fox [comrade/them]

F35s are basically a grift for the military-industrial complex. Developing them blew through every budget because putting the strategic needs of different operators and different environments on one airframe is dumb, and they need loads of parts constantly to keep the mill churning. As a desirable side effect, if the US decides to not let you use F35s any more, they can stop shipping parts and your fleet will quickly become nonfunctional.

If you stuffed that box with neutronium then:

1. Funny event: it’s so dense the Earth itself is basically a thin gas in comparison and it immediately falls through the floor, the ground, and the mantle to oscillate around in the core.

2. Funny other event: It’s so massive it dominates gravity nearby and everything within a couple of meters gets turned into Cool Physics from aggregating onto an incompressible box really fast and hard. Maybe the nearby atmosphere ignites from being compressed into plasma against the box.

3. Real physics step in and the neutronium immediately decompresses and the mass equivalent of an inland ocean in neutrons and angry high-energy high-mass decay products sterilizes everything through to the horizon with a gamma ray burst, also triggering massive seismic events from the blast as well as killing everything on Earth since the atmosphere is now radioactive and a lot thinner

The last record-holder, Strom Thurmond, would shit in a bucket in a coat room while keeping one foot in the Senate chamber and still talking. He was attempting, of course, to filibuster the Civil Rights Act.

The US isn’t even able to produce enough bombs for their proxy wars, never mind actually fighting peer powers

An island in Florida facing the Atlantic, Xi doesn’t need to do a thing that a hurricane won’t do first

Dr Angela Collier has done a video essay on why aliens won’t be silicon-based. She’s not a biologist but an astrophysicist but the focus of her video is mostly about how carbon chemistry and cosmic abundance is better suited to producing life.