Well he can’t unilaterally cancel the elections, for example, you know California will hold elections. The question would be whether he gets congress to ignore the results of the midterms.

Ok, fine in that scenario a few decades from now others will trust us…

And I’d be more ok with LLM technology in general if not for:

• The rampant copyright infringement
• The overcommitment of financial and actual resources

In and of itself, ok a neat little trick with some utility so long as it isn’t taken too seriously.

4. Sell off US debt

Realistically probably the most devastating thing they could do.

I guess in the CNN interview he said that? I just read the article, which would make me think his response would simply be “Well Denmark’s smaller military means they have no rights”.

But you are absolutely right that USA can pretty much already stage whatever military presence they want in Greenland so long as everyone can rationalize it as supporting NATO objectives, which would generally rubber stamp Greenland. The ‘we need Greenland for defense’ rings hollow with that.

However, I think the military is an excuse, and they really want:

• To have probable ports in a potentially more relevant shipping activity and extract some economic control from that position
• To hedge bets against warming to have some land that might be more attractive if local temperatures rise a certain amount
• Exert greater pressure on Canada to join up, being surrounded basically on all sides by USA.

They see a significant land mass with fewer than 100k as a cakewalk, from a force perspective, and given their ‘might makes right’ philosophy, it could be a likely next stepping stone.

The people wanted actual reasoning AI, not generative AI. They didn’t expect us to devote most of our nominal economic activity toward a few big tech companies to get it. They didn’t expect them to assert that text generators are ‘reasoning’ and when called on it declare that it’s not reasoning as humanity has known it, but here’s some buzzwords to justify us claiming it’s a whole new sort of reasoning that’s just as valuable.

Probably not invade, but some more targeted clandestine operations seem an actually possible outcome…

Practically speaking, if a foreign state feels they are going to get in a violent fight anyway, they may be more inclined to take action that doesn’t require a lot of people to make some key strategic changes.

He said in the article, based on “no one’s going to stop us”:

“Nobody’s going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland,”

“We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” he said. “These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”

“The United States of America is running Venezuela,” Mr. Miller said, dismissing international treaties enshrining a nation’s right to independence and sovereignty as “international niceties.”

If someone really deserves just getting a beat down, it’s Stephen Miller.

“Nobody’s going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland,” Mr. Miller told Jake Tapper

“We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” he said. “These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”

“The United States of America is running Venezuela,” Mr. Miller said, dismissing international treaties enshrining a nation’s right to independence and sovereignty as “international niceties.”

He’s not arguing we have some ‘legal’ right, he’s arguing that since we have a military, we can do whatever we want wherever we want so long as no one is able to successfully stop us…

It’s probably closer to the other way around… Before Trump was even voted in again Miller was out talking about how he wanted to see republican governors deploy their state’s national guard into democrat run states, openly calling for military invasion of some states by others…

If anything, Trump is downright moderate compared to the lengths Miller would want to do.

we were the country that prevented anyone else from trying that

And what better way than just doing it ourselves!

Why would Putin enjoy a heavy US naval presence in the contested Artic Circle waters?

In theory, he might not like a heavy foreign naval presence, but Greenland is already NATO aligned. So he’d be trading a NATO aligned region for a US-only region in exchange for a fractured NATO. Sounds like a decent trade. Also keep in mind practically speaking they are probably equally unlikely to actually boost military presence much, and if they really wanted just that, NATO would probably mostly let them do it if USA paid for it, without USA having to take it.

The Danish are not meaningfully contributing to the Ukraine conflict. And there is no reason to believe the big EU militaries would stop feeding supplies to Ukraine if the US invaded Greenland.

This isn’t about just Denmark, which materially would barely be impacted right now since Greenland is doing practically nothing. It’s about the notion of one NATO member invading another, and the absolute clusterfuck that would bring. A USA versus European NATO scenario would be his dream scenario. See “Foundations of Geopolitics”, where it’s mostly about getting Russia’s opponents to fracture and ruin alliances:

Russia should “introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social, and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements – extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S. It would also make sense simultaneously to support isolationist tendencies in American politics”.

This is also the book that makes annexation of Ukraine the top priority, that it must be secured before the broader Russian agenda can be executed. It also says they need to make the UK isolated from the broader EU. They know that above all else alliances must be broken for them to stand a chance to seize power.

Fear will keep the local systems in line

Yeah, absolutely nothing in the writing explained why he stuck with the emperor. I feel like the last thing he would have done based on his motivation to that point is stick with palpatine. Beyond being a psychopath, it doesn’t even make sense by those standards.

Empire strikes back set up a couple of plot twists that the series really couldn’t execute on. Nice in the movie since they got to leave it open ended, but bad for the series when they actually had to run with resolving those twists.

Also, he was the one who killed his wife.

Upon finding out that he was the one ultimately responsible, he went “nooooo” and I suppose went “well, as long as I’m in this cool suit, guess I’ll just keep doing the evil then”.

Frankly, I find his arc to be one of the least convincing “how a guy went evil and was redeemed” in fiction. Empire strikes back had the benefit of being able to leave it vague enough to leave it a potentially interesting turn, but when they actually had to delve into it, was pretty unfulfilling

Fun space action movies, but execution on the “twists” was not the strong point.

And what’s your point?

On your first point, ok, fine, perhaps some ‘save image as’ were in the files and people had no idea what it was… maybe… I think that’s a long shot, an odd image to retain without context of a related article or document clearly indicating what it is… It really strains credibility, but maybe possibly a misunderstood inclusion…

Ostensibly, they were supposed to be prepared to release the files ‘day 1’ of the administration, so they have had pretty much all year knowing this should be coming and preparing. Even if for some reason the deadline was unreasonable, it seems odd to just say nothing about that, not negotiate a different timeline with congress or something. It seems clear they were hoping that passing and have Trump sign that bill compelling the release was good enough optics and follow-up with token gesture was expected to be good enough. Which was absurd because Trump could have just done this anytime he wished, and for all the things he shouldn’t do unilaterally but does anything, this is where suddenly congress has to be all aboard…

Yeah, I remember working in the early 2000s with Russian institutes and things were really good.

2008 was when I recall the first “wtf”, in the war with Georgia.

I know that’s the deadline, but are they actually doing it? I’ve been assuming they’ll declare some bs on why it’s not viable to do so, hoping that somehow everyone has gotten over it after the bill passed.