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bolverk

Certifiably Surly
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Posts posted by bolverk

  1. 1 hour ago, SmokeyBear1861 said:

     

    All news articles about it have also been scrubbed from the internet. Archives are still available. http://archive.is/nC2ev

    Tommy is a Jewish guy who was trying to report to the public the details of a child rape gang in his country. He will be in constant danger in prison.

    I've also seen talk about why they are going after people for talking rather than stopping the violent, horrible crimes being committed against children. It's simple, on the one hand they can arrest people for twitter posts and have a nice peaceful day doing their Orwellian job. On the other hand they can get investigate and try to apprehend people who will threaten to kill their families...

    I'm quoting the OP so he can't go back and edit away his statements.

  2. Before reading this thread, I'd never heard of Tommy Robinson but I've learned to never take anything the OP says at face value. Of course, it didn't take long for my initial skepticism to be validated.

    Here's a link from The Independent still live on their website about his arrest:

    https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/tommy-robinson-arrested-leeds-court-child-grooming-trial-edl-founder-latest-a8368821.html

    Also, there is no credible source I can find that Robinson is Jewish. In fact, his Wikipedia page has a quote from him that both of his parents were Irish immigrants to the UK:

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Robinson_(activist)?wprov=sfla1

    When I googled his name and Jewish, I only saw returns from fucked up sites like Stormfront throwing out that accusation.

    I don't know where else the OP spends his time on the web, but I'm not a fan of posters who come here posting literal "fake news".

    @hayden_hornPlease, consider taking appropriate action.

    • Like 8
  3. 2 minutes ago, Tuco said:


    Wasn’t Carter Page talking about how the FBI had destroyed his life. Is he tying to get people to feel sorry for Page? Bold move, Cotton.

    Yeah, I suppose that's possible but Page will be 47 next month.

  4. 1 hour ago, pyrohornIII said:

    Has anyone found a central website or twitter feed that is a good, balanced, accurate and timely source for information?   I find Surly is great at providing arguments from both sides, but it is so time consuming.  Plus frankly, Surly just isn't for everyone, personality wise. 

     

    I'd like to find a place to send friends who are just now waking up to rotten smell emanating off of Trump's administration.  Some place that has timelines and stories that give more detail about points along that timeline.   Also some constant running narrative on what Trump has done and the fallout of his actions or inactions. 

     

    I have gleaned a lot from the WAPO, NYT, Vogue and The New Yorker, but they are all behind paywalls after the first few articles.    

     

    Any suggestions would be appreciated. 

    Incognito mode with Chrome gives you unlimited browsing with NYTimes and WaPo. If you hit an article limit, simply open another incognito window and you're set.

    • Like 1
  5. Just now, Armybrat said:

    The USAF fought Soviet pilots head to head in the Korean War. Of course the Rooskies were "volunteers" flying "North Korean" MIGs.

    That's right. I vaguely recalled it was you who had responded, but I didn't want to misattribute or misconstrue something you might have said. Thanks, Brat.

    Does this mean it was the first engagement between American and Russian ground forces then? Just looking for some historical perspective to understand whether this was a "first".

  6. 2 minutes ago, Longhorn Al said:

    Hill Country is getting it right now. Great light show.

    nytncy.png

    Dang! Glad I'm not about to drive that 2-lane winding stretch from Llano to Brady right now. It's harrowing enough in the dark. Can't imagine that in a thunderstorm at night, because it's heading that way... Hill Country Surly, watch your bungholes.

    • Like 1
  7. 2 minutes ago, Pato del Muerto said:

    You tell people that live in the French quarter what they should and should not be allowed to do?

    I was speaking from the tourist's perspective. If I'm following your logic, you're advocating vigilantism to shoot down potential criminals before they've even robbed or murdered in order to keep their numbers down.

    Again, as a visitor (or even resident), I'd prefer my chances of not getting killed or harmed in Wyoming than New Orleans.

  8. A downtown revitalization consultant once told me a story about him doing a public presentation in a small town out in Far West Texas. During the community input session, a rancher/cowboy type stood up and said he'd heard that the gays were great about fixing up old buildings and asked "how do we get some of those fellers here?"

    Yeah, the story is likely bullshit but it certainly rings true.

  9. 5 hours ago, High Plains Drifter said:

    20 yr old me did. 40 yr old me doesn't.

    If the grizzly population is becoming an ecological problem, then I'm ok with thinning them out a little. But I suspect, despite 686's post, that this isn't about that. This is about appeasing the hunting and ranching lobbies.

    I agree with all of this and it hits on the point I was criticized for. The human population of Wyoming is 580,000 (half that of Travis County in a much, much larger area), and most of that population lives in the eastern part of the state in places like Cheyenne, Laramie, Casper, etc.

    How much culling is really needed in a vast, unpopulated area like western Wyoming? I assume most ranchers are armed, and I have absolutely zero issues on the self-defense argument.

    So what if they kill a few cows each year? Just set up a fund to compensate ranchers at a fair market rate for any of their losses and an ecological equilibrium will eventually be achieved.

  10. 8 minutes ago, LongestHorn said:

    It is my understanding this was the result of Wagner having the incentive of collecting a cut of that oil but the bad intel.  They did not bargain for the American military combat experience.  IMO they did not think we were still there.  We watched Russian vehicles cross the Euphrates on pontoon bridges back in September.  I'm not sure, but I believe Russians were simply going for broke.

     

    I dunno, man. It seems intentional:

    The firefight was described by the Pentagon as an act of self-defense against a unit of pro-Syrian government forces. In interviews, United States military officials said they had watched — with dread — hundreds  of approaching rival troops, vehicles and artillery pieces in the week leading up to the attack.

  11. 14 minutes ago, Jörgen said:

    Roodborstje tikt tegen het raam 

    Tik tik tik lat mij erin, lat mij erin

    'T is buiten koud en te guur naar mijn zin

    Hello surly at work 2 am funny you responded so much. Is Texas really western like people wear funny hats and boots everywhere? Like John Wayne movies? I looked at news and see you habe more shootings at your school. You have angry children is it because they are fat?

    How's your Frisian?

  12. Posting this for Brisket and other erstwhile Republicans:

    Concerned by Trump, Some Republicans Quietly Align With Democrats

    WASHINGTON — Since Donald J. Trump began dominating American politics more than two years ago, Democrats concerned about his policies and behavior have taken solace in a group of influential Republicans who have consistently assailed the president as anathema to the values of their party, and the country more broadly.

    In the past year, however, influential liberal donors and operatives have gone from cheering these so-called Never Trump Republicans to quietly working with — and even funding — them. Through invitation-only emails and private, off-the-record meetings, they have formed a loose network of cross-partisan alliances aimed at helping neutralize President Trump, and preventing others from capitalizing on weaknesses in the political system that they say he has exploited.

    While this network has mostly eschewed electoral politics, some involved see the potential for it to help form an ideological — and possibly financial — platform to back candidates, including a centrist challenge to Mr. Trump in 2020, possibly from within the G.O.P. or even a third party.

    The network — composed of overlapping groups led by Democrats such as the donor Rachel Pritzker and several veteran Obama administration operatives, as well as leading Never Trump Republicans like Evan McMullin, Mindy Finn and William Kristol — aims to chart a middle path between a Republican base falling in line behind Mr. Trump and a liberal resistance trying to pull the Democratic Party left.

    “If you’re a Republican who is concerned about the health of the liberal order and alarmed over the destruction of the norms of American democracy, there’s no reason you shouldn’t be willing to work with a Democrat who is equally concerned about those same matters,” said Jerry Taylor, a Republican who is president of the Niskanen Center, a moderate think tank that grew out of the libertarian Cato Institute.

    While a slew of initiatives raised big money for cross-partisan bridge-building and even presidential campaigns in 2012, the current effort is different. It involves more players who are more actively involved in politics from across the spectrum, many of whom bring their own constituencies, making it less centralized and, in some ways, less organized.

    Yet they are arguably more united than past efforts by their concern over threats to democracy they contend are embodied by a single politician: Mr. Trump.

    It’s an amorphous, somewhat secretive effort, partly because some participants fear Mr. Trump and his allies would brand Never Trump Republicans as pawns of Democrats. Meeting locations, agendas and attendees are mostly kept quiet, while political intelligence is privately shared between participants on opposite sides of the political spectrum.

    But some of the collaboration is becoming more overt.

    Over the last couple of months, network members filed amicus briefs accusing Mr. Trump of overstepping his authority on matters ranging from immigration to his administration’s efforts to block a merger between AT&T and Time Warner. And last month, the Senate Judiciary Committee passed a bill to protect the special counsel investigating Russian meddling in the 2016 election, for which network members had lobbied.

    “It was a kumbaya moment,” said Lisa Gilbert, an official at the left-leaning watchdog group Public Citizen, which helped coordinate lobbying by groups across the political spectrum.

    A coalition involving many of the same groups is working to quickly mobilize mass protests across the country if Mr. Trump acts to impede the special counsel investigation. And next month organizers of a group of leading donors and operatives from the right and left called Patriots and Pragmatists are expecting their biggest turnout yet at a meeting in San Francisco, according to people familiar with the planning.

    The Niskanen Center hosts a semimonthly invitation-only gathering of Trump critics called the Meeting of the Concerned, which attendees are asked to keep confidential. While it is attended primarily by a rotating cast of Never Trump Republicans — including the pundit Mr. Kristol and the former Representative Mickey Edwards — meetings sometimes include a Democrat or two presenting research or analysis on relevant issues. Attendees have included Ian Bassin, a former Obama White House lawyer who founded a watchdog group, Protect Democracy, that has sued the Trump administration and that has brought on staff members and advisers — including Mr. Taylor — from conservative or Republican backgrounds.

    Other Republicans have been wary to get involved, Mr. Bassin said. “There is a troubling dynamic happening where anytime a conservative expresses concerns, they get branded a Never Trumper and are excommunicated from the American right.”

    But Mr. Edwards, a Republican representative from Oklahoma from 1977 to 1993, said he was not worried about stigma. “Party identity really is being set aside. We have bigger fish to fry,” he said. He has become involved in a number of cross-partisan coalitions challenging Mr. Trump in recent months, including working with the former Obama administration lawyers Neal Katyal and Joshua Geltzer to file a legal brief in March in a court case opposing Mr. Trump’s proposed restrictions on travel from predominantly Muslim countries. “It’s really a much more free-form kind of resistance. It’s a movement more than an organization.”

    Arguably the most intriguing of the cross-partisan gatherings are those convened by Patriots and Pragmatists, an informal coalition started in 2017 by Ms. Pritzker in response to the political polarization inflamed by the 2016 election.

    Ms. Pritzker was a founding board member of the Democracy Alliance, a coalition of major liberal donors that has steered more than $600 million to the groups that comprise the institutional left since 2005. In 2010, though, she dropped out of the alliance and began redirecting her larger donations to efforts designed to break through partisan polarization, primarily on climate change and energy production.

    The discussions at Patriots and Pragmatists meetings are intended to focus on big picture topics related to democracy, rather than elections or political funding. Nonetheless, some see the coalition as having the potential to bring the same kind of financial firepower to an anti-Trump centrist movement as the Democracy Alliance brought to the left. Its efforts were described by a dozen people familiar with the group, who spoke anonymously to describe private discussions.

    The group has held three two-day gatherings outside San Francisco, New York and Washington, to which Ms. Pritzker and her political adviser invited 20 to 40 people per meeting. Gatherings have drawn influential Democratic operatives like Mr. Bassin and the Democracy Alliance founder Rob Stein. They have also attracted big-name Republican and conservative thinkers, writers and operatives including Mr. Taylor, the legal analyst Benjamin Wittes and the foreign policy hawks Mona Charen, David Frum, Robert Kagan, Mr. Kristol and Jennifer Rubin. Also attending were Mr. McMullin, who ran a long-shot independent conservative presidential campaign against Mr. Trump in 2016, and his running mate, Ms. Finn.

    Perhaps most significantly, Patriots and Pragmatists gatherings have drawn major donors like William D. Budinger, a former Democracy Alliance board member, and representatives of deep-pocketed grant-writing foundations like Pierre Omidyar’s Democracy Fund and Democracy Fund Voice, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation’s Madison Initiative.

    For the last few years, those foundations have been donating millions of dollars a year to bipartisan and nonpartisan groups advocating political reforms. But they redoubled their efforts after the 2016 election.

    Stand Up Republic and Stand Up Ideas — founded by Mr. McMullin and Ms. Finn — have received a total of as much as $1.3 million from the Democracy Fund groups and the Madison Initiative. And Protect Democracy and the Protect Democracy Project — founded by Mr. Bassin — have received as much as $500,000 from those grant-writing foundations, according to financial information on their websites.

    Mr. Bassin’s group teamed with Mr. McMullin and Ms. Finn’s to host a two-day conference in Washington in February called the National Summit for Democracy, which was funded partly by Ms. Pritzker and also by a foundation funded by a Republican donor, Jerry Hirsch. It brought together groups and leaders from the Never Trump right with the liberal resistance, centrist Democrats and government watchdog groups to discuss phenomena that have garnered increased concern in the Trump era — from foreign meddling in elections to attacks on the press and the special counsel, and federal law enforcement, more generally.

    It’s too early to predict the outcome of the spike in cross-partisan organizing, Mr. Stein said. But he added that there was a “sense of urgency and intellectual vitality animating these efforts” that could “challenge conventional political wisdoms, 20th century political alliances and the two major, internally fractious, parties.”

  13. Worth the read. The following is a striking account of the battle between a few US commandos and a fuckton of Russian mercenaries (spoilered to avoid longcatting)

    How a 4-Hour Battle Between Russian Mercenaries and U.S. Commandos Unfolded in Syria

    WASHINGTON — The artillery barrage was so intense that the American commandos dived into foxholes for protection, emerging covered in flying dirt and debris to fire back at a column of tanks advancing under the heavy shelling. It was the opening salvo in a nearly four-hour assault in February by around 500 pro-Syrian government forces — including Russian mercenaries — that threatened to inflame already-simmering tensions between Washington and Moscow.

    In the end, 200 to 300 of the attacking fighters were killed. The others retreated under merciless airstrikes from the United States, returning later to retrieve their battlefield dead. None of the Americans at the small outpost in eastern Syria — about 40 by the end of the firefight — were harmed.

    The details of the Feb. 7 firefight were gleaned from interviews and documents newly obtained by The New York Times. They provide the Pentagon’s first public on-the-ground accounting of one of the single bloodiest battles the American military has faced in Syria since deploying to fight the Islamic State.

    The firefight was described by the Pentagon as an act of self-defense against a unit of pro-Syrian government forces. In interviews, United States military officials said they had watched — with dread — hundreds of approaching rival troops, vehicles and artillery pieces in the week leading up to the attack.

     

    The prospect of Russian military forces and American troops colliding has long been feared as the Cold War adversaries take opposing sides in Syria’s seven-year civil war.

    At worst, officials and experts have said, it could plunge both countries into bloody conflict. And at a minimum, squaring off in crowded battlefields has added to heightened tensions between Russia and the United States as they each seek to exert influence in the Middle East.

    Commanders of the rival militaries had long steered clear of the other by speaking through often-used deconfliction telephone lines. In the days leading up to the attack, and on opposite sides of the Euphrates River, Russia and the United States were backing separate offensives against the Islamic State in Syria’s oil-rich Deir al-Zour Province, which borders Iraq.

    American military officials repeatedly warned about the growing mass of troops. But Russian military officials said they had no control over the fighters assembling near the river — even though American surveillance equipment monitoring radio transmissions had revealed the ground force was speaking in Russian.

    The documents described the fighters as a “pro-regime force,” loyal to President Bashar al-Assad of Syria. It included some Syrian government soldiers and militias, but American military and intelligence officials have said a majority were private Russian paramilitary mercenaries — and most likely a part of the Wagner Group, a company often used by the Kremlin to carry out objectives that officials do not want to be connected to the Russian government.

    “The Russian high command in Syria assured us it was not their people,” Defense Secretary Jim Mattis told senators in testimony last month. He said he directed Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “for the force, then, to be annihilated.”

    “And it was.”

    Amassing forces
    The day began with little hint of the battle that was about to unfold.

    A team of about 30 Delta Force soldiers and Rangers from the Joint Special Operations Command were working alongside Kurdish and Arab forces at a small dusty outpost next to a Conoco gas plant, near the city of Deir al-Zour.

    Roughly 20 miles away, at a base known as a mission support site, a team of Green Berets and a platoon of infantry Marines stared at their computer screens, watching drone feeds and passing information to the Americans at the gas plant about the gathering fighters.

    At 3 p.m. the Syrian force began edging toward the Conoco plant. By early evening, more than 500 troops and 27 vehicles — including tanks and armored personnel carriers — had amassed.

    In the American air operations center at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, and at the Pentagon, confounded military officers and intelligence analysts watched the scene unfold. Commanders briefed pilots and ground crews. Aircraft across the region were placed on alert, military officials said.

    Back at the mission support site, the Green Berets and Marines were preparing a small reaction force — roughly 16 troops in four mine-resistant vehicles — in case they were needed at the Conoco plant. They inspected their weapons and ensured the trucks were loaded with anti-tank missiles, thermal optics and food and water.

    At 8:30 p.m., three Russian-made T-72 tanks — vehicles weighing nearly 50 tons and armed with 125-millimeter guns — moved within a mile of the Conoco plant. Bracing for an attack, the Green Berets prepared to launch the reaction force.

    At the outpost, American soldiers watched a column of tanks and other armored vehicles turn and drive toward them around 10 p.m., emerging from a neighborhood of houses where they had tried to gather undetected.

    A half-hour later, the Russian mercenaries and Syrian forces struck.

    The Conoco outpost was hit with a mixture of tank fire, large artillery and mortar rounds, the documents show. The air was filled with dust and shrapnel. The American commandos took cover, then ran behind dirt berms to fire anti-tank missiles and machine guns at the advancing column of armored vehicles.

    For the first 15 minutes, American military officials called their Russian counterparts and urged them to stop the attack. When that failed, American troops fired warning shots at a group of vehicles and a howitzer.

    Still the troops advanced.

    From the horizon, a barrage of artillery
    American warplanes arrived in waves, including Reaper drones, F-22 stealth fighter jets, F-15E Strike Fighters, B-52 bombers, AC-130 gunships and AH-64 Apache helicopters. For the next three hours, American officials said, scores of strikes pummeled enemy troops, tanks and other vehicles. Marine rocket artillery was fired from the ground.

    The reaction team sped toward the fight. It was dark, according to the documents, and the roads were littered with felled power lines and shell craters. The 20-mile drive was made all the more difficult since the trucks did not turn on their headlights, relying solely on thermal-imaging cameras to navigate.

    As the Green Berets and Marines neared the Conoco plant around 11:30 p.m., they were forced to stop. The barrage of artillery was too dangerous to drive through until airstrikes silenced the enemy’s howitzers and tanks.

    At the plant, the commandos were pinned down by enemy artillery and burning through ammunition. Flashes from tank muzzles, antiaircraft weapons and machine guns lit up the air.

    At 1 a.m., with the artillery fire dwindling, the team of Marines and Green Berets pulled up to the Conoco outpost and began firing. By then, some of the American warplanes had returned to base, low on either fuel or ammunition.

    The United States troops on the ground, now roughly 40 in all, braced their defenses as the mercenaries left their vehicles and headed toward the outpost on foot.

    A handful of Marines ran ammunition to machine guns and Javelin missile launchers scattered along the berms and wedged among the trucks. Some of the Green Berets and Marines took aim from exposed hatches. Others remained in their trucks, using a combination of thermal screens and joysticks to control and fire the heavy machine guns affixed on their roofs.

    A few of the commandos, including Air Force combat controllers, worked the radios to direct the next fleet of bombers flying toward the battlefield. At least one Marine exposed himself to incoming fire as he used a missile guidance computer to find targets’ locations and pass them on to the commandos calling in the airstrikes.

    An hour later, the enemy fighters had started to retreat and the American troops stopped firing. From their outpost, the commandos watched the mercenaries and Syrian fighters return to collect their dead. The small team of American troops was not harmed. One allied Syrian fighter was wounded.

    Who led the ill-fated attack?
    The number of casualties from the Feb. 7 fight is in dispute.

    Initially, Russian officials said only four Russian citizens — but perhaps dozens more — were killed; a Syrian officer said around 100 Syrian soldiers had died. The documents obtained by The Times estimated 200 to 300 of the “pro-regime force” were killed.

    The outcome of the battle, and much of its mechanics, suggest that the Russian mercenaries and their Syrian allies were in the wrong part of the world to try a simple, massed assault on an American military position. Since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the United States Central Command has refined the amount of equipment, logistics, coordination and tactics required to mix weapons fired from both the air and ground.

    Questions remain about exactly who the Russian mercenaries were, and why they attacked.

    American intelligence officials say that the Wagner Group, known by the nickname of the retired Russian officer who leads it, is in Syria to seize oil and gas fields and protect them on behalf of the Assad government. The mercenaries earn of a share of the production proceeds from the oil fields they reclaim, officials said.

    The mercenaries loosely coordinate with the Russian military in Syria, although Wagner’s leaders have reportedly received awards in the Kremlin, and its mercenaries are trained at the Russian Defense Ministry’s bases.

    Russian government forces in Syria maintain they were not involved in the battle. But in recent weeks, according to United States military officials, they have jammed the communications of smaller American drones and gunships such as the type used in the attack.

    “Right now in Syria, we’re in the most aggressive E.W. environment on the planet from our adversaries,” Gen. Tony Thomas, the head of United States Special Operations Command, said recently, referring to electronic warfare. “They’re testing us every day.”

    9

    I got curious and found the Conoco plant on Google .

    • Like 1
  14. 25 minutes ago, RayDog said:

    I think it is much easier to get a 10 point or more swing in rural counties. Trump won key states in a large part because he got 10 points more in rural areas than Romney. Beto can roll that back particularly with Trump's trade policies hurting farmers. 

    Getting a 5+ point swing in urban areas is easier since advertising can be more effective there and they are already swinging his way.

     

    12 minutes ago, tantric superman said:

    Sure Beto has votes to get in the suburbs, but he needs to be down in the valley rallying folks and speaking Spanish. He needs them excited about voting.  His folks in the suburbs need to early vote and then hit the road south and get every person in those counties to vote.

    Not sure what his spin will be with black voters, but they certainly can let him down.

     

    I'm pretty sure we're echoing one another: hit the 'burbs, mitigate damage in rural areas, and GOTV in South Texas.

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