At the risk of being jingoistic, this type of opponent is exactly what our military is designed to utterly destroy. If the US was an active participant it would have very quickly wiped the floor with the Russian army and would be dealng with Russian backed insurgents in the east.

Ukraine has been beating them with the stuff we routinely throw away (when the Republicans don't get in the way), I am convinced they have no non nuclear answer to our actual military.

This is undeniably good and I would like to see more. I would really like to see the federal government seriously look at the issues with power transmission and storage as those are the main hold ups in green energy right now and a lot of that is regulatory hurdles.

We could pretty easily hit all of our renewable goals in 5 years if power transmission projects didn't constantly get bogged down in NIMBY lawsuits.

I am not saying that the apparatus of government should be used to run roughshod over people with concerns about this, but we cannot let individuals stop vital infrastructure projects.

That's not something that are considering I hope.

I really wish Biden would take a harder line to get that under control. At the very least it's aid that ought to be going to Ukraine which is instead being used for that disgusting mess.

The only justification I can think of is that it's the only leverage we have over them and without it they would have no reason to be "restrained" at all. Even then I have my doubts.

Would that be an instantaneous thing?

Chinese has so many good ones.

Please forgive the lack of tones, it's been a long long time.

Ren shan, Ren hai: a mountain and sea of people - a remarkable amount of people by Chinese standards.

Ma Ma, Hu Hu: horse horse, tiger tiger - a mixed bag, or something that's ok.

They didn't secede because they were told to stop slavery. They seceded because it looked that the national consensus was moving against the expansion of slavery to new states and territories, which would have limited slave states overall power in the long run.

They were very explicit that they were leaving to protect slavery as an institution, but to be fair nobody in power was threatening to abolish it when they did so.

The last season of the Mandolorian wasn't even good. It spent most of it's time setting up other crap I am not interested in. There really isn't anything they can do that will make the premise for the sequels not a lazy regressive pile of garbage and it's dragging this show down with it. I didn't even bother with Ashoka since that looked like it was going to be even more of that.

New Haven is generally thin crispy crust cooked in a coal oven and a bit charred on top. Basically a NYC pie cooked in a hotter oven. They might do the sauce a bit different, IDK.

Yep my wife is an expatriate of Iowa, they are a surprisingly prickly people about outsiders.

I would think that if they are sent by USPS then the states would not be able to legally intercept them. USPS is not responsible for enforcing state laws and there are some pretty serious laws protecting the privacy and integrity of your parcels and mail.

I am probably overstating this a bit, and I am sure other stuff has hurt more at points, but I am still pretty upset about the Star Wars sequel trilogy. I had been waiting for them essentially since I was a kid in the early 90's, and I am annoyed that I allow them so much headspace. But it kind of ruined a lot of what should be an exciting time period for the franchise. They could have kept the same cast for TFA in the same roles more or less and just not done stupid/lazy/cynical/reductive movie and it would have been so much better.

JJ starting out by essentially wiping the table and trying to redo the OT basically fucked everything from the start. I am finding myself less and less interested in the current stuff as it tries to find a way to set that garage up and relatively explain it. I didn't take like the paperwork when they came out, and to be honest they are still kind of objectively bad, but they were additive and they felt like Star Wars, the new stuff is just lazy crap.