A Smith 🇺🇸🇵🇱🇺🇦

Plummeting birth rates and a relentless Russian threat are pushing frontline nations into a corner. How much longer can countries like Finland and Estonia justify keeping military conscription mandatory for men alone? Forcing only men into mandatory service while keeping it optional for women is an unsustainable compromise that cannot survive the current security landscape. For one, it is a massive double standard that serves no one. If a country genuinely values equality, that equality has to extend to national defense. From a strategic standpoint, the lesson from Ukraine is clear. No country has too many soldiers in a full-scale war against Russia, especially in a long war. Frontline states with tiny populations have zero margin for error, meaning we must mobilize every available human resource to maintain a credible defense. The demographic crisis is rapidly forcing this change. In the Cold War era, Finland routinely drafted up to 40,000 men annually. Today, despite a larger general population, the intake has starved down to just 21,000 a year due to declining birth rates. If that number dips under 20,000, maintaining a viable national reserve becomes hard. Transitioning to mandatory conscription for both sexes is the only logical path forward. It does not mean every single person gets put into combat. Both genders will face the draft, the military will pick what it needs, and the rest can do a civil service. It is fair, it is good for the nation, and it is wild that we have taken this long to realize it

THE PLANNED U.S. ATTACK ON IRAN has a hitch: most of the missile-targeting crew are queuing for toilets on the lead vessel, the USS Gerald R Ford. This is not a joke. A set of emails was obtained by NPR, a US public broadcasting group, revealing that toilet wars have broken out on board the most expensive ship the US Navy ever built. The Wall St Journal followed up to confirm the tale today. TLDR Summary: There are too few functioning toilets for 4,600 sailors and the problem is worsening daily—there’s no chance of fixing the system without returning the ship to the US dockyards. . BIG PROBLEMS TO DISCHARGE Problem one: Design planners screwed up by including too few toilets for 4,600 sailors, leading to 45-minute queues on a daily basis. Problem two: Engineers screwed up by installing a fragile vacuum system in which a single valve breakdown on one toilet can stop all the toilets in an entire department functioning—making the queues even longer. Problem three: Some of the temporary repair operations (such as using an acid flush to clear out calcium build-ups) can only be done while the ship is docked: no prospect of that. But with so many toilets out of order, too much pressure is put on the ones still working, so the problem will just spread. . KEY PLAYER IN U.S. ATTACKS And the issues have been gradually mounting for more than a year. “A March 18, 2025 email from the engineering department sent out to all chiefs on the ship said there were 205 [toilet] breakdowns in four days,” the NPR reported. The ship is at the heart of US overseas attack operations, working for months in waters near Venezuela, to support the abduction of the country’s president and the seizing of ships carrying oil to customers, and is now heading the planned regime change operation in Iran. Israel wants a pro-Netanyahu leader installed, as the US has done in many other countries. But how can they attack Iran while staff are queuing for the loo? . WAR OF WORDS ON BOARD One result of all this is war between sailors and on-board sewage staff (called Hull Technicians, or HTs). One sewage engineering head complained that the sailors put all sorts of problematic material down the toilets, including t-shirts: “Our sewage system is being mistreated and destroyed by Sailors on a daily basis. My HT's are currently working 19 hours a day right now trying to keep up with the demand.” Sigh. And the US taxpayer spent US$13 billion on the ship. On the plus side, it would be delightful if the carrier’s desperate lack of functioning toilets caused the attack on Iran was cancelled or postponed.

Everyone in New England right now. TikTok: jsilly66

The EU is moving toward opening up the internal market for non-European truck drivers. They are expected to be recruited mainly from Egypt, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Morocco, Tunisia and Kenya. The European Commission is now planning to simplify procedures as well as establishing common rules to protect drivers from abuse and ensure fair working conditions for non-European drivers. Until now, recruiting drivers from outside the Union has been the domain of private companies and individual Member States. This process, often complex and time-consuming, varies from country to country. The European Commission argues that a uniform legal frameworks will effectively combat the shortage of professional drivers in Europe by sourcing them from third countries. At the request of the European Commission, the International Road Transport Union (IRU) has prepared a comprehensive report analyzing all aspects of employing drivers from outside Europe. The report emphasizes the need to accelerate visa processes and the recognition of professional qualifications obtained outside the EU. According to experts, only through such measures can Europe realistically fill around 500 000 vacancies in the EU’s transport sector. One of the most important projects aimed at helping implement these assumptions is SDM4EU (Skilled Driver Mobility for Europe). As part of SDM4EU, procedures are currently being developed to enable the legal and rapid employment of drivers in EU Member States. Pilot projects are scheduled to begin in the second half of 2026.