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956 Worldwide

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Everything posted by 956 Worldwide

  1. This is an astoundingly uninformed take.
  2. You could have written this word for word in 1939 and 1940 substituting places like Philippines or Cuba and other domestic causes. And yet the Eagle Squadrons and the Americans who financed them are the heroes and we are embarrassed by the people who opposed them. German pilots bombing London and Russians lobbing shells at villages aren’t pawns. They can get fucked and helping them get dead is the most American thing anyone can do.
  3. Sending money for Ukrainians to kill the people occupying their lands and murdering and raping their citizens is awesome and cool. I have rarely been more satisfied than when I helped buy a Vampyr MLRS and to refurbish a T-70; and I hope they’re still putting the shit that goes bang in the right place. Winning wars over bad people is good.
  4. WCK does amazing work and knows what they are doing. That was a clearly marked aid convoy. There’s no acceptable explanation for this.
  5. @F250 and @Anastasis are right about this. “Immaculate Conception” sounds like a synonym for the virgin birth but it isn’t. It’s a piece of Roman Catholic doctrine fully explicated not long ago that holds that Mary herself was conceived free of original sin, because as God, Jesus could not have inhabited a sinful vessel. Protestants and Orthodox don’t have the same view of original sin so the issue of Mary’s state isn’t important and there’s no need for a doctrine. It’s like expecting them to get the ins and outs of papal infallibility, it doesn’t apply. It’s interesting if you want to get crazy with apologetics or just take an academic interest in it all.
  6. I think in some ways Mulkey is a lot like Saban, though Saban more effectively throttled his worse public impulses. Both of them are hyper-intelligent and driven and they are eating themselves alive over a game. Even when you win and get to the peak, it’s just a game that you won. The world doesn’t change, life doesn’t really change because you hoist a trophy. You need to invent fictional adversity and overcome fictional enemies to justify your intensity and why you are killing yourself and why it matters.
  7. Mission Berlin reported to the U.S. commanding general until 1974, when we recognized East Germany. In Berlin the Mission even had occupation authorities when it came to approving important municipal roles. MPs and not Marines guarded the facility.
  8. Berlin was an interesting case because for much of the time it was a legally occupied city and the mission answered to the U.S. general in control of the occupation zone. There’s a zone of shenanigans under diplomatic cover as well as responses and this is for sure on the upper end of the “fafo” spectrum for both sides given the activities and tensions. The Russians used “consulates” across Eastern Europe for all sorts of bullshit and after Ukraine some countries got fed up and just announced that the facilities were to be vacated and returned to the municipalities because they weren’t being used properly. That’s the standard way of dealing with this, but it’s also true that if they get a foothold in one country they use that to do illegal shit all across the region. It presents a big problem when they go beyond standard cloak and dagger stuff and real civilians get killed. It appears like this building itself was attached to the broader compound and had some legit purposes. My sneaking suspicion is that these guys were most likely moved into the building because Israel had been blowing up IRGC meeting points all over Syria and Damascus and this was a bid to try and protect them. Hezbollah stated that one of its people was killed in there as well.
  9. It’s going to cause a problem but it gets a bit more complicated than that. The facility has to be in use for a diplomatic or consular purpose. You can easily think of obvious examples where this doesn’t work. If the PRC constructed a small airfield next to its mission in say, Vancouver with the permission of the Canadians, and then started flying drone sorties from it against Seattle and proclaimed it was an inviolable facility that wouldn’t work as a defense. Even if Canada agreed, you can’t use a consulate as a military base to launch attacks. This is a grayer area of course, but revolutionary states in the Middle East have a history of playing in this gray zone. Plenty of terrorist attacks have been planned and launched from diplomatic facilities. The Libyans famously shot a protester in the middle of London from their mission. The aforementioned BA bombings were planned and directed inside of the Iranian embassy in Argentina. You generally lose inviolability if a facility is used to break laws. The normal response is expulsion but in this case the facility is operating with permission of the Syrians. The presence of so many IRGC operatives raises the obvious question of what the facility really was— they weren’t doing visas or promoting commercial ties.
  10. I boxed for a few years in junior high and high school in the valley and I learned many life lessons, most importantly “if a wiry little Mexican guy is ready to fight you, you don’t want to fight him.”
  11. All of them are retired NCOs and they live at the tower with families. Oddly, Royal Navy sailors weren’t allowed to do it until the 21st century, something to do with a difference in oaths they take.
  12. Ok you maybe have done something more fun in London.
  13. Wtf? The Yeoman Warder’s tour of the Tower is legit one of the coolest things to do in London. The best is to arrive in time for the first tour of the day to beat lines and have a warden who is just starting the day.
  14. You should tell him that, hope you’re not too attached to your arm.
  15. There are dogs that are just going to bark. Smaller dogs with a few exceptions are going to bark more than bigger dogs, they aren’t badly socialized or poorly trained they are just adding value where they can. Hounds like to bark just to hear themselves. There are quiet breeds. Basenjis are vocal in lots of ways but don’t bark. English and French bulldogs don’t bark. Big, confident and stately mastiffs of all types rarely bark.
  16. Went to dinner in Prague last week and the restaurant owner had a Czechoslovak Wolf Dog just hanging out. When he takes an interest in your roast chicken, you’re tempted to just gjve it to him.
  17. I would hire anyone who listed a Leisure Suit Larry score on his resume on the spot.
  18. Greek-ish grilled shrimp skewers and veggies, grilled eggplant and roasted garlic baba ganoush.
  19. @mchookem, this is fun to watch come together and I am glad to see it shaping up. My advice (toss it or use it) to anyone going to Europe is this— once you have the basic sketch, you should CUT activities and destinations before you try to fit any more in. I know that’s painful as you look at a trip like this but it has always paid off for me. Getting the most in and having great photos ends up being more rewarding for your friends than for you personally. Seeing the Med is awesome, but even more awesome is just to give up a bit and experience where you are. If you are finding a day or block of time, my best advice is to simply not fill it. In your case, I’d just leave unscheduled time in Florence or Rome. You can wander around, you can go back and get deeper into a place that caught your eye, you can do a last minute side trip that you didn’t think about. But you won’t regret it. In nearly all my travels in Europe, the unscheduled “let’s see what comes up” have been the best. Except when my kids demanded another aquarium. Fuck that. There are fish in the U.S.
  20. The short answer is that this is going to be a bigger problem for smaller NATO Allies that have to square off against Russia’s forward deployed mass and stop an initial onslaught. We will be fighting a very different war. We would be foolish not to take notes and adjust but tanks and artillery still have a place. We are also seeing the extreme value of strategic aviation and the ability to disrupt the adversary on their home field, the extreme importance of long-range fires (we need to get better at this) and that artillery remains the Lord of War.
  21. Negative points for using “Czechia,” LOL. This is going to roil the EP and provoke some uncomfortable questions. It’s good to throw a spotlight on this but Russian activities in the gray zone will continue. Budapest and Bratislava are the current safer harbors in the EU.
  22. We announced our own suspension in November, along with other NATO Allies. Russia formally withdrew. Today’s move is just Duda formally codifying that suspension in a law the Sejm sent to him. It’s a big deal but has been in the works for some time and was predicated by Russia’s formal withdrawal.
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