One more reason to thank our closest
It's really fucking great to have the US on our side. Truly!
War with...Iran?
- Thread starter Technarch
- Start date
It's really fucking great to have the US on our side. Truly!
Very true and Top Gun is probably the best example of this. The guy's call sign is literally Maverick, thumbs his nose at the incompetent top brass who are more interested in rules and regulations than getting the job done.
Looks like diplomacy via Truth Social isn't really diplomacy at all: (from politico.com)
(My emphasis)
In terms of soft power, America is a shadow of what it was before Trump v2. In terms of hard power? Maybe overextended already.
Man, it's just really weird how ALL sides can use AI to spew bullshit, not just the fascist shitbags working for Stephen Miller. I'm sure there's going to be an increased crackdown on AI-generated videos soon.
It really feels like this...
"haha, look, funny AI video making Obamas monkeys! free speech"!
"AI video making fun of Trump"
NO NOT LIKE THAT
Our navy is supposed to be on a rotating 1/3 schedule. One third on mission, one third in reserve, and one third in for maintenance.
Almost every ship is behind on maintenance. Extrapolate as you will.
Iran better be careful or Brendan Carr is going to take their social media broadcasting license away.
That may track with Trump’s M.O. This was recounted by his former fixer Michael Cohen during his trial. Trump makes requests for illegal or unethical actions indirectly and outside of traceable methods. That way when things head south, he can deny even requesting the action.
It’s why back in the 2020 election, Kemp was recording the phone call where Trump was requesting him to “find” the extra votes. The gambit was well-known by that time already.
No, the entire movie was Maverick learning how to play by the rules that everyone else abides by, because the rules exist for a good reason. His backseater and best friend begs him to get his shit together after they get reprimanded for buzzing the tower because he's got a family to support and he's afraid of getting washed out of the program or worse. His squadron mates tell him to get his shit together because he's more dangerous to them than the enemy is, and the very next training hop Goose gets killed because Mav is pressing too closely in order to score the victory and take the Top Gun trophy. The movie literally ends with Maverick returning to Top Gun to become an instructor after finally having absorbed all the lessons the senior instructors were trying to hammer into his head, and having exorcised the demons of his losing his father and Goose.
Pankaj Mishra writes in the New York Review of Books about the long history and ties between Iran and India. Just about where the paywall kicks in, he bemoans the fact that this is no longer the case under Modi.
He goes on, trying to find any mention of the Dena in Indian press finding it too is cleansed of courage and the freedom needed to even mention the act.
His fury doesn't end there, he takes Modi to task as well.
Good reading and well worth the $1 per issue paywall the NYRB requests.
Carriers deploy on six month schedules. Gerald R. Ford has been at sea for nine months, and is currently expected not to return to port for another two months.
The Ford was already in the Mediterranean when it was redirected to the Carribean for the Venezuela shit show, and was why the US had no assets available to support the best opportunity for overthrowing the mullahs when millions of Iranians were protesting in the streets.
I’m pretty sure
This despite him always posturing as if Fidel Castro personally wronged him in some way, this presumably to curry favor with the Cuban diaspora population of people who collaborated with Batista or the US-backed plantation class.
Rubio’s family just left during the Batista regime because they had better prospects in America and could afford the move.
This despite him always posturing as if Fidel Castro personally wronged him in some way, this presumably to curry favor with the Cuban diaspora population of people who collaborated with Batista or the US-backed plantation class.
I was thinking of the sequel, but maybe your point applies even more there since that was driven mostly by regret and guilt.
I would hope that if there were real guys like Maverick in the Navy they'd be grounded and discharged instead of coddled til the killed a teammate.
The Ford seems to have been having trouble lately.
https://www.pilotonline.com/2026/03...ss-gerald-r-ford-raged-for-hours-sailors-say/
That is the first movie. He backslid pretty hard by the second one.
Link
These people are flailing, can’t even land on a single message, and are just lobbing the goalposts.
Americans don’t care if Iran has nukes if it means gas is cheap. Still would be nice if American media pretended to care about the humanitarian side just a bit, but I guess they know their audience.
Ya, but that's more along the lines of unintended consequences I don't entirely hate than any strategically planned outcome. In fact, I'm pretty sure that Trump considers this to be a downside.
Wow, what an excuse, stated as if, once we find out they don't have nuclear weapons* it will open up again, when, in reality, it's up to the Iranians.
* As if we don't know this already. I mean, if they had them, we gave them the perfect excuse to use them.
The only slightly-plausible method I can think of for the U.S. to extricate itself from the Iranian hornets' nest would be to jettison Trump, blame the entire debacle on him, and submit him to the Hague for war crimes.
I was going to respond that you could substitute Bibi for Trump, and it might work, but Bibi's way too smart to allow that to happen.
Not to mention all the Epstein (and other) kompromat on so many people at so many levels of the US levers of power.
That's putting it mildly. He's not even concerned enough to maintain a coherent narrative.
30 hours to put out a laundry fire. 600 servicemen sleeping on floors and tables. If they're lucky the toilets are working that day.
Ford's been deployed 10 months now, there will be something else the longer they stay deployed. Irony is they're not even accomplishing anything. Three carriers plus a marine amphib assault carrier are just floating around not doing anything, not even providing security or escort duty. What an absolute shitshow.
Bibi's just as guilty, but I care a lot less about whether Israel engages in forever war with Iran.
The real problem is the Epstein child rapist billionaire class, yes, but for purposes of cauterizing the war, removing Trump would seem to be the most expedient option.
To the ruling political class in the US, setting that as a precedent is a worse problem than this current crisis. If US politicians were held to account for their actions…
Of course he is. His strategy benefits immensely from the war and Trump distracting media attention. Trump is a perfect pawn to take out Israel's last nation-state opponent freeing its own forces to do exactly what they're doing.
Would a cunning, highly experienced, intelligent. politically shrewd former Sayeret Matkal officer permit a "Pearl Harbor" (which got out of hand, not a lasting political loss) then run with that ball in Gaza while puppeteering his patsy to destroy Iran, whose leadership are conveniently reviled after offing thousands of their own citizens?
Surely no one would think of that....
Is the "former President" supposedly envious of Trump's "little excursion" actually powered by AI?
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/art...h-16-iran-war-cuba-learning-disabilities.html
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/art...h-16-iran-war-cuba-learning-disabilities.html
I like the cut of your jib sir!!
Well, if he'd gotten permanently grounded after the first time he buzzed the tower it wouldn't have been an interesting movie. And the context in which the reason Iceman thinks he's dangerous isn't because he's afraid of Mav's aggressive flying, it's because Mav had just gotten dressed down by an instructor in front of everyone for leaving his wingman, that being Iceman, who promptly got popped. Iceman tells Maverick his unwillingness to be a team player is going to get his teammates killed by the enemy because the enemy is dangerous enough as it is, but Mav not keeping his team and mission in mind will get everyone killed that much easier. This in fact is the whole point of the Naval Fighter Weapons School, which is to teach pilots air combat skills and tactics at the very highest level. Iceman is telling Mav to get with the program. Up to this point, aside from buzzing the tower, there's little Mav had done that would have got him kicked out of the Navy, he merely would have washed out of Top Gun and gone back to his squadron.
And in his defense regarding Goose's death, the F-14A killed lots of pilots due to asymmetrical compressor stalls at high AOA leading to flat spins, which is exactly what happened in the movie. (Seriously, the TF30 engines in the F-14A would compressor stall if you looked at them funny. They stalled in jet wash. They stalled at aggressive changes in thrust. Too much yaw when high AOA would trigger a stall, and the F-14 had plenty of adverse yaw in high AOA. At the time the risk was considered acceptable and the Navy expected to have upgraded engines that ended up being over 10 years late.) During ejection the canopy also had a tendency to float above the fuselage if the aircraft was in a stall. Real life procedures had to be put in place where if the aircraft was in a stall/flat spin, the crew should pop the canopy and give it a chance to clear before pulling the ejection handles. What Mav considered himself "at fault" for was for aggressively trailing Iceman instead of laying back a bit and giving Iceman a some time to cook which is what ended up getting him in Iceman's jetwash and causing the compressor stall, but that's not against the rules, and isn't in and of itself more risky than any other aggressive maneuvering in a plane that had lots of ways to kill its pilots.. All things considered it's entirely reasonable he would have been cleared by a board of investigation. Mav just takes it especially hard because he'd promised Goose he wouldn't let him down, and feels his aggression created a situation that got Goose killed.
Again, in his defense, the only two times he "broke the rules", he was the only one who would have paid the price. He flew the Darkstar for the speed record after he got word that Admiral Ed Harris had shut the program down because he wanted to give the people who'd worked so hard to develop it their win, and he knew that he would catch the blame and worst that would happen is he'd be grounded and separated. We know this because Admiral Ed Harris mocks him for only being a Captain after thirty years in service, so he's long been living on borrowed time. (One thing the movie gets right is the only way you can be a Captain as long as Mav was and still be in the Navy is either you have irreplacable skills, or you have interest from someone with influence. Mav had both, much to Admiral Ed Harris' chagrin.)
The second incident is after he flew the training course without authorization, and he'd already been removed as senior instructor. Mav had been removed not because of anything he'd done, but because the students still weren't able to complete the low level training course and Mav's protector Admiral Iceman had died and Admiral Jon Hamm just plain didn't like him. His goal here was to prove that the mission profile he'd been training his students to perfect could be done, and it if they could pull it off they would survive, rather than the much more conservative profile that Admiral Jon Hamm advocated but admitted would end up getting pilots killed. Again, here, the only consequences would have been for Maverick, he was already out of the program and the worst that would happen is he'd be grounded and separated (which was an inevitability now that his "guardian angel" Admiral Iceman was dead.)
What we see consistently from Maverick in this movie that is that he's more than willing to accept excessive personal and professional risk to himself, but is deeply anxious about his students and the people he cares about taking similar excessive risk. This is where the Rooster subplot comes in, because he's so wracked with guilt over how his reaction to his father's death indirectly led to Goose's death, he doesn't want Rooster following his path.
And I'll let it end at that because this is not the "Critical Analysis of Pete 'Maverick' Mitchell Thread". To wrest things back on topic, here's an article about the Israelis comprehensively destroying Iran's F-14 fleet. I guess it's a good thing they didn't let that movie languish in development hell even longer than they did.
https://www.twz.com/air/iranian-f-14-tomcats-meet-their-doom-in-israeli-airstrikes
Interesting that multiple ex-IC or ex-.mil YT podcast guests are letting it slip that Tulsi Gabbard presented a written assessment report to DJT before Feb. 28th that the current armed conflict with Iran would be a "no win" situation.
Also, instead of being a completely Netanyahu-pushed affair, the Saudi's (MBS) and the current long-time UAE ambassador to the US (nicknamed "Brotaiba" in DC circles) are also said to be instrumental, directly or indirectly (via Kushner & co.), in getting the military hostility with Iran started.
Also, instead of being a completely Netanyahu-pushed affair, the Saudi's (MBS) and the current long-time UAE ambassador to the US (nicknamed "Brotaiba" in DC circles) are also said to be instrumental, directly or indirectly (via Kushner & co.), in getting the military hostility with Iran started.
Before this is over there's a decent chance this will become known as a textbook example of a pyrrhic victory.
Ironic, given that NATO's Article 5 has only been invoked once. By the United States. And the rest of NATO helped without asking any questions.
Even though they probably shouldn't have.
As a former Navy man, that's a recipe for disaster. So many things can go wrong on a ship at sea and there's a limit to what even the most skilled crew can repair/replace before it needs a full refit/overhaul.
And that will absolutely KILL morale. Being forced to stay away from your loved ones well after the initial deployment date and knowing that you're accomplishing nothing? That you're only there for a senile old man's ego?
It's hard enough being at sea for a long deployment, but one with no reason? Watch conditions on board deteriorate at a rapidly increasing speed.