Dark Laughter

CNN covering the war live in Iran.

Ah, good, this will help disabuse people of the Star Wars theory of states, which assumes countries function similarly to how in Star Wars every part of a planet is the same and something happening on one part of the planet is always evident from wherever you are on that planet.

This is why you should always put a few rounds into one of the engines before jumping.

Iran: "Help us fight our mutual enemy like you promised!"
Russia:

I like how Russia managed to find a way to support Iran that was both highly escalatory and not particularly helpful to them.

YouTube video by ClickHole Powerful: These Veterans Recount The Heroics Of The One Lifeguard Who Was On Duty During D-Day

I think it's an imagination of war as basically being like ClickHole's D-Day lifeguard joke. youtu.be/rWXOtcj3q_w

The Deep State is the same guys who didn't get prosecuted for it, career professionals in the IC, so I feel like we broke even on this one.

Watching War Machine on Netflix and I encourage all veterans to watch this because I’m three minutes in and it opens in Kandahar with a three vehicle convoy of humvees doing QRF on a broken down humvee on the side of some road.

Then the Reacher guy gets under the hood and starts working on it.

Marines: "We can be ready in 6 hours."
Navy: "And we can have those Marines there in just a few short weeks."
Army: "We can have the 82nd ready in 18 hours."
Air Force: "We can be anywhere at the speed of flight."
Hegseth: "Okay, in 18 hours I want the Air Force flying to drop the 82nd into Iran."

Who would have thought a day would come when the time it takes to send a MEU would be so long that the president would be too impatient for it, or that this would be a good thing for the Marine Corps and a bad thing for the Army?

As long as we're criticizing FATAL, using the metric system to measure foreskin thickness instead of some weird medieval customary unit of measurement is just one more way FATAL lacks historical accuracy or verisimilitude.

2003 was kind of a landmark year for TTRPGs between that and BEF coming out.

Even though FATAL is the worst TTRPG ever made, looking at the success of PC RPGs like BG3 or Cyberpunk 2077, or the modding communities for basically any other PC RPG, in retrospect FATAL was virtually alone in its understanding of just how interested players are in their character's genitals.

There was an SNL episode in like 1998 where Jimmy Fallon played the ghost of John Lennon and everyone quickly realized his profound verbal reversal thing was just dumb, and I've wished so many times I could find a copy of it while trying to convince people some Mattis quotes are just dumb.

I think it's kind of endearing how we tell these guys "war is very horrible, its power to kill and destroy is unimaginable" and they're like "Did the guys on the torpedoed ship even get a chance to file an appeal or anything? This is an outrage, we need to tell war's manager we're going to boycott!"

“how about we send the kurds to ukraine” - the greatest thread in the history of the special activities center, locked by a branch chief after 12,239 pages of heated debate

Summon Kurds on a 4+, a 3+ if someone from the Barzani or Talabani clan is wholly within 12"

It is really a low water mark to be at war with the one of the worst regimes on Earth and manage to come away as the callous and undignified party.

"For veterans watching the film, the most unrealistic part may not be the extraterrestrial robot — it is the fact that nobody immediately assumes the alien is still part of the training scenario."

Police body cam footage shows DOGE knew Institute of Peace was private property during raid Footage obtained by The Handbasket’s lawsuit shows a hostile takeover on March 17, 2025.

SCOOP — Body camera footage obtained as a result of my lawsuit against the DC Metropolitan PD confirms DOGE and the Trump administration openly admitted they were entering private property when they raided the building on March 17, 2025. That didn't stop MPD from breaking down the doors.

My report:

Over nearly two decades of war, I've learned complex problems frequently have multiple answers, but it depends who you ask. For example, Lockheed can give you an answer that involves paying Lockheed, Palantir can give you an answer that involves paying Palantir, etc.

That Gulf has seen more than three modern wars, but it's incorrect to call Platner a Gulf War veteran or to refer to Iraq as "The Gulf War" vs. something like Gulf War 2. It's like calling the American War in Vietnam the First Indochina War or calling WW2 The Great War.

This is the kind of company I think we all secretly thought was implied by the Adam West Batman series, where you could just make a call and get a bunch of normal thugs willing to take a gig that required being dressed in weird costumes. youtu.be/EtO3zZII7r4

SEAL congressman says "ORT ORT ORT!"

I think this impulse begins with a desire to be more precise, then ironically devolves into creating names that circumvent the problem by being increasingly vague.

Realizing WW2 was overwhelmingly fought by reserve Marines who looked like Steve Rogers before he got the Captain America serum is a 🤯 moment for active Marines.

Warrant Officer awarded Medal of Honor for showing up on time and in uniform First CW5 in recorded history to arrive at own award ceremony in correct uniform, citation says

NEW: Warrant Officer awarded Medal of Honor for showing up on time and in uniform www.duffelblog.com/warrant-offi...

Some pretty good "from hell's heart I stab at thee" level comms.

If the DoD was honest with itself, our job mostly reduces to putting cards in the hands of FSOs so they can arrange a stable new status quo that's both more favorable to national security and ensures we won't spend our career constantly deploying to the same places.

🧵Feels like shouting into the void, but it is essential to note that the Trump/Rubio gutting of the State Department and blowtorching of US diplomatic capacity and credibility is an accelerant to this spiraling war and will seriously undercut US/allied efforts to pick up the pieces after. 1/