Walsingham

@Rpg master I don't want to sound like a total c***, given you actually live in Serbia, but I have to work with what I know. That is all that bombing was carried out against a backdrop of freaking ethnic slaughter. Now, I don't happen to agree with airpower's usefulness at a strategic level, and you reinforce that, but that doesn't affect one the Iraq invasion one iota. The invasion occurred in part precisely because standoff bombardment was proven to achieve little. To a ddress your second point, you quite correctly hold up casualty rates in Iraq. We obviously disagree in large part due to a disagreement in the nature and scale of those casualties. I can say that if I saw the rates as you put them I would probably regard intervention as a much more serious mistake. However, I do not. To the best of my understanding casualties among Iraq's civilian population do not exceed 150,000 and more importantly those casualties are largely a product of terrorist action not coalition forces. Some hold us accountable for those casualties in any case, but I consider those people misguided at best, and racist at worst by implying 'natives' only do what the Great White Man encourages them to do. If I am trying to explain myself I should add that I am aware of the frightful cost in civilian casualties that arose from the liberation of France in WW2. More than 300,000 according to my friend, the historian Duncan Anderson. Yet this is not regarded as a bad thing to have happened.

Aren't those rather poisonous? Yeah, I thought redbacks were so dangerous that if you gave them a colt .45 they'd actually become less deadly.

That, my friend, is the awesomeness that is 2000AD. The galaxy's greatest comic.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/8471182.stm

The Postman was extraordinarily bad. Of course fors ome time I thought The Postman was a remake of the classic Il Postino. Set in a post-apocalypse America. Which would actually have been awesome.

Up betimes and did three sodding hours of ironing. Watched the fresh fall of snow and watched starwars. Off in the evening to some Army training and had great fun with a command exercise where we had to plan and brief each other. Not sure what the point was besides showing that officers don't have it totally easy. I scored top marks, and it felt great to be back having been warmly welcomed. Just played some good old Star Wars Supremacy (the strategic win95 game) then got unfortunately depressed by reading this horrifying account of yet another children torturing children case. This sort of thing ruins my sleep.

I've read the same thing in several papers today. What is the point of the aid, given that much of Haiti was starving and completely fethed beforehand?

That is eerie.

You've addressed my points in a thoroughly gentlemanly fashion so I will try to respond in kind. I've only eaten a banana today, so I may not succeed due to hunger-gripes. Firstly yes, the US - and UK - has a tradition of supporting dictators when it suits them*. To an extent we live in the real world and have to do what we can with what we've got, but I do not defend those actions beyond that level. Indeed I had hoped that we might be moving beyond that position, during the heady days when we were part of the only remaining superpower bloc. In basic terms we do not have eat gristle today just because we ate gristle yesterday. Iraq and Afghanistan prove that we had the pure military capability to trounce any second or third ranking pervert's military. Secondly, I suggest that you and I are disagreeing over means and ends. You suggest humanitarian involvement is the means and I the end. I suggest that appeasing vested interests in the military and corporate community was the means and not the end. Perhaps the truth is a mix of the two, but to my mind provided the humanitarian result succeeds I don't see any cause for alarm. ~~ As an aside you bring up an interesting point regarding what constitutes sovereign rights and protection of critical national interest. I've been chewing on this for some time, and I won't pretend I've settled into a position. But i would say that to a degree the question rests on technical and organisational changes. I would say that the accepted version of what sovereign territory is stems from a 19th century appreciation of the baseline operating needs of a nation, coupled to what could be defended. But due to the complexity of modern technology, and the uneven distribution of the resources required for those technologies we find our lives are sustained by transnational infrastructures that can be critically threatened thousands of miles away from our borders. At the same time technical developments in weapon systems mean that a sustainable security buffer giving time to mobilise against horses and muskets can be overflown by a missile in seconds. There's probably something else to that to do with the role of suppliers to these new complex systems being corporations, but then I did say I hadn't been able to think it all through yet. *Saudi have not - to my knowledge - engaged in genocide in the tens of thousands. Perhaps you have a better comparison?

I couldnt imagine. Literally every single meal I eat has meat in it. Dont you worry that your manlog might fall off? Yes, I do worry about that. Thanks. I'm just off out to buy some food as I just completed our first bit of work in months. Only a few hundred quid, but still it's a big boost to my morale.

Water's a better bet, IMO. Sling out a floating boom, and drop them into a river or lake. I did read that suring the last Spanish civil war nationalist troops dropped food strapped to turkeys. The turkeys slowed the descent and then got eaten. Ironically using this method to feed and help people would now be considered inhumane.

The IT Crowd. The UK version is brilliant. I don't know if you can watch it in the US, but the UK's channel 4 has a free watch again service with all three seasons airing.

Moose, you know as well as I do how inaccurate paradrops are. Guarding an area that big would be nearly as difficult as guarding and maintaining a proper airfield.

*Screeching of mental brakes @ RPG master* Firstly, yes, in my opinion there have been grave and even culpable errors in the approach taken on Iraq. I do not believe that the corporations you mention were the cause of the war, but I do believe they were the cause of the failure in post-war administration. They provoked a reckless faith in post-war reconstruction which they completely failed to deliver. That failure has fuelled unrest and in my opinion should result in criminal prosecutions. However, I cannot at all agree with your assertion that he was of no threat to the United States. In pure old fashioned terms he was a huge stumbling block to any form of stability in the region. The stability of that region IS unequivocally a threat to world peace due to its effective monopoly of the balance of total oil reserves. Oil reserves which feed China, Japan, and the US and currently define the economic and foreign policy of Russia. But the principle threat he posed was the same threat posed by all such regimes which are predicated upon the constant application of internal terror. That is the perpetration of those terrors, defined as crimes in our worldview, is a direct challenge to the principle of our democratic rights and freedoms. Or as JFK put it more poetically if men in Iraq are being oppressed then we are all being oppressed. This last point no doubt strikes you as fanciful, but it is not mere rhetoric. The post Cold War laissez faire approach to dictators had been shown by 2003 to achieve nothing in reducing their power, and worse than that to encourage those dictators to test the bounds of their confinement. The central cause of the war in my analysis was that - Alternatives to war had been tried and failed - The results of war were perceived as directly introducing 25 million people to freedom, and sending a clear message to all other still oppressed - The effort was militarily straightforward and unlikely to be costly to our forces Leaving aside postwar casualties which have been caused mainly by terror attacks we clearly don't control, all the above are entirely true. The only caveat being that through our own internal divisions we have somehow contrived to send the opposite message to all other terror-states.

Why? You'll get yours sooner or later. EDIT: Partially as a cost-cutting exercise, and partially as proof that I can do anything I set my mind to, I've been having days WITHOUT MEAT. Mainly this means brown rice with vegetables cooked in plenty of chilli, ginger, soy sauce, and either tomato paste or peanut butter. Not too bad.

What evidence was there, that there was WMDs after the first Gulf War? Big fething heaps of them. Hundreds of tonnes of materiel. We're not talking the kind of things you leave accidentally in a taxi. I'd still like to know where the hell they went, even if it was just 'wrongly filed and disposed of as sewage'.

I do have to add that while there's nothing wrong with the laudable relief efforts being made, a huge part of the problem seems to be the almost total absence of functioning government or infrastructure. 'Sick' countries get hit worst by natural disasters.

The walls were to prevent their citizens being depressed by seeing people going about their daily capitalist exploitation. What we were told was barbed wire was in fact a form of Eastern pinata. 'Candy wire' is a sort of festive bunting festooned with crystallized fruit dainties and spun sugar.The CIA ate all the candy and then took pictures.

What are they mining, anyway? I bet it's a power source. I also bet they don't show how that power source saved the Earth from global warming. Sod the aliens. Be pure! Be vigilant! Behave!

Logistics is always a tricky business. Ever since I started reading military history I've had immense respect for the lazy bastards who do it professionally. I say that because there is a whiff in the air of assuming that it should must be easy, and yeah from here it sounds easy. But you'll have a bjillion different agencies, most of them won't necessarily know who has what assets, and any time anyone tries to exert authority to centralise planning everyone will have a hissy fit. Then you have people with different priorities. One guy will want surgical supplies, but will be competing for space with a rubble rescue dog team, but they get into place to discover they can't do their job because they squeezed their military escort off the flight in. Then their cars get stolen. You get the idea.

Rage take themselves waaaay too seriously. Ice-T was in freaking Leprechaun in the Hood

Success is sexy, and no amount of marxist huffing will ever change that. As has already been mentioned being fat is often taken as a sign of success. Similarly things like having long nails or pale skin. But men are treated the same way.

I'm definitely not messing with the Hungarian army. Over here calling in an airstrike on your own position is something you when being overrun by screaming bastards, not something you do over your coffee and cornflakes in the morning.

You think Ice-T would give a **** if he came up against someone who inevitably doesn't like him. I'm not saying Ice-T is some sort of general role model, but most 'gangsta' rappers these days are just fethwits actually trying to get into gangsta rather than people complaining about it.

Urchin - Ice Cream Van A slightly trippy rolling bouncing instrumental track.