Posts by BenWilson
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Hard News: And one war ends?, in reply to bmk,
And beer is easy to brew but most people, other than hobbyists, are content to simply purchase their supply.
It's way less easy than growing a plant. The number of veggie gardeners totally crushes the number of beer brewers, as evidenced by the size and number of shops selling the equipment. Furthermore, they already do it, so it's not like pulling out a couple of weeds around the dak patch is going to be this huge thing your standard hobby gardener will be deterred by. It's pretty rare to find a single property in NZ that doesn't have at least one plant that is tended by someone in the house. Just because it's an annual doesn't mean it won't grow in massive wild patches.
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Hard News: And one war ends?, in reply to Stewart,
Why not go with the better-understood natural version?
It does have the major disadvantage of being easy to grow, and thus hard to tax.
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Southerly: A Blog on Behalf of an…, in reply to Danielle,
I could not disagree more thoroughly with your post. In fact, I would like to encourage your post to bite me
I think the post will have to get in line behind the Limpet.
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Hard News: And one war ends?, in reply to Russell Brown,
I'm aware of a couple of NZers in the field who have gone to Colorado and encountered an incredulous response to the news that we're keeping the well-understood drug illegal and preparing to approve new ones.
LOL the stoners have forgotten how recently they were doing the same thing. Oceania has never been at war with weed, and always with terror.
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Southerly: A Blog on Behalf of an…, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Democracy is not something you “believe in”.
Ahem. Actually, I do.
So no I do not believe in democracy.
Nice to have this on record, finally.
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It's hard to believe that the USA has stolen a march on us in the area of sensible drug laws. Somehow their crazy mixed up system actually got something right.
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Hard News: This time it's Syria, in reply to Matthew Poole,
Sure, never said it wasn’t, but it’s still not the design to poison people.
This is significant why?
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Hard News: This time it's Syria, in reply to Simon Grigg,
Quite. And they very likely will. This then plays out on evening news in the US over and over – dead or captured pilots to a casualty adverse US public. Obama might not be up for re-election but plenty of Congressmen and women are.
I'd rate it about 50:50 that Syrians killing Americans would lead to a general US mood of pulling out, or going into all-out war. That's a hell of a risk, and the Syrians have a lot more to lose. I don't know where this idea has come from that the US public are pacifists and the congress won't support their commander-in-chief. It's certainly not borne out by any recent history. They're as likely to go wild as they are to back down.
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Hard News: This time it's Syria, in reply to Matthew Poole,
The design is thermobaric trauma, not poisoning.
It's a pretty horrible way to die, particularly for anyone on the fringe of the blast, which is a substantially larger area than those who are humanely vaporized at the epicenter.
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Hard News: This time it's Syria, in reply to Keir Leslie,
Eh I think on own never fatal (although am just relying on Farley here.)
Not on it's own, but it's a pretty important step, especially when wanting to minimize your own casualties, to take out the air power of the other side. For that reason it's tempting to see it as a way of protecting others on the ground. But it's effectiveness at that is highly circumstantial.
I would say that air support did help the Libyan resistance to Gaddafi. They still did the work on the ground, but the US didn't need to supply anything else to ensure Gaddafi was finished. The problem in Syria is that the battle on the ground is nothing much like in Libya. They're up against a much more effective military.
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