That looks like fun set to that music.

Damn that sarcasm button.

The imagery makes me think of my army service, on the other side of the iron curtain, we used to have a compulsory 2 years (1 year for university graduates after school, fortunately) so all the 18 yo kids got "drafted" for two years, not to war, but you never knew...

Everyone hated to go, hated it while there, it was a total waste of time, buggery, bigotry, boredom, drink and drugs, women, etc.
Everyone counted down the time to go home day by day like in jail.

Yet everyone posed for heroic photographs, preferably with their tanks (our group stood in front of our kitchen :-) and pretended to be manly.

That is how I see Vietnam, scared kids thrown into a difficult to justify war against the local people in a foreign country. Unenviable.

They deserve all the accolades and any help they can be given tenfold. Also they were all heroes if they did not chicken out.

And god bless America (meaning the US of A) if it can come up with a better way to pick wars. Kind of a hint is if you have to "defeat" the whole local population to win, dont start.

This is funny. Had to learn Cobol at school - lab still had a punch card machine and that was late 1980s.
Basic, obviously.
ZX Spectrum (Z80 assembly) - dissassembled and adapted a word processor for Czech - drew the extra characters and made up a printer spooler - that was the most fun with a computer ever, also I was young and had time. Also hated re-typing on a typewriter.
First thing (literally the first thing) after the iron curtain dropped got a PC and tried Pascal, databases and web-development but dropped out of all that in early 90s.
Doom, Quake, Civ, Sim City. Mostly scripts with some disassembly and poking around. Various scripts are the only programming I do now.

1. Monarchies historically existed.
2. Contested thrones and succession wars really happened
3. We built a wall in Germany, and a metaphorical Iron Curtain.
4. Polytheistic beliefs really were in tension with monotheistic ones
0. Natalie Dormer played Anne Boleyn
5. People used to fight with swords.

But of course, the genre - Fantasy - is practically defined by being set in a period analogous to a mashup of 800-1500 CE with the twist that some of the ideas of the time are actually true (gods, demons, magic, fantastic animals etc).

Sure, there is no need to speak in terms of civil war. Unless you're one of these guntoting, armed to the teeth nutjobs who think it would be a good idea. You know, the kind of people who buy an *assault rifle* for self defense.
However, no matter how well trained your riot police is, their less than lethal tactics are only useful up to a certain amount of people, they can become rather useless if the crowds get too big to contain or simply too violent themselves. That's when it gets interesting, that is when protest can turn into riots.
When the cops face huge, somewhat peacful crowds, they might enter Tiananmen Square. At what point would american cops or military personnel start thinking that it's unwise or inhuman to start firing into the crowd? Before the first shot? After the second magazine? On day three?
It's not the 1960s anymore but the sixties are not forgotten. Not by those who faced police officers willing to fire into the crowd. You know, black people. The kind of people whose parents and grandparents are still alive to tell them about their fight against oppression. This is still alive in the american concious, it shaped your country and it won't go away soon. Just ask Barak about his birth certificate.
Civil unrest is part of your recent history, the seed is there. Even under a President Stalin all you'd need go from isolated, contained riots to complete and irreversible shitstorm is a Martyr, a Neda Agha Soltan or a Treyvon Martin. No matter what ethnicity (although african american would be nice), that would present a tipping point.
Your police can bring out the tanks on Times Square if they want but if half of NY shows up, these guys inside the tanks might want to get out ASAP.
The Erich Honecker regime of the German Democratic Republic was basically brought down by somewhat peaceful demonstrations of people shouting "I'm mad as hell and I won't take it anymore" in east german accents.
The StaSi, the Ministry of State Security, who was efficient enough to make *every* citizen a potential informant in the eyes of their opposition, ran from the protesters like little girls. They used to imprison and torture people who spoke up.
The east german border used to be the most secure in the entire world. It was protected by minefields and guards who shot and killed anyone who tried to cross it. Before David Hasselhoff even had a chance to put on his illuminated leather jacket the government caved and just fucking opened it. People just strolled through Checkpoint Charlie and bought Bananas as if it was Christmas.
This was the beginning of the end for the Soviet Union. You know, the guys who lost over 20 Million people in WW2 and still kicked the Nazis in the nuts.
Nobody brought a gun. All the east germans had was shitty cars and lots of anger. They tore down not just a dictatorship, they tore down the iron curtain.
And they didn't even have a Nelson Mandela. Or Lech Walesa.
I still stand by my point: strength in numbers, not caliber.

I suppose that's how you react when you spent almost 50 years of your life behind the Iron Curtain.

It would be interesting to see if the authorities dared to arrest Assange if he was declared a diplomatic courier under Article 27 of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. Of if they dared to search a vehicle with diplomatic plates under the assumption that Assange is transported within.

We haven't had any decent cloak and dagger entertainment since the Iron Curtain went down. Better get some popcorn. >> ^Hybrid:

He still has to physically get out of the UK >> ^radx:
Small country, big cojones -- asylum granted.

Why is it always Europe? Don't get me wrong, I love my whities, but I'd love to see other region focuses as well. The iron curtain doesn't end in Russia.

Sure there is


>> ^marinara:

channels make a dumb interface anyway. We need tags like stackoverflow.com has.
The problem is, there are too many channels to help me browse videos, (i'f i'm looking for clint eastwood, most likely I WON'T find it in the Actionpack channel)
but not enough channels to label videos in any helpful manner. If i'm searching for animation from the iron curtain, there's no way to find it)

channels make a dumb interface anyway. We need tags like stackoverflow.com has.

The problem is, there are too many channels to help me browse videos, (i'f i'm looking for clint eastwood, most likely I WON'T find it in the Actionpack channel)
but not enough channels to label videos in any helpful manner. If i'm searching for animation from the iron curtain, there's no way to find it)

Reminds me of trying to use a crosswalk in Irvine, except instead of motorcycles and various scooters occupied by hardened citizens under the iron curtain, it's BMWs and Mercedes occupied by entitled business men on cellphones.

From Fox News' transcript of Obama's July 7 interview with Garrett, with the portions of Obama's answer Hannity omitted in bold:

GARRETT: In your speech this morning, you said the Cold War reached its conclusion because of the actions of many nations over many years. Mr. President, are the Russian sensitivities so fragile that you can't say the Cold War was won? The West won it? And it was led by a combination of Democratic and Republican American presidents?

OBAMA: Well, listen, the -- I think that you just cut out Lech Walesa and the Poles. You just cut out Havel and the Czechs. There were a whole bunch of people throughout Eastern Europe who showed enormous courage.

And I think that it is very important in this part of the world to acknowledge the degree to which people struggled for their own freedom. I'm very proud of the traditions of Democratic and Republican presidents to lift the Iron Curtain.

But, you know, we don't have to diminish other people in order to recognize our role in that history.


After airing the cropped clip, Hannity said:

HANNITY: Unbelievable. Now, that's interesting, because Lech Walesa, the leader of the Polish Solidarity Movement, said this about the end of the Cold War; he said, quote: "We in Poland took him, Ronald Reagan, so personally. Why? Because we owe him our liberty. Now this can't be said often enough by people who lived under oppression for half a century."

Mr. President, if I were you, you may want to consider hitting the history books maybe before your next foreign trip.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'Winston Churchill, Sinews of Peace, Iron Curtain, USSR, cold war' to 'Winston Churchill, Sinews of Peace, Iron Curtain, USSR, Cold War' - edited by calvados

>> ^doogle:
Can someone explain to me how cutting an iron curtain rod is more amazing than splitting a flying bibi bullet in half in mid-air?


One is in a studio in front of 100 people, the others are prerecorded.

...just saying.

>> ^doogle:
Can someone explain to me how cutting an iron curtain rod is more amazing than splitting a flying bibi bullet in half in mid-air?


It's not amazing for his skill, but for the strength of the blade.

Because beyond the first dent, it cut the pipe. Try it with a hatchet, what you end up with is the pipe squashed flat, THEN cut, if the pipe had been pressurized with water or something, it would have been a clean cut. If you noticed, the blade was undamaged after.

>> ^doogle:
Can someone explain to me how cutting an iron curtain rod is more amazing than splitting a flying bibi bullet in half in mid-air?


I certainly can't. That was the least amazing thing he did.