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Ghost of LL

Burnt Ends
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Everything posted by Ghost of LL

  1. No--that's what I was talking about. I couldn't remember what it was called. That didn't stop us in Baghdad.
  2. Iran is the Japan of this Axis. They'd lose, but it'd be a tough nut to crack that would involve some very nasty amphibious landings. Belarus is the Italy of this Axis. Lukashenko is going to end up strung up by his heels at a gas station. We have some CIWS that work on land. We used them to protect the Green Zone in Baghdad. I would think those would be ideal for countering these V1.2s.
  3. You mean apart from the millions of Arabs? And to be clear, there are two types of Arabs. For those that live inside Israel's 1967 borders, apartheid is entirely de facto. Oh, yeah, they have political rights. They can vote for an Arab party. But no mainstream party will ever enter into a power-sharing agreement with an Arab party. So the Arab citizens of Israel will never have political power. And that means that discrimination against Arabs in employment, housing, and healthcare is and will remain rampant and without possible redress. For the Arabs who live outside Israel's 1967 borders, the apartheid state is de jure. Israel has occupied the territory for more than a half-century. It has walled it off. It prevents travel. In Gaza, it prevents basic humanitarian aid from entering. It wants the territory, but what it fundamentally refuses to do is annex it and make the people living within it citizens with actual rights. It's a despicable arrangement that we only encourage. And frankly, I'm quite sick of it.
  4. I'm old enough to remember when Putin declared that kicking Russia off SWIFT would be an act of war. It has become very clear that there are no red lines in Ukraine. We can do whatever the fuck we want and not really risk a direct conflict with Russia. And even if we joined the war directly, Russia's actions have made it clear that it would be limited to the Ukrainian theater, and would almost certainly not spill out into a wider conflict. It's apparent that we need a major rethink in our Middle East policy. We have allies who share literally none of our values or interests (Saudi Arabia and Pakistan). We have enemies (Iran) who actively aided us when we were attacked by . . . checks notes . . . citizens of one of our allies who were funded by another ally. And then we have another ally (Israel) that is an apartheid state that provides us no actually benefit as an ally, only costs. To call it is "ally" at all is false. It's an "ally" is exactly the same way the Soviet Union was an ally during World War II--it takes all of our aid provides little or no reciprocal assistance to us--except in the key difference that it refuses to fight our enemy in a world war.
  5. Back to this, and to @Neonmoon's point, I think it's healthy to have a party that will ruthlessly throw its leadership overboard as soon as he/she/they become an embarrassment. Here, our political parties rally around them and pretend it's perfectly alright for a Q-Anon supporter to hold high political office.
  6. I think they actually changed the rules so that now it'll be decided by just the Conservative MPs. And, at this point, who really gives a fuck? It's not like the new PM will have any democratic mandate, irrespective of how s/he is appointed. S/he will just be inheriting a shitshow that can easily or quickly be put back. That's why guys like Jeremy Hunt are like, "yeah, no." this morning--who on earth would want this fucking job. You do have to respect King Charles, though. At this rate, he's going to go through as many prime ministers in just more than a year as the late Queen had during her entire reign. And that's a lot of kissing hands. Must be very tiring for him.
  7. Liz Truss will have a press conference momentarily outside No. 10. Presumably resigning.
  8. I think it's actually a mark of the maturity and stability of their democracy that Truss has a 9% approval rating. That's unthinkable here. But that's because politics here isn't about policy or the national interest or anything other than "Go Team Red/Blue."
  9. I've got to tell you, if you're not following this, then you just don't really enjoy politics. This is the very finest is luxury political disaster tourism. Now Truss has sacked the Home Secretary. Something about "but her emails." Yeah--seriously. The Home Secretary sent a confidential document from her private email. But really, it's about the fact that the (now former) home secretary, Suella Braverman, believes in zero immigration (which is pretty fucking gross, given that she is the daughter of two immigrants), while Truss realizes that the British economy relies on immigrants and needs to rescind some of the restrictions put in place under Boris Johnson. So that's two senior cabinet ministers getting shitcanned in a week. That's not the stuff of a stable government. And so now apparently you have others resigning. Word is the deputy whip has resigned. And there may be another resignation about to be announced. So there are a few options. None of them are great. The Tories could change the rules and oust Truss now. But who is her replacement? There's basically nobody who could rally a majority of the Conservative Party (much less the country). And in any event, who would want it? This is leading to some absurd speculation that you could see Boris Johnson make a triumphant return to No. 10. Or maybe the Tories decide to keep Truss around to the end of the year. They're figuring that there's going to be some economic pain associated with the new Chancellor's program of spending cuts. So they might as well get that out of the way and pin all that on Truss before throwing her under the bus. I mean, I give them points for cynicism. But it's so nakedly so that it really defeats the purpose. And then there's some discussion of having Truss resign and allowing Kier Starmer to form a Labour minority government with a limited confidence-and-support agreement from some Tory backbenchers. The idea here being (1) the Tories are in too much of a shambles to form a government, irrespective of how many seats they may have in the Commons, and (2) some of the blame for the current economic pain could be shared with Labour, reducing the electoral blow when the next general election comes around. I'm serious, though--if you're not scarfing down popcorn while all this is going on, you're just letting the best in life pass you by.
  10. I'll vote for Watson, but I'm not particularly enthusiastic about it. I think I might vote against Page Ellis for my council district. I mean, her opponent is a right-wing loon. But Page is useless. Definitely vote against the City's Prop A. That's just a bullshit subsidy for developers to maintain Central Austin's preferred zoning, while not actually doing anything for affordability. But it will cost us $300M (going back to our bond rating).
  11. Waaaay ahead of you--we've had Japanese bidets in the house for ten years.
  12. So I don't see a thread on here about Japan, so I figure I'll start one. Mrs.LL and I are heading over to Japan next March. The country is finally back open after Covid, and it's been a place I've long wanted to go. But I know nothing about it. We have a week over there, and I'm figuring four days in Tokyo and three in Kyoto. Does that sound about right? And what the hell do I do while there? I mean, other than eat a lot of sushi and drink a bunch of sake.
  13. Honestly, one of y'all with military/political/diplomatic/NAFO insight needs to explain to me just how this thing ends. Because I don't see it. Right now, you've got two combatants who are locked in a death grip with one another. This isn't anything like Afghanistan, where the Russians could just decide they'd had enough, cross a bridge, and be done with it. Even if Russia were to evacuate all of the occupied territories, they've kidnapped thousands of Ukrainian citizens. And I just don't see the Ukrainians not pursuing that militarily. Because, let's be honest--if Russia were to evacuate the occupied territories (and I think we all agree that Ukraine isn't going to stop fighting until that happens, including the Crimea, right?), that would probably mean that the Russian military is so badly degraded that it can't defend Russian territory. By that point, the road to Moscow might be open, allowing significant Ukrainian advances into Russia itself. But of course, that really does raise the prospect of nuclear-weapon use. So neither of these sides can stop fighting unilaterally. And there's really no available political solution that could result in an agreed cessation of the fighting. So I really don't see how this turns into anything other than a very long war. And to a very large degree, I think that suits us just fine. The way the United States has been dispensing aid, it's pretty clear that the primary goal is to degrade the Russian military. Ensuring Ukrainian victory is a goal, but it is decidedly a secondary goal. If that were the primary goal, we'd be giving them the good stuff--Abrams tanks, Bradley IFVs, F-16s--and the Ukrainians would be able to eject the Russians from Ukrainian territory in a couple months. But we're not doing that. Instead, we're giving them just enough of the right kind of weapons to make sure that they kill a lot of Russians and destroy a lot of Russian equipment without really having the ability to redeem all of their territory. And from a purely cynical standpoint, I think that makes a lot of sense. We don't owe Ukraine anything. And Ukraine shouldn't expect anything to come from the goodness of our hearts. What we've got going on right now is an exchange of goods for services. We give them goods, and they give us the service of killing as many Russians as possible. And that's an important service, because it means that Russia can't meaningfully threaten a NATO ally for at least the next decade. And because an attack on a NATO ally would have to be met with American military force, that saves American lives. So . . . TLDR: Buckle up--this is a multi-year war that is going to result in hundreds of thousands of deaths on both sides. But in reality, that's a feature, not a bug. That long-term war of attrition degrades Russia and thereby makes America safer.
  14. All while giving tax cuts to the rich and corporations, which if enacted would've blown a hole in the budget the size of France. And that then caused sterling to tank (at one point going as low as $1.04 to the pound. And that then exacerbated inflation, which is running at around 20%. So she had to blame it all on the Chancellor of the Exchequer (i.e., what the Brits call their finance minister) and sacked him. She then had to take on Jeremy Hunt, who is a political rival, as the new Chancellor. And now everybody knows she can't sack Hunt because she can't very well lose two chancellors in less than six weeks. So Hunt has all the power, and he knows it. And so does she. She's a massive failure, and now she's also an impotent one. She may live at No. 10, but she's no real prime minister any more.
  15. It's a pretty extraordinary position in which Jeremy Hunt finds himself. He lost out to Boris Johnson in the leadership contest in 2016, and then had a pretty desultory showing in the leadership contest earlier this year. But now, he's Chancellor of the Exchequer and is plainly more powerful than the PM. I don't know how long that is going to last (or how long it realistically can last), but that's a pretty wild turn of events for him.
  16. Well, the Chancellor of the Exchequer didn't make it. And I kind of doubt Liz will.
  17. So they're shipping Russian conscripts into Belarus in cattle cars? So how are those guys supposed to get to Kyiv? Walk? If the Russians think human-wave assaults work in 2022, they're about to be painfully disabused of that notion.
  18. Declaring Russia state sponsor of terrorism would be an accurate description of the state of affairs. But it is a threat you can only make good on once. And that is one of our big remaining non-military threats against Russia. We have the state-sponsor designation. And then we have the secondary-sanctions threat. But after that, we start getting into military steps to dissuade any further bad behavior. This is maybe bad enough that you want to make good on that threat. After all, at some point you have to make good on that threat, else it is no longer a threat at all. But we need to give real serious consideration as to what that leaves us left on the table. And the other thing is that we shouldn't go first on that. We've done a real good job on this entire thing of coordinating with our allies. We need to make sure that they're not blindsided by any declaration that we make. And ideally we would convince the Germans or French to make that designation first. This has the strong whiff of the V2 attacks. We dismiss those attacks as not having an impact on the outcome of the war. But in the meantime, they did manage to kill 9,000 Britons. It doesn't necessarily mean that no one can do business with them, but secondary sanctions do usually follow. It means that no American can do business with them. But there are few Americans who are doing so right now, anyway. The biggest thing is that it is a waiver of sovereign immunity. And that means that the victims of Russian terrorism can sue Russia in federal court. And since Russia has hundreds of billions of dollars in assets in the United States that are currently frozen, there is a huge pot of money that victims could collect on. That would be a huge problem for the Russian economy and the Russian government's finances. And the Russian government knows that and has been trying to avoid that designation. It really is a huge piece of leverage that we shouldn't pull the trigger on lightly.
  19. If that’s the kind of treatment a Texas school can expect from the refs, I CANT FUCKING WAIT to go to the SEC.
  20. So this is the first time I've gone to Texas-ou as a guy who doesn't live in Dallas. When I lived here, I'd of course drive. But now, I'm at a hotel in Downtown, so I can take the DART train or an Uber. What's the best option? How big a clusterfuck is the DART? And is Uber available after the game? Should I just say "fuck it" and drive like I always did?
  21. No--it's a multifuel engine. It'll run on anything. We run it on JP-8, because that's our universal fuel. We use it for tanks, IFVs, helicopters, aviation--everything. But it'll run on diesel, gasoline, kerosene--pretty much anything that burns. Yeah--that is the issue. It gets a smooth half-mile to the gallon.
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