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Good for you. However a rise in oil prices following the closure of Libyan wells would affect the US, whether you get your oil from there or not, especially as Japan's needs are expected to increase in the future. The 2008 economic crisis caused a serious loss of purchasing power in developed countries and the last thing we (you) need now that things are starting to look up is a >$150 oil barrel. And that's without getting into the possible catalyst effect that international intervention in Libya can have in other unstable oil-producing countries. Sorry but no. Taking sides in the civil wars of other countries is not only against one of the founding principles of the UN (Charter art. 2.7), it's also something very likely to backfire, immediately or down the road. Further, in this particular case, the rebels are just about defeated and all the allied strikes have achieved is prevent government forces from dealing the coup de grace. How do you figure we help them "seek freedom"? Frankly, if there's anything specious here it's your high-calorie analogies, old boy. See how many people you can convince that the full weight of the law should only fall on the weak - and only when the judges stand to benefit directly from dispensing punishment. It's not about "at once" either - rather, it's about "at all".

Thanks. So if the only military actions we are willing to undertake -outside self-defense- are those which "aid our economy" or have a decent chance of us coming out ahead in other respects, then that is the deciding factor, and not humanitarian concerns - pretty much the way societies have been acting since the invention of the spear. Only they didn't have nukes back then and therefore didn't need to sit down and get the rest of the big boys' approval to get started. Humanitarian concerns don't weigh on policy makers' consciences any more than they did on Augustus'. I loved the "sacrifices most people would not vote for" bit, as well. Delicious. I take it that you walk your way everywhere, warm yourself in winter with the power of your own self-sufficiency alone and the computer you wrote that from is made from wood, then?

When is force justified, you say? Well, according to the UN, it's justified whenever the UN Security Council says it is. That's one nice little corrupt loophole we got ourselves there, don't you think? "Achievable", yes. This is a key consideration. I'd go further and say "profitable", in terms of money, resources, strategic concerns etc. You don't go to war suspecting it may wreck your economy unless it's a war of annihilation. However, judgements of that sort are apparently only accurate in retrospect, and I guess the perfect example of this is in fact the as of yet unknown end result of the war in Afghanistan. The alternative, you ask? Beats me. But I'm not running for office.

Mind, I wasn't suggesting that we target the PRC next. It was just a reduction to the absurd of what you said were the reasons for the strikes. Those, along with the sham that is "international law" are so much bunk. It's always about the money, and if Libya wasn't where it is, the poor (un)armed Libyan rebels would burn for all we care, as have the Somali, the Uyghur or the ****ing Congolese. Humanitarian bull**** and the international legality window dressing are just tools at the opinion manufacturer's disposal to hit the part of the masses' psyche that is still governed by the judeo-christian ethos that defines Western culture. Democracy, **** yeah!

Well, if you are going to base your argument on the ability and willingness of countries to target US citizens in the past and completely going to ignore present geopolitical realities, then I hope that, for the sake of coherence, your follow-up will be an endorsement of airstrikes against the PRC and Russia. Because, before the attacks begun, Libya was even less of a threat to the US than Iraq in 2003.

Because, clearly, the Libyan state is in a position to threaten US national security. The power to declare war is a prerogative exclusive to Congress. Arguably, the Prez could act to prevent something like Pearl Harbor or 9/11, but authorizing airstrikes on Libya, even if it's to protect Libyan (as opposed to American) civilians is hardly the same. Maybe simply the whole concept of DOW is obsolete but that doesn't change the fact that simply deferring to the decision of an international forum -largely an instrument of the powerful anyway- doesn't give a President, PM or whatever powers above and beyond what's ordinarily invested on him. You know that you and I see eye to eye more often than not, but... really? edit: me suck at engrish. D:

Yes, with a strange dash of Lord of Flies methinks. Possibly. But ad hominems are ever so convenient. I'm very curious to see how this is going to turn out. If as Zor suggests a mass defection and/or the killing of Qaddafi are achieved, the regime change part of this business may be completed. However, the West's record on the subject of foreign political reconfiguration is rather unimpressive, and at any rate it rests mostly on the tacit, ever-present threat of literally awesome military force being brought to bear on them should things deviate too much from the plans laid out for (read: imposed on) them. We are already seeing the ability of the American military to project power being questioned, and the not-so-good economic juncture certainly won't help. And that is an optimistic prediction. If, on the other hand, foreign military intervention galvanizes Qaddafi's supporters and/or we fail to kill him quickly, things could get much uglier as the opportunistic leaders of this coalition start to feel the political heat derived from their failure to achieve their objectives in a timely fashion, and their already battered popularities take another hammering with elections around the corner. I'm specifically looking at Sarko, and to a lesser extent Obama. I have trouble imagining where this would go, but one thing is certain: we won't like footing the bill for their foolhardy grab for glory. In any case, I think the deployment of a sizable land force is unavoidable now and somebody will have to get around to it at some point. Unless we're happy with Libya becoming the next Somalia, but given its location in Europe's backyard and the energy thing, I very much doubt that. The undisputed winner in the game so far and for the foreseeable future is clearly Putin. If only because his rivals are so astonishingly incompetent and weak.

Are they? And here I thought that the idea of beating a country into submission by airpower alone was rendered obsolete in, like, 1944. That only worked in Yugoslavia after the Dayton Agreement, only here the scene and actors make something like that unlikely to happen. And even in that case a massive land-based peacekeeping force still had to be deployed to ensure compliance. So, who's going to cough up the troops to fight Qaddafi's loyalists in their own turf, after the US have declared that they have no intention of getting involved in another land war for the time being? The Europeans? Hahaha... that'll be the day.

Funny how the Arabs asked for it, the Europeans enacted it, and the US ended up doing the heavy lifting anyway. And now that the no-fly zone is a reality... what is next? Do they really expect Qaddafi to quit simply by grounding his air force?

Unfortunately, for the Japanese there isn't much choice with regards to nuclear power. http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/20110314-ja...ian-gulf-energy ^ While the piece's interpretation of Japan's WWII economic factors is... not what I'm used to reading, it's essentially right in that Japan's huge industrial economy is extremely sensitive to changes in the availability of oil. Nuclear power mitigates this dependency, somewhat. Perhaps if the power plants hadn't been so close to the littoral, the tsunami would have been a non-issue and damage less catastrophic, but the bottom line is that Japan really does need her nuclear plants.

Nice turnabout by Inter, but I don't think the knockout result really reflects what went on on the field. Eto'o was probably the most defining player, and he's pretty deadly when he and Sneijder are online, but I was generally more impressed by Robben's usual speed and technique. The referee was pretty much spot-on too which seems to be something worth remarking on these days. All in all, a much more interesting match to watch than Barcelona v Arsenal.

Fortunately, I am a native Spanish speaker, and there are some inexactitudes in what you posted. - Draws are in fact secret, and carried out under the supervision of a notary. If there was any evidence that clubs have access to this it would be a major scandal and would possibly land a bunch of people in jail. - It's not 2 games per day that are tested, it's 2 games per league "working day". Much as the Premier League, Spanish League working days have games distributed between saturday and sunday, and the system has one game from each day be tested. - Players aren't warned, only coaches and team delegates. Players are notified after the game is over. - Exclusive urine testing is standard practice in the French, German and English football leagues. No, it's only so if we accept suspicions and innuendo as proof. Odds of actually being caught are low indeed, but the system is not designed to be easy to sidestep as you suggest. Yes, but in those cases, there were actual trials in which they were acquitted. There is no such thing for what you (and some media outlets) are doing which is basically fling poo and make baseless accusations. There is no way of fixing that because there was never any actual evidence to discuss - not that this little fact matters much to some people. It doesn't look like Madrid is actually doing anything - all there is is what some sports radio journalist says he understood, and now he's backing down. No official statement from Real from what I've gathered. At any rate, I don't see how asking for better refs and more stringent doping controls would be hypocritical, unless they have been proven in the past to be guilty of these conducts. If they ask for that, it's hypocritical. If they don't, they are taking advantage of a system that's easy to game. What would be an acceptable way for them to proceed then?

The exploding reactor bit is perfectly plausible and we've effectively seen reactors exploding (as a common usage definition) even if the reactor core itself wasn't breached. And while there cannot be a nuclear explosion in the classical sense there is plenty of potential for something equivalent to a "dirty bomb" in superheated (plutono-) uranic slag hitting a water source directly. I'd agree that "nuclear explosion" really should not be used though. No, we haven't seen reactors exploding, effectively or otherwise. Hydrogen explosions happened inside the reactor building but not within the reactor proper, meaning that until today, containment structures hadn't been damaged and emergency cooling operations hadn't been compromised. This is just an instance of "common usage" expressions being misleading in a situation where there's no excuse for a lack of rigor. Being precise doesn't require convoluted technical explanations and said lack of rigor contributes to misinformation in a subject that's already controversial enough. That's why we have professional journalists to begin with, don't you think? Unfortunately, we may yet see an actual reactor explosion as the process you mention follows the Japanese inability to prevent a full meltdown. We don't need that to have a serious disaster though, apparently a fire getting out of hand at one of the now-exposed spent fuel cooling pools is a likely possibility as well, and it would no doubt further deteriorate working conditions on site. Fun.

Yeah, I wouldn't put any stock on what that clown says - the man is pretty much a political corpse even in his own party, thankfully, and watching him would be comical were it not for the fact that he's the president. Political will has very little to do with it, there's a bunch of stuff related to the march 2004 Madrid attacks which for some reason Zapatero's government has no interest in investigating but the judiciary is nonetheless carrying the case forward. From what's been made available, it looks like Fuentes has been talking tough and threatening to disclose big names he could have been involved with since 2006... never to act on those threats. Call me na

^ Yeah, I was really impressed by their reaction. Inspiring, to say the least. As far as I know, not even then a nuclear explosion could happen. "Enriched" uranium (~3% U-235) used in light water reactors simply cannot cause a nuclear explosion (for reference, weapons grade uranium is ~80% U-235 though lower concentrations are viable). This can't be stressed enough because I've been hearing talk these last few days of "nuclear explosions" and "exploding reactors". I hate when mainstream journalists can't seem to grasp simple concepts like the difference between an explosion in a nuclear facility and a nuclear explosion, and the fact that an actual nuclear explosion is the result of overcoming incredible technical challenges rather than a fortuitous event. And now this cluster**** is at the very least, going to cause delays in the decision making process as it pertains to nuclear power and energy policy. I wonder what could have been the consequences if instead of a NPP, the quake and tsunami had hit a hydroelectric dam.

I know about Messi's HGH treatment, but other than that...?

It does. Which begs the question why the demo doesn't show any of that, and is locked to "normal" difficulty. It may be that they've done with DA2 what they did with ME2, where the depth of the combat gameplay isn't immediately apparent. From what folks are posting, that may well be the case. I like action games well enough and some of the things I've read are very interesting (LOS aggro, physically avoiding attacks), but encounter design systematically based on waves and no friendly fire are serious turnoffs for me. Also it looks like they have finally given up on balancing a game that uses the same ruleset for the player and enemy NPCs - I can't say I like "boss mob" shenanigans, but I guess it's forgivable if the end result is fun. I wonder if they are planning on releasing a toolset. From what I read on the Bioboards, enabling FF is not as simple as editing a 2DA.

If it was advertised as an action game, then it fails even harder. ME2 and God of War are action games. DA2 is a party-based mongrel with a stripped down gameplay that relies on an autoattack function that was apparently left out (\o/). I know that so long as the game requires you to do anything more complicated than A,A,A,A,A to win, you'll claim it's "tactical" and dismiss all criticisms by fiat, but saying it's so doesn't make it so. Compare to JA or SS for reference of what "tactical gameplay" looks like. @Tale: can you comment on encounter design?

DAO had some combat lag issues that were introduced (or made worse) by patch 1.04, regardless of hardware apparently. In my experience such issues were directly linked to the amount of NPCs in a given cell, were they involved in combat or not. I'd rather they had fixed the issue than just sidestepped it but I don't know what's worse, lagged and unresponsive combat or enemies being magically dropped on top of your party. Having played the demo and reading Laidlaw's comparisons of combat in DAO and DA2, the impression I got is that enemies are indeed weaker overall. *shrug*

Only... it's not really fast-paced or meant to compare against BG or NWN. The difference with combat in DAO is that enemies are even weaker this time around (DAO was apparently too difficult), and it sports some really retarded, animu-inspired combat animations, giving it the appearance of a faster pace - all in the vein of "button -> AWESOME!" edit: I just checked, and some cooldowns have been halved. Never was too fond of cooldowns tbh, but weaker enemies and ridiculous animations contribute to the feeling of faster combat more than ability spam, I think.

Might be that what they want the product to be is based on what the product was advertised as? (DaRk HeROiC & tactical gameplay) Sure, buying into the hype is the player's fault but why market the game as something it's not?

Yeah, Van Persie shouldn't have been sent off. You shouldn't red card a guy for something so silly, and most certainly not when there may be doubts that he's actually heard the offside being called. And I agree about Alves. Scrawny diving piece of **** is always the first to pick a fight after he fouls someone, and somehow he manages to get away with it most of the time. Bad calls on the ref's part for sure. None of that however changes the fact that Arsenal did bugger all throughout the match. Nada, zilch, nothing. Their only goal was scored by a Barcelona player in the only corner kick they got. Maybe one or two shots on the goal. They chose to play cowardly, to live off the advantage they had from the first leg, and they paid for it. And rightly so, I might add. Messi's goal was just brilliant, and I'm a Real fan. Oh well.

You don't think if they made a game in a setting where that could work, they'd try? Yvonne Strahovski:

The romances and the linearity in his movies. Yeah, it's not like Bio games have ever been anything but linear, and chock full of cringe-worthy romance. So it may be true that Bio is the Michael Bay of games, but it's certainly nothing new.

Oh, I agree. Jail is a waste of resources and not guaranteed to rehabilitate. I'll tell you what's cheaper to deal with these hooligans: It's also time-proven method, you see.