Next show: juggling land mines. Stay tuned!

With each SFW deployed you have 5 BLU-108's providing discreet lethality over a very large range.
Two "bombs" are capable of destroying an entire division without leaving any unexploded ordinance. Redundant self destruct mechanisms eliminate "de-facto" land mines.

The infomercial nature of this video struck me as quite creepy.

Before deploying overseas, we had a day of lectures and presentations on land mines where they drilled it into our heads what various mines looked like, what they could do to a vehicle, to a person, etc., and that getting complacent was the thing that would get you blown up -- the day that (after, say, four months of always walking the extra 100 meters to a known safe passage through an area no wider than a city street) you try taking the shortcut. I remember walking outside afterward and imagining having to be afraid of the ground -- so strange.

Another story: one of our crusty old quartermaster sergeants, now retired, was in the former Yugo around 1992 when it was hot. He is said to have gone on a blind drunk one night and zigzagged around outside in the dark for a time, shitfaced, before he fell down and ended up sleeping where he was. When he woke up in the morning he found he was lying in the middle of a minefield. Maybe it was apocryphal... but I'll believe it. God looks out for saints and fools.

This is a serious necro-post/reply, but I had to do it.

It would be cheaper to move everyone away from the areas that will eventually be underwater than to reverse the inevitable change in sea level. Trying to stop global warming is like trying to stop the sun from shining. It's already happening, and is well on its way. The question is, how do we allocate our global resources to benefit as many people as possible. Pouring billions of dollars into fuel cell research will probably allow the U.S. to be driving mostly hydrogen powered cars by 2040. What could that same amount of money due towards eradicating AIDS. or providing world-wide micro-loans? or subsidizing local african and asian farmers as much as their US corporate counterparts. or 1/10000 as much in removing all deployed land mines from the planet. It's all about resource allocation, and if we don't figure that out, we're hosed no matter what we do in the long run.

BTW, I wouldn't rely on that map. I just zoomed into the area I grew up in - it's got the flood zones completely wrong.

Oh yeah - VS 3.0 rocks.


In reply to this comment by James Roe:
"Is change automatically bad?"

well when it leads to the flooding expressed in this flood map yes. Play around with the change in water height up at the top.

1) Deport all illegals from USA.

2) Giant wall along entire border defended by barbed wire, night-vision cameras, sniper squads, drones, land mines, helicopter gunships, satellites.

3) Seize Mexican oil reserves to pay for #'s 1 and 2.

That's not at all what I'm arguing persephone. The current situation with DU contamination in Iraq is serious to say the least. All I'm refuting is the idea that the entire area has been rendered uninhabitable for geologic timescales as Moret suggests simply because the half life of U238 is very long. What is being neglected is that uranium and thorium and radioactive potassium are found absolutely everywhere on the planet in dust form (some places more than others) and the uranium used to make these things was mined from rocks. I am saying that instead of taking 4 billion years or whatever to become a safe area again and only considering the half life of uranium is incorrect in that it does not factor into the problem the dispersal of the uranium dust in the area. That dust, especially since Iraq is no stranger to annual huge wind storms is going to be dispersed on vastly shorter timescales than 4 billion years. I'd guess that as long as you get rid of the contaminated tanks etc. themselves (bury them), that background levels of U in the region would return within 50-100 years simply due to this dispersal effect. Yes, that is still quite a while(!) and obviously the situation remains very serious right now, I certainly would not want to be living there, but to say the whole place is just condemned forever is certainly grossly inaccurate. Bottom line is that, like land mines, we should not be using wapons that make a place dangerous for anywhere near even these periods of time.

I fully endorse "mini sift offs" between rival videos, to see which one gets more votes, or if there's a tie.

I find the Benny Hill one more effective at mobilizing my sentiments against land mines, actually.

I did the same thing with a pair of tasering videos ages ago:
Bull: http://www.videosift.com/story.php?id=2370
Man: http://www.videosift.com/story.php?id=2371

Votes 7 to 5 in favour of bull as of now.