EU Spectacle
The word spectacle is carefully chosen, since this is what the current drama of which Greece is the symptom, not the cause, has become. It no longer bears any relationship to coherent democratic leadership or process of governance in a workable political and currency union. The cancellation at a moment’s notice of a summit of all EU leaders is extraordinary.
There is a problem with Greece, but it is not that difficult to solve. Indeed this blog working alone would be able to negotiate a workable solution. What is proving impossible is to find an acceptable solution, because the institutions normally established to process decision making at national and international levels are not there, or there in such abundance nobody can detect who is in charge. And to make matters worse the structure of the currency itself is unsustainable as it lacks a treasury and a finance minister answering to an elected government. A committee of finance ministers at loggerheads, elected by only one member state in each case, on conflicting mandates and to differing electoral timetables will work only in the good times and becomes dysfunctional under pressure.
So all we know at this moment is that Greece may or may not go bust tomorrow, the euro looks more like an impediment to growth than an engine of it, and the reputation of the EU as a coherent political union is severely damaged. Beneath that a big gap is developing between the north and the south of Europe, between the politicians and their electors everywhere and between those in the eurozone who want to stand firm to high principle even if it brings the whole thing down, led by the Germans, and by those who feel pragmatic reality demands compromise, led by France and Italy.
At the heart of of this crisis now engulfing the whole EU are three violated principles. You cannot have a democratic political union without an elected forum from which all authority flows. You cannot have a currency which cannot be printed. You cannot have capitalism which does not permit debtors to go bust. The first is violated because the whole EU is wrongly configured. The last two are rescinded because Germany says No.
message 1301:
by
Linda
(new)
Apr 11, 2016 07:43AM
There is no such thing as people with two genders. That sounds like a myth. You are either a man or a woman, nothing else. You can tell by DNA if nothing else. The business about a "man's mind and emotions in a woman's body" sounds really fake. Women for thousands of years have embraced both sexes while being women --- at least in a psychological sense. So there is nothing new there. They still have women's bodies, and that is what determines everything. If they look like women, they are women. It is that simple. They should not end up in men's rooms. But that isn't the real issue. It's the men in women's restrooms that is the problem. The men, not the women.
reply
|
flag
Yes, Russia does criminalize being gay or lesbian. They don't support it. And the Nazis certainly didn't support it. And I don't see what being an open society or a democratic society has to do with issues about men in women's bathrooms. It's just plain common sense. It doesn't work for any reason at all.
I haven't read the North Carolina law, nor do I watch the news. Gary is somewhat familiar with it. But it seems silly to me that states even have to enact such laws. Don't people have any practical sense anymore or has all reason and common sense been lost in the long aftermath of World War 1? No one would have thought of a law like that a little over one hundred years ago nor in the long reach of history before that. World War 1 did more to destroy traditional values and traditional ways of thinking than any war before it. The war of course is like the 100 Years War. It is still going on. It is in its Arab phase right now with the forming of nations' states and rebellions and revolutions. Someday I hope it all settles down again and people can think rationally. After all, children in first grade and kindergarten know that there is a women's room and a men's room and who is supposed to use which one.
You fell right into a trap mentioning Canada. What is the only reason that Canada holds together as a country? It is south of their border -- the US. Canada can hold all the elections it wants about Quebec. But Quebec can never leave the Union of Canada. The reason? Because of geography. It can't leave the union of North America imposed by the US and the Monroe Doctrine. France can't move into North America and form unions with Quebec as De Gaulle wanted to do. Besides, Canada isn't a real country in the traditional sense. It is not entirely separate from the US. They don't really have a separate military for one thing. And it would be impossible for them to conduct any really different foreign policy. Their economy is the same as the US with almost all the same companies. The border is really artificial despite recent attempts at political correctness. No one is going to build a wall along the northern border.
California is the home of all weird movements. We didn't know what to expect when we first crossed the border and visited the place the year after we moved to Tucson. However, let me tell you that the state is actually very diverse. You've got everything from the very conservative (remember Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon?) to the very liberal and weird and everything inbetween.But what I think you are really observing is how the US economy is concentrated on both coasts, the East and West. Inbetween you've got flyover territory which is very dull and for the most part uninteresting. Take it from me who had to drive back and forth across it just last summer. California really impressed me with the diversity of its economy. You drive into California through the Imperial Valley which means agriculture. You cross the mountain into San Diego. Immediately you have the US Navy base. You've got tourism and a huge convention city. Going north to Los Angeles you have Hollywood, more tourism, Disney Land, lots of real estate and retail, publishing companies, lots of other companies and businesses and tons of population on the freeways. You also have Long Beach, the biggest commercial port with all the traffic from China. Going north from there you cross another mountain into the Central Valley. Along the road you see the remains of old oil rigs some of which still operate. You see an irrigation system that pumps water over the mountain back to Los Angeles. You also see crops everywhere on both sides of either 1-5 or California 99. This is the place that invented large scale agribusiness. Just to the left is Silicon Valley and all sorts of tech industry. To the right is Yosemite and more real estate. And to the left again is the Wine Region that we toured in 2007. I even bought two souvenir bottles of California wine though I don't drink it. Going north towards Oregon you still have more tourism, etc. as well as the state capital. You even have the redwoods and the remains of a logging industry. There is a lot going on.
I haven't noticed the unisex restrooms anywhere, not even in my experience of office buildings. They certainly didn't have them aboard the Queen Mary 2, which is a British ship. Everything was male/female.
I went to Europe not knowing what to expect. I didn't leave the South of England unless you want to go back to when I was in high school when I went to London. But I didn't notice anything obviously extremely racially diverse going on in Southampton or in the environs in the short time I was there. I didn't see it in Salisbury either. Even more important I didn't notice anything diverse at all in Germany. On the contrary, I contrasted it with US society. When we went aboard we didn't notice women with green hair and purple nails, tattoos, men with earrings, or anything else that we now see in the US when traveling. I didn't see them on the ship either going back and forth across the Atlantic. In fact in Germany I was impressed with the family atmosphere. I also wondered at how blond everybody was with fair skin like Thomasina. Parents with multiple kids here would probably have one blond, one brownette, and one with darker brown hair. There all the children were blond with blue eyes and all conservatively dressed!!! It made me wonder if all that you hear about Germany and liberalism isn't propaganda or really means something else. In Belgium (I was in Wallonia) the family atmosphere was at least as extreme. All I saw were large French speaking families. Where I stayed overnight they seemed to be attracting mostly locals. Then we returned to the US and all the weird stuff.
I don't believe for a minute that people in Britain don't notice what color people are. It is only human nature to notice such things. In fact the blacks in America make a point of it. They say black is beautiful and wear colors suited just to blacks. They have separate hair dressers, too. You have to notice.
The origins of prejudice I think are interesting. For instance I learned something about myself a long time ago through introspection. I'm really an intellectual snob, not a social snob of any kind. If someone were intelligent and talked intelligently, especially if he was an academic, I probably wouldn't care if that person were orange, gray, black, or green or had polka dots or if he was wearing who knows what kind of costume. As far as people go they tend to be prejudice against anyone who isn't like themselves. The more an individual is different, the more they don't like them and are suspicious about them. This is true about language, skin color, religious beliefs, etc.
Linda wrote: "There is no such thing as people with two genders. That sounds like a myth. You are either a man or a woman, nothing else. You can tell by DNA if nothing else. The business about a "man's mind and ..."You need to read up on this. There are.
Loads of stuff I agree with, some I don't. I am happy to move on. I accept you are conservative with pretty strict boundaries and I respect that.I am liberal (with a small l) and to me it is all about the underdog or the people with problems not of their making. It comes from nursing an impaired life for twelve years. Before that I was very right or wrong, black or white, man or woman etc. But I have learned that nothing is absolute, everything is nuanced and suffering is very real.
You can't possibly have people of two genders. You may think you can, but you cannot. You have to be predominantly one gender because of your chromosomes and your DNA.
How do you envision the future of humanity? Would you think that all the races and ethnic groups are supposed to combine to such an extent that you no longer have white people, black people, etc? By the way, would this happen to the languages as well? Here you can combine to only a certain extent. It's more like everybody would adopt English, though English would take on more foreign words. What about customs, dances, rituals, customs? Is everything supposed to get combined somehow? Is this really the vision of the future that people want?
People these days certainly seem to like to mix things up. They want to mix up French and Vietnamese, Mexican and Spanish, Chinese and Swahili, and every other nationality. They even want to mix up men and women. In the past such things were supposed to be kept separate and apart with defined boundaries. This is all supposed to be in the name of everybody doing what they want as if we were at the tail end of some sort of extreme romantic movement of individualism. That's one way of looking at it. The other is to suppose that WW1 destroyed belief in all previously held beliefs so that after 1918 people wanted to forget about the structure of the Victorian novel and write stream-of-consciousness. They wanted to forget Rembrandt and Rubens and throw paint at a canvas. They even started to defy conventional physics and invent the nuclear bomb based on Einstein's relativity. One wonders what the future of all this lack of respect for authority and for tradition will be. But we can't go there. It's the far flung future. We can only imagine it.
We will read the book. I'll let you know when we get hold of it.
Linda wrote: "You can't possibly have people of two genders. You may think you can, but you cannot. You have to be predominantly one gender because of your chromosomes and your DNA."There are without doubt people born with both male and female organs and in the more advanced medical countries surgeons can make the person either exclusively male or female. There is also the disorder where the person feels male but has a female body and vice versa. I saw a very good documentary about it some years back. There were case studies, pictures and contributions by top flight medics.
It causes a lot of suffering as you can imagine. It is not always straightforward to determine which sex to go for when for example there is a female upper half and a male lower half.
Linda wrote: "People these days certainly seem to like to mix things up. They want to mix up French and Vietnamese, Mexican and Spanish, Chinese and Swahili, and every other nationality. They even want to mix up..."I will contribute to this tomorrow. Had a busy day and rather tired now. It is an interesting question which deserves attention.
Some of these TV shows you watch sound like they are rather pop, splashy, and preposterous. That is all I will say about that. This is not supposed to be science fiction. It is supposed to be real life. What you are talking about is hardly what North Carolina had in mind with their recent laws.
We don't have any definite plans for this summer yet. But Gary is thinking about possibly going to a conference in July about the Holocaust. At least that is one of the legal topics discussed. Most of it is about American law. That one topic is world law or historic law. This lecture is conducted by the American Holocaust Memorial. It would be curious to hear what they have to say about the subject. This would all be at the Hotel del Coronado in San Diego in July.
Of course what I think about the Holocaust is that Himmler and his confederates planned it and used Eastern Europeans to carry out much of it. They must have been trying to play on the tendencies that Eastern Europeans have even to this day about genocide and ethnic cleansing. They don't even try to hide it the way the westerners do. They want to do it openly. This is one of those issues for the EU. How do you bring Eastern Europe and Western Europe together? How do France, Belgium, Germany, England, and Italy deal with some place like the Ukraine or Serbia? (Believe it or not there is a Jefferson institute there!) Do you think all these Eastern European states should be members of the EU? Which ones and why or why not?
I look up on the wall in my house as I'm writing and see a painting I picked up in Santa Fe two years ago called "Midnight in the Colorado Rockies" done in blue, white and a greenish black. Above it is another sketch which looks almost like a giant postcard entitled "Ruby Beach" from the Hoh Humm Ranch on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State where I visited in 2002. They are just samples of the wild western places I've visited over the years that I've lived in Tucson. Of course Santa Fe is a lot less wild than the backwoods of Washington State where we first came up with the idea that we needed an RV, but still it is the less settled part of America. That's why we have creatures such as the Gila Monster.
Last night we looked up Gila Monsters and found a notice from the Tombstone Gazette in 1881 bragging that someone in Tombstone in the days of Wyatt Earp had found a 35 pound Gila Monster. It was put on display for folks from back East. In other words it created legends even in that time.
I remember in the New Forest in the south of England you had wild ponies along the side of the road. You also had pigs eating acorns. I looked up the New Forest and read about a Wildlife Park and read about Scottish wildcats, ferrets, lynx, wild boar, and a tropical butterfly house. It sounds a lot more pleasant than giant poisonous lizards in your backyard.
Linda wrote: "Of course what I think about the Holocaust is that Himmler and his confederates planned it and used Eastern Europeans to carry out much of it. They must have been trying to play on the tendencies t..."Linda wrote: "How do you envision the future of humanity? Would you think that all the races and ethnic groups are supposed to combine to such an extent that you no longer have white people, black people, etc? B..."
These are both really interesting points I would love to discuss but you will have to bear with me as I am up to my eyes in projects which leave me no spare time (or energy), but I will get to them!
Your projects sound interesting. Do tell.
I am still doing audio recording every day. Remember when I mentioned those audio books? I have finished recording Key to Lawrence Special Edition and 1935 Plot, the first two books of the Edward Ware Thriller Series. Now I am recording Captive at the Berghof. At the very least I am going to sell them on my Edward Ware Thrillers website. I remember you said that audio recording wasn't for you, but I've heard your voice. It would be good for that purpose.
Linda wrote: "I am still doing audio recording every day. Remember when I mentioned those audio books? I have finished recording Key to Lawrence Special Edition and 1935 Plot, the first two books of the Edward W..."I think a younger voice for a man than mine is better.
I also bought some script writing software called Final Draft. I don't have much acquaintance with writing scripts. But at the very least I was thinking of writing up a scene or two from Captive at the Berghof. Then we were going to try to film it ourselves using toy tanks at a distance with WW2 model soldiers and miniatures of Rommel, etc along with two actors speaking the Dora/Edward parts. We have chosen a scene that can be filmed from the point of view of Edward and Dora taking turns staring through the same binoculars at the Battle of El Alamein progressing some distance away. You hear Edward's and Dora's voices. But you don't see them. What am I going to do with the short film? Obviously I will use it as a more elaborate book trailer. Sounds like summer fun in the sand. We've even purchased some sand for the backyard to stand in for the Sahara Desert.
Linda wrote: "Of course what I think about the Holocaust is that Himmler and his confederates planned it and used Eastern Europeans to carry out much of it. They must have been trying to play on the tendencies t..."My position has always been that at the end of the cold war there should be no eastern expansion of NATO and the strategic aim should be for Russia to become part of Europe and a member of the EU.
It was critical to support Russia's first ever attempt to become a democracy and to allow it to share the benefits of the democratic world. Ideally I would have brought Russia in after Poland and then gradually closed the gap between.
Unfortunately neither Bush snr nor Clinton were up to the challenge and the EU was caught up in coping with the idea of one one big united Germany. The very worst option was to expand both NATO and the EU east without bringing Russia along, so once again it felt threatened from the west. But that was the option taken by a bad cohort of inadequate leaders all across the West.
Had Nixon or even Reagan been there I think it would have turned out better. Both could see a little further than their local focus group and that is what historic leadership demands.
Linda wrote: "Your projects sound interesting. Do tell."I have a lot of family things including an upcoming visit here from the Australian branch, a tricky blog schedule as we are in the midst of the EU referendum campaign, plus your primaries, the Trump saga etc, I have my dissertation in book form Turn Left To Power - A Road Map For Labour in final edit and a new project right up your street. It is a new 40,000 word Bonus Addition to be added into the back of Hitler's First Lady which I have to write detailing my upbringing in a family of Nazi secrets and how I uncovered them.
Linda wrote: "I also bought some script writing software called Final Draft. I don't have much acquaintance with writing scripts. But at the very least I was thinking of writing up a scene or two from Captive at..."Just a caution. I know that in the US the first Battle of El Alemein is somehow regarded as a milestone, but in GB there are two great iconic battles which are national treasures from WWII. The first is the Battle of Britain and the second is Montgomery's Battle of El Alemein. Church bells were rung all across the land and Churchill made a great speech about it 'being the end of the beginning'
The firs battle was seen as a failure because all we did was stop Rommel and Auchinleck was fired and his career ended. I am not sure which battle you are referring to so you may already have it correct. If you intend to sell any copies on this side of the Atlantic you must call it the FIRST battle of Alemein (if it is), otherwise you will have Liverpool all over again only worse.
It would be like me writing about Gettysburg as a Confederate victory, although at a certain level it was.
Just helpful advice intended. I know American interpretation is different, but your hero is English!
What would I use to film it with? I do have my trusty Canon SLR camera. I would have to use that affixed to a tripod, of course. That would have to do the trick. I don’t own a high powered movie camera. I do own a zoom lens.That might be all I need.
Linda wrote: "What would I use to film it with? I do have my trusty Canon SLR camera. I would have to use that affixed to a tripod, of course. That would have to do the trick. I don’t own a high powered movie ca..."Oh i am sure the Cannon SLR would be fine. I suspect your iPad may be even better.
You say that a younger voice than yours is better. Can you really tell age by a voice? I haven't noticed that. Your voice sounds fine. You should do an audio recording of Hitler's First Lady. Maybe you could put it on Audible.
How could Russia become a member of the EU? Isn't it too big? And why would Russia accept the euro as currency? Granted it's better than the Russian ruble which nobody in Russia takes seriously. Lots of Russians keep foreign currency in banks abroad. The Russian translator we know never gets paid from banks located in Russia. Instead he gets paid from banks in Cyprus and places like that. But there are political considerations, too. Russia thinks the EU is the new German empire.
Are you proposing that Germany not be reunited? That really doesn't sound right! As it is, Germany still wants to expand East. It still wants Germans to live in those territories that it lost during the war. Not that Germany openly admits this, mind you. But actions speak louder than words. You can hear Germans talking about it. Even my friend Gertrude in Austria thinks like this. She likes to vacation in the Czech Republic and talks about how people like her used to live there. She even wishes the Sud Tyrol would become part of Austria again, and that was lost in WW1!I just bought a 2000 year commemorative stamp for the Varruschlacht from 2009 when I didn't even know about it. Germany issued it. Angela Merkel said that Germans nowadays didn't need German nationalist thinking anymore but quietly they issued the stamp anyway and she actually went to visit the site of the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest. We have a photo of her standing next to Roman legionaries at the visitors center.
Why do you think an iPad would be better than an SLR camera on a tripod? As far as I can tell the iPad doesn't have a zoom. It is also hard to hold when you are taking picture unless you are using is as a scanner and aiming it directly down at a table top. Maybe if I put sand on top of a table and somehow built a border to contain it and I filmed directly down it might work.
Linda wrote: "Are you proposing that Germany not be reunited? That really doesn't sound right! As it is, Germany still wants to expand East. It still wants Germans to live in those territories that it lost durin..."No I am not proposing Germany should not be reunited, but I think its reunification so occupied Europe with the failed idea of the EU Constitution and the introduction of the Euro that it really did not work out what the plan should be for the old Soviet block states.
There was something of a triumphalist mood in Washington which celebrated its Cold War victory but did not think about the peace.
Anyway it looks on the cards that Britain may vote to leave. The outs have been moving steadily up in the polls and are now neck and neck. Obama is due here next week.
Linda wrote: "Why do you think an iPad would be better than an SLR camera on a tripod? As far as I can tell the iPad doesn't have a zoom. It is also hard to hold when you are taking picture unless you are using ..."It takes very good videos and pictures, but in your case if you want a set up camera on a tripod it would be no good at all.
Linda wrote: "How could Russia become a member of the EU? Isn't it too big? And why would Russia accept the euro as currency? Granted it's better than the Russian ruble which nobody in Russia takes seriously. Lo..."The Russia we deal with is European. It supplies most of Europe's gas and has come to Europe's rescue each time there is trouble. But it would not be possible on the kind of federated EU now unfolding which so much of Britain is against. It would have been possible in the nineties as part of the deal which allowed the reunification of Germany. You would have had a bigger EU but less dominated by Germany with a greater emphasis on trade and less on structures and politics.
When is the upcoming visit from the Australian branch? Is it coming up in a few weeks? The Road Map for Labour sounds interesting. And your add on Afterword for Hitler's First Lady sounds just like what I once advised you to do. In fact, I was just thinking about it again a couple of days ago when you recounted the saga about the leopard in Africa. It made me remember the beginning of Hitler's First Lady.
My battle of El Alamein is certainly not an American interpretation of the event. Americans didn't really participate. It was a British show, and yes I mean the first part of the battle before Montgomery when you had the Auk. I think the event was underrated. I don't know why the Auk was "sacked" as you British say. He should not have been. He did turn Rommel away, which was a big to do at the time. The lead up to it seemed very dramatic with Rommel causing the "Flap" where all the British were fleeing from Cairo. The army was even burning papers. Lines formed in the streets when everyone was withdrawing money from the bank. Even the British Navy sailed away! I could hardly believe it. P.S. If the Auk was sacked in my version you could interpret the reason being that Edward was the one coming up with the battle plan to deflect Rommel instead of the Auk. P.S.S. After the work of Edward and the Auk it made the job Montgomery had to do all that much easier. For heavens sake, what if he had not succeeded!!!! Then Montgomery would probably have not had a chance to appear to finish the job. The British would have been pushed out of North Africa all together.
I doubt if it would be Liverpool all over again. Those people were a bunch of ignorant louts doing circus acts in the harbor area. People who are interested in history are a different group.
I think the "plan" for the old Soviet block states has always been to prop them up and keep them in power so that America and Britain don't inherit all of Eastern Europe. They remember WW1 and how it started in the East and how the East threatened all of Western Europe and frankly want to keep it far at bay. The popular opinion in America doesn't support doing anything more for Russia. They think of them as a bunch of Communists. In fact, it is the one exception to the rule that it isn't politically correct to criticize national origins. It is perfectly acceptable to criticize Russians openly and make negative remarks about the country. I think somebody ought to impose borders on the country that are defensible. But that would be a big, big job that no one wants to undertake.
This is what I was thinking of dramatizing as a start:Edward and Dora talk to each other looking through the binoculars at the scene unfolding in front of them. You never see them. You just hear their voices while you watch the tanks.
Dora rushed up to her husband and Leopold. “I couldn’t find the map anywhere. The Hitler Special’s missing, too.”
Edward and Leopold exchanged stunned looks.
“I remember hearing a noise in the tent last night. Did Helga’s vandals steal them? Does Rommel have the map?” Dora wondered.
Edward sighed, “If he does, it’s too late to worry about it now. The battle’s begun.” He turned toward his troops and shouted, “Fire! Give them everything you've got.”
The commander of each artillery piece gave an order. He had an assistant to sight the gun. The ammunition handler brought the ammo up from the rear. The layer put the shell into the breech. The loader pushed it into the gun. The breech operator made sure that the shell was rammed home and the breech was put back in place. He fired.
The 25-pounders all along the ridge opened up on the German troops, creating a thunderous, deafening roar. Dora clapped her hands over her ears. She could see beyond the shields erected over each gun far out into the desert. Shells were landing barely within the range of her vision. She trained her binoculars over there.
The shells blew up the ground, landing around what she supposed must be the German 90th Light Motorized Division. She zoomed in on the insignia on a half-track. It showed a palm tree with a swastika and flag.
The fire increased. Sand and dust exploded up into the air in great columns fifty feet high, forming clouds that covered the ground, decreasing visibility. The dry earth became more pitted and scarred. Large, black trenches opened up like a trap for the unwary. German soldiers from the 90th Light tripped and plummeted into them. They were swallowed alive.
The German trucks and Zugmaschinen didn’t fare any better. They were going nowhere. Their tires were stuck in the soft sand. It had suddenly appeared where the expertly forged Lawrence map had assured Rommel it didn’t exist. Tires spun and spun. Crews got out to try to push them free. It did no good as their own feet sank deeper into the treacherous ground.
Dora trained her binoculars on the far distance. Two German officers were stopped in their vehicle. Their tires were spinning and sinking down into the soft sand. They couldn’t advance on foot. Shells were raining down upon them. There was too much swirling dust. Sand hung over the desert in big, black clouds, combined with bursts of fire.
When the smoke cleared, Dora caught sight of two figures hugging the ground. To judge by their uniforms and insignia, by what she’d glimpsed of their statures, ages, hair color, and more, they looked like the same two German generals she’d met two nights ago near Mersa Matruh --- Bayerlein and Rommel!
She tapped her husband on the shoulder.
He turned, and she whispered in his ear.
“Where?”
She pointed him in the right direction.
He used his field glasses to focus in on the site. Edward was impressed. “It looks a lot like them, doesn't it?”
Dora observed, “They obviously don’t have your missing map. They can’t tell where the soft sand is and where it isn’t.”
Edward smiled with satisfaction, “Perhaps ordinary Bedouin thieves took the map and the Hitler gun without knowing anything about them.”
“Maybe so, but you look as if you don’t really need the map,” Dora stated flatly.
“I had plenty of time to study it last night before it disappeared,” Edward admitted.
Dora crossed her fingers as the battle unfolded in front of them, “You’re really carrying the day.”
“With a little help from my friends -- you, Churchill, and Lawrence, of course. Only this time it's soft sand, not a narrow passageway like the Siq at the Battle of Petra,” Edward explained. “We’ve deceived Rommel with Lawrence's forged map. That's no easy thing to do. The only question is whether the Desert Fox will push on.”
“Under this kind of fire?” Dora exclaimed. “Through all that soft sand?”
He looked at her meaningfully. “He's a marvel of a general. He's taken everything that Lawrence thought about mobile units in the desert, surprise, and offense as the best defense, and put it into his own brand of Blitzkrieg warfare. He doesn't believe in giving up. That’s why giving him the real Lawrence map of the Western Desert --- letting him know where the firm sand is and isn’t --- would be like pouring gasoline on a wildfire. There would be no stopping him then.”
“Yes, I guess that’s the problem,” Dora agreed. “We still have to keep the real map from Rommel. That’s an impossible task. We don’t have it anymore.”
“We’ve got to find it,” Edward warned. “Or Rommel will discover how to skirt around the soft sand and push us right off Ruweisat Ridge.”
Why do you think Gettysburg was a Confederate victory? This I would like to hear.
If the current occupant of the White House is coming to Britain for a visit, call in the guards and watch out!!! Hopefully this will be his very last visit. You will never have to see him again.
Linda wrote: "Why do you think Gettysburg was a Confederate victory? This I would like to hear."I don't think that it was a Confederate victory, but at the same time it was not the Union success history has made it. Although Lee's order to Picket to charge the Union centre was a disaster, the Union command considered itself too damaged to counter attack. So after waiting a day, Lee withdrew intact with all his wagons, forces, guns and ammunition. It was a cavalcade eleven miles long.
A proper victory would have required a Union attack on Lee's weakened army, which destroyed it as a fighting force.There was enough Union muscle to do it. That is what Lee would have done if he commanded the Union or what Grant would have done if had had command at Gettysburg.
It would have ended the war, because the next day Vicksburg fell to Grant. That was a strategic disaster for the Confederacy and effectively cut it in two, It would not have been able to survive the simultaneous destruction of Lee. In the event the war went on for nearly a further two years with terrible slaughter.
Lincoln was furious with Meade and brought Grant back from the Mississippi to take overall command and Grant put himself above Meade as C-in-C of the Army of the Potomac. He put Sherman in charge of his old command and Sherman drove first on Atlanta and then from there to the sea at Savannah, burning every farm and crop in a swathe sixty miles wide in the process. This was the advent of total war.
So Gettysburg was a huge lost opportunity for the Union. Maybe that is why it has been turned into its greatest victory.
Linda wrote: "If the current occupant of the White House is coming to Britain for a visit, call in the guards and watch out!!! Hopefully this will be his very last visit. You will never have to see him again."Obama is hugely popular in the UK. Not Bush 2. He cannot show his face.
It would be impossible to have an EU which isn't dominated by Germany. Germany is the glue of the Continent and the lead nation of the Continent with the biggest economy of all. Russia doesn't belong in the EU which I once heard an EU official call "the United States of Europe". Russia doesn't come to anybody's rescue. They tend to create trouble most of the time by getting themselves involved in foreign situations which they can't handle. Their army isn't that good. Nor are they united enough. Putin presents a front. Behind him stand an oligarchy of power and wealth who are constantly trying to do each other in. Russia could easily dissolve into anarchy if we didn't prop it up.
