Blue

I'm not much of a Twitter user, and honestly thought the above Tweet must be some kind of photoshop or otherwise fake. After all, it's the US Food and Drug Administration, right? A federal agency with a $3.2 Billion (!!!) budget. You'd expect their official Twitter account to be more, I dunno, official? Went on Twitter and scrolled back to August, and sure enough, the above is legit. This guys Tweet below more or less sums up my thoughts. Honestly, how can anyone take anything from the .gov seriously these days?

That's part of what I question. My experience with the major depots (Ogden, Warner Robins, Ok City) is that the folks doing the depot line maintenance are all govt. civilians, who work whatever line they're told to. They're employed by the depot, not any particular production line. Maybe @Prosuper can chime in here.

Agreed, some of the logic and statements seem suspect. I wish the author provided more sources, or at least more background. Hence my ask if anyone in the A-10 community could corroborate any of the claims. His statements on the A-10 depot work for example. He jumps around from claiming it's an issue of parts, then an issue of manpower that leaves the depot with about half the throughput they need for the A-10 line. That's a pretty significant claim, with not much more than some hand-waving as a source. For me, it's not so much the question of tactical relevance of the A-10. It's more the question of to what extent is the Air Force going against the will of Congress to starve the A-10 fleet out of existence.

The Project on Government Oversight offers a good write-up on the Air Force's latest underhanded efforts to "retire" the A-10. Some pretty damning charges in this article; would be interested if anyone in the A-10 community (pilots, maintainers, depot workers, etc) could corroborate any of this. https://www.pogo.org/analysis/2021/09/new-document-shows-how-the-air-force-is-starving-the-a-10-fleet/

Yet you still continue to post.

Yeah, this. @pawnman, you're probably the most prolific poster in this thread. Why don't you step back and tell us a little about yourself, and why this is such an important topic to you.

Indeed. I'd be interested to know more about how the Aussie police force is used in these scenarios. I'm no expert on the law enforcement field, but here in the left-wing utopia of Chicago, the local PD has gone on record at being vehemently opposed to any kind of vax mandate. Very early on in the covid shenanigans, they half-heartedly enforced the mayor's rules on closures and the like, but that quickly evaporated. Wonder if things are different wrt the Aussie police force?

ZeroHedge is a daily read for me, more or less. It aggregates a lot of good stuff from all over. Market Ticker is a blog by one guy. The comments section is only OK, but I think his writing offers a good view on politics, the economy, etc. Some of his "must read" archived stuff is really good (links of the right hand side of his main page). Reddit can be worthwhile, but as others have pointed out, Reddit as a whole is very biased, and wrong-think tends to get one downvoted, banned, etc. MGTOW had its issues, but there was a lot of good content there about society, relationships between men and women, etc. It was banned about a month ago. NoNewNormal was a pretty popular subreddit (100k+ members), with content revolving around skepticism of Covid lockdowns, vaccines, etc. As of just today (like a couple of hours ago), it's been banned.

This is likely inappropriate given the gravity of current events at Kabul today. However, when I sit back here in my comfy office chair and daydream, I think about what could have happened over the past couple of weeks. There was that brief several days (week?) after Kabul began to crumble, but before they closed the airport to commercial flights. Folks were getting on whatever they could. Watching FlightRadar24, a Turkish Airlines 777-300 seemed to be one of the last civi aircraft to get out (16 Aug). Would have loved to see Trump have his 757 fly to Kabul to pick up a load of evacuees. The pics and video footage and accompanying chaos in the media would have been entertaining if nothing else. I'm not an expert in 757-200 ops, but bet it could have done it in two legs from NYC.

I was also surprised at the 15k number. I knew there were NGOs operating in-country, but I would have assumed a much smaller footprint of American civilians. The sheer number of different NGOs is surprising as well. The size, impact, current status, and future of all the NGOs in Afghanistan is something I'd be interested to see.

Dang man. The discourse here is good, but if you get all bent out of shape every time you get a lousy downvote, you're gonna have a bad time.

Ongoing chaos at Kabul Airport in the video below. However, FlightRadar24 showed a Turkish Airlines 777-300 (flight TK706) landed at Kabul ~30 minutes ago, so it seems maybe some semblance of order remains?

Kinzinger will likely lose his seat in the House due to redistricting. He's in a corner, and as one tends to do when cornered, he's flailing. Will be interesting to watch where he lands.

Taking a page from the AOC playbook.....

U2 flyby opens the show today. Cool. How does that work? Direct flight from Beale, do a flyby of OSH, then return to Beale? Can it be followed on FlightRadar24, FlightAware, etc?

My SO has become fascinated with gymnastics this Olympics. She's been watching all the events, along with the accompanying documentaries and the like. My take based on her endless prattling on our meaningful discussion: US Olympic level gymnastics kinda sucks for the competitors. They start really young, and train like mad. Nothing wrong with that, but it really seems to be more driven by overbearing parents, rather than ambitious kids. On top of all the sacrifices involved with training at that elite level, you have the fact that the longtime team doctor turned out to be a world-champion sex offender (Larry Nassar). Thought there was something where Biles was scheduled for six events, whereas the other teammates were only scheduled for two? Hadn't heard of her being "deified" in the media for quitting, I got more of a sense people were critical of her for "letting her team down," etc. Not sure though, I haven't been digging into it much. My opinion, based on the little I've seen - good for her. Something to be said for having the courage to stop, assess yourself, and say no when everyone around you is pushing in the other direction. She's long since proven herself to the world. Hope she weathers the storm, returns to the US, gets married, writes a book, whatever-makes-her-happy.

Ahh, good. The "Whatabout-ism" phase of the discussion.

I am very far removed from these circles, and my only current contribution to the military is being a taxpayer. That said, in the civvie world, when a promotion doesn’t make logical sense (not based on merit, etc), the usual answer seems to be based in meeting some diversity metric. YMMV.

“Hearts exploding” might be a bit of hyperbole, but I’d challenge anyone to refute what tac airlifter said.

Well that's.......interesting. First time I've seen responsibilities for "Diversity and Inclusion" lumped in with "Extremism." Does that mean all the various "Head of Diversity" positions scattered throughout the DoD are now going have additional responsibilities for rooting out "Extremism?"

So, on the topic of government programs run amok due to mission creep and nut-job leadership: https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2021/05/24/commerce-department-monitoring-itms/

Wife had friends over, so needed to get out of the house for a bit. Figured hitting the local cineplex would be a good way to kill some time. Was in the mood for some action/adventure, and narrowed the choices down to: Wrath of Man: Jason Statham does the Jason Statham action thing in a Guy Ritchie movie. Nobody: Better-Call-Saul Bob Odenkirk does a "shadowy badass pulled outta retirement" thing. Army of the Dead: Zombies and Las Vegas. And guns and stuff. Settled on Nobody. Was disappointed. Good cast, good concept, but the whole thing kinda missed, as if they had a half-baked script and just made the rest up. Glad I didn't go to Army of the Dead, just realized it's 2:28 long. Awful long for a zombie flick. Curious about Wrath of Man, but the Guy Ritchie stuff always seems to come off as all sizzle and no substance.

Alright, it's not obvious to me. What's going on within the DoD (serious question).

Link to the Disqus page of "Military Watchdog." where you can see his comment (about three comments down), under article headline "Space Force CO Fired Over Comments About Marxism in the Military Now Subject of IG Probe." @Springer, thanks for posting that. Any kind of "comments section" of an article usually seems to be an exercise in sifting through the nonsense to find the occasional gem. That particular comment is very insightful. Edit to add: Is it really possible that this one guy, Bishop Garrison, is the cause of all the Woke nonsense endemic in the DoD? His Linkedin bio certainly support the assertation he's some kind of beltway bandit bullshit artist, who's spent the better part of the last 10 years running around DC as part of various Institutes, Policy Centers, etc, to include stints on Hillary's campaign and the Biden transition team.

Once something like this is kicked off and funded, it'll be impossible to kill. More concerning, as is inevitable in any government program, Mission Creep will eventually set in. While this program may have some good intentions at the start (even if I don't agree with them), there is no telling what it will end up as 10 years from now.