ViperMan

Instead of limiting who can vote, a better solution would be a government that couldn't tax our productivity in an uneven manner, thereby redistributing my precious and limited time on this Earth to other people. In lieu of that, however, the next best solution is to limit voting to those who materially participate - and to strip it from those who are merely along for the ride. What that looks like specifically can be debated, but the philosophical point some have made on this board is pretty clear. I admit it's a re-imagining of our idea of "democracy," but then again, so is the fact that 40+% (nearly 50%) of my time is stolen from me in some form or another and "redistributed" to other people. That's not the system any of us signed up for either. Rather, it's the end result of a perpetual creep from our originally envisioned government instituted to help us secure our life, liberty, and happiness. For a long time, voting was the best means to guarantee everyone's collective, long-term goals. Now it's become a means by which certain groups use the government to disenfranchise other groups. Voting ain't it anymore. Voting is a nice-to-have. Voting is a mechanism, it's not fundamental to a good life. A good life is me being able to keep what I produce. As soon as voting has become the way whereby I'm made a slave to other members of society, it has ceased being a necessary part of our society. We're all familiar with the meme about two wolfs and a sheep voting on who's for dinner...that's where we are and where we've been for some time. You have millionaire SS recipients who take 12.4% of my wages and spend it on whatever, instead of selling their million-dollar homes. Instead, they're going to deed their estates to their heirs, and use my wages to bridge the gap to their end-of-life. 12.4% of my time enables old people to make choices they otherwise couldn't (or wouldn't) make. In a two-week period of Mondays through Fridays, that's (more than) one whole day of my time. My commute. My gas money. My wear and tear on my vehicle. My time I could spend doing whatever else I want to do. Instead, my time is spent going to work for the retired. 30% of my income to income taxes? Well, you can do the math on how many days that takes up. You have EBT recipients who use their benefits to purchase luxury goods. You have school lunch recipients who throw away literally 100% of the food they receive into the trash. Every. Single. Day. Again, that's my time being thrown into the (literal) garbage can. The examples go on and on and on. I don't lament people's shock and disbelief that people could advocate for something as seemingly undemocratic as taking away people's right to vote. I understand those beliefs rest upon a hopeful, childish, but ultimately naive view of how our government and society function. i.e. a view grounded in a high-school-civics-level conception of our society. It only seems gross when it's juxtaposed against the cartoonish view of what we're programmed to think. When it's held up to a holistic view that encompasses how money, time, and productivity are actually redistributed throughout our society, it's the obvious answer.

I can only infer that you're making reference to his irresponsible use of unsecure messaging apps to communicate secret information. Of course that should be punished / not tolerated. And here is me, a guy on the right, plainly saying so. Whether or not that deserves prison is a whole different discussion though. Probably boils down to intent. The difference between what he did (irresponsible) and what Schiff attempted to do is a universe of difference though. If you can't see objectively see that, you're beyond redemption. Now, if you can look at what Schiff has done and say, yeah, that amounts to attempting to illegitimately undermine the president of the US and that is wrong and should be severely punished, then there's probably hope for you. If all you can do though is point at Pete Hegseth, and go "what about this guy?" then I got nothing for you.

Would love to see Schiff convicted of a federal crime and thrown in prison. Same with Swalwell. Now I just hope the FBI and the JD have the balls to follow through with prosecution. Tired of talk. I'm ready to see some action from these players.

SECRET//REL BASEOPS LOL.

So, so, so much this. The irony runs deep when people who criticize homosexuality are then immediately called homos by those who feel some abstract need to white knight on their behalf. It's one of my favorite bits of the left, honestly. Not that there's anything wrong with it... Negatory: "Hey, don't be mean to gay people...Also, you're a fag." Some people are truly blind.

Interesting. I assumed they were required by statute so there was something publicly releasable so the US taxpayer got to have some sort of insight into where their tax dollars just went.

Welp. I guess it's started.

Thanks for the context.

Chef's kiss on this phrase. Perfection. Poetic. Catch-22. i.e. "We're doing this. So fuck you."

Ok, so I don't know the entire evolution of the _UPT timeline. I went circa '07 but already had my PPL, so I guess that meant I went around the time of IFT, but I didn't have to do it. In my mind USAF pilot training has basically been: UPT (60s, 70s, 80s). (S)UPT (90s, 00s) - with some variation or another of intro to flying in some sort of prop airplane (may or may not have attained a PPL)...if my memory serves, I think people were given like 25 hours in a prop to see if they could do at least that. Then, I get fuzzy. Was it IPT? with UPT 2.0, UPT Next, FUPT now? Seems like there was a schmorgasborg of choose your own adventures during the last 5-7 years. Which iteration of legacy is being referred to. If it's UPT and SUPT of old, then they are certainly off base.

Yeah, this is concerning. "In the new model, pilots will earn a private pilot certificate, instrument, and multi-engine ratings in approximately 120 flying hours within a maximum of 139 calendar days. Pilots then complete military specific flight training, earning wings after 108 days—55 hours in the T-6A and 50 hours in simulators. Leard explained, 'Prior to implementing this new program, our fundamental challenge was getting enough flying hours in the T-6A to meet our goal. This new program ultimately provides our pilots with more flight time than the legacy system while exposing them to a greater number of aviation competencies.'" There's a lot in that little snippet that I'm not even sure is factually true. I graduated UPT (technically SUPT) with over 200 hours - most of them were in the T-38. These guys are going to graduate with 175 hours with most of them in some combination of Cessnas and Pilatuses? Hmmm. Not sure they're getting more flight time. Certainly they're not getting more relevant flight time. Maybe he was referring to the T-1 track? Can't speak to what the T-1 guys graduated SUPT with, hours-wise. Does anyone know approximately? My top concern is that this just seems to be trading quality for quantity. Instead of wings with a star on top, can we begin issuing wings with an asterisk? Also, I would like the statement "exposing them to a greater number of aviation competencies" to be substantiated. I doubt this is true. And if it is, what competency did we just discover in the year of our lord 2025 to which I have not been exposed?

Things continue to go well for Russia...they are truly in the midst of finding out. ~ $2B in lost or damaged assets. ~ 1000 miles from the front lines in one case. More than 2000 miles in another. Four bases struck. I'm told this is what winning looks like for them? Victory must be right around the corner. This is a major boon for them. https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/ukraine-attacks-russian-nuclear-capable-bombers-siberia-2025-06-01/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2025/06/01/russia-ukraine-zelensky-putin-war-latest-news5291/ https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/ukraine-stages-major-attack-russian-aircraft-with-drones-security-official-says-2025-06-01/

No. It was not. 2020 (COVID) riots. Race riots. George Floyd. Kenosha shootings. The Jan 6th "coup" (lol). CHOP/CHAZ. All those things were sanctioned by democrats in power. There was no corollary to any of that on the right. There was no equivalent behavior to those examples promulgated by the right wing. What we saw during 2016-2021 was left-wing hysteria driven, encouraged, and applauded by people in power. By people in our government. By people in our corporate media. I'm not denying the Glenn Becks and the Alex Jonses on the "right", but why the right wing was fixated on "issues" hadn't had anything to do with the RW media. It had everything to do with reality.

Well. Go ahead...we can read the AIBs, which are not safety privileged. Which ones?

If it doesn't require SECDEF energy, then it doesn't require my energy / attention. Fair enough? Get rid of all the DEI nonsense. I never want to here another peep about it. I'd rather have a competent CSSs and finance shops than read another email from the CSAF or SECDEF about some eye-roll BS.

I sense an important point here. What is it?

At bare minimum it'd be easy to say to the pharmaceutical companies they cannot charge the US more than the lowest price they sell their drug for in any other country. Not a price control. Just a balancing of the scales and an evening out of the "markets." Wanna sell your drug for .15/pill in Zimbabwe? Cool with us. That's our price too. The differential price structure is what's fucked. It allows triangulation of the American taxpayer via the mechanism of Medicare, Medicade, and all our other socialized healthcare. I get to work everyday and pay a lot of taxes at the threat of gunpoint for the privilege of lining these massive drug companies' pockets so they can deliver "healthcare." If anyone thought this was a free market, they were consuming mushrooms.

Bruh. Don't miss the point. The point of these tariffs isn't ultimately to bring our friends and allies to the bargaining table to ensure Americans get fair deals, m'kay. They are being imposed solely for the purpose of increasing the cost of living in America...because. At least that's what Hakeem Jeffries would have me believe if I thought he had a single brain cell in his noggin.

This is precisely the point. Ask any modern liberal (leftist), mutatis mutandis, and they will not be able to answer this question - i.e. they cannot provide a general or abstract answer. Nay, they will not even engage with the argument on that level. It is literal proof of an uninformed argument and an unconsidered position. All you will get is some variation of he's stupid and/or colored orange.

I don't know what they did or didn't send over Signal, so couch this in terms of hypotheticals. *IF* actual plans were sent over signal, that's every bit as bad as Hilary's email server. It's sloppy as F and warrants resignations, and criminal charges. If we're gonna hang out to dry airmen who flex on whatever video game crew they play with by sending secret info, we sure as hell are gonna do the same if the SECDEF is being a sloppy MF. That said, it's very likely this is more of the same blue-haired hyperventilating ala "January 6th was a coup d'etat."

To be more clear: we need to throttle peoples' disposable income - especially people on the dole. Yes, that means welfare, Social Security, Medicare, Medicade, student loan forgiveness. It will mean people losing homes, being displaced from communities they can't afford to live in, schools they can't afford to attend, getting fired from their make-work jobs, etc. The core problem that needs to be addressed is people spending money they didn't earn. Unless we remove other peoples' money from the people's pockets who didn't earn it, we won't solve a single thing. Doesn't matter what you make the tax rate. At this point, the only way forward to to redesign the incentive structure in an attempt to systematically begin to dismantle all the bad decisions that have collectively led us to this point.

This guy gets it. Yep. The other dimension here is that increased demand for housing - through artificially increasing the population - places downward pressure on wages. This effect is across ALL jobs. ALL careers. Not just menial, day-labor type employment. So not only does the cost of available housing increase, the amount of work required to net yourself housing goes up also, driving a further divide. For everyone. We (still) haven't fully flushed out the recession from 2008, and all these present effects are still downstream from that and now all the COVID spending too. Banks withheld housing after the crash, lest they really get caught holding the bag. Post 2008, banks stopped foreclosing on certain delinquent mortgages. In 2019, some people saw this coming: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-bubble-era-home-mortgages-are-a-disaster-waiting-to-happen-2019-02-25 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/this-bubble-era-mortgage-trick-could-smash-major-us-housing-markets-2019-03-18 In 2024 some of these mortgages are now coming back to bite: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/zombie-mortgages-debt-haunt-homeowners/ All that cash which should have been collected from people who "spent" that money on housing found its way into other parts of the economy, instead. Personally, I don't have any questions on why the price of stuff is so high. We injected fake dollars into the system during the run-up to 2008, and we did it again during COVID. When you mainline billions upon trillions of dollars into the economy without concurrent economic productivity to absorb those dollars, you get what we have now. It's simple arithmetic. It sucks that there will be pain, but we're not choosing this course presently. We made this choice a long, long time ago, and much like global warming, much of it is baked in at this point. We kicked the can in '08. We kicked it again in '20. We're eventually going to have to pay the piper, and the sooner, the better. @Negatory, I think you're mistaking a desire for austerity, with folks' acceptance that the cure is going to be painful.

I also want to pile on with a reminder that the very year groups they force-shaped during that phase in 2011 or whenever it exactly was, they then began to offer TERA to the people who would have been otherwise eligible for retirement (albeit a reduced one). That's like being at 18 or 19 years of service and getting let go because they don't want to pay you your retirement / pension. Thanks for your service. See ya later. https://www.stripes.com/news/2013-07-26/air-force-offers-early-retirement-option-in-certain-career-fields-1836037.html1 https://www.afpc.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/856683/officers-enlisted-members-offered-early-retirement/