It's why I've called for a return of all our troops around the world.(except for Iraq) We do not have the will to win, so why bother trying? Let the Koreas duke it out, let Israel conquer the Mideast, and let the Russians take over the Balkans again. It's not our business, and I'm more than happy to let the little brown peeps fend for themselves, while we take care of our own business.

The benefits of such a policy are profound: No more casualties, save enough to pay off all debt, have the love of the rest of the world for leaving them alone. I'm all for it.

How many casualties per month, say in Korea, on average?

Since the cessation of hostilities? How many casualties per year?

In Germany?

If you are going to play stupid rhetorical games, I can suggest some other websites for you to haunt. And take "eats chutes and leaves" with you.

This is offtrack (well not entirely, one military analyst is quoted), but I just can't resist. Time is completely schizophrenic in this one. Here's the title of a new story:

Is it Time to Invade Burma?

But, they are not talking about overthrowing the junta. The underlying thesis is:

Some observers, including former USAID director Andrew Natsios, have called on the US to unilaterally begin air drops to the Burmese people regardless of what the junta says.

To me, that is only marginally different than the private relief efforts that individual citizens undertook when our government failed to act to help the people of New Orleans after Katrina and is actually an action I advocated last night when discussing the situation with someone.

Not content to leave it at that, however, the article ends with this little gem:

As the response to the 2004 tsunami proved, the world's capacity for mercy is limitless. But we still haven't figured out when to give war a chance.

I can't decide whether the entire article is satire or if the title and closing sentences were written by a different person than the one who wrote the body. What am I missing here? (And yes, I got the dig throughout where it is "Burma" and not "Myanmar".) Maybe Paul Dirks can translate from Timespeak for us.

Link: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1739053,00.html

The Earth's temperature may stay roughly the same for a decade, as natural climate cycles enter a cooling phase, scientists have predicted.

A new computer model developed by German researchers, reported in the journal Nature, suggests the cooling will counter greenhouse warming.

However, temperatures will again be rising quickly by about 2020, they say.

Other climate scientists have welcomed the research, saying it may help societies plan better for the future.

See how modelled temperatures may develop

The key to the new prediction is the natural cycle of ocean temperatures called the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), which is closely related to the warm currents that bring heat from the tropics to the shores of Europe.

The cause of the oscillation is not well understood, but the cycle appears to come round about every 60 to 70 years.

Imagine the payoff of knowing with some certainty what the next 10 years hold in terms of temperature and precipitation

Professor Michael Schlesinger

It may partly explain why temperatures rose in the early years of the last century before beginning to cool in the 1940s.

"One message from our study is that in the short term, you can see changes in the global mean temperature that you might not expect given the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)," said Noel Keenlyside from the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at Kiel University.

His group's projection diverges from other computer models only for about 15-20 years; after that, the curves come back together and temperatures rise.

Is Scooter lazy or illiterate? You decide.

Thank you Glenn this is an interesting read..

How many casualties per month, say in Korea, on average?

Since the cessation of hostilities? How many casualties per year?

In Germany?

American or native/civilian?

Don't forget rapes, Scoot!

Even funnier, the first I heard of that was when the French started speculating about it. Maybe the French will come back in fashion among the neocons.

--- apologies to everyone else is the number of following posts seems excessive, there's just too much good discussion going on in here and I'm trying to keep track and engaged ... ---

Thanks for bringing up the point about this being part of a much larger thing. To me, there are multiple big-picture dangers converging ... and I'm sure that compared to reality, the view that seems to me expansive is hopelessly myopic.

You mentioned the creeping (now barrelling) militarism. I wrote an essay about this back in 2000, when it was already a brow-furrower. I got it wrong, then, because I thought that the 'inputs' then (cultural ones like veneration of 'the Greatest Generation, usually only narrowly for WWII; high-special effects-budget movies that made a videogame out of combat --- including harrowingly 'realistic' movies like 'Saving Private Ryan' or 'Pearl Harbor'; the videogames themselves, etc plus ideological ones like 'liberal interventionism', nationbuilding, etc) would combine with demographics to produce a public desire to seek out a new 'generational challenge' through warfare. The essay's point (aside from calling out the danger) was to argue for another more constructive outlet like national service, expansion of VISTA/Americorps, a Green Manhattan Project, or something similar to soak up those energies. It makes me want to cry, thinking back to those halcyon days when the cultural trend was still just a ripple ...

Another component is a 'negative space' of institutional gaps created by decades of neglect in essential services (mostly publicly provided), oversight of industry, civic education, and so forth ... all of which seem to be mutually reinforcing so that, e.g. the media, suffering under harsh and unregulated economic conditions and rising professional expectations in the ranks, and poor decisions by management, ceases to exercise the functions we expect of them. (To say nothing of various resulting govt failures)

Finally, we have the culmination of a political and ideological movement (i.e. merging of many movements), decades old now and composed of many parts, with a very long view of their objectives, that skillfully knits together a range of fringe interests to game the system for their own benefit and the accumulation of their own power. They take advantage of the gaps and the cultural trends, exacerbating them along the way.

Or, um, did you mean something else? :>