brabus

@Pooter Ok, so the root cause is a specific type of inanimate object that is a motionless paperweight until a human with free will decides to be a POS and picks it up? Shitty diets, fast food, etc. kills WAY more people than firearms. Vehicle accidents kill double the people that guns do (I’m not counting suicides, many of those gun-related deaths are legal and justified, and many are criminal-on-criminal related, meaning no “innocent” people were killed). Where’s everyone calling for the ban of these inanimate objects that require human free will to use? The point of the above: it’s an illogical argument that inanimate objects are a RC of anything. Humans with free will are the RC of things based on the decisions they make (decide to kill someone, drive like a jackass, eat the 69th Big Mac even thought they have 3 different heart diseases). - In 2020 we were still at a lower murder w/ gun rate than 1974, and 2020 was a bad year in general. Murder w/ gun rates was fairly stable from 2000-2015, and then made a sharp rise from there, despite increasing gun sales over that entire time period. In fact, gun sales have risen steadily while murders have sharply declined over decades until that significant rise in 2015. There’s literally a negative correlation between the two. Guns didn’t change, so what else did? - # households with a gun has been DECLINING since the 60s, as increasing gun sales go to people with multiple (e.g. hunters and shooting hobbyists). Murderers using guns haven’t typically been the guy who has a large collection at home, it’s the deranged idiot who bought a gun last week/owns a couple or the gang banger/criminal who illegally acquired a gun and used it in nefarious activities (e.g. drug related). - It was common place not that long ago to see school parking lots filled with guns. It was not that long ago when kids brought rifles into school and stuffed them in their locker for use later that day in a school-sanctioned shooting event or hunting after school. No school shootings happened during this time. So, objectively and subjectively firearms do not have the correlation to un-justified murder that some people/gov members and the media want to claim. They are less involved in death than many other things in our country. They are a convenient boogeyman, but the facts do not support that “boogeyman status.” So now we’re back to the start of this discussion - what has changed this century (roughly starting from Columbine) compared to the 20th century? Well, generally positive morals and values were far more important and cohesive family units were more prevalent in the past. People were far more likely to understand the value of human life, even if they didn’t like someone. People were more apt to care about a stranger than they are today. So yeah, society has changed for the worse and is ultimately driving worse behavior. Perhaps we’ve opened Pandora’s box and we can’t put it back in. But, I do believe concrete solutions involve mental health services and campaigns/grass roots to minimize things that lead to mental health issues (#1: be a good parent, #2: community involvement to teach caring about others/reduce selfishness). We need to look hard into tying mental health to firearm access; I’m undecided on the best way to do that, but clearly something needs to be done. I agree with your immediate solution of hardening schools. My kid’s school has many concealed carrying people in it - every school should do this. Every school should have locked doors with controlled access. Combine those two things and you have a significant deterrent/significantly better chance of stopping a shooting/minimizing damage. Bottom line: I’m just as frustrated as others with how things are going in our country regarding murder, especially of children. I don’t want anyone’s kids to be in these situations. But, I want to actually solve the problem, and those who grasp at guns don’t give a fuck about solving the problem, as they are incapable or unwilling to identify the root cause and work towards solving that. It’s a difficult problem and I’m not arguing there’s an easy solution, but it’s disingenuous to say you care when all you do is yell #noguns in the face of the facts, with no effort put towards real solutions.

@FourFans Good points but you’re going nowhere. Prozac is an idiot who votes a blind D ticket just like every idiot who votes a blind R ticket. To further demo the balance of this problem, his statement above makes him as delusional/uninformed/blind as the people who happily push for trump in the primaries. They’re no different from each other, just one is on the D side and the other is on the R side. These people will always exist in our society, unfortunately. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink…

I think most of us have zero desire to vote for him again. At least he got the silent treatment from the crowd when he mocked Desantis like a child at his last rally. Hopefully that’s an indicator of what’s to come. The RNC is absolutely fucking retarded if they nominate him again, as he’s probably the one guy who can actually lose to Biden.

To your first (unquoted) point, I don’t know that Medicaid is the answer, but I am for diverting money from colossally wasteful spending and putting it towards mental health services. To be clear, I do not support more total spending or new taxes, I support throwing Peter off the cliff to pay Paul. Firearms (or hammers, or prescription drugs, etc.) is irrelevant. What’s relevant is we have a systemic issue with not just mental health, but also rapidly declining societal norms and values. Those two things tied together are the RC of our issues that manifest in many ways, one of them being evil shitheads who shoot kids. Grndpndr’s post is a small visual presentation of that. But most importantly, we collectively see far less value in other human life than we used to. We’re not ISIS, but we’re sliding that way (in terms of zero fucks given for the lives of others who aren’t us/our circle). So why has this happened? I could list a thousand things that have driven our society down the toilet, and I believe we specifically have declined further than other first world countries (likely because we have more money and innovative capability that has netted us some really negative things, amongst all the great stuff too of course).

Another mental health case kills kids in a school, and predictably all the dems can talk about is gun laws. Not one mention of the shooter’s mental health illness, specifically trans in this case. They do not give one genuine fuck about saving kids, they care only about power. I’ll keep saying it, if all you talk about is guns and don’t talk about/do anything to address mental health and societal issues, you do not care about kids at all because you refuse to identify and address the RC.

The root cause of all of these kids doing this is shitty parents. Either shitty because they support their kid having a mental health crisis, or so detached from their kid’s life they had no idea any of this was happening until too late. Either way they failed their kid, horrifically.

So what is China’s takeaway from this? I’m not sure what they can take away from this that means anything beyond the square root of fuck all. I mean, I guess they can take away that the gov doesn’t want to talk about stuff like this, but then felt pressured to when joe blow posted it. Cool, you caught the Tater China, well done.

That news piece makes me chuckle… Meh, believe what you want.

And if he kills a 5th person, it’ll be because of white privilege.

Hmmm, we’ll that’s one assumption without supporting evidence. The timeline was politically driven, not capabilities driven.

“Wait, you don’t need $469k/yr to make end’s meat? I don’t get it.” - Doug, 17 yr 7ER FO, has 3x secret families who don’t know about each other

I agree. But it still concerns me when enough people to spike the RWR are talking about civil war. It also concerns me when radical people on either side continue to push radical agendas in the face of opposition from what I’ll call “the reasonable” core of our population. There’s far more reasonable people than not, but don’t think that means we can afford to just brush off the crazies and say, “meh, they’ll just go away.” That kind of flippant attitude is exactly how we end up in a very bad spot years down the road.

Everything that is progressive and everything that is ultra-right. Currently the progressives are “out performing” the ultra-right. But neither are good.

I think any of the majors will let you work very little, but the major caveat at all of them is your category manning and seniority will play a huge role in whether you can actually do that or not. I could drop my entire schedule every month at DAL if I so choose - other categories couldn’t drop a single day. It depends!

No, concerned people talk about civil war instead of burying craniums in the sand and ignoring it. Almost half this country (recent poll) says they think a civil war is a very real possibility in the near-ish future. That is frightening we as a country have been sliding that direction. Millions of Americans are just asking insanity to stop, not asking for hard right policies. They just want a relatively middle country. The progressives are heavily leading the charge in making our country as far from the middle as possible. People are fed up with it, and if it can’t be brought back to the middle peacefully, it will be brought back violently. And I very much hope the former happens and not the later.

You must have picked that shirt up during a Kadena TDY in the early 80s.

If this goes down, it will only destroy the people’s confidence in our system that much more. Apparently the liberals really want civil war to happen, because continuing to do shit like this is how that happens. The irony is how poorly that’ll go for them.

Dude, you just glossed over what I wrote. I don’t know a guy who knows of a guy, I’ve personally seen it first hand. Another example is colleges blatantly use race as a decision factor in admittance…and SCOTUS has upheld the legality of that, for now anyways. Asians are perhaps getting the most fucked, as they’ve been purposely excluded from “BIPOC” but also aren’t “white.” The pursuit of “perceived fairness” is alive and well, but I guess you’re too blind to see it.

There’s the law, and then there’s reality. You can’t possibly be so aloof to think this doesn’t happen. I’ve seen it with my own eyes more than once. You are wrong. Related - have you payed attention to Asians getting completely fucked by DEI in this country? If not, look into it, it is in fact very much happening.

Pretty sure the bonus announcement states for each tier how much of it you must serve to avoid recoupment. Serve is defined as not curtailing the orders. For example I think this last 4 year option was you had to not curtail until after 2 years in order to avoid recoupment of those first 2 years, then you would not receive any further bonus payments.

Perhaps a lot of talking past each other here. DEI progressives/leftists/grifters (whatever you want to call them) only care about a narrative, which is to say they want to cook the books with numbers and don’t give a fuck about actual qualifications or merit, and in fact are biased and racists against certain demographics. On the other side are the ultra-right people who think women don’t belong in a cockpit, gay people can’t possibly be doctors, etc. (insert whatever other similar statement you want). I think most of us agree DEI could simply be destroying barriers to truly provide equality of opportunity. I don’t give a fuck how many white vs. black fly airplanes, but we can do better recruiting and educating in inner city Atlanta. I don’t care if we have 50% women or 2% women pilots, but we can put more effort into targeted recruiting at women’s schools, female sports events, whatever. We should be after these demographics not because of physical traits, but to maximize the applicant pool and look for hiring opportunities to diversify backgrounds (and therefore thought), but with zero fucks given about immutable traits. That direction and weight of effort of education and recruitment is how DEI could be a good thing, but instead, as it stands today, is all kinds of fucked up.

I remember almost hitting a PTIDS tether on a show of force…wouldn’t that have been a bitch if that’s how my story ended. “So he died fighting valiantly in Afghanistan?” ”No, a balloon took him down” ”….”

I could make maybe a little north of $100k (all taxable vs. only ~ half of mil pay being taxable). That just doesn’t cut it for me, but it may for someone else who has some nice additional income sources (spouse, passive real estate, etc). Also be ready to miss almost the entire summer and also be gone in the spring and fall for training, aircraft deliveries, etc. If you have kids, that’s a real deal killer for many. But again, that all may be irrelevant to some people, in which case go for it, because I imagine the flying is awesome and rewarding.

What!?!?! And here I was back in the day walking uphill both ways in 6.9’ of snow to go write OPRs the old fashioned way. Character count - the AF just can’t help itself, it has to make everything as retarded as possible.

If you know you’re moving there eventually, I don’t see a reason not to do that. Of course the big question is why aren’t you moving to that base sooner…are you talking about not getting that base for a while because it’s senior?