RE: BOO!!! Scared ya, huh??? Whats your favourite horror movie?

Saw Resident Evil last saturday… it was cool! Zombies, mutants, Mila Jovovich, it had all the quality stuff.

I like horrorflics a lot. I can see stuff like Braindead, the Living Dead series, or bizzarities like Event Horizon and such over and over again. Preferably with a beer or so within reach.

Eight Legged Freaks is great fun too if you’re into 1950s-pulp.

RE: Good Grief….

Phantom, i am glad my outburst resulted in a relatively well-put and decent post from you. Thanks for that – and no, i don’t need any headache pills. Writing that post above was enough to cool my nerves, thanks for your concern 🙂

>Although the Palestinians cheering in the streets did anger
>me towards them a good bit more.

It wasn’t THE Palestinians, it were SOME Palestinians. Don’t judge a country or a people from the impression you get from the media (which always will select the most impressive footage) or individuals. In all honesty and seriousness, i’d suggest you to go to an Islamic country once. I’ve visited some, and you will definately get a whole different view on those people than the hateful perception you now have. I wasn’t a great fan of Islam and the people following that religion either, but my travels to those countries (and stories of friends who visited others) have certainly broadened my view.

>Kev, as far as American reducing our stockpile of weapons?
>What’s the point in that when we are not going to use them
>unless we are nuked ourselves.

Then why maintain so many of them? Nuclear weapons are very expensive to produce, maintain and guard. The global overkill capacity the US has and maintains costs the US taxpayer a lot of money.

>And even then, if that
>happened, you all would probably tell us not to retaliate.
>You speak of our arsenal of weapons as if we are going to
>use them to end the world.

The impact of the Schumacher-Levy comet on Jupiter changed the views on the effect of nuclear war, even on a fairly limited (let’s say China vs USA) scale. In such a scenario, the world WILL end. And what will be left won’t be worth crawling out of the bunker for.

>I don’t really know how to view
>that as anything other than ridiculous. And Saddam isn’t a
>global threat I know, but he is a regional threat by far,
>plus the fact that a large portion of the world’s oil
>supplies is well within his striking distance. If only we
>had finished the job back in 1991….

Thanks for mentioning the oil in stead of hollow rhetorics about democracy. If you, and the American government, were so specific more often you would read a lot less criticism from my part.

Also, i agree with Geforce here that you shouldn’t throw (for example) the two of us in one bucket for once and for all. From how i know him and other people at this forum, i guess i could get along with Vortex a whole lot better than with Geforce no matter what their (or our) opinions on a certain topic.

RE: the whole shabang…

Phantom and Sauron;
Thinking Europe just sits on it’s ass and never intervenes in any crisis situation is utter bollocks. As said over and over again, European troops are/have been in plenty of international operations. Including ones the Americans didn’t participate in over the last 10 years: Sierra Leone, Eritrea, Cambodia, Cyprus, Sinai, Rwanda… And these are only the ones with a Dutch contingent. The list including other EU countries is a lot longer, yet somehow you always seem to ignore it. I have absolutely no problem with anyone critisizing European countries, but make sure you get your facts straight. That’s what you expect others to do when critisizing the US, so be a good sport and offer us the same courtesy. Unless you think you can have a unilateral debate of course }>

Phantom:
I’ll never agree with you Euro people and you all will never agree with me. Let’s leave it at that.
I hate getting impolite in what i consider to be a very entertaining and interesting discussion, but the arrogance and ignorance you display here is of a saddening, if not pathetic level. When I critisize the US administration, i am not critisizing the citizens of the US. Yet somehow you feel it necessary to respond by branding all European citizens as unable to ever agree with you? Fine. In that case, i hope you don’t consider yourself speaking for the whole USA as that would mean i find the whole country pathetically arrogant and ignorant. But i hope you will take the credit all by yourself.

I don’t think all of them are wrong. Europeans here do criticize the U.S. more than they ought to.
Here you go again. It’s not Europeans, it’s people like Geforce and me. If you can’t understand the difference between an individual with an opinion and a people with one opinion, i think you would make a perfect communist. The confusion between the individual and the collective is exactly what communism is all about.

I suppose it doesn’t really matter what people 3,000 miles away think {about Bush – A}, but nonetheless it is irritating.
It wouldn’t matter what people thought of Bush if his administration’s actions didn’t deal with them. But since the decisions taken in the Oval Office do deal with the world beyond America’s borders, i think it does matter. In all seriousness, if the US wants both to be at the forefront of democracy AND maintain such an important international position, i think non-Americans should have some saying in the elections of an American president (fun theory, huh? 🙂 )

Sauron:
Amazing or not, North Americans, while quite aware of their origins, certainly do not consider themselves Euro-American, at least not in my experience. p
Although i’ve never been to the US and can’t say anything really meaningful, my experiences (including plenty of talks with Americans i had) tell me otherwise. The Boston-Ireland link is very obvious (no, i won’t start about IRA-funding here), as i do think ties between Italian-Americans and Italy still are.

From my prospective, many Europeans still feel the need to be the centre of the world’s attention again and that is why they appear to resent the US at times.
I don’t want to be the centre of the world’s attention. The only country i can think of longing for that position is the US. All i want for my country, and every other country in the world is that their voice is heard and taken seriously.

Phantom again
{on Saddam} Firstly, he is an evil man right NOW and you all know it.
Saddam was evil in the 1980 and earlier just as well, his treatment of the Kurds being very cruel in the late 1970s too for example. But he didn’t intervene with Western interests back then.
To come back to some people’s defense of the US by bringing up American actions in the past (most notably WW1 and WW2) – just like the US was truelly great back then, my comments on the actions of the US government deal with the CURRENT administration. Just to say it once again.

I’ll close by stating again how lucky I feel to live where I do and with the opportunities that I have.
That’s nice. But don’t think being happy about your country is something exclusive for Americans. It’s not.

I know I’m glad that I only share my looks with Europeans though. Certainly not my views.
You biggoted racist little redneck piece of ####. That’s not the general European opinion, but mine. Tattoo yourself purple if you want to distinct yourself from your ancestors. You can strike out against individuals as much as you’d like, but not against whole peoples. Unless you’re a KKK member of course.

Phantom, i am really disgusted by the way you debate here. In stead of coming with arguments, you start taking opinions of certain individuals here at this forum to be representative of all of Europe. And in stead of countering my (what i consider to be well-founded) opinion with a well-founded opinion from your side like Vortex and Sauron do, you act like the poor defenceless US of A is being criticised for no reason whatsoever by the whole evil population of that poor, underdeveloped part of the world called Europe. Think again. THe US is very active on a global scale, and is therefore of great influence to other countries. To expect the other 190-some countries of the world to just sit down and swallow it all isn’t really realistic.

Again, i am critical to a part of American foreign policy, and the way it is put. I have no grudge against the country or it’s people. If that opinion i have is cause for one of those Americans to start an unbased rant against millions of people he doesn’t know, it is ONE American i don’t like.

Phantom, you should be very, very happy for your country that we don’t think alike!

RE: Morocco invades Spain

Geforce, i didn’t see any German sheepdogs in Ceuta. But apart from that you’re quite right – and who needs dogs if you have the Spanish Foreign Legion? It’s not without reason those guys aren’t based on continental Spain (:D) as they have a rather unfriendly reputation.

RE: Morocco invades Spain

Oh, and i think the Dutch should voice their claim on Gib as well. The rock was captured by a combined Anglo-Dutch force, and the final peace treaty mentioned the Rock (excluded the area where the airport is now, that part of land was actually stolen) was to be a British-Dutch condominium. Of course, the Brits cancelled this deal when one of the next Dutch-English wars broke out (i think we had about seven of those :D).

Gib is nice though. Especially for the die-hard British: as early as 1999, prices in shops were already mentioned not only in pound sterling, but in Euros as well 😉

RE: Natural gas…

>The problem I have with the greenhouse gas arguement is that
>CO2, sunlight and water are used by plant life for
>photosynthesis. More C02 could enhance the ability of plant
>life to grow and provide a self-regulating feature.

As in any natural buffer, variations can be delt with to some extent. But there’s more to the amount of CO2 (sorry, to lazy to make the ‘2’ small now) than just plant growth. It does have a greenhouse effect, which has effect again on water evaporation (=drought)… considering the amount of CO2 we’re burning now, i doubt it can be delt with in the same level as natural CO2 fluctuations.

>Also, there are no long term historical records that prove
>CO2 has been a constant percentage of Earth’s atmosphere for
>the past few millenia.

Yes there are. They can be found in polar ice. Fluctuations have been found, which correspond with known climatic periods (both the big ice ages, and the mini-iceage around 1500). The percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere is rising at an increasing speed for some 150 years now.

>With documentation of past massive
>meteor strikes, volcanoes and ice ages, there is a good
>arguement that the Earth’s C02 level fluctuates and is not
>steady state.

It does fluctuate, but even the historically proven fluctuations had their effects. The mini-ice age around the 1500s is a given fact, and combines with a low percentage of CO2 in the earth’s atmosphere.

>Most of the “scientists” who support Koyoto are soft social
>scientists (like psychologists who want us to “feel good”)
>and not hard scientists like meteorlogists who want to see
>statistical evidence instead of unvalidated computer models.

Scientific disagreement is a common thing, but i think it’s rather childish to politicise this in such a derogatory manner. Plenty of ‘hard’ scientists do see the statistical evidence for global warning you refuse to see. Or are the decreasing glaciers in the European Alps (some of them which were there since the last Ice Age, so some 20.000 years have almost vanished) not enough to backup the fact that the global temperature is rising?

RE: metric systems shortfall

Allright then… how many pints go into a case which is 13 inch long, 2 foot wide and 1 yard long? And if you pour a fluid in there which weighs 1/3rd pounds for each cubic inch, how much does that container weigh?

Or a simple one: if you walk two-thirds of a mile, how many yards is that?

Seems to me like an impossible job in the imperial system. Metrically you can do it by heart in a matter of seconds. The great thing about the metric system is that ALL measurements are logically connected to each other, and are very easy to combine. Even weights are logical, since one kilo equals the weight of one cubic decimeter (=one litre) of water.

Oh, and a pound is not 2 kilos, it is 454 grams. Or 0.454 kilos if you like. Or the weight of 454 cubic centimetres of water.

Perhaps you don’t like the metric system because you’re not used to it. Fair enough, but that’s not a shortfall of the metric system which i consider to be perfect, I think it’s your shortfall.

RE: American Bashing!

Well, its easy to judge what you don’t understand!

Ah, Scooter… please be a bit more careful! Comments like that are just BOUND to backfire on US foreign politics… Don’t be so inviting!