Maker Patrick

@Digdug30 @Jon_173d @thomasbsauer You are completely wrong on the pendulum. While still bureaucratic, the modern VA screens for everything and asks all the questions. "Have you ever had a nosebleed in 20 years of service" However, it's possible that your experience and mine are coming from two different regions.

@Jon_173d @thomasbsauer No. It's not. It is still extremely difficult to navigate the VA claims system. Period. Full stop. There is no pendulum other than a 20 year war bro.

It’s not fraud. It’s a very low standard to legitimately qualify for VA disability compensation. Good luck changing the standard, though.

@thomasbsauer It can be that in his case, but things are vastly different now. Mental Health is the big claim. That's what his is. That's the big one on most everyone's disability at the modern VA. MH is screened for much more than before. MH treatment is not stigmatized as much as before

@60Minutes Pay salaries high enough to attract the workers (duh)

Shipyards desperately need welders, pipefitters, and other skilled workers. But this work is grueling and dangerous. cbsn.ws/4bIyP6O

@AmerPhilo2025 Fascinating! That's an uphill battle. Might be time to bring it into the Overton Window at least But even the quote is mistaken. My household has 6 people, but only 2 votes. While I would not want my children to be able to vote yet, my house should have 6 votes. 6 ppl, 6 votes!

"Allowing virtually every citizen to vote has been a catastrophic disaster for the United States. We have allowed illiterate, uneducated citizens to hold hostage the world’s largest economy, most powerful military, and a robust intellectual culture. It has decimated the concept of civitas and allowed powerful actors with bad intentions to influence those who cannot think for themselves. To restore the United States, we must seriously consider ending universal suffrage." Read more below. ‍ ‍

@JHartley2 @CynicalPublius Then so be it. Do it

@CynicalPublius Don’t hate the messenger but you’re gonna court martial a thousand others too. This is the story of most bases including multiple I was on in Iraq and two in Afghanistan.

This is the most horrific thing I have read today. A lot of civilians don't understand that there were two choices in Iraq and Afghanistan: 1. Burn pits. -or- 2. Load up FMTVs with garbage to haul away somewhere and risk getting troops killed by IED ambushes for garbage. Little did we know we WERE getting troops killed for garbage, just 20 years later. But for an NCO to send his troops routinely WADING INTO A BURN PIT? This guy, if he is still alive, and the story is as stated, should be recalled to active duty and court martialed for manslaughter.

@NY_LBSS @F530Josh @KLloydProject You're retarded. You see "chart go up" and think the only possible reason could be fraud. More screening? More testing? "hurr durr nope, only fraud" Sleep apnea is tested for in a sleep lab in all cases. Do you think service members are defrauding the medical test equipment?

@F530Josh @KLloydProject Don’t care. Massive fraud is happening.

My favorite part of the VA discussion tonight is that not even five months ago I watched one of my Marines rapidly develop and get destroyed by rectal cancer that was linked to swimming in burn pits. He was one of several guys from that deployment that died that way almost twenty years later. Me and the boys are all pretty much waiting our turn at this stage. We had a company Gunnery Sergeant that was an absolute piece of shit on my first deployment. His hobbies included eating all of the Otis Spunkmeyer muffins, and finding menial and pointless tasks for the Marines to do when they could instead be sleeping. One of his favorite ways to pass the time was to sit on the hood of his gator inside of FOB Omar while the React Marines police called the burn pit looking for “non-burnables.” You see, the cool thing about a burn pit is that after a while they just stay on fire, like pretty much forever. They get real soupy in the less hot parts, and you can walk on top of the plastic soup. Sometimes, lazy Marines will throw pen flares, lithium batteries, SAW drums full of 5.56, and other random fun things in there instead of disposing of them properly. It was easier to toss the shit than it was to deal with Gunny interrogating you on why you needed to get rid of a dead battery. Most of the time, those things just pop on their own anyways. It’s no big deal, since it’s all just trash and it’s usually sequestered away from sleeping areas. For Gunny Diaz though, this was unsightly. You could see the “non-burnables” in the burn pit. What if the Battalion Commander, or someone from higher up the chain of command were on the OP when one of those things popped, or worse, what if they saw a radio battery!? Well, that would bring Gunny Diaz’s reputation as a Company Gunnery Sergeant into question. Can’t have that. His solution was pretty simple. Take the Marines from react, whenever they weren’t busy escorting Iraqis into the OP to get free money from “Captain Tom,” and have them wade into the burn pit to pick out the non-burnables. Easy. Gunny got a Navy Commendation Medal. We all get to have cancer twenty years later. Fuck you Gunny Diaz. You were and always will be a useless fat piece of shit, undeserving of the 0369 MOS and title of Company Guns. It wasn’t a very kinetic deployment. It wasn’t just us infantrymen that got to swim in the burning plastics. The cooks got a turn. The comm guys got a turn. The mechanics got a turn. Everyone got a bit of cancer swimming in. Great fun for everyone. Kevin died in November. He left behind a family who was entirely abandoned by the VA once he passed. They haven’t received any of the help his widow was promised. But yeah, financial Jerry Springer really do be doing the hard hitting investigative journalism on the massive VA fraud numbers.

@Alpaca_Capital Yes indeed. I ran a similar test a while ago. An entry-level factory worker job paid less than delivering pizza. "bUt MuH caREEr adVanCeMeNt!" Sure, but you get tips for delivering pizza.

How much does it pay? Genuinely asking. My experience from the US (where I grew up) is people pound the table about skills shortages and when you ask what they’re paying, it’s equivalent to working at Walmart in a no-skill job.

The requirement that lets companies get away with trying to hide these job postings needs to be revisited. If companies aren't posting their jobs to the top 5-10 internet job boards, they are scamming Americans in favor of H-1Bs. There's no other explanation.

@beerundbacon @SecVetAffairs @depvetaffairs Interesting. May I ask what base or state, and what years? I have a theory that the magnitude of recent VA changes may be different regionally.

@TheMakerPatrick @SecVetAffairs @depvetaffairs Maybe in your experience but I have a long list of experiences, both personal and from family and friends that say otherwise

I’m tired of a society that looks at Veterans as victims. We are not victims; we are warfighters and heroes. The @DepVetAffairs is refocusing our suicide prevention and mental health efforts to honor that warrior spirt. You have the discipline and heart. We’re here to provide the resources you need.

@PaulFisch1 @SuitablePolitic @sethjlevy Nonsense. Finishing building nukes in secret was their logical best path. They were apparently too infiltrated to accomplish that in secret. They were repeatedly sabotaged (thankfully) with STUXNET and other efforts. Yet they apparently admitted to being able to build bombs now.

Why? Iran has been weeks from a nuclear weapon for over 8 years. They obviously weren't finishing it and instead using their position to try to negotiate something like the jcpoa. Nukes are a deterrent to being attacked, but finishing would get them attacked by Israel. Sitting on the cusp was the logical position to use for diplomatic negotiations.

Trump is going to hit the power plants because he wants to turn the lights out for a variety of reasons, many of which pertaining to the seizure of Kharg Island. As @sethjlevy said, it'd certainly be on my list. But by giving this ultimatum, Trump forces the regime to respond with pride wnd put themselves in a no-win situation. When Iran goes to retaliate, their missiles and drones won't land. We will intercept everything. Because we're waiting for it. And they'll reveal the location of, probably, their final launchers. Or they fail to live up to their word and the regime collapses under the weight of how weak they've shown the world they are.

@Mookafish Would a lunar space elevator passing through L1 be more efficient? I've been told that we don't even need exotic materials and can use Kevlar due to the lower gravity. You don't need to spend as much energy on acceleration, therefore it ought to be pretty substantially efficient

These mass drivers are going to be very, very long. I've graphed out the required length of a mass driver depending on the acceleration, assuming they will reach lunar escape velocity (~2,400m/s) Even if the mass driver could reach 50m/s^2 of acceleration (~5G), the mass driver would have to be about 58km long.

@RealityTripper @Aristos_Revenge I agree that the system overcorrected. But let's put some things in perspective. The VA's reputation is awful for good reason. Homeless veterans are still far too numerous. Every piece of mail from the VA is adorned with "plz don't unalive yourself" markings.

@TheMakerPatrick @Aristos_Revenge "It's not much larger than that... Almost anyone retiring today will get 80% minimum..." HELLO? Don't you see this is the problem, and unless you veterans start policing your own and speaking up, we will literally cut almost all disability. This is insane.

@PaulFisch1 @SuitablePolitic @sethjlevy There is not a single reason, but multiple for and against such actions. Obviously, the threat to the straits is high up on the reasons-not-to-attack list. It's almost like the reasons-to-attack list got bigger and more important recently...

There is a reason why no previous president has attacked Iran. They have been the main source of our problems in the ME for 30 years. They didn't do it because they are not retarded. They knew we couldn't stop Iran from blocking the Hormuz and we would be forced into an unwinnable position immediately that would be an economic catastrophe.

@WomanDefiner Anyone leaving the service now is subject to much more meticulous screening and the VA is much more generous in rating applications than even a decade ago

I have a younger brother who did 3 tours in the GWOT who gets less disability than some of the guests on Caleb's show who never deployed and it drives me nuts.

@planefag Get your Master's

I must confess utter bafflement at this common refrain – even from the sober and level-headed, such as here – that Trump's stated objectives are somehow "tactical" and not "strategic," as if nobody intuits the direct connection between his clearly-stated strategic goal of rendering Iran incapable of threatening America and its core security interests, and the destruction of the tangible means by which Iran accomplishes that. It seems that conditional wisdom from past wars is now axiomatic; that no matter how crushing the tactical victory it cannot become strategic success without transformation via some dark diplomatic alchemy. To be blunt, this unspoken premise contravenes the evidence. Iran's threat to US security interests via its quest for regional hegemony was always rooted in hard power – indeed, Iran's waged non-stop regional war via proxy armies and relied on threatening a crucial sea line of communication + the globally vital oil infrastructure it serves as its defensive deterrent. By cultivating the Houthis they extended that threat to a second globally crucial SLOC and even went on the offensive there; the beginning of non-stop kinetic escalations to counter stinging kinetic defeats in their proxy wars which ultimately led to the current conflict. Soft power hedged, but ultimately failed to contain Iran's single-minded ambitions, just as it failed to contain the DPRK before it. The underwriter of all the regime's diplomatic dealings is violence or the threat thereof; their every bargaining chip is bloody. When a nation's power derives so fundamentally from hard power; even more than for most, it follows that destroying their capacity for warmaking destroys their geopolitical might. And yet, despite the President’s blunt and thorough statements of intent to those ends, the ground fact of regime change being pursued mostly by Israeli efforts (whom have the presence, the motivation, and the ground assets to enable it,) and the optionality of such as regards achieving the explicit objective of erasing Iranian ability to threaten core American interests – almost all professional interlocutors place success behind a veil impregnable to kinetic action. Regime change, the only in-doubt outcome, is elevated to decisive status via various theories; ranging from the supposedly inevitable progress of their nuclear program via inexorable will to dark musings of the war spurring some global proliferation cascade. Proponents of the former either omit explicit predictions of program reconstitution timelines in light of the systematic and thorough leveling of the centrifuge production and supply chain now ongoing, or offer ones that seem ludicrously short in light of the above; the “Tony Stark in a cave with a box of scraps” theorem. (Nor is the feasibility of building a sufficient arsenal of delivery systems under constant air threat; an especially curious omission given even long-time naysayers of BMD now discuss sipping martinis on IRBM aimpoints.) Advocates of the latter remain conspicuously silent on the probable rouge-states-cum-nuclear-powers-in-waiting lurking in the wings, which makes it difficult to evaluate their claims that destroying dangerous regimes pursuing nuclear weapons somehow increases the global risk from nuclear weapons. This is especially noticeable in Iran’s case. Firstly the regime’s decades-long struggle against increasing instability and waning political legitimacy is already at fever-pitch; with enforcers slaughtering protesters by the tens of thousands and decades of economic misery now compounded by existential pressures like insufficient water supply. The proliferation risks of a nuclear-armed Iran suffering a collapse or coup remain broadly unexplored; a curious omission given the many interlocutors remarking on Khameni’s probable successors being “more hardline” and Khameni’s own advanced age. Nor does Iran perfectly scan as a rational state pursuing rational goals via rational strategy that similarly rational rogue states would take as an exemplary case study. This fact is easily intuited via Iran’s five-decades long foreign policy of waging nonstop war upon, pursuing nuclear weapons in proximity to, and declaring their national raison d'être to be the destruction of, a state that already has deliverable thermonuclear weapons and unquestioned will to existential survival. And of course the “conventional invasion to proliferation incentive” causality chain is never applied to probable future policy of a nation devoted to pursuit of regional hegemony via proxy war once it’s inviolate behind a nuclear deterrent – despite the ongoing land war in Europe providing a perfect case-study. Indeed, it almost seems some august commentators *want* more results like the Russo-Ukrainian war; as if Proper Policy is defined strictly by the contours of Cold War era calculus. Only two days hence a remarkable article appeared in Foreign Affairs, shot through from headline to conclusion with a borderline scolding tone as it detailed how Iran’s stunning failures of deterrence and, above all, its failure to gain The Bomb, has made the world a more dangerous place. One can only imagine the reactions this engendered in Kyiv. For as Ukrainians can tell you, arguments revolving around unidentified “governments” pursuing nuclear weapons pale in comparison to tangible threats immediately before you, especially since they present weighable risks against nebulous theoreticals. As Liddel Hart once said, Clausewitzian focus on tactical violence is but one tool among many in grand strategy; and the goal of grand strategy is to destroy the opposing government’s power to make war. And to achieve this at lowest possible cost; one must strike at the enemy’s weakness; to effect their disarmament rather than destruction. And I can think of no scenario of "throwing a grindstone against an egg," (as Sun Tzu summarized,) more clear-cut than strategic bombers leveling the defense industrial base of a nation reliant entirely on counter-value deterrent, asymmetric insurgencies, and above all its enemies’ own "strategic patience" to safeguard their warmaking power. But I only have a bachelors, so what do I know, anyway?

@beerundbacon @SecVetAffairs @depvetaffairs That's not true recently. The VA in the past few years is thorough and generous. Nearly impossible for retirees to get lower than an 80% rating.

@SecVetAffairs @depvetaffairs VA isn’t about veterans, it’s a jobs program for unionized federal employees and a way for Congress to funnel money to pharmaceutical companies. The VA doesn’t give two shits about any of us.

@neilquinn @AlexNoonan6 There's no evidence of fraud here, yet you say it's insanely obvious. The VA system is what it is now. It's very meticulous and very, very, very generous compared to its reputation.

@AlexNoonan6 No politician is ever going to go after the VA despite insanely obvious fraud

It's really a shame that Caleb is the only person in the media on this with literally no one in the government saying anything

@LeighWolf @CMSPh_2010 How do you know he didn't earn it? Are you the psychologist that handled his case? You shouldn't be talking about your patients. The Navy medically separated him, supposedly. That doesn't happen on a whim. Do you really know more about his case than his doctors and the Navy?

You’re agreeing with me without even realizing it. YOU have earned disability, WE should be tripping over ourselves to get you exactly what you need in a timely manner. Meanwhile the gentlemen in the video is getting paid for life because he was someone able to “prove” that attending school gave him service related anxiety and depression. It bothers me a lot that you’re climbing mountains after being injured in combat and this guy is sailing into a future of forever payments.

If you think the Somali fraud is bad, buckle up for the forthcoming reckoning over VA fraud. Nobody wants to talk about it because it inherently requires criticizing “veterans,” but the problem isn’t going to fix itself. There’s an entire cottage industry that helps “veterans” defraud the VA at the expense of veterans that are actually disabled. The culture has become so toxic and entitled that ALL veterans are advised to pursue a VA disability rating, regardless of the nature of their service. In fact, there’s now people joining specifically to pursue easy, lifetime “disability” payments. This behavior is enraging to people who are, or know, genuinely disabled veterans.

@LeighWolf Retarded take. You have no reason to even suspect he is not a "genuinely disabled veteran" that you claim to want to support. The VA is a bureaucracy. It used to let vets slip through the cracks. Now it is vastly more meticulous and generous. It will never be perfect