Posted on 02/09/2002 12:14:34 AM PST by badfreeper
Princess Margaret, the younger sister of Queen Elizabeth II, has died "peacefully in her sleep" at the age of 71. In a statement Buckingham Palace said: "The Queen, with great sadness, has asked for the following announcement to be made immediately.
"Her beloved sister, Princess Margaret, died peacefully in her sleep this morning at 6.30am in the King Edward VII Hospital."
Her children Lord Linley and Lady Sarah Chatto were at her side at the London hospital.
Princess Margaret, who has suffered several strokes in recent years, suffered a further stroke on Friday afternoon.
She developed cardiac problems during the night and was taken from Kensington Palace to the hospital at 0230GMT.
She was born Margaret Rose on 21 August, 1930, at Glamis Castle in Scotland, the ancestral home of her mother's family.
Margaret was last seen in public before Christmas at Princess Alice, the Dowager Duchess of Gloucester's 100th birthday party.
She was confined to a wheelchair and wore heavy dark glasses, her sight having been affected by a stroke. Margaret's face also appeared puffy, understood to be the effects of medication.
© MMII
You are wrong. The citizens of Britain elect members to their legislatures, who vote the budget for the royal family. (Force was last involved by Cromwell, more than 350 years ago, to take power AWAY from the crown, NOT to give it to the crown).
People are free to be "sheep." Reference to others as "sheep" implies YOU fancy yourself to be superior, to the mere "sheep" in the midst. Unless you have a better idea, one man one vote, including sheep-people-voters. Are you the self-appointed "high-judge" of which "traditions" the "sheep people" ought to be permitted to retain and practice? Who appointed you?
I can't believe that your disdain for Europe goes as far as saying that no useful technological progress has been made there for 60 years. It really is just blind prejudice with no regard for the facts. It reminds me of those Soviet-era textbooks that claimed that Stalin invented the steam locomotive.
I seem to remember you saying the same about art and music! I know that Americans have a reputation for being insular, but surely you are just trying to wind me up...
Yet INTEL seemed very keen to buy up RISC technology along with Cambridge Technologies (AKA Acorn).
The Ramjet UK 1930's
Ramjet? You have to be kidding. How could Whittle bench-test a Ramjet? It was a normally aspirated jet engine he developed, even before the Germans. Granted they were the first to fly a jet-powered aircraft.
Where ? Controled sustainable fusion?
Yes, thanks, we did indeed have the first commercial nuclear power station.
Let us assume for a moment that the Brittish government rules through the concent of the governed as you seem to claim. I will grant that. The fact that a populace of a society excercises that right to make rather questionable decisions does not mean that those decisions are right ones. Hitler, was after all, elected in a parlaimentary system with a plurality of almost 44% of the German voters.
The fact that a population votes one way or another does not mean that they make the right decision all the time. We did after all, elect that louse Clinton by pluralities twice and in a democratic system we had to live with that mistake.
The fact that the Brittish people continue to vote subsidies or more precisely "welfare" payments to a family simply due to the fact that they are descended from a family that traces back it's history to a time of divine rule etc.. Does not mean that such a decision is by objectivity and fairness a correct one.
As to the fact that I consider myself superior to those who are less inteligent. Well, in the Darwinian state of evolution some of us fare better in some areas than others. I must however, admit that as far as physical appearance others outrank me. We can't be all lucky in all things. Equality is NOT a fact of life and unfortunately most people do not have the inteligence or common sense to be able to resist manipulation.
I am not a cultural equivalence fan however, and some cultures are vastly superior to others during certain times in history. Not all cultures and civilizations are equal and only those that "evolve" have any lasting value.
With respect to Europe there are some very significant differences between the US and Europe. We tend to be more tolerant of non-comformity, we actually thrive on it. Europe is the opposite, being homogenous societies the pressures to comformity are everywhere and that depresses radical free thinking.
With regards to rights. Americans believe philosophically that our rights are "inalienable" natural and "God" given. The state cannot under any circumstance limit or take those rights away, at least in theory.
The European tradition, having evolved from an aristocratic tradition, it is the sovereign and state that grants rights and can take them away. Thus Europeans see nothing wrong with a government limiting individual rights as long as they elected those who take those rights away.
There are countless other differences but that would take an entire thread to elucidate.
People are free to be "sheep." True enough and they are still sheep even if they are free to be so.
BUT I don't think Margaret will have to answer for things done so long before her birth as you seem to imply.
Ah yes....the ME, ME generation.
Gob bless Princess Margaret. May she find the peace now she never found in life.
My replies are not about bashing Europeans, just simply pointing out that they have structural problems in their social organization as well as in their philosophical foundations of government. Any way you slice it, European inovation for the last 50 years has gone south as far as original technological development. Like the Japanese they have become great refiners of technology developed elsewhere. We could discuss this at length but I don't think I could type that much.
We have much the same problem here in the United States and are engaged in the great debate of the direction of this society. Hopefully we will be able to resolve these question before the Chinese occupy us all and then it will be mute.
What you meant then, was "fission" NOT "fussion". There is a BIG difference. Nuclear power plants currently generate electricity by FISSION not FUSION. The first controlled fission reaction BTW, was under Enrico Fermi in 1943 I believe during the "manhattan Project" that developed the A bomb
Imagine how you would feel if some non-American were to ridicule your flag.
It does not hurt to have respect for other countries' traditions.
You've obviously never been to a real wake.....
RISC technology has been in dvelopment simultaneously both here and alsewhere. However, it has yet to show great promise in general applications, though some RISC architecture is being used in the latest batches of CPU's. It has yet to break through in consuler oriented PC's and applications.
The controlled nuclear fusion process that I referred to was at the Joint European Torus in Oxfordshire in 1991. By the way, the World Wide Web was invented by Tim Berners-Lee, an Englishman working at CERN in Switzerland.
My oath of loyalty and service is to the Constitution. NOT to the flag, or any King, sovereign or even the president even though he is under the constitution the "commander in chief". Once he no longer "preserves and protects" the constitution I owe him no loyalty at all.
I am aware of the difference between fusion and fission, thanks anyway.
The worlds first COMMERCIAL (as I said) nuclear power station was at Calder Hall, opened in 1956 by Her Maj QE II.
But the chips designed by ARM of Cambridge are in most cellular phones.
Not that I'm off-topic, or anything.
Let's get things straight. Berners-Lee developed HTML or the kernel of Hypertext Markup Language which makes links and web pages possible. The Internet is an offshoot of the initial network established by the Pentagon in the 1950's to make computer networks survivable in a nuclear war. It was the ARPANET from which basis the Internet evolved. The World Wide Web was already in existence though we were using crappy search engines and could only downlaod files at that time before Lee came up with HTML. Incidentally the browser technology which makes browsing the web possible and reading those HTML pages was Based on NCSA Mosaic. NCSA Mosaic; was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
I was using RISC technology back in 1987 in Acorn machines. Were you?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.