Obama's Performance (was "wins Nobel Peace prize")

[xilman]

Originally Posted by axn

Depends on what you mean by "part of".

Indeed.

I therefore claim that an act of war was fought on US territory in 1979. Under US law, the US embassy in Tehran is the sovereign territory of the US. See International Law Reports, Volume 72. p141 for a succinct statement of the situation.

Slightly less recent cases than the above, and which are much easier to justify in my opinion, occurred in the Philippines. The snippet below was taken from the Wikipedia entry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippines

Meanwhile, Spain ceded the islands together with Cuba, Puerto Rico and Guam, to the United States for $20 million during the Treaty of Paris. This led to the Philippine-American War, during which, Aguinaldo was captured on March 23, 1901. The war (along with the Moro Rebellion), continued until 1913. At least 34,000 Filipinos lost their lives as a direct result of the war and at least 200,000 may have died as a result of the cholera epidemic at the war's end.

Paul

[garo]

May I just clarify here that I meant that a war has not been fought on mainland US for 145 years. There may have been isolated incidents like the fire balloons but no widespread death and destruction that one usually associates with a protracted war. The US has been lucky to escape that and as such it is my belief that the US population has lost much of its collective memory of what war feels like.

[BotXXX]

Originally Posted by Zeta-Flux

We Americans have and continue to prove that we want peace in the world. Talk may be cheap, but the humanitarian aid we provide world-wide is not.

Humanitarian aid is also done for other reasons than "peace". For instance to prevent people from fleeing their homelands because of total despair and knocking on the US door for asylum (or sneakily migrating into the US during the dark nights).
An other reason is the "war on drugs". If you supply food/tools to people so that they can live decently, there is no need for them to produce ingredients for drugs. They are then less likely to produce to be able to survive to the next day.


As for the Nobel prize discussion, i don't agree with it - it should rather be based on the past instead of what might happen in the future. Nonetheless I truely hope he can live upto the expectations of the Nobel commity.

[xilman]

Originally Posted by garo

May I just clarify here that I meant that a war has not been fought on mainland US for 145 years. There may have been isolated incidents like the fire balloons but no widespread death and destruction that one usually associates with a protracted war. The US has been lucky to escape that and as such it is my belief that the US population has lost much of its collective memory of what war feels like.

I knew what you meant and have been nit-picking purely for the fun of it.


Paul

[garo]

I suspected as much but I wanted to make a clarification for the others as well.

[Uncwilly]

Originally Posted by garo

I suspected as much but I wanted to make a clarification for the others as well.

What about the U-Boats that have fired upon the coast line of the USA?

I figured I knew what you meant.

[garo]

And ... and ... and...., what about the mouse that roared?

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by garo

May I just clarify here that I meant that a war has not been fought on mainland US for 145 years. There may have been isolated incidents like the fire balloons but no widespread death and destruction that one usually associates with a protracted war.

What about the war on drugs? Or the wars on crime/urban-blight/pollution/poverty/illiteracy/evolutionisticism/obesity/wall-Street-bonuses?

As to your last point: indeed, protracter wars can be nasty ... we used to have them all the time in 9th-grade geometry and drafting class. At one point things even escalated to use of the internationally outlawed metal compasses, but then one of the kids almost lost an eye and our weapons of math destruction were banned completely from school grounds. The school administration went so far as to replace our rulers and straightedges with these rubber-coated bendy things used by engineers to help draw nice-looking curves - so we promptly invented non-Euclidean geometry. Quite an exciting year, it was.

[Uncwilly]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

The school administration went so far as to replace our rulers and straightedges with these rubber-coated bendy things used by engineers to help draw nice-looking curves - so we promptly invented non-Euclidean geometry. Quite an exciting year, it was.

Instruments of math instruction.

[garo]

I remember my protracter heroically giving up all its numerals in my high school war. I also found the metal divider a handier weapon. Two points are better than one.

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by garo

I remember my protracter heroically giving up all its numerals in my high school war. I also found the metal divider a handier weapon. Two points are better than one.

An acute observation...

Getting back to the thread topic, it appears that congress may have to vote to allow Obama to accept the monetary part of the prize. As stated in Article I, Section 9 of the U.S. Constitution,

No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.

Now I'm sure Congress will OK this - perhaps after some self-important-sounding speechifying - but I'm rather puzzled as to what the framers of the Constitution had against accepting gifts of skin softeners. "You dropped a balm on me, bay-bee, you dropped Obama on me..."

(Aside: LOL at some of the pretentious Presidential titles proposed by some of the original framers.)