Thought of the Day
Early Crew-Served Firearms
BULLET POINTS:
** The numbers are in, and now we know that Joe Biden’s SOTU speech was the worst-rated one in thirty years and generated ten million fewer viewers than his 2022 speech, according to Nielsen data. Perhaps Americans wanted to watch a non-fiction program instead of watching Biden repeat his oft-told lies. On the bright side, he didn’t deliver his fake Amtrak story again. But he did tell the lie about the GOP wanting to dismantle Social Security and Medicare.
** Russian companies received only $49.48 per barrel of Urals at Russian ports in January, down 42% year-on-year and just 60% of the European Brent benchmark price, according to the Russian Finance Ministry.
** During World War 2, the German Army issued Pervitin, a species of Adderall, to soldiers and pilots. The drug kept soldiers awake and alert, along with a slew of side effects and the chance of addiction. The value of Pervitin has been overestimated. The Blitzkrieg was successful more because of innovative doctrines, the seizure of intact fuel supplies, and luck than because of Pervitin. Relying on captured enemy fuel depots with fast, surprise deep strikes supported by a mixture of combined arms was sustained by neighboring, industrialized countries. One can argue that the USSR was industrialized at the time, but it stopped mattering when the Russians removed their entire industry from the West to beyond the Ural mountains. The Blitz stalled…no matter how much Pervitin they issued.
** On Thursday, the Daily Mail obtained more information that proves the mishandling of classified documents by the Biden family. According to their new report, “Hunter Biden’s business partner (who didn’t have a security clearance) was tasked with transferring sensitive papers from Joe Biden’s vice presidential office to the University of Delaware.”
** American Thinker – For no good reasons whatsoever, competence was allowed to die on the vine in order to give the less competent a leg up. Not superiority but “equity” rules the hiring, firing, and education of Americans. Worse, many of those who were affirmatively hired do not do as good a job as those whose excellence was obvious. You can see it in customer service, which for many businesses is abysmally incompetent. There is a resentful casualness in those who are hired to serve others that would not have been acceptable even two decades ago. The competence level one deals with on a daily basis is on life support.
** Over the past 30 years, Congressional salaries have gone up 231%. Because they work so hard for us…love us long time. Politicians are smart. Who else increases their net worth by $20 million a year on a $180 K-a-year salary?
** HALO over ice – Naval Special Warfare members perform a high-altitude low-opening jump during the 2022 Arctic Edge Exercise.
Bullet Points. Well something has to be done with Social Security and regardless of which branch of the uni-party has the reins at that time whatever is done will haunt them for a decade or two.
Congress. Pretty neat when you can vote yourself a pay raise and then not even need the money because of all the side deals that are going on.
American Thinker. Cherish someone in customer service who actually does their job. They still exist but are few and far between. My last experience with good customer service comes from the Social Security administration where a very knowledgeable lady resolved a long standing problem with my sister’s social security payments in a short 10 minute phone call. It was actually refreshing.
Congress (and the people in it) ALWAYS needs more money…
They would explain it another way…they DESERVE more money
People consider SS to be a pension. And it’s not. The Dems want to put everybody on the dole based on EQUITY. Which means you won’t get anything, Ed.
LL I already have been getting SS payments for a couple of years now and even though I paid into this mandatory pyramid scheme for 50 some years I treat every months check as a blessing. My kids and grandkids are screwed though.
because…inflation?
I guess. They should be forced to return tax dollars if graft exceeds the small portion of their compensation that comes from the public trough.
Incompetence is rampant. During my years of construction, I watched as the “professional” engineers became increasingly ignorant, the staff that supported their authority woefully incompetent, and would relish my opportunities to beat them up with the specification they would wield without understanding the consequences of their ignorance. Unfortunately, as time progressed, the specification would be ignored if the contractor was right, seeking compensation for errors became long waits of frustration, and my patience eventually eroded to nonexistent. Retirement was my best option, and I did so without hesitation.
My experience wasn’t just isolated to my profession. All aspects of society I observed were sinking into the same disastrous process, and the damage to society is obvious.
Outfit I work for recently hired a young engineer straight out of skool. I’ve probably related part of this story before, but anyway I was assigned to teach him certain aspects of our operations and was gob-smacked to discover (a) he did not have a basic working knowledge of trigonometry or algebra and (b) he had declared to the rest of the engineering staff that he was the smartest guy in the room.
How special to have a young self appointed leader like that. In my professional life, others would have made his life interesting. I recall a young ensign who was sucked into an anchored ships engine water intake. We only recovered a leg and a fin. He proclaimed himself the leader too. For a week or so
Was anyone charged?
With what? Nobody hurt him. I was in a combat rubber raiding craft among other CRRCs looking for him. I remember clearly a master chief calling out to me, “Mr. Lambert! I think that I found him.” He hoisted. the finned foot and leg aloft. The ENS apparently separated from his dive buddy in obscure harbor water and ended up getting sucked into the intake. The target ship for training had all that machinery shut down for safety reasons but he was 100 yards from there. He could have surfaced and somebody would have just picked him up. That’s protocol.
The phrase ” others would have made his life interesting. ” made it seem to me as if someone had done just that to him.
Nobody would have done that. There would have been a lot of pranking had he lived.
Oh, to be sure, but he’s a very considerate young man. He’s making his own life interesting enough without any effort on our part. The problem with being the alleged smartest guy in the room is, sooner or later if you’re gonna have to prove it, and so far he’s been a very slow starter.
Commissioned only compensation in sales soon shows who is smart. Equality? Kiss my ……….
Car biz, we would occasionally be afflicted with “company suit” visits, or worse, day long sales meetings. In twenty years I only met two who I would have hired for my crew.
Totally minor point but yesterday waiting to have my eyes checked, I noticed a door stop mounted behind a protruding 2′ L, presumable enclosing some ducting or plumbing. The edges were scarred from the door hitting but the door stop was pristine.
Your eyes work.
X2
The surgery provided WSF with bionic vision.
My incoming $’s have increased 865% since 1990. Not bad for an old DoD field guy, but the overall net hasn’t gone up by congressional standards. I don’t benefit from insider trading and bribes. 🤷♂️
Obviously you should consider running for office.
Competence, definition:
grade inflation, gender, national origin, and pigmentation were already factors in dental school acceptance as far back as the early ’90s and now these individuals are unable to understand the causation of rising costs of liability insurance.
“Jes’ cain’t figger it!”
At least the “underserved community” are getting their dental work done by people they trust. Heh!
Inner-city dentists for inner-city people. It makes sense.
“The value of Pervitin has been overestimated.”
Unpossible! Propaganda doctrine requires that there be nothing good about Germany the nation, nor broader German culture. Anything bad done by Germans is because of their intrinsic badness. Anything innovative is because they were methed-up drug fiends.
Something similar applies to Russians, especially these days (only they’re all blotto on cheap vodka instead of meth). Every decent person knows that there is nothing good about Russia, nor Russians, nor Slavic culture in general.
Yeah
What scares me is the ‘competence’ of engineers coming down the road…
And they’re responsible for understanding what they stamp will ultimately decide the ability of someone to survive, or not. If someone asks if I have any confidence they’ll be competent, my answer is “no”. Without software, even the best are now hampered by their ignorance.
We’re too old, Old NFO. We will be dead when the shit really hits the fan.
We framed up a complex multi hip/valley stick built roof for a discerning client who had an architect draw it out to “show us how to do it!” Every other instruction had a note added to it, “or at the discretion of the contractor.” After we we finished we took this dolt on a short instructional tour on how this had been done successfully for hundreds if not thousands of years.
Bill Whittle: Adderall and Me
Bill is one of millions of Americans for whom the prescription drug Adderall has been a godsend. And now there isn’t any. NONE.
https://podcasts.google.com/subscriptions?sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwim7pS0zuvyAhXQOM0KHdG_CIwQ6tUFegQIABAB
I have a daughter who takes and needs Adderall and two grandsons. It makes their lives better.
MRSLL claims that I have too much focus and if I took it, the Adderall would blow the top of my head off. But for those who need it, it’s a game changer.
HALO jump with no weapons visible empty mag pouches? Who are these guys?
Not only that, snow smocks covered by woodland camo everything… Undercuts the whole idea!
I was involved in the construction of four different model homes in a new subdivision.
We scrupulously followed the plans and specifications on the first three homes and on each we discovered that the homes could not be built as drawn by the architect. One of the reasons was that the hallways were not long enough to fit in the specified door widths.
The fourth house we added 18 inches to the overall length (who designs a house that is 45′ – 6″ long with rafters on 2 foot centers-stupid),
We told the plumbers which wall to do their layout from and gave a heads-up to roofers and floor guys. The changes were all kept among the tradesmen.
All the doors fit into the hallway. The rafters fell at 2 feet OC as they should.
The roof was a stick-framed cut-and-stacked roof with ssventeen hips and valleys. I cut the whole roof on the ground with no adjustment cuts needed.
On another model condominium project the architect could not make a stairs work in the specified space, threw up his hands after several attempts at us building according to his revised drawings, stormed off and said, “Just build it! You guys can build things we can’t draw!”
And we did.