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Welcome a-board.

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Islam doesn't require the wholesale destruction of that portion of the body portrayed in other post, a simple removal of some foreskin will suffice. If done as a child the pain is apparently quickly forgotten, unless of course there's a mishap during the procedure.

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Originally posted by lithos:

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Originally posted by Gromit:
For centuries they've been a great force for evil in the world, they discourage people from thinking for themselves, and they prey upon the unsophisticated, the uneducated and the immature.

Completely unlike lawyers, of course.

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Only two men have headed the IAEA since 1981 – Hans Blix and Mohamed El Baradei, and neither of them is a favourite of the Bush White House.

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Originally posted by striv:
11 civilians and 4 firemen so far in Peloponniso.

179 fires burning across Greece

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Originally posted by Gromit:
I'm intolerant of all religions, quite honestly.

For centuries they've been a great force for evil in the world, they discourage people from thinking for themselves, and they prey upon the unsophisticated, the uneducated and the immature.

And they get tax breaks for doing it.

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Operation Iraqi Freedom, it turns out, was never a war against Saddam ­Hussein's Iraq. It was an invasion of the federal budget, and no occupying force in history has ever been this efficient. George W. Bush's war in the Mesopotamian desert was an experiment of sorts, a crude first take at his vision of a fully privatized American government. In Iraq the lines between essential government services and for-profit enterprises have been blurred to the point of absurdity -- to the point where wounded soldiers have to pay retail prices for fresh underwear, where modern-day chattel are imported from the Third World at slave wages to peel the potatoes we once assigned to grunts in KP, where private companies are guaranteed huge profits no matter how badly they fuck things up.

And just maybe, reviewing this appalling history of invoicing orgies and million-dollar boondoggles, it's not so far-fetched to think that this is the way someone up there would like things run all over -- not just in Iraq but in Iowa, too, with the state police working for Corrections Corporation of America, and DHL with the contract to deliver every Christmas card. And why not? What the Bush administration has created in Iraq is a sort of paradise of perverted capitalism, where revenues are forcibly extracted from the customer by the state, and obscene profits are handed out not by the market but by an unaccountable government bureauc­racy. This is the triumphant culmination of two centuries of flawed white-people thinking, a preposterous mix of authoritarian socialism and laissez-faire profit­eering, with all the worst aspects of both ideologies rolled up into one pointless, supremely idiotic military adventure -- American men and women dying by the thousands, so that Karl Marx and Adam Smith can blow each other in a Middle Eastern glory hole.

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According to the most reliable ­estimates, we have doled out more than $500 billion for the war, as well as $44 billion for the Iraqi reconstruction effort. And what did America's contractors give us for that money? They built big steaming shit piles, set brand-new trucks on fire, drove back and forth across the desert for no reason at all and dumped bags of nails in ditches. For the most part, nobody at home cared, because war on some level is always a waste. But what happened in Iraq went beyond inefficiency, beyond fraud even. This was about the business of government being corrupted by the profit motive to such an extraordinary degree that now we all have to wonder how we will ever be able to depend on the state to do its job in the future.