FMBI

Speaking as someone who's addicted to geography, the African borders have not significantly changed since independence. Astro's right. http://static.howstuffworks.com/gif/willow/history-of-africa3.gif Some changes: French Somaliland is Djibouti - the others are unified into Somalia Libya got a small slice of various French colonies Rwanda and Burundi independent Chad now exists Other than that, as Astro said, they basically haven't changed at all. The French colonies were just split up into borders that hadn't existed before. In no case since have borders significantly changed due to either war or diplomacy. The closest that it's come to that was when South Africa dominated (and to some extent, still does) Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Zambia (and of course Lesotho and Swaziland), or when Rwanda, Uganda, Namibia, Zimbabwe, and Angola were looting the Congo in the Africa World War. If you can offer an example of where borders changed by more than a couple miles (or were merely reorganized, as in the case of Sudan, Cameroon, or Egypt) then I'll be glad to hear it. On the other hand, Astro,stop being an !@#$%^&*.

ROFL.. It wasn't rigged in the first place, she was just favored by a bunch of self-proclaimed party leaders. All the talk about logic in the other thread, and now you're making insane statements like this? That's a joke. Obama is 170 delegates ahead, she has to make up more than 300 while he only has to get 140 more. For months now, we've heard nothing but "WILL IT CONVINCE THE SUPER-DELEGATES", and we've heard the same inane statements repeated over and over by all the networks. Well, let me answer that. If they tried to switch allegiance to her now, it'd have to be a massive number (think 40% of the super delegate total or something along that line), and they'd all have to do it at the exact same time. You'd need billions (which, in case you hadn't heard, she does not have) of dollars in bribes and 5,000 riot police at the DNC. It ain't gonna happen.

Woah, people still do this? I first read it on the Museum of Hoaxes several years back. Speaking of which, the newest article right now is Child Trader.

No, it was more of a humanish thing. No robots.

And you didn't even need to do it in vitro. You don't know me, but congrats.

Not to be rude here, but while the borders weren't specifically set up to provoke conflict, it has been widely recognized for the last 50 years that the colonial powers really !@#$%^&*ed it up when they left. It was mostly a haphazard thing - for every Tanzania, you had a DRC or a Sudan. Basically the only African regions that got off safe were the ones which already had an established structure for long periods prior to colonisation - the ones which were just collections of tribes didn't have a chance. Also, although, especially in light of Iraq and the lessened power projection capability of Europe, the West is moving towards a more hands-off approach, it is arguable that in some cases it would be worth it to either completely split highly unstable countries up, or else station peacekeepers with actual support so they can help the locals negotiate and hold down outbreaks of violence. The danger here, of course, is that some genius who wants to gain political support will start another Kosovo and take control of the area away from people who have held it for centuries. One of the many reasons ethnic conflicts are so !@#$%^&* hard to stop.

They're very different people. Paul is a total !@#$%^&*hole, Andrew just likes to spam. Unban him IMO.

X, there are pesticides in use in Kashmir and Punjab that kill people, and the US is ramping up pesticide power because most of the stuff isn't effective anymore. I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say it might be responsible. God, I hope not. It does run in my family, but I've never really had any signs of it that I know of. I'll look into it, though. :\

One time when I was at my brother's friend's house 12 years ago, he had a game that I thought was cool at the time (today I might think it's a piece of crap, who knows). I don't really remember much of it, but I know that a lot of you are old enough to be familiar with early console games, so here's what I remember: For NES or SNES (I was young, OK? ) Had a background sort of like the PC game Dark Ages Had either 2 or 3 forms for your character - one of the secondary ones was called Shadow and was blue IIRC Had both dark and light levels, and parts where you could go through walls using Shadow (or whatever it was called) I expect that even if someone can figure out what I mean, it'll be almost nothing like what I remember, but..

Heh, I get a similar thing when I eat apples, peaches, and kiwis (and presumably other fruits, but I gave up after those three).. I always !@#$%^&*umed it was either acid or some chemical they put on it, but maybe it's sugar.

Andrew, why are you repeating things that everyone else has already said? Would you rather lick one of those hallucinogenic toads, or use mushrooms?

True, I know (and am related to) several people who have insisted for the past 3 years that Hillary would rig the race, and now that it's almost impossible for her to win (1884-1718), they're convinced that she'll have him !@#$%^&*!@#$%^&*inated or become a shadow vice president. Anyway, I just hope he continues being at least fairly independent of the mainstream. He isn't Ralph Nader or Ron Paul, but he has resisted several of the most gimmicky things the other candidates have backed. ^.^

Oh, and I forgot to mention, I also sometimes just mix up 5 or 6 things if the soda that I want is bad quality.* You wouldn't believe some of the weird flavors you can get out of it when you do that - Root Beer, mixed with tasteless Sprite, thrown together with overly strong Dr Pepper, with just a touch of Cherry Pepsi and perhaps a little Minute Maid. Freaky stuff. *such as at Burger King, where it's almost invariably weak and acidic

I found this site a few weeks back, and I figured I'd share some of the happiness with y'all. Link I had a great time with his modern links section, but the best part is that, like Jack "EARTHQUAKES AND HEZBOLLAH AND THE MARK OH MY" van Impe, Tim LaHaye, and others, he changes prophecies as he goes. As an example: Link Enjoy.

How is it even possible to get 800 a day? The most I've ever gotten was about 40 a day, and that was when I actually used my accounts all the time. Maybe my absolutely horrible small site mail service wasn't so bad after all.

Get a job you hate, work 10 years, and retire, IMO. Bahamas > Office for 40 years Would you rather have sex with Rootbear or The Real Picard?

There are so many things they've been searching for for at least 50 years.. Maybe a naked singularity?

This only works at Taco Bell.. Get one of their big (then again, do they have anything but big?) cups, fill 60% with Baja Mountain Dew, add in another 20% of Root Beer, mix in 10% Pepsi, and 10% Pink Lemonade. Boom. Tastes a lot like bubble gum, oddly enough.

I get 25 a week on an e-mail I haven't used in 4 years, 10 a week on my current one, and I dunno how many on my sometimes accounts.

Homemade gourmet food. Only option around here because the most expensive thing we've got is some horrible local chinese food that tastes like they forgot to put the spices in. Besides, I've always hated going out to restaurants on holidays. It gives me that statistic feeling that all americans dread.

What I don't get is why they'd go through SK - even !@#$%^&*uming the person was really from there, they could bump it through China. That way, if they get caught, it just gets blamed on those nasty deficit-building Chinese and nobody bothers to investigate. BTW, am I a weirdo for actually enjoying scam E-Mails? I've always giggled my way through them, savoring every "your gonna be rich, workk at home" I could get my hands on. And don't even get me started on the "119via8gra for y9u" type.

Foreign intervention? The African World War (biggest war since WW2) got zero coverage in the west, Sudan's been a genocidal mess for years now, and all the countries on the Arab-Black line have had continuous problems which have gone unnoticed (except for an occasional complaint about Nigerian militants interfering with the oil supply, of course..) As I said, unless the South Sudanese manage to keep har!@#$%^&*ing the core of the North, then I don't think it'll get much bigger - but if they succeed, then this could explode really fast. And it's interesting you pointed out the Eritrean part - I didn't really think about that, since they don't have much in common with any of the other countries, but I suppose that if Ethiopia intervened, they'd grab an excuse to take back the territory they lost after the last war.

Link If this really gets going, it could make the Congo look boring. Chad backing the rebels (for obvious reasons), Egypt backing N Sudan, Libya might support N Chad.. And of course you've got Ethiopia and Algeria as wild cards. My guess is that if N Sudan beats the rebels, then nothing will happen (other than a renewed genocide or something fun like that), but if the rebels manage to take over (or continue to threaten) Khartoum, then we'll see quite a war.

Purge, did it ever occur to you that your avatar is a possessed computer practicing self cannibalisation? Way to go, making me see that in a thread about food cravings. :s

Proof that Sadr wouldn't also be making underhanded maneuvers? Underhanded maneuvers are a fact of life; they have always happened and always will happen while official diplomacy and negotiations go on. The point is you asked me to provide proof of the US' willingness to negotiate with Sadr, and I provided this proof. Accept it and move on. Ok, so you admit that the quote is either a lie or misleading and yet you're saying it proves your statement? Yeah.. Uh-huh.. Claims about Petraeus' character are irrelevant. He is the commanding general in Iraq, and he was briefing Congress when he made his remarks. We have to assume his remarks are accurate in the absence of convincing evidence to the contrary. I'm not attacking his "character," per se, I'm simply saying that he's basically a figurehead Bush could stick in there to !@#$%^&*ure people that we'd turned a corner, all the while continuing the pointless, self-contradictory, policies of his predecessors. And as far as !@#$%^&*uming his remarks are accurate, if I may provide you with an extreme case, remember that Hitler's generals were insisting up to the occupation of Berlin that the war was going wonderfully. Obviously this isn't quite that drastic, but the continued claims of success are almost unbelievably ridiculous. Provide proof. You won't be able to provide it, for the simple reason that Iraq isn't stable enough for accurate stats to exist about who is killing the most civilians. I can't provide "proof" that one million Iraqis have died, either, but that doesn't mean the "54,000" figure provided by Fox news last year was correct. In that case, you look at accounts from the ground, and you study the overall picture. When you consider that the US is regularly carrying out air strikes, has undoubtedly carried out far more massacres than have been reported (I feel sorry for the scapegoats, personally), has had little regard for "collateral damage," and has dramatically lowered the quality of health of a vast number of Iraqis, I see no way that the insurgents could possibly have come near to the number of deaths we've caused. They have car bombs (yippee, 100 people killed and publicity for a week) and occasional purges, but it's actually counter productive for them to kill civilians because they want popular support. The US, on the other hand, wants to "cow the populace into submission," so it is reasonable (in a perverted way) that it would cause high levels of civilian casualties.