Uriel238 [all pronouns]

What sucks is that they’re less inclined to kill you by deciding to murder their friend and more inclined to get frisky and underestimate their playful mauling strength and break you the way a kitten mauls a clockwork mouse.

Your big furry friend will eat you later out of respect (and hunger) but will also miss you now you’re gone.

We invaded Iraq on the pretense that they were getting yellowcake from Nigerian suppliers, and US suppliers were in Nigeria trying to sell yellowcake to Saddam Hussein. He wasn’t interested.

We knew he wasn’t interested because Joseph Wilson, a US diplomat, was involved in the efforts to make the sale. Hussein saw which way the wind was blowing.

When George W. Bush started talking about invading Iraq (in speeches blending vitriol against Hussein and anger over 9/11) Wilson published a report about how Hussein totally wasn’t buying Yellowcake, which he knew about. And in response, the Bush administration burned Valerie Plame, who was Wilson’s wife and an actual CIA operative who was active and abroad.

She made it home safely, and could no longer work as a CIA operative. In the cold war, burning a spy for political reasons showed CIA you were careless, and deserved to receive a tape of ten hours of your loved one screaming as she was tortured to death. But those were different times, and presidents then had a few more scruples (and knew not to do that).

According to Al Franken, about 75% of ground troops during the Iraq war believed they were there as revenge for the 9/11 attacks, even though Hussein and Iraq had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. A friend of mine in Virginia noted his teen daughter was taught in American History we were provoked to go into Iraq because of the 9/11 attacks and the International War on Terror. I was around in 2003 watching Republicans nation wide saying torture is AOK and waterboarding isn’t really torture (until they went to have a SERE guy waterboard them for size. They all thought it was pretty terrible and even maybe torturous). Still, it was pretty clear that the IWoT and Iraq were separate things, even though the White House liked to conflate the two in speeches. Hussein and Al-Qaeda did not get along.

I remember the US attacked Iraq because Hussein allegedly had WMDs. The US couldn’t find any. The US had strong intel beforehand there were no WMDs in Iraq and that Iraq was still recovering from the 1990-1991 gulf war.

I think George W. Bush and Dick Cheney just wanted to kill and torture some Arabs for being too brown and because they couldn’t kill Saudis (like Osama Bin Laden, who figured largely in planning the 9/11 attacks). All the WMD nonsense was a deliberate lie.

Is that a fancy AK derivative?

Kateekalo!

In this case woke agendas means pets and treats

Recruits don’t have to start gay.

Interesting. My step-daughter got breve = half-and-half working at Starbucks, which just may be a local brevity slang.

Looked up Breve on wikipedia and confirmed it includes the coffee.

I didn’t have heavy cream in the house. But I drank coffee every day with half-and-half.

So I’m a total pet-drug-pusher. I had a cat who seriously jonesed for breve (half-and-half) so I gave her a milliliter a day. My dog today needs peanut-butter like it’s the ambrosia of the gods. It’s a small treat every once in a while.

Out of respect for your friends of fur, allowing them a small dose might enhance their enjoyment of life a bit, especially since we are social beings who enjoy sharing a meal with each other. And unlike half-and-half, cats can actually digest tuna.

I remember on some military channel how tank crews were terrified of burning up inside a tank (a common fate in WWII) and so the A1 was made as fireproof as they possibly could make it.

It may have just been history channel propaganda, though.

I think it’s like Kalash, a common name in undeveloped nations because they have direct experienc with the Automata Kalashnikova 1947.

That’s how it all started. Guys in planes with handguns.

The French eventually put a forward-mounted gun on the plane but had to install deflectors on the prop that would protect it from bullets. On the German side Fokker developed an interrupter gear to be mounted onto the Fokker Eindekker which prevented the mounted gun from discharging when the propeller was in the way. It wasn’t perfect, but better than the deflectors.

ETA: The story goes that Fokker himself went up to demonstrate the forward-mounted machine-gun with the interrupter gear, but once he got behind an Allied scouting plane, he didn’t have the heart to kill the crew. It didn’t take long, before other pilots gladly started shooting down enemy planes.

With biplanes, guns were sometimes mounted on the upper wing to evade the problem, though eventually the central powers developed their own interrupter gear mechanism.

Note that those flying contraptions were considered more valuable than pilots, and they were sent up without parachutes in order to given them incentive to return with the plane, or at least get it to the ground with less damage. As I flew WWI flying simulations, I noticed I had a while to think up some good last words while staring at the looming ground. Too bad no one would ever hear them.

You know, this was a critical plot point of multiple sci-fi media franchises.

Wait, sheep can report their surroundings like scouts?

I remember in C&C: Generals the GLA can produce riotous mobs which are super effective, but have a no visibility, so you have to light up the region either with military units (say a few rebels mixed in) or with nearby surveillance vans.

Since sheep are livestock I’d expect them to have zero visibility also.

The problem I remember is that it is expensive to get the rod up there in the first place.

Also every other nation would hate us and make jokes about the collective small penis of the US state.