Petulant Skeptic

Making friends with 18Ds is generally good advice. Lots of unpredictable good things come of it IME

When the combatant commands have a meeting with SECWAR does the CENTOM commander make the INDOPACOM commander sit in a cuck chair in the corner?

it's the new MAHA initiative to get people to Touch Grass™

An intensivist (for adults) once admitted to me, in a whisper, that as a pediatric intensivist I was probably more suited to caring for critically ill service members than he was since his days are mostly spent caring for people who would be medically unfit for service. Alas…

Iran creating tons of zombies would be a the most legitimate reason for starting the war that they've espoused yet

If the people don't come with the country Russia is a much better buy.

c.f. "If resources were the key to wealth, the richest country in the world would be Russia, because it has abundant supplies of everything…" -Thatcher

"BuT wHy Do MiLiTaRiEs NeEd To HaVe PeDiAtRiCiAnS???" -every GOFO in every service

I had a whole riff I started to type out about how the Norwegians would never buy the US because there's no way to square it with their commitments to a habitable Earth still existing in 2030 but I veered off in another direction when I started doing math

A fun writing prompt would be "identify the elements of the Norges Bank Investment Management responsible investments commitments that are affirmed or violated by having 10% of its assets in US government bonds"

Oh, I know. I just thought it'd be a fun(ny) mental exercise to see if their wealth fund could buy enough of the US to "own" it in a coercive, derivative way. One of my flavors of tism is to extend non-plausible ideas to their breaking point

Correction, they'd own ~3-4x what China owns, not 5x. Sloppy mental math.

With that they might have enough leverage to threaten market chaos and coerce the US into whatever they want. Doing so would definitely violate the fund's commitments to sustainability, good governance, and well functioning markets though

The largest fixed income asset the fund already owns is UST (worth 2,010 billion NOK), so it already makes up 10% of their wealth fund. If they liquidated the rest and bought UST with it they'd own ~5% of the UST market, which would give them ~5x what China owns.

The entirety of the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund is worth 20,411 billion NOK (according to their very slick webpage) which is ~2.13 trillion USD. Outstanding US treasuries are 38.87 trillion USD according to an LLM.

I teach my residents that one of the most ominous signs (for which I have no evidence) is a rising lactate in the setting of a normal (or high) cvO2 – my anecdotal vibe is that nearly 100% of those patients die.

I agree cvO2 isn't useful for estimating CO, but I do think its useful answering a lot of other questions. Eg a sleeping patient with critical illness and a blood pressure that is "too low". Is that bc the target we've chosen is arbitrary or does it really represent an O2 delivery deficit?

When I get a "thank you for your service" and I usually reply with some version of, "well thanks for paying me" and it's weird how nearly everyone seems not to have connected that their taxes are what pay for things like The Troops in a personal way

May we all enjoy the peace of my family’s newly adopted rescue dog

usually if you ask experts why an empire fell they’ll say it’s nuanced and multifaceted, so i think it’s kind of cool that with America future historians will get to just say like “oh they took the idiot train to moronsville”

My kingdom for a news article that describes how the US government pays for weapons to be manufactured and then gives the weapons themselves away. It's more like a war-as-jobs-program than a cash transfer.

If Erik Prince ends up SECDEF after you put this (back) into the universe I swear to god…

I agree Mattis was cringe but at least he had done an honest reckoning with the moral weight of making decisions that send people to their death. Hegseth gives the vibe that he thinks everyone else is an NPC in a game where he's the main character

I met Zach Randolph the Portland Jail/Trailblazer in a strip club for a friend's party and he was so drunk he couldn't remember his college basketball coach's name (he went to Michigan State)

My exact thought, in fact. Perhaps my saving grace is that my installation's AOR is INDOPACOM, the forever bridesmaid????

🥴 I have 89 days left in the Army

The nation’s dogs celebrate Kristi Noem getting fired.

In 2018 or so when I was a fellow I came into the ICU in the morning during a prolonged, unscheduled computer downtime and found multiple rooms where the resident had written orders on paper towel that didn’t include all the required elements. Nurses were so mad

Biggest error I’ve caught so far in the Pitt when the resident says “red is for arterial and blue is for venous” on the Doppler ultrasound. I was shouting

they were gonna send Kristi Noem to a nice farm upstate but they were worried about the safety of the dogs

while doing my job in a children's hospital I had to talk to the entire hostage negotiation team of the large city policy department where the hospital was