Category: Uncategorized

“Well, I’m sorry if you heard “Disneyland,” but I distinctly said, “military school.” – The Simpsons

Which historical period has the nicest shirts?  The Iron Age.

The primary factor in the success of any military organization is the quality of the people who run it and lead it.  Over the course of only five years, the level of trust in the United States military has dropped from 70% to less than half.  If the military was composed entirely women, I guess they could get divorced again and get the other half.

Why?

There are multiple reasons.  The first is that the Right has generally been more supportive of the military.  This was because the commies hated the military in the 1960s because it was stopping the worldwide spread of communism.  This resulted in a visceral and continual hate of the Left for all things .mil.  And, not everyone hates all of the Leftists.  Heck, I haven’t met all of them yet.

With an all-volunteer force after the draft ended, the sorting primarily drew two types of people – those that wanted to serve with honor and those that didn’t have any other place to go.  The sorting made a military that was strongly but not uniformly on the Right – 36% of post 9/11 vets are on the Right per a 2012 Pew® survey, and just 21% on the Left.

What did the Roman say when his ex was eaten by a lion?  Gladiator.

That leaves a big chunk in the middle, but is considerably more Right than society as a whole – at that time 34% of the general public described themselves as Democrats and 23% Republican.  The military has been (at least in America) a place where the service was apolitical, but the sense was on the Right.

In 2018 the numbers had gotten even larger, according to the Military Times® 45% of troops supported Republicans, and 28% supported Democrats.  In a 2015 survey from the Washington Post©, the Marines and the Air Force were apparently significantly more on the Right (at that time) than the Army or Navy.

I’m thinking all that is changing, and rapidly.  Weirdly, the more competent a person is, the more they tend to have Right-leaning views.  The fewer mental illnesses?  Again, the more Right-leaning.  And you’d have to be both crazy and incompetent to join the military in 2023.

Let me explain . . . .

I recall a quote from the late actor Ron Silver when he was at the Clinton inauguration back in 1992.  He saw the jets flying over and his visceral reaction was anger.  He hated the military.  But, he said, “I realized that those were our jets now.”

Ron used to live a hand-to-mouth existence.  Then someone told him about silverware.

When the Left says “Our Democracy” they mean just that, “Ours” as in it belongs to the Left.  Any outcome that doesn’t favor Leftists isn’t democracy by their definition.

I took The Boy on a tour of several colleges, including one of the academies.  I think he had the chops to get in and succeed.  He looked around and decided to go to Midwestia State.  The scholarship was pretty good, but he was vaguely concerned about the academy.  He didn’t explain why.

After the aftermath of COVID where students were being kicked out of the academies if they didn’t have the proper vaccination, well, I could see he made the right choice.  I’ve also seen briefing papers, PowerPoints®, and pictures that make it clear that .mil is now becoming thoroughly woke.

When the Right is in charge, the military is what it is meant for:  a tool to be used in war to kill people and break things, or help in extraordinary crisis like a hurricane or tsunami.  To the Right, the military not meant to be a social conditioning program to spout propaganda to the American people or the soldiers themselves.  Why do you think the Obama administration made it a point to purge hundreds of senior officers?  Because it was a fashion show?

Well, to be fair he’s also probably a Vice Admiral.

But the primary purpose of the military to the Left is the same as the purpose of anything to the Left.  Just like “Our” Democracy has nothing to do with you or me, the major mission of any FedGov body is to follow the ideology of the Left, secure power for the Left, and indoctrinate for the Left.

We’ve seen that with the absurdity of the gymnastics the FBI® and the DOJ™ have been doing to keep Hunter Biden out of the slammer for things that would put mere mortals like us into a Federal penitentiary for years, their working to control what ideas you can see, and their unswerving desire to disarm the public that they’re supposed to be serving.

But back to the military.  Recruiting is down, only 75% of recruits can make it out of a basic training and the various services have started “pre-basic” to take marginal candidates and help them do things like get in moderately decent shape or pass the ASVAB.  It’s the second part that’s scary – the last time FedGov lowered mental standards in the 1960s, they found that McNamara’s Morons they died at triple the rate of qualified soldiers, and took many of their fellow soldiers with them.

Forrest Gump wasn’t entirely fictional, but in reality he was the one who generally got Lt. Dan blown up.

I hear his password is 1Forrest1.

80% of people who sign up for the armed forces are from families that have members who served in the armed forces.  Those same relatives are now telling the kids to not sign up.  They’re not.  Despite more than doubling the pool of recruits by resetting the moral, mental, physical, and virtue requirements for admission to “breathing” because the numbers are collapsing.

It will get worse from here.

The systems and wonder weapons that the United States has collectively bet on are complicated.  They require tough, strong, motivated troops to use them properly and they have to work together – it’s not a game of Call of Warcraft™ or Grand Theft Duty©.

As our Navy ships run into each other and kill sailors because, seriously, the female officer wasn’t on speaking terms with another female aboard the urine and trash-bottle filled command center.  I’m not making this up (LINK).

“Well she needs to apologize first.”

Thankfully, we’ll never need a functioning military and can just get by with an indoctrination and jobs program.

Wait, did someone in Rome say that, too?

“I know what you mean, Blair. Trust’s a tough thing to come by these days. Tell you what – why don’t you just trust in the Lord?” – The Thing

He also broke up with his moonshiner girlfriend, but he says he loves her still.

One of the places we vacationed once upon a time was Branson, Missouri.  It’s absolutely a tourist town.  One of the places we went was Silver Dollar City®.  It’s like one of the large theme parks you’d find almost anywhere.  It’s also a nice place to go, not like that theme park that discriminates against the blind – Seaworld®.

I was walking there with The Mrs., The Boy, and Pugsley when we were all a decade younger than we are today.  All of a sudden, a young blonde man who looked like a fullback ran up to me.  He was probably 19 or so.  “Sir, sir, sir!  You dropped this!”  He handed me two $20 bills – they’d been in my pocket after getting change from buying sodas for the family.  They’d fallen out.

I was . . . stunned.  I couldn’t see this happening in most places that I’d been.  I thanked the young man, shook his hand, and he loped off to catch back up with his girlfriend.

That is the example of a high trust society.  People do things like that because they’re the right thing to do.  They get enjoyment out of doing them.  When I was surprised by behavior, like I was by that kid handing me cash, it made me feel great.  It gave me hope for society.

This also gives me hope for society. 

It was also a lesson for The Boy and Pugsley on how to behave.  Here is a person who could easily have walked away with $40, but who did the right thing and returned it.  No one would have ever known except for him and his girlfriend.  But, I’m betting, he didn’t want to have to live with being the type of person who didn’t live his life virtuously.

I think it also made the kid feel great to do something nice.  He got a great story to tell people about the goofy man with the little kids who dropped forty bucks out of his pocket.

Trust is crucial for a really high-functioning group of any type, from a family to a state to a country.  Trust provides a glue that keeps people together, and gives them common ground to collaborate.  People who trust each other tend to reciprocate, cooperate, and take care of each other.  It’s like the Mafia, but with fewer people being “taken care of”.

Trust also leads to prosperity.  Trust plays a huge component in how easy transactions are.  In a society where people keep their word, contracts aren’t as important because honor is important.

Where do you live?

Trust leads to greater governmental stability.  While there have always been awful people in government who were only out for themselves, I think we’ve reached the bottom in having awful people at all levels of government.  There are some good ones, but the FBI is generally pretty good at having them transferred to Fairbanks.

One of the things about cities is that they tend to breed anonymity.  In Modern Mayberry, we ignore gunshots and get concerned when we hear sirens.  In most cities, they ignore sirens and get concerned when they hear gunshots.

They were going to film part of the Transformers movie in Detroit, but Michael Bay said they couldn’t afford the CGI costs to repair the buildings.

A high trust society requires rule of law instead of rule of men or rule of The Party.  It’s that trust that the judicial system is impartial and does its best to send guilty folks to jail (or worse) and let innocent folks go free, no matter who they are.  There hasn’t ever been a perfect justice system, but if the people feel that it’s as good a system as people can create, it does the trick.

So, that’s what it’s like living in Heaven.  What does a low trust society look like?

• High levels of apparent corruption,
• Low confidence in public institutions,
• High crime rates,
• Political polarization,
• Lack of any sort of sense of a coherent society, or common goal, and
• Social unrest.

It’s clear that, as a nation, we’re closer to a low trust society than a high trust society.  Rather than just being a social or philosophical question – it’s one that costs money and determines what services are available.  An example is the new Walgreen’s® store in Chicago.  Apparently, Walgreen’s© got tired of having urban hunter-gatherers wander in and loot the store in broad daylight with little fear of any sort of legal jeopardy.   Walgreen’s© has closed nearly 30 stores in just San Francisco alone.

I guess they were asking for it.  And, yeah, I’m back on Twitter®.

Walgreen’s™ decided to build a store with no shelves, just a little kiosk where people can pick products from a digital tablet.  The idea of wandering down the shelves, shopping leisurely, comparing one product against another is dead in this store.  Pick the Preparation H™ and some clerk will wander to a shelf in the back room and pull a tube down and stick it in a bag.

Then, after the customer pays, they’ll hand them the stuff.  Walgreen’s© used to trust customers in Chicago.  Now, they don’t.  Their revenues will go down (nobody ever goes to the store to buy cashews, but when you walk by them . . . ) and their costs of having to have people run to get products will go up.

Why?  Stores are being looted on a regular basis.

Meanwhile, you could walk into Wal-Mart® here in Modern Mayberry and see every towel neatly stacked, all of the shelves full, and nobody stealing anything.  Yeah, they check my receipt as I walk out the door now, but the lady at the door only pretends to look at it.

Wal-Mart™ makes money here.  The Walgreen’s© in Chicago doesn’t.  San Francisco, plagued by a new breed of criminals that the police won’t arrest (or if they are arrested, the DA won’t charge) systematically loot store after store of products when they’re not busy pooping in the streets.

San Francisco is now low trust.  This is spreading.  I wonder where it will end up next?  Oh.

“Not random at all, maybe, like there’s some pattern here?” – Silence of the Lambs

Whenever I hire anyone, I throw away half the applications I get randomly.  I don’t want to work with unlucky people.

Apologies – I gotta get up very early tomorrow, and need some sleep.  Here are some random memes I found that I’ll share so I can prove I was thinking about you.  Don’t forget to celebrate #HumilityMonth this June!