Leaderboard

I’ve posted this before but I’ll tell the story again. I’ll never forget sitting in the base theatre in the Middle East around Xmas 2020. We had the opportunity to listen to the CSAF, CMSAF and the Sec of the AF. I was genuinely interested in what they had to say. There was a lot going on at the time. Most notably, Covid. We had been through a lot just to get in theatre with quarantines and such. I sat there and listened to two women and a black four star general talk for an hour about social issues, discrimination and how we all needed to do better. That’s all they talked about It was one of many turning points in my long AF career. And it was one of the most disappointing. I can’t even say that they thanked us for being there during the holidays.

What really blows my mind is someone is such a slug they can’t pass an embarrassingly low-bar PT test, and are so weak-minded (because its just mental at this low of a bar) they would rather bribe than workout a little bit. Fuck ‘em, send them packing as an example to the rest, and leave everyone else alone.

"Instead of punishing [the] individual and holding them accountable, the airmen are now required to attend more pt so no one else is in the same situation to fail," Glad to see time honored traditions of AF leadership are alive and well. When one idiot shits their pants, we all wear diapers. Bravo. 👏

I had no idea the fixed vs rotary wing divide between pilots was this bad.

Posting boomer political memes (left or right) is highly correlated with your friends unfollowing you on Facebook. Nobody wants to see that shit, go back to rooting for a sports team or get a retirement hobby. People tying their egos to the actions of a politician will destroy America. Hate China instead.

Every red state / county should be doing this Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

You don’t remember him actually being here, do you?

Ugh…I’d much rather just take a relatively easy fitness test once a year (worst case twice a year) than be required to wear an electronic device every day(?) for an entire year tracking what I am/am not doing according to the Air Force’s liking. But that’s just me.

WTF?

We professional warfighters in the Air National Guard would never condone the exchange of bottles of whiskey for signed-off PT test paperwork…never! 😆 I’m actually working an initiative right now to allow our OG to experiment with what the Space Force is doing. Unit funded and issued wearables tracking health metrics year-round in lieu of once-a-year testing where you can kinda cram your training and meet the mins while being a fat boi for 90% of the year. Accelerate change or lose amirite?

Decent article discussing Chinese food security: https://chinapower.csis.org/china-food-security/ TLDR: Chinese consumption has outstripped supply. They have plans to mitigate but if you’ve read Zeihan’s latest book, he brings up the very good point that mechanized agriculture in China will go away without energy. They would have to literally de-industrialize and resort to subsistence farming in order to feed themselves. No matter what, any potential conflict would be massively de-stabilizing for the CCP and I just can’t see an upside to starting a fight for them. That said, I would’ve thought the same thing about Russia/Ukraine six months ago, so never say never I guess.

Its not Rocket Surgery... AFSOC already used the same model with PC-12/U-28. Take them to the dirt in a slick bird and save your mission birds for high end training and combat. This is a simple training issue, tail draggers are different not cosmic.

If they removed their masks, would it be considered biological warfare?

Honestly, it appears this was a Lt's attempt to handle this at the bro level without escalating it. Sounds like there were allegations made that it happened but little substantiating proof. Lt then ordered the practice testing to see how widespread the problem was and as a way of keeping it in house and ensuring readiness. It wasn't until it was leaked on FB that it was because bribery was happening that higher command came in and said "hey this is serious, we need to get involved."

I remember my first TW lesson with a 20,000 hour ag pilot in a Super Cub. I remember thinking “it’s just another airplane” just before pushing the throttle in. I managed to use the full width of the runway multiple times before the completely nonchalant instructor said “Well, are we going to go flying or just f*ck around down here on the ground.” I fully endorse the idea that you should have some TW time before the first time you fly something like an Air Tractor.

Reminds me...

Now that was impressive! I sent my bride a heart via FlightAware so she wouldn't complain about my $150+ fill ups:

This might have been posted here in BO previously. This is one of my favorites google finds near Hooks, TX outside of Texarkana. F-111 at an Army Navy surplus store.

Really? I know they’re going away but ACC owns the Compass Calls and the ANG owns the Commando Solos and I find that incredibly hard to believe either of those entities would transfer them to AFSOC or AFMC for test. Especially not before the EC-37B is on the ramp. Based on the history of naked gunner hugs, “Big Gay” stamps, and covering every square inch of their work spaces with dick drawings, I think the Gunship community has fully embraced the gayest elements of the woke movement and probably didn’t need any training on being accepting of alternative lifestyles. Truly stunning and brave. I kid, I kid!

Sssh, RG just... Also...everyone knows money comes from birthday cards!

According to DAL’s chief health officer (impressive med background), the new strain is weaker than the traditional flu. So yeah, everyone move on with life and stop buying into the bullshit.

3 yrs later...... this is what a C-5 to Dover out of T-1’s looks like

Reminder that "he" is from CA. So reward will be a medal for his degenerate behavior and a long line of parents to "groom" their kids.

Thanks for sharing. I want to debunk alot of what's offered in this video, so I'm going to go through section by section, starting with the components that are most commonly misunderstood (myths), especially the 1921 hyperinflation in Germany. I know that most people here might not like Tooze as a source, instead many republicans rally around people like Scott Sumner, so I'll provide a link to his work as well. In short, the rise of national socialism in Germany was caused by deflation, not the hyperinflation which occurred over a decade earlier. This myth tends to be commonly understood by everyone in the US, while an actual understanding of money dynamics are not. In fact, the austerity policies following WW1 which were implemented in Germany were universally pursued and the largest contributor of deflation-induced political unrest which began in the 1930's. Which brings us to the first two sections of the video: coinage and the history of money in Rome & British Isles. What causes coinage to have value, why did rulers 'cry-up' or 'cry-down' their currencies, why was metal content often changed, and how did this affect prices. Generally, Desan is the best source for a modern understanding of coinage, although there are many others. The video begins with Rome, but this is some 3000 years later than the earliest recorded money known today, which is best represented in the clay tablets used for recording ledger entries in early Sumer (modern day Iraq). They even developed a method of signing ledgers, not unlike modern cryptographic hash functions (it's not ironic that many of these artifacts wound up in the personal libraries of bankers like J.P. Morgan, who themselves sought a deeper understanding of 'how money worked'). Many of us may have walked over the ground or even seen archaeological pieces of this society during our deployments and not noticed it, including the salt deposited throughout the territory, which accumulated over time from the irrigation ditches used to cultivate the land. The water from the Turkish mountains contains trace amounts of salt which became lethal to wheat and later barley over 2000 years of irrigation. It was these ditch digging activities which led to some of the earliest forms of money. Contrary to the video, we should really begin our investigation of money and inflation at the beginning, with the Sumer clay tablets, silver coinage, and barley unit of account. This was a monetary economy, with commodity money settlement (silver and barley), executed almost entirely with complex credit systems recorded on ledgers.

We can trace the origin of money from early civilization in Sumer through Egypt, Greece, and Rome. The video claims that what gave Roman coins value was the metal itself (with silver being more valuable than copper, because metal has intrinsic value). This is false. Here are excerpts from Desan covering the creation of money as instruments of 'value' (links available in earlier in the thread), and how the origin of value in fungible units was not the metal itself:

When the video claims that constraints in supply always lead to inflation (non-monetary inflation), we can provide examples of industries with very visible shortages but no price changes, typically because there is no relative power of producers or customer themselves hold power. Example, toilet paper and other sanitary paper products during the lockdowns. Despite frequently empty shelves prices were constant:

Re: fixed currency systems (such as a gold standard). The US current account is -$291B and it has ~8000 metric tons of gold, or $459B in terms of USD, given current prices per metric ton of $57M. How long do we think the US would be able to maintain gold outflows if import settlement is demanded in gold, especially when we consider domestic demand for USD conversion to gold? It's possible the US wouldn't be able to maintain a gold peg for even one year, maybe even a single quarter. I'm curious how you imagine the US fixing its currency to gold would turn out. Is the US gov depleted of gold a net win? Would something cause the US to be less reliant on imports? How would the US conduct domestic investment to reduce dependency on imports with gold settlement in place?