#war nerd

[victusinveritas]

[totally-a-wizard]

All credit to @matheusgraef for this wonderful peace of art!  Posted here on my blog with permission.

This is a portrait of my main character on the Neverwinter Nights server Arelith, Ezekiel Klennald, cleric (and rogue) of Tyr.  Prophet, warrior, massive nerd, part time smart ass.

[doctorcolubra]

Visit Original Link

Also: seriously good Joan of Arc history content from John Dolan and Mark Ames with Italian historian Annibale. A great far-ranging discussion of her military career and context, one of the best ever episodes of a very good podcast.

link because tumblr’s sound player is shady 

[belisaurus]

[belisaurus]

[nonevahed]

And don’t even believe that it’ll stop at $500 billion. Some Federal accountants are already figuring that the real cost of this rotten plane will top a trillion dollars. But you know what’s weird? It’s impossible to get “fiscal conservatives” angry about this stuff. I’ve tried, at my office. Every time I hear some poor sucker at work complaining about how he had to stand in line behind some “fat welfare-type buying steak with my tax dollars,” I want to tell him, “Well, you know you much one F-35 fighter is gonna cost? 200 million dollars. You can buy a lot of steaks — you could buy half of Argentina — for that kind of money. And it’s a dog of a plane, that’s the worst, it doesn’t even work.” But I don’t bother telling them that at work any more, because it just doesn’t register with them. The average office slave can understand a $20 food stamp and wrap their hate around that, but when you say “$200 million times 2000” his brain just shorts out. Besides, this is supposedly about “defense,” and to the average sucker, that’s sacred ground. You can’t tell them it’s not about defense, that America would be much safer, and richer, without a fleet of gold-plated lemons like the F-35. I’ve tried, and what happens is they get this annoyed little frown. They just don’t get off on it the way they do hatin’ on that fat lady with the four kids and the food stamps.

Gary Betcher, on the matter of the F-35

https://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/cheap-drones/

[samjuko-blog]

The War Nerd: Islamic State and American Narcissism

Best analysis of the demographics of ISIS (and disingenuous liberal pundits) I've yet seen by the War Nerd:

DILI, EAST TIMOR—It’s about time to do a premature autopsy on Islamic State (IS). It’s not quite dead, but the flies are buzzing, the thought-pieces are a-stinkin’, and the smell is impossible to i...