Duncan Lemp. Story from when it happened, Retrospective story with more details and investigation from months after
Short version - dude is asleep in his bed, a whole swat team busts in, shooting through his bedroom window and taking a battering ram to his front door, over some claims about illegally owned firearms. He gets killed.
Which is bad enough on it's own, but gets even worse.
See, Duncan got killed - in an actual no-knock raid - on March 12th, 2020. The very next day, Breonna Taylor gets killed in a case where the cops did knock and her boyfriend fired on them. But, nobody was shouting Duncan's name for months, because he was a libertarian white guy and thus did not fit the narrative. Furthermore, when his parents tried to protest and demand justice for his death they were told that it was a public health risk and if they didn't leave they'd be arrested. Guess they should have broken into a few Best Buys, maybe they'd have been allowed to protest then.
Duncan perfectly illustrates the farcical nature of the whole Defund the Police narrative. If you actually wanted police reform, he is the absolute best story you could have. But, since his skin color, chromosomal makeup and politics are not appealing to the Woke Brigade, he is excluded and ignored, perfectly proving that they don't give a **** about any actual justice.
Meanwhile the Soviet trained and equipped Afghan army is apparently falling apart, plagued by desertions and reports that troops looted and then abandoned former Soviet outposts.
Hmmm. If you replace Soviet with American in that sentence, it sounds like what has been happening over the last couple weeks.
No clue, but I don't see any realistic way the Taliban would become a conquering force in most directions.
I guess it's possible they could try to go north to take over some of the old Soviet satellite states, but I don't know enough about their motivations to say why they might want to. And no idea what Putin would say if they tried that either.
Going south (or southeast) you get Pakistan. Not only are the Pakistani and Taliban some level of friends (making war less likely), but the Taliban trying to invade a nuclear power would be stupid. Close diplomatic and cultural ties are definitely possible though.
Going east, you get China. And from the Uyghurs we know how the Chinese react to Muslims coming in.
And going west, they get Iran. And Iran and the Taliban are never going to get along (unless in an "enemy of my enemy" sense) because Iran is the largest Shia and the Taliban are Fundamentalist Sunni. But if the Taliban do try to invade Iran I'm just going to break out the popcorn and let 2 rival Fundamentalist Islamic nations who hate our guts beat each other senseless.
there is still a war there worth fighting
Even ignoring the question of "was there ever a war worth fighting there", assuming the maps and news stories are accurate, there is not a war worth fighting. Of the 5 largest cities in Afghanistan,
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Kabul is still under governmental control but is almost entirely surrounded by Taliban-controlled territory
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Kandahar is about 90% overrun by the Taliban (maybe 100% by now, last I checked only the airport and a few govt buildings were in governmental hands)
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Herat is under complete Taliban control
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Mazar-i-Sharif is still holding on, but is under active attack by the Taliban as I type this
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And Kunduz is under complete Taliban control
This story shows a breakdown of what the territories have looked like over the last few months. Short of a massive military invention from other countries, the Afghan government is done. Most analysts have been giving Kabul a month or two until it's conquered, and at the rate things have been going I personally think that's optimistic. Unless someone wants to send in a massive military force to occupy the whole country, there's nothing that can be done. And, given that the US spent 20 years propping up a provisional government that collapsed in a couple months - and to a group that was "defeated" by the US forces no less - there's only two options.
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Get the heck out while you can or
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Be prepared to spend decades if not centuries trying to grind the country into submission.
Given that the Persians, Greeks, Mongols, Turks, British, Soviets and now Americans have all failed in subduing Afghanistan, option 1 is the only realistic one. The US going back in again is just lunacy.
Anyone who gets Tex angry deserves to be shot repeatedly with a Heavy Gauss Rifle at point blank range. Despite (or maybe because of) being a whisky soaked gun nut, his Battletech lore videos are absolutely amazing quality. Seriously, check out his videos if you have any interest in giant murder machines.
Also, I just find Tex to be one of the most wholesome youtubers out there, and seeing the nutjob mob come after someone who seems like a genuinely nice, caring guy is even more disgusting than usual.
On the plus side, he does seem smart enough to realize that trying to appease the mob is pointless. In the response to this on his Patreon he ended it essentially by saying "If you're upset, then just get up and leave quietly. If you want to stay around and keep supporting, thanks."
I honestly wish that was what was happening. Instead, Biden's already announced he's sending more troops in. Supposedly to just evacuate the embassy, but I'm willing to bet it will turn into "well, we have to help stop the Taliban, so we're going to keep sending more troops in for the next few decades"
Don't know about Australia, but public schools here in New York are going the vaccine mandate as well. And in this case, when the mandate was issued it was conditioned on the vaccines being moved from experimental approval to full approval. And, here in the US they have not moved out of experimental approval. So, I think someone could make that argument.
Don't know if that applies in Australia, but might be worth looking into.
The fourth one is funny.
bigoted stranger who ... told her to "speak English"
Don't know about that particular stranger, but some of them should learn to speak English first before they tell other people to do so
I am surprised, a guy with tiny balls would have low testosterone levels (I assume) so that would make you a very bad warrior.
Could also be that he was Prince Tinyballs, second son to King WhatsHisName, who just sat around doing nothing of import but got to carry a sword around because he was a prince. Definitely wouldn't be the first case of a thoroughly useless heir who accomplishes nothing of import during his or her life.
"A number of Republicans, including most of their leaders, are bad enough, but over half the Democrats, including almost all the City Irish, are vicious, stupid-looking scoundrels with apparently not a redeeming trait ... a stupid, sodden vicious lot, most of them being equally deficient in brains and virtue."
That was the assessment of the NY State Government in 1882. And in the 140 years since then, there's no evidence it's gotten better.
Quoting from WotC's website:
Those that fail are transformed into driders — a horrid hybrid of a drow and a giant spider that serves as a living reminder of Lolth’s power.
Drow transformed into driders return to the Material Plane as twisted and debased creatures. Driven by madness, they disappear into the Underdark
A natural choice for crossing guards (for an appropriately race-mixed group of kids going off to wizard school), to be sure.
https://www.savetweetvid.com/ will let you download it. Post tweet link, click the resolution you want, and then file->save in your browser
That being said I have 0 faith in Elder scrolls VI and Bethesda will probably make the Dragonborn join the Imperials as canon
In the past, Bethesda has done a good job in the Elder Scrolls games of spacing things out enough so that there's no real decisions from the previous games impacting the future games. See the Nerevarine just vanishing and then Morrowind blowing up, or the Warp in the West.
In this case, though, I'm not sure. Even discounting the politics, what they've done in Fallout has majorly soured my opinion of them. Given their apparent massive boner for "everything must have Brotherhood of Steel, all the time!" I could easily see that being translated into "There must always be an Empire!".
The logical continuation of the storyline, though, is the Empire disintegrating (regardless of Ulfric), and then TES VI being rebuilding something from the ashes of it. Somerset, Valenwood and Elsewyr are under the control of a hostile, foreign power. Hammerfall got abandoned by the Empire. Morrowind is in chaos and ruins following the eruption and Argonian invasions. And Black Marsh was never really that integrated with the rest of the Empire to start with and broke off to do its own thing following the Oblivion crisis. That leaves the "Empire" holding:
Cyrodiil - still recovering from the Thalmor invasion High Rock - a historically problematic province full of power-hungry nobles Skyrim - in open revolt
Even if Ulfric gets put down hard and Skyrim fully bends the knee, the Empire is doomed.
Do you think all the doctors and healthcare workers are just making up their heavy case loads?
Signs point to yes. Maybe a few hospitals are legitimately overloaded (including your local hospital), but most are **PROVABLY ** not overwhelmed. My local hospital - which has 410 beds - had a total of 6 virus cases as of yesterday.
Looking up data for my whole state (NY), the numbers are as follows:
Total hospitalized: 1162 Total ICU: 239
Across a state with nearly 20 million people, 1100 cases and 200 ICU beds isn't going to overwhelm anyone or anything. NYC on its own has about half of that (527 hospitalized, 107 ICU), and even that is a drop in the bucket. See, for example, this PDF from a few years back (intentionally grabbing something before the virus to exclude any arguments about surge capacity being added/removed) which says "The city has 62 active hospitals, with a combined capacity of 26,451 beds."
And, looking at the CDC data, even in HHS region 4 (which has the highest number of per-capita hospitalizations), there's still only 5.44 hospitalizations per 100,000 people (and nationwide it is 2.54 hospitalizations per 100,000). Again, local clusters may make one or two hospitals get overwhelmed but if you can't have 6 people hospitalized for every 100,000 in the country there's much larger problems.
According to the second article I linked (the retrospective story) it appears that is the case.