kaputt

Did this article get taken down? I can’t find it anywhere. I think it’s point is dead on. For that reason it wouldn’t shock me if it got purged.

Still plagiarizing and doing it badly.

https://news.yahoo.com/mayor-lori-lightfoot-chooses-only-232100768.html “I have been struck since my first day on the campaign trail back in 2018 by the overwhelming whiteness and maleness of Chicago media outlets, editorial boards, the political press corps, and yes, the City Hall press corps specifically,” Lightfoot wrote.

Man, wait until you learn SECDEF, SECAF, and many other Air Force civilian leadership are are also political appointees... Wow, you really got me there. I had no idea, as someone who has spent years as an officer in the Air Force, that this was the case. 🙄 Come on dude, you know exactly the point I am making. Go read up on Bishop Garrison. He is not akin to a Deborah Lee James or a Heather Wilson. He is there for a specific purpose and his social media posts make no effort to hide the way he really feels about people that don’t align with his views.

Except this isn’t just some extra screening to ensure that the military remains apolitical or has bad actors screened out. This is a program being headed up by a partisan political appointee. THAT is the real problem with it and why it’s such a huge departure from what has been done in the past. I’m all for an apolitical military. But installing political officers that are aligned with a specific set of views and/or party to then police what they define as “extremism” is a very dangerous slope to go down.

Oh I totally agree on the fact that posting political views on social media, especially as a military member is a foolish endeavor regardless. But the issue I have with this is the fact that it appears an already existing road block to additional surveillance is being circumvented, and the individual heading the program leading this circumvention is a partisan political appointee who himself has some pretty extreme political views posted on his own social media. Which again begs the questions, what is our definition of extremism here? Is the NCO that posts about putting pigs in a blanket going to get the same attention as the NCO that posts election conspiracy theories? My guess is based on the man leading this effort, those are not going to be treated equally. Beyond that, where are we going to draw the line? If I never post anything on my social media but like or share a post to a family member from BabylonBee but the “algorithm” has determined that is “right wing misinformation” (attempts to label satire as misinformation have already happened) am I now f*cked? To me this is just another step down the slippery slope we are rapidly descending in this country to only have one “correct” way of thinking and everything else being silenced. And yes, I also agree that the Patriot Act was one of the first steps we took down this road and that it was ultimately a terrible direction for this country.

"Although in the past the military has balked at surveilling service members for extremist political views due to First Amendment protections, the pilot program will rely on a private surveillance firm in order to circumvent First Amendment restrictions on government monitoring, according to a senior Pentagon official." From the article... I suppose circumventing first amendment protections is of no concern to you? I'd also encourage you to read up on Bishop Garrison. I just did so from both left and right leaning sources, and that is not a man who is seeking to find extremism in just Boogaloo clowns; that is a man who thinks extremism is having voted for Trump for President.

Has it been defined yet what “extremist” views are? Can’t believe this is legal.

For once, those of us out in California, aren’t bearing the brunt of a garbage infrastructure problem. 😆

Well this seems to meet the definition of irony. Will the President be weighing in on how this makes Jim Crow look like Jim Eagle?

I think the stat was that transplants vote more red than people born in Texas. But the people born in Texas also includes the young people that were kids of those transplants. And those people are voting heavy blue.

So is the plan to just pretend the southern border doesn’t exist for the next 4 years? Because it seems like that is the plan.

So politicians and celebrities can give money to bail out rioters, but a cop can’t donate to someone’s legal defense. America, 2021. That being said, he should have used his brain a little more and not used a work related email.

I find it shocking and frankly downright scary, the amount of people in this country, including people in positions of power, that believe the burden of proving your innocence should fall on the defendant.

You would think it would make sense that contributions could be made to the same account. But it’s also a govt run entity we’re talking about here.

Does anyone know how TSP works when you transition to the Reserves? I was under the impression I would still be able to contribute to the account that was created when I joined active duty. I’m transitioning to an IMA gig and already separated from AD, but the reserve Det I’m supposed to in-process into is dragging its feet on getting me gained into the unit (already learning the true meaning of IMA; I am alone). Since I’ve just been sitting in the IRR in the meantime, the TSP thinks I have separated from federal service and sent me a little packet saying so. My question is, once I am gained into the reserves can I reactivate that account and make contributions to it? The TSP packet I was sent, as well as the TSP website, aren’t very clear on that. I’d hate to have to start a whole new TSP account when I already have one with a healthy balance.

We are starting to live in scary times. What is one supposed to do when the line between a private enterprise and government entity can no longer be discerned? Big tech has become so powerful and so intertwined with the Democrat party that they are essentially a defacto arm of the party/government. The left of course loves this because they can censor, delete, or promote any speech they wish and then hide behind the guise of “It’s a private business, they can set their own terms of service”.

Having had first hand experience in acquisitions, our process is truly a joke. The hilarious thing is that a commercial off the shelf upgrade to something like a Garmin GPS 175 (not to mention an even more featured GTN 650) would be super inexpensive in relative terms, and in the T-6 specifically, you could place it in the same space the old GPS sat and it would probably even be plug and play with the already existing avionics. And even if not, you could replace the ADI and HSI with a dual Garmin G5 set up and be done with it. But bring that solution forward in our acquisition process and we’ll tell you a thousand different reasons it could be a problem, spend a ton of money and years investigating, and either end up at the originally suggested solution having spent way more time and money than needed; or even more likely, spend the same amount of time and money and still end up at an ineffectual solution.

Hydrogen fuel cell is the only way that “clean” burning vehicles will replicate the flexibility and convenience of an internal combustion engine vehicle. Similar fuel up time and similar range. That being said, it is decently more expensive per gallon than gasoline, and likely always will be due to a more complicated production and distribution process. However if you ramped up the economy of scale a bit, prices would certainly come down from where they are now. The only reason electric has made such early gains is because it’s been easy to pass the infrastructure off to the consumer to charge at home and the primary market has mostly been upper middle class or higher individuals buying it as a second or third commuter car vs their primary transportation. Electric only will NEVER work as a primary means of transportation for many Americans. The tech to charge a battery to full will likely never equal gas or hydrogen fuel cell fill up time and lots of Americans street park their cars, live in apartments, live in rural areas, or otherwise don’t have a reliable access to charging infrastructure. Not to mention the issues of literally every citizen requiring use of the electric grid for their vehicle. Come to California in the summer and tell me if you’d still like to trust the “fueling” of your primary means of transportation to electricity. The smart path forward is that efficient ICE vehicles, hydrogen, and electric should all be part of the vehicle options consumers have for the foreseeable future. Each one has its merits that make sense for certain situations. Unfortunately though, our political class long ago stopped pushing for moderate solutions that make sense for the average American and instead tries to shove far reaching regulation down our throats in order to score political points and solidify power.

Got the J&J shot yesterday. Nothing crazy happened. Arm feels the same as getting a flu shot and no other response other than maybe a little extra tired last night.

Biden/Harris is one of the worst, if not the worst, presidential pairings we’ve had in a long time. And it has nothing to do with politics but the fact that it’s frankly a weak pairing of two incompetent people. Biden, a man losing his mental faculties (this is honestly sad for me to watch from a human perspective) who was also a mediocre senator that accomplished nearly nothing of note in his 50 years of service. Harris is actually even worse. She was not even remotely competitive in the Democrat primaries because she was such a terrible candidate; she couldn’t even produce a single coherent position on key issues in the primaries. Slept her way up the ranks in San Francisco to then get a chance to run for a senate seat (funny how this was barely mentioned, guess only Orange man can take part in affairs). But thanks to Obama connections she now has a non-zero chance of becoming President. The border crisis is case in point of complete ineffectual leadership. Biden appointed Harris to manage it. She hasn’t been to the border once, laughs at questions about the border, and hasn’t given any press conferences or updates on a plan of action. It doesn’t even matter if you think flooding the country with refugees is good for political reasons; there are still kids getting chucked over fences left to fend for themselves in the desert and then sitting in cages at risk of sexual assault, and our top two leaders can’t even lift their finger to do anything or even remotely provide a plan of action. Now Trump is no shining example of leadership, far from it in fact. Personally I considered voting 3rd party several times this past election. But when it came down to analyzing every candidate available, including the 3rd party ones, Trump was by far the most qualified to actually run the country, and it wasn’t even close.

You basically have to stick to niche sports now to avoid getting hit over the head with political messaging. My regular sports viewing is basically down to auto racing (Indycar, sports cars, sometimes F1) and golf.

To get a little bit back on track here, I finally decided to read the Georgia voter law from the actual government of Georgia website. Holy smokes the media, politicians, and even our sitting President have completely fabricated the outrage over this law. It’s frankly unbelievable the lies they’ve been able to spread on it. About the only thing I wasn’t a fan of was the increased powers of the state over what are usually county run election procedures. But beyond that, every single measure in there is perfectly reasonable to helping ensure legal voters are able to vote. The whole thing about the ID requirement is massively blown out of proportion. If someone doesn’t have an ID, they can can use last 4 of social, a utility bill, or several other items in order to validate themselves as a legal Georgia voter. And yes, grandma can still get water at the polls, it just can’t be handed out by someone who also says “here’s some water, but why don’t you vote for _____ today”. The worst part is that our own President got up there and called it worse than Jim Crow and wasn’t even remotely checked on that absolutely ludicrous statement.

Show me a study that actually says the color of your skin is a biological reason for being at higher risk of Covid... I’ve looked myself and the reason minorities have a higher death rate seems to be due to socio-economic factors, health culture within the community, and medical access. Those are real issues of course, but the thing about socio-economic issues is that they aren’t only limited to people of color. Although I guess people really believe that these days (Joe Biden’s “Poor kids are just as bright as white kids” comes to mind), which is honestly a form of soft racism in and of itself, but that’s a whole other topic itself. Bottom line though, a white person can also be poor, unhealthy, and have limited limited access to health care. I’ll reiterate again why this policy is legitimately racist. A poor person of color and a poor white person live next to each other in a poor section of Vermont that has had higher rates of COVID death. Each person has the exact same biological risk factor, is the same age, is the same sex, same access to health care, and both have no at risk people in their house. Under the governor’s policy, the white person cannot get a shot simply because they are white even though the person next to them, who is by all other measures equal to them other than skin color, can. That is discrimination in its most pure and basic form!!! Its honestly embarrassing that people in this country would give that a pass these days.