Lord Ratner

The Average YOY Inflation Rate under Trump was: 1.9% The Average YOY Inflation Rate under Biden is: 5.7% Ok I see what you're saying, I missed the "took office" part. However the inflation that took place in 2021 was not from Joe Biden. It was from Trump and the pandemic supply shocks. The inflation we have today, and that we will have for the next decade in all likelihood, is from Biden. And Bush, and definitely Obama. Lot's of chickens coming home to roost. And when Trump wins, and the economy slows down, the trillions in Fed stimulus that Trump will call for will make inflation even worse. Not that it matters. Every economic statistic is a disaster under Biden, yet that are plenty of stats to twist to make it seem like he's doing great. Remember when he was bragging about reducing unemployment... after a pandemic?

I'll go in pieces: Israel is not starving anyone. Hamas is. It's not Israel stopping the aid, it's the complete absence of anyone to receive and distribute it. Because Hamas wants more dead Palestinians. They have stolen aid for years, and continue to do so. Those deaths are irrelevant because they have nothing to do with Israel. Because as you are pointing out, what matters is how you wage the war. What does not matter is how many innocent civilians die as a result. You wage the war ethically, and that's all you can do. Especially in this situation where civilian deaths are specifically being used as a countermeasure to Israeli attempts to destroy Hamas, arguing that the arbitrary number of deaths is somehow relevant is literally playing into their strategy. You seem to have bought the Hamas narrative that Israel is starving the Palestinians. Nonsense. Sure, but that's global policy anywhere and anytime. It's not like the Allies didn't have culpability for isolating Germany and turning it into a pariah state. That ended up with World war II, but we still killed a fuck ton of Nazis. The dirt on their hands arguments is always used to draw a moral equivalence between the two belligerents in a war. But there is no moral equivalence here. Israel has never done what Hamas did, and by any rational account would never do what Hamas did. Hamas not only did it, but the vast majority of their population celebrated it. Anyone who has even the slightest difficulty understanding who the good guys and who the bad guys are in this war, and I'm not saying that's you, has no place in the discussion. Ultimately you have to base your judgment of a society on what they do, and what they proclaim. Based on this, I choose 100,000 dead Palestinians today over 100,000 dead Jews over time. I would rather neither, but not all civilians are equal, because not all countries are equal, and not all cultures are equal. Hamas was chosen by and supported by the Palestinians. At a certain point the population has to be responsible for the type of country they create. Again, that doesn't mean you have a green light to intentionally Target civilians. But that's not what's happening, and that's not what I questioned from your first post. The number of dead civilians does not serve as the measure for whether a war is fought ethically. There would be a whole hell of a lot fewer deaths if Hamas didn't purposefully put their military targets under and around civilians. And our long-standing rules of engagement allow for killing those civilians. Doesn't make it fun, but it doesn't make it unethical either.

Your Air Force dreams are dead statistically. You have three priorities now: Rack up hours for your airline application (fill the app out now and keep it updated every month). Start learning about the airline application process. Make damn sure you don't get promoted on the second look. You are forever a second class officer now. Some escape the gravity of a late promotion, most do not. Going to PIT should be a great way to not get promoted. Failing a PT test will guarantee it 😅 Prepare yourself mentally, financially, and logistically for a life outside of the AF. Where do you want to live? Do you know how civilian investing works? Are you ready to live lean for a while until your next career starts paying well? If you don't want to be an airline pilot, then you need to start networking aggressively. Spend the next year finding people who work in the field you're interested in and learn everything you can from them. We have people here who can speak to that world, I only know the airlines. As for airline hiring, I think we are possibly in a phase where the people hired today will be furloughed in a year or two. Maybe. Doesn't matter. Being furloughed means no airline apps to maintain and most importantly, no flying currency to worry about while you work outside of the industry. When hiring restarts, you get called back, no questions asked. Your airline will pay for your training and re-currency, which will put you in a spot to change airlines if you desire. This is part of the reason why you always take the first airline job you're offered. Good luck, and feel free to ask questions.

Why not? A supportive population, in fact an actively supportive population, is a part of the war machine. If we start down this road then we have to retroactively denounce Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Tokyo, Dresden, etc... Easy to do when it's not our own brothers and kids being killed on the frontlines. If I have to choose between their civilians and our soldiers in a war they started, it's a pretty easy calculation for me. No country in the history of combat has spent as much energy, money, and blood protecting the civilians of their enemies, not even the US. War is ugly specifically because if requires the mass death of civilians.

He claimed the inflation rate is down. He's right. He's also abusing the public confusion regarding inflation rates to bullshit about the economy and protect his party.

This has been argued at the end of each and every saeculum. You think our differences are more polarized than say, the build up to the civil war? You think the abuses of wealth and power exceed the 1920's? I don't. I think it requires enough of a time gap that the people we could be asking about the differences, if there are any, are dead. They could give us, as a population, the perspective needed to keep from repeating the cycle. But that's exactly why it's a cycle. Because those who lived through it are no longer around, no longer in charge, so we now *have* to experience it for ourselves. Because we have not gone through what the previous generation went through that created the America we long for today. But we will, and if we win the war, again, then we will have another 80ish years of American unity and strength, at which point our great-grandkids will have holodeck arguments about how America is collapsing and it will never be the same again.

Is what new?

The Bari Weiss podcast interviewing him is more interesting than the article. But to anyone who's been following this for the last few years it's just going to be more of the same. Still, it is interesting to hear "from the horse's mouth."

The left has more retards. Full stop. However the right has been in the process of catching up probably since around 2008. As best I can tell that is when the corporatist take over of the government was successfully completed. Starting with the tea party and probably peaking with Donald Trump, the populist movement within the conservative right means that the historical metric of success for Republicans, money making, is being replaced. Sure there are retards who succeed in the business world, but by and large you're going to see more intelligent people if you start filtering by income. But now that the Republican party is more interested in bravado than income as a result of the decimation of the middle class, I suspect we will see Republicans reach retard-parity in fairly short order. Once that is complete and there are no longer intelligent mature people to run the government, we should get ourselves into a nasty shooting war in pretty short order. That will once again reinvigorate the American desire for competent leadership, but only after much blood has been shed.

If something is too sensational to be true, it's probably not true.

What's next, companies and billionaires are going to just *give* money to candidates in the hope they will get special consideration should the candidate win? Wait no, it's different because it's a PAC or campaign donation, right? You guys are trying too hard.

You're missing the point. It's always time to ask for accountability as long as the open shot is at a conservative. Then Democrats somehow go right back to ignoring the law. The law doesn't matter nearly as much as the equal application of said law. So: Incorrect. That's exactly how you solve it. If a law can't be or isn't equally applied, your best option is to ignore it completely or, even better, abolish the law. There is a reason Lady Justice wears a blindfold. Also, aggregating different arguments from a different people to falsely depict a shifting narrative is not a particularly strong debate strategy. There also not just a single reason why this is a problem. But it's not being asked for, is it? There's not just one investigator and one court in the land. No reason they couldn't have gone after a prominent Democrat at the same time. But they didn't. I didn't see a single prominent Democrat calling for the disqualification or imprisonment of Biden for his mishandling of classified, as proven by the investigation. - But he turned it all over! - He was honest in his deposition - Mike Pence had classified at home too - His house has security And hilariously, this all started with the non-prosecution of Hillary, who 100% attempted to cover up her crime, just like Trump. They *all* mishandle classified. Our enemies aren't getting an upper hand because of classified being kept in a garage by a Corvette or a basement at Mar a Lago. So let's just stop, and focus on policy. Trump is no more a criminal than national-level politicians have been for decades. And none of this "if you or I did that..." Nonsense. There has *always* been a different standard for the elites, regardless of party. So we suddenly care about class-based discrimination after literally thousands of years of human history, and we are going to start caring *only* when Trump runs for president? And we wonder why conservatives are distrustful now.

Created by a Republican doesn't make it right. It's a foundational principal of our legal system, though I'm sure no one is shocked to see New York go a different way. I don't even care that they are doing it from a political perspective. Trump is going to win and his ability to do whatever he wants will be reinforced by these clearly political prosecutions. Democrats always think they're so clever, like when they gave Trump a bunch of free publicity in 2016 because they were sure Hilary could demolish Trump. Oops. This too will backfire. But from a societal perspective, give me a fucking break. How many executives went to jail after the 2008 Financial Collapse? Did New York forget about that law at the time? Remarkable they couldn't find any fraud back then. Selective application of the law is the single best way to undermine it. Democrats are completely shocked that Republicans have finally embraced their situational-faith in the rule of law. Buckle up, because the more the Republicans embrace the tactics of the left, the uglier this election season will get.

This is all you need to know. That's it. Everything else is just noise. In every other Court in America you have to have standing to bring forward a case. Even if someone beats the shit out of you, you have to tell the authorities that you want to press charges, or nothing can be done. New York decided to press charges on behalf of a "victim" that did not feel victimized.

Well, in this era. They were doing it in the 40s-60s with the communism hunting, right?

I think if it was a year ago, abortion would have a lot more weight. But fortunately the process is going the way I had hoped, and each state is coming up with their own rules, which will never shut up the activists, but will absolutely shut up the voters, who do not make huge distinctions between state and federal law, as long as they agree with it. More voters will be satisfied with abortion law as a result of the Supreme Court's action. And whatever damage it did in the election in 2022 I think was overridden by the absolute dog shit slate of candidates that Trump got on the ballots. Of course, if Republicans try to make abortion a federal issue again, which some of them are, they'll get exactly what they deserve. (Sidebar, if anyone is interested we can start a new thread on my theory that in our lifetime contraceptives and abortion will be outright outlawed as more countries grapple with the painful results of population decline.) As to immigration, I honestly don't know. While I do believe there is an element of society, especially in academia, who are trying to covertly flip over the system in order to rebuild it in a postmodernist, pseudo Marxist fashion, I generally don't give those conspiracies the credit of wide scale participation at the political level. But the continued insistence of many Democrats to support this absolute dumpster fire at the border is truly mystifying. I know they see the same polls that show how unpopular open borders are, and I know they see the polls that show Donald Trump taking the lead in a matchup with Biden, so whatever reason they are refusing to adapt is not because of political expediency. That only leaves a true desire for an immigration disaster, one that would support the eventual "reset" of our Democratic capitalist society into a communist Utopia, or they simply cannot fathom the idea of supporting anything that the opposition supported before them. The fact that Republicans have been anti-illegal immigration simply excludes the possibility of Democrats ever changing their mind? Either way, immigration coupled with Joe biden's obvious and continued decline is going to cost them the election. Unfortunately that means Donald Trump is going to win, which while the 4 years of his presidency will probably be marked by great policy and less chaos, it is very likely he triggers the same response that leads to another idiotic Democrat winning the following election and undoing whatever good things he accomplishes. Or maybe not since he can't run again. Until the war kicks off at least. Then we restart the cycle.

Absolutely hilarious. Greg Abbott should be remembered for the single most effective political stunt in American history

You've either been extraordinarily lucky, where you weren't paying much attention to the people you were flying with. The 75-hour rule is not for everyone. It's for the weakest links in the chain. That's pretty much the case for all of those types of restrictions. I've only been in the airlines for 6 years and I've already seen people who could have probably used another 75, but definitely were not ready right out of the chute.

Dibs on the chick in the helmet with the huge knockers

A fond "fuck you" for this post. Now that I know what this gun is, I can't talk myself out of getting one. I'm not planning on the canebrake version, but it's simply irresistable.

Not really. But one that has existed over and over and over throughout history. We are in the unpleasant phase of the cycle. In another lifetime whatever societies emerge from this conflict will find themselves in another.

If they really believed it there would be martyrs. There aren't. It's just team sports. That means yes, they will cheat and lie and steal (just like in team sports), but until they are shedding blood all the talk of an existential risk to democracy is just political cheerleading.

Yeah it's almost like the Nazis didn't invent art. How many kids started drawing swastikas without ever seeing the symbol before? Hell, they are still all over Indonesia.

There are two ground controllers at O'Hare. .75 and .9 if I remember correctly. Either way, there's two, *and* a metering frequency. Are you thinking of JFK?

Yes, California does. Just like a medieval castle, outsiders are allowed to enter under the declaration of parlay, in order to petition the homeowner. Anyone under the protection of parlay must be offered food and protection for the duration of their visit, lest the honor of the homeowner be impugned at Royal Court.