Lord Ratner

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

Ah yes, the hardcore fucking of a... **checks markets**... 4% drawdown. From astronomical highs. Like the economic disaster from Ukraine? Or the social catastrophe that followed Maduro's capture? Or the military disaster of the summer attacks on Iran? How many times does the philosophy have to be wrong before you question the philosophy itself?

He does indeed. And unfortunately that doesn't really mean much. He could have 10 million followers like some of the bigger science YouTubers, and it still wouldn't matter. It's all about ad prints. Don't get me wrong, there aren't many people I would rate higher as a friend, co-worker, or all around bro then John. I have another friend who makes about $50,000 a month on YouTube. All he posts are reaction videos of him watching videos of women doing or saying stupid shit while he overlays an incel/misogynist narrative with goofy sound effects included. It's the most cringy, immature shit imaginable. And he absolutely despises his followers, just like he despises the alpha male, diet-Andrew-Tate persona he puts on to make these videos, two a day, 5 days a week. Funnily enough, he's actually a pussy whipped bitch if you ever see him around his wife, but online he's a perfectly manicured toxic male. The algorithm cares only about engagement, and nothing drives engagement better than rage, jealousy, and inadequacy. It's also just wildly unproductive for society for someone as talented and driven as John to waste even 5 seconds of his time making YouTube more money 🤷🏻‍♂️

Ugh. John is a great dude but man am I tired of everyone trying to be an influencer.

Disagree on Patel. I haven't found a better measure of a politician's value than their ability to handle a long-form podcast. Patel is not perfect, and he engages too much in the Twitter chest thumping nonsense that has become the status quo, but he's able to speak intelligently on anything he's asked, and he has guiding principals. That doesn't mean you have to agree with those principles, but it's refreshing that a politician at this point can even spell out what guides them in their decision making. And I don't find any of the frat bro stuff off-putting. I'm tired of politicians pretending like they're formal and keeping all of their immature/illegal/immoral nonsense behind closed doors. Just be honest about it at this point. I trust an FBI director who can smash a beer with an Olympic team a hell of a lot more than the colonels and generals we dealt with while we were in the military who pretended like they had never had a drop of alcohol once they were in power.

He's the hero we deserve, but not the one we need right now.

Hopefully Bondi. Unfortunately Trump seems to hire women based solely on the "Biff test."

Yeah but it's ChatGPT 2.5

So far, this wins the award for coolest thing to happen in this war. What a fucking day to be a submariner!

This is the part nobody wants to admit. The rest of the world **was** fucking us. If the last five presidents had been willing to use even the smallest amount of pressure to keep shit like this from happening for 35 years, we wouldn't have needed Donald Trump to come in with the sledgehammer. This is also why I laugh when people try to use pure tariff rates as a counter-argument to Trump's "reciprocal tariffs." Sure, our allies had relatively low tariff rates against us, but the protectionist measures they employed to favor their industries over ours were rampant and audacious, and until recently, largely unanswered by the United States.

Honestly after my time in the Middle East, how could it not?

Fucking miracle. Nice to see our "allies" are prepared and trained to use all that fancy equipment they buy from us.

Yeah... But.... She's pretty hot.

Got it. I definitely did not hit a nerve. Thanks for clearing that up 😂🤣

Who hit a nerve? 😘

Honey, put your dick away. If you're too emotionally invested in this to read simple commentary, then you're probably not worth talking to at all. But for the fun of it: the simple reality is that there are a metric fuck ton of incredible people who have done incredible things after being shot, and all but a very small few of them went home or into the ground without a medal of Honor. Now maybe you've never read any medal of Honor citations, but I have. The bar isn't just high, it's in fucking low earth orbit. Maybe this guy deserves it. But for better or worse we have a president who believes any and every institution, convention, tradition, and norm should be upended for his own vanity and glamor. And if that means he can get a medal of Honor attached to his Venezuela mission, he's going to do it by any means necessary. That attaches a very real and very unfortunate skepticism to this particular citation. You can sit at home with your thumb up your ass and not think about it, but I choose to. And since you're on a message board where a bunch of people talk about shit like this, I will take your "aggressive STFU" and file it with some of the other asinine things you said here over the years. XOXO

In all seriousness, the threshold for getting an MoH as a living serviceman is incredibly high. And there's not one shred of doubt in my mind that this administration would happily violate the customary burdens for qualification so they could say that their operation had one more piece of flair on it. If the guy lives up to the standard set by previous recipients, then by all means. But getting shot and continuing the mission is not enough. And unfortunately for that pilot, everybody knows Trump is going to be pushing this as hard as he can, regardless of whether or not he deserves the medal.

Lol. Sure you would have. You're just old and lame now. I don't know many rowdy young men who wouldn't want to say they chugged beers with the FBI boss.

Sounds like typical big tech. We want those sweet DoD dollars, but we want to pretend like we stand for world peace and non-aggression. Fuck them. They should feel privileged to serve the military that created the world they profit so richly in.

I've been playing around with Openclaw, and it's a pretty cool glimpse into the future. I'm building my personal AI assistant, and with only conversational text, it's programmed custom flight monitoring scripts to track my airline flights, and a "crew journal" that will extract my trips them dig down to the flights and get the crew members I flew with, then after I land it'll all me if I want to record any notes about anyone. Then the next time I go to fly, it'll recap my previous entries about the crew member so we can resume the conversation instead of playing the awkward-intro game every time we fly together. No coding, just tell it what you want. It definitely benefits from the user having a coding background, because you know what to ask for. But that won't be the case in a couple years.

Thank you for proving my point in the very next post. Again, I look forward to your candidacy. But we both know that you're not going to do a damn thing but complain. Disgruntled indeed.