Tigris

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Just noting this for the posters that aren't familiar with Kansas.
Johnson county is one of the wealthier counties in the state.
Some of its residents are pretty uppity in regard to that, too.

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Heh, I know this one well as I was born on the Missouri side. And most of my family are on the Kansas side now. The Missouri contingent can be pretty resentful at the people who had the sense to get out.

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“Keep Me In Your Heart” from Warren Zevon

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I'll go with this.

Another for the conversation:

Antarctica expedition. Having a small boat with fewer than 200 passengers is important so that everybody can make landings which are restricted to smaller vessels.

Falklands - South Georgia - Antarctica.

I'd recommend doing a trip that includes all 3. And I'll throw in a recommendation for Oceanwide Expeditions. They do a great job.

Kenya/Tanzania is a close #2.

It's probably been 20 years since I read this one. But after all the discussion on here it's time. It was my first Cormac book and it will be interesting to see if having read almost everything he's done since then will help.

I'm a few hours in and I really like the narrator, I prefer it to reading the book. And I'd say it does help to be familiar with Cormac McCarthy's other work.

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The measures imposed by Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan may be designed in part to minimize the impact of another migration shock caused by Russians seeking to evade being thrown into a meatgrinder.

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In the spring of 2023 I visited Kazakhstan and there were an estimated 2-3 million Russians of draft age hiding out there. Our local guide was a primarily Russian speaker (it's the language of the government and education). She kept talking about how many Russians were everywhere we went. The language difference is pretty easy for a local. And it wasn't just Kazakhstan. Russians were everywhere, I got to tell a Russian in Hong Kong to go frick himself after an initially pleasant conversation went off the rails. After 4+ years the Russians know what the survival rate is at the front. The prisons are largely empty now and all the peasants and foreign dupes have largely been vacuumed up. This round of conscription is dangerous as hell for Putin.

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He’s lost his mojo . Shell of himself

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He's his usual self. People voted for him because they rightly hated the Democrats for all of their excesses and incompetence. But the warning signs have always been there. MAGA became a cult in which Trump could do no wrong. And that is idiotic.

After some heavy lifting recently it's time for a fun book. And at about 1/3 of the way through this is one of Pratchett's better books. Great and funny writing.

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When will the venerable ISW update to reflect this?

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Why do you insist on your stupid map fetish when it's pretty clear that both sides are manipulating the information about what is actually happening? It's mind numbingly pointless, and yet you insist on clinging to it. The maps are a tiny picture of what may or may not be happening. Schroedinger's war.

Florida Panhandle. This was the best summer I've ever had for them. Usually it's slow at my house but this summer was steady demand. Now we're into the start of migration and the numbers have gotten really high. It's a constant fight at every feeder. I had three at a wildlife refuge this morning where they are considered to be somewhat rare. Migrating birds are showing up here too, in low numbers so far, but fall is on the way, soon.