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You appear lost. Read the iBox.
Great post--wrong board? Oops.
Just kidding. The post could have come from either. :)
That from a stock board or a politics board? <g>
I can hardly wait to cut the grass tomorrow...
Mine's longer...
Seems to be...
I wasn't assessing responsibility, or "blame", as you call it -- merely giving you a source for factual accuracy. Being factually incorrect doesn't help you in making an argument, whatever it is. Take it for what it's worth...
AK
RE: No FEMA work force...it doesn't exist
Similar to FEMA’s funding arrangement, most of its employees are hired to perform work related to a specific, presidentially declared disaster. The majority of FEMA’s workforce is comprised of nonpermanent employees with various terms (from 120 days to 4 years), who are paid out of the DRF. As with the funding for the DRF, the number of these employees can fluctuate in response to the number and severity of disasters.7 The remainder of FEMA’s workforce is comprised of about 2,100 permanent full-time (PFT) employees, who are paid primarily out of FEMA’s nondisaster relief fund accounts. FEMA also uses contractors to administer some of its programs, but FEMA does not track data on the level of contract support it receives.
All volunteer? Gimme a break. Note the part about "contractors". I know people who work full time doing "contract" work. Heck, I've even been called. Not bad money either.
See page 11: http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d07139.pdf
A man's home is his castle, in a manor of speaking.
oooh, that hurts!
You got balls posting that.
Q. it has to be somebodies fault
A. it's never they're fault.
...the biologists were able to videotape the animal on film,...
Not too tech savvy, eh?
do it.. NOW
Runner-up in the Nike "do it" slogan contest?
It disfunctiolize's one's spelling too.
See first line of the iBox:
This board is for posts about politics and government
Reminder: Please stay on topic and be civil. Take the flaming to The Parking Lot.
Thanks,
AK
You have a Palm Pilot?
their killing us
TOS'd for violation of iHub rules.
please show me a credibal link!
repeat a meme over amd over
Just redundancy. Memes are naturally repeated.
meme
n. A unit of cultural information, such as a cultural practice or idea, that is transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another.
Ya, you got it, and it's in your cache, just like mine...poor excel...the feared red X in a box.
Can you see this?
Guess they don't like hot linking. Try this...a smaller version from another site...
Speed trap...
Nice to see everybody enjoying themselves tonight. Anybody for a beer?
off the top of my head
Losing your mind?
It's a new world for video games...
Experts: Islamic Militants Customizing Violent Video Games
Friday, May 05, 2006
WASHINGTON — The makers of combat video games have unwittingly become part of a global propaganda campaign by Islamic militants to exhort Muslim youths to take up arms against the United States, officials said on Thursday.
Tech-savvy militants from Al Qaeda and other groups have modified video war games so that U.S. troops play the role of bad guys in running gunfights against heavily armed Islamic radical heroes, Defense Department official and contractors told Congress.
The games appear on militant Web sites, where youths as young as 7 can play at being troop-killing urban guerrillas after registering with the site's sponsors.
"What we have seen is that any video game that comes out ... they'll modify it and change the game for their needs," said Dan Devlin, a Defense Department public diplomacy specialist.
Devlin spoke before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, at which contractors from San Diego-based Science Applications International Corp., or SAIC, gave lawmakers a presentation that focused on Iraq as an engine for Islamic militant propaganda from Indonesia to Turkey and Chechnya.
The sites use a variety of emotionally charged content, from images of real U.S. soldiers being hit by snipers in Iraq to video-recordings of American televangelists including Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell making disparaging remarks about Islam.
'INFIDELS CAME TO MY VILLAGE'
The underlying propaganda message, officials say, is that the United States is waging a crusade against Islam in order to control Middle Eastern oil, and that Muslims should fight to protect Islam from humiliation.
One of the latest video games modified by militants is the popular "Battlefield 2" from leading video game publisher, Electronic Arts Inc (ERTS) of Redwood City, California.
Jeff Brown, a spokesman for Electronic Arts, said enthusiasts often write software modifications, known as "mods," to video games.
"Millions of people create mods on games around the world," he said. "We have absolutely no control over them. It's like drawing a mustache on a picture."
"Battlefield 2" ordinarily shows U.S. troops engaging forces from China or a united Middle East coalition. But in a modified video trailer posted on Islamic Web sites and shown to lawmakers, the game depicts a man in Arab headdress carrying an automatic weapon into combat with U.S. invaders.
"I was just a boy when the infidels came to my village in Blackhawk helicopters," a narrator's voice said as the screen flashed between images of street-level gunfights, explosions and helicopter assaults.
Then came a recording of President George W. Bush's Sept. 16, 2001, statement: "This crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while."
It was edited to repeat the word "crusade," which Muslims often define as an attack on Islam by Christianity.
Two militant videos were also pointed out to lawmakers, including one called "Lion of Falluja," the city in Iraqi's violent Anbar province that has long been seen as a symbol of militant resistance.
Critics of the U.S. video game industry have long blamed the products for violence among American teenagers in civilian society, including high-profile shootings at public schools.
SAIC executive Eric Michael said researchers suspect Islamic militants are using video games to train recruits and condition youth to attack U.S.-led coalition forces in Iraq.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,194416,00.html
War isn't a video game.
Don't be so sure...........
Uncle Sam Wants Video Gamers
Playing Games Could Help Build Careers In The U.S. Military
ORLANDO, Feb. 8, 2005
--------------------------------------------------------------
"You can create your own world, you can lay down units anywhere you want, set any type of scenario."
Doug Whatley, military game developer
---------------------------------------------------------------
(CBS) Turns out, you parents of video-gamers have it all wrong.
Playing these games doesn't waste time, it builds careers in the U.S. military.
Which puts a "dude" side-by-side with Larry McCracken, a captain in the U.S. Navy - unlikely allies meeting at a video game conference in Orlando.
McCracken says the Navy came on board after the Army created a game called "America's Army."
As CBS News Correspondent Mark Strassmann reports, it became a runaway hit, first for recruiting and then for training.
In short, video games made better soldiers and sailors faster, safer and cheaper.
"The realism you get is the ability to keep somebody engaged and play a game for three or four hours as opposed to in a classroom, where after 15 minutes they're bored," says McCracken.
And, one thing young recruits in today's military have in common is that they've all played video games. They all talk the jargon.
"They know all the words," says gaming expert John Beck. "They can talk, 'Oh, this is like that game, and when they talk about it everybody knows, this is like Halo 2."
And talk about realistic.
One game teaches how to survive ambushes on what looks like a Baghdad street.
For some game-developers, the new target-market is the Pentagon and its war games.
And for military game developers like Doug Whatley, it means creating their own world.
"You can create your own world, you can lay down units anywhere you want, set any type of scenario," says Whatley.
For two worlds that just five years ago seldom crossed, there's a new, shared reality called simulation.
"It's been a huge shift," says McCracken. "I'm a convert. I just wish I knew how to play this game much better."
So fire away. America's national defense just may depend on it.
© MMV, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/02/08/eveningnews/main672455.shtml
So sadly true...
Evidence seized by federal agents and local investigators included "very detailed ledgers' that suggested Inglewood officers were receiving sexual favors at the businesses without paying, according to one source.
The ledgers, the source said, had the names of customers and the amounts they paid, except when the customers were police officers. In those cases, according to the source, the women entered a symbol in the ledger indicating that the customer was a police officer.
Geez, 50% off at the restaurant, doughnut shop, and dry-cleaners is the common practice here. Looks like those cops were "piggy"? <g>
New iBox.
The month is young. Some have more free time than others.
...so you wouldn't pick up a gun and go to foreign soil to defrend this country's interests?
Do you think we need to do more defrending? Or have we already lost enough frends as it is?
You're right, and it started in Clinton's rein...
Whoa Nellie, is that horse talk?
Alan Dupont: Scorched earth an insecure place
Climate change is eclipsing terror as the most likely cause of mega-death
-----------------------------------------------------------------
[from The Australian]
February 05, 2007
THE measured prose and bland title of the latest UN report on climate change belie the gravity and significance of its key message: that the earth will soon be a much hotter, drier and stormier place, and there is little doubt our way of life is the cause. This is not a naturally occurring cycle, as a dwindling band of sceptics maintains.
Of particular note is the growing belief among the world's top climate scientists that it will be virtually impossible to keep the rate of temperature increase below 2C, which is widely accepted as the threshold above which managing the risks becomes progressively more difficult and the consequences more dangerous. It is necessary to bear in mind the unprecedented rate at which the planet is heating up.
We have no experience of dealing with such rapid warming. Natural climate shifts of this magnitude typically occur over tens of millennia, not a few centuries. It is critical for governments, business and the public to understand this important difference. There is very little time to make the substantial adjustments necessary to bring down the rate of warming this century so that we can achieve climate equilibrium in the next.
Now that science has given us a better, though still imperfect, appreciation of the challenge ahead, it is time to focus on the consequences we can reasonably predict. The Stern review, published last October, shed much needed light on the economic dimension of climate change, including the cost of fixing the problem and how we might best manage the transition to a low-carbon global economy.
But there has been precious little thought about the foreign policy and security implications of climate change, which are equally profound and inseparable from the economic and environmental aspects.
Energy policy is illustrative. The domestic debate about the ramifications of global warming for Australia's future energy requirements has been far too siloed and parochial. Future policy on nuclear power and the export and processing of uranium should not be determined by environmental and economic considerations alone. We also need to think about our relations with other countries, our commitments to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the risk of proliferation.
The latter has been much exaggerated by opponents of nuclear power, but the point is we need to have a much wider debate about energy and climate change policy that includes, rather than ignores, foreign policy and national security.
There are other, more pressing reasons for taking a holistic approach. Climate change is fast emerging as the security issue of the 21st century, overshadowing terrorism and even the spread of weapons of mass destruction as the threat most likely to cause mega-death and contribute to state failure, forced population movements, food and water scarcity and the spread of infectious diseases.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change confirms and adds greater certainty to what climate scientists have long predicted: that extreme weather events are set to increase in frequency and intensity. Rising seas, caused by thermal expansion and melting ice, will inundate many low-lying coastal areas, threatening cities and productive agricultural land. Some small Pacific islands will become uninhabitable but no country will be unaffected, as Hurricane Katrina demonstrated when it devastated New Orleans 18 months ago. Images of the US 82nd Airborne Division patrolling the deserted streets of the city seemed like surreal scenes from a B-grade Hollywood movie at the time, but they are a portent of the future.
Indeed, things could be a great deal worse if some of the more extreme climate forecasts come to pass, such as a further acceleration of glacial and icecap melt and temperature rises above 3C. Although the balance of probabilities suggests that the more manageable mid-range predictions of the IPCC will be borne out, the worst-case scenarios cannot be dismissed, given the lack of serious global action to date and the IPCC's reputation for conservative judgments. Already, events on the ground are calling into question some of these judgments. While the IPCC forecasts that the north polar icecap is likely to melt by the end of this century, many leading scientists believe this will occur much earlier, perhaps as early as 2040 and certainly by 2060. As greenhouse gases trapped beneath the frozen tundra are released and deforestation and land clearing continue unabated, the resultant carbon imbalance will exacerbate the warming trend, perhaps more than the IPCC allows.
Over time, the climate change issue will inexorably move to the centre of the foreign policy and national security concerns of all states. Only last month the European Union's commissioner for external affairs Benita Ferrero-Waldner revealed that her talks with Chinese leaders had focused on climate change and that efforts to contain greenhouse gases have already become a centrepiece of the EU's external policy.
Unless carefully handled, tensions between the developed and developing worlds over responsibility for a deteriorating climate, already in evidence, may escalate. Climate change will also raise anxieties about food and energy, and increase the likelihood of destabilising competition for scarce resources that could be a particular problem for our region because of Asia's high levels of energy dependence and growing demand for food and water.
Supply of key agricultural products such as wheat, rice and corn is set to drop by one-third in China because of forecast temperature rises.
Although these sobering statistics should be a wake-up call for action, complacency should not be replaced by alarmism or defeatism.
If climate change is human-induced, then the solutions can and must be found within our collective resources and wisdom.
As a first step, the Government needs to take a more comprehensive approach by developing a national strategy on climate change that considers all the consequences of a rapidly warming planet. For this is an issue that transcends the environment and goes to the heart of national and international security.
Alan Dupont is director of the Centre for International Security Studies at the University of Sydney. He is co-author of a Lowy report titled Warming Up the Planet: Climate Change and Security (June 2006).
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21169646-601,00.html
Didn't you ever go to the zoo and poke sticks at the monkeys, just to liven things up for a few minutes??
Those the kids that grow up to be corrections officers?
This crap happens on both sides of the isle.
Spoken like a true Hawai'ian.
Seal Level is rising, levies can't help....