Sounds like it was a metal towing cable, like from a winch? I could definitely see that taking a head off easier than a sturdy rope.

Blanks require you to buy them, in a lot of these places you already have a pile of spare Soviet or local ammo at home.

Ahh, but we’ve never really had such top-to-bottom corruption like this. A president who thinks himself a king, and everyone from congresspeople to governors to state secretaries to city officials who want him to stay that way. Sure, Bush might not have suspended elections, or Obama, but I can definitely see Trump trying.

“Police action”, because even with the current climate, it might be hard to get Congress to declare an actual war.

Don’t breathe too big a sigh of relief, they’ve already made noises like they want to find ways to strip naturalization for a LOT more people than they already have.

No no, this is a hybrid. Suicide drone attacks from the Ukrainian war and nail-bombs to depopulate areas from their former neighbor Bashar al-Assad.

He also stole a shitload of art from the ambassador’s office in France in his first term. You’ll also recall that he wants (dunno if he got) the Declaration of Independence moved into the office as well.

It already basically IS the next Versailles. Versailles was built as a huge, ostentatious show of wealth and power over the aristocracy, so Louis XIV could show that he held all the power. By making all these fancy nobles drag their asses out to the middle of nowhere (at the time - the city effectively grew up to support the palace) and stay there for weeks or months at a time, often without proper accommodations (quite literally you would set up camp in the gardens or wherever you thought you could get away with it - if you stayed in the palace proper, you were quite high in status), you flexed serious power over them, especially when they felt they NEEDED to attend all these balls and galas and symposiums and concerts that were constantly happening there so you could stay in the King’s favor.

Any of this sounding familiar?

They don’t need to invent law and Roberts et al know it. See, the thing about being on the Supreme Court is that aside from Congress impeaching you, there is no other recourse. Your entire decision could be written as “lol no” and unless Congress decides to impeach you, there’s nothing anyone can do about the decision.

I’ll also throw in November Kelly’s No Gods No Mayors, and occasional guests Failure To Launch (space disasters) and Beyond The Breakers (shipwrecks).

But you know who does employ children, Sophie?

Also, we all forget he tried to gin up a war with Iran in his first term. Wartime presidents tend to stay in power, and he knows this - wartime protests would also give him an excuse to use the military at home like the blunt instrument he sees them as.

Actually, I think so. Remember that this guy wanted to gun down the Floyd protests not because he didn’t like the politics, but according to him, “good presidents don’t have riots”. He was willing to kill thousands of people just to preserve his own mental image of himself.

My governor has said he’s not sending in troops anywhere (after someone asked), but considering the EO allows the SecDef to literally send troops anywhere they feel is a “disruption of public order” in whatever quantity and capacity he deems fit, and considering Hegseth seems to be pretty much an administration hand puppet at this point…I’ll still go, but I’m definitely planning on knowing my escape routes just in case.

Yeah, the training for these includes “well here’s what not to do wink”.

Oh, Russia has an idea of their envisioned future. They even have a checklist for it.

Unfortunately, a good chunk of the steps are “and then the country surrenders to the overwhelming might of the Russian military”.

More specifically, there’s now a generation of people who didn’t get their ass beat for using their left hand (this was surprisingly common up through the fucking 90s in some places) and now they want leisure goods that are left-hand-capable.

Surprisingly, a lot of the white nationalist organs here in the US have VERY intimate contact with white national South African groups. I’m wondering how many of them are coming here to avoid getting caught in government dragnets in SA. Lots of the bombmaking know-how and quite a lot of weapons flowed into South Africa during the fight to keep apartheid from the 60s-90s (and now the fight to either topple the post-apartheid government or create a separatist state where they can institute apartheid), and much of THAT was supplied by contacts in the American KKK. Weird Little Guys did an incredible deep dive on the interlinking of the white nationalist movement internationally with white South African resistance to the ANC and the DeClerc and post-DeClerc governments.

Literally President Trump has said that, I believe in his first term. Something about how there shouldn’t be rules in war, and whatever happens/whoever happens to be in the crossfire, happens.

I was about to say, they tried. They have been trying for three years. They’ve committed a TON more forces than Ukraine, and still haven’t made significant progress. The invasion is a military failure on pretty much every level, and it’s only the most delusional that think Russia still has any chance of actually pulling off a successful annexation or occupation for any significant length of time.

You forgot the Spam.