Pooter

not in aircraft that were designed for a crew of two pilots to operate... I get it, IFR approaches are boring admin that shithot fighter pilots don't even talk about because it's so trivially easy. But if you've attended safety briefs you probably also know that admin kills more shithot fighter pilots than any other phase of flight.

The part I struggle to understand is the -46 community is airframe limited.. not pilot limited. This whole thing is a (bad) solution in search of a problem. We got generals concocting weird scenarios in their heads where the AF is somehow super flush on FMC Peggy's with no one to fly them.

It all depends on student ability. I don't know how you can say that no student should PA without knowing their background as well as their performance. I agree with you that we are watering down the standard but from where I sit, the quality drop is happening at the bottom end of the ability spectrum.. not the top. For every PA I've seen in the last 5 years I'll show you 10 students who were reinstated from a CR who shouldn't have been.

Heartily disagree. Course training standards exist for each block, and if a student can consistently meet or exceed CTS they should PA to the end of that block. I've seen tons of gradesheets for above average students where it's firewall MIF or better for the 3-4 straight rides approaching the end of block or a checkride. Do those 3-4 Firewall mif rides provide more experience which will yield a slightly better product at the end of UPT? Of course. More time under your ass will always be a good thing. But this idea that there's a certain number of sorties written in stone that it takes to make a pilot is just not true. Some people are going to need more, some people are going to need less, and some people will never get it no matter how many rides you give them. But if you force everyone to do the same number of sorties regardless of ability, you're literally doing no child left behind but with airplanes.

Global strike actually had an initiative going to develop a syllabus for 12B to 11X since the WSO/Nav positions are going away. Similar to an 18x you have a lot of experience there to leverage and anecdotally CSOs excel in legacy pilot training. But from what I understand Gen Willis in his infinite wisdom took personal issue with the proposed syllabus not having originated from AETC, so it didn't go anywhere.

Yeah it was t-6's and lol I don't think you're ever getting those back

Vance being the experimental test bed because they were so far ahead on timeline is maybe the fakest news I've ever heard in my life. In the 2018/2019 timeframe Laughlin literally sent instructors TDY to Vance solely to fly the line because of how far behind they were. Nothing against the Vance dudes in the trenches at the time.. the timeline problems were likely caused by manning blunders at levels far above them. The experimental programs started there because they were behind. That and yes-man commanders looking to get in the good graces of the aetc/cc at the time. It's amazing how quickly you "fix" timeline problems by just chopping flights out of the syllabus.

I can think of a few thousand very well appointed resort rooms and some very nice winter coats from dozens of overpriced ski shops that could be provided to those migrants free of charge! That might mitigate those cold temps if the left was actually serious about helping people. But we both know that would never happen. Their care for fellow humans extends precisely as far as the "coexist" bumper stickers and "hate has no place here" lawn signs.. and not an inch farther. Their nimby-ism is on full display when they cry 'logistics' over 50 people in Martha's Vineyard or even the possibility of a few migrants in aspen while conveniently ignoring the absolute shitshow they've forced on del rio for literal years. Out of sight out of mind I guess. Oh wait! and when they do pay attention to the border they publish literally false stories slandering border patrol for supposedly "whipping" migrants from horseback based on a single misleading photo. I have zero sympathy for the flaming hypocrisy of the left on the immigration issue. They've been using these immigrants as human pawns to bludgeon the right for decades while completely avoiding any consequences for their virtue signaling sanctuary city and amnesty policies.

Del rio doesn't have the support services to deal with tens of thousands of migrants either. It's a town of barely over 30,000 itself. Same applies for Laredo, Eagle pass, El Paso etc. Lacking the facilities to deal with huge numbers of migrants isn't unique to Martha's Vineyard or Aspen. Shipping migrants to upscale liberal enclaves might be a political stunt, but it's also giving them a microscopic taste of the logistical shitshow border towns deal with on a daily basis.

I still fail to understand the mandate outrage from military members. The military can literally order you on an ALR-extreme suicide mission in some bullshit war halfway around the world. Of course they don't have your best interests at heart. The military can mandate things about your fitness, alcohol consumption, drug use, grooming standards, and they can even put you in jail for things that are perfectly legal in the civilian world. And you signed up for it. No one made you. So if they need you to be vaxxed so the rotator doesnt get held up by a customs shitshow at your deployed location.. tough cookies. Do I think the mandates did anything? No. Do I trust the government or big pharma? Also No. Do I think the vaccine risks are zero? Also no. But the military mandated it for a multitude of reasons, some bad and some less bad. And in the grand scheme of things a 84% increase in a 0.01% chance of maybe getting myocarditis doesn't even register on the scale of things that are actual health dangers. Id believe the "my body is a temple" argument a lot more if it weren't for the bro-science pre-workout powder, twice-a-year cardio regimen, 7 shots at roll call, 3 monsters, and a pack of zyns per day. Because I promise all of those things are far worse for your heart.

There's not much that bothers me more than Air Force PA / journalists botching aircraft visrecce. I can understand the occasional nonner poster with flanker clip art but the people whose literal core job is to report factually on the mission we do is a bridge too far. @HuggyU2 you're a far better man than I. FFS the F-22 has never been stationed at Shaw and Looks absolutely nothing like a viper

Back on the nukes thing, I would definitely still bet on Russia having a big stockpile of functional nukes. They pulled out a lot of their fanciest toys for this Ukraine debacle and a lot of them appeared to function as advertised. Watching them utterly bungle their logistics chain and severely underestimate Ukrainian resistance/creativity has been a joy, but that doesn't mean we can write off all of their high end threats. Honestly, pulling off a successful invasion of a country backed by the entire western world is a much taller order than maintaining a handful of nukes.

Dude you seem really determined to pigeon hole people into one "side" or the other so you can set straw men up to argue against. I never said the government response, or fauci, or the CDC were perfect. I also specifically already mentioned that masking kids makes no sense, tech censorship is bad, and mandates on the civilian population were a gross overreach. So just calm down for a second. My whole point here is that we live in a big country, and a lot of people reacted in knee jerk fashion with incomplete information to this thing in a lot of different ways. Some states did nothing and some states went batshit with rules. And to a certain extent.. that's their prerogative because our government is designed that way. Were there some severe infringements on peoples rights? Yes. Were there states that sat on their hands and exposed potentially vulnerable people to needless risk? Also yes. Hopefully we can investigate and debrief both. But that is the nature of living in a very large country that pushes governance down to a low level. So cobbling together the reactions you specifically don't like a-la Fox & Friends and insinuating a giant coordinated conspiracy is silly.

Kindof, yes. Our constitution's take on federalism delegates massive authority to the states to govern differently based on the desires of different groups. And I'm not aware of any part of the constitution other than speech/religion/arms that says freedom will always be prioritized 100% over safety/health especially in a public sense. Regulations for "public health" are always a cost-benefit analysis, and depending how you weigh the variables (freedom vs safety), the answer to that cost-benefit analysis will be different. This is why the constitution is so great, it pushes governance down to the lowest level where things can be decided with higher fidelity. And when the cost benefit gets skewed too far away from freedom, that's what the courts are for.

Checks. They also almost perfectly match the inverse of vaccination rates. I'd bet it also maps pretty closely onto education and poverty rates. So you could argue those states, having such vulnerable populations, could have benefitted the most from more covid mitigation measures. Losing substantial weight isn't an overnight process so perhaps vaccination, masking, and distancing were good stop gaps as people worked to get in better shape. But instead the residents of Mississippi yelled freedom at the top of their lungs, continued shoveling hot pockets down their gullets, blew off mitigation measures and as a result have 4 times the death rate of Vermont. Which is totally fine. That's what the people in Mississippi want to do. And the people in Vermont want to be vegan marathon runners who live in an overbearing nanny state that probably destroyed tons of small businesses.

You're not wrong. Social media censorship is always bad. The wrong decisions were made by government in a lot of cases. Closing peoples businesses on the grounds that they're non essential is horseshit. Masking kids for years on end is pointless. Vax mandates for civilian workers is a huge violation of medical autonomy and privacy. But when you have a country of 320 million people in a patchwork of 50 states you're going to get a wide variety of responses. And cobbling together the ones you don't like into a big laundry list doesn't constitute a conspiracy. My state (Texas) did almost none of the things listed above. And if I asked you pre-pandemic which states would go batshit with regulations and mandates, you probably could have predicted it with high accuracy. But that's the cool part of the United States. You can choose where to live. It sounds like the voters in California and New York value perceived safety over freedom. I think that's ass backwards and it sounds like you do too. So shocker, I don't live in California or New York and I never will. On the flip side of the coin, the 5 worst states in covid deaths per capita are all Republican. I'd bet there are plenty of California and New York people who think these states' covid response was batshit. The lesson learned here is that there are trade offs between safety and freedom and you should live in a place that aligns with your values. edit: and if the federal government response is your primary concern.. maybe the Republican party should kick their trump addiction. Because no one in the history of the United States drives Democrat voter turnout like he does. Hitching your wagon to the mid 70's orange clown who denies election results, mishandles classified, and has zero appeal outside of the far right is not a way you get the things you want at the federal level.

Spot on. Perhaps American defense contractors should consider designing secret kill switches into all of our military tech... Because we seem to be stuck in an endless cycle of arming countries in proxy wars vs Russia/China only to turn around and have the exact weapons we gave away used on us a few years later.

*citation needed. I know joe and Jill Biden are important and I'm no scientist but I'm pretty sure one old couple with repeat infections is not a statistically significant data set. Also I've been reliably informed by far right pundits that getting covid isn't the concern. Dying from covid is. So what's the problem here? Biden got the vax which was designed for and was far more effective against the early variants. (Which were also more deadly.) This boosted immunity in the early stages of the pandemic when it was particularly dangerous for the elderly. Now that the virus has had 2+ years to mutate, the vaccine is less effective, and the strains are more contagious but thankfully less virulent. (Something literally every scientist worth their salt predicted..) And as the data changed the CDC and basically every state has lifted mandates correspondingly. Turns out the dems are still in charge and we aren't descending into a "zero covid or bust" 1984 hellhole. Things are just kindof going back to normal now that it isn't as big of a threat. You guys so desperately want there to be a conspiracy but I'm just not seeing it. Perhaps the one valid complaint you have left is how slow the military has been to get their policies in line with emerging medical guidance. But if you expected timely policy updates from the military I have a bridge to sell you.

You got me! I'm actually a mask mandate-loving cuck, and this cartoonist's subtle, biting political commentary doesn't have a homoerotic trump fixation at all.

I don't always get my political wisdom from ham-fisted hyper biased cartoons.. but when I do its from the guy who's sucking trump off so hard he invariably portrays a 76 year old man as a fit beefcake. Such compelling stuff. Much commentary. Wow.

Reuters is also good for basic facts and the breaking points podcast (recommended ad nauseum by Rogan) is great for in depth analysis.

Help me understand why applying the "comey standard" here would make anything better. His bungling of the email investigation led to Hillary not being held accountable.. is that what you want to happen again? Seems like your argument stems much more from what feels "fair" rather than what the right thing to do is right now. It's political tribalism at its finest.. the other team got away with it, why shouldn't your team get away with it too? This is the kind of childish tit-for-tat game that ends with no one being held accountable and the DOJ being used as a club only to try to whack your political opposition. I've said it before and I'll say it again, either classified matters or it doesn't. If you hold literally any consistent principles above political tribalism you don't get to be mad that Hillary isn't locked up while simultaneously defending/quibbling for trump. They should both be in jail and I honestly can't think of two people who deserve each other more.

Lol the mental gymnastics of trump apologists.. "we don't even know what they were looking for" "okay so they were looking for classified but we don't know if they found any" "okay well we know they found classified but he probably declassified it beforehand" "okay so he didn't follow the process to declassify it but surely other administrations have done this too right" "okay maybe we've never had another president do this before but it's probably not like important classified" "okay maybe it's classified pertaining to nukes but probably not like anything actually dangerous like bombs and stuff" Can't wait to see where the parade of quibbling and justifications lead in the coming weeks. It's been truly entertaining so far. Just here to remind everyone that standards should exist. And you should hold those standards above your political biases. Because If any of us were under investigation for anything remotely close to this or what Hillary did, we'd likely be in jail. Which is precisely where both of them should be.

Ruh roh 😂

I'm talking about admin.. not broader policy. You know.. the kind of admin that prevents you from getting a landscaping business and the four seasons hotel mixed up when you're shopping for press conference locations. Not here to debate George soros or military funding or which wars we should and should not have fought. I'm simply pointing out that the trump administration was notoriously all over the place on administrivia and it's pretty hilarious you'd even dispute that. Knowing who he is as a person and his level of disrespect for basic processes it seems not just probable, but likely he purposefully or accidentally mishandled classified. And now the DOJ is trying to make the warrant public and trumps legal team is potentially trying to prevent that move. Must be some good stuff in there.