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I talked to Matt's father on Wednesday. They knew what the sentence would be and were ready for it to be over with so this Stephenson could get on with spending the rest of his miserable days behind bars and the family could get some closure and move on with their lives. Watching the Denver7 video was especially difficult, they have video of Matt with his kids walking through the local fair, a giant smile on his face. 10 minutes later their lives would change forever. The Douche who killed him had a chance to speak at the sentencing, he decided to complain he didn't have a fair trial and showed no remorse for driving with a BAC 3 times the legal limit. Matt's father was also an Air Force Pilot and he commented on the generosity of the USAF family which raised $169,795 for Matt's family through GoFundMe. Finally, a special thanks to @Sua Sponte who provided a very special item to Matt's family, thanks to him his children we be able to hear their father's voice for years to come. I hope this serves as a reminder to all, nothing is guaranteed. Call your mom, call you dad, never miss a chance to tell your loved ones that you care. RIP Matt, you will be missed and as long as I am around, you will be remembered.

With support like that, how can the Iranians lose?

https://www.denver7.com/news/crime/man-who-killed-colorado-us-air-force-member-in-drunk-driving-crash-sentenced-to-life-in-prison

The regular citizens should man the fuck up and start fighting back for real. But, their culture’s bedrock is subservience and cowardice. So, they will not; while that doesn’t justify the regime’s actions, it also shouldn’t make any rational westerner feel like the west has to go in and save them. They won’t save themselves, not our problem.

With most of these idiots, Trump could speak in favor of Hamas, Mullahs, or cute fuzzy puppies and the useful idiots would protest against Hamas, Mullahs, or cute fuzzy puppies. They are just anti-Trump.

SOOOO much irony!

Front gate of Whiteman AFB.

Civil war is not an issue, because "we" (we the people) are not going to cut entitlements, like I said. The "we" that wants to cut the budget to something sustainable is such a small demographic that we have no path to electoral victory. As such, there will be no cuts, as we see with this bill. When my prophesized Great War happens, there will also be no civil war because suddenly "we the people" will be entirely interested in cuts as the government bombards us day in and day out with propaganda imploring us to buy war bonds and pinch every penny possible to protect our fighting boys and girls overseas. I'm not disagreeing with you per se; if somehow there was a way to pry the entitlements away from the entitled, there would certainly be violent social unrest. But the mechanism to take those entitlements away is the exact same mechanism that is protecting the entitlements in the first place. People voted for the politicians who ran on campaigns of leaving entitlements untouched.

If we substantially cut entitlements, there will be a civil war.

Because an increase on business taxes will devastate the stock market, and the boomers didn't build normal retirements like responsible adults, they have everything in the market and are relying on it to go up forever. And everyone in Congress makes their millions in the markets, and all the biggest lobbyists are directly tied to the markets, and now the pension funds are all over invested in the market and (even worse) private equity, and... you get the idea. We've decided that "the market" = "the economy" when that's not remotely true, and because of it we now make devastating fiscal decisions (and monetary decisions soon) that are excused because, hey the S&P is at an all time high so it must be pretty good, right? We will cut spending and entitlements only when we have no choice, and not a moment sooner. Most likely it will be while tens of thousands of our kids are dying overseas fighting the Chinese, or Russians, or who the hell knows who it will be. When mothers see a car with a white top drive by, and breathe a guilty sigh of relief when it stops at their neighbor's house instead of their own, or when the local radio stations list the names of the newest forever heroes as we drive to work, then suddenly there will be a renewed desire to funnel our tax dollars away from able-bodied deadbeats and wannabe-immortal senior citizens...

The bill is a freaking mess and nothing like what is was intended to be. Yes the tax cuts are extended but as you correctly point out, we need to address the debt. Look at defense spending, the requested number is actually a cut when you account for inflation. HOWEVER, they included a one time addition of $113B that pumps to DoD topline to $960B. Thats Fing crazy.

Looks like the House passed the Senate version of the BBB, and currently the markets seem to approve. I’m not a huge fan of the bill as it didn’t address spending cuts that I believe are way past due.

Cutting the F-35 buys in this bill bothers me a lot more than anything about the E-7. Maybe it's because across the 4 red flags I've done, the E-3s GAB'd every vul except 3 so I struggle to understand what airborne C2 could even provide me. But slowing production of our most advanced fighter on the promise of some silver bullet dominance platform that is just boeing renderings at this point feels like we're falling into the same trap that netted us 20% as many B-2s and F-22s as we should have right now. We've got 400 F-35s out of a planned order of 1,763. Less than a quarter of the way there and we're cutting F-35 production already for future promises from a company that can't produce a single engine trainer plane on time or a narrow body airliner without band-aid fixes. Long story short: if something doesn't change we are fucked. If we can't tighten the turn circle on making new stuff we at least need to have the patience to produce the stuff we've already developed in significant numbers.