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956 Worldwide

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Everything posted by 956 Worldwide

  1. So….are we going to talk about how no one told the NSC that SecDef was in the ICU for THREE DAYS. Are we cosplaying the politbureau here?
  2. Nuclear weapons have fundamentally altered the risks of wars between great powers. The Taiwan Strait remains the place where deterrence is most likely to be tested. I tend to agree with @InkaUtexas that the struggle is not going to be over territory, it will be over control of proxies and about our adversaries continuing to test the limits over the norms the United States has established. A hundred little brush-fires we can’t put out. Arming Ukraine for a decisive victory to take Russia out of the fight and re-energizing our defense industrial base are the two core solutions. I am pessimistic we can do that. The downside to nuclear deterrence is that it allows us to pretend that these small cumulative brush fires are not existential and can be just ignored or managed. But cumulatively they cannot be.
  3. Boeing was one of the world’s greatest engineering powerhouses and then it became an MBA and lobbying company. In my mind, this is the most important and telling part of the Boeing fraud agreement: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/boeing-charged-737-max-fraud-conspiracy-and-agrees-pay-over-25-billion I am only half joking when I say that we should pass a law barring anyone with an MBA from being a CEO or on an executive board for a Fortune 500 or important defense contractor company.
  4. I have a ring and say howdy and everything.
  5. New Russian 11th grade text about Donald Trump: “American government and political figure and businessman, born in 1946 and the 45th U.S. president from 2017-2021; the first U.S president never to have occupied any government posts before the presidency. The wealthiest person of any U.S. president. In 2020 he also campaigned for the presidency but as a result of obvious electoral falsification from the Democratic Party, he lost the election to J. Biden.”
  6. I don’t take offense, the leadership of the school is fucking it up in a very real way. I’ve been really depressed about it beyond the football team.
  7. So, China watchers have been watching for a while now a lot of churn in major CCP institutions, such as a foreign minister who disappeared allegedly because of an affair and a U.S. citizen kid, the sacking of lots of defense figures including the head of their rocket forces (strategic nuclear weapons) and a new DefMin…. Anyway, it looks like a major part of the shit show has to do with industrial scale corruption of their strategic forces. Missiles filled with water instead of fuel, vast fields of non-functional silos, etc. You can take the Communism out of Russia but not the Russia out of Communism.
  8. Aggie hat on: Nothing to worry about, whoop! Except maybe your chances to compete against us in the S-E-C! Hat still on but serious: A&Ms relationship with Qatar grosses me out and is a giant problem. Qatar is using us to edu-wash their image and has coopted several other major U.S. universities. I’m especially furious about the seemingly undisclosed gifts. The national security concerns are super spun up in this poorly written study, the Qatar foundation only “owns” the output of the TAMUQ campus which is a joke outpost that mainly serves to do the eduwashing above. The nuclear portion referred to amounts to a team of TAMUQ students being funded to to to CERN and work at the Large Hadron Collider— which tons of researchers do and doesn’t have a nuclear weapons utility. The partnership with Rheinmatell Bazan (German group) is not going to lead to any significant high-end tech and Qatar is not pursing any major indigenous defense capacity. They will always be a customer not a competitor. To put into perspective, we (the U.S.) sold them a special version of the F-15 in 2016, any one of which would be more useful to an adversary than the entirety of TAMUQ’s research output. TL;DR: My “fine” school’s relationship with Qatar is disgusting because of the blatant insider dealing with the assholes at the top and Texas politicians in exchange for sprucing up Qatar’s awful authoritarian image. If you’re looking for national security threats and dangerous dual use research misuse, I worry about other more competent actors, namely PRC DefMin institutions that have research agreements that never get reviewed with schools all across America; often the U.S. researchers don’t know that the money they get comes straight from the PLA.
  9. Surely some other Bani J. Mezquititla will come along and knock me off Google’s page 1….
  10. “When a woman wants to have sex with a handsome, attractive man and he shows her his dick, it’s fine. When I show my dick to the pom squad as they leave the stadium, it’s a felony. What gives?” /incels
  11. I think my favorite part about anti-vax stuff is how it was the ultimate #bothsides cudgel as something that was truly idiotic and conspiratorial but indigenous to soft leftie granola types, and then the right wing came along and said “actually we believe that stupid shit too!”
  12. My serious response to the “too big and diverse”, assuming I accept the reasoning (I don’t) is—- so what? What’s the alternative? Let’s talk about how to address challenges inherent to governing a large, diverse nation. Do we want to talk about devolution and subsidiarity? Ok, let’s talk about that. Or are we going to break up the country? Kick out all the “others.” Introduce the strong hand of authoritarianism? (Usually this is where this is going). Sorry but all those things are worse. “America is too big and diverse for democracy so let’s be autocratic” is a shit fucking take. I posted this in DT and joked that Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour is responsible for continued American economic primacy. It’s almost the truth though. In everything from human capital to physical plant to resources to institutions it is almost comical how advantaged the United States is over any nation on earth. Talking about American decline is absurd. The amount of wealth and power we have is simply incomparable. It is beyond me why we want to squander it and actively try to jettison our advantages. I think too many of us got too comfortable and so silliness is a change of pace.
  13. The Gettysburg Address was delivered at a moment when fresh of the boat Irish were bayoneting poor Southern whites who were fighting for the right of their social betters to keep black people in human bondage. You read that and really thought “oh, wow, we were really so much more united back then. Maybe pluralism was for that era.”
  14. It’s not political to call Elon or Tucker racist assholes. They hide behind politics as a defense to criticism of being horrible pieces of shit who are trying to help people like Vladimir Putin.
  15. There’s some real oatmeal brained shit on this thread. I really like the theory that when Mossad or the SVR go to recruit new agents, their go-to is “child of a well-known spy and criminal.”
  16. Dana Carvey as Strom Thurmond was the highlight. Farley was great but the best part of it was his background expressions when not talking.
  17. Incapable and also likely unwilling. Ireland has something like 3 brigades and a small patrol force to protect fisheries. About 8K active duty. They can’t sustain any sort of deployment to be the framework nation for something like this. You can read about their deployments, they commit in the tens to various multinational missions. https://www.military.ie/en/overseas-deployments/current-missions/
  18. China: China is rising! Nation of the future! BRICS! Belt and Road! U.S.: We are going to have Taylor Swift do an eras tour, lol.
  19. The regime has long pushed the “Jimmy Kimmel is not a pedo” narrative.
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