Ironhold

Here's what it comes down to. 1. The Chinese military is so utterly lacking in logistical ability that the Chinese Army cannot project itself for very long outside of China's borders. This has been a known issue for decades, and in fact back in the 1990s when it was alleged that Bill Clinton and Al Gore were taking Chinese bribes several of these bribes ostensibly involved Bill greasing the wheels so that these individuals could have tours of places like FedEx HQ where they'd have been able to learn how it is we're so good at logistics. 2. The Chinese Navy is relying almost exclusively on direct-combat surface warships due to the fact that their one and only aircraft carrier, a *must* for modern naval warfare, is basically a boondoggle. As much as China wants the world to believe it owns everything under the Nine Dashed Line, without a proper fleet of aircraft carriers they can't actually hope to seriously conquer anything, let alone maintain a presence. 3. The supplies that Chinese military servicemembers have is horrifically below par for a nation of its size and economic might. If you go to YouTube and look up Steve 1989 MRE Info, you can find videos of him displaying and attempting to consume Chinese military rations among other world military rations. When I was last able to watch YouTube he'd only gotten food poisoning twice, and the second time was a Chinese military ration that was so vile the chlorophyl in the vegetables had leeched into the pork in the meal. China knows that from a military standpoint, the only thing they truly have in their favor is their nuclear arsenal; they do have millions of combat-age men they can send to war, but again the best these men could hope to do is use human wave tactics to overwhelm positions. Smart people know that no one sane would be the first to push that button, as literally everyone else in that exclusive club will respond by pushing their own buttons in retaliation. But enough world leaders are cowed by the idea that China is using it as potential leverage. As a result, the Chinese government is prioritizing global conquest based on economic and cultural domination. China has the money, so much so that they actually own a considerable amount of US government debt; this is a big part of why so many conservative politicians have made debt reduction a big issue. China is also such a massive market that global companies are falling all over themselves to get into China, allowing China to dictate terms and even influence global entertainment.

People miss the fact that the chant "from the river to the sea" means "the people chanting that phrase quite literally want to see Israel forcibly wiped off the map and the people slaughtered or driven into the water". Hamas won't stop until either every last Israeli is dead or every last Hamas member is dead, and the international community is doing its best to pretend that they don't understand this.

The issue is that the UK, like much of Western Europe, is going warp factor 27 into the "progressive" future without first stopping to ask if that's even a good idea. They're voluntarily overturning everything that made Western Europe successful in the first place and forsaking their national identities to appease groups that will never be appeased unless they get to conquer those countries and reshape those countries into something that history says is doomed to failure. This is another symptom of the rapidly spreading disease.

This is something the international mainstream media needs to do a better job of. Instead of asking why Israel is targeting these facilities, they need to ask why Hamas is setting up their soldiers in these facilities. As it is, there's reason to believe that Israel is a de facto nuclear power, and that their Dimona nuclear reactor was in fact established to give them access to the nuclear materials they needed. If this is indeed the case, they will *not* hesitate to light someone up if Israel's survival as a nation is in credible danger.

I was talking about people who weren't entirely informed of the causes for which they're trying to champion trying to make those causes part of their identities. In this case, we have a group of individuals making a big spectacle out of something that would likely get them killed if they actually tried it *in* Palestine.

Most of your modern-day "antifa" types are actually anarcho-communists who see anyone to the right of Karl Marx as being "fascist" by default. Anarcho-communists believe that violence is a necessary part of breaking down the existing order in order to establish their ideal utopian existence, and so each antifa member you see on the streets is a would-be revolutionary who truly thinks that they are somehow working to overthrow the system and replace it with an utterly fantastic version of communism. It legitimately doesn't register with them that most of these individuals would have themselves been lined up against the wall back during the Russian Revolution or otherwise "dealt with" for being blights on society per the concepts of the Soviet-style communism that they champion. That being said, a lot of your pro-Palestine types are similarly ignorant, such as the "LGBT individuals for Palestine" crowd who don't understand that Hamas and other Islamic radical groups have a history of summarily executing people who are homosexual.

Thing is, we've been mocked in popular media since the 1800s. It's not so much "we've finally made it" as it is "we're one of the few groups that left and right alike feel comfortable in bashing".

Except... there are literally Democrats who refuse to believe that these people even exist, and many who do believe that they are, indeed, "fighting fascists" because they believe the propaganda. Those are the facts I've seen. A lot of what the Democrats claim Trump is guilty of they themselves are guilty of as well.

A couple of pictures have emerged showing "crowds" that weren't actually crowds. This includes one where the crowd doesn't show up on a reflective surface and another where the faces in the crowd are badly mangled as if an AI tried to generate the scene.

Did you see where the so-called "anti-fascists" tried to murder a Bernie Bro because he refused to surrender his American flag? https://www.newsweek.com/antifa-violence-portland-bernie-sanders-video-1082072 Yes, this is Newsweek. The mainstream media.

...That's because they've been busy proclaiming that anyone MAGA is a "Nazi" who deserves to have their skull smashed open on the concrete. Yes, from 2016 to 2020, anyone who wore a MAGA hat was literally in danger of being physically attacked by Antifa goons. There's a ready supply of stories of people who were assaulted by left-wing radicals that believed MAGA = Hitler. Even during the 2016 campaign, you had people calling Trump "Drumpf" because they wanted to emphasize his German heritage, part of a campaign of othering him on the basis of "Anything German is Nazi!" they had going. It was a very, very ugly period of time, and you can still find hardcore leftists who are still trying to push this.

I'll have to double check at work, but IIRC the first high school football game of the season is at the end of this month, which would be the 30th or so. I have to deliver the Saturday morning football special edition, so yeah...

Understand that if you do for any reason need to approach your bishop about receiving church financial assistance, he *will* ask to see your financial documents and he *does* have the authority to make any assistance conditional on lifestyle changes that can include spending limits and strict budgeting. If your wife has a spending addiction, then that might be a very hard thing for her to accept.

https://apnews.com/article/walz-swiftboating-kerry-trump-harris-national-guard-293e178ca9fe079e879787ee2269899e The Associated Press is of the opinion that the stolen valor charges being leveled against Walz won't affect him as badly as they did against Kerry, but IMHO the fact that they're even bringing these charges up is telling about how concerned people are.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_73_Easting Back during Desert Storm, an American force was ordered to engage and obliterate all Iraqi forces in between their starting position and the line on the map known as 70 Easting. The commander didn't stop until they had arrived at 73 Easting, inflicting massively disproportionate casualties on the Iraqi forces. On the surface, it's easy to attribute the success to then-modern technologies like GPS, night vision, and so on, with the United States fielding top-of-the-line military hardware against Iraqi vehicles that were 20+ year old Soviet rust buckets. In reality, there are two critical factors that people overlook: the outdated tactics the Iraqi forces were using, which dictated that it was impossible for a military force to attack from the angle the Americans attacked from, and the fact that American soldiers are given an appropriate degree of autonomy to act as they feel necessary while the Iraqi soldiers were paralyzed unless an officer told them to act. This battle is typical of how most engagements went during Desert Storm, with the outdated Iraqi tactics and lack of autonomy combining with the utterly worthless equipment they were giving their conscripts.

When it comes to the four-hour episodes of the show (very late 1978 through to the 1980s), there have been a few instances where either a story Casey told or one of the week's Long Distance Dedication requests actually synced with what we were talking about in Sunday School / Priesthood. That being said, Ryan Seacrest is the current host of the show. Many Top 40 and "Hot Adult Contemporary" stations, particularly the ones owned by iHeart, air the show, usually on Sunday mornings as well. There's also a similar 24-hour stream of episodes on the iHeart app. Unfortunately, the format of the show has changed drastically since Seacrest took over; the Long Distance Dedication is gone, I didn't hear a single listener letter on those few episodes I did catch, and half the time Seacrest did little talking beyond introducing the songs. It just doesn't feel the same under this new format. Also - Rick Dees' Weekly Top 40 is still on the air producing new episodes; stations can choose from a straight-up Top 40 or a "Hot Adult Contemporary" Top 40. This is in addition to remastered episodes of his show from the 80s, 90s, and 2000s that they can choose to air as well. For the new episodes, some of the artists on the chart will actually record jingles for the show which he'll play intermittently.

Premier Radio Networks, a content syndicator that is a subsidiary of iHeart Media, has been remastering select episodes of American Top 40 from the 70s and 80s. 95% of the time the remastered episodes are the same as they were when first broadcast, but I've caught a few instances where songs were edited due to modern-day sensitivities (like "Money For Nothing" by Dire Straits) or artificially sped up (generally around 110% speed if my guess is right, enough to where a person not otherwise familiar with the song wouldn't even notice) to make room for the bits where a modern-day announcer explains that it's a rebroadcast. A number of radio stations, mostly iHeart-owned "classic top 40" formatted stations, air these remastered episodes on Sunday mornings. Some will air both AT:40 70s and AT:40 80s, like KBGO-FM Waco Texas, while others will only air one or the other. Additionally, the iHeart Media app has a 24-hour digital-only station that airs these episodes back-to-back, generally airing a 1970s episode and then a 1980s episode (with both episodes picked at random). Note that in media markets where iHeart owns multiple radio stations, one station will be obligated to switch to an all-Christmas format for at least some period during the year. If the classic top 40 station is the designated sacrificial offering, then instead of the regular episodes that would have been scheduled to air you'll get some combination of the two Christmas episodes he did in the 1970s and a handful of Christmas shows he did in the 2000s. Casey is obviously very sick during these 2000s shows, and so it's actually rather depressing to hear these episodes; when KBGO is forced to switch formats I use the app to listen to the 80s show via WSWR Shelby Ohio.

During the high school football season, the newspaper I'm with publishes a special Saturday morning sports tabloid that sums up the previous night's game. I'm up about 4 AM or so to get to the office at 5, and with any luck I've got it distributed all across town by 10 provided I have at least one volunteer with me to help out. This means I often nod off during the Saturday sessions of October Conference. One year, I nodded off during one talk but could still hear it in my sleep. In the dream I was having, I was driving down a road and listening to that talk on the radio. The speaker (I don't recall who it was) happened to be talking about how everyone has a place within the church. In the dream, it occurred to me that my place is not having a place at all. That is, it's my mission to go where I need to go in order to do what I need to do. Not having a defined "place" gives me more freedom to go between groups and activities, but at the cost of my not having any sort of safe harbor when my own life goes sideways. Yes, in the dream the revelation was such that I missed my turn and had to loop around. Do I exactly keep the Sabbath "holy"? Most people who look at me would say that I'm far from it. For example, I normally have my headphones in and the iHeart Media app to Casey Kasem during church. Then when church is over, it's off to 7-11 for gas & lunch, followed by Walgreen's to pick up a few things. Thing is, the circles I transit and groups I hang out with are such that someone who came strutting up with a name tag would be turned out on their face just because of that name tag and everything associated with it, while someone like me who meets them on their level and they know as an associate they're willing to at least hear out. To them, I'm the guy they talk comic books with, or the guy they know from around town. Something like that to where they're comfortable and a little more open-minded.

I'm north of 40. This means I was here to see the final years of the Cold War, Desert Storm, Bosnia, 9/11, and so many, many other things that people before feared marked the End Times. Instead of worrying about what might be, we need to worry about the here and now, the things we can control and anticipate.

I'm reading reports that the same person who planned the Opening Ceremonies was the person who planned the Closing Ceremonies. So expect things to go downhill even further & faster.

"Keep Austin Weird" is already an advertising slogan for the city of Austin, Texas, and so given how deeply blue the city is it's hypocritical for the Democrats to use that as an insult.

No. Fan mail, positive comments online, and other shows of support work just as well.

In all seriousness, a *lot* of United States Military service members actually became fans of the series because it was something positive to counteract the often negative aspects of being deployed. The Military Times, part of the Gannett family of periodicals, actually did a story on it about a decade back.

The head editor at my flagship newspaper worked his way up from being a sports reporter. We got to talking about how poorly the Olympics were going when we were at the office last night, and he raised a point: failing a single test for anything performance-enhancing can get an athlete booted from competition or even derail their entire career, yet the boxer in question has failed numerous tests regarding certain hormones and so there is a question as to why they were allowed to compete.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concerns_and_controversies_at_the_2024_Summer_Olympics Take a look at how long that list is. And I don't think it's been updated yet with the issue regarding women's boxing; I'm still reading it. I'm actually getting nostalgic for the Goodwill Games at this point given how poorly so many Olympic events over the last 20 years have been.