Lord Ratner

Someone is going to win the culture war. And at the end of that process, they will have to have a system to support. What exactly is the conservative-right defending if they decide that the rule of law isn't a rule at all? Disregarding the supreme court *is* happening the country. It's one thing to adopt legal strategies to defeat the left at their own game. It's another to claim that the problem with the left is their disregard for the law of the land, so we need to disregard the law of the land to beat them. This is the most conservative supreme court in generations. If you lose a case with them deciding, then perhaps your strategy isn't going to be great for the long-term survival of the American system.

It does no good for conservatives to delegitemize the Supreme Court. You think ACB is rooting for the Democrats? The Supreme Court is how conservatives are going to fix many of the problems we have. Throwing a tantrum when they force you to find a better strategy that aligns with the constitution is a short sighted and stupid plan. I hope Abbott doesn't dick this one up.

I had a civilian attorney. Best $15k I ever spent. Not only did he know what he was doing, but the expert witnesses he had relationships with were fantastic, and those are paid for by the government.

Trump was never the cause, he was always the symptom. And honestly has anything changed to indicate different symptoms? The problem is not the people who are running. The problem is human nature and societal oscillations. It's happened before and it's happening again. It's a bummer.

Yeah, and that sucks. Believe me, the immigration crisis is infuriating. But you think it's better in Europe? Asia? South America? Something can suck and still be the best. It's a sad indictment on where we are, but it's reality.

Sure we can, and yes we do. I was addressing the words he chose to use, not the ones you might have used instead.

You just keep saying absurd things. Uniquely dangerous? Insufferable? How many of our citizens have we slaughtered on the shrine of Americanism? Where is our Stalinist purge? The suffering of the American people at the hands of our politicians, regardless of how incompetent, is only unique in how minimal it has been

And which countries are the icons of morality in your mind? Especially considering you just said this, pardon me for considering this statement a bit ironic.

I guess it could be a little different for a general, but for an Article 32 judge to recommend against court martial, you must have absolutely zero evidence against the defendant, and possibly some particularly incriminating evidence against the alleged victim.

I haven't been able to put my finger on it exactly, but I suspect it has to do with artificially low interest rates. In that environment, where retained profits do not make any money, it seems like all businesses eventually create an obsession with growth-at-all-costs, and we get the strange business world we have now. Unfortunately it's such a complicated issue that most people are simply looking at it and saying that capitalism has broken. They have a point, but I am afraid of the solutions when you think that business, rather than government intervention, is the root cause. USAAcould have remained a military only company and done quite nicely in perpetuity. But that would have meant little to no growth. You can see the same thing with all the private equity nonsense in the hospital and retirement home world. There's going to be a reckoning from all of this, and it's not going to be pretty.

This is incorrect. "There is no justice" and "life isn't fair" are the same thing. Timing is everything It's better to be lucky than good There is no justice. The real core values of the air force and life in general.

It shouldn't be. You are no doubt emotionally attached to other things that people find bizarre. It's basic human nature. Just look at bashi, perhaps the most emotional person on this entire forum, he's just emotionally attached to the other side of the argument.

I haven't been following it closely, but this administration is against mergers. As far as I've seen, strong economies induce liberals leadership, and modern liberalism distrusts business. So without huge concessions, I'd be surprised. It's not just airlines, the Adobe/Figma merger was blocked for no logical reason. So we'll just have to see

The thing about self hosting is that once you realize what's possible, you tend to want it. If money isn't a driving factor, get a TrueNas Scale box. It's got a great interface, it's easy to add modules to it, and most importantly, there's a large community of users so you can Google answers to problems you have. I would set it up as RAID5/Z-1. The downside with truenas is that you have to buy all your drives at the same time and they all have to match. Some of the other solutions allow you to add random drives as you go, but it's less efficient. If you're truly going to self-host your own backups, you will need a second box at a second location to clone your data to. All the raid drives in the world won't stop a fire from annihilating your data if it's stored it one location. Use the simple box from Synology or similar as the off-site backup.

How technically oriented are you? Comfortable with Linux?

It's funny how soft his voice gets when he's answering questions he'd rather not answer.

The government will only allow airlines to merge in bankruptcy. You have the dumbest executives in business running the airlines and the dumbest people in the West running the governments. Don't expect anything to make sense.

You think the winner of Miss America in this era is based on looks? There's a minimum physical threshold, sure, but after that it's just another organization run by out-of-touch elites desperate to show their "peers" how virtuous they are by "dismantling" their organizations as sacrifices to the non-binary gods of wokism.

Why? They are an advertising business, and the first outlet to drop the story gets the most traffic from the algorithms, and thus, the most ad money. The incentive structure for online news completely explains the abysmal quality.

How is that not the dream job?

Yup. I got burned by that in Venice.

Tell me you've never had children without telling me you've never had children.

I doubt anything is going to come from that. The new policy did not specifically single out firearms, it used the standard catch-all of "shaft." And it has absolutely nothing to do with consumer text messaging. Sure, it's possible, but until they start fining gun companies for sending out legal 2A promotional material, it's probably going to end up being much ado about nothing. We seen to be entering a (much welcomed) era where businesses are trying to distance themselves from political topics. Buds Light and Disney are serving as the cautionary tales. I hope it continues.

And you think ROTC is spitting out anything different? Nonsense. I taught pilots from every commissioning source. They were all fucking morons with the exception of one group, the prior-enlisted. Maturity, confidence, and wisdom come from experience, and experience requires independence. The prior-e's weren't smarter. Most were actually dumber, and well aware of it, but they knew how to make decisions on their own and act in a professional, non-college non-frat non-dorm environment. That's why they got picked over the other enlisted who didn't mature as well or as much. The academy kids knew how to study in a way that made pilot training easier, but that only gets you into the jet. Good hands were agnostic of the commissioning source. Once the zoomies and ROTC dorks had a little unsupervised life under their belts, the groups were mostly indistinguishable. But I suspect the academy sets the example that ROTC lives up to. I mean the programs themselves, not the cadets in them. After all, we never sent Zoomies to the ROTC programs (that I know of), but they sure did send them to us.

Do we get to hear the interesting part?