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I have the Best. Friends. Ever. Presented to me this past weekend at our annual guys' trip in celebration (commiseration?) of my upcoming wedding... and there was much rejoicing!!

You are rambling incoherently. I never said the host nation didn't get a vote. I never said leadership didn't get a vote. What I said was, as soon as someone does something inappropriate the policy will go away. As for your assessment of my leadership skills, you made a distinction there. You said "my" airman. My crew would be briefed on how to avoid being the reason for a base wide uniform change. My crew would operate in a safe and intelligent manner, hack the mission and make the most of being away from home. So, If I am sitting at the Fox bar with the swing shift ops staff and Services Squadron Sparky shows up with an offensive tee shirt or Mandy shows up in the daisies...I guess I'll just jump up and be a leader. "Remove those shorts Airman! That's an order!" Problem solved! Reality called, they would like you to stop by and visit sometime.

Or because he's not qualified to fly the jet.. I've heard it both ways.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say GearDownNoGreen must be a single, homely 45y/o woman surfing the internet for cute cat videos to share with us here at BOps.

His lack of reading comprehension and common sense strongly point to him being a mid to high-level manager in our Air Force. Or a USAFA cadet. Could go either way I guess.

Some unreleased audio from the jump:

Look what happened shortly after.

Clearly the former in this case, seeing as how he took off and landed the jet (probably just to demo how to do it for the pilot):

Or they just really feel sorry for you... I kid, I kid...congrats man! And if you can't finish the bottle, PM me and I'll give you the address of where to send it.

I hope someone gave this Academy dude an Achievement medal or something for having his priorities straight at such a young age.

EAGLE!! When is the F-22 going to crush these records? Someone on TR-2 should get on that. Anyway, It's a cool throw back to history but it certainly doesn't take any skill to fly supersonic in a modern fighter - as long as you can figure how to get the throttles over the hump into afterburner. It's impressive that he passed his physical at his age though. I wonder how he did in the G-X?

Gravedigger- You're right, but it's a distinction that's lost on most (fat ass) people (Americans). Still funny, though.

after 2651 posts, this thread finally gets good! ETA: The host nation pushes a lot of dumb shit (immigration policy), but I will bet my three beers for a lifetime that it's American leadership who gets butthurt about something someone wears and ruins it for everyone.

I rarely post, but choke yourself.

He wasn't " selected or non selected based on merit.". He was selected or non selected based on his records, just like the rest of us. Difference is his records were incomplete, he was too new to the AF to know how to correct it himself, and his leadership failed to ensure his job titles, etc. were correctly input. So I'd say he has a decent case for an appeal, it certainly wouldn't hurt to try, and your advice is terrible.

I give it a week before some idiot ruins it for everyone. I bet AAFES pushed this change. They needed a return on their investment of aisles after aisles of female civilian clothing.

Not sure if you mis-typed but that statement is not completely true. IAALX is a mutual fund. Period dot. It happens to be where your IRA is, but the fund in and of itself is not an IRA. An IRA is simply a type of account a person can have that has tax advantages (as is a Roth IRA, 401K, etc.). You can have an IRA in mutual funds or a variety of other investments. The IAALX fund is not limited to IRA accounts--you could have a regular, non-tax advantaged account in that fund as well. While it's true that it does invest in other mutual funds (and mutual funds can be invested in many different types if investments, not just stocks), IAALX is a mutual fund that invests mostly in stock mutual funds. So IAALX is predominantly a stock fund--approx 90% of your money is ultimately invested in stocks. If you're "fairly happy", then fine. But I'm trying to help you out here. You appear based on your posts to really have no real clue about investing, fees, loads, diversification, etc. As I've posted before, I used to be clueless. I was advised by someone I "trusted" to put my money into a consistently underperforming, extremely expensive fund. My misplaced trust and naivete combined to cost me a lot of money over the long run. You've said this now a couple of times and I'm wondering if you are confusing the TSP match with some sort of returns. Of course it's a good deal when someone matches your investment. It's free money. But that concept is absolutely independent of any returns you would get on the investment. In this case, since the match is completely unrelated to your IRA (it's in TSP) you need to mentally divorce the two things when you are analyzing the performance of your retirement accounts. I'm trying to help you brother. Whether you follow Dave Ramsey or not, whether you trust his recommended investment advisors or not, YOU need to get smart on this stuff. You owe it to yourself--as do all of the folks on here that don't understand the basics about their money and investing--so you don't get taken. I've said this several times on the forum, but go buy or check out from the library a basic book on investing. I recommend "Investing for Dummies," "Mutual Funds for Dummies," "Personal Finance for Dummies" or something of that sort. They won't make you Warren Buffet but they do a good job of explaining the basics of this stuff at the caveman level. If you read that stuff, I suspect that you will see the light about where your money is truly going and what it could be doing for you if you weren't overwhelmed with loyalty to a guy you've never met (DR). The fund you've chosen (IAALX) is not the worst out there--there are far worse. But it is consistently underperforming both the S&P and against it's category (similar type funds) every single year since it's inception according to what I can find on it. The thing that alarms me about it is that it is extremely expensive--2.2% in expenses per year plus a 1% load. That's really ridiculous. Someone is making a shit ton of money off of you, whether your IRA makes money or not. The question you would have to ask yourself is why would an investment advisor recommend a fund to you that has never even beaten the S&P 500 index? What is it about this fund that makes it the place to put your money? It's certainly not based on a history of strong performance. Possibly your investment advisor has a crystal ball and believes this fund is well positioned for the future, but that hasn't worked out well for you so far. I suspect it's because it's the best way to make him money, not because it's the best way to make you money. I've been there. Some quick hypothetical caveman math may put this in perspective a bit more for you... If you had $50K in IAALX on Jan 1st 2012 and never contributed another dollar, your IRA would be worth $55,930 today (11.86% gain as I type this). Let's assume for the purposes of the discussion that it would be the same on Dec 31. 2.2% in expenses equals roughly $1,200 that you paid over the year for that performance. You would also pay a 1% back end load on all of that money when you withdraw. If you had that same money in the Vanguard S&P 500 index fund, it would have made 15.44% so your $50K would be $57,720. The expenses are a lean 0.17% which is less than $100 for the year with no load--over $1,100 less than you paid (whether you realize that you paid it or not) for lesser performance. The difference is almost $2,000 this year alone not counting the load, so about 4% of your initial $50K more than you have now. Not chump change. If you had put your money in a commonly recommended managed fund--T Rowe Price Growth Stock--it would have gone up over 20% this year. That's about 4 grand more than you made or 8% of your initial hypothetical money. That's really not chump change. I'm sure there are errors in my back-of-an-envelope math, but you at least get the idea. Disclaimer: I'm also only using numbers from this year, so that's not necessarily fair nor is it the complete picture. Obviously they vary from year to year, the long term is what counts, and past performance is not necessarily indiciative of future performance, but like I've said, from what I can see your fund consistently underperforms year after year. And you are paying extra for it to do that. That's the point I'm really trying to get across with regards to IAALX. All I'm saying is that you would do yourself a great service, sts, to learn up on this stuff on your own. If you end up sticking with your plan, so be it. But do so armed with some basic knowledge and make the best decision you can based on logic and facts, not loyalty.

Wow, I'm glad AFCENT was worrying about this instead of the 6-month medal backlog. Not really a big deal for officers, but the E-dogs that hack the mish are getting bent over when it comes to promotion points. Make sure you take care of your people, right? Right.

I've been out for 20 years, and I was just an enlisted life support puke (do they even call it that anymore?) Everybody wore BDU's, us, the Army, the Marines, the Navy...we all wore the same shit, with black boots and black or tan t-shirts and nobody gave a shit if you rolled your sleeves up or not, or if the zippers on your flight suit were up or down. Baseball caps with squadron insignia. Pilots bringing us beer on Fridays (this may still happen) The missile wing and guys in silos (I was at Ellsworth) and nuke-armed B-1's on the alert pad. Getting jacked up hard at the same pad for forgetting my password. PLZT goggles. The wing king walking in the shop one Monday morning to catch most of us lying on the counters and floor hooked up to 100% O2 to cure our hangovers, and he just laughed at us. I never wore a reflective belt, and in 4 years I never once witnessed an enlisted person of any rank try to correct an officer for anything, let alone a uniform issue.

Never met the guy, but if he's still got a hair on his old fighter pilot ass, he'd throw up on me if I looked him in the eye and called him "sweet and charming". Not sure what your background is, but you lose any credibility you have with this statement..."trashing the reputation of one of this nation's last living heroes." You obviously have NO idea what you are talking about because our nation is blessed with thousands of living heroes, most of them under the age of 30 (many under 20). They are fighting in places you've probably never heard of, and are performing acts of heroism that make breaking the sound barrier seem kind of boring. But thanks for the lecture.

That's interesting, because there are a lot of aviators who have no respect for a guy who is a self-important windbag who once accomplished some amazing acts of airmanship but unfortunately eclipsed all of that with his enormous ego.