trump has become strangely protective over rfk, jr. it's unclear why, beside the endorsement, although the protective behaviour precedes the endorsement.

while it demonstrates some level of mental short circuit, his bizarre dog eating comments at the debate are clearly intended to project and distract from the suggestion that rfk, jr is a dog eater.

indeed, hamas is recruiting a new generation and going to university campuses all over the world to do it.

people sign up for this shit. what do you do?

https://www.timesofisrael.com/hamas-official-says-despite-war-losses-terror-group-has-recruited-new-generations/

my ears are still mildly clogged and it's just lingering forever.

i'm going to diagnosis myself with severe acute sinusitis and hope it gets better soon. like, very soon.

but the air conditioner upstairs isn't helping.

it's like the apocalypse. it already happened.

as an atheist, you might expect me to write that stuff off as a lot of nonsense, but i have actually read all of it (when i was quite young) and i realize that the eschatological part is a fairly poorly written piece of greek drama (there's a literature of this type of writing, and this is probably the worst extant example of it) but the bulk of the "prophecy" is really just base geopolitical analysis that is largely pretty rational and really anybody could have come up with.

if you're standing in jerusalem, at almost any point of history since cyrus, the beast from the east is obviously iran. one might note that most of russia is to the west of jerusalem.

the apocalypse, as described, is a relatively straight forward projection of the greco-roman/persian conflict that went on for centuries and came to an end in 628 ce. the last phase of the conflict saw the iranians capture jerusalem in 614, then the romans launched the first known jihad to recover it, in 627. this last war completely devastated both empires (imagine germany and russia after world war two), and actually resulted in a mass depopulation of roman palestine, as everybody fled or died. what happened next was the bubonic plague hit the devastated persians in 627-628 and persia was then outright conquered by the arabs in 633.

this is the conflict described by the geopolitical analysis in the bible, and you're left to draw your own conclusions about 1000 year reigns of antichrists and whatnot.

but my point is that it's not some brilliant foreseeing of history, it's just an obvious projection of an inevitable outcome, standing between these giant warring civilizations. some deep reckoning was inevitable. and it did in fact happen, in the 7th century.

if the bloc win lasalle, trudeau should resign as pm, resign his seat, resign from the party and go spend the next ten years hiding in hungary in abject shame.

for those looking in on the outside, losing lasalle would be like the democrats losing california. it would suggest they're completely dead in the water.

this will also be the second time in less than a year that the liberals will need to learn the lesson to let their constituents nominate their own candidates and stop parachuting candidates in.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-liberal-candidate-in-montreal-by-election-says-campaign-is-about-her/

the world should not have allowed the issue in yemen to fester to the current point. that these barbarians in yemen continue to exist is very pointedly a symptom of a lack of american leadership in the region.

a coalition similar to the one that defeated isis needs to be reassembled to entirely eliminate the houthis from the face of the planet.

these operations need not last forever. however, they need to continue until the enemy is destroyed. this should have been done years ago, and needs to be done now. those arguing otherwise should be dismissed as cowards and failures.

unfortunately, i don't think that either candidate for president has the leadership qualities to assemble a coalition of this sort to eliminate this enemy and we will have to deal with several more years of terrorist attacks until this threat is neutralized and destroyed.

were these russian missiles?

how did these monkeys get access to this technology?

https://www.israelhayom.com/2024/09/15/central-israel-strike-houthis-claim-hypersonic-missile-used/

they used to speak british in britain.

really.

it's actually true.

you may have heard older people or history teachers make the claim that "we'd all be speaking german" if world war two had turned out differently, which, if i may intervene, is extremely unlikely. hitler had an easy enough time invading a couple of weak neighbours, but you have to realize that most of them actually didn't fight. the british and french didn't actually fight either, at least initially. it was called the phony war. 

the russians fought, because the alternative was being turned into soap for lebensraum. the nazis really planned to exterminate the russians, but they probably would have just absorbed the british.

as soon as the nazis faced a real army, they collapsed. as they were landlocked and didn't have colonies, they had difficulty with things like access to oil. they didn't stand a chance in the long war. the british empire, including america and australia, was simply superiorly positioned. it was just a process of fighting it out, which they tried to avoid because they knew it was harmful and dumb (and because they liked the idea of arming the nazis to fight the soviets).

yet, the truth is that, at least in the anglosphere, we already speak german because the brutal invasion of britain by german speakers that is being imagined hasn't just already happened, it's happened several times, from several angles - vikings, danes, saxons, angles, jutes, normans, etc. if you look at a map, anglia and saxony are regions in the german-speaking continent.

there's been some recent historical revisionism that suggests that the germanic speaking barbarians may have been invited into the region to overthrow the romans (there's a curious historical event called The Great Barbarian Conspiracy, which is recorded obscurely, but seems to be exactly that), who were seen by the british as a colonial invasion force, and that the celts may have willingly adopted a germanic identity for that reason, as the germans were the freemen (this is actually more like braveheart than marx) fighting the declining empire and winning. if you've been struggling against an unwanted colonial power for centuries and somebody starts winning, it's enticing to want to join them. that's probably the actual reason why we speak german - because the germans beat the romans (going back to the battle of teutoberg forest, which is a fun story to read if you don't know it, even if it's half legendary), and the celts got slaughtered by julius caesar in one of the worst genocides in human history.

it is a little unconventional, but, for this reason, i consider the uk to be a part of scandinavia.

if that hadn't happened, we'd all be speaking brythonic (brittanic, or british, which is what they used to speak in britain), breton, cornish and welsh.