I’m a man of modest intellectual means; this is pretty obscure 🤔

Like something out of the Book of Revelations.

I read this thread yesterday afternoon and there is something to what he says. I’ve known a lot of SF guys who were high speed, but others who were knuckle heads. We rely too much on this idea of “surgical force” where a small number of men are “inserted” to deal with a particular problem only to find themselves isolated and overwhelmed. There’s also probably no reason to maintain large airborne forces except as sort of a farm team for the SF, no one is ever going to do a large scale airborne operation again, and we could probably save a lot of money by changing the 82nd, the airborne engineer brigade and some of those other forces over to regular ground pounders.

It’s extremely sad that any high-skilled soldier who is also a decent human cannot employ his skills anywhere else in our society and can’t be afforded either a lifetime fat pension or else free job training.

Meanwhile, the less-than-decent ones become mercs with Blackwater clones, sociopathic gay pirate politicians, or turn to overt criminal activities such as running drugs and contract killings.

Fuck this gay world.

I have no idea what the context of that post by “wyatt” is, or what the follow up by our own Dave Pinson is supposed to prove. Maybe when Steve sobers up, he can explain.

They were still dropping paratroopers long after the invasion succeeded so everybody could qualify for combat jump wings.

I sense we’re past Peak Military Worship.

We were sick of the military being denigrated by liberals and stepped up to defend them. But how it’s time for some perspective on the institution as a whole.

Too many conservatives act like raw recruits eager to grovel before a drill sergeant instead of citizens who are supposed to be calling the shots. And young White men need to be street smart about any military career. Hint: don’t volunteer for dangerous work.

I read that thread yesterday and there is something to what he says. Our political class seems to have this idea that they can “insert” “surgical forces” to deal with some task without having to back those forces up with real military punch and so they become isolated and overwhelmed (Red Wings and Gothic Serpent). Pin the SF down where they can’t make a run for it and they are very vulnerable as they usually don’t have much in the way of heavy weapons. I also think that there’s no good reason for us to keep such large airborne forces except as a farm team for the SF and so we could convert the 82nd and the airborne engineer brigade over to regular ground pounders and save a lot of money from jump pay and disability claims. No one is ever going to do a large scale airborne operation again, helicopters can accomplish the same task with far less risk.

Actually, if you read wyatt’s thread to the end, he’s pretty clearly one of us.

“black wife” coffee company? Lol!

Is everyone using voice to text now that words get so mangled?

Since I don’t really understand what this post is about – I am afraid of tweets more than needles – I will ask a totally O/T question here to the host. (That thread on the vaccine has 300-something comments already.)

You may have your own worries about the COVID-19, that some of us don’t, or you think we are blissfully ignorant. Whatever. My question is why you didn’t push your story about the purposefully late roll-out of the Pfizer vaccine to avoid a boost for the Trump campaign in the ’20 election more thoroughly?

I mean, whether the readers agreed or not, you spent a big effort a year ago Springtime on writing about all things COVID-19. I think your investigation/observations into and about the corrupt late roll-out of the vaccine, with probably government bureaucrat interference is one hell of a scoop. Didn’t you even notice this before the election, if I recall correctly?

Commenters went back and forth about your motivations and such in that recent thread. Almost all of us here would agree on your Pfizer story, and Conservatives and Trumpites all over the country would have liked to hear about it. Why didn’t you push that one any harder?

If that story had gotten out, viral, or whatever, you’d have made the big-time. Just sayin’…

I’m also unclear about the point of the post. There is something called Black Rifle Coffee Company, which I assume is what the person who wrote the tweet meant by “Black wife,” which is of course another iSteve type topic.

I think the point is that as a society we romanticize the role of elite military forces, when in reality their skills don’t transfer well to a civilian environment, but I’d be happy for some elaboration on Steve’s part.

Anyway, you no doubt remember the Blackwater contractors killed in Fallujah. The mother of one of the former SEALs caught in the ambush spoke about her son’s difficulties in getting a middle class civilian job after leaving the military. As she put (more or less) there isn’t a lot of demand for people who are good at killing.

Didn’t someone on iSteve link to a lengthy video by bearded Stanford psychiatry professor dude explaining the symptoms of major mental illness?

Wasn’t one of the symptoms “disordered thought processes” in the form of making “connections” between things that don’t make logical sense?

In trying to make logical sense, and I am often accused of making large leaps in the analogies and examples I offer, is iSteve engaged in self-deprecating humor that his skill in life is getting his readers who are worked up about his pro-vax stance to aim better when throwing a ball at the dunk tank paddle?

It is either that, or iSteve has finally experienced a mental breakdown in response to the wall of criticism from his fans?

iSteve, I’m still with you!

I would favor any military member for a job over a civilian. The one good thing about even the regular military or at least the military that I served in way back in the Eighties was that it instills discipline. Maybe that special forces guy does not have the right skills at the moment but you can bet he will show up for work ON TIME, and on time in the military is 15 minutes early minimum, be at work every day, and not be a whiner.

I’m sure there’s a point to this but you lost me on this one.

A lot of those guys wind up on police forces or as firefighters/EMT’s, as they should. They thrive on the high-stress, action-packed life. I have one currently in my family, another has recently passed on. Both with American Indian blood, interestingly.

The guy we know who was in the capitol charge in January is also one of these types. Nearly full blood native American, former military, struggles with civilian life and alcohol.

I think the converse is true as well. There’s not a lot of demand for boring, staid, middle class jobs among people who are elite level at anything, especially military.
Military pilots, especially fighter pilots, are bored stiff flying tourists around in airliners. They’ll often take up soaring or aerobatics to keep their adrenal gland well-exercised. I know a couple of ex-mil guys who were hip deep in the forever wars who seem to be doing well in my trade.
It’s well-paid, physically demanding, and just dangerous enough to require one’s undivided attention while working. Also, and this is important; very little contact with any kind of bureaucracy or hr types.

Gary Busey was very good playing a dunk-tank clown in the 1980 movie Carny. His best insult was “I know why your girlfriend is so short. She shrinks from your touch.”

There is this link about vaccine skepticism not being linked to every liberal stereotype of conservative people https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2021/07/17/mit-study-vaccine-hesitancy-is-highly-informed-scientifically-literate-and-sophisticated-n1462591

You know that my reasoning is “drop the arguing, take the cannoli” with respect to vaccine hesitancy. But the condescension towards those with vaccine concerns is breath taking. The Pretender on Pennsylvania Avenue “owns” the low vaccination rates owing to his inability to communicate concerns in any other way. And describing anyone with a counter argument as promulgating “disinformation” is completely Orwellian.

But has iSteve been in the least way condescending or belittling of anyone or wanting to ban anyone from his fine site over this?

Too deep for me.

https://twitter.com/Tinkzorg/status/1416449204705239041?s=20

They’ve already done the hard work on the Sapir-Whorf end.

Anglo Distruster is unsurprisingly not up to speed on the English Civil War, Albion’s Seed, et al.

Not to mention, say, the difference between the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of John.

Oh, I am sure Andrew Cuomo will land on his feet when he leaves Albany.

This is Steve humorously riffing on the hero-worship of SOF guys in American popular culture.

Black Rifle coffee was exposed by some veteran social media accounts as a liberal-progressive-owned company that secretly shits on its customer base. Although most of you have probably never heard of it, Black Rifle coffee is an integral part of a small but thriving sector of the American economy that caters to the subculture of the military–i.e. to working class troops of all races. A lot of people drank Black Rifle coffee when I was in the Army. It was a way of signaling your self-conception as a warrior. The geniuses who own the company realized that the social isolation of the military from the rest of society represented a perfect opportunity for profit. A number of other companies (‘Nine Line Apparel’, ‘Grunt Style,’ etc.) have done the same thing. Black Rifle coffee is just unusually aggressive in its snooty treatment of its customers. We’ll see if it comes back to bite them in the ass now that patriotic vets in all the services have decided to expose them.

I think Steve’s broader point is that the skills people pick up in the military don’t carry over especially well into the rest of society, and that it’s stupid to valorize people in the SOF community because of Osama Bin Laden or whatever. My two cents from interacting with SOF guys: a lot of them are physically fit, competent, well-trained white men with just the right combination of patriotism, intelligence, and low agreeableness to do dangerous and stupid work without asking too many questions of Uncle Sam. Their leadership (Stan McChrystal, Austin Miller, Mark Milley, William McRaven et. al.) are just as idiotic, corrupt, and incompetent as the rest of America’s elite. Killing hajis is a way of life for these people. The SOF community absolutely is an existential threat to our republic. Get a kick out of laughing at them while you can.

Black Rifle Coffee, which is a new company, has heavily promoted itself from the beginning and for a few years now as coffee for right wingers made by vets. Including doing ads ridiculing lefties. So its NY Times article—where it suddenly attacks Kyle Rittenhouse and St, Michael the Archangel (!) was quite a reversal.

I have to agree with Mr. Neuman… not sure what this is about…

But Sailer… an item for your attention occurred last night in the District of Corruption. Several subjects down your alley…

The Nationals game had to be suspended as there was a shooting outside of one of the gates. Two people wounded. Shots could be heard at the game causing the active shooting clown drill…

Baseball. Shooting.. Woundings not killings. DC in the AA area. Go to town.

As an aside.. the National fan base is pretty liberal. I guess what they have sown with the black black black movement is growing for them in their little enclave of DC baseball… All those liberals must have been pissing their panties in fear at that game. Well enjoy black culture. It is coming back in DC after years of gentrification…

Pretty sure the city will have a yuuuge police presence for future games.

Don’t forget this one too, Steve.

https://twitter.com/CurtMills/status/1416497828478787584?s=20

R senators are serving somebody, but it ain’t us.

I think it’s funny how SEALs get all upset when commanders send them in to do grunt work.

We’re elite!

There are just not enough OBLs hiding out in Pakistan to go around.

On Frog Twitter there’s been a tweet storm reckoning about a certain type of ‘conservative’ grifter: the military bro or specifically “operator” subculture that is being exploited by some vets, often decorated combat vets, who are trying to sell crap to patriotic/LARPy normies, and are pushing it into the fake and gay cringe zone.

The recent nadir of this trend is Black Rifle Coffee Company, which to great success threw all the badass happy warrior operator clichés into their product promotion and web presence. Fair enough, they want to make a buck, BUT now they’ve gotten into hot water with actual patriots for disavowing Kyle Rittenhouse, upon learning he wore one of their branded shirts upon release from jail, and more recently for an in-depth interview with the New York Times in which BRCC tried to virtue signal, big time. Basically, they are getting major shit for betraying their natural customer base. Also, some have found it interesting that two of the company’s chief executives are Jews, including the founder.

Here's how Black Rifle Coffee's executives see people who were upset with their condemnation of Kyle Rittenhouse pic.twitter.com/zU8u9LEVHY

— Scott Greer 6’2” IQ 187 (@ScottMGreer) July 16, 2021

Black Rifle Coffee also decided St. Michael is a white supremacist symbol because the Pentagon told them so pic.twitter.com/Kag3lhh6sg

— Scott Greer 6’2” IQ 187 (@ScottMGreer) July 16, 2021

Go f*ck yourselves. Never buying y'all's coffee again. Imagine your whole brand being unapologetically american and then you bitch out

— Dr. Carl Winslow (@MarkyMark36) July 17, 2021

Strong accusations. If there really is a “warrior culture” in our military… dear God, I fear for our enemies. What have we become, America? There is hope, though, now that more and more women are becoming soldiers. I’ve read that female tears lower male testosterone levels.

Well, I was a paratrooper. If you knew the truth you would laugh. My lived experience was more Stripes than Rambo. But I have found over the years that people don’t want to hear that, preferring instead some PTSD level storytelling. So I just shut up about it, which adds to the mystique.

Read the whole Twitter thread. I think the point was that the “elite” units of the military are full of frauds and hyping them up makes regular soldiers and citizens more placid.

During last year’s Reckoning, Black Rifle’s CEO Evan Hafer signaled that he was running a scam on the MAGA conservacucks. I am not surprised by this NYT interview at all. The larp is a good one though. I used to get their ads on my YT feed and it was comical, like something out of Team America World Police – dudes with beards and Oakleys firing giant guns, pulling giant fish out of the water, helicopters flying around, explosions, giant trucks, the whole deal, all to sell mediocre-to-bad coffee.

Yea that’s right – I read many, many times on right-wing forum and sites that BRC wasn’t very good but they bought it because they supported the pro-military, pro-veteran, right-wing message. Well, if those boomers are leaving then BRC is pretty much toast because they can’t compete on quality and the message doesn’t resonate for anyone else. For a guy like Hafer, though, there’s always another grift to be had. I am sure the Lincoln Project could use his talents.

I think there were political pressures to hold the vaccine back–any vaccine released before the election would have been automatically savaged by the mainstream media as “rushed” and “dangerous”.* As Kamala said, “If Donald Trump tells us we should take it, I’m not taking it.” If I was an apolitical shark heading a Big Pharma company, I would have waited, too.

*Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

If we have a ton of veterans from two shooting wars fought simultaneously over two decades, and their skills do not transfer well to civilian life, then it seems to me, we have a big problem.

Seriously, lots of unhappy veterans are not good for social stability. Ask the Germans.

Rob, any type of social stability America will have in the near future looks like an Orwellian Police State to me. I think we need MORE social instability right now.

(And, Black Sea, thanks for the explanation.)

Look up Pipehitters for a particularly egregious example.

It’s not just skills not transferring although that’s one aspect. They’ve got serious issues up to and including murder and widespread drug abuse. People don’t much care about the regular military going woke as long as they’ve got the SpecOps to do the actual warfighting.

But they in fact no longer have that either.

I’m glad my natural suspicion of any self-proclaimed ideologically “right” organization or Company Cult kept from being taken in on this one. It also helps I have trouble caring deeply about things that aren’t entertaining or interesting to me.

Well, there goes John Plywood’s whole thesis on US special forces successfully defeating Russia, China, and Iran. Realistically, of course, an functioning military is more than a few elite squads. It’s not like these guys are Space Marines in 40k.

I’m really not buying the premise that ex elite soldiers often have trouble getting good jobs.

Acquiring a CDL or or learning high paying skilled trade (diver, electric lineman, machinist) should be well within these guys’ abilities. There will always be a tiny whiny minority who think the gubmint owes them a living and get sympathy from j-skool blue checkmark dopes.

Whoever “peg” is on the tweet must not have heard of the panic induced by the two guys shooting up D.C. back in ’02 or that Bernie Bro, James Hodgkinson, who has already been erased from the cultural memory because leftists shooting up politicians is perfectly acceptable. Of course when the “right wing extremists” show up to stage an “insurrection” they all dutifly obey D.C. laws and leave their guns behind.

English Civil War

I expect to see Milley open a helicopter ride service before I see an ECW style coflict here, though it might be entertaining to see our perfumed princes wear their hair like Prince Rupert.

I remember seeing that Black Rifle Coffee at the hardware store and thinking… how many bags of coffee can they sell just by adding an AR-15 logo?

Then I go to the store a year later and they had a huge display and all kinds of Black Rifle Coffee t-shirts.

Post World War 2, it was common to hire ex-military officers as managers for your company. These were the guys who created the great economic boom of the 1950s and 1960s and the massive expansion of the US economy in the 1970s and 80s.

Then they retired and the crazy Boomers took over in the 1990s. The older Boomers had a lot of draft dodgers among them. Since the 1990s, Boomers have ruined many an older company that had become an venerable institution. Sears, Kmart, umpteen city newspapers etc., etc.

Those old army guys were a breed apart.

Boomers won’t hire army guys nowadays because they are terrified of them. Boomers know they are inferior at getting things done and have less personal honor.

Today’s CEOs are more like Hunter Biden than Eisenhower.

I don’t know what some of you guys mean by “skills don’t transfer”. It’s true that lots of things that grunts, artillerists and tankers do don’t translate easily into civilian life, but they should all learn things like how to communicate with superiors and subordinates, the importance of maintenance, how to meet a schedule and lots of other skills and experience that are useful in civilian work and, of course, there are lots of MOSs that more or less mirror the civilian job. The twitter thread is perfectly correct about how we shouldn’t venerate “operators” but don’t paint with too broad a brush about all veterans.

It’s not the same at all, those German soldiers came back to find a bunch of lefty thugs taking to the streets and undermining everything they held dear about their country.

LOL! the human tugboat thing takes the cake for sheer reality inversion. we’re reaching levels of chutzpah that shouldn’t be possible.

i’m not really surprised that BRC is yet another grift. it seems that grifting patriotic citizens is one of the more reliable cons in history. this new Freedom Phone is another one.

it’s pretty alarming to see that we really have very few actual allies and half or maybe even the majority of putative allies are just grifters. the patriotic Americans who keep the country running are a really deep treasure chest to be plundered for decades. the grifters might as well get while the getting is good, because in a decade or so they won’t be able to run this scam anymore as core America will be so utterly defeated and dying off, literally. Democrats will have largely made the Republican party illegal, so that will be the end of the scams.

People are fools for buying all these hoity-toity coffees like $tarbucks. McDonald’s makes the best coffee out there IMO and I am a serious coffee drinker. I can’t imagine someone who enjoys coffee would waste money on that overpriced, WEAK ASS coffee they serve at $tarbucks. Never heard of this “Black Rifle Coffee” but my guess is it is yet another overpriced brand of WEAK ASS coffee. I will stick to McDonald’s, Eight O’Clock or Maxwell House, lot cheaper and better.

It is pretty obvious that Steve Sailer has been gentrified into controlled opposition (whether Steve even realizes it or not). Why do you think he, of all people, is still allowed to post on Twitter, when far less ‘non-compliant, un-woke’ people have been deplatformed from Twitter?

Remember that for all the pretense of TUR being the last bastion of alternative viewpoints, RUnzie Baby is about as tied to the establishment as one can get :

I have written in the past, as you know, about what the true purpose of this website is.

I suppose companies are feeling pressure to move to the left …..everybody can’t be Mike Lindell …….better buy your pillows and bed toppers now.

https://twitter.com/tummymuncher/status/1416423110664990729?s=20

The late Lt. Gen. Hal Moore, who was played by Mel Gibson in the movie We Were Soldiers Once… and Young, saw a lot of close-up combat and death. He never glorified war.

From an article on Moore:

There’s another side to this stern warrior, though. Moore stays after Mass every Sunday morning at Auburn’s St. Michael’s Catholic Church, on his knees praying for every man he lost. Their names are alphabetized on 3 x 5 cards. Sometimes, Moore attends daily Mass, spending three hours a day praying for the men who died in his command…

“Gen. Moore once asked me, ‘Do you think God will forgive me for all the men I killed?’” recalled [Moore’s caretaker].

https://www.auburnvillager.com/features/a-generals-spiritual-journey/article_1b85cbe0-b363-5927-924f-398384c7376d.html

Woke Patriot Capital

Recently there was a huge dust up about the lab leak theory. It even went as far as liberal icon Jon Stewart endorsing it.

It’s gone nowhere. Why do you think that is?

And what if it were true? What are we going to make China do? Pay for it? What a laugh.

That’s a good intro, but there’s even more to it than that.

The CEO of the company, Evan Hafer, describes himself on the website as being descended from generations of Idaho loggers. Maybe it’s true that his father owned a logging company, but now that he’s trying to defend himself he points out the fact that he’s an Ashkenazi Jew.

Others on frog Twitter pointed out that Black rifle coffee profited off photographs of right-wing Ukrainian militias. These are the sort of people who make Kyle Rittenhouse look like a sweet kid. (Which he is.)

Veterans have useful skills. One is promptness, the skill in being able to show up to work with all the necessary equipment. Another is organization, the ability to know that you put gasoline in the mower before you try to start it. A third is cleanup, the skill derived from keeping the barracks clean. You have to sweep up the grass clippings after you mow.

Finally, there is always a need for security.
https://www.rt.com/usa/529484-cori-bush-private-security/

The Persians still need to remove a few key personnel as payback for that one. I don’t think they have forgotten.

I recently saw their commercial with the flame thrower wielding negro. I knew at that point they were cucks.

The only serviceMEN worth recognizing as honorable are really ones we have never heard of.

Sad to say, but the Navy Seals who found varying degrees of success after their military careers were over (the Blackwater guy, brother of trumps’s Ed Sec; American Sniper guy, and Lone Survivor guy), strike me as low rent conmen.

The lesson being maybe we should send all of our used car salesmen off to war because they make great soldiers??

You’re surprised that Tucker and Gaetz aren’t pacifists? They say they’re realists, and assassinating Soleimani was an effective piece of darkly realist geopolitics. Solemani would probably be President if it weren’t for the strike.

I don’t know if that would be bad for the US, but I find it easy to conceive that others think so.

I’d also be surprised if the strike wasn’t wildly popular with Republican voters. I, for one, support the general direction of where that is going. Since blood and death is going to remain with us for the foreseeable future, we should go back to wars being settled by dueling Kings.

It would be cheaper and save many lives. It would also make the US Presidential elections even more entertaining. Imagine if a key factor was considered to be gladiatorial ability. The intra-party debates could be a Royal rumble. The 2020 Democratic party fight would have been amazing.

The big problem is the US government keeps sending these young men to war.

Veterans should be able to get jobs in the trades, but despite all the bullshit unions spout about supposedly seeking vets, unions prioritize minorities and family members. Unions use the support our troops lie for publicly purposes only.

“I’m also unclear about the point of the post”

It could be that Steve is just riffing on a well-known line of movie dialog. It also could be that the Mormons updated Steve’s daily dosage. What I know is this: fossil-headedness is the reason why contemporary white dudes lost the civilization their fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers and great-great grandfathers built. Congratulations.

“and assassinating Solemani was an effective piece of darkly realist geopolitics”

It was theater; a show for Jared Kushner’s Israeli mafia friends. The U.S. policy towards Persian Iran has been insane since forever.

Anyway, you no doubt remember the Blackwater contractors killed in Fallujah. The mother of one of the former SEALs caught in the ambush spoke about her son’s difficulties in getting a middle class civilian job after leaving the military. As she put (more or less) there isn’t a lot of demand for people who are good at killing.

I’m sure business will pick up. I wouldn’t be surprised at billionaires and large corporations starting what are, in effect, their own private armies. Or they will rent private armies as needed.

“unapologetically american [sic] and then you bitch out”

It seems the contemporary incarnations of Christianity and corporatism has led to ball-shrinkage in present day white men.

I highly recommend watching a movie called “Carny.”

The film stars Gary Busey and Jodie Foster.

It actually offers an interesting glimpse into the Carny sub-culture that used to exist back a few decades ago. More of a documentary than a movie. Quite interesting and fun.

Here’s the trailer.

If you want to see the scene with the dunk tank, watch the below video from 5:45-12:00. Also, the first three minutes of the below video (0:00-3:10) are mildly scary, but it’s a good opening.

Trump would be a very good carnival promoter. In particular, I think he’d be adept at infuriating people (through insults) at the dunk tank.

That twitter-article on special operations guys cashing in on their reputation by selling branded merch to troop-sniffers made some really interesting points.

One was that, perhaps, that reputation is somewhat puffed up. He mentioned the “Lone Survivor” incident (upon which the movie with Mark Wahlberg was based) as an example.

He also made another interesting point. That perhaps the large-scale use of special forces over the last thirty years served another purpose: to intimidate rank-and-file soldiers and civilians – to lead them to the belief that these guys are well-nigh supermen and that any state backed up by them is essentially invincible. You may be a patriotic veteran, angry at what is becoming of this country, but what are you going to do about it? Stand against a government that is propped up by SEALS and DELTAS?

You’re surprised that Tucker and Gaetz aren’t pacifists? They say they’re realists, and assassinating Soleimani was an effective piece of darkly realist geopolitics. Solemani would probably be President if it weren’t for the strike.

You seemed to have missed the point. Gaetz and Carlson were against it. Or at least deeply skeptical of it.

I don’t know if that would be bad for the US, but I find it easy to conceive that others think so.

I find it easy to concieve that people who owe the primary or complete allegiance to other countries might think that it could be spun as “bad for the US”. But whether it is or not – to those people – is a matter of indifference.

I’d also be surprised if the strike wasn’t wildly popular with Republican voters. I, for one, support the general direction of where that is going. Since blood and death is going to remain with us for the foreseeable future, we should go back to wars being settled by dueling Kings.

And when do you imagine that that ever happened? (Hint: Never)

“I think the point is that as a society we romanticize the role of elite military forces, when in reality their skills don’t transfer well to a civilian environment, but I’d be happy for some elaboration.”

I agree, but I think Steve expects us to expand the “don’t transfer well” point. For example, grievance-studies majors have learned a skill that has limited application in the real world. Leafblower operators are adept at blowing those pesky leaves, but then are ill-prepared to move-on to the trades. And so on; examples abound. As a society, we place undeserved confidence in skill-transfer. (Of course, Ohtani is a counter-example.)

And when do you imagine that that ever happened? (Hint: Never)

Perhaps my absurdist humour wasn’t funny, but there’s no need to rub it in.

Trinity, discipline is why I required my children to play organized sports. Required practice time and learning game skills with kids you who may not have been your friends Old saying…Early is on time, on time is late, late in unacceptable.

He’s probably half Ashkenazi. If his mother is a gentile he isn’t Jewish unless he has formally converted.

Lots of people of Ashkenazi descent are not Jewish, even if they might think they are.

‘…The SOF community absolutely is an existential threat to our republic…’

That would depend on what you mean by ‘our.’

‘…You’re surprised that Tucker and Gaetz aren’t pacifists? They say they’re realists, and assassinating Soleimani was an effective piece of darkly realist geopolitics. Solemani would probably be President if it weren’t for the strike…’

Assuming you don’t mean President of the United States, the thought doesn’t disturb me much.

Actually, given who we’ve got…

Just some random thoughts. Fuck bill clinton for giving every service man a beret. Berets were for the elite. And, when I moved into my house the gentleman next door was a contractor. He asked me if I new a certain American Indian ironworker and I said yes and that he was working for me.Turns out my neighbor and the ironworker were both Airborne and jumped on D-Day. I have a book “Geronimo” about the Airborne in WWII. My neighbor is mentioned in the book as having been part of a group of troops that captured 185 Germans. When he passed I showed the book to his daughter. She said “I didn’t know dad was in the service.” What did she think the parachute tattooed on his forearm meant? Humble guy.

Maybe when Steve sobers up, he can explain.

Aha! Now it becomes clear to me. I had been puzzled all day about the volume of my truth serum remaining in my bottle. I was ready to accuse one of the kids..

JMcG–what’s your trade?

That is why I advocate an entirely different paradigm.

Instead of “help your friends”, I say “hurt your enemy”.

Instead of “give till it hurts”, I say “force your enemy to give till he hurts”.

If your method of “fighting back” is to give money to “the cause”, you just make yourself a piggy bank for grifters – impoverishing yourself while enriching cynical frauds.

On the other hand, there are no downsides if you STOP giving our money to known and open enemies.

Wall Street:
Don’t give them interest. Instead of borrowing, save and buy with cash.
Don’t give them insurance premiums. Don’t carry any form of insurance, just live a careful and healthy lifestyle.
Don’t give them rent. Blackrock is on its way to becoming the only landlord. Don’t make your adult children pay rent to Blackrock. Let them live at home while they save to buy their own house with cash.

Hollywood:
Cancel your cable subscription, cancel your Netflix subscription, don’t go to the movie theaters, don’t rent from Redbox etc.
Sell any and all Hollywood related merchandise currently in your possession.

Federal government:
Eliminate (alcohol, tobacco) or minimize (gasoline, guns & ammo) your purchase of goods subject to Federal excise tax.
Never visit DC – don’t give the DC local economy a penny.

State and local government (if you live in a blue state):
Eliminate or minimize purchases of goods subject to sales tax (junk food, fast food, “durable goods”)
Refrain from any home improvement which would increase your property tax.
Don’t visit NYC or any other ultra-liberal area as a tourist. Never give the bastards a penny!

Academia:
Tell your daughters to get married instead of going to college, and tell your sons to use higher education strictly as vocational training, with the explicit goal of paying as little as possible. Emphasize that an Ivy League degree now carries negative prestige in your eyes.

Mainstream media:
Cancel subscriptions, and don’t click on their websites (eliminate their click-count based advertising revenue)

Big tech:
Use a $5/month “kid phone”, delete your facebook account, cancel your internet access, use the library for free internet access.

Big Pharma:
Eat healthy, stay hydrated, exercise, get a good night sleep, and when you are very old and its time to die, just lie down and die gracefully. There is no need to ever give a penny to the so-called “Health Care” industry, staffed with murderers who perform abortions, perverts who perform sex change operations, and drug dealers who sell Oxycontin.

Basically stop paying for things which not only give you no benefit, but do actual harm to you. Save your time, save your money, avoid the mental strain of being subjected to enemy propaganda, all while depriving your enemies of revenue streams.

Even before the current employment situation, it was difficult to find employees who came on time, did the work, and did not stop their work to answer a text while in front of their boss. Finding someone with just basic job skills is very refreshing and surprisingly rare.

People are fools for buying all these hoity-toity coffees like $tarbucks. McDonald’s makes the best coffee out there IMO and I am a serious coffee drinker. I can’t imagine someone who enjoys coffee would waste money on that overpriced, WEAK ASS coffee they serve at $tarbucks. Never heard of this “Black Rifle Coffee” but my guess is it is yet another overpriced brand of WEAK ASS coffee. I will stick to McDonald’s, Eight O’Clock or Maxwell House, lot cheaper and better.

McDonald’s makes good coffee and there is a funny video somewhere of people picking it in a blind taste test.

But starbucks isn’t weak coffee. It is actually high caffeine. I don’t like the taste but it isn’t weak.

Most people go there for espresso and not the drip.

I thought it might be the other way around. Jewish hippie mother marries handsome goyish guy; gets back to the land. I’ve seen a fair amount of that. The surname is one of those German names that could be either, like Zimmerman.

I don’t think any of this is at all relevant except that Hafer himself brought it up. It’s like David French’s daughter. He used her race as a virtue signalling device. He should pay for it.

From his LinkedIn:

“After Idaho, I spent 20 years of my career serving in the U.S. Army as an infantryman, a Special Forces soldier, and a CIA contractor.”

Tells you something.

I tried to give you an “LOL” because I saw what you did there!

Special Operations doesn’t win wars. But the wars we’ve gotten involved in aren’t really wars and they aren’t winnable. Just ruinously expensive.

Viva Italia!

A lot of those guys wind up on police forces or as firefighters/EMT’s, as they should.

Get REAL:

The last thing you want are morons who sign up to murder people they don’t know, just because some politician says so, in any position of authority or critical decision making.

Has the US won a war on its own since the Mexican–American War (1846-1848)? All it does is throw billions at third world countries, and then lose.

The idea of demonstrating masculinity by associating yourself with the US Army is analogous to a tampon company demonstrating their femininity by using crack-whore transgender prostitutes as models in their ads.

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/fort-bragg-murders-1153405/

https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/fall-green-beret-officer-jim-gant-drugs-booze/story?id=24301847

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/dec/16/special-ops-command-study-misconduct-problem/

Yes, of course, consider the source. I’ve also heard the same if not worse from the inside. And then there’s this:

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Pipehitter

Don’t look up Mike Pompeo’s connection to all this if you’re a fan.

What?

I’m saying that Republican Senators shouldn’t be blackmailing a CinC with impeachment.

Plan trusters tend to count on the SpecOps guys to save us and so neglect to carry out their own duties and responsibilities as their ancestors did, or merely to even to take precautions to protect themselves and their families and communities at all.

That cavalry is not on the way.

You served in the “Military” huh Trin?

If you can walk back to sure after your boat capsizes, I’m not sure this qualifes.

‘liberal-progressive owned’?

You can just say ‘zionist owned’, you know.

Fuck bill clinton for giving every service man a beret. Berets were for the elite.

Military are just like grown boy scouts with actual guns. Who worries about all that sartorial shit and the bling & glitter on the uniform?

Especially the berets. They should just be berets, as in standard belgian army beret. Instead they are a complex way of carrying around some elaborate coats of arms. Why.

It’s a sure sign of decadence.

The intra-party debates could be a Royal rumble. The 2020 Democratic party fight would have been amazing.

I agree. It would be much more entertaining if primaries and elections were fought to the death. The last critter standing wins.

Imagine if a key factor was considered to be gladiatorial ability.

☮

What the hell is taking them so long, did they out-contract to Arabs?

The “Warrior-Heroes defending our freedoms” schtick is played.

Real American “Heroes” get real jobs in the real economy that provide real value-added products and services to their fellow American citizens.

Serving the War Machine to slaughter brown-skinned natives engaged in sectarian civil wars that have nothing to do with American citizens 6,000 miles from American shores is for chumps.

SpecOps = SpecDopes

well mein steve,

as we all ODESSA know the problem with china people and the flushton theory of man is…

AGENCY.

china people are very good slaves.

the best.

but they can’t be their own master.

so the west has been INFECTED with the destroyers of culture via PROTESTANTISM and via jews, REDUNDANT.

STEVE IS A MASTER OF APPLYING SAILER’S BUTTER KNIFE.

sometimes i wonder if steve and steve are the same person.

As Heinlein wrote, if the question is why, the answer is almost always money.

https://redstate.com/streiff/2021/07/17/is-black-rifle-coffee-about-to-throw-its-customer-base-under-the-bus-for-fun-and-profit-n412402

Gotta dump all the Deplorables before we go public and chase the Latte Karens!

The worship of all things SpecOps isn’t a new thing; we wear ties today because of a special force that served under Louis XIII, the Cravats. What are the ubiquitous cargo shorts/pants of today but versions of military parachute pants? If you can’t be an SF operator, you can at least look like one.

William Gibson has a nice take on the intersection of military clothing with street/workwear and its appeal to young men.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_History

The point that drove the novel: how much do you think the military spends on uniforms every year?

The line in the above should read “isn’t a new thing”. Editing failure.

I’m a lineman. Power, not telephone.

Seeing as how it is Shark Week on television, I was wondering how many Navy SEALS have been attacked by sharks during their training swims. A night ocean swim would scare the shit out of me. I know the odds against being attacked are pretty rare but people are attacked. Wonder how many casualties the Navy has had during peacetime due to shark attacks on SEALS?

we wear ties today because of a special force that served under Louis XIII, the Cravats.

Nah. He liked him some Croatian mercenaries, and the neck clothes they wore. They weren’t special forces, just another of the many mercs during the 30 Years War.

https://www.thevintagenews.com/2016/12/20/the-necktie-was-popularized-by-croatian-mercenaries-hired-by-king-louis-xiii-in-the-30-years-war/

If we romanticize “elite” military forces (and we do), I don’t see what that has to do with how skills transfer over to civilian life.

Romance harkens back to chivalry, and I don’t remember knights bragging about how marketable their skills were. Inside or outside the realm of warfare. They enjoyed being supported by the labor of others.

“Hey, I’m back from the Crusades. Watch how well I plow a field in my armor.”

Thank you for the link.

There is something to be said for serious military training as a way to turn boys into men, especially the discipline and the survival training they acquire.

Whether or not we will ever need old school infantry or airborne units to win a real war, however, is highly in doubt.

If you can walk back to sure

Dinah Sure?

My mother lived on an island in the Caribbean for about 30+ years . When I would visit I noticed that the coffee down there was delicious as good as any I had had . I asked at several places what brand of coffee they used , it was Maxwell House all over the island , why it was so good I don’t know . There are no fresh water springs on the island all the water they use is rain water collected in cisterns and the milk came from Europe in a box unrefrigerated until after it was opened so maybe that was the secret .

I assume PEG are his initials. The French being naturally contrarian make some good follows. He’s perhaps the best.

I believe we’re seeing just such a conflict before our eyes with Milley as Cromwell. The sovereign (us) has been so freshly beheaded that perhaps it’s not entirely yet clear.

Our military is profoundly unserious.

It’s not in doubt at all.

“Stand against a government that is propped up by SEALS and DELTAS?” Yeah LOL . A few years ago when the pirate business was booming in the Indian Ocean approaches to The Gulf and the Red Sea the shipping companies were hiring these clowns as security . On one ship the two former SFs bozos were found dead in their stateroom OD’d on heroin . You think they were the only two with a drug problem ?

wyatt’s been blowing up recently. I remember when he was just a gadfly at TRS and brought them low, rightly so.
Smart guy and very willing to go against the grain, including the dominant ones in “our” “dissident” circles.

If I were a Persian leader I wouldn’t interfere with the US military’s self destruction .

Airborne is likely even more valuable now. Its fast. With bigger planes you can get heavier weapons in. As long as you have air dominance (easier with next-gen drones) you can boots on the ground. With augmentation by autonomous killer robots (these already exist from Boston Dynamics and Chinese copies) you can go into a place hard and fast before they know it. Speed kills.

Agreed though on the limited utility of Spec Ops. Much of the failure of US forces post-Vietnam has been an over-reliance on Special Forces which as you say can get massacred if they don’t have an escape route.

On the other hand check out some African Special Forces in action:
https://twitter.com/ANeylec/status/1416352061780791301

I’m guessing his dad’s Ashkenazi because Idaho is pretty Anglo. A name like Hafer stands out a little bit there, and to my ear sounds a bit Yiddish. I wouldn’t hazard a guess if it were the Midwest.

Also his dad owned a timber outfit. That isn’t rare among Ashkenazim. A friend of mine comes from an Ashkenazi family that owned lumber mills in Ukraine. The Communists drove them out about a hundred years ago.

A few years ago one of the high school football teams near me was doing that training exercise picutured above, in which a column of teammates held a heavy log above their heads. Unfortunately, the log slipped and one of the team members suffered a fatal head injury.

There was the drowned SEALS in the Granada “War” weighed down by the packs…sort of a cluster…doesn’t quite fit the “movie” version we are force fed constantly

I’m an Iraq Vet and and owe my career as a Union Tradesman in a big blue east coast city to being a Vet and specifically the Helmets to Hardhats apprenticeship program. I have several friends (all white) who became Union Electricians, Steamfitters, Plumbers and Firefighters in New York New Jersey, and Philadelphia in the same programs. So it was common 10-15 years ago at least to get Veterans Preference on all the tests.

Troof scored so low on the ASVAB test that the only branch in the military he was eligible to join was the Army. The Army will take anybody even the Troof. I don’t know though, Troof might be like Cassius Clay/Muhammad Ali and not be able to even pass the aptitude test despite despite the Troof’s “collage” degrees and sheeit.

There is something to be said for serious military training as a way to turn boys into men, especially the discipline and the survival training they acquire.

It’s not the taxpayers’ job to fund personal development. Especially at the price the Pentagon charges.

Gen Woke Milley certainly is champing at the bit to go to war with White people. He figures it will be cheap and easy, and knows its what his masters want.

The man however is a monumental failure at warfighting. He’s good at kissing ass, but has failed in all his commands (tell me the victories in Iraq and Afghanistan) and never once seen combat. Not once.

Assuming he gets the go-ahead, he figures the troops will just obey him when he throws their relatives out of helicopters. And promotes unqualified blacks, lesbian blacks, etc. ahead of guys who get it done in combat. All the while deterring Chinese, Russian, and Mexican expansion in places like Hawaii, Taiwan, Alaska, and California.

Does Milley himself command charisma, presence, respect, authority, and leadership of the enlisted man?

That’s not to mention that the military depends on a robust US economy and transport and production links. In any civil war the likely experience would be more Lebanon that 1860, every place a combat zone until local dominance by one side or the other is achieved. Cities would be the worst place to be, if our nukes are functional they would be used (by both sides) and the death toll would likely approach the Taipeng Rebellion if not exceed it. So it would be a very good thing if it does not happen.

Just one example: all those helicopters and jet fighters and bombers use jet fuel (kerosene). That can’t happen when all the White refinery workers are dead, in camps, whatever. Pajeet from India might be fine doing low level scripting for some body shop, he’s not going to be able to run refineries. Which in any case won’t be receiving fuel because both pipelines and transportation corridors (rail/truck lines) will be hit early. And that’s not even covering maintenance — fighters need something like 24 man hours of maintenance for each hour in flight. You can’t cover it by Pajeet. It takes the mostly experience White maintenance crew to keep them flying.

Suppose Milley does run a one way helicopter service for the Regency? Either Joe or Kamala? How long before his guys throws a Spec Ops relative into the Atlantic or Pacific? Or a retired Spec Ops guy who is now a “contractor” for the CIA? These guys are all rule breakers with great will power and adrenaline junkies. The idea that they will be dutiful order followers if they and theirs are impacted is fantasy. Milley would be likely fragged by his own guys if he ran the helicopter service and he might or might not know it.

Steve convinced me to avoid getting vaccinated with his outstanding reporting in how Pfizer delayed the news of their effective vaccine until after the Presidential election to help Biden defeat Trump. Knowing that Pfizer helped elect Biden is one reason I refuse to give Pfizer money by getting vaccinated.

Since the 1990s, Boomers have ruined many an older company that had become an venerable institution. Sears, Kmart, umpteen city newspapers etc., etc.

If you want to know the real reason why Sears/Kmart is nearly out of business, do not focus exclusively on Eddie Lampert – who is just barely a Boomer, born in 1962. Watch the “Softer Side of Sears” commercial from 1994 that I’ve linked below.

While Sears had always sold clothing, its focus had long been on “hardlines.” These included tools and hardware (its Craftsman line was the best anywhere), automotive parts and accessories, appliances, electronics, home furnishings, kitchenware, sporting goods … basically, anything except clothing, with the exception of men’s workwear. For many years it did very well focusing on these things. This focus also gave Sears a reputation as a “guys’” store, unlike most department stores which were and are aimed mainly at women.

As the 1980’s moved into the 1990’s, Sears wasn’t quite as dominant in hardlines as it had been. Heavier competition was likely the main reason, for example the rise of Home Depot and Lowe’s ate into Sears’ tool and hardware sales. Enter the new head of the retail division, Arthur Martinez, a pre-Boomer born in 1939 (and completely white, he had some ancestors from Spain on his father’s side). Instead of doubling down the company’s efforts on hardlines, Martinez and his team had an idea that proved disastrous in hindsight: there was a huge market in women’s clothing, with large retailer markups, so let’s refocus Sears toward selling women’s clothing! And that idea begat the whole Softer Side of Sears.

What never seemed to occur to anyone is that while the market for women’s clothing indeed is huge, the level of competition is equally monstrous. Something like half the stores in any mall are mostly or exclusively selling women’s clothing. It also didn’t help that Sears’ male-oriented and rather stodgy image was totally unsuited for such a fashion-conscious market.

The Softer Side of Sears was the start of the company’s undoing, and then Fast Eddie came along and the company never recovered.

How long did they wait for the Maid of the Seas?

Lone Survivor guy), strike me as low rent conmen.

I can’t stand Marcus Lutrell.

I’m running that team, that goatherder is a grease spot and our guys come home alive.

On the other hand, Kris ‘Tanto’ Paranto of Benghazi fame is awesome.

Acquiring a CDL or or learning high paying skilled trade (diver, electric lineman, machinist) should be well within these guys’ abilities.

Low pay and not much excitement.

“Electric Lineman”? Mostly obsolete. They work on the power lines with cherry picker lifts nowadays.

“Machinist”? For a fellow who’s used to excitement? No.

You don’t know what you’re talking about, Grandpa.

I’m saying that Republican Senators shouldn’t be blackmailing a CinC with impeachment.

Why or why not? Please explain again.

‘…The Softer Side of Sears was the start of the company’s undoing, and then Fast Eddie came along and the company never recovered.’

I came along for Sears’ funeral — so to speak.

For me, the undoing of Sears was pretty clear. I’d always associated Sears with budget but reliable tools.

I bought a Craftsman drill. It failed. I exchanged it. The replacement failed. I exchanged that. The replacement’s replacement failed.

I just asked for my money back. Adios Sears. That would have all been in the late Seventies.

Let them live at home while they save to buy their own house with cash.

Oh yeah, very realistic.

“It’s gone nowhere. Why do you think that is?”

No new news to drive the story. So it remains plausible but unproven.

Because that isn’t what impeachment is for. If they wanted to be CinC they should have run for it themselves. If their employers wanted to they should have run someone in the primaries.

Black Rifle Coffee, which is a new company, has heavily promoted itself from the beginning and for a few years now as coffee for right wingers made by vets. Including doing ads ridiculing lefties. So its NY Times article—where it suddenly attacks Kyle Rittenhouse and St, Michael the Archangel (!) was quite a reversal.

This was covered on this weekend’s Fash The Nation (the right stuff dot biz).

(((Black Rifle Coffee))) is just a grift to rip off gullible right wingers, vets, gun guys, etc., it isn’t “made by vets” and it isn’t very good, and it is owned/run by two members of the tribe.

Apparently they don’t like it when people like Rittenhouse defend themselves and kill their fellow tribesmen kiddie-diddlers.

Once you start noticing these connections these “sudden reversals” aren’t surprising.

“black wife” coffee company? Lol!

Is everyone using voice to text now that words get so mangled?

It’s a meme.

My wife’s black son > Black Rifle Coffee Company > Black Wife Coffee Company

(((Black Rifle Coffee Company))) strongly disavowed Rittenhouse and his supporters, for tribal reasons and because muh anti-racism; in other words they unmasked themselves.

Ominous.

The days of respecting the US military are looong over. General Milley will use all of these many well meaning men to kill you, when he’s given the order. Milley will play golf while the bloodshed proceeds.

Yes, it still is. And rightfully so, in my opinion. Family get a leg up, if only because they can be well prepped for tests and interviews. Minorities, including women, are splashed all over the newsletters, but I haven’t seen them showing up on jobsites, and believe me, I’ve been looking.
The bookwork and drug testing are impediments to success for some folks.
Glad you’re doing well.

I think you need to check your numbers. Those jobs are certainly not low-paid. The excitement level is debatable. Memoirs of combatants returning from the Second World War are full of longing for a nice quiet life afterwards. Of course, they were draftees and hadn’t often sought out positions as front-line infantry.

Exactly, Prosa! Thank you for this comment. I remember thinking “can’t there be just one big store left for guys’ stuff?!” Sears used to be a great place for tools and guy’s clothes. I have a craftsman socket set from nearly 35 years ago for which the ratchets still work, no socket has ever stripped or busted, and amazingly, I’ve got every single one of them still (8 racks of them).

More recently, there was our experience with an exercise bike, documented by Peak Stupidity 2 years ago in “The Softer Noisier Side of Sears”. We have the 3rd one, which had really decent crank bearings, as opposed to the cheesy ones on the first two. I am really good at assembling the thing now!

But has iSteve been in the least way condescending or belittling of anyone or wanting to ban anyone from his fine site over this?

The continuing cracks about being afraid of needles, well … and I’ve got the feeling our host thinks that all of us against just GETTING the vax for themselves are not at his level of intelligence.

P.W., I admit that my common sense, without knowing much about virology, told me a year back that it was either the mutation from bats or a Q/A problem at the Wuhan labs. After reading that article by Nicholas Wade that Mr. Unz himself touted, I got enough out of it to see that the former was not the cause, so the latter was likely it.

Should we make China pay? Why? This goes in the “shit happens” bucket, but the resulting huge PanicFest, planned out or just done as a “never let a crisis go to waste” deal, is THE STORY here.

the belief that these guys are well-nigh supermen and that any state backed up by them is essentially invincible

No American believes that. If anything, the general consensus, left and right, is that “goat herders” beat the US military/empire in Afghanistan.

But one irony of the news media, government, and Hollywood for years glamorizing SpecOps units in Iraq and Afghanistan is that it sparked a domestic civilian market for their gear and ‘tactical’ shooting training, fitness (e.g. CrossFit), and ‘prepping’ in general, not in opposition to operators, but in (aspirational, sometimes tongue-in-cheek) affinity with them—this is why so many regular MAGA types, military and civilian, are furious at Black Rifle Coffee: MAGA normies feel duped and betrayed by a company of people they perceived as patriot friendlies.

You may be a patriotic veteran, angry at what is becoming of this country, but what are you going to do about it? Stand against a government that is propped up by SEALS and DELTAS?

See my comment above. No veteran or civilian thinks SEALs and Deltas are the ones who “prop up the government”. It’s a lot more mundane: resentful/craven oligarchs, media types, bureaucrats, academics, politicians, and woke and virtue-signaling voters. The Banality of Weevil.

“But what I do have are a very particular set of skills; skills I have acquired over a very long career.

“Skills that make carnival customers want to pay good money to my mom to dunk me in the tank.”

Last night I had a chance to dunk a nearby county’s GOP chairman into the tank at the county fair. But you had to pay. I brought the kids today to see the animals. It was free and the rides cost a dollar.

A couple hundred miles to the southeast less well-behaved animals managed to close another county’s fair early:

Dane County Fair Fights: Closing Angers Many, Deputy Struck

https://www.nbc15.com/video/2021/07/18/dane-county-fair-hours-changed-after-friday-night-disturbances/

(Yes, that’s Tajma Hall.)

I have written in the past, as you know, about what the true purpose of this website is.

Hasbara?

Also his dad owned a timber outfit. That isn’t rare among Ashkenazim. A friend of mine comes from an Ashkenazi family that owned lumber mills in Ukraine. The Communists drove them out about a hundred years ago.

Yup, the lumber business in Eastern Europe was a largely jewish business.

Re: SEALS and Spec Ops. There are a bunch. SEALs get the most publicity, mostly because every ex SEAL has a book, podcast, TV gig, etc.

Delta is newer, around 1979 IIRC, different, and aside from a very few books by Beckworth and one other dude mostly tries to be invisible. They are very good, and like MARSOC/Marine Raiders, Force Recon, Green Berets, Air Force Parajumpers (medics/spec ops dudes who rescue downed pilots) they are quite different from SEALs.

An enlistee in the Navy can go straight into BUDS and become a SEAL if he passes. Most don’t, the washout rate is something like 85-90%, but the majority of SEALs are dudes straight out of High School. They have to be approved by the Team they join, but that’s it. SEALS have the subject of a shocking lack of military discipline. Shooting (against orders) wounded enemy prisoners, strangling a Green Berets Sergeant in Mali who reported their theft of hundreds of thousands of dollars of cash and drug dealing. All those books. Etc.

By contrast, MARSOC/Raiders only takes corporals and sergeants from the regular Marine Corp, but they can’t be promoted past Sergeant. Delta is much the same, ditto Force Recon, Green Berets, PJs. Those groups want regular army/marine/air force dudes who have shown they can do regular military jobs before they get training. They don’t want to waste time with dudes who will wash out. Selection for training is rigorous and time limited: no raw enlistees, no senior NCOs better suited to other billets and likely needed there as well.

Generally, the SEALs are younger, do crazier stuff, and there are probably too many to retain quality. The other groups being under less publicity and pressure seem to have higher standards.

I don’t subscribe to the lab leak theory myself. The fact that Covid was circulating in Italy as early as September, 2019 means that the lab leak was not necessary and, as a theory, is now largely unmotivated. Besides which, I don’t believe that the work allegedly done by the Wuhan lab is even possible. It presumes too much of human ability to think that this thing was engineered.

So did the guys directly under the helicopter survive ?

Hasbara?

Excellent question.

The fact is, Ron Unz has invented a new type of Hasbara, that should be called ‘RUnzbara’. It is less focused on Israel as much as in support of the Jewish agenda in the US.

For details, see here about the true purpose of this website :

https://www.unz.com/anepigone/cogs-in-an-evil-machine/#comment-4617220

No American believes that. If anything, the general consensus, left and right, is that “goat herders” beat the US military/empire in Afghanistan.

I have to question whether you actually know any Americans.

Lots of Americans believe that “our troops” (as if they were) are fighting for “our freedom” (as if), and that the special forces in particular are the ultimate badasses.

No veteran or civilian thinks SEALs and Deltas are the ones who “prop up the government”.

If it came down to fighting in the streets, who d’ya think that establishment is ultimate going to employ?

The days of respecting the US military are looong over.

A lot of conservatives seem to be getting over the GI-sniffing. Maybe someday, uniformed servicemen (and, of course, women – oh, and otherkins and whatnot) will be complimented (sarcatically) with: “Thank you for your service to GloboHomo!”

https://ksi.uconn.edu/2017/08/12/16-year-old-killed-when-log-falls-on-him-during-football-drill-espn/#

The 5-foot-6, 134-pound wide receiver and defensive back was declared dead later at a hospital.

Sachem East graduate Carlin Schledorn, who played football as a junior, said carrying the log — about 12 feet (3.7 meters) long and the diameter of a utility pole — was a “team building” exercise.

“It’s very big. It’s like a tree, and it’s a challenge for people who weightlift,” he said. “Five or six people do it at once. I feel horrific for the team and coaches because I know them, and they are all great men.”

Little guys and big logs do not mix, apparently.

The fact is, Ron Unz has invented a new type of Hasbara, that should be called ‘RUnzbara’. It is less focused on Israel as much as in support of the Jewish agenda in the US.

So the articles he wrote espousing the view that the Mossad killed Kennedy and that Jews really were killing Christian children to use their blood in matzah were just to throw us off the scent? Cunning indeed! It brings to mind an old Jewish joke. Hershel challenges Chaim with a riddle “What’s green, hangs on a wall and sings?” Chaim racks his brain and finally says “I don’t know, what? Says Hershel triumphantly “A herring!”
Chaim protests “A herring isn’t green!”

H. “nu if you paint it green it is.”

C. “But a herring doesn’t hang on the wall!?”

H. “If you nail it to the wall, it does.”

C. ” But a herring doesn’t sing!!”

H. “That I added to make it difficult.”

I worked for a firm that manufactured weed wackers in the summer of 1979. The executives, who sold lots of weed wackers to Sears, were complaining about Sears stores having recently become shoddy. They saw it as a pretty new thing.

That would be a few years after Sears built that massive tower, “the worlds tallest building..” in Chicago. Talk about taking your eye off the ball.

While in Rio de Janeiro in 1986 a friend took me to the Rio Sears. He considered it a swanky store. Looked like a K-mart to me. A friend of mine took her Venezuelan father to an American Sears 15 years ago in Florida. The elderly man was greatly disappointed in the visit. He recalled the Sears of his yesteryears in Caracas. In Caracas in the 60s and 70s men went to Sears to get a nicely fitted western suit.

Sears once carried the standard of American can-do-it-ism overseas. I dare suspect that if there is a Sears in Durban SA, it was overlooked in the latest spasm of looting.

After seeing a number of adverts on American TV, my European wife asked why so many US veterans have difficulty getting back into civilian life, and the answer is that Uncle does little to help folks return to normal life. Assuming you don’t want to spend your life as a black-ops mercenary, if you don’t have a clear idea what you want to attain in life, you may well find taunting people to dunk you is your most valuable life skill.

Watch out when his eyes start rolling and his triggerfinger starts getting itchy.

That’s great to hear in all honesty. In my experiences, I’ve seen very little of that. (teamster and MC vet)

“and not be a whiner”.

Except if he is an ex-marine. Every one of those I had work for me was a cry-baby (and a blow-hard).

Was that in the aviation business, O.P.?

Can’t speak to today but when I joined in 2005 raw enlistees could contract for PJ training. I knew plenty of washouts. And I’m pretty sure the Army was running the 11X program back then where they’d contract guys to go directly from infantry training to SF

Well, in fairness, just about every veteran is ready to puke when some civilian tosser starts in with the “Thank you for your service” crap.

I knew a marketing exec from Sears who was there in both eras and lamented the drift away from what made Sears Sears. Chasing fads and being an early adopter of buzzwords, remember those, wasn’t a viable strategy. He singled out their Aisle of Style as one particular self-inflicted disaster.

We know the shooter was not a typical white sumpremacist because the story has gone away like a fart in a hurricane. There is no data at all anywhere in the MFM about the ethnic pedigree of those involved.

I’m guessing his dad’s Ashkenazi because Idaho is pretty Anglo. A name like Hafer stands out a little bit there, and to my ear sounds a bit Yiddish. I wouldn’t hazard a guess if it were the Midwest.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Idaho#German

Today, Idahoans of German ancestry make up nearly one fifth of all Idahoans and make up the second largest ethnic group after Idahoans of English descent

You learn the most amazing things arguing w/other commenters here.

I think what happens with “Anglos” is that their Germanness or Swedishness of any other northern European gets subsumed in the mix if they have an Anglo surname. If there’s no tipoff because of the name no one would suspect.

Also his dad owned a timber outfit. That isn’t rare among Ashkenazim. A friend of mine comes from an Ashkenazi family that owned lumber mills in Ukraine. The Communists drove them out about a hundred years ago.

Yes, quite common.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/29779989

Paperback Writer: 1
Bill P: 1

Onto the penalty phase!

(Tip: you can read Jstor if you have a Gmail account – sorry – or try to log in through your local library. The latter way you can download article. It’s a treasure trove.)

It’s a holdover from the post-Vietnam compensation.

Yes, it still is. And rightfully so, in my opinion.

Military people shouldn’t receive a preference over civilians for civilian jobs.

Eastern Washington is full of Germans, including Volga Germans who started many of the orchards it’s known for. The Palouse near the Idaho border (a bit of which extends into Idaho) also has a lot of German farmers. BUT, for whatever reason, the logging areas in the Pacific NW have few Germans, but lots of Scandinavians. So the west slopes of the Cascades, northern Idaho and the Olympics are more Anglo-Celtic with a substantial Nordic minority.

Of course southern Idaho is largely Mormon, hence pretty English.

My bet is that most German Idahoans come from farming families — not loggers.

(Tip: you can read Jstor if you have a Gmail account – sorry – or try to log in through your local library. The latter way you can download article. It’s a treasure trove.)

If you wouldn’t mind explaining, what is the process for reading Jstor through a gmail account?

And if one has access Jstor, how does one go about doing research? How did you manage to find this particular article, for example?

You run into a fair amount of lawyers with a military background in low-prestige practice areas because the military pays for their law school tuition.

Early on in my career I worked with a solo attorney who was a former green beret; his spectacular combination of arrogance, disagreeableness and incompetence would lead him into all kinds of bad situations. When I could see the writing on the wall that he would drag me into the same situations I bolted to a better law firm.

While he caused some catastrophes in cases he handled before, during, and after my time working with him, I don’t look back on it as an entirely bad experience; watching him make mistakes and then attempt to blame those mistakes on other people taught me some lessons about things to watch out for later in my career.

The title of the post hits something here; my old co-worker’s primary skill was using his aggressive personality to bully uneducated saps into taking terrible plea deals.

A comment above in this thread about veterans having mental problems is also spot on. To me it seemed like rather a case of Narcissistic Personality Disorder; other attorneys who knew him described it as some kind of PTSD and made it seem like I should feel sorry for him. He definitely relied on the “wounded warrior” mystique to get by in life.

At this same stage in my career I handles a number of criminal cases for veterans caught up in drug addiction, alcoholism, and domestic violence. In fact, I even saw my old co-worker email an attorney list-serv that we both belonged to requesting a referral for a lawyer in another state to represent an old army friend of his in a domestic violence case. While I certainly have a low opinion of how well the military prepares veterans for civilian life I am not sure how much of this can be attributed to institutional failure and how much of it simply “garbage in, garbage out.’

I think there is something about the simple social structure of the military where everyone slots neatly into an artificial hierarchy causes vets to be overwhelmed by the complexity of the civilian world upon entering it. I also believe the externally imposed routines and the way that veterans are also trained to manipulate a bureaucracy for handouts undermines individual responsibility and self-reliance.

Plenty of things to criticize about the higher education in this country but 9 times out of 10 the knowledge and skills a young person would acquire from a four-year degree will surpass anything they get out of military service.

My bet is that most German Idahoans come from farming families — not loggers.

Bill P scores the penalty goal.

( Sorry for double post. I messed up the rely on the first)
The fact is, Ron Unz has invented a new type of Hasbara, that should be called ‘RUnzbara’. It is less focused on Israel as much as in support of the Jewish agenda in the US.

So the articles he wrote espousing the view that the Mossad killed Kennedy and that Jews really were killing Christian children to use their blood in matzah were just to throw us off the scent? Cunning indeed! It brings to mind an old Jewish joke. Hershel challenges Chaim with a riddle “What’s green, hangs on a wall and sings?” Chaim racks his brain and finally says “I don’t know, what? Says Hershel triumphantly “A herring!”
Chaim protests “A herring isn’t green!”

H. “nu if you paint it green it is.”

C. “But a herring doesn’t hang on the wall!?”

H. “If you nail it to the wall, it does.”

C. ” But a herring doesn’t sing!!”

H. “That I added to make it difficult.”

Lots of Americans believe … that the special forces in particular are the ultimate badasses.

And how many of these badasses do you think the average American estimates are in existence? 10,000? 100,000? One millllllion?

If it came down to fighting in the streets, who d’ya think that establishment is ultimate going to employ?

LOL. It appears that you believe the establishment would rely on special operators to control a huge, heavily armed civilian population. No one believes that. There are simply too few, and that’s assuming they would all be loyal to the state in such a situation. Again: LOL.

If anything, the state (Biden, Swalwell) likes to threaten 2A supporters with air attacks and nuke strikes, not Delta raids. That’s laughable for other reasons, but there ya go.

https://www.businessinsider.com/biden-mocks-gun-right-advocates-who-say-assault-weapons-needed-fight-government-2021-6

FFS He was a living martyr when he was killed. A living Martyr. He was considered to have already given his life for his people by his people’s Supreme Leader. I’m sure he was warned that this could happen and probably couldn’t believe the US leadership to be so stupid as to do what they did. He may have even gone to Iraq knowing it could happen and believing that this was the preferred outcome.

Killing him accomplished nothing of benefit and they killed his Iraqi equivalent / best bro whom he used to hold hands with and pray together during battle. However that makes you feel does mean you could’ve survived more than a few minutes of the lives those guys lived for years … they were true to themselves and dedicated to their cause.

Killing them couldn’t have been stupider. Now the US is not able to be in Afghanistan, Iran and very soon Iraq as well.

If American foreign policy showed any sense they would’ve been using those drones to make sure Solemani died quietly in his bed.

Read the onion article from 2011 about leaving Afghanistan sometimes … I am sad that my team is run by fucking useless cowards like Justin but I need to be an adult about it. Little boys with powerful weapons killing men with less poweful weapons isn’t a future where my leaders become men.

I’m a long-time Peet’s fan, but when Dunkin’ arrived in the Bay Area, I journeyed to their store in Walnut Creek. I’d heard that East Coast folks raved about their coffee, and they were right. The dark roast brewed in their stores is particularly good.

Fuck bill clinton for giving every service man a beret. Berets were for the elite

I agree—berets for all are like participation trophies —but I recall that that was Gen. Eric Shinseki’s doing, not Clinton’s, and it was only for the Army.

BUT, for whatever reason, the logging areas in the Pacific NW have few Germans, but lots of Scandinavians.

Because they cut timber back home. I had a friend whose Finnish grandfather was imported with many other Finnish men to the Pac NW as timber-cutters. There were great waves of them.

They take themselves pretty seriously, though. At least the feild grades and senior NCOs do.

They can’t win a war. They waste our money. They don’t or won’t defend the borders. Now they have gay pride parades and trannies. They think the MAGA guys and gals are the enemy.

We seriously need a RIF.

I have always been told that Craftsman Power tools were not up to par. Makita, Milwaulkee, Bosch etc… were the way to go. Everyone had respect for the Craftsman hand tools up till the last few years before the end.

At the very end, I wouldn’t go to Sears because the sales associates were just completely incompetent and the service at the registers took FOREVER. I could have processed ten Home Depot checkouts in the time it took the numb sales clerks and clunky computers at Sears to process one.

I got so aggravated once that I walked out of the store with an item without paying, figuring the amount of time wasted queued for checkout was worth more than the item itself…

No, the one Jarhead I flew with had a screw loose, but he was alright. I get the impression marine officers are OK, if a bit bent. (You wouldn’t want them to do any heavy thinking). It’s the enlisted guys who are the whiners. I had a Special Forces E5 roommate who had worked with marines and he said they were crybabies. That was many years ago. I was surprised by the comment.

Working in heavy manufacturing, supervising skilled and unskilled workers for the last twenty-six years, I find the ex-marines stand out as the biggest bitchbags of all the prior-military. And the egos are obnoxious (but amusing to deflate).

Were they the incredible supermen you describe, or was killing them pointless?

You can’t have it both ways.

Was Soleimani a living martyr expecting death, or was his killing an outrage?

Seperate question unrelated to how you may feel about military service in general and/or the role that it plays in keeping the Republic safe. Do you think that people who were able to complete military service and keep their nose clean are more reliable on average than the typical 23 year old? More likely to show up to work? On time? Keep off drugs? Be functionally intelligent enough to do their jobs? Etc etc. Honest question.

…no one is ever going to do a large scale airborne operation again…

True. I read last night in VDH’s The Second World Wars (highly recommended) about the German use of paratroopers to capture Crete. The operation was successful but the Germans lost 300+ planes and suffered 7000 casualties including almost 4000 dead. They never attempted another airborne operation.

For cryin’ out loud.

I would have never have known about this apart from iSteve. WMTV-15 covered this, but WISC-TV3 didn’t find this newsworthy?

I have written in the past, as you know, about what the true purpose of this website is.

And yet here you are again, warning everyone about how this website is so terrible.

Did they finally kick off The Daily Stormer or what?

Here’s a thought. Set up your own website so the Truth can finally be revealed.

Report back on your progress.

I’d caution you against identifying the satanic cult of progressivism solely with the Jews.

In fact, that has been one of the devil’s greatest tricks during the present crisis. It’s not Jewry, but the dialectic of modernity and the ideology of moral equality, that have created the situation we are in presently.

“I have a craftsman socket set from nearly 35 years ago for which the ratchets still work, no socket has ever stripped or busted”

I’m always on the lookout for old tools, usually in the UK produced in Sheffield. They last indefinitely, unlike Chinese stuff.

…any vaccine released before the election would have been automatically savaged by the mainstream media as “rushed” and “dangerous”.

As I recall it, there was no question of releasing the vaccine at that stage. The point was to delay the announcement of successful trials until after the election.

Looks like Black Rifle Coffee got big enough to have an HR department.

There is a lot of self-selection going on. The fact that the armed forces at the enlisted level are 20 to 30% black (varies over time) might give you a clue that the military leans towards stupid (not profoundly stupid, just not super high IQ). Conversely, in a rich suburban E or W coast district you might have more whites going into the IDF than into the US military.

While in small towns, in the South, etc. there is more of a military tradition (and the officer corps is better than the enlisted (although there is less of a class gap than there was in the past, not because the enlisted have gotten better but because the officers have come down in class), the overlap in the venn diagram between “whites who are Ivy League material” and “whites enlisting in the military” nowadays (since the end of the draft) is very small so while you may be right that on average you would learn more in college, the people who would get more out of college already attend college and the people who would NOT get more out of college enlist.

Just go to

Jstor.org

There’s a button on top that says “log in through your library.” If your library isn’t signed up, click on the “Log In” button on the right.

That gets you to “Log In With Google”.

It’s simple.

You do research by entering in key words and bungling around. I don’t remember exactly how I found this article. Probably by entering in “Jews” and “lumber”.

A comment above in this thread about veterans having mental problems is also spot on. To me it seemed like rather a case of Narcissistic Personality Disorder; other attorneys who knew him described it as some kind of PTSD and made it seem like I should feel sorry for him. He definitely relied on the “wounded warrior” mystique to get by in life.

The military doesn’t select randomly from the male population anymore. It’s a self-selected group that probably exceeds others in the sort of aggressive mediocrity you outlined.

I’m a lineman.

For the county?

Are you aware of the fact that the overwhelming majority of the 89th Congress (that historic congress that passed most of the laws so unpopular here), were at least 40 years old, hence born before 1915? That is, not Boomers.

To take only one example, the Speaker of the House, John McCormack, a Massachusetts Democrat, was born in 1891.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_W._McCormack

Stop blaming all the shit on us Boomers, OK?

they were true to themselves and dedicated to their cause.

So were Hitler and Himmler. If your cause is evil, then being true to it means that you are evil too. The Iranian regime is evil. Iran (even putting aside its desire for nuclear weapons and dedication to the destruction of Israel) oppresses its own people. They are a sponsor of terrorism. They hate America. They shout “Death to America”. You should hate them as much as they hate you. The Iranians would be puzzled by why you love them. Some gay thing, like what was going on between Soleimani and the terrorist al-Muhandis, as you imply?

Little boys with powerful weapons killing men with less poweful weapons isn’t a future where my leaders become men.

I really don’t understand your objection. War isn’t supposed to be fair. Are we supposed to use only those weapons that the Iranians have? Would it have made you feel better if we had planted an Iranian style EFP under his jeep? Asked him to engage in solo combat with Gen. Petraeus? Should we give the Iranians drones to even up the match?

The Iranians are glad to kill American soldiers whichever way they can. If they had better weapons, they would use them. The only thing that restrains them is that they know that they have to carry out a covert war because they would (even with a diminished US military) lose in open warfare.

Before WWII, my grandfather owned a (small) mill in what is now Ukraine. The mill cut lumber with a big circular saw (my mother always talked about the “tsyrkulyarna” – Yiddish outside of academic circles did not bother inventing Yiddish words for such things – people just used the word in the local language) as well as grinding grain. Everything was driven by belts coming off the shaft of the water turbine.

BUT, immigration was such a disruptive experience (America was at a whole different technological and economic level – the kind of mill he was familiar with was 50 years out of date in the US plus immigration meant starting over from scratch, not knowing the language, etc.) that people often had to change trades when they came to America. If there were any mill owners from E. Europe who became mill owners in America, there weren’t many. In the US, I knew some Jews who owned lumber yards but not saw mills. I grew up in a community of Jewish chicken farmers in NJ. AFAIK, not one of them had been chicken farmers in the old country any more than Patels ran motels back home in Gujurat. Their Old World occupations literally did not translate and they found a new niche in America.

As for my grandfather, his years in a Soviet prison camp (plus his heavy smoking) broke his health and when he got to America he lived with his kids and did not do much of anything. He was too old to start over.

Cool. Thx.

The allied airborne operations weren’t much better. Sicily was a goatf**k, Normandy not much better, Market-Garden was a disaster. There’s a good case to be made that putting all the best troops in a couple of divisions made the army worse as a whole. It was glamorous though.

Funny you mention military aviation skills, Acchie. After 5 years chasing F14s and A6s on Nimitz’s flight decks, AC, LOX, ejection seats, after all that I couldn’t get a job cleaning toilets on commercial aircraft because I didn’t spend 50K getting an A&P license. So I became a telecom tech doing big fucking phone systems and wiretapping the big’s home phones to catch their wives cheating for the divorce. Skills? I dunno what that means. What’s more weird than my path? Not that I’m complaining.

That is true.

But life is hard.

Most males never develop the real skills that real men have —- usually, they are carried along by other males who are real men, and the followers, who want to be real men but who are not, and who will never be, get their little tattoos, and lift their little weights, and pretend they are men who other men respect. But that is not how it works. Almost all men are followers – lucky for them, women are usually unable to tell the difference – if women could tell the difference, things would be different. But they can’t, and things are not different. Well, it all works out, because most women are not attractive for very long —– this would be an unfair world if women were attractive for a long time, and the men who were real men could not find attractive women, due to the competition.

My friends, there is not much competition. Almost every male you know is a coward, and almost every woman you know is the sort of woman who is willing to marry a coward. Things are better in the United States than they are almost anywhere else, but things are what they are. You will often read resentful comments here from frustrated losers in life who want to criticize Americans, but trust me, for every foreigner who is a brave man, there are a dozen brave Americans. The people who say otherwise are losers in life who do not understand that the best that there is in this world is in places like America, not in the god-forsaken places where their beloved little cowardly military members live in their sad little countries that could never protect themselves without the help of people like Americans, not now, anyway.

That being said, if every once in a while someone develops courage by working for the USA government, getting paid to waste our tax dollars on hour after hour where they get paid to play with weapons, for a few years, well, good for them.

How stupid could you possibly be?

I have repeatedly said that I am in FAVOR of the true purpose of this website (which is ‘RUnzbara’).

If you had an iota of reading comprehension, this would be obvious to you from my comments.

See the blue text below. You are supposed to click that. It takes you to a comment I made that I linked to above as well. Have someone with an IQ higher than your 70 read it to you if it is too hard :

https://www.unz.com/anepigone/cogs-in-an-evil-machine/#comment-4617220

Yes, I am in favor of the true purpose of this website. Ron Unz and I are in cahoots, and I am one of the most valuable commenters here (and have been for years).

What is funny is that the true strategy can be revealed openly, and you 70-IQ wiggers still can’t seem to figure it out.

Just when I think I can’t overestimate the IQ of you idjits anymore, you continue to astound.

Jack, if you don’t mind, why did he spend years in a Soviet prison camp?

Very good. Kudos.

Troll

I think there is something about the simple social structure of the military where everyone slots neatly into an artificial hierarchy causes vets to be overwhelmed by the complexity of the civilian world upon entering it.

Hey there, Hubba Bubba–for most of the past 150 years, this country has been run by veterans, in both the public and private sectors. Civil War vets, WW1 and 2 vets–it’s only in the last couple of decades that it has lessened. Whether it’s “better” now is subjective, to be sure.

Most veterans do 3 or 4 years in uniform-so, about the same as the average college student spends in school. You think that that experience warps and cripples them and makes them unfit for the civilian world? LOL.

And how many of these badasses do you think the average American estimates are in existence? 10,000? 100,000? One millllllion?

Estimates? Probably a lot more than there are. Given that’s almost all they hear about. Like I said, the purpose is intimidation.

LOL. It appears that you believe the establishment would rely on special operators to control a huge, heavily armed civilian population. No one believes that. There are simply too few, and that’s assuming they would all be loyal to the state in such a situation. Again: LOL.

Rely on exclusively? No. Relay on? Very possibly. Use? Yes. There is evidence that the state already used them (Delta) against US citizens, at Waco.

Would they all stay loyal to the state? They seem to be all on board with everything so far. I think the notion that the US military will rescue us from the predations of our government is likely foolish optimism.

Agreed. There are no circumstances I can imagine where our leaders would send more than a battalion (i.e. the Rangers) to make a combat jump, and they would only do it to secure an airfield so that other, heavier, follow-on forces could be brought in to reinforce them. The ready brigade at Ft. Bragg, a status that rotates among the brigades of the 82nd, says that they can be “anywhere in the world in 24 hours”. Maybe so, but if we were ever going to send a unit to carry out such a mission it would have been in the aftermath of 9/11 in order to secure the mountain passes between Afghanistan and Pakistan and that didn’t happen. The large parachute drop that eventually did happen in the GWOT-the 173rd brigade jumping into Iraq-only happened after the Kurdish Peshmerga secured a jump zone for them and I believe that the “combat jump” status for that was later withdrawn.

The risks involved in sending 3,000 +/- soldiers somewhere in the world where they could only be supplied or reinforced by parachute are far too high to be seriously considered, having them potentially wiped out or captured would be a political disaster of the highest order. Then you have to start to try to figure out how to withdraw them once their mission is complete. Anywhere in the world that is close enough to either an existing airbase that we have access to or a shoreline that the Navy could get close to, so that the target area would be accessible by helicopter, would favor a heliborne operation for a variety of reasons. Add all that to the injury rate among the airborne and the associated costs from medical care and disability payments and you start to see the large airborne forces more as a liability than an asset, but we keep them because they are a WWII legacy formation and because the SF can draw from them for recruits who have already demonstrated some courage (it does take some guts to jump from an airplane, even in peacetime).

What is strange to me is the goalpost-shift away from the former claim of 92.7999989 effective! to the current claim that the “vaccine” mitigates the effects of the illness. Because it’s become pretty embarrassingly clear that this vaccine does nothing to suppress the virus–you can still get it, transmit it, and be hospitalized because of it. If anything, the vaccine appears to be driving the variants. Does it lower mortality? Since the people dying from it are overwhelmingly over 75, it might be keeping some folks on Medicare for 6 – 12 months longer before an aneurysm or cancer gets them. We don’t really know, because test criteria for vaccinated are different. When the initial numbers came out, the confidence interval for age 72 and up was extremely low–the elderly don’t have a lot of immune system left to stimulate, which is why formerly we told them not to get flu shots.

From your writings, I know you were in Houston about this time at Rice U. You must have been working for the Ballas’ family at Weed Eater. I know the family quite well and find them to be quite interesting from an HBD perspective. I am surprised this is the first time that you have mentioned your experience working there.

As the owner of a mill, he was a “capitalist oppressor” and an “enemy of the people”. In 1940, in order to consolidate Soviet rule, Stalin arrested and deported or imprisoned everyone in his sector of Poland that he thought could conceivably oppose that process – government officials, policemen, school teachers, academics, journalists, priests, landowners, etc. And capitalists. If your goal was to preemptively cut the legs out from under any potential opposition movement even before it could get organized, this was really a very clever move. It would have made Soviet control of this sector much easier.

In 1944, under pressure from the Polish government in exile in London, then part of the Allies, Stalin was forced to declare an amnesty and let all these people (including my family) go back to Poland. Although I’m sure that if any of them stayed in Poland they were re-arrested again after the war was over. My family headed west and kept heading west until they got to a displaced persons camp in the American sector of Germany.

Ironically, this saved my grandfather’s life and that of his family. Later, when the Nazis came thru, all the Jews of their town were exterminated but my mother’s family was safely (if hungrily) ensconced 3,000 km to the east, far from even the easternmost German advance. A couple of children had left the nest and were not living at home at the time that the family was arrested, so they did not survive.

Thanks for this story.

Your story proves that the Holocaust did in fact occur. A substantial portion of the Trashionalist contingent here insists that it did not.

Ron Unz says it did not occur, but he does not actually believe that. He says that just to encourage the denialists to become bolder and more vocal in order to bring disrepute to themselves. His mother was a Ukrainian-Jewish immigrant, for Christ’s sake, so he is directly related to people who were victimized by it first-hand.

I’ve always found Steve’s strongest asset is his mild temperament. He strikes me as someone who would rather drop breadcrumbs in a provocative pattern than shave a four-letter-word into the back of his head. Never shout when you can just as effectively hint.

It’s much easier to wield a subtle scalpel when the decline of society is slow and gradual, however predictable its pattern, inevitable its conclusion, or obvious its culprits; on the other hand, when the handbasket to hell has begun picking up frightening speed, as the recent Racial Reckoning has been doing – and is anybody else as shocked/surprised as I am to see Times-approved lefties and nationally-known politicians openly using that term? – even serene ‘n’ amiable Steve will spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and make with the throat-slitting ….as a casual perusal of his entry titles for the last, say, three or four months unmistakably indicates.

I read a what-if scenario (which I can’t find now) where Soviet troops attacked a lightly defended Swedish island (Gotland?), captured the airfield, immediately flew in heavy weapons and air defense systems, and captured the island. This required complete surprise, no large local force that could immediately counter attack, and being close enough to the target to get reinforcements there fast. You can’t do this at distance without giving the game away when everybody has satellite imagery.

It’s not all encompassing, and some would argue over a few details, but I really like the general attitude that your prescription for dissing the Feds and Big Biz is grounded on, Mr. Gruskos. Thank you for this. I want to ask you if it’d be alright to put this whole comment on my blog site.

Thanks, Jack.

… to have an HR department.

That is the end. She’s not my friend, the one with the big ass-end. I never want to get those emails again … the end..

Big damn apology due Jim Morrison, of course.

Well, I was a paratrooper.

Tell us some stories please.

Sorry, I have no idea, I just saw the clip on Twitter.

Yes, please do.

Obviously very petty bourgeoise. Thousands of Poles taken prisoner in 1939 or arrested in 1940 were intensely interviewed while in prison in order to determine if they would fit into the new Socialist state.

Those that passed were kept alive, although often still in prison. Those deemed a potential threat – priests, military officers, journalists, teachers, professors, lawyers, writers, etc. were all shot. All of them. Stalin’s favorite executioner, Vasily Blokhin, personally shot 7,000 of them in a custom cellar room.

Someone arrested by the Soviets in Poland circa 1940 who survived at all was quite fortunate.

I read the abc news link. A bit sanctimonious for me. Of course they’re going to drink and drug on the job. Their job is fighting and killing, not proselytizing and virtue signaling. Given the information in the article, looks like Gant was railroaded.

Most males never develop the real skills that real men have —-

What are examples of such skills?

Well, it all works out, because most women are not attractive for very long —– this would be an unfair world if women were attractive for a long time,

What would be unfair about women being attractive for a long time? Wouldn’t that be a good thing?

Now I’ve read the Rolling Stone link. Maintain my position. If you encourage War without condition, the “best and brightest” are not likely appropriate for the execution.

The 7,000 that Blokhin shot were mostly military and police officers.

Of course the Germans had much better technology and would have scoffed at the crudeness of Blokhin’s method. 300 per night, one by one – that was for amateurs. Even Blokhin did not trust Russian guns and used a bunch of Walthers in rotation.

My grandfather survived but he left as a vigorous middle aged businessman and came back 4 years later as an old, sick man. He was never the same again.

‘liberal-progressive owned’?

You can just say ‘zionist owned’, you know.

A lot of liberal-progressives these days are pretty notoriously anti-zionist.