MsGuy

Well, thank goodness we all know your anonymous football player is not Tua. His sole and only reason for bailing from Hawaii to Alabama was to escape his domineering mother. That's their story and they are sticking to it.

What ? What the fuck, people! Look, edit yourself however you like; it's all good and that's what the edit button is for. BUT... Don't go erasing your post and then leaving a couple of teasers about how great the missing post was and how it's a shame I missed the whole thing. ----- Maybe someone could PM me a copy???

The formula for Oklahoma beating Alabama is simple: 1st quarter: break Tua's anckle 2nd quarter: jam 2 or 3 fingers deep into Hurst's eye socket 1st, 2ns, 3rd & 4th: Big twelve offense. Back in the day John Vault used to keep a couple of brawny pulpwood cutters from Laurel County on scholarship. They didn't know squat about football but they could (& would) bust up just about anybody rather than go back home. Didn't matter if they were ejected, just needed them to get the job done. And if you think Bear Bryant was above all that, you're delusional. Bear was the reason Vault gave for needing those pulpwood cutters on his payroll. Mexican stand-off so to speak. Oh for the good old days when football was a game for manly men.

You know if OZ was an evil troll, he could announce Boy Toy is expanding to review destinations and websites of interest to gay men. Maybe OZ could even link to a false front shell site something like this: He could open up some pages soliciting suggestions for improvements, additional ideas, etc. I have no doubt the creative folks around here could come up with all sorts of great ideas. Me first OZ could give a lot of the categories a pretty good kick-start by copy and pasting relevant posts already scattered around the forums. Now your turn. PS Not that anyone here would characterize our beloved and benevolent OZ as a troll.

That's interesting. I didn't know you could delete a post topic title after you posted it. I tried to change a topic title a couple of times but couldn't figure out how to do it. Not that that actually means much. Tassojunior, would you mind giving me a hint as to how you deleted your topic title? Or maybe you made "Delete" your topic title from the get go just to jack folks for whom all this internet stuff is something of a mystery. Bad troll, Tassie, bad bad troll!!!

BBB, make sure your paperwork is all done for a quick get-away. I'm hearing those damn Frenchies kill each other over the gas tax on diesel. What's gonna happen to American ex-pats if (when?) the Orange One truly fucks up everything for everybody? They'll be on you like villagers on a monster. Maybe you could work up a good Kiwi accent? Start telling folks your mother is really Canadian?

...in 1959 the US and Turkey agreed to deploy one squadron of 15 nuclear tipped Jupiter medium range ballistic missiles (MRBM) missiles in Turkey. They also deployed them to Italy. The deployment to Turkey began in June 1961. They became operational in April 1962. This photo shows one of the five "flights" (3 missiles each) of Jupiter MRBMs deployed at Cigli Air Base, Turkey during 1962 and early 1963. The Jupiters were armed with 1.1 megaton W49 nuclear warheads. You can see from this map why the Soviets did not appreciate these missiles in Turkey. The sites in Turkey were largely in western Turkey. Even though the Jupiter was a MRBM with a nuclear warhead, it could hit Moscow. That certainly stuck in Khrushchev’s craw. Furthermore, the Jupiters really were very vulnerable. They had to stand in a vertical position, it took a long time to prepare them for launch, and they had little to no value as a deterrent. Instead, if anything, they would motivate the Soviets to attack them first, pre-emptively. -------- RA1, the missiles in question were the medium range version of the liquid fueled Jupiter. It took several hours to drag them out of their sheds, haul them to their launch pads, hoist them upright and then load them up with hydrogen and lox and otherwise spin them up to a ready condition. H>O>U>R>S. Recall these are not the Jupiter ICBMs buried deep in super hardened holes in Arkansas. These are the fragile birds sitting in a Quonset hut version. Said sheds being located less than a hour from Warsaw Pact air bases. Deterence value: zero; retaliation value: zip; even first strike value; awkward at best, but scary as shit to the Russians. So what they were was exactly what you NEVER, EVER want in your nuclear inventory: (1)scary as shit but (2) easily trashed in a pre-emptive strike. The worst of all possible weapons to deploy, more dangerous to you than to the enemy. RA1, hard as it is to believe, in 1960 the guys running the world simply had not figured out that nuclear weapons were not just a novel, game changing war technology, they changed the whole dynamic of great power rivalry. So, yes, obsolete from the day of installation. We actually made ourselves a smidgen safer by removing them. As the Russians made themselves safer by removing theirs. It's funny how it's easy to see how the Russians were better off w/o those Cuban missiles but much harder to see why the US was safer w/o those in Turkey. It takes figuring that out to begin to understand the true, real world, very practical consequences of possessing nuclear weapons. PS Did we know they were useless at the time? Well, a lot of people didn't understand it that way. So many in fact that that side agreement remained secret until we actually began closing the bases some months later. And Kennedy denied any such agreement to the day of his death. 1960's version of FAKE NEWS! LOL. So Dear Hoarder: at the least, Kennedy figured it was worth scrapping a handful of missiles to keep Khrushchev's head on his shoulders long enough to get those missiles out of Cuba. Remember there were lots of folks (hoarders?)in Russia who didn't understand how Russia was better off w/o those Cuban missiles. Learning to think in terms of 3rd and 4th order consequences doesn't come easy.

Apparently your lock button doesn't work.

I like the big print, Tartegogo. Much easier to read.

If you squint your eyes just right, the Bay of Pigs looks like a good thing. Taught Kennedy the wise men and expert advisers didn't necessarily know shit. The next time the shit hit the fan, he thought things through for himself.

Ain't it the truth, Dorothy, Ain't it the truth.

Well, duh. Clearly those goofy retards in Hanoi were obsessed with renaming Saigon Ho Chi Min City.

Dude, I was in SDS but the Weatherman faction was way too delusional for me even when I was toked up. Bless your heart if you were in it. I'm glad you didn't accidentally blow yourself up if you were. Nor get nailed for blowing up somebody else. Or get shot taking down an armored truck loaded with bank cash.

For most third world despots, there's not a whole lotta daylight between regime survival and personal survival. Where ia Sadam (or his sons) now? Where is Kadaffy (or his sons)? What will happen to the top leaders in Iran or in PRK if their regimes fail? It's kind of difficult to arrange a quiet retirement in Paris or London when you've spent decades doing the kind of shit those folks get up to. Some manage it, like in those clowns in South Africa, but for most, nukes are actually less dicey than their other alternatives. PS, my point on JFK was not that the enemy was internal. The Soviets were trying to put about a third of the US homeland under direct threat of destruction on 5 minutes notice. They had to go. The problem was how to get them out w/o general war. Nobody (us or them) had really thought through the problem and everybody was being forced to wing their actions under extreme stress. People under stress tend to fall back on old habits of thought and action. That's why football coaches like to practice the hell out of their players. Our side was pretty well practised at blowing up bases. Their side was likely pretty good at rolling tanks into places like Berlin. And those missile troops in Cuba were probably not too bad at spinning up IRBMs on short notice. And the Navy most likely had a good idea of what they would do to Murmansk, Sevastopol and that big Russian naval base in their Pacific Maritime region if a nuke took out a US carrier group. And so forth. Remember WW1 occurred without a single participant wanting a general war. Shit just happened. The version of that war that you and I were taught back when was pretty much based on Allied b.s.

OUCH! Well, dude, I did say she was tacking right. And you don't need to be a weatherman to know which way that wind is blowing. Confederate gear always codes White Lives Matter.

nynekkid, if you listen to the entire context of the headline quote, it's not at all clear that there was any intent to evoke race by Hyde-Smith. It's more like the awkward effort of an educated middle-class woman trying to be folksy for the crowd. Not code word type of thing at all. Please understand, I'm not saying you won't find any racism in MS. Hyde-Smith's heart if you dig down and rummage around. I am saying that the media is hyping the shit out this and folks on the Democratic side (who know better) are running around being loudly outraged about something they couldn't care less about. Not that I blame them; The Republicans are running some truly nasty attack ads about Espy designed to 'fire up the base'. So refreshing to see a race run strictly on the issues.

FYI, the episodes were shot in the Naples dialect. There were several scenes of kids in school learning to speak standard Italian (if it's not shot in dialect, the scenes make no sense, not that I speak Italian. ) The subtitles are easy to read and not distracting.

Just for the record, Chris McDaniel was the Klucker race baiter and fire breather in the MS senate race. Because of the peculiarities of MS's election law, there were 2 Republicans and one Democrat running for the office. He got about 1/3 of the Republican vote. Losing that Senate seat in Alabama seems to have put a damper on the raw meat and red blood tendencies of deep South Republicans. Hyde-Smith (the candidate you reference in your last post) is actually a country club type representing business interests. In fact she was a Democrat until fairly recently and came under fire from McDaniel for admitting she voted for Obama back before she saw the light and came to Jesus. Right now she's tacking right to make sure McDaniel's people don't sit on their hands in the run off and elect Espy (the Democrat). I can't speak for elsewhere but in MS politics, what you see taint necessarily what you get. It's a real zoo around here sometimes.

RA1, I agree that Kennedy was a very average POTUS, fucked up any number of times, died a timely death (for his reputation), and benefited from a massive and sustained propaganda effort by the Kennedy wing of the Democratic party in the years following his death. Think Hitler if assassinated in 1938. The Krauts would still be building monuments in his honor. That said, Kennedy was under tremendous domestic pressure to meet the Russian provocation with decisive military response. The CIA and military intelligence were insisting that the missiles were not yet operational but soon would be. Once they were fully installed the Russians would be in a position to thumb their noses at us. Pentagon advising take out the sites NOW, cabinet (including McNamara and Stevenson) thumping their chests and competing on who dick was bigger, Republicans screaming for blood and warning against a sell out. Kennedy, with little support from his administration, went with his least confrontational option: a naval quarantine. No blood, no dead Russians (and giving the Russians a week or two to think things over). Sanity prevailed, a deal was cut, we agreed to pull some soon to be obsolete missiles from Turkey and not to invade Cuba again; Ruskies pulled their missiles and agreed not to build any large Naval base in Cuba and not to station a large army presence there. Neither side had to admit in public to the side agreements. Not a bad deal for us. Good enough for us that it got First Secretary Nikita bounced by the Party not long after. What we know now is that despite all the assurances by our intelligence folks, some of the missiles were in fact operational. What we know now is that the Kremlin, not knowing if they could maintain communications with their command authority in Cuba in event of hostilities, had already authorized the use of those very operational missiles in event of a pre-emptive attempt by the US to destroy them. We didn't know Castro was willing to take a nuclear hit to keep those missiles and was throwing a fit at the notion of Russia backing out. Castro just didn't believe our private promise that he wouldn't wake up some morning to the sight of US troops landing in Havana harbor. So all that macho chest thumping by all those folks who should have known better was based on the false assumption the there was nothing much the USSR could do in response. No operational missiles, remember? Ask yourself what the result would have been of a Russian nuke going bang in the middle of a 2nd Fleet task force off the coast of Cuba. Back then, neither folks on our side nor folks on their side had really thought through the nature of nuclear war. Both civil and military authorities conceptualized nukes as bombs; extremely large, extremely destructive, but not different in essence from say firebombing Dresden or Tokyo. It was, in fact, only in the aftermath of the close call of the Cuban confrontation that folks began to realize that nukes were different in essential nature from other munitions. It seems an insane joke to say that it took folks almost two decades to figure out that nukes had made general war between Great Powers obsolete except as the means of an elaborate ritual of national suicide but that in fact is the case: Folks who own nuclear arsenals just can not use them against other folks with nuclear arsenals; It's exceedingly dangerous to engage in conventional war against a nuclear power; Because of very practical considerations relating to pre-emptive strikes, it actually very dangerous to set precedents by using nukes against non-nuclear powers. And so on... To this day, some folks still don't get it. So let's give Kennedy the credit he's due. his gut instinct was right and all the wise advice he got was very very wrong.

I saw the first two episodes back to back and thoroughly enjoyed them both. Riobard is right, this series is worth making an effort to see it.

I never held them against him in the first place. So far as I've ever heard, all his affairs were with adults and were consensual. Given the nature of this site, it's difficult to believe anyone here is addled enough to to get all bent about his affairs. Interesting that you would select the Cuban missile crises for praise. I too think that was his finest moment as President. The more details of that confrontation that have leaked out over the years since, the more it appears his refusal to be pushed into an aggressive military response may well have prevented nuclear war. Let's all pray that our current POTUS does not get himself into a similar situation requiring good judgement and steady nerves.

Well the way I heard it, Angela has engineered it where she doesn't resign (as Chancellor) for two more years. Seeing as how the Orange One thinks Estonia is somewhere down in the Balkans, that's probably all to the good.

I'm a little surprised that no one has mentioned Roman Polanski. Too far back?

AS, that's a swing and a miss on your part. There's no bureaucracy so capable of institutional insanity as an international bureaucracy. Remember when Kadaffy's Libya was made chair of the U.N. Commission On Human Rights? The Big News (see title of post) is that Interpol actually managed to avoid making a Putin stooge the world's top cop. I'm guessing that it didn't hurt that (1) China just embarrassed Interpol by kidnapping and disappearing its last top cop and (2) Putin has taken to issuing international arrest on sight murder warrants for Western critics. Maybe the first and maybe the second but the two together seems to have been just a bridge too far. But just barely.