I think we're on a good trajectory in the long run, but economically, the short run just feels.. bad. It feels like the last 5 years had a lot of robbing Peter to pay Paul, and the bill is coming due. But I have a lot of hope for the future. Gonna talk about what I see and why.🧵 Aside from a few remaining bright spots with room for some growth at the technological edge, I know at least I've been feeling a massive contraction of capex in my business. No one is spending money unless they have to. Not on expansion, not on maintenance. Feels frozen, stopped.

A follower of mine failed his polygraph for border patrol because when asked a question he "moved his foot" and that was taken as some kind of admission of guilt.

If we're going to hire 10k new bodies for ICE and have a 50 percent upgrade in BP manpower, Polygraphs should go.

Pro immigration activist communities rallied hard to block them from removing this measure which at CBP at least incurs a 50 percent casualty rate on applicants before they even make it to academy, usually over "inconclusive" results.southernborder.org/stop_congress_…

While a lot of these are no brainers, and stereotypes about the USAF are what they are for a reason, I still lurk a lot of those pages and I want to talk about what I see there, and I have a decent enough view of what is going on at both enlisted/officer levels:

I feel the enlisted side may be the worse off of the two. It's a constant conga line of the most simpering whiny *bitching* you can imagine. When COVID happened, people started taking advantage heavily and made that their "new normal". People faked COVID tests to get time off, people deferred PT tests for years on the basis of Services not having a good way to administer them with "social distancing" guidelines en masse, and the Biden admin shredded the basic foundations of good order and discipline.

If you go to the Air Force subreddit or the airman/nco page on Facebook, all you'll see is a stream of whining about the things they shouldn't have ever been given being taken away. On the other hand, anyone who is an Airman right now has never known any different. Military years are like dog years, any Airman that isn't the wettest behind the ears has spent almost their entire career under the Biden admin.

Ponytails for women, eyelash extensions, too much freedom in terms of stupid little designation patches for special functions, beards for men, black guys taking even worse advantage of the shaving waiver. These things, and the expectation that they will have to actually keep up with their PT, are all anyone is talking about over there. All they are doing is bitching.

The AF is so utterly disconnected from a martial way of life, sans a few particular career fields, that they need reminders. Regular squadron PT in lieu of "Individual PT" where people hide in their cars. Ruck marches. Drill and ceremony. Obstacle courses. Annual rifle quals. These things were all taken for granted and thrown out as "not relevant" to most jobs in the AF and "taking too much time away" from the mission.

But these are the only reminders other than wearing the uniform that Airmen and NCOs are even in a martial organization. It doesn't matter if they sit at a desk all day while they do their job, the AF needs to cut time from stupid annual computer based training on why they shouldn't r*pe anyone or k*ll themselves so they can have time to be put through these ritualistic tasks as a reminder. The ones who can't emotionally manage that without having breakdowns and crashouts over it on social media need to be shown the door.

There's also too many MWR sideshows going on. Many active duty airmen are more distracted by "volunteer" side projects than their actual jobs, and for some of these "extras" as the programs get cut, more bitching. Sorry, your language immersion field trip isn't worth the money, you aren't a linguist. Shut up. Your antiracist 5k you cleverly called "ruck racism" (this is a real thing btw) is stupid.

The officer side, I am disappointed to say, has a lot of problems but will be *easier* to fix. I served from the last year of Bush to the last year of Obama. As more and more women became commissioned officers due to more women going to college and DEI initiatives, the atmosphere became stifling. A lot of these women, frankly, are bitches playing office queen. They're the same brand of corporate sociopath you see at a fortune 500 company, where they'll climb over however many bodies they need to and do whatever management tells them they need to be doing to get the nod.

The good news is these women are easily steered. They'll do whatever "power" dictates, and I've noticed white women officers being strangely quiet in social media spaces as the black guy NCOs and black girl officers gnash their teeth as if they're the boss and not the commander in chief. I think they know which way the wind is blowing.

Most of these women burn themselves out into career staff officers anyway. They ruthlessly pursue goals from Lt to Major, and as soon as they get their first command they get absolutely bombed the fuck out in their climate surveys and consigned to some kind of staff job to ride out Lt Col and no real possibility of getting their bird.

But the reason this worries me, is that under normal circumstances (at least peak GWOT) the bottom of the pyramid was pretty solid. The Company and Field grade officers, as well as the enlisted, were pretty sharp people in 2008. Most of the head shaking was at the shitty absence of logic coming from the flag officers at the Pentagon and majcoms. This isn't the worst state of affairs, because the people on the ground will make do and figure it out, even if they have to omit how they figured it out in their reports.

But the strategic leadership of the Air Force actually seems to be getting it together under the current chief of staff. As far as trying not to always be fighting the last war, the Chief of Staff is trying to get out in front of what's probably in front of us. The Great Power Competition(GPC) alignment to INDOPACOM is actually a pretty good plan, and is getting executed on.

But I'm not sure the human capital is entirely "there" the way it used to be. There's too many redditors, furries, women, and black people complaining about eyelash extensions and beards. The damage done to the bottom 80 percent over the last 4 years is horrific (not to say the top 20 percent is ship shape either, it's not)

But that's a harder problem to solve, it takes longer to fix. When the people at the top are retarded, it's easy enough to fire them and start promoting young Colonels. But the "generation" of Airmen from the last 4 years are of miserable quality for the most part, and it's gonna take a long time to resolve these issues.

Time that we probably don't have.

https://x.com/Aristos_Revenge/status/1852820332807094554

This is absolutely insane, and I have yet to see an actual explanation with facts and figures. All I know is that sometime around 2022, at least my local AO in Houston suddenly exploded with Indians, Muslims, and Asians just showing up out of the woodwork. I don't know why, how, for what jobs, or how many.

But the change was sudden and unsubtle here.

My father in law has worked construction his whole life, concrete and safety inspection mostly.

Became a heat casualty at work last year, fell out and had to get a pacemaker put in. They laid him off as soon as he got out of the hospital, and he spent a few months looking for another job.

He's a hairs breadth away from 67 and got a job paying far less than what he was used to because nobody wants to hire a guy his age for the less labor intensive jobs as an inspector he's been doing for years and years.

He has to wait till the end of this year when his wife, who aside from being a part time paraprofessional at a school, has been a homemaker all her life. If they apply for social security early, they're penalized. If he doesn't apply jointly with her, she loses 30 percent of her benefit, permanently.

Without social security/retirement, he'd probably die on the job sometime in his early 70's out in the summer heat one day at this rate.

They're simple but good people, who grew up extremely poor and worked their way up and raised 3 kids. He was never in a position to go get some desk job he could do until 80 or whatever, the man can barely use a computer. He's nowhere near the only person in his position.

It's really easy to make an argument like this when you're a college educated desk enjoyer for your entire life. But that isn't how everyone or even most people live. He's waiting till 67 because that is the age you wait to claim social security till to get your max benefit. I did the math for them and if they both retire at the max age, they'll get about 5.5k as their fixed income to figure out for the rest of their lives.

The thing Elon doesn't understand is that the value of DOGE isn't saving money.

The value of DOGE is in bypassing normal bureaucratic back and forth to dismantle enemy institutions and human capital that act as sinecures for the left that finance their apparatus with tax $$$. 🧵 The "Fork in the Road" early retirement isn't a useful means of reducing manpower or saving money.

It was useful for ejecting federal employees who had so much TDS they couldn't stomach working for this administration or were lazy and ran away from being held to high standards.

USCIS just gutted the Special Immigrant Juvenile program, which one lawyer I spoke to referred to as the "MS-13 Visa Program". I talked to a few lawyers on both the Govt and Private side of the issue and I'll explain what this is and what this means: 🧵 The SIJ program is designed to cover cases of child abandonment, such as a child under 21 being abandoned by one parent in their home country, while the other resides in the United States. In reality, it's a gigantic fraud scheme. USCIS explains their reasoning:

What this is actually about is revenge, it's revenge season.

Trump is buck breaking big pharma over the entire industry collectively not telling the truth about COVID, botching the response on purpose out of greed, as well as turning what he wanted to be a cornerstone of his career, the COVID vax, into one of the biggest question marks that gets aimed at him from his own base.

You can count on the fact that several appendages of big pharma *knew* it was a lab leak, *knew* it wasn't all that lethal to most of the citizenry, and *knew* that it wasn't a good idea to deploy an untested technology like mRNA vaccines to hundreds of millions+ of people.

The one thing you do *not* want to do to a guy like Trump is embarass him. Obama did that at the correspondents dinner, and look how that went for him and his legacy.

I think that's the reason behind a lot of the actions regarding Israel of the last few days as well. Israel snubbed Trump within 72 hours of the 2020 election despite all the support he extended them during his first term.

In response there's been rebuke after rebuke of Israel, motivated by past insults and fresh ones, like AIPAC bragging about their access to Tim Waltz, and the likelihood that SignalGate was orchestrated by them to discredit Hegseth.

All of these things inconvenienced and embarrassed Trump, and the only thing worse than that which you can do to him is not reciprocate gestures of loyalty or friendship which he has shown. "Project Warp Speed" will always be a controversy, the economy was rocked onto its heels by the COVID response that wasn't actually necessary, lives ruined, childhoods crushed, and the idea that people knew and not a single one was able to tell him the truth of the matter burns a guy like Donald to his core.

Trump tolerates some incompetence and even some collateral damage/embarrassment from his fellows (see Guiliani) if they are loyal. This is one of his traits that I don't particularly admire, but it's true.

But what I do admire is his capacity for revenge against those who engage in pettiness, betrayal, or disloyalty. Let me clarify a bit about the vax.

Big Pharma lied about the efficacy trials and sued to hide the data to get the vaccine released, albeit after slow walking it to keep it from being released before the election.

Trump will never stop talking up project warp speed as being "stupendous" because Trump has gone on record saying *many* times not to admit mistakes, and even when you're losing to act like you are winning. He's never going to turn around and apologize, or admit something didn't work out as planned, or take fault/blame/responsibility for something bad. It just is what it is, it is his psychology.

But you can guarantee the fact that things didn't go the way he wanted *irks* the man incessantly. The same way what Israel did irks him. This is not a man who you want to dump a mess in the lap of (even if he makes tons of messes on his own that he tends not to clean up)

The only facts about the new Pope I've been able to glean thus far as a non catholic:

-He's American
-His timeline reads like leftist coal
-He's made statements disapproving of gays, gay marriage, and women in the clergy
-He's from Chicago (ick)
-He's publicly countersignaled JD Vance on ordo amoris and immigration but also vehemently stated the catholic church shouldn't be endorsing open borders and mass migration, but taking in refugees as they are able to Some snippets of his:

I think we're in the middle of the greatest epistemic re-sorting/unraveling of our lives right now. Shiloh Hendrix, Karmelo Anthony, Tariffs, the Civil Rights Act, White Guilt, TFR, WW2, it all ties together.

The death of boomer neuromythology: 🧵 There's been a lot of collected momentum over the last decade of people in the west realizing that things are *really* not ok, that the world doesn't work as it should. One of the most perturbing are many sets of punitive, unfair, illogical double standards.

"You missed the point of the movie" says the media literacy crowd

>fireman dad murdered by black guy while putting out a fire
>blacks try to break into his truck, shoots one and curb stomps the other, goes to jail
>makes a black friend and decides to reform and become antiracist
>gets out and his little brother is on the same path, tries to persuade him to stop hating black people
>little brother defends a smaller white kid getting beat up on by a ghetto black, gets shot and killed by him the next day
>original ending the director wanted was derek staring in the mirror, full of grief, and deciding to shave his head again
>Edward Norton pitched a fit and had it changed to Derek reciting the final stanza of abe lincolns inaugural address (Abe wanted to send all the blacks to Liberia/Haiti after the civil war was over, but was assassinated)

While I get that the point being made is something about the cycle of hatred repeating itself, at the end of the day it's black people who spend the whole film murdering people for petty reasons and engaging in theft by trying to break into Dereks truck.

About the only thing Derek did that was legally wrong was curb stomping the second thief. But on the other hand we've got the utterly senseless murder of his father and brother by black people with zero impulse control, and yet the theme of the movie is that it's Derek who shouldn't have felt the way that he did.

The film casts essentially no critical judgement on the black people murdering white people, and spends all its time addressing how Derek feels about it.

For all the talk of "dereks dad planting the seeds of racism in him"

Was he really wrong about black people considering he was murdered while putting out a house fire for no particular reason by a black guy?

There is something bizarre going on that I can't quite put my finger on, but it can be seen in the replies to this guys post. This guy has been poking around in DMs and replies of lots of RW twitter constantly asking for followbacks.

As I alluded to in another thread, there is something strange going on. Weird influencer accounts in "MAGAville" that have followings relative to exposure that make very little sense.

Couple that with what I saw earlier, why are large "normie" themed MAGA accounts creating "twin brothers" that they are boosting? These accounts are obviously not being accused of impersonation, they are sanctioned, because the "brothers" are mutuals.

Are they using their platforms to boost and create high follower alts to sell? What I have heard goes on is that people will create accounts and use this followback strategy until they reach a certain size, unfollow everyone they follow, change to a blank slate name and PFP, and then sell off the account. People buy these blank slate, high follower count accounts in order to immediately jump into things like monetization and begin to engagement bait.
But there is a certain and very similar "vibe" to all the accounts here. They are all congratulating Dustin here, but despite their followings only getting double digit views and 1 or no likes for the most part. Though there are a few accounts in the replies I know are organic.

I think the reality of what this guy is talking about is that antipathy towards blacks *from* most whites in this era was more or less gone. That doesn't mean it was reciprocated the other way.

These men are models of what we wanted blacks to be like, not how most of them actually are. Most racial discourse in the US amounts to white people wishing black people would stop doing hood rat shit all the time.

The left thinks this is because they're poor, or grow up without enough government services, which wouldn't explain the fact that poor whites of the same income bracket as poor blacks don't commit nearly as many crimes despite there being way more of them than blacks.

So when libs worship them like cows in India, what they're really saying is "Please see the light and act civilized we will do literally anything other than face the truth of the matter!"

And the traditional white conservative position essentially hinges on the police handling the problem and just throwing them in jail when they break the law while still more or less ignoring the racial element as best as they can.

The only thing that (privately) your average white american on the left or right would agree on if they took a moment to be intellectually honest is that they don't like most of the stereotypical "black" things that exist.

From stochastic irrational violent crime like Karmelo Anthony stabbing a kid for telling him he wasn't where he was supposed to be to black women being rude and disagreeable, whites really hate this shit and wish blacks would just act like Bill Cosby or Will Smith.

The real crime is that they taught an entire generation of white kids to treat blacks like they *were* Bill Cosby and Will Smith, when they are actually models of what white people wish black people were actually like.

The problem is that when anyone tries to confront this problem, the top 20-25 percentile of black america gets held up as an example that stereotyping is wrong and they aren't all like that. This is really just copium to the tune of "But they can change! Look at my black friend who went to college and has a mortgage and a family!"

And good for them, but there's a reason the first thing black people with the ambition for upward mobility do is move away from all the other black people. The problem is that an entire generation was shown an aspirational version of black people and told "See? They're just like you and me!" while most of the black community hadn't changed at all.

So racism wasn't gone, white kids were just shown black people as we wish they were and nobody gave us the memo that this wasn't really true if you lived in a major city. I'm sure all these dudes live in neighborhoods that are majority white. I had the viewpoint of the OP when I was younger, because there weren't really very many black people where I grew up. So my opinion was largely based on what I saw on TV or online.

But I've been stationed in Biloxi MS.. I've lived in Houston for 10 years now.. Not reality.

Indians seem to be doing to the internet what black people did to the mall This behavior is low class (or should I say caste?) and scummy, but subcontinentals seem utterly shameless about it.

https://x.com/OldRowSwig/status/1906723773799116833

Relevant story from a political event in TX I attended a few years ago juxtaposed with a meeting I was at last night: 🦣

I have a friend who is a really solid political organizer in Houston, knows all the ground game and does amazing work, normie gen X dad guy who really puts in the work. He taught me a ton about how local and municipal elections work, because of him I worked on several local campaigns. Good teacher.

But he had me come to an event with him, and there was this old guy who has been a Texas GOP employee for a long time. My friend introduces me to this boomer guy who he states is pivoting to manage the state parties efforts to recruit the youth at the high school level. This guy is like 65 years old at the time, this was maybe 3 years ago, he chairs several GOP committees both at the county and state level here in Houston.

So friend introduces me to him as one of his locals who is very sharp and understands the younger perspective etc etc and leaves us to talk. I sort of throw a softball with an opinion on how the younger generation are polarized extremes, if they have any interest in politics it's to the far end of the right or the left.

He immediately disagrees with me and says "I think one of the problems with our efforts to recruit in high school is that all this Trump MAGA stuff is too extreme, if we want to get them interested we need to be more moderate."

Gave him a sneer and shook my head in disgust and did an about face to go grab a beer at the bar. Knew with an opinion like that he was beyond help.

I was at a meeting last night talking about this exact same problem, and we've essentially abandoned getting any assistance from the state party whatsoever and are working with a TPUSA field director who is a lot more accomodating. I spent many years not liking TPUSA and Kirk, but they've been improving over the last few years, slowly but surely.

Also, during this meeting one of the local hardcore grandma volunteers that I frequently have friction with, she takes the mic and talks about how polarized by gender Gen Z is (she's right ofc) but then says we need to direct more resources at the high school level to try and get girls interested.

I took the mic to respond to her and said it was a waste of time to dedicate too many resources to bringing young women on board. If a zoomer girl isn't already down with the right because of her own convictions or religion or worldview, she's basically gonna be a lefty forever until she gets hitched and has kids and may cross the picket line then, and that a full court press on young men that ensures they are energized enough to show up and vote and make their friends vote makes more sense.

When I reminded my friend of my interaction with the old GOP guy a few years ago he said "He's more GOP than MAGA, but that's a dying breed with no future." Personally, I think *high school* outreach is a waste of time. College is a lot more fruitful, high school kids have way too much going on, both IRL and in their own heads, to start thinking of politics in any non-emotive way. It's just going to kind of attract the lame sheltered religious kids (who are good kids) but were already onboarded aggressively by their parents anyway.

This is really bad I've studied the negligible impacts of govt incentive structuring in Hungary and Japan, which has *some* impact, but not much

I'm convinced the only way to fix this is to get women to stop going to college, or to give men extreme preference in the most lucrative jobs at *scale*.

I'm going to be watching President Trump address congress shortly, I'll put any relevant things I hear in this thread, in case anyone can't/doesn't want to sit through it:

🧵 Big standing ovation as Trump enters, lasted a long time

Trump just sort of inferred for everyone to give Melania applause too and they did

What if.. and stay with me here

What if planned parenthood had a scam going involving unrecorded deaths from abortion turned into a lucrative source of fake identities, votes, lines of credit, and ultimately someday, social security fraud?

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1891350795452654076

Hmm let's line up some numbers

https://x.com/aidenHIKO/status/1891354011233890334?t=JeAyKiAb5WIETEUn-9999A&s=19

We severely need a fix for this. Almost all jobs of consequence are gatekept in this way, and it's frustrating, speaking personally as a guy without a degree.

So ubiquitous at this point I feel like I could just pencil whip it.

https://twitter.com/VDAREJamesK/status/1888491565108048096

Even now with the restructuring of the federal civil service across the board, there will be tons of vacancies but almost no good positions that don't demand at least a bachelor's. Which is disheartening.

What's funny is that no one can bring themselves on either side to state the real reason this is a logical thing to do. We all know these spiteful wretches aren't above tampering with data on the way out, so freezing them out of the systems until they can get a local copy makes sense.

The formal elements of the right don't really want to point this out because it'd just fan the flames to explain how mentally unstable and unreliable a huge chunk of the civil service is, because it exposes a major liability we've been sitting on for years.

The left won't point this out because, it truthfully explains why what @DOGE is doing is the right call.

Remember when Trump came into office the first time and all sorts of theater kids in GS jobs who ran social media accounts for federal agencies started rogue tweeting for a week or so until they were fired? Imagine that but it's actual data tampering meant to conceal wrongdoing or gum up the process of mapping out exactly what these people have been doing for the last quarter century. For everyone thinking this should be handled internally and not by an outside third party like DOGE, you really can't trust fedgov tech workers, and that's really obvious. Too many saboteurs in waiting, they have to be frozen out too.

https://x.com/lukerosiak/status/1885523747425399247

I grew up in the CA Central Valley in the 1990's, when it was still a pretty wonderful place. The place I grew up in no longer exists, and the people responsible have names and addresses.

That's why I'll never get tired of winning. It's why I've worked towards this moment for over a decade.

Rents are high, home ownership for the zoomers is difficult or impossible in many places. Job opportunities suck. My hometown is full of drugs and immigrants. My home state is ran by corrupt communist demagogues.

I want these people and their bullshit culture to feel the same way I have for most of my life, to see all the things they think are good crumble before their eyes. To be put through humiliation ritual after humiliation ritual, because we didn't deserve any of what they put this nation through.

And now we don't need to "imagine if the roles were reversed!" The machinations of these people destroyed the world I grew up in, the world I was taught to live and compete in. I will never forgive them.