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956 Worldwide

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Everything posted by 956 Worldwide

  1. Rybar is reporting that the first squadron of F-16s are in Ukraine.
  2. No, although some of the survivors said they knew what to do because they watched American insta and TikTok videos, so ‘Murica!
  3. Sauron was extremely disruptive— mass production, attempting to harness the immense power of the ring. Bunch of gatekeeping wizards and Luddite agrarians fucked it all up standing in the way of progress.
  4. Tucker: Winston Churchill was bad, actually. Are you upset because of his complicated approach to colonialism? Tucker: No, because he locked up Oswald Mosley during the Battle of Dunkirk.
  5. As with here when this happens, there’s a lot of confusion. Some reporting that the shooter had killed his dad that morning and the police went looking for him at a different building. This type of thing in a small country where it doesn’t happen can have major implications.
  6. There is also circulating, if anyone sees it, a claim that the shooter was a Ukrainian refugee. This is not even close to true. I’ve seen it mostly in English Twitter from the usual suspects, don’t post it here if you see it.
  7. My feed is full of people looking for their friends, family, children, siblings.
  8. It’s AI translating his last name literally. Also some suspicion that the telegram entries were faked.
  9. The latest news is 15 people killed in Prague by a shooter at the Philosophy Faculty of Charles University. 24 injured. The shooter owned some weapons legally, Czech Republic has some of the most permissive firearms laws in Europe. He wrote a manifesto in Russian on telegram stating that he was inspired by a Russian school shooter. https://www.seznamzpravy.cz/clanek/domaci-zivot-v-cesku-ze-chce-zabijet-psal-na-telegramu-kdo-je-strelec-z-filozoficke-fakulty-242319?_si=NTFmYTlwazBoNw%3D%3D&_ho=Ng%3D%3D&_zn=aWQlM0Q5NzUwMjA1NDIzMjcwMTcyODkzJTdDdCUzRDE3MDMxNzkzNDMuMDY3JTdDdGUlM0QxNzAzMTc5MzQzLjA2NyU3Q2MlM0Q4M0M2QzcyNDI1QzQ4MjhBNUZGNTQ3N0NFRDBFNEJENw%3D%3D&_st=MTcwMzE3OTMzNTIwNA%3D%3D&_ts=JTdCJTIyaW5pdCUyMiUzQTElMkMlMjJ0Y2xvYWRlZCUyMiUzQW51bGwlMkMlMjJjbXB1aXNob3duJTIyJTNBbnVsbCUyQyUyMnVzZXJhY3Rpb25jb21wbGV0ZSUyMiUzQTElN0Q%3D&_tc=Q1AzSXdBQVAzSXdBQUQzQUNCRU5BZ0VzQVBfZ0FFUGdBQVRJSlZ3UVFBQXdBS0FBc0FDQUFGUUFMZ0FaQUE2QUNBQUZBQUtnQVdnQXlBQm9BRG1BSWdBaWdCSEFDU0FFd0FKd0FWUUF0Z0JmZ0RDQU1VQWdBQ0VnRVFBUlFBam9CT0FFNkFMNEFhUUE0Z0IzQUR4QUg2QVFnQWt3Qk9BQ2VnRklBS3lBV1lBdW9CZ1FEVGdHMEFQa0FqVUJIUUNhUUUyZ0owQVZJQXRRQmJnQzh3R01nTWtBWmNBMG9CcVlEdWdIZmdRSEFoY0JHWUNWWUlYUUlvQUZBQVdBQlVBQzRBSUFBWkFBMEFDSUFFY0FKZ0FWUUF0Z0JpQUQ4QUlTQVJBQkVnQ09BRTRBTXNBWm9BN2dCLWdFSUFJc0FYVUEyZ0NiUUZTQUxVQVc0QXZNQmdnREpBR3BnUXVBQUFBQS5ZQUFBQUFBQUFBQUE%3D
  10. In Tashkent, at the summer peak when temperatures spiked at 110, Tashkent housewives watered their driveways. It kept the dust down and the water would visibly evaporate from the pavement and run into the blacktop. The water came from a tributary of the Syr Darya (the Jaxartes for you classicists). At the time it struck me as a stupid and wasteful thing to do. But water was virtually free, a legacy of the old Soviet government that simply gave water away to cities and factories and farmers. And why not, the Syr Darya was there, it flowed from the Tian Shen and emptied into the vast Aral Sea and the water was free and cool and kept the dust down. Tamerlane could have told you that, or Alexander the Great had he made it that far. Then I traveled West to Karakalpakstan, where the desert reminded me of Midland and Odessa except every shrub was coated in choking, crusty, white dust. The dust blew in, salty and poisonous, from what used to be a sea but is now just more shrubs and poisonous salty dust. And there is a giant empty factory there, that used to pack tins full of fish, and the soldiers of the Red Army ate the fish from those tins as they marched across Russia, across Ukraine, across Poland into Germany. There is a memorial to the fishermen that canned those fish. The gravestones in the cemetery in the seaside town that doesn’t exist are marked with anchors. Not far from the factory there is a fleet of hulking, rusted out ships coated in that poisonous white dust. They used to sail across the sea, for the fish, all the way to Kazakhstan where what is left of the sea is a slimy mud hole a man can usually walk across. That is what is left of the sea that fed the Red Army. The water that fed the sea is diverted via leaky and crumbling canals to grow cotton. And some of it, to water driveways in Tashkent in July. I think about those ships when I remember that Texans in 2023 are watering machines to solve computer Sudoku they can then pretend is money. We’d be better off watering driveways.
  11. The IRS has mostly abdicated on this in recent years, but that’s the law.
  12. Someone convince me not to buy this. Rarely have I wanted something so hard. It’s a Lotus Europa that someone else gave up on. I know it will bring me only pain and anger, but so help me I want this so bad.
  13. Churches cannot lobby as churches; and church officers aren’t to endorse political candidates at church or church functions. Pastors and church officers can endorse or lobby for candidates as individuals.
  14. JWs are not supposed to vote or run for office or serve in the military or have anything to do with politics. I’d imagine the”lean D” number is tied to the diversity of the JWs.
  15. Yep, doctrines of Biblical inerrancy and literalism are creations of and reactions to the modern era; a lot of Islamic fundamentalism and extremism comes from similar places and motivations. Most discussions of any religion at all get ate up with tropes for the simple reason that nearly all popular and accessible information on the subject is written by polemicists on one side or another. That’s no way to get a good feel for what the hell is going on and how people actually apply it. You see that right here. BrickHorn’s pop history of what was going on in Western Europe (and the Church’s role) during late antiquity to the late Middle Ages is a narrative created by 18th and 19th century modern anti-clerical, anti-Cathic polemicists who are completely discredited by anyone doing real scholarship. It’s the equivalent of Sam Harris’ deep takes on Islam. Not to mention the erasure of a thousand years of Greek speaking Christian Romans who kept reading and copying Aristotle and doing science— and their interactions, tensions, and fights with their eastern and western neighbors. TL;DR these narratives are pointless because they are polemics directed at Modern ideological opponents and not actually designed to understand the things. It’s a world view based on the 18th and 19th century equivalent of a Reddit post.
  16. The local practice of Islam tends to be much more chill in places where it came via traders and merchants as opposed to invading armies as the charts @bolverk shows. In modern times, big problems appear anywhere “charities” and religious schools funded by Gulf money appear. The combination of: 1. Saudi custodianship of the holy sites; 2. official Saudi Wahhabism; and 3. Gulf oil revenues has been extremely toxic for the Islamic world.
  17. “Show me in the handbook where it says I can’t have anal sex in the Senate and film it?”
  18. lol, we told him he had the dumbass. We left the possum for the day, and a buddy went home, got a possum trap, and set it up. Next day, possum was in the trap and we let it go outside of town.
  19. The stupidest mofo I ever met was senior to me at that pool. One year we found that a possum had taken up residence in the chemical store room back under some shelves. Animal control told us to fucking deal with it, it was hissing and snapping as we tried to hassle it into a bucket with a stick. That guy, a manager, went to a car and got a lighter and the grabbed a can of WD-40 and said he’d spray it like a blowtorch and burn it out. In a room full of fucking chemicals and shit, all toxic and many flammable.
  20. All through high school and college I kept my lifeguard cert and then added cert to teach the whole lifeguard course, first aid, and swimming. That kept me out of shitty manual labor jobs in the summer and out of school, the pay was good and the atmosphere great. A few times while teaching the course in the evening, I’d have the keys to the facility and I’d stay with one of the girls in the class to practice what we’d learned after others went home. The shittiest job was opening up the city outdoor pools back at home— one big Olympic size and the other was 50 yards. Both 12 feet deep. You can’t drain them in the RFV, the water table is too high and they’ll pop up. The city was cheap as hell and just let them sit all winter and spring and they were sludge pits come May. So first you’d shock the hell out of them and run the pumps with a lot of chlorine to kill whatever the hell was in there. After a few days when the tests showed the balance was almost healthy enough for people, you’d work. They were next to parks with seagulls. A LOT of shit, mostly chicken bones but also whatever fell and died or got thrown in, built up. That will clog the vacuum so you go in and swim down and hand scoop it up. Algae got up, including black stuff that algaecide won’t take out unless you treat for weeks. It’s cheaper to pay high school kids to scrub. Those long poles offer no leverage to get it off the walls and floors. We’d tie a cradle around a diving brick, tie the other to our waists, and you’d spend a few days basically underwater with a wire brush swimming back up to catch a breath, then back down to scrub more. Then you’d take the same brushes and some Ajax and hand scrub every gotdam tile. Then finally you’d rebalance the chemicals and run the pumps and it would be ready for summer. And high school kids had no business getting near the drums of acid and chlorine you used. That shit would slosh all over. One day after a weekend of pool duty, I was sitting in English class and saw a bubble in my hand, and peeled off a few layers of skin from my palm and fingers in one sheet. I also got an ear infection every damn year.
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