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Muda69

Booster 2023-24
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Everything posted by Muda69

  1. Aren't the Chiefs just following the playbook/formula perfected by the Peyton Manning-led Colts teams?
  2. As opposed to the 'savior' themes that floated around when Mr. Obama was first elected:
  3. Marianne Williamson Withdraws from the Presidential Race: https://reason.com/2020/01/12/marianne-williamson-withdraws-from-the-presidential-race/ Another one bites the dust.
  4. It all comes down to the principle that government should have no business dictating what an adult individual can or cannot put into their body. Actions have consequences, and if an individual values personal freedom then they don't want government protecting them from those consequences.
  5. Rand Paul, Mike Lee Are 'Empowering the Enemy' By Wanting To Debate War With Iran, Says Lindsey Graham: https://reason.com/2020/01/08/rand-paul-mike-lee-are-empowering-the-enemy-by-wanting-to-debate-war-with-iran-says-lindsey-graham/ History suggests that House and Senate votes on the Iran question will fall largely along party lines. Whether or not politicians express hawkish or dovish proclivities often depends on whoever is in the White House, but Lee and Paul's anti-war dispositions provide a relatively rare exception to that rule. It was actually Graham who explained it best: "You know, they're libertarians." Of course the pentagon officials don't listen to Congress because they basically control the executive branch of the federal government. They are not going to cede back to Congress the powers that legislative body has repeatedly given to the POTUS over the last few decades.
  6. If Trump Decides to Start a Nuclear War, No One Can (Legally) Stop Him: https://mises.org/wire/if-trump-decides-start-nuclear-war-no-one-can-legally-stop-him In other words, the only thing that stands between a president and his launching of nuclear missiles is his own moral compass. Anyone who isn't hopelessly naïve about politicians and political institutions will find this deeply disturbing. But why has there been no significant effort to develop some sort of check or veto to this process? Part of this lies in the fact the US military establishment maintains a posture very much in favor of erring on the side of aggression rather than restraint. In the early days of nuclear-armed Cold War, there were essentially no safeguards in place. A man claiming to be the president, if he had access to the right people, could theoretically call for a nuclear strike, and there was no set way of remotely verifying his identity. ... According to some critics of the Pentagon, however, the military was committed to making it easy to launch the missiles. The Air Force has even been accused of using "00000000" as a code that could enable the launch of a nuclear missile. According to Foreign Policy : Blair contends this easy-code protocol persisted for at least a decade, including the period when he was a launch officer. For it's part, the Air Force denies using the specific code of "00000000." Nonetheless, the pro-launch posture of Pentagon has long been observable. As noted by Jeffrey Lewis at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies: Other potential sources of human error or sabotage have surfaced over the years as well. Military personnel close to president Clinton have claimed he misplaced the so-called "biscuit," the card on which nuclear launch codes are printed. Presidents have often carried them in a coat pocket. But they can be misplaced. According to one of the men who carried the football: Other similar cases reputedly occurred when President Carter "left his biscuit in a suit that got sent to the dry cleaners." One case that has been confirmed, however, is when Ronald Reagan's codes were left discarded and unattended following his attempted assassination: While mere loss of the biscuit does not trigger any sort of launch, it is difficult to predict how access to the codes could be abused by someone else in a chaotic wartime situation. Scholars have suggested several potential problems with verification and authorization. ... The fact of the matter is there is no way to confirm a president has consulted any facts on the necessity of nuclear war, or that the president is in his (or her) right mind when ordering a nuclear strike. Efforts to portray Donald Trump as insane have forced some media figures and politicians to admit this serious problem. But Trump won't be president forever, and it is naïve in the extreme to assume this problem goes away when Trump's successor is sworn in. A very interesting, and very troubling, insight/history of the power of nuclear Armageddon the POTUS holds.
  7. New Evidence From Canada and the U.S. Suggests That Legalizing Marijuana Leads to Less Drinking: https://reason.com/2020/01/08/new-evidence-from-canada-and-the-u-s-suggests-that-legalizing-marijuana-leads-to-less-drinking/ These kind of studies must make the anti-drug warriors out there heads spin.
  8. https://www.indystar.com/story/sports/college/indiana/2020/01/08/hoosiers-lineman-coy-cronk-keeps-options-open/2848714001/ Wouldn't it be interesting to see young Mr. Cronk in a boilermaker uniform next season? After all he went to LCC.
  9. https://gizmodo.com/alcohol-is-killing-more-americans-than-ever-1840862638 Where is the outrage? Why hasn't this insidious substance been banned outright here in the United States of America? Oh wait, we tried that once already.......................
  10. You do know that females can now join Scouts, BSA troops? And you are right about the salty shipping costs. $9.25 for 4-6 boxes? No thanks.
  11. Probably true. There is more advertising money for the MSM in the 2020 POTUS election and the associated impeachment trial.
  12. Don't Believe Mike Pence's Spin About Iran and 9/11: https://reason.com/2020/01/06/dont-believe-mike-pence-about-iran-and-9-11/ There is no good reason to believe this is true. (And that goes as well for his follow-up claim about Soleimani plotting "imminent attacks"—more on that here.) The most obvious problem with Pence's claim is that 19 terrorists carried out the 9/11 attacks, not 12. We'll be charitable and assume that was a typo. The 9/11 Commission established that between eight and 10 of the 9/11 hijackers traveled through Iran to get to Al Qaeda training facilities in neighboring Afghanistan. That is, presumably, the straw that Pence is grasping for here. But the report does not link Soleimani or anyone else in the Iranian regime to the plot. In fact, Soleimani's name is never mentioned in the commission's 1,200-page final report. Here's what the report does say about Iran's involvement—or lack thereof: The 9/11 hijackers—like Al Qaeda frontman Osama bin Laden—were mostly Saudi nationals. Saudi Arabia and Iran are arch rivals, and much of the post-9/11 chaos in the Middle East is due to those two regional powers jockeying for leverage against one another. Iran, run by hard-line Shiite Muslims, is unlikely to forge an alliance with Al Qaeda, a Sunni group with ties to Saudi Arabia. Indeed, after the attacks Iran actively helped the U.S. round-up members of Al Qaeda, including bin Laden's son. Writing at National Review, David Harsanyi argues that Pence's interpretation of the facts surrounding 9/11 is "mostly right" because Iran has backed other terrorist groups, including Hamas, run by Sunni Muslims. But Harsanyi has to concede that there is "no hard evidence that Soleimani himself was involved" in 9/11, and he admits that the "commission could unearth no evidence proving that the Iranians knew what the 9/11 team was planning (which doesn't mean they did not)." Mostly right? No. These arguments do not support Pence's expansive claims, and they certainly shouldn't convince anyone to go to war. If anything, that kind of Bush-era connect-the-dots-to-9/11 logic should make Americans more skeptical of the administration's case for war with Iran, because it is exactly the same playbook—sometimes even using the exact same players—that led the country into the Iraq quagmire. Needless to say, the fact that Soleimani wasn't involved in plotting 9/11 does not absolve him from a history of plotting attacks that did kill and maim hundreds of Americans, among others. But the question we should be asking is whether killing him keeps Americans safer. By escalating the threat of war, it does not do that at all. Meanwhile, most of those deadly attacks were only possible because the targets were Americans in Iraq—and those Americans were in Iraq, at least in part, because Mike Pence was wrong about whether to go to war nearly two decades ago. He's wrong again now. Do we really want another military quagmire, this time in Iran, where trillions of dollars and thousands of lives will be wasted?
  13. https://reason.com/2020/01/08/can-we-stop-with-all-the-congressional-grandstanding/ Agreed. The less power government has over our lives the better. And too bad that most congressional hearings are all about sneering and 'scoring points' instead of actual learning the facts. Sound like several posters here on the GID........................
  14. The military-industrial complex run the federal government, not the people. Every president since Eisenhower has had to fall in line.
  15. https://jalopnik.com/classic-tractors-from-the-80s-are-becoming-popular-with-1840854969 Modern tractors are incredibly sophisticated and expensive machines, with lots of very advanced technologies for operation and control, but the fundamental mechanical design hasn’t changed all that dramatically since the 1980s. In much the same way that a 1966 Volkswagen Beetle can get your ass to and from work at generally the same sort of speeds as a 2019 Volkswagen Passat, on the exact same roads, using the same basic principles, a 40-year-old tractor does essentially the same job as a modern one, at a fraction of the cost, and with the ability to effect repairs without involving John Deere reps to come out with a USB key or enlisting the help of Ukranian hackers. What would be interesting is if one of John Deere’s competitors were to look at this and see an opportunity for lower-tech but still useful modern tractors, sold at a price well below what a modern, CPU-choked Deere goes for. Perhaps Mahindra & Mahindra or Case or one of the other big tractor makers will wise up? With less regulations than the automotive world, and with a significant portion of the potential market actively hostile to massive increases in tech, you’d think this could be a good idea. To be fair, though, I don’t know jack feces about farming. But I do know it’d drive me up the wall if I legally wasn’t allowed to repair a vehicle I owned. Yep, sometimes "modern technology" isn't all it's cracked up to be.
  16. "Well we are" is no answer and you know it. Why can't the likes of Israel, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan defend themselves? Pakistan has nuclear weapons, isn't that a sufficient enough deterrent?
  17. FTA: I took Accounting 101 during my college years and let me you if such extra credit would have been available I would jumped on it.
  18. And why has the U.S. engaged in these proxy war in Iran over the decades? What is their purpose? If it used to be oil then frankly that ship has sailed. The United State of America has been the world's largest producer of oil since 2018: https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=709&t=6 So Mr. Trump's solution to these 'festering' proxy wars is to assassinate certain Iranian officials then follow that up with a 'real' war?
  19. UMass Amherst Removed a Professor for Showing a Downfall Hitler Parody Video: https://reason.com/2020/01/06/umass-amherst-downfall-video-lowry-accounting/ UMass Amherst is a public university, and punishing a professor for an attempt at humor raises some troubling First Amendment issues. The administration should correct course and reinstate Lowry. No one should be encouraging accounting professors to make their classes even more boring. ..... Agreed. Public universities are not "safe spaces" nor should they be.
  20. Thank you for the clarification. Do you, in your legal opinion, believe Mr. Underhill went too far in this case?
  21. Why I Don’t Trust Trump on Iran: https://mises.org/power-market/why-i-don’t-trust-trump-iran I have contacted my elected representative in the U.S. Congress and urged him to demand the return of US troops from the Middle East.
  22. https://reason.com/2020/01/06/divided-appeals-panel-slaps-federal-judge-for-allowing-jury-nullification-defense/ An interesting story, and yet another example of the federal government abusing the interstate commerce clause to effectively terrorize individuals when state statutes are already sufficient.
  23. Another large dairy files for bankruptcy: https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/06/business/borden-dairy-bankruptcy/index.html
  24. Trump Wants to Target Iranian Cultural Sites, Says His Tweets Shall Serve as Notice to Congress: https://reason.com/2020/01/06/trump-wants-to-target-iranian-cultural-sites-says-his-tweets-shall-serve-as-notice-to-congress/ Destruction of cultural heritage sites and artifacts is opposed by the U.N. Security Council. The council—of which the U.S. is a permanent member—in 2015 condemned "the destruction of cultural heritage in Iraq and Syria … whether such destruction is incidental or deliberate, including targeted destruction of religious sites and objects." And condemning destruction of cultural sites and objects goes much further back than that. As the Los Angeles Times points out, the Hague Convention of 1907 said "all necessary steps must be taken" to spare "buildings dedicated to religion, art, science, or charitable purposes, historic monuments, hospitals, and places where the sick and wounded are collected." And the Geneva Convention states that "any acts of hostility directed against the historic monuments, works of art or places of worship which constitute the cultural or spiritual heritage of peoples." Acts such as these are considered by many to be a war crime, and a lot of U.S. media has been condemning them as such, as have some Democratic politicians. "Targeting civilians and cultural sites is what terrorists do. It's a war crime," tweeted Sen. Chris Murphy (D–Conn.). "The President of the United States is threatening to commit war crimes on Twitter," said Rep. Ilhan Omar (D–Minn.). Trump also announced over the weekend that his tweets shall serve as official notice to Congress of his intent to engage in military action against Iran. "These Media Posts will serve as notification to the United States Congress that should Iran strike any U.S. person or target, the United States will quickly & fully strike back, & perhaps in a disproportionate manner," Trump tweeted on Sunday evening. Rep. Justin Amash (I–Mich.) says all that needs to be said on this one: But for the record, here's how the House Foreign Affairs Committee responded: Quippy principles from Democratic leaders ring hollow, however, when party members in Congress have repeatedly voted against measures to rein in presidential war powers or require more congressional oversight. Trump's dangerous Twitter tantrums come as Iranian people have been pouring out in mourning over Soleimani, ("for now, Iran is united—in anger at the United States," says The New York Times) and the Iraqi parliament has voted the U.S. military out. Owing to that last bit, Trump has started threatening Iraq again. "If they do ask us to leave, if we don't do it in a very friendly basis. We will charge them sanctions like they've never seen before ever. It'll make Iranian sanctions look somewhat tame," the president said. Meanwhile, it hasn't taken long for the administration's justification for murdering Soleimani to start unraveling. Trump and company initially insisted that Soleimani's death was necessary because he posed an "imminent" threat to American citizens and was planning an upcoming attack that would cost hundreds of U.S. lives. But a range of administration officials suggest that Trump's political image was the only thing under imminent threat. The option of attacking Soleimani had been floating around as a potential (but not optimal) plan for months. .... Trump the Dictator.
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