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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."
The snide response to that is "why isn't the full-time professional army winning in Iraq?" However, I personally believe that has less to do with the make-ups of the individual forces and more to do with the strategies involved on both sides. So I'm only going to point it out, and not make it.
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Yeah, but did he ever get to go in the basement and see for himself? He doesn't say.
No conspiracy theory was posited here. He refutes a point that wasn't made, it is the standard for what passes as argument these days.
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That website is ace!
...and is that a midget painting in the top-left corner?
It is actually quite interesting atm, there is a guy painting the ceiling.
Loads of scandals being reported on the "paint blog" also!
If the full-time professional army was allowed to fight like their enemies in Iraq do, then the situation there would be different.
It isn't flamebait if it is the truth.
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The easy answer is that in Iraq, you've got civilians, trained and untrained soldiers on two sides, and the soldiers from the US and its allies. The problem is that the first three groups all blend in together when they're not actively fighting, and the US and its allies are trying not to hurt the civilians.
If we were really at war with Iraq as a whole, we'd do much better. This was the case early on, when we were fighting Saddam's army. We still tried to minimize hurting civilians; we could have won even quicker if we didn't.
Yes, I said won. We won that first war, then got stuck in a no-win situation in the follow-on war to decide how to fill the power-vacuum we created. Bush's biggest crime here was starting the first war without a viable plan for winning or avoiding the second one.
I take your point.
Under a different username, I once got modded -1, Insightful for speaking the truth, and it trashed my account (I went from excellent karma to, um, terrible or awful or whatever it's called, in just one post.)
As my fake sig might suggest, I have little patience for words used to justify my speech being deleted/censored/moderated/whatever.
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What I think or what I feel is irrelevant.
The fact is we've now killed millions of Muslims and for no reason whatsoever and the efforts by those who seek to minimize or excuse these atrocities need to be called what they are.
And if in so doing I am modded as flamebait or censored by the search engines, then so be it.
At this point I have no reason to believe we recover from this madness. I'm in this for my own karma only.
Most of you are monsters. And I judge the feedback I receive accordingly.
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Is this the way you honor your brothers sacrifice? He would have been real proud of you I'm sure.
I'm the original AC. My original comment was actually meant to be a commentary on the way you made your "point" rather than the point itself, but I realize that in doing so I made a swipe at your political views(that would be the point—provocative statements can be made indirectly!).
I agree to some extent on your point about honouring "war heroes". However, your soldiers aren't really the ones you should direct your anger at for the actions of your military, unless you're really only angry about the actions of individual soldiers. Direct your anger at the officers who fail to keep proper discipline that would prevent the atrocities, and of course at the people who declare the wars in the first place.
A "support the troops" mentality in which there is social pressure to support whatever military action the leader initiates is very, very harmful, but many would feel that there's nothing wrong with respecting the "troops" themselves, despite the fact that you disagree with the job they have been set to carry out and even if you feel it's morally wrong for them not to desert immediately. (As I understand it, the "support the troops" mentality these days is a sort of reaction to the treatment of the veterans of the Vietnam War, where some detractors of the war certainly did tend to blame the "grunts" and treat them badly afterwards.) There seems to be an element of the former in America today, though, and I agree that this is worrying.
However, you seem to have me pinned down as a supporter of the Pentagon, which is humorous to me. It's unwise to assume that everyone who disagrees with you on some particular point falls into the same political camp!
If I'm waving a flag, it's certainly not an American flag; I haven't been to the United States in a decade, and I strongly disapprove of their ideology of unilateral action. I'm also not much of a flag-waver on my own state's behalf; I consider myself an internationalist.
I'm on the extreme left politically. We probably share some views in disapproving of many of the recent actions of the US, the EU and Israel, but I nonetheless feel strongly, based on what I can read on your blog, that you're buying into conspiracy theories.
When those conspiracy theories are about things like the Pentagon being satanic, they're pretty harmless to me, except that they make people unlikely to take you seriously on the points where we do agree, and people who approve of the status quo will try to use such conspiracy theories as cheap shots to ridicule all its opponents.
When those conspiracy theories are about things like jews secretly ruling the world, they are directly harmful to me. It's very hard to criticize Israel without being labelled anti-semitic, and people like you aren't making it any easier. (When "it seems to be worth mentioning", clearly in the context of questioning someone's integrity, that a person is Jewish, that's a nice tip-off that you're flirting with anti-semitism.)
(When we're on the subject of recommended reading, I'd really recommend you study some articles about the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Isn't all this talk of a Zionist world government a bit too similar to those pieces of thoroughly discredited propaganda?)
Too late, Iraq already knows the earth is flat, the curvature is just a lens effect from outer space. Osama is going to bring Mars down and use it like a fly swatter to squish us all.
DOOMED!
-Billco, Fnarg.com
cunts like you need your fucking face smashed. I lost a brother and other relatives so cuntwipes like you can run your fucking cum-suck and get away with it.
Unless your relatives would be over a hundred and fifty years old, you didn't.
A soldier in the Armed Forces of our country JOINS to fight for his country's freedom. He actually fights for the freedom of someone else entirely, based on the thought that the USA is a whole lot safer if the wars aren't ever fought here. They're heroes, for sure, but it wasn't MY freedom that my grandfather and best friend fought for.
And trust me -- the dead would much rather have never had to go off to war in the first place. That "cunt" does more to honor their memory by standing against war and demanding justification for its inherent atrocity than you do with your jingoistic swearing.
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.