HowieF16

Am Yisrael Chai! Proud Jew! Proud Zionist. Combat Veteran. Fighter Pilot. 🇺🇸❤️🇮🇱

[HowieF16 @HowieF16]

@BradleyKellard There is a twist not discussed. Most students receive financial aid based on GPA being >3.0. If you can’t keep a 3.0 in a STEM class, you’ll drop the major for something easier that allows you to keep FINAID.

[HowieF16 @HowieF16]

@KentOszmanski Leading by example…Awesome!

[Captain Allen @CptAllenHistory]

On This Day — May 20, 1940

Auschwitz began operating today.

Not with gas chambers — those came later. The first 30 German criminal prisoners (future kapos) arrived at a former Polish army barracks outside Oświęcim to start building the machine.

The Nazis chose this spot deliberately: the heart of Poland, home to over 3 million Jews — Europe’s largest Jewish population — with perfect rail lines running straight to every major Jewish community. This was industrial geography in service of extermination.

But Auschwitz isn’t really the answer. It is the question.

The Holocaust did not emerge from a vacuum. For generations, Europe had been obsessed with the “Jewish Question.” Anti-Jewish laws, economic boycotts, propaganda, and expulsion fantasies were not Nazi inventions — they were refined and mainstreamed across the continent. When the Nazis escalated to total annihilation, they found eager collaborators in almost every nation.

By the time the trains rolled into Auschwitz, dozens of countries had already spent decades corralling, impoverishing, and isolating their Jews. The murder itself, horrific as it was, later became a psychological comfort: focus on the gas chambers and crematoria, and you can forget how so many nations quietly sighed in relief when the Jews of Europe were finally “gone.”

Eastern Europe often refused to return surviving Jews to their homes after the war. The West preferred comfortable moral lessons about “intolerance” over honest reckoning with its own role in shoving millions toward the furnaces.

Only the Jewish people were left to remember that when their brethren stood at the edge of the abyss, almost no one reached out a hand.

Auschwitz forces the real question: What do a people do when the world has proven — repeatedly — that Jewish survival cannot be trusted to others?

The answer was born in 1948. It is called Israel.

Am Yisrael Chai.

[HowieF16 @HowieF16]

@KentOszmanski I have not. I will need to read and watch some of this

[James E. Thorne @DrJStrategy]

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.

[Fred Aaron is Pops Culture 🇺🇸✡🇮🇱 @fredforthemets]

What is happening right now is what should have happened in 1979. Had Carter decapitated the Ayatollah’s regime when it seized the US embassy and refused to free the hostages, thousands of Americans who were killed by the evil Islamic regime of Iran and its terror proxies would be alive today. It took 47 years but now we are righting an historic wrong.

[HowieF16 @HowieF16]

@uricohenisrael It’s raining, can I stand under your nose and stay dry

[HowieF16 @HowieF16]

@uricohenisrael One of these days. I’m going to get back to Israel and have a beer with you in Tel Aviv, Jaffa and Jerusalem and the next day eat Israeli breakfast

[HowieF16 @HowieF16]

@WallStreetApes Cook your own damn good if you don’t want to pay the price

[HowieF16 @HowieF16]

@uricohenisrael June 2020

[HowieF16 @HowieF16]

@thewebbie Score one for us old guys

[HowieF16 @HowieF16]

@elonmusknews30 👍🏻

[HowieF16 @HowieF16]

@timeswmariana 3

[HowieF16 @HowieF16]

@uricohenisrael Well done. Until every Jew responds in the same manner, these Islamofascist bullies will continue to push there luck

[HowieF16 @HowieF16]

@CherylWroteIt @CherylWroteIt wishing you, your baby, your husband and children continued blessings. You have been a guiding light during these challenging times. Keep burning bright! Take care of yourself and when you are ready, come back. We will welcome you with open arms.

[Benonwine @benonwine]

A True Leader of Europe and the New Iron Lady of the Western World. 🇮🇹 🙏✊

[HowieF16 @HowieF16]

@CherylWroteIt Never! You are the best

[HowieF16 @HowieF16]

@uricohenisrael Wish I was there…

[HowieF16 @HowieF16]

@CherylWroteIt Public apologies and funding for 7 Oct victims should be the prereq before any negotiations