A and A is a game where you are on a team, either either Axis or Allies. You will therefore know who to expect the attacks from and who will stay with you until the end.
It is usually good to play in bigger groups. Be sure to team up with the best pro when participating in such a game. Hold off on the 1 on 1 games until after you get 3-4 games worth of experience under your belt.
Backdraft (1991)… lots of action, suspence, alcohol, and pagentry. Surprizingly good for a movie with no guns.
Ginsburg looks like an old a hag.
You need someone more bodacious for the next time a news making case gets media attention.
Oh yeah, the lawyers presenting need to be at least as hot as Marsha Clark… or even Ally McBeal.
That minor delay does not help Germany much.
By the time of D-Day, the UK or US will have already taken back F-Nor and dropped off enough inf + ftr to Kar for defense. By then, Jpn is the only avenue of attack on Rus.
Attacking US w/Jpn looks great on paper, but in real time and turns, stalls the taking of Rus. With every passing turn, the Allied economic advantage will make them stronger in arms.
http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/meast/10/27/oil.food.report/
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2001/03/01/politics/main275419.shtml
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Rich
http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=295926&page=1
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/27/AR2005102700954.html
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/tobin022301.asp
In the final analysis, I find the pardon of Marc Rich to be a highly monetized assault on American values. Seems like much of the over $100 million he evaded in taxes and fines were paid back in charity and bribes to Israel, Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Libya, and even the US (Clinton Library). Petty change for a billionare.
Oh yeah, he also got wealthy defying our trade embargo against Iran during and after the hostage crisis in 1979.
Rich’s agents made concerted efforts to gain that pardon, and if Clinton did not get it, they would have to wait for the next president and try again after 7-8 years, or 4 if the incumbent could not win reelection. Clinton always had a good eye for channeling advantageous donations. The Wikipedia link said that Al Gore tried to arrest Rich in the past, so no funding from the Rich organization if Gore won. In fact, it would have been risking millions in funding to the Republicans to unseat Gore if he won. GW might be offered bribes if Rich still needed a pardon and that amount of money was to much to give away to the Republicans. I think Clinton feared that amount of money would win even more Republican seats in Congress.
There were a group of friends who I played two games of A&A with late in my freshman year. One of them got a financial aide P/T job at the E campus laundromat/lounge. Officially that building would close at midnight. Unofficially, the one working there would close up at midnight, and reopen it for strategy games around 12:45 AM on Friday and Sat morning. I did my laundry there, and found out about the gaming group on my way back to the dorm after the Central campus library closed at midnight one Friday. Some of them were brilliant at strategy games, but they did not spend enough time at school. Half had dropped out, flunked, or transferred away by the next year, and only one other member of that group managed to graduate with me.
A&A was not their only game, they also had Shogun, Diplomacy, Supremacy, …etc. They also did a lot of random things with existing games, like modified extended techs for a tech intensive A & A. I did not play with them every week, which is probably why I graduated. The other graduate was a major whiz kid.
There were 10 of us, and 7 regulars. My arrival from the library often got me there after they had already set up the game of the night. They would have let me in if an extra was needed (about 1/3 of the time). Other times, I’d peruse the strategies used for about 45-150 min, and then go home for some rest. After one night when I joined in for the #2 A&A game of the morning, I joined them as they retired to the gangleader’s dorm. He had a 486 which was top of the line for that time, and tons of strategy games, and even some early network campaign games. They continued to game on that IBM until lunch. A&A was the only game I did decent on against these guys. I won 2 regular games and was losing when we quit the teched up version. I got nuked in Supremacy and stabbed in Diplomacy.
I find it ironic that greeks who drank away their weekends managed to graduate while most of my gaming friends did not.
In my junior year, late night lab sessions at the computer cluster would be kept lively by groups in one corner coordinating their play of NetTrek or some multi-player tank game. These were not my friends. By then most of my on-campus strategy gaming had to do w/Civ.
@El:
Think of it as surgery to remove a malignant cancerous tumor before trouble spreads.
Scalpel blades are often sharper than swords.Et tu, Linkon Pat Robertson?
Hugo Chavez may talk tough against the US, and act cozy w/Castro, but the USA still buys a lot of Venezuelan crude. He did not initiate an Opec embargo against the US, and he did not cheer the 911 bombers.
AFIK, Castro, Kim, and Hussein are the only world leaders who cheered 911. Such action is deserving of severe reprisals. If Chavez cheers 911 or some similar terrorist attack, then he would be in the same boat as the other 3.
It takes a while for the allies to attack the Phillipines.
Iraq has a huge, porous border which we are incapable of defending. But let me get this straight: we can’t stop illegal immigrants from crossing the Mexican border, but we’re going to make Iraq air-tight?
We have not gone back to carpet bombing yet. This would be totally unacceptable along the Mexican border, but the situation in Iraq might justify it. I think having night vision equiped aerial drones would also help in targeting future raids.
The 1984-ish construct of the new Iraq seems to be a good idea. Having all-seeing eyes everywhere in that country to spot trouble before it festers… doing that for 3-5 years would allow the govm’t and local military to establish stability enough for our troops to leave. However, I think the Bush and future administrations will keep military air bases there for at least 30 years. It will be something like the bases we maintain in South Korea.
I am sure you have great domestic spending plans, but it can all be ruined by another terrorist attack. I would rather have Iraq as their base than some mosque by the local flight school. I do not want another 911 on our soil. Given the Spanish elections after 311, I doubt if AQ will care about their losses in Iraq.
Where have I heard this before? Vietnam maybe? If we don’t fight the communists over there, we’ll be fighting them over here! It was a lie then and its a lie now. The insurgents in Iraq are almost all native TO Iraq
"WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Only 90 of the more than 5,700 people in custody in Iraq as security risks are foreign fighters, defense officials said on Tuesday, a figure that suggests the Bush administration may have overstated the role of outside militants in the deadly insurgency.
The officials, who asked not to be identified, said the U.S. military command handling security detention facilities in Iraq confirmed a report in USA Today that fewer than 2 percent of those in custody were foreigners."
I feel so much safer knowing we’re taking the fight to the enemy :roll:
Enemies of the US should be regarded as such whether they are AQ, Baathist, ACLU, commies, KKK, etc… It does not matter to me if the prisoners our troops detain are Iraqi or not. SH had a lot of supporters and we did not kill all of them in the initial weeks of the invasion, so they are still out there. Right now those leftovers are working to destabilize the new Iraq. It would be nice to win them over to the new provisional govm’t, but if they are so much against it to take arms, then that cancer must be removed to allow the new nation to live.
SH would have also kept funding the suicide bombers against Israel. Taking him out removes an obstacle to Mid-east peace.
As well as every other country in the MIddle East. Who are we invading next to help Israel? Perhaps Israel’s terrorist problems stem from its draconian polocies towards the Palesteinians. And why is Israel our problem? It’s enough we give them billions a year in unsecured loans. We don’t need to invade countries so Israel will feel more secure.
Israel will finally have a chance to rebuild and repay those loans after peace is secured in the area. Continued instability there nessesitates continued arms supplied at generous lending terms.
Where to begin with all this?
Three things to consider:
1. According to the 2002 NIE report, SH did not want to get involved in attacks against us out of fear of reprisal.
2. SH had ten years from PG1 to the Iraq invasion to try a terrorist attack against us, fund one, or provide logistic support for an attack. He never did. Too busy building presidential palaces, probably. But suddenly, when Bush comes to power, Iraq becomes an imminent threat, with their nuclear program, WMD’s, and ties to Al Queda
3. Iraq had no nuclear program, WMD’s, or ties to Al Queda. We’ve found one artillery shell with VX in it. If that’s the standard for preemptive invasion, then every other nation on Earth was more of a threat to us than Iraq was.
1. Who’s NIE? 2002? SH paid for assasination attempts vs. GHW Bush. Iraq also kicked out and hid damaging evidence from UN inspectors. He never toned down his rehtoric and cheered the 911 bombers. Evil is as evil cheers. Kim and Castro were the only other world leaders cheering 911 in the following week. That is anti-American enough to invite reprisal.
2. The 10 years showed that he clearly had nerve gas, the means to deliver it and kill or test it out on the Kurds in the mid 90’s. Killing Kurds, moving Sunnis into the north, and draining the southern swanplands were all part of consolidating power and depriving resources from potential internal enemies. In the decade prior to invasion, Iraqi West Bank agents also confirmed and then paid out numerous $25,000 awards to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers.
3. Nerve gas is a WMD. If not the deliverable shells, then certainly the notes on how to make more.
Just kill the Sub, Carrier and ftr in the Haw SZ. Bring a lot of firepower. You should have enough left over to be a counterattack deterrent.
Most of the Jpn spending should be used on trn + inf for the drive to Rus anyway.
You seem to be saying that unless we invaded Iraq, they would have eventually taken over the entire Middle East? Do you not understand Iraq was technologically backwards, crippled by sanctions, hemmed in by a ring of more powerful nations, and constantly monitored by the U.S.?
Let’s not forget that nerve gas has been around a while. Old technology that SH would easily have given to someone bent on killing Iraelis and Americans in mass slaughter.
@F_alk:
@Imperious:
majority of the public (which opposes Iraq) are a bunch of pacifists!
“Who lives by the sword, will die by the sword”
Think of it as surgery to remove a malignant cancerous tumor before trouble spreads.
Scalpel blades are often sharper than swords.
@221B:
According to the CIA, Iraq is turning into a training ground for terrorists. They come over, join the insurgency, and learn all the in’s and out’s.
True, but you cannot say Iraq is now a better training ground for AQ than Afghanistan was under the taliban. The Afghan training was unimpeded, while in Iraq the AQ terrorists are under direct counter attack whenever their presence is identified. And AQ, like the US, UK, cannot trust that the Iraqi people are always on their side. Many AQ terrorists have been identified and destroyed because local Iraqis provided the information necessary to do thies to the US, UK, Iraqi forces.
True, but it cuts both ways: the experience in Iraq is against an actual army, hell-bent on destroying them. Those that survive the “training” in Iraq are probably much more dangerous than those that came out of Afghanastan. Isn’t that general rule with soldiers? You can train them all you want, but nothing prepares you for combat like the real thing.
It then becomes a question of who will welcome these terrorists. If all exits in Iraq get bottled up, then they are trapped there and will eventually get hunted down.
Mary’s posts resonate with a lot of the pre-WWII rhetoric in support of PM Neville Chamberlain.
You know, the one who loved and trusted Germans so much that, he strangled military spending to the point where Hitler had a 3:1 air advantage vs GBR by the time Poland was sacked. Churchill was able to win the PM from the fascist sympathisers after the failed Norway campaign. Much could have been done to limit the suffering of Czechs, and German speaking Jews during Neville’s term of office.
This would have been Churchill’s depiction of Neville:
“oh my, bombers and battleships cost too much!!! I want to spend those billions for my domesic programs! Hitler already shook hands with me about having only continental ambitions, so we’re all cool about that. Why build bombers in the first place? They are only to used in war and I just got our nation out of another one.”You seem to be saying that unless we invaded Iraq, they would have eventually taken over the entire Middle East? Do you not understand Iraq was technologically backwards, crippled by sanctions, hemmed in by a ring of more powerful nations, and constantly monitored by the U.S.?
I wish you guys would understand that opposing the Iraq invasion does not = pacifism. I was supportive of the first Persian Gulf war. It was a very effective UN operation that cost us little, garnered us prestige, and stopped a greedy grab for land. Somehow, I doubt Chamberlain would have supported PG1. But go on, keep telling yourself that the majority of the public (which opposes Iraq) are a bunch of pacifists.
What I am saying is that SH would have eventually given germ warfare technology to nearly untraceable terrorist agents for operations against the US. Particularly in Texas, where GHW & Barbera Bush live. That would be just a short SW Air flight to your state.
SH would have also kept funding the suicide bombers against Israel. Taking him out removes an obstacle to Mid-east peace.
I am sure you have great domestic spending plans, but it can all be ruined by another terrorist attack. I would rather have Iraq as their base than some mosque by the local flight school. I do not want another 911 on our soil. Given the Spanish elections after 311, I doubt if AQ will care about their losses in Iraq.
The raids along the Syrian border are inflicting significant losses on the Baathists. The troops are just a few raids away from getting the rest of the replacement leadership. Iraqis are now looking for stable leadership. Keeping the insurgents on the run prevents them from establishing legitamate stability. It does not take away their ability to disrupt the stability that we recently set up there. They did get a decent turn out on the latest election. Things are more stable. Soon, they will be able to fight for it themselves. As in A&A, if you just sit on an advantage, the opponent will eventually build a counter. Minor advantages are not always permanent. You must exploit them and widen your edge in order to gain victory.
Mary’s posts resonate with a lot of the pre-WWII rhetoric in support of PM Neville Chamberlain.
You know, the one who loved and trusted Germans so much that, he strangled military spending to the point where Hitler had a 3:1 air advantage vs GBR by the time Poland was sacked. Churchill was able to win the PM from the fascist sympathisers after the failed Norway campaign. Much could have been done to limit the suffering of Czechs, and German speaking Jews during Neville’s term of office.
This would have been Churchill’s depiction of Neville:
“oh my, bombers and battleships cost too much!!! I want to spend those billions for my domesic programs! Hitler already shook hands with me about having only continental ambitions, so we’re all cool about that. Why build bombers in the first place? They are only to used in war and I just got our nation out of another one.”
Joining the Central powers that late in the game would have been absurd. Their subs sank our ships. Political suicide. Highly Nevillian.
Joining early would be equally absurd. the British navy would have sank or confiscated nearly all of our Atlantic surface ships. We would have also been left with no wealthy nations to trade with. Germany would have needed to crush the Royal navy in order for us to trade with them.
We would have had to declare immediate war on Canada. At least that is one part we could have slugged out to a win.