#Air Force graduation

[creative-pens]

I got 'sandbagged': Biden responds to his fall during Air Force graduation

Biden has been dogged by questions about his age and his fitness to serve, and his missteps have become fodder for political rivals as he campaigns for a second term in 2024.

COLORADO SPRINGS: President Joe Biden quipped that he got “sandbagged” Thursday after he tripped and fell — but was uninjured — while onstage at the US Air Force Academy graduation.

Biden had been greeting the graduates in Colorado Springs, Colorado, at the front of the stage with salutes and handshakes, and turned to jog back toward his seat when he fell. He was helped up by an Air Force officer as well as two members of his US Secret Service detail.

Onlookers, including some members of the official delegation onstage, watched in concern before Biden, who at age 80 is the oldest president in US history, returned to his seat to view the end of the ceremony.

“I got sandbagged,” the president told reporters with a smile when he arrived back at the White House on Thursday evening before pretending to jog into the residence. Two small black sandbags had been onstage supporting the teleprompter used by Biden and other speakers at the graduation.

“He’s fine,” White House communications director Ben LaBolt tweeted after the incident. “There was a sandbag on stage while he was shaking hands.”

Biden has been dogged by questions about his age and his fitness to serve, and his missteps have become fodder for political rivals as he campaigns for a second term in 2024. He has stumbled before going up the stairs and onto Air Force One and he once got caught up in his bike pedals while stopping to talk to reporters near his home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.

Biden’s personal doctor said after the president’s most recent physical exam in February that Biden “remains a healthy, vigorous 80-year-old male, who is fit to successfully execute the duties of the Presidency.” Dr Kevin O’Connor also documented the president's stiffened gait, which O'Connor said was the result of spinal arthritis, a previously broken foot and neuropathy in Biden's feet.

Biden is far from the first national political figure to stumble in public.

President Gerald Ford fell down while walking off Air Force One in 1975. GOP Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas, the GOP presidential nominee at the time, fell off the stage at a campaign rally in 1996. President Barack Obama tripped walking up the stairs to a stage at a 2012 event. “I was so fired up, I missed a stair,” he told the crowd.

President Donald Trump's gingerly walk down a ramp at the 2020 West Point commencement also sparked concerns about his health.

Trump, 76, was campaigning in Iowa when he heard about Biden's stumble and alluded to his own episode.

“He actually fell down? Well, I hope he wasn’t hurt,” Trump said after an audience member told him about what had happened to Biden. “The whole thing is crazy. You gotta be careful about that ... 'cause you don’t want that, even if you have to tiptoe down a ramp.”

The audience laughed as Trump recounted slowly inching his way down what he said had been a slippery ramp at the US Military Academy graduation.

“If he fell, it’s too bad,” the former president said. “We gotta just get this thing back on track. That’s a bad place to fall when you’re making, I think it was the Air Force Academy, right? That’s not inspiring.”

Meanwhile, GOP presidential candidate and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis used the opportunity to take a political shot at Biden while at a campaign event in New Hampshire.

“We hope and wish Joe Biden a swift recovery from any injuries he may have sustained,” he said, “but we also wish the United States of America a swift recovery from the injuries it has sustained because of Joe Biden and his policies.”

[purplesaline]

POTS PPL LISTEN UP

You all NEED to know about the Anti-G Straining Maneuver

It's what fighter pilots are taught to do when G forces are pulling all their blood from their brains to their feet (sound familiar?) to help prevent them from blacking out or going unconscious.

I have used this many times and it's very effective.

First tighten/contract all of the muscles in your lower body (abdomen down to toes). This acts much in the same way as compression stockings and helps force blood back upward and prevent it from running en mass to your ankles.

Second step is to take quick, shallow breaths. Basically you're hyperventilating here which helps to super-oxygenate your blood making what little blood you can get to your brain more effective at delivering the much needed oxygen.

If you find this technique at all helpful you can thank lesbian romance novels because that's where I learned about it and went "huh, that's basically what happens when I stand up I wonder if it'll help" and it did so now you know about it too.

[todaysdocument]

Congratulations to everyone graduating this spring! 

U.S. Air Force Academy cadets toss their caps in the air after President Kennedy’s address, June 5, 1963.

Collection JFK-WHP: White House Photographs

Series: Robert Knudsen White House Photographs

Image description: View from behind President Kennedy as he stands on a stage in the U.S. Air Force Academy stadium. Cadets in uniforms of blue jackets, yellow sashes, and white pants stand up from their chairs and throw their caps in the air. 

[seeyoulikeair]

Guess I'm going to Texas in October while on vacation.

[prismatica-the-strange]

Nope, I'm still crying

[qkmlh]

The fact that my tía y tío are deadass there rn getting to watch the fight in person ohhhh I know tía’s gonna be losing it either way

[so-weird-world]

Biden takes a big fall on stage just now at the U.S. Air Force Academy graduation

[incognito-princess]

I love when the President is in town, because my house is in the 3-mile radius of the runway where Air Force One lands and the whole time it's sitting there helicopters and fighter jets circle over my neighborhood. Plus, because it's the USAFA graduation I'll get to see the Thunderbirds take off!

[jcmarchi]

Stopping the bomb

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/stopping-the-bomb/

Stopping the bomb

“The question behind my doctoral research is simple,” says Kunal Singh, an MIT political science graduate student in his final year of studies. “When one country learns that another country is trying to make a nuclear weapon, what options does it have to stop the other country from achieving that goal?” While the query may be straightforward, answers are anything but, especially at a moment when some nations appear increasingly tempted by the nuclear option.

From the Middle East to India and Pakistan, and from the Korean peninsula to Taiwan, Singh has been developing a typology of counterproliferation strategies based on historical cases and to some degree on emergent events. His aim is to clarify what states can do “to stop the bomb before it is made.” Singh’s interviews with top security officials and military personnel involved in designing and executing these strategies have illuminated tense episodes in the past 75 years or so when states have jockeyed to enter the elite atomic club. His insights might upend some of the binary thinking that dominates the field of nuclear security.

“Ultimately, I’d like my work to help decision-makers predict counterproliferation strategy, and draw lessons from it on how to shield their own citizens and economies from the impact of these strategies,” he says.

Types of nonproliferation tactics

On Oct. 7, 2023, Singh awoke to air raid sirens in Jerusalem, where he was conducting interviews, and discovered Israel was under attack. He was airlifted to safety back to the United States, having borne witness to the start of a regional war that “now has become relevant to my research,” he says.

Before his hasty departure, Singh was investigating two singular episodes where military force was deployed to advance nonproliferation goals: Israel’s airstrikes against nuclear reactors in 1981 in Iraq, and in 2007 in Syria. To date, these have been the only major attacks on nuclear facilities outside of an active war.

“I spoke with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who ordered the strike in Syria, and with the commander of the Israeli Air Force who planned the Iraq airstrike, as well as with other members of the security bureaucracy,” says Singh. “Israel feels a large degree of threat because it is a very small country surrounded by hostile powers, so it takes a military route to stop another state from acquiring nuclear weapons,” says Singh. But, he notes, “most of the states which are not in this predicament generally resort to diplomatic methods first, and threaten violence only as a last resort.”

Singh defines the military response by Israel as “kinetic reversion,” one of five types of counterproliferation strategies he has identified. Another is “military coercion,” where a state threatens the use of military force or uses moderate force to demonstrate its commitment to preventing the pursuit of the bomb. States can also use diplomatic and economic leverage over the proliferant to persuade it to drop its nuclear program, what Singh calls “diplomatic inhibition.” 

One form this strategy takes is when one country agrees to give up its program in return for the other doing the same. Another form involves “placing sanctions on a country and excluding them from the world economy, until the country rolls back its program — a strategy the U.S. has employed against Iran, North Korea, Libya, and Pakistan,” says Singh.

India was rumored to have embraced military tactics. “I had always read about the claim that India was ready to attack the Pakistani uranium enrichment plant in Kahuta, and that planes were called off at the last minute,” Singh says. “But in interview after interview I found this was not the case, and I discovered that many written accounts of this episode had been completely blown up.”

In another strategy, “pooled prevention,” nations can band together to apply economic, diplomatic, and military pressure on a potential proliferator.

Singh notes that diplomatic inhibition, pooled prevention, and military coercion have succeeded, historically. “In 2003, Libya gave up its nuclear weapons program completely after the U.S. and U.K. placed sanctions on it, and many states do not even start a nuclear weapons program because they anticipate an attack or a sanction.”

The final strategy Singh defines is “accommodation,” where one or more states decide not to take action against nuclear weapon development. The United States arrived at this strategy when China began its nuclear program — after first considering and rejecting military attacks.

Singh hopes that his five kinds of strategies challenge a “binary trap” that most academics in the field fall into. “They think of counterproliferation either as military attack or no military attack, economic sanctions or no sanctions, and so they miss out on the spectrum of behaviors, and how fluid they can be.”

From journalism to security studies

Singh grew up in Varanasi, a Hindu holy city in the state of Uttar Pradesh. Frequent terrorist attacks throughout India, and some inside his city’s temples, made a deep impression on him during his childhood, he says. A math and science talent, he attended the Indian Institute of Technology, majoring in metallurgical and materials engineering. After a brief stint with a management consulting firm, after college, he landed a job at a think tank, the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi.

“When I moved to New Delhi, I suddenly saw a world which I didn’t know existed,” Singh recalls. “I began meeting people for an evening round of discussions and began reading voraciously: books, editorial and opinion pages in newspapers, and looking for a greater sense of purpose and meaning in my work.”

His widening interests led to a job as staff writer, first at Mint, a business newspaper, and then to the Hindustan Times, working on both papers’ editorial pages. “This was where most of my intellectual development happened,” says Singh. “I made social connections, and many of them grew more towards the academics in the security field.”

Writing about a nuclear security question one day, Singh reached out to an expert in the United States: Vipin Narang, the Frank Stanton Professor of Nuclear Security and Political Science at MIT. Over time, Narang helped Singh realize that the kind of questions Singh hoped to answer “lay more in the academic than in the journalistic domain,” recounts Singh.

In 2019, he headed to MIT and began a doctoral program focused on security studies and international relations. In his dissertation, “Nipping the Atom in the Bud: Strategies of Counterproliferation and How States Choose Among Them,” Singh hopes to move beyond a classic, academic debate: that nuclear weapons are either very destabilizing, or very stabilizing.

“Some argue that there is stability in the world because two states armed with nuclear weapons will avoid nuclear war, because they understand nobody will win a nuclear war,” explains Singh. “If this view is true, then we shouldn’t be alarmed by the proliferation of these weapons.” But “the counterargument is that there will always be an off chance someone will use these weapons, and so states should “try to use all their military and economic might to prevent another state from gaining nuclear weapons.”

As it turns out, neither extreme view governs in the real world. “The main takeaway from my research is that states are obviously concerned when some other country tries to make nuclear weapons, but they are not so concerned that in order to prevent a future destabilizing event, they are ready to destabilize the world as of now.”

In the final throes of writing his thesis and preparing for life as an academic, Singh remains alert to the parlous state of affairs in the Middle East and elsewhere. “I keep following events, knowing that something may prove relevant to my research,” he says.

Given the tense times and the often dark implications of his subject matter, Singh has found an optimal mode of blowing off steam: a daily badminton match. He and his wife also “binge watch either a spy thrill or a murder mystery every Saturday,” he says.

In a world both increasingly interconnected and increasingly threatened by regional conflicts, Singh believes, “there is still much to be discovered about how the world thinks about nuclear weapons, including what the impacts of nuclear weapons use might be,” he says. “I’d like to help shine a light on those new things, and broaden our understanding of nuclear weapons and the politics of nuclear security.”

[goelayne001]

I'm Still Here!

It has been several months since I wrote on my grandma blog, but just to let you know that I’m grateful to still be on this earth. So many people have died and some have graduated (Zion), gone on missions (Eryn) and returned (Ileina). Beth, Mandy’s sister passed away unexpectedly as well as both Smalls and Henry, their dogs. Our hanai daughter, Lisia passed away and we went to Idaho for her…

[sudden-stops-kill]

'2024 United States Air Force Academy Graduation Ceremony'

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"Large Group of Timmins Squadron Air Cadets to Graduate Into R.C.A.F.," Porcupine Advance (Timmins). August 26, 1943. Section 1, Page 1. --- Forty-two in B Group of Senior Trainees. Most of These Will Graduate into R.C.A.F. During the Coming Training Year. "Train To-day to Fly To-morrow" the Motto. ---- "Join the Air Cadets now! Train to-day to fly to-morrow!" This is the motto of the Timmins K Squadron Air Cadets. The Timmins Air Cadets have made remarkable progress, but they are determined to go still further. At present there are 42 in B Group, Senior Trainees. They include: - Gerald Badeski, John Bell, Hubert Blais, Richard Bouker, Francis Brochu, Eric Bull, John Clermont, Derek Couch, Victor Cowan, Rene Dumoulin, Floyd Dyer, Izzie Fishman, Fernand Fortier, Alfeo Gallino, Albert Glaister, Arthur Harnden, George Harrower, Frederick Horrocks, Ernest Isaacson, Richard Jackson, Robt. Jutras, Terence Kelly, Clifford Lockett, Stephen Marcineive, William Mackie, Leonard Mils, Kenneth Monahan, Ronald Mondoux, William McCagherty, Murray McIntosh, Joseph Pacione, Walter Robertson, Lincoln Rondeau, Patrick Roscoe, William Schofield, Robert Skelly, Francis Smith, Leonard Taylor, Robert Wheeler, Raymond Williams, Stanford Williams, Mervyn Villemaire.

This group with a few exceptions will all graduate into the R.C.A.F. during the coming training year, which begins Monday, Sept. 13th at Squadron Headquarters, Central Public School, Timmins. At this time an intensive course in Administration, Signals, Mathematics and Aircraft Recognition will start and continue throughout the two terms of the training year.

Any boy between the ages of 12 and 17 may turn out every Thursday night at Squadron Headquarters at the Central Public School.

[moodiest-moon-jelly]

Got 4 piercings recently, impulsively. Spent 300$.. I think next month I'll cave and go get a tattoo when I get money again. Maybe finally cover up the burn scar my dad gave me. The nightmares of him have been getting bad again.

[ridox]

yes zayne is hot and sexy but can we talk about how his entire life that man has lived by the book, following the rules, adhering to a strict regime that allowed him to graduate top of his class and be recognized as one of linkon’s, if not the world’s, best cardiac surgeon and how he’s subconsciously been forced to live under control control control because one small mistake could lead to devastating effects especially when your job entails being entrusted with the life of another yet when it comes to mc he just couldn’t do it anymore no matter how hard he tries, no matter how hard he suppresses his need, he just can’t help but lose control and finally be selfish for once to get what he desires the most and he desires her so much because she’s sweeter than any nectar this world could offer, she’s the air he so willingly breathes, she’s the only reason why it’s even hard for him to maintain his composure in the first place and if not for mc then zayne could’ve probably continued on living his day to day life following his habitual routine, obsessing over self-control and being the trustworthy doctor that saves lives but when it comes to mc all he sees himself as is but a human who’s willing to risk it all just to get a taste, just to get a little breath of her air, just for her to let him exist as a person worthy of devoting himself to her