Category Archives: Military & War

Scott Adams on Best and Worst Jobs

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Scott Adams finds it interesting that the guy with the best job in the world gets to blow up the guy with the worst job in the world.

“I have to think that the guy who fired the rocket by remote control loves his job. I have an image of him sitting in an air conditioned headquarters someplace, feet up on the desk, a bag of Cheetohs on one side, a Budweiser on the other, staring at his computer screen. It’s about 1 am and everyone else is asleep. The order comes through on e-mail saying something like “Blow up mud hut #4,7855.” So he takes a break from playing Doom and plugs that number into the GPS system and soon his drone is hovering over said mud hut, missiles ready to go.”

Let’s add Scott Adams to the short list of people I’d like to drink beer with after work.

Thou shalt not terminate with extreme sanction

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Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson calling for the assassination of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, a leftist who sits atop the largest oil reserves outside the Middle East:

“If he thinks we’re trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it. It’s a whole lot cheaper than starting a war. And I don’t think any oil shipments will stop.”

“Blind hatred instilled by militant Islam”

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“The killers always allege particular gripes — Australian troops in Iraq, Christian proselytizing, Hindu intolerance, occupation of the West Bank, theft of Arab petroleum, the Jews, attacks on the Taliban, the 15th-century reconquest of Spain, and, of course, the Crusades. But in most cases — from Mohamed Atta, who crashed into the World Trade Center, to Ahmed Sheik, the former London School of Economics student who planned the beheading of Daniel Pearl, to Magdy Mahmoud Mustafa el-Nashar, the suspected American-educated bomb-maker in London — the common bond is not poverty, a lack of education or legitimate grievance. Instead it is blind hatred instilled by militant Islam.”

— Historian Victor Davis Hanson, writing in the Washington Times

To die for

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“Three decades after the U.S. defeat in what Vietnamese call the American War, and just three years since the two nations signed a bilateral trade agreement, U.S.-branded hotels such as Sheraton have opened. U.S.-based tour operators are venturing in. And today, a United Airlines jet touches down in Ho Chi Minh City (still called Saigon by many), marking the first commercial American air link to Vietnam since the war.” — USA TODAY

I think I read some where that the US now does $5 Billion in trade with Vietnam. Flash back to the bloodiest days of “the American War,” and imagine you’re a U.S. soldier being ordered to risk your life to save the South Vietnamese from a life under Communism (I think that’s why we were there). If you could have looked into the future and seen that we would one day be trading partners with Communist Vietnam, would you still have been willing to lay down your life because politicians back in Washington decided it was vital to U.S. foreign policy?

So now our young men and women (and Iraqi men, women and children) are dying for a different foreign policy (I think it’s the War On Terror). Just for fun, let’s pretend it’s 2035 and the U.S. has just signed a new trade agreement with Osama bin Laden. Seems ridiculous. Obscene. But no more impossible than the USA TODAY story above would have seemed in 1970.

Should a young man or woman be asked to lay down their life fighting an enemy that will one day be a trading partner? If we use WWII as an example, I guess the answer is “yes.” We were on the right side in that war and we do lots of business with Germany and Japan (and Italy).

But, somehow, that just doesn’t feel right to me. If I’m going to risk my life to kill the other guys, I don’t want to kiss and make up down the road. Never. Ever. That’s why I would have made a poor soldiar and an even worse Secretary of State.

The wisdom of Hermann Goring

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Regular readers know I’m a big fan of George Carlin (and letting other people doing my thinking) so I would have bought his new book, When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?, even if Wal-Mart hadn’t banned it. And I couldn’t get past the acknowledgments without finding something worth writing down:

“Of course the people don’t want war. But after all, it’s the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it’s always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it’s a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger.” –Hermann Goring at the Nuremberg Trials

I think I’m gonna need a fresh highlighter.

Attention Baby Boomers

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David Brazeal writes:

This is to inform you that the Vietnam War ended 30 years ago. Please refrain from referring to this event in political discourse, except as it shapes our continued effort to frustrate the goals of world domination by our Cold War opponent, the Soviet Union.

It has been called to our attention that this war shaped your worldview when you were young, impressionable and intoxicated by hope and marijuana. While we understand your obsession, we can no longer tolerate it. Thus, we shall treat any continued prattling in the same way you treated the prattling of your grandparents, who spoke of The Great War ad nauseum between longing remembrances of FDR–with rolled eyes and involuntary commitment to a group home. Thank you for your consideration.

David was born in 1969 so he was a teenager in the mid-eighties. I just spoke with him on the phone and asked what he considered the defining event of his generation. The best he could come up with was Cyndi Lauper‘s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.”

War & Peace

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“Peace is best. You should make every sacrifice to secure peace. When you absolutely must go to war, however, you must try to kill all the enemy you can as quickly as you can, holding nothing back, until they have surrendered or you have been defeated utterly. It is a great fraud to think otherwise and it prolongs the agony. It would be better if people said, if we fight, we are going to boil babies in their own fat and blast the skin off nice old ladies, so they die slowly in great pain, and we are happy to do this, because what we fight for is so important. And if they conclude that it is not as important as that, then they should fight no more.”

— Robert K. Tanenbaum, Act of Revenge

Blogging from Baghad?

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I have no idea if this is the real deal. But if it is, well, it’s kind of amazing. Or maybe not. If it IS legit –and at least one person has done some research– it’s just such a good example of blogging.

“…half an hour ago the oil filled trenches were put on fire. First watching Al-jazeera they said that these were the places that got hit by bombs from an air raid a few miniutes earlier bit when I went up to the roof to take a look I saw that there were too many of them, we heard only three explosions. I took pictures of the nearest. My cousine came and told me he saw police cars standing by one and setting it on fire. Now you can see the columns of smoke all over the city.”

Assume for the sake of discussion this what it appears to be. No governments. No big news organizations. Just some guy in a city under attack, publishing his thoughts, feelings, whatever… to the entire world. The Internet has changed/is changing the world and blogging is an important part of that change.

Stock market prediction

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Douglas Rushkoff’s “official and not-to-be-wagered-upon stock market prediction is a 10-15% rise in the S&P by the end of February, and then freefall down to 6500 before the war starts. Then, a blip up with that sense of certainty that always accompanies a good ariel bombardment, and a blip back down when we realize that in a globally networked economy, war is bad for business, too.”