Uriel238 [all pronouns]

The thing is, where Putin has oligarchs that would dump him in a hot second if he dropped a bomb, Trump is absolutely eager to blow shit up and doesn’t care / can’t process the consequences of dropping the first nuclear bomb in hostility^† and breaking the black ice.

In Trump’s first term no-one in the Department of Energy or the Department of Defense brass were MAGA loyalists, even though many considered themselves Republican, conservative and endorsed US military interventionism and adventurism. So when they were told (for instance) to nuke the snot out of North Korea to give them what for, Mattis was there to say no. None of the later secretaries of defense under Trump (Shanahan, Esper, Spencer, and Miller) would have authorized a nuclear strike either. And if one of them did, the generals under them were likely to resign than carry out such an order.

Enter Project 2025’s Schedule F plan, which is going to retire all the old brass US loyalists that are sworn to defend the Constitution of the United States (and mean it) and replace them with Trump loyalists, who, when asked to launch a nuclear strike against somewhere in the other side of the world will say Yes Sir! (or By Your Command ) or ( With Pleasure ) whatever the going evil-empire affirmative salute is.

So it is a likely possibility non-zero not-insignificant possibility President Donald J. Trump will order a nuclear strike during his second term, and it will be carried out by the department of defense. He still really wants to express his fire and fury and show the world his dick is absolutely the biggest.

I thought about this during Trump’s first term (and pondering the possibility of Hope, Montana getting nuked – three times! – at the end of Far Cry 5 ), imagining that unlike Greg Stillson in The Dead Zone bullying his principals to launch a first strike, Mattis would be there, steak-knife in hand to save the world from a rogue president. He actually did, just without the confrontation or the need of a steak-knife. But it means the Heritage Foundation is forewarned this time.

† Yes, technically two atomic bombs have been dropped in hostility, but after Castle Bravo / Bikini Atoll we quietly shifted from the atomic age to the nuclear age. It’s a significant difference. Hiroshima had about a 15KT yield (12-18KT estimated) while Bikini Atoll had a 15MT yield (that’s 1000x Hiroshima). US Peacekeeper missles carry ten MIRV 0.5MT warheads and bombs dropped from airplanes are 2.1MT. So yeah, we’ve had atomic war, but not nuclear war.

This was actually cultivated in the aughts. George W. Bush endorsed multiple secret units of Christian soldiers from the US Army and USMC to serve as Chosen do perform missions for God, which is why Spiritual Readiness was figured into the CSFF readiness assessment.

Spiritual readiness was about being a Christian Evangelical loyalist (that is the white Christian nationalist movement we’re facing today). Commanders were reassigned in the Obama era, and Spiritual Readiness was revised to become more inclusive (they’d still really rather you believe in some higher power), but the units of commandos for God are still around.

I dunno what happened during Trump or since, but since Flynn is still doing Flynn things, I assume they’re standing back and standing by.

I bet he’d have volunteers, and would feel better if he gave it an actual try.

But he appears too homophobic to kiss a pretty boy that loves him.

So inside Mr. O’Neill’s mind, he feels too femmy to be a Linux Catgirl, and while he hoped becoming a Navy SEAL and even shooting Osama Bin Laden for FBI and for the President of the United States would assure him of his manhood, he still feels his inner princess inside him growing like a kudzu and strangling out his masculinity.

And this is why he, again, a fucking Navy SEAL who has performed real operations for the United States, has to pick on civilians for who they voted for, even though defending that right IS HIS FUCKING JOB AND OATH.

O’Neill is an asshole and a bully, and I pity him for his gender dysmorphia, but there is help out there if he wants it.

As a kid, when reading Fellowship I got slogged down after the incident in Weathertop, and the journey through to Rivendell was just miserable and I couldn’t get through it.

I tried again and read the whole series after the movies came out. That bit was still miserable and a slog but I got to Rivendell, and no part of the rest of the books were as bad as Frodo being dragged through Mirkwood while wraithing out.

So, in Towers in the movie, there’s a notorious seen where the orcs are hungry and the uruks solve the problem by killing the complainer. It looks like meat’s back on the menu, boys! Which implies that orks and uruks have fine dining, but also are content to chew on a raw corpse. It’s one of the more referenced scenes in the Peter Jackson movie series.

Contrast the same (approximate) scene in the book: The company is on the move and one of the orcs hands Pippin and Merry a big piece of dried meat. Merry (I think) is skeptical and asks what it is, fearing it might be someone that walks on two legs. The orc tells him to check his privilege and mutters in black speech.

So…I would totally not be surprised if I’m only getting two-fifths of the story.

I thought the F117a doesn’t have a2a capabilities. It acts like a hole in the sky, drops a couple of bombs and then the distant AWACS plane laughs maniacally.

Israel and the U.S. are both looking for ways to decouple Hezbollah from Hamas.

Decoupling Bibi from Israel would actually speed the peace process even more.

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.