Affentitten

Ukraine is weak. It is feeble. Well with her background at least she might have a clue about Russia. Quite different to her dilettantism in the Middle East.

Actually I think judo seems to be about the most boring and sedate fighting sport there is. Just lots of shirt grabbing with the occasional sight of people falling on top of each other. Maybe I'm just not initiated into the technicalities of it.

There was agreat gold medal judo match yesterday beyween a Russian and a Georgian. Talk about a grudge match. Georgia won.

Though the Chechens were solidly reinforced by Jihadists from all the usual sources. They marketed it well as a Muslim war. That wouldn't be the case in Georgia.

Not any more. They got shut down by Medvedev's Ministry of Truth.

In Soviet Union, irony kills YOU.

Here is some discussion of examples, along with the pro and cons arguments for whether they are exceptions. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_possible_exceptions_to_the_democratic_peace_theory#Modern The problem I, and many others, have with democratic peace theory is that it is such an easy and glib thing to toss off: "democracies don't make wars on each other". But technically they do. Then the quibbling starts about what sort of democracies, how many people were killed, what the powers of the executive are.....

I can tell you that RVs do exist

By no I mean no. Because the theory was blown away a long time before Russia v. Georgia. A more important question now. What's with Georgia and beach volleyball? Australia has had to play Georgia in both mens and womens beach volleyball and the Georgian teams are just Brazilians. How does that come about?

No, because the people that subscribe to that theory always have umpteen caveats to go with it. Like the democracy has to be more than five years old, has to be in a certian part of the world, has to have a certain type of constitution etc etc.

Only if you are afflicted with a grotesque Kiwi accent.

I should also add that it's kind of a zero sum game. I could go out now and rob a poor person of everythng they had. I wouldn't get much money off them, but I'd still have MORE money than when I started the exercise.

Without wanting to give a blanket anthropological answer, the main hook is that you are eating the soul of an enemy warrior. He might have lost, but he was still brave enough to face you. You don't eat the organs of his womenfolk or children.

I'm scratching my head over the fact that the Russians bombed Grozny into the stome age to stop them breaking away, but when someone wants to break away from somewhere else, they pull out all the stops in support. That's the Caucasus. Background from the War Nerd http://www.exile.ru/articles/detail.php?ARTICLE_ID=7426&IBLOCK_ID=35&phrase_id=12412&PAGE=1

Carlo is an OK guy...apart from his almost fanatic attachment to F-111s. As a TV reseracher I once spent an hour on the phone to him discussing the mathematical allegories in the 'information warfare' suite carried by certain ants or something that duped certain wasps into feeding them. Or was it the other way round? Anyway, everybody in the forum knows I'm not that great with numbers and I was barely hanging on by the skin of my teeth to follow him and take notes. When I hung up the phone I realised the whole office had stopped working and was looking at me. There was a simulatenous "What the **** were you talking about?"

I might have known you'd be a Carlo Kopp fan. I've interviewed him a couple of times in the past. A very interesting guy with a passion for his topics. Spending an hour on the phone with him is like having brain surgery: uncomfortable in the frontal lobes, but somewhat rewarding.

Well you could say the Spanish aircraft carrier is a good investment! By keeping up their ship-building capability they were in the market to tender for other countries. It's Spain who will sell us the hulls for our new Aegis ships and they are in the run-off to be the supplier for our two amphibious warfare 'mini carriers'. But hell, it's not like supplying the Australian navy is the road to riches.

Oh I'm not seriously pursuing this line. It was just an idle thought. I guess at least the MBTs were deisgned at a time when they were expecting a big arse armoured battle. The DDX is a post Cold-War concept really. I think in most countries the navies really have to work harder and harder in justifying their combatant ships. But they seem to be pretty successful! Here in Australia we're sinking billions into an air warfare destroyer that is all geared up to fight the Soviet Pacific fleet from 1982.

Yes, sorry. The point of all this was an idle speculation on the cost-benefit of all this anti-missile tech in major warships. It seems an incredible amount of rock that is there to blunt a small pair of scissors that has hardly ever been used.

The el Mina. I think it was bombed rather than attacked with a missile. However, I see that an Israeli destroyer was sunk by Egyptian fast missile attack boats in the same war. Possibly the first successful ship to ship missile engagement. The Tanker War in the Gulf. A US ship was hit by an Iraqi exocet in '87. The US sank a couple of Iranian ships in '88.

Ahhh that's what I was missing. Now I am basing my attacks around cutting off the extensions of the powerful teams rather than just trying to capture as many territories as possible. I'm much more successful.

I remember covering the DDX way back when for Beyond 2000! IIRC there was some pretty revolutionary concepts aside from the stalth, mainly in the electric drive system. But I haven't followed the project since then. I know ships have to be designed to counter missile threats, but i was wondering on how many occasions (aside from the Falklands) have anti-ship missiles actually been fired and been successful? I know an Israeli vessel took a hit from something off the coast of Lebanon in 2006, but what else?

Quite good fun and it's amazing what nuances even a simple game like this can have. I wasn't quite sure how the new dice got added at the end of the turn. Is it just random. Getting drawn to go last in a game with 5+ players is a huge handicap. I've had two games where I was just left with a single feeble territory by the time it was my go. In the 10 or so games I've played the team that gets to go first or second nearly always wins. The rest are just fodder.

Well if you call a stoppage on a game, the linesman needs to be able to provide a case for why. He's there to assist the ref, not just throw mud in the water. If for some reason he can't see the numbers on either player involved in a two-player incident, he certainly should be at least providing an opinion on what happened and what the outcome should be. But that's a minor quibble. We had the better of the ref in the first game, you guys had it in this last one. The fact is that the refereeing didn't really come into it as far as the result. We were hopeless and the ABs were clinical.

No, because he'd come out and say things like "I saw a black player and a gold player swinging their arms." And the ref would say "Which numbers?" and the Fijian guy would just shrug. And the ref would say "What do you reccommend?" and the Fijian guy would just shrug. Happened about 3 or 4 times.