Lord Ratner

So who thinks the Iranians are going to overplay their hand and piss Trump off into another 60-day AUMF bonanza?

Maybe I've got long covid, but who was the president in 2020? If there's one area that you and I will be in violent agreement on, it's that Donald Trump is a fierce critic of globalization and the destruction of American manufacturing. But he's been that way for decades, like a few other largely ignored voices, and it wasn't until a global pandemic erased the narrative surrounding just-in-time inventory that the Chips act was able to grow, let alone pass in 2022. Now, if I'm wrong and the pandemic had nothing to do with it, which is laughable given the numerous auto factory shutdowns during late 2020 and early 2021 that slammed everybody in the face over and over and over with semiconductor supply chains, but even so. The only other explanation is that the phenomenon is wholy and entirely attributable to Donald Trump, The first Republican and really first president of either party to dare to question the gospel of the free market. Personally I think he is a benefactor of timing rather than cunning, but if that's the route you want to go, sure. It is quite cute to hear someone attribute Chips to a democratic administration. If the supply-chain-wrecking pandemic that started before the chips act was drafted can't be responsible, I'm a bit perplexed as to how the Democratic administration that started after the act was drafted is somehow the champion. You can go back and forth on whether or not the Republicans or the Democrats get any credit for passing the thing. The Republicans were for it in isolation, but then the Manchin betrayal happened and everybody on the right went ape shit. It's not like the Republicans get much credit here, they've been shoving their head in the sand about globalization for decades. I'll give you the Russian invasion gaff. I was crossing wires between chips and energy. It's not frustrating, it's just boring. I understand that it's not necessarily some Grand strategy. You are in a vast majority of conservatives here, so there is more that you disagree with than you agree with, and only limited bandwidth to waste here (hopefully), and so you can spend all of your time trying to prove something wrong instead of just saying what you think is right. A contrarian has a contrary point. Not just "that's dumb let's just do all the good stuff without any of the bad stuff happening." I mean... You literally said that The point about harassing you to run for office is to illustrate that you are obviously either hilariously arrogant, which I doubt, or you just haven't considered how many hundreds/thousands of people exactly like you with exactly your ideas have tried and failed to get anywhere near the levers required to "do all the smart stuff ... But don't do all the really stupid parts." I could get that kind of policy prescription from the kids at my daughter's daycare. If it's so easy, why hasn't it happened? And if you know why it hasn't happened, and it's none of the things that I've said, then how do we get it done? I can't remember a single time that you have answered that question or even come remotely close to answering it. Your foreign policy basically boils down to finding a magic wand as far as I can tell. I'm no big fan of the political class, but there are some incredibly intelligent people throughout and none of them have been able to crack the egg. So what's your solution? What's your projection? You called it a straw man to say that you don't think there will be a giant war ever again. So when? Do you believe as time goes on we will be more or less prepared for that war? Do you believe we are more or less prepared than we were 10 years ago? 20 years ago? 30 years ago? Is our preparedness for this type of conflict trending upward or downward over time, and do you believe it will continue in that direction? Of the things we need to do to be prepared for that type of war, what should we be doing, and why do you believe we would do it despite the fact that for the last 30 years we have done the exact opposite? A lot of people have put a lot of time into a lot of very insightful posts about what they think is happening, why, and what to do about it. I don't mind explaining my contribution to that conversation, but if it boils down to: you are a utopian and I am a realist, well, like I said, that's just boring. At a certain point any belief system must rely on an element of faith at the foundational level, and when you get all the way down to that level, you've exceeded the capabilities of debate and discourse. Despite my best efforts, I can't seem to find anything from you that isn't just an article of Faith. One of my volunteer gigs at the union was moderating the union message board. We dealt with a lot of the same few dozen people who couldn't pry themselves away from the keyboard, despite it obviously being in their best interests. Every once in awhile one of them would message me in private asking me to ban their access, because they just couldn't let go of the endless battle over nothing, no matter how many times they tried to block themselves or delete their account. They always came back.

Just had to hit this one since it's the funniest part of your post. Was the pandemic not a... global calamity? You think after approximately 30 years of our advanced microchip manufacturing ability declining to zero, it's a coincidence that we suddenly decided we want to make chips in America at the same time a pandemic crushes supply chains and Russia invades Ukraine?

All? I'm just talking to you. You haven't presented one particularly interesting thought in months. If there's a spectrum of intelligent, novel thinking, Clark Griswold is all the way on the right side of the spectrum, and you are fairly close to the far left side. You wonder why nobody responds to you positively, yet you don't seem to realize that the "cheerleaders" on this forum (CH, brabus, Fourfans, viperman, me, etc.) aren't here to beat the other team. We're here to discuss with similarly experienced humans with similarly matching values things that are going on in the world. If our goal was to prove our own intelligence to ourselves by going up against a couple dozen antagonists, we wouldn't be here on a mostly conservative leaning forum of mostly old vets. It's also why guys like negatory and Day man and NS player and 17D Guy end up rage quitting in a huff. They didn't see a bunch of like-minded people discussing issues from different perspectives in the same neighborhood, they saw some sort of den of conservative malignancy and made it their righteous duty to stand on behalf of "the other side." Bottom line, they were here to prove people wrong. Sure, Cleared Hot gets a little Fox Newsish from time to time, and I use big words that Boomer6 has to sound out each syllable to understand, but none of the conservatives come to this site thinking it's time to prove you or the other token liberals wrong. Hell, it's not like you've said anything that you believe that anyone can address, but even if you had, I'm not particularly interested proving you wrong. You say you don't understand my view, and so I explain. I never said you had to agree with me, and like I said you're obviously not at a point yet where you can accept the existence of a philosophy that might disprove your own. I don't mind wasting the time because my daughter is taking a nap and I have nothing to do right now. It would be nice if baseops was what it used to be, a repository forum primarily for military flyers to get information about life and work in the military. But technology evolved and web forums that aren't hyper-specialized hobbyist groups are basically dead, so a few dozen Ghosts of Air Force Past come here to chat amongst themselves, show off their guns, and occasionally respond to one of you guys who seem to have decided that of all the places on the internet you can go to battle with people of the opposite ideology, this is where you'll make your last stand. I mean my God, look at Negatory. The dude is still here with a new username that reminds you every time you look at it that he literally could not pry himself away from fighting with a bunch of online strangers. It's an addiction. 🤷‍♂️

This is really the Crux of the whole thing. No, we can't. We hypothetically can do all of those things without doing the things you find illogical, but history and reality suggest otherwise. You still seem to be in the part of your ideological journey where you think societies and the politicians they produce will make hard choices without going through hard times. I do not. I don't think it's a coincidence that as the generation that endured world war II started to lose political power, we started making all the same mistakes that lead towards the conflict I believe to be inevitable. This isn't some wacky theory I came up with on my own. You've heard it before in one of its many various wrappers. Soft times create soft men. Soft men create hard times. Hard times create hard men. Hard men create soft times. Soft times create...

To be clear, this sentence, read fully, says that bombing Kharg Island wouldn't start a war. You might call it: So... Anyways Because it doesn't matter about what you do with the munitions you have right now. All that matters is how many munitions you can continue to produce/source. In a perfect world we wouldn't need these wars and catastrophes to motivate future-oriented behavior. But we don't live in a perfect world, we live in a human world. If it hasn't become abundantly clear that the developed nations of the West will absolutely not maintain their industrial or military capacities, then you simply aren't paying attention. Jesus just look at what they've done to pilot training. And the only way that it could have been done without war/disaster was with international trade policy that incentivized "reshoring" and "friendshoring," But everybody lost their fucking minds when Trump tried to put just a fraction of the tariffs that will be required to get it done. So instead, we're going to use government spending and the inflation tax to end up with the very same effect. To be fair, Trump went about that tariff policy about as stupidly and childishly and erratically as you could possibly imagine, but stupid childish erratic leaders are just a fact of life these days (Gavin Newsom, Ken Paxton, Mandami, MTG, etc). I did not invent the Fourth Turning framework. Ray Dalio calls it the Big Cycle. Niall Ferguson says it already started as Cold War II. Even Jaime Dimon is calling for rearmament. Anyways. After Russian oil and gas was permanently disrupted thanks to the war in Ukraine, the Europeans reclassified nuclear power as green energy after decades of championing decommissioning. They adapt like everyone else, they just do it slowly and they lie through their teeth about the justification. I've said it plenty 🤷‍♂️. Look I wish anything you would do was possible. I'd love to see America stay out of messy wars, increase spending on military readiness, ensure that critical business sectors like drug production, semiconductor manufacturing, and resource mining were domestically stable, control unproductive spending on social programs for the elderly, enforce immigration policy without rioting and chaos, stop spending at deficit levels measured in trillions rather than billions, etc. As I've said before, I can't wait to see your candidacy for public office. We need someone who's smarter than Trump and knows exactly how to fix all this. Please, we need you. But that's not the world we live in. We live in the one where we will destroy ourselves for cheap TVs and the dream of global peace. Removing Iran from the chess board would be a solid enhancement for Team America. And it hasn't escalated yet, despite your suggestions. It has simply dragged-on. It definitely hasn't gone the way the administration hoped (or how I hoped, for that matter), but there's been no escalation.

This was back in March, when we did not yet know whether or not the regime would collapse under the weight of a bombing only campaign. Now that that's clear, just blowing it all up is a more viable option. That said, I still think taking the island over would be the best answer, but politically it would probably result in a few American deaths so outright destroying it is the easier, even though less correct answer. So yeah, I've been pretty consistent. As far as depleting military resources, countries at peace that are expecting further peace do not build up their military, and they do not maintain it. Some places let it collapse faster than others, but the trend is always downward. This is a point I've made before that many of the "obviously I believe there's going to be a war again I'm just remiss to say where or when or why or if it will happen while I'm alive or while my kids are alive or while my grandkids are alive" crowd just sees as warmongering, because ultimately they believe in something I do not. A peaceful world. I want the inevitable war to start while America can still win it. There's a paradox there, because your enemies will not start a war when it is obvious that you can win. Obviously our capabilities/willpower have deteriorated to the point that some of our traditional adversaries have gotten feistier. That's not going to get better. We're not going back into the peace of the '90s. A chain of events has initiated that is going to eventually lead to a another Total war. If I had godlike powers and could control the timeline precisely, I would try to push that Total war off for about 10-15 years, while using a series of regional wars and catastrophes to continually Hammer the global supply chain in an effort to motivate Europe and the Americas to continue this brand new project of rapid de-globalization. We need to rebuild some level of industrial capacity, because that's where you make the drones and the missiles and the bombs and the ships and the planes, we need to secure enough chip fabrication capacity, which is still going to take another decade before we're caught up with Taiwan, and we need a mining Renaissance between Canada and the United States and Mexico, stripping every ounce of critical minerals that we can from the many many isolated and barren parts of our country. Then, send up the flare. Many Americans (and Europeans) are doing with China what Europe did with Germany in the late thirties. Just squeeze your eyes shut and deny the obvious message being sent by those who are not even shy about calling you their enemy. America was in a very similar cultural and political moment back then, with the Americans completely uninterested in participating in foreign affairs and large swaths of the population sympathetic to the fascists and Communists who were by any objective measure immoral governments that created misery for their people. Unfortunately for Germany and Japan, the United States was the largest manufacturing center in the world at the time, so it didn't matter that we kept our head in the sand too long and joined the fight too late. We cranked out 300,000 planes and 50,000 tanks. Who wins the war of production today? Anything that slows down the Chinese industrial machine is a win in my book.

Well to be fair, you're just here to scream into the void, so your questions are usually not particular consistent or honest. My "justifications" for this war are not going to be the same as the administration's, or Brabus's, or anyone else. What and who exactly are you referring to? And yeah, I'm totally crazy for thinking that we just happened to be the generation that figured out how to solve war (just like every society felt right before total war broke out). We did it, team! No big wars ever again. Don't mind the 4 year long land war in Europe or the biggest manufacturing economy building out a humongous and advancing military, they're doing all that because of peace 😂🤣

If it sets off a war immediately, probably not. If it doesn't start an immediate war, but forces Europe into regaining control over their energy resources before the inevitable war comes (and it neutralizes the largest destabilizing force in the middle east), then probably so.

Not quite. But yes, ours will be most insulated. It would be more appropriate to say that the mismanagement of their own economies at the shrine of globalization has put most of these countries in the position that any disruption can be a catastrophe. Because of this, we can't just smash the country that has been a sworn event for decades. Well, we can, but it'll be ugly.

I just read the summary, but didn't the police leave him to his protest?

Dibs on the trash can, or on the orange and blue corrugated metal mesh waste receptacle?

We're making two different points. I agree with you entirely that focusing only on military targets will not destroy the regime, because the regime is not motivated purely by a capacity of the wage war. Assuming that we are not going to occupy the country and implement regime change that way, which we aren't, then the only other option is to create the conditions by which the Iranian people overthrow the current leadership. Obviously they hoped that by weakening the irgc militarily and by killing the entire leadership chain, that would give the Iranian people enough motivation to re-attempt a coup. That failed, at least for the time being. So that leaves the only other means by which the Iranian people can be "motivated." Economic catastrophe. Bombing Kharg Island effectively ends the economic capacity of Iran. Whether or not the irgc is overthrown at that point is irrelevant. Iran has no way to generate money outside of its production of fossil fuels. No money, no government. It's happened many times in the past and it will happen happen many more times in the future. We could do this by continuing the blockade indefinitely, but that leaves the strategy up to the whims of the politicians. Destroying something that can't be rebuilt for years is rather final. However doing so would probably result in the greatest economic catastrophe since the Great depression, for Europe and Asia, and probably Africa too. I'm of the mind that this economic event cannot be forestalled indefinitely, but destroying Kharg Island would start it immediately in all likelihood. It would be enough to start a war between the US and China if it wasn't for the fact that China is so reliant on Iranian oil that they wouldn't be able to afford the war until they secured other sources. Obviously the Trump administration doesn't want this, maybe because of the mid terms, maybe because they have other international ambitions. I don't know and it's possible they don't even know. Trump is mercurial at best .

If our president wasn't obsessed with using the stock market as his favorite indicator of his administration's success, we could end the Iranian problem forever. Just a few sorties to Kharg Island and it won't matter anymore. We keep trying to avoid a global economic catastrophe that is unavoidable, but the longer we push it off, the weaker our allies become through their own suicidal policies.

Read, boy. Read!

Shack. 4 definitely, 5 maybe, and 2 exacerbating the whole thing.

Maybe you should read the actual debates the framers of the 14th amendment had. Neither the declaration of Independence nor the original Constitution addresses this situation, which is exactly why the 14th amendment had to be written. Thank God the founding fathers knew that we would one day have you to be the sole interpreter of their wisdom 🤣😂 I'm not sure how you can have an ad hominem against a political group, but okay. It also happens to be true. As far as the forum for identifying yourself as a citizen, I will accept the least formal and most rapid forum that results in a negligible number of improper citizen deportations. Since you've been unable to identify a single recent case of an American citizen being improperly deported, we could just assume that it hasn't happened. As for the historical cases, those all sound about right. I especially liked the part where the deported citizens got hundreds of thousands of dollars in compensation for the government screw up. I'd be happy to 10x that penalty for any citizen involved in a similar miscarriage of Justice. That's not justification to tear it all down. There will always be fuck ups. Until then, from the time you are approached by the authorities (first opportunity), to the time you spend in a detention center awaiting processing with translators available (second opportunity), to an informal meeting with an immigration officer where you are allowed to make your case with phone and Internet access (third opportunity), to the time it takes to board your deportation flight (fourth opportunity), that would be plenty. But again this is all just an exercise false ignorance. You know damn well that proving citizenship isn't a problem. This is functionally identical to the voter ID debates that have been held in such bad faith by the left that it is almost beyond comprehension. It takes the same level of fake stupidity to believe that black people in America don't have access to identification as it does to believe that immigrants don't have access to proof of legal status. Do you have any immigrants in your family? My mother still has her green card number memorized. This just isn't a thing.

What is confusing? Government screw-ups are not justification for abandoning government action. This used to be a pretty standard policy of the left, considering how many of their programs were grossly mismanaged and abused. None of our laws were written for the situation we are in now. It was never a consideration that tens of millions of people who have no right to be in this country would nevertheless be here. The protections afforded to American citizens, and others legally present within our borders, cannot be extended to every person on the planet. It is not hard to prove citizenship. Neither for the government nor the accused party. That there are a few dozen cases out of literally millions is evidence that this is not a real problem, any more than a few aircraft mishaps out of millions of yearly flights are indicative of a widespread aviation safety threat. The recharacterization of deportation as some sort of punitive action similar to incarceration is the exact trick being used to slow down the process for the ultimate goal of preventing deportation entirely. Same with the refusal of an asylum claim. If you get on a plane to America without a Visa or passport, you are not allowed to leave the airport until you can be seen in front of a judge. You are put on the next flight back to your country. We have the ability for the vast, vast majority of illegal immigrants to quickly confirm their illegal status and return them to their country of origin. Since the problem has been allowed to grow to the tens of millions, there will unsurprisingly be some mistakes along the way. If those mistakes are measured in a fraction of a fraction of a percent, I don't have any problem with that. Once again, show me the American citizens being deported or denied entry back into the country by an intentional process and we will have some sort of agreement. But you can't show that. If you believe the people here illegally have a right to the resources of our country, we just have a fundamental disagreement. I do not believe they have any claim to medical treatment, education, assistance programs, or voting rights. Along those same lines, I do not believe they have any claim to our judicial system, unless of course we are attempting to incarcerate, fine, or otherwise restrict that human being from anything other than their unlawful presence within our borders. Once again, it is simply intentionally naive or disingenuous to act as though we can't figure out who the vast majority of the illegal aliens are. They didn't come here from Mars. They are overwhelmingly from countries south of our border that have fully functioning governments with records systems that track their citizens just as we track ours. The left is just trying to make this about something it isn't because ultimately what they want is for them to stay.

Don't conflate me with other people on this forum. I think that cop thread is a bunch of absolute nonsense. A few bad apples in an otherwise incredibly functioning system, but because the algorithm knows what makes you angry, once you go down that rabbit hole all you'll ever see are cops abusing people's rights. It's a waste of time, as are most exercises dystopian fantasy. I don't care about the school bombing either. Shit happens in war. If A single government official got on the news and high-fived each other and talked about how awesome it was to kill a bunch of little girls (you know, like the Palestinians do), then I'd have a problem. But since I'm a grown-up who served in the military, I know that collateral damage, even mistakenly, sometimes happens. Only children assume that you can build a system free from error or tragedy. Even more ironically, all this hand ringing over the girls school in a country that would happily slaughter my daughter as a heretic if they had half the chance. Don't forget if any of those girls had grown up to be raped in Iran, she'd have an honor killing to look forward to, if she was able to escape the Iranian justice system with proof that she wasn't a willing participant. Spare me. And as far as being disingenuous goes, that's pretty rich. Focusing on the negligible number of citizens who have been swept up in a solution (and not deported) that has been a long time coming is just a distraction. Just be honest, you don't want illegal aliens deported. That's fine, you are allowed a political opinion as much as anyone else, but trying to make it a morality play by over hyping the anomalies because you know that the core argument has no foundation in law, history, or morality, is weak tea.

Nice try. First two links have no deportations. Third link has no names, so the circumstances of the deportation cannot be determined, but every similar named case has been exactly the same. The illegal alien parents of a birthright citizen child(ren) elected to take their citizen children with them back to the country of their deportation. Not the same, and you know it. In fact there's already federal court precedence that removes qualified immunity from law enforcement officials that do not promptly release someone after proving their citizenship. Morales v. Chadbourne But it is a very compelling reason to join the rest of the world and the framers of the 14th amendment in abolishing the nonsense of birthright citizenship.

If you have found any, I would love to see a verified claim that a citizen was deported accidentally. I have seen not one single instance, but even if there was one instance, that would not be relevant. If we had maybe 10 instances or 100 instances, that would start to matter. We're talking about tens of millions of people, and accident rate of 0 is not logical in any context, especially this context. Again, we are not talking about imprisonment, execution, asset seizure, or any other punitive government actions. Those absolutely demand due process. Being deported is simply fixing the glitch. This is one of those issues that doesn't require much research, because you know factually that if there were verified cases of law-abiding citizens being shipped off to El Salvador, you would never hear the end of it from one side of the political spectrum, just like when an immigrant murders and innocent woman on the subway, you never hear the end of it from the other side. So far the left has a bit of a problem producing any evidence of the threats they seem so adamant to defend us against.

Do you really think that this is just about figuring out whether or not the people are illegals or not? You think that's what the deportation judges are doing, looking for clues to figure out if they accidentally scooped up a citizen? Come on, you can't really think that, right? You think that in 2026, with the most unfathomably complex surveillance tools ever imagined by man, the real problem we are having is figuring out who is a citizen and who isn't? Exactly how many citizens are being accidentally deported? You ever met someone who had a hard time proving that they were a citizen? Lol, talk about bad faith.

I will never understand the argument that people in a country illegally should have a months- or years-long right to protest their removal. Are you here legally? If no, then you are deported. Deportation is not imprisonment or punishment, it is merely the cessation of violation. Where's the logical end to this nonsense? Should visa applicants in Zimbabwe have a right to "due process" if they are denied a green card? If not, why is it any different for the Zimbabwean who snuck in? If we are trying to give them prison sentences, then yeah, due process includes the right to a fair trial. But if we're just returning intruders to their rightful place, due process should include only food and water for the journey home.

The best fighter pilots in the world have been trained on an old piece of shit for decades. Stress and repetition, that's all you need. I'll take the graduating pilot who spent 300 hours in an analog dinosaur that kept him at the edge of his ability over the one with 100 hours in a state of the art, modern-day-relevant Gucci trainer. Cheap, simple, plentiful, and fast. That's all we need. But as usual, every acquisition is a vanity project for the good-idea fairies we call generals.

CNBCTrump storms out of interview after being challenged abou...The president said he would like to see the weaponization fund proceed despite setbacks.He's starting to flail. Just goes to show how no matter what's going on or what he's doing, at his core his ego cannot be controlled. Literally nobody gives a shit about January 6th or his nonsensical election fraud claims, yet he keeps bringing up these losing topics because he can't stand the idea that there are any losses whatsoever.