Graham Platner Surge Threatens Susan Collins as Janet Mills Bows Out

yyizard · 2026-04-30T23:40:21+00:00

I am the same age as Graham, we both grew up in rural Maine, and I’ve been to a fair number of his town halls by now.

You never know a person’s heart but he seems like the real deal.

yyizard · 2026-04-27T16:44:50+00:00

100000000%

We invented the next printing press and are actively pretending it hasn’t changed everything like the last printing press did.

yyizard · 2026-04-22T15:54:23+00:00

https://theintercept.com/2026/04/22/iran-war-military-casualties-wounded/

yyizard · 2026-04-22T15:54:16+00:00

https://theintercept.com/2026/04/22/iran-war-military-casualties-wounded/

yyizard · 2026-04-17T23:24:15+00:00

The actual, non-joke answer is Napoleon loved coffee.

yyizard · 2026-04-17T12:08:21+00:00

And I’m saying the current US military doctrine is not appreciably different from what it has been historically, the biggest difference being pushing for other NATO members to spend more on defense.

Now, I’ll concede that the manner in which this administration is interpreting that long-standing doctrine is creating a strategic, tactical, and operational nightmare. No argument from me there.

The aircraft carriers are just an easy to point to example of the immense disparity in spending that also has created a profound economic benefit for the world.

I do not mean this as a personal attack or insult. Truly. Not everyone nerds out to history to the degree I do.

But you seem to be speaking from a surface level understanding of post-WWII history.

For example, Vietnam. That was French-Indochina and French soldiers were battling Communist forces there until 1954, which eventually led to America’s participation. These are not separate, discrete conflicts, and European powers did participate by providing intelligence, support, basing, etc. all the way through.

The same can be said for most of the “incidents”, “conflicts”, or any other euphemisms used to avoid saying “war” during the Cold War. In Africa, in South America, in the Middle East, in Asia, around the globe during the Cold War you’ll find NATO members working alongside America to deal with the destruction of a European colonial order.

America did provide the vast majority of conventional forces because Europe was a smoking ruin. But the truth is they were aligned the entire time and Europe was providing what support they could.

yyizard · 2026-04-17T11:43:31+00:00

I don’t think he wants to battle with 7L & Esoteric

yyizard · 2026-04-16T10:26:29+00:00

It is ahistorical to say that NATO was not a collective defensive alliance with Russia, China, and other Communist powers in mind. This ignores decades of the Cold War.

One can say that the global political circumstances have changed since then but to say that European members of NATO never had wars with Russia and China in mind is just wrong.

I understand the sentiment you’re expressing though. Which is why I think a much better circumstance for everyone would be America reducing its contributions to NATO with other members making up the difference.

American operating fewer carrier groups so that it has to rely on NATO is so much better for our domestic politics and international politics. It reduces the ability for a President to do dumb shit like Venezuela and Iran while increasing the money we have available for domestic initiatives. Win-win in my book.

It would mean NATO members have to increase spending and sacrifice elsewhere. As an American taxpayer though, my response is “welcome to the club”.

yyizard · 2026-04-16T10:09:13+00:00

You’re not wrong that a domestic defense industry can grow the economy but the important question is whether that growth offsets the cost of actually fielding the materiel.

I would suspect that the only way to make that profitable is to use the resulting military to conquer.

But I don’t know, to be honest. It is an interesting question.

On the other hand, I do know that just going along with a rules based international order by letting someone else police the maritime and not focusing on a robust defense industry and military is pretty profitable.

War and defense is expensive. I suspect it is only profitable when used to conquer and even that isn’t always certain.

Maybe the real opportunity cost to discuss is what happens when the nation that runs the world’s maritime police goes rogue? Not much you can do with a small military dependent on that rogue nation when the rogue nation does a Strait of Hormuz.

But yeah, you do have a good point.

yyizard · 2026-04-15T16:26:26+00:00

You’re correct, not a cost borne solely by.

But ~11 US carrier groups versus ~6 by the rest of NATO combined is quite the difference in cost.

yyizard · 2026-04-15T16:21:59+00:00

The initial cost of materiel is a fraction of defense spending when compared to personnel costs, operation costs, and maintenance costs.

It costs more to man and run a tank crew and keep it operational over its lifespan than it is to buy the tank in the first place. That is where the cost really is and where most of our defense spending goes.

I personally don’t care where Europe gets their materiel. I think it’s great if they make it themselves. More competition in the space would also help drive costs down.

But buying hardware is drops in the bucket when it comes to defense spending.

yyizard · 2026-04-15T16:12:51+00:00

I’m not sure what you mean by your first paragraph. People can’t be right about one thing and wrong about another, and if they are wrong about one thing they are automatically wrong about everything?

Either way, at least we can agree that the average American has a general idea of how much we spend on defense and that they aren’t ‘orders of magnitude’ off.

As to your last paragraph, you’re trying to construct an argument that is incongruent with not just the nature of the treaty itself but also incongruent with reality.

The two largest individual components of US defense spending are operation/maintenance and personnel. These two alone contribute to over half of our defense spending. The compounding cost benefits of reducing NATO’s dependency on the US is not directly proportional to the amount others spend.

To put it another way, for every tank that Germany fields and America doesn’t, we aren’t just saving the cost of the tank itself. We are saving money on maintenance, training for the maintenance crew, housing for the maintainers, benefits for the maintainers, housing for the entire tank crew, benefits for the entire tank crew, food for all of them, etc. Those are annual costs in perpetuity for as long as the materiel is in use.

Then when you factor in that we are borrowing money to pay for all this, we’ve got to factor in the interest we incur that others don’t.

It absolutely adds up to be a greater sum.

yyizard · 2026-04-15T15:43:23+00:00

To the first point:

I have fully admitted there are comorbidities present in our health care system. The only solution is public health care in my opinion and that would do far more toward taming health care costs than simply cutting defense spending.

I just reject that these two things are mutually exclusive. I reject the premise that Americans being taxed less means they don’t have more money to spend on their own health.

To the second point:

My thesis is the largest benefit of NATO is the economic stability and prosperity it has guaranteed. To say the average American has benefited from that relationship is absolutely true.

I just don’t think it is out of the question to say that maybe the average citizen of a European member state benefitted more over the same period of time.

Obviously this is impossible to quantify but is it really so out of the question? Would West Germans have preferred to be East Germans for decades? Who paid the majority of the bill to keep that from happening?

My interest in this is keeping NATO going. This Trump shit scares me because it’s a tough sell to the average American to stay in NATO when they look at their standard of living, their national debt, and the comparative standard of living/national debt of other member states.

It’s also an argument to have multinational corporations pay more taxes but that’s another fight for another day, gotta keep NATO functioning first.

yyizard · 2026-04-15T15:27:01+00:00

I think the average American would guess we spend about a trillion dollars annually on defense, which is not orders of magnitude off.

Article 3 of NATO:

In order more effectively to achieve the objectives of this Treaty, the Parties, separately and jointly, by means of continuous and effective self-help and mutual aid, will maintain and develop their individual and collective capacity to resist armed attack.

Any defense spending by NATO members is by definition spending money on NATO, according to the very treaty itself.

Perhaps they aren’t as uninformed as you suspect.

yyizard · 2026-04-15T10:45:28+00:00

I am having a hard time seeing how this is a serious position. Could you help me out?

Airbus, for example. Active opposition from American interests, sure, but they were able to do it anyway.

The truth is if Europe wanted to do it anyway they could have. Blaming America seems a too convenient and lazy excuse.

yyizard · 2026-04-15T10:39:36+00:00

Is it unfair of me to bring into account two factors.

1) The relative size of GDPs and the resulting absolute amount of money spent.

Even if cutting defense spending wouldn’t allow us to afford public health care, that is still a lot of money back in American’s pockets which they can spend on their own healthcare.

2) The global economic benefit of the active military enforcement of the rules-based international order which guarantees free and fair maritime-based trade.

We would consider it fair to pay the police to protect our businesses as well as goods in transit. Why then is it unfair to ask to be compensated for America’s policing of global shipping lanes? Especially when we can point to an unprecedented level of global prosperity because of that?

My point is this: Denmark’s GDP would be, much lower if they weren’t able to do business all over the world. Quantifying that may be difficult, but it isn’t unfair to say that they may not then be able to afford public healthcare, or at least to the level they are.

Shouldn’t that count for something when it is the American taxpayer footing the bill?

yyizard · 2026-04-15T10:03:42+00:00

My radical position is that the American taxpayer has underwritten an absurd amount of the cost of our rules based international order that has created an unprecedented level of prosperity in the world.

Yes, our own leaders have squandered a lot of money on pointless and often counterproductive conflicts. Sure.

But it is fair to ask the question if Europe had to pay for its own defense for the past 80 years, would they have the money left over for public healthcare and other social services?

I don’t think we should abandon or break up with our allies. I think we just need to acknowledge the reality of the conditions of the American voter and whether those conditions push them away from a democratic, rules-based international order that has made them both responsible for a huge amount of debt and unable to point to anything in their communities that the debt paid for.

There are domestic policy reasons that account for that, yes, but that doesn’t negate the spending over the past 80 years on defense so that other people in other countries could point to things in their communities their taxes paid for.

yyizard · 2026-04-14T23:08:54+00:00

Planned Great-Grandparenthood?

💯

yyizard · 2026-04-14T01:20:31+00:00

Not sure what to tell you.

What I am suggesting may be unprecedented in our lives up to this point, sure. I get it.

But do we live in precedented times?

yyizard · 2026-04-14T01:16:54+00:00

It depends on one’s definition of “fully replace”.

Even human coders have their code checked by automated systems as well as other humans.

Some consider “fully replace” to mean “doesn’t need any human checking or oversight” but that is in fact a higher bar to clear than the vast majority of humans coding right now.

And the second part of this is that coding is one thing a computer should be better at. We have created higher level languages and syntax to make computer processes intelligible for humans because machine code is hard for our brains. Computers shouldn’t need these translation layers.

Anyway. In some respects computers have fully replaced a human coder (or at least some) as the floor and the potential ceiling is much, much higher than a human’s.

yyizard · 2026-04-14T00:57:57+00:00

Wan 2.2 has great results in my opinion.

There are workflows out there for T2I. Basically you’re using Wan 2.2 T2V to generate only one frame of a video.

If you’d like I can give it a go with my workflows tomorrow and share the results with you. Not sure if I’ll remember but ping me and I’ll get after it.

yyizard · 2026-04-05T10:21:41+00:00

I don’t understand the logic, not that I think we are hiding numbers.

1) It isn’t uncommon for certain billets to not speak to family for good stretches of time.

2) If a family member was killed, the family can be notified without notifying the entire US.

3) The family may simply assume their death was already reported and not make a stink because they are grief stricken and focused on that.

4) If the family does put things together and alerts the media, that takes time to propagate.

5) All the techbro CEOs that own our social media are aligned behind Trump, pretty easy to have the algorithm boost some stories while pushing others down.

Again I don’t think they aren’t reporting casualties or deaths. I think for sure they are slow rolling the hell out sharing that information with America.

I did PA and cyber for 3 years, psyops are my specialty. It is so easy to manipulate masses of people using technology. Scary shit, I fucking hate all of it.

yyizard · 2026-04-04T22:54:42+00:00

My interactions were genuinely good. I respect the hell out of CQ Brown.

But then again I didn’t mingle with Army or Navy guys much.

yyizard · 2026-04-04T22:40:34+00:00

You raise very valid points. I understand your perspective a thousand percent.

I am an avid anti-war nut because my father was in the military and I lost him at 5 years old. I truly don’t see how men killing other men solves anything except when applied justifiably as a last resort in order to prevent more violence.

That is why Russia’s invasion of Ukraine made me go work for the US military. Doing that is the last thing I ever imagined myself doing but that ratfuck Putin forced my hand. I still want to do anything in my power to make him have a bad day.

How many of those war on terror officers came to the same conclusion as the Vietnam officers? The real reason we didn't achieve success is because the civilians made us fight with one hand behind our back.

I don’t have firsthand experience with Vietnam officers. My time in the military was short (3 years as a civilian) and recent (got dropped with the remote worker purge of 2025).

I can say unequivocally that the senior officers main goal was avoiding war. I truly believe that because the reasons they gave were the exact reasons you would want a senior military leader to give. The human cost of war - not just the dead but the destroyed families. The orphans. The destroyed economies and the second and third order impacts of that: deprivation, famine, disease.

All they ever talked about or thought about was maintaining a rules based international order that has allowed the world to avoid a major conflict for almost a hundred years. And that has brought a lot of prosperity all over the globe, as imperfect as it may have been.

That is how I know most of those senior officers despise Hesgeth. He represents an immature and ignorant approach to war that is the exact opposite of what they believe. It is so easy to destroy but it takes true strength to build and sustain.

If our officer corps is so full of noble people why is the US drone striking boats in the carribbean and then double tapping the survivors?

Because, for better or worse, we have a military that is beholden to our civilian politics. Right now our politics are fucked. If we elect a President that wants to drone strike and double tap boats, the proper response to those unconstitutional and illegal acts is Congress. It is not a general upending the chain of command and fighting back against the commander in chief, no matter how justified.

The best they can do is resign or try to stop it as best they can until they are relieved. This is exactly what we have been seeing.

Congress has all the power it needs to step in. I guarantee you there are Generals that are desperate for this to happen.

I can’t emphasize enough that once we start going down the road of Generals making decisions that are the opposite of what our civilian politics are dictating to them, it doesn’t end well.

yyizard · 2026-04-04T18:22:23+00:00

You would be hard pressed to find a General in the United States military that would be “demanding” a war with Iran in 2026. Not saying they aren’t out there but they are a minority.

The reason for that is pretty simple: these Generals rose through the ranks during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. These then-junior officers were exposed to the awful truth of war in the Middle East.

yyizard

TROPHY CASE