MazelTovCocktail posted:

Finally we can spend 10-20 years now planning for jungle war fighting equipment since the Middle East ones will be useless. Hey Retro Vietnam stuff time!

Oh I was tooling around looking for Prime Deals for the Washington Post (since reupping to the Economist I’ve been getting back into current affairs again) and if you have Prime you can get three months of the Post free and then it’s $5.99 a month.

Anyone know of any decent NY Times deals.

Basically I’ve lost my ability to deal with paywalls or ignoring sources using them.

Also morbid interest besides say the WSJ or Daily Telegraph are there any decent center-right Newspapers our there worth reading (cue jokes about WaPo incoming).

The Iron Rose posted:

Honestly I'm willing to brush off the weird creepiness cuz he sure seems to do that to everyone which makes it more of a personal space issue than a sexual harassment issue so eh, I can live with it


but praising Cheney man? He's really aiming for the dumb american moderate crowd I guess

Hot Karl Marx posted:

Good thing McConnell has been hard at work for years to cover for poo poo exactly like this

colachute posted:

I agree with your sentiment and have for a while, but the CE thread for the last several months has said:


Also people have said not to impeach because it’s dumb. I said MONTHS ago to impeach and was told how stupid it was. At the very least it draws a hard line in the sand and handcuffs people to Trump if he eventually goes down for anything.

KirbyKhan posted:

How do I access this through my phone. Was digging for an RSS feed but I guess I gotta go through IHeartRadio app?

psydude posted:

Wasn't France's started largely by rural people complaining about increased petrol taxes aimed at reducing emissions?

WAR CRIME SYNDICAT posted:

And people cared about this?

WAR CRIME SYNDICAT posted:

I was being sarcastic, my dude.

WAR CRIME SYNDICAT posted:

No worries! My sarcasm was just a comment on how our country has decided to ignore that exact problem and in fact encourage it, especially when it comes to our president.

A Bad Poster posted:

Three things in the world should never be run as businesses: schools, healthcare providers, and the government. Their only purpose is to provide a service, nothing more. If the former two aren't running at a loss, then they aren't running correctly. If the government were run correctly, you'd tax people for just as much as you spend, but that would disproportionately take money away from the rich, since, ya know, they're the ones with all the money, so that's never going to happen.

Dum Cumpster posted:

Off topic thank you (I think) to whoever recommended the It Could Happen Here podcast. Off to buy more ammo!

Nostalgia4Butts posted:

AreWeDrunkYet posted:

Anti-interventionism - the Dem establishment is still very eager to blow up problems overseas. Gabbard is ... something ... but bucking the party line on the use of force automatically makes you an anti-establishment radical according to all the "reasonable" people.

Casimir Radon posted:

You get sat down by your fundie commander and he chastises you for not valuing the life of your ectopic miracle child. Then he puts you under house arrest and tells you to pray. At trial this is considered an expression of his sincere beliefs.

Ceiling fan posted:

There's no shortage of generals who'll say yes to anything that come from higher up the chain of command.

Nostalgia4Ass posted:

Well that certainly clears things up.

Casimir Radon posted:

Too many Evangelical shitheads in the military. They will happily pull out their Bible and cites you some scripture about why this is a good idea.

MRC48B posted:

Nah, we've been stacking the general officer ranks with yes-men (and women) for decades.

Let's burn this poo poo to the ground.

DoktorLoken posted:

Have you read Command & Control? Does this give you a warm (*not ionizing radiation) feeling?

psydude posted:

I don't think I ever attended a religious service the entire time I was in the military.

FAUXTON posted:

Jesuits are usually pretty rad conversationalists, the current Pope is one and he'd probably be totally cool with it but I imagine you meant ol' Benedict or hell maybe even JP2.

Nostalgia4Ass posted:

Five Guys is definitely not better than In N Out. However Habit Burger certainly is. There is one a block away from my house and Door Dash delivers for like 3 dollars.

Xenoborg posted:

The Military Industrial Complex works the same way! Just replace Politician with Procurement Office and Lobbyist with Contractor.

quote:

Jim Webb is a decorated Vietnam veteran, an author, a former Democratic senator, and a likely presidential candidate. Seven years ago in his book A Time to Fight, he wrote that the career military was turning into a “don’t break my rice bowl” culture, referring to an Asian phrase roughly comparable to making sure everyone gets a piece of the pie. Webb meant that ambitious officers notice how many of their mentors and predecessors move after retirement into board positions, consultancies, or operational roles with defense contractors. (Pensions now exceed preretirement pay for some very senior officers; for instance, a four-star general or admiral with 40 years of service can receive a pension of more than $237,000 a year, even if his maximum salary on active duty was $180,000.)

Webb says it would defy human nature if knowledge of the post-service prospects did not affect the way some high-ranking officers behave while in uniform, including “protecting the rice bowl” of military budgets and cultivating connections with their predecessors and their postretirement businesses. “There have always been some officers who went on to contracting jobs,” Webb, who grew up in an Air Force family, told me recently. “What’s new is the scale of the phenomenon, and its impact on the highest ranks of the military.”

Of course, the modern military advertises itself as a place where young people who have lacked the chance or money for higher education can develop valuable skills, plus earn GI Bill benefits for post-service studies. That’s good all around, and is part of the military’s perhaps unintended but certainly important role as an opportunity creator for undercredentialed Americans. Webb is talking about a different, potentially corrupting “prepare for your future” effect on the military’s best-trained, most influential careerists.
If more members of Congress or the business and media elite had had children in uniform, the United States would probably not have gone to war in Iraq.

“It is no secret that in subtle ways, many of these top leaders begin positioning themselves for their second-career employment during their final military assignments,” Webb wrote in A Time to Fight. The result, he said, is a “seamless interplay” of corporate and military interests “that threatens the integrity of defense procurement, of controversial personnel issues such as the huge ‘quasi-military’ structure [of contractors, like Blackwater and Halliburton] that has evolved in Iraq and Afghanistan, and inevitably of the balance within our national security process itself.” I heard assessments like this from many of the men and women I spoke with. The harshest ones came not from people who mistrusted the military but from those who, like Webb, had devoted much of their lives to it.

A man who worked for decades overseeing Pentagon contracts told me this past summer, “The system is based on lies and self-interest, purely toward the end of keeping money moving.” What kept the system running, he said, was that “the services get their budgets, the contractors get their deals, the congressmen get jobs in their districts, and no one who’s not part of the deal bothers to find out what is going on.”

shame on an IGA posted:

Wouldn't most of the now-nonexistent corn and soy have been exported?

joat mon posted:

Pretty much. GOP support in the House Judiciary committee to not impeach broke, then leading GOP Senators went to the White House and told Nixon that GOP support in the Senate to not convict had broken, then Nixon resigned.
What broke GOP support was the Supreme Court ordered release of "The Smoking Gun tape of Nixon and Haldeman discussing and planning the Watergate coverup.