trump (convicted felon, defamer, insurrectionist, contemnor, and rapist - $537M)

[raison de arizona]

We all know what it means when tfg starts accusing people of being criminals...

[Uninformed]

“Stop Waiting for Trump to Get Convicted”:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archi ... ed/627113/

Final paragraph:
“Which leaves society with a challenge. What to do? We count on criminal law to serve as a deterrent to malicious behavior. But Trump seems likely to evade it. Just as the protection of impeachment against mendacity has proven inadequate, criminal law will probably prove the same. And that means that the only real protection against Trump’s malignancy is the ballot box. Don’t invest too much hope in Merrick Garland. Even with the best of will (which I do not doubt he has), he can’t save democracy. Only we can.”

[Gregg]

Honestly, if they can't bring some kind of Justice to Trump is it worth saving?

FFS, he turned it into a banana republic and I spent my twenties in Central America so I know banana republics. If they just le that pass, just signal that that is going to be tolerated, well then sorry, I'm done.

[Dr. Ken]

[AndyinPA]

Blabber, blabber, blabber.

[raison de arizona]

Only the best people.

Kid Rock says Donald Trump sought his advice on North Korea and Islamic State
Musician, who visited White House in 2017 with Ted Nugent and Sarah Palin, said I’m like, ‘Am I supposed to be in on this shit?’


The rapper Kid Rock said Donald Trump once asked him for advice about US policy on Islamic State and North Korea.

In a famous picture from 2017, the rapper was shown in the Oval Office, behind the Resolute Desk, with Trump, the rock musician Ted Nugent and Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska and vice-presidential nominee. Palin said she invited the rightwing rockers “because Jesus was booked”.

“I was there with [Trump] one day when he ended the caliphate,” Kid Rock, 51 and born Robert Ritchie, told Carlson in reference to US efforts against the Islamic State.

“He wanted to put out a tweet … I don’t like to speak out of school. I hope I’m not. But … the tweet was, and I’m paraphrasing, but it’s like, you know, ‘If you ever joined the caliphate, you know, trying to do this, you’re going to be dead.’

“He goes, ‘What do you think?’ [ I said] ‘Awesome. I can’t add any better.’ But then it comes out and it’s … reworded and more political, to look politically correct. And just, ‘be afraid’.”

He also said he and Trump were once “looking at maps. I’m like, you know, like, ‘Am I supposed to be in on this shit?’ Like I make dirty records sometimes. I do.

“‘What do you think we should do about North Korea?’ I’m like, ‘What? I don’t think I’m qualified to answer this.’”

In four years in office, Trump both threatened and met with the leader of North Korea, Kim Jong-un. No progress was made in ending the US standoff with the nuclear-armed dictator.

Some online critics wondered whether Trump really asked Kid Rock what to do about North Korea.

But after Kid Rock’s White House visit with Nugent and Palin in 2017, Nugent told the New York Times the group discussed “‘health, fitness, food, rock’n’roll, Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley, secure borders, the history of the United States, guns, bullets, bows and arrows, North Korea, Russia and a half-dozen other issues”.

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/ ... amic-state

[Slim Cognito]

I think Kid Rock is almost as big a piece of shit as Ted Nugent. That said, I'd believe them over trump any day.

[Frater I*I]

No, honestly we can't do with out those "44 year old planes"* as we have no replacements for them at this time.

[I'm guessing he's talking about the F-15 which was first introduced 46 years ago, is our all weather interceptor, new ones are still being built because we have yet to get a replacement for it...]

[northland10]

No, honestly we can't do with out those "44 year old planes"* as we have no replacements for them at this time.

[I'm guessing he's talking about the F-15 which was first introduced 46 years ago, is our all weather interceptor, new ones are still being built because we have yet to get a replacement for it...]

It's still a young one compared to the B-52s which had the last B-52H's come off the line in 1961-1963. Something like 64 are still flying and 12 more are available in long-term storage. I heard 2045 was being considered for the final retirement but now they are thinking about bumping that date to later.

I guess this is what happens when you find a design that works so well. It is hard to find something to replace it. The new-fangled toys brought lots of new stuff but also brought a platform that had no long-term stability (not to mention, I think the B-1 has limitations on what it can carry, due to treaties).

I read not long ago that the military was looking into equipment that was more mission updatable. In other words, they could keep the overall infrastructure of a platform but swap out internal components and software easily for future mission changes, thus allowing upgrades without having to create a whole new platform. I don't know if the USAF has bought into that yet.

[Frater I*I]

It's still a young one compared to the B-52s which had the last B-52H's come off the line in 1961-1963. Something like 64 are still flying and 12 more are available in long-term storage. I heard 2045 was being considered for the final retirement but now they are thinking about bumping that date to later.

I guess this is what happens when you find a design that works so well. It is hard to find something to replace it. The new-fangled toys brought lots of new stuff but also brought a platform that had no long-term stability (not to mention, I think the B-1 has limitations on what it can carry, due to treaties).

I read not long ago that the military was looking into equipment that was more mission updatable. In other words, they could keep the overall infrastructure of a platform but swap out internal components and software easily for future mission changes, thus allowing upgrades without having to create a whole new platform. I don't know if the USAF has bought into that yet.

2060 is the plan, they started a program 5 years ago to zero hour the airframes, there is however an aircraft in the pipeline from Lockheed to replace it, the B-21 Raider, expected to enter service by 26-27

As well as size.

The M1A2 Abrams is an example of this...

[Gregg]

The F-15 is also totally bad ass. The fact is, around 50 years ago, the planes got to where they were capable of killing the pilots with the maneuvers they were capable of, so it didn't do much good to make them faster able to turn quicker etc.... An F-15 cannot be flown to its full potential because it would literally kill the pilot. The Air Force tested an interceptor version of the SR-71 (YF-13B) and it just didn't make sense. You can't keep them on patrol because they use too much fuel to be kept up, they take too long to get ready to fly to be left ready on the tarmac (fueling them ahead of time is a problem, they leak so bad on the ground the tanks would empty just sitting there) and trying to fly the kinds of things an interceptor needs to do at Mach 3.2 isn't something you'd call pleasant for the flight crew.

The only advances that made sense after that were stealth and then unmanned aircraft. And for the most part, that's the way we've gone.

[busterbunker]

Off Topic

I think the B-21 is replacing the B-1's and B-2's. Not the B-52's. Rock Lobster.

[roadscholar]

The F-15 is also totally bad ass. The fact is, around 50 years ago, the planes got to where they were capable of killing the pilots with the maneuvers they were capable of, so it didn't do much good to make them faster able to turn quicker etc.... An F-15 cannot be flown to its full potential because it would literally kill the pilot. The Air Force tested an interceptor version of the SR-71 (YF-13B) and it just didn't make sense. You can't keep them on patrol because they use too much fuel to be kept up, they take too long to get ready to fly to be left ready on the tarmac (fueling them ahead of time is a problem, they leak so bad on the ground the tanks would empty just sitting there) and trying to fly the kinds of things an interceptor needs to do at Mach 3.2 isn't something you'd call pleasant for the flight crew.

The only advances that made sense after that were stealth and then unmanned aircraft. And for the most part, that's the way we've gone.

Plus, it's easy to maintain a craft in perfect order when you have an unlimited budget. A 44-year-old fighter is not like a 1978 Ford.

[raison de arizona]

Mo Brooks failed the litmus test and is paying the price.

[neeneko]

The only advances that made sense after that were stealth and then unmanned aircraft. And for the most part, that's the way we've gone.

I also gather that a lot of the advances have been in things like sensors, weapons systems, countermeasures, and integration with other units (there is some fancy name for it that I am blanking on), things that can (and have been) retrofitted to existing aircraft.

[Kendra]

Perhaps Mo hasn't got the word yet?

[raison de arizona]

he changed his name to include the endorsement, whatta maroon!

[AndyinPA]

I can't get away from the Dr. Oz ads here. He has one that shows DFO coming on his show and shaking his hand with a big grin. He is NOT the one DFO has endorsed here in the run for Senate, but whatever.

[Suranis]

Ironically, the thing that made TFG stand out in the promaries was that he was the only one that was not engaged in the IHATEHILLARY wrestling match. He was the only one saying that things were going to get better for people (becasue he was brilliant and fantastic and the best ever, he would run everything so smooth and his leadership would have everyone drooling etc) In short he was the only one addressing what people actually cared about.

Now they are all in an ILOVETRUMP wrestling match and the people who actually stand aside from that and talk about what actually matters will stand out.

[johnpcapitalist]

No, honestly we can't do with out those "44 year old planes"* as we have no replacements for them at this time.

[I'm guessing he's talking about the F-15 which was first introduced 46 years ago, is our all weather interceptor, new ones are still being built because we have yet to get a replacement for it...]

It's still a young one compared to the B-52s which had the last B-52H's come off the line in 1961-1963. Something like 64 are still flying and 12 more are available in long-term storage. I heard 2045 was being considered for the final retirement but now they are thinking about bumping that date to later.

The B-52 is scheduled to continue flying until at least 2060, and it may be continued past that point. Late last year, the USAF awarded a contract to Rolls Royce to re-engine the B-52 fleet with new commercial business jet engines, which will give them another 30 years of life. Bizjet engines tend to go 10,000+ hours between major overhauls, so the expectation is that few engines will need to come off the wing for overhauls in the remaining service life of the plane. The current TF33 engines are much older so have much lower time between overhauls, and the engines in service are relatively fragile so there are lots of unplanned maintenance events.

Bombers can be exceptionally long-lived because they fly a mission profile like an airliner - a fairly predictable flight regime, with takeoff, high altitude cruise and then a landing. No high-G turns or engines repeatedly going from idle to afterburner and back. They also fly only about 300 hours per year, so if you take care of them, they'll last for a long time. The B-52 airframe is so over-engineered that they haven't developed some of the structural problems like wing cracking of other older large military aircraft like the C-5A.

Everybody keeps ancient bombers in service for many decades. The Russian strategic bomber is the Tu-95 "Bear," which is a propeller-driven design from the early 1950s that looks like it could be straight out of WW II. They undoubtedly have some real maintenance challenges with these because they use a 12,000-horsepower turboprop engine (still the largest turboprop to ever enter service, 70 years later) driving counter-rotating propellers, which necessitates an undoubtedly finicky gearbox on each engine. Given the Russian reputation for quality manufacturing, I'd be surprised if they can get those in the air for 100 hours per year, and it's likely that at least half the fleet are hangar queens. They're planning to keep that platform flying for a century as well.

I guess this is what happens when you find a design that works so well. It is hard to find something to replace it. The new-fangled toys brought lots of new stuff but also brought a platform that had no long-term stability (not to mention, I think the B-1 has limitations on what it can carry, due to treaties).

While there's a temptation to believe that the old stuff is better and thus that the new stuff was a waste of money, in this case, the old stuff is merely different, not better. Both the B-1 and B-2 (and in the future, the B-21) are designed to be "penetrating" bombers. That means they can execute missions in enemy territory, entering and exiting undetected. They don't need to have air superiority established via fighters before overflying contested territory ("contested" = where people might actually shoot back at you). In the B-52 heyday, the battle doctrine was that fighters would come in and establish air superiority by shooting down all the other guy's planes. Ground attack aircraft would jam radio communications, shut down surface-to-air missile sites and render radar inoperative. That would then open the skies for waves of high-capacity bombers to come in and pulverize what's left before a ground invasion would hold territory.

But the mission changed. As potential adversaries built up massive batteries of increasingly capable anti-aircraft missiles, it became nearly impossible to defeat all of them, so B-52s and similar aircraft on high-altitude bombing missions would never really be safe. The mission had to change to low-altitude penetration with an aircraft large enough to carry a useful payload, but agile enough to fly a varying mission profile at low altitude like a fighter. You can do an aileron roll in a B-1 and you can fly the famous "Mach Loop" training course in it, as a guy I know has done. You'd never do that in a BUFF (pilots' nickname for the B-52).

When stealth technology came along in the 1980s, the B-2 was a natural evolution of the mission. High altitude stealth gave you back the range you gave up with the B-1 because you were flying close to the ground. You could take off from England in a B-2 and strike Tehran and return without refueling, while evading all their surface to air missile defenses. The lack of need to refuel would be a huge force multiplier. But the cost of early stealth technology was prohibitive, so the program was cancelled.

The B-52 remains in service because of its huge capacity. But if there's a mission involving contested airspace, it's now relegated to being a standoff platform, dropping cruise missiles and long-range precision guided munitions from outside an area where the aircraft could be threatened. That's worth keeping around, but it's not a complete strategic solution. Ability to function in contested airspace is more essential today than it was at any time since WWII, which is why they're building the B-21.

I read not long ago that the military was looking into equipment that was more mission updatable. In other words, they could keep the overall infrastructure of a platform but swap out internal components and software easily for future mission changes, thus allowing upgrades without having to create a whole new platform. I don't know if the USAF has bought into that yet.

That's a goal of the F-35 and it's also a key expectation for newer UAV's and all other new aircraft, particularly swarms of coordinating autonomous vehicles. One concept has the F-35 functioning as a network server for lots of unmanned systems, with oceans of computing power on board that take sensor data and process it on the aircraft either for the pilot or for upload to theater or global command and control systems.

The F-35 has surprisingly frequent releases of on-board software given the complexity of the systems on the plane and the life safety criticality of much of it. A big issue for engine makers now is that the demand for electrical power is now far exceeding the capacity of the generators that were originally designed into the platforms. The F-35, fortunately, was designed with enough generator capacity, but older aircraft often can't handle the power loads that the military wants for future systems. It's not as simple as just bolting on a more powerful generator, because there's not the space for a larger generator in the fuselage.

[FiveAcres]

We used to live due north of the Air Force Academy, which meant that we were directly under the air show for graduation and home coming. One time, I looked up from where I was standing on our deck and saw this huge black thing above our house that was making no noise. A few minutes of googling and I realized that I had probably just seen a B2 flyover. I was astonished because I didn't realize they flew them in air shows.

[neeneko]

While there's a temptation to believe that the old stuff is better and thus that the new stuff was a waste of money, in this case, the old stuff is merely different, not better.

I see a couple of caveats with this though.

1) Standard is better than the best solution : Old stuff becomes its own standard, which from both a development and logistical stand point is a huge plus that anything new has to compete with.

2) The proof of utility is existence : Old stuff that sucks or does not do its job well enough get replaces, old stuff that does its job well sticks around. After a while, the only old stuff around is good old stuff, and that is always hard for new stuff to go up against since it has to be better by a larger margin.

[johnpcapitalist]

We used to live due north of the Air Force Academy, which meant that we were directly under the air show for graduation and home coming. One time, I looked up from where I was standing on our deck and saw this huge black thing above our house that was making no noise. A few minutes of googling and I realized that I had probably just seen a B2 flyover. I was astonished because I didn't realize they flew them in air shows.

One year, I was visiting a family friend who lived in Glendale, California, at a home up in the hills in the north part of town. It was New Year's Day, and we were having brunch. I heard a faint whooshing sound and went outside to look. It was a pair of B-2's flying low-altitude racetracks in formation in a holding pattern prior to doing a flyby down the length of Colorado Boulevard for the start of the Rose Parade in Pasadena, the town next door. I looked it up later and found that the place I was visiting was on the straight line you'd get if you extended Colorado Blvd. west through the hills. It was pretty cool to watch them do a half dozen orbits before the flyby.

Those planes came from Whiteman AFB in central Missouri, the only base with the B-2. They flew out, orbited until they were cued, did a 2-minute flyby, and headed directly back to Missouri. B-2's rarely land anywhere other than Whiteman. During the various Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns, they took off from Whiteman, tanked a few times, dropped their loads, and turned around and headed home on a 30-hour mission. They don't even do forward basing at safe places away from prying eyes like Diego Garcia, which is much closer to Iraq than Missouri.

Some estimates peg the hourly operating cost for a B-2 at around $150,000, so the total mission cost to buzz the Rose Parade was probably $2 million to $2.5 million for two minutes of publicity.

[raison de arizona]

Some estimates peg the hourly operating cost for a B-2 at around $150,000, so the total mission cost to buzz the Rose Parade was probably $2 million to $2.5 million for two minutes of publicity.

They could have bought a 15-second Superbowl ad for that

[Phoenix520]

I used to drive to San Diego regularly when I worked for NAL*. One day I was with my supervisor, who was driving. We were near Camp Pendleton.

“Oh, Lloyd, look at that!” In the lane next to us was a kit car made from the fuselage of a small jet. The “pilot” drove, and the passenger, who at this moment was reading a newspaper, holding it up so both pages were spread out.

Floyd swiveled his head to look at the exact moment the passenger lowered his paper and a B2 flew by, really low, on the far side of him. Lloyd was astonished, as were all the other drivers around us. It’s a miracle no one lost control.

Lloyd never even saw the kit car.

When the retired space shuttle made its last flight before heading to the museum, I lived near JPL. My neighbors and I went up to our landlord’s balcony to watch. The shuttle overflew JPL twice, which mean he went right over our heads, LOW, twice. Both times he waggled his wings at the scientists below.

I still get verklempt thinking about how cool that was.

* New American Library, publisher of all the classics you had to read in school.