The administration was absolutely culpable, but even if Bush and Cheney had been completely savvy about the affair I think we would still have seen similar problems at the operational level.

I think accountability is a good standard, but I think accountability also needs to account for the fact that learning lessons is a chancy process in its own right.

I may be reading you wrong, but I do think there's a level where holding the PDs in contempt for the things the US military now knows how to do is like holding racing bicyclists in contempt for things that mountain bicyclists know how to do. It's not that there aren't cross applicable lessons, it's that the…

Yeah, even for my limited connections to LA I'm becoming a little suspicious at how close it seems to be to becoming a symbol of urban decay and disintegration rather than a setting.

Sure, but the military had had years of their own horrific fuck ups to draw from.

Except it wasn't at all taboo prior to 9/11. The WTO protests in Seattle featured very similar gear and tactics in use by local authorities.

I sometimes wonder if everyone knows exactly where they learned the word oubliette.

Oh, the strange applies to my diet as much as anything.

At the time? I assume the primary problem was being enslaved by other Scandinavians.

Really, the CCCC are gonna be down for leek soup?

Picts were Celtic.

For me there is but one True Pam:

Just a ton of great married couples in that show these days.

I would have guessed that common usage for that area would still have been Regnal. The AD system had been calculated earlier but wasn't in wide use till a century later with the actual Gregorian calendar coming in in the 16th century.

I'll watch anything with Akkadia, though using CE and BCE in that context is somehow egregiously weird for me cause there ain't nothin' common about that scheme that's gonna be common to either of those two places.

You know. I can't think of a single magical counter to that. Water breathing isn't going to save you and the penalties from grappling, the hostile environment, and poetic justice are going to make it really hard to throw off even a quickened magic missile much less an adaptation or otuluke's invincible sphere.

I know an academic who deliberately introduces errors into relevant history articles so he can more easily spot and shame the lazy researchers.

I don't know, I really felt that the Space bit upped the ante in a pretty amazing way by fully committing to the work Pancakes, Divorce, Pancakes had done.

It's all the unavoidable lectures on its own historical inaccuracies. The movie would actually be shorter if it just included them and saved the audience the trouble.

I always think Ran and King Arthur (the recent horrible one) are 4 hours long because I watch movies with FAR too many academics.