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The sun shines, the tweets are positive, and the press must now clear quoting Biden Administration officials before actually quoting them. And they seem to be ok with that. Further, there are no more "kids in cages." Instead, this band of professionals have brought us "free range kids" who are found randomly scattered on arid border lands.

Generally speaking, if there is time, crews get together for dinner and beer at night. On long layovers (30+ hours) I've rented cars and and went sightseeing (Glacier National Park, among others) with the Captain. I was trying to get a 48 hour Paris, to try to get up to Normandy, then that bitch rona showed up and ruined everything. On one trip the Captain reached out to me before the trip started and we set up an whole day on a long Boise layover. We rented a car and went up into the mountains, rented 4-wheelers and had a blast. Ended the day at an awesome brew pub near the hotel. Then there are the slam-clickers...boooo!!!! Back to the general camaraderie part....one of my now good friends was someone from my indoc class. We ran into each other a few years ago and figured out we live like 3 miles from each other. Just had lunch with him today. He flies in the Reserves so we have that other common ground as well. Domestically, I try to keep to 3 day trips max. I'll cook some food to make 2 meals on the road, then I pack fruit, nuts and cliff bars to get through the day. I also take a Black Rifle company pour over kit, grind up some coffee before I leave the house and I make my own coffee each the morning before pickup. Plenty of options out there for flight kit bags that double as a cooler. Internationally, I'd take a meal for the leg over and have the FAs warm it for me. If carry whatever dried food International rules allow. On the return leg, I'd usually either bring leftovers from the layover or hit up a grocery store and buy some stuff for a meal. You can eat relatively healthy on the road it just takes some discipline and a little extra work.

That’s me!

It's a Festivus miracle!

I don’t understand, did you initiate this discussion to blame Trump for something? The link you posted stretches imagination to blame the former POTUS. Here’s an article about C19 origins with some truly good analysis and information: https://nicholaswade.medium.com/origin-of-covid-following-the-clues-6f03564c038

Great! money where your mouth is …. Being the change you want to see and all that. nice to hear about actions rather than just words.

Manipulating words or language is a key tool in promoting agendas. There are lots of examples of this like global warming/climate change, gun control/gun safety, woman/birthing people or words used to intentionally confuse the topic of gender. The abortion argument is no different. You can see it in words or phrases like unwanted pregnancy vs abortion or any of the terms used to describe life other than baby or human, etc. Pro-abortion people know that abortion takes a life. They just choose to direct the conversation somewhere else because most people don’t have the courage or intellectual honesty to just say that they believe in abortion for convenience whether it kills a baby or not. I’d have more respect for their argument if they did. Arguments like rape, incest or even the health of the mother are just distractions. The vast vast number of abortions are simply out of convenience. And with the progress made in medicine, the baby is delivered early or operated on in the womb. I’ve got a buddy who has a daughter who was born at 24 weeks due to the mother’s pre-eclampsia. She’s a normal healthy 6 year old now. I never really gave much thought to abortion one way or another until I saw her in the NICU. Seeing that completely changed my view.

Don't just post good shit like that and not include a link! https://www.ksat.com/news/local/2021/02/25/san-antonio-based-pilot-selected-to-join-air-force-thunderbirds/ Congrats, Wang Chung!

They are GS-2181-13s, so civil service yea.

SG waiver approved. Took 2 months exactly like @Terminator5 Timeline Update: selected: Aug 2020 @ Guard fighter unit MEPS: Feb 2021 MEPS 2.0 (liked it so much I went twice): Mar 2021 SG Waiver Approval: May 2021 Cond. Enlistment: Soon, date still TBD FC1: was told 1-2 months from today but date still TBD TFOT: ? UPT: ?

I’ve yet to meet a violently pro-life individual that has adopted kids. im sure they exist … I just haven’t met one.

BLUF: I want our laws and policy to err on the side of personal freedom and choice, particular on complex issues (such as abortion or gun control) Your question is over simplistic. I'll admit though it's an uneasy question though, but that's good. It assumes that all people will change their life after having a child to raise that child and not neglect it. But that's not even the case today. You could threaten the selfish parent with fines or jail, but that doesn't solve the problem of a child being raised poorly or perhaps even abused, and even if they are removed from the bad parents, they'll enter the foster care system. So here's some more uncomfortable questions. So who pays to keep a very premature baby (20ish weeks) alive? It's only viable through medical advances and affected by the availability of the equipment and staff as well as an individual's ability to pay for that advanced care. Should the mother or father be forced to pay for that care of they didn't want the baby in the first place but was forced to deliver because abortion was made illegal? Or if the government (society) is willing to pay for an expensive NICU stay, why aren't we willing to pay for other healthcare later in life (like an aggressive cancer through no fault of the individual, treatment is expensive and if you don't have the money, it doesn't matter how good the medicine is because you don't have access to it). This makes an unwanted child society's problem, and we don't have the drive/will to care for abandoned children at a larger scale. Do we give those kids free school lunch? What about access to medical care? How do we incentivize adoption, especially of kids that have significant medical out behavioral issues? Many pro life advocates stop valuing life after birth, as shown by their stance on access to medical care, or school lunch subsidies (or rejecting benefactors that aren't the parents from paying off school lunch debts), or willingness to adopt/foster children. All of that under the guise of personal responsibility (which does exist to a certain extent no doubt, but there's also a social responsibility as well that often is ignored). Because if we take away the abortion choice of an individual, we have to replace that with societal support. Otherwise, that child will suffer, maybe throughout their life (it can be hard to dig out of a hole, especially if you start life already in a hole) Some other uncomfortable questions: What constitutes a medically necessary abortion? An outright ban on abortion *will* kill women. Who makes the decision then? What about if it's in a gray area where there's trades between the health outcomes for the mother vs the baby with no "right" answer? Who pays for the expensive procedures that increase the odds of positive health outcomes, for either the mother or baby? Doctors, nurses, and medical staff do not week for free. What about if the women is pregnant due to rape? What if medicine identifies significant diseases in utero? If the baby will suffer and die shortly after birth, should it be brought to term? What if the parents don't have good insurance and will not be able to pay for treatment during the baby's short life, even if they expend all their savings and retirement accounts (which jeopardizes their life and retirement, putting additional stress on social systems as they get to retirement age)? What about maternal care before the birth? Should things like prenatal vitamins be provided to pregnant women to avoid adverse outcomes for the baby? (For example, supplementing with folate is recommended to avoid spina bifida in the baby). What about routine visits? What if the pregnancy is determined to be high risk to the mother or baby, who pays for the additional visits and specialist care? What about normal expenses during and after pregnancy? If a mother can't work due to pregnancy, should they starve (bad outcome for the baby) or go into debt if they don't have access to paid short term or long term disability? What if they aren't married to the father? Would the father of the child be responsible for reimbursing the government (or mother) for any support provided to the mother before birth? Should the mother get any say in the matter? Often the arguments ignore the fact that the mother is also a person that is significantly impacted by pregnancy physically, mentally, emotionally, and financially, and is not just an incubator for a fetus. On the other end of the problem, what do you think about the whole "poor women having babies to increase welfare payment?" Maybe they just really value life and won't have an abortion because they believe it is wrong/evil, and are doing the right thing by keeping the baby and raising it. Should the government force them to stop having sex? Or worse? There's many other questions that touch the abortion question. Like I said in the other thread, I don't think abortion for personal convenience is right, but there's enough gray area or unanswered questions that there may be acceptable or even necessary reasons for abortion. Since that's the case, I would want our laws and policy to err on the side of personal freedom and choice. Too often we focus on the 5-10% where the something (like freedom of choice) is abused, rather than the 90-95% when things work like intended for the reasons the flexibility was provided for.

My fear as well... it'll be sold as a replacement, then we'll end up with a national sales tax AND an income tax.

A post of clarity in a sea of sport-bitching. I like this thinking. Here's my problem with the discussion. Roe found that abortions were legal until 28 weeks, because that was the court-defined point of "viability." Ok, let's use that term/idea as the consistent standard. To be logically consistent, pro-choice people should now be for restricting abortions after 22 weeks, because medicine has improved since 1973, and the data shows that babies are surviving at 22 weeks. Hell, one was just born at 21 weeks in MN, albeit it was a miracle. The standard Roe sets is a sliding scale. As medicine improves, that number should keep going down. It could even theoretically go down to 1 day. Are abortion advocates going to hold that consistent "viability" standard if that happens? Hell no, because "viability" isn't really their argument. The true argument is "choice." It boils down to this: My ability to live my life as I choose, without the responsibility of a child, is more important than the fetus' right to live. Read that twice, and tell me that doesn't make you uneasy. Idk what the answer is, but I can't support that argument.

Well, this seems to be as good a place as any to make my first post. Pardon me, but I don't know where else to do it. These Invision boards are a challenge. Anyway, I got tired of being the amateur on my hobby boards, so I figured I'd join one where I already have the stink. FAIP, Herc Tac Airlift, 6500+ hours, retired 15 years ago. Haven't logged an hour, civilian or military, since. I really don't miss all the 0200 get-ups, NVG flying, massive prep just to get weather canx, Alpha-3s, rescheduled missions and the other crap, but I miss the pure enjoyment of flying after "gear up." And the comraderie. I bet I know, and have even flown with a few of you; I would like to reconnect not only here on the ethernet but also in person if it comes to that...cheers, Scott

Shack. I can't begin to tell you how beautiful it is to be less than 40 minutes from both my base and my guard unit. I bid reserve on purpose; sometimes long/most of the time short. There are days I get 3-4 hrs notice. Sometimes (rarely) it's a 4-day trip. A lot of times it's a 2-day or a day turn and I am back in my bed that night. I've gotten the call while I was mowing the lawn or working on the car and I was able to wrap things up and take a shower and pack and get out the door with time to spare. If you have the opportunity to live near a very junior base you can move up in the ranks on reserve pretty fast because a lot of Pilots are looking to get the hell out of there and move somewhere else so they don't have to commute more. I've flown with Captains that run off the airplane and asked me to shut her down because they're trying to make it to the next terminal so they can get home that night. Some have to stay in a hotel that night because they had no way to get back home and they're flying home on their off days. I couldn't imagine living that way.

It's a very simple question and I'm not sure what more clarification I could add. The discovery of a single cell or multi-cell organism on another planet would be defined by scientists as?

Blue Texas is like fusion power plants. Fourty years away, and probably always will be. Trump was extremely strong in the Rio Grande valley,he far exceeded the predictions of the Smart Ones. Now that Biden has thrown the border into chaos all the democrat elected officals are begging his handlers to do, something, anything, to show that they give a shit about the people who live and work down there. Harris donated a comic book. This week there was a Congressional runoff for a vacant seat near Fort Worth. There were eleven candidates. Two Republicans won and will face each in the election. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-backed-candidate-heads-runoff-texas-special-congressional-election-2021-05-02/