Aisha Greyjoy

I stayed too long. Should have left a awhile ago. Thanks for the good times early SK and Guardian of recent times. Nothing more to say then that.

That's something of a compliment I think.

It just hasn't worked when tried. Given the extreme costs of a failed government system(mass executions and the like), I'd suggest not trying it again anytime soon.

"The Spring 2017 War"

Personally, I hope to keep CS at war until Les Paul comes out of VM and gets a few rounds of pain or else is expelled. Cowards don't deserve to sit at the top. We, as a community, owe it to ourselves that being on top should be earned.

Yes, but if, with great resolve, and great determination, and no defections and surrenders, the strategy is given time to play out(4+ cycles), the strategy could work out. But a few alliances already bolted, didn't they?

Ahaha

Great. I'll make an account. Lots of interesting games there to play.

My point was, the actual $ I pay for defense isn't absurd. And America's spending per capita is abusrd when compared to Russia and China because their per capita income is so low. Compare the US to the UK or Germany, and we do spend a lot, being #1 and the World Police/Empire is not free or cheap. But its in the same ballpark. 3.6% or so of GDP compared to the mid 2's for most NATO countries, Germany is a bit of an under-militarized country ATM. An interesting quote is...(http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/russia/mo-budget.htm) Percentage-wise, Russia is one of the world leaders in terms of the share of GDP spent on defense. For instance, the United States’ defense spending makes up 3.5 percent of its GDP, with China’s reaching some 2.1 percent, whereas Russia’s amounts to 4.5 percent of its GDP. The Russian figure is the world’s largest after Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which spend 10.4 and 5.1 percent of their GDP respectively on arms. Really, the only large items are medicare and social security. Everything else in my taxes is kind of small. I spend 4x as much in property taxes for my local schools as I do for defense. Just to put things into perspective. And I think that's a good ratio. Lets keep that ratio.

I think I agree they do it for fun.

Big Data = Jessica Rabbit!

It might be dubious to claim that the F-35 is easily taken out by an S-200. http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/americas-f-22-f-35-stealth-fighters-vs-russias-s-300-s-400-s-17394 http://nationalinterest.org/blog/could-russia-really-shoot-down-f-22-f-35-or-b-2-stealth-17986 Sorry to post from a blog, but there's not a lot of articles on the subject. I did find a bunch of Russian propoganda on RT and Russia-Insider claiming they can easily shoot down an F-35.

Federal: On the mandatory spending side, I contributed: Social Security 3,083.23 (interestingly, they took out a lot more then that for my Social Security) Medicare/Health 2,357.76 (interestingly, they took out a lot less then that for medicare) Interest 544.10 Veteran's Benefits 241.82 On discretionary spending, I contributed: Defense 1,335.47 Education 218.04 Transportation 190.78 SS/Emp/Labor 163.53 Government 163.53 Veteran's Benefits 163.52 Medicare Health 136.27 International Affairs 136.27 Energy and Environment 109.02 Science Tech and Space 81.76 Housing and Community 54.51 Agriculture 27.25 For the record, I head a family of five with significant medical expenses, own a home, and pay a !@#$ton of local taxes, which contributes to relatively low federal tax burden. Really, a very typical American situation, except I have a stay at home wife, which is unusual now. Its hard to get too worked about how the government spends my $8771. Where on here should I be furious with the governemnt for spending that money? And really, as a liberal, can I freak out that the government spends 1335.47 of my money on an army? That seems like a real !@#$ing bargain to me. Best army in the world for the price of a new laptop? I'm more concerned about social security. As our people age, and work less, and live longer, how will we sustain that burden? Will that burden be sustainable when I'm old enough to get Social Security? Locally, I spent 10,200, not counting local sales tax and/or utility taxes, which I'd estimate at about $5000-$6000. Overall, that's about 25k in taxes I paid. That's considerably less then half. I consider half the "unfair" point. Half is where its reasonable to say "Why should I work, F you government!" So I don't feel overtaxed. Just offering a quick reality check to the usual idelogicial craziness we throw back and forth at each other here.

#ImWithHer But still.. I'm not with you on this one. Liberals lose the middle because they go too far. The point of conservatives is supposed to be to say "Whoah, whoah there chief, slow down!". Today's conservatives have lost that purpose, and instead say "1000 steps back, we must run at full speed backwards!", and without any reasonable rational voices telling liberals to slow down, we see this shit.

My general rule is, don't quote or cite motherjones, huffpost, or thinkprogress. If I see something there I want to share, find it somewhere else. I do sometimes read fox news because I wanna know what the other side thinks. And its really not all 100% awful. The opinion stuff is out there, of course. But I bet they are like...in the ballpark of 60% as accurate as other sources, which is bad, but its not the 10% liberals like to think. Worst source is obviously some random dude's conspiracy blog. Which is pretty much how infowars got going. Honestly though, some extreme sites may be more accurate reporting on their extreme topic, like redstate reporting on inter-gop squabbles(except redstate is so anti-trump, its kind of not really credible on that front)