Using violence, torture, and the backing of the Russian military, and after numerous failed coup and assassination attempts he took and held tenuous control. Torture hardly played a huge roll or he would have been successful the first time, or the second. He retained and increased that power in the 70-80's by spending his huge amounts of oil money on the people, mostly not by torturing them (except for Kurds).

The "others in the room" we're his forces, not random people who murdered for him out of relief. He didn't hand weapons to an adversarial group he was convincing to follow his lead by having them kill those who wouldn't. I mean...WHAT?

You use fear mongering as proof torture works? Um... ok.

Since what I've been discussing is torture working to get sensitive, useful information, not the long term terrorism and brutal oppression of a population, I'll just move on.
Yes, despots can ride nations into the ground by making the populations powerless and fearful until those populations revolt. Yes, an iron hand and willingness to make your population stone aged can allow you to hold on a long time. Yes, torture can be part of that, but only one small unnecessary part, a strong military willing to murder unarmed civilians is what it takes, torture or not.

Wow, now you think the U.S. military taking out Saddam proves torture works because ...force and violence?

Strength vs weakness is what worked, not torture or terrorism, that's why he failed, brought down by a coalition of locals and Americans with his military deserting him in droves when he needed them most.

Torture is not a functional interrogation technique nor a means to foster loyalty, only fear. Fear only works until someone adds hope to the equation.

Only if you ignore the acidification, heating, and other degradation of the oceans (which contain 99% of the living space and as much as 80% of all life on the planet)...and history. The massive habitat losses there are almost completely unrelated to farming feed crops and dwarf the recent losses on land.


Today creating space for farming is the major single cause for the intentional destruction of terrestrial habitats, but not historically.


Wiki-
Habitat destruction caused by humans includes land conversion from forests, etc. to arable land, urban sprawl, infrastructure development, and other anthropogenic changes to the characteristics of land. Habitat degradation, fragmentation, and pollution are aspects of habitat destruction caused by humans that do not necessarily involve over destruction of habitat, yet result in habitat collapse. Desertification, deforestation, and coral reef degradation are specific types of habitat destruction for those areas (deserts, forests, coral reefs).

...but what do you care? GET YOUWA AZZ TO VEGA!

No sir.

I'm addressing his comment about the invasion of Iraq happening because of "Saddam's campaign of genocide against his own people and his conquest of Kuwait." when that's absolutely not how the invasion was sold to us by W. That's only partially how Desert Shield was sold by Sr. (Keeping in mind the gassing had happened years earlier), but that didn't remove or even target Saddam and barely went into Iraq, so clearly wasn't designed to remove him from power or stop his atrocities, just to stop his expansion into our allies territories.

The invasion of Iraq and direct targeting of Saddam was by W, not Sr. and are what led to the current state of the region far more than any result of Desert Storm...what I thought he meant by "blaming Sr. for Iraq"....I read that as 'blaming Sr. for the current state of Iraq and the region'.
I may have misunderstood what he meant by "blaming Sr for Iraq", but I can tell the difference between bushes.

Yeah people are moronic about flooding during monsoons, that's why we in Arizona have a "stupid motorist" law that charges them for their own rescue.

Not only a month ago I was driving back to AZ from San Diego and it was pouring the whole way back. Got back to Tucson and it was cold and clouds everywhere. Next day decided to go to this awesome canyon because I knew there would be water and after a rain like that the Sonoran desert becomes gloriously green. Basically the whole canyon park is split by a wash that turns into a raging river and on this occasion the water was flooding over all of the bridges essentially making half the canyon park inaccessible.

Then, out of the blue comes this young guy walking super fast holding his two daughters' hands, began to cross the flooded bridge, the water was about two feet deep but it was moving fast. Luckily, a park ranger stopped him, but those two little kids probably would have been swept away and drowned. Later, on we saw a rescue heli go up and saw on the news that someone had been swept away because they tried to cross.

You and me both. Years ago I had a job at White Sands Missile range, where the main entrance road was named after PFC Marvin R. Owen, an MP who had been on duty during one of those monsoon rains. Some guy reporting for duty from New Jersey, or some such station, didn't want to be late. So he drove into the running arroyo that separated him from post HQ. He had his wife and two kids with him as I recall, and they all started floating downstream. PFC Owen drove his pickup into the arroyo in an attempt to stop the car, but they were all swept away.

They all drowned in the middle of the desert, and the next day most likely there was hardly any water to be seen.

I tend not to be the first one to cross.

Let's hope, since the Trump party does nothing but lie foolishly.

The Pentagon's official military assessment of the caravan was leaked today.....the military considers them no threat. <20% of the now 4500 are even expected to make it to the border, no criminal infiltration expected, no terroristic infiltration expected, <1% of the <20% expected to be allowed asylum....that's <10. (The last caravan only had 3). The military is not happy that they're being used as political theater, deployed in the desert with no actual mission and no possibility of being useful beyond being a photo opp for the foolish liar in chief. Even if they could possibly help when the caravan's remnants get here, that's 7-10 weeks from now, so there's no reason whatsoever for them to be deployed now besides political theater.

It's hard lying all the time when your lie requires the silence of patriots.

Side note: Apparently Trump's plan to remove birthright citizenship means his children need to be deported, their mothers were not citizens when they were born (anchor babies), so his plan removes their citizenship and makes them illegal aliens with no papers. Shoot them if they throw a stone, Trump said it's ok.

We're not just talking grazing land here, alfalfa makes up a considerable amount of livestock feed. And you know where they're growing it? In the middle of the fucking desert, but as it stands right now, land in the desert is cheap and so is water, so that's what we do.

Conservatives: FAKE DATA. NASA is just saying this to make money [but the denial stuff is all sponsored by the fossil fuel industry who somehow isn't biased]. Climate change is fake. If you think about it, CO2 is good for plants [most are doing their max exchange, and it makes them have less nutrition... plus most of the globe isn't green, it's blue or desert... would be one thing if there was a way to keep that CO2 where the plants actually were and down where they were], its what they breath. It's a war on coal and oil. Ice levels in the Antarctic are rising [some data suggests it has, and may, but it is offset by Greenland ice loss alone, let alone ice loss from every other place like Alaska, Canada, Russia, the Nordic countries, etc]. It's cold here on January 3, so much for global warming [odd they never mention the problem on August 23 or whatever]? They said there's going to be an ice age back in the 70's [they can't show the science papers, just an article in Newsweek or Time], and just last year or so, they said solar minimums will result in another mini-ice age [again, no, nothing about climate in the actual science paper, just the press running their own version of the paper].

Just..so..bad. Why is it so hard to write a good script? A story board? A director who has seen a movie or two? Lets CinimaSins this bitch;

1. opening shot is two shots at very wrong focal lengths, or that hole is actually very small.

2. One would think pre rendered special effects would not have issues with limited fill rates, but this comet clearly looks like its using a smoke trail from a video game on minimum graphic settings. You can count the number of particles on one hand.

3. For a desert nomad in a sand storm, she has an amazingly clean face, also, hoods that pull forward?

4. nomad is pointing at the clear as day impact landing of meteor as if it NEEDED to be pointed out.

5. a fairly large amount of simulated camera shake despite flames being so thin they don't smoke.

6. A horribly done transition shot where the boy is surrounded by smoke, fire, and lava, all except in the direction the camera is pointing.

7. Large tank army that no one notices until it passes them.

8. Physics, or lack of. the entire scene. Those 2 bypeds look like they were motioned captured by a two year old playing with his toys.

9. The expression on the boys face of surprise makes no sense for a robot of some sort who has crashed to the surface of a planet of which he had full intention of kicking ass in. The scowl afterwards makes it even more awkward.

10. what then proceeds is what can best be described as live gameplay from a random indie game from the steam store that utilizes a mostly black color pallet to hide the fact that nothing is texture mapped, low polygon models, and something that only slightly passes as a physics engine.

You know, there aren't any waves on the desert. I'm saying it's time for landspeeders.

http://www.91x.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/land.jpg

Ok, then rimfire isn't assault weapon ammo. You're mixing up topics, adding confusion for nothing on topic....
....and the data massively contradicts your contention that any normal handgun is more powerful or faster than assault weapons, which are 7.62x39 and .223, both over 3 times the power of .357 magnums and beat .44 magnums handily.

To be honest, .50 AE pistols do actually appear to have slightly more power than .223 caliber rifles, I had to look them up separately as they weren't listed, but they are far slower, and a .50 cal bmg has around 7.5 times more power, and desert eagles in the AE .50 configuration aren't normal pistols.

@noims -- My grandfather had about 10 war stories that he rotated through telling, pretty much exclusively after one of my uncles "broke the dam" by asking him to recall things as they were at the Oshkosh air show standing next to a P-47 airplane like he had worked on.

By the time that happened, my grandfather was in his 80's and in very good physical and mental shape (cattle rancher that did daily work manhandling heavy feed bags around, etc.) but had a quirky personality because he was 90%+ deaf. I don't think that was a result of the war, hearing problems seem to run in the family.

Anyway, he frequently used those hearing problems as an excuse for not having to interact with people. He had hearing aids, but he'd turn them off most of the time and just ignore people. I think some of that was being an introvert, and some was probably lingering "shell shock" / PTSD effects. But overall he really adjusted back to civilian life just fine. Got a degree in education on the GI Bill and taught and coached basketball to High School students, then worked as a small-town Postmaster, and eventually retired to work the ranch. I don't think any of us in his family, including his wife and children, thought of him as being "impaired" by the mental effects of the war. But it was clear that some of what he experienced had a very deep, lifelong effect on his outlook.


I wrote out the 3 stories of his above because they seemed to be the ones that had the most emotional impact on him. To me, it was interesting that a lot of stuff outside of combat hit him the hardest. He also had more traditional "war stories" stuff about victories and bravery, like when his unit captured / accepted the surrender of a young German pilot in a Bf-109 who deserted to avoid near certain death from flying too many missions after the handwriting was on the wall that the allies were going to win. But by far, he got more choked up about the other stuff like having to knock that French girl off her bike and seeing starving civilians and being unable to help them much.

Like you said, more banal stuff side-by-side with or against a backdrop of horror. I think it's pretty much impossible to imagine what those sorts of experiences in war are really like and what being in those situations would do to us mentally. And then WW2 in particular just had a massive impact on the entire generation. Basically everybody back home knew multiple people that went away and never came back. Then when some did come back, they were clearly different and yet reluctant to talk about what happened. Pretty messed up time to live through, I guess.

"If you see one of these things in the desert, don't touch it!"

Naw, really? The big, pissed-off centipede thing with giant jaws: Don't touch that? Well, FUCK! NOW you tell me! Damn, I was about to pet it and call it George. You certainly saved my ass there, Mr. "Hey -- I wonder what'll happen if I piss this motherfucker off and let it bite me? OW OW OW OW OW OW!!"

The saddest thing is there's probably video out on the internets of some guy sticking one of these things on his dick and letting it bite him. I mean, getting bit on the forearm is so 2017: you gotta up your game to get those YouTube views! 20,000,000 views and you get a free yo-yo!

Yup, time to write another review on Leafly.

I doubt that. ;-)

Except for territory they hold, I agree, Palestinian suffering is their only influence, and that's not much.

I agree, because we back them, Israel does as it pleases. I do think the 'arab world' has legitimate complaints beyond Palestinian suffering, like constantly expanding borders and expulsion from historical holy sites.

I see no chance for a single state (where non Jews are sub-citizens with no vote or power) or an Israeli designed two state (where only barren desert is Palestinian with all water and access controlled by Israel, shut off at any hint of complaint).

The Palestinians do want a two state solution, just not one where any land worth having is Israel and the leftovers are Palestine.

Israel gains nothing from negotiating when they can get what they want, like recognition of another land grab (Jerusalem) without negotiating. That's why this move is horrendous, it gives them incentives to not negotiate and just act unilaterally.

I don't think propaganda is that important to them that they actually prefer their allies suffering to reasonable resolutions, but I don't think that any reasonable resolutions are being offered or even discussed. Given that, what's the option? Outright war? With us backing Israel, that's a no go.

I think, if given a solution that didn't give everything to Israel, the Palestinians would jump at it (maybe not Hamas, but the people). Being offered second class citizenship after having all their land and possessions taken is not workable, and it's what they seem to get.

If N Korea sells Iran a nuke, I hope we can we go back to negotiations instead of genocidal one sided dictations.

Man... not me!
Go for homemade rocketry! And if this guy is a fireball or a smear on the desert in a week... still go. Risk-taking and a spirit of adventure IS something that used to make America great.
Don't get me wrong... his motive is silly. But I admire the will.