General Petraeus talk

General Petraeus came to campus and gave a talk last week.

It was pretty interesting, he didn't give a presentation, but took questions from the audience. He had some staff that would queue up the right set of slides to match what he was saying. It was pretty neat with a free form talk.

Nothing unknown was said so nothing to report there.

Going in, we were bugged by some american communist party people("Come join the reds") and some other damn hippies. They were giving us sheets of paper that had "hard" questions for him to answer about the wars. The people at my college are fairly well educated, so they basically ignored the 60 year olds. Everyone except this girl that was obviously from a former soviet state, who was like "Are these the list of questions that we can pick a question to ask from?".

I ended up crumpling the paper and giving it back to the protesters and asking if they recycled. They begrudgingly said yes.

Some protesters stood up during the talk, took off jackets to expose something on the backs of their shirts which they faced toward Petraeus. He either didn't see or ignored them. It was about 6 50-60 year olds and the crowd was not very happy, as all they wanted to do was see him talking. They were quietly escorted out for (I assume) blocking the view of people and blocking the aisle.

General Petraeus is a stand up guy, he seems to try and understand all issues from both sides.