Sort of a random thought I've been wondering about for a couple days. Seems like when you see US forces on TV, they've got this weird mishmash of woodland pattern camo and desert pattern camo going on. The Brits you see have all pretty uniformly got some nifty-looking desert camo, but the US doesn't seem to have it in gear or something. Given that lack of such was a problem back in Gulf War I, slightly curious as to why there seem to be more guys in woodland than in desert in this one. *shrug*

So dad left me a couple pieces of pepper bacon this morning, and I log in here, and there is much commenting. Today must, by rights, be a Good Day(tm).

I don't think I really need to comment on this or this.

Of whom I am curious to determine how many of you there are...

Encouragement to post on the tagboard over on the side there, or to leave comments. Make your poor, unloved blog writer feel a sense of worth and satisfaction with the world.

Regina, this is your fault. But you get a whole blog entry in response, for what that's worth.

Dontcha love how, in high school, they try to make you understand the "themes" of history and cause and effect and such things, but as for telling you anything about the "themes" of recent history and the causes of some of the problems and events of the last half-century...I haven't learned any of it yet in school, and all I know about it I credit to my parents, who taught me about the last 50 years. 'Course, there's the chance that I'll learn about it in US History in 2 years, but still, 16 years is a pretty long time to starve kids of recent and very relevant history.

This will sound pessimistic, but keep waiting. I didn't get any decent coverage of things until college, and even then my 10 week 1920s-present course skipped the 80s and 90s almost entirely because we ran out of time. To the extent that I know much of anything on the subject, it's because I taught myself. Even then there are serious gaps.

Now, were I to be teaching a high-school level US history course, I'd be doing a number of things. First, practically eliminate the emphasis on weekly quizzes and such. If anything, have some weekly homework, but no quizzes. Midterm and a final like in college, and that's it.

Second, find some main themes and focus on those. This wasn't particularly emphasized in my own HS-level courses. Race relations, the maturation of the democratic system, and foreign relations/growth of the US are three of the most important ones I can think of off the top of my head. You could even concievably skimp on the growth of the democratic system and save it for the US government course.

Third, focus more on the big events of the times. I didn't need, particularly, to have a whole chapter on the growth of industry in the 1820s, along with who invented the tractor and such. As part of the larger theme, yes, these should be mentioned, but. Instead, focus primarily upon the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, the two World Wars, and the Cold War/post Cold War period with heavy emphasis on the 1960s/Vietnam. For the Civil War, I can see myself assigning a bunch of book reading, then having everyone sit down and watch the Ken Burns Civil War documentry. Huge and long, yes, but it's GOOD, and students are generally happy with some videos. If I could think of some other good ones, I'd show them, too. Throw the obvious special emphasis on the post-1945 stuff, 'cause we're LIVING IT.

And now, having lost my train of thought, I shall end.

So some fool talking head on NBC last night is like "If the war goes on for more than six weeks, it will be a serious political problem for Bush."

It's about here where you sort of need to pause for a moment, and realize that we're living in the century of the five YEAR war. In fact, within the lifespan of the United States, we've had all of, say, one war that was less than a year, and that was Gulf War I. And why is that? Because we stopped short of fully invading Iraq. Limited objectives, limited time. This time is different - full blown country takeovers against opposition take a while. Anybody with any amount of intelligence on the matter has known this for some time.

So if you haven't noticed, my respect for the media is declining. I have some respect for the embedded guys, but 90% of your talking heads are fools.

This is the post that never ends, it goes on and on my friends...

So, anyway, the point of the whole thing here is less of a rant against a specific position, though most if not all of the previous was beating on the anti-war crowd. I beat on the kill em all crowd, too, not that you hear much of it. One likes to bill oneself as a political moderate, who doesn't particularly like the way far left or the way far right much. But the point here is a rant about common sense. Or uncommon sense, since a lot of people seem to have pretty much skipped American History in school, or got screwed in the learning of it. I'm coming to the conclusion over time that the way American History ought to be taught in High School is with less of an emphasis on the earlier stuff, and more of an emphasis on post-1945, which is precisely the bit that seems to get cut out of most classes that I've seen or been in. I say this as a historian, of course, and I'm not entirely sure how to condense the massive amount of reading that needs to be done to understand, say, the Vietnam War, but I am of the belief that Americans should have an understanding of our foreign policy over the last 50 years and why we did what we did. There seems to be a lack of understanding of it, even by many of those who lived through it. The idea that I, a 22 year old history student, should have, even with my limited reading, a better understanding of these things than some of the, say, 50 and 60 year olds that I've talked with is rather distressing to me.

Left out a thought. Bad me.

Lot of people amazed and mystified as to why, say, France and Russia, let alone anybody else, don't support the US position. Other countries have their own interests, yknow, which don't necessarily coincide with US interests, and in a lot of cases are pretty much opposite to them. Russian arms sales to Iraq, anyone? Way the world works. Get used to it.

So I've been marinating in Iraq war coverage for like, what, five days now or something? Seems like centuries now, for some reason. Keep coming up with random thoughts on the issue. Like you know how the first war was the "CNN war"? For my family, this one is going to be the "MSNBC war" for whatever that's worth, which isn't much.

So the White House is giving a press conference today, and they're talking about humanitarian aid and how it's hard getting it into Iraq because Iraq, yknow, mined the harbors. And these reporters are going on and on about the poor people of Iraq and how we're not holding up our end of the deal and giving them aid. Like, hello? It's pretty simple, really. The harbors are mined. The food is on ships. Ship + Mine = Sinking ship = no food. Really fucking amazing how that works, isn't it? You know at the end of the day that the reporters asking those sorts of questions, and the ones about the explosions are pretty much against the war, but the way they're going about protesting it smacks of either gross stupidity, or gross intellectual dishonesty in that they know the WHY full well, and are ignoring that to try and make the Administration look bad. Neither of them is all that palatable to me, the first for the obvious reasons, and the second because such is extremely unethical.

Speaking of which, another peeve of mine at the moment is the misguided belief that people, especially innocent civilians, are not going to die in this thing. They are. That's tragic, but it happens. Smart bombs, for all that they're amazingly accurate, do not always work 100%. Bullets are worse - they're not guided by a whole lot, which makes you wonder about all that AA fire going off in Baghdad. Deliberate atrocities are the worst, and you'll notice that those seem to be the realm of the Iraqis - heard about the uprising in Basra, or the fact they took over a fucking HOSPITAL? Go on, find me some evidence that the US/British forces are doing that sort of thing. No, inability to get food to people while the harbors are mined doesn't count. Yknow, they're trying, folks. Hard. But it doesn't always work, and that needs to be realized.

There needs also to be a return to the realization that pacifism on anything other than an individual level is basically a failure for a number of reasons, not the least among them being that in the land of the disarmed, the armed man is king.

Along with that, there needs to be a certain realization of the way the world works. Geopolitics, if you will, as well as economics and a few other -ics and -isms and such. The first of those is that the United States as a whole, not just the rich, has interests in other countries. Gas prices are but one reflection of that. Sure, you can shout "no blood for oil!", but you'll certainly complain when gas prices go up to $5 a gallon. Another manifestation of that is the whole "Made in China" label. Along with that, there's a certain few realities about applying the whole "Axis of Evil" idea, like how little bits of the world do not operate in vacuums.

All of that leads up to some sort of point. There is a reason why we are where we are now, and not in, say North Korea or Iran or Angola or something. Iraq is important because the regime there threatens our economic interests, which in the end affects the entire country and indeed much of the world. Iraq has also been chosen, instead of Korea or Iran, because firstly we have "legal", and I put that in quotes more to call into question the role of international law than anything, rights here - Iraqi violation of the ceasefire and a host of UN resolutions. This isn't present in Iran so far as I know, and only sort of in Korea. In Korea's case, there's a lot of worry about South Korea getting the crap beat out of it, which if you remember last time, it did. There's also worries about what the Chinese are going to do, which if you remember last time, they got antsy last time we ran over North Korea. In Iran's case, you'll notice as how it doesn't border much of anything, much less how, yknow, Iraq is right there, much less how Iran at least shows some kind of reform movement. We may yet go for those two, but not yet. As for Africa in general, we tried that once. If you've seen Blackhawk Down, you'll know about how that turned out.

Slightly (or not so slightly) amoral? Yes, it is. But that's how the real world works. Even America can't fix everything for everyone, no matter how hard we try.

This concludes tonight's rambling, disjointed rant.

One last note: Be careful which females you allow to play wargames. They...corrupt.

So the Monroe gang all got together last night for some serious gaming action. Thinking some LAN action, some Mechwarrior 3 playing, and whatever else. We got the LAN part in, anyway. Hours and hours of serious Mechwarrior 4 playing. Fear Gausszilla. Fear Gausszilla muchly.

Actually got the whole LAN working this time, too. Usually it fails, but this time we got it working. So there were some serious 5-way melees going on while Jason was off in the corner working on some obscene MW3 character. We'll play next time, really. Honest.

And as is custom at these things, somebody's car died at 3am and needed a jump. Jason's, this time. Currently at the bottom of the hill with a dead battery, waiting for him to come fix it and take it home. Also, I hold his computer hostage. Buahahahahaha.

And the foolish Odin computer in AoM thought he could Ragnorok me to death. Instead he crippled his econ. Buahahahahaha.

Been playing all day, in fact. I'm pretty consistantly beating up hard computers now as Hades, even against another Hades. Sort of figured out how to run very rapid econ expansion in Classical and Heroic, thus enabling me to stomp the opposition 1v1. Still haven't faced a Zeus or a Poseidon yet, and those are the ones that were steamrolling me before. We'll see. I still suck by online standards, but oh well. AoM's a lot different from AoK. Enjoying it so far.

So cleaning my room wasn't quite this bad, but it wasn't all that fun, either. And looking at my $70 AoM Collector's Edition box, I figured I had something to say, but then I realized I'd said it before. Almost said something about dogs, but no. I feel like I've said it all before, somehow.

Huh.

Well, AoM has gone down before me. 32 missions long, and even if the build and destroy stuff got to be a bit much at times, it was still quite entertaining. Entertaining enough that it's the first campaign that I've finished since AoE way back in '97. I ALMOST finished AoK's French campaign, but then didn't. That should tell you something, I suppose.

Firstly, this is fairly amusing. Another quote I read recently is along the lines of "Even viewpoints I disagree with shouldn't be represented this badly." Tell me about it. My 9 year old neice indeed.

And I'm sure that, one of these days, I'm going to regret telling a lot of people to shove it in my megarant down there. Ah well.

While we're at it, the random unkillable search the web IE window I just got can go fuck itself, too.

For both me and the Iraqis, it would seem.

Me, well, I'm now on Spring Break. Finally. I somehow missed one of my finals, but I'm done. All that matters. Now I get to relax, when I'm not taking care of mom, who went under the knife for foot surgery yesterday, and is now going to be stuck in bed for weeks. Along those lines, I drove way, way too much yesterday. Halfway to Corvallis, back home because I forgot the Jeep keys, back to Corvallis, late to my final so I'm running like mad to get there, only to realize that the place is empty, run around campus looking for it, run to my car to pick up Cole and get to the hospital, drive to the hospital, meet up with mom, drive Cole home because he apparently won't be driving my car back to Monroe because we're behind schedule, drive back to the hospital, leap in the Jeep, drive around wondering why mom isn't coming out, get mom in the Jeep, drive to Monroe, get dad to drive me BACK to the hospital for my car, drive home... I had 3/4 of a tank of gas before that, and I had to shove $5 in today because I was out. Yeesh.

On the Iraqis' part, well, war's on. I've any number of things I could be saying about that, but since I'm particularly tired of saying them at the moment, I'll simply say that I think President Bush is doing the right thing, and that I don't think Saddam Hussein is complying with the United Nations resolutions as the United Nations themselves have said, and that furthermore the United Nations' utter refusal to take any sort of responsibility and action for the last 12 years is ludicrous.

Random thoughts on the issue:

Those reporters who were like "IS PRESIDENT BUSH WATCHING THE EXPLOSIONS ON TV!!!1!!!!" during the press conference this morning need to get it the fuck together. Really. When Ari Fleischer explained for like the 5th time that yes, Bush DOES have some idea of what he's doing, and they KEPT ASKING THE SAME QUESTION, I wanted to throttle them. Same with the loser who inturrupted the radio coverage of the press conference to ramble on about how there's AA fire going off in Baghdad at the moment. Like I'm trying to listen to what the government has to say here, folks. Shut the hell up. They're just bombs.

I think my long interest in the military, and my being in history may have colored my view on that somewhat. Ah well.

The French, incidentally, can go fuck themselves too. "Iraq doesn't have WMD!" "Iraq doesn't have WMD!" "We'll veto any use of force!" "Well, I guess if Iraq uses any WMD, we can send troops. Oh, and by the way, the administration of post-war Iraq must be a UN thing."

The French, it should be noted, are missing a wonderful opportunity, in Chirac's words, to shut up.

And a quote from Mel Lentz on rasfwrj I thought was nicely put:

"If chemical weapons do come into play and we take considerable casualties then I would really like to see a few accidentally mis-targeted JDAMs land on some French interests. But I'm not bitter."

Monday, March 17th, 2003. A day that will live in infamy.

Not really because we will likely be at war with Iraq within a week, unless Saddam Hussein somehow isn't the dictator everyone's known him to be for a decade or more. No, I'm a supporter of the war. Nevertheless, people will die because of this, and that saddens me. It saddens me that things have come down to this, but mostly it's about a hopefully but not likely to be small number of human beings who will die because of a man who made himself their leader. There's also a lot of worry - not in the least because of a friend who's boyfriend is over there. Five or six people I knew in high school are also there or shipping over. I worry for them, and I worry/hope that in the end, we will in fact have done the right thing.

On a smaller note than that, you may in fact be wondering what the title of this post means. Clever metaphor for the Iraqi leadership? Not at all. Instead, the reason why the day will live in infamy - In a 5.5 hour marathon session at the dentist, the process of massive decay that took place on my upper front teeth has been pretty well fixed. Nine teeth. The pain involved in the operation was...considerable. With nothing more than some Valium and a whole load of Novacaine, I was drilled and lasered and poked and prodded into submission. I felt a good deal of it. Not just felt, as in "Oh, he's touching my tooth with something", but FELT, as in "Ohfuckmakeitstopowowow!!!" I couldn't swallow for about 3 hours, and there was a whole bunch of gunk floating about, causing me to choke every couple minutes. There were large portions of the time where I couldn't breathe, or couldn't feel myself breathe, because my face and nose were numb, or they were being blocked. In the process of being numbed, I have felt needles go in places needles should never need to go. And this is the upper front mouth, you know, so everything HURT like hell. The sensation of having a needle inserted in the roof of your mouth and then go into your nose is one I never care to experience again. This whole exercise is about the worst dental visit I have ever had, perhaps even worse than the aftermath of having my wisdom teeth out or putting my braces on/off.

You know, when I finally get to go back and be 12 again, knowing what I do now, definitely going to take better care of my teeth. Sure do have a nice smile in the here and now, though, when my face finally unswells enough to let me smile. Better than it's looked in about a decade.

So I picked up Age of Mythology for Xmas. I had been sort of vaguely looking forward to it, and vaguely antipathic towards it at the same time. Reason being, when I was playing Age of Kings a couple years ago, I played SO much of it, I physically cannot bear to look at the CD anymore. So you know that AoM is probably going to be just about that good. And this is frightening, 'cause, well, I like my life.

And really, it's better than about that good. What's more, the single player campaign totally blows away the AoK campaigns. The story's pretty convoluted, and there's a few too many build and destroy missions, but for the most part it's varied and pretty interesting. And it's freaking LONG. I've been playing for like a week, and I'm still only partway into it. This is good. Very, very good.

What's more, the game system itself is fairly superior to AoK, in that each civ is highly distinct, and it's possible to have distinct subcivs inside of each main civ, depending on what gods you choose. That's totally badass, in my opinion.

And I'm still partway into the Egyptian part of the campaign, but I think I like Greece the best so far. Egypt's economy is exceedingly cool, but their combat units blow. Greece, OTOH, has some good units, and their economy doesn't suck. We'll see how the Norse do, since I think I'm coming up on their part RSN.

The .jpg image format needs to die, horribly. Yay bitmaps.

That will be all.

Or not, really. I hate 6-odd hour car trips. Never mind that I slept most of the way back. More to the point, I took like 4 books with me, and read 3 of them. Two of them were dismal. That hurt.

Anyway. The whole point of the trip was to go up to Seattle for my brother's wedding reception. As these things are wont to do, it turned into this gigantic Family Reunion of Doom, though with more of her family than his family, really. And legions of legions of the happy couple's friends. This all turned into a giant party at their cooler-than-words-can-express house on Friday night, wherein I spent the entire night bored out of my mind. I don't do parties well at all, compounded enormously by the fact that I'm 22 and pretty much everyone else was a late-20s/early-30s professional of some sort or another. Absolutely NO relation either way. I sort of expected that, so at least I wasn't let down, eh?

Seattle, incidentally, sucks. The small town elitist in me notes that anywhere with triple overpasses cannot possibly be the center of civilization as we know it. Much less how our otherwise rather nice hotel was in the middle of this industrial slum, complete with collapsing brick turn of the century buildings. Erg.

So my weekend pretty much sucked, made better only by a certain sense of amusement and satisfaction watching my rather obviously happy brother and his wife float around their party. I can only hope to be so lucky at some point.

My reality, of course, has more to do with the part where I may or may not lose a friend here real quick, depending on how well my rather way too angry rebuttal of certain facts of our relationship goes over. Well, I hope. I've been worried all weekend over it. Can but hope.

Very annoyed at only getting 5 hours of sleep last night. Ah well.

Going to Washington over the weekend to hang with the family and celebrate my brother getting married. The verdict's still out on if that'll be fun or not. Maybe, maybe not. I do know that all designers of wedding cards need to be shot down in the streets, because every single one of them sucks amazingly.

Also, I imagine this whole trip is going to totally inflate my sense of annoyance at STILL being single. I could rant on that for a while, but I think I maybe won't.

A far more worthy rant topic, however, is how a certain person absolutely refuses, despite my repeated asking, to pin down a time to get together and do stuff, despite my clearly saying that I have other things I need to do, so could she fucking well say something? She didn't, so no hanging out with me for the week. Raarg. And it's not like this is a new thing, really. Normally I'm pretty patient about this sort of thing, but it's been, what, three or four times now? Fuck that shit.

And while we're ranting about stuff, death to the AT2 record sheet. I want it to BLEED. BLEED I say. And then I will poke out its eyes with sharp sticks and make it eat them. Grrrr.

4 hours of sleep. And I missed class because I forgot to set my alarm. Grrrrr.

Come the Revolution, I'm outlawing fatigue.

Happier than Cam in a pen of sheep!
---Whir

And Dwip said, "Let there be blog." And there was blog. And one or two people cheered weakly.

It's sort of custom to blather a bit about what what you're going to blathering about in these things, so...

Gaming, probably. History, 'cause I'm a history major. School, 'cause I'm in it. People. The usual. It will all, in the end, sound like pretentious drivel, but that's ok. I'm a professional.

I had sort of figured on having a site that actually worked before actually writing this, but, well, no. Some giant part of the site is still utterly broken as of the moment, but I'll be working on that.

And now, for the pretentious drivel part. I've been up all night as of this writing. It's like 9:30 am now, and I got up at 5 pm yesterday. Been doing this since about Friday. I honestly don't remember. The funny thing about telling the world to fuck off like this is that you lose track of time in a big way. Which is sort of a not good thing. The staying up, that is. I'm missing class doing it, and it's dead week. But I'm in burnout mode. I have it every so often, when I just shut down like this. Ah well. As long as it ends with me listening to some good music all night, reading some good stuff, playing some good games, well then, it's all worth it.

And this needs mentioning, because it's about the funniest thing I've read in weeks.