Imagine having your primary export be “brainwashed conscripts who will be used as meatshields on a foreign battlefield”.

You know, in addition to making risotto, another thing the Italians are pretty good at is making shotguns. So this problem should be solvable.

New variety of Cordyceps unlocked.

They literally said they color corrected and enhanced parts of it for visibility. So yes, the footage was modified.

Gob’s not on board.

I explained it poorly but the other half of the threat is “we have complete air superiority so we can strike your leadership itself any time they stick their heads out of their bunkers” or “we can destroy your oil fields and tank your economy at any point” etc.

Iran has very few chips left to play with considering they have zero air defenses at the moment. I predict they will be forced to surrender their entire nuclear program or they will face a decapitation attack and destruction of their entire refinement capability and military apparatus.

Armchair theory is that the US large platform bombers will be used to credibly threaten repeated bunker buster hits on Fordow nuclear site. This could pressure Iran to surrender its entire nuclear program including that site.

Currently Israel doesn’t have the capability by itself to destroy the site but US bombers possibly could.

This is what boggles the mind for me. He has this miniscule unknowable opportunity to get the door open, and jump from the plane at just the right time.

He had to hit the sweetspot combo of low altitude and airspeed that doesn’t cause him to die upon hitting the ground, but results in him being far enough from the blast of the aircraft itself impacting the ground. Its gotta be a fraction of a second window of time. He is literally one of the luckiest people in aviation accident history.

Some have theorized the tires disrupt object recognition in aerial imagery analysis (and possibly munitions or drone targeting). Obviously that didn’t work here as the targets were already known and visually confirmed.

Practically not that much, but the point is to inflict huge monetary costs and erode public support among Russians to continue the conflict. So from that perspective this is a pretty good bargaining chip going into further negotiations.

Back in 2017 there was also the framework of an agreement to have the US help develop and profit from gold and rare-earths in Afghanistan.

I’ll leave you to speculate how that turned out.

This effort itself is more like a FEMA disaster preparedness set of tools for the public. Whether it’s power outages, bad weather, or actual war, the steps make each citizen less of a liability to the overwhelmed emergency responders. Having reserve water, backup communication, and a family plan is not “remilitarizing”, it is just common sense.

I recently vacationed in Germany and the immigration polizei agent asked me, in English, “what’s the purpose of your visit here?” and I said something like “Urlaub machen und Bier trinken, naturlich!” He applied the stamp and waved me through without incident.

So… Thanks for being cool, Germans!

I mean, this is true that the offramp was always going to be Russia keeping Crimea and the Donbas, and Ukraine getting some kind of security guarantees that fall short of NATO membership. Unfortunately we took the stupidest, most deadly, most costly way to get to this conclusion.

I have awesome luck with this kinda thing. Was in Paris during a huge garbage strike a while back, and may be arriving in Germany during this.

If I go pitch a tent in Vatican City and take up permanent residence there, presumably he will order the Swiss Guard not to deport me. Good to know.

Yeah, this is dumb.

I own original hardware and buy 100% of my games but sometimes you just wanna run games that aren’t originally crossplatform on your Steamdeck for convenience, or on a PC with resolution upscaling, or for ease of streaming the gameplay, or tons of other legitimate reasons.

Nintendo has some great IP and gameplay, and I guarantee you their sales are not meaningfully hurt by people who pirate/emulate games. Those people were never their customers anyway. If anything the emulation community enabled streamers to boost the popularity of their games. (People like PointCrow did more for the sustained popularity of BOTW than all of Nintendo’s marketing efforts combined)

WTF is wrong with people.