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most racist administration in history

I laughed but the thought of that happening is terrifying. Based on Brandon/Austin/Miley’s handling of Afghanistan, I have zero confidence that things would go well for us in a blunt and escalatory conflict. The fact that Austin and Milley haven’t resigned is an embarrassment.

I know exactly what my service entails. America is bigger than a president, political party, or vaccine. Some people participate and actively work hard to make the military and their country better. Other people quit, have a victim complex, and cry about it from the sidelines.

To piggyback on ViperMan, nuance is great and all, but some things are self evident, no nuance required: - The American political system is better than Russia’s. Despite all our flaws, I’ll take a representative democracy over Putin’s kleptocracy every time. - The liberal world order (again, I’ll remind the less educated amongst us that “liberal” does not refer to US domestic politics here) established after WWII is better than an alternative where strong countries simply take what they want. The “establishment” that Putin and his apologists like to rail against has kept the peace for seven decades. Some of us have become so accustomed to that peace that it’s become hard to believe that it’s not just the de facto state of the world. It’s not. It takes a lot of work. - Invading a sovereign nation, no matter what cultural and ethnic ties you think you have, is wrong. That’s it. No need for discussion (or nuance). Respect for sovereignty is a key to peace in the modern world. It should be defended vigorously by anyone who doesn’t want to see the planet flattened by war. I could go on. Point being, there’s no gray area to hang out in here. No we aren’t perfect. Yes, we have our problems, some of them major. Despite all of that, we are objectively better than the alternative, regardless of which party is in power, regardless of our internal differences. Objectively. Better. Full stop. I choose to support OUR institutions, flawed though they may be, because it’s a far better option than operating in the wilderness of thought where the Russian and Chinese fact twisters want us. There are forces in this world that are true existential threats to our way of life. They are NOT your neighbor with the coexist bumper sticker (naive as he may be) or the Trump flag on his truck. They are not even Nancy Pelosi (who I guarantee you is FAR more of a free market advocate than Putin or Xi), or Mitch McConnell. It continuously blows my mind that some of us continue to point fingers at each other when there is no shit, painfully obvious evil rearing it’s head in the world with despots outright stating their desire to destroy western cultural values. It’s time to recognize what’s right in front of our faces, put our differences aside for a bit, and start pulling in the same direction.

To make a long story short, my childhood dream was to be a fighter pilot like the rest of the wannabees here. I'm currently a mechanical engineering student hoping to transfer to a school offering aerospace engineering, and earlier this year I was discharged from Navy boot camp (reserve air crew contract) for requesting a religious accommodation for the Covid shot. I have nothing against the people who got the shot, but this post is mainly for those who didn't get it or regret having done so. What do you recommend young conservative Christian men do now that military aviation is basically off the table for them? I've looked into civilian test piloting and other "non-standard" areas of civilian aviation, but they all seem like extremely cost-prohibitive and low-paying career paths, at least for those with no prior military experience. I just don't want to grow up to be that guy who could never scratch that itch with his career, and so foregoes spending time with his family for his hobbies instead of being a good father or husband. I like physics a lot, but a desk job doesn't really warrant the amount of torture that engineering coursework puts one through, at least for me personally. If I was in it for the money, I would switch my major to computer engineering or computer science. I'm just looking for some general advice or guidance. If you have some political attack or snarky remark, I would suggest moving on, as it'll be a waste of time for the both of us. If this isn't the right forum to post this, mods please let me know and I will delete. To all the pilots out there grieving the decline of the West, I salute you. Thank you for your service, even if we're not 100% sure what that entails anymore.

I just saw Huggy on YouTube. All I can say is don’t misidentify a Dragonfly as a Tweet.

Dude, really? It's ALWAYS hookers & blow.

I hope he launches a nuke. Let's just get the next big war over with already. We've got pronouns to police and this guy's shenanigans are stealing the spotlight.

Are you serious? Jesus is sick of your bullshit.

Found the salty nerd!

Lots to unpack there, but I'll give it a shot. One conservative Christian man to another...in front of everyone. A: The covid shot requirement does not take military aviation off the table for you. It might right now, but not forever. Eventually either the military will withdraw the requirement, or there will be another option of non-stem cell based vaccination (like an actually researched and studied non-emergency-use vaccine should be). It all depends on your basis for rejection. I, for one, had no defensible basis, as I happily and ignorantly received 8 rounds of the anthrax vaccine without asking twice, as I was young and stupid. That proved to be 100% risk/0% reward. Long story short, make sure you sincerely understand your basis for refusal, and that it's not just under the "I will not comply" category just because you don't like it. That's a childish defense based on ignorant emotion. If you have a sincere objection based on logic, stand firm on it, and find another way to your dream. If you say "it was my dream..." and hold that with the same hand as "I won't get the shot because..." and expect sympathy, you'll get none...at all...especially here. No one is stepping on your dream. You are holding a personal belief higher than your dream, and that's no one's choice but yours. Pick one. 2: Decide now what precisely that 'itch' is. If it's to fly, there are absolutely no all-denying barriers to you. Serious obstacles? Yes, but nothing completely stopping you. Life will suck. Pay will be low. Hours will blow. For a while. Make up your mind that you want to fly, then find a way. There. Are. Many. Even from a military background, I've yet to meet two guys with the same exact path. From the civil side, there are innumerable ways to end up in an airplane. It will heavily depend on where you're willing to live and what lifestyle you're willing to accept to get to your desired end state. Even then, the end state will change by the time you get there. Accept that as fact and your life will be easier. If you are a family man, and you want to be a pilot, your family life will suffer to some degree or another. Schedules suck. You will be away from home. You will miss birthdays, anniversaries, holidays, etc. But you were wanting a military life...so you should have been ok with that, right? Because military life is like that, only worse: you're gone longer, to worse places, for less money, while leaving your family is bad locations away from family, and oh yeah, people may be actively trying to kill you. Decide WITH YOUR FAMILY what level of life style you're willing to accept, then get to grinding. (If you exclude your bride from that decision, you will end up divorced) D: A 'standard' civilian track can take as little as 3 years to be in the right seat of a big jet. One track: earn your CFI, teach your ass off in little airplanes, get hired by a regional/cargo feeder, then get hired by a lower tier ACMI...OR go to an aviation academy like what United is starting...OR go fly a sky tractor crop dusting...OR go fly king-airs for CBP...OR work to get hired by a fractional...OR...fly bush cargo in Anchorage...OR...the list goes on. Get to studying. As much of a dumpster fire as AirlinePilotCenter forums are, the other side of that website is pretty informational, and you can find some pretty good data in the forums if you're willing to wade through the BS. Decide that no job is beneath you, and you'll be fine. If you choose the millennial attitude that some jobs are just too hard or too underpaid or too dirty, then yeah, your 'itch' will never be scratched, and you will be forever limited. If you choose that road, that's no one's fault but your own. If they say you need a vaccine to get the job, and you quit looking, that's your fault, not theirs. In short: Nut up or Shut up. There is no better time to get into aviation. Decide what you will or won't do, then get to work. P.S. I dis-recommend SE Asia. That results in a different kind of 'itch' that I've heard never goes away.

I've already given all of my assets and savings ($47.36) to support the victims. But only white victims. How does that sound? Racist? Yes, because it is. Now change the color to anything but white. Is that racist? Not according to our dear "leaders".

How about automatic 4.0 PEA (physical fitness GPA, which at a service academy is as important as military and academic performance) to guys that are morbidly obese and would otherwise get kicked out, yet are held on as "managers" for sports teams as they "develop skills". Or exemption of athletes from military duties that all cadets are required to do. It was an unhealthy eco-system 20 years ago, and I'm sure it hasn't changed much.

Ole Kamala letting us know where we stand as Americans in a crisis after she said the administration would take "equity" into account when dividing up disaster relief as Hurricane Ian rips up the eastern coastline. "We have to address this in a way that is about giving resources based on equity, understanding that we fight for equality, but we also need to fight for equity." Not to be outdone Uncle Joe says "A vital part of preparing fur Hurricane Season is to "get vaccinated now."

Also…LOTS of grumbling from the European populations about energy prices. Lots of very public demonstrations (not covered by western media) of European citizens demanding their governments lift sanctions against Russia. killing the pipeline forces these countries to hold the line against Russia w nato.

That’s because you are a web bot that only copies and pastes spam about “economics” and can’t think critically about geopolitics and the narrative gain Russia potentially gets and the US potentially loses from this.

When I saw the post about the AF Times Thursday, I dropped the reporter a quick note. She replied back, obviously embarrassed, and said she corrected it as soon as she saw my email.

Can someone please shed light on what the improper benefits given out by USAFA would be?

Those Vipers had to lie to get hangar space. - "Sir, I can assure you that we're all F-22's": says the F-16 - "Well come on in boys": exclaims the Hangar

Now in just imagining her stumbling up out of shooters at 6 in the morning with those shades on.

Too bad DoD can't have an adult conversation about how the money is spent/split up. People lose their minds if you ask why we have Service Academies, two land armies (or why the Army is so big when its mission is to defend other people's border and not our own), 4 air forces, why the Army and Marines buy different tactical trucks, why we have so many camo uniforms, whether or not PME is money well spent, etc. I think DoD has plenty of money; what it lacks is the ability to prioritize (Congressional meddling throws a monkey wrench in there too). If it could, maybe the AF wouldn't be flying such old iron....

Haven't followed every post, but is anyone actually arguing against these points?

Let me clarify for you @BashiChuni. That post was getting long and fairly unwieldy and I didn't want the main point to be lost. I guess it was. One of my other points was to say that there is a log jam of BS making its way through our collective system right now under the cover of "nuance" - in quotes. "Nuanced" positions on who is at fault in the Russia/Ukraine war fall squarely into that category. It's become highly fashionable to stake out a "nuanced" position on some topic in the world. "Look at how smart my opinion is!" "Look ma, both sides of the issue!" All I can say is no shit, there are two sides to an issue - people are fighting, duh. Take the Russian war in Ukraine as an example. "Nuance" has gotten some of us thinking that we are in the wrong on this one. "Nuance" gets us talking about the Gulf of Tonkin, COVID response, the Iran contra affair, Iraq '03, the moon landing, that the Earth is flat (which it is), etc, etc. Not all those topics, of course, but the point is that someone will always point to some instance in history where we probably fucked something up (or there's at least the perception that we did) and use it to score points presently. In short, the purpose of "nuance" is to place hand-cuffs on a given entity - in this case us. "As if" is my only response. Always thinking of the world in terms of "nuance" and "shades of gray" are their own memes. The world is more black and white than most of us now-a-days probably think. Putin has absolutely no moral authority or legitimate reason for his adventure in Ukraine - how incompetent America is at home or abroad doesn't change that one iota. Putin started this war. He drew first blood. It's his war to end. Us backing down or being "fearful" of escalating is going to get us more of the same. He needs to be made to fear for his life. IMO, we don't need "nuanced" opinions coming from soldiers who might be called upon to fight a war that sprouts out of this current conflict. Just ask Putin's troops how their moral is doing. Or how their shit feels when it's moving in the wrong direction. Probably a lot worse than "pretty darn good." "NATO expansion became an excuse post facto..." for Russian militarism and autocracy. "The ability of countries to determine their own foreign policy and their alliances, is written into the UN Charter...written into the 1975 Helsinki act...written into the 1990 charter of Paris for a new Europe...written into the 1997 NATO-Russia founding act...Russia's signature is on every one of those documents. Moscow signed the UN Charter, it signed the Helsinki final act...signed the NATO-Russia founding act that places no limits on NATO expansion..." etc, etc. I've posted this before, but it contains a density of fact that really should be grasped by anyone wearing a uniform who might have a "nuanced" opinion on who is to blame for this current war. I don't want to come across as saying that people shouldn't have nuanced opinions or that all stones shouldn't be overturned, so don't walk away with that message, either. I'm just saying that when you have very strong opinions, which are not based in fact (because in fact you don't know and will never know), there is another - unspoken - reason why you have that opinion, whether or not you admit it to yourself. I MFing guarantee you that no one getting shelled in Ukraine thinks of this as "nuanced".

Ha!! Your original post (before you edited it) might be one of the strangest flexes I've seen on Baseops in a hot minute. So you've been around a while, knew the founder of Baseops, have had lots of conversations, and probably knew BQZip's mom. Cool story Hansel. In regards to "original thoughts" Tucker Carlson's show on 28 Sep and the American Conservative (just to name a few) both drove the narrative that the US did this. I'm sure you thought of it first though. I had no idea that the center of resistance to the global monkeypox conspiracy was right here on Baseops forums. Learn something new everyday. One can only hope that with this experience we'll be better prepared for the next global elite disease conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids (or whatever that one was supposedly about). I'll leave it there with what I think is currently the funniest (but not my favorite) conspiracy theory out there.

I recently listened to a podcast hosted by the Federalist (right wing), and I was startled by the nonchalance John Davidson was able to claim the US sabotaged the pipeline. He did so without evidence (https://www.spreaker.com/user/10614200/populism-keeps-surging-across-the-west). I posted the link for reference, not as a recommendation to listen to it. Don't. I consider(ed?) the Federalist a legitimate source (albeit right wing), but needless to say, I'll be far more suspect of what else I hear come from them going forward. Why I bring it up is because I see the same thing from some on this message board, and from many others on the right side of the isle (which I am part of). I find this highly incongruent, actually. In my view, this default position has less to do with the goodness or badness of the action per se, and much more to do with the fact that it's being carried out by the Biden administration and is therefore necessarily wrong. Get over it. Putin is the one making threats. Not Europe. Not Biden. Not the USA. Not Trump. Pick your side. Your fear of "risking escalation" strengthens Putin's ability to escalate. Want to see him STFU? Next time he makes a nuclear threat, we indicate we will respond in kind on behalf of Ukraine. Fuck it, let's say we did blow it up: Putin threatens to cut off Europe from gas as strategic leverage, and we blow the pipeline up, thereby taking away his ability to leverage acquiescence from European governments, you know, a "burn the fleet" "shoot the hostage" type of logic. Fairly brilliant if you ask me. Maybe we should blow up NS1 in a couple months. Followed by others as time goes on. Maybe Putin will start to realize that oil flows in one direction, but money flows in the other. Yes, the administration is incompetent, has lost all SA, and seems to be doing its best to drive wedges wherever they can. And yeah, on about 99.9% (repeating of course) of issues, they've made objectively bad decisions. Be that as it may, it doesn't necessarily mean everything they do is wrong by default - all things and decisions should be judged according to their own merit, and in the case of the Russian war in Ukraine, we are doing good things, notwithstanding the likely fact that our spectacle of retreat in Afghanistan probably signaled to Putin (et al) that now would be a good time to get started with those war plans - but that's another discussion. That is what I think is a blind spot on the right - the unwillingness to give any credit even in places where it may be due. Lest we forget, this war started before the current admin was in power. No one on this message board knows - or ever will know - exactly what happened or who sabotaged the pipeline. Unless you're someone special, that is a fact. Another fact is that in each of us there is something that wants the world to be like a Tom Clancy movie - with clear cut lines of conspiracy and wrong doing. That fact is really what drives such strong opinions on matters like this, because in all truth not one of us knows. You don't know because you typed some URL in your interweb browser and read someone else's opinion/analysis. For my part, I strongly, strongly discount the possibility we did it, if for no other reason than the risk/reward ratio is way, way too high. The payoff? Very little. The potential cost if it was discovered that we unilaterally destroyed the pipeline? Well, we just achieved one of Putin's major objectives by getting NATO to act against itself. It's so unlikely, it's crazy and conspiratorial to consider it a possibility, given these realities. Insane even. The chances Putin did it? Nearly 100%. It lets him generate propaganda within and outside his country, and if it is ever discovered for certain that he did blow it up, well there are no political consequences because it belonged to him anyway. So there is a far higher payoff to risk ratio on his side as far as I can tell. All in all, I don't really care. We probably didn't do it, but if we did, I'm fine with it because it ultimately takes away leverage Putin thought he had. Putin is wrong. We are right. He should stop. It's that simple.

The liberals simply don't care. The country is being run by a demented shell of a man, I pray he doesn't hit the nuke button reaching for his Life Alert. As long as they got rid of the Orange Man. Truly criminal that his wife and staff are allowing this to continue.

The FSB just needs to shoot him already and get it over with.

High mortgage rates are going to be a godsend. It's the only thing that will reliably bring down prices, and lower prices are desperately needed. Even some of the housing bears think we'll only see a 10-20% drop in home prices, but I think that's wildly optimistic. If we have higher interest rates, housing will correct to the historical cost:income ratios. No, we didn't see the adjustable rate mortgages that blew up the last housing market. Canada and Australia are going to have to fight that demon. But we saw a level of institutional investor purchasing that was unheard of until this bubble, coupled with interest rates that are unsustainable in the long term. I think those two factors are going to be more, not less devastating than the adjustable rate mortgages were. Other factor is rents, people assume will continue to rise as housing prices fall, but they usually fall in tandem. If rents drop, the institutional investors that are already losing their dreams of asset appreciation will also lose their cash flow, and unlike mom and pop, the second it becomes unprofitable they will sell. To add to that, another thing we didn't have in 2008, the baby boomers retiring. Many of them are relying on their home price as a component of their retirement. 50% of the generation has no retirement savings, and of the 50% that do, the median retirement value is 105,000. Why downsize when the value of your home just keeps going up? Conversely, I think there will be a lot of panic selling when they see their largest asset lose 10 or 20%. And that'll only drive down prices further. Even though they are doing a surprisingly resilient job of fighting the pivot narrative, eventually the Fed is going to break something in this debt addicted market, and at that point the political pressure will be overwhelming. Don't get me wrong, in the long term. The only solution to this will be fiscal and monetary tightening, but I think that will only have the political support required when inflation rears its head again, after diminishing somewhat from this round of tightening. At the end of the day, the home prices we have seen are only possible with low rates and easy money, and inflation reduction is only possible with high rates and reduced liquidity. I do not believe housing will win out over inflation in the long term.

"Skip class or slack off?" I majored in that @ U of Hawaii.

Enjoy your Sunday.