I mean, they’ve gotten way better at it, but most of their equipment and doctrine are still targeted at utterly destroying a near peer level threat. The f-22 wasn’t designed to fight insurgents, nor is it suited to that task.

I would think that the USAF would happily establish and easily enforce a no fly zone over Ukraine and could probably pull it off within a few days of getting the order conservatively.

There was the story a few years ago when a well equipped and trained Wagner battalion “accidentally” picked a flight with a US army unit or base in Syria and got immediately demolished.

Writing this out definitely feels like braggadocio and it likely is. But I would think the Russians don’t want to find out why we don’t have universal healthcare first hand.

Russia lost in WWI before it ended, they were essentially knocked out of the war before the revolution and Bolsheviks made the official.

At the risk of being jingoistic, this type of opponent is exactly what our military is designed to utterly destroy. If the US was an active participant it would have very quickly wiped the floor with the Russian army and would be dealng with Russian backed insurgents in the east.

Ukraine has been beating them with the stuff we routinely throw away (when the Republicans don’t get in the way), I am convinced they have no non nuclear answer to our actual military.

Like, the rest of their albums are totally fine, that’s just how good their debut was.

I would kind of say the same thing about The Strokes, but I think some of their follow ups have aged well

Turn on the Bright Lights by Interpol is incredible, in my opinion it’s one of, if not the most impressive debut albums I have ever come across. The rest of their discography is ok, but nothing that I would rate anywhere close to that.

This is a katsup household.

I don’t think anyone is suggesting getting soy sauce made by someone with a handlebar mustache. Just that other brands tend to be way better than the Kikkoman you would find in a grocery store.

Lee Kum Kee for example is often in grocery stores and is way better for about the same price. Kimlan is pretty good. Sempio is way way better if you can find it, which shouldn’t be too hard if you live somewhere decent.

No need to attack them.

Would that be an instantaneous thing?

Gum Gum Gausszilla!

Lol, BTA: 3062 x One Piece

It’s fantastic, I am usually skeptical of alternate history as they tend to be lazy and are often masturbatory, but this book is great.

I honestly think that Bibi knows if he tanks Biden then Trump will probably be better for his government. He has basically no incentive to be reasonable since nobody is willing to hold them accountable and he knows it’s very unlikely Biden will be able to.

Chinese has so many good ones.

Please forgive the lack of tones, it’s been a long long time.

Ren shan, Ren hai: a mountain and sea of people - a remarkable amount of people by Chinese standards.

Ma Ma, Hu Hu: horse horse, tiger tiger - a mixed bag, or something that’s ok.

Yeah, I was trying to be careful with my comment not to imply the reason for secession was “states rights” since there are still plenty of idiots who are happy to bang that drum.

They didn’t secede because they were told to stop slavery. They seceded because it looked that the national consensus was moving against the expansion of slavery to new states and territories, which would have limited slave states overall power in the long run.

They were very explicit that they were leaving to protect slavery as an institution, but to be fair nobody in power was threatening to abolish it when they did so.

I really liked rebels a lot (especially once they improved the textures). I just can’t bring myself to get invested in Star Wars anymore given Disney’s handling of it thus far.

The last season of the Mandolorian wasn’t even good. It spent most of it’s time setting up other crap I am not interested in. There really isn’t anything they can do that will make the premise for the sequels not a lazy regressive pile of garbage and it’s dragging this show down with it. I didn’t even bother with Ashoka since that looked like it was going to be even more of that.

They have to get usable at some point, but I got tired of the (shitty off-brand) smart watch I had after a couple minutes. I replaced it with a fully analog Seiko watch and a fitness tracker ring.

Way easier to manage and still meets the needs addressed by the smart watch.

Yep. A wildly unrealistic part of me was hoping that they were setting up a branch to split the timeline away from the sequels or just ignore then with the series. As that become pretty clearly incorrect with the most recent season of Mando and I presume Ashoka I just stopped watching. I am not really interested in seeing them try and make sense of the stupid stupid lazy premise of TFA and I don’t want to see my childhood heros fail and give up. I will watch season 2 of andor because the first was awesome, but I am basically done with the franchise now.

Thank you.