Manage your expectations. Origin story in pinned tweet. Please don't feed the trolls. 'Well-adjusted, considering'.
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May 25 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
When I was maybe 12 I went to collect for my paper route on Memorial Day, figuring folks would mostly be home, and this older guy answered the door looking like he'd been crying and yelled at me about my egregious breach of decorum (he didn't use those words)...
..and later that day he called my parents to apologize, said he'd been in an emotional state and had been excessively harsh. I felt like total shit for that, still wince thinking about it. A good lesson in personal significance, memorial, and meaning.
Nov 14, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Embed journalism helped keep America misinformed for over 20 years of man-made disaster during GWOT.
I think of Linda Robinson as a professional writer / researcher, and I respected General Miller as a leader, but I wouldn't have been asked by one to escort the other around my district in Afghanistan had she not been seen as having views sympathetic to America's war efforts...
Nov 10, 2022 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
"Only time the US has ever successfully conducted a counterinsurgency" as I read somewhere about the US campaign in the Philippines early 20th C. Hearts and minds and concentration camps. How many insurgencies just want to avoid a mass grave or life in a camp (or life as a serf)?
US history in the Philippines is brutal. That place was screwed-over for hundreds of years and has been turned into the ultimate gated community by the corrupt ruling class. Another "organized crime family posing as a theocracy" government.
Nov 10, 2022 • 12 tweets • 2 min read
Watching Leave It to Beaver in an empty house was peak Gen X.
But hey, I consider myself extremely fortunate because both my folks worked and I lived in a neighborhood full of laid-off autoworkers (most of those marriages, from what I observed as a kid, did not survive sustained unemployment).
Nov 8, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Homeostasis is what humans want, inertia. People generally don't galvanize into action for that reason, but pain changes that equation. Frequently too late.
Had to take 19 hours of class to get a concealed carry license in New Mexico. Expected to hate it but I actually learned a lot, including a whole day of legal info about use of deadly force. One cool thing was meeting this old cop who taught several gun courses as a side-hustle.
Nov 8, 2022 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
The term "life-altering" bears some thinking about. Value the health you have. Protect it. If it helps, think of staying as healthy as possible as a form of self-defense (or of benefit to others).
Usually the first thing that happens when you get real sick is you find out who your real friends are, and there's probably not as many as you thought you had. Hell, every woman I ever met who'd had cancer seem like their husbands had left 'em after diagnosis. That's some shit.
Oct 3, 2022 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Spreading an existing pathogen via coordinated disinformation operations sounds like a form of biological warfare and a national security concern.
The term "hybrid warfare" has a lot of unpleasant implications on the public health side. Hell, public *mental* health is a national security concern as well and that should be obvious at this point. Too much of the US population is being turned against itself.
Oct 3, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Song came up yesterday, a personal favorite. When I learned how to do an association matrix back in the mid-nineties, pencil and paper era, one of the things you clocked was graffiti and I used to think about that in Manila a couple decades later.
New People's Army graffiti would show up before a drive-by RPG attack, stuff like that. "The signature of the artist." The stencil style M.I.A. uses in Galang always made me think of that, which makes sense. It's fast to lay down. Galang means "keep going" by the way. Persevere.
Oct 3, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Interesting how a common denominator in religion is a supernatural being bringing justice in the end-times, when organized religion is just endless man-made corruption. Al-Mahdi would jam a flaming sword into heaps of his clerics. While I'm on the subject, fuck you جيش المهدي
Let's go, all you MFs who were rocking "right-wing death squad" insignia last few years. Go join the Russian death squads and teach Wokraine a lesson in manliness.
Oct 2, 2022 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
In 2007 a friend went down south to Basrah in Iraq to do the site survey for the expansion of the Iraqi Special Operations Forces brigade to a division strength unit (with decentralized subordinate commands) and got rocketed so much he came back moving in zig-zag. Cover to cover.
On the rare slow day in summer '07 Iraq I used to sometimes walk around with bolt-cutters and open up abandoned shipping containers on my camp, where amongst a dozen other responsibilities I was camp mayor (thus responsible for property and keeping the lights on and whatnot)...
..One was filled with machinegun tripods, eight were full of ammo, and one was some kinda like pocket Ranger Joe's / US Cav military merch supply shop all full of tacti-cool shit. That one even had a non-military shotgun in it, I'm assuming for the sales rep it belonged to.
Aug 7, 2022 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
Really just terrible how Ayman al-Zawahiri got killed and then some people he'd negatively impacted while alive, via his own words and actions, said unflattering things about him.
Oops, I meant to say Jackie Walorski. Got the domestic religious extremists confused with the foreign religious extremists. My bad.
That was the first question the instructor asked in a defensive firearms course. "Do you believe in love?" The class sat silent, confused. "No romantics in here, huh? That's sad." Hands start to slowly raise. He continues to harangue the class until most hands are up, says...
You don't get to squawk about being persecuted for your religion if your religion includes molesting kids on a regular basis, and funds government takeovers to create more pedophile friendly environments (while calling your opponents "groomers" no less, because irony is dead).
Aug 5, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
"The officers asked him about the incident and Jensen “began to blabber about joining the Army"."
When the civilian humvee doesn't send a strong enough "I'm an asshole" message, one can simply point "mom's boyfriend's gun" at some kids at a skate park. Maybe ask 'em if they've seen Tony Hawk lately.
