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Joe Biden 2023: The Dark Brandon Rises


StassneyHorn

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13 hours ago, StassneyHorn said:

Let’s go Brandon
 

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/chinese-spy-balloon-during-trump-biden-b2276504.html?
 

Biden offers to brief Trump team on Chinese spy balloons they failed to catch

Biden administration official reveals Trump officials weren’t even aware of China’s surveillance balloons at the time

 

BTW, this should be the sole reference to the man in every article.

"the one-term, twice-impeached Mr Trump."

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9 minutes ago, Poe It Up said:

This is my biggest issue with politicians, they never admit they fucked up. You let the balloon cross the country before blowing it up. That was dumb, but all we need to hear now is how it won’t happen again in the future. 

That's what they chose to do. Why would they "admit they fucked up"? They didn't want to risk a shitload of debris falling from six miles up falling on people's heads. Had that happened, you'd be screaming bloody murder.

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9 minutes ago, Red Five said:

That's what they chose to do. Why would they "admit they fucked up"? They didn't want to risk a shitload of debris falling from six miles up falling on people's heads. Had that happened, you'd be screaming bloody murder.

Well, unless it landed on him. Maybe Biden did fuck up...

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15 minutes ago, Red Five said:

That's what they chose to do. Why would they "admit they fucked up"? They didn't want to risk a shitload of debris falling from six miles up falling on people's heads. Had that happened, you'd be screaming bloody murder.

Over Montana? Good lord, don’t tell me you believe that. 

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20 minutes ago, 'stache said:

So just ignore that military leaders (including presumably the highest levels of intelligence) recommended against it, because you obviously know more than they do about the facts and circumstances. I though you guys loved and respected the military?

Um, yes. I would definitely ignore such horrible advice. 

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4 minutes ago, Poe It Up said:

It was a heart check and we got punked. Now the the question is do we stick up for ourselves or are we going to make our cellmate’s bed every morning. 

I'm sorry, I don't know what that means. You think we elected to not shoot it down until it was over the ocean, for reasons other than the ones stated. Why?

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Lol. Internet dude knows more than 5 star generals on international relations. Also pretends that the part about having stopped it from broadcasting information before shooting it down was accomplished. And other idiot not pretending that the prior incidents under trump didn't actually happen, because best prezident evar tough guy. You people never cease to amaze me. (yes, "you people," as in you people).

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9 minutes ago, RomaVicta said:

There it is. The appeal to the insecure teenage boy afraid of not looking tough

A balloon flies over the US and it's a gut-check. Why weren't we man enough to attack the balloon as soon as we saw it? We look soft! [FOX added to the hysteria by having guests speculate that maybe it had Covid germs!]

This pathetic hysteria would be the most minor of stories if not for this watery-boweled desire to embrace both fear and rage. It would likely just be an amusing story in a healthier republic. Now the fear- and hate- mongers (linked so we don't lose the precise meaning of the word and its aptness here) beat the drum to rouse the emo-badasses of the right.

Of course, CNN does their thing of talking about it endlessly and showing videos of the balloon while consulting political and military experts. Wall to wall coverage. 

It's a fucking balloon. If it presented a threat to the US by what it may have detected, we would have shot it down and taken our chances with the debris. China' intelligence capability is huge and does not rely on balloon observations of Montana.

Can we just try to grow up for a few hours? This is monumentally absurd.

I'm negging Poe for contributing to the distortion of what this trivial event clearly is. Fuck you. Thanks for your part in diminishing the hopes of the republic through dishonest and third-rate sophistry. Don't fall out of any windows, dickhead.

This. Anyone crying about how a fucking balloon humiliates us has some seriously deep-seeded insecurities and should seek therapy.

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4 minutes ago, Red Five said:

Of shooting down the ballon that we shot down? 

We heard in real time that we were waiting before it was over water before shooting it down. Then that happened. 

Right, it needed to complete its mission because Montana was so densely populated. 

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8 minutes ago, 'stache said:

Lol. Internet dude knows more than 5 star generals on international relations. 

This is my entire take on the thing. To me, seems like it should have been shot down early, but I also know that I don't know shit about the situation.

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3 minutes ago, Hookah Horns said:

Right, Montana is as desolate as the moon and there's no chance a huge chunk of debris hits a person. Fucking moron. 

Even if there was only a 1% chance of it hitting anyone, why take the chance? It's a fucking balloon, it's not a threat. And to the extent we have any interest in actually inspecting any of the equipment it was carrying, there's probably a better chance of that shit surviving impact with water than the ground (though given the height it fell from, probably still not much of a chance).  

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2 minutes ago, Hookah Horns said:

Right, Montana is as desolate as the moon and there's no chance a huge chunk of debris hits a person. Fucking moron. 

I definitely think the "we don't want to shoot it down because of debris in a populated area" is a red herring. Montana has on average 8 people per square mile. Then it flies over the NE corner of Wyoming and western Nebraska. There's a lot of open space. Maybe they wanted to study its flight for more info. Like I said, I don't know shit. But given the flight path, debris hitting people doesn't hold water.

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4 minutes ago, WhatTheBuck said:

Because outrage must be expressed over everything that Biden does. Period. Full stop. It really is that simple.

If he had shot the balloon down as soon as it crossed the Aleutians, they’d express outrage because he acted too quickly, it was a hostile act that escalated tensions with China, we didn’t know where it was going, it fell into deep, cold water where it would be harder to retrieve. (I don’t know how deep that water is, I’m just assuming it’s deeper than the 40-some feet where it is now.) If he had shot it down over Montana, they’d be outraged that Biden ignored the advice of his military advisers and unnecessarily put American lives and property at risk.

Joe Biden could cure cancer and they’d be outraged that he was putting a lot of doctors and drug makers out of work. It doesn’t matter what he does. They must express outrage over it. That’s the playbook. Hell, he doesn’t even have to do anything. He’s not taking away your gas stove but they’re outraged that he is. And they’re too stupid to learn that they’ve been duped when they see that he never came for their gas stoves. 

Thinking for themselves. 

This is exactly right. If people wanted to talk about TDS, then BDS seems 10 times more powerful considering he hasn't pulled 1% of the stunts his predecessor did.

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3 minutes ago, FirstTimeCaller said:

I definitely think the "we don't want to shoot it down because of debris in a populated area" is a red herring. Montana has on average 8 people per square mile. Then it flies over the NE corner of Wyoming and western Nebraska. There's a lot of open space. Maybe they wanted to study its flight for more info. Like I said, I don't know shit. But given the flight path, debris hitting people doesn't hold water.

Maybe, but the right would’ve had a field day in the unlikely event that someone got hurt or something got damaged. I don’t doubt that his advisers counseled against shooting it down when he wanted to because it wasn’t a security threat. We can jam it’s signals and maybe we just don’t move our super secret weapons around out in the open when it’s flying overhead. Duh. I suppose there’s also the possibility of sightseers and souvenir collectors if you shoot it down over land

We’ve got divers retrieving the hardware that fell into the water. The FBI can reassemble a plane that blew up in the sky. I’m sure we can gain a lot of information from what crashed into the ocean off of this balloon. 

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30 minutes ago, FirstTimeCaller said:

I definitely think the "we don't want to shoot it down because of debris in a populated area" is a red herring. Montana has on average 8 people per square mile. Then it flies over the NE corner of Wyoming and western Nebraska. There's a lot of open space. Maybe they wanted to study its flight for more info. Like I said, I don't know shit. But given the flight path, debris hitting people doesn't hold water.

I don't really get how you get from your premise that it's unlikely to hit anyone to the conclusion that the risk of hitting anyone is a red herring. 

China spies on us all the time and they know where shit like our missile silos are. Preventing the Chinese from getting slightly more high res pics of them isn't worth the small risk of killing someone. What is so hard to understand about this? It's also likely that we left it up there to see what it was doing and what it was capable of doing. 

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34 minutes ago, wildcat09 said:

Even if there was only a 1% chance of it hitting anyone, why take the chance? It's a fucking balloon, it's not a threat. And to the extent we have any interest in actually inspecting any of the equipment it was carrying, there's probably a better chance of that shit surviving impact with water than the ground (though given the height it fell from, probably still not much of a chance).  

My understanding is this was the key to the decision to wait.  We wanted to recover the debris intact as much as possible to inspect it which means shallow water landing.   This is what intelligent professional adults do that spend a few brain cells thinking about the situation.  They don't just shoot at somethings soon as they see it.  They think about- 

a.  minimizing or eliminated threat of the object (jamming its ability to communicate).

b. possible negative consequences of shooting the object down at different locations.   

c.  possible benefits of subsequent actions after shooting the object down and how best to accomplish that goal. 

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32 minutes ago, FirstTimeCaller said:

This is exactly right. If people wanted to talk about TDS, then BDS seems 10 times more powerful considering he hasn't pulled 1% of the stunts his predecessor did.

Frankly I don’t think I’ve ever slammed Biden on here. I didn’t vote for the guy, but I’ve always viewed the president as our pilot and I always want my pilot to do well. 

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“Shoot it Cletus” is not the first action of a country with a singular brain cell.

Observe, study, feed it misleading info, find out who is responsible, see the data it’s collecting, jam it if possible, corner the responsible party into lying are all things that can be accomplished. Don’t blast it to smithereens when you can hope to use the same tech or replicate it

Horn Dog beat me to the submit button

Edited by StassneyHorn
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35 minutes ago, Hookah Horns said:

China spies on us all the time and they know where shit like our missile silos are. 

It's public information.  Russia inspects our silos.  There are still active nuclear missile silos in Colorado, Wyoming, North Dakota, and Montana.

I grew up in Missouri, and until maybe 25 years ago the locations of active missile silos near Warrensburg were widely known, and indeed were used as landmarks:  "Head to the silo and then west for 4 miles", etc.

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It should go without saying but since the MAGA talking point of the day is to encourage shooting at things in the sky .....

 

The Science Of Why Firing Your Gun Up Into The Air Can Be Lethal

 

https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2020/07/02/the-science-of-why-firing-your-gun-up-into-the-air-can-be-lethal/?sh=4f906bbeff65

 

Spoiler

"What goes up, must come down," is an old saying that remains true for any object thrown or fired from Earth's surface that fails to escape into space. Even a bullet, fired straight up at the maximum speed a gunpowder blast can accelerate it to, will never leave the lowest layer of Earth's atmosphere. A combination of gravity and air resistance will slow it down until it reaches a maximum height, whereupon it will fall back down to Earth's surface.

 

When it does, however, its landing location will be wildly unpredictable owing to the effects of wind and air. It will be traveling much slower than when it was first fired, as its terminal velocity (due to air resistance) is far lower than the initial muzzle speed. But even so, these falling bullets can injure or even kill people: something that's most likely on July 4th and New Years in the United States. Here's the science behind how "celebratory gunfire" can, and often does, kill people.

 

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that bullets are dangerous. When a typical AK-47 fires, the bullet leaves the muzzle at about 1500 miles-per-hour (about 670 meters-per-second), approximately double the speed of sound. Even though the bullet itself weighs only 0.2 ounces (with a mass of around 5 grams), it possesses the energy of a brick dropped from a 16 story building. With all that energy concentrated into a very small area, it can easily break through your skin, causing severe internal damage and even death.

But a bullet that's fired straight up would only hit you with that same speed when it came back down if you were on a world without an atmosphere, such as the Moon. On Earth, however, we have a substantial atmosphere, which means we have air resistance, and that changes the entire story.

A bullet fired straight up on Earth, assuming there's no wind, might still be able to reach a maximum height of around three kilometers (about 10,000 feet), and will then fall back down to Earth. However, just like a human skydiver only accelerates for a few seconds before reaching terminal velocity, the air resistance acting on the bullet will prevent it from reaching speeds even close to muzzle velocity ever again.

Instead, a falling bullet comes back down with a speed of only around 150 miles-per-hour (241 kilometers per hour), which is just 10% of the speed it was fired with. Because of how energy works (proportional to your speed squared), a bullet that falls from high in the air only possesses 1% of the energy of a bullet newly fired from a gun: the equivalent of a brick dropped from a height of just 50 cm (about 20 inches) off the ground.

In terms of speed and energy, this simple treatment does, in fact, correctly give us the properties of a bullet fired up into the air when it hits the ground. But in terms of location, bullets that are fired even straight up can actually come back down up to two miles (about three kilometers) away from where they were fired.

A 150 mile-per-hour bullet won't be lethal in most instances, but there are two factors that can change the equation dramatically.

  1. Bullets that are fired at an angle, rather than straight up, may never stop and begin tumbling; instead, they can maintain much greater speeds: many hundreds of miles-per-hour.
  2. If a bullet has enough speed to break the skin, it can potentially be lethal; this occurs at different speeds for different bullets and different individual people.

 

The type of bullet used is tremendously important for determining whether it's possible for a bullet to break your skin or not, as well as the type of skin in question. In general, the accepted threshold for where a bullet will break the skin barrier is 136 miles-per-hour, but the true figure varies wildly. Some combinations of perfectly round bullets impacting thick skin will bounce off a human at speeds up to 225 miles-per-hour, but that's the ideal case.

A pointier bullet can move slower and still break the skin, as will a smaller-caliber bullet, having its force concentrated over a much smaller area. For instance (according to Mattoo's equation😞

buckshot will perforate skin at 145 miles-per-hour,

bullets from a .38 caliber revolver break skin at 130 miles-per-hour,

9mm handgun bullets can break skin at just 102 miles-per-hour,

and a .30 caliber bullet will break skin at only 85 miles-per-hour.

There are also enormous variations in how easy it is to puncture skin: both from person-to-person and across different places on an individual's body. Healthy adults tend to have the most difficult skin to puncture, as it's both thick and high in elasticity. Babies and young children have thinner skin, while the elderly have thicker but low-elasticity skin, making it easier to tear or puncture. Even just on your face, the skin on your upper lip is 50% thicker than the skin on your cheek, while the skin just below your cheekbones (close to your nose) is even thinner, particularly in the elderly.

A large suite of military ballistics tests were compiled in a report by U.S. Army Major General Julian Hatcher, which determined that a .30 caliber bullet reaches a terminal speed of 200 miles-per-hour: enough to break skin in practically all cases.

It sounds extremely dangerous, but you might think that such an occurrence of a stray bullet hitting a person is so rare that it wouldn't matter. Perhaps, you'd reason, there are so few airborne bullets and so few people compared to the land area over which these bullets could land that deaths and injuries pretty much never occur.

Oh, how wrong you'd be. Just anecdotally:

  1. In 2010, Marquel Peters, four years old, was killed by a stray falling bullet in Decatur, GA.
  2. In 2013, Aaliyah Boyer, age 10, was killed on New Years by a falling bullet in Maryland.
  3. According to a 1-year study conducted on stray bullets, 4.6% of all deaths and injuries occur as a direct result of celebratory gunfire.

  4.  
  5. In 2017, Javier Suarez Rivera, age 43, was killed moments after midnight after stepping outside his residence on New Years in Houston, TX.
  6. Also on New Years in 2017, Texas State Representative Armando Martinez was hit in the head with a stray bullet; he survived.
  7. On July 1st, 2017, Noah Inman, age 13, was struck and later died from a stray bullet in Indiana, likely from celebratory gunfire.
  8. And in 2019, Dr. Chad Wilson's emergency room removed a stray copper bullet from the top of a woman's head due to celebratory gunfire.

In fact, celebratory gunfire is illegal in all 50 states across the country, and if someone is killed by that bullet, in many states you can be charged with a felony. This leads many to ask the obvious question, "If celebratory gunfire is illegal, then why are guns fired into the air at military funerals and events? Why do we have '21 gun salutes' if this is so dangerous?"

The answer is simple: those events use blanks, not real bullets.

Unfortunately, most celebratory gunfire that occurs in communities uses live ammunition, which is what results in these potentially lethal consequences. A bullet fired up into the air doesn't cease to be dangerous because it's out of sight; typically between 20 and 90 seconds later (but up to two full minutes later), it will eventually come down.

The most dangerous conditions for celebratory gunfire occur in urban areas with a high population density, when large crowds are outside late at night: the night of July 4th and New Years Eve are typically the peaks of stray bullet injuries from this cause. Dense, small bullets will achieve higher terminal velocities than lighter, larger bullets, making them more dangerous. At high altitudes, there's less air resistance, meaning that stray bullets will carry more kinetic energy and pose a higher risk of death than at low altitudes.

The behavior that is riskiest to others, though, is firing a bullet at an angle into the air, rather than straight up. Bullets that are fired very close to perfectly vertical will lose the most speed; those that are at an angle can maintain velocities that ensure they will puncture skin, regardless of where or whom they hit.

Although celebratory gunfire continues to be an unnecessary cause of injury and death in the United States and across the world, there are a number of positive aspects to focus on. A CDC report in 2004 noted that celebratory gunfire in Puerto Rico killed 2 and injured 25 on an annual basis; since 2012, campaigns to reduce that number have successfully eliminated New Years deaths from stray bullets. Raising awareness works.

Firing a gun into the air creates a potential hazard for anyone within a two mile radius of the person firing the gun, and the danger will not subside until a full two minutes have passed since the final gunshot. Although there are no recorded incidents of the person firing the gun also getting hit by their own stray bullet, it remains a frightening possibility, but not the reason it's against the law. As is often the case, your individual freedom to celebrate ends when it infringes on the lives and safety of innocent bystanders.

 

 

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1 hour ago, WhatTheBuck said:

JFC, Paul, at least point the gun UP.

It’s like living with a six-year old.

I mean look at these juvenile assclowns. Ten years ago this kind of stupid shit would have been considered beneath any of our elected officials except as some kind of joke on a personal account. 

Now this thing is on their official accounts and actually constitutes pandering to their voters. 

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2 hours ago, WhatTheBuck said:

JFC, Paul, at least point the gun UP.

It’s like living with a six-year old.

Just the fact that this is something that appeals to anyone is insane. Even if you are the staunchest 2nd amendment advocate, wouldn't you look at that and think "it's 60,000 feet up, moron. All you're going to do is 1) look like an idiot shooting at a target out of range and 2) run the risk of that bullet doing damage when it comes down."

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What I like is that as much as the GOP whines about the border they simply never actually present bills that could pass.

I also like the way the GOP whined incessantly about healthcare and how they had a better plan.  A plan that interestingly like the border plan, is a secret plan, never to allowed to be seen by the American public.

Now the GOP that spent more money with less results on their deficit creating monster called the 2017 Tax cuts and Jobs plan.  Only it didn't produce any more jobs than the economy they inherited.  In fact for all the borrowing... they never did create more jobs annually even after falling 560,000 jobs behind the Obama/Biden economy they took the helm of in 2017.  Two thirds of that tax cut ended up in the hands of the top couple percent.  Who simply did not need it.

Now you will not be allowed to see the GOP plan to decimate social security and put more common folks in the poor house... while preserving that tax cut for the wealthy. You see that tax cut that further concentrated more wealth into fewer hands is exactly what the GOP plan is.  Helping the average man and woman is just something for slogans, not for legislation.  

But it's always fun to see the endless delusion of the misinformed here.  But hey without disinformation and self delusion a thinking Republican would blow their fucking brains out at their stupidity.

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As mentioned on a previous page, Marty Walsh will be the first Cabinet secretary to depart.  25 months after Biden took office.  Talk about some good stability there.

He will be the Lead Negotiator for the NHLPA. Julie Su should be the front runner for the job as Deputy Labor Secretary and was one of the finalists for the main job. 

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