MAP PR0N!

[gehringer_2]

1 hour ago, chasfh said:

There's a correlation between this and which countries I most want to visit.

No surprise the Finns understand their situation all too well, but Erdogan apparently doing quite the job of keeping the Turks riled up.

[gehringer_2]

1 hour ago, romad1 said:

Australia has a very large US military presence on the north coast.  It would be an immediate target of PRC attack in a WWIII scenario.  As does Guam (presuming that is the blue dot in the western Pacific). 

True. My father and Uncle both served in the PTO so I'd heard all the names of the places, but until my trip to Australia I never had any sense of how close WWII came to 'down under'. I'd always known separately about both the Battle of the Coral Sea, and that the Great Barrier Reef was the best place in the world to dive, but never understood they were basically the same place!

Edited December 29, 2025 by gehringer_2

[romad1]

40 minutes ago, gehringer_2 said:

True. My father and Uncle both served in the PTO so I'd heard all the names of the places, but until my trip to Australia I never had any sense of how close WWII came to 'down under'. I'd always known separately about both the Battle of the Coral Sea, and that the Great Barrier Reef was the best place in the world to dive, but never understood they were basically the same place!

The distances here are not small though.  The US Marine base in Australia is in Darwin area in the Northern Territories (the area anyway) and the rest of civilized Australia is down south and east along the coast.  So, basically the back of beyond.   The base is a staging area for a bunch of systems that would further forward deploy to the islands in the western Pacific in the event of a ...thing with the PRC.   There are a couple of these already deployed to the Philippines and may be deployed to Japan which are causing the PRC leadership to lose their minds.  This would be the Typhon (not typhoon) missile system.  Muy bueno for us system.  

 

edit: looks like kegsbreath and the Japanese decided to deploy to Japan. 

https://www.defensenews.com/global/asia-pacific/2025/09/15/us-army-reveals-typhon-missile-system-in-japan/

[gehringer_2]

1 hour ago, romad1 said:

The US Marine base in Australia is in Darwin area in the Northern Territories (the area anyway)

On a flight from Sydney to Darwin we stopped at tiny airport at GOVE (8,000 ft runway though), which looked like it was only there for the military. Unclear what the stop was for. Maybe something in the cargo hold (triple 7 IIRC).....

The attention span of the US media is so short it hard to know if Xi has let the temperature come down a little over Taiwan  (as might be the recent perception) or if it's just fallen off our American media radar.

Edited December 29, 2025 by gehringer_2

[romad1]

6 minutes ago, gehringer_2 said:

On a flight from Sydney to Darwin we stopped at tiny airport at GOVE (8,000 ft runway though), which looked like it was only there for the military. Unclear what the stop was for. Maybe something in the cargo hold (triple 7 IIRC).....

The attention span of the US media is so short it hard to know if Xi has let the temperature come down a little over Taiwan  (as might be the recent perception) or if it's just fallen off our American media radar.

If you ask the Falun Gong/Shen Yun types in America you'll hear that Xi is no longer alive or is no longer in control. 

If you look at Drudge you'll see a lot of alarmist stuff.  

Its shrugs from me.  My preference is they are kept off the warpath because they fear we smack them hard enough to cause regime collapse.  That's what they fear. 

[chasfh]

22 hours ago, gehringer_2 said:

these people clearly haven't been paying any attention to Trump. Greenland is going to be the 1st target when the Donald decides it's time to rumble.

I can see senile Trump talk everyone around him into military action in Switzerland which, not for nothing, is NOT in NATO. There's a lot of money to steal there he can split with Putin et al.

[chasfh]

This is good:

I like this, it's worth adding. I'm a little surprised at the Virgin Islands:

Rank	State	2023 Share of Tourists	Tourist Numbers (000)
1	New York	28.84%	9,076
2	Florida	25.21%	7,933
3	California	19.92%	6,269
4	Nevada	6.83%	2,149
5	Texas	5.95%	1,872
6	Hawaiian Islands	5.30%	1,668
7	Illinois	4.73%	1,488
8	Massachusetts	3.99%	1,256
9	New Jersey	3.25%	1,023
10	Arizona	2.99%	941
11	Georgia	2.89%	909
12	Pennsylvania	2.68%	843
13	Guam	2.24%	705
14	Washington	2.07%	651
15	Utah	1.82%	573
16	Virginia	1.58%	497
17	Colorado	1.48%	466
18	North Carolina	1.45%	456
19	Tennessee	1.36%	428
20	Michigan	1.22%	384
21	Ohio	1.06%	334
22	Maryland	1.03%	324
23	Louisiana	1.01%	318
24	Connecticut	0.93%	293
25	South Carolina	0.70%	220
26	Indiana	0.67%	211
26	Minnesota	0.66%	208
28	Wisconsin	0.65%	205
28	Oregon	0.64%	201
30	Puerto Rico	0.50%	157
31	Missouri	0.49%	154
32	Wyoming	0.41%	129
33	Maine	0.36%	113
34	Kentucky	0.33%	104
35	Alaska	0.32%	101
36	Alabama	0.31%	98
37	Kansas	0.29%	91
37	Rhode Island	0.29%	91
37	New Mexico	0.27%	85
40	New Hampshire	0.26%	82
40	Oklahoma	0.22%	69
40	Arkansas	0.21%	66
40	Iowa	0.21%	66
44	Montana	0.21%	66
45	Delaware	0.17%	53
46	Idaho	0.17%	53
47	Nebraska	0.17%	53
47	South Dakota	0.16%	50
47	Mississippi	0.13%	41
50	Vermont	0.13%	41
51	North Dakota	0.08%	25
52	West Virginia	0.07%	22
53	U.S. Virgin Islands	0.06%	19

[chasfh]

I ... I had no idea ... 😲

Where You Can & Can’t Flush Toilet Paper Around The World

[chasfh]

[chasfh]

Map of The Holy Roman Empire At Its Territorial Peak In The 12th Century

[chasfh]

Careful where you go in London.

London’s Violent Crime Rate Compared To The UK National Average

[chasfh]

Fascinating!

[chasfh]

Supercalifragilistic