Jump to content

statsman

Full Members
  • Posts

    2661
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Posts posted by statsman

  1. So, to recap- Goines creates a pretense to charge in, falsely. He has heroin in his vehicle, ready to plant. The police bust in, shoot the Tuttles and each other, killing the Tuttles and injuring Goines enough that he couldn’t plant the heroin. 
     
    Goines retires with his pension and dodges criminal charges. 
      
    Way, to go, Houston, way to go. 

    • Like 1
    • Rage+1 2
  2. 4 minutes ago, Brian Fantana said:

    Wow.

     

    Yeah. I would argue that whoever a society or people gets it into their heads that they are innately superior to another, really shitty things happen. 
     
    That’s why I think we Americans should embrace an identity as the mongrels and castoffs of the world. 

    • Hook 'Em 2
  3. No intent to derail thread; I hope this adds perspective on making horrible decisions (when the question itself is horrible and all the options are horrible). 
     
    Imperial Japan had a bio weapon research unit in China, Unit 731. They killed 200-300k, but they were almost entirely Chinese populations, so the west took little notice. They were working on a plan to spread pestilence to California. 
     
    Their operation shut down immediately upon the post Nagasaki surrender. The army leaders went to the pens where human test subjects were kept, popped a cap into each of them, and abandoned the base. 
     
    Unit 731 did not factor into the atom bomb decision, but I can be persuaded that almost anything that expedited its end was worthwhile. 

    • Hook 'Em 1
  4. 4 minutes ago, RomaVicta said:

     

    It's all monstrous. 

    I have a line I use in discussions about the U.S. using nukes to end the war in the pacific. 
     
    “We were at war with monsters (Imperial Japan could match Hamas, atrocity for atrocity), and in order to defeat them, we did monstrous things”. 

    • Fuck You 2
  5. 3 minutes ago, Brian Fantana said:

    Cool. They can stop using my tax dollars, then.

    I think that’s in the future. 

  6. On 3/26/2024 at 12:19 AM, bolverk said:

    Here's how I see things from a very basic level.

    There's a group of people who had a land claim from 2,000 years ago, and they'd been treated like shit for a very long time all over the world after they lost their land claim. Then, there was another group of people who tried to exterminate them. Well, the exterminators got their asses kicked, and the rest of the people felt bad. So, the people with the land claim were gifted the original land that another group of people already lived on to make the exterminators feel better about themselves.

    The people whose land was given to the almost exterminated people weren't too happy about their land being given away, but they lost to the new land-owners, like, 3-4 times in wars. So, the nearly exterminated people got a little cocky and said, "There's no place for you on our land that we claim from 2,000 years ago! This land was promised to us by our sky daddy!"

    The losers said, "The prophet of our sky daddy ascended to heaven from here!!! You can't have it."

    Then, another separate group said, "Well, the son of our sky daddy and his 12 buddies said that the people whose sky daddy said this was their land needed to have it back so that the son of our sky daddy could rule the world for something like10,000 years according to our sacred book. Also, we feel really guilty about what happened to the previous landowners from 2,000 years ago by some of our own exterminators, and you guys are brown. So..."

    Well, the people that had been living on that land didn't take too kindly to any of that, and they devised fucked up ways to resist all that shit, including blowing up the new landowners, along with buddying up with some neighbors. But they still didn't do too well and lost even more land.

    Now, the previous landowners are still pissed and doing fucked up shit to resist, while the new landowners are doing some fucked up shit to the previous landowners. Never mind that the new landowners have some genocidal fucks among their leadership alongside genocidal fucks amount the previous landowners.

    So, yeah, maybe we should take a step back and reconsider our involvement in all this fucked up bullshit.

    There is a little more to this. 
     
    During the Holocaust, the western nations had opportunities to help, by taking in refugee Jews. Some individuals helped, bending rules and skirting regulations, to help some escape. They had to break rules, because western governments were more concerned about keeping another war from breaking out, and dealing with domestic issues. For example, see the ship that FDR sent away from Miami, full of German Jews trying to find sanctuary in America, pre-war. 
     
    After the war, there were survivors of the camps. Some tried to return home, and reclaim property. Many were killed, notably in Poland. It turns out that murderous anti-Semitism was not purely a German feature. 
     
    This played a big part in the creation of modern Israel. The western nations were trying to settle down, and really didn’t want the agitation of dealing with “them” (check out contemporary news accounts of Jewish post war refugees in the NYT archives; they are jarring in their anti-Semitism). When the Zionist proposed the Levant, the western powers couldn’t believe their luck. 
     
    “Never again” to the Gentile world means “we’ll never stand aside and watch a genocide again”, which clearly, is bullshit (ask the Rohingyas and Uighers, among others). The world absolutely will stand aside and watch. 

    “Never again” to Jews means “we’ll never count on Gentiles to save us or even do simply the right thing again. We’ll take care of our protection ourselves” and they mean it.

    So, here we are. There is a humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Israel could do more to help. Hamas is actively trying to keep aid from civilians, because this disaster is their best chance of survival as an organization. And if Hamas does survive as an organization? They will be seen as the victors, and the leaders of the Palestinian people. Goodbye, Fatah and Palestinian Authority. 
     
    A couple of things that could be discussed more:

    Iran is bankrolling Hamas’ military ventures. Their hands are far more involved in this than Qatar’s. Oh, for a coherent Iran policy. 
     
    I don’t know if Israel has an end game strategy for Hamas, but it will have to involve killing a lot of Hamas militants and leaders. They “declared war” on Hamas, but any ending that looks like a conventional war ending (surrender, detentions of leaders, occupation) isn’t a real ending at all, but merely a stay in the conflict. We know from experience with Guantanamo releases that nobody gets reformed and rehabilitated in ME conflicts. 
     
    So, part of me wonders if Israel has thought this ending through, and part of me fears that it has and we might see it. 

    • Like 1
  7. The future of Unwra, the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, is in the air as Arab countries fail to fill the funding gap left by the U.S.
    https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/arab-nations-balk-at-funding-u-n-aid-agency-vital-to-palestinians-5f79a5e9?st=l91wr88i2nbgp23&reflink=share_mobilewebshare
     
    Shitty situation. Gazan civilians need humanitarian aid. UNRWA is hobbled by lack of funding, due to ties to Hamas. Israel is prioritizing security over getting the aid there (fear of weapons smuggling, fear of aid getting to Hamas). Hamas is the enemy of the aid getting to the civilian populace (humanitarian suffering increases international pressure on Israel to cease fire). 
     
    In short-Israel is ambivalent about Gazan suffering (at best, alleviating it is very much a lesser priority) and Hamas wants the suffering to worsen in the near term, in support of getting a cease fire. Shitty situation. 

  8. 3 hours ago, Bevo said:

     

    I hope that is what it is and not simply the lack of desire to fight Russia. But, even if it is true that soldiers don't want to fight because of the lack of weapons, it then becomes a chicken or the egg argument. I don't want to spend a lot of money and pay high oil prices, to a nation who doesn't want to fight for its independence. If the support inside Ukraine is there to fight for its independence from Russia, I'll support it, though.

    This may or may not add perspective-

    My dad was a career, 26 years enlisted man in the U.S. Army. He was proud of serving and proud of his country. He went to Vietnam in 1969, a  32 years old SFC, with a wife and three kids back home. 
     
    He had a tough duty, running a sniper school in the Mekong Delta, and getting plenty of duty in the field, as well (and sometimes the CIA would pick him up because they got info and needed him for a “shoot”). He told me recently that in his tour over there, about halfway through, he and his peers realized that we (the U.S.) weren’t fighting to win, and thus, weren’t going to win. He says that his attitude and approach changed with that revelation, and he became much less willing to take on risks to further the mission. He said, “No one wanted to be the last one to die for a mistake” (the ‘mistake’ being the war). 
     
    Ukraine is on track to lose this war, at best losing the areas Russia claims, at worst losing more. It didn’t have to be that way, but that’s where it’s heading because Russia is on a wartime production footing and Ukraine can’t match it. The west could match it, but “we” hoped instead to support Ukraine the cheap and easy way, giving them a bunch of old and not very functional (talking about the French here) ordnance. 
     
    I posted on this thread a year and a half ago, that we could give Ukraine all we have to spare, or we could give them what they need to win. We chose the former. 
     
    More people are going to suggest that Ukraine negotiate a new border. Once that starts, the western politicians will jump on that opportunity to stop worrying about paying for guns instead of butter, and it really will be all over for Ukraine. 

    • Hook 'Em 4
    • Rage+1 5
  9. 43 minutes ago, 'stache said:

    Their literal existence is to be a public figure. Nothing else. They don’t govern, they don’t negotiate on state visits, they exist, period. I cannot comprehend what would have been wrong with a press release several months ago: “The Princess is being treated for cancer, please keep her in your thoughts, and we ask for privacy at this time.”

    There, the gossips will still gossip, but the truth is out. Also, again because their only job is to be famous, shouldn’t she use this for cancer awareness and fundraising? I just don’t understand why people think they are private citizens.

    You’re recommending they handle her medical situation the same way as King Charles’, and that went fine for him. Why wouldn’t/couldn’t they do the same for her?

  10. I think a big part of their problem is that their soldiers get sent to the front, and rarely get rotated out. There is corruption; men can bribe their way out of the draft, or bribe their way to better assignments. 
     
    Now that they are being driven backwards, and rationing bullets and shells, being a Ukrainian soldier looks like a pretty awful option. 

    • Hook 'Em 1
  11. 8 hours ago, Bevo said:

     

     

    That is terrible news - like it makes me doubt my support. Maybe it is typical for people not to want to fight when their country is in peril but that is at odds with my thoughts.

    If this war is about the size of Ukraine’s military, they do not have a chance of winning. Thats the war Russia wants to fight, where soldiers are just numbers, and they are expended as needed. 
     
    Ukraine’s only chance is to fight as a western army, but they need the advantages of a western army- the top weapons, and functioning supply chains. 
     
    But, here we are. Two years in, and nobody in the west has gone into wartime production of artillery shells. They have been given various defunct missile systems, and they are running out. Frankly, the western governments are not acting seriously. We act as if it is a strategy to give them three different tank systems, in various states of disrepair, and say, “MacGyver this into a victory”. 

    • Hook 'Em 8
    • Like 1
  12. On 3/21/2024 at 4:51 PM, A’Dam Psycho said:

    Land Thief fan big mad

    What a fucking idiot. L-O-fucking-L!

    This moron doesn’t get it- he’s wondering why they just flipped the 2024 schedule, instead of playing the other half of the league in 2025. 
     
    Texas and OU are playing each year. Arkansas wants one thing- an annual game with Texas. Now, the Aggies may not want that game every year, but ESPN does. 
     
    OU may have a tough adjustment. 

  13. 1 minute ago, jimmyjazz said:

    This chick:

    image.png.78e91f7ded223847c6fab4adf74bbe2b.png

     

    looks a fair bit like Austin songbird Kim Longacre (of Zeitgeist / The Reivers).  It's not, but there is a similarity.  Pretty much every (straight) guy who used to go see late 80's early 90's indie rock in Austin had a thing for her.  Sorry for the threadjack, I just wanted to find a phot of Kim:

    image.png.4897e22b0e0b5888bc334a347597916b.png

     

     

    We saw them at the 1991 SXSW, really enjoyed their cover of “Shattered” (I think they played in the Texas Union). 

    • Hook 'Em 1
  14. 5 minutes ago, Bevo said:

    I did a quick search and the first article that I read, well let's just say I disagreed with pretty much all of it.

    The author was Marco Carnelos who was an Italian diplomat, who I know nothing about. I also know nothing about the publisher, the Middle Eastern Eye.

     


    Victoria Nuland: Farewell to the queen of US foreign policy disasters
    Marco Carnelos
    22 March 2024 14:07 GMT | Last update: 1 day 7 hours ago
    For 30 years, from Iraq, Syria and China to Ukraine, Russia and Israel, Nuland's impact on US foreign policy has been disastrous. Let's hope her successor is an improvement
     

    Sometimes, major policy changes are anticipated and even symbolised by mere bureaucratic decisions.

    This could certainly be the case for the US Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland, who recently announced her retirement after three and a half decades serving as a senior US foreign policy official under ten different secretaries of state. She has probably decided to leave what appears more and more like a sinking ship.

    The decision, which has been accompanied by scant coverage in western mainstream media, incontrovertibly signals the abject failures of the Biden administration’s policies, especially in Ukraine and the Middle East.

    The first was supposed to isolate and sanction Russia and bring it to its knees, hopefully triggering a regime change in Moscow.

    The second was the unwavering support extended to Israel to reaffirm a Pax Americana in the region through the Abraham Accords, crowned by a deal with Saudi Arabia, and to silently sweep the Palestinian question under the rug.
     

    Two years after Russia invaded Ukraine, Kyiv, short of funding and weapons, seems to have no capability left to affect the war's trajectory.

    Sanctions against Russia backfired spectacularly, creating massive problems for Europe’s industrial competitiveness. Ultimately, Moscow has been isolated only by the western countries, while its political and trade relations with the rest of the world are unaffected. On the contrary, they are growing, as is its economy.

    In the Middle East, notwithstanding Washington's massive support to Israel in its war in Gaza - for which the US is borderline complicit in a genocide - the Netanyahu government is blatantly ignoring the Biden administration’s pleas to restrain its military offensive and to allow humanitarian aid to a starved Palestinian population.

    A ceasefire, or a humanitarian truce, remains elusive, as does a deal for the dual release of the Israeli hostages and the Palestinian prisoners. Finally, an Israeli-Saudi deal seems more distant than before.

    In the pantheon of US power, the US undersecretary of state for political affairs is the third-ranking member of the US State Department, after the secretary and their deputy. Nevertheless, it is the real engine of US foreign policy.

    Nuland has not been just a high-level US diplomat, she has been the spearhead, the golden girl of the US warmongering neoconservative and liberal interventionist movements, which in barely two decades have given humanity the Iraq, Syria, Libya, Ukraine and Palestinian disasters.

    In such a desolate landscape, then, if any face should be associated with the last decade's US policy on Russia and, particularly, with the critical file of Ukraine, it is Nuland’s.

    Her career, in which she held top positions within the US foreign service, witnessed the progressive deterioration of US-Russian relations and also US-China relations, to the point where the risks of military confrontation in Europe and East Asia haven't been as high since the most hectic days of the Cold War.

    Nuland married Robert Kagan, one of the key founders of the neoconservative think tank Project for a New American Century, which strongly advocated aggressive US military intervention around the world. Nuland shared Kagan's views on Russia, and pursued an obsessive anti-Russian policy, becoming one of the most vocal advocates of the fateful Nato’s eastwards expansion.

    In fact, so relentlessly has she pursued them, that she has now helped create an increased risk of a major global conflict that could affect three strategic theatres at the same time: Europe, the Middle East and East Asia.

    It is a rare thing, even in the glorious annals of US diplomacy, to have had an official combine Russophobia, Sinophobia and Islamophobia to produce so much damage.

    From 1993 to 1996, Nuland was chief of staff to US Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, the architect of the Clinton’s administration policy on Russia. The 1990s were the happy years of the US-Russia relationship, at least from the American standpoint.

    Russia's then President Boris Yeltsin was much loved by the US foreign policy establishment because he was weak and ready to execute all the “instructions” coming from Washington. Among them, the disastrous economic shock therapies, including fake privatisations, which created a class of oligarchs that seized control of the country's resources and accumulated immense fortunes that were syphoned out of the country.

    But these were not good years for the general Russian population, whose level of poverty plunged to Stalin-era levels. These were the years that slowly created the conditions for Vladimir Putin’s rise to power.

    Under Yeltsin, Russia was not only keen to adopt US-prescribed economic remedies but also to tolerate acts blatantly detrimental to its historical interests, such as the Nato-led war which broke Kosovo from Serbia in 1999.

    In the George W Bush administration, Nuland served on the foreign policy staff of Vice President Dick Cheney. History can tell us how much damage US foreign policy caused at that time, starting with the Iraq disaster.

    From 2005 to 2008, Nuland was the US ambassador to Nato. At the infamous Nato summit in Bucharest in April 2008, she pressed allies to grant membership action plans to Ukraine and Georgia.

    When the German and French governments refused, she was involved in the blunder in which Nato promised that Ukraine and Georgia would one day be admitted.

    Later, in the first Obama administration, she was spokesperson for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and present at the creation of two further disasters: the regime change war in Libya, which turned the country into a failed state, and the unrealistic “Assad must go policy”, which helped transform a peaceful uprising in Syria into a brutal civil war, creating one of the worst humanitarian disasters of the 21st century.

    However, her most important accomplishment, for which she deserves an imaginary academy award for foreign policy blunders, was her handling of the Ukrainian file in her capacity as assistant secretary of state for Europe and Eurasian affairs under the second Obama administration.

    There, she organised the “Maidan coup”, according to the Russian narrative, where she brilliantly succeeded in bringing Ukraine under the western political umbrella and ousting Ukraine's legitimately elected president, Viktor Yanukovych. This overturned a previously agreed political deal brokered by European powers to avoid Ukraine descending into chaos. Famously, in a leaked call to the US ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, she said "Fuck the EU" at the time.

    Bloody and tense years followed, especially in the Donbas region, where fighting broke out between the new US-backed regime in Kyiv and pro-Russian forces in the east, and the relationship between Russia and the West deteriorated after the former, as a reaction, seized control of Crimea.

    There was a four-year pause in Nuland's career between January 2017 and January 2021, during which she did not deploy any ticking bombs. The reason is simple: she was not welcome in the new Trump administration.

    Unfortunately, under the new Biden administration, Nuland was back and she assumed the critical job of undersecretary of state for policy. With Nuland back, the Kremlin immediately concluded that there was no room for any understanding with the US.

    Discreetly, and largely unreported by mainstream media, western military involvement in Ukraine increased and so did Russian anger. It was a trend that, after all, had been ongoing since 2014, as recently revealed by the New York Times.

    Three years later, what Nuland leaves behind is nothing short of disastrous.

    She has accomplished an increased risk of a major global conflict that could affect three strategic theatres at the same time: Europe, the Middle East and East Asia.

    US moral standing has been severely injured, and, in the best case, the global rest are indifferent to US pleas and narratives.

    Western democracies are also facing moral bankruptcy in the rubble of Gaza while the International Court of Justice has accepted to inquire if Israel, whose right to self-defence has been uncritically supported for too long by the West, is committing a genocide.
     

    The only words of common sense are coming from Pope Francis who, in the case of Ukraine, has urged the international community to recognise how desperate the situation is and to consider peace negotiations to spare further casualties; even the pope was not spared shameful attacks on him from those distorting his words.

    In the Middle East, the picture is similarly gloomy. Like the Ukraine situation, the conflict in Gaza is reaching a stalemate, while the risk of escalation remains high, especially with a potential major conflict looming along the Lebanese-Israeli border.

    Meanwhile, US leverage over Israel has zeroed, and the Biden administration blindly perseveres in preaching its narratives of good and bad.

    Last year, when Wendy Sherman stepped back as US deputy secretary of state, Nuland was nominated as acting deputy secretary of state. Nuland was close to being crowned and it would have been the coronation of her career.

    But in what was probably one of its smartest decisions, the Biden administration picked the National Security Council coordinator for the Indo-Pacific, Kurt Campbell, for the job. Campbell had been the architect of another failed policy, Hillary Clinton’s pivot to Asia.

    Let’s at least hope that Campbell does not turn China into what Russia was for Nuland.

     

    Thank you for the example. I think a more accurate summation of her career is “she was a mid to high level state department employee for thirty years”. 

    • Hook 'Em 1
    • Like 1
  15. 17 minutes ago, Bevo said:

    I don't know who David Sack is, someone educate me. I wonder if he believes his BS or if he is simply a grifter paid by Russia.

    I wondered the same, before. I think he is some tech guy, connected to Musk somehow. 
     
    There is a funny type of intelligence that wants to see patterns and conspiracies where there really aren’t any. These are the people who get honestly sucked in by the Russian propaganda nonsense. You can spot them by their pet responses:

    ”That’s what they’d like you to think.”

    ”You really believe that’s a coincidence?”

    It seems to be a real desire to demonstrate being smarter than everyone else  

    There is a poor woman, named Victoria Nuland, an under-secretary of state, who by all accounts does a hard working and merit-worthy job. This poor woman’s career is nearly ruined by these conspiracy mongers. They claim she is the chess piece mover controlling US foreign policy behind the scenes. 

    • Hook 'Em 2
    • Like 1
    • Rage+1 2
  16. Can someone save me from a shitload of googling?

    OK, I get that the king of England, 500 years ago, was filthy rich, primarily through owning a bunch of property. So, they had Crimwelk’s revolution, and executed the king. Q1: did they then have the state take the property? Or a bunch of barons take it? Or a combination? (I’m guessing that it wasn’t put in a blind trust, but I could be wrong)

    Then, a couple of decades later, they decided they needed a king again, and brought this German guy over to be king (and thus, the Windsors). W2: Did they then just give him a bunch of property? Was it pretty much what the executed king had?

    Thanks

×
×
  • Create New...