WTF-Beta

Power, without a shred of decency or honor.

Historical allusions are always fraught. It's 2025, not 1938. On the other hand, negotiating the dismemberment of another country without that country at the table is a rather bad practice.

Something about a piece of paper that bears his name and mine ...

You're making sounds of disgust. I'm just describing how they operate.

The only way to "exclude" Hamas is to occupy the territory with a sizable military force that can go door to door seizing weapons and engaging in combat with battle groups that resist, and which can go tunnel to tunnel wiping out Hamas operatives in them. Any other idea is delusional. Hamas will kill its way to control as soon as it can.

GOP Congress-critters have been very good at getting federal employment in their states and districts, disproportionately so, methinks.

Schadenfreude is a delicious sentiment sometimes ....

Eff Cassidy. My vat of empathy for children in his state is quite empty.

You are kidding me. That's fake, right?? Are there human beings that .... stupid?

Asymmetric warfare, man. On what planet do you think they would wear uniforms and fight like a "regular army?"

The goals of the Hamas leadership are more political than tactical/military. Survival on a rubble heap with dead Palestinian children all around them can still be a strategic victory to that kind of leadership. As long as they retain power (because of their capacity to pull the toenails out of anyone who disagrees ... before slitting their throat, of course) they believe they've won. And they have a core of fighters and potential fighters who will fight and murder over and over again, nurtured by old and now by new grievances.

We all had it. It was a right of passage through childhood, along with mumps and chicken pox.

Roald Dahl's letter about losing his daughter to measles in 1962 ...

https://fs.blog/roald-dahl-letter-daughter/

I had measles around the same time in 1962. I was more fortunate.

As a writer for the left-wing rag The National Review just wrote ...

"Hagan Scotten, the lead prosecutor in New York City mayor Eric Adams’s criminal case, already had an amazing set of achievements: Recipient of two Bronze Stars, law clerk for both Chief Justice John Roberts and then-D.C. Circuit judge Brett Kavanaugh, highest grades in his graduating class at Harvard law school, and more. He now should get a prize for Awesome Resignation Letter."

Clerk for Roberts AND Kavanaugh. Hmmmm, just another libtard prosecutor.

We are going to need to dismiss every Trump-appointed attorney the moment a Democrat wins the White House again. Banana-Republic, you say? Maybe, but no future Democrat in the White House can afford to ratify the politicization of the Justice Department in the name of restoring the non-political traditions of the DoJ. The broom will have to be applied first.

The assistant US Attorney resigns with a flourish ...

I suspect that NY courts can take over where federal attorneys have failed.

https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_fullsize/plain/did:plc:pjiafkey2cokiupsxpswqlk7/bafkreiacecmkwytorek73kdnienb4jl2dhdvchbujbfl6gesro547l5du4@jpeg

Here is how to make it stop ...

Germany, France, the UK, and Poland need to transfer $100B of top-of-the-line equipment to Ukraine. They also need to double the size of their militaries, which will, of course, eat into civilian employment producing goods and services. They need to invest hundreds of billions into new factories to produce more of their own armaments. And they need to sign reciprocal agreements with Ukraine to put boots on the ground.

And we all know they will do none of this. Europe at present is a talk shop of moral outrage signifying nothing.

I really think that the combined militaries of Poland, Finland, Sweden, and the Baltics could defeat what remains of Russia's current military and do it in short order. Despite this advantage, they will not even offer the gear to replace lost US supplies. The combined GDP of the EU is an order of magnitude larger than Russia's. But Russia's political will is an order of magnitude larger than the EU's. There is no Churchill in the current EU who can induce people to reorient their thinking toward defense and foreign policy. Perhaps this is the downside of the longstanding US security blanket we threw over them, but frankly, they are soft. Totally soft. I still remember the Dutch military abandoning 5K Bosnians to butchery because, hey, we might have to risk combat with the Serbs. Soft. Soft. Putin knows the European Union is incapable of stopping him.

Russia will bluster and cajole its way to a tactical and strategic victory over Ukraine because of the crass withdrawal of the US (Trump in Putin's pocket), and the moral cowardice of the European Union.

If only the Bundeswehr could regain the fighting vigor (without the ideological baggage) of the Wehrmacht.

Hey, enjoy the day ... or night, as the case may be!

I love it. I'm the moderate in this discussion ...

We know about Doggerland in part because fishing craft have periodically hauled up evidence of land-based plants (ancient wood and tree trunks) and human settlement from the ocean floor of that part of what is now the North Sea.

The territory has changed hands quite a lot ...

NIce video ...

https://bsky.app/profile/antongerashchenko.bsky.social/post/3lhqdeoyles26

Of course, this magnifies the geo-political importance of the Suwałki Gap

Those Red-State GOP leaders surely know that their Democratic counterparts are watching and taking notes. A Democratic administration in 2028 could crush the most ruby red parts of the nation in a flash by tweaking federal spending away from them and toward "friendly" blue states. One reason we have succeeded over the years is in having some solidarity across political lines to make transfers hard to manipulate for political gain (i.e. by making it difficult to reward friendly state and punish "enemy" states).