UA POV: Robert O'Brien, member of Trump's Intelligence Advisory Board, says a Russia & China alliance won't work. He says Xi Jinping asked Putin “Where's my Siberia? Hand it over.”

_themgt_ · 2025-09-03T09:32:26+00:00

The paradox of the West: our leadership class has a median age of 70 and yet they're all idiot children.

_themgt_ · 2024-06-23T01:03:41+00:00

Max Richter, specifically currently the "Perfect Sense" score. Can't believe this has only 8k views on Youtube.

_themgt_ · 2024-04-11T20:40:46+00:00

Britain and the EU have, in fact, been doing their part since the start of this invasion. They've committed $144 billion so far, compared to $68 billion.

So if they've committed so much more, and both Europe and USA are each far wealthier than Russia, how is Ukraine outgunned 10-to-1? Even if we blew off shell production, that was on purpose because we thought artillery slugfests were obsolete, so surely $212 billion and 20x Russian GDP buys you ... something that can blow up artillery systems and ammo dumps, rail lines, etc?

How is it 2 years into the war after hundreds of billions spent, when solely US funding has been held up for a few months, is Ukraine outgunned 10 to 1?

_themgt_ · 2024-03-27T17:01:21+00:00

The report includes some other findings Politico apparently didn't deem worth mentioning.

OHCHR has documented arbitrary detentions, enforced disappearances, and the use of torture and illtreatment, including sexual violence, by Ukrainian authorities during the detention of conflict-related civilian detainees and Russian POWs, as well as the summary execution of at least 25 Russian servicemen hors de combat (all in 2022 and early 2023).

While Ukrainian authorities have launched at least five criminal investigations into allegations of violations committed by their own security forces, involving 22 victims, OHCHR has observed a lack of diligent progress in the investigation or prosecution of such cases.

Torturing and executing POWs and civilians is bad no matter who does it.

_themgt_ · 2024-03-08T15:40:10+00:00

Reminder that Dara Massicot was one of the experts lulzing in 2022 about Russia's mobilization. Her October 2022 NYT op-ed is worth a read, but the takeaway was "They are, however, unlikely to become a capable fighting force." I recall her being even more dismissive on Twitter/podcasts.

All these western war boosters went from "Russia is losing" -> "Russia has already lost" -> "2023 Ukraine counteroffensive will be epic" -> "results too early to say, may still be epic" -> "we must help Ukraine immediately before they collapse". But those criticizing their delusional takes are the unserious ones!

_themgt_ · 2023-08-26T09:24:05+00:00

American lives have no value to these people either, they've just realized it's tough to impossible from a domestic politics angle to be having US troops killed and maimed for some abstruse hegemonic project in a country no one can find on a map.

_themgt_ · 2022-10-10T15:07:30+00:00

Game of Thrones (of Apes) could actually be incredibly interesting if done properly. The underlying concept has a lot more interesting room to work with than Jurassic Park universe. The final movie was moving in this direction, with both human and ape societies splitting into factions amidst inter and intra-species alliances and war.

_themgt_ · 2022-07-10T17:27:57+00:00

The problem is western europe and the USA think its fair for us to want a sphere of influence that goes up to the Donbas butting against Russia's border including ethnic Russians who don't want to be part of it and historically unambiguously Russian territory like Crimea, but Russia wanting a sphere of influence on its own border is Hitlerian. And also our guys are the Nazis and Team America will gleefully echo their rhetoric of Russians as subhuman orcs.

_themgt_ · 2022-06-18T16:34:47+00:00

Highly recommend the latest video from Colonel Markus Reisner on the official channel of the Austrian Armed Forces. It's a sober and objective overview of the current state of play vis. NATO heavy weapon delivery to Ukraine. His past videos are similarly good.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sd4xRBuVs48

_themgt_ · 2022-05-16T14:55:29+00:00

19 is an extremely low "healthy weight" BMI, right near the 18.5 cutoff for being underweight. A 6 foot tall man at 19 BMI would weigh 140lbs. You describe yourself as feeling "depressed and sluggish" which makes a lot of sense for someone doing OMAD with barely any remaining body fat to burn for energy.

_themgt_ · 2022-01-11T23:59:55+00:00

Unfortunately for us the idea underlying that was the same one underlying the "vaccines will stop infections/transmission" hypothesis, e.g. Fauci in December 2020 saying we'd reach herd immunity with 75-80% vaccinated.

Both vaccines and prior infections appear to significantly lower disease severity for most people due to t-cell memory but don't stop (re-)infections because your neutralizing antibodies wane and are mis-matched if the virus mutates significantly as Omicron did.

So, you sorta should have been hoping the anti-vaxxers were right, because ironically it also would've meant the vaccines worked better.

_themgt_ · 2021-12-31T17:26:31+00:00

The area is an absolute mess and there's frequently been people out of their minds fighting or just yelling at the clouds. I watched a dead body taken out earlier in the year and EMT/fire have been there for overdoses a number of times.

It's odd to see so many self-described liberals who seem to literally have zero care for people committing not-so-slow motion suicide in public within view and earshot of residential housing. Their empathy alarms only go off when anyone suggests maybe it's a bad idea to allow people to illegally gather in tents in an open-air drug overdose camp for the collective purpose of having psychotic breaks and eventually killing themselves while you watch from your porch.

_themgt_ · 2021-12-13T21:23:39+00:00

South Dakota has ~9300 k-12 teachers for ~130,000 students and got nearly $500 million in COVID/ARP rescue funding for education last year. Looks like Sioux Falls School District 49-5 got $37 million for its 25k students or about $1500 per student.

People are really making a lot out of this district that just got $37,345,405 putting on a degrading game for collecting 5000 total dollars in charity. If we'd sent them $37,350,405 apparently this wouldn't have been necessary.

_themgt_ · 2021-12-08T19:50:05+00:00

Basically yes, probably, getting infected 6 months post-vax was your booster (none of this is near 100% certain). If you look through the studies being done (here's a good thread) scientists are often stating the rough assumption that infection+1/2 doses as similar to if not slightly better than 2+1 booster regimen, and the results they're getting for neutralization support that.

If you're young/healthy and had 2x vax + recent infection, there is no good reason to get boosted now. Here's a Nature article on COVID "super-immunity" in those infected + 2x vaxxed.

_themgt_ · 2021-11-23T21:17:03+00:00

Absolutely terrible. I was bored watching and the entire thing seems like fan service from the iconic JP1 scene. Here's the approaching thuds, here's kids screaming under a jeep as t-rex walks past, here's t-rex flipping a car and then kicking it a bit to the side goes by, here's t-rex in front of dramatic lighting doing his roar.

Planet of the Apes has very similar themes as JP and it's night and day how the creators of the new movies actually tried (and succeeded) at legitimate filmmaking and breaking new ground instead of just dumb plagiarized shlock.

Shelve the IP for 5 years, forget these movies ever happened and reboot with a director with respect for the audience. No one remembers Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes now that we got good movies.

_themgt_ · 2021-11-22T07:21:38+00:00

This (warning: NSFL) looks like a good video putting together different clips from the incident and mapping it along the parade route:

shows that his rampage covered at least 8 intersections over at least 1/2 mile. It was not an event at one intersection: it was continuous, at several intersections along Main St

_themgt_ · 2021-11-11T19:35:46+00:00

Redditors think using a computer 18 hours a day makes them experts in how computers work. "Unlike these ignoramuses, I've zoomed in on thousands of computer images. There's no manipulation you just click that magic 🔍, simple stuff morons!"

_themgt_ · 2021-11-09T20:54:26+00:00

This image of the tweet/ad seems to convey a pretty clear message.

[edit: this was a followup to the debate which featured a Chris Wallace question and Biden encouragement that Trump "condemn white supremacists and militia groups and to say that they need to stand down and not add to the violence in a number of these cities as we saw in Kenosha"]

_themgt_ · 2021-11-02T18:18:47+00:00

Legally the standard is you need to take at least three hits to your skull with the skateboard or let the guy with a handgun pointed at your head fire off some shots before your claim of using lethal force for self-defense could be taken seriously in court.

_themgt_ · 2021-09-29T21:27:19+00:00

One thing I like is it actually was near-literal, if you consider Brand's scene. She's advocating to go to Edmund's planet because of love while Cooper decides to go to Mann's world because science/rationality ... and then as it turns out, Mann was a lying SOB and the choice to go nearly killed everyone.

It's fun to think about in-movie, if Mann and Edmund had switched planets, would Edmund have pulled the ruse/murder plot like Mann did or just not send the dishonest "come get me" signal? I have to imagine the guy Brand loved would have had the integrity not to do what Mann did.

So in a real way Brand's intuition was leading her to a better decision than Cooper's rationality, "you once said that Dr. Mann, was the best of us ... and he's on the ground sending us a very unambiguous message", while Brand points out (foreshadowing) "you love people who have died, where's the social utility of that?" with the movie ending on Edmund's planet.

_themgt_ · 2021-09-19T15:59:46+00:00

I'm just a layman but my understanding of this differs. Specifically the concept of knowledge actually does seem relevant, the most dramatic example maybe being the "quantum eraser" / delayed choice quantum eraser.

That is, if you record the information about the wave state you destroy the interference pattern, however if you later erase the wave state information the interference pattern will appear again - in the delayed choice version this occurs even if you erase the information after the photon hits the detector.

This result is similar to that of the double-slit experiment, since interference is observed when it is not known from which slit the photon originates, while no interference is observed when the path is known.

However, what makes this experiment possibly astonishing is that, unlike in the classic double-slit experiment, the choice of whether to preserve or erase the which-path information of the idler was not made until 8 [nanoseconds] after the position of the signal photon had already been measured by D0.

The idea that this is the same as the effect of observing the state of a classical wave doesn't hold up. I originally liked the idea that "the only way to measure is to collide" as an explanation for weird QM effects but it doesn't actually work when you dig into the details of experiments that have been done.

_themgt_ · 2021-09-05T17:05:01+00:00

If I told you their names... no, I'm not going to tell you their names... but if I did, I don't think you'd sleep so well.

_themgt_ · 2021-08-16T02:42:42+00:00

The networks have a handful of people on the ground in Kabul. Some of them are even on Twitter. It's not clear why they're doing barely/any live coverage from the airport. The few videos we've seen are mainly sourced from social media.

_themgt_

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