Aside from all the rest, Friedman is jaw-droppingly wrong. After the Israelis had left Lebanon, although the Lebanese civilians were in anguish, and had experienced considerable pain, and massive collateral damage to their infrastructure, they did not in fact turn on Hezbullah, they did not control Hezbullah. On the contrary, Hezbullah entered the mainstream of Lebanese politics for the first time, and grabbed up a rather larger share of power than they had had previously.

Which was precisely the reason the attacks on Israel stopped.

In fact, Israel has only made progress towards peace when it has lost, or at anyrate its enemies have gained increased status-- the peace with Egypt was only possible after the Yom Kippur war, peace with the PLO was only possible after the Intefada, peace with Jordan after the 2nd Intefada, etc.

I mean Friedman is a buffoon, and getting more and more so every year, but you don't see him actually being as plainly and stupidly wrong, in addition to being vile, as this time around. Coming up with a clever, apparently inside-knowledge phrase like the morning after the morning after business, does not in fact make you right, it makes you pompous, in addition to being an idiot.

Well, after all the years of playing and coaching, I have to say that football is not the worst for injuries, and that in particular I have found head injuries to be fairly rare. Joint injuries is where football rules I suppose.

The worst injuries I have seen were in hockey, rugby, and basketball (the former has weapons and high speed projectiles; the latter two have essentially no protective equipment). The worst head injuries I have seen were in baseball, when some kid catches a beanball or a bat in the head.

Then there are the "Extreme" versions of biking, boarding, etc. where really truly horrible things can happen to you.

But really, you can get seriously hurt playing just about any sport-- I had a friend horribly throw his back out bowling, its been years and he still has a lot of trouble.

:Whether or not to play contact sports, especially after having sustained one or more concussions, isn't an easy decision. There are no right answers. In the end, it boils down to athletes using their heads off the field to determine what using their heads on the field might cost them."

Nice wishy-washy summing up in good journalistic style ending paragraph there. Apply some clever parallelism in your prose, and hey, its a good story, right? God forbid that Mr. Burton should actually have an expressed point of view.

These are 15 to 17 year old males, for the most part, learning discipline and getting an outlet for their testosterone fueled aggression, for the first time in their lives. Football saved my life, probably; I am sure boxing and snowboarding have saved others' lives. How do you epidemiologically measure that outcome?

No, lets mollycoddle our young men and continue to live in fear; heck, it would probably be a better world if we castrated them all at puberty. God forbid that they engage in unsafe activities.

I just love that phrase!

Shitter's idea has captivated me. But it can be improved upon. Instead of returning rocket for rocket, I mean that is kinda random and might not actually kill anybody, and besides, for it to work you need to see it on tv, and anyway rockets cost money, what Israel should do is the following:

Round up several hundred Gazan civilians at random, being sure to include women and children. Doesn't really matter who, any will do, they are just Ay-rabs after all. Every time Hamas launches a rocket, just kill a few of them on live tv-- Isarel could pick whatever ratio seems best to teach those Hamas children a lesson. It would be cheap too, you wouldn't have to use any US technology, just a knife or something (I understand that approved method used by barbarians was to swing a child by its feet to smash its head against a wall-- cheap and effective).

So you know, each rocket, 10 random civilians killed, on TV (10 for one was the approved Nazi number, why not use it here since it worked so well before). That would solve Israel's problems in a hurry, you betcha! And the ratings would be tremendous, you could actually make money with it, sort of the ultimate Reality TV.

And of course, it would provide excellent "moral clarity."

Z you troll, you are now picking on one of my countries. You dolt, at least Canadians have a national anthem that says nothing about war or violence, and can actually be sung by normal human beings. And yes, we do still stand on guard.

That, and we are really really big. Its not what you do with it that counts, after all, it is how big you are. And we are really really really big, it drags on the ground when we try and walk is how big we are. (Fawking Russians think they are bigger, hah, what they have in time zones we make up for in having almost all the fresh water on the planet: FU Putin, hah hah hah).

After all, you could basically fit Israel in between Regina and Moose Jaw, which by our reckoning is basically the distance between an outhouse and the garage; and Gaza itself is about the size and population of Calgary, only with less traffic congestion and better weather.

I have emailed you a screenshot. Your site basically works (though with some odd resolution problems) on IE, but various Firefox configurations have trouble.

Cheers

Still doing some research, different machines, different browsers, etc. So far the results vary a bit, but Firefox on XP pretty consistently delivers a mess. Mind you, I haven't gone in naked yet (no ad & flash blockers, no Vidalia, etc.)