Jump to content

956 Worldwide

Full Members
  • Posts

    10300
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    26

Everything posted by 956 Worldwide

  1. India confirms the ceasefire but not the rest of Marco’s claims.
  2. 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.
  3. Pakistan PM confirmed but not Indians yet.
  4. We are announcing a ceasefire.
  5. He studied in France so he for sure knew it and likely the Anglo Norman version.
  6. 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 :)”
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. 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.
  10. 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.
  11. 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.
  12. 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
  13. 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 . . .
  14. 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.
  15. We are in a five alarm fire. The White House is openly threatening to suspend Habeas Corpus. https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5292820-white-house-miller-immigration-crackdown/ Habeas Corpus has been suspended four times. During the Civil War, during reconstruction and Ku Klux Klan insurrection, during an early 1900s Philippines rebellion, and in Hawaii after Pearl Harbor. This isn’t even the Constitution. Habeas Corpus predates Magna Carta. It is the great writ that separates freemen of England from despotism elsewhere. It’s encoded in our nation’s DNA. It is insane to even contemplate it, and it is the threat of a tyrant.
  16. It’s crazy, I really preferred Michelle’s stance of eating healthy and not having polio.
  17. To be clear, “functional medicine” is just quackery. She might as well have quit her residency to do reflexology or sell ground up animal potions.
  18. Absolute fucking lunacy. “Actually it’s better that the surgeon general isn’t really a doctor.” And regarding the last paragraph, this country had a week-long meltdown because Michelle Obama planted a vegetable garden.
  19. The post from @Masshole Horn and constant whining from my ten year old inspired me. She loves Indian food and I hate how gotdamned expensive it is. This is more of a riff on butter chicken than a real attempt. Leaving the skin on isn’t traditional but I love grilled chicken skin and I cooked the sauce separately and poured over the grilled drumsticks that cooked all the way on the grill. They got slashed to the bone and marinated overnight in a yogurt/spice mix. Slammed and went hard.
  20. A bit of earnestness I’m sure I’ll regret. I am not a Catholic, I am a believer. I do not think that the pope is infallible, even when speaking ex cathedra. The Catholic Church, like every institution of the Christian faith, is not infallible and quite often has been significantly worse than that. In the late 1970s Karol Wojtyla became John Paul II. He was also not a perfect or infallible man, and at times he could be rather worse than even that. But this man proclaimed from the chair of St. Peter to millions of Central and Eastern Europeans that the inhuman and anti-moral system they lived under had lost all credibility and moreover, that they didn’t need to be afraid anymore. And while that may seem simple and trite, in the 1970s and 1980s fear was as much a part of that corner of God’s creation as castles and beer and dumplings and sour cream. Fear hung in the air, written in red, blown in from a leaden gray Moscow sky. Millions of people decided to believe him and acted thus. Catholics and non-Catholics and atheists and Jews and within ten years the fear was gone, the Soviet barracks emptied and the castles and beer and sour cream and dumplings remained. No one had to shoot at anyone, no superpower intervened. Maybe it was God or maybe John Paul II or maybe neither. Maybe it was just people who looked for a reason to stop being afraid. Today a friend with Slovak passport, Hungarian name, Jewish roots, and secular worldview— a sensitive and intelligent woman, a graduate of Columbia j-school, an award winning anti-corruption crusader— wrote that perhaps the selection of Leo XIV will serve as an “impulse to calm an agitated America or to return to basic values like care for your neighbor and empathy.” Maybe so. It’s possible. Deus vult.
  21. Today the State Department dropped a graphic using Avro Lancasters. This type of stuff drives me nuts. You can see the RAF roundels. In ordinary times I’d say this is a nod to allies but it’s not our brand now and it’s just dumbness.
  22. I love the Walk of Life Project. Dr. Strangelove is my favorite.
  23. Not as deep as you’d think. Once you get down 1-2 levels that starts becoming apparent. They are grabbing really junior people who have no idea what they are doing to serve at the assistant and undersecretary type levels. They aren’t known quantities either. A lot of this, outside the meme appointments, is evidence that no one serious wants to be a part of this.
  24. I spent the worst year of my life in Karachi. China has little reason to want actual escalation and many reasons not to; they are delighted to get some data on how well their systems work against a fighting opponent but zero reason to want an actual war. The United States also has zero interest in this spiraling. And while miscalculation and face-saving can lead to some bad outcomes, both India and Pakistan are calibrating here in rhetoric and action. I still thing a slow wind-down is most likely.
×
×
  • Create New...