Super Lucky:

The SS-Memoria guaranteed ticket celebrating the 1-year anniversary of Heaven Burns Red went ahead and granted me 3 SS Memoria, with luck gracing me with two more acquisitions than the game intended.  The three were all characters already employed in powerful squads, too -- samurai Inori, base Muua and swimsuit Mari.  Samurai Inori got to limit break 2 with the reward, but Muua and Mari are stuck at 2.5 and need some protean shards to actually benefit from their stroke of luck.

At this rate I'm going to have a max limit break ninja Mari and swimsuit Mari competing for my attention (two Memorias of the same character can't be employed in the same squad, because obviously however someone dresses up they can't be in two places at once).  They're both super-hot so that doesn't sound so bad.  Nevertheless, the first in queue for my next protean shards continues to be fox Miya.

I gave samurai Inori my latest eternal daphne because her damage dealing is unrivalled.  Now she's up to limit break 2.  She'll get her special ability with just one more limit break, giving her another 30% up to crit damage for her first critical hit.  When I'm throwing around 16 million damage attacks, another 30% is quite a lot.  Maybe even enough to challenge Apophis. . .

I vociferously condemn Trump's blatant regime change operation against Maduro in Venezuela.  If Venezuela had invaded Guyana it would be fine to counterattack in self-defense of the beleagured, but all Venezuela did is claim that Guyana rightfully belonged to them.  There are land claims like that all over the planet, and it rarely amounts to anything.  (India and China, for instance, have a disputed territory.  We don't attack China preemptively because they made a claim on India.)

The ostensible reason for our Venezuela fleet is to fight drug rings, but Venezuela is not a major drug hub.  It's barely a blip.  You could more effectively fight drug smugglers virtually anywhere else on Earth.  Venezuela's next door neighbor Colombia would make much more sense, as would our next door neighbor Mexico.  So bombing Venezuela to fight drug smuggling is a farce.  No one could possibly believe that lame excuse.  As an excuse for starting a war, it's the most obviously fake, dumb bullshit in history.  The cover story is an insult to our intelligence.

But I also condemn the listless rest of the world, which never bands together to stop American aggression.  If China and Russia signed a mutual defense treaty with Venezuela, Iran, and all of America's other targets, these things wouldn't happen.  Nuclear powers should protect their trading partners, lest their partners be picked off one by one and eventually the nuclear powers have no one to trade with.  America protects all of its allies.  So why doesn't Russia or China do anything for anyone?  This is such an obvious losing strategy.  Do they not see what's happening here?

Another thing that bothers me is everyone condemned Russia's 'brutal and unprovoked' attack on Ukraine.  Unprovoked was the key word the whole world blathered on and on about.  But obviously Russia was provoked, 14,000 ethnic Russians who had voted to join Russia had been killed by the Ukrainian military right across their border.  Meanwhile America has to sail thousands of miles to even reach Venezuela, which is on another continent, and has never in its entire history done anything to us or any of our allies.  All they ever did was oppress their own people and sell oil, something which is indistinguishable from hundreds of other countries, including the USA.  If you want to talk about unprovoked, what is this?  What is America then?  Super duper unprovoked?  And yet just you wait, if America does bomb Venezuela, no one anywhere in the West will dare use the word 'unprovoked' as a descriptor.

At least Iran provoked the west with a potential nuclear weapons program.  That was a dumb excuse, but it was an excuse.  You could argue that nobody wants to let an adversary get their hands on weapons of mass destruction.  But Venezuela had no nuclear program.  They're completely innocent.  It's absolute madness.  And Trump is getting away with it.  It's insane how Russia can't even save their kinfolk right across the border but it's okay for America to do anything.  Why do people put up with obvious double standards?  Don't they understand that all morals begin with consistency?