Walsingham

'Happiness? Happiness...is to wake up, on a bright spring morning, after an exhausting first night spent with a beautiful... passionate... multi-murderess.' Iain M. Banks; Use of Weapons

Well, Sun Tzu did write about human nature. Considering that people have been using his advice in one form or another for around two millenia now, you have to say he probably had a fairly decent grasp on human nature. Hell, he's the one that said the best general is the one who doesn't need to resort to force and solves the problem before armies have to start moving. Exactly. He's my favourite all round author. Plus you have to love the bit about marshalling troops. This, combined with the moral component of command sums up my views on leadership in every respect.

NSFW, but do a search on Rodney Carrington 'Show them to me'. It's a song about boobs make peace, which now I think about it may be where the UN has been going wrong.

I don't accept this nonsense about freedom being binary. I don't have the freedom to murder people, but that doesn't take away my freedom to kill in self defence. I suggest that freedom of speech - despite Numbers' very good point about subjectivity - is consistent with banning extreme hate speech.

Surely war is the harshest testing ground of theories of how we work as humans. Fantasies and grand theories are shredded like scraps of sail on a foundering galleon.

I'd say the Resident Evil series is probably the best reason not to vote Capcom. Better reasons to vote Capcom would be Devil May Cry or Street Fighter. If the best reason to vote Capcom is Streetfighter then Capcom should be kicked off a cliff.

What's really embrassing is that I'd been reading Sun tzu two days ago when I made the original point about leadership being an acceptance that other people play a part in an individual's behaviour.

Well, that's embarassing.

You're saying voting obsidian mocks and denigrates both Nelson Mandela's torture, imprisonment, and heroic forgiveness of his enemies?

And the quote is from...?

That's okay, this is kind of becoming the "once a day" post thread. I have trouble with numbers.

You must search the Prophet much deeper as you seem knowing nothing about if you really wish to. I doubt it though as you simply cannot figure out that there were no 'bombs' at His age.. You are correct that there were no bombs. There were, however, plenty of other ways for innocents to die. If you suggest that innnocents should die for a perceived affront to your prophet then I still maintain your religion is fascinating and worthy, but that you are a contemptible form of pond scum.

I just read that link to Ayn Rand. That is some stone cold insane s***. I mean grade A loopylaloser. People seriously follow this woman? He [a man Rand admired deeply] cut a girl in half, sewed her eyelids open, and threw her at her father AFTER he paid her ransom in full and on time?

The kind of brilliant physicist who tells power crazed egomaniacs that everything they do is right?

Yes, my underpants are law. That's why we don't get many visitors.

Registered, voted, commented. We are currently thirty behind, you jackanapes. MOVE!

I'm in the approach, five by five.

If I may rephrase my somehwat caustic colleague's objection: 1. Correlation does NOT mean causation. Clearly in a lab we try to control variables and often can say without reasonable doubt that causation is implied. But this is not in a lab, squeaky. I come from the land of human factors where this point is well understood and long lamented. This is an important point. Poverty correlates with crime. Crime kills millions every year. Yet there is not one tenth of the consensus on action to directly give away stuff and halt poverty. 2. A model is not a hypothesis in itself. For example, Lanchester's square law is very good at predicting the outcome of armed conflict, but it excludes everything except biffing from the calculation. This is important because Lanchester would not have predicted the outcome of Vietnam, or the Soviet Afghan war, or the Falklands. A model may predict but often contains no disprovable component, which you will concede is what makes a strong theory. 3. If, as the quote suggests, equivalent rises are common without industrialisation, then this must be accounted for. Thus far I see no account. Calling me a fool doesn't do the job. But I have no doubt you will supply the necessary now I point this out.

ROFL. Good thing my character shares with the other NPCs.

If you're going to let little things like tattoos, and veins running with the blood of ancient evil stop you, you're going to be very lonely, old man. Will Almighty and I have the right idea. Think 'guileless savagery' combined with 'full lips'.

Interesting counterpoint which I will need time to digest.

I'm afraid I have a higher opinion of your religious authorities than you do, it seems. I would regard it is incumbent upon a wise man to react sensibly to provocation, not to fabricate additional provocation. This is not the action of a wounded man, but an active aggressor. Also it is you who seem to constantly act on this notion that every element of Western society si out to entrap and attack 'Islam'. To do so is to pay no attention whatsoever to how we treat our own authority figures. Our own archbishops of the Church of England have stated that in the evnt of someone mocking Jesus it is the part of a true Christian to remember that God is not likely to cry himself to sleep over it. He is a big boy, after all. I suggest that the prophet (PBUH) cares a great deal more about bombing the innocent than pictures of himself, which was the whole point of the cartoon in the first place.

We curse the stones on the footpath for blocking the way for out feet dammit! I think CIA needs to take lessons from Mossad. Heck, they could outsource the job of killing Bin Laden to Mossad. As for Iraq, well, I know I like a good conspiracy theory, but I honestly think that it was the old man Bush who pulled the strings and told Bush Junior to go finish the mess that he himself had left behind. "Son, that guy is still sitting there in Baghdad mocking me. If you do nothing else with your presidency, you God damn get that sucker to bite the dust good or God help me, you are no son of mine" (add heavy Texan accent). Have you seen footage of Bush senior with junior? There's no way I'll believe he approves of his son.

On the contrary, given how much we ALL depend on the US economy being healthy... wait. Do I mean on the contrary? I'm too tired.

You can kill a big guy with a piece of shrapnel the size of a pinhead. If you want to talk about small components upsetting a large system.