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bolverk

Certifiably Surly
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Everything posted by bolverk

  1. The first 6 minutes are worth watching—there are lots of good chuckles about Israel and Iran. The remaining 8 minutes make fun of Trump if you care to stick around for that.
  2. That's helpful for understanding the rationale a little better. Thanks for the context.
  3. I get that as a long-term concern since it's already been discussed quite a bit, but the issue of being invaded with the risk of losing the entire eastern half of the country seems a bit more pressing right now. Again, I don't like giving them too much shit over it, but this is an all-out war.
  4. I really hesitate to criticize Ukraine too much, but this issue has puzzled me.
  5. Ukrainian drone operators are impressive. Boop, boop, boom in the butthole.
  6. This is a good, straightforward assessment of Ukraine's three biggest challenges. All three seem fixable, but it will take time. They also should remind us of all the lost time. Ukraine’s Big Vulnerabilities: Ammunition, Soldiers and Air Defense The shortages add up to a dire situation for Ukraine in the third year of the war, presenting commanders with near impossible choices on how to deploy limited resources. Ukraine’s top military commander has issued a bleak assessment of the army’s positions on the eastern front, saying they have “worsened significantly in recent days.” Russian forces were pushing hard to exploit their growing advantage in manpower and ammunition to break through Ukrainian lines, the commander, Gen. Oleksandr Syrsky, said in a statement over the weekend. “Despite significant losses, the enemy is increasing his efforts by using new units on armored vehicles, thanks to which he periodically achieves tactical gains,” the general said. At the same time, Ukraine’s energy ministry told millions of civilians to charge their power banks, get their generators out of storage and “be ready for any scenario” as Ukrainian power plants are damaged or destroyed in devastating Russian airstrikes. With few critical military supplies flowing into Ukraine from the United States for months, commanders are being forced to make difficult choices over where to deploy limited resources as the toll on civilians grows daily. Even before the disappearance of American assistance — a bill to provide $60 billion in military and other aid may come to a vote in the House of Representatives this week — there was a consensus among Ukrainian commanders and military analysts that the third year of war was going to be extremely difficult. President Volodymyr Zelensky warned again on Monday night that delays in American assistance are deepening the challenges at the front and said the latest information from Ukrainian intelligence suggested that the Kremlin is preparing for some sort of major offensive in late spring or early summer. The three most critical challenges for Ukraine have been evident for months: a lack of ammunition, a shortage of well-trained troops and dwindling air defenses. Now, as Russia intensifies its assaults, each individual issue is compounding the impact of the other vulnerabilities and heightening the risk that Russian forces will push through Ukrainian defenses. Here is a look at the critical challenges Ukraine faces at the moment and how its leaders are trying to mitigate them.
  7. Wordle 1,032 4/6 🟩⬛🟩⬛⬛ 🟩⬛🟩⬛⬛ 🟩⬛🟩🟩🟩 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Connections Puzzle #310 🟦🟦🟦🟦 🟨🟨🟨🟨 🟩🟩🟩🟩 🟪🟪🟪🟪 Daily Quordle 813 4️⃣5️⃣ 6️⃣7️⃣ m-w.com/games/quordle/ ⬜🟨🟨⬜⬜ ⬜🟨🟨⬜⬜ ⬜🟨⬜⬜🟨 ⬜⬜⬜⬜🟨 ⬜⬜🟨⬜⬜ ⬜⬜🟨⬜🟩 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🟩🟨🟩🟨⬜ ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 ⬜⬜🟨⬜🟨 ⬜⬜⬜🟨🟨 ⬜⬜⬜⬜🟩 ⬜⬜⬜⬜🟩 ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜ 🟩⬜⬜⬜⬜ ⬜🟨⬜🟨⬜ ⬜🟨⬜⬜⬜ ⬜🟨⬜🟩⬜ ⬜⬜⬜🟨⬜ 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 ⬜⬜🟨⬜🟩 ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 ClickWord.org Daily 437: 605 points (top 20% 🎊) 12 words: ⚛️⚛️🟪🟪🟪🟪🟥🟧🟨🟩🟩🟩 💪 Best word: 134 points 🔥 Streak: 6 days #ClickWord #ClickWordDaily437
  8. I have no idea how you break it out by who pays taxes or how exactly their taxes are structured there. From what I recall, lots of EU countries depend heavily on VAT taxes, which wouldn't necessarily be based on households. Then, of course, there's income which is. I'm sure @956 Worldwide could help out better with that query than me.
  9. My hunch (hope) is that Iran doesn't hit back if Israel only goes after the proxies, based on Iranian statements so far. Now, if Israel decides to take it to Iran proper, then all bets are off because each will want to hit the other back incrementally harder with every salvo. Israel clearly has the better air defense between the systems we've given them and the US/UK air forces hanging around. Can Israel bet that they know where all the missile sites and nuclear enrichment facilities are? We've already stated we're not going to get involved with hitting Iran, but do we help if Hezbollah or Syria jump into the fray? Are the Russians still hanging around Syria to provide air defense? If so, what kind of assets do they have, and is there a risk of a direct confrontation between us and them in the skies over Syria? At home here and in the EU, are there going to be sleeper cells that get activated? How much of a distraction would that all be in keeping NATO focused on assisting Ukraine, who's already unhappy that we haven't demonstrated air support to them like we just did for Israel? So many questions.
  10. I'd been curious what a potential maximum punishment might look like in NY. At worst, though, he'll likely get probation and some community service. With our luck, his hours served as president would likely count toward meeting. From here: https://www.criminaldefenselawyer.com/resources/criminal-defense/felony-offense/new-york-felony-class.htm
  11. This one might be too "political" for the DT thread. Ukrainians see ‘hypocrisy’ in Western allies’ defense of Israel. For people in eastern Ukraine, where nightly barrages of drones from Russia outpace the military’s overwhelmed air defenses, the response by Western allies to Iran’s aerial assault against Israel this weekend produced uncomfortable comparisons. The militaries of the United States, Britain, France and others stepped in to help Israel defend against the fusillade of more than 300 Iranian drones and missiles, nearly all of which were intercepted. A similar number of aerial weapons are fired at Ukraine on a weekly basis, its officials say, with many of the drones in those attacks designed by Iran and now produced by Russia. Since the start of this year, Russia has fired 1,000 missiles, 2,800 drones and 7,000 guided aerial bombs at Ukraine, according to Ukraine’s permanent representative to the United Nations, Sergiy Kyslytsya. While Washington and other allies have provided Kyiv with some powerful air defense weapons, they have not directly confronted Russian forces, and Ukrainian officials have long argued that the supplied weapons are insufficient to counter the threat from Moscow. In the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, where 1.3 million people live with nightly air raid alarms, many people expressed anger and disappointment over the weekend that Ukraine’s allies, wary of provoking Russia, don’t give it the same protection as they did Israel. “When rockets fly in Israel, the whole world writes about it,” said Amil Nasirov, a 29-year-old singer. “Here, rockets are flying, and we don’t have American bombers that are saving the sky like over Israel.” “It’s very stupid; it’s hypocrisy,” he added. “And it’s like some devaluation of Ukrainian lives.” Ukraine has begged since the outset of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022 for more tools to close its sky to Russian missiles. But the first Patriot missile systems from the United States and Germany — the only proven defense against ballistic missiles — did not arrive until the spring of 2023. Ukraine also pleaded for F-16 fighter jets, which the Biden administration, which must approve any transfers of the American-made planes, long resisted providing them out of concern that Moscow would see it as an escalation. It eventually relented, but Ukrainian pilots are still training on the systems and they are not expected to fly in the skies above Ukraine until this summer. Ukrainian officials noted the role that fighter jets played in defending Israel as a sign of their importance in air defense. President Volodymyr Zelensky said the response to the Iranian attack was clear evidence that “the world has everything necessary to stop any missiles, Shahed drones, and other forms of terror,” referring to the Iranian-made attack drones that have been a large part of Russia’s arsenal. “The whole world sees what real defense is. It sees that it is feasible. And the whole world saw that Israel was not alone in this defense — the threat in the sky was also being eliminated by its allies,” Mr. Zelensky said in his latest nightly address. Britain’s foreign secretary, David Cameron, said on Monday that while his country has been one of the staunchest military supporters of Ukraine — training thousands of troops and providing tanks and other advanced weapons — Britain could not shoot down Russian drones over Ukraine because it could inflame a wider war in Europe. “If you want to avoid an escalation in terms of a wider European war, I think the one thing you do need to avoid is NATO troops directly engaging Russian troops,” Mr. Cameron told Britain’s LBC radio station. “That would be a danger of escalation.” The United States remains the chief supplier of the munitions for Ukraine’s best air defense systems. But the last time Congress approved military aid for Ukraine was in October. In the intervening months, Ukraine’s air defenses have been critically depleted, while Russia has greater success in using air power to advance on the front line, attack Ukraine’s energy grid and inflict more casualties against civilians. At least 126 people were killed and 478 more were injured in Russian strikes in March, a 20 percent increase compared with the previous month, according to the United Nations.
  12. Food for thought on some Israeli options Israel’s choices in responding to Iran’s attack all come with risks. As Israel’s leaders continued on Monday to mull a possible response to the massive Iranian aerial attack over the weekend, they faced several choices, all of which carry their own risks. In the past, Israel has hit back hard when its enemies attacked, hoping to discourage further hostilities. A cross-border raid in 2006 by Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Lebanese group, kicked off a devastating monthlong war, and rocket barrages fired by armed groups out of Gaza have escalated into days of heavy fighting and destruction. But this time Israel is juggling a host of conflicting interests, as well as some new factors. If it does respond to the unprecedented Iranian attack — itself carried out in retaliation for a strike on an Iranian Embassy building in Syria that killed top commanders in Iran’s armed forces — Israel must weigh whether to do so in proportion to the actual results of the Iranian assault, which was largely blocked by air defenses and caused little damage, or to consider what could have happened if more than 300 drones and missiles had actually hit Israel. Hard-right members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government are pushing for an immediate and forceful response, saying that the lack of one will further weaken Israel in its enemies’ eyes. Some Israelis see an opportunity to use military strikes to fulfill the longstanding Israeli goal of degrading Iran’s nuclear program. But other Israelis are urging restraint or so-called “strategic patience,” wary, among other things, of taking the nation’s focus away from its war with Hamas in Gaza, the efforts to release its scores of hostages there and its skirmishes with Hezbollah along its northern border, as well as the risk of setting off a broader regional conflict without international support. Analysts say the success of Israel and its allies, led by the United States, in blocking most of the Iranian attack has given Israel the leeway to choose how and when to respond, if at all. “Israel has the apparent legitimacy to attack Iran,” said Yaakov Amidror, a former major general and national security adviser in Israel who is now at the conservative-leaning Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security. “The other option is to say, we achieved what we wanted by eliminating the Al Quds Force commanders in Damascus, the Iranian attack failed, so let’s do what we need to do,” he said — which means finishing the campaign against Hamas in Gaza and investing in preparations to take on Hezbollah in Lebanon. “Both are good options,” he said. “Each has pros and cons. It’s a matter of preference.” Foreign leaders, chief among them President Biden, Israel’s most important supporter, have been pressing for restraint. Mr. Netanyahu has not publicly threatened Iran since the attack ended on Sunday morning. Other Israeli military and political leaders say they want to preserve and strengthen, not jeopardize, the alliance of Western and moderate Arab countries that, for the first time, came together to repel the Iranian attack and defend Israel. The Iranian attack has given Israel a burst of international support after months of censure and opprobrium over the scope of the killing and hunger in Gaza, and some officials say that means Israel should act against Iran only in coordination with its allies. “Israel versus Iran, the world versus Iran,” Benny Gantz, a centrist member of Israel’s war cabinet, said on Sunday, laying out the choices. “The strategic alliance and the regional cooperation system between us has been seriously put to the test, and now is the time for us to strengthen it. We’ll build a regional coalition against the Iranian threat and exact the price from Iran in the manner and at the time right for us.” Israel’s options range from openly striking Iran, symbolically or with full force, to not retaliating at all, a concession that experts say Israel could leverage to encourage further international sanctioning of Iran or the formalization of the anti-Iranian alliance. There is a precedent for doing nothing: During the Gulf War of 1991, as Iraq lobbed Scud missiles at Israeli cities, Yitzhak Shamir, then Israel’s hawkish prime minister, exercised restraint at the urging of the Bush administration to preserve the American-led coalition with friendly Arab states. Israel could also orchestrate some kind of bloodless cyberattack or revert to the ways of its yearslong shadow war with Iran, relying on spy craft and covert actions against Iranian interests, inside or outside Iran, without claiming responsibility for them.
  13. Just to put this into perspective, €4.4 billion / 17.7 million people = €248.29 from every man, woman, and child in the Netherlands. This would be equivalent to the US providing $88.0 billion at today's exchange rate.
  14. I'm fully aware that the admin's policy is that it won't go on offense with Israel. I also fully disagree with your interpretation that this means we're not interested in deterring Iran, that we can't work in conjunction with Israel in that deterrence, or that our support for their defense is "tepid."
  15. This is fucking laughable. We just shot drones and missiles out of the sky before they even reached Israel. These are both statements I strongly disagree with but can't respond to here because that would be CR.
  16. We can keep going back and forth about every fucking thing that's ever happened in the past between the US, Iran, Israel, etc., going to the coup we backed that overturned Iran's duly-elected government and installed an unelected despot 20-some-odd years before them attacking our embassy in Tehran. And, yes, I understand that ever since the hostage crisis, the Islamic Republic of Iran has been the adversary of both the US and Israel. No. fucking. shit. Up to this point, nearly everything that's gone down between Israel and Iran has been conducted through proxies -- very similar to the Cold War the US had with the Soviets. We back groups that fought the USSR, and they back groups that fought us. But what neither of us did was directly and openly attack one another. Right now, we are backing the Ukrainians in their fight against Russia. Would you not expect us to respond if Russia bombed our embassy in Warsaw in retaliation for us helping the Ukrainians out, for example? I don't know if you've been paying attention to any of the threads, but our resident international bros clearly explained last week that embassies are off-limits. When have I suggested we should break any commitments to supporting the defense of Israel?
  17. My country-ass grandma used to have an expression about turkeys being so dumb they'd drown in a rainstorm from looking up and watching it fall.
  18. Did I say Israel SHOULDN'T respond? Whatever they do, I certainly hope it's carefully concise and clearly communicated because I, for one, don't want this to turn into a situation where we have to back the current Israel government on one side while Russia/China are backing Iran on the other in a hot war. At the same time, shit's still going down in Ukraine and tempers continue to flair in the Far East over Taiwan and the South China Sea. Besides, Bibi's got enough on his plate right now, dealing with Hamas, Hezbollah, a humanitarian crisis, and staying the fuck out of jail.
  19. Israel bombed Iran's embassy in Syria, which is its "sovereign territory." You are kidding yourself if you don't think Iran didn't feel obligated to respond in kind. They were, however, very careful in telegraphing and communicating their response, letting both Israel and the US know more or less what would happen. That gave everyone a chance to get ready and go through the motions. We told them where the tolerable limits would be, but that does not mean the US "approved" the attack. All of this was carefully choreographed so that Iran would save a little face without it blowing up in everyone's faces by turning a regional conflict involving Israel and Iran into a wider war involving global players backing each side. Brat, I'd always thought you'd been a history teacher. Maybe I was wrong, because anyone who has studied the start of World War I should know how hot-headed shit can easily spiral out of control without clear communication of intentions and expectations through diplomatic channels. That's how the assassination of Franz Ferdinand by Serbia ended up getting Russia, Germany, France, and Britain into a cauldron of boiling blood.
  20. This is all you can see now without an account. No comments No subsequent posts in a thread No trending topics I guess since I used to have an account or am signed into Google, it still has an option for me to sign in with my Google account even though I disabled my account 6 months ago. You can either provide a Thread Reader link or you'll have to copy/paste each post in the thread if you think it warrants the effort.
  21. This is a good piece on what various Arab countries in the Middle East are trying to do to de-escalate the situation. Free link: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/15/world/middleeast/iran-israel-mideast.html?ugrp=m&unlocked_article_code=1.kk0.In_c.2Isb-hTJ5rmp&smid=url-share
  22. About the bill's author: Fritts attended Liberty University and the University of Tennessee (I guess he didn't actually graduate). On April 5, 2023, just weeks after a deadly school shooting, he voted to move a bill forward to arm teachers. On April 11, 2024, Frits was one of only two house members who voted against bills SB 1917 and HB 2041 that would ban marriage between biological first cousins.
  23. Here she is graduating from USC with her mom and dad.
  24. I never considered the creepy whirring sound those quadcopters would make in further terrorizing you.
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