If

[billcoe]

You're wrong, we completed our objectives, whether you agree with them or not.

 

I suspect that once they sit down after the fact - do the math and divide what we spent into what we got, they'll realize that we f*ing overpaid X3 the going rate. In the end, we got off lucky in terms of American lives, not so much Iraqi life's. If one thinks regime change was a goal, a single Tomahawk missile to a Hussein family reunion would have been significantly more cost effective and the end game would have been very similar with much less innocent life and American treasure and world goodwill wasted. We could have sat back, let the international community work on them, and had the manpower, money and hardware to deal with the real threat just next door, a nuclear armed Iran.

 

What was our opportunity cost? Hard to calculate. Fortunately, jb has his oil to refuel his SUV now. Little pricey though.

 

Cost and justification are a separate issue.

 

I can split those separately:

 

Cost: near bankruptcy for the country and a huge debt.

 

Justification: made up lies to get in: even more loss of trust in our elected leaders.

 

Outrageous costs and minimal justification. Mostly we alienated the entire international community by our complete disregard for the protocols they believed we should have followed. In doing so, we have made the world a more unsafe place going forward. We got lucky, so far, but it ain't over till it's over and it ain't over yet. We have not completed our objectives. It's not over.

[JosephH]

Mostly we alienated the entire international community by our complete disregard for the protocols they believed we should have followed.

I don't think it was so much that they believed we should have followed those protocols so much as we tried and executed Japanese and Nazi officers and politicians for the same behaviors and told the world we expected them not to not disregard those protocols.

 

Proud. Good to know I served to protect the freedom of the executive to behave in the same manner as people the United States convicted and executed as war criminals.

[Serenity]

I'm getting dizzy...from all the gayness...

[billcoe]

I'm getting dizzy...from all the gayness...

Very interesting, it's true that gays who are out seem much happier than straights or closets, so congrats on coming out Mike. In either case I'm not asking and I'm not telling.

 

What I'd like to see is my country pissing significantly less money down the toilet both in general and especially for shit like this. If we have to then we have to, but we didn't have to in this case and we borrowed the $ from the Chinese to do it. At the end of the day, if our economy goes toast from paying for bullshit military expenditures like this: we won't have the $ or the credit tomorrow for the next war where we might be in desparete need for it.

[Lucky Larry]

y'all are pining for pyscho-gramps and dingbat aren't ya?

sweet, I'm going to try and play that role--what a minute--I am that role

[Lucky Larry]

this is interesting stuff Bill, the angle to have assassins/tomahawks take out the cancer with a surgical strike is good argument; however, the USA does not condom surgical assassins-- It's morally/ethically wrong. Whereas killing off the locals, sacrificing the enlisted, mutilating people and economies, invading countries (blah blah) seems to be alright with pro-somethings. hooray democracy. I love it when people say don't complain if you don't vote, or you get what you vote for--wah wah. discrimination is alive and well--if your old, ugly, poor health. profits keep soaring and management complains about labor costs eating up all the profits. OK--all the usual rants. the technology has changed peoples lives but not the greed. it's great to hear how people talk about how great this country is, it probably is 'if' you can take advantage of it--I have. time and again i hear from people how work place politics keeps them from doing their jobs, and how the least qualified advance-I have seen it myself, people that can't read get to be supervisor--strange times. surplus of bodies, disposable bodies, sad times. btw this admin or that admin--it's all a dog and phooey show. left , middle, right all blow the big dick. gawd save the queen.closed minded people that hide behind gay and * language blow too, it's not funny. although i wouldn't say it to their faces--i guess i have to blow myself now. hee haw

[ivan]

the enter key is your friend larry maybe the space bar too?

[JosephH]

I'm getting dizzy...from all the gayness...

Well, that doesn't surprise me you being a republican - honestly I don't know how you tell a straight republican from a gay or drug addicted one, they all sound the same.

 

And true, I must admit, once you flush those troublesome, gay Nuremberg trials from your consciousness life is just so much simpler and serene.

 

Where were you in '42?

I was somewhere in Peru.

Where were you in '44?

I was nowhere near the war!

Obviously no reason why our national morality shouldn't be as bankrupt as our economy. War crimes, crimes against humanity - minor irritants! And hell, aren't we all just a little Serbic when it comes right down to it and we're trying to get things done? God knows, with all our modern technology and guys like Johnny Yoo on our side we damn well ought to be able to come up with a stain-proof flag.

 

 

[ZimZam]

In short, we spent two trillion dollars to aid and abet Iran and China's interests in the region in ways they themselves could only have dreamed of. Invading Iraq was the very definition of insanity in terms of attempting to use that action to restore and reassert America's superpower status.

 

I can't agree more. Saddam was contained. The real war was two doors to the east, and the gov't. abandoned it, and now it's way out of hand. Not that Glenbeckistan was winnable either. Hope y'all like wonton soup, cause your children will be slurping down that instead of Obama's kool-aid. Re-read the list JH posted up. Al-Qaeda not withstanding, China is the country that is on the verge of fucking shit up. xie xie nie.

[Lucky Larry]

the enter key is your friend larry maybe the space bar too?

enter? space? final frontier?

[tvashtarkatena]

In short, we spent two trillion dollars to aid and abet Iran and China's interests in the region in ways they themselves could only have dreamed of. Invading Iraq was the very definition of insanity in terms of attempting to use that action to restore and reassert America's superpower status.

 

I can't agree more. Saddam was contained. The real war was two doors to the east, and the gov't. abandoned it, and now it's way out of hand. Not that Glenbeckistan was winnable either. Hope y'all like wonton soup, cause your children will be slurping down that instead of Obama's kool-aid. Re-read the list JH posted up. Al-Qaeda not withstanding, China is the country that is on the verge of fucking shit up. xie xie nie.

 

We let a few disco-going, flight-simulator playing Arabs cut off our balls and gut our national character on 911. They won, hands down.

 

Our 'librul', enlightened society is what separates us from the animals out there. It is, or was, or maybe never was, the ONLY thing that separated us from the animals. It's what makes us truly free.

 

To those anti-librul, anti-intellectual nutjobs out there: Islamophobes ("It's not a race, dood!", homophobes, librulphobes, negro-president-phobes, fill-in-the-blank phobes out there, whose political agenda is essentially a (stupid) 9 year old's temper tantrum: Tens of millions of fundies, both at home and abroad, are cheering you on. Let's burn this shit down to the lowest common denominator!

[JosephH]

Trump and Palin will solve the Mideast problem in 2013 just as soon as she figures out where it is and he figures out how to add gambling and drinking exemptions to the koran.

[tvashtarkatena]

Aasif Mandvi, during his recent Bill o' Rights appearance, celebrated the burning of the Koran; "Sales are BOOMING this year!"

 

Remember, its not racist...cuz its a religion!

[tvashtarkatena]

His response to a the talk show idiot who claimed that 30% of all Muslims were terrorists:

 

"That's 600 MILLION terrorists...this should be a cake walk!"

[tvashtarkatena]

It's too bad such humor goes right over the heads of fully half of our not-terribly-bright population.

[Doug]

What percentage of terrorists are muslim?

[tvashtarkatena]

Hard to say, cuz the term 'terrorist' is damn near as watered down as 'hero', its siamese twin. Murka's conservatives sure know how to over-inflate a word to make the crushing boredom of their BargainShoppingTopian dream seem more interesting.

[Doug]

"Support the Troops"!!!!

[ZimZam]

Further cement

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101118/ap_on_re_eu/nobel_peace_prize

[ivan]

since when did the scandanavians need to kiss china's ass?

 

i'd be more than happy to accept the check on homeboys behalf

[ZimZam]

since when did the scandanavians need to kiss china's ass?

since they came in at #2. the sleeping tiger awakes. this is the most significant one of the pack.

 

 

The rise of China as an economic and political juggernaut has become a familiar refrain, but now there's another area in which the Chinese are suddenly emerging as a world power: education.

 

In the latest Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) comparative survey of the academic performance of 15-year-olds around the world — an authoritative study released every three years — Chinese teenagers from Shanghai far outscored their international peers in all three subject matters that were tested last year: reading, math and science.

 

In reading, the main focus of the PISA survey, more than 19% of the Shanghai students attained the top two grades, almost double the proportion in the U.S. and nearly three times the average of major developed countries. At the bottom end, just over 4% of the Shanghai students failed to make the grade that is considered the baseline for reading literacy. Elsewhere, on average, four times as many students struggled below that level.

 

This is the first time that China has participated in the PISA tests, and the results are especially stunning because they are so unexpected; only a generation ago, the Chinese school system was ravaged by the Cultural Revolution. But as the tests showed, education in China has been spectacularly rebuilt as a modern, high-performance and egalitarian system, at least in some cities.

 

Even Finland and Korea, the two countries that in recent years have been at the pinnacle of international education, were left in the dust with average scores that were considerably behind those of the Shanghai teenagers. And the stunning performance was confirmed by the results of Chinese students in Hong Kong, who came second in math and science and ranked fourth in reading.

 

Some nations that have put in place school reforms in the past decade, including Germany and Poland, did show improvement in the survey. But the U.S. and France, among others, had at best mediocre results that were lower than their reading scores in 2000, the first year of the PISA survey. Conducted by the Paris-based Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the PISA study tested teenagers in 34 OECD nationals and 31 others in 2009.

 

Even without the startling Chinese scores, the latest findings upend some traditional notions about education and should give pause for thought to policy makers everywhere. One surprise is the suggestion that there's little difference in the performance of students from private schools and those from public schools, once socioeconomic differences have been factored out. Another is that paying teachers well is a more effective tool for improving school performance than small class sizes. The survey also raises doubts about the overall effectiveness of aggressive competition between schools. It found that this could trap the most disadvantaged students in the least successful schools, thereby exacerbating social inequality and negatively impacting a nation's overall performance.

 

When it comes to reading skills, rather more predictably, the survey confirmed that girls almost everywhere read significantly better than boys, unlike in math and science, where the tendency is reversed. It also demonstrated conclusively that adolescents who enjoy reading and curl up with a novel for 30 minutes a day score better than those who don't, or who only read comic books.

 

But the big revelation was the spectacular performance of Asian nations, especially those adolescents from China whose reading comprehension was tested. Four of the top five reading performers in the survey are Asian, with Singapore and Korea joining Shanghai and Hong Kong at the head of the class.

 

Among non-Asian countries, only Finland kept up at the very top, although Canada, New Zealand, Australia and the Netherlands were not far behind. Japan also ranked in the top 10.

 

In mathematics, the Chinese results were just as spectacular as in reading: more than one in four of the Shanghai 15-year-olds showed themselves able to conceptualize, generalize and creatively use information, including modelling complex problems, compared with just 3% of students in the OECD area. (Comment on this story.)

 

Two Chinese cities, of course, don't constitute the academic performance of an entire nation of more than one billion people. But in a policy-implications brief for Arne Duncan, the U.S. Education Secretary, the OECD tried to explain why Shanghai and Hong Kong had such high-performing schools.

 

Among the lessons to be learned was that authorities in both cities abandoned their focus on educating a small elite, and instead worked to construct a more inclusive system. They also significantly increased teacher pay and training, reducing the emphasis on rote learning and focusing classroom activities on problem solving. In Shanghai, now a pioneer of educational reform, "there has been a sea-change in pedagogy," the OECD said. It pointed out that one new slogan used in classrooms today is: "To every question there should be more than a single answer."

 

"The stunning success of Shanghai-China, which tops every league table in this assessment by a clear margin, shows what can be achieved with moderate economic resources and in a diverse social context," said OECD secretary-general Angel Gurria in the report. The big question now is whether the Shanghai and Hong Kong results can be repeated across China as it emerges as a superpower.

 

 

 

Edited December 7, 2010 by ZimZam

[ivan]

since when did the scandanavians need to kiss china's ass?

since they came in at #2. the sleeping tiger awakes. this is the most significant one of the pack.

 

 

The rise of China as an economic and political juggernaut has become a familiar refrain, but now there's another area in which the Chinese are suddenly emerging as a world power: education.

 

In the latest Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) comparative survey of the academic performance of 15-year-olds around the world an authoritative study released every three years Chinese teenagers from Shanghai far outscored their international peers in all three subject matters that were tested last year: reading, math and science.

 

In reading, the main focus of the PISA survey, more than 19% of the Shanghai students attained the top two grades, almost double the proportion in the U.S. and nearly three times the average of major developed countries. At the bottom end, just over 4% of the Shanghai students failed to make the grade that is considered the baseline for reading literacy. Elsewhere, on average, four times as many students struggled below that level.

 

This is the first time that China has participated in the PISA tests, and the results are especially stunning because they are so unexpected; only a generation ago, the Chinese school system was ravaged by the Cultural Revolution. But as the tests showed, education in China has been spectacularly rebuilt as a modern, high-performance and egalitarian system, at least in some cities.

 

Even Finland and Korea, the two countries that in recent years have been at the pinnacle of international education, were left in the dust with average scores that were considerably behind those of the Shanghai teenagers. And the stunning performance was confirmed by the results of Chinese students in Hong Kong, who came second in math and science and ranked fourth in reading.

 

Some nations that have put in place school reforms in the past decade, including Germany and Poland, did show improvement in the survey. But the U.S. and France, among others, had at best mediocre results that were lower than their reading scores in 2000, the first year of the PISA survey. Conducted by the Paris-based Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the PISA study tested teenagers in 34 OECD nationals and 31 others in 2009.

 

Even without the startling Chinese scores, the latest findings upend some traditional notions about education and should give pause for thought to policy makers everywhere. One surprise is the suggestion that there's little difference in the performance of students from private schools and those from public schools, once socioeconomic differences have been factored out. Another is that paying teachers well is a more effective tool for improving school performance than small class sizes. The survey also raises doubts about the overall effectiveness of aggressive competition between schools. It found that this could trap the most disadvantaged students in the least successful schools, thereby exacerbating social inequality and negatively impacting a nation's overall performance.

 

When it comes to reading skills, rather more predictably, the survey confirmed that girls almost everywhere read significantly better than boys, unlike in math and science, where the tendency is reversed. It also demonstrated conclusively that adolescents who enjoy reading and curl up with a novel for 30 minutes a day score better than those who don't, or who only read comic books.

 

But the big revelation was the spectacular performance of Asian nations, especially those adolescents from China whose reading comprehension was tested. Four of the top five reading performers in the survey are Asian, with Singapore and Korea joining Shanghai and Hong Kong at the head of the class.

 

Among non-Asian countries, only Finland kept up at the very top, although Canada, New Zealand, Australia and the Netherlands were not far behind. Japan also ranked in the top 10.

 

In mathematics, the Chinese results were just as spectacular as in reading: more than one in four of the Shanghai 15-year-olds showed themselves able to conceptualize, generalize and creatively use information, including modelling complex problems, compared with just 3% of students in the OECD area. (Comment on this story.)

 

Two Chinese cities, of course, don't constitute the academic performance of an entire nation of more than one billion people. But in a policy-implications brief for Arne Duncan, the U.S. Education Secretary, the OECD tried to explain why Shanghai and Hong Kong had such high-performing schools.

 

Among the lessons to be learned was that authorities in both cities abandoned their focus on educating a small elite, and instead worked to construct a more inclusive system. They also significantly increased teacher pay and training, reducing the emphasis on rote learning and focusing classroom activities on problem solving. In Shanghai, now a pioneer of educational reform, "there has been a sea-change in pedagogy," the OECD said. It pointed out that one new slogan used in classrooms today is: "To every question there should be more than a single answer."

 

"The stunning success of Shanghai-China, which tops every league table in this assessment by a clear margin, shows what can be achieved with moderate economic resources and in a diverse social context," said OECD secretary-general Angel Gurria in the report. The big question now is whether the Shanghai and Hong Kong results can be repeated across China as it emerges as a superpower.

an informative article for sure, but doesn't really answer the question - sure, the chinamen are smart and industrious and have a big old part to play in the world, but so what? what's china going to do to sweden if they don't (didn't? have the nobels actually been handed already?) kowtow on the peace prize ceremony?

[tvashtarkatena]

They're gonna take that big old standing army and...and...

[ivan]

...take'em to the golden dragon lunch buffet and bankrupt that motherfucker!

[tvashtarkatena]

Flood Swedish roads with Chinese drivers.

 

GAME OVER.