Walsingham

What the hell is that for?

Semisonic - Closing Time

Made me laugh. You're saying that amongst the handful of troops we've ever had in Iraq they managed to hide and conspire to carry out demolitions on a massive scale. Yeah. Clearly that was down to British Army officers and not the trained insurgents of the Mehdi army and their IRGC backers. Once again, your speculations fall over because you have zero first hand knowledge of anything except the internet. The British Army is like family. It's tiny. There's absolutely no ****ing way you could reliably use anyone who'd been through any of the training establishments without them bumping into folks who knew them. Hence my contention that the entire structure would have to be rotten. It clearly isn't rotten, so your theory fails. And I speak as someone who knows and has employed/worked with Army intelligence and SAS types. As for your scientific errors, actually you DO have the burden of proof, as taks has said repeatedly. We both have engineering training, I have mentioned my friend who is a specialist in damaged buildings, and it all looks kosher. You have 600 experts who disagree? We have the rest of the entire ****ing world. Not only is the burden of proof on you as the divergent source, but taks and I have a record on the fora to fall back on. We don't lie, and if we get something wrong I think we generally admit it. So ante up.

I just re-read it. Touching how? taks, I never liked the lightfighting idea. Typically high end management, adopting a tool which worked for someone else in a different era and with a different scenario.

Bushmills is great whisky. Cheers.

Today I celebrated the birth of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ by giving gifts of booze to a small subsection of my family. I had terrible insomnia last night, but fortunately remembered I have panzer general loaded on my laptop. So now I'm in a kind of wehrmacht ridden haze. Family fights are due after lunch, centring on one of my disgusting siblings.

Be offended at them, not me. Please read: Were British Special Forces Soldiers Planting Bombs in Basra? http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?con...p;articleId=994 As I said, two British SAS guys were caught trying to stage an Al Qaeda bombing. That's not a conspiracy theory, that's a fact. They were caught doing it. They got thrown in jail and British forces busted them out. This was in the news, but they brushed it off as if it was nothing. Also, when you say "your friends and colleagues", if you mean the military, it's not your everyday soldier that's behind this. Al Qaeda is a US/UK/Israeli/Pakistani intelligence operation. Think spooks. There are, as you saw with those SAS guys, 'special units' in the military that are engaged in such activities. How is shooting cops in Basra and trying to stage a false flag bombing "honorable conduct"? When you invade a country and a ton of people there hate you, shootouts between infantry and the people there are to be expected. You can't pin it all on an organized "Al Qaeda". Most of the shootouts are real, but the bombings? Nope. Many of the bombings are false flag operations designed to keep the Al CIAda scares alive. Want evidence? Here's some evidence: I'll try to keep this really simple. 1. You accusing my friends of dishonourable conduct MIGHT be justified if you knew them or had any first hand experience of Iraq and Afghanistan. You don't. All you have is a bunch of self-congratulatory fantasies, totally unsubstantiated by anyone other than known enemies of the US and UK. It's like me telling you that your dad is a serial killer because I heard it from a guy on the internet. 2. Al Qaeda isn't a fantasy. It is a convenient label for a worldwide array of islamofascist organisations from the Phillipines to Algeria to New Jersey. It's existence is evident not just in the bombings and shootings, but in every website, every crappy hate filled pamphlet, every angry schoolkid. Not only does mean you'd have to have a shadow agency BIGGER than every other government dept combined. But it is spheroids, because the entire ****ing architecture of the threat is modular and decentralised. Even a moron couldn't believe that Al Qaeda could be controlled centrally by your shadow government, because there are no control mechanisms beyond public ideology. 3. If you think there has been no honourable conduct by UK forces in Iraq then you clearly think that going on patrol, pursuing murderers, building infrastructure, delivering medical aid, while consistently abiding by the rules of war, suffering and dying isn't honourable, and you're bloody fool. And if you think the same men would abide by a conspiracy to hurt the people they are suffering to protect then you're an even bigger fool.

Introduced my girlfriend to the parents the last couple of days. They liked her so much I had to half-jokingly tell them she was mine, not theirs! My mum is frail and tottering like a cross between a newborn chicken and Yoda. She even has a stick like Yoda that towers over her. I keep trying to make her speak like him, without realising. However, while she is obviously in need of protection, she is also being bloody annoying. "oh I am so frail, why don't you and your father repaint the kitchen? You know I'll only have to do it myslef if you don't." Then begins hauling herself in that direction like a slug impersonating Christ.

I'd agree also, at least initially. But after Rumsfeld left they suddenly started doing better. It's a MYSTARY.

I gave homemade stuff away over the christmas warm up. Otherwise, I kind fo gave up. I used to make jewellery for the ladies, but it is quite expensive and they rarely appreciate the effort. Which is ironic ecause I almost always have someone offer to buy the bloody stuff when I do.

Drinking for 12 hours yesterday, I invented a venison stew (very finely chopped venison), with onions, garlic, leeks, pepper and marjoram. A bit of red wine, and served over mustard mash, and drizzled with truffle oil (I did say I was drunk). Unbelievably good.

You'd need people in your unit to corroborate, really. And if you're ratting them out, they're hardly likely to support you.

I had to get the parent out of the cancer clinic for Christmas. She's in fine form, but weak as a sparrow. Very very frail. My girlfriend hit it off with the parents by blagging a wheel chair for my mum from the NHS. I failed to hit it off with her mom, because I had to tell her in no uncertain terms NOT to go on her planned cycling tour of south africa. I mean two elderly people on a cycle? I've had five family members killed in the last few years, and two more shot. It's not even sensible violence. Starving HIV infected maniacs off their proverbials on drugs, staggering around shooting people to gt their freaking shoes. It's like DnD.

I'd forgotten about those turanic raiders. That was an awesome bit of the game when they first appeared. The contrast with your scientific looking outfit was really extreme. Gave you thsi real sense of "Oh my god, alien life! ...and they're mahdi asshats."

It's not as bad as the Arkansas Unmarried Couple Adoption Ban. It's only a proposition. You know, if you chaps signed up to an international human rights treaty you could avoid a lot of this by people appealing to the external court. We've been getting a lot of stuff like that through the EU.

The fact is that those rules are not always adhered to. You can find examples in the open media. What I find extraordinary is that they are ever adhered to. But that's the difference between a bunch of wannabes and a proper army: discipline. The reason the rules exist are twofold. Firstly, and fundamentally, and despite what your parents told you, the guys in green are not monsters. They're actually pretty stand up guys on the whole. Mad as fish, usually, but good guys. I like to think its because the army makes you stronger, and when you are properly strong you simply don't need to be a bad guy. But that's beside the point. The point of the first reason is that they don't want to shoot first in case they're wrong, and they end up shooting some poor bastard who's walking funny because he's got the runs, and not because he's got a suicide belt on. The second reason is that if you do shoot the wrong guy, you've not just killed an innocent man, but you've probably set back the local mission by a year, if not indefinitely. That means you've either got to stay doing the job for a lot longer, or maybe the job just doesn't get done. And if the job doesn't get done then every man who has made sacrifices, got divorced, got injured, lost a limb, or died gets flushed down the lavatory of history. And that's the kind of thing which does not make a proper army happy.

Erm... wouldn't that in fact be democracy? Nudists, smokers, sheep worriers... they all get picked on.

Unless I've misunderstood your point (something I do occasionally), you're contradicting yourself. You're suggesting we should have supported an internal civil war. I would suggest: 1. Saddam was bloody good at fighting internal threats 2. Saddam had committed genocide in an attempt to avoid a civil war 3. In what way is a civil war 'better'? Civil wars are long, bloody, and utterly without any restraint or conventions. They are fought by amateurs with all the horrors that that entails. 4. By contrast the US coalition did a magnificent job of fighting Saddam conventionally in a very short time, with what one can only conclude was as small a cost in lives as possible. 5. This conventional fighting was soured by post-war errors, which resulted in a level of violence which is less than a civil war, but by its own lights betrays just how bloody a real civil war could be.

I made the yearly purchase of the booze for the family. My stepfather as always gets the pick of the litter, a 21 year port wood Balvenie. It's quite a ritual for me now, and there is substantial 'flirting' with various whiskies in the lead-up to Christmas, as I come into the shop every couple of days and we get the excuse to try lots of different types. I'm also planning on getting him one of the new blackberry phones. I'm just about to try my 'new' second-hand weights machine for the third day running. I usually use free weights but I have to admit there's something almost soothing about a machine.

Actually, I should be very careful even suggesting we were great. I'd like to clarify and say that the manifold bad bits don't negate the rarer good. My point was merely that, courageous as Ghandi was he only got away with it because we didn't apply the simple 'cure' of random violence. If you want to see what it looks like when people try non-violent means against someone who IS violent, just look at the poor bloody Zimbabweans.

I can almost cope with the fact that you're relying on the statement of the guys who made the buildings that they think it would be fine if hit by a plane. except for the fact that my pocket expert at my end assures me that they don't know what they are talking about. I can see why, because I know personally the huge differences between naval architecture, and salvage engineering. The guy who designs a ship often will be completely wrong about how it will behave once it starts sinking/catches fire/ is overrun by tribbles. I can cope with that because by contrast you are actually maintaining that Al Qaeda is a fiction designed by British and American special forces? I want to laugh, but I'm not sure I can start laughing that much and not die. Or it could be that I find the suggestion that my friends and colleagues would be detonating bombs every day that killed civilians in their thousands, grossly offensive. It's offensive to their sacrifices, it's offensive to their honourable conduct, but most importantly it's offensive to their ****ing eyesight. Or how do you explain the regular shootouts with terrorists and the infantry? How do you explain the way we keep finding dead terrorists and failing to notice they are ****ing caucasian?

If Ghandi had tried his tricks with almost any other colonial power he'd have just been locked up or worse. Fortunately, while the British Empire was not very shiny, it had patches of awkward nobility on occasion. But more importantly, if you are dealing witha democracy you can argue and effect change. But i am not talking about making democracies change. I am talking about making vicious totalitarian fethwads change.

Hungover. Gave gifts of fruit and veg to my friends for their christmas feasting. Played the old strategy game Star Wars Supremacy (I think it was called Rebellion in the US). Am disturbed to note that I no longer need the translator to interpret the beeps and whistles given off by the imperial R2, which delivers status messages. I have turned off teh interpreter, and I get a whistling chirrup and know it means a ship is repaired, or a rebellion has started. Playing quite an interesting game today, since the rebls got off to a good start, and actually fielded a halfway decent fleet. I had to keep them busy chasing obsolete dreadnaughts, until my research allowed me to begin building Imperial II star destroyers etc. I absolutely adore this game, btw, and am always on the lookout to play it against someone.

Bush's greatest crime in teh eyes of the world has been to point out the essential bollocks which makes everyone feel snug at night: that good intentions are enough to effect change. If you believe in democracy and essential quality of human life, then you want to extend it. If you try to extend it you will run into people who are against you, and they aren't going to change by any means short of a punch in the snout. Because you can ignore strongly worded letter to the UN, but you can't ignore a pencil stuck in your eye.

I made a cinnamon and allspice type chilli just teh other day. I liked it! What puzzles me about the mayonnaise is that if you are just adding eggs and oil, why not just add eggs and oil? Is it the emulsion you need?