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956 Worldwide

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Everything posted by 956 Worldwide

  1. Last night I went to a screening of Porcelain War, followed by a conversation with two of its subjects and Frodo the Yorkie. I’m still processing a lot of it, but I think what sticks with me the most is how well it captures the Ukraine that I know and love as Ukrainians see it and how the central couple are so exactly Ukrainian, right down to their casual switching between Russian and Ukrainian. I won’t dwell on the narrative but it follows an artist couple—ceramicists— and their dog in Kharkiv. Slava makes little animal figures for his wife to paint and doesn’t like guns but also trains riflemen for the armed forces and belongs to a drone and mortar unit that defends Kharkiv and later deploys to Bakhmut. Lots of switching between their life at home in Kharkiv under fire and excursions to nature when the can interspersed with GoPro and drone footage from Slava’s unit. It was a rough watch and had me sad and stewing after, and so I’ll make a list of people I hate. I used to have a kind of desultory dislike for people but Ukraine has made me, for the first time, truly loathe whole groups of them. - Russians who think this war is cool and makes their country better, obviously. - Americans and Westerners have the chance to see this beautiful and courageous and imperfect nation and want to demand they be perfect to deserve to defend themselves against Orcs. - The outhouse scum who have tried and largely succeeded in framing Ukrainians as our enemies who are stealing from us. - Most of all, the bone-dry, powdered ass big brains policy experts who have recently announced that Ukraine needs to feed their 18 year olds to Russians, and we will send body armor. But we’re not going to let them escalate, no! It’s fucking grotesque to call this a manpower problem when we won’t let them take the fight to the enemy and deny, delay, dissemble on every request for more strategic capabilities. Fuck them for asking Ukraine not just to sacrifice its today but also its tomorrow to ease our fears that Putin might get bit mad. Anyway, please go watch the movie if you can. It will be in Houston on 10 January. https://porcelainwar.url.film
  2. Those incidents were widely reported. I can’t help you man. You’re making your own narrative. https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/losangeles/news/los-angeles-man-arrested-for-flying-drone-over-taking-photos-of-vandenberg-space-force-base/ https://www.yahoo.com/news/chinese-national-sentenced-espionage-involving-154117672.html
  3. Clear statement from NSC today: NO corroborated drone sightings NO mothership NO foreign nexus to alleged sightings Most inquiry into reported sightings are just manned civilian aircraft Gap in authorities of who responds to stuff like this. Government communication has been disjointed to say the least. But what we have in NJ is textbook mass hysteria and social contagion. It’s truly alarming how many people walked outside and flipped their shit after seeing the airliners and biz jets and helicopters they see every day, flashing international standard civil aviation lights. This whole uproar has been driven by irresponsible and uninformed local elected officials, a stream of bullshit from the UFO media, and really bad communications from people who should do better.
  4. The IRS has piloted a free, easy to use direct online filing system that has gotten extremely great feedback from nearly everyone who has used it. So of course GOP reps want to kill it because they want to force people to use commercial tax preparers.
  5. No, that didn’t happen, classic case of social media laundering things into what people want it to say. Twitter is terrible for this because it’s all formerly UFO accounts now hyping drones. The original briefing is here. The Q&A starts at about 22:40 on the NJ stuff. The spokesperson is very particular with her words and says several times that the Pentagon is aware of “drone sightings that have been reported” and then also states more than once that “this ACTIVITY” or “these sightings” are not U.S. or adversary drones and refers to lawenforcement to investigate.
  6. Tilman Fertitta as Ambassador to Italy and this is all going to be so much dumber than you thought.
  7. “Kayla was wearing a coho, did you see? I can’t believe she even bothered to show up in that.” “I know, I wouldn’t dream of showing my face unless I could at LEAST wear a fresh sockeye.” “Well, Josh gave Shannon the most GORGEOUS fresh chinook, I guess it’s been a really good year.0
  8. God is the social contract for theists.
  9. The problem we are facing is that basically everyone thinks they and no one else should get to edit the social contract line by line. But really all you’re doing is using a lighter.
  10. This should be required reading every time some company is about to roll out a new customer portal.
  11. When I think about the storied Mets franchise, I’m confident that in no way will paying Juan Soto over 2/3 of a billion dollars blow up in their faces in the most hilarious and destructive way possible.
  12. It is amazing that half the internet was speculating that this guy was John Wick but in fact he was tweeting about banning flashlights and conveyor belt sushi.
  13. A red beard is a powerful thing. When I first moved to Pak I was clean-shaven and after a couple months I decided to grow my beard out. It came in with a lot more red than I expected and there was an immediate change in respect and attitude, especially from the Pashtuns.
  14. I’ve always wanted to produce a “manifesto.” Somehow I get stuck on “screed” or if I’m really in the zone “jeremiad.”
  15. Not so much that they let them get a start, as much as ISIS had a useful role to play once they were not an existential threat to Assad. And contrary to their press image, ISIS leaders are fanatics but not berserkers— they were capable of cutting temporary strategic deals. - ISIS was extremely useful as a tool to attack and undermine U.S. forces and U.S. allies in Iraq and later U.S.- aligned groups in Syria. For Russia, undermining the west is always the first strategic imperative. - ISIS was a useful rhetorical tool for many years; Russia got a lot of mileage and influence by claiming that they were all that stood between the “U.S. created” ISIS savages and a regional caliphate; in fact they simply effectively kept the stove at a simmer but never a boil. - ISIS and other jihadi groups are a useful pressure valve to get rid of extremist Muslims inside the Russian federation and make them someone else’s problem, and there is less blowback to killing them abroad than at home. - Russia and Assad could let them slip off the leash a bit and cause an uptick in migrant flows to Europe which has always been something Russia cannily exploits (Turkey is not innocent here either). - At one time Russia liked to hold them in reserve as a bargaining chip to get the West to the table. “Let’s go after ISIS together, and put aside all these quarrels over (Russia’s) Near Abroad.” It’s well documented that Russia and Assad allowed them to operate against common enemies from within the “regime controlled” zone. It’s kind of cliche, but the U.S. vs. Russian view of jihadis sort of reflects the inheritance of Western vs. Eastern Rome (Byzantium). The one likes to bring overwhelming force, wipe them out, completely destroy them, see if you can replace them with something more amenable. The second never wants to fully defeat an enemy because they can always be useful so long as they aren’t an existential threat.
  16. I will again say that I am far from “optimistic” but following these scenes from the prison….Assad was sarin gassing people and had a giant hydraulic press he used to squish people and would dissolve their remains in acid. All the takes about how bad it might get next should go on pause for a bit.
  17. Given that his name is Luigi and not Waluigi we should default to assuming he’s on the right side of things.
  18. How do you fuck up a McDonald’s transaction so badly that you get asked for an ID?
  19. In what I know will shock everyone, we bombed ISIS positions in what was until very recently a Russian/Assad controlled area of the country. Almost like they’d been allowing ISIS to hang out there.
  20. Tbh, it’s going to be really hard to be worse than what left. Syria was a charnel house. I’m not saying I’m optimistic, just that it’s hard to get lower, Assad sarin gassed people and ran the country like the USSR during the Great Terror.
  21. The Russians will likely negotiate an exit, there is nothing left to defend and the rebel groups can only lose by not letting them go.
  22. That monkey’s paw really curled when they asked for tyrannical and bloody oppressors of Arabs and Muslims to fall on October 7.
  23. Israel is mopping up the regime’s chemical weapons stockpiles.
  24. Assad is almost certainly in Russia. The Russian MFA announced definitively that he has left the country.
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