Friday, July 29, 2011

We could have had the Moon, instead we get Afghanistan

In the spirit of a picture is worth 1000 words, I present the following.






Full sized original, along with explanatory text at The Pain Comics


Hat/tip to hrhqod1 on LiveJournal, who got it from jwz.

After the seeing the above, then rereading The end of an era: last space shuttle mission and Science and society for the week ending July 16, 2011, I'm tempted to drink heavily. Instead, I'll post my standard rant about Afghanistan.
I used to play a game called Pax Brittanica, which simulated world conditions from 1880-1916. In that game, Afghanistan was a region that was 1) most likely to revolt, 2) a real pain to conquer, and 3) cost more to govern than could ever be extracted from it. Furthermore, should anyone ever be dumb enough to actually invade it, the mere act of occupying the country would be enough to give at least one major power, if not two, cause to declare war. In the games I played, no one ever messed with the place.

If a friggin' game can figure that out, why can't people do so in the real world? Yeah, I know, Osama bin Ladin and the Taliban. Still, the above wisdom should have been enough to convince people to get in, get the job done, and get out.

I still stand by this piece of wisdom I gained by being a gamer geek.

4 comments:

  1. Congratultions, babystrangeloop, you're the first traffic driver here whose postings are OK with me. Stick around.

    BTW, if you're going to wrap your ideas in aluminum foil, how about connecting Anders Behring Breivik's attack to Norway's declining oil production?

    http://petrocollapse.blogspot.com/2011/07/planned-maintenance.html

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  2. Pro tip for Tim Kreider: "Casualties" are the total of those killed, wounded, and missing. It seems to be a common error these days.

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    1. If anything, that would make the total for Afghanistan a lot higher. I don't know what it would do to the number for going to the Moon. After all, who knows what the number of workplace injuries were at NASA and their contractors for the Apollo program.

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