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

[Gem Hound]

I use Chrome, no changes here.

 

[Lord of Elves]

Font is irrelephant.

 

[Luckymoose]

Font is irrelephant.

That isn't true. Font determines how we perceive the text and content within. A poor font is a negative.

 

[Lord of Elves]

That isn't true. Font determines how we perceive the text and content within. A poor font is a negative.

wat r u talking about lucky

 

[Darksaber1]

Font is irrelephant.

I think I saw one of those at the zoo once. Only briefly though, since it wasn't that interesting.

 

[Masada]

Even serving and former US officers don't buy the whole "human shield" line.

...“Eleven battalions of IDF artillery is equivalent to the artillery we deploy to support two divisions of U.S. infantry,” a senior Pentagon officer with access to the daily briefings said. “That’s a massive amount of firepower, and it’s absolutely deadly.” Another officer, a retired artillery commander who served in Iraq, said the Pentagon’s assessment might well have underestimated the firepower the IDF brought to bear on Shujaiya. “This is the equivalent of the artillery we deploy to support a full corps,” he said. “It’s just a huge number of weapons.”

Artillery pieces used during the operation included a mix of Soltam M71 guns and U.S.-manufactured Paladin M109s (a 155-mm howitzer), each of which can fire three shells per minute. “The only possible reason for doing that is to kill a lot of people in as short a period of time as possible,” said the senior U.S. military officer. “It’s not mowing the lawn,” he added, referring to a popular IDF term for periodic military operations against Hamas in Gaza. “It’s removing the topsoil.”

“Holy bejeezus,” exclaimed retired Lt. Gen. Robert Gard when told the numbers of artillery pieces and rounds fired during the July 21 action. “That rate of fire over that period of time is astonishing. If the figures are even half right, Israel’s response was absolutely disproportionate.” A West Point graduate who is a veteran of two wars and is the chairman of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation in Washington, D.C., he added that even if Israeli artillery units fired guided munitions, it would have made little difference.

Even the most sophisticated munitions have a circular area of probability, Gard explained, with a certain percentage of shells landing dozens or even hundreds of feet from intended targets. Highly trained artillery commanders know this and compensate for their misses by firing more shells. So if even 10 percent of the shells fired at combatants in Shujaiya landed close to but did not hit their targets — a higher than average rate of accuracy — that would have meant at least 700 lethal shells landing among the civilian population of Shujaiya during the night of July 20 into June 21. And the kill radius of even the most precisely targeted 155-mm shell is 164 feet. Put another way, as Gard said, “precision weapons aren’t all that precise.”

Senior U.S. officers who are familiar with the battle and Israeli artillery operations, which are modeled on U.S. doctrine, assessed that, given that rate of artillery fire into Shujaiya, IDF commanders were not precisely targeting Palestinian military formations as much as laying down an indiscriminate barrage aimed at cratering the neighborhood. The cratering operation was designed to collapse the Hamas tunnels discovered when IDF ground units came under fire in the neighborhood. Initially, said the senior Pentagon officer, Israel’s artillery used “suppressing fire to protect their forward units but then poured in everything they had, in a kind of walking barrage. Suppressing fire is perfectly defensible. A walking barrage isn’t.”

That the Israelis explained the civilian casualty toll by saying the neighborhood’s noncombatant population had been ordered to stay in their homes and were used as human shields by Hamas reinforced the belief among some senior U.S. officers that artillery fire into Shujaiya was indiscriminate.

“Listen, we know what it’s like to kill civilians in war,” said the senior U.S. officer. “Hell, we even put it on the front pages. We call it collateral damage. We absolutely try to minimize it, because we know it turns people against you. Killing civilians is a sure prescription for defeat. But that’s not what the IDF did in Shujaiya on July 21. Human shields? C’mon, just own up to it.”

 

[Lord of Elves]

EDIT: considering recent events perhaps broaching more severe discussion of the Israel-Palestine issue is not suitable for this thread

 

[Masada]

It's more for Symphony D. who likes looking at the technical aspects of this sort of stuff.

 

[Lord of Elves]

I had thoughts -- mostly self-affirmative polemic nonsense about the ill deeds of Israel and other major American allies -- but I am not certain expressing these thoughts will be conducive to the kind of dialogue that is now desired ... in this particular part of the forum.

I am not wholly clear on what kind of conversation it is kosher to have just at the moment.

 

[Daftpanzer]

I think I saw one of those at the zoo once. Only briefly though, since it wasn't that interesting.

No doubt about it, comparison with Firefox, Chrome is rendering the fonts with more smoothness and 'anti-aliasing' it seems, even though the zoom is 100%. Both claim to be using Verdana font on the page. I kinda like it, but dislike how it just suddenly started happening randomly.

 

[Daftpanzer]

Link to video.

In the year of our lord, 2014, patriots of NES - starving and outnumbered - charged the fields of While We Wait.

They fought like warrior poets. They fought like NESers. And won their freedom...

 

[Thlayli]

Funny dystopian medical industry quote I just encountered at work:

"The UPP establishes a minimum price below which no reseller can advertise or sell a particular product. The intent of the policy is to reinvigorate the rich clinical dialogue that is so important to effective patient care, rather than focusing on cost."

They then go on to threaten anyone who sells below their list price with being cut off from the supply of medical products. This is Johnson and Johnson.

 

[Masada]

Interesting.

Not everyone earning money has become a victim of the IS group’s dubious accounting practices. Some employees, of institutions like Mosul’s courts, provincial government and universities, have been being paid in secrecy.

The money is transferred from Baghdad to one of the nearby cities that are not under the control of the IS group, such as Kirkuk. After this the money is smuggled into Mosul in cash and salaries are then distributed to the different heads of department in secret, and they in turn pay their employees in secret.

One accountant who was involved, and therefore could not be named, said this was being done because otherwise the IS group would confiscate the payments.

“Optimistic people say that the percentage that the IS group takes will go up,” the accountant commented. “Pessimistic people say that this is the last time anybody here will be paid.”

Also interesting.

(Damascus, Syria) – Surrounded by her friends, Nadia smiled as she showed them her shopping and chatted about who she visited and the places she went to in Damascus. The student was able to take her baccalaureate in commercial studies in Damascus after leaving Kfarbatna, a town south of the Syrian capital which is controlled by the opposition and under siege by government forces.

“I was able to call my brother who lives in the Gulf to wire me money,” Nadia said, adding that her brother told her to live life to the full after the months of suffering she had experienced. “I will buy whatever I want and I won’t deprive myself of anything.”

Nadia was one of many students who travelled out of besieged towns south of Damascus and in Eastern Ghouta to the capital and other government-controlled areas in June in order to take their exams. According to media statements from the education ministry, about 390 baccalaureate students and 1,000 ninth-graders made the trip. Some 400 Palestinian students also left the embattled Yarmouk camp under the supervision of the United Nations relief agency UNRWA, to take examinations in a Palestinian camp that is partially controlled by the Syrian government.

In order to leave besieged areas, students had to obtain permission from the State Security headquarters in Damascus. This became possible thanks to an initiative by local teachers, mediated by the Baath party branch in Eastern Ghouta and UNRWA.

 

[Azale]

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/08/reading-hamilton-from-the-left/

All this shaped Hamilton’s politics. He saw his adopted nation as being in a similar position to himself — in search of strength, but profoundly weak — and he had a firm grasp on economic realities. Because Jefferson had slaves and a plantation, he could maintain the illusion of independence and write fetishistic paeans to the yeoman farmer while enjoying the luxury to which he had become accustomed. Hamilton operated with an acute sense of his own vulnerability. He depended on patrons throughout his career; he appreciated structures of power for what they were, and what they made possible, and developed the ability to adapt and graft himself on to them. Even his attraction to artillery (the mechanization of war) seems like a comment on the utility of power.

 

[Lord of Elves]

Naming my firstborn after Alexander Hamilton.

you say i am crazy but my methods produce results, mein kommandant

 

[Nuka-sama]

Oh man, I sure do love playing arm chair economist/social theorist with no real world experience

 

[Daftpanzer]

'Oh man, I sure do love playing arm chair economist/social theorist with no real world experience ' - said every politician ever!!!

 

[Nuka-sama]

'Oh man, I sure do love playing arm chair economist/social theorist with no real world experience ' - said every politician ever!!!

And every university student

 

[Azale]

better than using one's small slice of real life experience to cover any and all circumstances

 

[Shadowbound]

better than using one's small slice of real life experience to cover any and all circumstances

Drunk Shadow: "Let me tell you an analogy from Ballroom Dance that suggests a solution to your completely different problem."