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He never had the country.

Dude cool it. Guy was very honestly inquiring about the veracity of the story which has been reported by multiple questionable outlets. It's quite clear he had his own suspicions already and was looking for more info, or as you so eloquently put it, was trying to sort through the bullshit. Noone fell for this story but you come off as a total ass hole with the tone of your post.

Israel’s rate of hospitalization and ICU admittance has shown that vaccinations 100% work, resulting in a huge improvement for the vaccinated population. Your statement = base rate fallacy. I would love for you to read and internalize this example of numerous similar analyses that I am going to include below. This one is actually pretty easy to follow. After that, you’ll be able to better understand how statistics have been presented to you incorrectly, and, therefore, you can then recognize where you have regurgitated some misleading statements. But let me guess. Nah? https://www.covid-datascience.com/post/israeli-data-how-can-efficacy-vs-severe-disease-be-strong-when-60-of-hospitalized-are-vaccinated I know you personally want to enforce your personal will on women and men everywhere and dream of creating a handmaid state, but Roe v Wade is not a relevant comparison to this discussion about public health. I would say make another thread, but please for the love of god do not. Also, while Texas has been successful in legalizing a religious citizen police cyber snitch state (congrats), almost all legal analysts believe that if a case was ever actually brought to trial it would be ruled unconstitutional. Also want to remind you that 2/3s of Americans do not support that law or restrictions on abortion. Citing nit picked Lawfare that clearly hasn’t finished as an example of how everything else can be overturned is not a good argument. You could make even more outrageous claims. Go ahead and say that since slavery was overturned, legal precedence doesn’t matter anywhere. Anything can be overturned, so therefore I can argue anything is unconstitutional! In fact, you disagreeing with me on here and spreading misinformation intentionally is illegal! It’s unconstitutional! It hasn’t been up to the Supreme Court yet, but it will be, you just wait! The data is correct. Thanks for recognizing. Your “99.9%” data is bullshit misinformation that makes you feel good - go ahead and admit that and we can get back to the adults table. Tell me what other minor transmissible illnesses result in 10-30% of the sick population having medium and long term effects. The onus is on you now to prove my actual scientific statistics don’t matter. But, let me guess? Nah? Instead, you’d rather deflect and argue that everyone who died was unhealthy, instead of also realizing that a ton of fat, old, unhealthy people have been protected by the vaccine. Most states have already declared a state of emergency. The nation is there. That actually empowers most governments more than you would like. Hospital ICUs are entirely full. And now the majority of people support a common sense vaccination and restrictions. Gotta love a republic/democracy. But let me guess. Nah?

Lol. Liberals love to pretend they cherish your above stated core tenet. But there’s always an anti-freedom catch that forces others to comply. There’s a catch with owning guns, there’s a catch with free speech on campus, there’s a catch with medical care, posting on Facebook, abortion, church services, public schools, election law, immigration, etc. In fact there’s no subject where liberals actually live out your alleged core tenet. They’re just tyrannical hypocrites every time.

You don't know who signed off on the strike, or what the approval level was, or what the ROE was, or what the intel was, or anything really. You're looking at an outcome and demanding... something. What, a public debrief and root cause analysis? War is messy, innocent people die, mistakes are made, people do horrible things. This has always been. There is no fancy all knowing technology that will make it something else. There will never be a process that will satisfy a libertarian sense of due process prior to engagements. It will always be fucking terrible. The answer is to not engage in it when it isn't absolutely necessary. I'm not saying accountability and transparency isn't important, or that simple admission that a mistake was made (when a mistake was made) isn't the ethical thing to do. I'm saying the urge to cut off people's heads says something about the people demanding it as much as the act that draws the mob's ire.

Copy shot. My anger is misplaced. I am tired of misinformation permeating all aspects of everything. This was not a foul on @torquedwho literally asked 3 times if it was real. My bad.

Already much better.

Any reason to believe that the process under a different administration, under a completely different operational scenario, after a massive explosion killed a bunch of people in a very public way? - I don't know. Big public failures like the VBIED at Abbey gate have resulted in relaxed ROE before (Blade 11). I would imagine the intel sources on the ground were a bit constrained as compared to a couple years ago. Does another VBIED escalate our withdraw more or less than a bad hellfire? What is the political/public/strategic impact of another attack and more dead Marines? Does that make it more likely that the NCA would end up pressured to "do something?" I do think that the operations surrounding the evacuation were not business as usual. For what it's worth I get the anger, I've picked up a lot of broken people there.

I know what the approval level has been the last 10 years - the CFACC. Do you have any reason to believe it’s different? If anything, it might be higher based on the politics, but I doubt it. I also have intimate knowledge of standard ROE over the last decade, as do probably a lot of people on here - maybe even you. Also, being in the targeting cell at the CAOC in the last 5 years should give me some credibility to understanding the process of how intelligence is supposed to go to targeting to make an informed risk based decision. There is a difference between a standard strike and one that is primarily political, I.e. this one. It’s similar to the multiple Syria strike packages ordered by Obama and Trump. This is a strike while we’re trying to literally withdraw from a theater. This should 100% not escalate our retreat - should it not be held to a higher standard? I believe that there is a better place we can get to than to never hold the military responsible because “war is messy.” And that is coming from someone who has prosecuted attacks with multiple CIVCAS. Some of those were good and could be argued to be “worth it.” But some of them were f’d and should have had someone be accountable. To complete the argument, people’s heads should be cut off occasionally when things get fd. They should have been for the last 20 years.

Okay, give it 24 hours. If it's still looking like a free pr0n site by then, try clearing cache.

GD it.. sorry guys, I'll figure out wtf happened. Go to Afghanistan for 2 weeks and the whole forum gets f'd.

How can anyone trust this guy? He is literally admitting he has no idea as to why, just that you should. https://twitter.com/tomselliott/status/1436366439901024262?s=20

Old Covid in 2020 studies was typically 2-4, I believe. Delta estimates are higher, usually 5-9. Although I have seem some studies that estimate 6-7. And a Yale one that estimates 3.5-4. The numbers come from an internal CDC document, page 15: https://context-cdn.washingtonpost.com/notes/prod/default/documents/54f57708-a529-4a33-9a44-b66d719070d9/note/7335c3ab-06ee-4121-aaff-a11904e68462.#page=1 https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/variants/delta-variant.html EDIT: and the source article for that document is here https://www.washingtonpost.com/context/cdc-breakthrough-infections/94390e3a-5e45-44a5-ac40-2744e4e25f2e/?_=1

Remember, in America healthcare is a business. If it isn't profitable, it's not getting done. It's not a bug in the system, it's a feature Plus, there's been a shortage for a while in healthcare, where demand has outstripped supply. Even doing things like adding nurse practitioners to cover for a lack of doctors had been a band aid fix at best

It may be a simulator animation, but the cockpit separation from the fuselage and fall gave me some serious chills.

If your point is that there would be benefit in being more nuanced in saying who should be vaccinated, you are right. In an idealistic world, you’d be able to do that. Just like how in an ideal world, I shouldn’t have to run my PFA if I ran a half marathon the week prior. But realistic employment of idealistic policy runs into several issues, and that’s why there is no way I can tell the PT monitor to accept my 1:27 half as a passing score. I still have to run the 6 laps. 1) How does the government assess if you’re not at risk to say that you probably don’t need the vaccine? You don’t even tell the flight doc the actual amount of whiskey you drink each week; how will big government know if a random 40 year old is actually an unhealthy risk factor that’s going to clog up a hospital? First, the government would have to get everyone’s health records, which would be seen as a gigantic breach of privacy, I am sure. There is no government mandated health screening. There is no government oversight of your medical records. Lets go down this path further. The gov mandates that all people over the age of 50 get the vaccine, because they can tell age with the SSA. I’m sure there’s still be bitching and moaning, but let’s pretend that this was popularly accepted. Okay, that solves this pandemic for a giant group that is at risk. Now they have to cover everyone under 50 that is high risk. They try to figure out how to mandate high risk under 50s to get the vaccine. They realize that 42% of Americans are Obese. 75% of Americans are overweight. And they can’t tell anything else about these humans individually based on privacy. Almost impossible to assess cardiovascular health by looking at someone. You can’t ask everyone to send in their BMI. People won’t tel you if they are smokers or drinkers. They also realize humans are notoriously bad at self reporting their health, especially if it’s about something they don’t want. The only way to capture a sufficient amount of the at risk population is to have everyone be vaccinated. Which it turns out makes sense anyways because the vast majority of Americans actually have risk factors because we are an extremely unhealthy nation. 2) This virus spreads quickly and in a shitty way that is not easy to control. It has an R0 value of 5-9. Yes, I wanted to say 6-9, but I feel that would have been nit picked. That means that if you send your healthy, not at risk, kids to school sick, they’re gonna end up getting a looooot of other people sick through secondary infections. You ever played the six degrees of Kevin Bacon? Where it almost always proves that we are way more interconnected as a society than you would ever assume? Well apply that to this scenario. Your kids - who won’t interact with any old people or at risk folks directly (other than tons of teachers, but we’ll ignore that) - will get kids of at risk people infected. They will get kids of caregivers infected. They will get people who work in critical industry infected. And it only takes 2-4 jumps to hit a huge percentage of a specific subset of society. It doesn’t have to just be kids. It can be young fighter pilots. They spreads it to an enlisted maintainer, who spreads it to the entire MXG. One of you is going to hit the commissary or the gym, which will open up the whole base. And everyone’s spouse and their place of work is now at risk. It quickly becomes unmanageable, exposing tons of high risk folks to the illness even though the first person was not “at risk.” Additionally, it spreads both asymptomatically and before symptoms emerge. So there is no real way you can stop this effect, no matter how well intentioned you are to keep your sick kids - or your sick self - at home. You cannot insulate the effects of spread via good intentions. 3) Human beings, whether you like it or not, are not as well intentioned as we wish. There is a natural range of support for individualism vs the collective across Americans, leaning more heavily on individualism than almost any other country. Here’s an anecdote. My parents, who are old, are at high risk for COVID. They aren’t healthy, they don’t take precautions, and they meet many other risk factors. Due to the politicization of this virus, instead of getting vaccinated, they have paid for fake vaccine cards. They may die for their insistence on listening to idiots on talk radio, and I think about that a lot, but the point is that folks don’t want to tell the government anything. They will go as far as intentionally obscuring truthful data if they think that it will give them a shred of liberty. Some people will do it just to give the democrats/republicans a middle finger. Doesn’t help public policy. How many people would lie about if they were actually at risk if we tried to implement a nuanced policy? The gods honest truth is that this disease is not easy to detect. It’s not easy to find symptoms. It has lasting health effects that are significantly worse than the vaccine. It randomly hits some demographics that we could not predict. And we don’t know everything about it. The worst part about this whole thing is that the vaccine didn’t end up providing nearly the protection from spread we were hoping it would. The only reasonable public policy decision is to include everyone, or the vast majority of society, because we have no realistic way for the government to comb through your records to say that you aren’t at risk based on limitations of privacy and manpower. Not to mention the exponential increase in work for almost no population benefit. Idealism is no reason to nitpick public policy that, by and large, does good for the public. Just like how I shouldn’t waste everyone’s time signing a waiver for my PFA to get my half marathon to count - I should just run it.

Yup! Non-TFI ANG here...well if you don't count the slew of AD LTs they send our way because the AD can't absorb them. Anyway, a few year ago, we had an AD guy who was our WG/CC (dual status T10/T32). After that assignment he went back to the AD. Were back to ANG bosses, but I suspect that was a test bed and we'll lilely be seeing more that stuff in the ANG as well. So glad to be bailing soon.

Another fantastic video.

Science wins again. Vaccine largely ineffective.

Are there only two groups in the discussion? Unvaxed vs vaxed? How about children? How about previously infected people? How about people sub 40 who are healthy?Isn’t it weird how every issue boils down to one group vs the other— almost like the media is fueling division… The infection fatality ratio for children under 12 is 3500X less than those 65 plus according to CDCs best estimates https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scenarios.html it just seems a little simplistic to boil it down to two group. Also we know the long term risk of smoking, do we know the long term risk of covid or the vaccine? No.

Combat Talon...

IMO the state department in recent (ie last 20-30) years has always seemed to be more the progressive side of our international arm, whereas the military was more the conservative side. Now that the military is going more towards the progressive side as well, I imagine we’ll see more failures wrt our international interests.

Someone's not getting a ventilator. If there are 20 patients and 20 ventilators - great, everyone gets treatment. But if there aren't enough resources to go around, then yeah, I'd prioritize the vaccinated people. Not for any moral judgements, but because the data shows that vaccinated people are more likely to recover than unvaccinated people. Just like if there's one heart for a transplant, boards are much more likely to give it to the marathon runner with a congenital problem than to the 400 pound couch potato, because the prognosis for long-term recovery is better. What would you do...first come, first served, outcomes be damned? "Sorry, you got sick at the wrong time after doing everything right, I have to go put this guy who was eating horse dewormer on a ventilator now"?

I was waiting for “actually it’s Trump’s fault”…no, this mess is 100% Biden’s mess. Trump had an exist strategy…woke Miley sat on it until Biden finally made a decision in April and now we have one of the largest humanitarian crises in recent history - and because the guy in the office can’t put a sentence together let alone make a strategic decision, it might get much worse.

Joke is going to be on them now that any company over 100 employees has a vaccine mandate now. It’s a really dumb hill to die on folks especially people with multiple pages of immunizations and a slew of them being for anthrax. Like really who has seen anthrax besides that Daschle mail thing in like 2002? Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk