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berlinerbaer

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Posts posted by berlinerbaer

  1. On 7/24/2023 at 11:58 AM, Longhorn_Fan68 said:

    fuck Israel. it's way past time we stop propping them up. I have never heard a good argument as to why we send them so much money. Key protector if the region? Orly? which recent conflicts have they prevented or stopped? as best as I can tell they only use their military against people who have as much right to be there as they do. they could share, but they don't want to. their bigotry is no more tolerable than the versions we have here at home.

    The Israelis know where the bodies are buried. Careful letting the dog off the leash.

  2. 7 hours ago, The Original Greaser Bob said:

    Best approach is to get into any power conference, hold on, and hope that they can hang on when the next round of realignment takes place.  Lightning will also have to strike in the form of a generational football coach a la Harbaugh and a Phil Knight style alumnus to save the program.

    Being relegated finishes Stanford football off, with very negative implications for all its other sports. 

    Your prognostication applies more to Cal than Stanford.

    Harbaugh/Shaw actually happened and the best Stanford could do was not even fill their own stadium. The Phil Knight option is more realistic but money doesn't matter if the networks don't think people want to watch. They are a disinterested fanbase and there's no changing that. That said, I think it would be possible for a handful of donors to prop the AD up even in the absence of power conference membership, or anyone else caring.

    Cal was selling out its stadium in the mid/late 00s but football reverted back to the mean and couldn't maintain fan interest. A Harbaugh-like coach or major benefactors would both be godsends right now. Maybe we're seeing the latter, but they have to contend with campus politics, a retiring chancellor, and a meek AD. For Cal, I'm afraid it really is power 4 or bust.

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  3. 2 hours ago, Parliament said:

    Mr. Bass talks about the prep work that China is doing like food stocking (18 months of wheat for example) and building coal-fired power plants.  That won't be enough.  Add in the fact their military is unproven, they gotta invade across the ocean and yeah, they'd lose.  

    But there are counterpoints.  Fighting and losing a war might be seen as a "uniting" event for Xi.  Losing a war, badly, would get rid of a buncha excess Chinese males.  We need to be careful not to just look at this from the perspective of western democrats.  For a non-European dictatorship winning/losing can look very different.

    I'm not saying this guy is right or wrong, but we need to listen to the contrarians.  I worry we are not.

    Don't mistake Surly opinion as a microcosm of overall opinion in the West. The real contrarians are the guys like Zeihan. All of our war games show the US losing at least an aircraft carrier. Nobody who matters is downplaying this threat and, if anything, its the China hawks like Bass who hold more sway over actual policymaking.

  4. On 7/3/2023 at 11:46 AM, Schulz2.0 said:

    They monopolized rare earth minerals and other metals by having the government subsidize the industry. That drove the cost so low it put other manufacturers elsewhere out of business. 

    Now that they are cutting supply, costs will go up and new players will come online and ramp up their own production. Won't happen overnight, but China is either going to back track or they will be out of the raw materials market.

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  5. 53 minutes ago, 956 Worldwide said:

    Of those, only the Ka-52 and Mi-35 have any sort of kinetic offensive capability. The others are transport, electronic warfare, and eye in the sky—- what you’d expect in a “keep an eye on this” situation. 
     

    Notably missing from the area— Su-25 and Su-34 attack aircraft that would have made short work of any column driving down a highway. The only aerial hit that’s confirmed is a mistaken rocket attack that hit a bus.

    Of all the things I’m sure of, I am sure there was never a top-down order through the RuAF chain of command to attack and stop Wagner.  

    I thought I heard the Russians set a daily record for number of missiles launched at Ukraine yesterday. It would have been easy to annihilate the Wagner column if there was consensus to do so.

  6. 1 hour ago, Nice Guy Eddie said:

    The latest from Montana.

    As an outside observer, it’s always been strange that a deep red state like Montana always elects a democrat, Jon Tester as their senator. He’s up in ‘24. One aspect that has helped Tester a bit is that there is always a Libertarian in the race who receives a 2-3%. When you add the Libertarian and the GOP candidate together, they either equal or exceed Testers total. But Tester always defeats the GOP without a majority.

    To remove the the libertarians from the mix, Montana’s GOP-led legislature is looking to switch to the CA style of a jungle primary where all candidates compete in the same primary, regardless of party, and then only the top 2 go to the general. Result, no libertarian candidate in the general.

    the kicker is that this law would start the ‘24 senate race and then immediately sunsets. It’s basically the Defeat Jon Tester law. The law hasn’t passed yet.

    538 did an article on the Montana top 2 primary stuff last week and why they don't think it will change much.

    https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/jon-tester-montana-2024-election/

    Basically, many indies don't like Ds or Rs, according to exit polls, and will sit out the runoff. Even if they all show up for the runoff, the R would need to pull them at a 2 to 1 clip to close a hypothetical 1 percent gap with Tester. 

  7. On 3/28/2023 at 1:50 AM, Voldemort86 said:

    Would love to see Tate voted out because he sucks, but we haven’t got as many wins out of controlling the governorship from those states as I hoped.

    I thought Kelly could get some form of legal medical pot in Kansas and prevent the GOP from making the house map worse. She failed at both.

    JBE did help lousiana get their marijuana laws updated to what is pretty good for a southern state, but he couldn’t help us at all with redistricting. We should have 2 dems in us congress and the GOP kept us at one.

    Beshear hasn’t gotten us any wins at all in Kentucky as far as I know. 
     

    these dem governors are just placeholders unfortunately. Still better than GOP whackos I guess.

    wisconsin Supreme Court is the important election in 2023. The Wisconsin maps are more rigged than anywhere else in the country. They need to be fixed.

     

    The legislature just overrode Beshear's veto and passed the country's most restrictive anti-trans bills into law. Is that his fault?

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  8. 5 hours ago, 956 Worldwide said:

    It should have raised red flags that she was both the president of the Chinese Student Association and an association that represents Asian-Americans— one group is clearly foreign and the second is for Americans. 

    The CSA is dominated by American citizens of Chinese descent, who will dwarf the number of actual foreign Chinese students at any university in CA. 

    The bigger red flag would be a foreign CSA president of a third tier state university hobnobbing with influential Bay Area politicians. 

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  9. 3 hours ago, Balcones said:

    22 years a signal officer in the military. Retired though, so maybe things have changed. What do I know? 

    If we don’t use radio frequency to communicate anymore, what do we use, son?  If not HF, VHF, UHF, L band, etc… what is the new medium? These radio waves can’t go past 60,000 ft? When did that change?
     

    In my day, we used radio frequency for communicating to satellites. VHF, UHF, L-band, etc.. kinda depended. We even used radio frequency to communicate with GPS satellites. No idea what they use today.

    Moving horizontally? No comment, son.

    I wasn’t aware you couldn’t jam a frequency anymore. Or interfere at all.. You couldn’t collect information traveling through the air.  Would be interesting to see what a balloon at 60,000 ft could do to a plane at 35,000 ft. But all planes have super secret “secure communications” Right, son? I’m not sure if planes use radio frequency anymore for their systems. They did in my day.
     

    Obviously the Chinese would only want to collect information on just military networks. That would be their only reason to be over the US.  The only target to collect on. Probably have no interest in testing/collecting/messing with civilian networks, aviation, commerce, media, etc… 

    So, tell me about the new non-radio frequency we have these days.

    All sensitive stuff done nowadays should be line-of-sight at microwave frequencies, if not done through fiber optics underground. There isn't much done with omni-directional transmitters anymore.

    This thing got a nice listen to police scanners, citizens band, and shitty AM radio.

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  10. 4 hours ago, Biff Tannen said:

    Cool. I’d like to live in your world where we can have rational discourse and democracy works. Do I take one bong hit or multiple?

    You think CA Dem voters shouldn't choose their nominee for Senate? How do you think the nominee should be selected?

     

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  11. Jesus Christ this thread, and I mean #bothsides. So many bad takes.

    A highly contested primary with lots of good candidates running is what should happen in a state like CA that means so much for Democratic politics. It's nobody's turn.

    It's not chaotic, it's democracy. The people will decide.

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  12. She's smart enough to know she doesn't stand a chance in a 3-way race against Gallego and an Republican. Her play was to prevent another Dem from jumping in. Oops.

    This is a woman who speaks the language of money. If Sinema thinks she might end up on the short end of the stick financially, she'll tuck her tail between her legs and retire before 2025. I fully expect Gallego to issue a press release glorifying his fundraising haul over the past month or so.

    All that said, I do not share the confidence of y'all that Gallego would win a 3-way either. Just enough batshit R voters and not enough margin for error for the Ds. 

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  13. 1 hour ago, Anastasis said:

    Pro move.

     

     

     

    Somewhere I read that normally the speaker sets rather strict rules on where the cameras can look in the House chamber, or maybe its voted on in the rules package. Well we don't have either yet so the cameras are panning around showing members doing weird stuff, like this guy vaping and AOC chatting with Gosar.

  14. 42 minutes ago, Old Freak Nasty said:

    I'd like to think the electorate would be wise to the GQP trying to pin the House dysfunction real-world consequences on the Biden presidency, but then I realized I put the words electorate and wise together.  FNC will pin the economic chaos that's about to ensue on Biden and MAGA and other standard issue stupids are going to parrot it to anyone that will listen on Facebook.

    This McCarthy problem is going to become Biden's in time.

    Naw. I'm starting to really think people are sick and tired of the bullshit. The electorate had its chance to be collectively stupid in November but many unexpected instances of wisdom occurred instead.

    Defaulting on our debt is going to suck, but I think we can pick ourselves up off the mat.

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