Walsingham

I know I have a weird sense of humour, but two links today on the M.Star attack got me laughing out loud. 1. Terrorists claiming attack use wrong picture in boasting video. (shown is the Sirius Star) 2. Conspiracy theory is that a Russian UFO -a-like crashed into the vessel.

The real Dougie MacArthur.

Is it really that daft?

Just came back to the thread. Awesome stuff. Go me! "I say, you chaps over there with the whatnots. Bugger off, will you?"

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/wildlife/...cat-in-bin.html I thought that the woman was bloody weird, and definitely wrong to inflict senseless cruelty. But my sympathy immediately shifted when I heard some Voightkamf happy dingbats have made death threats. Person>cat, you halfwits.

*scribbling noises* note to self: acquire venture capital. Messiah factory. Holy Land a bit crowded. North Wales?

I'm not sure 'living in Milton Keynes' is my idea of happily ever after, but I take your point.

Ok, it's the place, not the drink. But same diff. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/7...r-553-days.html

In life terms I'd say 25 lbs of excess fat is better than 80 lbs of excess a-hole. Got confirmation that a big contract has got through to the final hurdle of comissioning. Fingers and toes crossed.

ROFL. That is absolutely ludicrous.

Zoraptor, I hope we're not going to abandon each other in disgust here, but I have my doubts. 1. The Taliban has directly threatened the persons included in the files, and the threat has been assessed by multiple sources as credible. LINK Moreover the Taliban routinely kill persons they feel are informers or collaborators. 2. No one at all inside Afghanistan, including standard news media, had any illusions that civilians were being hit in airstrikes and at cordons. If you failed to pick up on that prior to the wikileak then frankly you weren't remotely informed. 3. Governments are indeed a special case, distinct from private citizens. Violating personal data can lead to losing your job, disgrace, suicide. If government data is violated then it can lead to lost battles and lost wars. The fate of nations, and thousands of casualties can be consequences. 4. If you feel you should have the right top publicise any government files you happen across then you should not sign multiple commitments to the effect that you will not do this. The filthy scrote at the centre of the leak (whoever he is) was not a conscript they were a professional. If they had concerns they could have gone to their CO or to Congress. Instread they felt tehir own judgement was sufficient. It's bull**** and it makes me extremely angry. ~ I'll say it again, nice and clearly, no-one gained an iota from the release of these files except the Taliban. An outcome that is ****ing obvious and precisely why we have official secrets.

I'm going to go see it obviously, but that looked like a game cutscene.

I agree that it's hard to find such people, but *suddenly thumps table hard* no ****er said it would be easy! You mention security and I'll use my fire analogy again. Healthy state means economic fuel, security oxygen, and political spark. One doesn't come first. They have to all occur together.

My own take on the banking failure is that the sector failed to develop sensible risk management and investment models. Instead they simply set a more or less arbitrary industry standard and worked around that. Utter crap. And it's not stopped. They're still using the same models but with the sensitivity dialled up. Which means of course that in the long run that sensitivity will ebb away, and we'll be back where we started. My solution to that is that the financial modelling used should be open to investors by law, and subject to academic review by tradition. ~~ Shifting back to the military question, Monte is spot on. Full dominance has benefits far in excess of parity. Dominance forces opponents not to test the dominance (which is cheap), and there are economies of scale. Or at least there ought to be. Having said that, I do think US military force needs to be rebalanced. Forcing opponents into asymmetric warfare is fine, so long as you have a massive assymetric capability waiting for the bastards. The US doesn't. I'd therefore back dropping two damned carrier groups and having a dedicated peace support division, incorporating construction, gendarmes, psyops, and spec forces.

Damn you, Ebay!

Found an old copy of Cosmic Slop Shop's mellow but catchy . I was curious to know why CSS never recorded much, so I went looking and sicovered that it might be something to do with the way Big Lurch took PCP, cut open his room mate and ate her lung. He was found by police wandering around, covered in blood, shrieking at the sky.

They look like they'd taste like rabbit only darker. So yeah, rosemary, and slow cooking. Something red and tanniny to go with... EDIT: Today I took basically the whole day off and thought about life, death etc. Pretty relaxing. Felt sad about my mum foinf, as I gradually got my head around what she'd been trying to achieve and why she was such a pain in the hole.

That broomstick thing reminds me of the regulations that girls schools in Oxford when I was growing up had rules against electric toothbrushes. True story. But seriously, what kind of mentalist designs a vibrating broomstick?

Orogun, I think you've thrown a wide ball there, I'm afraid. Forgotten about the war? Possibly. Did the leak remind people that there was one in any useful way? Don't be daft.

I apologise for not understanding. I don't think I am qualified to back you up, but that argument looks sound. At least for the United States. Moving forward, though. What now? Do you allow the country to be riven entirely, or is it possible that by working togethera bad plan* can be made to work. *Assuming, for the sake of argument that it is.

Hmm. I may get this response wrong on the first pass, because you've given me a lot to chew on. I like your notion of working with and propounding a less radical version of Islam. I'm also 100% convinced of the necessity of working with Turkey. I'm not sure what the correct mode is for working with Pakistan. Quite frankly I'm not sure Pakistan is a viable healthy nation state, composing as it does two radically different polities. You have the urban and agrarian areas of the southeast and coast, awkwardly welded onto the (and I mean this in the nicest way) dingbat hillbillies of the North and tribal administrations. The two regions need radically different economic models to function, let alone political systems. My feeling, especially after reading the superb I Wouldn't Start from Here is that the political spark must be present. Mueller describes the way Paddy Ashdown engaged with Bosniaks in his role as 19th century colonial adminstrator (in the 20th century). And I think the need for charismatic personal commitment and flair is especially important and especially absent from many troubled areas. People cannot and should not trust abstract institutions, so they can only be engaged by serious personal tuchus. I'm damned if I know who taht could be in this day and age, but recognising that sending grey faced careerists is not the answer would be a bloody good start.

Monte, you of all people should know that smart and war don't usually go together. Sometimes you just have to go with bags of smoke, straight up the middle, etc etc. The problem as I see it, and I'm genuinely interested to hear your rejoinder, is that we are fighting now in order to avoid the kind of 'justified' war which the public seem to enjoy. Not only is pre-emptive striking less costly in our own blood, but I fear it is the only system possible in a world running in so many dimensions and with such powerful, long ranged weapons. Naturally I'm talking about the danger of another campaign on the same scale as the IRA bombing campaigns, with hundreds of devices exploding each year across the country, not just in Ulster. But I'm also talking about the danger of a resurgent fascist inspired pan nationalism. As I say, not in two years but in ten. I don't deny that there's a good case to be made for not choosing to start a head on conflict with jifascism in the way we have and when we have and where. But we are in the breach now, and merely retreating is not only going to waste the blood shed so far but necessitate a higher blood price in the long run as our enemies are emboldened by that failure. Whereas success, however dim it seems and far off, is the best means of discrediting those enemies and ensuring they remain as challengers to international system rather than proper players in it.

I may have already mentioned that when my friend's kid got baptised I made him a present of Sun Tzu's Art of War. They really REALLY should teach that **** before high school.

1. Confirm the notion that publishing lists of local informants has not resulted in deaths directly from those lists, because I think it's fairly ****ing sensible to presume the opposite 2. Dirty? Dirty how exactly? That civilians have died has never been denied. That special forces are involved in hunting and killing leading Taliban surprised absolutely no-one. It's not even a new tactic. What has the leak achieved that is positive? EDIT: The principle of leaking as some sort of heroic act is the bogus notion here. I think there's a tremendous double standard here from some of you chaps. What if someone in the police, or your ISP, or your doctor's office decided to publicise an aspect of your life that was potentially damaging because they felt a personal virtue in that information being made free to your spouse or business competitors? You'd be livid, and you'd want to know by what right that decision was taken. Vigilantism is fundamentally and inescapably wrong in a democratic society.

Uncontrolled spending, unamanageable debt, coupled with devaluation of currency. Every bad economic move GWB made, Obama has doubled down on it. The collapse is inevitable barring any major change. Why do you think gold, which has a real value between $700 & $800 per oz is now trading at over $1300? GD, you're simply making your own case worse. This is precisely the problem with basing curency on gold rather than the market. Gold itself is only worth whatever the market says. It's not a dichotomy.