I love the militant far-right’s obsession with disabling the power grid. Like yeah, if you took out my town’s power for months, ground my job to a halt, and put the vulnerable in danger, I would take up arms…against you.

He and his circle already made millions on puts and invested the winnings back into a dipping market, now it’s time to ease off the gas to drive the value back up. Repeat every week or two.

American “commitment” to anything is worthless now more than ever. Like giving cash loans to a bombed out drug addict you can only expect pain by penning deals with us.

To him it doesn’t matter how foolish it is, how much money it would cost, or how many lives, Mexican or American, it would grind up. If it’s a viable vehicle for him to consolidate emergency powers, rile up a fervent base, and become an American Emperor, he will take it.

It may start out relatively focused as a counterterror/counterinsurgency op…but once he pisses off the Mexicans enough for them to fight back, he’ll have his casus belli (to his base) for open war. The unrestrained conservative order of battle will make the invasion of Iraq look positively pleasant. It was very common for war hawks back then to pine for the day we could just wipe Iraqi cities off the map and “let god sort them out”. It’ll be less Fallujah, more Gaza.

If he can get away with launching a Special Military Operation against the cartels and then Mexico as a whole, then Greenland and Panama are next. Then Canada. Then god knows who else. Maybe our war chest will bottom out by then, but that chest runs very deep.

Trump just moved an entire Stryker brigade, vehicles and all, to the Mexican border.

I think the clearest way to declare himself President for Life, or at least grab a third term, is to invade Iraq Mexico for WMDs fentanyl, provoke a war, and bend everything in his favor in a system he’s already fixed.

We Americans need to come to terms with the fact that this is how the rest of the world sees each and every one of us now. Either as an orcish, violent animals, or as selfish, cowardly quislings and bystanders. It doesn’t matter who you voted for, or who you sent $20 to here and there. We are giving our consent every single day we are not physically fighting back against this insanity. And that stench takes a generation to wash off.

Fun WWII parallel: after the war, reprisal murders against the German diaspora were a problem in Europe. I’ve seen it claimed that half a million Germans were killed this way, but nobody really knows because the public sentiment was so against Germany after the atrocities they committed. People kept quiet, police shrugged their shoulders and moved on.

Ignorance is not an excuse. Cowardice is not an excuse. It may not be your fault, but it is your responsibility to do something.

We’re an angry drunk running down the street with a shotgun trying to pick fights. Dangerous and repulsive, but all reasonable people can do is try to get out of the way until police arrive. Except there is no police in this geopolitical metaphor.

“We have always been at war with Eastasia a despicable mafioso-state.”

I take it the Russian disinfo factories got a hefty raise after their recent resounding success, so I’m gonna expect more of these demoralization pieces with no intrinsic value.

Targeting or even murdering random Americans will only accelerate the breakdown of civility and accomplish nothing. Recognize your words as an emotional outburst and channel your anger into something more constructive.

Also, they won’t be buying anything if they become festive decorations on fences and lampposts across the country.

Notifying others requires you to think of other people and value them. The US, under the leadership of a pathological narcissist, will do neither of these things.

They’re already preparing the deflection of blame to “rogue radical elements” on conservative media. Or that the Demonrats and Biden already stole all the money years ago and DOGE uncovered it.

I don’t know about “investing” and putting risk in the Russian state. But raw materials for cash? Dual-use components for cash? Cash for cheap oil? If Russia’s willing to rip the copper pipes out of the walls to pay for the things it needs, I’m sure someone here will be willing to take it.

I didn’t say it was the wrong choice. Just that now it is more of an uphill battle than ever, perhaps with exception of the first month or so of the conflict.

Europe needs to step up and quickly.

We don’t need to switch sides overtly for our hyena financiers and industry captains to make a buck trading with Russia, giving their war economy a sigh of relief which they desperately need.

We’ll see if he can hold out if/when we lift our sanctions on Russia and start allowing the transfer of everything they need to rebuild their military hardware. Or even worse, selling them our own weapons.

EDIT: And now around three hours after I posted this, White House announces directive to drop sanctions. gg

Russia’s Admiral Kuznetsov is also very large and theoretically more able to defend itself than at least the Nimitz class…if it wasn’t a reeking shitpile that can’t even move under its own power consistently.

The reason is that they expected that carrier to sail with little backup or none at all. Meanwhile every American carrier is just the centerpiece of a larger, exorbitantly expensive battle group. They can’t afford that, so they have to compensate somehow.

I’d assume the logic is the same with Chinese ambitions here.

They DO want to be like modern Russia, earnestly. The national chauvinism, the suppression of LGBT, the violence against women, the kleptocrat oligarchs running the show, the use of the Church as a political tool, the brutal wars of spoils…the list goes on.

The FSB should be an internationally recognized terrorist organization.

Of course that would open the can of worms that every major intelligence agency in the world is basically a terror organization, so they won’t.

Looks like a target-rich environment for raking belt-fed machine gun fire. Tiananmen Square had a lot of determined, angry people show up too.

Might wanna pack more than some picket signs.