"Terrorism" is a word that only the winners are allowed to use, apparently.

I mean who cares that a backwards-ass country like Palestine ...

Thank you for acknowledging that they are a country. Maybe you can convince the government of Israel to do the same.

but the problem is that their offer used words like "truce" instead of "peace" to describe what they would be signing up for.

Given what happened to Fatah for using words like "peace", I'm not sure why any other words should be used with Israel.

That is true, but does it really matter for any purpose other than assigning blame

I'm just afraid that "assigning blame" is something only Israel is allowed to do.

I wouldn't want to be the person tasked with solving this problem. It's way hard. But I do believe that pressure should be applied to the combatants a little more evenly. As you say, Hamas may not be a party that can be negotiated with, but it's pretty clear that Netanyahu most certainly cannot be negotiated with. He has said so both with words and actions. There is a right wing in Israel that is holding the whole region hostage, and the current administration does not appear willing to put them in their place, because they are the "base".

The goal of Hamas, on the other hand, is the complete destruction of the State of Israel and Jews as pe

Or so we are told by Israel.

The only thing is, the very existence of Hamas and their stance on recognizing Israel is a product of Israel's double-dealing with Fatah, and before that the PLO.

I'm convinced that the government of Israel wants this conflict to continue, because it guarantees them political power, support from the US and each time there is a flareup, there are more Palestinian houses bulldozed to make way for settlements. It's a classic expansionist/eliminationist game plan.

My entire view of the situation has changed over the past 10 years from absolute support of Israel in their struggle against their hostile neighbors to questions about Israel's unorthodox way to seek peace through expansion to horror over the Israeli concentration camps where Palestinians are held and the cage they have made of Gaza to my current inability to believe anything that comes from the Israeli government or the Zionist press. It has not been a willing or comfortable transition. I had to undergo the conversion from hasbara tourist (as a non-Jew) to someone who has seen the horror in Gaza with his own two eyes.

There were three types of law in the old Jewish custom -- ceremonial, civil, and moral.

You are citing the usual legalistic apologia regarding Bible. That the really ridiculous rules didn't apply, because God didn't realize that when he was writing the Bible it would be taken seriously two thousand years later. That certain rules in the books of law (funny word, "law"), aren't really laws because geez, God must have been kidding and anyway, crab meat is good. And we don't stone adulterers because things would have gotten kind of bloody around the Gingrich household. We are told that certain commandments are not really commandments and Christ was the original free-market capitalist and He would have been the first to load up undocumented Central American children on a bus at gunpoint to send them back into the meat grinder. In my lifetime, we've been told that God didn't want miscegenation, or civil rights, or racial integration, or gay people married, but God is OK with capital punishment and bombing brown people and greed and "Stand Your Ground". Are there any greater moral relativists than modern American Christians?

Christ Himself stopped that practice

When you say "stopped" you mean, "didn't say anything about it". There's a whole list of things he didn't say anything about, including homosexuality and abortion and women being subservient and on and on. Most of that stuff was left for that old fraud Paul, who had his own little kinks, and more than anyone else, including Christ himself, defined Christianity. Funny how the Word of God is so fungible.

More recently, of course, there are great doubts about whether Paul even existed at all. More likely he was a creation of Josephus. The Cult of Rome.

As you might know, although in the racist sectors of israel's society this view is present...

And currently running the government.

Prime Minister Netanyahu is someone who has benefited from and promoted death his entire career. And not just beginning with leading a parade which carried a mock coffin of Yitzhak Rabin, who was murdered by one of Netanyahu's followers shortly thereafter.

When Netanyahu called for generalized violence against Hamas in response to the crimes of the few who were involved in the death of those three teens, he knew exactly what he was starting. It's his goal to "cleanse" Gaza, once and for all, and he's been itching for this opportunity. It's as if the United States had responded to the assassination of President Kennedy by bombing and invading Texas.

Just go read Netanyahu's series of statements and tweets following the discovery of the deaths of the teens. Look at the timeline of his incitement of violence against Palestinians, the subsequent murder of the 15 year old Palestinian, the severe beatings of others and the burning death of a Palestinian child. And finally, his use of so-called "DIME weapons" against Palestinian civilians. Committing war crimes to stay in political power is pretty despicable.

http://www.independent.co.uk/n...

No, my concern is that you seem not to understand that in the UK, not handing over the password is a crime and so requires the higher standard of proof. Part of that is that you have to prove the defendant even possesses the key (you can't hand over what you don't have).

A secondary concern is how often courts in the U.S. and seemingly in the U.K. have employed sophistry in an attempt to lower the standards for a conviction in general. In some cases by claiming something that looks exactly like a criminal conviction in every way is somehow something else.

BTW, criminal law is SUPPOSED to be unbalanced in favor of the defendant. The consequences of jailing the innocent are worse than the sonsequences of not jailing the guilty.

Thanks! I'm getting ready to post chapter thirty in a minute. I screwed up in this post, though, I forgot I already posted the chapter where Knolls finds that Green is Destiny's dad.

Interesting persuasion tactic there. I'm convinced now that Bitcoin advocates are oversensitive clods who fart out their mouths. You could do the whole concept a favor by stitching your fingers together and your mouth shut.

You also sound awfully callous about actually kicking poor people completely out of society.

anti-government types

The IP address these changes were coming from was congressional so, no.

I'm pretty sure it can be argued that at least one house of Congress is currently being run by anti-government types, so yes.

FWIW, this is the first useful thing I've personally seen Twitter used for.

You got a problem with food tweets?

[note: the first time I typed the above, I mis-typed it as "foot tweets" which sound much more interesting]

Or they can pay an external astroturfing outfit.

Or vice versa.

So you propose a currency that will only work if you own a working smartphone that is only accepted by a small percent of online vendors? How will I buy gas and food with that?

Helicopter parents are so last year. We have drone parents now.