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956 Worldwide

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956 Worldwide last won the day on April 17

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  1. Unreal to see an AF2 transport with a military honor guard. The complete collapse of “service to country” into “service to MAGA.” Most vet funerals do not get the full guard, it’s usually just two service members to fold the flag. And watching the full VIP transport: there used to be an office in the State Department to assist family members with the unreal awfulness of the death of a government employee in service overseas. Repatriation of remains, effects, household, paperwork, autopsies. It was closed and everyone fired in July.
  2. These organizations are currying favor with the chief executive without being explicitly told to, because that’s what is expected and those who don’t will be noticed. For the same reason, most MSM is avoiding accurate reporting on what Kirk said and worked for (it’s possible to do so without condoning or justifying the attack and 30 years ago they would have). They do not want to be targets of the hate machine or an outburst from the Oval. Speaking of cancel culture and soft censorship. They are all obeying in advance.
  3. Not a uniform but incredibly fucking good. Goes so hard.
  4. Tim Pool and Lauren Southern and Tenet Media.
  5. I wish it would get more public traction. It’s instructive to read through the whole case against Benny Johnson and others who got “duped” into taking Russian intelligence funding. It’s really jarring to see how mercenary and fake all this is. These new-wave influencers log off and talk metrics and reach and impressions. I don’t mean to say that they don’t have genuine political leanings but what they say isn’t real to them. It’s a numbers job, they are going to do a deep dive into the data, see what hits, which segment got the most rewatches, what went viral. And then say more of that. But out there in the land of medical bills and failed marriages and dingy strip malls and hunts for college scholarships and layoffs, people fire up their reels and X and to them it’s real. It creates monsters and I wish more of them realized they were watching people doing kayfabe.
  6. Pretty much agree, as I posted above. We saw a similar movie across much of the 1970s and into the early 80s. We’ve kind of memory holed two assassination attempts on Ford. Not political violence in the sense of targeting Franz Ferdinand, with a clear aim and rationale. Pre-existing disturbance turbocharged into derangement by political rhetoric of existential threat and struggle.
  7. I was aware of Charlie Kirk and TPUSA as an organization although until today i was simply aware that it was part of America’s ambient noise of outrage and urgency. I did do a scroll through his recent statements, which returned the expected results of a stream of existential anger at the latest cause mixed with a fair amount of blatant falsehood. He was recently seized with the brutal murder of Iryna Zarutska by a multiple felon (an outrage I share) although it had mostly evolved into a proxy beef with Van Jones. A metaphor as Iryna’s innocence and tragedy receded and political feuding stormed to the foreground. America seems to be well into a phase similar to that of the 1970s, an unrelenting stream of violence that is only political in the sense that we have chosen hysterical fury as our baseline political state despite mostly living lives of comfort and plenty. I suspect that like the killer of the Minnesota lawmakers, whoever shot Kirk will be infuriated or politically agitated, but unable to coherently explain how murder would address the causes of the fury. Which is by design and it seems Kirk was in many ways an architect and show-runner. America’s ambient noise is existential outrage. Many right-wing figures have come forward to talk of Kirk’s private kindness and happiness. I actually don’t doubt that this was true. I don’t doubt that his two beautiful daughters have had a life full of joy and giggles and sweetness and now they will live with a gaping hole where daddy should be. And one day they will learn that many people they never knew were not at all sad to see their daddy’s life dribble away on the internet. It’s hard to explain what this private tragedy will mean to them. It’s crushing that Kirk packed away his kindness and friendship into a private realm and chose to publicly create the ambient noise of existential fury. Of course he did not deserve this. But none of us do, none of us deserve to live this way. Being publicly and privately kind is always a choice we have.
  8. Russian doctrine: escalate to deescalate. Oh, and they just got a shit ton of great intel on tactics and procedures if they ever decide to do it for “real.”
  9. A no-fly zone in Ukraine would require US support and intel at lease. I am far from confident this admin would do that. It would be easily the most “escalatory” thing we’ve done since 2022.
  10. I will also add— Russia has with this “error” entirely deflected attention away the clearly non-erroneous massive air raid on Ukraine at a time when we’ve allegedly demanded that stop or else. Instead we are talking about what to do since they droned Poland. This is a classic of Russian negotiations: demand all of someone else’s cake and then act like they've conceded something by “settling” for only half.
  11. It’s deliberate a deliberate gray zone probing action, designed entirely to see how NATO and the president will respond. Early returns— weakly. Let’s see the outcome of the Article 4 mechanism (which is a fairly big deal to invoke) and what kind of unity emerges. Either way, some other type of escalation from Russia is likely.
  12. Even if you’re fully on-board with this EO— surely you concede that children’s lit on these themes exist and that those books have been really influential one way or another, right? How are you supposed to teach a survey without bringing them up. It’s like if we decided we were big mad at, I don’t know, European national identity in the Habsburg realm and said we couldn’t teach anything about it. And then said any survey course on 19th century European lit had to completely ignore books on those topics. It’s totally stupid and conflates understanding something with advocating for something (which I will grant you— understanding often leads to tolerance).
  13. I’m not sure what you’re watching. This video is missing a lot but I’ll use cardinal directions to make it easy, even though we don’t know the actual bearings: 1. The object is lined up within the MQ9 targeting cross hairs and the MQ9 camera is tracking it on a near perfect SE bearing, matching its speed and bearing. Expected— this MQ9 is using its laser to target the object for another MQ9. 2. The Hellfire from another MQ9 comes into frame at about :17 roughly from the NW. It makes impact on the object and knocks it out of the targeting cross hairs towards the WSW. 3. The object tumbles and then falls out of frame at about :21. Its trajectory is now far more SXSW than SW and it falls out of frame almost directly due “South” of the targeting crosshairs. For it to disappear from frame after having been perfectly matched to stay in the MQ9’s targeting cross hairs— either it changed trajectory or the MQ9/MQ9 sensors did. Occams Razor says the thing that got hit with a missile changes its trajectory. At :22 or :23 the view changes to a zoom out. There’s no time stamp or telemetry here. We have no idea when this was filmed and what filmed it. It’s interesting but without that info— useless to use for speculating on what happened. So yes— the thing that got hit with a missile behaved like it got hit with something.
  14. Except it doesn’t. It spins around and then goes off on a markedly different course. The debris from the impact that is picked up on this sensor also goes off on the same trajectory. And you can’t tell in this short clip about altitude and what happens next, it’s entirely possible that this thing is in the process of crashing. We at least have to share a common understanding of what we see; and this is not an object that sustains its original flight path after it’s been hit with a missile.
  15. For context— the Shahed-type drone used by the Houthis weighs over 400 pounds. They are bigger than you think. Plenty of things in the sky that won’t be completely destroyed by a glancing Hellfire strike. That’s not to say that’s what this was but the way the object reacted is not out of line with extremely terrestrial technology.
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