Why is it that the proponents of this argument never substantiate it with numbers?

How many troops are deployed to combat from Israel versus other bases in the region? What percentage of our supplies are stored in Israeli bases or pass through Israeli ports on their way to combat forces? Hell, how many airstrikes against Iran departed from Israel versus other locations (like literal aircraft carriers)?

I have a funny feeling that Israel’s military value to America is “impossible to quantify” because all efforts to do so have made it obvious that this relationship is a massive net loss for America.

What an incredibly sad thing to admit.

I’d nearly forgotten how he sent JD “Mercy stroke” Vance to resolve the situation.

And yet we still can’t fly our air superiority fighters over Iran without taking fire. Outstanding work, boys.

It’s the sort of move that might look like a clever reversal, but ultimately has a very steep price tag.

A blockade is an act of war, and this one is clearly pointed at the rest of the world, not Iran. It’s predicated on the same faulty assumption that Trump’s administration made when invading Iran: our military is unanswerable, and they will take it lying down.

Escalation paths from this are all bad-- what if an EU ship ignores challenges from a US Navy vessel, or China sends a military escort with a shipping fleet? Are we really about to start another shooting war, or will we stand there with our dicks in our hands as they sail by?

I’m thinking this brilliant idea is abandoned in a week.

Gosh, I wonder what Iran thinks about that idea? The article has this to say:

Any “joint venture” was not part of Iran’s 10-point peace plan that the U.S. agreed to and the president previously called “workable.”

And that’s it! Guess this one is still in the “concept of a plan” phase.

“The lies linking me with the disgraceful Jeffrey Epstein need to end today,” she said, adding that “numerous fake images and statements about Epstein and me have been calculating [sic] on social media for years now”.

So this isn’t about empowering the victims of Epstein’s criminal enterprise to find justice, it’s about punishing them for inconveniencing her?

That’s utterly ghoulish. Jesus Christ, Melania.

That’s not true! Trump’s handlers are very good at picking people who are competent at funneling money into their own investments!

Oz claimed that New York’s Medicaid program last year provided some 5 million people with personal care services, which assist people in need with basic activities like bathing, grooming and meal preparation. That would add up to nearly three-fourths of the state’s 6.8 million Medicaid enrollees.

…

But the real number of New Yorkers who used those services last year was about 450,000, or between 6% and 7% of total enrollees, CMS spokesman Chris Krepich told The Associated Press this week.

What the fuck. I normally attribute malice to powerful entities that should know better, but this is so god damned idiotic I am seriously questioning if it’s actually gross incompetence.

TIL that objects re-entering the atmosphere vary considerably in their initial velocities, and that ones from further out (e.g. lunar visits) tend to be much faster than those from LEO. It’s not intuitively surprising, but I’d assumed that given the “narrow window” used for re-entry, all objects needed to dump enough velocity to arrive in a fairly tight band.

He knew where the war hawks said it would go. It’s so weird; now that they’ve got their war, they don’t actually know what to do with it.

The presence of A-10s suggests that Iran’s strategic air defenses have been destroyed or greatly suppressed. The plane is more vulnerable to air defenses than fighters.

I don’t even know what to make of this statement. It’s such a bizarre thing to guess about. It could very well be that this is entirely for optics!

It’s the missing GitHub status page.

GitHub is teetering on one 9 over an entire quarter. There are serious, systemic problems in Microsoft’s shop.

This line of thinking would make a lot more sense if there wasn’t a long, storied history of Trump completely ignoring sycophants when they’re not immediately useful to him. You’d expect someone like Carney to know better. It’s enough to make a person physically cringe.

Like anyone who’s been paying the least bit of attention, I was wondering “wait, what’s new here?”

In a letter sent Tuesday to Attorney General Pam Bondi, Raskin said the documents point to a broader risk to national security, writing: “These new disclosures suggest that Donald Trump stole documents so sensitive that only six people in the entire U.S. government had access to them, that the documents President Trump stole pertained to his business interests.”

This is more interesting than the headline, in my opinion. The claim that they “pertained to his business interests” is not exactly the same thing as selling them to the highest bidder. It suggests either that Trump’s businesses are the subject of intense scrutiny by the fed or, more likely and more worrying, Trump is much deeper into brokering sensitive information than we expected (as in, it’s one of his main sources of income).

HOAs make a lot of sense when there’s shared private infrastructure, like elevators. They make less sense when they dictate what color residents can paint their houses.

It also says “never”, but yeah, it’s a pretty bland statement when you put the context back in (literally and figuratively).

You might read this article initially thinking it is just the US snubbing Ukraine yet again, but the real answer is laid out in black and white if you read further:

An Iranian Shahed is said to cost $20,000 to $50,000, depending on the model. The Ukrainian interceptors are even cheaper. Concerns about intercepting such a cheap, simple target with a multimillion-dollar munition spiked during U.S. fights against Houthi rebels in Yemen, and have remained high since.

You can practically hear the US MIC breathing heavily in the gallery during these talks. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan transferred trillions from US taxpayers to military contractors over 20 years, but a belligerent the size of Iran with modern warfare techniques could realize that dream again in 5.

The economy not only shed jobs in February, it also lost jobs in two of the last three months, three of the last five months and five of the last nine months. (During Biden’s term, there were literally zero months in which the economy lost jobs.)

And this is all before the imminent corrections when the AI bubble pops, which will take us from accelerating tumble to free fall. An astounding feat, given what this administration was served up.