It is the same. I guess the editor thought a real recording of thousands of men doing war chants was worth using, even if they were speaking the wrong language? The only people who would catch it are Zulu speakers and people who have a very clear recollection of one of the 20-30 songs in that movie. I spotted it because I'm a big Zulu history nerd. No one else who saw the movie with me noticed or cared when I mentioned it.

That is a pretty crazy spike! Once upon a time I used to build oil and gas conferences. New Mexico wasn't even in the top ten US states we were looking at for shale oil/tight oil development. I got out of that space around 2010, which looks like when things started picking up for New Mexico. Pretty amazing what the last decade has done!

There is a lot of criticism in this thread. I'll say it's a very pleasant show to watch with your significant other at the end of a long day. You feel like you're going on a nice little vacation with a super-positive person who just wants you to have a good time. Is it Bourdain? No, and I for one am happy it doesn't try to be. Let the man have this amazing chapter of his life and bring his family and us along for the ride. There isn't one episode where I feel he ever wasted my time.

The West isn't sending its soldiers onto a battlefield. They're giving equipment —in many cases older equipment— to a country facing invasion and an existential thread to its sovereignty that is asking desperately for aid. The soldiers using those weapons are members of the Ukrainian armed forces.

When the US armed the Mujaheddin in the 1980s to fight the Soviets, that wasn't Americans shooting at Russians.

When the Soviets and Chinese armed the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong in the 1960s and 1970s, that wasn't Russians and Chinese soldiers shooting at Americans and South Vietnamese.

When the Soviets armed the North Koreas, that wasn't (officially) Russians shooting at the UN forces, even though it was an open secret some of the MiGs were being flown by Russian pilots.

When the Americans did Lendlease and Destroyers-for-Bases in 1939 and 1940, that wasn't the United States entering a shooting war with Germany.

Now things may continue to escalate, and maybe the West does end up becoming active participants in the Ukraine War, but if the Russians think that line has been crossed, they haven't seen anything yet. A NATO attack with modern equipment and modern training used by fresh troops is not what the Russians are dealing with at the moment, and based on the first year of the war, I doubt very much they could deal with it.

The thing I keep hearing is that the show has a powerful 'the writer(s) had an idea they couldn't get made without an existing IP, but then upon getting a new show for the existing IP greenlit, they ignored everything about that IP that wouldn't let them run with their original idea' vibe to it.

Velma is not new Scooby-Doo content done with a fresh angle. Velma is whatever the showrunner really wanted to make, draped in bits and pieces of Scooby-Doo IP so the studio would think it would be interesting to the kids who watched Scooby-Doo who are now adults in the key demo. I'm sure sometimes this sort of thing works out fine. It looks like this isn't going to be one of those times.

We don't have a big military, but we're a NATO country that spent more than a decade in Afghanistan.