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Brisketexan

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Posts posted by Brisketexan

  1. That we need to broker cessation of violence among these Slavs asap. 

    bingo-tarantino.gif

    Double bingo.
    First cited post tells you all you need to know about how little Ana understands about conflict. Many times, a brokered imperfect peace is the best call. MOST TIMES, even. Sometimes, it is not. Wisdom is knowing the difference between the two. I’ve dealt with conflict, professionally, for decades. And those propositions bear out. Most times, I can see immediately that the parties need to resolve their dispute (I even have a pretty good idea HOW they should resolve it/how much it’s worth). It usually takes them a good bit of time to realize it (metaphorically, after shelling each other for a couple of years and gaining little), but they get there. But sometimes, the conflict is one that can only be resolved by final victory/defeat. If you don’t end it now, you’ll just end up in it again, etc. Those cases are stupid and destructive…but very real.
    For Ana to blithely post “root cause analysis,” clearly having in mind a look back over the past 30 years (“blame NATO!”), and not over the past THREE HUNDRED YEARS (this is what Russia does, irrationally, stupidly, and destructively, over and over, regardless of what other actors do) tells us plenty.
    Russia is a chronically abusive spouse who is currently beating the shit out of his wife. Ana looks back at last night and says “well, she shouldn’t have burned his dinner and made him mad. They should each apologize to each other, and she should learn to cook.”
    It’s insultingly stupid. To come from someone posing as a guru offering wisdom from the mountain peak is pathetic.
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  2. The part of the Ana bit that I like the most is not the “look at me, so much more thoughtful than you philistines” part - that’s just trite. It’s the part where he mocks a policy position, yet never offers a well thought out alternative path. It’s always just some version of “we shouldn’t do X, and you guys are suckers for thinking we should.” Ok…so what SHOULD we do? “I already told you - not X.”
    It’s cowardly, and a regular admission that he indeed has no actual counter-thoughts.
    And yeah…it IS funny how every time there’s the opportunity to go after people who agree with and act upon the proposition “fascist authoritarianism sucks,” Ana comes running to bash them with a response time that would be the envy of every fire department in the country.

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  3. .d4742f71ce967d40817be8065406c023.jpg

    How is it “the struggle” when you got to eat such awesomeness? I mean, it even has the coveted brownie.
    When I was poor…but still deserved the very best, because I’m worth it…I’d get two different Banquet meals for my dinner. They were like $1 each. Winning.
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  4. Long/interesting article about Putin liking the smell of his own farts/believing his own propaganda/using his own product.
    https://www.rferl.org/a/putin-victim-own-propaganda-ukraine-glasser-interview/32616268.html
    RFE/RL: The first question, and pretty much most of the questions will be about the man in Moscow whom you studied and reported on for years. Are there still moments that he surprises you, or does something that you didn’t expect?

    Susan Glasser: I would say that, because we were warned so explicitly in the advance to the run-up and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, I can't say that it was a surprise. But it's still a shocking decision, especially because it was extremely risky. Some people previously saw Vladimir Putin as being an incrementalist, certainly aggressive, but careful within that. And you could say that the invasion of Ukraine was certainly not incremental, except perhaps by some crazy logic.
    One of at least the short-term consequences of this invasion of Ukraine has actually been to increase the level of repression and eliminate the possibilities for opposition inside of the Russian system…
    I think that Putin, in the big picture, has surprised us all. Let's not forget that 20 years ago, if we were having this conversation and we said, “Well, he will have become the longest-serving leader of Russia since Josef Stalin, that he will have invaded not one but two of his neighbors, that he will be forging a new alliance with China that will have a ‘no limits partnership’ as the definition of this alliance,” we would have been shocked. It was not in the frame of possibility. So, in a big-picture sense, I would say that Vladimir Putin has surprised us all, actually….
    I think that he seems to have become perhaps more messianic, more wrapped up in his own vision of personalized power over the 20 years that he has been in power. That's not surprising -- that's happened in many dictatorships -- but it does seem that Putin views himself now as a sort of heir to the tsars.

    RFE/RL: Is there a kind of a “I am the state” thinking behind that?

    Glasser: Yes. The cult of the leader is something that he would have grown up with in the Soviet Union to a certain extent. He is clearly more in the mold of the early leaders of the Soviet Union -- the Lenins and Stalins -- than he is of the mold of collective leadership in the later days of the Soviet Union. I've always thought that he viewed himself as the sort of successor to the KGB leader who became one of the final leaders in the Soviet Union, Yury Andropov, and that he sees himself…

    RFE/RL: Accomplishing what Andropov couldn’t?

    Glasser: Exactly. That Andropov died too soon and was succeeded by [Mikhail] Gorbachev, who obviously is not a hero to Vladimir Putin.

    RFE/RL: How much does Putin embody modern Russia? Has he molded the state into his image, or was it Russia that molded him according to a popular demand or something like popular sentiment of what Russia wanted to be?

    Glasser: You know, it's very interesting, because I was based in Moscow in the first years of Putin's tenure as leader, the first four years, and I remember interviewing once one of the pollsters who worked for Putin -- Aleksandr Aslund -- when he first was elected Russian president. And Aslund said, “You know, the Yeltsin years, this idea of democracy in Russia, it was like taking a river and putting a dam in and eventually the river overflows and goes back to its natural course.”
    And so he and those who helped to create Putin perceived Putin, in a way, as simply being a part of the inevitable restoration of the Russian river flowing in the direction that it would. And I think to him, the idea was that Putin could have been anyone, in effect; that Putin was simply the natural and logical manifestation of a return to a more authoritarian state.

    TLDR version: Russia is an authoritarian piece of dick populated by pathetic thieves and slaves. Always has been. Always will be.

    Wall it off and be done with it.
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  5. Brits moved a battalion to the NATO Rapid Reaction Force. Kosovo is under a UN Mandate so if Serbs move, we react. Balkan wars are messy and seem to happen every 30-40 years. 
    Yay???? 

    Well…so the boy’s Central and Eastern European Studies class was maybe taking a trip to Belgrade in the spring. Or…maybe not.
  6. Well, bow season starts this weekend. Get a crossbow and shoot him in the spine right between the front shoulders, should drop like a rock. He looks like at least 6.5.
    CHIEF

    He was out front when I got home. Our little bachelor herd hangs out in our yard a lot. Two young 8s with him.

    4d8e0e9912535fa0c2d6508e405f713f.jpg
    bf5ccae7a3910fab6e9bfcb28051190b.jpg

    In the first pic from our backyard, you can see the genetics at work. For years, the dominant buck around here had a hefty rack, but it was heavy on the height, not so wide on the spread. All the bucks have a similar rack now - taller, not so wide.
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  7. 34 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

    The people who aren't from Texas seem to work hardest at being Texan.

     

    Fucking this.  Every thing he desperately cited...is true about most all of the men I know who grew up in Texas.  None of us spend any time trying to burnish our bonafides by bragging about how old our boots are, or how awesome our "aresenal" is.  We just . . . wear our boots.  And shoot our guns, when we have occasion to.

    Fake carpetbagging Texans are steaming piles of shit.

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  8. 1 minute ago, Chewbacca said:

    My mom still has a room in her house that I'm not allowed in.  It has white carpet.  I think I've been in it ~3 times in over 30 years.

    "Don't wipe your hands on those!  Those are the guest towels!"

    Still have no idea why that distinction fucking exists.  It's as stupid as decorative pillows.

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  9. 1 hour ago, Pancho said:

    @fattyflattie, care to comment about your party and what you’re voting for?

     

     

    The guy in the tape helped oversee the confirmation of Brett and served as a clerk for Neil.

    I'll save you the time: he's cool with it.  All of it.  He wants more of it.  Because...and this is super important: NONE of that will rain down on him directly or his family.  Sure, will millions of legal citizens (born here in the USA, citizens by plain language of the Constitution) be imprisoned or deported in this Trump dreamland where they simply do what they want, unhindered by any law?  But why should Flattie care, he's not one of them.  Etc. etc.

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  10. 5 minutes ago, Surly Bevo said:

    Kind of like how it gets really hot in the summer and because the earth rotates the sun disappears below the horizon is a known event?  Because a few times this summer that came close to handing us our ass. 

    4 minutes ago, freyguy said:

    and this state is just great at planning for known events....

    Well, what we need to account for is the fact that Texas is really, really, really, really stupid.

    Like "we're a state that has a Texas A&M in it" stupid.

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  11. 13 minutes ago, Surly Bevo said:


    The eclipse is next April 8th and lasts a few minutes in a pretty narrow path (at least in terms of totality)

    Nope, not that one.  They're talking about the annular eclipse on Oct 14th.  And they are indeed planning for it, because it is going to be a problem -- for a significant period of time, it will reduce the irradiance received by solar panels  materially -- at its peak, around 15% of what they would produce under a clear sky.  BUT, it's a known event of known timing, and can be planned for.

  12. 3 minutes ago, Pescado_Rojo said:

    We'll just start a fire in our fire ring at our secret camp in the woods, skim our stash of girlie mags, and drink the warm beers we had stashed  that we stole from someone's older brother. Might even dip a little cope. 

    That's a pretty solid afternoon.

    Shit, man....I'd be down for that, like, TODAY.

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  13. 48 minutes ago, Bozo_Casanova said:

    Tell me this incel thirst trap twitter account/substack blogger doesn't write exactly like her:

     

    Two things.....

    1)  Would.

    2)  I mean, the funny thing is, in and among her psychotic ramblings, there are some sparkly nuggets of truth.  For example, she's not WRONG about the nihilist non-ideology of the modern right.  The post she cites is wrong because it assumes there are actual IDEAS there about how to "really run society" -- wrong, none of them are interested in actually running a society.  They are only interested in creating self-serving fiefdoms, not a "society" at all.

    God, intellectually, we are so fucked.  

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  14. 6 minutes ago, bolverk said:

    Yeah, that's the sideshow distraction. The real one, again, is the draconian spending cuts.

    If they want spending cuts, I propose 100% spending cuts for each of their districts.  They don't want federal spending?  Don't accept any.  Easy-peasy.  I'd draft up a bill saying as much: "All of the following agencies will expend $0 in the following geographic areas: Alabama House districts X, Y, and Z; Arkansas House districts....etc. etc."  Back it up, bitches.  But it's cool, those folks can still pay taxes and still get their money's worth.  We'll earmark all of the tax dollars paid from within those districts for the military.

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  15. Just now, Ghost of LL said:

    My Brother in Christ--Diane Feinstein was born in 1933.  She is definitely not a Boomer.

    The Late Silent Gen types are just as shitty in that respect.  And remember, we're Gen-X, we get to shit on EVERY other generation, because why the fuck not, what are they gonna do, fuck us over/ignore us?  Gee, how ever will we survive such treatment?

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  16. 1 minute ago, DixonHur said:

    I agree, but as @Brisketexan pointed out, we already doing this with the DEA, so what's that harm in agreeing to, checks notes, keep doing it.

    I'm probably just being a bit naive.  Or perhaps, I was just conditioned to assumed the GQP demands would be way more outrageous, so these seem pretty tame.  

    Devil will be in the details.  And a lot of devils, of that I'm confident.

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