"Siri, what killed the most U.S. soldiers in the final year of World War 1?"

 

Asking for this dumbfuck:

Mind you, this fits with this overpromoted dumbass' worldview, where pushups always trump logistics (yswidt) and military learning. 

His abysmal ignorance of why the US military has been aggressive about things like preventive medicine, field sanitation and hygiene since 1941 explains a lot (tho this jackass is on record boasting that he doesn't wash his hands after dumping a load, so YMMV...).

I wrote a whole series on "The Imperial Japanese Army in WW2: What Went Wrong", and one of the single biggest failures that hammered the 大日本帝國陸軍, Dai-Nippon Teikoku Rikugun was the whole manly-man/bushido cult of warriorness that neglected beans and bullets for swords and spirit. 

The notion that somehow a poorly-supplied, under-resourced and -armed fighting force would beat more logistically and tactically competent enemies because of some sort of mystical whatever-the-Japanese-is for "cult of the badass"?

That's our boy!

So when I see stuff like this sad Fourth Gulf War Navy chow:

 

I think, yep, that's Major Pushups at work.

If the present Administration has a constant through-line, it's that if you can think up some way to do the dumbest thing possible in the clumsiest, most ridiculous way, the Trump people will find some thing that is so much more idiotic to fuck up in a way so ludicrous that you would dismiss it as an improbable fiction? That's what they'll do.

If it wasn't that innocent people will be hurt and killed by this dumbfuckery I'd just laugh.

Instead it makes me so goddamn furious I long for a sharp knife and their throats. 

Straining at bullets, swallowing glaciers

A friend of mine linked to this video:

Fighting Back Against A School Shooter

Fighting back against a school shooter:

Posted by TheBlaze on Monday, March 7, 2016

It's apparently a clip from a much longer training film that argues for a more active, aggressive defense against school shooters.

And y'know what? In a perfect world I'd be all about this.

For one thing, the whole "duck and cover" response to danger kind of pisses me off. Run away? Fine. Fight? If you want to. But cowering in hopes of being overlooked? Seems like a pretty miserable way to die, if that's how you're gonna go.

But.

We don't live in a perfect world. We live in a world where we have to make choices about how we spend our resources.

And I have two problems with this little video.

First of all, it's a school shooter video. It assumes from the jump that school shooters are a thing, a horrible, omnipresent, immediate, clear-and-present danger thing that must be aggressively confronted. I talked this to fucking death damn near ten years ago, but as horrible as the cable news people try and make it, the simple fact is that mass murder just isn't that big a threat in the US in 2016. IT's not like dying of dysentery was on the Oregon Trail back in the day.

You're more likely to get run over by a bus than you are to be killed by a madman with a gun in your school, kids. Seriously; Uncle Chief has done the math. Turns out that about 14 kids a year get squarshed by those ol' yella-dog buses. But about 297 people total - that's adults AND kids - got shot in school between 1980 and 2012 when Sandy Hook brought the whole "school shooter" thing back into fashion. That's about 9.3 people a year; the third of a person was either a really little kid or possibly a Donald Trump voter, but, whatever.

So throwing a lot of money at school shootings is like throwing money at ballistic missile defense or alien invasions; not a good return-on-investment thing.

Second of all, while it looks and feels nice, I think it completely mistakes the point of the "lockdown huddle".

The trainer of the video assumes that the point of the huddle is "protection" or something. He's right...assuming that the "main problem" is trying to cut down the casualty count and not actually control the kids' panic.

If I had a bunch of troops I had confidence in, and felt were both cool-headed and trusted each other I'd use his methods. My problem would be that...that's what I'd do with trained, confident troops. I'd trust them to stay still and silent until they had to take aggressive action. That's what good troops do in an ambush drill, which is basically what this is; a plan to ambush the shooter.

My problem would be that if I didn't trust my troops, or trust them to trust each other, spreading them out makes it much more difficult for 1) them to combat their own panic and 2) me to control them and prevent them from doing something panicky and dangerous.

So spreading them out makes it MUCH more likely that the most panicked one will bolt for the door and try to escape, or start screaming and crying, thus both alerting the nutter that we're there in the room and, possibly, unlocking the door for him.

It's a great idea, but it requires a HELL of a lot of training and a really high level of confidence and aggression in the kids.

Meaning that to do this successfully you'd have to...you knew it, right; spend a hell of a lot of time and money training kids and teachers to do this.

It seems to me that for some reason We the People are more and more inclined to do this stuff; worry and fret ridiculously about madman bullets, tiny, horrible problems that have a miniscule probability of harming us...while ignoring things like the melting glaciers that warn us of global climate change that have a real serious likelihood of fucking up our entire world.

I don't know why we do this. It kind of pisses me off, and I wish we'd stop. But it seems to be a people thing and no amount of pissing and moaning on my part will do anything about it.

Dining In

Sex dreams and now this. Lechery, lechery, wars and lechery. Nothing else holds fashion, I kid you not...

Anyway.

To begin with, my parents were of the school of parenting that believed that innocence was bliss.

I think I didn't even know that there were expressions inadmissible in polite company until high school at the earliest. Even after that my profanity was not convincing until the U.S. Army taught me to swear and then some.

I now have some considerable experience with the subject and have become through experience a thorough believer in the notion that the more you know - and, in many cases, the sooner - the wiser and more judicious you will be in your selection and employment of the rougher forms of the English language.

Because swearing and cursing, like any other form of speech, have a form and a style and an elegance to them when done correctly. And it is well for a person to do things, any thing, with form, style, and elegance.

Even invective.

But.

There is also an element of discretion involved.

If you are ignorant of the language then oftimes you will be oblivious when it is used, or misused, by others. It has always seemed to me that having someone on staff with a reasonably filthy mind is essential to avoiding errors such as this one:

Wanna bet Cathy got a whole bunch of smartass remarks after that header appeared on her column? Especially with the little smirky-face picture above it? And all because nobody on the "Examiner"'s editorial staff looked at that and chuckled "Eat out Catherine Cleary, hunh? I'll bet..." Derp.

I'm not sayin' you have to be filthy.

But it doesn't hurt to know about filthy. All's I'm saying.

(h/t to Nancy Nall for this little gem)

Who Knew?

Thank God for Jezebel.
Because if we didn't know any better, we'd assume that high heels just gave you painful arches, bunions, hammer toes and other foot problems. But no, it turns out that post-partum fitness...ummm..."down there" is contingent on tripping around in those high-high-HIGH four-inch spikes. Well, Tyra says so, and if Tyra says it, it must be so!

If I'd only known: think of the fun Mojo would have had biking to work in her Meliani pumps. Mrrrrowr!

(Honestly. And we wonder why after the past eight years McSame is in a dead heat with, regardless of what you think about "Change" and the relative virtues of the candidate involved, the man who represents the only current opportunity to put the GOP slime machine back in it's box. Sigh...)