Lord Ratner

Uh huh. Scoreboard.

It's always pointless trying to guess what Trump will do, but he is the only politician with the balls to play hardball with Russia. Okay, Vladimir, if this whole thing is about preventing having NATO right up against your border, then you have two options. You can vacate all Ukrainian territory, affirm the sovereign borders Ukraine as they stood in 2013, and in return you will have a binding treaty that the United States will never support or allow Ukraine membership in NATO. Or, we can lock the borders where they are now after your incursion into the East, we will consider this new Russian territory to be the buffer between NATO and Russia, and immediately recognize what remains of the newly defined Ukraine as the newest member of NATO. Otherwise I'm willing to bet that we can print money to supply Ukraine for longer than you can draft citizens to fight them.

You can build a beautiful house with the finest craftsmanship, sparing no expense and employing the best building techniques. But if the house washes away during the first storm because you built it on a foundation of sand, you are still left with nothing, despite your effort. It wasn't a waste for *me* because I got to do cool things with great people for good pay, and it dropped me right into the airlines with hardly any effort of my own. I would much rather have done what I did than spend 10+ years in the regionals, but that includes the retrospective knowledge that I wasn't killed or seriously injured. But it was a waste for the country. It was a waste of 2,459 troops. It was a waste. At this point, the only way what we did in the Middle East can be "effective" is if we end up in a war, a real, big, no-shit ugly war, in the next 10ish years. We have a humongous population of experienced warfighters, active and veteran, that will put any nation we fight in the grave through a much shallower learning curve than our enemy will face. Russia has proven that experience is the secret ingredient. I believe that will happen, though I hope it will not. At that point we will finally see the "value" of our wasted time in the desert.

Precisely because you can't predict how an individual will age and decline, and the job is too important to risk on something like Biden, I'm using statistical models of cognitive decline, and last I looked the models showed cognitive decline increasing around 75 years old pretty substantially. So, 65. Yeah because there isn't a gigantic industry behind analyzing election results and voter habits... It's all just magic smoke! I've been surveyed no fewer than a dozen times this election alone. More to the point, I avoid hiring people over 75 whenever possible. I'm not allowed to fly passengers with them (at a much younger age of 65), and I don't find them to be open minded or particularly fun as a group. So why would I vote for them to run the country? They (Boomers) are also the biggest threat to the financial stability of our nation. Almost everything in this quote is... Silly. I never once studied in pilot training (other than going to the UTD), so I'm not sure what that does to the rest of the analogy. Nor did it mean everything to me. I turned down one of 3 T-38s for my class because I knew that being a fighter/bomber pilot would mean a *lot* of studying and I don't like studying. I've recently not filled out preferences if I didn't have a preference. We definitely had students who specifically didn't want to fly the older airplanes because they were old. And the AF doesn't study dream sheets in the hopes of understanding future track select trends. You do know that they track partial ballots, right? Is this why you vote? To feel brave? To gain the admiration of your peers? I don't. I just vote for what I think is best. And while I think Trump winning is better than Kamala winning, I think it would also be good to see reduced turnout for Trump as an indication that despite his victory, he is not the direction the conservatives should go. Your suggestion that these things are not tracked is frankly laughable. Agreed. And I'll be voting, just not for president.

That was good. Bravo

Chase Oliver (and the libertarian party) is a joke, and Jill Stein is a fossilized joke.

The electoral college is going nowhere. They'll find something else to complain about, I assure you.

Oh, and JD Vance changes everything. Considering how many whacked out leftist internet trolls are trying to actually assassinate Donald Trump now, there's a halfway decent chance Vance becomes the president sometime in the next 4 years. That possibility is more than enough for me to vote for Trump, while still hoping that it doesn't happen of course.

You children just pick a few dissected quotes from a few posters here and act like everyone is saying the same thing. Go back and find any posts from me where I am denying the things you say we are all denying. You won't find them. Has it occurred to you at any point that the reason you keep falling back on the same stupid arguments is because you don't have anything approaching a policy prescription for America? We all get it, you're aghast at what a terrible person Trump is. The difference is some of us consider him not particularly worse than the people who have been occupying Washington for decades. And it's hilarious that you would list generals, who I consider to be the most pathetic group in America right now, as some sort of evidence. This generation of generals have distinguished themselves in nothing other than their ability to eat the most shit and disregard their own virtue to assure promotion in an organization that hasn't accomplished anything for decades. I don't like Trump. I didn't like him in 2016. Does it matter, what I have before me are two choices and two very different visions for America. I would love a different candidate representing the more conservative vision for America, but I didn't get one. Doesn't change the fact that if I have to choose between what Donald Trump did when he was in office and what Harris did while she was in office, that question is so simple that it boggles my mind you are even here defending the opposition. But you aren't defending the opposition, are you? You're doing the same thing Harris is doing: everything in her power to focus on Trump's admittedly awful personality instead of her obviously awful track record. I'm not voting for anybody for president this year because I've decided philosophically that I'm against presidents over the age of 65 beginning their first term. I'm in Texas, so I can do that and hope that there will be some statistical change that can be recognized and hopefully get us better candidates in the future. But if I was in a swing state, I would be voting for Trump. If you are unable to understand how someone can vote for someone they don't consider to be moral, then I have to wonder what type of drugs you are taking that make you think your candidates are moral. That's the more interesting conversation here.

Marco voices interviewed a guy named Anas recently who goes over why Israel is probably not going to hit Iran's oil. It's an interesting conversation. Lots of support needed from other countries to make a meaningful dent in Iran's oil capacity. I suspect they will target people. Israel has been on a roll cutting heads off snakes.

Can shrapnel set off tannerite? Also Kinzinger has his glasses on top of his head while shooting within shrapnel range...

Only rookies 'bate with their dominant hand.

Just refuse the offer. They'll have an appraiser come out, I've only done it once but the appraiser in some cases just looked at me and asked how much money I wanted for the specific object/fix. When they do an assessment of what a repair costs, they do it on the assumption that you are using similar materials and a professional to do the repair. Anybody who's been conscious for the last 4 years knows that labor is extremely expensive these days, so if you get a couple example quotes you'll have the appraiser in your pocket. Almost every single thing was deemed more expensive to repair than to replace.

Okay gotcha, the video I saw cut off shortly after he threw the stick. I didn't realize they had released more footage. I do love the idea of using a thrown broomstick as justification to continue firing on the apartment. Fuck that guy.

Did he have the hole in his head in that video? Did the drone finish him off? I'm confused. Well done though. Rough time to be an enemy of Israel. Can you even imagine the paranoia within Iranian leadership right now?

Both of those were actual ideas (you forgot swallowing a uv light) that have been investigated as solutions to problems. Did Trump read more than the title or the headline? No. But acting like he just made it up from thin air is simply incorrect. I don't get your point here? What's the difference between that and Walz not being able to answer honestly about immigration or the Afghanistan pullout? You're looking for differences where there are none. Plus, even if Trump is a moron (and I don't think he's particularly smart, just very, very media savvy), JD Vance is smarter than Trump, Harris, and Walz combined. And Pence was also rather smart, though not politically effective. But the Biden Harris team takes the cake.

I think what's been made crystal clear over the last 4 years is that we have the dumbest presidential team in the history of America. Everybody knew Joe Biden was the idiot of the Senate, so there's no surprises there, but at least my impression was that Kamala was viewed as duplicitous and deeply political, but not stupid. There's no way around it at this point, she is actually unintelligent, at least by the standards one expects to be operating in national level politics. There hasn't been a new question asked of her in at least a month, just the same ones repeated over and over, and yet somehow she and her team haven't put together a functional response? I'm not saying it has to be honest, but this woman acts like every single question is the first time she's ever heard it. It's really quite stunning from a political malpractice standpoint. Same thing for Walz during the debate. How the hell did he not have an answer ready to go about his lying about tiananmen square? Or immigration? These are national level campaigns operating on nine-figure budgets. No one thought to put an answer together for that? I don't want to make it sound like Trump is much better, he fucked up that debate pretty spectacularly, but he does a better job than Kamala and Tim. JD Vance however has done a much better job, and in fact the only thing I've seen him stumble on is January 6th, but it is painfully obvious he's not allowed to answer that question in any rational way because Donald Trump refuses any rational explanation.

Nothing different about it. The American people, regardless of party, no longer trust "experts." They still trust *their* experts, but that's human nature. It's just a broader loss of faith in the institutions, which is warranted because the leaders of those institutions decided a while ago that the purpose of the institution was to further an ideological goal, instead of just doing-the-thing (collect taxes, prosecute crime, administrate education programs, preserve public land, research and defend against disease, etc). That's why Republicans have been (until Trump) weak on immigration despite the contradiction with rule-of-law, because they wanted to further a flawed view of unfettered capitalism. And Democrats have supported the greatest absurdities of affirmative action despite the contradiction with equality and colorblindness, because they wanted to further a flawed view of utopian equity. Trump and Bernie are the voters' anguished response to the liars leading the government, espousing values they do not uphold in their own lives or in the way they steer their organizations. Bernie just failed to stay true to his values (thank God), so he lost to the Democratic machine. Trump did not. Both are insane, but these are insane times🤷🏻‍♂️

I want to get the Gen2 Ranch in 300BLK with a PTR Vent 1. Gets close to "movie quiet" while still using a real caliber (unlike .22LR, which I love, but it's for kids 😂🤣). Speaking of 22, I got a Sig P322 and I gotta say, the 20rd mags really mitigate the most annoying elements of shooting a 22 pistol. With a can on it (Warlock) the thing is stupid quiet. And very light. Probably my go-to snake gun just based on the decibels. And somehow I end up more of a Sig fanboy. Needs a replacement trigger though, the plastic is flimsy. Now just waiting on the can for my Rattler. We'll see if the NFA gods will honor me with a fast approval...

I think talks about mandatory service miss the point. I don't think the Israelis have a heightened sense of purpose because of their mandatory service, they have a heightened sense of purpose because there is an immediate and obvious threat nearby. And even then, a lot of young Israelis were succumbing to the same aimless malaise we are in the West... Until October 7th. We're fat, dumb, and (un)happy. From everything I've read, the 1920-30s were the same. Then economic crisis, then total war. WWII was so catastrophic that it provided the West with meaning and identity for the next 70 years. I think WWIII will have the same effect.

The Democrats are absolutely terrified that the polls still skew in favor of Democrats, as they have for the last couple election cycles. If that's the case, Trump has it in a landslide (by modern standards, not like Reagan).

Here's the video of anyone wants to watch. Also, if you have kids that watch YouTube, this is a channel to add to their whitelist.

Smarter Every Day on YouTube did a presentation (I believe to NASA) on this. It's a complete lack of seriousness within the space bureaucracy. There's no way this goes to plan, and a very good chance the decisions made will end up getting the program cancelled when budget woes rear their ugly head. Better hope Elon can carry the entire mission on his shoulders.

He's old and probably losing his marbles. I too am ok with a President Vance.

Yeah, I remember. I just didn't see how that was a differentiation between the KC-10 and 135. In pretty much every other way, however, the -10 was a better platform 🤣😂. Also, what you quoted was a response to this: Kinda true, if you are being hyper literal.