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How the Pentagon Got Its Shape
Pcol writes "The Washington Post is running a story on the design process for the Pentagon building and why it ended up with its unusual shape. In July 1941 with World War II looming, a small group of army officers met to consider a secret plan to provide a permanent home for War Department headquarters containing 4 million square feet of office space and housing 40,000 people. The building that Brig. Gen. Brehon Burke Somervell, head of the Army's Construction Division, wanted to build was too large to fit within the confines of Washington DC and would have to be located across the Potomac River in Arlington. "We want 500,000 square feet ready in six months, and the whole thing ready in a year," the general said adding that he wanted a design on his desk by Monday morning. The easiest solution, a tall building, was out because of pre-war restrictions on steel usage and the desire not to ruin Washington's skyline. The tract selected had a asymmetrical pentagon shape bound on five sides by roads or other divisions so the building was designed to conform to the tract of land. Then with objections that the new building would block views from Arlington National Cemetery, the location was moved almost one-half mile south. The building would no longer be constructed on the five-sided Arlington Farm site yet the team continued with plans for a pentagon at the new location. In the rush to complete the project, there was simply no time to change the design."
Curious to see them working so hard to explain the shape.
Could it be that they're afraid the policies they're being asked to enact today might cause some of us to believe the building design was inspired by the pentagram as used by the Church of Satan?
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Here is the printable version ...
as noted at the bottom,
this this is an excerpt from an upcoming book The Pentagon: a History by Stephan Vogel. Newspapers tend to do these reprints over 3-day weekends since
not a lotta news happening -
here's something ... uhhhhh ... exciting happening today ... ;-)
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
Ever heard of the law of fives ?
That's a pretty good cover story. Really they had to radiation-shield the pentagram that locks down the devil at its center, with lots of authoritarian human bodies to absorb the extremely high frequencies that scorch souls.
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make install -not war
1941 and they were already considering a permanent home for the "War" department. In a country where the army was not to be a standing army and it was to be all-volunteer? Typical.
Here's a idea to get rid of the Empire quickly: pass a Constitutional amendment that no military troops can be paid or reimbursed, ever. This way, the only reason why men will go to war is a real one -- real fear that their families, friends and properties may see harm.
Good article, by the way.
How the Pentagon Got Its Shape... (It's pentagonal.)
This vividly reminds me of "the time when the milkman was 47 minutes late"
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
Apparently, Taco can cheer for a long weekend, but he completely neglects the reason for it. Today is Memorial Day, where we pay tribute and honor those that gave their lives for their country, so that we can continue to live in freedom.
God Bless Our Troops, and God Bless America.
At least they were honest back then. Now it is called the "Defense Department"?! HA!
Mind | Body | Spirit | Cash
of a post 9/11 Daily Show comment calling it "the quadragon". but no one really knows how that happened.
oh marmalade.
I kind of expected the definition of the origin of the math pentagon: "After 4 sides, a square, became so useful we had to think for years about how to top it.. and then it came to us: FIVE sides".
..."Rectangle", "Quadrilateral", and "Square", tested poorly in focus groups.
You mean all those conspiracy web sites that claim that the shape of the pentagon and capitol hill are giant satanic drawings are bullshit!?
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
All this talk of technology and free software is a distraction. What really matters is our preparations and readiness for war.
Pretty much everything we do just conforms to the limitations of our environment. It's all we can really do, after all. That the Pentagon's shape happened because of an artificial "environment" (the shape of a plot of land) is irrelevant. And then, the shape wasn't changed when it was moved because of a lack of time...well, this is also pretty common, I think.
I'm not trying to pooh-pooh the article, but it's just kind of...well...you know, my shoe is shaped kind of oblong and rounded because, well, that's how feet are shaped. Isn't that amazing?
I guess what I'm getting at is...erm...why is this interesting? I guess the only news here is the bit about how it was shaped to fit one site, then moved. Riveting stuff, that.
gameDB
In more innocent days, the center ring, lower level of the Pentagon contained a mini-shopping mall (called the Concourse) with department stores, a bookseller and other shops, restaurants, a Post Office, and businesses such as dry cleaners. It was also a major transfer point for people taking public transportation (at that time it would've been all buses) into and out of Washington, DC.
"Here's what's happening. You're starting to drive like your Dad..." - Red Green
WW2 was a special time in the history of the public service. Projects were approved and built at a pace that embarrasses us today. Sure, the military had a bureaucracy but there was a war to be won. Everyone focused on being effective. Petty bureaucrats with petty bureaucratic concerns were swept aside.
The lessons were learned in WW1. When that war started, the British officer corps was incompetent. They were in charge of the empire's troops and there were massacres of Canadian, Australian, Newfoundland etc. troops. The colonies weren't about to put up with that. In fact there is a story that the Canadian prime minister hauled the British prime minister out of his chair by his lapels and made it very clear that, if there was another such massacre, the Canadians were going home. The incompetent British officers were replaced by competent colonials. By the time the Americans arrived, they had some very good models of military efficiency to copy. (You could also make the argument that they weren't that stupid in the first place.) In any event, when WW2 came along, the lessons learned in WW1 were still living memory.
Sadly, given enough peace time, the fat bloated bureaucracy rears its ugly head again. The meritocracy is suppressed. If we had to build another Pentagon today, it would cost too much and take too long, and some company close to certain politicians would get rich. In fact, looking at the corruption and waste of money in Iraq, I'm feeling very depressed.
Fuck Everything, We're Doing Five Sides.
of the final five cylons.
Have a new defense department in a building shaped like a circle. The theme of the building being what goes around, comes around.
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
English-born poet W. H. Auden worked on an Army commission in the 40s and mentioned once, having been to a meeting in the Pentagon, wandering the halls for what seemed like forever. Finally spotting a guard he walked up and said "Excuse me, but how do I get out?" to which the guard replied "You are out."
They're using this fictional history as a way to cover up that Yog-Sothoth is imprisoned in the center. Certainly the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon was an attempt to free Yog-Sothoth (see the "Elder Sign" section).
Ah, never mind, I'm sure they'll get it right in rev 2.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Rushed work is crappy work.
Proper planning is expensive, but pays for itself in the long run.
Sometimes you have to rush, but we tend to rush things a lot more than we need to.
It sucks.
So we shouldn't bother honoring the persons killed in past wars in defense of our nation because we disagree (however strongly) with the war going on today?
Good solid thinking.
One area where the Brits and Americans had to relearn the lessons of World War I was anti-submarine warfare. Only after many ships were sunk, and lives lost, did they reinstitute the convoy system that had proved so successful in the previous war. It was if the allied navies had suffered a collective attack of memory loss and were determined to repeat all of their previous mistakes. In contrast, the Germans had developed and practiced new tactics to make more effective use of their modernized submarine fleet. The damage to the allies was only limited by the relatively small size of the German submarine fleet and design deficiencies in their torpedoes.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I suspect much of the dirty details of WW II have become myth. I doubt there was a single time in history where the shades of grey were really black and white.
I believe it would be more accurate to say that bureaucracy was ignored or routed around more during WW II. Bureaucracy never works.
http://pubs.logicalexpressions.com/pub0008/LPMArti cle.asp?ID=208
I put the 't' in electrical engineering.
What the fuck does your comment have to do with the construction of the Pentagon? I'll tell you: it's completely offtopic, but par for the course for you. You use any opportunity to post your hippy-dippy lefty bullshit at any anytime. I'm surprised these idiot moderators still fall for it every time. Maybe it's because they're also dirty, smelly hippies who have no lives like you.
He he he...
Does that make the Pentagon Hell's anus? It's the right shape.
cry me a river, everybody kills something directly or indirectly
This worked so effectively for us in Vietnam.
Oh wait...
Also the "full time professional Army" isn't winning in Iraq because the war was horribly mismanaged right after the fall of Baghdad.
The Iraqi police were fired (but kept their weapons), the factories (which provided jobs) that were in operation before Saddam was captured weren't opened back up, and the people that actually had some real experience governing (the Sunnis) were banned from... government.
So now you've got a bunch of armed unemployed Iraqis with nothing to do and al-qaeda whispering in their ear, and a bunch of novices running the government...
Here's to the crazy ones
There's a movie related to that experiment.
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
In July 1941 with World War II well under way in Europe...
Thank you mr. jack thomson. Your insight into the ingenius theory that people play violent video games because they want to kill another living being is undoubtable! Also the fact that only people who are raise with bad parenting play bad video games. Astonishing! You should get a nobel prize for such wonderful insight.
You never realize how much manually made unmanaged "linked" lists suck, till you have src.link.link.link.link...
Perhaps you aren't old enough to remember the Vietnam war, but I do. The US was never officially at war against North Vietnam, they spent ten years helping South Vietnam fight the Viet Cong insurgents. They dropped a few million tons of bombs in North Vietnam, for sure, just like they did on the Viet Cong supply routes in Laos and Cambodia, but they never attempted to invade North Vietnam.
If the US had wanted to win the Vietnam war they should have invaded North Vietnam. Land there in an amphibious attack and war would have been won in a matter of weeks. Likewise, if they want to win the Iraq war now, they should invade Syria and Iran. If the US Army had stopped at the German border after liberating France from Nazism they would have lost WWII.
Ever since Truman refused the MacArthur request to attack China during the Korea war, the US has had this doctrine of limited wars, fighting proxy armies as if the power behind them did not exist. A very expensive way to obtain limited results.
I am sorry, but are we reading the same history book ? Sure on the short (!) term duration of that war most of the country which practized resistance were not liberated by themselves, but without the resistance in many country, the Nazi occupation army would have had a field day and put the troop back on the front. Which they did not/could not. And one can argue that as time passed, the advantage was on the various resistance, "slowly" grinding the occupant. I am not saying this would have been immediate, but it is quite clear that sooner or later the situation would have exploded in the hand of the german.
- or at least there used to be...
(Ground Zero was the center court yard, and the dirty water dogs at the stand were great!)
- i used to love walking around the world's largest indoor parking lot...
- my first divorce attorney was in E-ring in the early '80s... gave me great advice on how to tick off the ex during proceedings in Manassas at the courthouse..
I thought everyone knew this, but I guess not...
A pentagon is a very traditional shape for fortifications. Reason is very simple. If you have a pentagon shaped fort then each side of the fort can provide supporting fire to its two adjacent sides.
A sides on a square fort cannot provide supporting fire at all. Sides on a hexagonal fort can but with a hexagonal fort you can only get 50% of the defenders firing against an attack on a side. With a pentagonal fort you can get 60%. This basic fact makes a pentagon the most effective shape for a fortification, assuming no terrain features to change the situation.
It would be an amazing coincidence if The Pentagon was pentagonal for any reason but this.
The real reason was that certain other countries had a building with FOUR sides and the people who built the pentagon were thinking, fuck it all, we're going to FIVE BLADES..errr SIDES!!!
TLF
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
Screw the pentagon, i want to know how this military building got its shape.
This has nothing to do with the construction of the pentagon, and his off-handed assumption that playing violent video games is bad is either an attempt at trolling or the most poorly supported 'argument' I've ever seen.
Which I assume is why America is having no problems in Iraq.
Deleted
"In July 1941 with World War II looming..." In July 1941 WWII wasn't looming it was already underway for almost 2 years
Try the Congo, or Dafar. Somalia is another place.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The article details that Army officials noted with pleasure how the pentagonal shape recalled the era of pentagonal shaped fortifications.
Anyway, if you read at least the first page of the article you would have learned that the Pentagon was originally sited close to Arlington National Cemetery on an oddly shaped tract of land bounded on five sides, thus necessitating the five-sided nature of the building. When members of Congress and other officials protested that the monolithic design would obscure the view of Washington from L'Enfant's tomb, the building was moved to its current location.
When I was about nine years old, my father and I were discussing the shape of the Pentagon and the reasons for the unique shape of the building. I concluded that perhaps the shape recalled the branches of the military of government that occupied the various wings of the building; Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and Joint Chiefs/Secretary of Defense. That's what I thought, at least.
Within every disorder there is order, just as within every order there is disorder. This is called the Hodge-podge.
I am not a KFSC.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
i always thought it was one side for each military branch
1. army
2. navy
3. air force
4. marines
5. coast guard
i thought each side of the building was devoted to that military branch's offices
is that something that just farted into existence in my subconscious?
i swear i heard that somewhere
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"Get me the Pentagon. Yes the Pentagon, monument to military spending. Four walls and a spare!"
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
Can we please get rid of the attitude that WWII started on 7 December 1941. I always find it interesting that the British (and even the occupied Dutch) declared war on Japan the same day the Americans did, but not only did the Americans take two years to declare war on Germany, they didn't even declare war on Germany first--Germany declared war on the US! Looming indeed!
Headquarters at Bergstrom Air Force Base, Austin, Texas, was a circle. The building is now the Hilton Austin Airport Hotel after the base was converted into the new civilian airport. Reportedly, the old SAC war room is now the hotel ballroom, and a number of retired officers came for New Year's Eve 2001 as the hotel was opening and stayed in their old offices.
They say the mind is the first thing to
Er.. WWII started in 1939 (with pre-war practice in China starting in 1931-37). By 1941 it was well under way.
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
From the summary: "In July 1941 with World War II looming"
A wee bit late, no?
This is what the parent comment has to do with the design of the Pentagon. The entire story is a paid effort to make soft news about the U.S. military.
You are being manipulated.
What does that have to do with anything? It doesn't matter what kind of regime Iran has, funding insurgents in Iraq to make things difficult for the US is in their best interest, as that makes it harder for the US to attack Iran. And in case you haven't noticed, the US is building a missile shield in eastern Europe with the purpose of nullifying the Russian nuclear deterrent, so the reason Russians are arming Iran is hardly because of a purely "economic motive". As for the Chinese, Taiwan. In case it needs elaborating, more US resources wasted in the middle east = less US resources available to defend Taiwan.
A pentagon shaped building is cool. Squares are for nerds.
Camping on quad since 1996.
Two lines and a triangle got a bit tipsy at the company holiday party. The rest, as they say, is history.
What's so unusual about a pentagon? Should it have been an un-usual square? Or maybe an un-usual circle? I don't get it... Or is it just me..
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What is an elephant?
It's a mouse built to military specifications.
Not surprised they built a five-sided building.
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
The number one reason for invading Iraq was to reduce the worldwide production of oil
I know this is off-topic, but it bears saying.
Not just Jews died under the Nazis, but everybody seems to forget that.
I am not trying to minimize the plight of the Jews, just trying to remind everyone that they weren't the only ones who died.
They are the only ones we seem to remember. A whole ton of Roma died too, and it is STILL ok in Europe to screw them over.
In fact, the 18th century designers of Washington, DC inscribed an inverted pentagram into the street system, with the southern point being what would become the Washington Monument (itself loaded with Masonic stones). A less strong argument can be made for the Pentagon itself. If you can get past the UFO talk and specious arguments, this map shows that one of the five points of the Pentagon points to the Washington Monument and another of the five points to George Washington's home in Mt. Vernon.
you should've super-imposed a pentagon on goatse and posted that instead.
failure.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I always thought that the Pentagon was part of a larger conspiracy involving the number 19, a mere glimmer of which is described by Minister Farrakhan at http://www.mrcranky.com/movies/eightandonehalfwome n/62/10.html. I refer to the Pentagonment Conspiracy, of course, as you must read it as pent-agon-ment, or a five-part plan for action).
Hold up... skyline!! What skyline? DC has laws stating that no buildings may be over 20 feet taller than the width of the street they face. What DC has is a profound lack/i> of skyline!
Poor urban planning and laws like this have, of course, caused many of the city's problems. The sprawl around DC is absolutely unbelievable.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
if only we got such intelligent humour more often around here
dang, I'm outta mod points.
We bombed the shit out of civilians (Tokyo, Dresden, Hamburg etc etc). The nukes killed far fewer people then conventional bombing as well as far fewer then would have died in an invasion. No the Japanese were not ready to surrender when we nuked them, learn some history. They wanted to keep China in exchange for ceasing hostilities. Using nukes on the Japanese was the right choice, no question.
It was total war on both sides.
We certainly didn't follow the Geneva conventions as they are currently re-interpreted by anti-war zealots. (e.g. Geneva conventions only apply to uniformed combatants, but the 'anti-war' folks today think they apply to insurgents.)
What we did was mostly constrain the looting and pillaging that has been a feature of just about all other armies/wars (e.g. The Soviets took everything that was or wasn't bolted down out of East Germany and all the other countries they rolled through.)
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
The English and French leadership used their own men as cannon fodder thought out WWI.
Tactics simply hadn't caught up with weapons. Modern infantry tactics are all about mobility and flanking. America learned that in the Civil War. England and France had not learned it in WWI.
General Pershing was a hero for telling the English and the French that there was no way in hell American troops would be put under the incompetent English and French officer corps.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
As the article says, it was originally designed as an irregular pentagon to fit a particular piece of land that was also an irregular pentagon.
When I was a kid, I always thought the shape of the Pentagon was a patriotic reflection of the shape of the five-pointed star on the American flag, Army Air Corps insignia, general's stars, etc.: connect the five points and you have a perfect pentagon. (Also, trim off the five arms and you're left with another.) The article mentions nothing about this, but it's hard to believe they didn't notice this.
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
Not to pick a hole in the history but lets be clear that WWII with the Nazi regime in Germany committing genocide and the enforced slavery and prostitution going on in Japan started quite a few years before... by 1941 pretty much all of Europe was occupied and large parts of Eastern Asia were equally suffering.
So its interesting on the shape and all... but its only on the verge of the US entering WWII, most certainly not on the verge of the war itself.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Wow, all this time I just thought it was a monument to Murphys law, four walls and a spare!
Or as I've heard from friends assigned there, the five sided squirrel cage!
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
What really happened was: They said "Thy will be done Dark Lord", and began to build.
"we've got trenchcoats and bad attitudes" - John Constantine, HellBlazer
The Nazis began building U-boats again in 1935, and they were largely a continuation of WWI designs from 1918 or 1920 at the latest. They were small and cramped. The Type VIIC was the most common U-boat, and they began building in 1940, IIRC. They were only around 700 tons. For an example of how cramped they were, they had two heads, one of which was almost entirely used for stowage of provisions, and the entire crew (44?) had to use the one other head. It was not a pressure head, and could only be dumped either when surfaced or possibly near the surface. At any depth beyond that, the crew used buckets and cans and whatever else would hold the sewage until it could be dumped overboard once surfaced.
There was no forced ventilation system; they relied upon open hatches. Once surfaced, it took a long time for the ends of the boat to get fresh air. Combine that with buckets of sewage and you do not have a happy crew.
These problems were typical of the rushed repeat designs carried over from WWI. There were some design considerations between the wars, typically such as making safer electrical wiring and going to hydraulic controls, but nothing close to a proper design bureau.
Yes, convoys were introduced right in the beginning, and yes there was a severe lack of escorts. The US, altho not involved for two years, had a typical problem. They had rushed thru massive building programs in 1917 when they entered WWI, most of which (the famous flush deck four pipers) were not built until the war was over. As small as they were, and as obsolete as they gradually became, Congress was in no mood to discard them for new designs in the tight economy of the Depression of the 1930s. Those were the 50 ships transferred to the British, and in spite of them being half the necessary size, and having puny 3" guns in most cases, the British were glad to accept them, even after the war had been going on for a year, simply because they were desperate for escorts.
The Wolf Pack of WW II was thought up by Donitz long after WW I. It was not effective at first because there were so few U-boats. I believe there were only something like a dozen U-boats at sea at any given time during the first few months of war, including those in transit. These first U-boats had good pickings because they dove deeper than the British had expected and because the British were as unprepared as the Germans were. There were very few escorts to protect the convoys, but there were every few U-boats to take advantage of that. If you look at the stats, you will find that sinkings per U-boat dropped alarmingly as time went by, averaging something like one sinking per boat per month, annd most boats were sunk without ever having sunk any ships.
Contrary to your belief, contact exploders were by far the most successful. Both the US and Germans gave up on the too-clever idea of magnetic exploders and went back to the tried and true contact exploders. The US problems were compounded by having both magnetic and contact exploder problems, and by the original testing being done in cooler Atlantic waters as opposed to operational use (and failure) in the warm south and central Pacific. There were quite a few well documented cases of ships coming into port with unexploded torpedoes embedded in their sides.
There is a general myth about the superiority of the German military because they had so much secret development between the wars. Their U-boats were awful designs, successful only at first and only because the British were equally unprepared. Their battleships were lousy bang for the buck, being just overbuilt WWI designs with poor armor placement and poor guns; they survived only from being vastly overbuilt, not from good design. Compare the Washington (35,000 tons, 9x16 inch; 27 knots) vs the Bismarck (42,000 tons, 8x15 inch, 30 knots). Their tanks at the beginning of the war were no better than anybody else's; it was their continuation of their new late WWI strategy and the French continuation of old WW I strateg
Infuriate left and right
Do you realize how much damage elitist punks like you do to Apple? Or is that the point? Nietzsche said that the most perfidious way of doing harm to a position is to argue poorly on its behalf.
I see your informative link, and raise you a pithy comment.
I actually think that the Pentagon is beautiful. However, I think its shape is too distinct, and is prone to aerial attack. A pilot would easily find it even without a map. Shouldn't such an important building have an ordinary shape, be camouflaged, or lie completely underground?
"In July 1941 with World War II looming, ..." - ????!!!!!!!
Up until 1941, the world, minus America, were just playing silly buggers.
.
Five is right out!
www.bannination.com Two things float to the top he
9/11 Eyewitnesses to Explosive WTC Demolition 1 of 2
Please go fuck your mother. And then kill yourself. You are useless.
Basically, they should give the military a goal, then let the military figure out how to impliment it.
That would imply the military knows more than the politician about something. How's your ego going to feel when a bunch of dumb roughneck hicks with guns come up with a brilliant tactical strategy?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
and can drop rocks on anyone's head.
:)
If you worked for the Reader's Digest, they could sell it as a pamphlet!
(I'm going to borrow your explanation for future use).
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I'm not trying to pooh-pooh the article, but it's just kind of...well...you know, my shoe is shaped kind of oblong and rounded because, well, that's how feet are shaped. Isn't that amazing?
You're obviously not a woman. Take a look at the shape of some of their footwear sometime, and tell me it's not amazing.
The US free market: two halves of a government-granted duopoly are free to set the market price.
I promise to remember you.
So the propaganda number is up to a million now?
Why not just make it a billion. The dumbshits that comprise humanity will probably sswallow that one, too.
FUCKHEAD IMAM: America has murdered twenty billion Muslims, killed every kitten in the world, and blown up the Moon!
LEGIONS OF THIRD WORLD DUMBSHITS: Death to America!
LONE VOICE: Uh, the Moon is still there.
FUCKHEAD IMAM: Kill the Unbeleiver!!!! Kill the Heretic!!!
LEGIONS OF THIRD WORLD DUMBSHITS: Grrrrrr! (tears Lone Voice to pieces with their bare hands, and then stones a 14 year old girl to death because she happened to be standing near him)
...but they just didn't have the polygon counts back then. Computer Aided Design on the early von Neumann machines was not fun.
It is people with this kind of anger who think it is okay for their government to kill.
Well sweety, you see, when a hexagon and a quadrilateral love each other very much...
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
The United States was not at war until December. From the perspective of the United States, the war was "looming".
Looming does not necessarily mean something doesn't exist yet. It just means it is on the horizon. Forgive me for not using the OED, but they don't seem to have an ad-supported online presence, and it'd be silly for everyone reading this to have to subscribe.
How many British do you suppose would have said the threat of war was "looming" in 1937 and 1938? Well, Japan had already invaded Manchuria in 1931 and Germany had already sponsored the Spanish Civil War in 1936. Japan invaded China in 1937. Germany annexed Czechoslovakia in 1938. So the conventional, "the war started in 1939" might sound a little Poland-centric to those countries.
So when, exactly, do you propose that the war definitively was not "looming" for any particular country? 1931?
BTW, the US, despite trying in vain to remain neutral, was doing swift business with those countries resisting Axis advances before it entered the war.
But the military screwed it up!
Not being a part of the Defense Department, the Coast Guard isn't even IN the Pentagon. Also, the Air Force didn't exist as a service at the time the Pentagon was built. So I don't think your theory holds up.
Yeah, and look how well that turned out for them! We're well down the path of giving up democracy in favor of empire, bread and circuses, etc, ourselves.
I could pick a few nits with this, but you're largely right. The question is, what is our continued presence likely to accomplish? The answer is, more of the same, but with our folks caught in the middle. The simple fact is that not even ORDER is going to be imposed on Iraq by us, to say nothing of DEMOCRACY. It's time to cut our losses and get out.
Clearly the point was somewhat lost on you. Killing everyone who opposes me in warfare is, by definition, how you win a war. If you consider surrender and option for "winning," I must point out that surrender is the other side deciding not to oppose you - under pain of death - and since you've killed everyone else, ergo the definition above. There is absolutely nothing noble or desirable about war.
Note also that I did not say that we should have gone to war. We don't have any fucking business in the middle east. They can keep all their oil, for all I care - $8/gallon for gasoline is just fine with me, and I drive quite a gas hog (it's a truck; I actually use it for work). There is no useful way out of this conflict. Our idiotic^Willustrious leader has managed to make many of the same mistakes that were made in Vietnam. It's all the more surprising since his advisors were mostly involved with Vietnam after things were in total disarray.
Again, what I meant was that if you go to WAR, you must be willing to destroy your enemy completely, with no trace that they ever existed. Anything else is just sport. Thing is, this "sport" our administration is playing looks like war to them - and they are reacting properly to it. Those people really hate us, and they hate us more every day. We will win this war, or we will lose this war - there are no other outcomes. And, quite honestly, since turning Iraq into radioactive glass is not a realistic option either (since it is the only way to "win" this "war"). Unfortunately, our president has too small a penis to admit that he has utterly failed.
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And, for the record, I was very popular in school. You see, I was objective and understood consequences of actions - from the beginning. It came across as being fair and honest. I'm a consultant now, and people hire me because I am honest.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Here's an alternate theory of the Pentagon's shape.
http://brunix.ie/pics/Tyrant%20Prince.jpg"Fortress for a Tyrant Prince"
From 'Serlio on Domestic Architecture'
By Sebastiano Serlio (1475-1554)