A continuing series of learnings from a variety of interesting & informative podcasts.
This Extract is from Hardcore History Show 33 ( Blitz Old School Toughness) RSS http://feeds.feedburner.com/dancarlin/history?format=xml

Could we beat our grandparents in a major war?

Down side of a civilization.

Do we need the toughness to survive?

Life cycle of history doesn't really work.

Good historians look at human trends from deep history over thousands of years, not hundreds.

Sparta was as great as it was, only because it had a culture's goal to grow the ultimate fighting man in Greece. Men were raw material to one goal.

They became corruptible & luxury loving which caused the fall of their city-state.

Like in Young Frankenstein, the Doctor wanted the Hans Delbrück's brain, but gets switched with a brain as Igor states, is from "Abby Normal" (a.k.a."Do Not Use This Brain! Abnormal").

You can give them (your fighting force) the best spears or guns, but if the men won't stand there to throw the spear or shoot the guns. It doesn't matter how good the weapons are.

In Afghanistan if we had to use the same weapons as the Afghans It would be a very interesting war.

Can you make society tougher.That's what the Nazis were trying.

In the end, we're currently most likely on the good side of the down-side. It the bad side of a downward society that sucks to be there.
issueofourlifetime@gmail.com

Adjust a single word to make to make a Victim

Review the caption and compare it to the photo (using the Full Story link). Can you can find the lie?

Egyptian security personnel erected barbed wire on Monday along a section of breached wall in Rafah, a Gaza border town.

Thanks Mark
New York Times found 121 cases in which veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan either "committed a killing in this country, or were charged with one." The "committed a killing" formulation includes car accidents.

Thus, with declining deaths in theater, the media narrative evolves. Old story: "America's soldiers are being cut down by violent irrational insurgents we can never hope to understand." New story: "Americans are being cut down by violent irrational soldiers we can never hope to understand." In the quagmire of these veterans' minds, every leafy Connecticut subdivision is Fallujah and every Dunkin' Donuts clerk an Abu Musab al-Zarqawi with an annoyingly perky manner.

It was the work of minutes for the Powerline website's John Hinderaker to discover that the "quiet phenomenon" is entirely unphenomenal: It didn't seem to occur to the Times to check whether the murder rate among recent veterans is higher than that of the general population of young men. It's not. Au contraire, the columnist Ralph Peters calculated that Iraq and Afghanistan vets are about a fifth as likely to murder you as the average 18-34 year-old American male. Better yet, the blogger Iowahawk meticulously drew his own "patchwork picture" of another "quiet phenomenon": the Denver newspaper columnist arrested for stalking, the Cincinnati TV reporter facing child-molestation charges, the Philadelphia anchorwoman who went on a violent drunken rampage. As Iowahawk's one-man investigative unit wondered:

"Unrelated incidents, or mounting evidence that America's newsrooms have become a breeding ground for murderous, drunk, gun-wielding child molesters

Full Story

Bluffing at the big table

Since when does the winner of the pot get blamed for having the higher hand? Doesn't logic dictate that blame should be thrown to the one hiding the real story (a.k.a the Truth). Saddam pretended to have the W.M.D.s and played high stakes poker. When you lose, you lose big. The world community (U.N) agreed the W.M.D.s the were in place. They wrote sanction after sanction, for Saddam to come clean. Saddam had every chance in the world to prove to the world the W.M.D.s were not there. ......... What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas. Saddam chose to sit at the big table and try to bluff his way the the pot. ......... Saddam, What happens in the Middle-East, doesn't stay in the Middle-East.

McCain is not to be trusted.

With Fred out of the race, I'm afraid McCain is the front runner for the long run. The good thing, he's out of money and big shots aren't forking over any dough. The Conservatives are withholding their support. John is going to have to give in to them, if he wants to win. I just don't trust him, The only way I'll vote for McCain is if he chooses Fred as a running mate. The bad thing is, Fred is his friend and may sign-on with his old buddy McCain. I just hope Fred holds out for some real conservative valve commitments from the big fat liar.