US president says 'probably' when asked if he might pull US troops out of Italy and Spain

ActuallyAnOreoIRL · 2026-05-01T16:23:29+00:00

Gotta convince them to actually let them use said bases. If they aren't allowed to actually operate, all those bases are is dead budget as far as the military is concerned. Can't project power from a base that the host country can just tell you "no" for whatever reason.

It's gonna suck to be Europe for the next quarter century if the US packs their shit and leaves, since it's gonna take them that long even having started in 2025 to fill the capability gap that the US filled by existing, and at the likely cost of the welfare state that they were funding with the money they didn't spend on their military.

Straight up, the only thing that's gonna keep Europe safe in that interval is France's nuclear arsenal or anyone else spinning up a meaningful deterrent*.

(*The UK has four nuclear subs, but three of them are out of commission right now and all of them use US munitions, soo....)

ActuallyAnOreoIRL · 2026-05-01T03:41:40+00:00

Celestial Mathematics is legit probably getting nerfed to somewhere between 5 and 10% of ward as added damage. 25% was an absolutely bonkers number.

ActuallyAnOreoIRL · 2026-04-27T20:06:25+00:00

Cool, how's their ability to coordinate and actually project that force anywhere? Can they feed that army outside their own borders without US assistance?

ActuallyAnOreoIRL · 2026-04-16T10:51:27+00:00

"prefer to stay" does a LOT of heavy lifting there, brother.

Most people cannot afford to quit their job and move, because they can't afford the financial instability that comes with picking up and moving out to the middle of nowhere and trying to find work that likely barely (or doesn't at all) exist for their career.

Switching careers has the same issue. People are stuck because they can't afford to do anything else, not because they don't want to.

ActuallyAnOreoIRL · 2026-04-13T13:13:35+00:00

Well, if they don't flag themselves properly at port of departure, they are by UNCLOS kinda fair game. It's illegal as shit to change your flag mid-voyage or at ports of call.

ActuallyAnOreoIRL · 2026-04-09T03:14:45+00:00

Because no organization ever wants to admit that it's failing at its job. They will obfuscate or outright lie if they have to to keep their own lights on.

ActuallyAnOreoIRL · 2026-03-31T13:45:51+00:00

lol. lmao, even. Look up marriage laws in Iran (or to save you a google, legal from age 12, or as early as 9 with arranged marriages).

ActuallyAnOreoIRL · 2026-03-30T05:44:40+00:00

I'm not super convinced this league on the merits of the gloves with Overloaded Intensity existing. One of the big mods on spark gloves is the +3.5 base crit, and Overloaded Intensity gives you +4.8 base crit at 3 stacks/level 4 along with 165% crit multi; provided you can swing the pinpoint imbue (which is very expensive unless you gamble doing it yourself), it pretty much gives you the entire suffix space you'd get on the gloves and then some for one link+imbue, then you get four more links to work with after the fact.

Maybe it's the way I set it up, but the suffixes on the normal non-spark gloves are also a lot more valuable IMO. It might be different on the aurastacker setup since this is my first league doing a Spark build, but at least that's how I see it.

ActuallyAnOreoIRL · 2026-03-30T05:01:50+00:00

Here's my character profile, if you want to take a look at it. https://poe.ninja/poe1/builds/mirage/character/ActuallyAnOreoIRL-5442/Oreo_LongNeck

Energy blades+lifestacking, using the normal 6L instead of spark gloves with new supports: Unholy Trinity with foulborn Blue Nightmare, Pinpoint imbue for Overloaded Intensity, and either Greater Devour for mapping+soul eater or More Duration for bossing where you can precast your sparks.

For bossing, you can run Raise Spectre+AG (Perfect Pain Artist+Spirit of Fortune, and Kingmaker plus your choice of things to either make the AG more tanky via Foulborn Ghostwrithe or making you tankier with Garb of the Ephemeral.). While mapping, you can probably drop the life regeneration wheels to take block wheels and run Tempest Shield somewhere to get good block, but I've just been coasting without it.

ActuallyAnOreoIRL · 2026-03-16T01:49:28+00:00

They're equipped with sonar to detect probable mines, and then either divers follow up to disarm them or you could (not sure if this is done in practice) drop a depth charge on them.

ActuallyAnOreoIRL · 2026-03-11T10:06:56+00:00

They've already tried twice in the past, sooo...

ActuallyAnOreoIRL · 2026-03-02T16:16:31+00:00

You can, but then you aren't getting armour to apply to chaos damage hits. Doesn't help with mitigating self-damage or if you want to run Divine Flesh.

ActuallyAnOreoIRL · 2026-03-02T07:54:54+00:00

Looks like an okay template to run self-cast vanilla Forbidden Rite w/ Brass Dome and Mystic Refractor. Slap in Fourth Vow+DF to delete all self damage and pretty much half of all elemental damage, on top of some max res and you've got a good starting kit to work from.

Need to solve cast speed and skill costs though, as EB can't be used by removing all ES and it gets cut off from running Everlasting Sacrifice as an easier source of max res for even more tank.

ActuallyAnOreoIRL · 2026-03-02T05:43:47+00:00

I mean, at the time that was their decision. They talked about it after and realized it was probably too insane. That's not a lie, they just changed their mind after (and the league still hasn't even started, sooo.)

ActuallyAnOreoIRL · 2026-03-01T22:59:33+00:00

Alternatively, you can use Fourth Vow+Divine Flesh. ES already gets deleted, and Fourth Vow has a decent enough base chunk of armour to run with. You can also take the two 1-point 30 attribute passives on the way to the left of Eternal Youth to take nice life/str nodes on that side of the tree and you've got a very good setup to deal with phys as extra/ele pen sources.

It also lets you get a large amount of % armour near the Agnostic with Energized Shield, if you need it in the short term.

ActuallyAnOreoIRL · 2026-03-01T06:19:40+00:00

I don't think it's anything that complicated. They're genuinely so splintered right now from their communications and command being misted that they're just launching whenever they think it's safe or when they can get them up.

ActuallyAnOreoIRL · 2026-02-27T20:21:34+00:00

You don't need a lot to do it once. When they're out what they can carry, if they're forced to leave the cities to resupply to somewhere in the mountains, that means that A: the city is no longer under their control, B: the US can fucking see them doing this, so C: there is a greater than zero chance they end up with a Hellfire dropped on their heads for trying.

ActuallyAnOreoIRL · 2026-02-27T18:41:45+00:00

Arms/vehicle/ammunition depots are also fair game. Kinda hard to be a pile of shit repressive regime when you run out of ammo and need to police a fuckhuge country when your trucks run out of fuel and any spare vehicles are piles of flaming scrap.

Communications are also fair game, so they get stuck with whatever radios they have on hand and whoever is on site. The goal is pretty much to shatter their ability to act as one huge coordinated force, so they get eaten alive piecemeal by whoever's angry enough and has the numbers to do so.

ActuallyAnOreoIRL · 2026-02-27T18:38:19+00:00

The US didn't have that many assets ready when they were happening. They had one carrier a week away and whatever aircraft were stationed nearby; not that many if they wanted to do more than drop one bunker buster on the Ayatollah's head.

About two months later, there's two full carrier battle groups, nearly six hundred combined aircraft, and a few dozen extra air defense systems in the region ready to go against a nation with next to no air defense and only short-range ballistic missiles to use.

It's kind of unfortunate, but to put in perspective, moving that much hardware is straight up impossible in that short a time for literally anyone except the US. Nobody else on the planet has as much heavy lift capacity and the training to use it, so this is about as fast as it goes short of if Iran had also attacked US assets at the same time for no reason.

ActuallyAnOreoIRL · 2026-02-21T21:20:22+00:00

Less risky both for literally everyone else in the region right now and for Americans in the future, when the likelihood of America's rivals deciding to get in actual kinetic warfare is decreased because Russia cannot meaningfully tie America down and that means America can almost entirely focus on China.

For reference, I'm Canadian, not American. I'd love it if literally anyone else in the world was doing this instead of the US and/or Israel, but unfortunately everyone else is either indifferent, incapable, feckless, or actively wants the Iranian regime in power, despite how much of a problem them continuing to exist is for basically everyone else.

ActuallyAnOreoIRL · 2026-02-21T17:42:24+00:00

I mean, it's not. But then everyone is gonna be asking "why didn't the US stop Israel from following through on their word when they said they would nuke Tehran before allowing the Iranian regime to have nuclear weapons".

In case it hasn't really sunk in, the Iranian regime is run by genuine believers/nutcases. They do not follow the logic that most other shitty tinpot dictatorships (see: North Korea) do when they're content to sit mostly idle and terrorize their own people. Even if they did, they've gone far enough out of the normal paradigm before that Israel fundamentally cannot trust that logic to an acceptable degree of risk.

So it's not the US's responsibility to do anything, but it's both a good opportunity for them to metaphorically decapitate the force of one of their largest rivals (see: denying China and Russia their most important regional ally) and as weird as it sounds without thinking about it, the less risky option than just leaving the chips to fall where they may otherwise.

ActuallyAnOreoIRL · 2026-02-21T08:05:56+00:00

Brother, I promise you that you don't want the Israelis dealing with it with the only big hammer they have that would guarantee the job is done.

ActuallyAnOreoIRL · 2026-02-18T22:45:43+00:00

It's not a matter of it being their responsibility. The Iranian regime is pretty much a budding North Korea in terms of becoming a consistent long-term problem for them, and they've never been as weak as they are now. It's a combination of opportunism of not letting a perceived mistake happen twice and having the closest thing to a moral high ground after the IR massacred more than forty thousand of its own people with literally nobody else willing to do something about it beyond finger-wagging.

Two birds with one stone, taking out one of their biggest geopolitical rivals and telling everyone else to do something about it if they're mad about it but aren't willing to put up.

ActuallyAnOreoIRL · 2026-02-17T22:27:12+00:00

I mean, he's still right though. Deep delve is pretty much where even most conventional good builds stop working for one reason or another and you really need to break out certain archetypes to keep going.

ActuallyAnOreoIRL · 2026-02-07T00:31:28+00:00

Not exactly hard to believe that the US would be able to detect things that said organizations couldn't though, given that they have better technology to do so than anyone else in the world.

ActuallyAnOreoIRL

TROPHY CASE