http://www.geocities.com/calvinnason/Oktober_Guard_Headquarters.html
(blinks)
(wipes monitor)
(blows nose)
(discards kleenex)
Ooookay, Spellbound. I admit defeat. That was TOO good, and wickedly funny. I can see the look on the old boy’s face now, and my version’s probably better than the one YOU saw.
(snicker)
I hate this idea that man cannot get socialism to work because he is not good enough for it.
Socialism cannot, and will not work because it is an inherently unjust system that forcibly takes from one group and gives, unearned, to another. Everyone becomes a parasite of everyone else as morality is turned on its head and the good and capable are punished for being good and capable.
Well, yes. And this is different from our current system HOW? Nobody ever asked ME whether or not I felt like paying taxes, or how much I thought I owed, or where I thought the tax money should go.
There IS no fair way to take money or stuff or whatever away from one person and give it to another. The best we can do is write it all off as the cost of doing business. At least representative democracy offers me the possibility of becoming rich some day.
And then going on eBay and finding a GI Joe Adventure Team Headquarters Playset.
And then using the Internet to hunt down Rocky Belicec so I can shove the thing down his throat…
Wang Ka, you should teach political science.
Teach political science?
In the PUBLIC SCHOOLS?
(rotflmao)
Shows you how different I was. I played with Legos. I built big models of battleships from the red and black ones and re-enacted the First World War in my bathtub.
splash splash
“Admiral Beatty, column turn hard to starboard!”
splash boom
“They’ve sunk the Queen Mary! All guns open fire!”
splash splash splash
bang bang
“MICHAEL! STOP SOAKING THE FLOOR!”
“Sorry mom.”
…
*splash splash splash boom
"Take that you German dogs! I sank your flagship! Ha ha! Jellicoe to the rescue!
splash splash splash boom*
Actually, I told a lie. The Royal Navy got the Lego ships (Anglophile that I am) and the Germans got the old Flexi-blocks. Which of course were harder to sink since the German ships were solid, I had to be content with having them break apart rather than sink like the Lego ships would.
Despite his generally nonviolent tendencies, why does this make me think of Linus Van Pelt so very much? 
Can you tell my father’s a naval officer?
So you are saying that the good and capable should be rewarded? Then by golly I guess that you are against capitalism also then! Or are you saying that being good and capable of fraud, abuse of monopolies, treating workers as a discardable commodity, and abuse of the environment are what we should reward people for?
Capitalism does not generally reward the good and capable citizen, but rather those good and capable of working the system. And we are taught from a young age that people and resources are disposable in pursuit of this goal. That was why I never had an action figure. An action figure was like a valued employee that you had to care for and treat well. 2" plastic soldiers for my neighborhood.
Ricky across the street had the brown army men, I had the green. The field of battle was the empty lot with the sandy spot. Oh the horrors and atrocities committed in that war by bloodthirsty 8 year olds. Years later you would still find half melted soldiers who had refused to talk, still wired to the sharp and rusty sparkler wire. On the way to the emergency room for the tetanus shot we would relive the glorious battles.
Tales of valiant soldiers melted by Ricky’s giant flamethrowing war machine known as The HairSpray of DOOM. Many the times I buried my men cursing my Mom for not having long hair. Until Ricky ignited my Secret Defense… A moat of gasoline. Ricky’s Mom seemed to hide the hairspray after that and the gas for the mower was kept locked, even though we inisted that the blisters on our hand were healing nicely.
Yes, we were generals concerned only with winning the battle, environment and casualties be damned. Not gonna get that playing with Action figures. Ah, we were good capitalists back then.
Well, duh.
To swipe an analogy used elsewhere, the INGREDIENTS for an apple pie are WORTH LESS than an apple pie.
Why? Because someone had to make the damn pie.
A pie made by me is WORTH LESS than a pie made by a Cordon Bleu pastry chef.
Why? Because he spent years learning how to make pies. Me, I’m just reading aloud out of the Betty Crocker Cookbook. Plainly, he might know a thing or two that I don’t.
The bottom line is this: value is not absolute. A thing is worth what people will pay for it. A service is worth X, with X being the skill involved in performing the service, as modified by the sheer number of competitors performing the same service.
You can buy a pie lots of places, but there ain’t THAT many Cordon Bleu pastry chefs.
Socialism, on the other hand, tends to assume that your pie is the same as mine, assuming identical ingredients.
Consequently, why would anyone want to become a Cordon Bleu Pastry Chef, when all you’re going to be allowed to make, moneywise, is the same money I make at the friggin’ bake sale?
And even in variations of socialism that do NOT assume that your pie equals my pie, you aren’t paid by the level of your skill and ability. You are simply paid what someone else thinks you need.
Consequently, again, why bother going to Cordon Bleu school? Just get a Betty Crocker Cook Book.
But as to army men… ah, those were the days. A bag of army men cost 59 cents at the dime store, and you got a LOT of them. One of the greatest, most memorable experiences of my childhood was the time we re-enacted the entire invasion of Normandy in a sandy lot near a chum’s house, using a horde of plastic army men… and a large bag of fireworks.
I mean, we blew our combined allowance for the WEEK on the stuff, and only a handful of army men survived… but mighod, it was worth it. There is an ugly beauty in dropping a Black Cat into a foxhole with a little green army man, and watching him be blasted into moist green confetti…
Regrettably, we were young and ignorant. Durned if I knew who led the battle of Normandy, so we couldn’t exactly blow him up.
But I’ll tell you, those Nazi bastards had some serious artillery on their side…
Almost as bad as Legos getting sucked down the drain. I lost more simulated battleship guns that way… sigh:
With our gang, army men also had about a twenty minute lifespan, as the store we bought them at sold, fairly cheaply, smoke bombs. Those giant sulfur matchheads with a fuse stuck in t’end?
Firecrackers were the weapon of choice, I grant you. But there was a special ambiance that sulfur stinking smoke, in thick billowing clouds, brought to a battlefield. Plus, the smoke was akin to a blowtorch, temperature-wise, at the point where it exited the little colored ball.
So you’d stuff one under a tank, light the fuse, and watch the thing undergo a slow motion napalm strike, if you’d planted the smoke bomb just so. If not, you still got the show, but it was more like a tactical particle weapon strike, as a hole burned instantly through some upper surface of the tank, smoke gushing out in hollywood quality clouds, and all the while the tank was slowly melting inwards towards that point, looking like it was being eaten by a pocket singularity.
And once you had that stage set, you of course started setting off the individual firecracker land mines/artillery rounds.
War is hell, gentlemen.
Now now Wang-Ka. I was not arguing that Socialism was workable. Simply that the argument given byMuab’Dib was very much at odds with the realities of society. The whole Socialism-bad-punishes-good-and-capable thing. If your goal is rewarding the good and capable, you better find yourself an imaginary planet. Rewards currently go to those who just happen to have been in a position to take advantage of them.
Do wealthy heirs earn their inheritance simply by virtue of being born? Do models deserve more money than ugly people simply because they have a nice face? Are Rocket Scientists inherently more deserving of a good income simply because they were born smart, their family instilled the value of education, they had the money to go to school, and they got lucky in a job interview? Is a poor child born in the ghetto to a drug addicted Mom in a failed school inherently not deserving of a comfortable life because he has nowhere to turn for help?
So I reject Muad’Dib’s argument about Socialism being inherently bad. It seems no worse than Capitalism. However, I agree that socialism is not workable in the real world. All for one and one for all works only in small groups where everyone can be held immediately socially accountable for slacking off. Evolution has shown us that if you can get someone else to do your work, you have more time to drink beer and find a mate.
And I was always jealous of my friend Todd who had GI Joe with the Kung Fu Grip.
Well, no, BD, I didn’t think you were arguing in FAVOR of. And I meant no offense by my response; sorry if I came across a little stiff. You sounded to me like you were interested in discussing the issue, that’s all.
And while smoke bombs had their place, I never quite was all that hot about them on the battlefield. Sure, I liked them, but those big thick clouds of colored smoke tended to attract unwanted parental supervision (“hey, is something on fire?”)
M-80s and Black Cats, on the other hand, do make noise, but no one thought much about this in the tiny li’l Texas town where I grew up. I don’t know why. I must have destroyed about thirty of the neighbors’ trash cans by lighting M-80s, and then upending the can over them before they exploded, which tended to cause the can to rupture – if you were lucky, you’d get it to do MULTIPLE ruptures, along the fluting along the sides, and you’d get something that looked like a galvanized steel hula skirt.
Actually, now that I think about it, that may be why fireworks regulations began to pop up, about the time I entered my teens.
…but while I can’t criticize your “fog of war,” there was just no substitute, for me, for blasting the little green blighters out of their foxholes. Especially since, if you were lucky, you’d just blow one of them in half, and he could crawl, agonizedly, back to his lines, gasp out a proper “give 'em hell” speech, and expire, inspiring his little plastic comrades to finally regroup for a final, mad rush against the Nazi artillery positions…
GI Joe’s Kung Fu Grip was a kick, wasn’t it? One of my Joes was an Original Series Joe, the old early 1960s model, whose hard plastic molded hands wouldn’t actually HOLD anything – they kind of looked like he was holding his thumb and index finger apart to show how small something was, or as if he was doing that "world’s smallest violin, playing “My Heart Bleeds For You,” gimmick, or whatever. Kung Fu Grip Joes, on the other hand, could hold onto ANYTHING, or slide down the clothesline. They were great… at least, until their little rubber fingers broke off…
Michael Ellis. Of course, the Queen Mary wasn’t commissioned until AFTER WWI. Sheesh, people!
I knew a girl who used to play with the little GI Joes and flush them down the toilet-they’d come back up in the filter, according to her.
See, my Barbies were rampant man haters, who used Ken as their sex slave. Ken never had any clothes-and Barbie had entire trunks full. Of course, Barbie had to share Ken with Midge and the Other Barbies, and occassionally Teen Skipper, so I don’t know who got the better deal…hmmmm…
Guinastasia, this tells me much more about you than I had any right to know…
And you had toilets with filters? You mean, like a swimming pool, or something?
Honestly.
Still, what do you expect from a girl? I mean, how much do women know about First World War Battlecrusiers. Feh! 
Yeah, the kiddie sized explosives were the best bit. Can’t argue that. The smoke bombs were, oh, let’s say an appetizer, to the main course.
But parental supervision was pretty non-existant in the summer months, in our nieghborhood, so we got away with pretty much anything that didn’t leave too much evidence to be covered up by 5 or 5:30 in the PM.
Never did go in for garbage can demolitions m’self, but one guy I ran with had a thing for M-80s in mailboxes. This was the same guy who, years later, became fond of throwing lit road flares from the back of a speeding pickup truck. Last time he pulled that stunt (at least, that I’m aware of, as we parted ways pretty much at the end of the night in question) was on a night we were ‘evading arrest and detention’ with a half consumed case of illegal beer in the truck.
His rationale was that the cop would have to stop and put out the fire, and we’d get away. Logic was never his strong point.