And Moses' immediate successor was Joshua, who was even bloodier. In fact, the Book of Joshua in the Old Testament is a celebration of genocide after genocide.
For example, everybody knows that Joshua blew the trumpet at Jericho. What is understandably not emphasized in most Bible schools is what happened to Jericho after the walls crumbled.
Joshua 6:21And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword.
Joshua 6:24And they burnt the city with fire, and all that was therein: only the silver, and the gold, and the vessels of brass and of iron, they put into the treasury of the house of the LORD.
So there you go: the murder and the subsequent looting of a whole city, blessed by the Bible. There is much, much more of this in the Book of Joshua. Hey, if I commit as many genocides as that guy did, could I get a book of the Bible named after me?
Hydrogen is just a 25% efficient battery. We already have much better batteries.
We do? Are you accounting for the energy cost of making the batteries in the first place? What about the energy cost of recycling the toxic remains of dead batteries?
Well, you take your energy as hydrogen, I'll take it as electricity at 1/4 of the price...
Except you won't get any electricity at night (if you're using solar power), or on calm days (if you're using wind). Most of the renewable sources of energy are sporadic. Directly using electricity from these sources is not so cheap if you have to include the cost of rainy day storage.
With a hydrogen economy, you could generate hydrogen while the sun is up, when the wind is howling, or while the nuclear plant is humming. Then you are free to burn the resulting hydrogen any time you like, anywhere you like. Hydrogen means freedom in time and freedom in space.
Freedom of energy usage (in cars for example) is more important than absolute efficiency. If you are using a huge renewable source of energy, such as solar power, you can afford to waste some of it when you generate hydrogen.
(3) The Bush administration is lying again, as usual. John Negroponte, the Bush official cited in the article, is the same Negroponte who was involved in Honduras' and El Salvador's death squads during the 1980s.
And probably not coincidentally, we began hearing about death squads in Iraq a few months after Negroponte was appointed NCI.
That this appalling man has become a high official in the Bush administration says a lot about Bush himself.
I have a really hard time believing anything that Negroponte (or Bush) says without independent corroboration.
A better conclusion is that Munich will no longer be dependent on the whims of a single operating systems vendor. The city is undoutedly sick of being held to ransom and generally jerked around by The Monopoly. They are declaring independence.
As every American knows so well, a Declaration of Independence can have enormous benefits in the long run, but can be rather costly in the short term.
There's bad, and then there's worse. There's always worse.
For example, Bill Clinton was undoubtedly a slippery liar, but he took good care of the country as a whole. His wars were short and sweet. Under him, FEMA was an effective agency, widely praised for its quiet competence in hurricane relief. And when he left office, the economy was booming, and the federal treasury was predicting annual surpluses as far as the eye could see.
And now we have W. Two seemingly endless wars, and a third one probably starting up. Gas prices heading for the stratosphere, largely because of those wars. "You're doing a heckuva job, Brownie!" And probably $4 trillion of extra debt laid on the country before he leaves office.
There is no doubt: W is much worse. Sometimes when all the choices stink, it can still be very worthwhile to fight for the least bad option.
And no one is asking you to take up arms -- at least not yet! Just do something positive, anything. Millions of little actions can really add up. Don't give up, it's not too late to rescue the country.
(As for Perot, I never thought he had a chance to win. He returned to the campaign trail only because the jeers of "quitter" were too loud for him to stand.)
By the way, George Washington had a hell of a lot more to lose than you do: he was either the wealthiest or the second wealthiest man in the Thirteen Colonies. And yet he did not hesitate to put it all on the line -- his life, his fortune, and his sacred honor. You have benefited from his courage every day of your life.
What do you think George Washington would have thought of the current George, the cowardly and immensely dishonorable Torturer in Chief?
I suggest you learn all you can about Dubya, before it's too late. Learn the truth, learn what he really is like -- and contrast that with the incessantly worshipful coverage he gets on Fox News (and probably on most of your local media). Then perhaps you will begin to realize how dangerously near the end the Republic has come.
This is the Republic that George Washington fought for and nearly died for at Valley Forge. Are you willing to do something to save it?
"A courageous man only dies once; a coward dies a thousand times." -- paraphrased from Julius Caesar (Shakespeare).
Besides, I wasn't necessarily advocating violent insurrection -- though the way things are going, that may be necessary some day. I was only saying that George Washington got off his butt and did something about an intolerable situation. In honor of his deeds and his immense courage, do you think you could bother to do something positive, such as learning all you can about President Torture?
Inherited money is declining as a share of wealth in the U.S., according to the study, accounting for less than 20% of high-net-worth individuals in 2002.
So 80+% of all millionaires in America are "new money".
Deception alert. Deception alert. If you include enough people, then of course most of them will be self-made. According to the article you referenced, you only have to be a millionaire to be counted in Capgemini's study. Because of the real-estate bubble, many middle class people have houses worth more than a million dollars, and that is hardly what I would consider wealthy. So Capgemini's numbers are meaningless and highly deceptive.
Secondly, someone who starts with a million dollars in his trust fund has a hell of an easier time becoming a billionaire than somebody who starts with literally nothing. Yet the former would probably still be considered a "self-made" man: notice how few of Bill Gates' biographical summaries mention the huge head start he received from his corporate lawyer father. This too is deceptive.
Third: notice that 5 of the top 10 people on the Forbes 400 list of the richest Americans in 2005 are Waltons. Trust fund babies, all of them. They never had to work a lick in their lives and can hardly be considered self-made. Yet more mendacity.
A truer picture emerges from the same article, if you think clearly. "The wealthiest 5% controlled 59.2% of the nation's wealth in 2001". And "The wealthiest 1% [owned] 31% of total financial assets held by families or individuals". The truth is that the gradient of wealth in America is extremely steep.
The lesson here is that before we can think clearly about the distribution of wealth in America, we have to fight through many layers of deliberate deception. The story of the "self-made" man is mostly a myth, a carrot to keep the donkeys working hard.
You have beautifully demonstrated why Pascal's Wager is a classic false dilemma.
Pascal's Wager goes something like this: you may as well believe in God. If he doesn't exist, then your belief is mostly harmless. If he does exist, then you are doing the right thing. Therefore (the wager part) you are most likely to benefit if you believe.
The hole in this argument is that it's a false dilemma: the Wager is artifically restricting you to two choices: to believe in God, or not to believe in God. But what if the true master of the universe is not the Christian God but some other deity, such as Shiva, Buddha, or Bondye? In that case, if you have chosen to believe in God, you have made a serious mistake. Thus Pascal's Wager is fatally flawed.
There will never be democracy in the Middle East, Islam won't allow it. Name one democratic Middle Eastern country.
There was one: Iran. Dr.Mohammed Mossadegh was elected Prime Minister in 1951. But he made the serious mistake of believing that Iran's oil belonged to Iranians. He nationalized Iran's oil industry, so of course the U.S. had to overthrow him. (The U.S. involvement in Mossadegh's overthrow is proven by recently declassified CIA documents.)
$7 a gallon gas will absolutely destroy the economic well-being of the lower and lower-middle class workers in our society, but upper-middle and upper class workers will continue to drive the same as they did before.
Which is why, along with the gas tax, there should be Gas Stamps. These would work like food stamps: you could use the gas stamps to pay for gas. Gas stamps would be given out to the same people who receive food stamps, so the added government bureaucracy would be minimal. With gas taxed to $7 a gallon, the government would have plenty of funds for the gas stamps.
I know that it's slashdot doctrine that Office is only used because of its format, but its not the case.
(Emphasis mine.) Strawman argument alert!
No one is claiming that Office is used today only because of the format. The document format lock-in is one of the reasons -- maybe the major reason -- but not the only reason people use Office. And the lock-in is absolutely intentional on Microsoft's part.
And.doc format is not why Microsoft won in the wordprocessing / office market. Remember the forced bundling of Windows 3.x with every computer sold with MS-DOS (i.e. with practically every computer on the planet)? Remember all those DOS + Windows + Office bundles? Who could compete with that? This was part of the reason why Microsoft lost the anti-trust case. MS would have been in a world of hurt if a newly-installed and thoroughly bribed Bush administration hadn't called off the government lawyers and wimped out on the anti-trust settlement.
He didn't speak the "raw truth", he didn't even speak half truths. He exagerated facts, twisted them in a funny way, made up other facts to fit the theme, and collaged the whole thing into a funny piece.
OK, list them. What major point did he exaggerate or twist? Maybe a few minor things received a bit of comedic overemphasis, but that is how satire works. On the major issues, Colbert was spot on (the supine press, the Iraq war, the WMD lies, the illegal NSA wiretapping, the unprecedented level of corruption, Katrina, global warming, and so on).
And the White House press correspondents at that dinner hated it! Hoo boy, did they ever hate being called out for their almost Stalinist censorship of the news. Witness how little coverage Colbert's takedown is receiving in the mainstream media. It didn't happen, history has been rewritten, you must be deluded to believe that someone named Stephen Colbert ever existed -- see, there are no pictures of him, never mind the suddenly empty spot in this photo!
It doesn't matter what the people thought they were voting for. In a democracy, the people have the ultimate power of the vote, and therefore they have the ultimate responsibility for the results. No excuses.
My bookshelves are so full that I have greatly slowed down my rate of book buying. I would love to throw all my paper books away (several tons of them) if I could store them on a hard disk, then download what I need to a portable e-book reader.
Finally, rising oil prices make other energy sources economic. There is a wonderful piece from the IEA on the various costs of different power sources. Solar isn't cheap now. But if the oil price is $150 a barrel, it doesn't look so bad.
Sure, the economy will adjust to declining oil supplies. Economies always adapt to changes.
The important question is, will they adjust quickly enough to avoid massive suffering and resource wars? The cautious answer, the conservative answer, is, "maybe not" -- especially if a proper adjustment requires technology we don't have, or sources of financing we don't have. Economists hate to admit it, but sometimes adjustment is synomymous with crash and die. Which is what happened to the people on Easter Island: no more people, no more resource problems.
My point is that we can't afford to sit back complacently and wait for the magic of the market to rescue us. Maybe it will, but then again maybe it won't. If it does not, the consequences could be horrendous, up to and including extinction. A wise and cautious nation should proactively hedge its bets -- it should conserve, it should implement alternative sources of energy, and most of all, it should search intensely for new sources of energy. But what is the U.S. doing instead? It is spending $2 trillion on the first of the resource wars, and probably less than $1 billion on energy research. This is obscene on so many levels.
Either a direct choice to give something up, or an indirect choice to take the risk.
Oh come off it. Of course the Russians made a choice. They could have surrendered to the Nazis, like France. But they decided to fight ferociously, and they died in their millions. It was the heaviest sacrifice, by far, in WW2. Becase of it, they destroyed more of the Wehrmacht than all the other Allies combined -- which is why they, and not the loudly bragging U.S., deserve the credit for winning WW2.
Have you finished making false and utterly unsupported assertions, like a neocon?
The first American attack on German-occupied Europe was by the Eighth Air Force, in July 1942. Which was a month before Staligrad started.
Big deal. Americans were not dying in large numbers until mid-1944, which was as I have said a year and a half after the Battle of Stalingrad made it clear to everyone that the Russians were going to win.
Umm, no. Lend-lease was never about money, it was about equipment.
Equipment was essentially a form of money -- and only money. Besides, as I have said, even at its height, Lend-Lease accounted for only a quarter of Britain's fighting ability. I do not know how much help the Russians got from it, but my guess is, not enough to make a difference. The Russians started the war with more soldiers, artillery, and tanks than the Germans. The Nazis were initially successful because Operation Barbarossa was a surprise attack, and because of better doctrine (blitzkrieg). But by the winter of 1941, just as Lend-Lease really got going, the Nazis were stuck. So, as I said, Lend-Lease is just another pathetic and desperate attempt by Americans to hide the meagreness of their actual contributions to the European theatre.
Large numbers of Americans avoided making the ultimate sacrifice until the heaviest fighting was over. For whatever reasons, the unalterable fact is that the U.S. ended up waiting until it was basically safe before invading Europe, fighting some relatively small battles there, and then loudly grabbing all the credit. Nice move, not.
In contrast, the Russians destroyed more of the Wehrmacht than all the other Allies combined, and lost more people than all the other Allies combined. That tells me who worked harder, and won.
The USA invaded France at about the earliest possible point in history. Note, by the way, that the British had no capability at all to invade France - those were American landing craft they came ashore in.
So what. The Russians did not need America's relatively feeble contributions. They were going to beat the Nazis anyway.
Eisenhower announced that the USA/UK would not take Berlin at the end of March.
Nice dodge. Eisenhower made the announcement because he knew the Russians would get there first, and with an unbelievably huge army. They had 2.5 million men, 42,000 artillery, and 6000 tanks in place by April 1, 1945. And the Russians were battle-hardened by years of grim fighting and made bitter and vengeful by memories of Nazi atrocities in Russia. It was no contest.
And, interestingly, there is some evidence that the Cold War happened largely as a result of Stalin's desire to hide from the West just how badly the USSR was hurt in WW2 - they worked hard to convince us they were capable of overrunning Europe because they were afraid we'd overrun THEM if we knew how weak they really were.
Perhaps. The Russians were undoubtedly tired by having to suffer the brunt of the fighting in WW2. They undoubtedly weren't keen to continue against the Americans.
But that doesn't change my point, which was that the Russians won WW2, not the credit-hogging U.S.
Really? So, we waited till a year and a half after the Battle of Stalingrad (Aug42-Feb43) to enter WW2? And here I thought we entered in December 1941! How silly of me!
Read the rest of the thread. I have already explained that I was only talking about the European theatre.
Useful clue: Examine carefully the effects of Lend-Lease. Which was a clear violation of international neutrality laws, and which went into place in March 1941. Nine months before we officially entered the war.
The trumpeting of Lend-Lease was only another pathetic American attempt to grab more credit for winning the war than was deserved.
Lend-lease was only money. As far as I am concerned, dying is the ultimate sacrifice. Which would you rather lose, your life or a tiny fraction of your fortune? Twenty-two million Russians died in WW2; in Europe, U.S. casualties barely exceeded that of Latvia. The American sacrifice was not worthy of being called a major contribution.
Even at its height, Lend-Lease accounted for only a quarter of Britain's war fighting capability.
Lend-Lease was only a loan. Britain is still paying it off, 50 years later.
[Blah, blah, we wanted to invade Europe, but we didn't, blah blah.]
If the U.S. generals wanted to invade Europe before 1944, they must have thought it was feasible. But for whatever reason, the U.S. held off, risking only its money in the European theatre, until most of the heaviest fighting and dying were over. The proof that the U.S. had it relatively easy after D-Day is the level of U.S. casualties in Europe compared to the other Allies. When the U.S. sacrificed only about as much in Europe as little Latvia did, it cannot fairly claim a major share of the credit for victory.
Note, by the way, that if the Russian's "winning" WW2 were the impetus for us to get serious about the war, we wouldn't have stopped short of Berlin. Which, if you'll remember, we did.
The U.S. stopped at Berlin because the Soviets were there first. Why do you think the Cold War began almost immediately after WW2? It was because two gigantic armies, that of the Western Allies and that of the Soviet Union, were nose to nose in Berlin in 1945.
Slashdot Mirror
For example, everybody knows that Joshua blew the trumpet at Jericho. What is understandably not emphasized in most Bible schools is what happened to Jericho after the walls crumbled.
Joshua 6:21 And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword.
Joshua 6:24 And they burnt the city with fire, and all that was therein: only the silver, and the gold, and the vessels of brass and of iron, they put into the treasury of the house of the LORD.
So there you go: the murder and the subsequent looting of a whole city, blessed by the Bible. There is much, much more of this in the Book of Joshua. Hey, if I commit as many genocides as that guy did, could I get a book of the Bible named after me?
We do? Are you accounting for the energy cost of making the batteries in the first place? What about the energy cost of recycling the toxic remains of dead batteries?
Except you won't get any electricity at night (if you're using solar power), or on calm days (if you're using wind). Most of the renewable sources of energy are sporadic. Directly using electricity from these sources is not so cheap if you have to include the cost of rainy day storage.
With a hydrogen economy, you could generate hydrogen while the sun is up, when the wind is howling, or while the nuclear plant is humming. Then you are free to burn the resulting hydrogen any time you like, anywhere you like. Hydrogen means freedom in time and freedom in space.
Freedom of energy usage (in cars for example) is more important than absolute efficiency. If you are using a huge renewable source of energy, such as solar power, you can afford to waste some of it when you generate hydrogen.
Or, even more likely,
(3) The Bush administration is lying again, as usual. John Negroponte, the Bush official cited in the article, is the same Negroponte who was involved in Honduras' and El Salvador's death squads during the 1980s.
And probably not coincidentally, we began hearing about death squads in Iraq a few months after Negroponte was appointed NCI.
That this appalling man has become a high official in the Bush administration says a lot about Bush himself.
I have a really hard time believing anything that Negroponte (or Bush) says without independent corroboration.
As every American knows so well, a Declaration of Independence can have enormous benefits in the long run, but can be rather costly in the short term.
There's bad, and then there's worse. There's always worse.
For example, Bill Clinton was undoubtedly a slippery liar, but he took good care of the country as a whole. His wars were short and sweet. Under him, FEMA was an effective agency, widely praised for its quiet competence in hurricane relief. And when he left office, the economy was booming, and the federal treasury was predicting annual surpluses as far as the eye could see.
And now we have W. Two seemingly endless wars, and a third one probably starting up. Gas prices heading for the stratosphere, largely because of those wars. "You're doing a heckuva job, Brownie!" And probably $4 trillion of extra debt laid on the country before he leaves office.
There is no doubt: W is much worse. Sometimes when all the choices stink, it can still be very worthwhile to fight for the least bad option.
And no one is asking you to take up arms -- at least not yet! Just do something positive, anything. Millions of little actions can really add up. Don't give up, it's not too late to rescue the country.
(As for Perot, I never thought he had a chance to win. He returned to the campaign trail only because the jeers of "quitter" were too loud for him to stand.)
By the way, George Washington had a hell of a lot more to lose than you do: he was either the wealthiest or the second wealthiest man in the Thirteen Colonies. And yet he did not hesitate to put it all on the line -- his life, his fortune, and his sacred honor. You have benefited from his courage every day of your life.
What do you think George Washington would have thought of the current George, the cowardly and immensely dishonorable Torturer in Chief?
I suggest you learn all you can about Dubya, before it's too late. Learn the truth, learn what he really is like -- and contrast that with the incessantly worshipful coverage he gets on Fox News (and probably on most of your local media). Then perhaps you will begin to realize how dangerously near the end the Republic has come.
This is the Republic that George Washington fought for and nearly died for at Valley Forge. Are you willing to do something to save it?
Besides, I wasn't necessarily advocating violent insurrection -- though the way things are going, that may be necessary some day. I was only saying that George Washington got off his butt and did something about an intolerable situation. In honor of his deeds and his immense courage, do you think you could bother to do something positive, such as learning all you can about President Torture?
It's good that George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin didn't have your pathetic attitude.
So 80+% of all millionaires in America are "new money".
Deception alert. Deception alert. If you include enough people, then of course most of them will be self-made. According to the article you referenced, you only have to be a millionaire to be counted in Capgemini's study. Because of the real-estate bubble, many middle class people have houses worth more than a million dollars, and that is hardly what I would consider wealthy. So Capgemini's numbers are meaningless and highly deceptive.
Secondly, someone who starts with a million dollars in his trust fund has a hell of an easier time becoming a billionaire than somebody who starts with literally nothing. Yet the former would probably still be considered a "self-made" man: notice how few of Bill Gates' biographical summaries mention the huge head start he received from his corporate lawyer father. This too is deceptive.
Third: notice that 5 of the top 10 people on the Forbes 400 list of the richest Americans in 2005 are Waltons. Trust fund babies, all of them. They never had to work a lick in their lives and can hardly be considered self-made. Yet more mendacity.
A truer picture emerges from the same article, if you think clearly. "The wealthiest 5% controlled 59.2% of the nation's wealth in 2001". And "The wealthiest 1% [owned] 31% of total financial assets held by families or individuals". The truth is that the gradient of wealth in America is extremely steep.
The lesson here is that before we can think clearly about the distribution of wealth in America, we have to fight through many layers of deliberate deception. The story of the "self-made" man is mostly a myth, a carrot to keep the donkeys working hard.
You have beautifully demonstrated why Pascal's Wager is a classic false dilemma. Pascal's Wager goes something like this: you may as well believe in God. If he doesn't exist, then your belief is mostly harmless. If he does exist, then you are doing the right thing. Therefore (the wager part) you are most likely to benefit if you believe. The hole in this argument is that it's a false dilemma: the Wager is artifically restricting you to two choices: to believe in God, or not to believe in God. But what if the true master of the universe is not the Christian God but some other deity, such as Shiva, Buddha, or Bondye? In that case, if you have chosen to believe in God, you have made a serious mistake. Thus Pascal's Wager is fatally flawed.
You didn't say which finger. ;)
There was one: Iran. Dr.Mohammed Mossadegh was elected Prime Minister in 1951. But he made the serious mistake of believing that Iran's oil belonged to Iranians. He nationalized Iran's oil industry, so of course the U.S. had to overthrow him. (The U.S. involvement in Mossadegh's overthrow is proven by recently declassified CIA documents.)
Oops, forgot to log in. The above posting is mine.
Which is why, along with the gas tax, there should be Gas Stamps. These would work like food stamps: you could use the gas stamps to pay for gas. Gas stamps would be given out to the same people who receive food stamps, so the added government bureaucracy would be minimal. With gas taxed to $7 a gallon, the government would have plenty of funds for the gas stamps.
(Emphasis mine.) Strawman argument alert!
No one is claiming that Office is used today only because of the format. The document format lock-in is one of the reasons -- maybe the major reason -- but not the only reason people use Office. And the lock-in is absolutely intentional on Microsoft's part.
And .doc format is not why Microsoft won in the wordprocessing / office market. Remember the forced bundling of Windows 3.x with every computer sold with MS-DOS (i.e. with practically every computer on the planet)? Remember all those DOS + Windows + Office bundles? Who could compete with that? This was part of the reason why Microsoft lost the anti-trust case. MS would have been in a world of hurt if a newly-installed and thoroughly bribed Bush administration hadn't called off the government lawyers and wimped out on the anti-trust settlement.
OK, list them. What major point did he exaggerate or twist? Maybe a few minor things received a bit of comedic overemphasis, but that is how satire works. On the major issues, Colbert was spot on (the supine press, the Iraq war, the WMD lies, the illegal NSA wiretapping, the unprecedented level of corruption, Katrina, global warming, and so on).
And the White House press correspondents at that dinner hated it! Hoo boy, did they ever hate being called out for their almost Stalinist censorship of the news. Witness how little coverage Colbert's takedown is receiving in the mainstream media. It didn't happen, history has been rewritten, you must be deluded to believe that someone named Stephen Colbert ever existed -- see, there are no pictures of him, never mind the suddenly empty spot in this photo!
Look up Lysenkoism. Lots of UFO research too in the old Soviet Union.
It doesn't matter what the people thought they were voting for. In a democracy, the people have the ultimate power of the vote, and therefore they have the ultimate responsibility for the results. No excuses.
Ah, but what if the sheep elected the herder? Then whatever the herder does in their name is their fault, absolutely their fault.
My bookshelves are so full that I have greatly slowed down my rate of book buying. I would love to throw all my paper books away (several tons of them) if I could store them on a hard disk, then download what I need to a portable e-book reader.
Finally, rising oil prices make other energy sources economic. There is a wonderful piece from the IEA on the various costs of different power sources. Solar isn't cheap now. But if the oil price is $150 a barrel, it doesn't look so bad.
Sure, the economy will adjust to declining oil supplies. Economies always adapt to changes.
The important question is, will they adjust quickly enough to avoid massive suffering and resource wars? The cautious answer, the conservative answer, is, "maybe not" -- especially if a proper adjustment requires technology we don't have, or sources of financing we don't have. Economists hate to admit it, but sometimes adjustment is synomymous with crash and die. Which is what happened to the people on Easter Island: no more people, no more resource problems.
My point is that we can't afford to sit back complacently and wait for the magic of the market to rescue us. Maybe it will, but then again maybe it won't. If it does not, the consequences could be horrendous, up to and including extinction. A wise and cautious nation should proactively hedge its bets -- it should conserve, it should implement alternative sources of energy, and most of all, it should search intensely for new sources of energy. But what is the U.S. doing instead? It is spending $2 trillion on the first of the resource wars, and probably less than $1 billion on energy research. This is obscene on so many levels.
Oh come off it. Of course the Russians made a choice. They could have surrendered to the Nazis, like France. But they decided to fight ferociously, and they died in their millions. It was the heaviest sacrifice, by far, in WW2. Becase of it, they destroyed more of the Wehrmacht than all the other Allies combined -- which is why they, and not the loudly bragging U.S., deserve the credit for winning WW2.
Have you finished making false and utterly unsupported assertions, like a neocon?
Big deal. Americans were not dying in large numbers until mid-1944, which was as I have said a year and a half after the Battle of Stalingrad made it clear to everyone that the Russians were going to win.
Umm, no. Lend-lease was never about money, it was about equipment.
Equipment was essentially a form of money -- and only money. Besides, as I have said, even at its height, Lend-Lease accounted for only a quarter of Britain's fighting ability. I do not know how much help the Russians got from it, but my guess is, not enough to make a difference. The Russians started the war with more soldiers, artillery, and tanks than the Germans. The Nazis were initially successful because Operation Barbarossa was a surprise attack, and because of better doctrine (blitzkrieg). But by the winter of 1941, just as Lend-Lease really got going, the Nazis were stuck. So, as I said, Lend-Lease is just another pathetic and desperate attempt by Americans to hide the meagreness of their actual contributions to the European theatre.
Large numbers of Americans avoided making the ultimate sacrifice until the heaviest fighting was over. For whatever reasons, the unalterable fact is that the U.S. ended up waiting until it was basically safe before invading Europe, fighting some relatively small battles there, and then loudly grabbing all the credit. Nice move, not.
In contrast, the Russians destroyed more of the Wehrmacht than all the other Allies combined, and lost more people than all the other Allies combined. That tells me who worked harder, and won.
The USA invaded France at about the earliest possible point in history. Note, by the way, that the British had no capability at all to invade France - those were American landing craft they came ashore in.
So what. The Russians did not need America's relatively feeble contributions. They were going to beat the Nazis anyway.
Eisenhower announced that the USA/UK would not take Berlin at the end of March.
Nice dodge. Eisenhower made the announcement because he knew the Russians would get there first, and with an unbelievably huge army. They had 2.5 million men, 42,000 artillery, and 6000 tanks in place by April 1, 1945. And the Russians were battle-hardened by years of grim fighting and made bitter and vengeful by memories of Nazi atrocities in Russia. It was no contest.
And, interestingly, there is some evidence that the Cold War happened largely as a result of Stalin's desire to hide from the West just how badly the USSR was hurt in WW2 - they worked hard to convince us they were capable of overrunning Europe because they were afraid we'd overrun THEM if we knew how weak they really were.
Perhaps. The Russians were undoubtedly tired by having to suffer the brunt of the fighting in WW2. They undoubtedly weren't keen to continue against the Americans.
But that doesn't change my point, which was that the Russians won WW2, not the credit-hogging U.S.
Read the rest of the thread. I have already explained that I was only talking about the European theatre.
Useful clue: Examine carefully the effects of Lend-Lease. Which was a clear violation of international neutrality laws, and which went into place in March 1941. Nine months before we officially entered the war.
The trumpeting of Lend-Lease was only another pathetic American attempt to grab more credit for winning the war than was deserved.
[Blah, blah, we wanted to invade Europe, but we didn't, blah blah.]
If the U.S. generals wanted to invade Europe before 1944, they must have thought it was feasible. But for whatever reason, the U.S. held off, risking only its money in the European theatre, until most of the heaviest fighting and dying were over. The proof that the U.S. had it relatively easy after D-Day is the level of U.S. casualties in Europe compared to the other Allies. When the U.S. sacrificed only about as much in Europe as little Latvia did, it cannot fairly claim a major share of the credit for victory.
Note, by the way, that if the Russian's "winning" WW2 were the impetus for us to get serious about the war, we wouldn't have stopped short of Berlin. Which, if you'll remember, we did.
The U.S. stopped at Berlin because the Soviets were there first. Why do you think the Cold War began almost immediately after WW2? It was because two gigantic armies, that of the Western Allies and that of the Soviet Union, were nose to nose in Berlin in 1945.