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[Sethomas]

Dear Ranxer:

On behalf of the "left of center" community and proponents of the English language, I would like to say "no thank you." We feel we will get along just fine without your hyperbolic dissertations. Perhaps we will miss your mastery of the "stream of consciousness" style, but I would hate to exhaust you any further.
-Seth Thomas Pace
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GA, remember "Shock and Awe"? We were crying that there would be a horrendous number of casualties for very good reason. I wasn't posting at the time, but as suspense was building I was appalled by the media's failure (as far as I witnessed) to explain why such a strategy would be particularly deadly. In a regular spaced-out strafing of a city, a bomb takes out a building and the laws of physics cause oxygen to rush in from all sides via displacement. In a raid such as that proposed by Shock and Awe, all the air is depleted of oxygen simultaneously and thus displacement has to come from higher in the atmosphere, which can take several hours. In that period of time, people in hundreds of city blocks that may have not even been bombed would asphyxiate. Perhaps not everyone, but the elderly, young, and obese would be at particular risk.

If that sounds far-fetched, oxygen depletion is what caused such a high civilian casualty rate in Dresden. Due to the gravity of the atomic bomb droppings at the end of the war, most people completely overlook that there were months of fire bombing campaigns over Tokyo. Some historians have argued that as many as a million civilians died by asphyxiation in those raids.

I will be the first to say that it's an absolute blessing that Shock and Awe never happened. But that doesn't come to any real consolation for the fact that over 3,000 people were killed utterly without purpose.