Ready Room – The Optimistic Conservative

TOC Ready Room 27 October 2025: Two pings (Aircraft carrier to counterdrug fight off Venezuela; Geopol rhetoric versus actual results)

What’s wrong and right with the world of national security and power rhetoric.

These will be a pair of Ready Room notes on the headline topics. More people with each passing month seem to be catching up with the OODA loop of current events (while others like the Carlson/Owens fold are pegged on bizarre takes that have nowhere to go). And so much is always happening that it’s not a good use of time to try to write at length about most of it.

But there are some points worth making about the headline topics. So, diving right in, the carrier situation.

Ping One: A carrier to Venezuela

USS Gerald R Ford (CVN-78), which Is currently deployed in the Mediterranean, was ordered on Friday 24 October 2025 to the Caribbean to enter the counterdrug fight there. Ford will bring at least one Aegis destroyer escort (four deployed with the carrier in June), one of which will presumably be USS Winston S Churchill (DDG-81), which has been serving as the carrier’s air defense commander during this deployment. Continue reading “TOC Ready Room 27 October 2025: Two pings (Aircraft carrier to counterdrug fight off Venezuela; Geopol rhetoric versus actual results)”

TOC Ready Room 14 August 2025: Gaza et al; Russian missiles; Perspectives on Qatar, Iran; Mental health; more

What’s wrong and right with the world – though today, mostly wrong.

It’s past time for another Ready Room, and I’m running with a random batch of topics that have been prominent recently (or at least of interest to me). The topics should explain themselves pretty well. I’ll introduce the first one, which is incident to Trump’s move to clean up the streets in Washington, D.C., with a minimum of commentary.

Back in January 2021, I wrote about the process of deploying the National Guard in the National Capital Region, which is in its entirety a designated federal reserve. (At the link, I recommend doing a word-find on “Title 32” to go directly to the relevant portion. It’s a multi-topic post.)

The whole NCR extends beyond the District of Columbia, but encompasses it and makes it in U.S. law a federal reserve 100% of the time. Continue reading “TOC Ready Room 14 August 2025: Gaza et al; Russian missiles; Perspectives on Qatar, Iran; Mental health; more”

TOC Ready Room 27 March 2025: Signalgate – A little slice-and-dice on Jeff and Mike’s excellent adventure

What’s wrong and right with the world, heavy-sighing edition.

Update going to post. As of Wednesday this is starting to settle out a little. The entire text message chain has been released, and boy, is it a nothingburger. At the end of the original article text, I’ve appended some comments from another forum on why it’s a nothingburger. For those who want the short version, the updates at the top, and the concluding comments, may do the trick. (For perspective, I do recommend not missing the ”Key takeaway” section titled with a break in bold letters. And sorry about any redundancies. It’s either get this up as-is, or not, at this point.)

At the outset, an executive summary.

First, the question about whether things were classified and/or could have damaged operational security is poorly framed and poorly understood. Continue reading “TOC Ready Room 27 March 2025: Signalgate – A little slice-and-dice on Jeff and Mike’s excellent adventure”

TOC Ready Room 28 February 2025: The five things I did last week (plus bonus deeds) – DEI and DOD, Putin, SECDEF Hegseth, China, strange diet in Connecticut, more

What’s wrong and right with the world, max perps edition.

(Admin note: This has to be updated at this point to the five things I’ve done this week, plus the five from last week. There’s also a dip into the week before that. I’m declaring a cutoff, although if I have to I’ll get a head start on next week.)

(Admin note 2: Since the Musk takeover, embedding tweets has been increasingly restricted and is now thoroughly unreliable, unless you’re participating in X on some form of paid basis. Even on a paid basis, use of the embed feature is restricted. Basically, you can copy in the URL, but whether the tweet is shown with its content is up to the X server, and your account is last in line for rendering embeds. To make sure readers can see the tweets, I’ve gone with including screen caps here. Will have to figure out a long-term solution, as the screen-caps method takes forever. I include links in the text to any tweets where I know you’ll want to read through a thread.)

I couldn’t be prouder of having a bonus deed (correction: two bonus deeds) to lead with: a deed occurring in this current week, as opposed to last, and already setting a pace I defy anyone to match. (Fine, already: three bonus deeds from this week. It’s all getting pretty rooty-tooty out there. Update: It’s now another Five deeds this week, plus last week’s Five, to ride along saddle to cattle with the Musk-feds drama of the Five Things You Did At Work for Uncle Sam. There are two from the week before last. A round dozen is enough.)

These notes on my life-work heroics will be as brief as I can manage, befitting both the Ready Room and the spirit of the Five Deeds.

China takes a flying leap across the South Pacific Continue reading “TOC Ready Room 28 February 2025: The five things I did last week (plus bonus deeds) – DEI and DOD, Putin, SECDEF Hegseth, China, strange diet in Connecticut, more”

TOC Ready Room 22 August 2024: Biggest grab-bag EVAH; Defense, economics, nuclear energy, more

What’s wrong and right with the world.

As the Democratic National Convention & Mass Protest-fest bursts upon us, it’s time to get some updates out of the way so we can concentrate on whatever moments of eventhood may eventuate this week.

There are quite a few notables to tag, so these will not be in-depth treatments. There are several national security issues, but we’ll start with an economic policy topic that demands urgent treatment, because most commentators are focusing on the wrong thing in discussing it.

They’re focusing on what they understand (very well, to be sure), and not on what we’ll really – really – regret in the long run.

“Price-gouging”: Just say no to the witch-hunt

The topic is being discussed among pundits as “price controls.” Candidate Kamala Harris spoke relatedly on the matter late last week, and pundits, knowing well the counterproductive damage always done by price controls, were off to the races laying out for us the excellent case that it’s lunacy to impose price controls.

But in Ready Room at TOC, we’re all about getting inside the OODA loop. Continue reading “TOC Ready Room 22 August 2024: Biggest grab-bag EVAH; Defense, economics, nuclear energy, more”