technically (as I understand it) the Consitution doesn't grant those rights to the non-Americans.
Some rights in the Constitution are considered to have a prerequisite of "must be a free citizen in good standing", yes. For instance, if you're convicted of a felony you can have your rights to firearms, your right to vote, your right to associate taken away from you. (The government will let a paroled felon go to church, but not join the Crips. That's an example of how the government restricts the associations of criminals.) Other rights are inherent to the person, such as the right to an attorney, and must be granted to everyone.
The dodge used in Guantanamo is this: the Constitution only applies within the United States. Guantanamo is Cuban soil, and thus it's governed under Cuban law...
(True, by the by: the US doesn't own Gitmo. We've just got it on a very long-term lease from Cuba. It's annoyed Fidel Castro for decades.)
Personally, I think Gitmo is a pathetic way to try and dodge the Constitution. But the logic Gitmo's defenders use is basically what I outlined above.
The problem isn't that the Administration isn't respecting international law; in fact, there is no problem at all. The reason why the U.S. Government has historically been so averse to foreign trials for U.S. citizens is because of the United States Constitution.
The Constitution is not the creation of our government. The Constitution creates our government. As a consequence of this, the government cannot enact any law or enter into any treaty which goes against the Constitution. How can it? The government, being inferior to the Constitution, has zero authority to violate the Constitution.
So now take a look at the United States Constitituion and its several guarantees to criminal defendants. American defendants have the most and the best safeguards of any nation in the world. The various proposals for International Courts of Justice lack these safeguards. For instance, the last I saw, the proposal for the International Criminal Court did not guarantee the defendant the right to a jury trial, nor did it guarantee that no indictment would issue except upon presentment of a grand jury.
If ICC doesn't guarantee the right to a jury trial or the right to a grand jury, then the U.S. Government cannot become party to it. Why? Because that'd be Congress saying "well, in some cases, yes, we agree that American citizens can be denied the right to a jury trial and the right to a grand jury..."
And the Constitution--which establishes our government--announces to the world, clear and cold, this is not allowed.
I don't fault you for saying "It doesn't look like precedent to me, it looks more like the US is doing it because they can". It does look that way to Europeans, whose governments can typically do anything they want subject to the will of the voters. The American government is sharply limited in contrast with European ones. We see this time and time again, where some European power asks Bush to spare the life of one of their nationals who's been convicted and sentenced to die. Bush then has to say "err, he was convicted and sentenced to die in California. I have no authority to pardon criminals convicted in state courts. I can call up Governor Schwarzenegger if you really want, but I don't think he'll pay me much attention. In fact, he'll probably hold a press conference to say he hung up on me, which is a, exactly what Ronald Reagan would've done if Nixon had called then-Governor Reagan up begging for a pardon for someone, and b, given how popular I am in California, it'd guarantee him re-election..."
Most Americans don't really understand the Constitutional issues behind the ICC, nor the Federal/State dichotomy in government. I hardly expect the rest of the world to understand it any better.
such as the suggestion that those of us with AS are indulging in some kind of fad.
When I was evaluated for AS, my psych told me that I had clear enough symptoms that an AS diagnosis was appropriate... but that ultimately it was up to me whether I had AS. If having the knowledge that my brain was wired differently helped me cope with life, helped me accomodate my shortcomings, let me live a happier and better life, then by all means: let's get the AS diagnosis taken care of.
But the flip side is that a lot of people take diagnoses and turn them into excuses why they can't do $foo, why other people need to accomodate them, why they're... etc. If you're one of these people, then even if AS is a correct diagnosis, it's critically important that you not label yourself as AS, because it'll just become one more label you hang on yourself as a way of giving yourself permission to fail.
AS is often a fad diagnosis. (The worst I ever saw was a father telling me about his four-year-old with AS. Come on.) But the existence of fad diagnoses does not in any way negate the existence of accurate AS diagnoses, nor the help that self-knowledge can bring.
I have AS. I'm a graduate student; I almost got married once, but it didn't take. I've worked in the industry and received my fair share of glowing recommendations and don't-let-the-door-hit-you-in-the-ass goodbyes. I have the respect of my peers and more friends than I deserve.
None of this happened either because or in spite of Asperger's Syndrome. I'm wholly responsible for all of them--the particular way my head is wired has zero responsibility for any of them.
The way my head is wired is just a fact of existence. What I choose to do with my life... that's up to me.
"Calculus Made Easy" is, unless my memory is wrong, in the public domain--it was printed in the very early part of this century, before IP became so draconian, and Silvanus P. Thompson is long-dead.
So if you want, you should be able to find Silvanus P. Thompson's original "Calculus Made Easy" in the public domain--Gutenberg might have it.
The versions which are still under copyright are the annotated versions, e.g., the one edited by Martin Gardner (of Scientific American's "Mathematical Games" column).
I have a copy of the Gardner edition of "Calculus Made Easy" and I'll heartily attest to its worthiness. After taking three semesters of calculus, the subject was still incomprehensible to me: I could solve calculus problems, but I didn't understand why calculus worked. After reading "Calculus Made Easy", I understood.
After reading this last, the only thing I can say is that you're sufficiently deranged as to make further discussion fruitless.
There are a lot of good points you could've made with the war in Iraq, the 2000 election, etc.: but you've squandered them by going for simplistic sound-bite answers instead of demonstrating that you have any appreciation for the other side of the issue.
There's a lot of things Bush has done which deserve criticism. I'm a Republican and I'm not going to vote for Bush in the next election--that should tell you something about how critical I am of him.
But you're not criticizing. Criticizing requires an honest assessment of the issue from all sides, and then praising what is praiseworthy and deriding what merits derision.
What you're doing is one-note saysaying. If I want that, I'll read Molly Ivins. Much like you, she's a one-note naysayer. Unlike you, she's quite entertaining to read.
(Wow. A Republican who likes Molly Ivins? Who reads Camille Paglia? Who reads New Republic? Who'd've thought? But this is what you need to do if you're going to be a critic.)
Umm, hello you idiot, I was talking about the Sun. You know, that big round glowy hurty thing that your Mom keeps telling you not to look at directly?
So was I. Where do you think the He-3 comes from?
It's actually going to be cheaper to mine the lunar regolith for He-3 than it would be to ship square kilometer upon square kilometer of solar cells to the Moon. (Why can't you build the solar cells on the moon? Well, first, the Moon lacks the raw materials... second, the Moon lacks the industrial infrastructure necessary to build sophisticated solar cells... third, the Moon lacks the power required to run an industrial infrastructure...)
You're still begging the question. We can't get immense power out of the Moon until we figure out how to put immense power on the Moon. This can be an immense, trillion-dollar investment in fuel required to put solar cells on the Moon... this can be an immense, trillion-dollar investment in mining technology and fusion research to develop lunar He-3 fusion... this can be, basically, anything: but the "anything" is guaranteed to be incredibly, spectacularly, tax-payer-refusingly expensive.
HISTORY TAUGHT YOU CLUELESS ROBOTS NOTHING?
A lot more than it's taught you, I daresay.
Putting weapons in space DOES NOT GUARANTEE THAT SOME FUTURE MAD SOCIETY WON'T USE THEM.
No. But it does guarantee that when some madman decides he wants to use them, that we'll have the tools necessary to make sure he doesn't live long enough to use them.
You are not going to be able to remove war from the human psyche. It exists. It's the mad demon of human nature which haunts us for as long as human beings exist. The rational response to this is not to say "let's get rid of all weapons", because that only affects the people who are moral and civilized enough to not want to develop weapons in the first place. It does nothing to prevent madmen from attempting madness, or building new and evil ways to wreck lives and communities.
The rational response to this is to say "evil exists: given that, how must we prepare for it?"
The obvious response is to make sure we're ready for it when it happens. That means militaries. That means rough men with guns who are ready to do violence on your behalf the instant somebody tries to burn down your home, rape your family and steal your heirlooms.
Anything else is simply not a realistic assessment of history. Thus it has been: thus it will continue to be.
Because, frankly, I'm not smart enough to figure out some universal solution that will make evil simply not exist.
considering that there's a near-infinite supply of energy to be directed...
Right. All we have to do is discover fusion first, and then we have to figure out an efficient and totally automated way of mining He-3 from lunar regolith (we're talking grams of He-3 per ton mined), then we have to build a very large base, then we have to... etc.
Your statement is somewhat akin to saying "it's easy to create a universe: first, you have to become God..." You're assuming the very thing you're trying to demonstrate the existence of: amassing enormous power on the Moon is easy only if you've already solved the problem.
We simply must -not- weaponize space. That is all. And those of you with the power to vote in America had better make sure your country doesn't do it.
We simply must weaponize space.
Look, I'm sorry if it offends your sensibilities, but like Thomas Sowell said, "reality is that which doesn't go away when you stop believing in it."
Space will be commercialized. It will be weaponized. It will be developed. It will be colonized.
History shows us that there has never been a natural resource that has not sooner or later had some crafty person figure out how to make use of it. Not one resource--not ever--has been an exception to this rule. Reality says we need to believe space will be the exact same, even moreso, given the spectacular amount of wealth waiting for us out there. (You ever seen the numbers for the amount of precious metals in a good-sized asteroid? One single good-sized asteroid, brought back to Earth, would have so much precious metals in it that it would collapse the world economy.)
History also tells us that natural resources are always in contention. Or, put bluntly, people fight wars over natural resources. It's been this way from time immemorial. (And please stow any cheap responses about "yeah, Bush has proved this".)
Space is going to be no different. There's natural resources out there, those natural resources are going to be utilized, and wars are going to be fought over them.
"We simply must not weaponize space!" is great as a moral statement. Unfortunately, it totally fails the Santayana test.
You are failing to pay any attention to the lessons of history.
History tells us people who don't learn from history the first time get to pay the tuition all over again.
I am not interested in the "we must not weaponize space!" taboo. It's balderdash, trivial tripe, easily refuted by history.
The question I'm interested in is "how does one morally and ethically weaponize space, under what civilian controls, under what laws, and under what political systems?"
The minor matter of it being a few days trip from the Moon to the Earth, as well as any attack being immediately visible ("Hey, Sergei, there's a huge spike in the Moon's EM emissions--the Americans are up to something!", to say nothing of radar and amateur astronomers) precludes it from being useful offensively. An attack which takes literally days to arrive is worthless when an ICBM counterattack would take only half an hour to arrive.
The United States Constitution guarantees that litigants will "have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor" (Amendment VI). While Amendment VI is construed strictly towards criminal trials, the right to have a compulsory process to obtain witnesses has been construed to also apply to criminal trials.
A subpoena is the classic tool used to compel witnesses to testify. MS has no protection from subpoena just because it isn't a direct party to the lawsuit(s).
The moon has tons of resources for constructing weapons, especially new kinds of nuclear weapons
The surface of the moon is overwhelmingly composed of worthless and/or low-value materials. You're not going to find anything there that'll be useful for a nuke. The surface of the moon is awash in helium-3, which is very useful for fusion power, but is not all that useful for nuclear weapons.
While your first two points are bang-on right, your third point sounds like a paranoid Nader rant against the "military-industrial complex". It undercuts the other two points, which, as I just said, are exactly correct.
Its very, very difficult to defend against moon-launched attacks...
No harder than defending against an ICBM, mostly.
The reason why the Air Force was, at one time, making plans to put nuclear silos on the moon has nothing to do with how devastating lunar-based attacks can be. Instead, the moon would be the ultimate defensive weapon.
How long does it take a nuclear missile to arrive on Earth after it's been launched from the Moon? A few days at the very least. So what happens if you do a launch from the moon? Everybody else sees you launch and turns your country into rubble days before the missile arrives.
That's why the Moon is useless offensively. And that's why the Moon is useful defensively. Because even if America were to be totally wiped out in a nuclear first-strike, the lunar silos would still be safe for a minimum of a couple of days while the ICBMs launched from Earth were en route to it. And in those couple of days, the lunar silos could mount a pisser of a counterattack.
Mutually Assured Destruction, or MAD. While I'm no fan of plans to militarize the Moon, I have to say in some way I'm vaguely pleased that the Air Force was considering turning the Moon into the ultimate defensive weapon, one which would be utterly worthless for offense.
You say that holding all the primaries on the same day would bias the election towards metropolitan areas. But doesn't holding the elections all on the same day do just the same thing?
Not really. The election isn't political discourse; it's political decisionmaking. On election day, all the discussion is done and now it's just up to the people to decide which candidate has the better platform (or, as is often the case nowadays, the better PR campaign).
I'm all in favor of making sure rural America has a say in political discourse, and in favor of prolonging the period over which discourse is relevant. I'm not in favor of running elections by those same rules--decisionmaking has a much different set of needs from discussion.
Actually, I'm right. You're attributing words and ideas to me which I never expressed, and which I have better sense than to propose.
Thus, the boundaries between states really don't matter
I know.
Campaigning in areas of dense population let you gain visibility to more people at once.
And if you have no other competitor in the area, then the nightly news isn't going to waste much time on the competition when the candidate is in the city. The reason why candidates will segregate themselves in urban areas is not because of political realities, but because of media realities.
The upshot of the segregation into cities and metropolitan areas is the same, though. To cater to the audiences in the big cities, they'll talk exclusively about metropolitan concerns and thus lock rural people out of the political debate.
This is not an argument for doing elections all at once. After all, if elections were done all at once your vote, as a member of the rural Illinois community, still wouldn't be heard and wouldn't count.
This is an argument for moving Super Tuesday closer to the end of the campaign season--a move with which I agree.
My condolences on Illinois having practically no direct input into the selection of the Democratic candidate. It's a lousy deal, really. But moving to an all-at-once primary system won't make your deal any better.
This proposal gets floated so often that I can only consider it malinformation at this point--a pervasive meme which works to people's detriment.
Let's say, for sake of argument, that all 50 states have their caucuses and/or primaries at the same time. They start at the same time, end at the same time. What are we going to see from the candidates?
Well, Kerry would park himself in California for two weeks prior to the primary. Edwards would take New York. Sharpton would go for an inner-city like Baltimore, Dean would take Boston and everyone would be lobbing grenades at Kerry in a desperate attempt to keep him from getting God-knows-how-many delegates in one fell swoop.
Do you see what'd happen? The candidates would campaign only in high-population areas and would talk only about metropolitan issues. Because really, if everything all gets settled at once, it doesn't make any sense for Kerry to sit down at Gwen's Diner in Lisbon, Iowa (great food if you're ever in the neighborhood) and talk to the usual crowd of farmers, hunters and retired schoolteachers who hang out there.
These people are American citizens. They pay taxes. They get overlooked by East and West Coasters every single day of the year except for about one month every four years, when the East and West Coasters come to Iowa to ask Iowans "so, now that you've actually met $candidate, what do you think?"
If you make everyone vote all at the same time, what you're going to do is tell everyone who doesn't live in a major metropolitan area--and that's forty-eight percent of the nation--that their opinions don't count, that they're too minor to matter, and that since everything's settled all at once and fifty-two percent of the delegates are decided in the big cities, that the entire political debate will revolve around big-city concerns.
A campaign season exists to allow vigorous political debate to take place. It exists to make sure rural citizens, who have as much right to be heard as you, have a voice in political proceedings.
Re:Your easy answer is, alas, too easy.
on
Space Burial
·
· Score: 1
The Japanese were trying to surrender anyway.
The article you're linking to is a good one: unfortunately, it's not all that good for your position. As it makes clear, what the Japanese were pushing for was a settlement, not a surrender. A settlement means "a negotiated end to hostilities". A surrender means "you win".
Moreover, the settlement the Japanese were pushing for would have kept the Imperial system in place... namely, the same Imperial system which started the war. Japan was objecting to the Emperor being turned into a figurehead--they wanted him to remain as their deity--and objecting to the prosecution of Japanese military leaders for war crimes. The United States' response to this was a blunt "no: you can either abolish this deific cult around the Emperor and dismantle the political system which caused this war, or you can die. Take your pick. We're past caring which one you choose."
One thing I'm unclear on in the article you linked to is how the term "unconditional surrender" is vague. In matters of international diplomacy, "unconditional surrender" is one of the clearest and most precise terms out there. It means you put down your arms, admit your defeat, cooperate with the victors, and make absolutely zero demands of your own. It is the ultimate form of surrender, and for that reason it happens very rarely. I do not understand how the words "unconditional surrender" can be interpreted as anything other than a clear and unambiguous (if exceptionally stark!) demand.
The United States demanded unconditional surrender primarily, I believe, because unconditional surrender would be a necessary prerequisite to dismantling the Imperial government.
Basically what it amounts to is this:
We gave the Japanese a choice between a surrender which would dismantle their government, or protracted war
The Japanese said "how about we stop fighting and we each keep our governments"
We interpreted that as meaning they'd chosen protracted war
We annihilated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to no greater degree than we annihilated Tokyo, just with far fewer bombs
Hirohito decided maybe getting rid of the government was a better option than continued atomic bombardment
The goons surrounding the Emperor decided they'd rather see the war continue
The goons surrounding the Emperor tried to assassinate him before he could deliver his recommendation to the Cabinet
The assassination failed
The Cabinet received the Emperor's request
The Cabinet approved the unconditional surrender of Japan
The United States dismantled the Imperial government and turned the Emperor into a pure figurehead, with no cult of religion nor personality
And for nigh-on sixty years Japan has been an outstanding member of the international community.
... What I find interesting that, for all your talk of how Japan wanted to surrender, the article you linked to never mentions the word 'surrender' when describing Japanese peace offers.
"The Russians had been the only major nation with which Japan still had a neutrality pact, and, as such, had been Japan's main hope of negotiating a peace with something better than unconditional surrender terms..."
Note the phrasing: negotiated peace, not surrender. The Japanese were not offering surrender, just an end to hostilities. There's a big difference... as the essay you linked to compellingly argues:
"Unfortunately for all concerned, Japan's leaders were divided over precisely what terms should be sought to end the war, with the Japanese military leaders still wishing to avoid anything that the Allies would have considered a clear 'surrender'. Surely Japan's leaders hold the lion's share of the responsibility for the fate that befell Japan."
Do we have responsibility for what happened to Nagasaki and Hiroshima? Yes. Does Japan have more responsibility? Yes.
Wor
Re:Your easy answer is, alas, too easy.
on
Space Burial
·
· Score: 1
However, before the bombs were dropped, Japan was willing to surrender under the stipulation that they got to keep the emperor.
Not true; Japan was willing to come to a settlement which would end hostilities, but leave the Emperor in place along with the cabal of militarists who were responsible for the Pacific war.
The U.S. quite reasonably said no: "the only surrender we will accept is one which completely dismantles the government which started this war."
After the Emperor unconditionally surrendered, we did just that: we dismantled the government which started the war. The Emperor was allowed to remain on as a figurehead, completely divorced from power. Japan was forcibly turned into a democracy, and for the last 50 years Japan has been a responsible and mature member of the international community.
So no, we didn't "let them keep the Emperor anyway". We forced the Emperor to publically disavow his status in Japan as a deity; we forced him to recuse himself from politics; we forced him to get rid of his advisors and make them available for war-crimes trials.
None of that would have happened if we'd accepted their initial settlement offer.
Re:Your easy answer is, alas, too easy.
on
Space Burial
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Given our other option was Operation Olympic, which would've resulted in (conservative estimate) five times as many dead? Yes, I think a case can be made that not dropping The Bomb would have been a war crime.
Under the Geneva Accords, a nation is obligated to conduct war in such a manner as to minimize the depradations, casualties, loss of life and property damage to non-military targets. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were apocalyptic attacks, yes. Olympic would have been worse.
So by that metric--if we had a choice which would have left Hiroshima and Nagasaki as flaming cinders, but the rest of the mainland mostly untouched, or a choice to do a mass invasion which would have left the entire island chain aflame and smoking, it would be a war crime to not choose the atomic option.
In the general case, of course it makes no sense to say "not dropping a nuke is a war crime". It's absurd. Balderdash. Ludicrous insanity.
But in the context of "our options are drop a nuke or else kick off Operation Olympic"... not dropping a nuke (i.e., going the Olympic route) could be viewed as a war crime.
It's a spectacularly difficult question.
Your easy answer is, alas, too easy.
on
Space Burial
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
it DID cause the cold war
More accurately, it kept the Cold War from becoming hot. The Cold War was going to happen regardless of whether we dropped a nuke or Martha Stewart on Hiroshima. The US and the USSR were (are) both ideologically expansionist powers, in that each wanted to see its ideology adopted by the rest of the world. When two expansionist powers come into conflict, there's going to be a cold war and most likely followed by a very hot one. Unless, of course, both sides know that a hot war would be a literal hell on earth, thus giving both sides a strong incentive to not start a hot war.
Did we come close to nuclear war in the Cuba embargo? Damn straight. Why didn't we exchange nukes? Because both sides were reluctant to.
For the first time in the history of the world, we've invented a weapon which has not been used for over fifty years. That has never happened before.
I actually rather like the Bomb. It's a simple, one-question choice: are we as human beings morally developed enough to be allowed to continue existing?
It's a one-question exam, scored pass or fail. So far, humanity has made the right choice. I think that's rather hopeful, myself.
If any other country committed such an atrocity against another as the United States did to Japan, we would have World War 3
I see. So we could either kill 250,000 Japanese (and several thousand Korean slave workers who were in Hiroshima when the Bomb hit, and several thousands of other nationalities, too) in two attacks so terrible, so catastrophic, so Wrath of God, that the Japanese surrendered... or we could go forward with Operation Olympic and kill millions of Japanese and millions of Americans.
After the Nagasaki bomb hit, the Emperor was willing to surrender. Do you know what his aides' response to this was? They tried to murder him so that he wouldn't be able to surrender; and without an Emperor who could sign a surrender, it would've condemned Japan to decades of warfare. That's how hardcore, how serious, the Japanese generals, warmongers and militarists were: they wanted the world to end.
By nuking two cities, the United States forced a surrender.
Was dropping The Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki a war crime? I don't know. I genuinely don't know. No matter what arguments you make for it being a war crime, there are powerful and compelling arguments that not dropping The Bomb would have been a greater crime. And no matter what arguments you make in defense of The Bomb, you cannot argue away 250,000-plus people wiped out in an instant, their shadows etched onto the sides of buildings.
I have no answers. I only appreciate the spectacular difficulty of the question. That you have found easy answers strongly suggests to me that you have no appreciation of the question.
In the end, humanity is advanced more by people who have no answers than by people who have answers without understanding the questions.
May I suggest using the money to buy mega cartons of Marlboros for Darl's cellmate when he lands in Pound-Me-In-the-Ass prison? While you're at it, make sure to mention that you're a "friend" of Darl's and it'd be such a "shame" if anything "unpleasant" happened to him...
Given that Darl is bound to wind up married to the man with the most cigarettes, the trick is to make sure the right man (or in this case, the most "oh dear Lord have mercy God NOOOOOOOOOO!" man) has the most cigarettes.:)
My name is Robert Hansen. I was born in Iowa, not far away from a city called Estherville.
Know who the other famous Robert Hansen from Estherville, Iowa is?
AN ALASKAN SERIAL KILLER WHO MURDERED TWENTY-ODD HOOKERS.
I discovered this while dating an Alaskan. You ever seen the Seinfeld episode where Elaine is dating a guy named David Berkowitz? You ever sat there on the couch with your Alaskan girlfriend, watched this episode, and felt enormous sympathy pangs for both Elaine and David?
And let's not even get into Robert Hanssen, the FBI agent turned traitor...
I don't know. Why don't you try Google for a converter between English and metric units?
Kids nowadays. Don't even know how to use Google. Asking me to spend five minutes typing up a reply because they're too lazy to spend one minute looking on the Web.
But I would venture to guess even a few hits from the pelvis up from an AK-47 would incapacitate most soldiers (I note you didn't compare the AK to sniper rifles, which are the two main weapons in CS. I'd be more interested in that)
I did compare the two. Most sniper rifles today use the 7.62 x 51mm NATO cartridge--2,650 foot-pounds of force. That'd cover the PSG-1, the M24, the M40, the M21, the MSG-90, the Accuracy Internationals, etc.
Some higher-caliber weapons use the.338 Lapua or the.300 Winchester Magnum.
The AK-47 uses the 7.62mm x 39mm Russian cartridge--1,500 foot-pounds of force.
And as the Black Hawk Down example shows, sometimes assault rifles do a pretty lousy job of putting the bad guy down. Admittedly, half the reason there was the ammunition used was armor-piercing (and as such tended to punch clean through instead of causing a lot of wound trauma), but the 5.56mm M-16A2 versus the 7.62mm M-21 comparison is a good real-world example of the differences between the two.
That said, the few FPSes I enjoy playing are Ghost Recon and Rainbow Six: Raven Shield. In both of those games, wound effects are frighteningly realistic. If you get hit, and the wound breaches your armor, you're very likely to be incapacitated or killed from just one round.
This total control is why the sniper is feared. Their gun is no more deadly than an AK-47 in real life - a bullet is a bullet, and the author says this in the article.
The muzzle energy of a 5.56mm NATO (the M-16's cartridge) is about 1300 foot-pounds. The muzzle energy of a 7.62mm Russian (the AK-47's cartridge) is about 1500 foot-pounds.
The muzzle energy of a 7.62mm NATO (most military sniper weapons) runs 2,650 foot-pounds. In other words, a 7.62mm sniper rifle more than doubles the muzzle energy of an assault rifle.
The number one indicator of how bad a gunshot will hurt you is where the bullet is placed. A 9mm to the tip of the nose will obliterate the medulla oblongata and cause instantaneous death within a hundredth of a second; but a 12-gauge to the foot will just take off your foot.
The number two indicator of how bad a gunshot will hurt you is how much muzzle energy the round has, and the round's wound ballistics. Read Mark Bowden's Black Hawk Down for examples. Army Rangers equipped with the M-16A2 were scoring multiple torso hits against Somali insurgents, but the 5.56mm round simply went clean through. It left neat holes which, while painful and probably eventually lethal for the insurgents, didn't do very much to incapacitate them.
On the other hand, the Delta Force snipers were equipped with M-14 battle rifles firing the 7.62mm NATO round. The 7.62mm round more than doubled the muzzle energy of the 5.56mm round--and unlike the 5.56mm round, the 7.62mm rounds generally did not exit their targets. The Delta Force snipers were getting reliable one-hit kills--not incapacitations, outright kills--on pretty much any shot that landed from the pelvis on up.
The 7.62mm cartridge is basically a.30-06 with a shortened case. The.30-06 will reliably take down anything short of an elephant; and it'll even take down an elephant if you can get a good shot. (At the dawn of the 20th century, the.30-06 and 8mm Mausers were weapons of choice for African poachers.) It's used, repeatedly and successfully, against bears, elk, moose, water buffalo, rams, and other big and tough-to-kill animals.
The 5.56mm cartridge is a varminting round--typically used against anything up to a coyote.
Not all bullets are created equal. Shot placement is first and foremost the determinant of damage; but it's nonsense to say that an AK-47 round does roughly equal tissue damage and trauma to a 7.62mm NATO round.
(And don't even get me started on the.300 Winchester Magnum... four thousand foot-pounds. Or the.338 Lapua... five thousand foot-pounds. And these are all common sniper weapons.)
In real life. Snipers are a bitch. It takes very real work to take out a sniper in a battlefield, especially a good one.
If I recall correctly, Army counter-sniper doctrine begins with "first, call in an artillery strike..." That should tell you just how serious the armed forces take snipers: the preferred method of dealing with one involves saturating city block-sized areas, one after another, with artillery barrages until there's nothing living larger than an amoeba.
In real life, snipers suck. Unless they're on your side, in which case they're so "cool" they have their own nickname: Murder, Incorporated.
There are only a few well-known snipers (or, as they're called in the Marines, scout-snipers) in the last century. Vasily Zaitsev and Carlos Hathcock are probably the two best-known, Zaitsev working in the Siege of Stalingrad and Hathcock working during the Vietnam War. Zaitsev's exploits are legendary: read the book Enemy at the Gates (avoid the movie, if you want to know the real story) and you'll shudder.
Hathcock's exploits are just as well-known. During the Vietnam War, he and his spotter once eliminated an NVA weapons platoon--around fifty men--in eight hours. It was Hathcock's scout-sniper unit which first received the appellation Murder, Incorporated. To this day, the Marine Corps nickname for their scout-sniper teams is "Murder, Inc.".
Many regular soldiers and Marines hold scout-snipers in contempt. Why? Because regular soldiers and Marines are scared shitless of snipers. They are the total antithesis of warfare. Soldiers understand killing in the heat of battle, when the adrenaline's pumping and you know you're in danger and your buddy just got severed in half by an RPG-7. They don't like it any--and no sane person should!--but they understand it. To a regular trooper, a scout-sniper isn't war: a scout-sniper is the Angel of Death following you wherever you go, and ending your life at a totally random moment, without warning, without escape, without mercy.
A scout-sniper who's working for you may be the Angel of Death walking the field on your side, but he's still the Angel of Death, and troops tend not to like that one bit.
Slashdot Mirror
Guantanamo is U.S. soil the same way that all miltary bases and embassies are U.S. soil.
Really? So you mean for every embassy, we pay rent to the host country?
That's the defining trait that people glom onto in an attempt to argue Gitmo != US soil. If it was United States soil, we wouldn't be paying rent.
technically (as I understand it) the Consitution doesn't grant those rights to the non-Americans.
Some rights in the Constitution are considered to have a prerequisite of "must be a free citizen in good standing", yes. For instance, if you're convicted of a felony you can have your rights to firearms, your right to vote, your right to associate taken away from you. (The government will let a paroled felon go to church, but not join the Crips. That's an example of how the government restricts the associations of criminals.) Other rights are inherent to the person, such as the right to an attorney, and must be granted to everyone.
The dodge used in Guantanamo is this: the Constitution only applies within the United States. Guantanamo is Cuban soil, and thus it's governed under Cuban law...
(True, by the by: the US doesn't own Gitmo. We've just got it on a very long-term lease from Cuba. It's annoyed Fidel Castro for decades.)
Personally, I think Gitmo is a pathetic way to try and dodge the Constitution. But the logic Gitmo's defenders use is basically what I outlined above.
The problem isn't that the Administration isn't respecting international law; in fact, there is no problem at all. The reason why the U.S. Government has historically been so averse to foreign trials for U.S. citizens is because of the United States Constitution.
The Constitution is not the creation of our government. The Constitution creates our government. As a consequence of this, the government cannot enact any law or enter into any treaty which goes against the Constitution. How can it? The government, being inferior to the Constitution, has zero authority to violate the Constitution.
So now take a look at the United States Constitituion and its several guarantees to criminal defendants. American defendants have the most and the best safeguards of any nation in the world. The various proposals for International Courts of Justice lack these safeguards. For instance, the last I saw, the proposal for the International Criminal Court did not guarantee the defendant the right to a jury trial, nor did it guarantee that no indictment would issue except upon presentment of a grand jury.
If ICC doesn't guarantee the right to a jury trial or the right to a grand jury, then the U.S. Government cannot become party to it. Why? Because that'd be Congress saying "well, in some cases, yes, we agree that American citizens can be denied the right to a jury trial and the right to a grand jury..."
And the Constitution--which establishes our government--announces to the world, clear and cold, this is not allowed.
I don't fault you for saying "It doesn't look like precedent to me, it looks more like the US is doing it because they can". It does look that way to Europeans, whose governments can typically do anything they want subject to the will of the voters. The American government is sharply limited in contrast with European ones. We see this time and time again, where some European power asks Bush to spare the life of one of their nationals who's been convicted and sentenced to die. Bush then has to say "err, he was convicted and sentenced to die in California. I have no authority to pardon criminals convicted in state courts. I can call up Governor Schwarzenegger if you really want, but I don't think he'll pay me much attention. In fact, he'll probably hold a press conference to say he hung up on me, which is a, exactly what Ronald Reagan would've done if Nixon had called then-Governor Reagan up begging for a pardon for someone, and b, given how popular I am in California, it'd guarantee him re-election..."
Most Americans don't really understand the Constitutional issues behind the ICC, nor the Federal/State dichotomy in government. I hardly expect the rest of the world to understand it any better.
such as the suggestion that those of us with AS are indulging in some kind of fad.
... etc. If you're one of these people, then even if AS is a correct diagnosis, it's critically important that you not label yourself as AS, because it'll just become one more label you hang on yourself as a way of giving yourself permission to fail.
When I was evaluated for AS, my psych told me that I had clear enough symptoms that an AS diagnosis was appropriate... but that ultimately it was up to me whether I had AS. If having the knowledge that my brain was wired differently helped me cope with life, helped me accomodate my shortcomings, let me live a happier and better life, then by all means: let's get the AS diagnosis taken care of.
But the flip side is that a lot of people take diagnoses and turn them into excuses why they can't do $foo, why other people need to accomodate them, why they're
AS is often a fad diagnosis. (The worst I ever saw was a father telling me about his four-year-old with AS. Come on.) But the existence of fad diagnoses does not in any way negate the existence of accurate AS diagnoses, nor the help that self-knowledge can bring.
I have AS. I'm a graduate student; I almost got married once, but it didn't take. I've worked in the industry and received my fair share of glowing recommendations and don't-let-the-door-hit-you-in-the-ass goodbyes. I have the respect of my peers and more friends than I deserve.
None of this happened either because or in spite of Asperger's Syndrome. I'm wholly responsible for all of them--the particular way my head is wired has zero responsibility for any of them.
The way my head is wired is just a fact of existence. What I choose to do with my life... that's up to me.
"Calculus Made Easy" is, unless my memory is wrong, in the public domain--it was printed in the very early part of this century, before IP became so draconian, and Silvanus P. Thompson is long-dead.
So if you want, you should be able to find Silvanus P. Thompson's original "Calculus Made Easy" in the public domain--Gutenberg might have it.
The versions which are still under copyright are the annotated versions, e.g., the one edited by Martin Gardner (of Scientific American's "Mathematical Games" column).
I have a copy of the Gardner edition of "Calculus Made Easy" and I'll heartily attest to its worthiness. After taking three semesters of calculus, the subject was still incomprehensible to me: I could solve calculus problems, but I didn't understand why calculus worked. After reading "Calculus Made Easy", I understood.
After reading this last, the only thing I can say is that you're sufficiently deranged as to make further discussion fruitless.
There are a lot of good points you could've made with the war in Iraq, the 2000 election, etc.: but you've squandered them by going for simplistic sound-bite answers instead of demonstrating that you have any appreciation for the other side of the issue.
There's a lot of things Bush has done which deserve criticism. I'm a Republican and I'm not going to vote for Bush in the next election--that should tell you something about how critical I am of him.
But you're not criticizing. Criticizing requires an honest assessment of the issue from all sides, and then praising what is praiseworthy and deriding what merits derision.
What you're doing is one-note saysaying. If I want that, I'll read Molly Ivins. Much like you, she's a one-note naysayer. Unlike you, she's quite entertaining to read.
(Wow. A Republican who likes Molly Ivins? Who reads Camille Paglia? Who reads New Republic? Who'd've thought? But this is what you need to do if you're going to be a critic.)
Umm, hello you idiot, I was talking about the Sun. You know, that big round glowy hurty thing that your Mom keeps telling you not to look at directly?
So was I. Where do you think the He-3 comes from?
It's actually going to be cheaper to mine the lunar regolith for He-3 than it would be to ship square kilometer upon square kilometer of solar cells to the Moon. (Why can't you build the solar cells on the moon? Well, first, the Moon lacks the raw materials... second, the Moon lacks the industrial infrastructure necessary to build sophisticated solar cells... third, the Moon lacks the power required to run an industrial infrastructure...)
You're still begging the question. We can't get immense power out of the Moon until we figure out how to put immense power on the Moon. This can be an immense, trillion-dollar investment in fuel required to put solar cells on the Moon... this can be an immense, trillion-dollar investment in mining technology and fusion research to develop lunar He-3 fusion... this can be, basically, anything: but the "anything" is guaranteed to be incredibly, spectacularly, tax-payer-refusingly expensive.
HISTORY TAUGHT YOU CLUELESS ROBOTS NOTHING?
A lot more than it's taught you, I daresay.
Putting weapons in space DOES NOT GUARANTEE THAT SOME FUTURE MAD SOCIETY WON'T USE THEM.
No. But it does guarantee that when some madman decides he wants to use them, that we'll have the tools necessary to make sure he doesn't live long enough to use them.
You are not going to be able to remove war from the human psyche. It exists. It's the mad demon of human nature which haunts us for as long as human beings exist. The rational response to this is not to say "let's get rid of all weapons", because that only affects the people who are moral and civilized enough to not want to develop weapons in the first place. It does nothing to prevent madmen from attempting madness, or building new and evil ways to wreck lives and communities.
The rational response to this is to say "evil exists: given that, how must we prepare for it?"
The obvious response is to make sure we're ready for it when it happens. That means militaries. That means rough men with guns who are ready to do violence on your behalf the instant somebody tries to burn down your home, rape your family and steal your heirlooms.
Anything else is simply not a realistic assessment of history. Thus it has been: thus it will continue to be.
Because, frankly, I'm not smart enough to figure out some universal solution that will make evil simply not exist.
And I know that you aren't, either.
considering that there's a near-infinite supply of energy to be directed ...
Right. All we have to do is discover fusion first, and then we have to figure out an efficient and totally automated way of mining He-3 from lunar regolith (we're talking grams of He-3 per ton mined), then we have to build a very large base, then we have to... etc.
Your statement is somewhat akin to saying "it's easy to create a universe: first, you have to become God..." You're assuming the very thing you're trying to demonstrate the existence of: amassing enormous power on the Moon is easy only if you've already solved the problem.
We simply must -not- weaponize space. That is all. And those of you with the power to vote in America had better make sure your country doesn't do it.
We simply must weaponize space.
Look, I'm sorry if it offends your sensibilities, but like Thomas Sowell said, "reality is that which doesn't go away when you stop believing in it."
Space will be commercialized. It will be weaponized. It will be developed. It will be colonized.
History shows us that there has never been a natural resource that has not sooner or later had some crafty person figure out how to make use of it. Not one resource--not ever--has been an exception to this rule. Reality says we need to believe space will be the exact same, even moreso, given the spectacular amount of wealth waiting for us out there. (You ever seen the numbers for the amount of precious metals in a good-sized asteroid? One single good-sized asteroid, brought back to Earth, would have so much precious metals in it that it would collapse the world economy.)
History also tells us that natural resources are always in contention. Or, put bluntly, people fight wars over natural resources. It's been this way from time immemorial. (And please stow any cheap responses about "yeah, Bush has proved this".)
Space is going to be no different. There's natural resources out there, those natural resources are going to be utilized, and wars are going to be fought over them.
"We simply must not weaponize space!" is great as a moral statement. Unfortunately, it totally fails the Santayana test.
You are failing to pay any attention to the lessons of history.
History tells us people who don't learn from history the first time get to pay the tuition all over again.
I am not interested in the "we must not weaponize space!" taboo. It's balderdash, trivial tripe, easily refuted by history.
The question I'm interested in is "how does one morally and ethically weaponize space, under what civilian controls, under what laws, and under what political systems?"
The minor matter of it being a few days trip from the Moon to the Earth, as well as any attack being immediately visible ("Hey, Sergei, there's a huge spike in the Moon's EM emissions--the Americans are up to something!", to say nothing of radar and amateur astronomers) precludes it from being useful offensively. An attack which takes literally days to arrive is worthless when an ICBM counterattack would take only half an hour to arrive.
They'd just be a potential witness.
The United States Constitution guarantees that litigants will "have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor" (Amendment VI). While Amendment VI is construed strictly towards criminal trials, the right to have a compulsory process to obtain witnesses has been construed to also apply to criminal trials.
A subpoena is the classic tool used to compel witnesses to testify. MS has no protection from subpoena just because it isn't a direct party to the lawsuit(s).
The moon has tons of resources for constructing weapons, especially new kinds of nuclear weapons
...
The surface of the moon is overwhelmingly composed of worthless and/or low-value materials. You're not going to find anything there that'll be useful for a nuke. The surface of the moon is awash in helium-3, which is very useful for fusion power, but is not all that useful for nuclear weapons.
While your first two points are bang-on right, your third point sounds like a paranoid Nader rant against the "military-industrial complex". It undercuts the other two points, which, as I just said, are exactly correct.
Its very, very difficult to defend against moon-launched attacks
No harder than defending against an ICBM, mostly.
The reason why the Air Force was, at one time, making plans to put nuclear silos on the moon has nothing to do with how devastating lunar-based attacks can be. Instead, the moon would be the ultimate defensive weapon.
How long does it take a nuclear missile to arrive on Earth after it's been launched from the Moon? A few days at the very least. So what happens if you do a launch from the moon? Everybody else sees you launch and turns your country into rubble days before the missile arrives.
That's why the Moon is useless offensively. And that's why the Moon is useful defensively. Because even if America were to be totally wiped out in a nuclear first-strike, the lunar silos would still be safe for a minimum of a couple of days while the ICBMs launched from Earth were en route to it. And in those couple of days, the lunar silos could mount a pisser of a counterattack.
Mutually Assured Destruction, or MAD. While I'm no fan of plans to militarize the Moon, I have to say in some way I'm vaguely pleased that the Air Force was considering turning the Moon into the ultimate defensive weapon, one which would be utterly worthless for offense.
You say that holding all the primaries on the same day would bias the election towards metropolitan areas. But doesn't holding the elections all on the same day do just the same thing?
Not really. The election isn't political discourse; it's political decisionmaking. On election day, all the discussion is done and now it's just up to the people to decide which candidate has the better platform (or, as is often the case nowadays, the better PR campaign).
I'm all in favor of making sure rural America has a say in political discourse, and in favor of prolonging the period over which discourse is relevant. I'm not in favor of running elections by those same rules--decisionmaking has a much different set of needs from discussion.
It's an interesting idea, though.
actually you're wrong about this
Actually, I'm right. You're attributing words and ideas to me which I never expressed, and which I have better sense than to propose.
Thus, the boundaries between states really don't matter
I know.
Campaigning in areas of dense population let you gain visibility to more people at once.
And if you have no other competitor in the area, then the nightly news isn't going to waste much time on the competition when the candidate is in the city. The reason why candidates will segregate themselves in urban areas is not because of political realities, but because of media realities.
The upshot of the segregation into cities and metropolitan areas is the same, though. To cater to the audiences in the big cities, they'll talk exclusively about metropolitan concerns and thus lock rural people out of the political debate.
And yet, that's exactly what they've told me.
This is not an argument for doing elections all at once. After all, if elections were done all at once your vote, as a member of the rural Illinois community, still wouldn't be heard and wouldn't count.
This is an argument for moving Super Tuesday closer to the end of the campaign season--a move with which I agree.
My condolences on Illinois having practically no direct input into the selection of the Democratic candidate. It's a lousy deal, really. But moving to an all-at-once primary system won't make your deal any better.
This proposal gets floated so often that I can only consider it malinformation at this point--a pervasive meme which works to people's detriment.
Let's say, for sake of argument, that all 50 states have their caucuses and/or primaries at the same time. They start at the same time, end at the same time. What are we going to see from the candidates?
Well, Kerry would park himself in California for two weeks prior to the primary. Edwards would take New York. Sharpton would go for an inner-city like Baltimore, Dean would take Boston and everyone would be lobbing grenades at Kerry in a desperate attempt to keep him from getting God-knows-how-many delegates in one fell swoop.
Do you see what'd happen? The candidates would campaign only in high-population areas and would talk only about metropolitan issues. Because really, if everything all gets settled at once, it doesn't make any sense for Kerry to sit down at Gwen's Diner in Lisbon, Iowa (great food if you're ever in the neighborhood) and talk to the usual crowd of farmers, hunters and retired schoolteachers who hang out there.
These people are American citizens. They pay taxes. They get overlooked by East and West Coasters every single day of the year except for about one month every four years, when the East and West Coasters come to Iowa to ask Iowans "so, now that you've actually met $candidate, what do you think?"
If you make everyone vote all at the same time, what you're going to do is tell everyone who doesn't live in a major metropolitan area--and that's forty-eight percent of the nation--that their opinions don't count, that they're too minor to matter, and that since everything's settled all at once and fifty-two percent of the delegates are decided in the big cities, that the entire political debate will revolve around big-city concerns.
A campaign season exists to allow vigorous political debate to take place. It exists to make sure rural citizens, who have as much right to be heard as you, have a voice in political proceedings.
The article you're linking to is a good one: unfortunately, it's not all that good for your position. As it makes clear, what the Japanese were pushing for was a settlement, not a surrender. A settlement means "a negotiated end to hostilities". A surrender means "you win".
Moreover, the settlement the Japanese were pushing for would have kept the Imperial system in place... namely, the same Imperial system which started the war. Japan was objecting to the Emperor being turned into a figurehead--they wanted him to remain as their deity--and objecting to the prosecution of Japanese military leaders for war crimes. The United States' response to this was a blunt "no: you can either abolish this deific cult around the Emperor and dismantle the political system which caused this war, or you can die. Take your pick. We're past caring which one you choose."
One thing I'm unclear on in the article you linked to is how the term "unconditional surrender" is vague. In matters of international diplomacy, "unconditional surrender" is one of the clearest and most precise terms out there. It means you put down your arms, admit your defeat, cooperate with the victors, and make absolutely zero demands of your own. It is the ultimate form of surrender, and for that reason it happens very rarely. I do not understand how the words "unconditional surrender" can be interpreted as anything other than a clear and unambiguous (if exceptionally stark!) demand.
The United States demanded unconditional surrender primarily, I believe, because unconditional surrender would be a necessary prerequisite to dismantling the Imperial government.
Basically what it amounts to is this:
... What I find interesting that, for all your talk of how Japan wanted to surrender, the article you linked to never mentions the word 'surrender' when describing Japanese peace offers.
Note the phrasing: negotiated peace, not surrender. The Japanese were not offering surrender, just an end to hostilities. There's a big difference... as the essay you linked to compellingly argues:
Do we have responsibility for what happened to Nagasaki and Hiroshima? Yes. Does Japan have more responsibility? Yes.
Wor
However, before the bombs were dropped, Japan was willing to surrender under the stipulation that they got to keep the emperor.
Not true; Japan was willing to come to a settlement which would end hostilities, but leave the Emperor in place along with the cabal of militarists who were responsible for the Pacific war.
The U.S. quite reasonably said no: "the only surrender we will accept is one which completely dismantles the government which started this war."
After the Emperor unconditionally surrendered, we did just that: we dismantled the government which started the war. The Emperor was allowed to remain on as a figurehead, completely divorced from power. Japan was forcibly turned into a democracy, and for the last 50 years Japan has been a responsible and mature member of the international community.
So no, we didn't "let them keep the Emperor anyway". We forced the Emperor to publically disavow his status in Japan as a deity; we forced him to recuse himself from politics; we forced him to get rid of his advisors and make them available for war-crimes trials.
None of that would have happened if we'd accepted their initial settlement offer.
Given our other option was Operation Olympic, which would've resulted in (conservative estimate) five times as many dead? Yes, I think a case can be made that not dropping The Bomb would have been a war crime.
Under the Geneva Accords, a nation is obligated to conduct war in such a manner as to minimize the depradations, casualties, loss of life and property damage to non-military targets. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were apocalyptic attacks, yes. Olympic would have been worse.
So by that metric--if we had a choice which would have left Hiroshima and Nagasaki as flaming cinders, but the rest of the mainland mostly untouched, or a choice to do a mass invasion which would have left the entire island chain aflame and smoking, it would be a war crime to not choose the atomic option.
In the general case, of course it makes no sense to say "not dropping a nuke is a war crime". It's absurd. Balderdash. Ludicrous insanity.
But in the context of "our options are drop a nuke or else kick off Operation Olympic"... not dropping a nuke (i.e., going the Olympic route) could be viewed as a war crime.
It's a spectacularly difficult question.
it DID cause the cold war
More accurately, it kept the Cold War from becoming hot. The Cold War was going to happen regardless of whether we dropped a nuke or Martha Stewart on Hiroshima. The US and the USSR were (are) both ideologically expansionist powers, in that each wanted to see its ideology adopted by the rest of the world. When two expansionist powers come into conflict, there's going to be a cold war and most likely followed by a very hot one. Unless, of course, both sides know that a hot war would be a literal hell on earth, thus giving both sides a strong incentive to not start a hot war.
Did we come close to nuclear war in the Cuba embargo? Damn straight. Why didn't we exchange nukes? Because both sides were reluctant to.
For the first time in the history of the world, we've invented a weapon which has not been used for over fifty years. That has never happened before.
I actually rather like the Bomb. It's a simple, one-question choice: are we as human beings morally developed enough to be allowed to continue existing?
It's a one-question exam, scored pass or fail. So far, humanity has made the right choice. I think that's rather hopeful, myself.
If any other country committed such an atrocity against another as the United States did to Japan, we would have World War 3
I see. So we could either kill 250,000 Japanese (and several thousand Korean slave workers who were in Hiroshima when the Bomb hit, and several thousands of other nationalities, too) in two attacks so terrible, so catastrophic, so Wrath of God, that the Japanese surrendered... or we could go forward with Operation Olympic and kill millions of Japanese and millions of Americans.
After the Nagasaki bomb hit, the Emperor was willing to surrender. Do you know what his aides' response to this was? They tried to murder him so that he wouldn't be able to surrender; and without an Emperor who could sign a surrender, it would've condemned Japan to decades of warfare. That's how hardcore, how serious, the Japanese generals, warmongers and militarists were: they wanted the world to end.
By nuking two cities, the United States forced a surrender.
Was dropping The Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki a war crime? I don't know. I genuinely don't know. No matter what arguments you make for it being a war crime, there are powerful and compelling arguments that not dropping The Bomb would have been a greater crime. And no matter what arguments you make in defense of The Bomb, you cannot argue away 250,000-plus people wiped out in an instant, their shadows etched onto the sides of buildings.
I have no answers. I only appreciate the spectacular difficulty of the question. That you have found easy answers strongly suggests to me that you have no appreciation of the question.
In the end, humanity is advanced more by people who have no answers than by people who have answers without understanding the questions.
May I suggest using the money to buy mega cartons of Marlboros for Darl's cellmate when he lands in Pound-Me-In-the-Ass prison? While you're at it, make sure to mention that you're a "friend" of Darl's and it'd be such a "shame" if anything "unpleasant" happened to him...
:)
Given that Darl is bound to wind up married to the man with the most cigarettes, the trick is to make sure the right man (or in this case, the most "oh dear Lord have mercy God NOOOOOOOOOO!" man) has the most cigarettes.
Cigarettes: Viagra for the penal system!
You think you have it bad?
My name is Robert Hansen. I was born in Iowa, not far away from a city called Estherville.
Know who the other famous Robert Hansen from Estherville, Iowa is?
AN ALASKAN SERIAL KILLER WHO MURDERED TWENTY-ODD HOOKERS.
I discovered this while dating an Alaskan. You ever seen the Seinfeld episode where Elaine is dating a guy named David Berkowitz? You ever sat there on the couch with your Alaskan girlfriend, watched this episode, and felt enormous sympathy pangs for both Elaine and David?
And let's not even get into Robert Hanssen, the FBI agent turned traitor...
Kids nowadays. Don't even know how to use Google. Asking me to spend five minutes typing up a reply because they're too lazy to spend one minute looking on the Web.
Short answers:
.223 Remington / 5.56mm x 45mm NATO: 1350 ft-lbs, 1830 J .30 Russian / 7.62mm x 39mm Russian: 1500 ft-lbs, 2033 J .308 Winchester / 7.62mm x 51mm NATO: 2650 ft-lbs, 3592 J
Next time, please use Google.But I would venture to guess even a few hits from the pelvis up from an AK-47 would incapacitate most soldiers (I note you didn't compare the AK to sniper rifles, which are the two main weapons in CS. I'd be more interested in that)
.338 Lapua or the .300 Winchester Magnum.
I did compare the two. Most sniper rifles today use the 7.62 x 51mm NATO cartridge--2,650 foot-pounds of force. That'd cover the PSG-1, the M24, the M40, the M21, the MSG-90, the Accuracy Internationals, etc.
Some higher-caliber weapons use the
The AK-47 uses the 7.62mm x 39mm Russian cartridge--1,500 foot-pounds of force.
And as the Black Hawk Down example shows, sometimes assault rifles do a pretty lousy job of putting the bad guy down. Admittedly, half the reason there was the ammunition used was armor-piercing (and as such tended to punch clean through instead of causing a lot of wound trauma), but the 5.56mm M-16A2 versus the 7.62mm M-21 comparison is a good real-world example of the differences between the two.
That said, the few FPSes I enjoy playing are Ghost Recon and Rainbow Six: Raven Shield. In both of those games, wound effects are frighteningly realistic. If you get hit, and the wound breaches your armor, you're very likely to be incapacitated or killed from just one round.
This total control is why the sniper is feared. Their gun is no more deadly than an AK-47 in real life - a bullet is a bullet, and the author says this in the article.
.30-06 with a shortened case. The .30-06 will reliably take down anything short of an elephant; and it'll even take down an elephant if you can get a good shot. (At the dawn of the 20th century, the .30-06 and 8mm Mausers were weapons of choice for African poachers.) It's used, repeatedly and successfully, against bears, elk, moose, water buffalo, rams, and other big and tough-to-kill animals.
.300 Winchester Magnum... four thousand foot-pounds. Or the .338 Lapua... five thousand foot-pounds. And these are all common sniper weapons.)
The muzzle energy of a 5.56mm NATO (the M-16's cartridge) is about 1300 foot-pounds. The muzzle energy of a 7.62mm Russian (the AK-47's cartridge) is about 1500 foot-pounds.
The muzzle energy of a 7.62mm NATO (most military sniper weapons) runs 2,650 foot-pounds. In other words, a 7.62mm sniper rifle more than doubles the muzzle energy of an assault rifle.
The number one indicator of how bad a gunshot will hurt you is where the bullet is placed. A 9mm to the tip of the nose will obliterate the medulla oblongata and cause instantaneous death within a hundredth of a second; but a 12-gauge to the foot will just take off your foot.
The number two indicator of how bad a gunshot will hurt you is how much muzzle energy the round has, and the round's wound ballistics. Read Mark Bowden's Black Hawk Down for examples. Army Rangers equipped with the M-16A2 were scoring multiple torso hits against Somali insurgents, but the 5.56mm round simply went clean through. It left neat holes which, while painful and probably eventually lethal for the insurgents, didn't do very much to incapacitate them.
On the other hand, the Delta Force snipers were equipped with M-14 battle rifles firing the 7.62mm NATO round. The 7.62mm round more than doubled the muzzle energy of the 5.56mm round--and unlike the 5.56mm round, the 7.62mm rounds generally did not exit their targets. The Delta Force snipers were getting reliable one-hit kills--not incapacitations, outright kills--on pretty much any shot that landed from the pelvis on up.
The 7.62mm cartridge is basically a
The 5.56mm cartridge is a varminting round--typically used against anything up to a coyote.
Not all bullets are created equal. Shot placement is first and foremost the determinant of damage; but it's nonsense to say that an AK-47 round does roughly equal tissue damage and trauma to a 7.62mm NATO round.
(And don't even get me started on the
In real life. Snipers are a bitch. It takes very real work to take out a sniper in a battlefield, especially a good one.
If I recall correctly, Army counter-sniper doctrine begins with "first, call in an artillery strike..." That should tell you just how serious the armed forces take snipers: the preferred method of dealing with one involves saturating city block-sized areas, one after another, with artillery barrages until there's nothing living larger than an amoeba.
In real life, snipers suck. Unless they're on your side, in which case they're so "cool" they have their own nickname: Murder, Incorporated.
There are only a few well-known snipers (or, as they're called in the Marines, scout-snipers) in the last century. Vasily Zaitsev and Carlos Hathcock are probably the two best-known, Zaitsev working in the Siege of Stalingrad and Hathcock working during the Vietnam War. Zaitsev's exploits are legendary: read the book Enemy at the Gates (avoid the movie, if you want to know the real story) and you'll shudder.
Hathcock's exploits are just as well-known. During the Vietnam War, he and his spotter once eliminated an NVA weapons platoon--around fifty men--in eight hours. It was Hathcock's scout-sniper unit which first received the appellation Murder, Incorporated. To this day, the Marine Corps nickname for their scout-sniper teams is "Murder, Inc.".
Many regular soldiers and Marines hold scout-snipers in contempt. Why? Because regular soldiers and Marines are scared shitless of snipers. They are the total antithesis of warfare. Soldiers understand killing in the heat of battle, when the adrenaline's pumping and you know you're in danger and your buddy just got severed in half by an RPG-7. They don't like it any--and no sane person should!--but they understand it. To a regular trooper, a scout-sniper isn't war: a scout-sniper is the Angel of Death following you wherever you go, and ending your life at a totally random moment, without warning, without escape, without mercy.
A scout-sniper who's working for you may be the Angel of Death walking the field on your side, but he's still the Angel of Death, and troops tend not to like that one bit.