LongLeftFlank

Hmm, John, I've been a consultant for 10 years now, but if you can find a way to tie use of the word "surely" to a "specific probability range" that is endorsed by the US intelligence community, I shall bow down in shock and awe at your superior wankery-skills. (Knocking myself off my own grammatical high horse BTW, "surely" is an adverb, not an adjective as I stated above -- incorrectly )

While I don't expect non-native English speakers, particularly engineers, to write (or edit) flawless King's English in this day and age, this piece definitely crosses well into AYBABTU, throwing the credibility of the entire article into question. Warning flags: general use of passive voice ("it has been known that") and biased adjectives ("clearly", "surely", "apparently"). If the author has sources and data to substantiate his assertions, he needs to quote them, not layer on weasel words. No sale, sorry.

Especially if it's a Syrian government contract... Code more quickly, infidel dogs, or by the false teeth of the Prophet, we will show you a different kind of "skinning".

Name that film.... Patrick Swayze: "Wait a minute. I thought there were a billion screaming Chinamen." WHOOOSH!!!!! Powers Boothe: "There were."

I am shocked, shocked that anyone should intimate such a thing. My mum is kicking herself for not putting everything into oil stocks the moment those two got elected. Just spent a half hour in a gas line at Costco (haven't done that since 1977). And overhearing the conversations at the pumps, the GOP could be in for a nasty surprise in November. Gerrymandering or no. A lot of drive-thru-megachurch "Red" America is perfectly willing to vote Democrat if they get pissed enough.

"The next three days will be terrible...."

I'd point out also that white US social attitudes and policy towards Indians, even at the time, were a lot more conflicted than that shown by Germany toward Jews, or by Hutus towards Tutsi. US opponent Tecumseth became a widely admired folk hero -- the Saladin of his day. The honesty, loyalty and self-reliance of Indians was as celebrated (though just as stereotyped) as their courage and savagery (e.g. James Fenimore Cooper through Frederic Remington). The Wounded Knee slaughter was decried as a scandal and a national shame in its own day, and not just among Boston Brahmin Transcendentalists. Chief Seattle's speech (the original, not the crunchy 1970s fabricated one) survives because it was widely published in white US newspapers. Again, romantic images of Indians didn't match actual attitudes on the ground: at best condescending (church sponsored Indian schools), at worst lethal (pestilential internment camps). But hardly the picture of a US Final Solution, or a Manifest Destiny gleefully built on heaps of Indian skulls.

Abbott, you argue your side as well as I've seen it argued, but you are engaging in hyperbole, however sincere and visceral your feeling. It may well be right to reach for harsher words than "assimilation" to describe the privations endured by Native Americans from 1500-1920 or so as they were encircled, displaced, at times killed/caused to die, and universally marginalized, but GENOCIDE is simply not the correct word to apply relative to the real genocides of history. And selective quotes from US presidents really don't bolster the case. In the 1944-45 period, you can also find numerous quotes from Western leaders, most notably Churchill, forcefully advocating the mass destruction of the German intelligentsia and Junker class, and the reduction of Germany to a level of near-starvation agrarian subsistence. Understandable in context, given two world wars, 4 years of total war and savage bombing, plus growing evidence of the enormity of Nazi crimes. What really matters is whether these emotional statements were implemented as real policy. Context matters. Prior to 1783, the Iroquois -- encouraged but not led by the British-- had carried out a number of very violent raids on white settlements deprived of their military age males who were away fighting for the Patriot cause. Whether or not their motive was: a. rolling back recent white encroachment b. exacting revenge for past white aggression c. seeking loot and scalps from weak neighbors (the JasonC theory) their actions were sufficiently barbaric that barbaric postwar American reprisals can be understood, if not justified either. But we can argue "who started it" until doomsday. The undeniable fact is that Sonderkommando Sullivan didn't execute Reichsfuhrer Washington's orders very thoroughly. Most Iroquois survived, scraping through 1784-1930+ on the usual meager combination of day labour, barter, subsistence farming, and (later) white charity. Not pleasant, not easy to escape even today, but also NOT genocide. I'll leave it to someone else better versed in US history to defend the other 3 presidents on Mount Rushmore -- IIRC, all 3 also spoke and legislated in favour of Indians at other times. No, they hardly rolled the clock back to 1491, or even followed up to ensure that Indians got a square deal to match the lofty rhetoric. But neither they nor the US government were the rabid Indian killers you paint them as.

I've taken the liberty of forwarding the above discussion to some friends of friends in the Princeton physics department. They may be able to either rebut or illuminate your argument. I'll let you know. I generally think of myself as being among the better educated people I know, but you've definitely left me in the dust with this one....

FWIW, back in Jan '89, a Dutch friend and I retraced the Ardennes attack (and massacre*) route of Kampfgruppe Peiper, using the Osprey book as our guide. At a few places, we wandered into the woods to see what the terrain was like. Typically, there's only a lot of underbrush adjacent to settlements and main roads. Pine stands on level ground have a dense canopy and offer little ground cover beyond dense needles, treefalls and ground undulations/watercourses/ditches, but the low light plus density of skinny, scraggly trunks heavily impairs vision beyond about 150m or so. Nasty places for sniping, ambushes and treebursts. I vividly recall one such spot about 50m off the small dirt road near a lumberyard called Buchholz (not the station AFAIK) where I stumbled across a small memorial marker to a US major killed at or near there in early Jan '45 (counterattack). As you get into wooded slopes (e.g. the Ambleve valley up to Stoumont), you get older, thicker trunks, but a less uniform canopy so there are small saplings fighting for light as well. There's also more fallen trunks as well as small rivulets and gullies and boulders to offer cover. * Not to slop over from a now tiresome separate thread, but all that about the infamous Baugnez crossroads massacre being mistaken identity is just more Waffen SS fanboy greywash. We ran across 3 other memorials to GI and civilian prisoners murdered by SS along Peiper's route -- not so many dead as Baugnez, but groups of 5 - 10 victims, too many to be anything other than deliberate murder.

Not sure that he's represented anywhere that: (a) being assimilated was anything like a pleasant experience for the aboriginals at the time, or for their immediate descendants ( that it was wholly irrational (as opposed to pointless) of them to fight, given their existing cultural norms, or © that the settlers/US Government were just nice hardworking Protestants happy to embrace their "red" brethren into the melting pot with open arms as equals so long as they clothed their nakedness, feared Jehovah and tilled the land. We all know this wasn't the case. Assimilation was a long journey (still ongoing). Up to 1900, unprovoked massacres, forcible evictions and naked land grabs did occur. Numbers of natives died of exposure and neglect when penned into de facto concentration camps. Well into the 20th century, racial discrimination and the poverty culture made reservations very hard places to escape from for those who couldn't pass for whites. It's only been in the last 20 years or so that most North Americans have felt no stigma (even pride) about revealing native ancestry. But all that is a LONG LONG LONG way from mass graves, programmed extermination and gas chambers, or the systematic enslavement/rape or death by starvation that was the inevitable fate of overrun groups in prior centuries (are there any aboriginal Celts left in Poland?). In fact, the fate of the North American natives was about as fortunate an outcome as overrun aboriginals got anywhere at the time, excepting perhaps New Zealand and Polynesia (and their intelligentsia ain't thrilled to bits with things either).

I long ago accepted JasonC as my personal lord and saviour. Although he's more of an Old Testament smiting and fulminating type of prophet. Jason, speaking of (meta)physics, if you ever came into physical contact with Noam Chomsky, do you think an enormous explosion would result as you annihilated one another? Or would a rift simply open in the space-time continuum (you know, the one you apparently employ in order to do all this writing). Nunc dimittis P.S. Yes, yes, I know it's Holy Thursday and I'm blaspheming. But I gave up a whole load of stuff -- including CM -- for Lent.

... Next thing we'll be reading music reviews in Janes or Military History. Franz Ferdinand -- Bouncing Back From Sarajevo, the "Archduke of Soul" Reinvents Himself as a Gang of Four Tribute Band.

And then be forced to go back and get it.... --What are you? --We are PTR-riflemen. --Where is your PTR then? --We left it there. --Go back and get it! This should tell you much of what you want to know about what life was like for Russian ATR riflemen. Iremember.ru - V Zimakov, PTR gunner

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Footage of the brewup, among other things Panther Brewup - Cologne

I once proposed a business idea to my pogue relatives in Cape Breton.... take a cue from the berry and citrus growers, and sponsor "Club Your Own" sealing expeditions. Fresh Air. Family Fun. All You Can Club For One Low Price. (Just kidding, eh?) P.S. Q: What's the difference between a harp seal pup and a time share? A: For a harp seal, the beating stops after you're dead

Yep. And if an APC is a death trap, this makes the Hummer, with whatever armor you slap on it, what exactly? You listening out there, Donald "Go to war with the army you've got" Rumsfeld? Or is the Bradley/Hummer contract constituency in Congress more important than the lives of the troops? (Don't all answer at once now).

A buddy of mine, a USN SEAL, did some "grey" work in Israel and the Levant after leaving the service. Among other things, he co-authored a 1983 study on a new troop carrier for the IDF, after M113s proved totally unsatisfactory for MOUT in Lebanon (i.e. a lot of Israeli kids were killed or maimed in the things). They determined that there was just no substitute for MBT armor protection when it came to MOUT. The other option on the table was the equally expensive Bradley, which the IDF declined owing to insufficient armor and troop capacity and some other 1980s teething troubles (underpowered, trouble swimming due to top heavy turret). Even back in 1988, my friend was, and remains, convinced, that APCs in MOUT are basically death traps. A modified tank is the best way to save life and limb, and operating costs compared to the latest APCs are very similar.

.... and the headscarf and gumboots. I didn't want to be the first one into the cesspool, but this is just too good to resist. I believe the platinum dyejob and collagen implants depicted in the bmp are more typical of a SU-92 Mafiya Floozy. This model, affectionately dubbed "Suka" by the troops, was the mainstay of the Guards Clubland Divisions throughout the Yeltsin era, seeing a great deal of action on all fronts (nudge nudge saynomore). A few models were subsequently exported to London, Brooklyn, Toronto and Miami Beach, where following extensive refitting and upgunning, they remain in widespread service today in the... (OK, I'm going to stop this now before I get a visit from a big ugly man in a tracksuit named Evgeni).

.... or costumed as infiltrators from the Hermann Goering Division (which they took a little too literally)

.... or costumed as infiltrators from the Hermann Goering Division (which they took a little too literally)

Thanks, gents, for the advice and links. A few highlights from my reading so far include: - Numerous difficulties arose in correcting artillery fire, observation was limited... Shells embedded deeply in the swampy soil... Offensive movement was fraught with great losses [by treebursts]. - Infantry support weapons were widely employed down to company level. - In inaccessible areas, infantry operated ahead of the tanks... which fired from a halt before the infantry emerged from the defiles between the swamps.... [Against pakfronts], the tanks and SAU carried parties of submachine gunners. - Troops had great difficulties with the mixed minefields and wire obstacles. - Special detachments were sent out to limit enemy attempts to destroy or block roads. And this more or less flanges with your advice on tactics.

Speaking of SU-76s, any pointers or sources on historically realistic tactics for the "Beotch" in an offensive infantry close support role? Clearly you can't use them like T-34s. The scenario I'm thinking is a Fall '44 infantry battalion attack vs. German blocking positions in some godforsaken patch of marshy pines on the Polish-Baltic frontier (what a bloody awful place to die, eh?). The otherwise highly amusing "Colombina" memoir doesn't shed much light -- the only offensive CS role described is shooting a German AC (and then getting brewed up in turn). I notice most "in action" photos show SU-76s lined up in arty position, wheel to wheel, e.g. Russian Warrior - SU76, although this may be posed. Full disclosure: I have a childhood score to settle with "Suka", having had to sift through mounds of hideous orange SU-76 counters in the SL Cross of Iron module to find AFVs I actually wanted to fight with

Ah, dear old Fremont, "Center of the Universe". Are they still doing the outdoor cinema up there? Like the "Svejk" animated gif, too.