I wonder how being a Cult President worked out for others

Unironically Hezbollah should send some folks to link up with the DPRK forces in Russia to learn. That's a good point about the deployment of drones, I think you're probably right.

I think a lot of that is the escalation ladder. Perhaps they should have been more aggressive from day one, but then how many more civilians would have died? Nashrallah regretted 2006, even though they "won". I'm sure that experience was driving a lot of the caution this time.

The Chinese at the time were mostly not communists who were fighting and dying. China did tie down a vast amount of Japanese infantry, but I don't think it's fair to discount the United States' role in actually fighting and doing heavy lifting (I should correct though, China did too) in the Eastern front. The Western front without the US would have been even bloodier but it looks like the Soviets would have eked out a win. I don't think that's the case at all in the East without the United States.

No doubt it kind of sucks, but how much more can you ask a people to endure, you know? The support front became the main front, and thousands have died for Palestine and to stop the Entity's aggression. Who am I to dictate to some of the only folks on earth actually fighting and dying for Palestine?

Bittersweet for sure to celebrate a ceasefire in Lebanon whilst the machine churns ever onward in Gaza. There's some level of defeat here, but the way I've at least seen it framed is that Lebanon shifted from the "support" front to the "main" front, and that's about all that Palestine could have ever expected. Nobody else in the world has done what the Lebanese people have done for Palestine, so none can criticize a ceasefire unless they're willing to do what Hezbollah and co have done. I'm glad your family is still saying safe.

I absolutely do not want to give credit to the United States because death to America but the communists only did the heavy lifting in the West. The Eastern front against Japan was all the United States (and China) except for the very end where the Soviets swept over all of Manchuria and scared the US into using nukes.

Just to add on here, I have cystic fibrosis and I take a drug that "costs" $400k+ per year, and I will be taking it for the rest of my life. Argentina produces a version through an obscure patent law loophole they found for like $10k. It's all absurd and fucked.

If Hezbollah wants to honor the memory of Nasrallah and not go back on their word, there will be no ceasefire with Hezbollah unless there is also a ceasefire in Gaza. This, as it stands, is a non-starter. Unless Hezbollah wants to capitulate to Israeli demands, the only "ceasefire" the Israelis can get is with "Lebanon" aka the government which is not currently fighting Israel anyway.

Even the English press is engaging in bizarre conspiracy brain over those telecommunications cables that broke in the Baltic a few days ago. This is from the Financial Times, print edition so can't link it unfortunately.

Investigators seeking to explain two severed data cables in the Baltic Sea are scrutinising the movements of a Chinese bulk carrier, the second such probe in recent months amid rising concerns in Europe over potential acts of sabotage.

Yi Peng 3, a Chinese registered vessel that was travelling from the Russian port of Ust-Luga to Port Said in Egypt, passed close to both the Swedish-Lithuanian and Finnish-German cables around the time each was custom on Sunday and Monday, according to data provided by maritime tracking group Marine Traffic. Sweden is investigating both incidents, and is examining what role the Yi Peng 3 might have played, according to people familiar with the probe.

Ah yes, everybody knows the secret to Western hegemony is a communication cable between Sweden and Lithuania, the two major players of NATO and strategic masterminds of the strategy of Chinese containment.

DPRK press releases never miss. The amount of sheer posting energy latent inside each one is off the charts. Whatever about the Great Firewall protecting the West—the collective firepower of just a few thousand North Korean posters unleashed upon the internet would be enough to eradicate the collective psyche of the West in like two months.

There's also this massive 2010 paper called "Growth in a Time of Debt" that was used by the EU to justify austerity measures in Greece and elsewhere. The paper claimed that countries with debt ratios above 90 per cent of GDP suffer a yearly 0.1 per cent contraction in their economies, so therefore you have to reduce debt ratios to below 90% so GDP can grow again. Was cited everywhere, a massive impact on the real world, one of the pillars of austerity.

Turns out this is completely wrong because their sum in Excel was "accidentally" missing a few countries and instead when they corrected that Excel issue turns out "that countries with the quoted debt ratio grew 2.2 per cent, only 1 per cent less than nations with lower debt ratios."

Per: https://voxeurop.eu/en/austerity-measures-in-europe-are-due-to-an-excel-error/

The broad strokes of your rant I agree with, but you can a) buy region free DVD and blu-ray players very easily these days that totally bypass all of the bullshit copyright region locking shit, b) you can just press the menu button on your remote to skip all the ads (if the discs even have them). Most blu-rays these days don't have any ads at all though, especially for any movies more niche than like Hollywood stuff. And c) digital hoarding is great, but large hard drives especially fail quite randomly, and then you're shit out of luck. A blu-ray will last for decades with no issues; after a decade of uptime an HDD or SSD is probably toast with no prospect of recovery. And that's all to say that Blu-ray quality for films is genuinely really good. Sure, you can get that in a hard drive but for the full blu-ray quality you're talking 20GBs+ for a single film. 4k gets even crazier. I have a 12TB hard drive filled with movies, but I make sure to have backups of it as well and often really obscure shit is hard to find online, much easier to just buy the blu-ray.

Wrong; absolutely failed in guessing Láeg, the charioteer of Irish hero Cú Chulainn. Couldn't even get Diomedes from The Iliad. Really needs to brush up on its epic poetry knowledge.

The claim here is that the historical Israelite kingdom of David, which lasted around a hundred years ~1000 BC and is the historical focus of a lot of stories in the Hebrew Bible, "controlled" various parts of what is now Southern Lebanon, either formally (very unlikely) or informally through hegemonic trade domination. The latter is potentially true, but how that then "proves" that Southern Lebanon is Israel is rather suspect, given that the historical Kingdom of Israel again lasted only around 100 years, was kind of a freak accident because of the giant power vacuum that developed at the end of the Late Bronze Age into the Early Iron Age in the Levant and the fact that Assyria had basically destroyed all of Jerusalem's competitors for them. The kingdom was later destroyed by the Neo-Assyrian Empire and later the Neo-Babylonians.

The claim is very funny because really, if you want to go like back further, "Israel" and "Lebanon" were both possessions of New Kingdom Egypt around ~1300 BC, and under Hittite domination before that, and before that a kind of merchant zone that shuffled between Egyptian and Sumerian control. So really, by Israeli archeological standards, Israel is actually Egyptian and Egypt has the historical right to conquer and exert control over their historical possessions in the Levant.

Canaan

Your point more broadly is well taken, yes, but Canaan/Canaanite is actually a very well attested historical name that exists outside of the Hebrew Bible. The people commonly called "Phoenicians" called themselves Canaanites, and even as late as the 2nd century AD folks from North Africa around Carthage (which was originally a Phoenician colony from the city of Tyre in what is now Lebanon) called themselves "Canaanites" because they were descended from people in that region. Canaan isn't anachronistic, they were a real people who self described as Canaanite.

It's the only reason why the UN exists at all. Veto power is built into the UN Security Council, so all Security Council members have veto power. It's basically just a realpolitik admission that actual power lies within a few countries. If the US doesn't want something to happen, they can block it real life. Same with Russia, China, etc. The "Great Powers" have the ability to unilaterally use their power, and the UN tries to reflect that ability.

That was the most tame thing an Irish person could possibly say about meeting the fucking King of England (aside from like my weird British-aristocracy loving relatives, many such cases in Ireland unfortunately)

I'm so sorry. He was a lovely cat, always enjoyed your pictures of him and I know he knew you loved him. That's our blessing and curse as cat guardians: we get all the love, but in return we agree to be with them until the end, to help ferry them to their deaths, holding them to their last breaths. I know Mr. Softie appreciated you to the last. Thanks for being there for him.