Yeah, here's a bbc article about the same thing, with before/after pictures:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4041321.stm





Quite the change...

Now I'm convinced that no one's ever going to convince you of anything.

So be it. I might as well try to translate James Joyce for you, Mandrake.

But this is going to be a piece of cake for me, because the US economy may collapse a lot sooner than even I expect. Within the year. You'll see. Of course some Pollyana like you actually believes the US economy is in great shape, which makes YOU look like the inhabitant of some chocolate-coated fantasy world. And you don't seem to understand the economic conditions that existed in Germany in the 1920s, so how can I explain the similarities?

BTW: In case you forgot, Mr Short-Term Memory, you posted a message to JMP about that Arnie thread being closed. And you defended his decision to close to thread. End of story. Like I said, JMP was an asshole and you all sucked up to him.

JMP, it does look like you're applying the rules very selectively. Look, that thread was a bunch of feces, I agree, but as long as we can reply to it and pooint out just how much of a wanker wertham is, I don't think there's any harm in it.

Changing the title to make it more descriptive, would've solved the problem more effectively, IMO.

I went back and looked up what the hell you're talking about: http://boxofficemojo.com/forums/viewtopic.htm?t=44458



JMP subsequently re-opened the thread.

Too little too late. I was long gone by then,

And who the fuck is he to judge what I say... or you to decide what the thread should be called? What incredible arrogance. It was a perfect title, because it was all about Arnie's lies to the convention. But I guess revisionists stick up for one another, and you conservatives must defend your own, right or wrong.

And read it again. You're all like, "Yassa, Massa Jim. You was right to do what you done." And then you get the personal attack in there for good measure, just to show that fatuous straw boss who never could string more a few words of gibbersish together that you were his fawning sycophant. Really pathetic brown-nosing there, K.

And why even get involved in the first place? As soon as he locked the thread I quit BOM anyway, because ALL of the mods there were idiots, so it was diificult to get a good discussion going. That's another way of me saying: The next time I want your "help" I'll ASK for it.

NOTE TO SELF: Is this Groundhog Day?

The next time I need YOUR input on what and how to post, I'll ask you. If you don't like my posts, don't read them, but don't accuse me of something I didn't do and expect me to let it slide.

If it pertains to a thread I started, and you think it's "shitty" anyway, why would you even bother to waste your time? As someone who's been reading your posts for a long time, I can say with some expertise that THAT cheap shot of yours was not one of your finest moments. Some people knew I was leaving anyway, so why flog a dead horse?

To be accurate: I DIDN'T go back and check that thread in detail, but I DO remember how much it bugged me when everybody decided to play Pile On the Rabbit. Clearly, in your post, you are supporting JMP's opinion that the thread is crap, although you didn't say anything about locking it. (I don't know if the thread was deleted or not.) So... yes, you did take his side in that.

You thought the thread should be EDITED. I thought you were supposed to be a libertarian?
That's called censorship, in case you forgot.

It didn't surprise me to see James Matrix Asshole act like a jerk, because he IS a jerk; but I expected better of you. I thought YOU were your own man.

The mods at BOM were deleting my posts and closing my threads because they didn't like my "liberal" agenda. (In case you didn't notice it, Sean's mods all toed the line for him, so what was the point in bitching about any of their decisions. They were all trying very hard to get a bunch of us "old-timers" to quit, in case you didn't notice.)

Oh, and BTW: If you ask me, it looks pretty obvious that someone IS messing with the health of the Ukrainian opposition leader. Now why do you suppose they would do that?

Obviously, you don't gun down your political enemies in the streets anymore. There are more sophisticated methods to destroy them.

And their parliament appears to have decided that fraud was involved, which maked this a conspiracy, like I said before. It was "bad" counting, it was deliberate falsification of results.

This would only qualify as a conspiracy if we didn't realize what was going on. What happened in Ukraine was a blatant attempt by the Yanukovich people to usurp power. They didn't even try to hide anything.

Parliament, the Supreme Rada, does not have the authority to overturn the election results, which, according to the government, made Prime Minister Viktor F. Yanukovich the country's next president. But the vote - even the debate itself - signaled the swelling dissatisfaction over an election marred by accusations of wholesale fraud.

Parliament's action is the second official move calling into question the runoff's outcome. The first came Thursday, when the Supreme Court blocked the publication of the runoff's results until it could examine the fraud accusations.

The fight over the election - over the country's very future - is now moving on several fronts, each utterly unpredictable. It has been only 13 years since Ukraine became independent in the breakup of the Soviet Union; its democratic traditions are still being formed, and its branches of power are largely untested.

So how do you think will this turn out, Dima?

With their websites and stickers, their pranks and slogans aimed at banishing widespread fear of a corrupt regime, the democracy guerrillas of the Ukrainian Pora youth movement have already notched up a famous victory - whatever the outcome of the dangerous stand-off in Kiev.

Ukraine, traditionally passive in its politics, has been mobilised by the young democracy activists and will never be the same again.

But while the gains of the orange-bedecked "chestnut revolution" are Ukraine's, the campaign is an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in western branding and mass marketing that, in four countries in four years, has been used to try to salvage rigged elections and topple unsavoury regimes.

Funded and organised by the US government, deploying US consultancies, pollsters, diplomats, the two big American parties and US non-government organisations, the campaign was first used in Europe in Belgrade in 2000 to beat Slobodan Milosevic at the ballot box.

Richard Miles, the US ambassador in Belgrade, played a key role. And by last year, as US ambassador in Tbilisi, he repeated the trick in Georgia, coaching Mikhail Saakashvili in how to bring down Eduard Shevardnadze.

Ten months after the success in Belgrade, the US ambassador in Minsk, Michael Kozak, a veteran of similar operations in central America, notably in Nicaragua, organised a near identical campaign to try to defeat the Belarus hardman, Alexander Lukashenko.

That one failed. "There will be no Kostunica in Belarus," the Belarus president declared, referring to the victory in Belgrade.


But experience gained in Serbia, Georgia and Belarus has been invaluable in plotting to beat the regime of Leonid Kuchma in Kiev.

The operation - engineering democracy through the ballot box and civil disobedience - is now so slick that the methods have matured into a template for winning other people's elections.

In the centre of Belgrade, there is a dingy office staffed by computer-literate youngsters who call themselves the Centre for Non-violent Resistance. If you want to know how to beat a regime that controls the mass media, the judges, the courts, the security apparatus and the voting stations, the young Belgrade activists are for hire.

They emerged from the anti-Milosevic student movement, Otpor, meaning resistance. The catchy, single-word branding is important. In Georgia last year, the parallel student movement was Khmara. In Belarus, it was Zubr. In Ukraine, it is Pora, meaning high time. Otpor also had a potent, simple slogan that appeared everywhere in Serbia in 2000 - the two words "gotov je", meaning "he's finished", a reference to Milosevic. A logo of a black-and-white clenched fist completed the masterful marketing.

In Ukraine, the equivalent is a ticking clock, also signalling that the Kuchma regime's days are numbered.

Stickers, spray paint and websites are the young activists' weapons. Irony and street comedy mocking the regime have been hugely successful in puncturing public fear and enraging the powerful.

Last year, before becoming president in Georgia, the US-educated Mr Saakashvili travelled from Tbilisi to Belgrade to be coached in the techniques of mass defiance. In Belarus, the US embassy organised the dispatch of young opposition leaders to the Baltic, where they met up with Serbs travelling from Belgrade. In Serbia's case, given the hostile environment in Belgrade, the Americans organised the overthrow from neighbouring Hungary - Budapest and Szeged.

In recent weeks, several Serbs travelled to the Ukraine. Indeed, one of the leaders from Belgrade, Aleksandar Maric, was turned away at the border.

The Democratic party's National Democratic Institute, the Republican party's International Republican Institute, the US state department and USAid are the main agencies involved in these grassroots campaigns as well as the Freedom House NGO and billionaire George Soros's open society institute.

US pollsters and professional consultants are hired to organise focus groups and use psephological data to plot strategy.

The usually fractious oppositions have to be united behind a single candidate if there is to be any chance of unseating the regime. That leader is selected on pragmatic and objective grounds, even if he or she is anti-American.

In Serbia, US pollsters Penn, Schoen and Berland Associates discovered that the assassinated pro-western opposition leader, Zoran Djindjic, was reviled at home and had no chance of beating Milosevic fairly in an election. He was persuaded to take a back seat to the anti-western Vojislav Kostunica, who is now Serbian prime minister.

In Belarus, US officials ordered opposition parties to unite behind the dour, elderly trade unionist, Vladimir Goncharik, because he appealed to much of the Lukashenko constituency.

Officially, the US government spent $41m (£21.7m) organising and funding the year-long operation to get rid of Milosevic from October 1999. In Ukraine, the figure is said to be around $14m.

Apart from the student movement and the united opposition, the other key element in the democracy template is what is known as the "parallel vote tabulation", a counter to the election-rigging tricks beloved of disreputable regimes.

There are professional outside election monitors from bodies such as the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, but the Ukrainian poll, like its predecessors, also featured thousands of local election monitors trained and paid by western groups.

Freedom House and the Democratic party's NDI helped fund and organise the "largest civil regional election monitoring effort" in Ukraine, involving more than 1,000 trained observers. They also organised exit polls. On Sunday night those polls gave Mr Yushchenko an 11-point lead and set the agenda for much of what has followed.

The exit polls are seen as critical because they seize the initiative in the propaganda battle with the regime, invariably appearing first, receiving wide media coverage and putting the onus on the authorities to respond.

The final stage in the US template concerns how to react when the incumbent tries to steal a lost election.

In Belarus, President Lukashenko won, so the response was minimal. In Belgrade, Tbilisi, and now Kiev, where the authorities initially tried to cling to power, the advice was to stay cool but determined and to organise mass displays of civil disobedience, which must remain peaceful but risk provoking the regime into violent suppression.

If the events in Kiev vindicate the US in its strategies for helping other people win elections and take power from anti-democratic regimes, it is certain to try to repeat the exercise elsewhere in the post-Soviet world.

The places to watch are Moldova and the authoritarian countries of central Asia.

Ian Traynor
Friday November 26, 2004
The Guardian

The Guardian proves once again that it is a piece of garbage.

Here's another article with the same general theme: http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story ... 11,00.html

Apparently, anything that the U.S. supports is inherently bad.

There is so much evidence of conspiracy here, the verdict is virtually unanimous.

But of course YOU'LL never admit it, because once you get an idea in your mind, only that idea has any validity. For example, Paul Krugman is an idiot, according to you... which may come as quite a shock to his students at Princeton, or wherever he's at now. So you get props to Friedman, yet at the same time, like Krugman, MF "sounds the alarm" in the recent documentary The Corporation.

You think all liberals are evil, yet a bald-faced lliar like Arnie is a great man ?

You think that there was fraud in the Ukrainian election because your guy lost, yet you think Dems as sore losers for bitching over the irregularities in FLA in 2000 or Ohio in 2004.

(And I didn't pull that one out of my ass, I posted the article here and you slectively ignored it as usual. You should be working for Pravda.)

There's no consistency in your logic, You are consistently inconsistent. If Wertham says an election is rigged, it MUST be untrue because Wertham said it.

Please.

I call them as I see them, and, unlike you, I don't let anyone brainwash me . You allow your "religion" to blind you to the truth of the Palestinian situation and your "nationality" to the one currently unfolding in the Ukraine.

BTW: Mathematically speaking, I can't ALWAYS be wrong.

Think of the money you could have made had you taken my advice and invested in Marvel back in 2002. (I also recommended AMD to someone at work who asked for advice around the same time.) Now I've got a stock tip that will make a fortune for some lucky schmuck, but I sure as hell won't be telling you :wink:

Not only that, but I'm retracting all my Krem votes... because you have a knack for pissing me off :wink:

Isn't the Ukraine the place where the US had a sizeable military base for the Afghanistan war and used it as its staging area?

No. Maybe you're thinking of Uzbekistan?

Yeah I probably am.

Guess I need to add "don't post before morning coffee" to my list of rules on avoiding gaffes.

KIEV, Ukraine - Ukraine’s election turmoil took a turn toward a constitutional crisis on Wednesday as Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych stated he would not accept his dismissal by parliament earlier in the day, calling the no-confidence motion illegal.

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Emerging from a meeting with international mediators several hours after parliament narrowly voted to bring down his government, Yanukovych said, "I will never recognize this decision."


http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6374820/