Did they really name the C3 "Xtard"?

Great, 4chan has an airforce now! Ohwell, better them than WallStreetBets.

I don't trust your video, not even a little bit.

I know you just dismissed opposing evidence earlier up thread, but here's a link to audio recordings and english transcripts the NSA captured and posted from Israeli helicopters in the area at the time. Again, I know you dismiss it, but they certainly were uncertain of what had just been hit/attacked.

https://www.nsa.gov/news-features/declassified-documents/uss-liberty/recordings.shtml

Friendly fire is a fact of war, Canadians on a training mission in Afghanistan where killed by USAF runs despite their training operation and location being registered with the airforce. Fatal screw ups happen in war so it seems much less of a stretch to call this an accident than a deliberate scheme against an ally.

You go ahead and believe some video referring to the 'mockingbird media' and using literally 4-5 words of audio and leaving out all other communications though, I'm sure they left it out for brevity and not because it contradicts their narrative. That's something only the mockingbird media would do...

Or perhaps more briefly, provide a little better evidence before acting like this is as clear cut as our knowledge that the earth is round...

Your video, Croatian airforce pilot puts his Pilatus to the test, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

1. I hate writing lists like this.
2. but only because I'm afraid I don't have enough cool stuff to put on them
3. I swear.. a lot, but I get away with it... in person, because I'm Irish, and in writing, because I'm an eloquent motherfucker
4. When I was a kid, I really wanted to be a space shuttle pilot. My entire room was covered in space posters, until I was eventually convinced this wouldn't happen in my early teens (kinda hard to be a shuttle pilot when you live in a country with no space program or even an airforce).... at which point....
5. I started listening to heavy metal and for years I wanted to be a touring musician. Played in a few bands, even recorded some stuff, but I was never really that good, but I did teach my brother to start playing
6.... who is now waaaay better than I ever was, has a degree in music and releases some of my favourite music.
7. I am by a long way the most level-headed member of my family.
8. I like to think I'm resourceful (read as "watched one too many episodes of macgyver as a kid") and set myself little challenges all the time (like trying to break into my own house)
9. I've been arrested once and spent a night in a cell
10. I love the mountains (snowboarding, mountain biking) but didn't realise this until my late 20s. It's one of my great regrets that I didn't start these things sooner.
11. I'm a 3rd dan (soon to be 4th!) black belt in Aikido, but....
12. I haven't been in a fight since high school.
13. A small immature part of me really wants someone to attack me so I can find out.
14. The rest of me isn't nearly that stupid.
15. I love to cook (especially BBQ), and will happily spend all day preparing a meal for my wife or my friends.
16. I don't have or want kids, but I get on great with them (I suspect they think I roughly as mature as they are).
17. I teach a kids Aikido class.
18. I'm very good at my job, but it's just a means to an end for me. If I never needed to work again, I wouldn't.
19. No-one will read this far.
20. I think people are basically good, but they're also stupid and easily manipulated... this goes for me too.
21. I really want to travel again, but life keeps getting in the way.
22. I'm a total geek.
23. I like to look at everything from all angles, but there are somethings I have no time for (homepathy, racism, homophobia, climate deniers, etc). I don't believe in debating these people.
24. I sometimes wonder if I should put my money where my mouth is and run for public office, but then I remember that that would seriously cut into my snowboarding/mountainbiking/aikido-ing time.
25. I am very tempted to delete this list.

In Soviet Russia Airforce during Thanksgiving, Turkey shoots you!




Ya. That was stretching it.

the infantry love these planes and the airforce hate them. They are cheap (relative) and highly effective

You're missing the point. The USA may be able to say that they own the moon, and even get everyone on earth to agree to it, but without a permanent base on the moon, and a way to defend it, they can't enforce the claim.

Let's imagine that the whole of a small country, like France, is magically teleported to the moon. (With a protective air bubble, and the necessary resources to survive and defend it.)

The entire population of earth might still agree that the moon belongs to the USA, (as they could be coerced by military action and trade agreements), but the entire population of the moon would say the moon belonged to France - or the Moonians as they might call themselves - until the USA becomes motivated to put a competing presence there.

Flags are an effective means of designating territory on earth because they represent the nation whose power is backing up the claim. The flag on the moon is not backed up by the US Navy or Airforce, but instead with the knowledge that they last put three people there, for under a week, 41 years ago.

Isn't this breaking a couple of hundred rules in their airforce? would love to get a new response link on this one.

Edit: nm, Brazilian not British, so yea no rules. -_-

Back in '88 I got to be on the tarmac at an airforce base under a space shuttle strapped to a 747. If you have not seen it you can not imagine how massive that combination is.

>> ^Payback:

Drones have already proven where the future of air power is.


Only against poor, little countries with hardly any airforce to begin with.
U - S- A -- U - S - A -- U - S - A

The Myanmar Airforce sure has downsized since the 80s.

So, these statistics are from the IRS and isn't internet hearsay. Medicare makes the percentages paid by top earners go up. So do property taxes. (Sales tax and state taxation is another discussion and doesn't involve the Federal government. In any case there's no way to enforce a progressive sales tax. So if this is unfair, then the only thing to do is eliminate it altogether. But that is a state-by-state decision.) Medicare along with Medicaid and some other mandatory taxes account for 33% of Federal expenses/budget, while social Security for 21% (even thoug Social Security is a separate Trust Fund).

Social security is capped for various reasons and it doesn't have anything to do with current tax debates or legislative proposals. Social security tax is about 15%, half of which is paid by the employer. Social Security is in theory a separate budget from the rest of the federal budget. And for 2011, the total tax is reduced with the employee paying only 4.2% of it and the employer paying 6.2%.
Medicare, as mentioned, is not capped at any income. On a million dollar income you pay about $14,500. On a 45K income you pay about $652.

Unemployment taxes are paid fully by employers not employees.

The complaint that the bottom 80% pay 13% is misleading because the bottom 50% (half the population) pay between only 0-3%.

Top 10% (not top 20%) - pay 70%
Bottom 50% - pay 3%
Everyone else - 27%

But it gets a bit more complicated because about 47% of households pay 0% income tax, a majority in the bottom 40% of earners.

Top 10% earners have to pay more (70%) for the roads, government salaries, wars, national parks, Airforce One, NPR, corporate welfare, bank bailouts, and most other government services (the bottom 50% pay less than 3% of it) but when buying goods (with or without sales tax), like coffee or an iPhone or pumping gas or a movie ticket, it does cost top earners a smaller percentage of their income.

Some other "taxes" are, in effect, flat taxation like business license, car registration, bridge toll, sanitation and flood control, parking meters, etc.

Fairness in this is a matter of opinion (and self-interest). I'm not an accountant so I can't really go into all the various loopholes in our tax code.

And I'm talking mostly about taxation at the Federal level of which income tax accounts for about half. Like I said, sales tax is a state matter and so are fees like parking meters etc. Taxation at the state level seems to draw less controversy because Democratic states will "happily" pay more and Republican states will "happily" pay less and you can select a state to live in at just the right taxation for you.

And as we all know on the Sift, you have that statists on one side who think more taxation is better because the government is here to help and anti-statists on the other who think "that government is best wich governs least" (or not at all). And also the hybrids like Lyndon Johnson, Larry King, Jon Stewart, and others, including most corporatists.

>> ^Ariane:

>> ^Trancecoach:
The Top 1% also pays nearly 40% of the Federal Income Tax
>> ^ghark:
Some interesting facts about the top 1%:
The Top 1 Percent Of Americans Owns 40 Percent Of The Nation’s Wealth
The Top 1 Percent Of Americans Take Home 24 Percent Of National Income
The Top 1 Percent Of Americans Own Half Of The Country’s Stocks, Bonds, And Mutual Funds
The Top 1 Percent Of Americans Have Only 5 Percent Of The Nation’s Personal Debt
The Top 1 Percent Are Taking In More Of The Nation’s Income Than At Any Other Time Since The 1920s
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/10/03/334156/top-five
-wealthiest-one-percent/


Umm, no.
"The Internet is awash with statements that the top 1 percent pays, depending on the year, 38 percent or more than 40 percent of taxes.
It’s true that the top 1 percent of wage earners paid 38 percent of the federal income taxes in 2008 (the most recent year for which data is available). But people forget that the income tax is less than half of federal taxes and only one-fifth of taxes at all levels of government.
Social Security, Medicare and unemployment insurance taxes (known as payroll taxes) are paid mostly by the bottom 90 percent of wage earners. That’s because, once you reach $106,800 of income, you pay no more for Social Security, though the much smaller Medicare tax applies to all wages. Warren Buffett pays the exact same amount of Social Security taxes as someone who earns $106,800."
http://wweek.com/portland/article-17350-9_thin
gs_the_rich_dont_want_you_to_know_about_taxes.html
Sales taxes and other flat taxes are even more unfair. We low income people pretty much spend all the money we make and as a result pay (in my state) 8% of my income in sales taxes, while the top 1% only spend a small fraction of their wealth on items likely to collect sales tax, so I would not be surprised if the average top 1% pays even 1% on sales tax.
The top 20% earn 93% of the wealth, yet only pay 70% of the taxes, leaving the other 13% to the bottom 80% who only earn 7% of the wealth. THAT is what needs to be corrected.

My question is.. will we ever actually use it? The F22 was damn impressive but because we no longer have any enemies with any real air force capability it was simply never used. I can see the whole 'but someday we might' attitude but to me that's bunk. I mean even if we invaded Iran, their airforce consists largely of 80's aircraft that we gave them, F4 Phantoms, F86 Sabers. Their most up to date aircraft are defunct F14's we purposefully sold them without given them any repair manuals and defective parts and some MiG-29's that the Russians gave them that are likewise as defunct. Sure they have a lot of these but against US or European aircraft such as the F-35 or Europe's modern Typhoon or Sukhoi SU-47, a country like Iran would be outmatched dramatically and a confrontation for air space would likely be over in weeks and we'd likely barely loose a single fighter thanks to modern fly-by-wire and 'fire and forget' weapons.

So in the end I just don't see the point. This is corporate welfare at it's finest.

It's what I always say: You need a 21. century aircraft designed to fight 21. century aircraft to fight tiny 20. century armies with a small/non-existant airforce.

>> ^Skeeve:


Sorry if I didn't make myself clear.

Naw, you made yourself clear. (I linked to articles discussing the "decade of" thing in my comments above.) I just didn't want to drift too far from what we were actually discussing and wanted to stay on point.

Thus far, I am pretty unwilling to trust King Steve on his word. He's broken his word too often and shown that he can't be trusted. I won't list the lists of reasons to point to that. You seem well informed enough to know the criticisms against him.

You are welcome to your opinion, and I do hope we get some upgrades to the airforce when the time is right (I see you like helicopters but we disagree on that time being the present.

Nice chatting with you.