Replies

Sorry, a stupid question. Does "grounded" mean they are broken, or that someone has told them not to fly?

I cannot work out from the news which one it is and they seem very different to me.

Not a stupid question at all — it is THE question and the reporting is bad at it.

They are not broken. Every one of those aircraft could take off right now. A safety system will not clear them because it cannot phone home to a server in the United States.

So: told not to fly, by a computer, on behalf of a country that is not theirs.

Oh. That is much worse, isn't it.

Every defence procurement committee on earth opened a new agenda item this morning and the item is one sentence long: "what in our inventory has a switch we do not own?"

I do software. The answer is going to be "almost everything" and it is going to take four years to find out.

Serious question from someone who builds things for a living: if you were the Japanese or the Koreans this morning, would you sign the next order?

Because I would not. And that is my industry. That is my town.

THANK YOU. Thirty years of paying for their defence while they lecture us about our own elections.

If they want an air force they can build an air force.

I teach 8th grade. Tomorrow morning a room full of thirteen year olds is going to ask me whether we just sabotaged our allies' planes, and I do not have a good answer.

Whatever this is, it is going to be in a textbook. Please think about which paragraph.

Genuine question and not a gotcha: who buys the next batch?

I have spent thirty-one years welding things that get sold overseas. If the customer finds out the switch is in Texas, the customer buys French next time. That is my pension you are negotiating with.

I did two tours with Danes. Small army, no complaints, went where we went.

You can think Europe underpays and still think this was a filthy way to do it. Both of those fit in one head. Mine has been holding them all afternoon.

Eleanor, it is serious but nobody is hurt and nobody is likely to be hurt tonight. Some allied aircraft cannot fly because a computer service was switched off.

Go and look at your birds. I mean that kindly. There is nothing you can do about it before morning.

Thank you dear. I had a woodpecker today.

"They were not elected. I was."

I teach civics. That sentence is the argument every strongman in the textbook makes, word for word, in every language, and my students are going to hear it tonight from their own president.

I have to teach the chapter on checks and balances on Thursday. I do not know how.

To be clear about what happened tonight: the law did not fail. The law was enforced by five people, and the five people were removed.

A constraint that depends on a removable signature is a constraint on the signatory.

Or — and hear me out — unelected officials spent six days blocking the Commander in Chief and he removed them, which is a power he has always had and every president has used.

You are allowed to hate it. Calling it a coup because the paperwork went the way you did not want is exactly why nobody trusts civics teachers.

I did not say coup. I said the sentence is the argument.

And you are right that he has the power. That is the actual problem and it is the thing I have to explain on Thursday: that a lot of what holds a country together is not a law, it is five people deciding not to sign something, and that it turns out you can just fire the five people.

imagine being the comptroller. imagine spending 25 years learning the entire federal disbursement code and then getting walked out of a building by a security guard on a saturday night because the number would not go where the man wanted it to go

anyway. clock in. clock out.

I have covered this building for nine years. I have watched every kind of disagreement in it.

A diplomat who came out said one sentence to me and went back in: "That was the end of it."

They are American.

They are in the harbour and they are at the government buildings and nobody is shooting. Our people are just standing there watching them. I do not understand what is happening.

I have been driving since 2004 and I have never once pulled over to read the news. I am pulled over.

Greenland. We invaded Greenland. I am sitting in a truck stop in Nebraska trying to make that sentence mean something.

Nobody was hurt. I want to hold onto that tonight because I work in an ICU and I know exactly what the other version looks like.

Nobody was hurt. Everything else can be argued about tomorrow.

In Latin America we have a very specific feeling this evening and there is no polite English word for it.

It is not joy. Nobody wants this. It is the feeling of watching someone finally do to a rich friend what they have done to you for a century, and hearing them use the same word for it that you were told was a conspiracy theory when it happened to you.

Frederiksen's voice broke on the word "partner".

I have never had a strong opinion about her. Tonight she is standing in the Folketing saying the thing out loud that all five million of us are thinking in our kitchens, and her voice broke, and I am not embarrassed to say mine did too.

Not one shot fired and not one boy hurt. That is a President.

Say what you want. Eighty years of talking about that island and he went and did it in an evening and nobody's mother got a phone call.

I have voted for this administration twice and I preached for it once, which I regret.

We took another nation's land tonight because we wanted it and because they could not stop us. There is a word for that and it is in the Book, and it is not a word about strength.

I will say this on Sunday. Some of you will leave. Go with God.

"judge me in a month"

buddy i am judging you in real time on my phone in a warehouse break room and it is not going great

My son enlisted in August. He is nineteen. He is at Bragg.

I am not asking whether this was right. I am asking whether he is going somewhere cold. That is the only question I have and there is nobody to ask it.

Pastor, I have read your post four times.

I do not agree with you. I think you are wrong about the country and I think you will regret saying it from the pulpit.

But you are the first person on this app all night who sounded like they were wrestling with it instead of scoring points, and I wanted you to know a stranger noticed that.

Tanya — nobody can tell you and anyone who says they can is guessing.

What I can tell you: if he is at Bragg he is with the best-drilled people in the world and they take care of the nineteen year olds first. Keep the phone charged. Do not doomscroll at 3am, it does not make the call come sooner.

Ma'am, that is more grace than I have shown anybody today. Thank you.

I would rather be wrong in front of you than right in front of people who are enjoying this. There are a lot of them tonight, on both sides, and they frighten me more than the news does.

Two closings collapsed this morning. Both buyers pulled when their rate lock repriced overnight.

I understand none of the geopolitics. I understand that a family of four is not moving into a house on Saturday because of something that happened in Brussels at lunchtime.

Nine person machine shop in Pennsylvania. I import a part from Stuttgart every six weeks.

My bank returned the payment this afternoon. Not blocked, not sanctioned — a compliance officer somewhere decided not to risk it.

That is forty percent of my order book sitting on a shelf in Germany. I am not a geopolitical actor. I make brackets.

This is the mechanism, right here, in one shop.

Sanctions almost never bite because of the rule. They bite because ten thousand compliance officers all decide independently not to risk it, and there is no appeal against a decision nobody formally made.

I am sorry about your brackets. I mean that.

Let me get this straight. WE are the aggressor, but THEY froze the savings of a country of 340 million people over an island of 56,000?

I have been talked down to about Europe my whole life. Explain to me how that is the proportionate one.

Deb — genuinely, not fighting — they did not freeze your savings. They froze government accounts. Your money is fine and nobody in Brussels wants it.

And the "island of 56,000" is a country's territory. That is the whole point. Small is exactly why it mattered. If size decides, then my country is next in some other argument, and there are 1.3 million of us.

Alright. The savings thing I had wrong and I have checked and you are right.

The rest of it I am keeping. But I looked up where Tartu is tonight, which I could not have done on Friday, so you got something out of me.

People keep saying "the Germans closed the runways" like it is a headline.

The man who closed the runway coaches my son's football team on Wednesdays. He came round on Sunday with a cake. He looked absolutely wretched about it.

None of this is happening between countries. It is happening between neighbours who all have to be at the same school gate tomorrow.

"We'll fly out of Maine."

Sir, I have loaded those aircraft. Flying out of Maine means a tanker crew doing fourteen hour cycles in Arctic weather to put gas in one fighter, every day, forever.

They will do it. They will not complain. Somebody should say out loud that you are spending them, and that spending them has a bottom.

Marek, from Tartu: yes. Every word.

The people posting "good riddance" tonight all live at least a thousand kilometres further west than we do. It is very easy to be principled about a shield when you are standing behind two other people.

What was rejected matters as much. A general ban on US military aircraft and vessels using any EU infrastructure was dropped — Berlin and Paris said it would be "a blockade, drafted and signed."

Naming US officials individually was set aside and "held in reserve." That phrase is going to come back.

Estonia's minority statement, in full, because it is the best sentence anyone has produced this month:

"The package as adopted measures the rope while the arson is at the door."

Genuine question for anyone who knows: what happens to ordinary things?

I have a US pension from eight years in Boston. My sister banks with an American bank here. Is any of that in this, or is it only governments? Nobody in the coverage says and everyone I ask says "probably fine" in a voice that is not fine.

Only governments and only named companies. Personal pensions, personal accounts, ordinary retail banking: not in it, not intended to be in it, not going to be in it.

What CAN reach you is banks being over-cautious and slow. Annoying, not dangerous. Keep records of anything delayed.

"Probably fine" is right, and I understand why the voice is not fine.

Watching European officials discover, live, that a sanctions regime is easy to write and impossible to steer.

We have been on the receiving end of eleven of these. Every single one hit a hospital supply chain nobody intended to hit. Every single one had an official at a podium saying "there are humanitarian exemptions".

The exemptions are real. They also do not work, because the compliance officer is not reading the annex.

There are four hundred American service members inside those fences tonight on generator power.

Every single conversation about this is about the weapons. I understand why. I would just like one person in the coverage to remember that there are people standing next to them, and that somebody is married to each of them.

My cousin is one of the Feldjäger on that road tonight.

He rang his mother at nine and said: "Wir stehen nur da. Sie stehen auch nur da." We are just standing there. They are just standing there too.

That is the whole thing. Two sets of young men standing in the rain because older men could not sign a piece of paper.

Good numbers on the shipyards. Finally somebody talking about jobs instead of doom.

Deb, respectfully, three hours before that post, foreign soldiers sealed three airfields holding American nuclear weapons and the American airmen inside are on emergency power.

I am not trying to score a point off you. I genuinely need to know whether you know that, because if you do not, the problem is bigger than any of us arguing here.

I did not know that. It was not on my feed. I have looked it up now.

I am not going to pretend I have changed my mind about everything because of one reply from a stranger. But I did not know that, and I should have, and I am cross about it in a way I am still sorting out.

Thank you for not being nasty about it.

Japan is the only country that has been on the receiving end of these weapons.

I want to say something profound and I find I only have something small: my grandmother is 88 and she watched the news about Büchel with no expression at all, and then she got up and made tea, and I have never seen her look older.

Half of Iceland is proud today and half of Iceland is terrified and I have served coffee to both halves since six this morning.

The proud ones say we finally have a defence. The terrified ones say we finally have a target. They are both right, which is the worst possible outcome.

A French missile battery. Seven hundred miles from our Marines. Eleven days after we secured the Arctic.

Everyone screaming about aggression this month suddenly has nothing to say about this one. Funny how the escalation ladder only counts when we are on it.

It is an air DEFENCE battery. It shoots down things that are flying at it. It cannot hit Greenland, it cannot hit a ship, it cannot hit anything that is not already attacking Iceland.

I am not being clever. That is what the letters SAM mean. If the presence of a defensive weapon on the territory of a country that invited it counts as provocation, then there is no such thing as defence and we should all stop pretending.

They destroyed the air defences first, then the aircraft, then cratered the runway, then landed.

I have read that sequence in staff college papers about my own island for twenty years. Watching it executed on a NATO member at four in the morning has been the single worst hour of my life as a citizen of this place.

Neuf. Nine.

Nine French families were woken up this morning by an officer at the door because of a decision taken in a room in Washington by people who will never learn their names.

I taught for forty years that this is how it always begins. Not with a declaration. With nine.

The battery was invited by a parliament, eleven days after we took Greenland by force.

I have been on the side of "the mission is the mission" my whole adult life. But you do not get to move first, twice, and then call the other man's rifle provocation. That is not toughness. My grandfather would have had a word for it and it was not a nice one.

154 prisoners and nine dead in six hours of close fighting.

I want to say something about the nine, but the number that has stopped me is 154. Those are 154 people who woke up on Sunday as allies of the men who captured them by lunchtime.

There is no medical word for what that does to a person. I have looked.

Iceland had no army because for eighty years it did not need one, and it did not need one because of a promise.

Every small country in Europe is doing the same arithmetic tonight and it is not about Iceland. It is about what a promise is worth on a Sunday morning.

He said "that is where it stops".

I have heard a great many men say where it stops. My husband was in Korea. I do not remember it ever stopping where they said.

I hope I am wrong. I have been wrong before and I have never wanted it more.

Everyone in this thread has an opinion about international law and I have an opinion about Marcus, who is 24, from Ohio, and who fixed my generator for free in the storm two winters ago.

He is behind a fence this morning. That is all the law I have got in me today.

1,150 Americans. Held. By Britain.

I have listened to six weeks of lectures about norms from people who are now holding American kids in a fenced housing block. Every single one of you owes this country an apology and none of you will give one.

Two days ago American forces killed nine French servicemen and captured 154 British and French soldiers on the territory of a third ally.

I am genuinely not trying to score a point, because I think you are right that those 1,150 people are innocent. But "held" and "captured" are the same word and one of them happened first.

My husband is one of the 1,150.

You are both right and it does not help me. He is innocent AND it happened second AND he is still behind that fence AND nine French families are burying people.

There is no arrangement of those facts that lets anybody win this argument. I wish you would all stop trying to. I am so tired.

School is open today. I checked at five in the morning because I did not know if that was still automatic.

Thirty children are going to walk into my classroom in two hours and I am going to teach them about the Louisiana Purchase.

My grandfather flew out of Norfolk in 1943. Norfolk, England, not Virginia. He is buried forty minutes from Lakenheath.

We are bombing the country that buried him. I do not have a bigger thought than that and I have been trying to have one since four this morning.

He did not want this. They took our people. They put subs to sea. They moved first at Lakenheath.

We are behind him. Bring them home.

I have defended nearly all of this and I am not going to pretend otherwise now.

I cannot defend this one. Britain. I do not know a single person in this town who thinks we should be shooting at Britain and I know a lot of people who have been with him the whole way.

I am not switching sides. I am just saying it out loud once.

"I did not want this."

Sir, on the nineteenth of January you had no plan to take Greenland and you took it. On the ninth of February you told us the line stopped at Iceland. It is the sixteenth.

I preached forgiveness on Sunday to a half-empty church. I am not able to preach this. I am asking my congregation to pray for the British and I expect to be called something for it by Wednesday.

respect for saying it. genuinely. no dunk.

this app would be about forty percent less poisonous if more people could type "I cannot defend this one" without it meaning they lost.

A state of war between the United States and the United Kingdom.

My grandfather fought alongside both of them. I typed that sentence into a translation app three times because I did not believe I had understood the English correctly.

Navy. It says Navy.

My son is Army. I read the word Navy and I felt relief and then I felt so ashamed of the relief that I had to sit down on the stairs.

Somebody's son is on that ship. I am so sorry. I am so sorry that my first feeling was about mine.

Tanya. Every single one of us on this street felt exactly that this morning when we saw it was not our husband's hull number.

It is not shame. It is what love does when it is frightened. Do not carry that one on top of everything else.

"I ordered the operation she was on. Nobody else ordered it."

I have been on this app defending him for six weeks and I have taken some abuse for it, some of it deserved.

Tonight he said the one thing I needed him to say. It does not bring back thirty-two boys. I am still glad he said it and I am still not sure what I think about anything else.

Deb — I have been on the other side of you in these replies for a month.

You are right. He said it, and it was the right thing, and I am not going to take that away from him tonight.

I hope you and I are still arguing about all of this in ten years. That will mean we got to.

"Nobody else ordered it."

Forty-one days I have been shouting at this man on this app. Tonight he said the one thing that is hard to say and he said it plain.

Does not change my mind about one single decision. Changes what I think of him for about an hour. Both of those are allowed.

"I don't rule things out. That's the whole job."

Sir. My son is nineteen. He is at Bragg. XVIII Airborne Corps is in that plan and so is he.

Rule it out. That is also the job. That is the part of the job where you tell a mother in Indiana that her boy is not going to be in the first wave onto a beach in a country we were allied with at Christmas.

Rule it out.

Tanya, I am 74 and I have nothing useful to offer you except that I am thinking about your boy tonight, and I will again tomorrow.

That is not much. I am sending it anyway.

reporter: will you rule out invading britain
president: i don't rule things out
reporter:
president:
reporter:
president: that's the whole job

sir that is not the whole job. that is not any part of the job. genuinely which part of the job did you think that was

Every serving person I know is reading that gaggle tonight and doing the same thing: working out whether their unit is in the troop list.

Mine is out. My daughter's godfather's is in.

Sir, you have about four days. Rule it out. Not for us — I know how that goes — for the nineteen year olds who cannot say anything and will go anyway.