. But to return to the main issue: 1. Response measures do not rise in a direct scale proportionate to the main event. I do not need a different ambulance if I get hit in the chest with a .22 or a .50AE round. 2. My information concurs with Rostere's. They hadn't considered flooding at the site, and the power redundancies were insufficient - and far more importantly - not geographically diverse enough or where they were they didn't consider issues of transport into a quake hit zone. 3. One of the biggest problems at Lloyds of London in the last century was that they failed to grasp pretty basic maths. Because the odds of any single extreme disaster were nearly zero they calculated their exposure as low. However, what they should have been doing is calculating the odds of NOT having an extreme disaster, which is the reciprocal of the probabilities to the power of the number of possible events. Given that the number of possible extreme events is in fact pretty huge, their exposure turned out to be high. The question here is the same. Not the probability of a quake of this magnitude, but the probability of NOT having something which affected the local area very significantly (affecting the diesels and the storage pools), AND the wider area infrastructure to transport in alternatives. Which strikes me as pretty low. As I say, the disaster response industry very quickly identified one of the problems with Katrina being that no-one had grasped that a storm surge and a hurricane might co-occur. Even though any expert in the field would have told you that they did. Here they seem to have not noticed that quakes and tsunamis go hand in hand. Which is odd given that they 'invented' tsunamis.