Seems like they've been doing it since 2008. Is there a ten year statute of limitations or something?

I was explicitly talking about what would happen if Russia launched nuclear weapons specifically at the United States, not an arbitrary non-nuclear NATO country.

NATO would still be obligated to retaliate in an attack on other NATO countries, whether nuclear or otherwise, and Russia's military would still almost certainly lose very badly and very quickly, given their current levels of force depletion, but I do agree that it would probably not involve a nuclear response. It wouldn't need to.

The reality is that if Russia launched nuclear missiles at the U.S., the U.S. would wipe them off the map. If you honestly think otherwise, I have a bridge to sell you. And if you're really that detached from reality, you're right. There's no point in this discussion.

On the one hand, the idea of an iPad with two large-ish screens sounds tempting. Lots of people I know use 12.9-inch iPad Pro displays for reading music, but it is challenging if you can only see one page at a time. It's a lot better if you can show two.

On the other hand, 18 inches arguably isn't *quite* big enough. Two iPad Pros would be a little over 20 inches, and those are really on the small side.

And knowing Apple, it would be a $3500 tablet. Meanwhile, I'm doing it with a 24-inch wall-mount Android tablet that cost me something like $450.

My conclusion that there's no reason NATO needs Ukraine is backed up by the fact that NATO hasn't let Ukraine in. If it were a meaningful strategic military advantage, it would have happened long ago. NATO doesn't want Russia to be its enemy, and is wary of taking on countries that are actively at war with Russia. Committing arms in a proxy war is one thing. Outwardly engaging Russia except in defense is quite another.

At the same time, a lot of countries near Russia often want to be in NATO because they regard Russia as their frenemy at best, and a loose cannon just waiting to go off in their direction, and being part of NATO strongly discourages Russia from doing so. Georgia, Ukraine, now Finland. It would not surprise me if Uzbekistan or Turkmenistan or Mongolia pushes in that direction within the next few years. All because they have seen what Russia has done and are afraid that they will be next.

The only way Ukraine would be a strategic advantage would be if it just happened to provide some path with low population where missiles could strike before anyone sees them. But either way, Russia has dead man's switches and stuff, so if the missile silos aren't 100% taken out before anybody notices, it's over. It's a suicide mission even without committing actual troops. NATO wouldn't be crazy enough to do that. And Russia fearing that sort of outcome is just plain bats**t crazy, because there's no rational reason for them to do so.

The U.S. hasn't cowered in fear of Russia nuking us since the Cuban Missile Crisis. We don't even think about the possibility of that outcome, because we know that they know that nobody in Russia would survive if they tried. Russia badly needs to reach the same level of trust. They may not agree with NATO or trust it, but they should at least be able to trust that NATO won't behave in an irrational, ridiculously self-destructive fashion. And if they can't get to that level of trust, the problem isn't NATO or the things that NATO does. The problem is that their government is paranoid delusional, and their people have been led to be similarly paranoid delusional through limited access to non-state-run media and widespread brainwashing by government propagandists. And the only way to fix that is by getting Russia to open back up.

True, and that system does work pretty well.

Of course, it's not the whole story. Vietnam is far from the only time the US got up to some unilateral shenanigans (i.e. bypassing all that nice world institutions stuff).

The US has a long and copious history of invading other countries, destabilizing governments (democratic and otherwise) and assination plots of everyone up to and including heads of state, and there's no shortage of it after WWII.

The outright annexation did stop post WWII. Well, except for a bunch of Pacific islands, which was done with UN endorsement.

The recommendation was not to expose babies to tree nuts in any form because so-exposed babies seemed to be more likely to develop nut allergies. It turns out that was due to recall bias and the opposite is actually true.

Assuming you are older than 25, you (and I) were probably exposed to peanut butter, along with other common food allergens, on purpose by our parents around four or five months old. As I recall (can't confirm) that was the general recommendation prior to 2000. Around 2000 the EU said five months and the US said 36. Current guidelines are 4-6 months.

And icons that aren't as recognizable, and black text on a dark grey background, where unless the brightness is all the way up, the average person can't read it, and...

The number of things Apple did wrong in this design is so staggering that nothing short of setting fire to it will fix the problem. Someone designed it to be pretty with apparently absolutely no thought given to making it actually be readable or usable.

If this were the first time Apple had done something like this, it would be bad, but Apple has done things like this previously on multiple occasions. It's time to bring back the human interface design experts that made their technology great prior to about 2003 and pay them to be the people who say "no" to all the graphics designers who think they know human interface design.

Depends on whether you think they will launch them knowing that it means annihilation rather than mere regime change. It's a huge gamble.

Not even slightly. America has nuclear-capable cruise missiles with a range of up to 1550 miles. There is not a single target anywhere in Russia that could not be reached by those missiles when fired from out in the ocean.

Either the cruise missiles are capable of evading Russia's air defense systems and taking out the silos or they aren't. If they are detected first (and realistically, they would be flying for probably multiple hours, so the odds of not being detected are rather poor), nothing else matters, because the nuclear missiles are either going to launch or they aren't. Flying for a hundred extra miles over a neighboring country on its way to such a target would neither make it easier for Russia to detect nor cost it a critical bit of extra range.

The way you take out the nuclear launch sites suddenly would likely involve sabotage from the inside and/or compromising computer systems, not missiles from a neighboring country.

That's a fair point.

I mean, they're not useless to NATO. When you need more planes quickly and Russia is willing to sell them cheaply, it doesn't matter if they would be outclassed in a dogfight with an F-35, because you're not going to be fighting against those anyway.

They're still way, way behind.

I do think there is a bit of a difference between the agenda of a limited term presidency of extremists and the agenda of the Chinese communist party though.

The US has invaded all of its neighbours, most multiple times. Many of those neighbours got annexed and remain so. There was even a whole holy destiny religious thing to justify it. You didn't have to be a neighbour though, the US would invade you no matter where in the world you were.

Are. It's not in the past. Since WWII the US decided all the other powers should give up their colonies and the US and USSR would have "spheres of influence" instead. So not outright annexation, but if you don't do as you're told, more invasions.

It's not "a limited term presidency of extremists." The current bunch are just less subtle. They're also more talk and less invading, so far.

Define successfully. A few hundred Tomahawk cruise missiles launched from subs off the coast, and the war with Ukraine would have been over years ago. Russia's military tech is decades behind at this point, and although they might get off a lucky shot or two, they are hopelessly outmatched by NATO.

Their war with Ukraine made this obvious to the general public, but you can bet the spooks at various three-letter agencies knew it many years earlier, if not decades.

The only real threat Russia poses comes from the possibility that they would decide to launch nuclear ICBMs to destroy the entire world as a final act of spite. Were it not for that, they would be a total paper tiger from a military perspective.

If your definition of "successful" is "regime change" or "destroyed all military targets", yeah, they could have successfully attacked Russia long ago. The only definition of success that they probably can't achieve is taking out all of Russia's nuclear launch sites before they can launch.

Now?

It didn't explode out of nowhere. Some people have always been allergic to nuts. Pediatricians jumped the gun a bit around 2000 based on poor evidence and started recommending completely avoiding exposing high risk babies to nuts until they were three years old (in the US). This turned out to be exactly the wrong thing to do and produced a generation of kids with much more severe nut allergies. More kids with more severe allergies caused even more restriction on exposure.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/a...

Clearly. If NATO wanted to attack Russia, they could have done it ten thousand times by now.

To be clear, NATO likely *is* attacking Russia's *political power* because of the way Russia has repeatedly abused that power, but NATO is not attacking Russia's land, people, military, or buildings. And NATO would stop doing that if Russia would stop threatening its neighbors.