SympathysSilhouette

Name?

Remind me who these two are again? I am pretty sure I at the very last once knew the name of the girl with the chaps (on the right in the picture).

The French army is excellent, but very specialized. They don't have the numbers, but their combat units are amongst the best in the world. But perhaps more important to discuss right now: Olaf Scholz has freed an immediate budget of 100 billion to bolster German defense spending. And more consequential by far: a commitment to a minimum of 2% of their GDP to defense. Translated through the realities of their current GDP, that is an annual investment of around 74 billion dollars. That would immediately make them the fourth biggest spenders in the world in terms of their defense. Behind the U.S., China and India, but ahead of Russia. For all the talk of "poking the Russian bear", what the Ukraine invasion has actually achieved is breaking through a 7+ decade long taboo when it comes to significant defense spending for Germany. The black eagle has risen from its ashes. Great job Putin!

Things just got very interesting. If an escalation is coming, it'll happen soon.

Xi can't move on Taiwan as easily as Putin can on Ukraine. For one thing, his relation to the Chinese military (which is a separate column of Chinese society altogether) isn't like Putin's. In essence, the Chinese brass will only consider an incursion into Taiwan if they themselves deem it opportune. They aren't beholden to Xi in the traditional sense. They are more like the Turkish military once upon a time, until Erdogan neutered them a bit. And probably more significantly, an invasion of Taiwan would be a very complicated thing. We are talking a degree of difficulty that would rival operation Overlord. It is certainly an operation that would require a huge amount of resources and years of preparation. And would need to be launched at a very specific time of the year to even stand a chance. So I don't think however Putin's incursion into Ukraine turns out, it will be at all instructive to China as a playbook for Taiwanese ambitions on their part.

What is the long-term prospect even if Putin wins? I don't think he can support an occupation. He doesn't have the means to do so, even if you don't even factor in Ukrainian nationalists who will be desperate to drag the occupying force into a bloody insurgency. So what does he gain? Annexation of a part of the country (to the East)? What else? If the entire idea was no longer to have a pro-EU/NATO presence on his border, that doesn't change if he has to leave some of the country outside of his control. But he definitely lacks the resources to occupy a country the size of France, with a population of 44 million.

There is a certain irony in Zelensky's courage. Here is a head of state who begged for more U.S. help for years and only got a fraction of it. Yet he is staying and fighting for his country. Meanwhile, the propped up regime in Afghanistan fell almost immediately and Ghani fled immediately, taking a fortune in stolen money with him. In spite of the fact that Afghanistan received far more support in terms of equipment and training from the U.S. Seems all of that money could have been much better spent in Ukraine.

The European response has frankly been pathetic. Now the Russians have openly threatened Sweden and Finland and the reaction is still *crickets*. This is incredibly pathetic. We aren't even talking about a real super-power like the U.S. or China here. Russia has a GDP of less than half of Germany. If not for their nuclear arsenal, we should be treating them roughly like Spain or South Korea in terms of their global importance. Yet people here are terrified to even respond in kind when they are openly threatened?

Who is that? Also, boo at the nipple censorship!

I Mella.

Also, the combat-effectiveness of the Russian reserves is dubious at best. So the numbers are impressive, but they don't really translate like they would in smaller armies.

True, but in a direct conflict with the U.S., the Americans' air superiority alone would end the conflict before it even started.

This only makes sense if he can successfully install a puppet regime. A long-term occupation is a non-starter. This is a country larger than France and with a population of 44 million people. Even the U.S. eventually lost the desire to deal with years upon years of insurgency, and they have a military budget that dwarfs Russia's (12x what Russia spends annually).

Source: Guess

But other models have gained weight and I still was able to easily recognize it was them. e.g. Jill Goodacre. She has aged and gained weight in the picture on the right, but I still recognize her as Jill. Like Clauds, I'm not even 100% convinced that picture is actually Marisa.

The 2013 one with Alex Daddario & Tania Raymonde isn't great, only reason to watch it is those two actresses.

Her body in this shot looks amazing!

I don't know, but I'm pretty sure that pretending racism doesn't exist won't help much either. And I am discussing anti-CRT when I am talking about book bannings. If the people trying to ban the books mention CRT as their reason why, it seems pretty fair to me.

MLK Jr. has been recycled to something utterly nonthreatening to the status quo. This is not who the man actually was. He was a lot more radical than people choose to remember.

I'm pretty sure that MLK Jr. would have been against banning books about Ruby Bridges or Maus...

WTF is this? The internet so so fucking weird!

It's just a terrible fit. Nolan & Joy are so humorless and who ever adapts Fallout needs to include the (dark) humor that has been part of the franchise from the very beginning.

Thanks!

I don't want to pile onto this since it's a bit mean to talk like this about her appearance. But it's not like all of her contemporaries have changed a lot. Petra is only one year younger, was in many of the same issues as Marisa but doesn't really look all that different from her SISE heyday. I'm not saying that she looks exactly like she did when she was say 25 here, but she essentially looks like the same person, only a bit older. Again, not wanting to be mean or cruel, but Marisa has changed substantially more. So much so that I doubted it was even her when someone posted that picture for the first time.

She looks younger there, so I'm guess they are a few years old?