Pooter

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.

That is the going theory. FBI hasn't yet released what was found in the raid. 1) would that make it okay? 2) I actually kindof doubt it. Looking from the outside-in those administrations seemed to have their shit far more in a sock than the trump camp. Also probably a better general respect for national security and classification procedures. There are literally insider accounts of trump attempting to flush documents down WH toilets.

Some hypocrisy In light of recent events.. The "lock her up" crowd suddenly not caring at all about mishandling of classified documents. The "but her emails" crowd suddenly caring so much about mishandling of classified documents. It's wild that people are so mentally broken by political polarization they can't even recognize a standard and apply it equally. Either classified documents matter or they don't.

Yeah I'm selling this one, beware it's appreciated since I bought it. I won't take a cent under $269,696. alternatively.. you could be more specific about what you're looking for

I saw someone shit on the sidewalk within 3 hrs of arriving in SF earlier this year. I was in LA for an overnight stay 2 years ago and saw more homeless people in 24 hours than I have seen cumulatively in the rest of my entire life including many years living in other major cities. There are very nice parts of California. But those places are either very far from the cities, or near the cities and prohibitively expensive

Specifically relating to the green new deal: Policy: spending massive sums of taxpayer money to achieve climate equity. The idea being that climate change "disproportionally affects people of color and marginalized communities" (Read the bill it's in there) so we have to dump truckloads of government cash into said communities and green energy initiatives to achieve equity. Result: -Skyrocketing energy costs making us uncompetitive with China, while also not solving the worldwide carbon emissions problem. -Higher inflation due to government spending/skewing of the energy market -Increased reliance on foreign oil. (How's that working out for Europe right now?) -Increased outsourcing of manufacturing jobs to countries without garbage climate policy. So I've given you a few examples, care to expand on why you think her policies won't empirically hurt the economy while also doing nothing to solve climate change?

Do the pre course workbook. You'll have a pre-test (grade doesn't matter) which will kick everyone's ass other than the nerdiest of MAF guys. Similar but not identical test on the last day and you must get a passing grade. Vast majority of the pre course workbook directly related to pre and post test questions so don't just chaff it off. As an RPA guy there will be a ton of gee whiz info for you that isn't super applicable which was the same for a lot of caf dudes. But if you have a genuine interest in aviation it's all good stuff to know and the course was taught really well.

Because every wild left fringe idea right now will be a mainstream democrat view in 5 years, and probably policy soon thereafter. The constant crusade to be ever more progressive dictates that they always have to out-do their past selves to continue to attain virtue. AOC is the foreshadowing of where the left is going to try to drag the Overton window. So maybe it's worth debating the garbage ideas now, before they take hold and cause real damage. Maybe right now we can chalk up The green new deal and other AOC proposed crap as some pie in the sky nonsense from a juvenile queens bartender/tik tok star. But come find me in five years when we've tanked the economy (further) in the quest for a racially equitable climate justice utopia. Then it will be very apparent exactly which of her policy prescriptions negatively affect you personally.

I don't buy that this is some sort of "in case of war break glass" test. Please describe to me a scenario where you are short a bunch of copilots (due to attrition or some kind of attack) where you're not also short on ACs, IPs, and airframes. I'll wait. This is how you socialize a garbage idea you know no one will sign off on for its own merits. You pitch it as some newfangled combat contingency test, get the waiver passed, and then implement it by precedent years after the original detractors are long gone. Call me a conspiracy theorist but what do you think is the air force's more pressing problem: a) pilot shortage or b) near peer shooting war where we somehow have a bunch of perfectly functional -46s laying around with no one to fly them

I think in normal normal ops, no it would not be crazy to fly with a single pilot. Lots of automation and low task loads when things are going completely standard. I would guess this holds for most crewed aircraft in benign situations. The issue is when the situation becomes not benign. When nonstandard things / EPs / mission changes start happening now you have a single brain having to manage a very large very complex aircraft and deal with those externalities as well.

Fair enough. I guess for that kind of money you'll get some takers. I still don't see money as the root cause though. Air Force officer pay is a comfortable living. It's not competitive with the airlines obviously, but I know countless Air Force pilots who find military flying far more rewarding would happily ride it out to 20 if they could avoid 2 things: 1) being forced to move/deploy somewhere shitty 2) queep And number 1 continues to ratchet up in importance as you get older because eventually you have a family to worry about. Why do you think the guard has such great retention? Spoiler: it's not the money. 90% of guard pilots are making bank from the airlines anyway and they choose to come back and fly for pennies on the dollar for the Air Force. It's because they're insulated from being forced to move and from queep.

.. not that many people. I don't know a single one. I know dozens of commercial pilots. Maybe that appeals to a handful of people extremely motivated by combat ops in the Middle East but that is the exception not the rule. Long term retention on a mass scale in the conus is what I'm talking about. We're not losing experienced pilots in droves to the Middle East contractor mafia in any significant numbers.

Agreed, but Ive also never seen the topic brought up by military leaders in any congressional forum ever. The idea that locations impact retention is not in congressional calculus at all.

Pile on: the other side of the shithole locations coin is that the people living in nice places are terrified of being forced to PCS to a shithole, so they avoid signing onto anything that might impact control of their own destiny.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: base locations are the largest barrier to Air Force retention. Laughlin can't even retain geriatric sim instructors reliving their 80's glory days.. never mind young CFII candidates wanting to travel, make money, and maybe even have a social life. This will crash and burn just like countless other efforts have, because they continually fail to address the root cause. location location location I'd love to see a study done on the 7 day opt rate for active duty guys getting assignments to places like Laughlin, cannon, holloman etc... But I doubt we'll ever see that. It might actually make the Air Force confront a real cause for the retention issue: the Air Force has systematically closed bases in good locations, and no matter how cool the job, people do not want to live in shitholes.