Phil1111

How long will it take for trump to say something stupid and derogatory about President Carter? Or has he done it already.

Isn't there still time?

ChatGPT can salvage your life, so there is hope.

Yeah, just 31 days and he will have the power to send in the marines. in other news "The Danish government has announced a huge boost in defence spending for Greenland, hours after US President-elect Donald Trump repeated his desire to purchase the Arctic territory. Danish Defence Minister Troels Lund Poulsen said the package was a "double digit billion amount" in krone, or at least $1.5bn" American hegemony becomes dominant again.

Evidently to Libya

I take it that Deckker has got under your skin a bit?

Putin has caused Finland and Sweden to join NATO. Now with Hezbollah and Hamas gone, Iran's power has been severely diminished. With the fall of the Syrian(Assad) government Russia has lost its Mediterranean bases.

It is, well it was a nice country. It was the USSC that opened the doors for oligarchs to take control.

The consumer will certainly pay. There are 11 billionaires in the trump administration to be. Not one is driven by an altruistic ideology.

Agree although 9 months there and the same back to visit a place thats the same as the moon seems a stretch.

Agree Agree with a caveat about the dangerous power of creating a monopoly. Not all billionaires are bad. But killing other private competition to create a SpaceX monopoly like Google would not be good. SpaceX is certainly showing NASA, Boeing, Blue Origin, Russia, China and the ESA how its done.

China has now banned the export of key minerals like gallium, germanium and antimony to the US in response to American export bans of high technology items to China. The trade war is now starting to simmer. Oh! wait too bad that China will still export those items to Canada and Mexico. Come January 21 Americans will come to Canada for their prescription drugs and EV batteries.

The west and free markets won the cold war. Putin is nothing more or less than a criminal kleptocrat. He as a temporary alliance with a communist dictator. With a family dictatorship and a Islamic theocracy. Not one of which enjoys domestic popular support. Each of which is propped up by the power of a gun. After trump's second term, American justice will come roaring back and trump will spend the remainder of his life buried in litigation. IMO

He wasn't pursued. He came to the attention of prosecutors who made a deal to let him off, more or less. It was a trump appointed judge that threw the deal out. Thats not to say that a judge wouldn't have given him a light sentence or no jail time. The fact is he admitted to the tax charges which were serious and the gun charge is a felony. Does the law apply to all equally or not? trump's pardons are an obscene exception. If a Black man was prosecuted for the same gun "crime" the president's son should be as well. Using trump's pardons as a example or precedent to justify Biden's actions is sinking to trump's level. The entire concept of the pardons is intended to be centred around making right unfair convictions. US presidents are giving pardons to people they know personally or have had involvements with. All to subvert the concept of all equally before the law.

Agree. trump's pardons are in a completely other world. "Among those receiving pardons was Kushner’s father, Charles Kushner. The elder Kushner had been convicted for crimes that included extorting his own brother-in-law by hiring a prostitute to lure him into a sexual encounter, video recording the encounter and then sending the film to his wife, Charles Kushner’s own sister." All of this pardon B.S. makes banana republics look princely compared to the US.

Sorry Nigel but you're dead wrong. Biden claims Hunter charges were politically motivated. Here are what the facts show LA Times story: "Earlier this year, a federal jury in Delaware convicted Biden of federal gun crimes, including lying about being drug-free when he purchased and briefly owned a gun while he was addicted to crack cocaine. Biden was on trial for three felony charges, and the jury convicted him of all three. In addition to lying on a federal background check form and giving a false statement to a federal firearms dealer, he was also convicted of possessing a gun while being an illicit drug user." He lied on the gun application forms....“It was not politically motivated. Politics played no part in this whatsoever. Again, we just went by the evidence,” the juror said. In September, Hunter Biden pleaded guilty to all nine federal tax charges he faced, just as jury selection was about to begin in a downtown Los Angeles courtroom. The indictment in the tax case included racy details of Biden’s life between 2016 and 2019 — the period during which now he admits he failed to pay at least $1.4 million in federal taxes — including the hundreds of thousands of dollars he spent on escorts, a pornographic website, hotels, luxury car rentals and other lavish personal expenses." Instead of letting his son face a judge who could determine if he was unfairly prosecuted when a deal was on the table. Instead of putting to rest the whole idea of a "politicized justice system". Biden just confirmed that it is.

When the mind, the facts and the debate is lost. The reliance of brain rot is brought to the fore. ‘Brain rot’ named Oxford Word of the Year 2024 "Brain rot’ is defined as “the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging. Also: something characterized as likely to lead to such deterioration”. Our experts noticed that ‘brain rot’ gained new prominence this year as a term used to capture concerns about the impact of consuming excessive amounts of low-quality online content, especially on social media. The term increased in usage frequency by 230% between 2023 and 2024. The first recorded use of ‘brain rot’ was found in 1854 in Henry David Thoreau’s book Walden, which reports his experiences of living a simple lifestyle in the natural world. As part of his conclusions, Thoreau criticizes society’s tendency to devalue complex ideas, or those that can be interpreted in multiple ways, in favour of simple ones, and sees this as indicative of a general decline in mental and intellectual effort: “While England endeavours to cure the potato rot, will not any endeavour to cure the brain-rot – which prevails so much more widely and fatally?”

Mmmmmm now that a purchase price is better defined! ...I'm surprised that a DZ, a manufacturer, or a major retailer hasn't bought it. IMO 2-3 active individuals are needed in the skydiving section to drive engagement. Newbies and those debating coming back need gear and not every DZ is active enough to have active FB groups.

The KC-X is an excellent example of how politicians, insiders, weapons suppliers and lobbyists drive the $800 billion machine. Although Canada and some other countries are worse when it comes to domestic jobs/politics first. Functioning of the system and value are way down the equation.

People choose to go to those sections and others can ignore them. There needs to be more participation in the skydiving forums themselves. More participation in checking out the advertising. agree

They just bought some F-15EX fighters which is the latest with digital flight controls. Israel gets its jets at about 1/2 price because of the Jewish lobby in America.

Ah the French and art. Americans and football: SoFi Stadium tops the list, costing $5.95 billion in inflation adjusted dollars.8 stadiums cost over $1 billion to build.

They sure did a nice job. A $700 million euro work of art to rebuild.

I hope that everything works out. There is a possibility that Elon can cut some fat out of Washington. A smaller possibility that the direction of leadership will be traditional GOP, i.e. cut spending such that the deficit is reduced. Having said that there are many elderly and poor that are vulnerable. I most closely identify with John McCain a compassionate conservative and one that looks for consensus.