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Hawaii and Alaska??? Hell no. California, Oregon, and Washington.... Can I get back to you on that?

A little squadron souvenir earned while protecting a TF-160 MH-47 one dark night many years ago. 40MM HE impact right on the RPG launcher (and shoulder/neck area of the bad guy).

I dunno man. Kinda hard to tell a sovereign nation to stop fighting for every inch of territory that’s been annexed by an aggressor. If the Ukrainians are willing to fight for the next 20 years, & tie up the Red Army in the process, I say let ‘em & provide whatever weapons are reasonable for that end.

The "Free Press" is dead, replaced by mouthpieces for each political party. Truly sad. It is now being reported that CBS knew about Biden's classified documents BEFORE the mid-terms and sat on it. NBC knew about the second tranche for weeks and sat on it.

Damn thats crazy, I don't remember the "sexual preference" section of the application... I must've glossed over that

We knew that COVID targeted fat old people from what, January 2020? We knew it didn't affect kids either by the time we went into lockdown in March. We knew it spreads almost entirely indoors by April, because I remember the Florida beach controversy. Nearly everything we "learned" about COVID after the summer of 2020 involved an "expert" prediction that proved inaccurate.

69 UPT selects

Mid-summer 2020 is a good line for enough data available to call with near 100% accurately everything that has happened and is “just now” coming up. Prior to that I’ll give anyone a pass, after that people were simply lacking critical thinking skills, too lazy to research beyond media headlines and “expert” talking points, prioritized emotions over logic, politically polarized to the point they’ll happily walk off the cliff if that’s what the party says to do, etc. For those who woke up late and acknowledged it, good for them. I hope they have the maturity to do a self-debrief and identify how they fucked up and what they can do next time to avoid the same mistake. Because there absolutely will be a next time.

NICE

No. No. No. No. No. And no. We knew all those things and more. And moreover, the historical record in this very thread is still available for those who care to go back and read it. People here knew the mortality rates were getting blown out of all proportion. How did they know? It wasn't because they were conspiracy nuts. It was because they looked at and compared diverse data sets, examined how certain groups were behaving and listened to what they were saying, and taking in the totality of all that, made a more accurate deduction. Plenty of others were willing to just take the properly-credentialed authorities' opinions and run with them, sans critical thinking. I'm glad you've revised your view "now" that "more" data is in - and respect that you have the balls to publicly admit at least that much. If you dare look back further, however, you'll notice that the data to make that same determination was present then, as well. History is not confirming for you that other people "guessed" right. We more thoroughly analyzed the data available and made a more correct assessment.

I try to avoid JFK Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

IMHO supporting Ukraine has been and continues to be a wise decision. As of the end of November the U.S. has given $50B to Ukraine, with half of that being military aid. Our annual defense budget is currently at $725B. For just under 7% of a single year of defense budget we have helped humble a superpower, all without losing American soldiers, that my friends is a bargain! For at least the next 10 years Russia has been removed from the world stage as a conventional military threat and I believe it has given China something to think about, all without losing American lives. In many respects I would argue this has been our most effective proxy war. Russia may or may not ultimately win this war but the implications of it will shape Russia for a generation. The Russian military has lost significant amounts of equipment (and I guarantee there is a flood of captured equipment flowing to the U.S. for exploitation that will pay dividends for years.) The Oryx website reports 8,000 pieces of equipment destroyed, damaged, abandoned, or captured, including some 1,500 tanks, 700 armored fighting vehicles, and 1,700 infantry fighting vehicles. Bottomline, it will take years and huge amounts of $ to rebuild their military. The bigger impact is in casualties, the numbers are staggering. I obviously don't believe the published numbers from either Ukraine or Russia as they are always misstated. DoD and several think tanks have done independent assessments that seem to settle on 100,000 Russian Casualties with between 40,000-50,000 deaths. The demographics of those losses is staggering and touches every part of Russian society. A few data points to put it into perspective: 1. In 20 years of combat in Afghanistan there were 2.456 United States military deaths. 1,932 of these deaths were the result of hostile action. 20,752 American service members were also wounded in action during the war. 2. In 20 years of combat in Vietnam there were 58,148 were United States military deaths. 300,000 American service members were also wounded in action during the war. 3. In 20 years of combat in Iraq there were 4,431 were United States military deaths. 31,994 American service members were also wounded in action during the war. In a single year the Russians have suffered almost as many deaths as the U.S. did in 20 years of war in Vietnam. Additionally, Russia's population is less than half (143 Million versus 332 Million), this war has touch a large majority of families in Russia. Putin's ability to survive demonstrates his grip on power, but without success I don't think he will survive. War is terrible and this is no exception. But when you step back and look at the situation from the perspective of the Great Power game, this has been a huge win for us.

It’s financially non-sensical by a long shot to stay in and bypass years of seniority. You have to value certain intrinsic/non-monetary things far more. Nothing wrong with that, just stay in with eyes wide open and understand the long lasting ramifications of your decision as a young O-4. Spoiler: You can hit all those things in the guard, so really there actually is only one logical choice! I kid…sort of.

It’s weird being on the LZ when the heavier stuff is going off because you blank out the goggles but you can see… then it gets dark again… then it’s bright again… it’s like being unaided in a T-storm at night, but luckily by that point you’re pretty much completely on instruments anyway so it’s just peripheral noise. Makes it real damn critical to spot the laser back at the RP though if you’ve got a difficult LZ. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

On the board call page on the portal, it specifies you must list all of them unless you're rated.

Yup, the last 2 posts pretty much sum up the feelings (at least the vocal minority online) of some of the so-called deadzoners who lost their pensions and are firing up a storm against this TA. I think the other 60% of the company who was hired in the past 9 years is going to be OK with the agreement, along with a decent portion of the older guys, so it will pass overwhelmingly. I, personally, am a no voter for the sole reason that they deleted hundreds of "his/him" references in the contract and replaced them with "they/their." That's hundreds of concessions if you ask me, LOL. Kidding.

Always loved watching the ACs lay waste, very satisfying.

An older group nearing retirement wants/wanted a lump sum to make up for their terminated pension because they feel like they lack time to make up the difference with the “new” 401k system.

A “follow the greens” system would probably be simpler & cheaper. JFK‘s taxiways are a mess, especially if you aren’t a regular. The Alpha/Bravo making a loop around the terminals & then becoming separate parallel taxiways is retarded. A cheap & easy immediate fix would be to simply rename them to something logical. Another would be to instill a little patience into the controllers. There are plenty of crews who only see that place once in a while & if you ain’t a local, it gets convoluted real quick there.

That’s what I was thinking too, good to hear someone with way more crewed experience say that.

On USAF crews, anyone can say Reject and it's to be honored. I've had a flight doc call it, in fact, because he dropped his coke. He was banned from being on headset in our squadron after that. However, I'll take that over the 121 world where only the 64 year old captain who needs readers to see the instruments correctly can call it. I'm with you. I would call it if needed and take my lashes rather than try to amplify what I'm seeing and hope the CA agrees. It all depends on the situation. I've had several captains at my current company affirm that course of action too.

One thing in that type of situation I don’t understand SOP-wise is how the FO can “never” say the word “abort.” It’s “say what you see.” Which I completely get 99% of the time. But in the event of an incursion and possibly killing hundreds of people, I feel like I would say abort and we can talk about it later. Takes too much time to say “AA is on our runway” and too much risk of getting a “huh?” from the CA. In such a time critical scenario, why would I ever be descriptive before directive. Curious what guys say who have done crewed flying longer than me.

Id want to keep Washington as well. Seattle is, well, its seen better days. But the Peugot Sound and northern cascades are still legendary outdoor wonders.

It's all starting to make sense. 😆

I agree. If China invaded the west coast, at what point do you think the US would negotiate a settlement that gave up Hawaii, Alaska, California, Oregon, and Washington?

I generally don't believe a conspiracy theory that could otherwise be explained by stupidity and incompetence.

Adding even more data to support my opinion of the Biden family. What a complete Douche. Hunter Biden: Fighting to prevent daughter with ex-lover from using his last name

I like how she's using a gas stove. That must have been extremely hard to cook with all of those poisonous fumes.

I saw a one-legged stripper pole dancing once.

And that’s the excuse you tell yourself to feel better. Despite this entire reply I disagree with, I will give credit to you changing your viewpoints over time. I am not including you personally (I know we had several back and forth in the past) in my above comment. In fact, you are the opposite of the people I described. To you’re overarching statement that it was pure guessing optimism with no info (paraphrasing), completely disagree. It was critical thinking based on observation, data (yes there was data that was rapidly coming out by summer, but it was suppressed heavily), and unemotional/logical thought process. Throughout the first 2 years tens of millions of people called it 100% time and again, they were labeled all sorts of things. No, it is not logical for you to argue all of them had no SA and just got lucky that they were completely right, it is logical they executed as stated above and everyone else made errors in judgement (trusted garbage lies, illogical arguments, etc.), thought processes, and allowed emotion to rule over logic. Zero stones cast at those who came around and acknowledged what had transpired.

So true!

The irony of a free press is that it is simultaneously a democracy's/republic's greatest defender and greatest threat. When the press does its watchdog role faithfully against the government irrespective of who is in power, it is vital to our system of governance. But when it decides to become merely the propaganda arm for one political party, then it is dangerous.

Were those lower strat folks, that you know, selected because of some all important factors that you could do nothing about ie, race, sex, and or sexual preference? You know the really critical things to consider when selecting pilots??

Nah bro, says that you oversimplify things significantly into right or wrong, black or white. You have become what you criticize, and you all wonder why folks stopped commenting back. The forum turned significantly more into an echo chamber the last year, which has been nice for you guys, but doesn’t necessarily represent reality. We all, right now, have the benefit of knowledge we did not have when decisions were being made. Your debrief choice (i can’t really call it a loop) is that we all made and then executed the wrong decisions in the beginning of the pandemic, and that “we” have doubled and tripled down and screeched the entire time. But in reality we as a society had very limited SA or perception of what the actual truth of the situation was until science uncovered some of those answers. It took months to years for that. And, you seem to forget, we had to operate and make decisions in that limited SA environment. You can’t put the big arrow on a decision when your SA is super low. The ends don’t justify the means. I believed, and will continue to believe, you 100% did not have the SA in the Summer of 2020. For example, we now know mRNA vaccines are entirely ineffective at stopping transmission - we were hopeful they would be very effective. Didn’t know that. We now know that we’re looking at a significantly lower mortality variant with significantly higher spread - the first variant spread slower but had a mortality rate about 10 times higher pre-vaccine. Didn’t know when that was coming. We know that COVID is airborne. Didn’t know that, remember folks sanitizing everything? We know how to test for it, and we know generally how long folks are contagious. We understand mortality risks much more completely now (fat and old). We did not know any of these things with significant certainty for a long time. You’ll also note that many folks on here changed our minds on many policies as more data emerged. As folks got vaccinated and mortality decreased and transmission reduction efforts clearly failed, many folks like me changed our opinions. We built SA and made decisions with said SA. You can demonize that, if you want, but it’s a pretty rough take. If your point is that in the absence of proof, we should be optimistic, fine, that’s your philosophy. But it doesn’t mean those that wanted to be conservative in the face of unknowns are inherently wrong and/or evil. In fact, you literally can’t prove that those efforts didn’t save significant lives (bang your head against the wall on that one, if you want). For the record, I think that masks and vaccine requirements now should be entirely removed in society with the exception of elderly care or hospitals. We should have gotten rid of it over a year ago for the military. There is more nuance to how decisions have to be made and opinions should be formed than you give credit.