DukeNukeEm

Atlanta...

I must be the only person in the world who watches Bulls games and thinks Boozer is doing a decent job. If he hit more of his shots it'd obviously be a lot better but hes definitely contributing to the offense.

My body isn't ready for OT.

You could've heard a pin drop in there.

Whats that supposed to mean?

Adam Dunn is the last time I trust the mathletes and their tired bulls***.

Half? I would say its about double that. Intelligent people can be partisan hacks too.

Rosetta Stone is incredibly annoying to try and download or torrent. I've gotten close a lot of times, but it always just craps out.

http://www.oddball-mall.com/knucklertalk/index.php I hope this doesn't count as spam, but I find it really fascinating from a Freemason/Secret Society perspective. I've seen everything on the internet from 2girls1cup to horse porn images and this website takes the cake as the strangest corner of the internet I have ever seen.

I'd support new ownership for the Bears long, long before I would a new franchise.

Nobody should be too shocked about Rose's play. The guy has been in two straight playoffs and made the series a lot more competitive than they ever should have been. People say since he never won that's a lack of experience, but asking any of the great ones and most of them will say losing is so much important than winning when it comes to learning how to win a title.

They gotta go to England? That sucks.

I think I'm about as an old someone could be and still barely remember life before the internet. But to answer your question Steve, I built s*** out of Legos and ate glue. The internet has been a slight improvement I'd say.

1. 4chan.org/sp/ 2. NYTimes.com 3. Gmail 4. Battle.net 5. SoxTalk.com 6. Chicago Tribune 7. MMO-Champion 8. ArmchairAthletes.net

Pretty much this. Keep in mind when enforcing a UNSC binding resolution, the UN typically picks up the tab on the cost. Even if we fund 30% of their budget its still nice to see it spread around.

Qadaffi is, IIRC, the longest serving head of state in the world other than Fidel. Hardly an apt comparison.

Heh.

Duerson shot himself in the chest so they could study his brain. I mean, if hes willing do that, cant help but wonder if he timed this with the CBA hellfire. Either way, incredibly sad stuff.

I'm not really sure this was organized, or at least not politically, and I think that's kind of where a lot of the failure by the United States to understand what this situation stems from. The entire lens through which we've viewed the revolutions in Egypt has been economic or political. The Muslim Brotherhood has been a buzz word, the Suez Canal has been made into an issue and people are throwing around the same cliched elements of Middle Eastern politics that have been thrown around since decolonization. I mean I dont want to just come out and say this s*** is basically inconsequential, but it sort of is. The issue has always been, like it was in areas I'm much more fluent with in Eastern Europe and the former USSR, a dignity one. The contempt for the state in Egypt is not a fresh movement and its not necessarily bred out of a political desire to govern themselves. Democracy of course complements this revolution but its not the end-goal. There was an editorial by Nikolai Grozni in the NYT a day or so ago that likened the collapse of the Soviet bloc and independence of the former republics to the Egyptian revolts that I think really nailed it, and he does a much better job of articulating how this works than I'm about to do. When there's repression in a state it starts to form these alternate political and moral universes, where people are fed up with their quality of life as provided by the regime and the regimes response to it falls into a predictable pattern. At first they repress further but then work to install or amend the regime to be more friendly to the current power structure while still palatable to people who are unhappy with the current situation. Think Hungary in 1956, during Nagy's brief stint running the country after Rakosi resigned there were some sweeping reforms in the country and even demands for Hungary to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact. Of course Soviet tanks rolled in, killed half of them and put Kadar in power under a new very Soviet-friendly government. But even after 1956 Hungary became probably (other than Yugoslavia and maybe Albania) the most independent and least-communist state in Eastern Europe with a lot of reforms by Kadar. Hungarians still rejected the new party, but without the power to match the Soviets many of them simply began to drop out from society. Quality of life didn't necessarily improve in Hungary, just like it didn't in Poland after the de-collectivization of agriculture in the 50's or in Czechoslovakia after the Prague Spring, but it started eroding the states notion of a politically "guaranteed" moral universe and forming an alternate moral universe in its place. One where people actually feel like they dont need the state to feel dignified and they dont have a despot who holds them back. As time goes by more people subscribe to the alternative until the political institutions that enabled a wholly political response to what was clearly a moral problem evaporates. That's kind of what just happened in Egypt. Enough people dropped out that the idea of rejecting the government became rapidly contagious, and without an overwhelming outside influence like the Soviets willing to put it down it actually succeeded in toppling Mubarak. What's happening in Egypt is not about installing democracy or realigning the power structure in the country, its about people wanting to be treated like people. That's why its impossible for there to really be an organized political backdrop fueling the revolution. So what you have is a very prominent state reseting its trajectory, not necessarily in another direction, but just taking it off the path it was going down. Its a very exciting time for Egyptians, and something the rest of the world shouldn't fear but instead start embracing. There are a lot of people in other countries watching this and understanding that they dont have to submit themselves to the state and be continually repressed. We'll see where it goes.

Alexei or Paul Konerko. Voted Alex.

Honestly Balta, if all you have is a chart that does nothing to prove your point followed by a snide remark I'm just gonna consider this argument over. Keep on panicking though, the world is always on doom's doorstep no matter what.

You said the movement of crude through the Suez is about equal to the output of the United States. Alright, I'm guessing you remember when Hurricane Rita hit and shut down most of the refineries in Texas; nothing meaningful really came of it. Now you're saying I'm supposed to believe that delaying the flow of a similar volume of oil for at most 5 or 6 days is supposed to have some sort of noticeable impact. Gas might go up a quarter of a cent for a here and there wont be enough time for shipping costs to flow down and raise the price of consumer goods. Nobody is going to look back on this and say "Remember when the Suez Canal was closed? That's really when the wheels came off." It's basically a non-issue unless you have an obscene amount of money invested in oil, and even the people who do aren't losing their minds over it.

There is absolutely no consequence to Russia knowing this. Even if they didn't know already they probably dont care much now, they aren't the big old boogeyman anymore.

Is that oil just going to magically disappear because some outdated canal is closed for a couple of weeks or months? Boats are fine pieces of technology you know, they can traverse any type of water nowadays... not just canals! People just want to assign some arbitrary strategic important to Egypt whatever way they can. Egypt is close enough to some relatively large oil producers so out of the laziness they figure they must be able to attribute this to the global energy trade. I dont buy it, nothing will change in the unlikely event anything happens to that canal. Not a big deal.

About 5% of the world's oil. Its not that big of a deal, most of it goes to Europe and honestly the more they go to Gazprom the better.