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Wisdom cries out for a hearing
Larry P. Arnn@DrLarryArnn
Every time you make a choice, it places a mark on your soul, and it makes you what you are.
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Charles The Hammer
899 posts
Charles The Hammer
@CaptainLionHart
Christian, husband, father, grandfather, World’s Greatest Fighter Pilot 😂, Defender of The West
Christendom Katılım Şubat 2025
158 Takip Edilen100 Takipçiler
@CaptainLionHart @xAviation Is the F-18 nose gear steer ed by the rudder pedals? Or is there a tiller.
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Every platform the Navy employs has a lifespan measured in various ways. You can often preserve and extend that lifespan by not beating them up, not over using them, and performing routine scheduled maintenance.
The war in Afghanistan began as a just cause. It was functionally over by March/April 2002, but we stayed another 20 years to “democratize” tribal goat herders.
The war in Iraq started ostensibly to knock Hussein out of power, but we again stayed to try and find the Iraqi Thomas Jefferson (he doesn’t exist).
Through those 20+ years: We beat up our Carriers.
We beat up our airplanes.
We beat up our subs.
We beat up our ships.
We beat up our Amphibs.
We beat up our SEALS.
We beat up our Sailors.
We beat up our Marines.
We extended deployments and deferred ships maintenance. We extended aircraft life beyond design. We extended our people beyond any rational limits.
Example - the CO of a SEAL unit took his own life leaving behind a wife and kids. He’d been deployed to AF/Iraq more than TWENTY TIMES of various durations. And the Navy has the gall to scratch their head about Sailor suicide. You, the Navy, broke this man and many others. You broke our fleet and simultaneously pursued useless platforms (Zumwalt/LCS), wasting billions. You put thousands of extra hours on our aircraft.
And for what? Abby Gate? The Taliban back in power and abusing women, girls, and boys?
All of the above were choices the National Command Authority made, along with the DoD. Choices made by the people in power who now scratch their head and wonder…..”Gee, why are we having these problems?”
cdrsalamander@cdrsalamander
It should be noted that this is not the first extended deployment. As I reported at the time, it was regularly stated starting in the early 2010s that “eight and nine month deployments should be expected” … and 11 month deployments not unusual. It is Sailor abuse at best—almost criminal mail-management at worst. We have had an undercapitalized Navy for over two decades in carriers, amphibs, surface combatants, and auxiliaries…hell, all of it. Much of the blame must start with the Navy itself, and NAVSEA in particular. Congress second.
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@MCCCANM What is the Captain’s options and responsibilities in s scenario like this?
G-PA@IndianaGPA
Frontier Airline Kicked Off this Deaf person because the Flight Attendant said she wasn’t paying attention to her commands! It says on her Boarding Pass and Ticket that she’s deaf, they still removed her 🤬
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F1 has become the "green" olympics
Cameron@CxmeronCc
🗣️ Fernando Alonso: “Right now we have a World Championship of batteries.” #F1
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Look man you do NOT want to play Gay Chicken with the Marine Corps
Millard Fillmore@FillmoreFanatic
BREAKING: IRGC vows to “molest” newly deployed US Marine Expeditionary Force. Analysts remain uncertain as to what this means. #News
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@OmniAeronautica @shanaka86 I want to believe this but if it's true, it seems like something that would have been done earlier. Instead we have Trump threatening to do it for a week before finally doing it.
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KHARG IS NOT A HOSTAGE. IT IS A FINANCIAL CHOKE POINT.
The strike on Kharg revealed the actual strategy. Every military defense on the island was destroyed while the oil infrastructure was deliberately preserved. That distinction matters. This is not about destruction. It is about control.
Kharg handles roughly 90 percent of Iran’s crude exports. Whoever controls that island controls the regime’s primary revenue stream. Destroying the terminals would remove barrels from global markets and eliminate the leverage that infrastructure provides. Securing them does the opposite. It preserves the export system while cutting the regime off from the cash that funds the IRGC, the missile programs, and the regional proxy network.
Control also prevents another strategic outcome that has been unfolding quietly for years: China’s access to heavily discounted Iranian oil.
Beijing has been buying sanctioned Iranian crude outside the Western financial system at steep discounts. Those flows helped fuel China’s attempt to build parallel settlement systems and gradually weaken dollar dominance in global energy trade. If Kharg operates under coalition control, that channel disappears overnight. The regime loses its revenue stream and China loses subsidized sanction evasion oil that supported its alternative currency ambitions.
More importantly, a secured Kharg Island opens the door to a long term stabilization framework.
Instead of destroying Iran’s energy infrastructure, the facilities can operate under coalition or international supervision where revenue is escrowed rather than flowing directly to the regime. Those funds could compensate the United States, Israel, and allied nations for war damages while preserving Iran’s productive capacity for a future post regime government.
In that framework the island becomes something very different from a hostage.
It becomes a financial choke point and a stabilization mechanism.
The regime loses the ability to fund aggression. China loses discounted sanction busting crude. The global oil system keeps functioning. And the infrastructure remains intact for the day Iran is reorganized into a normal state accountable to its own people.
Destroying Kharg removes leverage.
Controlling Kharg turns the regime’s own economic lifeline into the instrument that forces its end.
x.com/omniaeronautic…
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BREAKING: President Trump just put a gun to the head of 90% of Iran’s oil revenue and pulled the trigger on everything around it.
“Moments ago, at my direction, the United States Central Command executed one of the most powerful bombing raids in the History of the Middle East, and totally obliterated every MILITARY target in Iran’s crown jewel, Kharg Island.”
That is the President’s exact language on Truth Social tonight. Every military target. Obliterated. The coastal missile batteries. The anti-ship missile installations. The radar sites. The short-range air defence systems. The IRGC garrison of 250 to 500 personnel. The fast attack craft support. The naval mines infrastructure. Everything that defended the island, destroyed. Everything that makes the island valuable, deliberately spared.
The oil terminals are still standing. The loading jetties are intact. The storage tanks are full. Ninety percent of Iran’s crude exports flow through those terminals. Trump left them untouched and told Iran why: “for reasons of decency.” Then he added the threat that makes decency conditional: if Iran interferes with free and safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz, the oil infrastructure goes next.
This is the chequebook doctrine made operational.
For fifteen days, this campaign has identified three layers governing the war: the nuclear programme is the existential minimum, the Strait is the clock, and the oil infrastructure is the chequebook. The chequebook was deliberately spared to control what gets rebuilt, by whom, and under what conditions. Tonight, Trump confirmed it. Kharg’s military defences are rubble. Kharg’s oil terminals are leverage. The island that handles Iran’s entire export economy now sits defenceless, its military guardians obliterated, its revenue infrastructure intact but held hostage to a single condition: open the Strait.
The calculus Iran faces is unprecedented. The 31 autonomous IRGC commands that have been firing continuously for fifteen days just lost their forward defensive position in the northern Gulf. The coastal batteries that could threaten tanker escorts are destroyed. The radar that tracked shipping approaches is destroyed. The fast boats that laid mines operated from Kharg support facilities that are destroyed. The island that was Iran’s shield has been turned into America’s hostage.
Iran’s oil cannot flow without Kharg. Iran’s military can no longer defend Kharg. And the man who ordered Kharg’s military annihilation has told Iran that the oil infrastructure joins it if the Strait does not open. The Supreme Leader who ordered the Strait permanently closed from a hospital bed just received the response: the terminals that fund his war are one presidential order from becoming the same rubble as the missile batteries that used to protect them.
Brent will react within hours. The sparing of oil infrastructure should limit the immediate spike, but the threat converts every future Iranian provocation in Hormuz into a potential trigger for the destruction of 90% of Iran’s export revenue. The war premium is no longer about whether oil flows. It is about whether Trump decides to let it flow.
The war began with an assassination. It escalated through mines, drones, and burning tankers. It crossed the nuclear threshold at Parchin. It crossed the alliance threshold at Incirlik. Tonight, it crossed the revenue threshold at Kharg. The existential minimum is the uranium in Pickaxe Mountain. The existential leverage is the oil terminal standing untouched on an island where everything else has been destroyed.
Iran’s crown jewel just became America’s hostage. The ransom is the Strait of Hormuz.
Full analysis - open.substack.com/pub/shanakaans…
Shanaka Anslem Perera ⚡@shanaka86
JUST IN: Hours ago I wrote that Kharg Island was the red line the coalition drew for itself. The one target whose destruction would do more to end this war than every other strike combined, left untouched because reaching it would create consequences the coalition cannot manage. Axios just reported that US officials are actively discussing seizing it. The report, citing administration officials directly, says discussion is underway to capture Kharg Island alongside special forces raids to secure Iran’s highly enriched uranium stockpiles. No order has been given. No deployment has been authorized. It remains in the discussion phase. But the fact that the option is being reported through Axios sourcing from inside the administration means the policy debate has moved from contingency planning to active consideration. Kharg Island handles roughly 90 percent of Iran’s crude oil exports. Approximately two million barrels per day at pre-war capacity. The revenue funds roughly 40 percent of the Iranian government’s budget including the IRGC payroll that sustains thirty one provincial commands. Seizing it would collapse the regime’s revenue overnight. That is why the option is being discussed. It is also why it has not been executed. In 1979 the Carter administration developed contingency plans for seizing Kharg. The plans were rejected as too difficult and too risky. In 2026 the military calculus has shifted: 80 percent of Iranian air defenses are destroyed according to the IDF, the Iranian navy has been severely degraded, and the US has near total air superiority. The operational feasibility has improved dramatically since 1979. The economic calculus has not. Seizing Kharg removes Iranian crude from global markets for years, not weeks, because rebuilding offshore loading infrastructure under wartime conditions requires complete reconstruction. It spikes Brent toward $150 or beyond. It triggers the recession America is trying to avoid. It gives China an escalation rationale Beijing currently lacks. And it requires holding a small island under continuous drone and missile attack with supply lines across a strait Iran has demonstrated it can threaten. The Axios report also references special forces operations to seize Iran’s highly enriched uranium. That pairing tells you what the administration is actually debating: whether the endgame of this war is limited degradation, the current trajectory, or complete strategic decapitation, meaning the simultaneous elimination of Iran’s revenue base and nuclear capability. Trump has demanded unconditional surrender. Iran refuses to negotiate. The air campaign, however brilliant, has not produced capitulation. Every day without political resolution increases pressure to escalate toward options previously rejected as too costly. Kharg Island is the measure of how far the United States is willing to go. The discussion is the signal. The seizure, if it comes, is the moment this war transforms from a regional conflict into a global economic crisis that touches every economy on earth. The red line I identified is no longer theoretical. Washington is discussing whether to cross it. open.substack.com/pub/shanakaans…
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@gregkellyusa It’s not the bombs being dropped on their heads, it’s the trash talking Secretary of War that really pisses them off. Don’t drink and post Greg.
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Pete Hegseth should save his “trash talk” for his Podcast Bros. The reason PROFESSIONAL WARRIORS avoid unnecessary TAUNTING of the Enemy: it can come back and Bite, HARD. And it’s the PILOTS who fly over enemy territory at Risk. I served with FOUR PILOTS who got shot down and TORTURED. Lose an engine (only one in the F-35, thanks a lot Lockheed Martin!)—and they’ll be the ones to answer for Pete’s Rhetoric. Let General Cain talk more.
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@arts_of_war @michaeljknowles Sam - will you be selling this piece or is it already commissioned by a buyer? I would love to own some of your art.
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The charge of the Polish Hussars at the Siege of Vienna in 1683 was the largest cavalry charge in history. I am painting this epic moment one painstaking detail at a time. This is exactly what I do - bring history to life in fine art.
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@grey4626 Too much truth with too many teeth! I love it!
As a war vet myself, I say that if this person didn't serve during wartime, they are very close to someone who did.
Wait! Gunny Payne? Is that you, ya salty ol bastard? Why are you hiding behind a Badass Mad Genius Lesbian's account?
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Pete, we love you. This is long fucking overdue.
You magnificent, steel-forged son of a bitch, you’ve just dropped a 90-day operational decapitation strike straight into the command-and-control node of the enemy’s long war against our military soul.
The Army War College, National Defense University...once crucibles where officers learned to master Clausewitzian friction, Sun Tzu’s deception, and the raw, merciless calculus of closing with and destroying the enemy...have been hollowed out into goddamn re-education camps run by critical-theory commissars and DEI psychological operators.
They didn’t just teach “whiteness studies” and “genocide through gender analytics”; they weaponized the classroom as a fifth-column psyop, deliberately fracturing the warrior psyche, replacing the predator’s will to kill with performative guilt, grievance hierarchies, and equity-induced hesitation.
This is textbook internal subversion, classic Maoist cultural insurgency executed with clinical precision.
They knew exactly what they were doing:
erode unit cohesion at the doctrinal level, poison the center of gravity of American combat power...the officer corps’ unapologetic lethality...and turn future generals into apologetic social workers terrified of their own shadow.
The battlefield doesn’t give a fuck about feelings; it rewards only the ruthless, the meritocratic, the psychologically unbreakable.
These Marxist infiltrators understood the psychology of collapse better than we did...they attacked the mind before the body, and for years we let them.
No more.
Your Task Force is the counter-battery fire we’ve been begging for:
surgical, time-bound, lethal.
Audit every syllabus, purge every commissar, burn the cancer out root and branch.
Restore the temples to what they were meant to be...kill factories where only the sharpest, hardest, most lethal minds rise.
Merit über alles.
Warfighting doctrine über alles.
No quarter, no safe spaces, no apologies.
The real warfighters have been watching this slow bleed with clenched jaws and white knuckles.
You just gave them the green light.
Drive the spear home, Pete.
Reclaim the high ground of professional military education with fire and steel.
This isn’t reform.
This is reclamation through absolute, unforgiving violence of action.
🗡️💀🪖🗡️
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth@SecWar
Professional Military Education should produce warfighters and leaders—not wokesters. That’s why we are establishing a Task Force to evaluate our Senior Service Colleges and ensure the focus is where it belongs. No distractions. Just warfighting.
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Charles The Hammer retweetledi
As an Atheist, I offer no apology, no grovel, no limp-wristed mea culpa for the Crusades.
Quite the fucking opposite.
We didn’t go far enough.
We barely scratched the surface of that medieval death cult before it slithered back into the shadows, licking its wounds and plotting its next parasitic conquest.
And every spineless Westerner today who clutches pearls about “imperialism” or “colonialism” is just a psychological masochist, high on the opium of guilt, begging to be castrated by the very ideology that has dreamed of our extinction since the 7th century.
Let’s strip the sentimental bullshit and stare into the abyss with unflinching precision.
Before any knight ever took the cross in 1095, the Islamic juggernaut had already devoured the Christian heartlands of the Middle East and North Africa in a blitzkrieg of fire and sword...Byzantium bleeding out, Alexandria’s library ashes, Spain falling in a single generation after 711.
Charles Martel’s hammer at Tours in 732 wasn’t some quaint skirmish; it was the fucking line in the sand where rational Europe said “no more” to the caliphate’s vision of universal submission.
The Crusades were the desperate, belated counterstrike...not unprovoked aggression, but existential recoil against a supremacist theology that divides the world into Dar al-Islam...the house of slavery...and Dar al-Harb...the house of perpetual war.
Philosophy 101, you cowards:
this isn’t “Abrahamic cousins” nonsense; it’s Hobbesian war of all against all, where tolerance meets the intolerant and dies whimpering.
We failed because we stopped short.
Jerusalem retaken?
Fleeting.
Constantinople?
Lost forever in 1453 to the same Ottoman machine that would later hammer at Vienna’s gates in 1683...only Sobieski’s winged hussars and raw European will turning the tide at the last possible breath.
The psychology here is lethal and eternal:
Islam’s doctrine weaponizes the believer’s psyche into a death-cult automaton, promising paradise for butchery, while the West’s post-Enlightenment mind...drunk on Nietzsche’s slave morality inverted...now flagellates itself for daring to survive.
We internalized the enemy’s narrative, convinced ourselves the Crusaders were the villains, and now watch mosques sprout like tumors in our cities while apologists scream “Islamophobia” at the mirror.
Profound, isn’t it?
The same civilization that birthed Locke’s tolerance, Hume’s skepticism, and Darwin’s merciless truth now kneels before a 1,400-year-old blueprint for domination because admitting the threat would bruise its fragile, secular ego.
We didn’t go far enough.
We left the roots intact...Koran, Hadith, the whole supremacist architecture...seething in the soil, ready to sprout again under every migration wave and demographic Trojan horse.
Next time the pendulum swings...and history’s dialectic demands it will..:the eradication must be total, ideological, scorched-earth.
Burn the books, salt the earth of the mindset, leave no theological stone unturned.
Civilizations don’t negotiate with memetic cancers; they excise them or perish in the dar al-Harb they refused to end.
This isn’t hate.
This is the profound, venomous love of a free mind for its own fucking survival.
We apologize for nothing.
And if the West finally grows a spine, it won’t be in the name of any god...it’ll be in the name of reason that refuses to be enslaved again.
End of sermon.
The hammer waits.
🗡️💀🗡️
BraveHeart™@Braveheart_USA
As a Westerner, I’d like to apologize for The Crusades. We clearly didn't go far enough.
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@clbolt Let him cook! The best part of this discussion is the clergy revealing their true colors. Can't imagine what they say about their congregations to each other when we're not around to hear it.
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@lukedsimmons The pushback on sabbaticals isn't about the concept of a sabbatical but the arrogance displayed by the clergy in defense of their sabbatical privileges. Don't bite the hand that feeds you. Read the room.
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I’m a big believer in well-done sabbaticals for pastors.
But I understand the pushback — too many are done poorly.
When they are reactions to poor self-management, lead to a pastor leaving, or are a last-ditch effort to save a bad situation, it’s no wonder people resist.
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@BobKellemen @jasonkovacs "People are talking about how other fields don't do sabbaticals. Really? Academia does sabbaticals."
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It's fascinating to see the current X debate on #Pastors and #Sabbaticals since @jasonkovacs has been writing about this for years. Why did X choose this week to break over whether pastors need a break before they break?
People are talking about how other fields don't do sabbaticals. Really? Academia does sabbaticals.
A 2019 study showed that some form of extended leave was available in 16% of American companies.
A 2026 study by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics collated the average PTO which included vacation days, sick days, personal days, holidays, and medical leave days (for the person and for family member issues). Most workers in America have significant time off annually. They receive 15-20 paid vacation days (3 to 4 weeks) after 5-7 years of work, plus 7-10 paid holiday days (during the first year of employment), plus 5-7 sick days, plus personal days, plus medical leave days, averaging 35-40 (seven to eight weeks) work days off annually.
Multiply that times 7 years and you have a year off of workdays every seven years! That sounds like an incredibly generous sabbatical policy.
Maybe churches would not consider pastoral sabbaticals if pastors had 35-40 workdays off annually, if pastors were not on-call 24/7, if they did not work most holidays, and if they had a 9-5 schedule. None of that even factors in the toll it takes on the embodied-soul to counsel the hurting, grieve with the grieving, visit the sick and dying, do multiple funerals per year, deal with critics, live in a fishbowl, etc.
Plus, most pastors taking sabbaticals are not just resting: they are researching, writing, and doing further educational, ministerial, and personal development.
None of this is a novel concept. Charles Spurgeon typically spent a month to six weeks almost every winter in Menton, France to refresh his embodied-soul.
BTW: As a pastor, I never took a sabbatical. As a professor, I took one part-time sabbatical that covered three months, during which I wrote my first two books.
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What if I told you that:
-I’m actually ok with sabbaticals and want to see it as a much more wide spread practice in our culture.
And
-My argument is not really against sabbaticals. It’s against Ghey Pastors who think that their job is the most difficult job in the world, therefore they should have a sabbatical lest they burn out.
There are difficulties in the Pastorate. But it is neither the hardest job, nor the heaviest job, nor the most troubling job. If you are the type of Pastor who will burn out if you don’t get a sabbatical….just go ahead and burn out. Someone can take your place, and you can become a congregant so that your smoldering wick can find more life.
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@DanielRitchie Probably the same ones who have jobs that don’t give them a choice and have mouths to feed and bills to pay. Lucky if they get a sabbath let alone a sabbatical.
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I wonder how many of the theobros dunking on the concept of a sabbatical are the same dudes that work 14 hours on a Sunday and call it a Sabbath?
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My thoughts on the Sabbatical question.
My father worked for 36 years in an aluminum can factory. The last I remember, he had 4 weeks of vacation annually which the union had secured for him, on top of recognized sick days. He worked 12 hour days in a harsh environment. How harsh? He had all four fingers on his left hand severed between two spools of aluminum each weighing about half a ton. They were sewn back on, but were never the same. Dad worked hard and provided well. I’m proud of my dad.
I began preaching 20 years ago at the same church I pastor today. I’ve had years, several in fact, where I went 52 for 52 (i.e. I preached every Sunday). This wasn’t ideal, but we were a small church and there were times when I didn’t have the help. Also, and this is no secret, I actually love to preach. If I go several weeks without preaching, I miss it. My normal routine for vacation for the past ten years or so is to take 2 weeks of vacation in the late summer, and maybe a week in the spring. And I do take a couple Sundays off from preaching each year to allow other elders the opportunity to preach, even if I am not gone. I would probably say now I preach maybe 44-46 out of 52 Sundays.
Up until a few years ago, I never heard of pastors taking sabbaticals. But now I hear about it quite often. And I don’t think it’s wrong necessarily. If the church wants to bless their pastor with some time off and it doesn’t harm the church financially, then they are within their right to do so. Where I think there is somewhat of an issue for me is when I think about my dad. He worked harder, physically, than any man I ever knew. He hated his work. It was stressful physically and mentally. But he did it because he loved us. And as much as he hated it, he did not complain. His bosses were sometimes difficult, his work friends would sometimes get on his nerves and at times he feared he might lose his job. Is my job more stressful than his? In some ways, yes. I have had to minister to people who are dealing with broken marriages, threats of suicide, wayward and even dead children. My job is hard. My dad has even told me, he thinks my job is harder than his was. But I also have blessings he doesn’t have. I get to be one of the first people to hold newborns in our church. I get to stand next to young men and women when they take their wedding vows. I get to hear the affirmation of God’s people weekly when I preach the Word to them. I am a blessed man.
After 20 years, could I have a sabbatical? I am certain my elders and church would support it if I asked. And maybe one day I will. But for now, I’ll just stick with my vacation time. It was good enough for my dad. I think it works for me too.
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