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956 Worldwide

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Everything posted by 956 Worldwide

  1. They are canceling Nobel-prize winning economists because woke. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/13/opinion/stiglitz-trump-dei.html?unlocked_article_code=1.G08.On8J.4hSuhXSYq--k&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&sgrp=g
  2. Leo firmly stood on the side of Ukraine while calling for a just and lasting peace and then called for children to be returned. His first call was with Zelenskyy of any world leader. It’s really, really nice that now we have a new “most important American in the world.”
  3. Americans haven’t been the worst tourists in decades. Both Americans and Brits can be rough if you’re on the budget cruise or near a stag/hen party but the bulk of them are fine especially the farther you get from home. Russians, Israelis, Mainland Chinese (Hong Kongers and Taiwanese are fine) and Gulf Arabs are unpleasant, as are middle class Indians/Pakistanis. For sheer unpleasantness, like it’s a competition to be the rudest, it’s likely to be the latter.
  4. This is a fucking crabcake.
  5. No problem flying an airframe for that long, look at the B-52s that are still in inventory and will remain for a couple decades. Good maintenance and replacing engines does a lot. It’s a lot of the stuff inside that is now more expensive and painful to keep going, and the 747-200 has been discontinued for years so it’s harder to find standard replacement parts for the standard 747 stuff. Side note, getting a look at a B-52 is inside is an incredible look at an analog airplane. All the stuff that makes it work is just there to see and touch.
  6. Well, any plane the president on does become AF1. The current VC-25 which has things like nuclear-shielded wiring and EW countermeasures is not really a 747 in any sense of the word, it’s a 747-shaped flying command center. They should never even try to have a meeting on this plane as there is no way to debug it. Modifying this jet to meet VC-25 standards would likely cost more than the 747’s value even with the royal family mods. I think your gut on this on is correct, he plans to take delivery and use it a few times stateside and then have his own 747 for life. His library foundation is going to be an incredible grift machine.
  7. The people who become AUSAs and agents or really anything during this admin are going to be some real pieces of work.
  8. I don’t think you can underestimate the ethos of building cases for real courts either. Most Feds, and especially the FBI, want to return a real indictment that leads to a conviction. Or on the FBI side, they want to catch a spy or real terrorist and preferably do both. The FBI isn’t event interested in inside government threats and clearance shit unless it’s going to return an indictment or reveal actual espionage; the ticky-tack administrative violations are left to individual agencies for HR actions and shit. Same with DEA, they want cases or maybe a dead body from a firefight. ICE certainly has some investigative function and goes after real criminals but a big part of the work is just rounding up people who have a deportation order or no papers. So it’s not a big mental leap to “go arrest that guy cause we said so.”
  9. There’s a lot here that we don’t know, too. Especially the questions of who was flying, what they’d been told to do, and how they were doing it. The Pak military and the Pak AF in particular has long been a frankly better trained and capable force. A lot of that has to do with decades of training and doctrine that we helped them with while the Indians relied on the Soviets. But even going back to the Raj, the British believed Punjabi Muslims made better, more trustworthy soldiers and then trained them to be. You still hear about “martial races/castes” on the subcontinent with zero trace of irony.
  10. Organizations build cultures over time and culture is powerful. There is a reason for example, that the Red Army was a target and not a tool of repression. DHS and ICE are uniquely suited for being tools of abuse. We are not that far away in time from when FBI agents only wore white dress shirts. Hoover certainly abused liberties, but he built the bureau into one of the most trusted and elite institutions in America. You cannot imagine Hoover’s G-Men wearing balaclavas and disappearing people. Subsequent reforms made it hard for them to return to freelancing. It attracts a better class of person with more education and more options and they tell you your job is to catch spies and terrorists and the worst criminals. They are told that to do their job effectively they must be trusted by everyone but the real baddies. They believe it, mostly. The CIA cannot be effectively and widely used against regular Americans. The people they hire and the skills they recruit for are completely unsuited to doing something like listening to opposition politicians or infiltrating domestic gatherings. Their people would be angry, insulted, and resentful if you even asked. Not even on (only) moral grounds but simply because they’d be bored and see it as beneath them. DEA and ATF are cowboys who deal with a lower class of criminal, who often are immediate and urgent threats. Adrenaline junkies who want to kick down doors and exchange fire (or at least they imagine they are). Again— nothing would be more insulting to them than to ask them to go put cuffs on a fucking mayor who is angry about a new jail. DHS is new and has no real culture and is a hodgepodge of weird toys. ICE is already conditioned to arrest people who are not really dangerous and whose crime is really just procedural and administrative. They are comfortable rounding people up with a standard of evidence much lower than for a real court. They are conditioned (unlike the FBI) to go into communities and be feared and distrusted even by people who aren’t doing anything wrong. They are a large force present across the country. They are perfect for this stuff.
  11. “Right-wing regime threatens to arrest opposition leaders for protesting new security service detention facilities.” https://www.axios.com/2025/05/10/trump-ice-arrest-house-democrats-new-jersey In the most predictable move ever, the White House has turned to DHS to serve as its internal enforcers. If we ever get a D congress and President again ICE has to be abolished and DHS broken up and the parts returned to other agencies. Any intel functions should also be destroyed and those needed created at other agencies. It’s irredeemable. They’ve even adopted the “balaclava thug” aesthetic that is straight from Belarus.
  12. India confirms the ceasefire but not the rest of Marco’s claims.
  13. This. Our race to get the F-35 in service wasn’t ever about making the money printer go brrrrrr for contractors. It’s been obvious for a long time now that 4th gen aircraft are not particularly survivable in contested airspace. We saw that in Ukraine already, it’s not like a MiG or Su shows up more on radar than a Rafale or F-16.
  14. Pakistan PM confirmed but not Indians yet.
  15. We are announcing a ceasefire.
  16. He studied in France so he for sure knew it and likely the Anglo Norman version.
  17. I like sending texts with lots of typos and autofill induced errors. It’s a real power move that shows the recipient that you can’t dedicate too much effort to them and shifts the burden onto them to decipher what you mean. Kind of like when you get a carefully crafted and thoughtful email and then you respond with something like “GR8, thx :)”
  18. Eh, the vast bulk of Southern Cone Italians and Germans and Europeans pre-date fascism. It’s easy to forget that for centuries the educated European elites viewed South America and even Mexico as the smart bet on an up and comer, not the United States. Argentina was one of the wealthiest countries in the world and attracted lots of European immigrants.
  19. Fun fact: this is will be the first pope since Adrian IV in the 1100s who speaks English as a native language. Adrian (Nicholas Breakspear) would have spoken a Middle English dialect that you couldn’t really understand if spoken and would barely be able to decipher if written in a modern script. Also, Medieval English Norse-inflected names are so freaking cool. Almost American Indian level cool.
  20. Some future historian is going to want to mine other countries’ diplomatic dispatches. The Brits will be the best written but the Japanese will have incredible insight and perspective. The Russians will have the inside scoop.
  21. They fired the Librarian today basically for being a black woman today. Needless to say: 1. The Library of Congress doesn’t have a children’s loaning section. Or any loaning section. 2. The Library of Congress has all the books. Literally all of them. It’s part of the copyright process.
  22. A 17 minute speech at an intro all hands is truly bananas. There is no way to pull that off without being either insane or senile.
  23. We are truly expanding the frontiers of mental illness and I am here for it. To be honest I am ready to leave everything and all responsibilities to follow the dictates of an AI that calls me Star Walker. https://archive.ph/TjqSr
  24. I cannot emphasize enough how the country works now. The President acts based on what he sees on Fox and Friends which broadcasts what the President wants to see and then the President makes decisions based on what he watched and then Fox and Friends reacts to what he does and then the President . . .
  25. Fair enough, it’s something I’ve viewed with deep suspicion and RFK Jr endorsements didn’t help but this is way deeper knowledge than I have.
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