The Old Hack

...that would explain a lot.

Please! Children might be reading this! Keep your posts safe for work, or at least use the spoiler option so readers can get a little warning!

Eep? ...I think Tedd had better get cracking on making those devices that can help protect ordinary people from magic. And then have them mass produced.

Palpatine said that an entire legion of his finest stormtroopers were lying in ambush down there. My own headcanon is that some bureaucratic screwup sent that legion to the other end of the galaxy by mistake. Subsequently some terrified bureaucrat dispatched a couple battalions of green recruits barely able to tell their left feet from their right in their place, hoping no-one would notice the difference.

It would be a bit like an alien race making contact with us but the only human they got to interact with would be Jack Black on a perpetual sugar high. I think you are right. Especially when one considers that during the initial phases of WW1, the troops actually moved fairly rapidly. It wasn't until the battle of the Marne that things really bogged down, and by then they stayed bogged. This was actually what the Gungans had planned until Amidala talked them into helping the humans. She offered a high-risk plan with a possible quick win as well as a more permanent alliance that the Gungans (and humans) would both profit from. But as you say, if this had not happened, the Trade Federation could still have spent forever trying to pacify the Gungans without succeeding. In fact, even if the plan had failed, I suspect that enough Gungans would have escaped to still make Naboo a very bad bargain for the Trade Federation. Since they are all about profit, it is quite conceivable that they could turn Naboo into such a bad deal for the Federation that they might eventually have departed out of sheer despair at the constant red figures that would be all they ever got out of the planet. By then, the human population might well have been reduced to almost nothing but the Gungans could have cared less. Absolutely. They are fairy tales of heroic struggles, not actual attempts to describe a war of conquest. Oddly enough, the cartoon series "Rebels" does a very good job of portraying the occupied planet of Lothal and how life there would be, including how resistance gradually spread and the Empire clamping harder and harder down. Eventually Thrawn has the planet in an iron grip. But by then the Empire is committing so massive resources there compared to what they had there at first that from the viewpoint of an asymmetric warfare historian the resistance could be viewed as a resounding success in draining effort and tying resources down. All true. It is just that... their weaponry was too primitive and the Ewoks themselves kind of runty. Also, those stormtroopers were supposedly elite units. Given that apart from what they captured the Ewoks only had muscle powered weapons it just doesn't seem convincing. Originally the plan was to have the residents be wookiees. If they had stuck to that, the battle would have been far more believable to me. Harry Turtledove's 'Worldwar' series postulated aliens invading Earth during WW2. They possessed superior weapons and tanks but the human opposition had numbers and the ability to not only replace losses but rapidly improve on their technology. Worst of all, these aliens had only ever conquered two other planets and neither had possessed technology worth speaking of, and they had not waged war among themselves for many centuries... so their doctrine had just not kept up with their technological advances. Their poor doctrine in particular hurt them badly when fighting humans. Also, the Empire believed in cheap fighters in large numbers. The basic TIE did not even have shields but relied on maneuverability to not get hit. Add in swarm tactics and they became a force to be reckoned with. The Rebels did not have as many pilots or ships but what they did have was a better resource proportion of pilot to fighter. As a result they had the X-Wing which individually was superior to the basic TIE and probably at least the equal of the TIE Interceptor. The Rebels could only be very, very relieved that neither the TIE Advanced nor Defender saw production in any large numbers. I also suspect the shield requires considerable power or why else would it have been down initially when the Empire arrived at Hoth? Once it was up it could repel 'any bombardment' but it probably took power from almost everything else the Rebels had. In the season 3 finale of 'Rebels' Thrawn did manage to nearly destroy the Rebel base shield with continued bombardment but he broke off before annihilation so he could capture the leadership. Mind you, that was a jury-rigged shield generator they had scrounged from battle wreckage dating to the Clone Wars so was probably neither current nor performing at optimum capacity, and possibly not even intended to last against large scale orbital bombardment to begin with. A single battleship it might have been able to hold off for a while, but Thrawn had an entire fleet.

A very good point. I can certainly accept this as a hypothesis; it seems sound to me.

The horrible thing is, I feel the Gungans in general (not including Jar-Jar) are just so much better than the Ewoks. Yes, they are comparatively primitive but their weaponry makes sense. Instead of using stone age weaponry it is more like a late 19th century army (with an extremely tough defensive position) facing a WW2 army. Admittedly they get cut to shreds and rout as soon as their big shields collapse but at least that seems reasonable. In fact, the Gungans could potentially be far more dangerous to the Trade Federation if they had been able to fight them in wetlands, marsh or even on the shore of a lake. It is only because they are forced to go on the offensive to draw the Trade Federation forces out that they end up fighting on an open plain where the droids had all the advantage.

http://www.egscomics.com/index.php?id=2454

It is possible, of course. But Magic still cared enough to tell Tedd that Pandora had reset so as to remember him as family. Though this might just have been relating what it saw as 'possibly pertinent information', or some similar clinical reason.

"Why does gravity hate me?"

I am sure she had weighty reasons.

My poor old Burmese Catso was chronically confused. He was such a good kitty but he had this constant expression that made him look terminally baffled. He would do things like fall off the bed while shifting position and then sit on the floor like, "I am almost completely sure that I did not mean to do that but somehow this happened anyway. Why?"

Are they at least making you work the graveyard shift? You do have a lot of practice with ancient tombs.

You deserved that for your wanton abuse of phonetics.

I find it astonishing that someone with as much experience with cats as you have could ever make a certain statement about where a cat can and cannot go. If it decides to go to the top of the podium, there is where it will be.

I am informed that my conception of a mistranslation in this instance may itself have been shaped by a political argument. Thus I fear that this postulate of mine is suspect given that this was something I read years ago in sources no longer readily available to me. Given that it most certainly has also been affected by erosion of my memories and how I wanted the argument to be, I am afraid I have to retract it.

Precisely. To be fair to Göring, much as I hate to waste any effort on that, he was under similar pressure from Hitler. Indeed. As it should be in any organisation which hopes to survive for any length of time.

Well... kinda sorta. In a 'tell the boss what he wants to hear' way this was actually pretty close to what actually happened. Luftwaffe's own intelligence officers felt under pressure to deliver optimistic results to Göring so they continually reported that the RAF was buckling under the pressure and that with just a little more effort could be made to completely collapse. This resulted in Göring maintaining what was most of the time a fruitless effort and not noticing a brief window of time (when the Luftwaffe was hitting Fighter Command's airfields) where it was actually true. It ended up with Göring chasing a chimaera of victory that constantly moved just a little further away from him, much like that classic cartoon of a donkey induced to chase a carrot dangling from a stick.

Now this is a real fan of the winter olympics.

Which was codswallop and just an example of bad translation. In the original the verse spoke of a poisoner, not a witch. I daresay there is an important difference. If anyone here feels like reading an interesting article about how translation errors or deliberate mistranslation can create a world of trouble for a holy text, I highly recommend this article.

As I stated, it was unintentionally. It was more like a tragedy of errors than anything else. But the Luftwaffe did get derailed from a winning strategy to a losing one. I am actually not sure. Anyway, I was being snide more than anything else. Rather like how Grandpa Simpson during his time as a combat engineer in the US Army received the Cross of Iron for the number of casualties his incompetence caused his own side. Still, you might have a point. Perhaps a special medal should be created just for him. Something like the Deleterious Flying Cross.

Come to think of it, the Luftwaffe did get 'lured' during the Battle of Britain, albeit unintentionally. Luftwaffe had switched from bombing towns and factories to striking at the airfields of Fighter Command, which was in fact a winning strategy and was pushing the RAF to near desperation. That was when one of Luftwaffe's bombers accidentally dropped its bombs on an outlying area of London itself, something Hitler had expressly forbidden as he was worried about provoking the British into striking at Berlin. Fortunately for this strategy, Winston Churchill was a calm and very patient man who in no way believed in responding to force with ten times as much force or that disproportionate retribution was the best retribution. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA! ...no, sorry, I couldn't write that with a straight face. Anyway, the outraged Churchill ordered a long range night bombing raid on Berlin the very next night. A furious Hitler called Göring in front of him and yanked several of his medals off (err no, wait, that was The Great Dictator by Charlie Chaplin) and the humiliated Göring decided to display his antigenius by ordering the entire offensive to switch to bombing London. He did this just as the airfield strategy was beginning to succeed and the RAF breathed a huge sigh of relief as the pressure came off. Admittedly the bombing raids did some damage to London but at least the RAF managed to survive. Göring was really an amazing man. He saved England at least twice by aborting highly effective strategies in favour of less effective ones (the first time was when he decided it wasn't 'worth the bother' to make concerted attacks on Dowding's radar stations) and he kept bleeding his Luftwaffe white in the skies above England long past the point where more sensible men might have called the whole thing off. I feel it is very unjust that he was never given the Victoria Cross for his efforts.

Not either pursuing the Luftwaffe out of British airspace nor attempting to otherwise interfere with them in German airspace was. The decision to keep as much of the fighting as possible where Britain's own pilots could be recovered but the Germans could not recover theirs most certainly was. And a very wise one, at least until Britain went from air parity to air superiority or better yet air supremacy. They could check out any time they wanted, they just couldn't ever leave.

Oh Lord. At least you found them.

I like the island Manhattan!