Ssnake

Also, military pensions included in US figures, not in most other countries.

I prefer Army Painters; I exclusively hand brush my miniatures. Their paint bottles have a mixing ball, that's a huge advantage IMO. One day I shall unleash my zombie horde here, if only in pictures.

On the Leopard 2, they are. Plus rubber banding, of course.

Given the number of shotgun owner encounters for the last 150 years, either he never got mistaken or his Christmas magic saved him perfectly fine. He's still around, unless you construct a father-son legacy construct like in The Phantom.

The inauthenticy of my zombie Santa Clauses can't be fixed by applying authentically researched colors.

I like their brushes, but don't use their colors (because, overpriced IMO).

Indifferent, really. That you get anxiety over the mentioning of the Christian god is something that rests entirely in yourself. If you felt equally about Buddha, Allah, Shiva, and their followers you'd feel second class every day because there's not a single day in a year that isn't taken by some religion as a Day of Significance. If you do feel like that every day, you'll have my sympathies. If you don't, I posit that you don't pay attention to those other religions. Then ask youself why Christianity in particular causes your anxiety.

I was about to say that Russia is a world leader in exporting nihilism and imperial aggression. But, as you seem to be serious, a. I don't think I know enough b. even if I did, I wouldn't want to give them good ideas

What has the world come to.

Back then, the solution to unemployment was to push them over a cliff, I saw in this documentary:

Drunken Telegram shitposting by Medvedev in August '22 (hastily deleted, back then) certainly hasn't helped to make them feel secure. https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/09/16/kazakhstan-russia-ukraine-war/

...just in the other direction.

You know, Rick is at least reading what I write. "Europe" can't "grow up". It cannot establish a unified command structure for cultural, historical, economic, and political reasons. (And if it did, you'd hate it.) Europe can withstand Russian aggression only united, but that won't work without one outside lead nation; it can't be European. Nobody wants to follow Germany, or France, or Britain alone. Italy, Spain, Poland are no credible alternative. It simply will be America, or nothing - and by extension, it'll be Russia, eventually. It will defeat all the European nations in detail; starting with the small, then going for the non-nuclear ones, and finally by making the remainder politically irrelevant. It's very much possible for freedom and democracy to lose in that scenario even if the geostrategic trends aren't in Russia's favor. When Nazi Germany overran most of Europe, it had the industrial base of the whole contrinent at its disposal, and a unified command structure. It took all the might of America, Russia, and the UK combined to defeat Nazi Europe - and then to keep it out of Russia's hands.

NATO planning - under American leadership - called for conventional European forces to defend in depth and delay Soviet conventional advances long enough for US reinforcements to arrive (hence the annual Reforger exercises, REturn of FORces to GERmany). That "Europe" as a whole would withstand a WP attack all by its own (and without the explicit nuclear guarantees by ther US) was never on the table. And it basically couldn't be because there is no unified command structure. NATO had one, of course, but that worked basically only with firm US leadership. Try to get Germany, Belgium, and Italy to agree on a coherent and effective military response without US involvement if, say, WP forces invaded Austria. Whatever doubt there may have been, they were thoroughly removed during the Yugoslavian civil war where France, Britain, Germany and other European nations couldn't even agree on a coherent foreign policy, let alone a military strategy except "let it burn". The nations of Europe are sovereign enough that it takes a lot of effort to form a coherent foreign policy. It's working for slow-moving events and trend-like developments, but not where an OODA loop is required that can react in under half a week. In the US, the president gets briefed, the advisors offer conflicting opinions, the president decides, and the Joint Chiefs go to work and execute the president's decision. In Europe, the various leaders must convene, find a compromise, then communicate that coherently, get individual parliamentary approval, and then the Bundeswehr where next to nobody speaks Italian, and the Italian Forces who neither speak German nor English, are supposed to act in a coordinated fashion? LOL, no. It's not whether Europe has the money or industrial production capacity. The US are fully right to point out that it's all there and that many European states have been freeriding on the US taxpayer's dime. That's got to stop, and Trump may just be the president that's needed to get the message through. But the fundamental, strategic disadvantage that Europe has and which can't be fixed, at all, is the lack of a unified command structure. If the US want to draw on European capacities, the price to pay is to provide firm leadership. Firm leadership requires a steady commitment to a common cause. This is why a lot of people in Europe get very nervous about US presidents who indicate less than firm commitment to NATO, or pull out of a common operation without prior consultation and without a decent plan for extration of all forces.

The Windsors draw a lot of tourists. Not sure if the average US president has a similar touristic appeal. Also, the coronation costs were paid for by money earned by crown possessions (mostly, renting out land to farmers and such), not taxes. All in all I think the Windsors may actually be a net positive industry for Britain. Of course, I have no idea what the opportunity costs of having The Royals are, but it seems like a majority of Britons prefer keeping them. As much as I am an anti-royalist, I can tolerate this completely emasciated form of autocracy.