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I first met Rat when he PCS'd to Fairchild 2007-2008ish. Within his first day of checking in for MCT, he cussed out the civilian that ran MCT scheduling, refused to fly with an IP that wasn't a Lt Col (he was a Lt Col at the time), and was just a massive asshole. I was the only boom available, so I was scheduled to fly with him. For what he is as a terrible person, he's a great pilot (old -141 dude at McChord). We ended up refueling Reserve C-17s out of McChord and right before AR he tells the IP he's just going to check off and watch AR (we had another 1Lt Co with us to fill in). He goes back with me to do AR and starts talking to me about what I thought about refueling C-17s. I told them they usually were terrible, it's difficult to refuel them with a -135 because we have to fly it in contact unlike pussy -10 booms who have a computer do it (ALAS), and the reserve guys were usually the worst at doing AR since they're usually just traditionalists. He responds that he was a reserve -17 guy at McChord and starts ranting about how great the jet and community is and how much he hates the -135. He then became my Sq/CC a few months later. I worked in training flight and came back from lunch one day and a copilot I worked with told me that no one in the squadron can send squadron wide emails without removing Rat from the dristo list. I asked him why and he told me he sent out a 93 ARS/All email and Rat called him in the office, stood him at attention, and yelled at him for "spamming his inbox." He then pulled out a red pen, prints out said copilot's email, and proceeds to correct the grammar like a second grade teacher since he was an English major at USAFA and the speechwriter for the SECAF. I was on ONE Alpha Alert at Fairchild and we went out to the alert ramp to do the daily preflight. What was normally a 10-15 minutes daily alert preflight turned into hours because maintenance wanted to do tire rollover checks, service the APUs, etc. Finally, one of the crew chiefs said that all three of us didn't have to be out there and the AC looks at the copilot and I and said we can just go back to the alert facility. I was chilling in my room when the alert shack controller knocks on the door and has the following conversation with me: "Do you know where your AC is?" "Uh, he was with maintenance doing the daily preflight. Probably buttoned up the jet and went to lunch at the BX." "No, dude...he's being thrown in the back of a SF patrol car." I walk out from the alert shack with the controller and see my AC in handcuffs being pushed into the back of a patrol car. I look at the controller and ask him what I should do? He looks at me and says, "I dunno man, I've been in 25 years and have seen some shit, but nothing like this." I go to the copilot's room and tell her to stay in her room and that our AC got arrested. I went to the squadron and found the Chief Boom and was telling him what happened when all of a sudden Rat walks around the corner, stands in front of me and says, "Get the fuck back to that fucking jet and preflight it now!" I scurry off back to the alert shack and see my AC and ask him what happened as we're frantically preflighting the jet. He tells me that he called Rat from the brig, which then made Rat come over to the SFS, find the SFS Sq/CC, who was a Major, and proceed to stand him at attention in front of his own squadron and scream at him that his dipshit low ASVAB Airmen degraded ONE Alert. My AC was arrested because they were confused on how "pre-announcing" worked at alert aircraft and had erroneously arrested him. Rat was in his car with his wife (wife was driving) and she got pulled over for speeding on the base. The SF troop was doing the traffic stop and Rat apparently became unglued and threaten the dude's career, got out of the car, and only got back in the car when the SF troop was about to escalate the use of force with him. So, of course Rat makes up a big lie that the troop was being belligerent with his wife and "unprofessional," pressuring his Sq/CC to Art. 15 him. Rat hates facial hair and would used to get on the returning deployer aircraft and occasionally give out LOCs to pilots and booms who had deployed mustaches. The rule became to shave once you hit your RON from redeploying at Mildenhall/Ramstein and be clean shaven the next day when you landed back and saw Rat. Rat used to have schedulers and SARM print out currencies and schedules for people and hand it to them right after they landed from deploying to remind them that they had to log a P280 event right when they got back from post-deployment time off. I went to instructor upgrade with a pilot and before we both left for Altus we had to go meet with him. He started talking about flying in instructor upgrade in the -141 at Altus, how fun it was to teach, etc. to the pilot. He looked at me and said, "Oh yeah, good luck in whatever booms do in instructor upgrade." I responded, "Sir, you mean teach people how to refuel airplanes in the air?" He sorta picked up I wasn't amused and said, "Yeah, or you could've been a pilot, but I guess that would've required you to do better in high school." He made a copilot, who just had testicular cancer, talk about it in front of the squadron. He ordered a copilot in from his two weeks time off after a deployment with his family to have a formal promotion ceremony to Captain. It pissed Rat off that the guy was super pissed at him for coming in to have a promotion ceremony. Later on the guy was supposed to assume alpha alert early in the morning. The night prior he felt sorta ill, but thought he’d feel better in the morning. He woke up and felt worse, went to the flight doc and went DNIF. Rhatigan was so mad at him, he gave him an LOC/LOR for dereliction of duty since he thought the guy was trying to get out of alert duty (which was a god send to do, since you were away from the squadron and Rat). The guy is in the Guard now last I heard. I personally flew with Rat on a deployment sortie when he was my deployed Sq/CC. Since we had three pilots on board, I took my copilot back to the boom pod and let him refuel A-10’s and F-16’s all day. I felt bad for him since the cruise out to the AOR meant Rat was GKing him on all of the various Soviet era airfields between Manas and Bagram. Oh yeah, one more story. Guy that was a copilot/AC at Fairchild was in Rat’s squadron. He ended up going to Kadena and getting into some “TDY Shenanigans” while on a typhoon evac that got him an Art 15. He ended up deploying soon after when Rat was the new OG at the Deid. Rat sends out an email about his “vision” and about himself as the new OG. Guy in question responds with “Hey, maybe we should lunch sometime dude.” Why? Who the knows? He tells me the next day his crew shows up and the ADO tells him that his crew is off the schedule and that he has a personal meeting with Rat. So, he goes and see Rat in his office during meeting time and Rat says “Hey, ###, come on in. Haven’t seen you in a long time.” He walks in, not thinking defensively, and sits down and Rat immediately stands him at attention yelling at him about how he’s a Colonel and how dare he use lack of email professionalism, how he had the audacity to ask Rat to write him a character reference to the Wing King at Kadena when he got his Art 15, etc. The switches tones and says “yeah, we should do lunch with me and your crew sometime, just let me know!” When I was PCSing to Altus in 2010, I was leaving right before Fairchild had a Aircrew Standardization & Evaluation Visit (ASEV). Right after I left, so did Rat, and the other shitty Sq/CC from the other squadron (Sush R.). Our DO became the new Sq/CC and is a great dude. The AMC/A3V ASEV team comes in, finds out that a pilot in AC upgrade hooked a sim check on a Thursday, got corrective training on Friday and rechecked, then deployed Monday. However, his Form 8 didn't have the corrective training signed off, so they considered him unqualified. They then did a SARM review and found he had flown for six months technically unqualified. That then led them to dig a lot deeper and they found some other bad things. In the end the the entire base aircrew was decertified and couldn't fly unsupervised. Pilot and booms from the Washington Guard had to fly and get all pilot and booms in the OG requalified. The Wing King ended up firing the old DO, the guy who replaced Rat. Their reasoning is that he was in the seat longer than the other Sq DO and they wanted a head for the failure. I always blamed Rat for that because he had the wrong people in the wrong jobs solely for promotion potential, not because of their skillset and work ethic. Rat was never punished for that because he's an old General Selva boy, he's protected. Even when he fired off a majority of Sq/CC's at Little Rock, it took a long time for anyone to do anything to him and in the end he was just sorta told "you're not going anywhere, here's your Legion of Merit, you're retiring." I know to this day it burns Rat that he didn't get a star. Oh well. Oh yeah, he's a Mets fan. https://www.dvidshub.net/video/152055/col-patrick-rhatigan-mets-shout-out

Supposedly the record for TFP (hours, kinda) in a month was smashed last month at SWA. Dude somehow earned 500 TFP bidding on everything he was legal for in Open Time, and since all OT trips were double pay last month, he earned roughly $123,000. He could basically take the next 11 months off and earn as much as a 12-year Major does in a year. Good luck to those sticking around!

So in summary Uncle Joe has: 1. Screwed the Afghanistan Withdraw. 2. Torched the stock market (all gains since the election now erased). 3. Brought inflation home to America. 4. Failed to stop the virus as promised. 5. Opened the door for Russia to invade Ukraine. 6. Allowed China to rage in the South Pacific and now launch large force packages at Taiwan. 7. Tried bring us all back together by destroying the filibuster. He sure has re-established America on the world stage. Yes Trump is an ass, a horrible person, but this was worth all your hate? Simply unreal.

Somebody probably said this on here already, but why the hell are the Washington elite (from both parties) so worried about Ukraine's borders but don't give a rat's ass about our southern border?

I'd be really interested to see literally any amplifying data on these claims. Also I have a few tiny questions before we just take "the conservative treehouse" (very reputable news organization I'm sure) at face value. -What was the sample size -What were the sample demographics -Which vaccine are we talking about -What constitutes a "neurological issue" and if the military is approximately 2 million people are we saying almost half of them now have a neurological issue? -What is the base rate of increase in these categories for unvaccinated people

^SuaSponte about sums it up. I only had one personal interaction with him when he was the OG at the Died. My crew shared a bus with another tanker crew that had the “pleasure” of flying with him. He was basically an asshole to my entire crew from the time we picked his crew up on the bus until we got back to tanker Ops. He basically berated the crews, talked about how awesome the B-1 was, how much the tanker sucked…to two tanker crews under his command. When he started giving us shit I thought he was joking, but nope…he’s just a prick. Like, I just met this dude when we got on his bus. O-6 OG/CC. There was no “how was the flight?” Or “what base are you guys from?” Nope. Actual quote as we rolled past 3 row: “You guys think you’re the top of the spear? That’s the tip of the spear right there (points to B-1 out the window).” He helped us carry a total of zero bags through customs and helped us carry zero bags back to the bus and helped us unload zero bags once we got back to ops. Thanks asshole. He flew with another crew from my base on that trip, smoked and joked with them the whole time since they were both patches, And then after the flight he marched right into the squadron commanders office and jacked him up for allowing his crews to have mustaches out of regulations and morale patches. I knew two of the SQ/CCs at the time and he made their deployed lives hell. I also would not piss on him if he was on fire.

A few more: If there's a conspiracy to cover up adverse effects why was J&J temporarily pulled out of an abundance of caution for blood clotting issues? Are other countries seeing ten-fold increases in "neurological issues?" or 300% increases in cancer? What kind of cancer? These are some pretty basic questions I would expect anyone attempting to do their due diligence to ask. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, not a 2.5 minute video utterly devoid of context or supporting data.

Can you share how many nights you spent away from home in 2021?

There’s a lot of money to be made (defense spending) with the situation in Ukraine, and military aid/action doesn’t offend certain groups back home when it comes to politics/support to the left. Back home in the US, there’s not a lot of money for defense contractors to be made with increasing border security (though there is money to be made on border walls, UAVs, etc), but having secure borders equates to “racist policies” and is overall not good politics for the left. Also worth mentioning that many businesses love illegal immigration for the cheap labor, hence why many on the right don’t truly want it either. So like most everything when it comes to American politics—money and power, both on the right and the left.

When did we move past the binary system? Let's not get complicated - she's a 1.

Email the org box about your situation. They said they have flexibility to move dates around with dates up until 31 March.

Absolutely. This has been my message to military dudes and dudettes, and most particularly my message to their spouses. You may think you know why you want to live somewhere, but you might not be considering the totality of what that decision will entail. My wife has absolutely no family in DFW, except for of course me. And living in one of the mega hubs has allowed me to run this hustle, which means not only am I home more, I'm home on more of the days that I want to be home. All the while making much more money for much less work than I would as a commuter, or even at a smaller hub. That's not to say everyone has to do what I do; I remember how many friends getting out were moving to where their wife's family lived. Understandable. After 10 to 20 years of getting jerked around by the military so your husband/wife can do awesome things with awesome people in awesome airplanes while you sat at home, it's completely reasonable to want to make a major decision for once like where to live. But the airlines are a strange and stupid career, and they are most heavily influenced by where you live. So everybody choosing not to live at a primary hub for whatever airline they work for needs to very strongly consider the implications. I think we take for granted that the airlines allow you to live anywhere. Telecommuting for other jobs has similarly detrimental effects on your career outlook and earnings. If you look at all of the factors and determine that earning less and working more is a price you're willing to pay to live somewhere else, then by all means, I'm happy for you. But for my wife and I, as we get ready to have kids, we decided it would be better for me to be home more often than for our kids to have more time with the rest of the family. As for the money stuff, I think the rest of the world is waking up quite suddenly to the financial reality of the last 2 years of pandemic fuckery... It's going to be fascinating and terrifying to watch the Fed juggle inflation and the associated social unrest it causes, with their true and unstated primary purpose, propping up the stock market. The market is eating shit on the potential of going from unfathomably low interest rates (0-.25%) to mildly less unfathomably low interest rates (1-1.25%). Last time we had an inflation panic, it followed the government expanding the monetary supply by around 13%. It took interest rates of 20% and two recessions to beat that inflation back down. This time the government expanded the monetary supply by around 25%... Buckle up. How does that relate to the airlines? Pilots always lose in recessions. Spend accordingly.

I know what the reg says. I also know if you call the dude he sometimes will approve no recoupment in cases of being 2x passed over and forced to retire/separate. Sent from my iPhone using Baseops Network mobile app

I would not piss on him if he were on fire.

We hated him too.

If it comes to locking horns with Putin, this will not just be in the Ukraine. What side deals did Putin make with China, will the Russian Pacific fleet support Xi's Navy on an invasion of Taiwan? How many troops families are we willing to send a flag and purple heart to? Don't have much faith in the American people to support this especially with the leadership team voted in and installed. Will true warriors emerge and take charge and be violent and merciless enough to end this nonsense? It's amazing when your young you want this but after a long career you bang your head against the wall to think the human race is so stupid.

No they can specialize. They can specialize in night 1 SEAD, DCA, etc.... I don't care if they specialize but theyre going to specialize in the shit that cost casualties and money, not flying around uncontested and won battlespace delivering an occasional JDAM. This is their country. If they aren't willing to die for it why should I be?

Lets face it, there are two events we all don't want to happen: a military intervention of Russia invading Ukraine, and Russians directly threatening more countries. No western nation has the stomach to stop the current (continuing) invasion, yet no one wants Russia on their own doorstep either. It's a Catch-22. If we (western nations) don't want to deal with an increasingly power hungry Russia tomorrow, we have to do something today...which we don't want to do. Long game, or short game. Sometimes winning at one means losing at the other. I don't have the right answer. All I know is that America's current leadership is clearly not up to the mental and moral gymnastics needed to successfully navigate these waters to an outcome that is beneficial for our nation, not to mention beneficial for other nations and our collective future.

Sure. But that’s not how our political elite run things. They love a good war/military involvement, whether it’s small (Iraq 2.5/ISIS or Libya) or not so small (Iraq/Afghanistan invasion and occupation). It’s beyond time to pull out of NATO…which doesn’t mean that you still can’t have positive relationships with other countries when it suits our interests and provide aid when we want to. But let’s be honest, NATO gets is power/authority from the US…not because Iceland or Slovenia is a member. And yet we’re obligated to defend these countries if attacked, who clearly aren’t concerned with protecting themselves. About 10+ years ago I had dinner with a buddy whose wife’s sister was married to an attorney from Iceland. We were chatting about militaries and he said that Iceland didn’t need much of a military because NATO would always defend them. Look at how much Iceland spends wrt their military obligation to NATO, and then tell me who is the fool? NATO might have made sense when there was the Warsaw Pact…but now, not so much.

Either way, this falls squarely into the play stupid games, win stupid prizes column for me. Don't vandalize/break into a federal building (or any building for that matter) and your chances of getting shot tend to diminish rapidly.

Is FedEx sending their "shiny Pennies" to Weapons School?

Here's the thing. If it was total bullshit, it would have warranted and received zero response. Absolutely zero response. The fact that it has received a major response, being addressed by the man himself, and also is now "under investigation" is all you need to know that the allegations are fully credible. And you know what? Someone acting with integrity in the face of other people acting with none is never a foul.

Brutally honest answer at the end of the day: while there are certainly great MAF guys who could do well in fighters, many probably wouldn’t be very value adding, especially later in their career (and that’s if they even make it through the pipeline). The basic flying stuff that translates to fighters is about 5% of the job. It’s the other 95% that’s the big hurdle. The young guy straight out of the pipeline from the start will generally provide more long term value. I’m sure that’ll piss some egos off, but reality hurts some times.

Let’s hope the Chinese only attack during day, vmc conditions.

https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2022/01/24/very-concerning-attorney-testifies-to-compiled-adverse-vaccine-reaction-statistics-provided-by-whistleblowers/ https://rumble.com/embed/vqlh63/?pub=264yz