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HUGE PUBES A PLUS posted:I've never heard of weapons grade nuclear material going inert. The half life on uranium is how many millions of years? The US has a government agency tasked to secure weapons grade nuclear material all over the world. I think the weak link is the tritium needed for the fusion core. It's got a half-life of 12.5 years, so it has to be renewed periodically. I guess the fission part of the bomb would still work, but the yield would be far lower.
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Sep 5, 2014 04:57
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My Imaginary GF posted:Not at this time, no. I'd highly recommend watching BM's posts to see if any videos surface soon with NATO's response force/trainers geotagged to western Ukraine. NATO is holding some joint exercises with Ukrainian troops in Western Ukraine in September. This is not a secret. They thought about cancelling it due to the unrest, but Eastern European states insisted it go forward.
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Sep 7, 2014 23:47
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my dad posted:I honestly still don't understand the point of definite articles. What kind of useful information that can't be grasped from context are they supposed to convey? They're completely alien to me, and I have to think about what I'm saying almost every time I use them in English. "Give me five" "Give me a five" "Give me the five" all have rather different implied meanings.
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Sep 9, 2014 01:52
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Majorian posted:The US supported Georgia and Ukraine for a Membership Action Plan. The only reason why they didn't get it was because France and Germany opposed it at the Bucharest Summit. Membership Action Plans are the fast track. True, but the MAP was never approved and neither country gained that status. That they applied for it means nothing.
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Sep 13, 2014 00:22
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Majorian posted:No, but it does mean something in that the US consistently and loudly supported them for it. I shouldn't be amazed that the Bush Administration didn't realize what signal they were sending by this, but God help me, I am. quote:During a recent trip to Ukraine, U.S. Vice-President Joe Biden reaffirmed Ukraine's right to join NATO. I think they all knew exactly what signal they were sending. "gently caress you and your 'spheres of influence'" has been a consistent US policy.
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Sep 13, 2014 00:29
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Majorian posted:Given that pretty much everybody who has written on this subject for the last six or so years uses the term "fast-track," and the only person sperging out about it is you, I'm going to chalk this one up to you being fishmech. Fishmech is right, there is no fast track for Ukraine or Georgia. Numerous people calling the sky pink doesn't make it so.
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Sep 13, 2014 03:14
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Majorian posted:Look, call it what you will - my point still stands: pushing for a Membership Action Plan for Ukraine and Georgia was a horrific mistake on the Bush Administration's part, and it was a mistake on the Obama Administration's part not to reverse that policy. There was no policy to reverse. NATO rejected their request, and that was then end of it.
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Sep 13, 2014 03:20
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Majorian posted:Apparently not. Biden's comments in 2009 suggest to me that the US hasn't given up the dream. You seem to be moving the goalposts, now. That has nothing to do with fast-tracking anything, and everything to do with the US's consistent position of allowing sovereign nations to do whatever the hell they want with regards to applying to join NATO.
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Sep 13, 2014 03:31
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Majorian posted:I really, strongly doubt that most NATO countries, the US included, would go to war with Russia over the status of the Donbas - regardless of their Article V obligations. Which is a big part of why France and Germany aren't letting them in in the first place - why let in a country that you're not willing to protect? This is no different from the arguments about whether NATO would actually defend the Baltics, and is equally dumb. If Ukraine was a NATO member, Russia would not risk their own security by loving with Donbas on the chance that maybe NATO wouldn't respond.
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Sep 13, 2014 03:54
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Majorian posted:But like I said, that's a big part of the reason for why neither Ukraine nor Georgia is a NATO member in the first place. Nobody wants to go to war with Russia over Eastern Ukraine. So why continue to loudly pursue a policy of making them members when A, it's not going to happen anytime soon, and B, it worsens tensions in the region already? Nobody is loudly pursuing a policy of making them members. Everybody knows Ukraine is decades away from being eligible to join, so it's all just so much posturing. The US's consistent position is that Ukraine is free to apply for membership whenever it is ready, rather than telling them they'll never be allowed to join whatever they do. If Russia doesn't like that, then tough poo poo for them is also the deliberate message.
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Sep 13, 2014 04:00
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Majorian posted:I just posted a quote of John Kerry saying that the US wants to do this with Georgia. Here it is again: And the article you posted says in its very first line that Obama says it ain't happening, whatever anybody else says. Somehow that doesn't come across as particularly forceful pushing.
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Sep 13, 2014 04:07
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Majorian posted:Once again - I'm not defending Russia. I'm pointing out that NATO hosed up in its policy towards Russia and Ukraine. Once again - everybody is telling you that your definition of "hosed up" is really dumb. NATO didn't actually do anything.
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Sep 13, 2014 04:11
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Majorian posted:NATO hasn't done anything because Germany and France won't let it. The US, on the other hand, has even pushed for Georgia to be able to bypass the MAP: You are still inventing "proof" out of thin air. Since France and Germany are capable of overruling the US's desires, the US's desires by themselves don't mean anything. And yet you argue that the US's desires are what make Russia afraid of NATO. The only fact extant is that Ukraine applied to join NATO and NATO said no. That's it. Everything else is you making things up.
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Sep 13, 2014 04:38
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StandardVC10 posted:Russia's fear of encirclement, while no doubt real, seems more like a convenient rationalization to justify their heavy-handed reaction to Yanukovych's ouster more than a good explanation for why they attacked Ukraine to begin with. Precisely. It has nothing whatever to do with anything NATO has done and everything to do with Russia's own internal dynamics.
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Sep 13, 2014 05:13
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StandardVC10 posted:If anything this whole thread is opening my eyes to how disjointed and counterproductive NATO members' policies toward Eastern Europe and Russia has been. That said, however, it was Russia's decision alone to intervene in Ukraine as it has, and just because they feel so threatened, doesn't mean they couldn't have done something else to protect the interests they consider to be at stake. I guess I fail to see where NATO's policy toward Eastern Europe has been disjointed and counterproductive. The former Warsaw Pact and SSRs that joined NATO did so for their own, completely valid, reasons. Their fear of invasion by Russia was valid. I don't see how NATO refusing to let them join, then standing by as Russia consumed them would be a preferable alternative.
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Sep 13, 2014 05:35
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HUGE PUBES A PLUS posted:We got fishmeched again. Sorry. It wasn't Fishmech. It was Majorian continuing to insist that Russia invading Ukraine is NATO's fault.
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Sep 13, 2014 15:03
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Torrannor posted:I find it incredible that Washington spent much of the 90's and 00's ringing Russia with military bases and trying to reduce it's influence in the neighborhood, and there are people seriously surprised that the Russians see this as an hostile act and are trying to counteract that. And I find incredible that Russia's response to all its former satellite and client states bailing for the West was to get more hostile and controlling toward the ones that remained. NATO letting those former Warsaw Pact and SSR states join was antagonistic, but the fact that all those states wanted into NATO in the first place is the actual problem that Russia has only made worse through its behavior. It's like an abusive mother being furious that a bunch of her kids prefer to hang out at the house next door, so she beats the ones that are left to teach them a lesson.
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Sep 13, 2014 23:29
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Peel posted:Majorian is advancing a serious position with backing from prominent scholars of international relations. If all you have in response is 'No U', don't bother posting. You're making a really obvious and pedantic point. Of course it would be perceived as threatening to Russia. What you and Majorian are constantly dismissing is why Ukraine would want to do that, despite its antagonism to Russia. Russia not understanding that its former client states fear it and want to get away from it, and consequently not modifying its international behavior based on that is the foundational problem.
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Sep 14, 2014 17:22
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Majorian posted:Thank you for this, I really appreciate it. I'd be interested in hearing what part of my argument you're not convinced by, too, though - one of my goals here is to strengthen that argument, after all, for when I write about it for more public consumption. There is nothing wrong with NATO's policy. Russia would not be respecting anybody's sovereignty or neutrality if they didn't have to. Telling Ukraine that they'd never be allowed to join NATO and would be forever at Russia's mercy would be criminal. The only policy that has been successful at curtailing Russian hegemony has been NATO membership.
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Sep 14, 2014 17:55
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Majorian posted:But the evidence that I've posted indicates that NATO expansion eastward did, in fact, play a significant role. But that thesis does a rather bad job of explaining Russia's behavior. NATO expanded east precisely because all those former client states felt threatened by Russia's imperialistic agenda and were fleeing for protection. Your thesis explains why Russia is doing this in Ukraine, specifically, rather than, say, Estonia or Poland, but does not explain Russia's overall attitude and behavior. "Russia is loving with Ukraine because Ukraine was afraid Russia was going to gently caress with it" isn't a very impressive statement.
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Sep 14, 2014 19:32
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karthun posted:No, Russian aggression can also be stopped by allowing absolute capitulation to Russian foreign policy and letting their oligarch's loot your country. The eastern expansion of NATO is simply the world not standing by idly as Russia re-assimilates its former client states. It wasn't the eastern expansion per se that was the problem, it was Russia getting its chain jerked that its plans were not going to be left unchallenged. Hence blaming NATO is another way of saying Russia got mad at not being allowed to act with impunity.
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Sep 14, 2014 20:38
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A Buttery Pastry posted:Ukraine is Russia's underpants. That explains Chernobyl.
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Sep 17, 2014 23:31
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MagicCube posted:They do that to Canada with about 12-18 bombers per year. I know a couple pilots who have flown those intercept missions and they just shadow them until they go away. Yeah, this stuff goes on all the time, everywhere. It was an almost daily occurrence during the Cold War. Probing air defenses to see if they had any blind spots, how quickly they reacted, etc.
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Sep 20, 2014 01:18
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Nintendo Kid posted:It's not that they're expected to run because they're cowards or because NATO is so strong, it's that they'll leave because Putin wouldn't see much point wasting his own resources in this particular way. The problem with this is that you're assuming Putin would back down. Instead, he may decide a proxy war in Ukraine with NATO is a pretty keen idea, and all you've accomplished is escalating the conflict to more dangerous levels with more civilian loss of life. Making any assumptions about what Putin would or wouldn't do is going to go badly. Nonintervention is the more prudent course of action.
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Sep 21, 2014 18:46
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Gunktacular posted:What effect is this crisis having on oil prices? Are they related at all? The specifics of how the global oil markets work are beyond my knowledge. If anyone has a good summary I'd love to hear it. Oil prices are falling, despite the turmoil in the Middle East. This is making Russia's economy suffer. Thus the question would be about how the oil market is affecting the crisis, not the other way around.
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Oct 10, 2014 14:44
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HUGE PUBES A PLUS posted:It's not alright to dehumanize anyone, not even Roma. Putin is sounding more and more like George Bush.
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Nov 6, 2014 15:34
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fatherboxx posted:Basic high school history course sucks in general, let's settle at that. I suspect the entertainment factor is a big part of it. A bunch of 15-year-olds in a classroom in Moline aren't going to care that much about the Soviets and their travails. Stalingrad might hold their attention for a while, but generally they would be more interested in places their grandfathers or great uncles may have been active. There's only so much you can do, and sometimes you have to cut your losses and move on. I'm sure the same is true of teaching 15-year-olds in Russia.
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Nov 6, 2014 17:25
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computer parts posted:Japan. Germany/Europe after WWII. The Marshall Plan was so successful it has left the impression that a version of it can be done anywhere.
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Nov 8, 2014 15:55
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BouncingBuckyBalls posted:Yea it has made some news sites already. If someone can tell us what is the plane that was photoshopped in. I'm reading people say it is supposed to be a MiG-29. Given that we know the left front of the plane was hit, I guess that shot was a miss. If they're going to fake their evidence, at least fake it in a believable way.
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Nov 14, 2014 19:32
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Jarmak posted:I'm not entirely sure this is a phenomenon which is getting worse. Back when most cities had multiple newspapers, the difference wasn't the news content. People subscribed to papers based on their editorial slant.
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Nov 15, 2014 02:47
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Pycckuu posted:I didn't criticize the contents of his blog, just that he posts about it incessantly and only links to it specifically to generate more hits. That's probably because a lot of people here are interested in it, as he started the blog (and everything that followed from it) at the insistence of the SA community.
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Nov 15, 2014 21:11
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A Buttery Pastry posted:The oil pipeline will actually be a pneumatic tube system, allowing Russian special forces to stealthily deploy in Turkey and capture He who controls the Sea of Marmara controls the world. 
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Dec 1, 2014 20:44
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Best Friends posted:This is stopped clock territory because it is completely true that Obama loves appointing fundraisers and democratic money insiders to actually important ambassadorial roles. Obama is pretty garbage as far as appointments in general, and I'm an Obama supporter. Except that every president ever has rewarded contributors with ambassadorships. It's standard protocol. If Obama hadn't done it they would have been pissed. Actual diplomacy is handled by careerists. The ambassador position itself is largely ceremonial.
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Dec 4, 2014 00:21
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Ardennes posted:First off, I am just giving my opinion, this isn't some argument one way or another. However, I think at this point it makes more sense to get kids into typing than handwriting (at least to the extent I heard is taught). It made sense I think until the late 1990s/2000s when computers were fairly rare in Russia and much of the former Soviet Union, and having good handwriting was a necessity but at this point em. Russia has caught up. Kids still need to be taught handwriting but the emphasis needs to keep up with technology. The value of handwriting is not in the writing itself, but teaching kids to focus, pay attention to details, and master fine motor skills. Those are valuable skills applicable in thousands of ways, apart from whether they'll ever use it. /derail
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Dec 8, 2014 21:56
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McDowell posted:Watch Putin start a loving war. This is eerily similar to how the Soviet Union collapsed.
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Dec 16, 2014 04:34
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Poroshenko should offer Putin some economic aid as a gesture of friendship.
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Dec 16, 2014 15:14
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Cuntpunch posted:Can anyone provide sources on how the 2013 Maidan was completely a Western-led fabricated coup, and not a populist movement akin to the 2004 Orange Revolution? It comes up again and again with every single justification for Russian intervention, but mostly it seems to be "some american politicians happened to go to Ukraine to try and help find a solution" getting turned into "the CIA was responsible for all the protests." Same way that George Bush engineered 9/11 and NASA faked the Moon landings.
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Dec 19, 2014 01:18
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kalstrams posted:They're already fleeing poor country with subpar higher education, same as elsewhere in Baltics with few exclusion cases. Besides that, cheating the draft is way easier than fleeing the country just because of it. Most countries find cushy desk jobs for their intellectuals if they get drafted, anyway. Henry Moseley being used as cannon fodder at Gallipoli made them think things through a bit.
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Dec 20, 2014 17:33
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kalstrams posted:New Year is the same, Christmas is in early January. So I guess New Years is secular and based on the Gregorian calendar, while Orthodox Christmas is based on the Julian.
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Jan 1, 2015 05:03
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Friendly Tumour posted:Jesus Christ you people. No offence, but still I remember back in the Balkans wars in the 90s, somebody gave as justification for an atrocity they'd committed that they were getting even for some other atrocity committed against them back in the 15th century or something. That told me everything I needed to know about the whole situation.
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Jan 29, 2015 23:29
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