President has wide latitude in matters like this. Air strikes in this context are legal for him. He can even deploy troops as long as their deployment isn’t longer then 60 days.

Working long solo sessions of people leaving me the fuck alone tends to be correlated with me getting projects done.

Yeah, but I’m talking about if this happened to me when I was a kid.

I kinda would have been, but I had a dictionary at home so didn’t use the library one much.

The programs these churches run are typically filling in gaps in social programs that the government doesn’t have the political mandate to enact.

If these churches were taxed you’d see their charities diminished while the funding went to some pork belly spending project, or at the very least not related to what services the church is suddenly not providing.

Not all government spending is a net positive.

Further erode relations between Israel and other ME countries.

Turn international political option against Israel.

The only path to any kind of resolution in which Gaza gets sovereignty is if Israel is forced to the table by the international community.

To do that, Hamas has to get Israel to kill as many Gaza citizens as they can

Everyone knows how dangerous guns are. Part of the point of owning one is that it can be used in a dangerous situation to protect yourself.

The mental issue part is why anyone would want to harm another human with one.

I’m around your same age and have always been told immigrants generally good.

That’s not a generational view you have there. I’m willing to bet that immigrant is a synonym for ‘not white’ by whoever in your past has said this.

Apparently the plan was to disband the local department and merge it into the department of a neighboring area, then split the cost in an effort to lower the overall operating costs of police services in the area.

The other city they were going to do this with declined the deal and so this town had to keep their local force in tact.

Upon hearing that the city they worked for was trying to eliminate their jobs, a bunch quit.

We have quite a while yet. We spend about 200 billion servicing the debt right now and have around 4.8 trillion in revenue.

The warning line is having a debt equal to your GDP. The US has a GDP of around 28 trillion but a debt of 34 trillion. So we are past that warning line, but by itself that doesn’t mean anything.

For other countries it would signal to banks and other countries that it might be a bad idea to loan to them, but the US has a kind of special status in the global economy and this hasn’t slowed down loaning so far.

No joke, 50th anniversary of the first F16 flight is coming up very soon.

Granted the guts of that plane have been upgraded over and over, but still.

Eventually the interest in the debt will grow too large to service. The government will have to print more and more money leading to hyperinflation. The entire global economy will be impacted as faith in the dollar collapses. The global economy slows and eventually switches to trading in the Yuan. The US loses a ton of it’s soft power globally.

I think the per capita measurement of pollution for China is not really an apples to apples comparison to other first world nations as so much of their population lives in poverty.

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We just had one!

I am convinced the goal was to provoke a strong response from Israel. The reason is they knew the strong response from Israel would be disproportional and would damage relations between Israel and the rest of the ME.

Israel was approaching normalized relations with most of the major Arab nations around it, most importantly SA. Normalized relations with Israel would likely mean significantly less political and economical support coming to Hamas. Without outside resources Hamas is neutered.

So, seeing the real possibility of a large reduction in their economic and political power in the horizon they took desperate action to stop it, knowing full well the outcome.

I never watched x-files when it aired.

I tried to watch it a few years back but only made it to season 2. Maybe it gets better later, but the show was so formulaic that I grew bored of it pretty quick.

Eh, I’m here to relax and have fun.

Not be told I’m a piece of shit who deserves to be executed because I had the audacity to be born every ten minutes.

If anything, that supports the idea that the poll numbers should be even harder against the war than they are reported.

It was all part of an effort to economically hurt Russia in response to the war.

Best case scenario was Russia deciding the hit to their economy was not worth the war and back pedaling. No one realistically thought this was going to happen though.

The next best case scenario was for the changes in quality of life for the average Russian would create enough internal pressure that the war would be called off.

This hasn’t happened yet but internal support for the war has been dropping over the last year and some of that is attributed to the dismal state of the Russian economy, which is a direct result of things like Lush pulling out.

https://www.euronews.com/2023/12/02/russians-support-of-ukraine-war-collapses-finds-poll

And even if neither of these come up fruition, the more Russias economy is damaged the harder it is to fund their war effort. This gives Ukraine a bit more breathing room in their war effort.

While the effect of a single company like Lush is unnoticed, it’s the collective effect of everything from these pullouts, to trade sanctions and other soft power diplomatic plays which total up to a noticable effect.