How many passengers can a C-17 carry? Lots of numbers being banded around yesterday so here's a thread 👇 pic.twitter.com/ebn4J78PKg

— Andy Netherwood (@AndyNetherwood) August 17, 2021

This is the only accurate thread I’ve seen about the C-17. This person knows what he’s talking about.

The C-17 is a great aircraft. Absolutely enormous on the inside and unlike the C-141 and the C-5, can land on unimproved (read: dirt) airstrips. I was one of the first few hundred people to jump out of one when it was still being tested for airborne/paratrooper operations. (They throw weighted dummies out first to make sure nothing really bad happens. We joked we were the “cheaper dummies.”)

In 1997, I jumped out of a C-17 into Kazakhstan after flying 9,000 miles or so. Though it’s a great plane, never was I so glad to be tossing myself out of one. Those military seats are not comfortable in the least.

Little correlation between deadlift ability and being able to survive in the wild.

I'd rather be light, agile, fast, and be able to do chin-ups.

— GuruAnaerobic (@GuruAnaerobic) August 17, 2021

This is mostly true, who gives a crap?

Deadlifting is fun and I like doing it. And it does correlate with me being able to load a moving truck, etc. I’m not living in the goddamn wild and never will. Also I can do a lot of chin-ups.

Watching people spin out Zero Covid “what if” fantasies is tedious and boring. It’s just the most useless thing. There was never even a ghost of a chance of India and other poorer places locking down long enough to halt community spread. They simply could not. And anyway, humans are not the only host for SARS-Cov-2, so lockdown would always by “mysteriously” breached in most places.

The best we could’ve done — while harming billions — would be slowing the spread a little. That’s the very best. Instead, we got Zero Covid fantasists complaining about people not locking down hard enough, long enough, instead of concentrating on real mitigations like better ventilation, contact tracing, getting vaccination and vaccination mandates done, etc.

Of course, the Zero Covid fantasy also leads to to recurring (and probably perpetually-recurring) lockdowns and prison countries. But I think the lockdown lifers see all of this as a feature rather than a bug. For many of them, this has come to be about more than just preventing Covid. It’s a new religion and the god of pointless sacrifice must be worshipped.