Lord Ratner

Now I know you're delusional. These people don't pass on cabinet jobs. They didn't spend their whole lives rolling around in the mud to suddenly become principled now. Doesn't matter which party they're in.

Two would be crazy. Every member of the House of Representatives would be a slave to their staff in a way much worse than the president currently is to the bureaucracy. I say 3 terms for senators and 6 for representatives, and that applies to all districts. No switching counties or states for another 6/3 terms. You need a few years to become an expert in any job. But the incidence of corruption is much higher in the 20+ year offices. Also, it greatly reduces the number of geriatric congressmen, since so many are age-in-place barnacles. A particularly savvy politician could then only serve 46 years of elected office if they successfully win every election as a representative, senator, vice president, and president. Numerically that will be impossible for more than 4 people per generation. If you can pull that off, bravo. The rest will be limited to <20 years

That's honestly how it should be everywhere.

You need a Republican governor to replace them with another Republican. And if they were getting elected based on name recognition only, the seat can flip in the next election. See Joe Manchin.

Trump lost by how many million last time, and won by how many this time? That swing accounts for a significant portion. Also the left went from defeating the literal devil in their minds, to supporting someone who had the charisma of a wet paper bag. That accounts for some more. Further the overall turnout driven by the pandemic probably resulted in a lot of people who only voted because they were bored not voting this time around. I'm not saying it's not significant, but it's also not inexplicable.

Remember, the only part of an AR-15 that matters is the stripped lower receiver. You can regularly get those for $20. That's a cheap form of future gun-control insurance.

I agree, but those were not sloppy operations, and in both cases they *felt* plausible. Why? Because we all know NATO or the UK or the US aren't going to go to war over the assassination of Russians by Russians. But if Russia downed two planes full of Westerners, especially given the current state of the relationship between Russia and the West, there would be a war. It was just luck back in 2014 that the plane accidentally missile'd out of the sky wasn't a Delta flight full of red blooded Americans. There are better and safer ways to test the aviation security infrastructure than with actual incendiary devices so poorly designed that they both went off by accident. I have no idea what happened, obviously, But this is not the first time Western forces have attempted to frame Russia for something in an attempt to drum up more support. The pipeline example was much more transparent, but this one has the same smell to it. And with Donald Trump favored to win the election, I can see some "misguided" pro-Ukrainian spies thinking this would be the best way to protect the way. And before Bashi gets an erection so hard he passes out, I'm still strongly in favor of providing Ukraine with the resources to prolong this fight.

But it's so much more than that. First (R) president to win the popular vote in two decades. An indisputable electoral college victory. Huge gains within minority groups. Retaking the Senate and most likely holding the House. It's the closest thing to a mandate a presidential candidate can win in the modern era. This will greatly reduce "the resistance," especially from within the conservative sphere as many will be forced to reevaluate their future and strategy. It's still a tragedy that we're in a point in history where Donald Trump is the leader of the free world, but it's as good as the tragedy could have gone. We're still on a collision course with fiscal and monetary doom, but perhaps we can at least put out some fires.

This is one of those stories that you have to stop and consider. It just doesn't add up on its surface. Remember when everybody said Russia blew up their own pipelines? This story sounds like that. If you're going to declare war on the United States this is a very strange and uncontrolled way to do it. "Downing commercial passenger or cargo planes would be a big step up and some Western intelligence agencies have questioned whether such a plot could be the result of Russian spies carrying out a plan without the full authorization of the Kremlin, according to people familiar with the matter." This is very different than saying "Russia did it."

It's been a long time since I was a UPT IP, but I always had a simple hypothetical for the tanker guys I flew with that were debating the assignment. You can adapt this to whatever your current airframe is. If it was a Wednesday, middle of the day, and I came to your desk and told you that I had a pattern only sortie about to step, and you had no beans left, no requirements, nothing in your desk job that required you to skip the flight; basically, if you did it you would be doing it for nothing other than to hop in the plane and fly a little. It hasn't been a while since you've flown, and you haven't been flying your ass off. Just... Do you *want* to fly? If the answer to that is "hell yeah," then you're probably going to enjoy UPT. If you're the guy who would rather use the time to catch up on some low priority tasks, or maybe hit the commissary so you don't have to after work, or whatever other simple life and career tasks we all have, then it's probably not for you. Bottom line, if you just fucking love flying airplanes, it's hard to get a job as good as upt. If flying planes is just how you pay the bills, then moving your family to the least exciting cities in America is probably not going to be particularly fulfilling.

Gotcha. I'll probably buy one of the kid sized rifles, since I'd like to start them at around 6, and I can just cycle them through it until they are big enough for the grown up guns. Got a few years before I need to worry about that. That Marlin 1894 though... That might be a more immediate concern

Did you just get the standard size, or their kid-sized rifle? How hold was your son when you got it for him?

Well well well... I might have just found the gun my kids will learn to shoot on... Very interesting, and a pretty good price too. How much different is .22 Magnum compared to LR? I only have experience with the latter.

Twice as much as an 8 DPI 9 line?

Yup. And it'll be even quieter with a can. The PTR Vent 1 is calling to me.

Will you fuckers please stop talking about all the guns that I can't get out of my head once I've seen it? I'm still recovering from the Rattler. I always toyed with the idea of getting a lever action, but it never even occurred to me that 357 Magnum was a good option. Since I'm not buying anything in a caliber I don't already own... And they are threaded? Damn it.

I'm not saying there's not some fuckery going on, but that doesn't really pass the smell test. Why would you have to bus 11,000 people from Georgia? Why would the distribution be tilted that way? I absolutely believe the part where most of the people at these rallies are the same people that go to all the rallies. I'm guessing the percentage of repeat attendees is lower at a trump rally, but still very significant.

What? Who are the people we risk our lives for that are not also us? The people who listened to Trump in 2015 were surprised with how he actually ended up governing. Myself included. My assumption is that he will run the same playbook, but this time with fewer cabinet members who are actively subverting him.

Uh huh. Scoreboard.

It's always pointless trying to guess what Trump will do, but he is the only politician with the balls to play hardball with Russia. Okay, Vladimir, if this whole thing is about preventing having NATO right up against your border, then you have two options. You can vacate all Ukrainian territory, affirm the sovereign borders Ukraine as they stood in 2013, and in return you will have a binding treaty that the United States will never support or allow Ukraine membership in NATO. Or, we can lock the borders where they are now after your incursion into the East, we will consider this new Russian territory to be the buffer between NATO and Russia, and immediately recognize what remains of the newly defined Ukraine as the newest member of NATO. Otherwise I'm willing to bet that we can print money to supply Ukraine for longer than you can draft citizens to fight them.

You can build a beautiful house with the finest craftsmanship, sparing no expense and employing the best building techniques. But if the house washes away during the first storm because you built it on a foundation of sand, you are still left with nothing, despite your effort. It wasn't a waste for *me* because I got to do cool things with great people for good pay, and it dropped me right into the airlines with hardly any effort of my own. I would much rather have done what I did than spend 10+ years in the regionals, but that includes the retrospective knowledge that I wasn't killed or seriously injured. But it was a waste for the country. It was a waste of 2,459 troops. It was a waste. At this point, the only way what we did in the Middle East can be "effective" is if we end up in a war, a real, big, no-shit ugly war, in the next 10ish years. We have a humongous population of experienced warfighters, active and veteran, that will put any nation we fight in the grave through a much shallower learning curve than our enemy will face. Russia has proven that experience is the secret ingredient. I believe that will happen, though I hope it will not. At that point we will finally see the "value" of our wasted time in the desert.

Precisely because you can't predict how an individual will age and decline, and the job is too important to risk on something like Biden, I'm using statistical models of cognitive decline, and last I looked the models showed cognitive decline increasing around 75 years old pretty substantially. So, 65. Yeah because there isn't a gigantic industry behind analyzing election results and voter habits... It's all just magic smoke! I've been surveyed no fewer than a dozen times this election alone. More to the point, I avoid hiring people over 75 whenever possible. I'm not allowed to fly passengers with them (at a much younger age of 65), and I don't find them to be open minded or particularly fun as a group. So why would I vote for them to run the country? They (Boomers) are also the biggest threat to the financial stability of our nation. Almost everything in this quote is... Silly. I never once studied in pilot training (other than going to the UTD), so I'm not sure what that does to the rest of the analogy. Nor did it mean everything to me. I turned down one of 3 T-38s for my class because I knew that being a fighter/bomber pilot would mean a *lot* of studying and I don't like studying. I've recently not filled out preferences if I didn't have a preference. We definitely had students who specifically didn't want to fly the older airplanes because they were old. And the AF doesn't study dream sheets in the hopes of understanding future track select trends. You do know that they track partial ballots, right? Is this why you vote? To feel brave? To gain the admiration of your peers? I don't. I just vote for what I think is best. And while I think Trump winning is better than Kamala winning, I think it would also be good to see reduced turnout for Trump as an indication that despite his victory, he is not the direction the conservatives should go. Your suggestion that these things are not tracked is frankly laughable. Agreed. And I'll be voting, just not for president.

That was good. Bravo

Chase Oliver (and the libertarian party) is a joke, and Jill Stein is a fossilized joke.