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Man. It's like being the second in command of Al Queda. I remember a 4 year straight where that was the most dangerous job in the world.

Don't you wish you could buy them all a beer?

To consolidate discussions from both the Ukraine & politics threads. Open for discussing all things energy policy! I’ll lead with this: despite rhetoric to the contrary, US domestic oil production is projected to set a new record high in 2023, reflecting a full recovery from the losses due to the pandemic. “U.S. crude oil production averaged 11.2 million b/d in 2021. We expect production to average 11.8 million b/d in 2022 and to rise to 12.4 million b/d in 2023, which would be the highest annual average U.S. crude oil production on record. The current record is 12.3 million b/d, set in 2019.” Source: Energy Information Administration Short-Term Energy Outlook, Jan 2022

This one made me chuckle.

Full disclosure, I know him in the real world and he is a good human being. While I have no desire to sit around the camp fire in my hemp pants eating veggie meat while we play the tambourine, he is an American patriot and a warrior and I would proudly serve with him.

Scratch one S300

Because people aren't two-dimensional caricatures. There are more than two different belief systems out there. Subscribing to a dialogue that can't deviate from a binary solution is asinine.

Wind is a terrible energy source for mass production. Nuclear is the cleanest and safest energy source we have available. We even have the ability to make power from elements that can't be weaponized and can be recycled almost to zero remaining waste. Let's spend some money and energy getting that in place (to at least eliminate coal usage). There is no excuse for us to depend on coal for more than 20% of our power generation. https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3

Good video of a destroyed Russian fuel convoy.

Are you related to Circle Back Jenn? She has been spewing that same lie for months. This narrative is a talking point right out of the Pravda playbook, Putin himself must smile when he reads it. Lets get to some facts about all of the "unused leases". - The law already requires companies to either produce oil and/or gas on leases or return the leases to the government – the so-called “use it or lose it” provision – generally in the first 10 years. - When a company acquires a lease, it makes a significant financial investment at the beginning of the lease in the form of a non-refundable bonus bid and pays additional rent until and unless it begins producing. - For federal onshore, the Mineral Leasing Act prevents any one company from locking up unproductive excessive federal acreage. - Developing a lease takes years and substantial effort to determine whether the underlying geology holds commercial quantities of oil and/or gas. The lengthy process to develop them from a lease often is extended by administrative and legal challenges at every step along the way. This administration discouraged American energy. For more than a year it has halted new federal leasing – key to future energy investment and production. It canceled energy infrastructure, blocked development in parts of Alaska, entertained new taxes to punish the U.S. energy industry and chilled future investment by signaling that oil and gas wouldn’t be part of America’s future energy mix. All last summer, the administration called on OPEC+ to increase its production more rapidly in the face of rising energy costs, bypassing American producers. Don't believe what either party says at that podium, do your own due diligence as am American and get to the facts. This administration has done everything within its executive, legislative and judicial power to thwart American energy production and the lease argument is simple propaganda meant to distract all the folks too lazy to look up the facts. A federal judge canceled major oil and gas leases over climate change

This should be in the Farmers Hall of Claims

USAA took another step backward today as they are eliminating the Limitless 2.5% cash back credit card. Replacing it will be a Preferred Cash Rewards Visa paying 1.5% cash back. USAA is slowly turning into any run of the mill bank.

This has been one of the most interesting points. We have the Ukrainian military leveraging geolocating/literally the public of the world to find Russian armor. What a resource to tap. The Russians have their population walled off who think nothings going on. Crazy how much of a disadvantage you are at when the free world hates you.

Really? Progressives literally think that requiring an ID to vote is “Jim Crow 2.0”.

https://newsworldupdate.com/politics/more-republicans-than-democrats-would-stay-and-fight-if-what-happened-in-ukraine-occurred-in-us-poll/ BLUF: if the US were in the exact same situation as the Ukraine, the majority of Republicans would defend the country while the majority of Democrats flee.

We were yanking and banking to get away from one of these, and some 6s, one night in the Desert Storm. They didn't get a lock on us thankfully, we ran out of chaff but still had the partially effective pods. Good thing the Iraqis were not as good as these guys.

1st, I like Earth. But I also like gas, so I'll be a self professed racing enthusiast. BTW, hydrogen, the smallest atom, is not easily stored. It likes to escape from sealed containers. And what is dirty hydrogen? And then there's this...

I got an email two days after I sent in my packet. I'd send them an email if you haven't heard anything by now.

Ukrainian SA-8 shooting down something

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/ukraine/2022-03-04/what-if-russia-loses Good analysis of what Putin's failure in Ukraine could mean for NATO, the US, and Europe going forward.

Unconfirmed reports coming out on Twitter night now saying a Ukrainian Marine unit conducted a raid on Kherson airfield and destroyed around 30 forward deployed Russian helicopters. Here’s to hoping it’s true.

Because they aren’t. They’ve done everything possible to shit on domestic production. My brother works in the oil industry, it’s heartbreaking to see what this administration has done: appeal to domestic environmentalists by crushing domestic oil, simultaneously increasing reliance on brutal dictators. I love the environment, but green energy isn’t ready for the volume our nation requires. And sending money to OPEC instead of US based production has been awful for national security.

It's easy to get caught up arguing about this project or that project, but the macro trends are very clear. The U.S. has massively ramped up domestic fossil fuel production and exports, and our reliance on foreign fossil fuel imports has dropped significantly. We're a net exporter of fossil fuels as of 2020. However, not all fossil fuels are interchangeable obviously, so there's some stuff we import because we have less of it than we need or it's cheaper to import than to produce domestically to meet our needs 100%. Repeal the Jones Act for one. Overall though fossil fuels are a giant global commodity and there's not some lever on the Resolute Desk that makes oil (or consumer gasoline) prices go up or down. Fair arguments can be made that Dem administrations typically try to reduce fossil fuel production/usage at the margins due to climate change concerns and GOP administrations usually don't, but the big numbers don't lie, see the graph below. 2008-2020 was 2/3 controlled by Democrats and our domestic production went up very significantly and our net imports dropped very significantly. BL: Obama admin recently oversaw very substantial domestic fossil fuel production increases! Trump admin also did this. Good work. Long-term, I'm personally in favor of an energy abundance policy - we need *massively* more energy as a human species and we can do a lot of amazing things if we're able to achieve that. Space colonization, significantly more food production, large-scale ocean water desalination, and direct carbon capture all become much more commercially viable with energy abundance. That means way more nuclear (ideally figuring out fusion), way more solar/wind/tidal/geothermal, and yes also some fossil fuels so long as you can price in or mitigate the negative externalities of carbon emissions and other pollution. If you have direct carbon capture powered by fusion for example, and other emissions controls such that net emissions/pollution are negative, burn all the fossil fuels you want! It's also currently impossible to launch rockets without fossil fuels so even in the above fantasy example, there will likely always be a place for extremely energy-dense types of fuels. Medium-term, I'd love to rely less on OPEC dictators + Putin and would rather see us put more effort into energy sources that are more sustainable. Nuclear + renewables > domestic/friendly-nation fossil fuels > hostile-nation fossil fuels while we still need them, which we do. We are well on way down this track. Short-term, we still import fossil fuels from Russia and we should stop. Their illegal and immoral war in Ukraine is a travesty and we should punish them as directly as possible without risking significant further escalation or loss of American lives. This will cause pain at the pump and we should do whatever we can to alleviate that, e.g. temporary federal gas tax holiday, increasing any domestic production that we can, and leaning on the rest of OPEC+ to pump more. Not to detract from efforts to move toward abundant, sustainable energy as described above, but we can and should do both. Source for the graph below. Edit to add: f*ck Putin, long-live Ukraine...to stay on topic 🇺🇦

Just saw this which kinda aligns with my current observation of the situation. Let's not forget Putin cares about himself, he can rattle the nuke button but deep down he's scared and knows that that'll be the end of mother Russia forever. He's scared shitless. Which is why he's thrashing around Bashi, dudes shitting himself sitting at 12 foot long tables and all. Putin can call them an act of war all he wants. Nobody cares, I think we'll see the end of him soon if the Russian people have anything to say about it. Imagine the American military killing Canadiens. F*ck that, this is going to boil over internally for him. How many Russian intelligence officers want this to be their legacy?

For whatever it's worth I'm not going to have a say in this soon. I will be a civilian shortly and as much as I love this world, it's a world the AF won't let me stay in and I need to find something else. Point being, for myself, and the rest of the civilians in society, we are trusting you with our security and to make good decisions with it. Sure, myself, and other Americans, are outraged at what is happening to the Ukranian people. We are even willing to pay higher gas for it. But how many of those people, if you explained to them the realities of nuclear war, would be willing to accept that risk on themselves and their families, for the sake of proving a point? Your oaths of office are not to NATO, and not to Europe. You swore oaths to the US constitution and your obligation is to the United States, it's people, and it's interests. We are trusting you to keep those interests, mainly our lives, our safety and our freedom, at the forefront of your decision tree. If you are failing to do this for some obscure reason, you are failing us, and that to me is sad. Very few people on here have communicated how in their world view they are going to continue to protect US interests. I have no problem with radical plans to ousts evil dictators, but I'm not willing to risk the lives of my wife or children to do so. For those of you that stay, you do so at great peril and I thank you for that. The world may be on the precipice of entering the most complex security environment we've seen in 30 years and I'm hoping the redundancy of operations in the GWOT didn't mend our thoughts into ones based on complacency. I only hope that the US makes smart foreign policy decisions that value our troops and their lives appropriately. I pray that your generation never have their "Afghan moment" which is something that left me and many others with a striking amount of moral injury. If we are going to be the leader of the free world we need to recognize that is a job that is hard, needs to be taken responsibly and will require us to make tough decisions about our values and the values of our own people. There will be pressure from other countries to mold the world into their own order and we need to resist that, applying pressure where we can, but recognizing that US power and resources are limited and should not be squandered. That's really all I have. I have weeks left. Going to be a wild transition but I'm ready for it and I'm really excited for what's next. I sincerely wish the best of luck to all of you.

And on a side note, a couple of the smartest guys in my UPT class washed out. Intellectually they made the rest of us (including the IPs) seem like special ed students. So even if he had washed out, it doesn't mean he doesn't have the smarts to logically crush anybody else's arguments/thoughts.

Between all the verbal fellatio about how we were getting a “masters class” with all of your apologist drivel you literally stated “Why yes... I am saying we should have stopped NATO expansion in 1990 when we had the chance. There wouldn't be a Vladmir Putin problem if we did. Not only that we had several off ramps including up until February when Vladmir Putin sent President Biden a list of demands thatencompassed his security concerns in central Europe.” You are blaming NATO for not taking any off-ramps from Putin’s demands implying that because we didn’t bend to his demands we are responsible for what happens next. So while I didn’t go through and reread everything it was very clear that you were heavily implying the west forced Putin into attacking in Ukraine by crossing some red line you theorize exists and it’s our fault for not understanding him. Ukraine can choose to align themselves however they want they should not have to serve as a buffer if they recognize the value of relationships with the west and choose to pursue them that is their sovereign right and not an excuse to be invaded by a power hungry despot.

Yep, that was one of the biggest learning to operate areas, ground ops at the big airports. Ramps, metering, call or monitor, what's a Porter (the plane that says Porter on the side), and finally, "copy, follow the RJ" and they say that's not an RJ, its an Embraer. Commercial WEFT identification wasn't in indoc. Funny, but when SWA started ops in O'Hare, one would hear a funny comment like, "you ain't from around here, are ya" when trying to taxi.

I feel sorry for anyone still falls for this tribal nonsense. What a ridiculous thing to buy into. I can't imagine harboring this much disdain for my fellow Americans.