Baffled Boomer MAGA OG

RE: The Pilot’s Rescue (an alternate history) It’s April 5th, 2026 (or, as President Kamala Harris declared it, the “Trans Day of Visibility”). On a routine training mission over Kuwait, an American F-15 pilot became disoriented, failed to respond to orders from her flight lead, and flew into Iranian airspace, only to be immediately shot down by China’s latest air defense system, bought by Iran with the money President Harris had been shipping to Iran monthly to assist in the build-up of their nuclear weapons program. The pilot was a 1st Lt. and had just recently graduated from flight school, over the objections of her instructor pilots. Despite her known shortcomings, the training squadron commander had been forced to give her a set of wings and an F-15 seat because otherwise he would have failed to meet his monthly quota for female pilots. On the run, 1st Lt. Jones was doing the best she could to evade Iranian ground forces, but due to changes in SERE training to make it less offensive to a variety of leftwing grievance groups, she really did not know what she was doing. Still, she had not yet been captured. President Harris convened her core inner circle for national defense matters in an emergency meeting: 1. Vice President Elmer Fudd (known for his proficiency in shooting down flying birds). 2. Secretary of State Adam Schiff. 3. National Security Advisor Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. 4. Secretary of Defense Tom Nichols. 5. CIA Director Alexander Vindman. 5. Chairwoman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff ADM Lisa Franchetti. After 30 minutes of deliberation, the President’s team determined it was too risky to mount an attempt to rescue 1st Lt. Jones. The CENTCOM commander was ordered to call Jones on her survival radio and order her to surrender, while Secretary Schiff would negotiate her release. (Israel had offered to help but President Harris would not even take their call.) Following orders, 1st Lt. Jones surrendered and was taken to Tehran for interrogation. Due to the open borders policies of President Harris and her predecessor, President Biden, Iran had a large, functioning arm of its Quds Force on the ground in the USA. Members of that force went to 1st Lt. Jones’ house and took pictures of her children playing in the front yard. Showing these pictures to Jones and threatening to kill her children, 1st Lt. Jones was forced to film a tearful confession of war crimes and a lengthy denunciation of the USA as “The Great Satan.” (CNN played this video virtually on a loop for 7 days while their announcers silently smiled like Hannibal Lecter.) Months of negotiations ensued between Schiff and Iran, and ultimately Schiff was able to obtain Jones' release by agreeing to (i) ship 500 pounds of enriched, weapons grade uranium to Tehran, (ii) send $500bn in cash in small bills to the Iranian mullahs, (iii) withdraw all US forces from the Persian Gulf region, (iv) denounce Israel as a Satanic force and (v) make President Harris wear a hijab during all public appearances regarding the matter. Upon 1LT Jones’ return home, she was met with great fanfare by a hijab-wearing President Harris at the White House, where Jones was awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross, a Purple Heart, promoted to Captain and appointed to carry Harris’ nuclear football. Months later Iran nuked Tel Aviv, Israel nuked Tehran in response and Secretary Schiff agreed to broker peace negotiations. (Unfortunately for the mullahs, the Twelfth Imam did not then arise from a well in Qom. Boy oh boy were they pissed.) Then I woke up and remembered what really happened: SecWar’s team put together a daring plan, President Trump said “EXECUTE” and we did. * * * P.S., coming from a family with military aviators and having spent plenty of time in the back of military aircraft piloted by women, I must say that there are PLENTY of highly competent female pilots whom I would trust with my life. But the fact is that during Democrat regimes plenty of unqualified people of all sorts were advanced into all kinds of jobs they had no business performing, thanks to DEI policies. I mean no offense to the many highly qualified female combat aviators, with whom I would proudly serve.

2nd American F15E crew member rescued and safe after complex rescue operation that began Friday morning, two senior US officials confirm to me.

OUT OF BOUNDS: Megan Rapinoe slams the new IOC policy limiting women’s events to biological females based on sex testing. "This committee is framing it as based in science, which it’s not," she said. "This will ultimately just prevent people from competing within the women’s category that they feel like they have an unfair advantage. It’s just really hateful."

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.