Yeah, ‘aerial battle’ would have been the term I used, but hey since when are journalists supposed to know what words mean?

I suppose it is technically possible there could have been some actual close range dog fighting in this giant battle, lots of jets involved still have actual guns, as well as less long ranged and less accurate missiles…

On the other hand:

Holy fuck.

125 aircraft engaged in essentially one gigantic battle?

That is totally unprecedented in the modern era.

So, uh, anyway… Pakistan and India both have nukes, and as best I can tell, both have threatened to use them is things escalate… so… uh… yeah…

https://www.reuters.com/world/india/pakistan-says-three-air-bases-targeted-by-indian-missiles-2025-05-10/

Apparently there is a cease fire, apparently Trump is taking credit for it, apparently it has already been violated?

I am watching India Today’s livestream and they are currently saying Pakistan has and is currently still violating the ceasefire, and I have little doubt the Indians are as well.

EDIT: Former Indian Secretary MEA is basically saying Trump’s ‘ceasefire’ is complete bullshit, that India and Pakistan reached their own ceasefire, and though it seems like its falling apart, the other point here is that neither Pakistan nor India are paying any attention to Trump, they have no idea what he is talking about, they have not agreed to anything mediated by the US.

Just to give some context here:

US Dockworkers (Longshoremen) are not all in the same Union.

The West Coast and Hawaii are ILWU.

The Gulf and Atlantic Coasts are ILA.

The ILWU came out heavily against Trump before the election, endorsing Kamala.

The ILA on the other hand… basically decided to time their most recent strike with the latter stages of the 2024 campaign, snubbed Biden on multiple occasions, openly praised Trump on many occasions, both before and after he was elected…

… though I don’t think they formally endorsed Trump, its fairly clear which horse they backed.

Teamsters, on the other hand, represent… road maintenance workers, truck drivers, train operators, railway maintenance workers, construction workers, newspaper workers, police, warehouse workers… after over a century of union mergers, their represented industries are much more broad.

And they didn’t formally endorse anyone, but uh yeah, similar to the ILA, its very, very clear that leadership prefers Trump.

I mean, you joke, kind of, but a massive, MASSIVE amount of QAnon bullshit that drives current rightwingers in the US is literally nothing but inventing fake demonic pedophile cults and putting anyone they don’t like in these made up cults…

All so that they can demonize others, and what this functionally does is give these nutjobs an infinite well of whataboutisms to either shift a conversation about pederasty and child abuse in any christian church/sect … over to ‘the even worserer badderer people’…

…or just do something akin to a ‘no true scotsman’ and claim that anyone in any church who is a pedo or child abuser… well actually they’re not a real christian, they’re a secret demonic cult member who is embedded in the organization to both commit evil and also to discredit the church when they are exposed.

The purpose of a system is what it does, not what it claims to do.

These people invented what is essentially their own new religion, a religion dlc, which entirely serves as a mechanism to avoid and make impossible discussions of actual child sa, abuse, going on in the institutions they revere.

Yeah, once upon a time, a lot of young men were highly motivated to either prove themselves as men, get away from shitty home situations, and/or personally put a stop to the Nazi scourge…

… how did Patton put it?

"We’re not just going to shoot the bastards, we’re going to rip out their living goddamned guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks.

We’re going to murder those lousy Hun cocksuckers by the bushel-fucking-basket."

… And that is of course to say nothing of the British, French, Russians, etc, who all either faced invasion and aerial bombardment, or literally were invaded an occupied by a murderous, rascist, mechanized death cult.

Not trying to sound like a jingoistic military enthusiast here, war is the worst hell that man has ever invented and perpetuated… but the fact is that some things are worth fighting for, some threats will not retreat or rescind against anything other than the use of coordinated violence in self-defense.

A fascist is nothing but a bully and a liar, who will stop at nothing to satisfy their own ego.

As the Brits would say…

Courage!!

Selfish, emotionally immature, fearful idiots believe that everyone else is like them, and is just lying about not being so.

Therefore, all those ‘other people’ are devious liars who are more crafty then ‘us’, so ‘we’ must outscheme ‘them!’

… all of this shit is literally scientifically verified.

The more conservative you are, the more likely your brain make up is to respond out of fear of potential loss, to shut out disconfirming informstion… as opposed to the potential gain of trying or exploring something new, that causes you to confront whether or not you may be wrong.

This is where the magic of near meaningless corpo-babble comes in.

The layoffs are part of a plan to aspirationally acheive the goal of $10b revenue by EoY 2025.

What they are actually doing is a significant restructuring of the company, refocusing by outside hiring some amount of new people to lead or be a part of departments or positions that haven’t existed before, or are being refocused to other priorities…

… But this process also involves laying off 500 of the ‘least productive’ or ‘least mission critical’ employees.

So, technically, they can, and are, arguing that their new organizational paradigm will be so succesful that it actually will result in increased revenue, not just lower expenses.

Generally corpos call this something like ‘right-sizing’ or ‘refocusing’ or something like that.

…

But of course… anyone with any actual experience with working at a place that does this… will tell you roughly this is what happens:

Turns out all those ‘grunts’ you let go of, well they actually do a lot more work in a bunch of weird, esoteric, bandaid solutions to keep everything going, than upper management was aware of… because middle management doesn’t acknowledge or often even understand that that work was being done, because they are generally self-aggrandizing narcissist petty tyrants who spend more time in meetings fluffing themselves up than actually doing any useful management.

Then, also, you are now bringing on new, outside people who look great on paper, to lead new or modified departments… but they of course also do not have any institutional knowledge, as they are new.

So now, you have a whole bunch of undocumented work that was being done, processes which were being followed… which is no longer being done, which is not documented… and the new guys, even if they have the best intentions, now have to spend a quarter or two or three figuring out just exactly how much pre-existing middle management has been bullshitting about, figuring out just how much things do not actually function as they ssid it did…

So now your efficiency improving restructuring is actually a chaotic mess.

… Now, this ‘right sizing’ is not always apocalyptically extremely bad, but it is also essentially never totally free from hiccups… and it increases stress, workload, and tensions between basically everyone at the company, to some extent…and decreased morale, increased stress basically always reduces efficiency, to some extent.

Here’s Forbes explanation of this phenomenon, if you prefer an explanation of right sizing in corpospeak:

https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/rightsizing/

Yep.

Thats another prime example of them literally doing essentially exactly their paranoid fears.

Oh howabout FEMA death/concentration camps?

… Well, FEMA is probably fucking over, but the plan for migrants, suspected migrants, and the homeless… literally is send them all to prison camps, and if we don’t have enough capacity, build more pop up semi permanent structure camps on the outskirts of major cities.

They became lost, staring into the void, and now are the monsters they dreamed of.

… This is unironically what all the rightwing conspiricists have been afraid of for two+ decades now.

This is what they thought Clinton, or Obama or somehow the UN or ‘ZOG’ would be able to use as the mechanism to instate tyranny.

… And now they are doing it themselves, so utterly deluded that they would short cicruit if you tried to explain this to them.

I grew up in a right wing nutjob household. This is what I was told my whole life, growing up. I was indoctrinated into it, and had to deconvert myself out of it similar how I had to deconvert out of christian extremism.

These people are perfect hypocrites.

Ah, my alma mater.

One of the first protests I was a part of … way back in 08, was the very same issue, pro-Palestinian advocacy.

Back then we aimed at occupying a different building, but seeing as this new building (that didn’t exist when I was there) was literally funded by Boeing, the MIC… yeah, its more fitting.

I never cared for football or anything, but uh Go Dawgs!