The Hobbit Hole VII - But not yet weary are our feet...

Ohoh... did I miss you? I was off in the kitchen getting guac and chips!

Goodnight... (((Ramius)))

4,781 posted on 03/31/2004 8:45:52 PM PST by Wneighbor (Well the view looks better from ahead than it looks behind)

" I got to hear him make noise on the phone on my birthday last week!"

Cool!

4,782 posted on 03/31/2004 8:46:20 PM PST by Sam Cree (Democrats are herd animals)

To: Ramius; Wneighbor; All

Speaking of EU being overtaken by socialism, I've been hanging out with son this evening on a website that all his friends are playing - Going around at school, and getting popular. I'm very suspect.

http://www.nationstates.net

The UN is the world's governing body. hmmmm, and my little country of, ahem, Yoakle, is not a member. hmmm

4,783 posted on 03/31/2004 8:48:01 PM PST by My back yard (Take GPS reading twice, nuke once)

To: Ramius; Fedora

I read something recently on a thread here about new types of planes that'll be so fast they might outrun any projectiles they could fire, so an entirely new type of weapon system would be required.

'Course I don't have much understanding of what was being talked about, and probably got it wrong.

4,784 posted on 03/31/2004 8:49:09 PM PST by Sam Cree (Democrats are herd animals)

It was a very nice phone call Sam. My birthday fell at just the right time. Myranda and the oldest granddaughter Courtney (who lives in Oregon) were both on spring break and had both flown to Alabama to spend spring break with Jill and Tom. So, both my girls were there, all 4 of the grandkids and Tom was on vacation that week. So! I got to talk to all 7 of them. And they all sang Happy Birthday to me! :-)

Just one of those little things that makes you know everything in the world is right at rain at that moment! :-)

4,785 posted on 03/31/2004 8:51:25 PM PST by Wneighbor (Well the view looks better from ahead than it looks behind)

I'm not worried about the UN/EU in themselves, but in conjunction with what they might do with an ally like Kerry or Hillary in the Oval Office. It'd also be a big inconvenience if we lost our British alliance to the EU leftists--those British air bases we've been using since WWII are handy :) But on the positive side, we are picking up some good allies in Eastern Europe, so we've got the EU nicely encircled.

On blasters, wasn't there a FR thread on those over the past week?--something about tasers minus the attachments, I think.

4,786 posted on 03/31/2004 8:52:10 PM PST by Fedora

To: My back yard; Overtaxed

Heh...

The Furry Corporate Paradise of Bushytails

"We have more nuts than you can possibly believe"

4,787 posted on 03/31/2004 8:53:21 PM PST by Bear_in_RoseBear (He's so tall! He's so tall!)

Was that the thread a few days ago where the Russians were bragging about some counter they had to our missile shield and someone speculated it was a new type of scramjet?

4,788 posted on 03/31/2004 8:55:39 PM PST by Fedora

HAPPY BELATED BIRTHDAY!

Nice that you could talk to the kids like that. It really means everything.

4,789 posted on 03/31/2004 8:56:11 PM PST by Sam Cree (Democrats are herd animals)

To: Ramius; Wneighbor

My Nation's motto is "Have dog will travel" i chose that, but the rest here was chosen for me by my answers to some carefully worded questions.

UN Category: Right-wing Utopia
Civil Rights: Few
Economy: Powerhouse
Political Freedoms: Very Good

Location: The East Pacific
The Republic of Yoakle is a tiny, economically powerful nation, remarkable for its barren, inhospitable landscape. Its hard-nosed, hard-working population of 5 million are free to succeed or fail in life on their own merits; the successful tend to enjoy an opulent (but moralistic) lifestyle, while the failures can be seen crowding out most jails.

The minute, pro-business government, or what there is of one, juggles the competing demands of Law & Order, Commerce, and Defence. Income tax is unheard of. A powerhouse of a private sector is led by the Information Technology, Book Publishing, and Arms Manufacturing industries.

Crime is a serious problem. Yoakle's national animal is the dog, which teeters on the brink of extinction due to widespread deforestation, and its currency is the yew.

4,790 posted on 03/31/2004 8:56:18 PM PST by My back yard (Take GPS reading twice, nuke once)

A scramjet thread, yeah, but a different one.

4,791 posted on 03/31/2004 8:57:10 PM PST by Sam Cree (Democrats are herd animals)

HAPPY BELATED BIRTHDAY!

Thank you! I'm still celebrating even though it was over a week ago. Myranda is riding the train up to Ft. Worth on Saturday and staying here with me till Monday. :-) We will have to do some celebrating then too! :-)

4,792 posted on 03/31/2004 8:57:50 PM PST by Wneighbor (Well the view looks better from ahead than it looks behind)

To: My back yard

The UN is the world's governing body. hmmmm, and my little country of, ahem, Yoakle, is not a member. hmmm

Reminds me of when I was in high school and they had the better history students attend something called Model UN where you go to a college building which simulates the UN building, and you pretend to be a UN diplomat and argue policy with other students playing other diplomats. It worked about as efficiently as the real UN :) About halfway through my friend and I skipped out and visited the comic-book store down the street--I believe I bought some Spider-Mans :)

4,793 posted on 03/31/2004 8:59:27 PM PST by Fedora

To: My back yard

I'd more there. Got room for an elf in that shire? :-)

4,794 posted on 03/31/2004 8:59:35 PM PST by Wneighbor (Well the view looks better from ahead than it looks behind)

We're getting so good at warfighting now that I actually worry that we're getting *too* good at it.

I don't. Somebody someday would have made the great breakthrough. I'm glad it was us.

War will always be horrible for us, because we care for our troops that defend us. And we will always have grunts down in the mud.

But those grunts will not only be able to kill the enemy, they will spread despair among those enemy we haven't yet engaged. We did that in a small scale in Iraq, which represents almost a quantum leap, despite the klinton years, in military capability. And it's accelerating.

The Poles, the Germans, and the Japanese all fought bravely to the bitter end. That's because they all knew that at least they could hurt their attackers, even if they would be destroyed. But if they can't even smudge our paintjobs, all hope is gone. As someone said of this war, it was the biggest mismatch since Godzilla vs Bambi. Personally, I thought it looked more like Robocop walking through the drug lab, from the movie, Robocop.The depersonalization of war is good for us, bad for our enemies. It's a way of denigrating their status as a worthy opponent, and mocking any self-image they may have of themselves as warriors, or even men. Why inconvenience our troops when we can send assemblies of computers, explosives, and bandwidth to hunt them down without feeling or hate? We're saying that as an opponent, they are worth only as much as a cheap weapon. If I can shame and insult an enemy into giving up, so much the better.

From what I can tell, the fighting in the first few days was pretty intense. Iraq did everything it could to make the entire country into an Iwo Jima, other than throwing in aircraft and armor, which they didn't have much of. After the first few days, the word got back that not only weren't they hurting the Americans, but their troops were blown away almost without effort. As somebody else said, it was the biggest mistmatch since the British Army vs the Martians in HG Well's War of the Worlds. Sometimes this brings its own problems. For one thing, we left a lot of enemy troops, now in civilian clothes, thinking that we were weak in not killing everyone in sight. They come from a brutal country, and cannot comprehend any form of mercy. So they hope that by killing us in ones and twos, they can achieve some form of victory, since they could not kill us by the thousands.

Iraq was remarkably untouched by our campaign, Saddam did more damage in peacetime than we did in the war. If Baghdad wound up looking like Berlin after the Red Army got through with it, and there were a million Iraqi civilian casualties, I guarantee they wouldn't have any inclination to give us a hard time, or sit on the fence to see how things shake out.

Sorry, sort of drifted away from your initial statement. I think the more antiseptic and long-range we make war, the more it demeans the enemy's fighting spirit, and sows despair. That means we have to kill fewer of them, and have fewer things to fix when we win, along with saving more of our own troops' lives.

4,795 posted on 03/31/2004 9:03:07 PM PST by 300winmag (FR's Hobbit Hole supports America's troops)

4,796 posted on 03/31/2004 9:03:10 PM PST by Fedora

Yeah, I am sure it was one of those.

4,797 posted on 03/31/2004 9:05:49 PM PST by Sam Cree (Democrats are herd animals)

To: Fedora; My back yard

When I was in high school I participated in "Boy's State", which was supposed to be a simulation of Michigan state government. Kids from all over the state spent 10 days in a Michigan State University dorm; the various wings and floors of the dorm made up "cities" and "counties", etc.

One of the big events while we were there was the "state convention", where we all gathered together in a hall to vote for candidates for state offices, such as governor, attorney general, etc. Since almost none of the candidates were known to every "city", the practice of vote trading was quickly discovered... reps from each city began visiting other cities, making offers like "Vote for our candidate for attorney general and we'll vote for your candidate for secretary of state."

When the organizers of the event found out, they were horrified; they quickly got up onto the stage and announced that under no circumstances would vote trading be allowed, because that sort of thing never happened in real state government!

Right then and there I gave up on the whole farce as hopelessly naive.

4,798 posted on 03/31/2004 9:10:37 PM PST by Bear_in_RoseBear (He's so tall! He's so tall!)

Good night, All.

Have to get some sleep.

4,799 posted on 03/31/2004 9:11:28 PM PST by Sam Cree (Democrats are herd animals)

You've got some interesting points there, too, 300w. I agree it's an advantage on the psy-war front in that respect. On the other hand I also see the left trying to turn that advantage against us in that when we win so efficiently some people have a harder time perceiving the fact that we're threatened by our enemies. I guess the left will always try to do that, though; but that aside, in the overall big picture it's a huge psychological and military advantage, I agree.

4,800 posted on 03/31/2004 9:11:42 PM PST by Fedora

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