Pidesco

Where have you seen this? I'm trying and failing to find this being reported. In any case, if true, even just the fact that Russia has taken this long to achieve air superiority seems laughable to me.

Elerond joined the forums last decade so by my standards he is a newer forum member.

Xard, Kirottu and Musopticon are the original Finns. Only Kirottu remains.

Gromnir posted about her before. As I recall he had gushing praise for her, even if she wasn't his first choice.

As far as assymetric war is concerned, I guess the Ukrainians can throw up a fight, but they won't exactly be the Mujaheddin fighting in very rugged terrain with Rambo's infinite ammo helping out. The rain in Ukraine falls mainly in the plain because that is almost the entire terrain.

I imagine Finland will only be at risk with Russia once the Baltic states have gone down. But I think they should join NATO anyway.

The point of the sanctions here is not how much they will affect the Russian economy at large (breaking news: poor people will bear the brunt of the damage), but how much they will affect Russian oligarchs and the corrupt money flows that Putin is dependent on. It appears like this quite the gamble Putin is taking here, and I have no idea how long Putin can just ride it out. Also, given that Putin is waving around the nuclear cudgel while his rationality is reasonably being put into question, I can see why the US and Europe are taking the meek approach, as much as it annoys me that the Ukrainians are getting screwed over while the world stands and watches.

Putin is clearly not a rational actor. Any analysis predicated on the idea that he is rational is going to be more or less wrong. If I understand the situation correctly, given the weight of the sanctions, he is risking internal Russian stability, sooner or later.

It worked for the US really well i the 50s, why wouldn't it work now?

"If other countries have it worse, we should not complain about our country" is a pretty terrible line of reasoning. Reminds of a neighbour I once had, who said her son was a good kid because he had never mugged or killed anyone.

This thread details pretty well why this is terrible and concerning.

They stacked them and ate them, once upon a time. They were really tasty, apparently.

Regarding party names in Portugal: Foreign journalist trying to understand the Portuguese elections

Check the last page for some elaboration.

It is a very standard parliamentary democracy so I do not know what you are on about. People vote for parties, depending on demographics and geography those votes are translated into seats in parliament, whichever party/coalition gets the most votes gets to form a government with a bunch of ministers, lead by a prime minister. There is also a president, a head of state with limited executive power elected by popular vote, and a local election system where people are elected to county and parish office.

So Portuguese politics time! Portugal is a small European country right next by to Spain. We like to call ourselves the third world country of western Europe. We are your standard western Europe economy but with really, really low wages. We have a social safety net of sorts, a national health service that is terrible but still saves a lot of people that would otherwise die. We are permanently in debt and in some economic crisis. We were a fascist dictatorship until 1974, and since then we've been a fairly stable democracy with more or less always the same parties with seats in our parliament. There used to be four parties. The center left PS (Socialist Party), the center right PSD (Social Democratic Party), the left PCP (Portuguese Communist Party, more for workers' rights, especially manual laborers), and the right CDS (Democratic and Social Center, more Catholic). Anyway, as a reference for Americans all the parties to the left of CDS, are leftie pinko parties to you. Now those two more moderate parties, PS and PSD, have always been the parties of power with much larger voter bases, but they have slowly been losing their majorities, as the spectrum has become more fragmented. Now this fragmentation has been the story in the 21st Century. The first new party to show up was BE( the Left Bloc), a party about as left as PCP but more tailored for middle class office workers, and more focused on social issues(abortion, drug legalization, euthanasia, LGBTQ+ rights) than worker rights. They were a big success in the 00s, and overtook PCP as the more left force of note in parliament. There are now more left parties in contention(like PAN, the Animals and Nature Party, or Livre (Free, like a new upstart BE). However, in more recent years it was the right that got more fragmented. The more important party of that change was Chega(Enough), a party( actually essentially a single confidence man, playing the con of his life) trying and succeeding to leverage "economic" concerns, where "economic" means taking away the social safety net, complaining about the Roma,and stealthily longing for the Fascist days. It's the Portuguese version of the extreme right party that now exists in about every Western country. You know, Neo-Nazis pretending they are not because they have better haircuts and suits. One other right party that has now become of note is IL (Liberal Initiative). Basically upper middle class twits of the year. They studiously avoid the more terrible topics of Chega, but still have idiotic proposals that screw over the poor like a flat income tax(15% for everyone). I'm not sure if they earnestly believe in it or if they are just using it as talking point for the gullible. Now for the current situation. So the last Legislative elections had given a limp minority mandate to PS, as seemed increasingly inevitable. In order to have a proper majority in parliament and the ability to govern, PS struck an unwieldy left leaning deal with PCP, BE and PAN. This generally meant that, for the government not to lose its mandate, PS has to convince the 3 smaller parties to go along with their budget, which is approved in parliament. if not the government would consider to have lost its mandate, and the President would have to call new elections. This is exactly what happened in December. Specifically PCP and BE felt betrayed by PS's budget proposal, and voted against it. So we got these elections yesterday. PS said they wanted an absolute majority(very low likelihood), PSD just wanted to beat PS(very low likelihood), Chega and BE wanted to beat each other, while CDS and PCP were simply trying to survive. Every other party just wanted to take as many seats as they could, however few. So, what happened yesterday, exactly? Well, going into election day yesterday, polling predicted a small minority for PS, and a dead heat between BE, Chega, IL, and PCP(maybe). Small margins meant anything could happen! Well, not quite, it turns out. PS got their wished for absolute majority, PSD was pummeled across the country, Chega won handily against their rivals, becoming the third political force in Portugal(xenophobes gonna xenophobe, of course), IL became the fourth political force(huge surprise), BE came fifth in votes, sixth in actual seats (enormous defeat( lost like half of their seats), PCP got 6 seats. PAN and Livre got single seats. CDS lost every single seat so they are deader than a door nail(someone literally left a wreath at their HQ last night, lol). So the real winner was PS of course. They were the only ones who got everything they wanted, and got like the first absolute majority of the past 15 years. António Costa, their leader and PM is very competent and a leader who leads, but also a snake oil salesman, who still abides corruption as is standard in Portugal. But at least we don't have an also rampantly corrupt, "fascist delusions" PSD/Chega/IL government. Chega won the battle of the also rans. It just caters really well to terrible people. IL really knew how to target their niche too, apparently. TLDR: Moderate left PS won the election, retaining their mandate but now with a juicy absolute majority. Everything else is going to the dogs.

That joke was made by Marvel itself, like 40 years ago. Specifically, a nice elderly couple joins Hydra in order to get health insurance.

Or you can be Buster Keaton, do everything for real and still die of old age.

First person Arcanum with a dialogue wheel and sexy elf romance. And VATS.

Selective reading is indeed quite a bother.

The point is that those past deeds and policies are still clearly and definitely negatively affecting people today. To ignore that not only does it not make the problems go away, but rather it keeps them around in perpetuity.

First, read the Hawkeye series by Matt Fraction and David Aja from 2012. That's where Kate Bishop comes into her own and it is also the main inspiration for the TV show. Regarding Young Avengers, you might want to try the 2013 series by Kieron Gillen(yes, the PC game journalist is now an acclaimed comic book writer) and Jamie McKelvie. It is really quite good and Kate Bishop features extensively in it. Regarding Moon Knight, the run by Doug Moench and Bill Sienkiewicz from the early 80s is probably the only one really worth reading. As you say the writing is not always great, but Sienkiewicz's work is always great, even if this came before New Mutants and Elektra: Assassin where he really knocked it out of the park. Anyway, I also really enjoyed that trailer, and it made me really hopeful for the series, when I was figuring it would be totally ignorable.

What in the world are you talking about?

If the bread you eat can be described by elementary solid geometry, you can only be classed as evil. Case in point, my step daughter. Also, if the bread is previously sliced, it's just criminal.

A deadpan "What a maniac" is certainly something I wouldn't usually expect to hear from a news anchor live on TV.