Monte Carlo

I think you've hit my nail on the head. Ashdown was precisely the sort of supremo (q.v. Gerard Templar in Malaya) required. Send him to the 'Stan forthwith and give him some clout. The pity is, and I'm genuinely not being chippy about the Yanks, the US foreign policy machine consists of almost nothing but careerists you are rightly leery of. Iraq proved that US civilian administrators are NOT match-fit. You'd need an ex-military man, as the US armed services has thrown up a generation of thoughtful, imaginative generals whjo might be ideal for the role. QED. . Agreed, boychick See? We agreed all along.

This is the most powerful argument for rationale behind the Arizonan legislation. It's reasonable. It's why liberals deliberately ignore it.

I just decided, inspired by Tigranes, that I could save myself forty quid by playing IWD instead. And have more fun.

My character is nails. Take off his armour Tigs, just do it, he's so Tunnel-Fightier it won't make any difference. And arm him with a club. A non-magical one. Mwuahahahahahaaaa.

You are correct, utterly, in conflating the issues of the War (capital 'W' deliberate) with the political dimension in Europe. We now have (a) a large Muslim population in Europe who have every right to be cautious about military action and (b) a growing sense of discontent with multiculturalism, which even significant voices on the political left suggest isn't working quite how they envisaged it. Every round fired in Helmand (etc) has a potential political impact in London and Amsterdam and Paris. Modern European Islam needs nuturing as a natural buffer against it's less enlightened cousin. We aren't doing that. We also need to get uncompromisingly tough with Pakistan, a nuclear armed military dictatorship that can barely feed it's people or manage natural disasters but can plot relentlessly and ingeniously it's nearest democratic neighbour like a silent movie villain tying a girl to the railway track. Much of the threat is the ISI's glove puppet, and it needs to be ripped off. My view is that the growth of violent, politicized Islam is one of the first big ripples hitting us from the collapse of the Soviet Union. And we have to ride it, not try and build impregnable flood defences doomed to be swamped. The way to do that, in an era of 24 hour news media, the internet, asymmetric warfare and politically balkanized populations in Western democracies is not War. By War I mean tanks and airborne brigades and objectives and body counts. I do like my history, and I often think "what would a colonial administrator in Trans-Jordan do in 1920?" OK, his first move would probably be to send over some bombers to drop poison gas followed by a squadron of Rolls Royce armoured cars to shoot up what was left. But, triteness aside, these would have been the bluntest of instruments in a very large tool box full of other, more precise, devices. He would have known all the players, personally. Spoken the language. Lived in the region. Set up and administered everything that actually worked. I know imperialism is a dirty word, but the alternative in the 21st century seems to be either 'peacekeepers' cowering in barracks whilst mass rapes and genocide takes place or keeping Scandie aid workers in tax free salaries and brand new SUVs. Or, now, alientating the adherents of one of the world's great religions by fighting bloody great wars with no discernible big picture objectives. So what do we do? Big carrots, big sticks. Go seriously Mossad on the bad boys. Nurture moderate Islam. Woo Turkey. Manage Pakistan. Be pragmatic about immigration and cultural and social cohesion without being racist or exclusionary. Give the Afghans an option - do you want us to fix this place or don't you? If you do then we need to run it for you for a while, but not with Karzai. But if you invite the Taliban back then there will be consequences. None of these things are especially radical, but they're not happening.

An update. The infinity engine games look and play beautifully on this rig, which says more about Windows 7 as an OS than Alienware I guess. Nonetheless, for me it's good to have a machine that loves old games, some of my favourites are pretty creaky now. I'll be putting JA2 on it soon. Company of Heroes was great. Now it isn't. I'm getting like 4.5 FPS. It sucks. So I've installed FO3 and Men of War to see if it's the machine of CoH. No real problems with either, MoW has a helluva lot going on but runs beautifully, the only performance compromise was for me to switch down to the middle shadow setting (big deal). With a few minor performance tweaks FO3 is very nice. On a 15" laptop. It might be that I can't update CoH on my machine, for some reason the auto-updater won't work so I'm a bit bummed because it's one of my fave games. No biggie, though, seeing as it's going to be free imminently as CoHO so I'll just download it then. Cheers MC

This is why the US edumacation system is inherently superior to ours. It also explains the historical accuracy of movies such as U-51 and The Patriot.

Mwuahahahaha. I am the most tunnel-fightiest tunnel fighter evar.

Parallels with 1973 abound - America was in the grip of an unpopular war and under tricky Dicky conspiracy theories abounded. Nonetheless, it sorta ruined it for me.

Just had a look at the CE and, for once, it's a CE worth forking out the extra money for. Especially the graphic novel. I'm quite looking forward to this one, along with DS3 Obs are back in the saddle as far as I'm concerned.

Children are our future, which is why this week I began to teach my five-year-old about Chuck Norris. At school he is learning rudimentary maths, how to read and write and also how to make animals from papier mache. The teachers, as far as I can work out, are doing an excellent job. The child is well-adjusted, happy and has lots of friends. He looks forward to going to school. But he has been taught absolutely nothing about Chuck Norris. It irks me. Chuck isn't even on the National Cirriculum. I must admit there have been a number of challenges. For example, there's no way as a responsible parent I'm going to teach my toddler what a round-house kick is. And he's far too young for Delta Force. So I had to limit his early stages as a Chuck Padawan to (a) explaining what a Texas Ranger is and (b) showing him a picture of Chuck wielding two mini-Uzis whilst wearing a denim shirt with the arms ripped off. He didn't find that too cool for some reason, but it's early days. However, the joke that 'When Chuck Norris was born he drove his mom home from the hospital' got a laugh and I've told him to tell the teacher the gag so she can understand the pivotal importance of Chuck in modern education. If only there was an animated Chuck Norris TV programme or DS game, then my work would be done.

Going to see The Expendables in on my 'Must Do' list for this week. I am giddy excited about it, am pleased to hear the positive feedback on this thread.

^ THat's truly awful art, they look like a Nordic Eurovision band entry circa 1998.

OK Brainiac, what about this? I can make a multiplayer game of BG2 where I create and control all of the characters. I'm playing a mp game... as a single player. MWuahahahahahahaaaaa!!! ETc. Mechanics = multiplayer. Gameplay = SP. I know folks who play the Conan MMO basically SP. They like the game, hate the other players. I'm not saying DA2 is a MMO, just that it adopts some of the concepts we associate with them.

Because, what you do when managing leaked security information, is give a running commentary to the other side as to it's veracity. Duh.

In which case the man is a buffoon and it serves him right, given what he has gone and done. People braver than he'll ever be are probably being hunted down and tortured as we speak because of his actions, so tough.

I made this point to a friend, a serving officer with a shed-load of ops tours under his belt. I made the old "imagine the BBC at Omaha Beach" argument. He replied that WW2 was a war of national survival. Afghanistan manifestly isn't. The hoops you have to jump through to make even a vicarious argument that it is simply aren't credible. Although I doubt anybody of one star rank plus who planned Overlord would ever have been promoted, by modern standards, and Ike would never have made PotUS. The French, for example, were extremely magnanimous about the strategic bombing of vast areas of Normandy in June 1944, even when it became apparent that it wasn't remotely accurate. Why? Because the alternative was Nazi occupation. The public in early 1944 were also fully aware of the charnel house of Cassino. After all, neighbours in every street were getting telegrams informing them of deaths in action. Why did they swallow it? Because the Nazis bombed London and Bristol and Exteter and Coventry and killed thousands. My argument remains - We could police Afghanistan by air, in much the same way we contained Saddam for ten years. The people there don't appear to want 'liberation.' We are spending blood and treasure we cannot afford on something that increasingly looks like a fool's errand. This isn't even a remotely controversial POV, I have neither a beard nor sandals and am one of the more Hawkish members of this forum. I simply believe that you only fight wars you can win, with clear strategic and tactical objectives. Afghanistan is the red-headed bastard stepchild of Tony Bliar and Dubya's love in. It really is time to move on, and find other smarter, cheaper and frankly ruthless ways of managing Islamo-Fascism festering in failed states. Cheers MC

With the greatest respect, one of the main issues with the Koran is that the haditha can, and are, interpreted in many different ways. In much the same way as stuff from the Bible is. Difference being, Islam hasn't had it's Martin Luther / Reformation moment yet.

If my character dies then I want him raised from the dead irrespective of cost or operational efficacy.

The Crazies Strange. I started to enjoy it then kinda lost my interest after the US Army & Government = SS Kommando. I was picking up this sort of half-arsed Iraq allegory in there and it just wasn't working. If you want to make a zombie movie without zombies then fine, but the government conspiracy meme can be done much more subtly and convincingly (State of Play, anyone?) or amusingly (Mel Gibson in Conspiracy Theory). My view = a horror hodgepodge with genre identity issues, some good characters wasted and typical mindless stormtrooper portrayal of the military. Cheers MC

Actually, yes. +1 Hell yeah.

I have bags of faith in Blizzard, D3 will be awesome, polished and basically the best thing to happen to gaming a year either side of it's release date. See y'all on Battle.net

Star Wars: The Old Republic. Granted. I meant new franchises - alhough I suppose MMOs are the natural PC-only route for Bio, DA2 looks like a single-player MMO!

There is a certain sense of the past repeating itself --- after BG they went in a console direction with Jade Empire and there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth. Then they delivered a PC title with NWN then went back to consoles with ME / ME2 then delivered a PC-orientated title. I think now, though, the direction of travel is clear (consoles) and Bio is simply echoing broader trends in the industry. I don't really like their games, well 90% of them, but that's show business. I'm not a gambling man but I doubt we will ever see a PC-only or PC-orientated title from Bio again.

The trailer is very purdy, liked the sword-staff on the main guy. However, one pretty trailer does not a great game make, does it?