The United States, via NATO, has underwritten European freedom for six decades. Why should that stop now? It's in the US's interest to keep Europe free and peaceful.

I'm not, at this juncture, suggesting military intervention; not directly anyways. But certainly help Ukraine through military aid defends its sovereignty and integrity seems a good idea, as well as pushing Europe for harsh sanctions.

With Russian units now making incursions outside of Crimea, I think it's only a matter of time before Europe goes along with the US plan for harsher sanctions.

I think you have it wrong. You see, these creationists...they have a book which describes exactly how the world was created. It is called the Bible and it states pretty clearly how it happened. The problem here is that this so called "evidence" contradicts the very strong evidence they have...namely, their book.

Since it contradicts their book by claiming to take billions of years, it must (by very definition) be wrong. So what you really have is the Big bang is a bad interpretation of the natural world.

Now excuse my while I go wash my hands for typing that.

Hawking radiation?

I would love to give all politicians a break...somewhere around C1 or C2.

The are a number of questions about the validity of the vote. Considering Crimea's ethnic makeup, 95% approval seems a questionable number. No international observers of any note during a referendum that carves out a chunk of a sovereign state. A sovereign state, I might add, that Russia itself guaranteed the territorial integrity of in the 1990s.

If Russia gets away with this, it will essentially mean that anywhere in Europe where there is an ethnic Russian population of any note, the country in question will be forced to either tow Moscow's line, or risk a Russian invasion to "liberate" the ethnic Russians.

Wipe out its major cities, and whatever functioning infrastructure remains, it will be heavily damaged and the Russian state will be compromised. Hitler almost managed it, but didn't have the resources to pull it off. Even with Russia's natural protections, Germany came damned close to driving the Soviet regime east of the Urals.

All these war games were played out half a century ago. In an open exchange of ICBMs, both countries, and pretty much everyone in between, gets all but wiped out. That the Russian leadership might hole up in some Siberian outpost is a given, but by the same token the Continental US is a big fucking place too, and you don't think the plans are still on the books to move the Executive, Judicial and enough for the Legislative for a quorum to some undisclosed location?

A major nuclear exchange between Russia and the US would be catastrophic for both countries, and I doubt whatever crawled out of the glowing rubble of such an exchange would much resemble the two nations that went in.

Perhaps that is what he meant about most transparent administration? You know, kind of like trying to beat the world land speed record.... oh wait thats fast...for single wheeled vehic....oh how about single wheeled electric, multi-passenger vehicles? What No record?....oh we have that so beat!

Set the bar low enough, and you barely need to step over it.

This obsession with "moral standing" is ludicrous. Do you think the British Empire had heap loads of moral standing on September 1, 1939? Do you think the US and the USSR had barrels of "moral standing" hanging around when they joined the fight against the Nazis?

Nations do shit things, sometimes for perceived benefit, or simply out of greed. If we allowed every ill actions we had done in the past hold us back, no one would ever intervene when some other nation state violated the general rules of international conduct?

Russia signed an agreement in the 1990s guaranteeing Ukraine's territorial integrity in exchange for Ukraine's nuclear stockpiles. Thus, even excluding any notions of territorial integrity that have been a part of international law since the end of WWII, Russia is in violation of its own treaty with Ukraine.

So yes, it sucks ass that the US invaded Iraq, but do you seriously want the US to sit in the corner and refuse to come out when Russia starts enlarging itself with trumped up referendums, because a decade ago it did a naughty thing?

"I'm fairly sure that Obama wouldn't have the balls to push the Red Button regardless of Putin wanting to,
or common sense.

It takes bigger balls to find actual solutions.

I like how people have suddenly for got that turning either country into a 'radioactive waste land' will throw the whole world back to the stone age. Possible even eliminating humans from the planet.

" China (and maybe India, too) would be "
eating popcorn? no. More like panicking to figure out how to survive the massive radioactive cloud.

The West didn't intervene in the Prague Spring, and they won't likely directly intervene now. Ukraine isn't worth the pain of open warfare.

Beyond that, the US has been for weeks now trying to push for vast overarching sanctions. It's the EU that lacks the backbone. For full sanctions to really work, it has to be both the US and the EU.

They absolutely can not.
The issue is will Putin use that as an excuse for expansion? The follow up question being, is he going to expand regardless?

How would Russia survive it better when it relies upon energy exports to keep its economic ship afloat? Guess what the first victim of a major economic slowdown is...

Australia also has a gifted, oh wait, it is only for sports douche's. Want to know the real reason why this is so, because they sell advertising, and the companies that sell shit get lobbyists to get the government to pay and promote sports, basically subsidising advertising to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. Face it, reality is science and engineering types don't not make good advertising tools. Often they are not pretty enough (or average enough looking according to this http://www.faceresearch.org/de...) or they are unwilling to lie about the quality of products (it's not lying it's acting being the normal bullshit coming out of athletes mouths). So it not just about sports worship, which in reality is advertising driven, it is about the advertising itself and the government subsidising it at public expense (in return of course, it's not lying it's acting, what great politicians they are, according to those self serving athletes).

Hmm, it would seem you have never heard of blood in urine, http://www.webmd.com/digestive.... Where blood can pass, so can any other infection within the body, not just urinary tract infections. This is for disaster zones, people will be injured, under extreme stress and concentrated in rescue zones subject to a full range of infectious diseases, all bodily fluids should be considered risky and need to be contained and treated. Treating just the main problem and ignoring all other problems is just plain stupid.