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Anyone who takes ST as a guideline for life needs to have their intelligence questioned Combine that and the horror of 9/11, and that'll clue you into what he's thinking. Anyways, before he signed up, I told him at least he'll be relieving all those poor guys in Iraq now.
He also chose to start as a grunt, since he didn't want to be one of those know-nothing officers. If he was going to lead men, someone would have to promote him. A friend of mine from highschool who was really really smart, and extremely talented at pretty much everything he tried (various academic subjects, art sports) did exactly this. He got really high scores on everything and chose infantry. His CO wanted him to do ranger school, but he didn't go just to piss the guy off. Sometimes very intelligent people act irrationally, but are still intelligent people. He finished his army time in the 90's and is a lawyer now. don't people ever thought that they might die or seriously wounded for being a infintry? She didn't want to be an officer because she didn't want to be a 'know-nothing officer'. I have a lot of family in the military and they will all tell you that's idiotic. Your friend would've benefitted by Ranger school, but he fucked himself over just because his CO at the time was a jerk. FWIW, my sister-in-law has 2 master's degrees and is still an idiot for going in enlisted and refusing to take advantage of what the military had to offer. Some people really don't feel ready to send people to die. You can be the poor sucker taking orders or you can give them. Grunts get paid less and get less respect (from the brass) to do more work. Do I really need to tell you there's a difference between being reponsible for a whole platoon, and being one of the platoon members? I think you're smarter than that, so I don't need to tell you. In peace-time, I can see how it would be foolish not to become an officer if you could. Any other opinion is an attempt at rationalizing a poor decision, IMO \_ I can see: "It's always better to have money." I can see: "It's always better to be an officer, if you can live with men dying under your command." I can see: "It's always better to be an officer if you want to live." There are people who think it's better to be enlisted, but they are (to use the same word) idiots. I say this as someone with both enlisted soldiers (privates) and high-ranking officers (colonels) in my family. I'm the one with the brother who signed up as a private. In any case, I'll go with "It's always better to be an officer, if you can live with men dying under your command" rather than "It's always better to be an officer". Perhaps you can talk to the colonels again and ask them to compare the two sentences and see which one they like better. Oh yeah, and it's Infantry, too, and you're getting sent to Iraq. I know this because I have a niece who is in now (not in Iraq - yet), a brother-in-law who just came back from Iraq, and now my nephew wants to join (Marines). This is the opinion of two Army colonels and an Air Force captain. The impact of the advice is to seriously consider becoming an officer, and if you don't, its your choice, and your family members could always discuss pros/cons with the colonels. you meant: "Sorry to have to express my opinion of it in that way." Thank God our nation has brave young men willing to post freeper links to the motd every 20 minutes. I spent three years (as a medic) in the 82nd Airborne and I post on the motd all the time. Basing your life on a book promoting fascism, manifest destiny, mini-nukes and Cold War sensibilities. Ah Heinlein, where everyone is beautiful, the men all get laid and the women give it up like it's going out of style... If you have, then either your reading comprehension skills need work, or you're looking with REALLY biased, politically slanted glasses. "Write two good books promoting opposing political stances and sell them both." In sci-fi, notables include Hyperion and A Fire Upon the Deep. Vinge gets bonus points for cool physics, and inventing the notion of Singularity, Banks get points for the setting and society, and of course his ship names.
html "So the likely winner of a war like this is an up-n-coming world economic power that has been investing in its own economy while we blow a trillion - yep, a trillion - dollars on nothing. Not hard to figure out who the likely suspects are here.
com/s/ap/20070508/ap_on_re_us/fort_dix_plot \_ Thank goodness torturing suspects in gitmo, warrantless spying on terrorists, and the Patriot act yielded valuable intel which allowed the government to catch these guys!
Only Ron Paul sounds like a real conservative (besides the debatable abortion stuff). He seems like one of the few who actually stands by clear principles, even if I don't agree with them all.
html Iraqi Oil: More Plentiful Than Thought, 215 billion barrels, or double only second to Saudi Arabia, and more than Iran at 136 billion barrels of oil. Time to fulfill your American dream by buying that big house 45 miles away from the city and the SUV you've always dreamed of having!
org/u/ik0 \_ Like the lawyer said at the end of Robocop 2: "Don't worry Sir, I'll find the proof, whether it exists or not" \_ this is the part I don't understand. story_id=4289059&fsrc=RSS rss Struggling to pick up the pieces Aug 17th 2005 From The Economist Global Agenda A new report from the International Monetary Fund says that Iraqs econom ic growth is stalling because of the deteriorating security situation. P olitical progress, too, seems to have slowed, with the government strugg ling to produce a new constitution. Without substantial improvement in o ne of these areas, the future of Iraq looks grim IN IRAQ these days, officials are constantly confronted with the conundru m of the chicken and the egg. If the government can get the struggling e conomy back on its feet, rising incomes will sap the supply of desperate insurgents. But as a new report from the International Monetary Fund (I MF) makes clear, it will be devilishly hard to get the economy back on t rack without first stemming the tide of the insurgency, which is devasta ting efforts at reconstruction. Iraqs all-important oil industry is the most obvious victim of this. This slump in expectations is caused by the unexpectedly low volume of oil production, which is now p redicted to reach an average of just 2m barrels per day (bpd) this year, nearly 20% less than the 24m bpd originally forecast, and still well b elow the 25m bpd that Iraq was pumping before the 2003 American-led inv asion. The report attributes this to the insurgency, which has made Iraq s oil infrastructure one of its primary targets. The insurgency is hobbling development efforts in other ways. The threat of violence has deterred investment in the country; to date, says the re port, none of the foreign banks granted licences in 2003 has yet opened up shop. It has also required donors and the government to divert an inc reasing share of funds meant for rebuilding Iraq to protecting its worke rs and equipment. Security and insurance reportedly make up 30-50% of to tal reconstruction costs. The result is economic insecurity that undoubtedly makes recruiting easie r for the insurgents. With 96% of households receiving monthly food rati ons, the United Nations Development Programme says that nearly half the children under five are malnourished. Infant mortality is over 10% of li ve births, compared with 3% in neighbouring Jordan; and 193 out of every 100,000 births in Iraq end with the mother dying, against 41 in Jordan. Most estimates of unemployment are in the 30-40% range, though one stud y from the University of Baghdad put that figure at 70%. Public services, which help form peoples opinion of the government, rema in patchy and unreliable. Last week Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia cleric who at one time headed his own insurgent force, began calling for protests against the poor level of water and power services. While virtually all of Iraqs households are hooked up to the electric grid, and most of the m have access to piped water, many report that the reliability of supply is very poor. These p...
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