I see it as a gateway. A lot of people will go to the protest, talk to other people, and maybe get involved with something more meaningful.

I’m from the US southeast so I’ve seen plenty of these people. IMO, they should be avoided. There are plenty of devout Christians that are quiet about it and they’re fine. They’re often good people actually. The ones that are extremely forward about it are performing for their in-group. The in-group is all that matters. Since you aren’t in it, you don’t matter to them. At best, they’ll hang out in order to proselytize to you. I find them condescending and intentionally disconnected from the outside world. Effectively, they’re in a cult.

No US losses, not a single soldier?

7 soldiers were injured by shrapnel or gunshot wounds. There hasn’t been any announcement of US deaths.

Not a wall of bodyguards around Maduro?

The Cuban government provided elite guards for Maduro. They announced that 32 of them were killed in the raid.

yet they didn’t have any radars set up to detect air infiltration?

They certainly did. Detecting aircraft doesn’t mean you can do anything about it. This was a big operation with explosions all over the city. Many of those were knocking out air defenses and targeting air bases. Some of the aircraft used were stealthy and might have evaded detection before striking air defenses. 150 aircraft from the Navy, Air Force, and Marines were used.

All of the equipment shipped in from Russia and China leading up to this moment, no missiles that could’ve taken out those low flying helicopters?

I’m not familiar with China’s military aid. But IIRC, Russia flew one transport plane with “air defenses” which is more of a symbolic gesture than a solution. Let’s not forget that using advanced aircraft to strike deep within contested airspace is kind of the US military’s whole thing. By the time the helicopters showed up, any air defenses that could have brought them down were already dealt with.

They capture Maduro AND his wife? Why his wife, it just seems an unnecessary liability to add to the equation.

Yeah idk. That is weird.

but what they haven’t taken over Venezuela?

…yet. My guess is that they learned from Iraq. In Iraq, they did the same kind of thing to Saddam and then took over and tried to run the country. That turned out to be a huge political problem for the US for decades. They want Venezuela to essentially be a vassal of the US, which they can do without directly running the country. Likely they are using the threat of doing this again to push Venezuelan politics toward giving concessions to the US.

Feels like a psychological operation to make us believe the US hegemony is alive and just as invincible as it’s always been

At this point you are purely reaching for conspiracy to fit things within your preferred narrative. The rest of your post is very conspiratorial. A lot of parties are kind of shocked at the moment and waiting for some of the dust to settle before taking concrete action.

White supremacists liked American History X. The lady running the summer camp in “Jesus Camp” said she thought the movie was a good portrayal of her ministry.

You are taking disconnected elements and spinning a huge narrative with big reaches which just isn’t necessary to explain the actions of world leaders.

That is straight up Q anon conspiracy nonsense. The reality is that geopolitics is complicated and interdependent. The US has sewn influence and is very powerful on the world stage. And, when push comes to shove, a lot of world leaders don’t care about rule of law or norms as long as the bad things are being committed by an ally a long way from home.

It is fully possible for the crew to ignore orders

You have no idea if that’s true. Russia is an authoritarian country. It didn’t get that way by allowing underlings to assert themselves. Even in your example of losing their jobs-that could be suicidal if they have a family relying on that income. In Russia, the punishment could be much worse. In an authoritarian oligarchy like Russia, all of the levers of power are controlled by the handful of elites. The entire national system is built for their benefit. Your average grunt is a victim in all this. They don’t have the ability to dissent. They’ll get made an example.

Or the sailors might have been gung-ho and did it without their captain knowing. Hell, idk.

The crew should not be penalized for decisions they have no control over. That’s crazy.

I mostly don’t. Maybe this isn’t the kind of answer you were interested in. I think memorable experiences are transient and are more beautiful the more fleeting they are. The more I try to immortalize some moment, the less I feel I’m able to enjoy it in the moment. There are some exceptions. I keep recipes in Google keep. Most of them I just know how to make but I might need my memory jogged for a measurement or temp setting. I also have a small notebook I use as a gym journal. “Journalling” seems like a stretch for the chicken-scratch numbers, though. It’s mostly so I know how much weight to use next time I go.

Oh yeah. My knowledge of how to make 3 perfectly flat surface plates will rebuild the origins of precision.

A lot of cool projects on here. I’m not actually a programmer so everything I’ve done is little more than a script. In high school, I taught myself python by solving project euler problems. Many of them involved prime numbers so I got increasingly good at making prime number generators. I was really proud of getting it down to just a couple lines of elegant simplicity.

It doesn’t matter. Nobody is going to be convinced by anything you say. The protesters won’t be especially hurt by a really good burn. You could yell gibberish into the megaphone. The important thing is that you are there, loudly showing your support for the drag queens.

Is this trolling? I’ve never heard any of these fake quotes.

I’ve never been a big fragrance guy. When I found out about people like you, I decided to just go fragrance free. If it’s not a big deal to me and it gives a few people headaches to be near me, might as well just not do it. There are some tangential benefits. My deodorant irritates my armpits less now. My hair oil used to irritate my skin if it got on my forehead. Now it doesn’t.

Left analog rubber shouldn’t peel back and expose sharp plastic. The triggers shouldn’t feel like mushy shit. The screws should be a regular Phillips head. I wish the cable were shorter (I could make that one a reality but I don’t feel like it).

She lied about calling Joe Biden a war criminal which is kinda based. I’d rather her own it than do it and pretend she didn’t but I don’t mind that she did

Yep. The worst part of winter isn’t all the clothing. It’s getting undressed every time you arrive at your destination.

This sounds like it might work. I’ll play around with it. Hopefully being chess-specific doesn’t make it incompatible with a smash tournament.

I don’t drink at home. I’ll let loose when I’m out with friends but at home I don’t drink. I had a period of my life where I was very close to becoming an alcoholic. It wasn’t until a recovering alcoholic (using extremely broken English) suddenly seemed very concerned with me and told me I could talk to him any time that I realized where I was heading. A couple years later I messaged him to tell him how important that moment was to me. I don’t even know if he could read English well enough to get the point but I hope he understood.

My mom met a non-binary friend of mine and their girlfriend. My NB friend comes across as a masculine muscular bro dude but their NB and pan. I mentioned to my mom later that they were NB and she was like “but he has a girlfriend…?” I had to walk her through “you’ve heard of men being attracted to women, and women being attracted to women. Well Zack is neither and is attracted to women.” In her mind, gender and sexuality were like, part of the same thing. Which I guess they are but not the way she thought.