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956 Worldwide

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Everything posted by 956 Worldwide

  1. Per online sleuthing she was at Pier 17. There is not much distance between the pier and the bridge and from the video it looks like her screws won’t come out of reverse and she is moving backwards fast. Very likely would have been far more dangerous to try and scramble everyone down by the time it became clear it was going to happen. These ships are diplomatic and educational symbols and when they are in a port, they offer free tours and stuff for the public. Super shitty and sad all around.
  2. From my understanding the Mexican, Colombian, and Peruvian ships are all sister ships built in the same yard in Spain. And that they are themselves basically templates of the USCG Eagle which was seized from Nazi Germany at the end of the war and turned into the Coast Guard’s tall training ship.
  3. Trump going to the Kennedy center and demanding more “Cats” from the new board will never not be hilarious.
  4. Two elections right now with high-level Trump regime interest: Romania and Poland presidential elections. In Romania the hard-right candidate (Simion) is likely to win the second round. This comes after Trump had a temper tantrum when Romania re-ran elections and disqualified a more blatant pro-Russia candidate following a clearly illegal, Kremlin tied influence campaign. Trump later yanked Romania’s Visa Waiver status in what was widely seen as a political move designed to up pressure and spark anger to get Simion over the line. In Poland big-tent centrist movement Civic Platform candidate, Warsaw’s liberal mayor Trzaskowski is the front runner in the first round. The Trump regime has openly tried to boost populist Law and Justice candidate Nawrocki, giving him an Oval visit shortly before the elections. They will likely face off in a second round. There is already a conspiracy theory bubbling in Polish right wing spaces about how Soros and Obama tied NGOs are boosting Trzaskowski. I expect it to get boosted further in MAGA-world after the first round. The regime is very invested in building a populist Europe and intervening into elections in a way we have not seen before.
  5. The orders have come down across government: the goal is to ape the worst rhetoric of the administration, not to actually accomplish the administration’s purported goal. There is no space to try and get your way to Trump’s destination by a different path than the one Trump has laid out.
  6. A Bachelor-style contest but for fiery Latinas where you get a green-card but have to marry the incel who puts the ladies through their paces.
  7. Talks in Istanbul revealing just how far away Russia is from any serious effort. The low-level delegation headed by a man with no real clout in Putin’s inner circle demanded that Ukraine withdraw from territories Russia has “annexed” but does not control and threatened to seize two more. Usual banging on about demilitarizing Ukraine and ensuring the “Kyiv regime” can’t threaten Russia. None of this acceptable to Kyiv in any way. The admin decided to take the line that this cannot be solved unless Trump and Putin meet. This gives Putin quite a lot and Trump very little and so it will probably happen. I don’t expect a lot from Russia as sprint and summer make for a good time for fighting and trying to seize more. Internally Russia is uninterested in consumer welfare and remains fully committed to reconstitution.
  8. Wow, so many misogynists in there. Dems are so terrible at weaponizing government. Tulsi should have been booted from the Guard and had security clearances removed. It would have happened to any other 05 who acted like she did. And it would have maybe been enough to keep her from being DNI. It was her political activities that saved her because Biden and Co were terrified to be seen as “weaponizing” government so the more of a loudmouth political asshole you were, the safer you were.
  9. Few ideologies really are. There has emerged one on the foreign policy front: neo-isolationism militarily, neo-mercantilism economically, and a willingness to use diplomatic tools to advance right-wing populism and nationalism in the Western world, transactional everywhere else. Its not one that he will apply coherently or that he formed, but that is what coalesced among his viziers.
  10. I’m not super excised about removing the designation for Syria, although of course the business deal is gross. But, I think even a Harris admin would have been moving this way: 1. There really is a window here to roll back Iranian and Russian influence in the region and with it a lot of the cover for terrorism. 2. You have to give a path off of a designation if behavior really changes. Otherwise there’s no incentive to change. A chance here to show the region that there is a way to reform and rejoin the world. 3. It will cause Anastasis to melt down. Announcing that you think the Syrian guy is really hot is super weird though.
  11. Really eerie how prescient many normie libs were in identifying the incel/fashy tendencies of the Bernie bro movement.
  12. Needs to be noted that it’s almost cliche in intelligence studies that the Soviet collection and analysis apparatus was incredibly effective and good and then it all got filtered for ideological purity and became worthless.
  13. The therapy bills Tulsi and Anastasis rack up after this could pay for the Qatari jet.
  14. The problem with having career officials from the embassy or department present is that then somewhere an official record will be created. That is what this is about.
  15. 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
  16. 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.”
  17. 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.
  18. This is a fucking crabcake.
  19. 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.
  20. 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.
  21. The people who become AUSAs and agents or really anything during this admin are going to be some real pieces of work.
  22. 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.”
  23. 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.
  24. 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.
  25. “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.
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