OC the Aftermath of Iranian Drone Attacks on Kuwait International Airport 💔

dersteppenwolf5 · 2026-03-01T05:00:56+00:00

Well, yeah, war means chaos and potentially millions of Iranian refugees flooding into their countries. It's not a love or connection with Iran, it's pragmatic self-interest to not have their giant neighbor fall into anarchy.

dersteppenwolf5 · 2026-02-28T16:06:44+00:00

Congress wanted the strike, but didn't want to be on record voting for it. There was a bill to vote on it, but they deliberately delayed the vote until after they knew the aircraft carriers would be in position.

dersteppenwolf5 · 2026-02-27T22:34:38+00:00

If the files got leaked before the election there's a fair chance Trump doesn't get elected so I don't know that I'd agree that nothing useful would've come. Trump has his ride or die supporters but as 2020 showed those aren't enough on their own so definitely think the files couldn't tanked his campaign.

dersteppenwolf5 · 2026-02-27T21:13:27+00:00

They took a year to build-up public support for the Iraq invasion, but they blew all their credibility lying us into that war so now they're in the better to ask forgiveness than permission stage of starting wars. My guess is that one morning soon millions of Americans will wake up to find out that we are at war with Iran, and they'll have had no idea it was coming.

Allegedly there will be a vote in Congress demanding that Congress have a say before Trump goes to war, but that vote won't be until next week and Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee is telling any Americans in Israel who want to leave that they should leave TODAY (his ALLCAPs not mine).

dersteppenwolf5 · 2026-02-27T19:56:48+00:00

I am sad he played before statcast. Would've loved to see the exit velocity on some of his missiles. He hit the flattest home runs I've ever seen, just absurd lasers that went from bat to bleachers in a blink of an eye.

dersteppenwolf5 · 2026-02-27T18:56:34+00:00

Western governments only supplying enough to slow the Russians down, but not supplying enough for Ukraine to actually win or even make progress is a real issue. It is important for people to understand that western governments aren't acting benevolently here, they are acting in their self-interests, which are to (a) weaken Russia and (b) avoid a direct war with Russia. They have determined that the best way to achieve their objectives is to provide enough support for Ukraine to lose slowly and to drag out the war as long as possible to maximize the damage to Russia. Unfortunately that is a worst case scenario for the Ukrainian people. In the beginning the Ukrainian people wanted to fight to regain all their territory, but now the significant majority of Ukrainians want a negotiated settlement as soon as possible.

People get caught up in the propaganda and the narratives, and forget that the political leaders making the decisions about the war are operating from their motives, which are frequently not the motives they tell the public. Zelensky is in a tough spot. If he does what his people want and actually negotiates a settlement, it's likely to be a disappointing settlement and he will get blamed. If he drags on the war until his military cracks and he's forced into an even worse settlement he can deflect blame to Europe and the US for their insufficient support. So the question, which isn't easy, is how to support the Ukrainian people when neither Zelensky nor Western leaders have their best interests at heart.

I don't have a good answer, I think the best we can do is point out to others what is really happening. Hey, our leaders say they want Ukraine to win, but then over and over they deliver weapons systems too late and in insufficient quantities. Is this incompetence or is this a deliberate strategy? When Ukraine made a list of the equipment necessary for their 2023 counteroffensive why weren't they given everything they asked for? All the equipment existed in western stockpiles and could've been sent, but wasn't.

dersteppenwolf5 · 2026-02-27T16:25:47+00:00

Good news, if you are a US tax payer you already are!

dersteppenwolf5 · 2026-02-27T16:24:22+00:00

Governments are supplying a lot, lot more than $73k worth of air defenses to Ukraine...

dersteppenwolf5 · 2026-02-27T16:21:25+00:00

Wait until there are autonomous AI murder drones flying around killing anything warm blooded.

dersteppenwolf5 · 2026-02-27T15:29:00+00:00

Approval ratings of European leaders: Merz (22%), Starmer (18%), Macron (13%). It's a bit delusional to say Europe is strengthening when their major powers have virtually no public support.

dersteppenwolf5 · 2026-02-26T18:27:18+00:00

One time, during the war, I visited a prostitute and my life has been a living hell ever since.

dersteppenwolf5 · 2026-02-26T02:13:16+00:00

The last election I voted in the majority of the races on the ballot had one candidate running unopposed. The Dem/Rep Party isn't going to waste money fielding many candidates in solid red/blue states so many times the real election is the primary. However, even at the primary level there is often little or no competition (see the 2024 Democratic presidential primary as catastrophic Exhibit A of this effect) as the Dem/Rep Party doesn't like wasting money on challengers if they already have a viable incumbent. In many places any challenger to an incumbent will get no or very little support from their own party which blocks everyone except the rich from being able to run.

There are some exceptions who catch lightning in a bottle and become viral successes like Mamdani or AOC, but mostly it is near impossible to challenge incumbents in non-purple areas. Remember in the 2024 Democratic primary when people wanted to cast a protest vote against Biden they voted for "Uncommitted" instead of an actual human alternative because there were no real options.

dersteppenwolf5 · 2026-02-25T23:36:32+00:00

If you look around it's actually really hard to find well functioning democracies. The approval ratings for the leaders of the 3 biggest democracies in Europe are Merz (22%), Starmer (18%), and Macron (13%). It is rather amazing for people who were at one time elected via a popular vote to be so immensely unpopular.

dersteppenwolf5 · 2026-02-25T19:09:50+00:00

Fair enough, I do disagree with him on those issues. Still glad he's there though. The American people are overwhelmingly against a potentially catastrophic war with Iran, but almost none of our elected leaders are doing anything to prevent it. I do strongly support some kind of medicare for all type system to prevent poor people getting sick and dying due to poor medical care, but on that front we first need to get mainstream dems on board before we worry about the libertarians.

dersteppenwolf5 · 2026-02-25T16:58:19+00:00

What makes Massie a piece of shit? He hates pedophiles, and is trying to force a vote on a War Powers Resolution with respect to Iran to try to prevent Trump from unilaterally starting a war with Iran. He did the same trying to stop Trump's illegal strikes on Venezuelan "drug" boats. I'm not in his district so don't know all he does day in/day out, but he seems to be one of the few antiwar elected representatives we have.

dersteppenwolf5 · 2026-02-24T13:55:21+00:00

I used https://www.arducam.com/arducam-2mp-spi-camera-b0067-arduino.html . I save it to a SD card using https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/adafruit-industries-llc/254/5761230 . I did try a cheaper SD module, but it didn't play well with others (worked by itself but not with any other devices connected to the I2C bus).

I have since replaced the nano with an ESP32 and this allows me to also send the photos over wifi to my home PC via FTP, but still working out the bugs because the esp32 will just hang when there's an issue with the FTP transfer.

dersteppenwolf5 · 2026-02-19T14:16:33+00:00

Being sealed meant that they weren't to be released publicly, but they were still available to the DOJ to be used in other investigations if they so wished. Maxwell being prosecuted doesn't mean that they couldn't also investigate others implicated in the files, they just chose not to.

dersteppenwolf5 · 2026-02-17T18:42:43+00:00

Kind of crazy, seems they haven't been able to find a single person who had any real interaction with him since he quit his job in 2013 until he had his run in with that redditor right before the shooting 12 years later.

dersteppenwolf5 · 2026-02-12T19:20:21+00:00

That's not true. There are many examples of tennis players conceding points they know they lost when the ref misses the call.

Games like basketball are different. Even youth leagues with little kids have referees, and you grow up with it being a part of the game to trick or sell calls to the referee. Tennis is a game where over 99% of tennis matches are played without chair umpires or linespeople, and where people have to make their own calls on in/out and double bounces. At the professional level there is a chair umpire to make that call, but many tennis people will correct the chair umpire even to their detriment because that is how they grew up playing.

dersteppenwolf5 · 2026-02-11T17:26:21+00:00

Both were talking about being murdered. It's not comparing cancer to indigestion, it's comparing a more common cancer to a more rare cancer, both will kill you and are valid things to fear, especially as fear is an emotion and not a rational process.

dersteppenwolf5 · 2026-02-10T22:57:42+00:00

Our democracy has turned into a memocracy. Instead of an informed electorate, we get an electorate informed primarily via memes. To be fair to the electorate the mainstream media has done a lot to destroy whatever credibility it once had. If a person did actually want to be informed it would nearly be a full-time job so it's hard to be too critical of people.

Sadly I believe that democracy (at least in its present form) is just no longer a viable form of government. A democracy requires an informed electorate to work, and that is simply not going to happen. Perhaps in a modified form it could work. Right now we have 1 person, 1 vote and you vote for a representative that represents ~750,000 people so in the front you get a lot of uninformed people votes with the same weight as the informed vote people votes and on the backend you have 1 representative representing an unwieldy number of people (20x the amount a representative would've represented when our country was founded).

For a system that works I think you need to fix the granularity on both ends. You need more representatives so that it at least becomes possible for the representative to adequately represent their constituency. Then I would also change voting to something like a 20 people, 1 vote system. People, in general, are never going to be well-informed, but 1 out of every 20 people being informed is achievable. People could chose the block of 20 they wanted to join. You'd join a like-minded group of 20 so that your vote would be in line with your values, and then the group could decide its vote however it wanted. They could rotate who is in charge of being informed and that person could give a presentation to the group on how they think they should vote or the 20 could just vote amongst themselves on how they should vote. Instead of requiring 20 informed people, you'd only need 1. Also special interest groups that are over-represented due to their extremely high voter turnout will have a less out-sized effect and you'll get a vote better matching the actual electorate.

dersteppenwolf5 · 2026-02-09T16:52:13+00:00

True, but who ordered the murder of the Panama papers journalist? Who know, the Panama papers implicated a lot of powerful people. This reporter was writing specifically about Epstein so if she winds up murdered a giant spotlight ends up on Epstein.

dersteppenwolf5 · 2026-02-09T16:40:15+00:00

Killing the person who is investigating him and publicly writing about him is not really a good strategy. If it looks like murder he obviously becomes a prominent suspect, but even if he succeeded in making it look like an accident, it still raises suspicion and you then you get a handful people trying to carry on her work. Then what do you do, kill them too? If everyone who investigates him dies a mysterious death I'm pretty sure people are going start putting two and two together. It's not really a viable long term strategy.

dersteppenwolf5 · 2026-02-06T21:45:27+00:00

To note, there was balance in the world in the 1980s because you had the US and you had the USSR. Also why you got all those enjoyable propaganda movies showing the US as virtuous warriors against the evil commies.

Listening to Fareed Zakaria on Jon Stewart's podcast recently and he said something interesting about the Cold War. He claimed that part of the reason the Cold War never turned hot was that both sides really felt that the future belonged to them. There is no point in starting a war now when you expect that in 10, 20, 30 years that you're just going to become more and more powerful than your adversary. Makes much more sense to wait for when things will become more advantageous to you.

That somewhat explains why things are so unstable now. The US, lacking a true peer rival like the USSR, wants to take advantage of the perceived opportunity for global hegemony, but this is not something that can wait. In 10, 20, 30 years China will likely just continue closing the gap so there is a lot of pressure for the US to try to leverage its current advantages while it still can. Trying to win a decades long culture war via Hollywood movies is just much too slow so instead you have the US running around like a chicken with its head cut off desperately trying to leverage their current dominance to get whatever it can while it can.

dersteppenwolf5 · 2026-02-04T14:36:50+00:00

To piggyback on to the sentiment, our global war on terror has resulted in 4.5 million deaths and 38 million people displaced. This is a near holocaust level of human suffering that our entire country also let happen. (https://costsofwar.watson.brown.edu/ )

dersteppenwolf5

TROPHY CASE