ViperMan

Boom. Roasted. Stroke of a pen.

Rog. And I hear you. I will say though, that I've yet to see such immediate and blatant disregard for the rule of law. Exhibit #1 is the student loan "forgiveness" debacle. Joe Biden loses it in court, and then immediately turns around and says "fuck that." This is dangerously corrosive to the underlying system we have in place.

This is a good idea. It makes it very clear what certain things mean (i.e. the 2nd amendment) when you read the document in whole. It always baffles me why people zoom into the microcosm that is an amendment, while discarding the rest of the document. You'd think that the Constitution didn't mention militia anywhere else besides in the 2nd. When read in whole, there is no question why the phrase "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms" was added.

You're referring to our current administration, right? The guy who loses a case in the Supreme Court and then immediately disregards the decision, turns around, and does the very thing that was just called illegal?

Most of what you said was true, buuuuuuuut it's also wholly irrelevant. Since the vaccine doesn't stop transmission, it's not anyone's business whether or not you decide to take it. This is a free country, and that means people get to make decisions for themselves, both good and bad. Think about your logic for 2 seconds dude. The vaccine was forced on all of us, and yet everyone got exposed anyway. Read that last part over and over until it sinks in.

Stock up on XOM/BP/USO/SHELL. Dems never look beyond one dimension when they're making decisions.

Ummm, point of order. People in the military are not allowed to murder. murder 1 of 2 noun mur·der ˈmər-dər pluralmurders Synonyms of murder : the crime of unlawfully and unjustifiably killing a person

I got no problem with meat (sts) or hunting for food. I do have a problem with intentional disregard for life and causing suffering for the sake of a more powerful entity's pleasure. Surely you can distinguish this. Tell me you can see the difference between these two things. FFS. No animals don't have "rights" in the same sense that humans do. But then again, there is no golden tablet floating out there in the universe that enshrines what rights humans have either. But I also know you know the difference between trophy hunting and torturing an animal to death. Those things are different. I know you know that.

Because he's a bad and evil person. If he thought he could get away with it, he'd be doing it to people. That's how psychopaths operate.

I'm sure Russia is wondering what the answer to this question is too. Don't forget about that half of it. Probably more than they can afford. I wonder if all the Ukraine naysayers would be voicing how well Desert Storm was going if we got stopped dead in our tracks 30 miles in on day one, and a year later we were still involved in this slog of a war in a country that should have taken us 69 hours to roll. I'm sure they still think that's what "winning" looks like.

Pure ignorance.

Maybe I can get ChatGPT to do this for me. I don't want to waste my time... Copy timeout. Valid.

Had no luck when I tried with a FSDO. They straight up told me "we don't do those anymore." I was like "What??? How does a government office literally just shed one of their stated duties?" I was not given a satisfactory answer. $85 to the DPE it was.

Diversity would be A-cups bro. This ain't diversity.

When is anybody's guess, and it's a fool's errand to try to predict crashes. I hear what you're saying re: offsetting effects through the rest of the economy, but there is a reason why your average asset has become so decoupled in price from other goods. For example, I can still buy a pretty decent car for $20K. That was true in 2000. I could buy an amazing home in 2000 for $500K. Now? Don't even think that'll get you a shack in certain areas. This decoupling is what I'm talking about. The money class figured out a way to inflate the price/cost of anything that can be used as a vehicle to pass on wealth and has pushed it out of reach for your average American - this is a humongous social problem in the offing. So sure, don't buy the stealth crash. It was meant as a metaphorical way to simply describe what I've laid out above - which is that if you try to buy anything right now that is going to hold value indefinitely, you're out of luck. Americans have been split into two classes by the last 15-20 years of monetary policy. Or perhaps a better way to say it is where the "slice" between the classes cuts, has moved waaaaaaaaaaaay to the right. Not good.

I think a closer analogy would have been someone ala Jeffrey Epstein's Ghislaine Maxwell - i.e. the lady who sold a bunch of young girls down the road into sex slavery. Yeah, no one deserves it, but if it had to happen to one person, I think we could agree that she'd be a fair candidate.

This is where you just have to look. Look at the housing market. Can you afford a new house? Can a working family afford a house almost anywhere in this country anymore? Look at the level of capital it take to purchase an asset now-a-days (i.e. something that's going to hold value). The degradation has begun. If you need to see a "crash" to have the point proven to you, well you may wait for eternity. But I'll just point to the above fact again. We didn't need a crash to cause housing to be unaffordable, and yet if no one can afford a place to live, how is your QOL doing? If you define a downturn as stock prices crashing, then sure, maybe that's not going to happen, but if you can't buy a house to live and thus you have to work forever, then I'd say the crash was a stealth crash. It didn't look like what you were expecting, but the affect has been the same.

That process is beginning now, IMO, but there are many naysayers out there whose job is to spout rainbows and keep people in denial. Read a book called "The Coming Generational Storm." It points to the size of generations and how accounting needs to be internally balanced. The baby boom generation has written more checks than they can cash, now, smaller generations below them who are less productive are going to have to make up that productivity gap and pay those bills. This, combined with the flattening (redistribution) of productivity to many other parts of the world are going to lead to tougher economic conditions for those who don't have the means or wealth to support themselves and their families. Current housing prices are probably the thing that is going to cause the most people to wake up - that they may never come down again, combined with flat wages, is going to mean many people must permanently work.

I dunno dude. I feel like when you advocate for policies that will inevitably lead to this happening to the people she represents, you most certainly do deserve it. In fact, I can't think of anyone who would be better placed at the top of that list. Poetic justice if you ask me. The ones who didn't deserve it were her kids. Who knows, maybe some of them will grow up to be cops and state prosecutors. Here's to hoping they do. Maybe that's how the cycle functions.

None of those bugs are being used to fear-monger and bludgeon our society into all manner of ridiculous behaviors, so apples to oranges much? I'm sure if there were politicians out there beating the war drum over the four horsemen of the yearly flu, you'd have the hypothetical response you're sarcastically looking for. As for me, I'm not confused by this. The powers that be have used the COVID event to shuttle in all manner of onerous policies and shove our economic system off a cliff. In the future, I hope our dollars are worth what we're all saving them for. I hope the trillions of dollars that were printed, someday find the productivity they stole from the future. Flu and Malaria don't make money. COVID does. Your sarcasm is misdirected, and you clearly don't understand what people are pissed about. "Unscorable @ 9, 2".

Voting in the next election isn't going to solve anything. There will be no candidates that are middle of the road that could actually undo the fracture within our society. The outcome is going to be one thing: one group will lose big time, and the other group will hold the reigns of power for four years. Our current cultural moment is one in which when one party wins, the other loses. We are not going to have a candidate that is going to offer any middle ground. Your vote isn't going to change that most basic fact. It didn't always used to be that way, either.

Based on what you wrote, it's safe to say we have diametrically opposed views on who and what Snowden is and we will not likely reach agreement. I think he is a sock-puppet Russian spy who was specifically designed to take advantage of a certain element within the American psyche that looks to defend the concept of liberty and has a certain default level of distrust in the government - all of which I can understand to some degree, and which I can support given our country's founding on July 4th. It makes him the perfect psyop. You can also look at the precipitous slide in relations between major world powers in the last 10 years (i.e. since 2013 when the revelations happened) and the theft of other computer-hacking tools from the CIA/NSA/etc, which have certainly been used against us to unknown effect and draw a not-so-indistinct line between the idea that a "patriot" traitor inspired other people in positions of trust within our government to betray it. How were those tools "stolen"? Do we even know? Are they being used against us right now? The bit about how the program was used for personal gain/vendetta carries the same structure as the "guns kill people" argument from the left. Any tool can be used or abused by people with an agenda - that doesn't negate the necessity of the tool. And in any case, the NSA isn't collecting a database of your dick-pics. Even if they were, based purely on volume, they'd only be able to look at a single pic for no more than .000069 seconds. You call what he did whistle-blowing. I call what he did treason. I don't think those NSA programs were illegal. I think the Russians/Chinese/terrorists, probably already had some general idea that they were going on, but the net effect was to inspire a distrust in the US institutional apparatus...how's that working for us today? So yeah, when Vivek says he would pardon Snowden, he loses me - because it shows me his level of discernment/big picture SA. He has missed the point of Snowden - which was to inspire distrust of our government - not to disclose government programs that basically amount to the government collecting data that everyone was willingly giving to there phone-service provider anyway.

Vivek loses me when he supports Snowden being pardoned. Who, for the record, is a Russian counter-intelligence professional. A spy who did more damage to our national security than anyone else I can name, except for maybe the Rosenbergs. He has fell, hook, line, and sinker, for a Russian op. Having him as President would be good in some dimensions, and catastrophic in others. Maybe he'll wake up, time will tell. I think his heart is in the right place overall, but he is woefully misled in certain areas.

By your logic nuclear submarines and M1 Abrams tanks are "jets". Turbine-powered does not equal jet.

The government discussing aliens "seriously" is officially the moment our government jumped the shark.