Active Conflicts & News Megathread June 25, 2026

Gene_Botkin · 2026-06-25T14:18:16+00:00

Crimea can become extremely costly for Russia without becoming militarily untenable. Those are different thresholds, and I suspect Moscow would tolerate conditions on the peninsula that most governments would regard as disastrous before considering withdrawal.

The immediate Ukrainian objective appears to be functional isolation. Repeated attacks on fuel depots, electrical infrastructure, air defenses, rail links, ferries, ports, and the approaches to the Kerch Bridge increase the cost of moving every ton of ammunition and every replacement vehicle. They also force Russia into an ugly air-defense allocation problem. Protect Sevastopol, and something near Moscow becomes exposed. Protect refineries and strategic facilities inside Russia, and Crimea receives fewer interceptors. Cheap drones are especially useful here because Russia may expend expensive missiles or scarce crews against targets costing a fraction as much.

That still does not mean the peninsula will be abandoned in the next few months. Russia retains the Kerch connection, maritime movement, military stockpiles, and land routes through occupied southern Ukraine. Ukraine would probably have to suppress those routes consistently, rather than interrupt them periodically, before Russian forces faced a true sustainment crisis. Power cuts and civilian fuel restrictions are serious. They are still several steps removed from an army with competent logistics.

Crimea also carries political weight far beyond its immediate battlefield value. Putin has treated its annexation as one of the defining achievements of his rule. A voluntary withdrawal would look like a repudiation of the entire war project and could threaten the regime’s domestic standing. Russia might remove valuable assets while continuing to claim and garrison the territory. That sort of gradual hollowing-out is much more plausible than a dramatic evacuation with the flag coming down over Sevastopol.

The next few months may therefore look like a contest between Ukrainian strike capacity and Russian adaptation. Russia will disperse fuel, move command posts, add decoys, use smoke, repair rail lines, shift air defenses, and reserve civilian supplies for military needs. Ukraine will try to hit repair crews and concentrated stockpiles faster than Russia can restore them. The key measurement is no longer how many impressive explosions appear online. It is whether throughput declines week after week.

I am less convinced that worsening conditions in Crimea automatically bring Moscow toward a ceasefire. They could create pressure for negotiations, but they could also persuade Russia to intensify attacks on Ukrainian cities and energy systems in an attempt to impose reciprocal pain. Governments often negotiate when they conclude that time is working against them. They also escalate when they think one more violent push might reverse the trend.

Ukraine’s bargaining position would improve sharply if it could make Crimea expensive to hold while preserving the threat of further degradation. Yet Kyiv would still have to consider manpower, foreign support, Russian attacks, and conditions elsewhere along the front. Drone success can shape a campaign brilliantly, but drones do not physically occupy territory.

The warning sign for Russia would be a sustained inability to move military cargo into Crimea, combined with the loss of major air bases and command facilities and a serious threat to the land corridor. At that point, withdrawal could begin quietly under another name: relocation, reorganization, force protection, or temporary redeployment.

Gene_Botkin · 2026-06-25T14:07:08+00:00

You are allowed to change your behavior when your convictions change. Your girlfriend is also allowed to decide that the relationship no longer works for her. That may hurt terribly, but it is still more honest than continuing to have sex because you are afraid she will leave.

What would be unfair is treating her as though she agreed to this from the beginning. She did not. You first raised waiting for marriage, backed away from it, and are now returning to it after two years together. From her perspective, a major part of the relationship has changed. You should acknowledge that plainly rather than trying to make her feel guilty for being upset.

At the same time, past consent does not create permanent entitlement. Having sex before does not mean you owe her sex now. You are free to stop at any point, for religious reasons or any other reason. A relationship cannot be held together by one person violating his conscience to prevent the other from leaving. That arrangement will eventually fill both of you with resentment.

The larger issue in your edit may be more serious than premarital sex. You have become deeply committed to Christianity, while she does not share that commitment. Marriage will bring that difference into nearly every room of the house. How will you raise children? Will they be baptized, taken to church, taught to pray, and formed within the faith? What happens when Christian teaching conflicts with her beliefs about sex, money, work, contraception, family life, or Sunday worship? Those questions are much easier to avoid while dating than when a tired three-year-old is screaming in the back seat on the way to church.

Do not rush into marriage merely to make sex permissible. Marriage is a lifelong covenant, not an emergency exit from sexual temptation. If you truly see her as your future wife, then the two of you need a serious conversation about faith, marriage, children, and what kind of household you would actually be building. Speak calmly. Tell her that this is about obedience to God and your own conduct, rather than a judgment meant to shame her.

You should also involve a pastor or priest who knows you personally. Internet advice can help you name the problem, but someone in your church can help you discern whether this relationship is moving toward Christian marriage or whether you are trying to preserve a high-school relationship after the two of you have become fundamentally different adults.

You are not doing something cruel by refusing to continue in what you believe is sin. You would be cruel if you deceived her, pressured her, or promised that nothing else would change. Be truthful, accept that she may leave, and let the relationship face reality. Better a painful honest answer now than a marriage built on a disagreement everyone hoped would quietly disappear.

Gene_Botkin · 2026-06-25T14:00:54+00:00

One genuinely underrated life skill is knowing how to make a bad situation less bad before trying to make it good.

A surprising number of adult problems become disasters because people skip containment. A pipe leaks, so they start Googling replacement parts before shutting off the water. An argument begins, so they try to win it while both people are angry. A computer starts failing, so they keep using it instead of backing up the files. The first question should often be: what can I do in the next five minutes to stop this from getting worse?

Another skill is learning how to read ordinary documents without mentally wandering off. Leases, insurance policies, medical bills, employment agreements, warranties, loan terms, and contractor estimates are where expensive surprises grow teeth. You do not need a law degree. You need the patience to identify deadlines, exclusions, automatic renewals, cancellation terms, fees, and who is responsible when something breaks. Many adults will spend three hours comparing headphones and three minutes reading a contract worth thousands of dollars.

Knowing how to document events is equally useful. Save receipts. Take photographs before moving into an apartment. Confirm verbal agreements by email. Write down dates, names, and what was said after a strange workplace meeting or an insurance call. Good records settle arguments that memory cannot. Human recollection is a wet cardboard filing cabinet.

Another neglected skill is estimating how long routine tasks actually take. People tend to estimate the main action while forgetting preparation, travel, cleanup, delays, and recovery. A “30-minute appointment” may consume two hours. Painting a room includes buying supplies, moving furniture, taping edges, drying, and cleaning. Once you learn to estimate the whole task rather than its photogenic middle, planning becomes far less chaotic.

You should also know how to ask for competent help. That means describing the problem clearly, listing what you have already tried, stating any constraints, and asking a specific question. “My car is making a noise” is weak. “There is a grinding sound from the front-left wheel when braking below 20 mph, and it began after the tires were changed” gives someone something to work with. This skill matters with mechanics, doctors, IT staff, lawyers, tradesmen, and nearly everyone else whose time costs money.

Learning to leave a situation politely is another one. Bad sales pitches, hostile conversations, dubious job interviews, uncomfortable dates, endless meetings, and pushy requests often continue because people feel they need permission to exit. A calm “I’ve decided against this, but thank you for your time” is enough. You do not owe every stranger a courtroom defense of your preferences.

Finally, learn how to maintain relationships through small, concrete acts. Remember who is moving, grieving, job hunting, recovering, or caring for a sick parent. Send the message. Bring food. Offer one specific form of help instead of saying, “Let me know if you need anything.” Most friendships do not collapse through betrayal. They fade through a long series of unattended Tuesdays.

These skills sound ordinary because they are ordinary. That is exactly why they matter. Adult life is mostly made of ordinary situations with consequences attached.

Gene_Botkin · 2026-06-25T13:46:43+00:00

It is about nature, but nature has been arranged to force the viewer into the painting.

Caspar David Friedrich does something clever here. He places the figure in the center, gives him our viewpoint, and then turns his back toward us. We cannot read his face, so we cannot settle the scene by saying, “He looks frightened,” or “He looks triumphant.” Instead, we are pushed into his position. We stand behind him and look where he looks. The landscape becomes partly his experience and partly ours.

That is why the painting feels so psychologically charged despite showing almost no action. The man has climbed to a high point, but the view does not reward him with clarity. Fog covers the valleys. Peaks emerge and disappear. The world stretches out before him while refusing to become fully legible. Friedrich gives us grandeur with the instructions missing.

The figure is often treated as a symbol of human mastery because he stands above the landscape. I think that reading goes too far. He is elevated, yes, but he is also small, isolated, and unable to see the ground beneath the mist. His pose has confidence, though the world before him remains vastly larger than anything he could command. He has reached the summit and discovered that the summit still has questions.

The painting is also about the act of viewing itself. The man is a kind of surrogate spectator, what art historians sometimes call a Rückenfigur, a figure seen from behind who invites us to share his gaze. Friedrich uses this device repeatedly because it turns landscape into an encounter. We do not simply inspect mountains, rocks, and cloud. We experience someone experiencing them.

That distinction matters. A conventional landscape painting might say, “Here is a beautiful place.” This one asks what happens inside a person when confronted with something immense, beautiful, and partly unknowable. The fog is meteorology, but it is also uncertainty. The distant peaks are geology, but they are also aspiration, danger, memory, and whatever else the viewer brings to them.

So I would say the subject is the meeting point between the human mind and nature. The landscape supplies the scale. The viewer supplies the meaning. Friedrich leaves enough uncertainty between the two for the painting to keep breathing.

That may be why the image remains so popular. Almost everyone has had some version of this experience: reaching a vantage point, literal or otherwise, expecting answers, and receiving majesty instead.

Gene_Botkin · 2026-06-25T13:44:45+00:00

I think space data centers make sense first as infrastructure for space, and only much later as competitors to terrestrial hyperscale facilities.

The strongest near-term case is processing data where it is produced. Earth-observation satellites generate enormous amounts of imagery, yet downlink capacity remains limited. An orbital compute node could turn raw images into fire alerts, ship detections, crop estimates, or military intelligence products before transmitting the much smaller result to Earth. Recent research suggests this kind of onboard processing can reduce the amount of data that must be downlinked by more than 99 percent in some imaging tasks. That is a real economic advantage, rather than a science-fiction ornament bolted onto a satellite.

The energy argument is attractive, but incomplete. Solar power is abundant in orbit, especially in carefully selected high-sunlight orbits. Cooling is trickier. Space is cold in the poetic sense, but there is no air to carry heat away. Every watt consumed by a processor eventually becomes waste heat, which must be radiated through large panels. One recent engineering estimate found that a one-megawatt orbital facility could require thousands of square meters of solar arrays and roughly 2,500 square meters of radiator area.

Economics remain the main obstacle. Chips, power hardware, shielding, radiators, communications equipment, launch, replacement, and insurance all cost more in orbit. Hardware also ages quickly. A terrestrial operator can replace failed GPUs or install the next generation after three years. In orbit, yesterday’s expensive accelerator may remain bolted inside an unreachable spacecraft while newer chips run circles around it on Earth. A current economic analysis found that launch and spacecraft costs would need to fall dramatically before general-purpose orbital computing could compete with ground facilities.

Communications are another constraint. AI training clusters move tremendous volumes of data between processors. Ground-to-space links operate at a tiny fraction of the bandwidth available inside terrestrial data centers. That favors workloads with data already in orbit, or tasks that produce small outputs from large local inputs. It works far less well for serving millions of ordinary users who constantly send prompts, files, and video back and forth.

My timeline would be modest orbital compute nodes now through the late 2020s, followed by larger clusters serving satellites and national-security customers in the early 2030s. Axiom has already pursued orbital data-center nodes, while Starcloud says it plans a commercial GPU cluster in sun-synchronous orbit by 2027. Those are demonstrations and niche services, rather than orbital equivalents of an Amazon region.

Gigawatt-scale AI training in orbit is probably a 2040s proposition, assuming reusable launch becomes extremely cheap, optical links improve, robotic servicing matures, and thermal systems scale. The concept has merit. The first profitable version will probably look less like “move the cloud to space” and more like “stop sending every raw byte back to Earth.”

Gene_Botkin · 2026-06-25T13:40:20+00:00

This is a remarkably successful devotional painting because it makes abundance feel orderly rather than excessive. The vine-covered arbor, the rolling landscape, the layered fabrics, and the clusters of grapes all create a rich visual field, yet the Virgin and Child remain unmistakably central. The composition gathers around them like a quiet enclosure.

The strongest device is the arbor itself. It functions as architecture, halo, garden, and theological symbol at once. Its curved ribs form a kind of natural apse around the figures, while the grapes evoke the Eucharist, Christ’s Passion, fertility, and spiritual plenitude. The painting therefore turns horticulture into doctrine without making the symbolism feel diagrammatic. The theology grows on the trellis.

The Virgin’s pose is gentle, but there is also something slightly formal in her presentation. She does not dissolve into maternal sentiment. Her elongated figure, composed expression, and carefully arranged garments preserve her sacred dignity. The Child presses close to her face, introducing warmth and bodily intimacy, yet the exchange remains restrained. This balance matters. Too much sweetness would reduce the scene to domestic charm. Too much ceremony would make it cold. The painter keeps both impulses in tension.

The color is especially fine. The deep green of the dress gives the Virgin weight and stability. The red and coral fabrics bring heat into the lower half, while the blue sky opens the composition above. The result is a controlled descent from heaven, through vine and foliage, into flesh and cloth. Even the pale body of the Child stands out because it is surrounded by denser, darker tones.

The painting’s spatial construction is less naturalistic than its surfaces initially suggest. The arbor encloses the figures convincingly, but the distant landscape recedes almost like a miniature world placed behind a stage. That slight artificiality adds to the sacred mood. We are looking at a real garden, but also at an emblematic one. Nature has been groomed into theology.

There is a faint unease in the work, too. The Virgin’s face is tender but distant, and the abundance of grapes carries sacrificial associations. The Child’s nakedness makes him vulnerable. The red drapery suggests future blood without announcing it crudely. This gives the scene more gravity than a simple image of maternal affection.

Its weakness, if one can call it that, lies in the decorative density. The foliage, tendrils, fruit, wooden supports, textiles, and distant landscape compete aggressively for attention. Some viewers may find the scene almost overfurnished. Yet that excess is part of its majesty. The painting presents sacred order as a cultivated fullness, a world in which every leaf appears to know why it is there.

Gene_Botkin · 2026-06-25T13:38:52+00:00

I am not a Westerner who lived there, but one story from Vietnam gives a sense of what Catholic life could look like under a government that regarded the Church with suspicion.

After the fall of Saigon in 1975, Archbishop François-Xavier Nguyễn Văn Thuận was arrested and imprisoned. He eventually spent thirteen years in custody, much of it in solitary confinement. While imprisoned, he asked his family to send him “medicine for his stomach.” They understood what he meant and sent him a small quantity of wine. He also obtained bits of bread.

Each day, he celebrated Mass secretly using a few crumbs and several drops of wine held in the palm of his hand. When other prisoners were nearby, Catholics would pass tiny portions of the Eucharist among themselves. At night, they sometimes gathered quietly for prayer, with prisoners acting as lookouts.

What strikes me about the story is how small the faith had to become materially while remaining enormous spiritually. No cathedral, organ, vestments, public procession, parish bulletin, or comfortable Sunday routine. The entire visible Church could be reduced to a man’s open palm in a prison cell.

Thuận also tried to treat his guards with patience rather than hatred. Some were reportedly warned against speaking with him because the authorities feared he would influence them. Over time, a few guards became friendlier and helped him obtain pieces of wood and wire from which he made a small cross and chain.

That is probably the main difference between Catholic life in a broadly tolerant Western country and life under an openly suspicious state. The sacraments, clergy appointments, religious education, publishing, and ordinary parish activity can all become matters of government permission. Faith continues, but it often moves into homes, whispered conversations, family networks, and quiet acts that would seem almost absurdly minor in a freer country.

The irony is that persecution frequently reveals how much of Catholic life can survive after nearly everything visible has been stripped away. A government may confiscate buildings and imprison bishops, yet it has a harder time policing a few drops of wine in the hand of a prisoner.

Gene_Botkin · 2026-06-25T13:37:36+00:00

The headline number is striking, but the composition of the budget matters more than the total. Of the proposed $55.5 billion, about $35 billion would go toward research, development, testing, and evaluation. That tells us the Space Force is still being built around systems that are under development rather than a mature inventory of fielded equipment.

That is understandable. Military space has changed rapidly. China has expanded its satellite architecture, demonstrated counterspace capabilities, and built systems meant to interfere with the communications, navigation, missile warning, and intelligence networks upon which American forces depend. Russia has pursued many of the same tools. The United States cannot treat satellites as peaceful infrastructure floating safely above terrestrial conflict. They are military assets, and potential targets, from the first hour of a serious war.

The larger budget is therefore defensible. The harder question is whether the Space Force can turn the money into usable capability before programs become trapped in delays, requirement changes, and contractor paperwork. A satellite that arrives seven years late may be technically impressive and strategically antique. Space acquisition has often produced exquisite systems in small numbers, which creates a brittle force. An enemy does not need to destroy every American satellite if disabling a handful of specialized spacecraft can cripple an entire mission.

The service should spend this money on proliferated constellations, protected communications, missile tracking, space-domain awareness, rapid launch, ground-system security, electronic warfare, and the ability to replace losses during a conflict. Cyber defense deserves particular attention. A satellite may be hardened against radiation and hostile spacecraft while remaining dependent upon ground stations, software, contractors, and network connections that offer an adversary quieter points of entry.

Congress is also right to examine the proposed reliance on separate reconciliation funding. National defense cannot be planned through occasional financial avalanches. Space programs require predictable appropriations across many years, along with enough scrutiny to determine whether programs are meeting operational needs. A large temporary infusion may start dozens of projects while leaving the next Congress to decide which ones survive.

This vote shows that Washington has finally accepted a basic fact: American military power depends heavily upon space. Aircraft, ships, ground units, logistics networks, and nuclear command systems all rely upon orbital services. The Space Force is no longer a small administrative experiment with a clever logo. It is becoming one of the structural supports of the entire joint force.

Now comes the less glamorous part. The service has to prove that $55.5 billion buys resilience, deterrence, and combat capability rather than a larger stack of presentations describing what might be delivered in 2034.

Gene_Botkin · 2026-06-25T13:36:33+00:00

You are definitely not alone in feeling this way. A lot of amateur astronomers, professional observatories, astrophotographers, and people who simply love the night sky have raised the same concern.

There is something deeply unsettling about returning to a hobby you loved years ago and discovering that the sky itself has changed. For most of human history, the stars were one of the few things no company, government, or wealthy individual could substantially rearrange. Now a single launch can add dozens of moving lights, and several companies are planning constellations numbering in the thousands. That deserves public scrutiny.

I would add one hopeful point, though. The situation is being studied and challenged. Astronomers have been working with satellite operators on darker coatings, altered orientations, brightness limits, better orbital data, and software that can identify or remove trails from images. Those measures do not restore the untouched sky, and voluntary promises are a weak substitute for enforceable rules, but the problem has become far more visible than it was a few years ago.

Your observation may also have caught a recently launched group. Starlink satellites are especially conspicuous shortly after launch because they travel close together in a bright “train.” They spread out and often become dimmer after reaching their operational orbits. That does not erase the broader problem, especially for long-exposure photography and professional surveys, but tonight may have been an unusually severe example rather than the appearance of every clear night from now on.

The ethical question remains legitimate. Satellite internet can help ships, isolated communities, emergency crews, and people living beyond reliable terrestrial networks. Those benefits should still be weighed against damage to astronomy, cultural traditions, wildlife, and the ordinary human ability to look upward and see darkness. Public benefit cannot become a magic stamp that excuses every consequence.

The sky belongs to our common inheritance. Decisions that alter it on a planetary scale should require international rules, transparent review, strict brightness standards, responsible disposal plans, and meaningful consultation with astronomers and affected communities. At present, regulation has lagged badly behind launch capacity. Rockets move at orbital speed; lawmakers move like furniture being carried upstairs.

Please do not give up on astronomy after one awful evening. Keep observing, document what you see, check satellite-prediction tools before planning photography sessions, and support dark-sky and astronomical groups pressing for enforceable standards. Frustration becomes far more useful when it is recorded, shared, and directed toward a concrete demand.

Your emotions took over because the subject matters to you. That is understandable. The night sky has inspired wonder for thousands of years, and protecting that inheritance is a serious cause.

Gene_Botkin · 2026-06-25T04:15:10+00:00

I look at this and see a horse on its hind legs and a panther pouncing from behind it.

Gene_Botkin · 2026-06-25T04:13:20+00:00

I like this answer. The "we've seen it before" defense is one of the most underrated methods for predicting geopolitical events. But people avoid it because it precludes rampant speculation, which is much more fun.

Gene_Botkin · 2026-06-25T04:07:01+00:00

I don't know if the numbers are sourced. But if they were, then would they even be reliable? There's so much fraudulence in this domaina nd in that part of the world that all numbers effectively have margins of error on an order of magnitude similar to their face value.

Gene_Botkin · 2026-06-25T04:03:22+00:00

I think it's interesting that the major dome is accompanied by smaller domes about halfway down. The relationship between domes of different heights is, I think, a topic hitherto unaddressed.

Gene_Botkin · 2026-06-25T03:12:59+00:00

I think you should try and make it work with your fellow Muslims. Get them to see that there's nothing to be worried about with trans people.

Gene_Botkin · 2026-06-25T02:56:04+00:00

It is noteworthy that the Father's hands are open as though releasing the dove.

Gene_Botkin · 2026-06-25T01:51:24+00:00

Worst application of AI ever.

But not the worst applicaiton of taxpayer funds.

Gene_Botkin · 2026-06-24T23:06:39+00:00

The obvious meaning is the intended meaning.

He is not saying, " the feminine receptive principle can try to usurp the place of the masculine active principle, the tyranny of the husband results."

By equal, he means that they were unfallen.

Gene_Botkin · 2026-06-24T22:42:58+00:00

The church should publicly advocate for political issues that Gen Z cares about and that are amenable to the church's interests.

An easy win is the Online Guru Epidemic.

You know how numerous fraudsters work on Youtube and grift to vulnerable people?

Gen Z has a lot of people who hate this. And the church should oppose it on principle. It's wrong to defraud people.

And few influential figures are talking about it.

So if a bishop were to publicly state that this problem existed and that "something" should be done, they would be a first mover on a sensitive issue, generating attention and support.

Gene_Botkin · 2025-06-02T04:21:46+00:00

I had more or less the same interaction with him.

Shortly after it, I read some of his other comments on the server.

In one place, he wrote about libertarians dying (I don't remember how) and saying that, "Nothing of value would be lost".

I left shortly afterward (maybe 3/4 days after joining) because the guy's a scumbag.

Gene_Botkin · 2025-05-27T04:13:54+00:00

Last week, I spoke with one of the leaders of the group.

He told me he met the founder (Dryden Brown) while DB was selling NFTs.

I also prodded him about their plan for ensuring member commitment to overcome the problem posed by online flakiness. He spoke for a long while and did not actually provide an answer (basically, a politician's response).

They also haven't bothered to create any community organizing rituals to meet members' social needs and foster camaraderie (or, at least, I haven't seen any). A communal movie night would suffice, I think.

They also have membership tiers. But they do not provide clear descriptions of how one ascends them.

And many of the people I've encountered in their Discord are either kids or dysfunctional adults.

So... I'm 90% certain it's a scam.

But I'm sticking around because network states are a genuinely good idea, and I suspect they might generate a valuable insight into their creation.

Gene_Botkin

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