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November 11, 2004

US Adds 600 Iraqi Terrorists to Arafat's Hellbound Posse

That's their estimate, at least, which I'm guessing is pretty inflated. Hard to count bodies in the heat of battle.

Still-- they're obviously killing a lot of these thugs.

It's good to read this:

In one of the most dramatic clashes Wednesday, snipers fired on U.S. and Iraqi troops from the minarets of the Khulafah al-Rashid mosque, the military said. U.S. Marines called in an airstrike, and an F-18 dropped a 500-pound bomb on the mosque, destroying both minarets.

Not that I necessarily am I big fan of blowing up mosques, but it's a sign that that the commanders here are serious.

posted by Ace at 12:14 PM

Comments

Once these terrorist loser realize they can't hide in hospitals, schools and mosques, they will know their days are numbered. Maybe we are learning that you can't fight this war with them tactics of the last one.

Posted by: Steve L. on November 11, 2004 12:23 PM

Finally: Rules of engagement that make sense.

Posted by: Patton on November 11, 2004 12:32 PM

Hats off to the future veterans. Kick ass.

Posted by: Joe R. the Unabrewer on November 11, 2004 12:53 PM

I have to disagree with your stance on blowing up mosques. I am a big fan of blowing up mosques that have snipers in the minarets...

Posted by: Qur'an Pundit on November 11, 2004 01:00 PM

Finally: Rules of engagement that make sense.

And about f*cking time too.

Posted by: W on November 11, 2004 01:01 PM

It might not be as hard to keep track of enemy KIA as you think, as shown in this article. They can't go outside without being seen. If you can see it, you can kill it.

Behind him, the pilot of the UAV adjusted the flight path as his partner tightened the zoom on the plane's camera. The images on the screen jumped slightly and focused on two black spots hopping from place to place behind an earthen berm.

"I confirm weapons," said Sg. Jenifer Forman, an imagery analyst. "Watch their right arms when they run. They're shooting across the river."

When the black spots bobbed together, the screen suddenly bloomed white, then settled back into focus, showing a thick gray cloud and a scattering of small black spots, like someone in the cloud had thrown out a handful of rocks.

"Tank gun got them," Neumann said. "Picked them up on their thermals. They're scratched. Scan up the street."

Posted by: Larry J on November 11, 2004 01:03 PM

The King called out his jet-fighters
He said, "You'd better earn your pay;
Drop your bombs between the minarets
Down the Kasbah way!"...

Posted by: DaveP. on November 11, 2004 01:29 PM

ACE - I think the 600 number is realistic. Though they don't publicize it, the military is tracking bodycounts closely and the circumstances where the bad guys were taken out so that they don't have to pay out when the deceased baddie's family shows up claiming the dude was an innocent civilian caught in the crossfire.

And the Marines and Army are there to kill, not capture or repel the enemy - or ignore them if they make it into the Mosques that used to be safe harbor...

The US forces were primed by commanders saying this is their shot at payback for their buddies killed by IEDs made by the bad guys....and indications are they are killing the thugs, killing massively, and killing with relish and glee! Also nice to see the Iraqi troops are imbued with the same sense of happy payback after their recruits and soldiers have been hit repeatedly by the thugs - sometimes executed in cold blood.

Posted by: Cedarford on November 11, 2004 02:02 PM

As a general rule, blowing up places of worship is to be avoided, sure, but in each of the buildings the Marines captured in Fallujah, they all had large stockpiles of weapons (e.g. the hospital).

Blowing up Mosques = maybe not.

Blowing up Ammo depots that only look like mosques = definitely

Blowing up ammo depots that look like mosques and hold about 50 "insurgent" motherfuckers with 500 lbs. bombs = a thing of fucking beauty

Posted by: hobgoblin on November 11, 2004 02:50 PM

The assertion that our troops kill with relish and glee is at best uninformed, at worst a despicable slander. Those who make that assertion should try getting their news and perspective from someplace other than Al-Reuters or AFP.

Posted by: BrewFan on November 11, 2004 03:16 PM

The "Iraqi journalist" they quoted (anonymously, for his protection) about halfway down the piece is the same bozo the BBC quoted by name claiming the U.S. blew up a makeshift hospital and killed all the doctors and patients. LGF has more info on this guy. Frickin' AP.

Posted by: Ken Hall on November 11, 2004 04:08 PM

BrewFan -

Clearly you have never been in the military. Or watched the news that shows the reaction of a five-man Army fire squad ventilating Iraqi insurgents bearing weaponry. Few things make a soldier happier than seeing a building full of bad guys shooting at them being blown to smithereens from a tank round they personally aimed and fired. Or dropping a enemy with a rifle shot. The Marine snipers do not go out with grief counselers to get them through their sobbing guilt following their whacking someone at 600 yds carrying a RPG. Or being part of a targeting team call - something I am acquainted with - that results in a bomb or cruise missile catching 8-10 bad guys with a ticket to Paradise, according to the battlefield assessment report. Elation. Satisfaction with a job well done.

As the Duvall character said alluding to the "smell of napalm in the morning" - the sweet smell of victory!

Despicable slander? No, reality. War isn't Marquis de Queensbury. It's seeing 10 Syrians going across the border in infrared - utterly clueless they are in danger - then dropping a 1,000 lb bomb on them with no warning, no opportunity to surrender. Shooting fleeing insurgents in the back. Blasting a car with 25-mm cannon, even though there is a woman in the car along with the gunman - and wishing you had a beer to celebrate!

Do US soldiers wantonly kill? Seek to maximize death? Of course not! But the motto of breaking things and killing people to make the mission succeed is true, and our guys do their job very well...with few, if any regrets.

Posted by: Cedarford on November 11, 2004 06:28 PM

Soldiers don't kill with relish and glee. The adrinline is high and you are just glad you did't let anyone down and you got them before they got you. Emotions!!! You made it.

Posted by: Screaming Eagle on November 11, 2004 06:32 PM

BrewFan -

Clearly you have never been in the military. Or watched the news that shows the joyful reaction of a five-man Army fire squad ventilating Iraqi insurgents bearing weaponry facing them. Few things make a soldier happier than seeing a building full of bad guys shooting at him and his buds being blown to smithereens from a tank round he personally aimed and fired. Or dropping a enemy with a rifle shot, mano a mano. The Marine snipers do not go out with grief counselers to get them through their sobbing guilt following their whacking someone at 600 yds carrying a RPG. Or being part of a targeting team call - something I am acquainted with - that results in a bomb or cruise missile catching 8-10 bad guys with a ticket to Paradise, according to the battlefield assessment report. Elation. Satisfaction with a job well done.

As the Duvall character said alluding to the "smell of napalm in the morning" - the sweet smell of victory!

Do US soldiers wantonly kill? Seek to maximize death? Of course not! There are strict rules of engagement. But the motto of breaking things and killing people to make the mission succeed is true, and our guys do their job very well...with few, if any regrets. And payback and vengence are motivators.

Posted by: Cedarford on November 11, 2004 06:39 PM

Ah, excuse the double post! Got a error message that the website wasn't responding, and tried again after 5 minutes...but my post go in on the 1st attempt..

Posted by: Cedarford on November 11, 2004 06:41 PM

"Clearly you have never been in the military"

Like to make a wager on that asshat?

"Few things make a soldier happier than seeing a building full of bad guys shooting at them being blown to smithereens "

Being happy because your life is no longer in danger is vastly different from relishing or taking glee in the death of another human being.

"Or being part of a targeting team call - something I am acquainted with"

Read that in Sgt Rock? I liked that comic book too!

"It's seeing 10 Syrians going across the border in infrared - utterly clueless they are in danger - then dropping a 1,000 lb bomb on them with no warning, no opportunity to surrender. Shooting fleeing insurgents in the back. Blasting a car with 25-mm cannon, even though there is a woman in the car along with the gunman - and wishing you had a beer to celebrate!"

This is what you think of our fighting men?CedarTroll, its obvious your view of the military and war comes from video games, not reality. Screaming Eagle hit the nail on the head. Read his post then please STFU if only because its Veterans Day.

Posted by: BrewFan on November 11, 2004 06:56 PM

BrewFan - if you ever were in the military, you were a clueless rear etchelon fuck. You have no concept of what the guys at the "tip of the spear" do. Or why they are happy punching out the ticket of the enemy - not remotely like BrewFans pathetic imagined "mourning ceremony" - weep, sob...every soldier (in his mind )must go through...at having to kill "beloved fellow human beings".

What a putz!

Posted by: Cedarford on November 11, 2004 11:56 PM

CedarTroll,

I must have struck a nerve! That means there is hope for your shriveled little soul. I have a suggestion. Get off the computer, get a job, and save enough money so you can afford to move out of your mom's basement. Give up the comic books and video games and go back to school. Once you have a life, perspective and reason soon follow. I promise.

HTH.

P.S. I don't intend wasting Ace's bandwidth trying to help you any further, because, after all is said and done, you are just another troll. Like all trolls if ignored you will simply disappear. Good ridance.

Posted by: BrewFan on November 12, 2004 06:44 AM

izloki ooiz.

Posted by: Salamon on December 25, 2004 10:45 AM

Bush has no buisness in Iraq

Posted by: U WAN D TRUTH on January 28, 2005 05:27 AM

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In more marketing for Project Hail Mary, scientists say they've found the biosigns indicating life growing on an alien planet. It's not proof, just signatures of chemicals that are produced by biological metabolism, and it could be nothing, but scientists think it's a strong sign that this planet is inhabited by something.

In a paper published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, a team of scientists announced the detection of dimethyl sulfide (along with a similar detection of dimethyl disulfide) in the atmosphere of an exoplanet called K2-18b. This is actually the second detection of dimethyl sulfide made on this planet, following a tentative detection in 2023.
Tons of chemicals are detected in the atmospheres of celestial objects every day. But dimethyl sulfide is different, because on Earth, it's only produced by living organisms.
"It is a shock to the system," Nikku Madhusudhan, first author on the paper, told the New York Times. "We spent an enormous amount of time just trying to get rid of the signal."

He means they tried to prove the signal was caused by things other than dimethyl sulfide but they could not.

Artemis moon shot a go, scheduled for 6:24 Eastern time tonight
Great marketing arranged by Amazon to promote Project Hail Mary. Okay not really but it does work out that way.

TJM talks John Boorman, director of Excalibur

Good rickroll

What? Skeleton of the most famous Musketeer, D'Artagnan, possibly discovered in Dutch church closet.
Dumas picked four names of real musketeers out of a history book, D'Artagnan, Athos, Aramis, and Porthos. So there was an actual D'Artagnan, though he made most of the story up. (Or, you know, all of it.)*

Charles de Batz de Castelmore, known as d'Artagnan, the famous musketeer of Kings Louis XIII and Louis XIV, spent his life in the service of the French crown.
The Gascon nobleman inspired Alexandre Dumas's hero in "The Three Musketeers" in the 19th century, a character now known worldwide thanks to the novel and numerous film adaptations.
D'Artagnan was killed during the siege of Maastricht in 1673, and there is a statue honoring the musketeer in the city. His final resting place has remained a mystery ever since.

A lot of Dumas's stories are based on bits of real history. The plot of the >Three Musketeers, about trying to recover lost diamonds from the queen's necklace, was cribbed from the then-almost-contemporaneous Affair of the Queen's Necklace. And the Man in the Iron Mask is based on real accounts of a prisoner forced to wear a mask (though I think it was a velvet mask).
* Oh, I should mention, Dumas says all this, about finding the names in an old book, in the prologue to his novel. But authors lie a lot. They frequently present fictions as based on historic fact. The twist is, he was actually telling the truth here. At least about these four musketeers having actually existed and served under Louis XIV.
Fun fact: You know the beginning of A Fistful of Dollars where the local gunslingers make fun of Clint Eastwood's donkey and Eastwood demands they apologize to the donkey? That's lifted from The Three Musketeers. Rochefort mocks D'Artagnan's old, brokedown farm horse and D'Artagnan is incensed.

A commenter asked which should be read first, The Hobbit of LOTR?
Easy, no question -- read The Hobbit first. It's actually the start of the story and comes first chronologically. It sets up some major characters and major pieces in play in LOTR.
Also, the Hobbit is Beginner-Friendly, which LOTR isn't. The Hobbit really is a delightful book, and a fast read. It's chatty, it's casual, it's exciting, and it's funny. In that dry cheeky British humor way. I love that the narrator is constantly making little asides and commentary, like he's just sitting next to you telling you this story as it occurs to him.
LOTR is a very long story. Fifteen hundred pages or so. The Hobbit is relatively short and very punchy and easy to read. If you don't like The Hobbit, you can skip out on LOTR. If you do like it, you'll be primed to read LOTR.
Oh, I should say: The Hobbit is written as if it's for children, but one of those smart children's stories that are also for adults. Don't worry, there's also real fighting and violence and horror in it, too.
LOTR is written for adults. (It's said that Tolkien wrote both for his children, but LOTR was written 17 years later, when his children were adults.) Some might not like The Hobbit due to its sometimes frivolous tone. Me, I love it. I find it constantly amusing. Both are really good but there is a starkly different tone to both. LOTR is epic, grand, and serious, about a world war, The Hobbit is light and breezy, and about a heist. Though a heist that culminates in a war for the spoils.

The Hobbit Challenge: Read two more chapters. I didn't have much time. Bilbo got the ring.
I noticed a continuity problem. Maybe. Now, as of the time of The Hobbit, it was unknown that this magic ring was in fact a Ring of Power, and it was doubly unknown that it was the Ring of Power, the Master Ring that controlled the others.
But the narrator -- who we will learn in LOTR was none of than Bilbo himself, who wrote the book as "There and Back Again" -- says this about Gollum's ring:
"But who knows how Gollum had come by that present [the Ring], ages ago in the old days when such rings were still at large in the world? Perhaps even the Master who ruled them could not have said."
In another passage, the ring is identified as a "ring of power."
I don't know, I always thought there was a distinction between mere magic rings and the Rings of Power created by Sauron. But this suggests that Bilbo knew this was a ring of power created by Sauron.
Now I don't remember when Bilbo wrote the Hobbit. In the movie, he shows Frodo the book in Rivendell, and I guess he wrote it after he left the Shire. I guess he might have added in the part about the ring being a ring of power created by "the Master" after Gandalf appraised him of his research into the ring.
I never noticed this before. I know Tolkien re-wrote this chapter while he was writing LOTR to make the ring important from the start. And also to make Gollum more sinister and evil, and also to remove the part where Gollum actually offers Bilbo the ring as a "present" -- Bilbo had already found it on his own, but Gollum was wiling to give it away, which obviously is not something the rewritten Gollum would ever do.
But I had no memory of the ring being suggested to be The Ring so early in the tale.

Finish the job, Mr. President!
Melanie Phillips lays out the case for the total destruction of the Iranian government and armed forces. [CBD]

TJM acts like he knows anything about John Wick and screenwriting. It's embarrassing, really.

Podcast: Sefton and CBD talk about how would a peace treaty with Iran work, Democrats defending murderers and rapists, The GOP vs. Dem bench for 2028, composting bodies? And more!

Oh, I forgot to mention this quote from Pete Hegseth, reported by Roger Kimball: "We are sharing the ocean with the Iranian Navy. We're giving them the bottom half."

Batman fires The Batman
Batman is disgusted by the Joachim Phoenix version of Joker
Batman tries to fire Superman
Batman is still workshopping his Bat-Voice

Forgotten 80s Mystery Click: Red Leather Suit and Sweatband Edition
And I was here to please
I'm even on knees
Makin' love to whoever I please
I gotta do it my way
Or no way at all

Tomorrow is March 25th, "Tolkien Reading Day," because March 25th is the day when the Ring is destroyed in the book. I think I'm going to start the Hobbit tomorrow and read all four books this time.
The only bad part of the trilogy are the Frodo/Sam chapters in The Two Towers. They're repetitive, slow, and mostly about the weather and terrain. But most everything else is good. Weirdly, the Frodo-Sam chapters in Return of the King are exciting and action-packed and among the best in the trilogy. (Though the chapters with everyone else in Return of the King get pretty slow again. Mostly people talking about marching towards war, and then marching towards war.)

Sec. Army recognizes ODU Army ROTC cadets for their bravery and sacrifice in private ceremony
[Hat Tip: Diogenes] [CBD]

TJM gives you a brief tour of his movie collection.

Forgotten 80s Mystery Click
One day I'm gonna write a poem in a letter
One day I'm gonna get that faculty together
Remember that everybody has to wait in line
Oh, [Song Title], look out world, oh, you know I've got mine

US decimation of Iran's ICBM forces is due to Space Force's instant detection of launches -- and the launchers' hiding places -- and rapid counter-attack via missiles
AI is doing a lot of the work in analyzing images to find the exact hiding place of the launchers. Counter-strikes are now coming in four hours after a launch, whereas previously it might have taken days for humans to go over the imagery and data.

Robert Mueller, Former Special Counsel Who Probed Trump, Dies

“robert mueller just died,” trump wrote in a truth social post on march 21. “good, i’m glad he’s dead. he can no longer hurt innocent people! president donald j. trump.”

TJM has thoughts on Superheros and Iconography