When you saw no cultural footprint, that was when Avatar carried you.

I think zubok has swung the consensus too far toward "blame gorbachev", which absolves the system a bit. If you point to a single man as the cause of an empire’s downfall, you really ought to ask how the fate of an empire came to hinge on a single man.

no matter how well a constitution is constructed, It will not insure freedom and prosperity unless it is supported by a moral, virtuous population.

Denmark lost more troops per capita in the post 9/11 war on Afghanistan. Saying they “are not a good ally” because they won’t surrender their territories to the US is lunacy. We are betraying our allies to satisfy the whims of a would-be Emperor for whom the US is not enough.

I believe @dsquareddigest.bsky.social coined the phrase “dawn raid on his own reputation” for everything Walzer writes on Israel

"The maximum amount that was tax deductible"

Show me the lie

The problem with this premise is a hypothetical president AOC or (insert progressive here) would almost certainly be filled with a bunch of overconfident, uninformed ninnies albeit for reasons entirely different from those animating Sullivan and co.

Enabled by UAE: “Between 30,000 and 100,000 people may have been killed in six weeks, with 60,000 as a plausible midpoint. That pace of killing would be unrivaled since the Rwanda genocide of 1994…the death toll in El Fasher in less than two months may be comparable to that in Gaza over two years.”

There is literally one path in D national security world and that’s attacking yourself to the hip of a principal and riding it all the way

The embargo on hiring from industry is fucking moronic and getting rid of it is one of the tentpoles of that "how to fix/staff Dem defense" piece I keep promising to write someday

Because it could carry a shitload of really big bombs. In the mountains in Kunar, especially mountains with thick forest, often nothing but *a bunch* of GBU-31s was going to stand any chance of doing more than get the enemy to go back inside his cave for a bit. Here’s a piece I wrote about this once

Re: MQ-9s, yes for sure they were the Air Force’s big investment in this, and they were hugely important for a certain subset of CAS. I think *arguably* is doing a lot of work there though. In some situations especially in eastern Afg, B-1s, not MQ-9s or A-10s, were the best CAS platform, while…

5) The USAF also invested in, as @mikeblack114.bsky.social points out, MQ-9s which are arguably a better CAS platform than any of the previous aircraft 6) It’s then able to use Vipers / Strikes etc as relatively capable CAS platforms as well, and a lot of aircrew training shifted to CAS

3) so the USAF basically saw that, historically, other services had provided the low end airpower for the CAS fight (the Marine Corps especially has a heavy focus on CAS) 4) throughout COIN, the USAF has been dealing with block obsolescence issues (F-16/F-15/B-1/B-52/B-2) - it had to replace these

I think there are a few nuances here worth highlighting. 1) the only reason the USAF had Skyraiders in Vietnam is because the Navy was getting rid of them anyways; similarly, the OV-10 was originally a Marine program 2) the A-10 basically became out of date as soon as it was fielded (air defenses)

this is less RURAL rural (because those areas have a teetotaling streak + LE with nothing to do who are generally assholes) and more exurban; ie the kids who lived in a subdivision and went to a thousand kid HS but whose house backed up to a corn field and wore realtree while driving their BIG TWUCK

Health minister says U.S. health institutions no longer trustworthy partners #Canada The issues with misinformation in the U.S. are “a big preoccupation,” Michel said, and a reason that Canada needs to look to other like-minded countries. globalnews.ca/news/1159152...

"The massacres in El Fasher are among the most predicted slaughters in the history of atrocities. Yet no one, from world leaders to the United Nations secretary general, António Guterres, has made it a sufficient focus." www.nytimes.com/2025/12/24/o...

This was very obviously one of the greatest strengths of the Romans, as Polybius and Livy and Claudius all observed!

In actual fact, one remarkable thing about Roman citizenship is that,.like American citizen, it was generally 'all or nothing' - a newly enfranchised veteran was instantly every bit a citizen as the bluest blooded senator.

When the emperor expanded citizenship to a community for loyal service, he sure as hell wasn't adopting them as his heirs. The same obviously goes for soldiers getting citizenship on discharge.

Freed slaves, for instance, immediately became Roman citizens but they very much did not get adopted by their former masters. There was an expectation they'd act as clients, but even that wasn't codified into law until quite late.

This is extremely dumb for a variety of reasons but perhaps the most obvious is that the Romans didn't apply their adoption law to grants of citizenship. I cannot communicate how basic an error he is making here. Staggeringly elementary, a thing you learn in Roman Civ 101.

Since I see Vermeule was up to being super fucking xenophobic around Christmas and he purports to be this paragon of Catholic ideology, let me reiterate that man absolutely preyed upon me and other younger women (who reached out after the below skeet) & made us feel extremely uncomfortable.

yeah I think this is something people mostly don't get: ships + cannon were *unbelievably* powerful. like, the classic outside context problem for most places but even in the context of European land warfare ships were incredibly strong. (Games very rarely represent this well, curiously)

1. Use Taiwan as a proving ground 2. Then export the story to Japan 3. Wrap it in elite validation 4—Taiwan was treated as a proving ground. Now the same Silicon Valley playbook is being marketed to Japan. 5 Ask Palmer Luckey— Who absorbs the risk when startup defense systems fail?

More on our call: www.pm.gc.ca/en/news/read...

Unusual for tankies to show their love of Nazis and Hitler so strongly

vance is a genuine lunatic

“Israel is our aircraft carrier in the Middle East” No that’s Bahrain actually

the people on here who are very clearly temperamentally pro Israel but too ashamed to say it outright so they dress it up in the thinnest nonsensical of realpolitik are funny

It is wild how people focus so much on Chabad and not at all on the fact that ISIS explicitly and openly stated it intends to kill Jews in their places of worship. The son joined in 2019, well before the genocide. Some people truly cannot help but dance on the graves of children to make a point.

I am slowly replicating all my "historical" content to a second channel called "OffTheRangeTV". If you'd like to revisit some of that, or just have a backup, please subscribe! youtu.be/T-58xd4c_Z8

If I remember rightly this character is Mughal which makes this exceptionally funny. Brb googling “gunpowder empire”

I’m kind of mystified by this myself, because when you see Cameron in interviews he’s clearly put a lot of thought into characters, there’s an absolute ton of sourcebook lore, and elements like Quaritch’s deal with Varang genuinely have some interesting elements to them. And yet…

R.F. Kuang works hard to ignore non-European imperialism. The exception is her first book, *The Poppy War*, which is ripped word-for-word from Iris Chang's *The Rape of Nanking*. And even *The Poppy War* casts the Japanese as subhuman race traitors who sold out to Europe and deserved the atom bomb.

I’m pretty early so maybe the characters will realize their fixation on the uniquely European roots of imperialism is itself Eurocentric and solipsistic, but I’m a bit concerned they’re just going to realize they’re morally obligated to use the tools of the academy to destroy the academy

it feels like good historical fiction will make you at least partially complicit in the past by making you understand it, and this book is written specifically to ensure that the readers never suspect that they, the protagonist characters, or the author are even one iota complicit

Has anyone read the book Babel? I’m trying but every time I start to get into it it gets really didactic in a way that just rips me right back out of it

The recent wave of 70+ strikes against ISIS in Syria also seemed at least as focused on facilities as on actual ISIS commanders or operatives (which is what JSOC likes to wait for and strike)

Some (disappointed) Nigerian media suggesting this Tomahawk strike didn’t hit much at all. The Biden admin used to take flak for doing tit-for-tat symbolic strikes against empty Iranian proxy facilities in Syria. Seems like this admin may be doing a bit of that with ISIS in Nigeria and Syria.

That’s the picture that emerges when you place those two headlines side by side— One side is stress-testing war now The other is stress-testing patience One system converts commercial logistics into immediate combat power The other converts deterrence into a please wait your turn.

I know small cattle ranchers hanging on in 2025! They do stuff like “regenerative ag, grazing to reduce fire risk on public lands, public-private partnerships, with expensive cuts at farmers’ markets in blue cities” type stuff

I’m not even expecting gen pop to get a slight grip on American meat industries and supply chains, but all the would-be wonks and policy intellectuals really owe it to themselves to do a couple-hour breeze-through of how our meat is produced.

It was a great USNI article too, originally (won the General Prize): www.usni.org/magazines/pr...

Finally getting around to reading this in its entirety, although apropos of the Navy lighting their shipbuilding strategy on fire this week for the third time in 20 years Full disclosure my priors are this book is 100% correct and doesn't go far enough, but I look forward to having them validated

I’m back after a 3 day suspension for sharing a link to publicly available police reports exposing Blood Tribe nazis. They also removed the post. Bluesky evidently prioritizes the protection of literal, active nazis over community safety. Unfortunately for BT, they’re already in the sunlight now :)