Lord Ratner

No, I'm mad because all reporting/interviews/personal interactions indicated that they have always been, and remain completely opposed to the withdrawal. So a more accurate and less patronizing rephrasing of your assessment would be: I'm mad that more generals didn't resign in protest because they didn't like the political decision that the elected president made. You know, the decision that has been the biggest foreign policy embarrassment in modern American history? That got more Americans killed in one day than in the past several years combined. Or are you aware of any flag officers who were advocating for a complete pull out?

This might be the worst post I've ever read here, only because of how insidiously dangerous this mindset is. Yeah, war is messy. But this war wasn't messy for over 2 years, and really it wasn't messy for quite a bit longer than that. This war was very very clean, to the point where you can't even really call it a war anymore. But it suddenly became very messy because of the idiotic desires of the president (and his predecessor) and the bureaucracy that enabled them to fuck this up. Under Trump a couple high-profile generals resigned because of this idiotic desire to return to isolationism. Where were the resignations under Biden? It is inconceivable that the military hierarchy did not know this was going to happen. Anyone who has been deployed there over the last two decades knew that this would happen if we left, so where are the high-profile resignations? Where are the generals falling on their swords in an attempt to prevent bloodshed? Instead we get an airstrike as a consolation prize, a wishful distraction by an administration that is fucked up so royally even an incredibly accommodating press can't help but push back on their lies. If you don't lose your job over a fuck up like this, then you are essentially advocating for a system that has no accountability.

Did the advertising on these forms just get a whole lot worse for anybody else? It seems like I have to click through five pop ups and banners now just to navigate to the next topic. I'm not sure I can browse the forums much longer like this, but I wanted to make sure it's not just my phone

This is the single biggest complication with liberal ideology (I'm not saying you are necessarily a liberal). Smart people who have a track record of making responsible choices that lead to successful outcomes look at the people around them, many of whom are in fact not nearly as smart, and despair the bad choices they make that often lead to worse outcomes. It eventually leads (with the best intentions) to restricting, discouraging, or outright banning the behavior. And without fail, the people who were meant to be helped by the ban find new and creative ways to self-destruct. That's just how humans are. For many, many people they only learn successful habits through failure. Even very smart, otherwise rational people. Taking away that failure opportunity only send them in another destructive direction, except now they are exacerbated by the rage of having some well-meaning prick tell them what the "must" do. There is a positive correlation between personal freedoms and national power and wealth. Paradoxically, short term complications lead to long term success.

Vaccines historically do not have effects that manifest more than 12 months after getting the shot. Mostly it's a matter of weeks. However identifying the pattern takes much longer, and constructing and executing the proper studies to validate the potential effects takes even longer. Years in fact. 10 years also ensures the bulk of the elected officials, appointees, and bureaucrats involved "at ground zero" are cycled out, allowing for a more dispassionate analysis of the necessity for a mandate.

At least 10 years of real-world data using voluntarily vaccinated as the sample. Then mandates must be proportional to the threat, so only mandates where they make sense. Hospitals and schools. Children when the disease actually threatens children. The severity of the disease is the true regulator of vaccination rates. If COVID-19 was killing people like SARS or MERS(10-30%), people would line up for the vaccine, just like they did in Feb/March when it came out and all the fat/old people who were most at risk went and got it. After 10 years of studying the vaccine effects, then you can make it mandatory as well as punish people on their insurance premiums if they won't get it. Disclaimer, I'm voluntarily vaccinated, so your stupid and hysterical arguments are not just ridiculous-sounding to the anti-vax crowd.

Yeah, I think we're just split on semantics. How you execute the vision is up to you, but if your execution doesn't live up to the executive vision, buhbye. There's no time to spend months or years trying to retrain a bunch of generals or colonels to think how you need them to think to execute the vision. That's where Welsh failed. This is one of the ongoing problems with the concept of time and milestone-based promotions. I think that's semi-functional up to lieutenant colonel. But colonels and generals should be promoted based off the job they have, not the jobs they had. That would free up higher level commanders to select exactly who they already know to be the right people for the right job (vision), then promote them to the required rank. Historically this happens anyway during wartime with field promotions. When the stakes actually matter, which they have not for many many years, the ridiculous system of broadening and education to produce leaders is cast aside.

I used to make this point about autism. Even if you believe that vaccines cause autism (which I don't), the number of autistic kids is way lower than the number of kids killed/ruined by measles, polio, etc. So isn't autism better?

Shack. I'm vaccinated, but I'm completely against the mandatory programs because once your leaders demonstrate they are perfectly comfortable lying to you, trusting them is foolish. We still don't have hard numbers for ending lockdowns and mask mandates after 20 MONTHS! Really? You have to be intentionally blind to think there's a plan. There isn't. Just like the military, the people who desire and achieve leadership positions in government bureaucracies are largely incapable of operating in an unfamiliar situation. Our system prioritizes individual liberty because the incompetence of leaders in large organizations is an old and persistent phenomenon. Just look at the totality of the pandemic, not just the mandates you like or the actions that made sense, but the whole timeline, and tell me you want more government control over our lives. No thanks.

Exactly that mentality is why military leadership is so bad. What you described is a lack of accountability to the vision. It comes from the mindset in the military that the right professional education and career "broadening" will produce good leaders, when in fact, for a lot of people who make it to Sq/CC and above, they just don't have what it takes. You can't run a huge organization without delegating, and delegating is an ongoing process. Keep cycling through people until you find the right one. But in the military we instead we cycle leaders out every two years regardless and "let [them] loose to figure it out" for that short amount of time. The results speak for themselves. Figuring out how to solve a SQ/GP/WG specific problem as the leader of that organization is great. Figuring out your own interpretation of the executive vision is not. Comply or step aside. An example: https://www.507arw.afrc.af.mil/About-Us/Biographies/Display/Article/2409725/colonel-michael-b-parks/ This guy got one of the worst climate assessment surveys in the AF when he was SQ/CC. 44 pages of comments of I remember correctly, almost entirely negative. I've never seen such a united disdain for a commander from the whole squadron, even the ones he was pushing for future command. Yet there he is... Rewarded. There are plenty of examples.

I never once saw a general who held his subordinate generals accountable to their leadership vision. I'm not sure you could find a more revered leader than Welsh as CSAF, yet for all his talk of "if it doesn't make sense, we don't do it," he never fired a general or O-6 who ignored that philosophy within their own command. And there were plenty to make examples of. It might be the single greatest leadership failing of the AF. Wing commanders and above are only held accountable if they do something illegal or something that generated publicity.

For the same reason the vaccinated are being told to wear masks. The leadership knows they can't easily discriminate between vaccinated and unvaccinated, so unvaccinated people will be able to get by not wearing masks. This is intolerable to the power hungry, so everyone wears masks. They are, however, smart enough to realize that if the vaccinated were told the truth, that they were forced to wear masks because the unvaccinated were breaking the rules, they would never go along with it. So instead we're subjected to wild exaggerations and logical fallacies about disease transmission amongst the vaccinated. It always shuffles back to the same unanswered question. If the vaccinated are largely protected from the disease, and everybody has had a chance to be vaccinated, and the unvaccinated are not asking anybody to do anything to protect them, why exactly are masks still mandatory? And overloading the hospitals is no longer a relevant argument. It's been 18 months and trillions of dollars spent. If the hospitals haven't been built out to handle this disease, they never will be.

Shack. You've hit precisely on why I'm so opposed to what .gov has been doing for a year and a half now. If this was really about "the science" we'd be doing things a lot differently. This is a battle between political ideologies. Primarily, the modern leftist movement (more collectivist than the classically liberal left of the 1900's) views this as an opportunity to prove that collective compliance will yield superior outcomes over decentralization and individualism. Thus the outage over republican states choosing different prevention strategies despite no correlation between lockdown policies and long term spread. Since they were unable to secure national uniformity on masking and lockdown policy, vaccination is the final opportunity to "pull together" and validate the merit of centralized (federal) control. If infection-based immunity is a part of the solution, then the eventual goal (herd immunity "beating" the disease) will have been obtained through means not directly guided by the government. For the political left, COVID was an opportunity to finally justify the abolishment of states' rights, a long held goal of progressives.

Which in no way takes away from the success of the vaccine. But it sure does remove legitimacy from the very aggressive push for mandatory vaccination in a wide range of career fields (like airline pilot and military). And now we are already talking about booster shots, after less than a year. I suspect many will want those to be mandatory as well. I'm a big science advocate, but I've never heard of a single medical research subject being mastered to the point of directing legally compelled participation in less than a year. There's no such thing as experts on new diseases, and COVID 19 is still very new. It's not a coincidence that overwhelmingly the "pro-vax" people are democrats and the "anti-vax" people are republican. Like everything else in the modern world of social media and 24-hour news, it's about what team you're on, not facts.

I'm not sure this sounds the same in your head as it does to the rest of us. I'm vaccinated and you sound like a twat.

For sure. It's not about what the left (institution, not voters) will go after as racist (literally anything), it's about what will capture the attention of the moderate voters.

That's kind of my point. Harris was picked because they recognize that presidential candidates need something that catches attention. In their opinion, her being a woman and black was the hook. I don't think Biden won so much as Trump lost, because Biden doesn't have any hook at all. Trump was his own worst enemy and he paid the price. Don't get me wrong, I like DeSantis a lot. He's been a good leader, he's able to coherently explain his position, and he's not afraid to call out media bias. But those are red meat for the base. If you want to pull Independence and Democrats, you need something the differentiates. DeSantis is just another white guy with ideas on how to run the country. He has nothing visual to distinguish him from the competition and attract the shallow voters. I also agree that Dan Crenshaw is not ready to run for president, which is why I'd love to see him as Haley's running mate. 8 years in Washington will make him a national figure, give him all of the experience he needs, and we would actually have a relevant and intelligent vice president. I really liked Mike pence, but he's just another boring white guy. For better or worse, we need to push back on the leftist narrative that conservatism is a white only event. It's difficult to do that without interesting figures.

Exactly. You'd have to be retarded to think an F-16 is harder to fly than a KC-135. One was designed to let the single pilot execute multiple mission types simultaneously while communicating with air and ground units, the other was repurposed 1950's airline technology with steel cables moving the controls. Now, harder mission? Ten times out of ten the fighter mission is orders of magnitude harder than the tanker mission. It's not even close.

I like the Desantis a lot. But at the end of the day he's just a white guy. He has no hook. Nikki Haley is a minority woman, and Dan Crenshaw may be a white guy, but he's a white guy with an eye patch. And a Navy Seal war hero. He has been very clever in wearing that when he has perfectly serviceable fake eyes that he could be using instead. But a boring white guy needs a hook, and an eye patch certainly draws attention. No one gives two shits about the vice president, so I don't think Nikki Haley as the running mate will make a difference. Besides she's got the experience at this point, she should run for the big seat. All the have learned the real lesson of Donald Trump, which is never to apologize or be weak with the media. They are able to do that without the ridiculous clownishnes of DJT, and they have an intellectual argument for their positions.

Nikki Haley with Dan Crenshaw as VP. I think that'll get you 16 years of Republican rule pretty easily. The debates would be a blood bath. I'm not sure even the most ardent democrats can defend Biden through this either tactically, strategically, or politically. The guy is just losing it. I'm amazed at how many "press conferences" he openly starts with "they gave me a list of people to call here." Watching Stephanopoulos literally coach Biden into saying we wouldn't leave Americans behind was another low point. Imagine the irony of the American people choosing the most boring democrat candidate (against the will of the party machinery) to escape the insanity of Donald Trump only to get a whole new type of insanity.

Well, let's ignore for a moment that Biden has a 40-year track record of being an idiot. The situation in AFG is no longer fixable, so why not shift to the "distract" phase?

Watch how Biden is responding. He's gone full angry-old-man. I don't think there's any chance he resigns, which means the 25th amendment, which will be a nightmare for the Dems. He sticks around longer as the inevitable catastrophe on AFG unfolds, then we get President Harris from a contentious legal procedure. Not good. Trump was a clown, and he was just as anxious to pull out of AFG. No one can say if he would have like this, but he certainly was pushing for an even hastier timeline. That said, the *entire* pitch from Biden/Democrats was bringing the adults back in power to save us from the endless Trumpian catastrophes (that were regularly promised but never materialized). Biden is in for less than a year and we get a literal repeat of Saigon. So I'm not sure how the democrats will talk their way out of this one. I suspect the midterms will be a bloodbath. I don't know a single person who had *any* experience with the ANA who thought they would maintain control of the country. There's zero chance this wasn't briefed over and over and over. And if Adam Schiff is already selling out Biden by defending the Intel community, then the party royalty has already decided to sacrifice him.

Agreed, only to add that cash is a party of diversifying. We've gotten so used to the concept that stocks are the only place where your money can make money, because fed policy for the past 15 years has basically made that the truth, barring real estate. How does the phrase go? Bulls get rich, bears get rich, but hogs get slaughtered. There's just too much that doesn't add up, and it looks like inflation is going to be what brings the whole silly plan down. Consider: - higher than expected unemployment, yet 10 million unfilled jobs - crippling supply chain issues *still* hitting nearly every industry. Does anyone think it's good for the economy that you can't buy new cars thanks to the chip shortage? - all of the growth estimates have been off in the wrong direction, and this is after a pandemic set the bar very low. And now China's growth is also slowing. - the government is literally injecting $120 *billion* per*month* into bonds and mortgage backed securities. - inflation... The great destroyer. Right now the cost of margin trading is between 4 and 6% depending on how much money you have in the account. That's with interest rates effectively set at zero by the fed. If inflation continues, and you know it's going to because the Fed is now admitting that it's happening and they wouldn't do that if there was any hope that it wasn't, the cost of all of that leverage is going to go up. Fine and well as long as the stock market keeps delivering these eye-watering games that we seem to have completely acclimated to, but if the FED has to admit that inflation is now a concern, how long do you think they'll be able to keep injecting 120 billion per month into the market? What happens when the biggest support for market prices gets removed, at the exact same time that the cost of leveraging goes up? I was talking to someone who expects a 50% reduction in the s&p 500. It sounds crazy, until you look at the chart and realize that a 50% drop would only bring us down to 2016 levels. Is it really hard to imagine the market, after enduring a global pandemic that continues to cripple the economies of entire countries, would go back to a level it was at only 5 years ago? I'm not advocating for selling everything and sitting on a pile of cash, but if you're not going to take profits after the most incredible run up in prices under the most unlikely conditions, then you're never going to take profits at all. So many people who are euphoric over the stock markets last five or six years don't seem to have stopped to consider exactly what the implications are if this really is the New Normal. Now is a really good time for people to look at their bank accounts and make sure they are complying with the common sense financial security measures that no one talks about anymore. Do you have 6 months of expenses in a savings account, ready for an emergency? If you lose your primary income source at the same time that the market takes a giant hit, are you going to be in a pinch? Do you have a mortgage that you can only afford if there's no change to your employment status? The biggest losers in any crash are always the retail investors. Always. Meme stocks and cryptocurrency have the institutional investors on edge. Sure they'll get on CNBC and tell you how they're buying Bitcoin, but they're surprisingly quiet when they sell after all the retail investors follow their lead and buy something they don't understand. And of course I could be wrong, I probably am. But my family and friends who have everything in the market right now I'll admit that none of this makes any sense. And when I ask them when, if not now, is their trigger to take profits, they have no answer.

Not just any old threat... A terror threat 😂🤣

The leveraging levels are concerning as well. Maybe more concerning than everything else. Right now that leverage only costs 4-6%. If the totally-transient-and-not-concerning inflation eventually forces the Fed to raise the rates... Remember that when the market is over-leveraged, everything loses during the correction. We got a fast-paced glimpse at this in March of 2020. Stocks, bonds, precious metals, crypto, REITS... they all tanked. We're more leveraged now than were were then. Only cash survives the onslaught.