Lord Ratner

I'm not at all against buying the Argentinian pesos. America is going to have to accept that we are not at war with free market enemies. Would it be better or worse for us to have stable allies in our hemisphere? After 30 years of funding the buildup of China, we are now in the unfortunate position of competing with the monster we created. That monster is going to dump money on every country that it can to weaken our sphere of influence. That doesn't mean we give everyone money and bankrupt ourselves like the Soviet Union did, but it does mean we have to be realistic about what it takes to cultivate and retain allies. Argentina is in the very rare position of having elected a leader on the message of hard choices to fix things. Unsurprisingly, those hard choices are making it hard for him to retain control. No one here should be surprised, Americans have become entitled and lazy as well. But of all the countries in South America to support, and hopefully turn into an example, the one with a historically humongous economy and fiercely pro-american leader is probably the best bet. I wish we could go back in time and divert trillions of dollars in manufacturing build up to the people much closer to us that share a much more similar history and moral philosophy. But we didn't, so now we have to do it the harder way.

Bought some toys to make range day a lot more fun: https://ar500targetsolutions.com/product/12x20-ar550-reactive-hostage-target-system-1-2/ And this fancy bit of kit: https://shootingtargets7.com/products/dueling-tree-target I'll report back in a couple weeks with the review

If she's kept from the House when the government reopens, I'm with you 100%. Until then it's just mock outrage. The Constitution did not contemplate a government shutdown.

That's not really the issue though. I agree with you that they will do us they're told (and right now they are just being told to make money). The issue is that what they produce is fundamentally unhelpful in a great war. China will be in a better position to manufacture the precision components required to mass-produce F-35s. That's a result of companies like Apple funding both the industrial capabilities and the intellectual capabilities required. They can convert their existing infrastructure towards wartime production. We can too, just not for the types of weaponry that we currently procure. One of the more fascinating things lucky pointed out was how China mandated all of the civilian Maritime assets be designed to military spec. So a ferry that is used to shuttle cars and semi trucks from Port to Port still has the ability to handle tanks. That type of foresight simply does not exist in America.

This is the Crux of it. You either have to believe all of them are stupid, which is true for the majority but not the entirety of our executive and general officer class, or they just don't care. The ugly reality is that the F22 is a completely useless airframe in a great conflict, purely by merit of its scarcity. And the F32 is most likely not far behind based on how difficult it would be to ramp up production. And just like all the bankers during the great financial crisis, these "leaders" will skitter away into the shadows like the cockroaches they are, never to be held accountable, while dudes like Luckey end up being the secret ingredient to winning the next war.

Palmer Luckey on Rogan is pretty good. Hearing a defense contractor talk about designing weaponry that can be manufactured in an auto factory is refreshing. At the end of the next war I don't think the current defense giants will be on top anymore. How many F-22/35s are we going to crank out in the next global conflict?

My favorite part of a government shutdown are the news mashups showing every politician from both sides taking the exact opposite position during the previous shutdown when it was the other team leading it.

Right now the only obvious enemy is China. Not only do they have enough people, they have a huge imbalance in the male:female ratio. Excess unmarried men are a societal risk. Additionally, the population hasn't fully appreciated that their life savings have been squandered building ghost cities that will never be occupied. That won't go over well as their boomers attempt to retire. Even without that, their demographics are terrible because their Baby Boomer generation was huge and the one-child policy created a much larger generational imbalance between the boomers and millennials than exists in the rest of the world. Last I saw the revised population estimates were 200-300 million fewer Chinese than we thought 10 years ago. Shrinking population = shrinking economy = social unrest. You know of a better way for a dictatorship to quell social unrest (with a bunch of excess males) than war? We're already in the early phases with the trade war. Think of it from their perspective, not ours. The US is forcing a reindustrialization in the West, which is a direct attack on China's wealth generation. And the primary pressure points against America (rare earths production being a huge one) are being identified and, at least rhetorically, mitigated in future plans. If we allow China to take over their half of the planet, particularly all the east Asian countries, then maybe there's no war. But we won't, so eventually everything will spill over into another global conflict. Honestly I'm amazed at how many people just operate on the assumption that humanity has evolved out of wars.

War.

Is that a gondola pole? When I flew with Huggy he may have tried to hand-start the prop, but he still knew about powered flight 😂😂

At least now we know what the bargain was to get the qataris to abandon Hamas and force the ceasefire. This might be another bit of 4d chess on behalf of the Trump administration. Giving the qataris a no shit facility in the United States is going to tie them to us in a much more concrete way than simply having a base in their country. My suspicion is that the Trump administration has decided that we are going to buy the qataris away from the Chinese and the Iranians. And we're going to lock them in with a deeply integrated military, similar to how we have locked in the Saudis. Obviously the 4D chess bit is tongue in cheek, but it's just another example of the Trump administration making a decision and buying into it 100%. In an era where the dreams of a cosmopolitan worldwide alliance have fallen apart, if the Republicans commit themselves to the concept of a Balkanized world again, we can start making moves to make sure that our sphere of influence is the more powerful one. The real problem of course will be the the pseudo-utopians on the far right and the far left that have turned into New age isolationists. They'll bitch and moan about the duplicitous nature of the Qatari regime as though that's not an inescapable facet of international relations. It's got to be a rough time to be a libertarian.

I wasn't sure what people saw in her when she was nominated, and I haven't seen much from her to change my opinion. She's pretty, and I suspect that was enough for Trump 🤣😂

This is correct. Last I saw Fort Worth was the largest and only "major" Republican city in America. And they don't have a notable crime issue to speak of. Dallas is completely blue, minus the strange politics of the current mayor.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/restoring-law-and-order-in-memphis/ Also, you think Memphis is Red?

Philosophically, if the governor isn't asking for help, then I'm inclined to be against it. I would make exceptions for the protection of federal buildings, such as during the race riots of 2020, but that's not happening right now. Politically, I have no idea. It could work, and it's not a stretch to see how. That could be a big political win if it forces Democrats out of their reflexive embrace of crime.

The guy who owns my local gun shop is an M1 collector, and I asked him to take a look just to make sure it seemed fine. We got the gun from my wife's family, apparently the friend of an uncle or something brought it back from the war. The mags don't look ancient, but the only markings on them are "U" on one, "SW" on another couple, and "M2" on the extended. Right now the site isn't letting me upload pics. From AI: "In summary, your "U" and "SW" marked magazines are authentic pieces of World War II history. Your extended "M2" magazine is more likely a later, commercial product, but a careful examination of its features can help to more definitively determine its provenance"

Anyone listen to Dave Smith on Coleman Hughes' podcast? It's loonnnggg (3.5 hours), and I can't understand how Coleman can stand to play nice with one of the most dishonest "pundits" in media right now, but it was fascinating to hear how full of shit Smith is. Despite his ignorance, Smith is a pretty good example of why libertarianism is an unworkable political philosophy and is more of a starting point for American thought. There's definitely too many comedians parading around as political historians and analysts.

No, but he did call dibs.

Sure. You're a bad-faith debate participant who's gotten addicted to political news theater. Even Boomer could keep focused long enough to read that.

I've got one, and honestly the only reason I feel comfortable with the thing is because the bullets it uses are such low power rounds. It's strange feeling how much less... sturdy... a gun from that era feels. But then again they were just being smashed out by every factory that could produce them.

Where? Which dudes? Be specific. Did any of the people who are interacting with you now say that? I certainly didn't. O Face has never used the word "golf" on this forum Also are you equating a game of golf to a commander's call? Are those on the same level of national importance? You have an obnoxious habit of lumping together everything that's ever been said on Fox News as some sort of proxy for what the real individuals here are saying specifically. Why do you come here if not to directly interact with us? Is this just some outlet for you to howl at the moon? There are legitimately interesting conversations that happen on this forum, and on this topic, but all you can respond with is a whataboutism that none of the people talking to you at the moment actually said?

I know, I know, it's your username, if you weren't miserable about literally everything in the world, what else would you do? But it's pretty amazing to see people defending the *generals* against the first secdef in my lifetime that is telling them they have to live by the same standards they enforce.

Are you suggesting that commanders' calls should all be done digitally? Or that Zoom is the same thing as an in-person presentation?

I'm sure he's great. It's not like we have a cadre of purely sociopathic generals. But the nature of the system is such that only "yes men" are going to make it to the top. There's no real metric for effectiveness or success when we aren't in a global war of existential magnitude, so ass-covering and knob-polishing are the prerequisites. How many shitty bosses with toxic leadership did this guy serve without quitting? How about the first time his commander in chief babbled nonsensically on the global stage from 2017-2021? No, because there was still runway ahead for his career. These are the same chumps that spent their youth in the O-Clubs with strippers, drove back to their dorms drunk, then 20 years later told us with a straight face that if you have more than 3 drinks in a night (0-0-1-3) you are a bad officer, while neglecting to mention they have a bottle of Scotch in their Wing King desk. There was never a cause-of-the-day they wouldn't support, whether it was the drunk-sex-is-rape crusade of 2003, the great heritage room massacre of 2012, the Covid firings, or the transification attempt only recently squashed. They love their country, and they served it more than most Americans could ever fathom. But they were not, are not, men of principal and backbone. They are the ones who could best morph into whatever the next boss wanted from them, and the idea that an All-Call would be the last straw is laughable.

Oh please. The only sword these guys fall on is the fleshy kind that gets you promoted if you don't gag too hard on it. His plan fell apart, so he's leaving. Same as it ever was.