Lord Ratner

You're not actually this... simple, are you? - It's already a 20 year boondoggle. This is the regime that made our misery in the middle east 10x worse. They have terrorized our allies and slaughtered our servicemen. This is the end of the boondoggle. - I said we could, not we would. It's merely an honest assessment of our economic and military capabilities. You know, define what's possible before you decide on what to do. - Preventing the most fanatical, violent regime on Earth from getting nuclear weapons is all the moral high ground I need. Jesus, as far as bad-faith arguments go, you're worse than my ex wife.

You mean like the missiles they've been lobbing all over the place for a few years now? Pointless hypothetical. We're obviously capable of holding the island. Casualties are part of the job. A shitty part, but not a surprising one. We've already found out that the Iranians have a much longer range missile capability than previously believed, what other secrets do we wait to find out until our cities getting hit? Marines die so the civilians don't have to. This is nothing new. Yup. And at the end, Iran has no nuclear program. We've already discussed how that's not worth it to you. It's absolutely worth it to me. Absolutely no part of this has to escalate into nation building. You just don't see any other way because that's been our reality for decades. But we are perfectly capable of murdering Iranian politicians, sanctioning their economy, and blowing up their factories, especially with the Israelis providing the Intel, for the next hundred years. And there's no way that they can have a nuclear program if we keep doing that. It's not just unlikely, it's impossible. We were not escalated into Iraq or Afghanistan. We proudly marched into that Quagmire, still furious from 9/11. This is not then.

They would. I would consider it materially the same as parking a bunch of warships around Iran. At a certain point you have to accept the semantic limitations, and get to the point. And for me, the point is we should not take over Iran and attempt to transform it in the way we did Afghanistan or Iraq. Taking Kharg Island is about taking resources with strategic geopolitical consequences and applying pressure. Kind of like taking Maduro. Outside of starving the regime of money, it does nothing to give the Iranian people a better future, something that I consider their obligation, not ours.

I committed war crimes or followed orders I know to be unlawful because my family could only be supported by a military salary. That's a hot take. To your broader point, I agree with officers being generally critical of the nature of their service, but it only takes a quick AI prompt to articulate the inherent conflicts between section 8 of article 1 of the Constitution, the War Powers Resolution, and the Chadha ruling. We've been struggling with it since Jefferson went after the Barbary Pirates. The Congress still had afterbirth on it and already it was coming up with ways to avoid its war-declaring responsibilities, inventing the AUMF. The most consistent interpretation of current law, which I think applies here, is that the president has 90 days to either get congressional approval to keep attacking Iran, or wrap it up. Past that, I personally would believe the operation is exceeding statutory authorization. However I don't think any officer below the rank of general has any moral or legal authority whatsoever to concern themselves with that. An unlawful order is not the same thing as an unlawful campaign. And an order given during an unlawful campaign is not an unlawful order.

For a guy who has a track record of being wrong and having to walk back comments here, you sure are confident in everybody else being wrong. I also explicitly said that we should take Kharg Island. Try not to get an erection while you struggle with ways to make those two statements mutually exclusive.

I don't think there's a simple objective answer to your question. The framers clearly understood that Congress could not be relied upon to act swiftly in times of military necessity. Thus the commander-in-chief. And more recently, the last few decades, Congress has happily offloaded unbelievable amounts of their authority to the executive. That includes many of the powers to wage war, despite retaining the now largely ceremonial function of declaring it. So I think the real answer in light of that, is that the president has the authority wage war until a veto-proof majority of Congress decides to take it away. The president is, after all, a direct representative of the people, and the only true representative of all Americans. The alternative to this construct is incredibly dangerous. Not to say that the current construct is danger-free, but I would rather we over-war, than under-war, if that makes sense. The former can be fixed with the existing structures of our government. The latter is existential. And my suspicion is that if we end up nation building, which I absolutely don't think is happening, you'll have more than enough Republicans vote against him to break a veto.

To be fair to the firefighters in this incident, they blasted through a green light without looking. That's why it's so absurd that the airport with simultaneously operating crossing runways didn't have the automated system for preventing runway incursions installed at the crossing points.

Why does anyone think this is some sort of surprise. Seriously I sometimes wonder if some of you really aren't just random civilians that found this forum. Or has the military gotten so pathetic that the members have forgotten exactly how a war works? People die. Things get blown up. Planes crash and economies get hit. Iran needed to be dealt with. It was never going to be easier to deal with them than shortly after they got their dick kicked in following October 7th. So we could have waited like a lot of you seem to wish we had, and lost more planes in people when we inevitably had to clean up this mess. Or we could just done it now. I'm glad we're doing it now. I would rather not wait until we rationalize ourselves into irrelevance like Europe has.

It would probably help to make the automated crossing and takeoff warning systems mandatory at such busy airports. They are one of my favorite inventions.

I've gotten into the habit of twisting my entire body towards the window and looking as far back over the wing as I can when visually clearing. I find that the physical movement makes the action take approximately 2 to 3 seconds as opposed to maybe half a second just quickly turning my head in that direction and back. Makes it a lot harder to "pencil whip" the act and miss something because my mind is on another task. Basically the same idea as pointing to or physically touching the altitude window when confirming an altitude clearance. Makes it a lot harder to miss any errors when you add an exaggerated physical component.

Waiting on paperwork for the Form1's, but I'm converting my Rattler and the ZF-5T I just got to SBRs so I don't have to deal with the brace nonsense. I haven't shot it yet, but I think the FRT in the MP5K clone is going to be a riot...

Yeah, this is exactly the point. Except your contention that they aren't a bunch of irrational head choppers is mostly unsupported. They have repeatedly and continually acted in a way that is only rational if you truly believe the United States was never going to respond. As demonstrated over the past few weeks, they are powerless against us. And yet for decades they have targeted and slaughtered Americans whenever they could. In fact if you listen to the entire podcast Coleman covers a multitude of attacks that are clearly insane for the Iranians to have attempted. And yet they did. So yes, the evidence suggests that they are in fact irrational head choppers. And those irrational head choppers can never have a nuclear deterrent. So long as they are irrational head choppers, we must retain the ability to stomp them whenever their antics exceed our patience. Enriching uranium to 60% obviously indicates the desire for nuclear weapons. We need not wait any longer than that to act against those goals. We certainly don't need to wait until they are at some arbitrary point much closer to a nuclear capability. There is not another country on planet Earth that regularly conducts government proceedings after proclaiming "Death to America" loudly and publicly. Why people keep pretending that Iran is just like our other adversaries is a mystery to me.

The intelligence community doesn't have a great track record of knowing when a country is close to getting nuclear weapons: At 1:21:00 Coleman covers the many failures, but the whole debate is good. Literally no country has ever refined uranium to 60% and not been working on getting nuclear weapons.

No, I don't think that would work. But I think you're close. This idea of yours needs to happen where the major airline hubs are. That's where you could find cfis with military experience and a general willingness to fly for money. I can think of a lot of guys at American Airlines who would love to moonlight teaching the next generation, as long as it didn't take away from their lives in the same way that all the other Air Force /guard/reserve duties do. Pay for a retired or separated Air Force pilot working at the airlines to get their CFII, and then give them a decent "per day" pay for showing up and flying two or three student rides. Do it like the Air Force academy liaison program and allow them to accrue time towards retirement, but no official Air Force pay. You get the idea. That would end up being wildly cheaper than active duty pilots at an active duty base teaching, but you could get that military-esque training. Just a thought

Some of us believe that expensive gas and unstable markets are worth it to move the pieces on the board for the inevitable war with China. Apparently some of the Trump admin, including Trump himself, agrees. I'll judge the effort once it's done, or at least a few months in, but if it works, then yeah, easily worth it. Seriously though, noble deaths? Who's the child now? We all signed up to die for causes that were too big for us to understand as 18 years olds. Now you should know better.

One of the reasons these conversations are so unproductive is because people like you, clearly motivated by bitterness and spite, approach the solution from a position of vengeance. Intent matters, and if everything you say is dripping with contempt, then the possible policy solutions being suggested will be poisoned and fail. The best thing you could do, if you truly care about the issue, is to simply keep quiet. Just look at the last few years of your conversations here. What have you accomplished? Even when everyone is in agreement, you somehow find a way to turn it back into a fight. I was impressed when you admitted you were wrong during covid, but it doesn't appear to have had any meaningful effect on your overall disposition. If all you're shooting for is to feel superior, then by all means, carry on. At least then your actions are aligned with your intent. But if you're trying to change minds, you're just not the right tool for the job.

Yep, summerslide covers the estate tax concept. It's also worth reading his series that starts with "My life is a lie. He's not some sort of lifelong progressive who is just now finding the spotlight. His research has changed his perspective (and mine) rather profoundly, and I think it's identified a blind spot in a lot of wealthy and or conservative people's philosophy.

This one is sort of political, sort of economic, but does anybody follow Mike Green? His substack is "Yes I give a fig" and I'm pretty sure he's one of the most intelligent people I read. He's been in the news a bit because he's decided to deviate from his usual market and passive investing commentary and take a look at what's happening to the middle class. He recently put out a piece showing that the real poverty line, if you use similar assumptions to what was used in the '60s when it was created, is a hell of a lot closer to $100,000 a year than it is to to $35,000. There's a lot of nuance in there, but it's a fascinating theory. He most recently looked at why why there is such a divide between The haves and the have-nots, and he put it together in a three-piece article that I am pretty sure is in front of the paywall on substack. The short version is, bringing back a very aggressive estate tax maybe the only practical solution to the increasingly divided economy. Anyone who's interested in this type of thing, I strongly advise taking a look.

Yeah, but what is your point?

Yes that's exactly the point. If you're France, any increase in the price of a barrel of oil is bad. They produce practically nothing, so they exist as a pure consumer. The United States is not even remotely similar. While the price of oil going up obviously increases the price of anything using that supply chain, we also have a gargantuan oil industry, and increases in oil prices are excellent for a huge parts of our economy. We've also increased our capacity to export natural gas, which becomes more valuable internationally when the price of oil goes up. I also have to point out that your understanding of the oil industry is fairly juvenile if you think that there's just one oil price. Just because the price on the news is $100 per barrel does not mean that's what everybody is paying, or buying, or refining. It's not the dumbest thing I've heard, but it's pretty dumb.

That's life. We don't do nothing never we can't do everything. This isn't a Iraq, a country that was by and large doing nothing to the United States in the early 2000s. This is Iran, the country that has been actively and perniciously attacking us for decades. If your analogy holds, and the children of the Ayatollah attempt revenge, how is that materially different? In this case, the worst case scenario is the status quo. It's just not the same as the forever wars we were used to.

Agreed, but the same logic applies. Forecasts of doom and chaos are worthless when the doom and chaos never comes. Your entire point is hypothetical. Maybe you'll be right. But so far the anti-interventionists have been wrong on basically every single Trump engagement, especially WRT Iran. And they can't spell out exactly how this goes sideways. What, we get another Islamo-fascist regime, but with no credibility or military might left by which to threaten the world? Oil goes up because the production of a country viral to our biggest enemy (China) was squashed and the American energy complex gets more money and power? That doesn't mean you should keep quiet. It just means there's not yet any reason to believe the sky-is-falling crowd. If we send in the infantry, I'll happily be the first to agree with you. As of yet there's no evidence we're planning that, and you can't hide troop movements like that. Too many people are still shell shocked from the failures of Afghanistan/Iraq that they are conflating all military intervention with nation-building. Now, if we send in the men with beards to capture and control Kharg Island, all the better. The message is pretty clear to anyone who is listening. Fuck with the US, and we will take your stuff and kill you. I for one am a big fan of that message. If my neighbor woke up every morning and threw rocks at my wife and kids while they left for school, promising to rape and murder them when they got home, I'd light his house on fire and execute him as he fled the flames.

Good time to be a gun store owner in Virginia