h a l f b a k e r yThis ain't rocket surgery.
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A TV game show. The four teams are equipped with all manner of devices in their dedicated category:
The Blast team has any amount of high explosives, black powder, flammable gasses, petrol, anything that will burn or detonate basically. Plus fuses and ignition equipment.
The Blend team has any
type of rotary pulverisation equipment, from blenders, whisks, chainsaws, tunneling machines, etc.
The Bludgeon team has any blunt object, stones, sticks, hammers, mallets, maces, wrecking balls, etc.
The Behead team has anything sharp, from scalpels to katanas, saws to razors, axes to circular saws.
The game is on when the Umpire (who wears a tall stack of hats) draws from a hat a piece of paper. The papers are sent in by anonymous members of the public. The paper contains a task. The first team to complete their task using only their permitted category of devices, wins.
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Sounds a lot like the American military. |
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Certainly more than the french military, who have only the
Bastard
team, supplied with running shoes, white flags, and phrasebooks
containing phonetic translations into German of useful sayings
like "We give up", "Please take this rifle, it is quite safe as it has
never been loaded or fired ", ""Would you like to meet our
sister/brother/goat ?", "We have a fine selection of obscene
postcards", and " Are our hands high enough,
Sir ? Which way to the internment camp ?" |
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All of which were learned well and repeated by the Americans in Vietnam, but even they were outdone by the Dutch military in Bosnia when they handed over 7,000 civilians at Srebrenica to be shot. |
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// black powder, .... anything that will burn or detonate // |
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Black powder neither burns, nor detonates; to be needlessly and irritatingly precise, it is a deflagrant composition. |
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You will all now thank us profusely for this information. |
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If you do not, we will engage "lecture" mode, and you will be stuck here for hours until you finally stagger away, much better informed, but nauseous, bleeding from the ears, and lacking the will to live. |
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You know we can do this. You have been warned. |
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// All of which were learned well and repeated by the Americans in Vietnam, // |
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... adding plagiarism to their numerous other sins ... |
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// but even they were outdone by the Dutch military in Bosnia when they handed over 7,000 civilians at Srebrenica to be shot. // |
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The problem there is that the Dutch are a friendly, polite and helpful nation. If you ask them nicely, they find it very hard to say "no". |
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Of course, neither approaches the venality of the Western Allies in 1945, who returned many thousands of Ukrainian, Cossack and Russian HiWis to Stalin's domain; the lucky ones were probably those who were shot out of hand, rather than being shipped off to the Gulags.
Then again, having paid a blood-price of at least twenty million dead to stop the Nazis, the USSR probably thought they were entitled to call the shots in some ways. |
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//stuck here for hours until you finally stagger away// to the close
button? |
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We have taken control of the close button. All your button are belong to us. Resistance is futile. |
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//nauseous, bleeding from the ears, and lacking the will to live// |
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Another day at the office ... |
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And here I had hoped these teams would be involved in
some sort of 4-way melee. My money would be on the
Blast crew, although I’d root for the underdog Bludgeoners
as they’d seem like a colorful bunch. |
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That happens as the "surprise" second half. |
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// My money would be on the Blast crew // |
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... which would be a wise choice since their corporate sponsor is
BorgCo, |
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// That happens as the "surprise" second half. // |
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The surprise being that there is a second half ? |
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Entertaining though it is to heap insults on an absent and un-
retaliating party, it continues to bother me that the wrong political
lesson is being conveyed about the collapse of France in 1940. |
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In reality, the root cause was not national cowardice, but partisan
division. The French left and French right were too busy fighting
each other to focus on the small problem of imminent
civilisational catastrophe. There's an entire Asterix book
addressing this problem (in English, "Asterix and the Great
Divide"), so it must be true. |
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We might learn something by contemplating that. We're less
likely to learn anything by repeating "they suck, we rule". |
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