Lord Ratner

I'm not sure what your point here is, but the Bundy standoff in 2014 is one of the best examples of why the second amendment matters in modern history (the second being Waco). In the Bundy standoffs, BLM nonsense and executive rulemaking were challenged with the threat of violence. Had there been no guns everyone knows the Bundy's would have been rounded up in one day and the issue would have never made the spotlight. Instead. the constitutional right to have weapons offset the power of the government and introduced a limiting principal to the random rulemaking power of the BLM: are we willing to hurt people to enforce this rule. The government should always have to perform this calculus before making a rule or law. This was a case of the 2nd Amendment limiting the government without bloodshed. In the case of Waco, government overreach and zeal resulted in a horrifying loss of life. But the aftermath changed the way the government operates. This was a case of the 2nd Amendment limiting the government with bloodshed. In both cases, only the 2nd Amendment allowed for important limitations on government intervention. As far as Bundy, in 2016 he was arrested and charged, which curiously ended with this little nugget: So I'm not sure you're making the point you wish to make about Bundy. Jan 6th, however, was a mess. Inspired (though not legally incited) by Trump. If you're wondering why Republicans are so reluctant to care about it, you'd have to appreciate the years of double-standard-outrage the left has imposed on the right. A year earlier the left was literally cheering on rioters.

I'm actually skeptical. A lot of the people who give a shit about this issue live in states that are absolutely not going to change abortion access. There's also a 0% chance that abortion takes a meaningful position on the list of Americans concerns when the economy is doing poorly. Again, they didn't make abortion illegal, though some states certainly will, and the people in those states are already used to living in an abortion-hostile environment. While it may have been politically risky, it was absolutely the right thing to do legally. If you haven't taken the time to read the draft ruling, it's only about 40 to 50 pages of actual text, and Scalia did an excellent job laying out the sheer lunacy of both the Roe and Casey rulings. We need a greater return to states rights. The ideological differences in this country are growing, and you don't solve ideological differences by forcing one side to do what the other wants. That goes for both the left and the right.

Got to push back on you here. When the FED tried raising the interest rates back in 2017-2018, Trump lost his mind and was publicly excoriating Powell everyday as the stock market slid. I don't think there's a chance in hell that he would suddenly find God on sound fiscal policy, which was always a weakness for him. It is certainly possible that the inflation factor would change Trump's calculus, but we certainly have no evidence to suggest that. I also think Trump would have pushed for more stimulus, though not as much as the democrats. One of the biggest drivers of inflation in this economy was the direct payments to consumers from the government, and that part of stimulus I think Trump would have wholeheartedly endorsed. Agree on energy policy, agree on covid policy.

No. I rarely interact with them. Unlike the flight attendants, we don't need to be on the plane before they board / after they deplane. I was most surprised by how easy the entire airport process is. You almost never wait in line for security, passengers dive out of the way when they see you coming, and the cockpit door filters out most of the nonsense. Definitely something I didn't appreciate until working at a passenger carrier. But boxes are obviously much, much, much less hassle. The advantage of the pax carriers is volume of flying. More planes and more pilots and more flights means more permutations for schedule construction and manipulation. We also have dramatically less night flying. My first choice was UPS and my second choice was FedEx. I was already in training at American Airlines when UPS called, and by that time it had been clear that both my job and my wife's job we're going to take us to Dallas. That was enough for me to turn down the interviews and stick with American, because as I believed then (and know for sure now), my strategy only works well when you live in base. You really have to figure out what type of person you are, and that's going to determine what type of flying your best suited for. There are mission hackers, crew dogs, sightseers, people pleasers, authoritarians, loopholers, managers, unionists, teachers, etc. Each airline offers different opportunities for those types of people. I spend a lot of time at my airline teaching people my method (maximum ratio of pay:hours flown). It's a process and it takes time, and in many cases by the time I'm done explaining it, they are so put off from the idea that they seem pathologically compelled to explain to me why my system isn't actually that good. It's a curious response, but a lot of these guys unknowingly weight any work that isn't sitting in the cockpit as many, many times more onerous than actually flying. So while I usually only fly between 30 to 50% of what a regular line pilot flies in a month, because I spend 10 to 15 hours per month (in 1-5 minute blocks) working the various trading platforms, they view that 15 hours as much worse than the additional 50 hours they spend flying. And usually I'm making somewhere between 15-40% more pay. I mention all that to highlight the concept. Their personality is to do the job they're told to do, not spend years learning the nuances of their contract so that they can exploit it. So what type of military pilot were you? You can probably use that information as the third criteria in selecting an airline 1. Who offered you a job 2. Where can you live without commuting 3. What flying job fits your personality?

Cool, another French crew with very different opinions on which direction the plane should be moving...

It's 99% Boeing's fault. They sell the plane to foreign countries the same way Airbus does. Gear up auto pilot on. It's not the training and proficiency, it's the idiosyncracy of specific pilot groups who hand fly well beyond what is necessary that just happened to apply a software-based malfunction for a system that wasn't even taught to the pilots in a meaningful way. This wasn't just runaway trim, and there was no way prior to the crash to train for an malfunction we weren't taught about. My thoughts only.

The nose trim switch is override the MCAS, so the MCAS would begin trimming the nose down very quickly, but using the reverse direction would reverse the trim. Once you let go of the switch, it will resume trimming those down. After the fix, this system is now limited in how many times it will try to trim forward. The stab trim cutouts which is always work. However the control column trim cut out, which disables nose up trim when you push the yoke forward and disables nose down trim when you pull the yolk back, did not override the MCAS system. This is because the system was basically designed to prevent you from stalling the aircraft, so it would by necessity need to override the pilot pulling back. The system still does this after the fixes. Correct on the stab pressure locking out the trim wheel. Ironically, I didn't realize that 737 crews aren't trained on how to resolve this because the trim system is similar in the KC135, where I was taught how to deal with it. For runaway nose down trim, if you cut it out while massively out of trim, the solution is to have the pilot flying put their feet up on the console and pull back as hard as they can, with the assistance of the other pilot, and get the plane somewhere around 20° nose up. Then the pilot not flying releases the yoke, while the pilot flying allows the plane to enter a vomit comet Arc, somewhere between -1 and 1G. While the nose tracks down from 20° back to the horizon the other pilot furiously trims the plane nose up, and at the horizon both pilots get back on the yoke and pull it nose high again. Rinse and repeat until the pressure is neutralized and the wheel is once again usable.

Not true. The nose trim switch is fully functional during an mcas failure, however every time you release it it will fight you in the opposite direction (nose down). I believe anybody who regularly hand flies the 737 would instinctually use the trim switches while fighting the forward tendency of the mcas, until the other pilot realized that the trim was running away and disabled it. The big risk would be disabling the trim system after it already put in a ton of forward trim. But that is less likely for someone who instinctually trims away pressure on the yoke. The manual trim wheel does not work very well when there is a high amount of force on the yolk.

Because it was at least 99% Boeing's fault. That said, at least at American Airlines it is highly unlikely that emergency would have led to a crash. Our pilots are much more proficient at hand flying and do so for somewhere between 5000 to 25,000 ft each leg, mostly on climb out. But the system was designed in a phenomenally poor manner, with what appears to be no thought for what happens if something in that system were to break. That's what happens when you prioritize marketing over engineering, a problem within the American executive class that is not limited to Boeing.

Problem is it's now well established that the CDC withheld data from analysis. Complaining that the people are poorly informed while ensuring they remained poorly informed. There's only one reason you do that... To perpetuate a lie.

I think not. The polls are devastating, so they have to give on something. And apparently they are doubling down on homelessness, illegal immigration, trans nonsense, don't say gay, etc. So maybe they won't 🤷🏻‍♂️

We benefit from more options, not fewer. Thanks for dropping in. You'll have a tough time competing with Trident, but if you do in sure we'll see the testimonials here in a matter of weeks. Good luck to everyone, I suspect the housing market is going to look really ugly really soon.

I think this is the sticking point for a lot of the isolationists. They suggest we will demonstrably harm our economic interests by "taking sides," in this case, the side of defending sovereignty, but they forget that the very wealth they seek to protect was gained explicitly through the stability provided by a world that respects sovereignty. You make it sound like there are only two choices, but obviously there are not. We aren't launching cruise missiles into Russia. There are many steps between unrestricted interaction and nuclear war. But we should not be supporting a country (and trading with the US is absolutely a form of support) that does not acknowledge sovereignty at a minimum. We are also providing material support to the Ukrainians, which we should. We do this because we hope it will lead to a Russian failure, which would be a win for the concept of sovereignty. The isolationists (FLEA being the most breathless example here. Similar to Tucker Carlson, who I also frequently agree with) keep asking what we are willing to sacrifice for Ukrainians. Not much, honestly. Ukrainians should sacrifice for Ukrainians, and they are. But for the geopolitical norm (sovereign borders) that has yielded unfathomable wealth and human flourishing for Americans and foreigners alike? Yes, for that we should sacrifice a lot. And that concept of sovereignty came from the enlightenment-era moral revelation of the sovereignty of the individual. Turns out when you base your society around that morality, wealth and growth follow. We should not be so quick to let it wither.

From the debris to the left it looks like it might have been an IED (perhaps not improvised) with an EFP. Nasty thing to drive into.

They're also happy to buy a shitload of American goods. So we should be careful before we write off the continent under an "America First" philosophy. But you're spot on in regards to progressive priorities. It's clear that Biden realizes the answer is energy production, but that he would lose his base should he pursue it. America should unleash the natural gas and oil producers (within the context of protecting the environment from accidents and spills) while developing the next generation of nuclear technology to export around the world. Unfortunately, progressives are completely unable to make the connection between energy access and human flourishing. The only technology that provides the required energy for the given population, while simultaneously fulfilling their goals of carbon reduction, is nuclear. But I've also believed for a long time that the progressive position on environmentalism is far more about preventing human growth than it is reducing climate change. But to admit that would be the death of their cause.

Sam Harris, who I often disagree with, had a good podcast about why this all matters to the West. The economic repercussions that will follow a regression in the world order, one where every country has to dedicate huge amounts of money to defense instead of social programs, healthcare, research, education, production, etc, will be devastating. Considering the millennial and gen z generations will already have to pay the bill for the ridiculous Keynesian spending of the Boomers and the financial-markets-fuckery of Gen X, it'll be a pretty hard hit to also have to fund the next world-wide rearmament.

How old do you think I am? Further, are you implying ones views are not subject to evolution? Seriously, your arguments are absurd and emotional.

Yeah dude, war sucks. Is your new argument that I haven't adequately put together a detailed plan of action for the entire armed forces of the West to employ against Russia? Shall I prioritize the targets for the initial strike as well? It's ironic that you think my position is poorly thought through, yet yours has absolutely no consideration for what the long-term effects of permanent appeasement entails. Just as long as your family doesn't have to move into the path of a nuke, right? The failing of your position is that there is a winning possibility. There isn't. There's just a series of shitty situations. You believe that staying out of Ukraine means only the Ukrainians will suffer and the rest of the world will bop along happily. I disagree. I think many generations will suffer if the United States is unable to respond to a nuclear attack by one country on another. Ok, you are clearly incapable of reading a post and responding to the actual content. If you haven't realized by now that my point is it's not about defending Ukrainians, then your ability to read is beyond my ability to fix.

You keep spouting this ridiculous nonsense, which is especially insane coming from someone who is actually in the military. How did your oath go? I must have missed the part where they asked me to put my family in the path of a hypothetical nuke. You keep acting like the worst thing that could happen is an American city being nuked. And maybe it is the worst thing that could happen this year, but it's not the worst thing that could happen at all. Empires fall, and some of us believe that the United States in decline is a tragedy for the billions of people on this planet. We've done more to advance the cause of human flourishing than any other society in history and at a pace never before imagined. That wasn't happenstance. It was a series of ideals developed over centuries, primarily in the West, that culminated in what we have today. Those ideals will not die in a nuclear strike on New York, Dallas, Los Angeles, or San Francisco. But they will die if we decide that there is no right and wrong, that self-interest is the only metric by which we engage in the world. And using previous examples of failure to be righteous is a pretty shitty excuse for failing again in the future. Not only will it lead to a dimmer future for my kids and their kids, appeasement doesn't fucking work. It's kind of like communism, everybody always has a fancy new academic way to do it, and it's totally going to be different this time, and then we end up in the same place. So rather than pretend like your question has any logical basis, I will answer the more rational and less hyperventilating version of it. If doing the right thing (which is absolutely a valid topic for debate) and protecting a world that has become immeasurably better than it ever has been, through protecting the fundamental idea that the individual is sovereign with a right to form a society and choose that society's destiny, leads to a nuclear strike on America by an evil regime, yes, I am prepared to accept that risk.

I would not respond with nukes. I would absolutely retaliate with nukes against a nuclear attack on the United States, and I would consider it a reasonable response to a nuclear attack on a NATO ally, though not a mandatory response. We do not need nukes to destroy a country. I would, however, respond with a declaration of war, a total blockade of all commerce with Russia (to include sanctions against any country that continues to support Russia), a No fly zone anywhere we could install one, and the explicit condition that the war ends upon the surrender or death of Putin and the officials we deem instrumental to the usage of nukes, as well as the denuclearization of Russia. Of course all the propaganda we put out would be that we are at war with the Putin regime, not the Russian people, yada yada yada. We have to have a clear objective (removal of Putin, denuclearization of Russia), as well as a plan to quickly and aggressively reintegrate the Russian people with the world economy at the end of the war. The Russian people are not Afghans, they were already heavily enmeshed in Western culture, and intimately tied to the rest of the world. Is it possible that Russia responds to that declaration with a nuclear attack against the United States? It is. It's also possible that Putin loses his mind and launches a new anyways. We've had to live with the realistic threat of nuclear war since we invented the damn things. But the nuclear peace that followed world war II was not one based on the appeasement, it was based on strength. In fact, we have spent decades since then appeasing Russia in the hopes that they would become something they have not. And here we are. As to the support of the American people, I might have sided with you prior to the invasion, but seeing the response of the citizenry of the world has given me pause. I did not expect the world to support Ukraine to the extent that they have, and I suspect that a nuclear attack would rouse something in all of us we forgot was there.

Nope. As repeatedly stated, it's a war over the use of nukes at all. Ukraine becomes immaterial. See above. It is vital that the nuclear stalemate be maintained. Secondarily, the extreme wealth of the West, and the world at large, is reliant on the concept of sovereignty. Going back to the bad-old-days of empire building will make us much, much poorer as a nation if we have to recalibrate our trading economy around countries that can be conquered at the whims of tyrants. Sure, NATO protects Western Europe, but you don't want NATO to exist, so by your logic every country without a superior military can be taken over by Russia or China, and we are to allow it unless there is a direct interest. And since you clearly will avoid a nuclear exchange at all costs, no direct interest is going to override that fear. There are a lot of Asian countries we do business with. But if China wants to take them, cool. What's the problem? And you think the world, and especially the US, will be better for this? That sounds like an Ayn Rand fantasy. It seems like the libertarian/isolationist wing of the right has joined the left in pretending that the things we did to create the present-day world didn't actually contribute to creating the most prosperous period in human history. It just happened *despite* our power projection. It's nonsense. The South Koreans sure are better off. Taiwan is better off. Kuwait is better off. Israel is better off. And all the countries that weren't invaded as a direct result of the United States military umbrella are better off. And we are better off. Most of your post is a reply to things no one said or scenarios that don't apply. A whole lot less than historically. Why is that? I explicitly stated we shouldn't respond with a nuke. We don't need to. Here we agree, and giving a nuke to Ukraine would not lower the tensions. A nuke or two aren't much of a deterrent anyways. We didn't lob nukes in Vietnam. Also, why was it different? Is this some sort of relativism nonsense? If you can't see the difference between how the West interacted with the world and how the communist regimes interacted with the world, to include the very disparate body counts, you've gone down a path that has no underlying logic. You either believe there is right and wrong in the world or you don't, which doesn't mean you always start a fight when something wrong happens or always do the most righteous thing, but when you start making comparisons as though there is parity between communist China and the United States, then the underlying assumptions have rendered the rest of this conversation pointless. They did not use nukes, so how does that compare? Ironically, Putin is in fact threatening the use of nukes, but you don't consider that a hollow bluff. Why? So again, is this the only line? That leaves every country on the planet available for conquest, and given the sad state of Europe's military, Asia, Africa, South America, and the Middle East aren't the only countries that would be at great risk under this philosophy. Essentially, India, Pakistan, North Korea, China, and Russia are free to invade as they see fit. And we will be better off staying out? I think maybe one of the primary disconnects here is that the isolationists (and I don't mean that as a pejorative) seem to think Ukraine is an isolated incident. I certainly don't. I see Ukraine as the logical outcome of a Western coalition that has lost faith in itself and allowed its strength to atrophy. I think Ukraine is just the first symptom of a much deeper disease. Fortunately it turns out Russia's military sucks balls, but no one in the West or East thought they were that bad off. I don't suspect China, just based off their numbers alone, would be facing the same type of stalemate if they had invaded Ukraine or a similarly sized country. The USSR was not a fluke. And while the West has evolved into a triumph of human cooperation and restraint, unanimously agreeing to abandon the goal of empire building, not everybody has signed on to that arrangement. If you believe that China and Russia would be content with merely establishing trading agreements with the countries in their sphere of influence, you have to ask yourself why they haven't just joined the West, since that's exactly what we do in the West. I submit that it's because they have far greater ambitions, namely, rebuilding ancient empires by force. And they both have nukes, so what exactly are we going to do to stop them?

I don't think it's quite that simple. Once nukes are used there's no precedent that's good. But responding with a nuke just because someone else used one is also setting a bad precedent. With so many smaller countries getting nuclear weaponry, I don't think we want to set the precedent that using a tactical nuke guarantees nuclear annihilation. But it should still guarantee annihilation (of the offending government). There are other ways to accomplish that, and no matter how many tactical nukes Russia uses in Ukraine, it is still not the same as launching an ICBM into New York. The problem with brickhistory's logic is that weakness emboldens aggressors. When it becomes clear that you will avoid something at all costs, you no longer have any leverage against someone whose desires do not overlap your own. In this case, Putin can wave nukes around and therefore, we can no longer intervene. Well. What if he decides to start using nukes if we don't lift the economic sanctions? What if he threatens to use nukes if we keep supplying Ukraine with stingers and javelins? Isolating Russia, similar to North Korea would not be an acceptable solution to the use of nuclear weaponry. Deterrence only works if annihilation follows, so the current regime would have to be destroyed. Anything short of Putin's head would be an endorsement of the use of nuclear weaponry to the tyrants of the world. Of course, the response to this would be that we are guaranteeing war. But that's also bullshit. We're not guaranteeing anything, we're just responding to the world we exist in. It's self-flagellating to claim any sort of responsibility to this by the United States. We're the first non-imperial power of this magnitude in history, and just because we didn't disband NATO after the USSR collapsed (though we absolutely did attempt to get Russia to join the West, and they refused), doesn't mean we have any responsibility for what's going on in Ukraine. Bumbling and missteps do not equal guilt, the guilt lies squarely with the Russian government, and should they decide on this path, that will be their fault as well.

I think China is wildly overrated, present day. There's certainly a future I can see where they represent a real threat, and obviously anyone with nuclear weaponry poses a threat, but their entire existence is propped up on an even more spectacular financial magic trick than ours. Their military, while impressive in size is nowhere nearly as well equipped as ours, and unbelievable less trained. Further, there's been no examples of totalitarian regimes whose militaries perform better, man for man, then the militaries of the West (in particular the US). It would be one thing if we had to invade China (or Russia). That's a fight I don't want. But since the United States does not conquer other lands, we wouldn't have to. The economic warfare being waged on Russia would be far more catastrophic on China. Russia is deeply reliant on trade, but China exists in its present form solely because of it. If anything, I think the economic damage being done to Russia, married with the incredibly poor performance of their military (which is more experienced than China) has given China reason to perhaps push back their ambitions a couple more decades. There's a lot of smart money out there that's anticipating a Chinese economic catastrophe that rivals Japan's in 1989. I think xi jinping himself is deeply concerned, as his moves to rein-in real estate speculation, possibly too late, indicate a fairly significant level of concern. Since there are no longer localized recessions, the United States or China going into a recession will send the rest of the world with China relies on growth numbers that we haven't seen in generations, and those numbers are not looking good. Couple that with their version of the baby boomer wave and the population catastrophe the one child policy created, well, let's just say I'm not so sure our position as the top dog is in any short or medium term risk. Be that as it may, humanity is long overdue for a true war. I think Ukraine shows that it wasn't only the West that wildly underestimated how awful a real war can be. Perhaps it will turn out that Putin did us a favor, giving us a much smaller war to forestall the big one.

I think that might be the difficult thing for a lot of people to reconcile. They're simply might not be a scenario where we are not involved, other than surrendering the world order. Unfortunately, everything now boils down to Putin's insanity and his subordinates' will to follow. I don't think either can be reliably assessed. But I think any use of a nuclear weapon anywhere in the world is a guarantee of war, and potentially a world war. I think at that point our response will very much determine whether places like China decide to wait another couple decades before making their move (war), or capitalize on the chaos to advance their strategic goals (world war).

With the intelligencia increasingly convinced that nuclear weapons are a realistic possibility, what does the "hands off" crowd here think should be the response should Putin use a tactical nuke in Ukraine? Is there any condition where Russian action within the Ukrainian border justifies an increased and direct global response? If so, explicitly spell out the red line. Personally, I think any use of nuclear weapons justifies the immediate declaration of war with Russia. In fact, that goes for any country. And not economic war. War war. No nuclear counter response, that I believe can/should only be used in response to a nuclear attack on the US, but an immediate and total blockade of Russia, establishment of no-fly over the Western nations surrounding Russia (we aren't going to send US planes over China, but I think they'd join the West against Russia to protect their own nuclear assets), and immediate sanctions against any country that continues to trade with Russia. The only acceptable "surrender" is the removal of the Putin regime and the denuclearization of Russia. Basically, everything short of actually invading Russia. The danger of losing the concept of nuclear deterrence, which explicitly requires the nuclear powers to use nukes for defense only, is too vital to let perish because Putin is afraid of losing control of Russia. Barring nuclear use by Putin, the question of genocide is a much tougher red line to draw. I'm not sure what the right answer is there, because the real strategic victory is for the Ukrainians to defeat Putin rather than the West. It seems more and more likely the Ukrainians can win with enough supplies from the West, but it's by no means certain. If they are overrun and a prolonged insurgency becomes a genocide, what do we do? I find it hard to believe the answer is to just watch.