We could make our Defense cheaper. We could reinstate conscription. We could transfer large portions of our standing forces into guard and reserve units. We could stop invading central and southwest asian countries. We could increase direct military aid to our allies.

The other good ideas include more unmanned and uninhabited systems (WHERE APPROPRIATE, and nobody has convinced me yet that naval presence is worth a damn unmanned), as well as investing more in the dark arts of gray zone warfare.
Now, all that wouldn't be very efficient were we to need to go to war in a hurry. But maybe... And this is crazy... We shouldn't be in a hurry to go to war?
But our adversaries -- Russia, China and Iran -- all invest heavily in the dark arts, all use conscription, are all investing in unmanned. They ain't crazy. They know if WWIII was about to kick off they'd need time to boost readiness and train conscripts.
And I know what folks would say: "Sometimes you don't have a choice of when you got to war. Think of 9/11."

And, good point. But my recollection of that time period was that in Afghanistan, the CIA and SOF had the Taliban and al qaeda just about licked within a few months.
Then we decided on making Afghanistan a democracy. Sure the Taliban would probably have come back. Maybe. The Northern Alliance was pretty tough with US backing. We probably could have left and we would have made our point.
But increasing direct military aid to our allies makes sense if we want to keep them in our orbit while we draw down. Good for them, good for us, good for interoperability, and we don't have to pay their personnel tab.
Two things: You want to lay off 1/2 the military, David? By no means! I want to enable the success of the country by unleashing the best and brightest on our economy, while offering them the security of monthly guard and reserve income and regular activation opportunities.
Would Congress go for it? Of course they would, because we're not stopping the war machines, we're just giving more of them directly to our allies. Your two weeks per year might be spent in Lithuania training them how to operate Patriot, made in the USA.
I'm also not convinced this model would reduce the need for all the civilian support infrastructure in the localities that host bases. Same rough number of troops, only not all there at once.

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global health policy in 2020 has centered around NPI's (non-pharmaceutical interventions) like distancing, masks, school closures

these have been sold as a way to stop infection as though this were science.

this was never true and that fact was known and knowable.

let's look.


above is the plot of social restriction and NPI vs total death per million. there is 0 R2. this means that the variables play no role in explaining one another.

we can see this same relationship between NPI and all cause deaths.

this is devastating to the case for NPI.


clearly, correlation is not proof of causality, but a total lack of correlation IS proof that there was no material causality.

barring massive and implausible coincidence, it's essentially impossible to cause something and not correlate to it, especially 51 times.

this would seem to pose some very serious questions for those claiming that lockdowns work, those basing policy upon them, and those claiming this is the side of science.

there is no science here nor any data. this is the febrile imaginings of discredited modelers.

this has been clear and obvious from all over the world since the beginning and had been proven so clearly by may that it's hard to imagine anyone who is actually conversant with the data still believing in these responses.

everyone got the same R
Brief thread to debunk the repeated claims we hear about transmission not happening 'within school walls', infection in school children being 'a reflection of infection from the community', and 'primary school children less likely to get infected and contribute to transmission'.

I've heard a lot of scientists claim these three - including most recently the chief advisor to the CDC, where the claim that most transmission doesn't happen within the walls of schools. There is strong evidence to rebut this claim. Let's look at


Let's look at the trends of infection in different age groups in England first- as reported by the ONS. Being a random survey of infection in the community, this doesn't suffer from the biases of symptom-based testing, particularly important in children who are often asymptomatic

A few things to note:
1. The infection rates among primary & secondary school children closely follow school openings, closures & levels of attendance. E.g. We see a dip in infections following Oct half-term, followed by a rise after school reopening.


We see steep drops in both primary & secondary school groups after end of term (18th December), but these drops plateau out in primary school children, where attendance has been >20% after re-opening in January (by contrast with 2ndary schools where this is ~5%).

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