Lord Ratner

In that regard we are in complete agreement. I've made it clear that I was not for any form of mandate with this particular vaccine. But that is different than supporting or otherwise spreading an objectively flawed claim about the vaccine impact. The person who is discrediting the false claim is not also obligated to make any further accurate claims. Creating a justification for a mandate is a separate issue with its own requirements. What you said is: "If you want to "debunk the conspiracy" then we'd need to know the number of miscarriages in a non-vaccinated control group compared against the number in the vaccine group, then curate for other factors (lifestyle risk choices, age, overall health, etc.). This should be easy to debunk given that data exists, I wonder why that wasn't part of your article?" That's not true. All that is needed to debunk the conspiracy is to discredit the evidence presented for the conspiracy. This is like the people currently claiming that some fuzzy video footage and unexplained lights are evidence of aliens and unless you can specifically prove that the lights in those videos weren't aliens, then the baseline assumption must be that it was in fact aliens.

Just because what took longer? The point is that those drugs had years and years of data behind them before they were forced on anyone. Decades in some cases. This was a vaccine with absolutely no data behind it, because it was invented in a matter of months before deployment, and the fucking thing didn't even work. Which should be all the proof that you need, because even if something isn't dangerous, you should not be forced to use it if it doesn't even do the thing you claim it does. To compare the covid vaccine mandate to other vaccine mandates is to be intentionally ignorant of the differences.

If someone makes a claim, especially a claim with a specific percentage in it, and you prove that the claim was impossible to make with the provided data, you are not then required to go through the data and come up with a corrected claim. The 44% claim was debunked. It is now on the conspiracy theorist to provide a newer number, this time with adequate support.

Yeah, that doesn't add up. The best case scenario is that you get experienced soldiers from this, but with so many soldiers in Russia being conscripted, it is unlikely they will have a whole lot of people sticking with the military whenever this fiasco is over.

Yup. Every Boomer: "Your generation is used to getting a participation trophy for everything!" Me: "And who exactly bought those participation trophies? Was it the 8 year olds, or their boomer parents?" Boomers: ..........

I'm a big Vivek supporter, but he got over his skis a little. The "bought and paid for" accusations were gross. I hate that crap. He has a couple other attacks that I thought were scummy. He needs to stick with being smarter and more open then the rest of the field. But I also think he's running for VP.

Same

If you read "the Fourth Turning" it suggests exactly this solution. Unfortunately.

Wait a sec, did you come around to my POV? Fuck, I still owe you a response. I'm a bad Internet friend 🤣😂

Lol, that movie was dog shit. Every corny military trope in one movie. Liam Niessen wouldn't even get a haircut for it 😂🤣. Good effects though. And Rhianna.

Which part?

About damn time. It never made sense to me that only Democrats were allowed to let women drown in their car upside down in rivers while they stumbled home drunk. I feel sorry for you. You made politics personal when the people who you are defending couldn't possibly have less regard for you. They don't despise you, but that's only because they don't want to know that you exist in the first place. They just need you to keep feeding from the limitless tap of outrage so that you can fight their war for them. And yes, of course the right does this as well. You'll get over it one day. They'll make a promise that actually matters to you, and when it isn't kept the illusion will crumble. Until then, they will rely on you steadfastly ignoring any source that doesn't already agree with their position. As long as they are getting rich, and you are not.

Definitely doesn't have anything to do with telling people they are born racist, gender doesn't exist, and their kids should get hormone treatment without parental knowledge or consent. A couple decades of that nonsense will raise the hackles. All while the untrained son of the vice president blackmails Chinese Nationals with threats of his father's retribution if he isn't paid a lot of money, while people like you insist that not only is there nothing wrong with that, but you surely wouldn't have cared if the last president did that. To those of us who can see your basic and generally boring political hypocrisy, it's just obnoxious. But to everyone else it's maddening, and now they are acting mad. Democrats took for granted for decades that Republicans would never act as unhinged and insane as they acted anytime they didn't get their way. Republicans have since started acting and unhinged and insane, and the liberals are not liking the taste of their medicine.

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.