nsplayr

It’s great man! Fantastic place to live and to visit. I’m staying busy, full-time line IP, not a bad gig. Technically bumming but on several back-to-back 365s which I refer to “the franchise tag” haha. Hope I don’t blow my ACL and the GM has to cut me 😅 Whatcha been up to lately?

Agree with above. If there had been a real playoff for a few years at least, the need to jump to a bigger super conference wouldn't be necessary. Although money was the #1 factor as you said, the long odds of a "lesser" conference standout actually winning the national championship always seemed like BS to me - you should get to play for the trophy. Being undefeated in the schedule you were handed and then going to the Tire Bowl or whatever is just wrong. I'm just happy with the PAC 12 now dead that my University of Utah showed out. Members of the conference for only 11 years, 4x championship game trips, 2x Pac 12 championships, back-to-back, reigning champs and last champs before the lights went out. Good luck in the Big 12! (or 16? we really gotta drop numbers from these conference names...)

I'll reiterate that I'm not gonna respond to political stuff anymore. There is no need to @ me. I've always been a mainstream liberal democrat, a Kerry-Obama-Obama-Clinton-Biden voter, and probably always will be. If in the future you have questions like, "What would nsplayr think about XX?" you can look at what the mainstream Dems are saying and that's probably close enough for government work. If you really want to know my political opinions, feel free to reach out and we can hang out in person if you ever visit Nashville or if I'm TDY to wherever you are. I've wasted enough time & energy debating here for 15+ years. For where I'm at in life now, the juice ain't worth the squeeze. It probably never was. Being a keyboard warrior is a terrible hobby that I don't recommend anyone partake in, and I've officially given it up after a long and illustrious career. I'll probably still comment sometimes on AF-related stuff and my DMs are always open to help out homies who wanna know more about Draco, the Guard, L3 Harris, the MQ-9, Nashville, etc. I've learned a lot about the Air Force, have gotten good advice from older dudes, and have enjoyed all the RUMINT since joining BO.net as a baby 2dLt...I'm still happy to pay it forward to the next guys for whatever my $0.02 are worth.

It’s stuff like this…why would I want to talk to a person like this? Few of you would either if this kind of assumption was directed at you, having made no comment at all. And maybe you feel that way about me based on stuff I’ve said in the past. Ok, cool, the feeling is mutual. Y’all can feel free to stop @ing me and move on with life. ✌️

Very few here ever give anything valuable back in terms of debate. It’s frankly not worth it anymore for me. If fellow military aviators (who happen to be liberal) aren’t sufficiently “humanized” for you, nothing I can say here will help. I have a great mutual understanding with all the conservatives I know in real life - some friends, some family, some squadron homies. I do enjoy debating & talking with those people, have learned some good stuff, and have changed some previously held views over time. Same with friends who are fellow liberals and people everywhere in between. I can’t say the same overall for folks here, and at this point, like I’ve alluded to previously, I’m just gonna stick to AF related stuff for the most part. 15 years of political sparing is a good run. I won’t be be perfect though…everyone is a little bit of a crackhead about something in life 😉

Yea well…that guy sucks, as we all know! I am astounded how he’s continued to fail up so very, very high.

Happy Independence Day! Integration is our superpower here in the US and if we could figure out a way to export it to Europe, we should do it. 🇺🇸

Bros, user @congressman last visit to the site was March 15, 2022. He ain't here and he ain't likely coming back. Recommend close thread & migrate typical political bashing to the main event in "The Next President..."

I feel like you’re maybe jumping to conclusions…moot!

8 months later…”Yea, well I had sex with your wife!”

After some light googling it appears that Jean-Paul Marat was born in Switzerland, so there ya go 😂 I’d also give Napoleon half-credit for being from Corsica rather than the French mainland. But yea, most Frenchman throughout history have been French, solid observation. Not a book recommendation, but the Revolutions podcast by Mike Duncan is fantastic, I highly recommend it. Season 3 is the French Revolution and it’s 55 episodes. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/revolutions/id703889772

The French are gonna French. Shit, they’re on their fifth republic among other forms of government in between. Protesting and occasionally guillotining everyone is basically a quaint national pastime if you can A) enjoy the show from the outside and B) ensure you don’t have an infantry square marching toward your capital. When people in the US talk about how bad civil unrest is or gets here, I always encourage them to read even one (1) book.

Sure, what I’m saying is this wasn’t “a story” like hey we landed on the moon, every local channel is gonna carry that news and they can use this pre-packaged script and shots and etc. for simplicity’s sake. It was a specific, forced message from their corporate bosses. I just wanted to be clear about what those videos were. It’s not a coincidence or a convenience.

Not quite, it was a forced read of a script distributed by Sinclair Broadcast Group, which owns many local stations. Sinclair has a well known conservative slant in terms of what they prioritize covering, which is not bad per se, but thats not always what folks expect from their super-local news team on the bunny ears stations. Sinclair compelled the local versions news teams to read this exact script, which might sound decently normal if you just hear it on your local station once, but gets creepier when you know dozens and dozens of stations all were forced to broadcast the exact same bit by their corporate bosses. Your views of what they actually said in the piece may vary. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/02/business/media/sinclair-news-anchors-script.html

Truer words have never been spoken!

First one is intentional, second one wasn't 😁 If you wanna make Harris magically go away you're gonna need 2x handwaives, bare minimum. And yea, I'll take my meds in the form of tequila please 🇲🇽

Thank you, I'll consider it after I get that sweet, sweet TAFMS check 😂 Actually no, because mouthpiece I mean press secretary is a terrible, thankless job and I've already been the mouthpiece at SERE with predictable results ::slap!:: I think you trailed off there, need to up the dose the Geritol again 🥃 But I think I know where you were going, and I just don't think that's likely. I also think I know Dem politics better than most around here, but then again I've been wrong once or twice before and I'm open to it happening again! If Diamond Joe steps down, Harris hand waive hand waive disappears and somehow Newsome of all people is the 2024 Dem nominee, I'll send ya a bottle of something decent. Care to make a bet on it being Biden? You certainly have more money to blow on stupid bets than I do! Well I spend 0.0 minutes watching cable news per week on average, so you'd have to tell me. Then again, bringing up Sky News as something fundamentally different than Fox News when it was also started by Rupert Murdoch...lol ok. If the facts support that then sure, investigate away! Investigating a sitting President is harder than a typical case, but certainly not without recent precedent! I can't say this enough times, if y'all want a broad prosecution of white collar, politically connected criminals: Your. Terms. Are. Acceptable.

Sure, being perceived as too old and feeble to serve in the office you're running for isn't ideal. I would advise candidates to not get that reputation lol. Memo to Dianne Feinstein - retire you old hag! I for one also think Biden is older than is ideal for such an important job, but we/he shit the bed picking Harris as the VP and based on her weakness, Uncle Joe has to let it ride one last time. But I will be voting for him over the likely Republican candidates, although y'all could surprise me and nominate someone great and with crossover appeal to Dems, but the way things look right now, I highly, highly doubt that will happen. You go to war with the army you have, as one asshole once said. If Whitmer or Warnock or Buttigieg or Polis or Klobuchar wants to run and Biden bows out, freaking sign me up, I'll be working the phone banks when I'm not on orders. But I can't support Harris first and foremost because she won't win, so we're kinda stuck. I was cheekily in favor of a bank-shot move of appoint Harris to SCOTUS rather than Kentanji-Brown and put someone more politically viable in VP slot, but those kind House of Cards moves don't usually work out IRL. BL: if the next election is perceived by the voting public as a referendum on Biden, he'll probably lose. If it's seen as a choice between Biden and Trump/DeSantis/etc., he is probably favored to win as an incumbent. People can think of a candidate whatever they will, when there are two names on the ballot the only thing you have to do is get more votes than the other guy. Lots of people thought Trump was a huge a-hole in 2016 but also hated Clinton, and he won the voters who disliked both candidates and thus the election. He understood that as a candidate and spent more time making people hate her than trying to get moderates to love him and it worked. As re-elect campaigns go, 2012 Obama successfully made it a choice between himself and Romney. Same with 2004 Bush and Kerry. 2020 was a referendum on Trump more so than everyone head-over-heels loving Biden, and he lost. Those are the historical races most relevant to 2024, although we haven't had a back-to-back exact re-run since 1956 so there are some different dynamics there than 2004, 2012 or 2020.

Yea, pretty incredibly...normal! With today's levels of polarization & general dissatisfaction, it's par for the course. Here's the running approval rating of every recent President at this stage in his presidency. If you didn't already know the results of their re-elect efforts, could you look at these graphs and tell who was reelected and who wasn't? Maybe, but maybe not! Trump - not reelected, decently close, Biden numbers are nearly identical, underperforming by half a point Obama - reelected, decently close, Biden underperforming by 4.5 points GWB - reelcted, decently close, Biden underperforming by 20 points Clinton - reelcted, not that close (Perot a factor), Biden underperforming by 4.5 points GHWB - not reelected, sorta close (Perot a factor), Biden underperforming by 28 points Reagan - reelcted, massive landslide, Biden numbers are nearly identical, underperforming by 2 points So yea...pretty hard to say this far out! He's underrunning everyone until you get back to Carter, so that's not great, but very similar numbers to Trump who lost close yet also Reagan who won in a massive 49-state landslide, so a lot can happen obviously. GHWB was massively popular at this point and he lost. GWB was way above water and won, but it ended up being pretty close, etc. The GOP nominee will matter a lot, to state the obvious. In general every sitting President is the favorite for reelect, and if it's a rerun of someone he beat previously, even more so. If the opponent nominee is someone new & dynamic (see Bill Clinton) I'd put that person as the slight favorite, pending real world events and the actual campaign.

Yea it's those "local control" dickhead planning commissions that f everything up usually. It's a bug everywhere but incredibly prevalent in many liberal strongholds. "Environmentalists" are cutting off their noses to spite their faces when rejecting clean energy, desalination, etc. projects because we need all that stuff about 10x over if we're going to thrive on our changing / heating world. So so much new stuff needs to be build and the government needs to push aside these low-level commissions, partner with industry, and just build it. Case in point, my HOA initially tried to deny my project to put solar panels on the back roof of my house for basically aesthetic reasons i.e. no good reason. Joke's on you MFers, I'm now the president of the HOA (which I hate BTW) and approved the project back in January. IMHO HOAs are localized aesthetic fascism typically run by busybody, brainwormed Boomers and I highly recommend never living in one if you can avoid it 😅 What you do on your property is between you, the government and God, I as a random neighbor should have zero say in that. If I were king for a day I would greenlight every single housing, clean energy (including nuclear) and desalination / water reclamation project on the books and tell the private sector I want 1,000 new projects on my desk by Monday. We need a liberalism that builds and any conservatives that wanna jump on board are also more than welcome too!

I'm a very climate/energy-oriented liberal here and I love nuclear. F all the NIMBYs and "greens" on my side of the aisle who fight against it. From what I've seen we haven't built more due to A) inertia, B) insane regulation leading to insane costs to open a new plant, and C) a political alliance between fossil fuel companies & conservatives plus tree-hugging greens who are scared of radiation that basically caused A and B. I'm enjoying the benefits of cheaper electricity living in the TVA service region where we have three working nuclear plants. I'd put a micro nuclear reactor in my garage if The Man would let me! As a country we're decades behind, but the best time to start catching up is now. Small, modular reactors, molten salt reactors, push the boundaries with fusion research, do it all. All energy that is carbon-free is good energy at this point and energy abundance is the key to unlocking an awesome future. Imagine electricity so abundant that it's not even worth it to meter it, imagine nearly unlimited fresh water due to desalination, minerals mined from asteroids and brought back to earth...all because of energy abundance...LFG. TBH we kind of do. Not a vaccine, but the beginnings of a real cure: https://abcnews.go.com/Health/5th-person-confirmed-cured-hiv/story?id=97323361 Even short of a true cure, modern AIDS medication regimes put a ton of people in a place where HIV is no longer detectable in their blood. Hell of a win for modern medicine!

As you can see in my signature block, it's not the first time! We also agreed on something on July 11th, 2011 😅

Nah, I kinda figured I'd try to get my point across but that in the end no one would change their minds and I probably should just bang my head against the countertop instead. I was right to have that suspicion! I'm truly beginning to view my entire ongoing participation in the forum here as not worth it. Why am I here debating with a bunch of people I've never met, who don't respect my opinions or share my values, and don't give a f anyways? It's a great question. Frankly I don't know what I'm getting out of talking to all you smelly assholes that I can't get by just talking in person to my squadron homies. Politics, flying, AF bitching, etc., it all gets discussed on shift and I've got plenty of years in uniform left to enjoy that back & forth. Good luck to you, have a great life.

So pull out your Republican Rolodex and hit up David Weiss and give him a piece of your mind. I am happy that any charges were brought at all, since I was told that could never happen. If you want to go to law school, become a U.S. attorney in the next 6-9 months and magically charge Hunter Biden so that it guarantees he goes to a federal pound me in the as prison, be my guest. I don’t give a single, solitary F about that guy and I don’t think any of my fellow liberal voters do either.