Lord Ratner

Fooled around with an E when drunk (stupid, I know), turns out she had a history of cheating so when her husband (stupid, I know) got suspicious she claimed rape/sexual assault. Every single thing in the case pointed towards my story, to include when OSI wired her and had her try to get a confession from me, DNA evidence, every single witness testimony, a ton of pictures from that night showing her being very "friendly" with me, etc etc etc. It was $15,000 and a lot of stress for my family and friends, but I got more than paid back financially when the AF kicked me out with a $70k severance (no continuation offered) and I got to start at the airlines 2 years earlier than my UPT ADSC would have allowed. I also met my wife when they sent me to SOS at 9 years 3 months, the literal last week of eligibility, as some sort of consolation for being court martialed🤣. So things work out strange sometimes. I still owe you a reply in the Ukraine thread, but our union negotiations have my limited rhetorical attention span occupied at the moment.

This. Everytime I had an O-6 or above asking why my generation didn't want to stay in longer, I had to explain that I simply didn't have the same memories they had from their CGO years. It takes a lot of emotional attachment to the military to want to deal with the life of an FGO and above, and frankly, we didn't have that, especially in the heavy world. Instead, we had the all-men-are-rapists campaign, the great cleansing of 2012, RIFs from my second year at USAFA until the sudden reversal in 2015, 0-0-1-3 and literal article 15s for shenanigans that were tame compared to the stories the O-6 writing the Art15 would tell in private, blah blah blah. Never mind the two-months-on two-months-off deployments to the Died that guys would do for years because the AF decided that trickfucking the 90 day flying hours restrictions was more important than any sort of balanced family life, or the camaraderie built from deploying as a squadron. Ironically, after I was court martialed (not guilty all charges) it *improved* my Air Force experience. I was immediately relieved of all the non-flying nonsense that they make you do to chase down the next promotion. I would have done anything to get "back on the path," but they were done with me, and boy when you start producing the quality of work that you would expect from someone who has been guaranteed to be passed over, they stop giving you work to do. If the AF wants to improve retention they need to accept that young people who want to kill people for their country have a lot of energy to burn in unsavory ways. Fail to provide that and they will not serve for another 10-20 years off the inertia of great memories and personal connections. Those people will in turn help recruiting.

Surely you've met a Washington staffer before. I'm guessing they ended the investigation because they couldn't afford to lose half of the hardest workers to drug tests😂🤣

This is a logical move though from the people who believe there are no differences in humans at all and as such you can just pick whatever identity group you want more representation from. The idea that you're going to find a bunch of recruits from a political demographic that fundamentally believes that America is more accurately characterized by it's flaws rather than it's strengths is silly. They're called Social Justice Warriors because they already believe they are in a war. They don't need a real one to feel like they are doing something.

Story time.

The high-end real estate market got clobbered already, so it was never going to get back up to $25M. The $800k savings was just the push that made him realize $14.5M was a more realistic price.

I'm not sure there's a point in joining during the post-war periods. Obviously if you don't have other options, sure, but I started at the Academy in 03 when military appreciation was sky-high and the budget was booming. By the time I got out in '17 the silliness was outweighing the serve-your-nation pretty significantly. I was thoroughly unimpressed with the O-6+ cadre who seemed to think mentorship was telling you how awesome it was for them as CGOs and how they didn't understand why my generation doesn't want to stay in (without ever seeming to realize pre-9/11 O-club antics were long dead by the time we commissioned). Then of course the obligatory lecture on how you were a bad officer and bad person if you needed more than 3 drinks to have a good time, from the dude with a bottle of scotch in his desk. Unserious leaders in unserious times makes for a pretty frustrating experience. And if things get serious and scary, there will be limitless opportunities to join a freshly funded and focused military with a renewed appreciation for killing enemies and breaking things. So maybe do something else until then. I'm pretty content in my airline job that the military rolled me into, but someone starting off now would get to the airlines with less time and frustration if they just went to one of the pilot factory schools, and they'd have a better seniority number and higher income to pay off the loans. That wasn't an option in '03-'13. In retrospect, being told that all men are rapists and only women lack the capacity to consent to sex after having a beer was a walk in the park compared to the nonsense now. I had fun, but I don't miss it

You've been repeating the same thing over and over for months, regardless of the varied and diverse discussions happening here. And you managed to do it in a way that comes off is just, I don't know, juvenile? Impetuous? I'm not exactly sure, but it doesn't feel like another adult in the room engaged in the conversation. Yes, the expansion of NATO has been provoking, but pretending like Russia has been some innocent and compliant neighbor throughout all of this is laughable. There is a reason the bordering nations have wanted to join NATO in the years following the collapse of the USSR. But I'm not sure anybody needs a lecture on critical thinking from someone with the rhetorical complexity of a speak-and-say.

Same to you Didn't see that, since we weren't in a dialog at that point. Good article, and I don't dispute the findings. It's not so much that I think we can't do something if we don't do the other things, it's more to my overall financial point that those other things indicate the fruitlessness of fiscal responsibility on a governmental level. There is a finite amount of money between now and financial Armageddon. They will spend every dime if you let them on nonsense, or you can divert some to better causes. But it will be spent. There was a ton of fraud. A metric shit ton. And where it wasn't fraud, such as my stimulus check, it was waste. It's a separate issue, but it demonstrates, again, my overall point that being fiscally responsible with Ukraine spending at the cost of inaction (further discussed below) is illogical, because fiscal responsibility is no longer a goal of the system. It's like following a rule from an older version of the 11-202. No one is telling you to do it anymore, and it's slowing you down, so why are you doing it? We are arguing semantics now. If I buy a fully loaded Ford F-350 4x4 for $35,000, that's a steal, but it's not a paltry sum. In this case, the MSRP of destroying the Russian military can be reasonably set at the annual rate of military spending (~$700B), and we are paying a whole lot less. Don't get caught up in the analogy. Suffice it to say we are spending a lot less than if we had to do it ourselves. I don't consider this conflict mono-dimensional. There are lots of reasons to support Ukraine, though you certainly don't have to agree with them, they are still real reasons. Materially weaken a bad actor (done, but still progressing) Dispel the image of Russian military strength (done) Enforce the vital concept of sovereign borders (ongoing) Support a country against an act of evil against them (ongoing, more below) Scare Europe into considering the utility of a functional military again (done) Force the West to realign their supply chains, especially for energy production (done, but progressing further) And yes, there are definitely good reasons to not support Ukraine further. It shouldn't work in your household. It shouldn't work nationally, and eventually won't, but your ability to load up on massive debt will expire in a matter of months/years, whereas the country's ability is measured in decades. It's not logical, it's catastrophic, but it's happening anyways. Quite the contrary, one of the reasons I support the funding of Ukraine against Russia is specifically because I view it as a moral good. That doesn't mean you can run national policy off morality alone. I generally believe that if the act is immoral, you never do it as a nation, but if the act is moral, you now have the green light to weigh it against other interests. I do not believe that the political missteps of teasing Ukrainian involvement with NATO justifies this invasion. It is evil, in my eyes, and for as long as the Ukrainians wish to fight, and as long as we can afford it (already addressed), I want to support them. Yes, in a way. Except I don't want to actively speed it up directly, I am simply ok with getting there sooner if it means spending some of the fake money on moral or useful endeavors. However, I do believe we are better off getting to the collapse sooner. In the aftermath everyone will be jockeying for control, as they always do. A weaker Russia and a weaker China gives us a better shot of coming out on top. But more broadly: This whole thing is game theory, or the prisoners dilemma. Except I can tell you already what the other prisoner is going to do: they are going to spend us into oblivion. So your financial discipline is only going to ensure you lose. By the time you are proven right, you're long gone. I truly believe there is a 0% chance of returning to financial sustainability without a devastating financial catastrophe. Look at the response to 2008... we solved a debt bubble with a newer, much bigger debt bubble. And now the largest voting demographic is completely reliant on home values, stock prices, and government spending to fund their unearned retirements. You think they are going to vote that away for our sake? But the longer we take to get there, the weaker we will be. We will lose the musculature of innovation, as Europe has. Our military will continue to degrade, as Europe's has. Our resource infrastructure will wither away, as Europe's has. Seeing the theme? We can look across the ocean to see our future, and I don't like it. Better to hit the hard times now while we still have some hard men and women to lead us from the (metaphorical) rubble. But if it takes another 50 years I fear we will be as weak and helpless as the Europeans. That'll give China an advantage, especially when they conveniently let a few hundred million retirees die to rebalance their lost-cause demographics, something we would never do, and suddenly they have a strong foundation to build an empire on.

To where, and how much? I'm not saying you're wrong, but that is a very non-specific claim. Either way, the amount of the money being expended is small potatoes compared to other problem areas of the budget, therefore my concern is proportionately minimal. I guess if you consider fraudulent claims to be beneficiaries. We certainly aren't benefitting from the ensuing inflation. https://www.npr.org/2023/01/09/1145040599/ppp-loan-forgiveness Who is making that claim? It wasn't a paltry sum, it's just that the other sums are unfathomably large. Further, what Russia was capable of was not as important as what the world thought Russia was capable of. We are now free of the illusion that Russia poses a meaningful threat to the world, especially after the loss of military lives and equipment, and the decisions made in light of this revelation will allow us to better allocate resources for the next few decades. For $100-200 billion? That's a steal compared to the annual DOD budget alone. Less of a waste, sure. Neutering a geopolitical adversary is a good thing. We don't have to do it, but if the opportunity falls into our lap, we should take it. Geopolitical stability is always the result of intense violence and the will of the victors in the aftermath. The experiment with McDonalds diplomacy has failed, and Russia is a nice little warning shot to China (the real threat). And how much of a waste is important. SS, Medicare, and Medicaid, and CHIP were about $2.4 trillion in 2022. If we round up to $200 Billion for Ukraine, that's less than 1/10 of the cost of the big-ticket waste, for the annihilation of much of the Russian military. Not bad. I'll try to make it understandable. First, "it's better to try and doom adversaries than try and help ourselves" is a strawman. That option is not on the table. We are not going to get our financial system in order. It is not going to happen. Governments are not going to willingly give up fiat currency, and voters are not going to willingly cut or cancel their government-provided benefits. That leaves only one possible outcome, other than complete global collapse, which I do not believe will happen. Hyperinflation will lead to societal instability, which will lead to political upheaval, which will lead to monetary and fiscal reform. At the end of that road we will once again be in a world without fiat currency and with limited government spending, until of course the cycle repeats in another 50-100 years. Let's call the point at which the monetary system collapses "the reckoning." I don't know when the reckoning will happen, but it will happen whenever the amount of money being printed exceeds the productive output of the society supporting it. So between now and the reckoning we will spend XXX trillions of dollars. That money can go towards supporting senior citizens that didn't plan for retirement, Ukraine, repaving the interstate system, a colony on Mars, or anything else. Some of those things might actually increase the productive output of the society (the ideal purpose of government spending), but most will not, pushing us closer to the reckoning. So yeah, with the inevitable demise of the spend-anything era of modern governance looming, I would rather we spend the money on something like clipping Russia's wings (or China's), rather than paying people not to work, or building museums to celebrate nonsense cultural anomalies, or funding weapons systems that go nowhere, maintaining military bases in countries that aren't interested in their own defense, or keeping old people from dying of natural causes, or shoveling billions into the pharma companies to protect us from a new cold, etc etc etc. The money will be spent, so instead of tilting at windmills trying to stop the bleeding, try to redirect the spending to something that might set us up in a better position to "win" the great-global-reset. I wish it wasn't so, but the Trump era should have clearly demonstrated that there is no group interested in responsible spending. None. So let's win the game we are actually playing, not the game we wish we were playing.

This sums it up for me. I don't believe in the "every dollar counts" philosophy of government spending. Either the government is going to spend itself into catastrophe or it won't. If it is, which I believe to be the case, then I'd rather see some of the funny-money-printing that will doom us go towards mildly useful endeavors, rather than watch it all get wasted on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, bank bailouts, PPP loans, student loan forgiveness, university funding, etc. There's an unknown-but-finite $$ amount where all this nonsense falls apart. It's going to be spent on something, might as well be something that weakens our enemy a little.

Because it's a team sport now for conservatives, as it has been for Democrats since Obama. And in team sports, your team can do no wrong....

Here's where you lost the thread. You were doing well. Are conservatives so far on their heels now that they're arguing for no government involvement at all? Because that's not conservatism, it's not even libertarianism, it's anarchy. The right to property includes protection against other people whose actions would prevent you from using/enjoying yours the way you see fit. No matter how hard we try, ultimately, that is the subjective line that needs to be defined with limiting principles. Your entire first paragraph was a great list of oversteps, but it's pretty nuts to tell someone that they should move out of the slums as though that's the only place you'll ever be where someone is playing loud music at 3:00 a.m. You should spend some time if you ever get the chance talking to someone who deals with code enforcement at the city or town level. They're not going to be able to justify everything, but a lot of the rules that seem absurd are actually based on very difficult to decide cases. For example, I found it thoroughly obnoxious that our town has someone driving around making sure no one has overgrown yards (greater than 12"). And honestly, I don't think they should have someone who is proactively looking to enforce these rules, but the tall grasses very quickly become breeding grounds for rats and mice that migrate to the surrounding houses seeking shelter. I know this because my neighbor was overwhelmed by a flood of rats from my property, and when I finally got around to whacking down the overgrowth it looked like one of the biblical plagues scurrying away from my lot. My biggest problem with code enforcement is when the actual affected parties are all communicating and comfortable with a code violation, but the town is unwilling to waive policy. These laws and regulations exist to protect property owners from other property owners, so if the property owners don't care, the town shouldn't have any standing to enforce. That's where we start to see the real overreach.

That's what I've been wondering. Maybe the party has decided who they want to run against Desantis or Trump, and it ain't Joe. I suspect Newsom will be working behind the scenes to get this into the news, if it's as true as it seems to be.

And yet we know you'd be here pissing into your Cheerios if Jared kushner or Don Jr had been charged with a crime in such a way to ensure that they never face any consequences for it. I'm not trying to say that you are unique from the people here who defend Donald Trump ceaselessly, I'm saying you're exactly the same.

My views on this have evolved a lot. Here's where I am now: Wealth inequality is irrelevant. That part I've always believed, but what matters, and what I didn't see before, is how the wealth disparity is produced. I think the people who make things are able to be as rich as possible without much consequence. Think Bill Gates, Bezos, Musk, Carnegie, Walton. Something about our connection to their products and services makes their immense wealth understandable. Plus, the creation of technology or a service that makes humans more productive (even as a second or third order effect) ultimately adds far more to the collective wealth of our society than the millions and billions that accrue to the founders/inventors. But the unleashing of modern banking since the 70's has been altogether different. You should not be able to make billions off financial engineering. At best, loans enable the above innovations, but the banking system has found a way to make as much or more than the industries they enable. Problem is, so much of modern financial markets are simply transfers of wealth between parties. It's gambling. Guess who's better at that game? It ain't you. Nothing demonstrated this better than the nauseatingly-ironically-named Robin Hood. Nothing more than a transfer of wealth from the retail investor (poor) to the banks and private equity managers (rich). And when the retail investor found a hole in the armor with GameStop, they shut it down. Disgusting. The third element is the unstoppable printing of money by the Fed. These made up dollars are vacuumed up by the top .1% of Americans at a stunning rate. So when the inflation hits from boosting the money supply, the already-rich are sitting on a greater share of the money, drastically reducing the impact of inflation on their purchasing power, while the commoners like us get crushed. This wealth is created by political access, favoritism, and shady banking practices. It is this type of wealth inequality that will destroy our society if we don't stop it, yet the pandemic wildly accelerated the problem. But it gets worse. The Republicans are still reflexively defensive of business from the communist movement of the left in the 50's and 60's. They haven't figured out that modern crony capitalism has two sides of business, the makers and the bankers. Until the find a way to escape the bankers, they will be useless. Tucker Carlson is the strongest voice against this new phenomenon, though he flails around the center of the problem at times. The Democrats are equally useless, because they are hell bent on attacking the makers while the bankers fund their campaigns and promote their ESG nonsense. In the war against crony capitalism, the Democrats have decided to attack the capitalists with the help of the cronies. Talk about missing the mark.

The bourbon defense is always allowed around here 😂. Cheers!

Yeah I know. But she was one. That's kinda the point, the party is running out all the moderates. I see a split coming oif they can't figure out what to do with the progressive movement. They'll probably lose Manchin next. But fair shot.

RFK Jr for one. Tulsi Gabbard. Joe Manchin. Mark Kelly. Yeah, he cares about it so much he convinced Republicans to not vote in Georgia, costing them the Senate. He decided not to fund any candidates running in 2022, almost unheard of for an ex president, because he wanted to save everything for his campaign. So much for the red wave. He's decided that siding with Disney over Desantis was in our best interests, definitely not his political interests. He cares about one thing only: himself. He's publicly shit on people who made fools of themselves defending him such as Lindsey Graham, Bill Barr, and Kayleigh McEnany. And all that is just the new stuff since his first run. Ew, no, I covered that. Who the fuck are you talking about? Did you read the post at all?

I know you might very well be too fucking stupid to communicate with, and I say that only because I've had to read what you post here, but I don't need the media to tell me that Trump is a fucking asshole, doesn't give two shits about this country, and has violated every moral clause that most of us consider important. And he does so without having any shred of remorse or regard for other people. There is no one he hasn't betrayed. I still voted for him, because I'm capable of having more than one thought in my head at a time. But he has lost his fucking marbles and demonstrated with absolute inescapable clarity that he will never put anything above his own vanity. The country deserves more than that. Unfortunately, Joe Biden is not better than that. But there are democrats who are, and if by some miracle the Democratic party can find it in themselves to nominate someone who actually loves this country more than they love themselves or enriching themselves, I will vote for that person before I vote for Donald Trump.

This is just another example of the shit that we saw all the time in the Air Force before this trans insanity happened. How many times have you heard about some pilot that was a total bro when he was a captain or major or even a squadron commander and then they become a general and at best standby idly while ridiculous nonsense is imposed upon their subordinates, and at worst, participate? The types of people who are willing to do what is necessary to get to these jobs are not the type of people who often have deep-seated beliefs. And so when the beliefs of those they must rely on for further promotion are insane, they adopt them. Then you see someone on a podium who 20 years ago wouldn't have imagined they'd be spouting the ridiculous nonsense they are, but because it's the present rallying and cry of the cultural elite, all of a sudden they are true believers. It seems unbelievable that so many apparently intelligent people are spouting this nonsense, but that's because you're (not you specifically, M2) operating on the assumption that they put any thought into it at all. They haven't. These people don't have values other than their own progression. Once you accept that, everything they say makes perfect sense. They spent an entire career doing what other people told them to do to get where they are, so it shouldn't be surprising that they will also say what other people tell them to say.

We call that the Texas conundrum.

RFK Jr is more than a little nuts, but I think part of the problem is that when you are involved in a conspiracy and see just how truly insane it can be, it becomes too easy to see conspiracies behind every shadow. That said, he points out the absolute insanity of modern democrats aligning themselves with big pharma companies, And if you had told any Democrat that 5 or 10 years ago they would have laughed in your face. So maybe he's not that crazy. That said, he seems completely uncorrupted by progressive identity politics. The real question though is who are "his people?" For everybody clamoring about how Joe Biden ran as a moderate and became a hyper progressive, that's because Joe Biden never had people. So when it came time to staff his administration, it was all a bunch of Obama and Clinton staffers, and the Obama ones in particular have been hyper progressive for a long time. Trump showed that it's difficult to overcome the upper and middle management ranks, and Joe Biden barely has the cognitive capacity to read a cue card, much less manage the subversive interests of hyperpolitical underlings. I like that RFK is an old school liberal, but I would be shocked to find out that he has any sort of meaningful network, and that's vital when it comes time to staff the administration, at least if you have any intent on controlling it and bending it to your agenda. But I would vote for him over Trump in a microsecond. If it's Trump Biden I'll probably just toss the vote to the libertarian.

Why? You know the answer. Because it feels good. Second and third order effects be damned.

Nashville is not remotely like SF, Portland, Seattle, NYC, or Chicago, in politics, population, or the crime and homelessness (drug use) wave. It's a nice town. Liberal cities in conservative states have had a much harder time enacting the policies that have led to the conditions in the big cities. That's lucky for them. Austin is another good example. Every time the local government gets stupid, the state legislature steps in and takes away their toys. That doesn't comport well with the idea of localized government, but unfortunately we've seen that these issues manifest long after the offending ideologues have skittered away, and the damage takes years, or maybe generations, to fix. Dallas is another funny one. Usually the surrounding suburban areas funnel money into the city to fund all the absurd spending cities pride themselves on, but here they structured it so the money stays in the suburbs to be spent on schools and whatever else the residents want. The local newspaper is always crying about how little money Dallas gets for things like subways and buses and other downtown ornaments. The rest of us are quite happy to keep the city purse depleted.