darkcalling

Going with the doomer thing I wonder if the US will create some top secret fairly effective missile shield capable of intercepting 400 warheads or so. Given US militarization of space I'm going to say that actually all those Starlink satellites have a secret payload of a brilliant pebbles type interceptor or the ability to turn the satellite itself into one somehow because it just makes no sense to spend all that money on satellite internet just for the potential of military and CIA in field use when previous attempts in the 90s (when brilliant pebbles was rejected initially) by Bill Gates and other ghouls failed so badly. I mean I get it's more economical now so I am being a little silly here with this and that the US is more desperate than ever to create internet/comms not subject to local regulations and censorship for manipulation and propaganda operations. But uh it would be a little odd for the US to not have some militarized payloads on those Starlink systems. Even say nuclear weapons that can provide a revenge system, they all start falling out of the sky towards China under power if they don't get a certain signal every 15 days or something. Heck they don't even have to be functioning nukes, they could be dirty bombs with conventional explosives set to explode a mile up above China to shower it in radiation. Mad villain shit.

I am so positive they see nuking China as a necessity and as part of that have multiple things in the works to neutralize their retaliatory capabilities. Among other things we've seen they've been tricking hobbyists into installing free radio equipment they offer through vague internet cut-outs which can not only gather signals but also jam and block in the event of war. All the US would need would be the ability to jam the airwaves completely for 30 minutes in order to get the drop on China and nuke them without them being able to order their forces to retaliate in time. China's advantage and disadvantage has always been using mobile launchers and moving their missiles around. If they can jam the air and also using hacking via previously compromised (possibly hardware backdoors) to shut down wired communication networks then China is in trouble. Even blocking half their forces from getting the retaliate order for 15 minutes would be enough for the US to win. The empire I seriously worry is just suicidally homicidal and desperate to cling onto power, white supremacist rage blinds it to even the possibility of compromise so even a chance their plans might work might be enough to get them to launch the nukes.

I mean fuck I wouldn't put it past the US putting in the effort to have smuggled in suitcase (or full size) nukes into China which are remote controlled via radio signals which they threaten to set off and kill tens/hundreds of millions of Chinese and call that a "nuclear deterrent". They're just so much more vile than even that.

Bloomer take is though the US may be able to win a war against China as part of blockading and encircling them and shield its mainland from retaliation that China by 2030 or so will have nearly 1000 warheads and mount many of them on hypersonic delivery mechanisms.

Other thoughts on "classified nuclear deterrent" are maybe they're doing the doomsday machine deadhand thing, either a system (please be Elon AI so it doesn't work) on the ground or something like Russia has lately been proposing which is nuclear powered nuclear tipped cruise missiles which can fly for years. You send them up where they can't be intercepted easily, have them fly around, program them to strike their targets on a signal or on sustained cessation of a signal to them.

I mean this is an empire that's used biological weapons. That the Russians credibly accuse of doing illegal biowarfare work in Ukraine. That sprayed agent orange. I guess our hope is that the US military contractors sucker the US and don't deliver on time and keep delaying and delaying and the US just kind of collapses.

Well he can from Russia by not murdering Putin. If they killed Putin his own life would be forfeit and I suspect that's a big reason Russia doesn't kill him. That and they don't want to martyr him when he's going to grow increasingly unpopular. But it leaves a kind of line uncrossed to not give justification to the Ukrainians doing that because at that point Russia not only nukes Ukraine but they probably have to nuke some of their supporters, perhaps Rammstein airbase in Germany, or some big NATO base in Poland or the UK or some US proxy force that allows them to express their displeasure and inflict pain and dissuasion from ever doing that again without directly hitting the US in a way that forces them to hit Russia back directly.

From the nazis in his own regime is another matter but he does seem to have consolidated power during the course of the war by removing rivals and adversaries so he may be quite a bit safer than he was at the start of the SMO. I think honestly if Trump could get rid of him super easily with a guy waiting in the wings he wouldn't mind it because of the personal disrespect and lack of groveling and ass-kissing he displayed to him.

Yes-ish, you're mostly right as there are specific weapons types for specific uses. Using a full size h-bomb designed for striking a city to hit an armored group doesn't magically turn it into a tactical weapon even if the use itself might be said to be. The people responding to you are ignorant or just playing with words in a "acktually" type way. While there isn't any I suppose international standards body definition of the fact, tactical nuclear weapons are smaller and understood to be smaller because they're for battlefield use and you don't want to hit your army which is often in fairly close proximity. One can look at descriptions of payload size for various tactical nuclear weapons in NATO and Soviet arsenals to verify this. Nuclear artillery shells exist for instance and very much are tactical not strategic weapons. There's definitely some grey area around missile delivered types given the varying megatonage but tactical weapons.

Just because something doesn't have a hard and fast concrete definition doesn't mean there aren't connotations commonly understood to have some meaning in a certain way.

Specifically US and Soviet Union had several rounds of agreements on reductions of and control of nuclear forces with definitions agreed by both sides on limiting strategic weapons in one way and tactical nuclear weapons in another way. They used these terms, these aren't imaginary terms they are ones recognized by major powers and military planners and weapons designers and are valid and real and carry real meanings.

Tactical nukes in another sense are meant to be deployed to the battlefield, often with mobile launchers or by aircraft whereas stationary/silo ICBMs are I believe nearly entirely strategic weapons in the case of Russia and the US (China is another matter).

Who denies climate change too. Thinks because he writes vaguely science-related stuff he's qualified to dispute the conclusive findings of thousands of scientists in their field and dozens of world-wide scientific bodies.

Other than things other people on the left recommend repeatedly I'm generally into just rewatching a lot of old good stuff. I mean I guess to my credit I have a pretty large amount of media, more than two dozen TV shows, over a thousand movies. I get a lot of enjoyment out of riff audio mixes for B movies and worse. Like watching objectively terrible stuff while people are making fun of it is great fun compared to watching better production value but still terrible soul-crushing stuff that everyone is saying is great.

I would say do make a conscious effort not to get trapped in a kind of paralysis seeking perfection, watch something new once a month if you can, even if it's not necessarily new, even just new to you like a classic movie you've never seen before.

Insurance companies would know. They would know because they know diagnoses and track them to approve or deny medications, visits to medical professionals like psychiatrists/psychologists/etc. They can just demand those records from them scarily enough.