TimS

@ComicDaveSmith @sostalksmoney Too bad. I hear he was REALLY refining his “Coleman Hughes crushed Dave” bit.

Wise choice @sostalksmoney

@ConceptualJames You exemplify the stunning bravery to sacrifice other peoples’ kids. You’re what we call a chickenhawk.

Imagine dreaming wistfully that your guy would have been the president who oversaw Iran getting the nuke and yet did nothing. What a pussy ideology.

@philthatremains USgov has long claimed it uses power to enforce a legal system that applies to all countries. USgov has found this useful, even tho it somewhat constrains action. Now you wanna drop the pretense? Okay, but it’s gonna have some consequences that you probably won’t like.

the United States decides what is or is not international law

@MarioNawfal “If you don’t take this deal after they sneak attacked you twice during negotiations and killed your negotiators…”

If the Iranian regime does not accept Trump’s off-ramp, they shift from being the victim to becoming the aggressor

Iran won’t accept a deal because it would be suicide. Why squander a huge current advantage by giving US-Israel time to restock and come back at them in a year or two. The seal has been broken. Iran knows it must emerge with permanent strategic advantage, at any cost, or this cycle will repeat forever.

IRAN REFUSING TO ACCEPT TRUMP'S CEASEFIRE PROPOSAL REMINDS ME OF WHY I HATE THE REGIME SO MUCH IF THEY DON'T ACCEPT A DEAL SOON, THEY WILL DESTROY THEIR OWN COUNTRY

@realajedelman “No other ally in the world today actively assists the US as Israel’s does in enacting Israel’s policies.” Fixed it!

Hate Israel all you want but one thing is absolutely, abundantly clear after the rescue of the American pilots and as this war has proceeded: No other ally in the world today actively assists the US as Israel does. They are the truest ally in every sense of the word. NATO won't even let the US fly through their airspace. Israel? They'll put their own pilots in the line of fire to rescue an American. That's allyship.

On Easter morning, this is what President Trump posted. Everyone in his administration that claims to be a Christian needs to fall on their knees and beg forgiveness from God and stop worshipping the President and intervene in Trump’s madness. I know all of you and him and he has gone insane, and all of you are complicit. I’m not defending Iran but let’s be honest about all of this. The Strait is closed because the US and Israel started the unprovoked war against Iran based on the same nuclear lies they’ve been telling for decades, that any moment Iran would develop a nuclear weapon. You know who has nuclear weapons? Israel. They are more than capable of defending themselves without the US having to fight their wars, kill innocent people and children, and pay for it. Trump threatening to bomb power plants and bridges hurts the Iranian people, the very people Trump claimed he was freeing. On Easter, of all days, we as Christians should be reminded that the son of God died and rose from the grave so that we can be forgiven once and for all of our sins. Jesus commanded us to love one another and forgive one another. Even our enemies. Our President is not a Christian and his words and actions should not be supported by Christians. Christians in the administration should be pursuing peace. Urging the President to make peace. Not escalating war that is hurting people. This NOT what we promised the American people when they overwhelmingly voted in 2024, I know, I was there more than most. This is not making America great again, this is evil.

@john_mcguirk “The West and Islamism” you say? What other cultures have non-Western norms?

The Americans went in, sacrificed a few hundred million dollars in kit, just to get one guy out alive. Who precisely blew up the planes is entirely irrelevant. That the Americans would spend a hundred fortunes to save one soldier is the difference between the West and Islamism.

@ryangrim @shaunmmaguire Psychopathic child.

@shaunmmaguire I’ll let our secretary of war explain

How did we get to the point Where so many Americans are rooting against America?

@Kontora @warsurv How dare they fight back! Look dude, they’ve already stuck US assets and allies hundreds (thousands?) of times. And here you are saying they don’t dare. Lol

@warsurv If Iran strikes any U.S. or Israel target they will pay big time. Trump will send them back the Stone Age.

🚨‼️ BREAKING 💥 🇮🇷 Iran warns of a historic move tonight The Iranian Army says a massive surprise is coming, one the world will remember for centuries.

@PaperhackWriter @ElementalArgon @BiblicalAnarchy @coldxman @ComicDaveSmith What are you talking about? We absolutely know that those destabilizations were caused by US military and intel operations and funding/arming of regime opponents like Al Qaida proxies in Syria. There’s no mystery there at all.

@ElementalArgon @timtas @BiblicalAnarchy @coldxman @ComicDaveSmith No it isn't. Because absent the memo, we don't know that those destabilization were caused by US policy or something else.

Can anyone point to one thing @coldxman "wrecked" @ComicDaveSmith on? People bring up the Wesley Clark memo without understanding its importance The memo is just part of a mountain of evidence showing the NeoCons wanted regime change in the Middle East for years...

@PaperhackWriter @BiblicalAnarchy @coldxman @ComicDaveSmith “I’m not even asking for definitive proof. … Prove it’s true.” You can’t make this stuff up. 🤣

@timtas @BiblicalAnarchy @coldxman @ComicDaveSmith I'm not even asking for definitive proof, I'm asking for at least some *actual* evidence. One guy saying some other guy told him about something isn't evidence. Yeah, Clark might be making it up, or the guy who told him about the memo was making it up. Prove it's true.

@PaperhackWriter @BiblicalAnarchy @TheREALDanNally @coldxman @ComicDaveSmith You’re being intentionally obtuse. We’re comparing Clark’s verbal account to actual events, which goes to veracity.

@BiblicalAnarchy @timtas @TheREALDanNally @coldxman @ComicDaveSmith But we don't know that! We can't compare what was written in the memo to subsequent events, because none of us have a copy of the memo.

@PaperhackWriter @TheREALDanNally @BiblicalAnarchy @coldxman @ComicDaveSmith Who made anything up?

@timtas @TheREALDanNally @BiblicalAnarchy @coldxman @ComicDaveSmith So therefore you can just make up stuff and call it evidence?

@BobAbraham82192 @dumbestic @DrJStrategy True. It’s mixed.

@timtas @dumbestic @DrJStrategy But lots of LNG is transported by tanker in many areas of the world

Food for thought. Trump, Hormuz and the End of the Free Ride For half a century, Western strategists have known that the Strait of Hormuz is the acute point where energy, sea power and political will intersect. That knowledge is not in dispute. What is new in this war with Iran is that the United States, under Donald Trump, has chosen not to rush to “solve” the problem. In Hegelian terms, he is refusing an easy synthesis in order to force the underlying contradiction to the surface. The old thesis was simple: the US guarantees open sea lanes in the Gulf, and everyone else structures their economies and politics around that free insurance. Europe and the UK embraced ambitious green policies, ran down hard‑power capabilities and lectured Washington on multilateral virtue, secure in the assumption that American carriers would always appear off Hormuz. The political class behaved as if the American security guarantee were a law of nature, not a contingent choice. Their conduct today is closer to Chamberlain than Churchill: temporising, issuing statements, hoping the storm will pass without a fundamental reordering of their responsibilities. Trump’s antithesis is to withhold the automatic guarantee at the moment of maximum stress. Militarily, the US can break Iran’s residual ability to contest the Strait; that is not the binding constraint. The point is to delay that act. By allowing a closure or semi‑closure to bite, Trump ensures that the immediate pain is concentrated in exactly the jurisdictions that have most conspicuously free‑ridden on US power: the EU and the UK. Their industries, consumers and energy‑transition assumptions are exposed. In that context, his reported blunt message to European and British leaders, you need the oil out of the Strait more than we do; why don’t you go and take it? Is not a throwaway line. It is the verbalisation of the antithesis. It openly reverses the traditional presumption that America will carry the burden while its allies emote from the sidelines. In this dialectic, the prize is not simply the reopening of a chokepoint. The prize is a reordered system in which the United States effectively arbitrages and controls the global flow of oil. A world in which US‑aligned production in the Americas plus a discretionary capability to secure,or not secure, Hormuz places Washington at the centre of the hydrocarbon chessboard. For that strategic end, a rapid restoration of the old status quo would be counterproductive. A quick, surgical “fix” of Hormuz would short‑circuit the dialectic. If Trump rapidly crushed Iran’s remaining coastal capabilities, swept the mines and escorted tankers back through the Strait, Europe and the UK would heave a sigh of relief and return to business as usual: underfunded militaries, maximalist green posturing and performative disdain for US power, all underwritten by that same power. The contradiction between their dependence and their posture would remain latent. By declining to supply the synthesis on demand, and by explicitly telling London and Brussels to “go and take it” themselves, Trump forces a reckoning. European and British leaders must confront the fact that their energy systems, their industrial bases and their geopolitical sermons all rest on an American hard‑power foundation they neither finance nor politically respect. The longer the contradiction is allowed to unfold, the stronger the eventual synthesis can be: a new order in which access to secure flows, Hormuz, Venezuela and beyond, is explicitly conditional on real contributions, not assumed as a right. In that sense, the delay in “taking” the Strait, and the challenge issued to US allies to do it themselves, is not indecision. It is the negative moment Hegel insisted was necessary for history to move. Only by withholding the old guarantee, and by saying so out loud to those who depended on it, can Trump hope to end the free ride.

@PaperhackWriter @TheREALDanNally @BiblicalAnarchy @coldxman @ComicDaveSmith Do you have any basis for thinking guy made it up? Even a guess as to motive for telling a NATO commander such a whopper? Or just serving your bias?

@timtas @TheREALDanNally @BiblicalAnarchy @coldxman @ComicDaveSmith I don't know whether clark made it up or the guy he was talking to was full of shit (my gut says the latter).

@ConceptualJames Fair enough, it’s only been the last few days that libertarians have been ratioing you. Before that it was the broader “woke right” ratioing you.

@timtas Since when?

I'm going to start liking my own posts so the Libertarians can't use their bots to ratio me anymore.

We’re dealing with people who claim the right to operate under total secrecy and lie to us as it suits them. We have no means to discover their plans. It’s reasonable to take these types of reports from deep insiders seriously. Sincere question, do you think Clark made up the story?

I think Hughes made a good point about the dubious evidentiary value of the memo. I never said anything about Hughes citing Condoleezza Rice. To my mind, Rice's words are superfluous; it's sufficient to point out that Clark claims someone told him about a memo, a memo Clark never saw, a memo no one today can find, from a person whose name we don't know. That's such weak evidence, we don't even need Rice's words about how Rumsfeld authored snow-flake memos.

@ConceptualJames I’d be shocked if Tom’s net worth wasn’t at least 20x yours. You’re an author right? How many NYT best sellers? Tom has two. He has six children. What’s your legacy? If you’re gonna start a ridiculous dick measuring contest, check your dick size first.

Going to review this book next.