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SabreFan1

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Everything posted by SabreFan1

  1. I just want to see if I can get anyone to try it so they come back onto CDC and rue the day I was born.
  2. Chances are you wouldn't have noticed. I never let on how much pain I was in. The only quick reaction I showed was after I rubbed my eyes and I gave a chuckle admitted what I did so nobody would wonder why I was holed up in the restroom. I'll see if Amazon has any Korean fire noodles so I can order some and try it out. I'm guessing it was ramen?
  3. I never found out what the sauce was called. I was busy afterwards trying to avoid having to eat the wings so I wouldn't get crap from anyone after bragging.
  4. Foul tasting battery acid, but with one heck of a kick.
  5. When I was young and dumb, I once ordered hot wings at a Thai karaoke bar out west and actually said out loud, "hey I was born and raised in Buffalo, there's no way I can't handle whatever these people put on those wings." I was wrong. I took one bite swallowed it, thought my mouth and throat were melting, stupidly then touched touched my eyes, then thought my eyes were on fire, then headed to the restroom and continually washed my eyes and mouth out for a few minutes only after scrubbing my hands clean. Fortunately I kept it together long enough to get to the restroom so nobody was the wiser. Needless to say, I didn't touch the wings afterwards. To this day I wonder what they put on them. I only remember it being a garlic-y tasting fire.
  6. I dare you to smother your eggs with this... https://www.hotsauce.com/da-bomb-beyond-insanity-hot-sauce/
  7. Trump once hyped minting trillion dollar coins until someone made him aware that the US was already in effect printing trillions in new dollars all through the Obama presidency through the use of treasury bonds. That's when other countries started complaining about the US debt and China started selling of the bonds it was holding. Then between that and the continued deficit spending even after the new money, Standard & Poor downgraded the US credit rating to AA+ which funny enough ended up hurting Europe more than the US since the first thing everyone does when the markets get shook is pull out of investments worldwide and buy US treasuries.
  8. China's navy is still antiquated in comparison. Their only carrier was built 50-60 years ago and they bought it used a few years ago from a frmr. Soviet satellite nation. Right now they're working hard on their air force and ground power since they're focusing on regional dominance for now. Their Air Force and ground power will be a match for the US in 20 years or so. I should have been clearer in my previous post. That's a fair question. Unfortunately the US has historically been poor in safeguarding it's biggest secrets beginning with the atomic arsenal in the 40's & 50's. I'm astounded that nobody has gotten their paws on the plans for the F-22 since even our allies have been jonsing to get it. As for copyright and IP abuse, it will continue to happen as long as companies continue to use China as the world's factory. It's one of the reasons that the US is investing in Vietnam. As for depending on other country's geniuses, I was read an article a year or two ago that talked about how China was surreptitiously sending some of their best and brightest young people to top US universities in order to not only work on and gather information on top secret projects, but then go back to China after they graduate. So we were basically giving secrets away abut teaching our own competition at the same time. Fortunately universities eventually caught onto it and haven't been allowing Chinese-born students into sensitive projects any longer. There's an argument to be made for either option. I just believe that when the day comes, the US will choose to devalue it's currency by "printing" more capital rather than blowing the entire system up. There are advantages to devaluing your currency like making your exports much cheaper which in turn creates jobs, but the trade-off is that nobody will want to lend you money while your currency is devalued and imported goods will become crazy expensive so things like steel to build machines and vehicles will all have to be sourced domestically. Not to mention that much of the materials that we use in our electronics are imported.
  9. You're overestimating China's current abilities, but that said, they are quickly modernizing their equipment and are likely only about 20 years away from matching the US militarily and they won't be mired in other parts of the globe. It doesn't help that the Air Force has been so lax with their cyber security that China has been able to lift the plans for the F-35 and are attempting to clone them with their J-31 program. As for the economic "games" both countries are playing, it's just going to be a tit for tat exchange that will just slow down each country. It's a game that China can play for a long time. For the longest time, the large majority of US debt was held domestically. With these wars being fought and tax breaks being handed out coupled with ever increasing spending, the scales are tipping more and more towards foreign held debt. In the end there will only be 2 ways out of that debt, either "print" more money and weaken your economic clout and borrowing power or default and take the rest of the world's economy with you. The first choice is the only real option and once we begin to do that, it will be the beginning of a long slide from power. At the same time China's clout will be increasing and eventually the lines will intersect.
  10. You have more faith in the future than I do. The US will never attack mainland China and our debt in 2-3 decades will cripple our ability to beat China the way we beat the USSR. I'm not anywhere near as worried about Russia as I am China, but for every resource we lose to Russia, it's a net gain for China. Every empire eventually falls. The closest parallel to the US is Rome and they fell as much through their own foolishness as they did from their enemies. The US will eventually meet the same fate and I prefer that we take every advantage that we can to push our downfall further into the future and that includes hoping that a crappy president like Trump is successful in procuring the battery grade lithium and other mineral resources that have been discovered in Afghanistan. I can at least take solace in the fact though that once it begins, it will be a decades long slide and I will be long dead by the time we hit bottom. In a perfect world, the Saudi royal family would be out of power and we'd have a deal with their people for their oil. Same with Afghanistan. In a perfect world, the Afghani people wouldn't be so tribal that we have no other choice but to let a Saudi-like brutal regime like the Taliban get back in power. Unfortunately we don't live in a perfect world. We're a bunch of intelligent sophisticated primates who still have basic primal urges that include dominating other primates that we live with/near.
  11. I was hoping there was an explanation. I was hoping that you didn't actually think that was possible.
  12. Ah ok. I was like, "he can't actually think that there really is that much money in the world".
  13. I'm a realist Strome. Do I like the idea of sleeping with the Taliban, no. But I accept that we want access to their mineral wealth instead of it going to Russia or China. Do I like that we prop up the Saudi regime, no. On the same token, I'd rather we had a close relationship with them and benefit from it instead of Russia and China. I understand and accept that that part of the world will never be a pleasant place. So you either play the game and do the best you can for your country or you give those advantages to another country and lose out. As for part of the world not liking the US and considering us the bad guys, why would I care? People didn't like the British Empire, or the Huns, or the Romans. We are nowhere near as bad as past empires, but we are still disliked because we do what we have to in order to stay in power. China will likely eventually displace the United States as the pre-eminent power on the planet because we are going to eventually, likely within the next 25-30 years, fall from power once our debt finally crushes the world's financial network. Are you naive enough to think that China will be benevolent and not do the same things as every other empire? I'll bet they turn out to be a lot more ruthless than the United States has ever been.
  14. The Stingers didn't come until 1986 which was towards the end of the war with the Soviets. They were responsible for only about half of the losses of Soviet aircraft. Your second paragraph is incredibly ignorant of the US as a whole. I'll be frank, as much as people like to hero worship the military, people stopped caring years ago about the casualties. That's why it's rarely in the news any longer. Even now, I'd personally have to look up the casualty numbers in the previous year or two and I'm a news junky. The long and the short of the entire thing is that nobody in the United States cares any longer about Afghanistan or even Iraq for that matter, but people are getting tired of pumping money into that country. Trump even campaigned on pulling troops out of Afghanistan. All he ended up needing was the carrot and that came in the form of resources and the only post-US organization capable of governing that region and granting access to those resources is the Taliban.
  15. Huh? There's never been that much money globally in the history of mankind let alone just in the US... https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/how-much-money-is-there-in-the-world.html
  16. That's just weird. I'm surprised Canadians aren't in more of an uproar about it. At least the US is trying to bribe the bad guys so it can get it's mitts on over a Trillion dollars in recently discovered resources...
  17. You should have kept reading the thread further. I've taken the crux of the above arguments and gone even further. I'm a realist and a pragmatist. Everything the US does in the end is to further our own interests and I've stated them in a few posts. As for before the wars in Afghanistan started it basically boils down to something we haven't discussed here... After 9-11, the American people for once were pounding the war drums rather than the government. We were just waiting for our government to tell us who had attacked us. Dick Cheney and George Bush weren't going to admit that Saudi citizens had carried it out and financed it so they chose 2 targets of convenience instead. The mastermind of the attack, Bin Laden, who was hiding in Afghanistan. Then they threw in Iraq because it had been a thorn in the US's side and they wanted a "freebie" excuse to topple Saddam Hussein. A funny thing then happened years after the attack, the US started to find Gold and Lithium in Afghanistan. Fast forward to Trump, who is salivating over the US getting it's hands on that wealth and you get him making nice with guys who are just as bad as the Saudis.
  18. I'm now in my mid-40's so I'm old enough to have known and talked with WW1 vets in my youth. I understand the history of the United States better than most. Comparatively in history, we're the "nicest" empire in history, but we are still an empire. We will always do what's in our own best interests to maintain our standing in the world. In the first half of the 20th century that included watching Europe tear itself apart so we could pull ourselves out of a decade long misery and solidify ourselves as the strongest nation on the planet. Not many people know that there were European nations still paying us back for WW2 debt up into the 90's and early aughts. In today's day and age, in order to keep our power, we will make deals with nasty people in far-off countries. When we attacked Afghanistan, they had relatively nothing of value. After we got in there, we found a lot of lithium and unlike with oil and gas where the United States has an abundance of deposits, we only have one lithium mine located in Nevada. It's no secret how aggressive we have been over the decades in procuring oil for our technologies, infrastructure, and vehicles, now that lithium is becoming a bigger player in the same arenas, our sights are shifting and we're either going to make nice with questionable countries and the not so nice regimes to get access to it or we'll get aggressive to accomplish the same goal. Here's a quickie primer article written about it that I just Googled for anybody interested. It's a 60 sec. read. It's the shortest one I could find for CDC. https://www.benzinga.com/analyst-ratings/analyst-color/17/04/9281777/war-torn-afghanistan-sits-stubbornly-atop-vast-reserves- P.S. Canada has lithium deposits/reserves in Quebec and Manitoba. We'd like your deposits neeeooow please!
  19. Tell me you're scr*wing with me or do I have to verbally beat you down too?
  20. And here you show your lack of intellect (as always) and understanding next to your obvious dislike of the US. Not to mention your lack of knowledge of current events. You don't understand US politics as a whole. The US presidency is one or two steps short of a kingship and the country is a living breathing entity. What was George W. Bush and Dick Cheney's politics were not Obama's and most certainly not Trump's. The liberal Democrats were stomping around claiming the US "lost" years ago, then Obama actually did something right and first found Osama and killed him then he stepped up the drone attacks and started killing Taliban en masse again. Then the liberal arm of the Democratic party shut up after that and watched as the Obama administration tried to continue to build a failed Afghan government. Now we're onto the Trump administration. He has been saying even before he ran for and became president that he wanted the US out of Afghanistan. The main objective was achieved and the secondary objective of stabilizing the Afghani government was a gigantic failure because the region is much too tribal and fractured. The US could stay there another 17 years and that will still be the case. Now is the time to sign agreements for an economic benefit in natural resources (mainly lithium) with the only people that have proven that they can form a stable government, the Taliban. The US is not squeamish when it comes to backing crappy dictatorships when it benefits us economically; ie: Saudi Arabia. We even let millions of European allies die for years so we could pull ourselves out of a Great Depression by selling them armaments and resources. We do what's best for us and continuing on in Afghanistan is not best for us. Getting our hands on as much of Afghanistan's Trillion dollar deposit of Lithium on top of other mineral deposits in that country benefits us. Just like the violent Saudi's sell us oil for our vehicles, Afghanistan's equally violent Taliban will supply us with their lithium that will power current and future technologies, mainly for electric vehicles and wireless technologies. See the parallels yet or do I have to draw you pictures? As for current events, Trump wants to go to war with Iran and in order to sell yet another war you can't still be fighting 2 others. He's already stirring up sentiment against Iran domestically and is even trying to provoke them into attacking our naval vessels. He recently sent a couple of warships into their waters in an attempt to do so. That's right out of the Vietnam playbook except this time there was no "false flag" like there was in Vietnam. He tried to do it the old fashioned way by p*ssing them off. It was barely reported on and the outfits who did publish were too afraid to point out the parallels. That is what's going on and that is why Trump isn't following Bush's and Obama's playbook. It's not because the US is afraid, it's because it's in our best interest economically to do so. If the Taliban doesn't make it worth the Trump Administration's efforts and tries to back out of any future economic deals, Trump won't hesitate sending troops right back in, especially if he doesn't end up getting his wish to attack Iran. Then it will be up to the next president in 1-5 years to decide what he wants to do at that point. Continue bombing rocks and killing Taliban soldiers and leaders or try to make another deal for their lithium and mineral deposits.
  21. How about you respond to my previous posts rather than run around erroneously saying the Taliban has won? I'm sure it feels great for you to believe that since there are people who can't stand the US. That doesn't change the fact though that the US accomplished it's main goal, but is finally giving up on trying to rebuild a country that doesn't want to help itself. The Taliban offer stability and they are willing to negotiate mineral and lithium rights with the United States. When it comes down to it, the Trump administration never cared about their citizens and the US public stopped caring years ago. Trump is also trying to begin a war with Iran so in order to sell that to the public, he needs to pull troops out of either Iraq or Afghanistan. Iraq would split up and go into civil war if the US left it completely.
  22. I understand that, it's what I was alluding to in earlier post(s), but you use the word "ignorant". People constantly misuse the word ignorant in an attempt to make a weaker argument somehow more valid. Apparently that's what you were doing.
  23. Explain how it's "ignorant"? I both know of and am aware of civilian losses, but in the context of the Soviet invasion's lack of success in the theatre of war, it has little to no bearing. It just made them look bad to the rest of the world.
  24. It began when I was in kindergarten and ended when I was a sophomore in high school. I just double checked the numbers and the Mujahideen had 57,000 killed and 37,000 injured with not much heavy equipment loss since all they mostly had was small and medium arms. The Soviets had over 14,000 killed and 54,000 injured with very heavy equipment losses. Unless you're talking about wholesale slaughter of non-combatant civilian Afghanis, I don't know where you got 2,000,000 dead but the Soviets were semi-beaten by a lesser armed guerilla force with the home advantage. Fewer Soviets than Afghanis died but so many Soviet soldiers came home injured and so much equipment was lost that it became an unpopular war in Russia and after the US under Ronald Reagan leveled heavy economic sanctions against the USSR it was the beginning of the end for the Soviet Union. Gorbachev then decided the war was no longer tenable and decided to pull his troops out and the USSR then the entire country fell apart a couple years later.
  25. The Soviets got their butts whooped in the fighting because they were mostly fighting on the ground. The US won the fighting because the armed forces softened them up with cruise missiles from the air and the sea and only after that then moved in on the ground. You can't fight guerilla fighters in their own territory unless you are willing to dump major resources into fight like the US did. The Soviet Union tried to do it on the cheap and with no technological advantage. It's the attempted nation building that in the end was doomed to failure since the Afghani people have no idea how to run a modernized country no matter how much resources you pump into the country. As much of a moron Trump can be, he recognized that fact and is now just interested in getting a large piece of their Trillion dollar lithium and mineral deposits. The best way to do that is to give control back to the Taliban after getting them to sign treatises handing over the rights to as many deposits as you can get them to agree to.
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