While We Wait: Writer's Block & Other Lame Excuses

Golden1Knight said:

I wonder why the United States was spying on third world nations. They fear something? Or want to steal any secrets? After all, I'm pretty sure there are no Brazilian terrorists out there.

And I also wonder why our country did not give refuge to Snowden. If our president wanted retaliation, nothing better than having a former U.S. security agent. Who knows what else he has to tell.

Click to expand...

You're on the NSA list for suggesting Brazilians are not terrorists.

Lol brazilians are a welcoming and warm people. We do not hate anyone except Argentines.

PS thank you for cheering we Dutch on.

Golden1Knight said:

Lol brazilians are a welcoming and warm people. We do not hate anyone except Argentines.

Click to expand...

I totally agree.

Golden1Knight said:

I wonder why the United States was spying on third world nations. They fear something? Or want to steal any secrets? After all, I'm pretty sure there are no Brazilian terrorists out there.

Click to expand...

Not a single one, and there never will be.

The best thing about the Germans in particular complaining about spying is the rank hypocrisy. Until very recently, America didn't even tell its companies if it found out they were being spied upon. Germany, meanwhile, more or less conducts state-sanctioned industrial espionage on behalf of its companies. But citizens man, that's against the rules, that's off limits.

Golden1Knight said:

And I also wonder why our country did not give refuge to Snowden. If our president wanted retaliation, nothing better than having a former U.S. security agent. Who knows what else he has to tell.

Click to expand...

Because your President isn't actually serious and doesn't actually want the consequences that would come from taking such an action.

Crezth said:

not nearly enough INTERNET LIBERTARIANS in this thread.

Click to expand...

THIS HOUSE IS CLEAN

Its also possible that the Brazilians were conducting their own espionage and didn't want somebody like Snowden being an uncontrollable security risk in their own country.

I still have no idea why Putin did.

Just remember that Russia doesn't spy.

Crezth said:

Just remember that Russia doesn't spy.

Click to expand...

No, it just contracts out the vast body of underemployed but well-educated Russian software engineers to undertake cybercrime or cyberwarfare operations as needed.

Russia reaffirms its fancy for shooting down airliners by providing the missiles and GRU leadership to shoot down a 4th, adding to its 3 confirmed kills. 2nd and 3rd place runners up, Zimbabwe and the Polisario Front, have no comment at this time.

With US having only one confirmed kill. I thought USA #1.

"We delete airliners like you on the way to shooting down real planes."

Symphony D. said:

"We delete airliners like you on the way to shooting down real planes."

Click to expand...

http://youtu.be/ycsYXeeaidA?t=2m47s

This is the most interesting Wikipedia page I've read today in some way even vaguely related to current events. The links under "See Also: Fall Survivors," particularly Alan Magee, are also worth reading. This one is also interesting.

Have a weird story too.

Next up, WW3 - just in time for the centenary of WW1.

Seriously though, this is awful. A friend of mine flew the very same flightpath today on the way back from a holiday in Thailand via Kuala Lumpur. Scary.

I had a pneumatics teacher who survived a car crash, train crash, truck hit-n-run and then one day a plane crashed onto a field he was working and hit him. Needless to say he was full of prosthetics (glass eye, arm, legs, metal fittings in bones) and his speech was impaired but he did his job well enough. We called him Kiborg Joža.

I've been showing Perfectionist, and Symphony already knows about him, but The War Nerd has been on a tear recently concerning Israel-Gaza & ISIS.

read him and provide opinions por favor i dont want to go 2 ot

Azale said:

read him and provide opinions por favor i dont want to go 2 ot

Click to expand...

"Lessons from Gaza: The power of any high-tech military is way less than it seems on paper" is pretty dumb, so I'm not very impressed.

Logically, in classical military terms, it’s simple: you’d massacre or expel the whole population. Israel doesn’t quite have the ruthlessness to do that, but they have enough to keep hitting Gaza, killing some of the people they want dead and, since it’s a crowded slum with a huge birthrate, a lot of women and kids who are just hunkering down trying to survive.

There’s a lesson here that the typical war nerd, obsessed with high-tech hardware, could learn if they wanted to: the effective combat power of any high-tech power is way less than it looks like on paper.

Click to expand...

Yeah, protip: high-accuracy high-firepower munitions aren't designed for wholesale slaughter and when coupled with a meandering and murky policy with no clear objectives, don't achieve anything. So when you use military hardware for situations it was never built for, it's not worth as much as you'd think! Wow, what a profound insight. Truly only a genius could discern such a thing.

The Western method of war isn't built to conduct lengthy occupations of people who don't want to be occupied and it hasn't been since like, the Boer War. Occupation involves large troop counts and essentially total ruthlessness, which small professional militaries with strict RoE and a press back home can't do. Surprise, any Western style force stuck occupying territory and doing "COIN" is generally going to do poorly.

Israel is a state fundamentally built on the idea of occupation at this point, so of course it's flailing around uselessly and the hardware is a sideshow. I don't know, maybe this is good reading for people who are clueless?

"I.S.I.S. and the Western media: Groping each other in public like a Kardashian Thanksgiving" tl;dr ISIS is overhyped Western fearmongering. Yeah, okay. Good news for clueless people.