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These remind me of the "Murphy's Laws of Combat":

1. You are not superman.
2. Guided missiles - aren't.
3. Suppressive fire - isn't.
4. If it's stupid but works - it's not stupid.
5. Don't look conspicuous - it draws fire.
6. Never draw fire - it irritates those around you.
7. When in doubt, quickly empty the magazine.
8. Remember, your weapon was made by the lowest bidder.
9. Never share a foxhole with anyone braver than you are.
10. If your attack is going really well, it's an ambush.
11. If you can't remember, the Claymore is pointed towards you.
12. All 5-second grenade fuses are 3 seconds.
13. Try to look unimportant - the enemy may be low on ammo.
14. If you are forward of your position, the artillery will be short.
15. The enemy diversion you are ignoring is the main attack.
16. The easiest route is always mined.
17. The important things are always simple.
18. The simple things are always hard.
19. If you are short of everything except the enemy, then you are in combat.
20. No OPLAN survives first contact with the enemy.
21. When you are in a secured area, don't forget to tell the enemy.
22. Incoming fire has the right of way.
23. No combat-ready unit has ever passed inspection.
24. No inspection-ready unit has ever passed combat.
25. Working as part of a team is essential - it gives the enemy other people to shoot at.
26. If the enemy is in range - so are you.
27. Remember: tracers work both ways.
28. Beer math means that 2 beers times 37 grunts in a platoon equals 49 cases.
29. Friendly fire - isn't.
30. Anything you do can get you shot - including doing nothing.
31. If you make it too tough for the enemy to get in, then you can't get out.
32. The only thing more accurate than incoming fire is incoming friendly fire.
33. Radios fail in direct proportion to your need for help.
34. If you take more than your share of objectives, you will be assigned more than your share to take.
35. When both sides are convinced they are about to lose - they're both right.
36. Professionals are predictable - too bad the world is full of amateurs.
37. Murphy is a logistician, or . . .
37a. Murphy was a Grunt....
38. Recoiless rifles - aren't.
39. Automatic weapons - aren't.
40. A sucking chest wound is nature's way of telling you it's time to slow down.
41. The enemy attacks on only two occasions - when you're ready and when you're not.
42. Body count math is 2 NVA + 1 blood trail = 21 enemy KIA.
43. Things which must be together to work can't be shipped together.
44. The most dangerous thing in a combat zone is an officer with a map.
45. The quartermaster has only two sizes - too large and too small.
46. If you really need an officer in a hurry - take a nap.
47. The only time suppressive fire works is when it's used on abandoned positions.
48. There is nothing more satisfying than having someone take a shot at you and miss.
49. Don't be conspicious. In a combat zone, it draws fire; out of the combat zone, it draws sergeants.
50. If the sergeant can see you, so can the enemy.
(And from our brothers in the Navy):
51. Splinter shields will.
52. Accurate fire from a moving boat isn't.
53. The ammo passer doesn't always.
54. Armor plate on a patrol boat isn't.

Does anyone have the whole set?

A google search turned it up all over the place. For example: http://www.geoffmetcalf.com/rules_20021121.html

I like #24: "Do not attend a gunfight with a handgun, the caliber of which does not start with a '.4'".

The "pizza delivery" scene from "Inside Desiree Cousteau". There's nothing more romantic than kazoo music.

"If I have one criticism, it is that I myself would have insisted on perhaps just un soupon more fawning.

This should clearly have been "soupçon", but the froggish letter probably got mangled and dropped in the cut-and-paste.

I think if you want to understand what's really going on, what's behind the rhetoric and the machinations, you would do well to make a systematic evaluation of the objective correlation of forces. Otherwise, you'll end up making an ass of yourself, like all those hundreds of posters on the Iraq Attack Betting Pool thread.

Well then gosh, why don't you just come out and explain it to all us poor asses -- so that in a few months we can laugh at how wrong you were.

Just bought another can of Spam yesterday, 25% reduced fat BTW, but does this Orange Alert mean I should go for the full 100% fat content next time

Or stock up on the fresh stuff:

ROFL!

There really should be an archive of the "Pic of the Day".

"We haven't gone to the end, far from it...there is still an alternative to war," Chirac said after meeting Finnish Prime Minister Paavo Lipponen in Paris.

"...par exemple, nous pourrions la reddition immobile, qui n'a pas été essayée encore ", Chirac continued. ("for example, we could still surrender, that has not been tried yet".)

The problem with software is that if you have code to deal with unusual situations (like unusual drag on one wing), that code might not ever get exercised in real life until something goes somewhat wrong.

And if there's a bug in that section of code, it may turn a "somewhat wrong" situation into a "catastrophicly wrong" situation. I would take a good hard look at the possibility that unusual drag (or loss/corruption of sensor input) may have caused the computer to overcorrect at Mach 20 (with disasterous results).

Very well said. I'm a programmer, and we've had applications out in the field which suddenly turned up nasty bugs after over a DECADE of proper operation, due to what we jokingly call "the moon is full and it's a tuesday on a leap year" bugs.

These are the ones that only manifest themselves when a rare set of circumstances combine.

I can easily see something like that happening in the Columbia disaster -- a bug or poor design decision in an ancient piece of code which never rose itself from slumber until the very first time a high-drag-on-the-left situation ever occurred.

From that one video there seemed to be a violent yaw 90 deg. to the flight path.

That one video didn't show the shuttle sideways, as many assumed, it showed the shape of the camera aperture during an out-of-focus period. Your other points are good, though.

Coulter writes about The Media as if it's one unified entity, an entity which also includes all liberal politicians. That's the only way I can think that she'd be connecting the New York Times with John Kerry.

She wasn't actually "connecting the New York Times with John Kerry", except in the puckish manner discussed below. You're straining for something that wasn't there.

Columnists don't have the luxury of being able to write individual columns for each item on which they want to comment, especially if the items deserve different amounts of treatment.

She wanted to comment on several topics, including the "how can we have a war, we're mourning" silliness, the NYT's avoidance of the Ritter arrests, and Kerry's sudden "discovery" of his Jewish roots to pander for votes. So she could either cover them as a mixed bag, which is extremely common for political columnists, or she could dump two of them and not talk about them at all, while expanding the remaining topic to a full column even if it would require fluff padding to fill the required space.

Obviously the former was a better choice than the latter.

Now there are two ways to handle a mixed bag column. The first is to draw horizontal lines between items to help the transition-impaired (or otherwise place some sort of "new topic alert" markers to aid the less adroit readers). The other is to just make the transition from one topic to another while writing and trust in the intelligence of one's audience to see a segue and understand that it is one.

Coulter's trademark method of doing this is the wry segue -- rather than just start a new topic de novo in an abrupt transition, she likes to tie obvious shifts of topic together with wisecracking remarks that highlight some sort of commonality between the topics, no matter how remote, in a conversational "oh, that reminds me" fashion. Besides being entertaining in its own right for both the writer and the reader (and the more remote, the funnier it is), it's also a good writer's device to keep the reader's attention from wandering or skipping to the next newspaper page, as would be invited by a more obvious "and now for something completely different" break. By the time the reader realizes they're starting a new topic, they're already partway into it.

This technique is even more powerful when trying to keep from getting interrupted (by the host, or another guest) during verbal debates or televised talking-head shows, where it's hard to regain the "floor" once you've lost it.

If you're misled by the headline, remember that columnists don't usually pick the headline, the "host" publication does. And even if the author chooses it, it's better to headline the primary topic in the piece than to try to list all mixed-bag topics in a short headline.

You say that she "needs a good editor", but it looks as if she's doing fine on her own on her compositional decisions.

She's lovely, but I'm afraid Ann dropped off my idol list when she ran that piece that...I'm not even going to talk about...which is understandable, given Barbara's death and her closeness, but still, you're in the spotlight there, y'know?

I believe that history will prove her right on that one. In the end, it will be the only way to bring about lasting peace.

Plus there was one other instance when I heard her use the phrase, "You're invading my personal space!" during some interview, which...for some strange reason really made me not like her so much as I had (I think it was the PC quality of the remark coming from someone I don't associated with PC *at all*).

First, I agree with others who feel that you're missing the satirical point on that one -- Hillary had recently made "personal space" famously a topic, and ludicrously so.

Second, a recognition of "personal space" predates political correctness by several decades. There have been articles about it in the psychological literature since at least 1965. The recognition that people get reflexively uncomfortable if someone else "gets in their face" is in no way founded on PC, and despite sharing a word in common is not synonymous with the liberal touchy-feely "I need my space".

Finally, even if she had been serious, chastising someone for violating your personal space seems perfectly compatible with conservative values to me -- it's reminding them to stop being unacceptably rude and to show a little basic respect and manners.

. Coulter is a product of the Clinton Era; hate-filled, vicious, a veritable pit viper.

Oh, puh-leaze...

I've watched Ann Coulter every chance I've had, and read all her books. I've not seen a shred of "hate" in her, and no hint of being a "viper". What you're mistaking for "hate" is actually derisive *SCORN*.

And lord knows the current generation of liberals deserve all the scorn they can get.

As for "vicious", that too is off base. She's fierce in defending what she knows is right, and rooting out what she knows is wrong.

Must... resist... Fokker... joke...

I was robbed at gun point by two black teenagers. Does that mean that every group of two black teenagers will rob me at gun point?

Of course not. But I was not speaking of a single sample (although I used one as a specific instructive example), I've spoken with literally hundreds of anti-evolutionists through the past several decades. I have a good overview of the ranges and types of their beliefs.

A dogmatic anti-evolutionary stance is an anti-scientific stance -- it's the mark of a person who allows his faith-based (not necessarily religious) beliefs to override his ability to accept (and to outright deny) experimental findings and well-established evidence.

Do you have a source for this allegation.

Absolutely -- decades of experience with anti-evolutionists.

A study of religious beliefs v scientific contributions?

Don't change the subject. I've already stated that a "religious belief" in general is not incompatible with good science. That's not what I'm talking about when I speak of those with a "dogmatic anti-evolutionary stance".

And on *that* subject, yes, I've seen first-hand the scientific incompetence of such people.

"The Germans who poisoned the wells and springs of northern France and Belgium and fed little children poisoned candy were angels compared to the teachers, paid by our taxes, who feed our children's minds with the deadly, soul-destroying poison of Evolution....Evolution and the teaching of Evolution in tax-supported schools is the greatest curse that ever fell upon this earth." -- T. T. Martin, "Hell and the High Schools"

Freedom of religion and equal protection under the law are guaranteed by the Constitution. There are Federal criminal statutes for discrimination based on religion. Federal and state law expressly prohibits discrimination based on religion. How do you justify your position under the law?

I'll let H. L. Mencken respond to that one, since he did it so much more eloquently than I could. Note, by the way, that this passage is part of his first-hand coverage of the "Scopes Monkey Trial", wherein a school teacher was on trial for teaching evolution (gasp), and Mencken was writing specifically of using religion as an excuse to reject the findings of science:

The meaning of religious freedom, I fear, is sometimes greatly misapprehended. It is taken to be a sort of immunity, not merely from governmental control but also from public opinion. A dunderhead gets himself a long-tailed coat, rises behind the sacred desk, and emits such bilge as would gag a Hottentot. Is it to pass unchallenged? If so, then what we have is not religious freedom at all, but the most intolerable and outrageous variety of religious despotism. Any fool, once he is admitted to holy orders, becomes infallible. Any half-wit, by the simple device of ascribing his delusions to revelation, takes on an authority that is denied to all the rest of us.

I do not know how many Americans entertain the ideas defended so ineptly by poor Bryan, but probably the number is very large. They are preached once a week in at least a hundred thousand rural churches, and they are heard too in the meaner quarters of the great cities. Nevertheless, though they are thus held to be sound by millions, these ideas remain mere rubbish. Not only are they not supported by the known facts; they are in direct contravention of the known facts. No man whose information is sound and whose mind functions normally can conceivably credit them. They are the products of ignorance and stupidity, either or both.

-- H. L. Mencken, "Aftermath", The Baltimore Evening Sun, September 14, 1925

First, is there any particular reason you respond twice in two different ways to almost every post of mine? How about getting your thoughts in order first and responding all at once?

You indeed appear to be adamant in your determination that you won't even seek a plausible way that the water really is water and then proceed on that hypothesis. Instead you just throw up objections that even a minute's mature considered thought can address, as has been demonstrated on this board time and time again. And then you blame the messenger for pointing this out. There are big issues and debates in Bible scholarship, but your kind of petty complaints don't even come close.

Fascinating -- change "Bible scholarship" to "evolutionary science", and that's a *perfect* description of creationists' failures on these threads when it comes to understanding the field they rail against.

As for Bible scholarship, I've spent more years examining it than you'll ever believe -- perhaps more than you have. The difference is that I'm not trying to "disprove" the Bible, I'm just pointing out that the ultra-literalists have a real problem, because in order to "reconcile" the Bible one has to apply interpretation to it, and that's a fallible human issue. But I already made this point earlier, it appears you didn't give it enough attention.

[NO clarification follows]

You had already bid me goodbye, I saw no point in trying to clarify things for you any further. I did, however, want to point out to other readers that your mischaracterization of my comments was not what I actually said -- and I trust they can compare for themselves and see the difference.

"Did not!" "Did too!"

Just how old are you?

If I am headed to heaven, your good bye means you're headed to...

Wow, the self-righteous arrogant smugness of this statement is absolutely breathtaking -- not to mention the fact that you seem to take a very unchristianlike satisfaction in declaring that I'm bound for Hell. How gleefully vengeful of you.

On that note, I'll bid you farewell (and believe me, I'll not waste any more time on you) with:

Those people who tell me that I'm going to hell while they are going to heaven somehow make me very glad that we're going to separate destinations. -- Martin Terman

NO, one does not have to be an evolutionist to understand this! Most all creationists believe in evolution within the species...

I'm not sure that "most" is a fair assessment of the number. I've encountered far too many creationists who deny even that.

Even the ones who do accept it have mental blocks against evolution in larger forms, although they have trouble agreeing on *what* amount of evolution is allegedly impossible.

But the point is that a full understanding of the biological sciences requires far more than just an understanding and acceptance of "microevolution" -- evolution of all types bears heavily on almost every aspect of the biological sciences.

The article does not blame creationist physicians for the over-medication problem - it blames the whole community:

By the 1960's it became apparent that some bacterial pathogens were developing resistance to antibiotic-after-antibiotic, at a rate faster than new antibiotics could be brought to market. A more conservative approach to the use of antibiotics has not been fully accepted by the medical and agricultural communities, and the problems of emerging multiple-drug resistant pathogens still loom.

You need to read it more carefully. It does not blame the "whole community", it says that it has not been "fully accepted", meaning that some subset of the whole is resisting a more careful use of antibiotics. Guess which subgroup is more likely to deny the problems of forcing pathogens to evolve?

Dini appears to be stating his prejudicial imaginings as fact:

"It is hard to imagine how this can be so, but it is easy to imagine how physicians who ignore or neglect the Darwinian aspects of medicine or the evolutionary origin of humans can make bad clinical decisions. The current crisis in antibiotic resistance is the result of such decisions"....

No, he's absolutely correct. I've met anti-evolutionists, including a Freeper on a recent thread, who flatly denied (he termed it "absolute garbage") the well-established fact that bacteria mutate and evolve resistances to antibiotics (and demonstrating this is done on a regular basis in simple lab experiments). He denied it apparently simply on the grounds that, he believed, even such "microevolution" is impossible, and therefore any resistant bacteria had to be present in the original sample (even though the aforementioned lab experiments flatly disprove this).

A dogmatic anti-evolutionary stance is an anti-scientific stance -- it's the mark of a person who allows his faith-based (not necessarily religious) beliefs to override his ability to accept (and to outright deny) experimental findings and well-established evidence.

There's nothing wrong with being religious and a scientist -- many are. But there *is* something wrong with a person whose faith motivates him into an anti-scientific mindset, and then attempts a career in one of the sciences. It's rather like an atheist trying to be a priest. Either way, their heart and mind are not of the right perspective to do the job properly.

Thankfully, most religious people who go into science have a positive attitude about and understanding of science, and they do fine work. That's not what is being discussed here. But unfortunately there's a small subset of the faithful who become real cranks on the subjects of geology or evolution or other types of science, and are unable to accept the fundamental principles of those fields. The point is that such people are not suited for careers in the sciences which involve those fields.

Ahhhhh...but are they not still bacteria?

Yes they are, but that doesn't mean that evolution didn't take place.

Does one have to be an evolutionist to understand this?

Apparently so, given the number of anti-evolutionists who seem to have trouble with the concept.

well, well...is this the best the professor can do?

You're mistaking one example for the totality. So no, it's not the best he can do. Is that the best you can do?

Last I read, anti-resistant bacteria were still bacteria. Just why does one need to believe in evolution to understand this idea?

Because apparently, people who are against the notion of evolution don't understand it well enough to know that it encompasses far more than species-to-species transitions.