Lord Ratner

Who is justifying that?

For Greenland? Any military action. Diplomatic and economic I can't think of a line outright.

First line of defense is a pump action shotgun, unchambered. I know some people are very paranoid about announcing themselves, but to me it's far more likely that the person in my house is going to be one of my kids or someone I know who's being dumb, and I don't want to shoot that person. Hearing a shotgun rack will cause 99% of people to either announce who they are or start running if they shouldn't be there. If it happens to be that 1%, buckshot is a very persuasive crime deterrent.

My buddy has one of those. Great gun. With this particular purchase the focus is on the frt, and what gun will be the most fun with it. I don't consider the FRT to be anything but a toy for lots of manufacturing and legal reasons. Truth be told, this is my second choice. The ultimate gun for an frt would be a Thompson 45, but I am yet unaware of anyone making that adaptation. It's got a bit of a hard on just thinking it's that gun with an frt and a drum mag 😂🤣. Depends on The gun. On some you have to swap out the spring, but on others like the MCX rattler and a lot of the newer guns, you'll have a valve that can be adjusted at the front of the gun to change the gas pressure. Suppressors are great, but you're missing out if you haven't been using subs.

What do you mean by this? Rounds don't accelerate once they leave the barrel. Are you saying if you use a lighter ammo for the longer range? I'm thinking about an FRT because I think the MP5 platform is one of the most obvious choices for an FRT. So this will be a range toy, since there's no universe where I use an FRT for home defense. My biggest concern with the MP5 versus the mp5k is that the MP5 ends up being remarkably similar to the MCX Rattler. As I grow my collection I'm trying to bring in guns that offer a different shooting experience, not just a different name or caliber. I'm also very average sized (that's what she said!), so the mp5k doesn't present the same ergonomics for me as it does for someone with a bigger build and gorilla hands. 😂🤣 I think with the vertical foregrip and a shorty suppressor, the mp5k will be a hoot to hand to someone at the range with a 30 round magazine of 9 mm. And I won't have to cry as I listen to the money flying out of the barrel at FRT speeds.

Bingo.

Buddy I hate to break it to you, but that's every president for the last couple hundred years. The only question is what he thinks his legacy should be. I doubt it's "expand the land mass of the US more than any previous president." It probably has a lot more to do with bringing back the post-war America he grew up in. It's not like he's hiding the ball. Make America Great Again. He wants the US to be the dominant force on the planet (again). He's bitched about tariffs and trade imbalances for decades. He hates drugs. He bemoans the collapse of manufacturing in America. He views illegal immigration as a scourge of foreigners coming to the US and importing crime while exporting wealth. And he is absolutely, 100% a petulant egomaniac. So anybody who slights him is almost certain to see him turn the government on them. Whether that's relitalatory investigations for domestic opponents or retaliatory trade policy for international opponents, that too has been quite predictable.

It's not immoral if the plan is to buy it. It may be exploitative negotiations, but as I said before, that's the devil's bargain Europe made when they outsourced their security to the US. I happen to think a big fucking war is coming, so I'm a bit more amenable to efforts to shore up our side of the globe. I am, however, skeptical of Trump's specific strategy in this case for obtaining Greenland. I think his taunting of Canada was a pretty big whiff, so we'll see if it works with Europe. I would consider any arrangement where the US "owns" any part(s) of Greenland to be used 100% at our discretion as a big win. I think the best case scenario, and perhaps most likely, is that the "compromise" ends up being the sale of specific small, strategic, uninhabited parts of Greenland to the U.S. and mineral/resource agreements with Denmark for the rest of the land. We get what we need with none of the headache of another random population that is and isn't American. Trump is 80. There's no universe where his prowess and people skills are what they used to be, and it's showing. I think he's still on the mark for the "what" of his foreign policy, but the "how" is struggling.

Well right now the house is on fire and I need to decide which one to save first...

MP5 or MP5K? Either will be a clone, but I am having more trouble with this decision than I had naming my children. Either will be suppressed.

Lol. Childish. You can buy the houses surrounding them and make them miserable. You can use eminent domain. You can wait for a forest fire to obliterate the neighborhood then use onerous regulations to prevent the owner from rebuilding. Pretending like the world is a libertarian playground is why Maduro lasted in our back yard for years and China became a super power using our money. That doesn't mean we storm the beaches of Greenland, but especially considering the Danish status quo is only possible through the grace of our military umbrella, if we want it, the question is not "is it for sale," the question is "how much." This is the devil's bargain Europe made 30+ years ago when they outsourced their military capacity to us. Turns out the interest on that loan is a killer.

We all need to stop pretending like this is some sort of new phenomenon. The Doctor who discovered germs was ridiculed to the point of being declared insane, and dying because of it. Doctors have never been particularly accommodating to change, because doctors are just humans with a higher capacity for knowledge retention and association. But that improved software is still running on the same dumb ape hardware. If anything, doctors are even more stubborn and willing to kill people due to their pride than normal people. Too much ego. Don't make friends with doctors. Especially the young ones. The horror stories you will hear about how many people die in hospitals because of senior citizen doctors refusing to retire is absolutely terrifying.

That was amazing. Adding that to my movies review channels (pitch meetings, honest movie trailers, and the critical drinker).

Dan just did a big long podcast with Andy Stumpf covering the recent controversy. The short version is that his "insider trading" is measured in the low tens of thousands and had no inside element to it. Shawn Ryan is a bit of a whiny bitch for a Navy SEAL. Or maybe not, if that's normal for them. But Crenshaw goes over that too and what Ryan was calling a threat was pretty clearly not. I'm hard-pressed to find someone in Congress I like more than Dan Crenshaw. You don't often find someone with the experience he has, electability, and the willingness to subject himself to many recorded long-form discussions about detailed policy issues. I think the bigger issue is that we are just at a phase where the population expects something that is not possible from politicians.

Uh... Those were the distraction. Not the goal.

Unfortunately for the oil industry, cheap oil (energy) is good for literally everything else. If it wasn't for the absolute inability to accomplish anything at all, the best thing the government could do right now would be to build 50 nuclear power plants across the country and drive the marginal cost of energy down to zero for the next 50 years.

Yes, well, just like in the '70s and '80s, the problem is going to be Islamic fundamentalists. I don't think Egypt is that bad of a comparison. Mubarak was definitely better than Khomeini, but regardless it was the Muslim brotherhood that the population supported before Al Sisi came in and shut it down. A much more extreme version of this problem exists in Palestine. The Palestinians in Gaza are no fan of Hamas, but that doesn't mean we are going to like who they end up supporting. Fingers crossed.

I think I'll wait to see who follows before getting interested. Egypt, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan... It's not an easy region to reform. The Iranian threat is what made the Abraham accords possible. I wonder if the Middle East can unify without a central bad guy to align against.

We've already proven that immigration to the United States is not something controlled by the migrant. It looks like the administration is already gearing up to send the TPS Venezuelans back to Venezuela, and if they stick to it then overthrowing a hostile regime will be yet another excuse removed from the asylum-for-everyone crowd. We spent so many decades being lied to about the illegal immigration situation that it now seems almost inconceivable that there was never a legitimate excuse or cause for it in the first place.

It would be quite refreshing if the United States reasserted control over the Americas. I know the fashionably isolationist wing of the Republican party is going to hate this, but they've gotten to live in a fantasy world that we built after 50 years of interventionism between the end of world War II and the fall of the Berlin Wall. After 30 years of neglect, it appears we must once again participate in the game of thrones.

They just tried to elect a president. If the military doesn't try to assert control, they'll have a leader who is very Western-friendly. With what just happened, I doubt the Venezuelan generals are eager to take over the role of dictator at the moment. There should be no other puppeteers in our hemisphere.

I did a CDI once for a group of maintainers who had sucked up the engine covers into the engines of a kc-135 during an engine run at night. This was a group of five maintainers, all of whom had forgotten to bring a flashlight, and so instead of either finding a light source or just walking up to the engine to see if they were covered, they just skipped every procedure and rule to prevent this mishap fired them up. Sadly this is completely believable. I hope he went quick.

Eventually you realize that the entire organizational pressure to sacrifice is driven by nothing more than the unquenchable need for promotion and power of those working their way up towards the top. It's been a long fucking time since anything we were doing in the military actually mattered from the perspective of defending the Homeland. Sure, small operations here and there, but nothing that justifies the institutional insanity that everyone experienced while they were in. It's just a bunch of losers who desperately want to be generals. Even the "good dudes." Your personal and family life was meaningless to them because they didn't even care about their own. Flag officers. I still think there were some (rare) good O-6s.

Maybe it's changed, but the "above 50%" was very loosey goosey as well.

Short-Term, I expect volatility from here on out. The major moves have already been made. There may be some more life in the miners in the short term, but those all ballooned up pretty dramatically as well, and the miners won't be safe from an equity recession. Long-term, eventually a bubble is going to pop, at which point I expect the government to step in with eye-watering amounts of stimulus. That'll start phase two of the gold bull run. And if the crypto fairy tale collapses at some point, that'll be even more money shifting back into gold.