(no subject)

Was in a bit of a quandry last night. I got home and not only had three DVDs arrived from NetFlix but a box of ten books I had ordered arrived as well....entertainment overload!

I decided that with the insurance guy coming I would need to unwind so I picked a short book which I knew would end well and enjoyed it til he got there. I'm going to have a great weekend with all this stuff.

Stolen from sos_usa

Very interesting...

If the US and Iraq do go to war, there can only be one winner, can't there? Maybe not. This summer, in a huge rehearsal of just such a conflict - and with retired Lieutenant General Paul Van Riper playing Saddam - the US lost...In the first few days of the exercise, using surprise and unorthodox tactics, the wily 64-year-old Vietnam veteran sank most of the US expeditionary fleet in the Persian Gulf, bringing the US assault to a halt.

What happened next will be familiar to anyone who ever played soldiers in the playground. Faced with an abrupt and embarrassing end to the most expensive and sophisticated military exercise in US history, the Pentagon top brass simply pretended the whole thing had not happened. They ordered their dead troops back to life and "refloated" the sunken fleet. Then they instructed the enemy forces to look the other way as their marines performed amphibious landings. Eventually, Van Riper got so fed up with all this cheating that he refused to play any more. Instead, he sat on the sidelines making abrasive remarks until the three-week war game - grandiosely entitled Millennium Challenge - staggered to a star-spangled conclusion on August 15, with a US "victory".

Full story here

(no subject)

You know you're typing too fast for your own good when you have to enter you username and password three times to get it to work. Stupid split keyboard.