Excellent idea. Good posting. Serves as a fine example of what intelligent intercourse is all about.

Between the wingnuts on the right who will whine about anything BHO does, the wingnuts on the left who will whine that BHO isn't all love and unicorns, Russian trolls who have allowed cold war thinking to be revived, and Muslim trolls who are just pissed, yeah, there's going to be a lot of negatives. Oh, and let's not forget the Slashdot Hipsters who're "too cool to fool".

As old as mankind, child. There, there, back to sleep now.

Tonight on Fox! Osama bin Talkin'!

Excellent posting, gman. Thanks. Another factoid that escapes the revisionists is the fact that, previously to the a-bombs, we were fire-bombing cities. Tokyo lost over 100,000 people in a previous raid. It took 100's of bombers and 1000's of men, with very little loss on our side because we had air superiority. (ref. wikipedia; "The Operation Meetinghouse air raid of 9–10 March 1945 was later estimated to be the single most destructive bombing raid in history.[2]")

The Japanese, with their warrior culture still in control of their living god, took these blows as any good warrior would.

When the idea finally sunk in, after the second a-bomb, that maybe we could, instead of sending a hundred bombers to bomb one city in one night, send one bomber each to a hundred cities in one night and utterly destroy them, well, the smart ones were finally able to overcome the warriors.

I'd rather "the taxpayers dime" than the taxpayers millions.

That's called killing two stones with one bird.

I'll second that. "The History of Rome" podcast was pretty good. I still go back and listen to some of my favorite episodes.

"210 reasons..." pretty much covers it. Too much communism, capitalism, religion, and lack of religion. Etc. Interesting, the list contains much of the best of humans, as well as the worst. I guess I'm reminded that every solution to a problem contains the seeds of the next problem.

"The message is a message to all the people that is we're going to exert our power over you," he said. "Jews are the default scapegoat throughout history for despots to send a message to the general public: Don't step out of line."

Well, yeah, the Georgian prez nailed it. One paragraph in a diplomatic cable. One man's opinion. This is what you call "the entire Crimean plan"?

Absolutely. A huge part of spycraft is keeping the other side in the dark about what you actually know and how you know it.

I agree. I expect it will lead to hundred of thousands, if not millions of deaths.

You have no idea.

Hah! That's worth a grin.