yunyun333
2d ago
People don't look at the night sky enough. Here's the former governor of Maryland complaining about the constellation Orion. There are a lot of things up there that look strange when you zoom in really hard with a shaky camera!
yunyun333
9d ago
Last Friday after several days of deadlocked deliberations, the judge agreed to the prosecutor's request to drop the most serious charge of manslaughter, and asked the jury to consider the lesser charge of negligent homicide. It's strange that the jury was so quickly able to dismiss this charge while spending multiple days debating the more serious one.
This case was pretty controversial but judging by the political temperature I don't forecast any major protests or riots.
yunyun333
12d ago
Ports require lots of heavy machinery to do their job, you can't 10x their capacity in a few days. LNG terminals (Taiwan imports 98% of energy) also cannot be easily migrated.
The routes between west and east are highly mountainous. One was closed for 13 years due to typhoon damage. They could all be shut down with well placed missiles, crippling resupply.
This is all ignoring submarine warfare/anti ship ballistic missiles.
yunyun333
13d ago
A blockade will require, almost certainly, getting ships onto the far side of Taiwan
The four ports responsible for >95% of shipping are all on the west side. The east side of Taiwan is obnoxiously mountainous.
yunyun333
13d ago
Sortie generation is inversely proportional to distance, and Hawaii is ~5000 miles away from China's coast. If you can't stage out of Japanese bases or Guam then can you bring meaningful fires?
yunyun333
28d ago
The US did try to kill Saddam though, and Saddam never bothered to surrender. When your tanks are rolling through Baghdad unmolested it was a pretty clear sign that his reign was over.
n the early morning of 19 March 2003, U.S. forces abandoned the plan for initial, non-nuclear decapitation strikes against 55 top Iraqi officials, in light of reports that Saddam Hussein was visiting his sons, Uday and Qusay, at Dora Farms, within the al-Dora farming community on the outskirts of Baghdad.[153] At approximately 04:42 Baghdad time,[154] two F-117 Nighthawk stealth fighters from the 8th Expeditionary Fighter Squadron[155] dropped four enhanced, satellite-guided 2,000-pound GBU-27 'Bunker Busters' on the compound. Complementing the aerial bombardment were nearly 40 Tomahawk cruise missiles fired from several ships, including the Ticonderoga-class cruiser USS Cowpens, credited with the first to strike,[156] Arleigh Burke-class destroyers USS Donald Cook and USS Porter, as well as two submarines in the Red Sea and Persian Gulf.[157]
yunyun333
30d ago
So is he part of said 'transition team' or does he just have the ear of someone on it?
yunyun333
1mo ago
We can't even produce enough shells for ukraine. It's explosive in a metal container, how hard could it be? And on the other end of the scale we can't produce enough ships, and also some of the ones we do produce are garbage, and we don't have enough sailors to properly man said ships. I don't see much reason to be more optimistic about the shiny new thing.
yunyun333
1mo ago
How can news sites call it so early if it's such a small margin at the end?
yunyun333
1mo ago
Taken from credibledefense:
Nothing quickly changed. Ukraine has been struggling with a major manpower crisis since 2023, now the front is finally collapsing as a result.
First off, military service has never been popular in Ukraine and they had issues with draft dodging since early 2015.
Early in this war the AFU primarily relied on volunteers or at least motivated individuals who eagerly did their duty when mobilized, ie conscription during wartime. However, the Ukrainian mobilization system was corrupt, incompetent, and the pool to pull from was deliberately kept small. Even by early 2023, cracks in the mobilization system were notable since early 2023. But nothing was done, probably because there were high hopes for the Spring 2023 Counteroffensive, if it went well then the war would hopefully end with a military victory in 2024.
But the counteroffensive was a disaster. More so, the Ukrainians kept it going for six months, racking up losses they never planned to take, the mobilization of new soldiers was grossly insufficient to replace losses, so combat units grew weaker and weaker. A reputable military analyst named Michael Kofman says the Ukrainian only cut their counteroffensive off because they basically ran out of troops.
During the summer of 2023, the mobilization crisis finally became so problematic that Zelensky got involved. The UA parliament passed a law to lower the mobilization age from 27 years old to 25, but Zelensky refused to sign it (he was worried about it polling badly). However, he did mass fire every regional military recruitment commander (called the TCC), as corruption and incompetence were the two best words to describe the system.
However, the situation didn't improve, it just got worse. Just as the Ukrainians cut off their strategic offensive due to unsustainable losses, the Russians started theirs, and it's only grown in intensity as time went on. Initially it was largely directed against Avdiivka, that culminated with its fall in April 2024. Then the Russian strategic offensive grew in scale on a broader front, adding Kharkiv in May, with other localized offensives against Chasiv Yar, New York, Kupyansk, and along different locations in the South.
The fall of Avdiivka was outright blamed on two things, limited ammo (blame fell on the US for not passing the large supplemental aid package to help Ukraine) and manpower. Zelensky finally agreed to make mobilization reforms and in April he signed the law to lower mobilization age to 25, he also signed laws expanding penalties for draft dodging, to make it easier for TCC to track mobilized personnel, and a few other odds and ends.
Ukraine mobilization jumped up in numbers in May, when the laws went into effect, and in June too, with the first month numbers of inducted personnel being reported to be at 35k, which was more than they got the previous four months combined. June supposed got about that many too, then it started dropping. Those that came in during May took about two months to be fully inducted into the AFU. counting admin, transportation, screening, training, and more transportation before they would arrive at their units, so it would be around August when the results would become noticeable.
However, August saw a much greater expansion of the war. Ukraine attacked Kursk, successfully too, driving pretty deep and taking close to 1000 sqkm of land. There are many reasons they might wanted to do that but what it did do is turn a relatively quiet frontage on the border hot, necessitating triple or more of AFU units to hold the new ground they took and to try to take more. Kursk has become the strategic main effort for Ukraine, that's where the majority of military assets are going in terms of reserves, quality equipment, and manpower.
In the Donbas, the Ukrainians never stabilized the front after losing Avdiivka and that's come to bite them in the ass. They've had numerous fall back lines but none held and the Russians keep advancing. Now they threaten the key transportation hub Pokrovsk, but also everything south of it. Because priority of everything is going to Kursk, the Ukrainians are losing more there, and many AFU units are being seriously attrited in those locations because they're stuck fighting against the Russian main effort (getting the bulk of Russian military support), taking heavy losses they can't place, effectively dying in place because they're not allowed to retreat and there isn't anybody to relieve them with.
The Russians launched a big offensive against Vuhledar in late August and it fell in late September, largely because the unit holding it was utterly exhausted. Reserves were sent and they did poorly, a mix of unpreparedness and poor morale.
Meanwhile, the manpower crisis keeps getting worse. The May July induction numbers dropped significantly, by 40% according to reports, or more. Zelensky still doesn't want to consider more mobilization reforms especially to expand the pool of potential recruits because he's worried about polling.
Overall, AFU morale is seriously degraded and now desertions have become a major problem, including among the better troops who finally had enough and quit because the way things are going nobody is leaving combat without becoming a serious casualty. The problem was so bad that the UA govt tried to fix it but because they're worried about political optics and polling, they took a very timid approach to limiting desertions, instead of cracking down they outright decriminalized desertion for first time offenders. The hope is those who left already will want to return knowing how badly they're needed and that there won't be any punishments. But it effectively motivated everyone who hadn't deserted yet as they know they too will suffer no consequences.
Overall, the intensity hasn't been this high since the start of the war in terms of Russian momentum. The AFU units fighting can't replace losses, can't be relieved, can't retreat unless violating orders. Losses are beyond casualties, most of the vacancies are deserters now. More and more units are crumbling, and when they crumble it causes Russian successes, as they aren't blind and are timing their attacks against the weakened units to take advantage..
I'm not saying that the AFU will crack and a major operational breakthrough will happen. But historically when those happen due to attrition, the runup to mass collapse looks like what is happening now.
yunyun333
1mo ago
As I understand it, the situation in the donbas is deteriorating at an accelerating pace in favor of russia. US officials have come to the same conclusion.
U.S. government analysts concluded this summer that Russia was unlikely to make significant gains in Ukraine in the coming months, as its poorly trained forces struggled to break through Ukrainian defenses. But that assessment proved wrong.
Russian troops have advanced in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. They have clawed back more than a third of the territory that Ukrainian forces seized in a surprise offensive in the Kursk region of western Russia this year. The number of Russian drone strikes across Ukraine has increased from 350 in July to 750 in August and 1,500 in September.
“The situation is tense,” said a Ukrainian major stationed on the Ukrainian side of the border near Kursk who goes by the call sign Grizzly. “We are constantly losing previously occupied positions, the enemy has an advantage in men and artillery, and we are trying to hold the line.”
In addition the number of glide bomb strikes has increased to >1000 a week, and it is too risky to deploy expensive anti air assets close to the front to counter these, as Russian ISR has improved. Shahed drone strikes are also getting through more easily due to depleted AA, Ukraine is no longer claiming 90% shootdowns as in previous months. Ukrainian desertion numbers have skyrocketed and their solution is that everyone gets 1 AWOL as a treat. Zelensky is still resisting Western calls to conscript 18-25 year olds but there may be no other choice.
yunyun333
1mo ago
This may not end up mattering in the end, but still hilarious.
yunyun333
1mo ago
NYT is predicting Trump winning iowa +9. So what was with that selzer poll?
yunyun333
1mo ago
Nate silver wins the bet if trump doesn't win by 8 points, is what I read.
yunyun333
1mo ago
By my math she would need to win ~72.5% of the remaining votes to lose by 8. I don't know how plausible that is.
yunyun333
1mo ago
Terrorism still probably has purchase among boomers who are Israel's biggest fans in the west anyways. But everyone else can just read about what Israelis say amongst themselves and realize that the distinction is meaningless at this point.
yunyun333
1mo ago
They could pretty easily have stopped october 7th by just paying attention to the border. Hamas pretended to be beaten by not responding to some Israeli provocations and Netanyahu thought they were done.
yunyun333
2mo ago
You should look into aboriginals in Australia, alcohol really fucks these people up.
yunyun333
2mo ago
It's a decades old case, there are a lot of contradictory things floating around on the internet. The governor's statement may be correct, but according to this article the ex girlfriend's testimony is a bit muddier:
About three months after Cole’s interview with police, a woman named Laura Asaro was arrested for sex work. Asaro told officers that she had information related to “the murder of the woman in U. City.” But when detectives arrived to question her, she would not talk to them, stating she was “just trying to get out of the arrest.” Police questioned her for two hours to no avail. They tried a different tack four days later: Detectives told her the charges would be dropped if she cooperated. They noted the reward for information. “She was not receptive, so detectives then told her that Ms. Gayle’s husband had posted a $10,000 reward in the case involving the death of his wife, and she would be eligible for some or all of the money if she helped out,” prosecutors wrote.
Maybe she forgot about getting the reward because she was a crackhead sex worker, but she didn't exactly come forward voluntarily either.
yunyun333
2mo ago
Yesterday a man named Marcellus Williams was executed via lethal injection in Missouri. He was convicted of the murder of a local journalist. The main points of the case are that
a) no forensic evidence at the scene (the victim's house) connected him to the crime; DNA fragments on the murder weapon (a butcher's knife from the kitchen) were not his; a bloody footprint was not the same shoe size he wore.
b) He sold a laptop taken from the house to someone else;
c) Two people, a former jailmate and ex girlfriend, both told police that he had confessed to the murder. However, they had a financial incentive for doing so.
On balance it seems fairly likely that he did it; being a career criminal, having two unrelated people tell the cops you did it, and having possession of an item from the crime scene is pretty damning. It also can't be that hard to avoid leaving behind forensic evidence - use gloves, shave your head or wear a balaclava, even deliberately wear differently sized shoes. But when talking about the death penalty, we must take the 'reasonable doubt' thing extra seriously. So what do you think mottizens?
yunyun333
3mo ago
I don't think there was any intent to achieve a significant political goal, they were forced to use it because it was about to be discovered.
It was not Israel’s preferred course of action to detonate the pagers ahead of a full-scale war with Hezbollah, but security officials made an 11th-hour decision after at least two Hezbollah members suspected something was amiss with the devices.
Israel has been posturing for an invasion of Lebanon but clearly aren't ready for it just yet.
yunyun333
3mo ago
laughs in Latin
Although if you believe that Christianity helped to take down the empire, that was kind of born out of Jewish resistance.
yunyun333
3mo ago
Canada's finance minister quits over Trump tariff dispute with Trudeau
Seems like Trudeau is floundering for some ways to keep his job and his head economist didn't approve. I'm not sure why Trump wants to mega tax Canada but it certainly can't have helped. This may end up bringing down the Trudeau government.
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