Lord Ratner

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.

Damn, water really kills the wow factor of an explosive. Well. Most of them. Next phase?

Collapsed into the wheel wells shortly after takeoff and never uncollapsed before landing

So how much absence of evidence is required for the random people who saw nothing with their own eyes and know no one who saw anything? A few years ago one would look at this story and say "man it's kind of hard to believe that that many famous people were involved in a massive pedophilia ring over the course of years and with many very trackable forms of transportation, and no one blew the whistle knowing they could make a lot of money doing so and stop something evil from happening." But that was years ago, when there hadn't been investigations by both political parties and literally millions of people speculating, hypothesizing, and scrutinizing releases of information. Or the hundreds of women in the era of me too keeping silent when prominent figures on both sides of the political spectrum can be implicated. Not to mention staff and visitors. Now that this is one of the most investigated cases in modern history, it's not hard to believe anymore. It's becoming impossible to believe. Turns out Jeffrey Epstein was a pedophile who also fancied himself a power broker and connection maker. Another completely unsurprising element to this whole story is that he went to Great lengths to keep his pedophilia hidden from the many, many, many people who would have everything to gain by turning him in and very little to lose. At this point, some of you guys just want it to be true. Personally I'm relieved that for once, the horrible conspiracy is just a theory.

Politics reflect the population, not the other way around. We have an unserious president because we have an unserious population, and that's not going to change until something serious happens to force them out of the delusion. Ironically, unserious politicians are going to accelerate the drive towards whatever ultra serious situation lies ahead.

Just wait. He didn't even make it a year before relapsing into full-on Trump mode. Three more years and anyone with a pulse running against Republicans will win in a landslide