RFC2324 posted:

Imagine a place that wants to be super conservative like Texas, but also wants to party like it's spring break all the time.

That place is Florida.

psydude posted:

I give it another two months before civil war breaks out.

AP News Wire posted:

Venezuela vote count allegedly manipulated

The CEO of the voting technology company Smartmatic says the results of Venezuela’s election for an assembly to rewrite the constitution were tampered with.

Antonio Mugica told reporters in London on Wednesday that there was a discrepancy of 1 million votes between the turnout figures announced by the government and those recorded by his systems.

Mugica said “it is therefore with the deepest regret that we have to report that the turnout figures on Sunday, 30 July, for the Constituent Assembly in Venezuela were tampered with.”

Smartmatic was a company created by Venezuelans that provided electronic voting machines used during the administration of the late President Hugo Chavez.

In recent years it has branched out to provide the same services to countries across the world, while continuing to provide support for elections in Venezuela.

shyduck posted:

https://twitter.com/WalshFreedom/status/892752848114651137

AkrisD posted:

George Bush's great legacy continues to touch the lives of brave American families a decade and a half later.

facialimpediment posted:

In this new NBC article

- Donnie compares Afghanistan to a failing NYC restaurant and got the timeframe wrong (said it closed for a year, it was two months)

- Donnie wants to fire the 4-star in charge of Afghanistan because

- Donnie will not sign off on a new Afghanistan policy because he doesn't know what he wants

- Donnie complained that NATO troops are lovely (cited unnamed veterans)

- Donnie wants Afghanistan minerals and is annoyed that China bought mineral rights in Afghanistan a decade ago

- Mattis takes walks when deciding things and after a particular meeting with Donnie he took a REALLY long walk


https://twitter.com/frankthorp/status/892876015818727424

quote:

The aerial surveys determined that Afghanistan may hold 60 million tons of copper, 2.2 billion tons of iron ore, 1.4 million tons of rare earth elements such as lanthanum, cerium and neodymium, and lodes of aluminum, gold, silver, zinc, mercury and lithium. For instance, the Khanneshin carbonatite deposit in Afghanistan's Helmand province is valued at $89 billion, full as it is with rare earth elements.

TBeats posted:

someone break it down for me. what do people theorize would happen if we just.... left afghanistan? not leaving a small group of US troops behind. i mean 100% of all US assets out.

if the answer is gas prices would go up, then that's the answer. if the answer is all of america would die due to terrorist attacks, then that is the answer. but what do "experts" or whatever think?

Proud Christian Mom posted:

As part of a deal with the HFC to help lower the deficit, the Trump admin has sold West Virginia for $500m to a Russian investment group

bengy81 posted:

I'll take that wager.
I think he is gonna pivot off healthcare and talk about a big infrastructure plan to gently caress with McConnell.

psydude posted:

He was the mayor of White Sulfur Springs, where the Greenbrier is.

For those of you who haven't been to the Greenbrier before, the people who live there have about as much in common with the majority of the rest of West Virginia as Hillary Clinton does.

facialimpediment posted:

Supposedly it's Mogul.

WAR CRIME SYNDICAT posted:

There's a trump tweet for literally everything isn't there

Bolow posted:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/loca...8db8_story.html

Should have just hung the fucks from a bridge tbh

KildarX posted:

Edit: In current events news, apparently my college handed out my phone number to the local army recruiters for some reason. I got a text asking me how my day was. Jokes on him I'm a Goony out of shape MMA nerd. Army don't want me.

Handsome Ralph posted:

I had a recruiter walk up to me as I left my old apartment building. He started out by asking how long I had been out for and if I ever wanted to get back in. I told him I was never in (I'm guessing either my haircut or my paracord bracelet led him to think I was prior service), and being confused, asked him if he was working at Walter Reed or something.

"Nope, just I'm a recruiter. I work up the road."

Maybe it worked on someone once

North Korea now making missile-ready nuclear weapons posted:

North Korea has successfully produced a miniaturized nuclear warhead that can fit inside its missiles, crossing a key threshold on the path to becoming a full-fledged nuclear power, U.S. intelligence officials have concluded in a confidential assessment.

The new analysis completed last month by the Defense Intelligence Agency comes on the heels of another intelligence assessment that sharply raises the official estimate for the total number of bombs in the communist country’s atomic arsenal. The U.S. calculated last month that up to 60 nuclear weapons are now controlled by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Some independent experts believe the number of bombs is much smaller.

The findings are likely to deepen concerns about an evolving North Korean military threat that appears to be advancing far more rapidly than many experts had predicted. U.S. officials last month concluded that Pyongyang is also outpacing expectations in its effort to build an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of striking cities on the American mainland.

While more than a decade has passed since North Korea’s first nuclear detonation, many analysts believed it would be years before the country’s weapons scientists could design a compact warhead that could be delivered by missile to distant targets. But the new assessment, a summary document dated July 28, concludes that this critical milestone has already been reached.

“The IC [intelligence community] assesses North Korea has produced nuclear weapons for ballistic missile delivery, to include delivery by ICBM-class missiles,” the assessment states, in an excerpt read to The Washington Post. The assessment’s broad conclusions were verified by two U.S. officials familiar with the document. It is not yet known whether the reclusive regime has successfully tested the smaller design, although North Korean officially last year claimed to have done so.

The DIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment.

An assessment this week by the Japanese Ministry of Defense also concludes there is evidence to suggest that North Korea has achieved miniaturization.

Kim Jong Un is becoming increasingly confident in the reliability of his nuclear arsenal, analysts have concluded, explaining perhaps the dictator’s willingness to engage in defiant behavior, including missile tests that have drawn criticism even from North Korea’s closest ally, China. On Saturday, both China and Russia joined other members of the U.N. Security Council in approving punishing new economic sanctions, including a ban on exports that supply up to a third of North Korea’s annual $3 billion earnings.

The nuclear progress further raises the stakes for President Trump, who has vowed that North Korea will never be allowed to threaten the United States with nuclear weapons. In an interview broadcast Saturday on MSNBC’s Hugh Hewitt Show, national security adviser H.R. McMaster said the prospect of a North Korea armed with nuclear-tipped ICBMs would be “intolerable, from the president’s perspective.”

“We have to provide all options . . . and that includes a military option,” he said. But McMaster said the administration would do everything short of war to “pressure Kim Jong Un and those around him, such that they conclude it is in their interest to denuclearize.” The options said to be under discussion ranged from new multilateral negotiations to reintroducing U.S. battlefield nuclear weapons to the Korean Peninsula, officials familiar with internal discussions said.

Determining the precise makeup of North Korea’s nuclear arsenal has long been a difficult challenge for intelligence professionals because of the regime’s culture of extreme secrecy and insularity. The country’s weapons scientists have conducted five nuclear tests since 2006, the latest being a 20- to 30-kiloton detonation on Sept. 9, 2016, that produced a blast estimated to be up to twice that of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945.

But producing a compact nuclear warhead that can fit inside a missile is a technically demanding feat, one that many analysts believed was still beyond North Korea’s grasp. Last year, state-run media in Pyongyang displayed a spherical device that government spokesmen described as a miniaturized nuclear warhead, but whether it was a real bomb remained unclear. North Korean officials described the September detonation as a successful test of a small warhead designed to fit on a missile, though many experts were skeptical of the claim.

Kim has repeatedly proclaimed his intention to field a fleet of nuclear-tipped ICBMs as a guarantor of his regime’s survival. His regime took a major step toward that goal last month with the first successful tests of a missile with intercontinental range. Video analysis of the latest test revealed that the missile caught fire and apparently disintegrated as it plunged back toward Earth’s surface, suggesting North Korea’s engineers are not yet capable of building a reentry vehicle that can carry the warhead safely through the upper atmosphere. But U.S. analysts and many independent experts believe that this hurdle will be overcome by late next year.

“What initially looked like a slow-motion Cuban missile crisis is now looking more like the Manhattan Project, just barreling along,” said Robert Litwak, a nonproliferation expert at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and author of “Preventing North Korea’s Nuclear Breakout,” published by the center this year. “There’s a sense of urgency behind the program that is new to the Kim Jong Un era.”

While few discount North Korea’s progress, some prominent U.S. experts warned against the danger of overestimating the threat. Siegfried Hecker, director emeritus of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the last known U.S. official to personally inspect North Korea’s nuclear facilities, has calculated the size of North Korea’s arsenal at no more than 20 to 25 bombs. Hecker warned of potential risks that can come from making Kim into a bigger menace than he actually is.

“Overselling is particularly dangerous,” said Hecker, who visited North Korea seven times between 2004 and 2010 and met with key leaders of the country’s weapons programs. “Some like to depict Kim as being crazy — a madman — and that makes the public believe that the guy is undeterrable. He’s not crazy and he’s not suicidal. And he’s not even unpredictable.”

“The real threat,” Hecker said, “is we’re going to stumble into a nuclear war on the Korean Peninsula.”

In the past, U.S. intelligence agencies have occasionally overestimated the North Korean threat. In the early 2000s, the George W. Bush administration assessed that Pyongyang was close to developing an ICBM that could strike the U.S. mainland — a prediction that missed the mark by more than a decade. More recently, however, analysts and policymakers have been taken repeatedly by surprise as North Korea achieved key milestones months or years ahead of schedule, noted Jeffrey Lewis, director of the Center for Nonproliferation Studies’ East Asia Nonproliferation Program. There was similar skepticism about China’s capabilities in the early 1960s, said Lewis, who has studied that country’s pathway to a successful nuclear test in 1964.

“There is no reason to think that the North Koreans aren’t making the same progress after so many successful nuclear explosions,” Lewis said. “The big question is why do we hold the North Koreans to a different standard than we held [Joseph] Stalin’s Soviet Union or Mao Zedong’s China? North Korea is testing underground, so we’re always going to lack a lot of details. But it seems to me a lot of people are insisting on impossible levels of proof because they simply don’t want to accept what should be pretty obvious.”

Fifield reported from Krabi, Thailand. Yuki Oda in Tokyo contributed to this report.

CommieGIR posted:

https://twitter.com/JuddLegum/status/894979350055059456

I.....

Gorka The Dorka posted:

“There’s a great rule: All initial reports are false,” Gorka said. “You have to check them and find out who the perpetrators are. We’ve had a series of crimes committed, alleged hate crimes by right wing individuals in the last six months that turned out to be prop propagated by the left. Let’s allow the local authorities to provide their assessment and then the White House will make its comments.”

Zeroisanumber posted:

Gorka's one of the slimiest piles of garbage to ever darken the halls of the White House.

Stultus Maximus posted:

Gorka's a Nazi, a fraudulent blowhard, and a moron.

CommieGIR posted:

Per Gizmodo, there is not a picture going around Google showing a leaker being beaten.

Gonna be a few job opening soon.

TBeats posted:

I wouldn't ignore the 100th bomb threat even if the last 99 were bullshit.

facialimpediment posted:

I count this as the first sex scandal of the Trump Administration.

Jason Miller, chinless wonder and one of Trump's original liars, was basically a shoe-in to be Communications Director after Trump became President. He backed out of the administration and took a CNN commentator position because of rumors that he cheated on his wife on the road with another campaign surrogate, A.J. Delgado. He basically said that he needed to spend more time with his family.

AND WE HAVE A LOVE CHILD!

http://pagesix.com/2017/08/09/ex-trump-staffers-reveal-love-child-after-campaign-trail-sex-scandal/amp/

quote:

(Britain, derogatory) An ineffectual upper-class male, typically dim-witted and of a weak or indecisive character, frequently one who gained his position via nepotism or other social connections.

tastefully arranged labia posted:

look up that word in the dictionary and it's just a picture of him

TBeats posted:

Lol

"Okay I'm to the point in my life where I wanna swallow a bullet because I feel like I have no reason at all to live so..."

*chambers a round, cocks hammer*

".....wait a minute, this goes against my oath!!"

Blind Rasputin posted:

Lindsay Graham was just on tv and said he discussed NK with Trump and that Trump is, "mentally there in terms of a pre-emptive strike."

Trump is having a high level security briefing with Kelly, Mattis, and Pence in a bit. Will just have to wait and see what happens after.

tastefully arranged labia posted:

Oh god he's shopping for a war

Woof Blitzer posted:

I need some hot takes right now!

Hunterhr posted:

.30-06 and .45 ACP that's how Granddad did it, that's how America did it, and it's worked out pretty well so far.

Nostalgia4Butts posted:

best tank scene ever is kellys heroes qtiyd

shame on an IGA posted:

Buckle up for the financial system to take an astonishingly huge poo poo soon, it turns out the LIBOR, commonly used as the base interest rate for mortgages, credit cards and other loans the world over not only was being manipulated but the thing it was supposed to measure even when working properly doesn't exist.

As many as 60% of outstanding loan contracts worldwide could be subject to renegotiation or litigation if that specified benchmark ceases to exist.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/taibbi-is-libor-crucial-financial-benchmark-a-lie-w497305

FastestGunAlive posted:

gently caress three percenters (imagine the Hound's voice when you read it)

FAUXTON posted:

Bolow posted:

Rename Fort Benning to Fort Sherman tia

Terrifying Effigies posted:

There's already a Fort McPherson...in Atlanta.

LongDarkNight posted:

I feel like he could have condensed that down to 14 words.

Immanentized posted:

The white nationalist creed is 14 words having to do with securing a future for a specific race and lineage of children

MA-Horus posted:

Goes a little something like this (I'm not writing the whole thing out because I'm at work)

We must secure the existence...

facialimpediment posted:

NYT reporter got info on what happened in Barcelona. The attackers wanted to make a big bomb, but couldn't rent a big truck. Then, they wanted to make smaller bombs in vans, but blew up their house because they didn't know how to properly make said bombs, leading to the vehicle attack.

Thread here with pictures of the blown-up house: https://twitter.com/rcallimachi/status/898516026924687361