Cunigulus [they/them]

The airforce pilot>commercial airline pilot pipeline offered such a great income plus perks and prestige that the airforce has never had a problem finding people who want to fly - until now. Maybe no one has good enough eyesight or - what caught my friend out - a lack of mental illness. They won’t let anyone depressed or suicidal fly for them, and in today’s world of mental health awareness that cuts out a lot of likely pilots.

They tried to get an Italian shipbuilder to step in and they’ve been even worse than the existing domestic manufacturers. The problem is there’s no domestic shipbuilding industry anymore, at least not an internationally competitive one. You need commercial shipbuilding as a knowledge and talent base for military shipbuilding. We’ve pretty much only got military shipbuilding and those companies have morphed into the most grotesque MIC graft vampires you can imagine. They’re basically no longer capable of engineering and building working warships. Korea does have a very large and advanced ship building industry, as does Japan. In terms of actually getting usable warships, farming production out to them is actually a good idea in the short term. In the long term of course this will only lead to a further decline in US shipbuilding capacity.

That’s exactly what he’s going to do. Trump’s replacement for him doesn’t look at all qualified. He’ll steer policy from his seat while Trump’s toady tries to spin things. The board does very much act as a board. The Chairman doesn’t really have special powers, he’s just the public face.

Climate change mitigation via geoengineering is very feasible, and in my mind, inevitable. It just opens up a massive can of worms and climate scientists don’t want people to think CO2 emissions aren’t something to worry about because we can geoengineer our way out of the problem. We’ll probably have a global geoengineering regime in place within 20 years or so. Luckily it’s looking like the techno-optimists are kind of correct and solar + nuclear + geothermal is going to eventually be a viable energy replacement for advanced civilization, albeit with continued exploitation of fossil fuels for some time. We’re not going to be able to reproduce American suburbia for everyone with electric cars.

The doom is temporary. It’s imperialism that is doomed. The big question is how the world transitions.

What is it with Denmark being so evil lately? Maybe they deserve to lose Greenland.

China is not bragging about the slow and cheap one way attack drones they have designed, because they’re not prestigious or sexy. Going toe to toe with the US with advanced ballistic missile tech, sixth generation fighters, and aircraft carriers is what they want to brag about, but behind the scenes the Chinese have explored basically every conceivable cheap drone platform out there. The US would struggle to make a million shahed copies, but China could probably build a billion if they really wanted to, and the reality is they’re going to do a both-and strategy here. If they can win the war with their shiny high-tech weapons they’ll just do that, but if it comes down to a long conflict they absolutely will produce cheap drone weapons systems in the billions along with new systems for deploying them and win that way.

Are militaries just getting bored and starting small wars now or something? Is this Thailand poking Cambodia to disrupt some of the developments they’ve done with China on behalf of the US?

The original bridge cost $141 million to build, about $743 million in 2024 dollars.

It did take about five years to build, but seven times the inflation-adjusted cost? We’re totally fucked as a nation if we can’t fix the rampant cost disease.

Honestly I think everyone in the West except the US is going to be fine, and the US will eventually be ok because of how rich we already are. Europe has some cultural issues to work through to be sure, and there’s plenty of potential for violence to emerge, but it’s really only the US that is overly dependent on these super profits with a completely hollowed-out economy. The UK is kind of in the same position, but is already well into the process of collapse. The US has just kept growing on the parasitism and letting everything else atrophy and it’s going to be in for the biggest shock when the global economy shakes it loose.

How free and fair are these elections? Could there be widespread fraud or is it a very open and regulated process? Is there just a lot of foreign-sponsored propaganda driving support for the various blocs? It seems from your analysis that things are slowly getting a bit less sectarian, which on its own is probably a good thing, but that this is occurring in the direction the propaganda press is pushing. In other words people are tired of conflict along the lines that are drawn, and the easiest way to negate that seems to be to just vote the way media tells them. From a leftist perspective, maybe all this sectarian conflict has to die down so that political divisions along class lines can resurface. That this negation can emerge simply from the establishment asserting itself is actually convenient.

Caracas is very defensible if enough forces are mobilized. You’d probably have to assemble an infantry force of over 100,000 just to occupy it after you use whatever airpower to assault the city and wear down the defenses. I think it would require too many boots on the ground to supply them all by air, so you’re going to have to secure one of a few roads through forested mountain passes up from the coast, and those come in across town from many of the most important places you’d want to focus your occupation forces. If the Venezuelans have even a little backbone it’s a very difficult job even with overwhelming technological superiority and air dominance. Maracaibo and the oil fields would be a doable target, but actually I don’t think occupying Caracas is possible without mobilizing a much larger force. Honestly it might be straight up impossible for the US military to do in it’s current state.

Now some kind of decapitation strike followed by an attempt to install a puppet with limited special operations forces and air strikes might be something that feels a bit more feasible for the US military to attempt, but I kind of doubt they’ll be able to pull off the second part. Venezuelans aren’t necessarily happy with their current situation, but they’re definitely not going to be happy with the US murdering a bunch of people and bombing their country. There are also deep class and racial divides in the country that underlie its politics and uphold Chavismo’s grip on the country. If you fracture the country on those lines, the more white comprador sections of the country will probably just lose. If the US were smart they’d find some Afro-Venezuelan face for their puppet government, but then that would probably alienate their supporters too much.

I think Rubio wants to overthrow the Venezuelan government by force, and he might be powerful enough to push through some kind of stupid decapitation operation that just devolves into a complete mess. I think there are plenty of saner heads in the Pentagon and Washington establishment that are trying to gently push back or slow-walk this confrontational policy, so it’s kind of up to Trump’s whim whether it happens or not. The fact that it hasn’t happened yet, after all of this provocation, makes me think it’s less likely that anything will happen, and some shiny new toy project for US foreign policy will come along in the mean time and we’ll forget about this like we forgot about the bajillion times Bush and Obama threatened war with North Korea.

They can just attach a million drones to balloons and send them over in waves to overwhelm our air defenses. I don’t think long range strikes against the US mainland would be that difficult for China if they had a little time, resources, and motivation. If the US stays in the war after getting pushed out of the West Pacific I could see them needing a credible capability to strike targets in the US as a means of encouraging a negotiated end to the conflict. If it drags on longer they’ll just build a thousand ship fleet and take whatever they need. This is kind of a repeat of Japan and the US, but in reverse. China has overwhelming superiority in manpower and industry so it’s really just a question of how far things have to go before the US gives up and whether nuclear weapons are used this time.

Wow, that’s actually terrifying. A big war would be baaad for me as an American, and it looks like it’s coming. Hopefully the military leadership here is smart enough to back down and the political leadership can take it on the chin and make peace quickly after they’re defeated in the West Pacific. I really don’t want my home town getting burned down by drone swarms.

Doesn’t look like it now, he seems to have surpassed the Sliwa factor

Coverage I was watching mentioned that Staten Island reported disproportionately early, which had a lot of Cuomo votes.

Very much looks like a case of “how cheaply can we spin up a drone that looks convincing enough to get us a DoD contract at 400 million per”

The Venezuelans have had some surprisingly effective intelligence in the the US, most notably through double-agents. If they learn with a high degree of certainty that a strike is coming they need to prepare to strike first to hit whatever they can because they’ll lose all significant air and naval capabilities within a couple of days anyway. Playing like good little boys and waiting until most of your offensive capability gets wiped out is worthless, even politically. They don’t have the kind of deep strategic reserve that, say Iran has, they have a relatively small and moderately capable conventional navy and air force that they can probably score some hits with, or let get blown up in port/hanger. Sinking a destroyer or two, knocking out an AWACS platform, cratering a runway, all of these things could have useful impact on military operations and more importantly, would rally the people to defend their country and prevent the US from getting the cheap easy victory they must be imagining. If things get kinetic it’s use it or lose it for those assets. Get a couple of symbolic wins and prepare the ground forces to defend the central plateau and harass any landing in the Maracaibo region. Their air defense can’t really hold up and deter air strikes for long, but they can prevent successful airborne operations if they can muster and disperse their ground forces to defend critical areas. If they let the navy and air force get wiped out with nothing to show for it, there’s a very real risk that the army and militias just roll over and allow some sort of Special Ops-led coup.

I ran into my friend’s cousin today, who lives in a more rural area of our state. He says the local medical facilities there are no longer capable of delivering babies. This is in a community of over 10,000 people which serves as a ‘urban’ hub for maybe 100,000. Mothers have to take a two hour drive when they go into labor or arrange potentially dangerous alternatives. Women have given birth on the side of the highway on the way to the bigger hospital in another part of the state. This isn’t a particularly poor or undeveloped area of the US, just rural enough that these serious problems have emerged. They have doctors and medical facilities, but delivering babies, probably the most important and ancient form of health care, is beyond their capabilities in this system. What. The. Fuck.

This whole thing is so dumb. What do they expect to accomplish? Chavismo is built on the basis of very real racial and class divisions in Venezuelan society. They can’t decapitate the regime and expect to be able to install a puppet. They’re not going to invade and occupy the capitol. They might be able to destroy the Venezuelan Navy and Air Force and occupy the main oil producing region, but that itself would be an Iraq-war scale effort and I don’t think they have the will to expend those kind of resources. I just can’t figure out what they’re really planning here. Do they want to do a strike like they did on Iran with no real strategic impact just for show? We’re seeing a fair number of these ‘nothing ever happens’ mini-wars like the recent exchange between India and Pakistan. The extreme violence in Ukraine and Palestine is showing people that you can have a little war as a treat and nothing will come of it. It’s like we’re playing Hearts of Iron and world tension is a real thing.

Maybe we have to look at the internal politics of the Trump administration. Hegseth has really got a grip on the War Department and Rubio at State wants to throw the Gusanos a bone and this is what these idiots have come up with and there’s just no sane figure with enough backbone in the government to stand up and say ‘this is fucking crazy, this will not work, all we can do is create chaos and uncertainty and embarrass ourselves, possibly ruining our geopolitical position in Latin America permanently’. To be fair that’s a hard case to make, look at how much the Arab nations have debased themselves allowing Israel to commit genocide with absolute impunity. These assholes then take a look at Latin America and see no military power with any experience or real competence able to stand up to them at all and think they can bully the right into power wherever they want. Are they right? I’m not so sure.

Part of the deal throughout the Cold War was that military conflicts never escalated beyond internal repression, direct US intervention was limited, and no one had to worry about a big war. If the US goes and gets one going they’ll force the whole continent to respond, and given the current global climate and long-term geopolitical trajectory I don’t think the response will be favorable to the US.

Why the hell, apart from terrible racism, would you want to curtail the birthrate in Greenland? If you’re going to do anything useful in the territory you’re going to need a lot more people.