Category: “The Floggings Will Continue Until Morale Improves”

  • An Alternative to Running?

    The Marine Corps is instituting a substitute for the 3-mile run on the PFT requirement in the form of a 5,000 meter bout on the rowing machine.

    https://www.militarytimes.com/opinion/medals-misfires/2018/02/15/medal-marine-corps-fitness-test-offers-smart-alternative-to-running/

    Marines seeking to do that will require a medical chit to prove and explain why they can’t run. But it will allow fit and hard-working Marines to still earn a top score on their fitness test without risking unnecessary injury. – Article.

    Okay, I can “do” 3 miles easily by walking, but I’m a lousy runner. Swimming? Takes me an hour to swim 15 laps in a 25-meter pool, but I’ll stick it out and do it. One lap is down-and-back.

    But the rowing machine? Would you please give me a break? That’s supposed to build muscle tone in lower extremities and in dorsal muscles, not be a fitness test.

    How about this instead: Marines who can’t run worth a crap can probably do speed or race walking. If you’ve ever seen racewalking competitions, you know how demanding it can be. There are speed records available for comparison, so why not tone up with a loaded pack, hit the track and do racewalking instead, with someone timing you? It’s easier on the knees and other joints, and has the same benefits as running. A racewalking marathon is 50 miles, not 25.

    I don’t understand this obsession with running. Never will.

    The article closes with this heartening observation: “It’s heartening to see the Marines push ahead with common-sense change that maintain high standards while also considering the unique needs of individual service members who might be contributing to the Corps readiness in non-traditional ways. Other services – and Pentagon bureaucrats – should take note.”

    Yeah – WIENIES!!! Try racewalking instead of sitting on your backside and rowing. Try treading water for 2 hours in the deep end of the pool with your hands six inches above the surface, and see what it does to your butt and thigh muscles. Try wearing a loaded pack everywhere you go, instead of just during training hours.

     

  • New and Updated Invectives

    New? It’s older than dirt.

    While it is indeed disconcerting to find that a senior Marine Corps officer has been or is being dragged into the corner by his left ear for the alleged use of a word that means ‘a bundle of wooden sticks’, and is also the name for a Welsh pork sausage dish, there should be and is a remedy for such mistakes, especially when, to the majority of us, what he is reported to have said seems rather minor.

    Normally, expletives are reserved for moments of stress, extreme stress, and/or a need for mind-blowing, explosively hyperbolic vocables. Vituperatives are not associated with giving advice unless one is at a sports event, being held up at gun point, or chasing ants and stray squirrels away from a picnic table full of food.

    It is, therefore, perhaps time that this issue was properly addressed. There are, of course, substitutes for terms that are currently considered to be offensive to people whose lives revolve around getting attention for their sex lives instead of their ability to do the job they were hired to do. And it’s not particularly difficult to insult someone so creatively that he doesn’t realize he’s been insulted for at least 24 hours, or someone tells him so.

    Insults have a long and gloried history, going quite far back to Days of Yore, and even further back to The Olden Times. The Romans were notoriously bawdy and made no bones about it. “Futue te ipsum” means exactly the same thing in Latin that it means in English. One should use it sparingly to keep it effective. “Was die Bümsen?” in German means exactly the same that it means in English.

    You could, if you so desire, take a class in learning all the possible curses and insults in all languages available, but if you have to write them down for a deaf person, it might lose its effectiveness.

    I can’t imagine anyone overreacting to being advised to not do anything ‘too lily-livered’ or ‘milk-quaffing’, can you? How about ‘weedy’? Or ‘wimp-assed’? Or ‘dipstickish’? Or ‘femmish’? You see, there is always a way around those so-called rules that encourage wimpish, pants-pissing codpiece sniffers to complain, when it is obviously much ado about nothing.

    The esteemed LtCol Mainz might have been better off in the current counter-culture of hypersensitivity to profane and insulting expletives if he had spent some time perusing the online dictionary of Shakespearean insults. I’m sure that he’d have found a fine substitute for ‘faggot’, something such as ‘flap-eared, flat-brained fishmonger’s offal’, although I do acknowledge that using multiple polysyllabics can take longer than a two-syllable single word.  I would also add that insulting people without their realizing they’ve been insulted, while it is a skill, is easy to learn.

    http://www.literarygenius.info/shakespeare-insults-dictionary.htm

    I suggest that, for those going into war zones, where the shoot-shoot-bang-bang seems endless, a few lessons in expansion of vocabulary into Shakespearean, Gaelic, and Old Norse cussing would be more beneficial than wasting tax dollars on removing a senior leader whose mistake was the misuse of an old Latin word that was allotted to the front runners at the head of an incoming Legion or Victrix. After all, the Norse were notorious for engaging in bouts of insulting each other before they even began a fight.

    I will leave you with this message to those whose sensitivities are enormously overblown, and whose need for attention is more prominent than your fat asses and pert little noses:

    Futue te ipsum!

    Du kannst mich mal am Arsch lecken!

    ¡Chingese ustedes!

    Iqéishi! Iqéishi buadda!

  • The Weeping, The Wailing, The Gnashing of Teeth….

    They just won’t give up, will they? The Democrats in Congress want to put Judge Brett Kavanaugh under a microscope to find out what’s wrong with him.

    What’s wrong with him is that a) he worked in the White House for a Republican president (Bush, Jr.) and b) he’s nominated by a Republican president.

    “WASHINGTON — Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s elevation to the Supreme Court could have unknown and problematic implications for national security, according to a key Senate Democrat requesting more records from the nominee’s past.”

    Note the use of” could, unknown, problematic”. These words are specifically used as monkey wrenches to make the hearings on Judge Kavanaugh less likely to occur in this lifetime.

    Sen. Jack Reed, “D-R.I., and ranking member on the Senate Armed Services Committee, on Thursday requested chamber Republicans and the administration grant access to all files regarding “Kavanaugh’s (past) service in the White House that address national security and the scope of presidential authority on national security matters.”

    Kavanaugh worked in the White House Counsel’s Office under President George W. Bush from 2001 to 2003, including during the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

    Reed said senators need to understand his involvement in a host of issues — including policies on the detention of enemy combatants and domestic surveillance programs — before taking a vote on his nomination.” – Article

    The link at ‘Bush’ relates to detainees at Gitmo in 2015.

    https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2018/08/23/key-democrat-worries-trumps-supreme-court-nominee-poses-national-security-concerns/

    The “committee” has thus far received over 258,000 pages of documentation about Judge Kavanaugh. If they are so very worried about his qualifications and his views of how to treat people who would rather burn Americans alive than give them a fair hearing, why didn’t they bring this up before?

    Have they finished reading those ++quarter million pages of documents? That’s longer than “War and Peace” ( a mere 1,225 pages) and I doubt that any of those Committee Democrats have ever waded through Tolstoy’s novel to at least page 25, never mind read it. I would find it necessary to ask how much of it they have read, in fact, so that I could assess their dedication to a cause.

    But not to worry, GOPers are on it:

    “Republican leaders have labeled it nothing more than a stalling tactic. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, noted earlier this week that more than 258,000 pages of documents have been made available already.

    “The reason why we’re talking about the great paper chase is because, I think, our Democratic colleagues have found out all of their other attempts to undermine or to criticize this nominee have fallen flat,” he said. “And so now it’s just a question how much paper is going to be produced.” – Article

    In addition, Democrats are now throwing up Manafort’s recent conviction, because (whimper) they simply want to delay the hearings, because (excuses) “… the Supreme Court could be pulled into legal proceedings against the president .”

    Well, why didn’t they think of that before? And what legal proceedings? (Gasp!) Are you talking ‘impeachment’, Mr. Reed? You know, when you’re trying to hide what you’re doing, it’s best to not hint at it even a little bit. Now there’s no surprise left, and dTrump already knows what you’re up to, anyway.  And how come two of you wusses wouldn’t vote to impeach Bill Clinton? Did he have you guys by the short hairs back then?

    GOPers are rebutting this as a delaying tactic.  Of course it is. The Democrats have essentially zip, zero, nada, rien, nichego. You have to feel a little sorry for them. The way they grasp at straws is just sad.

    And the beat goes on….

     

     

  • Thursdays are for Cooking…

    How about that? It’s Thursday again, summer’s coming to an end, and the local Strawberry Festival drew huge crowds last weekend, lasted 2 1/2 days, and included a book fair, art fair, and a band.

    Everyone had a good time, and took home lots of strawberries.

    It won’t be long before apples are ready for the cider press.

    When Peter Mayle was busy writing his books about his retirement and food adventures in Provence, in the south of France, he described a particular pig belonging to one farmer, as a gourmand of apples left to ferment into hard cider on the trees. If this particular pig judged the apples to be not quite ready, he would wait a week or so, then start headbutting the apple trees to get his fix of hard cider, and spent most of his time in maudlin grunting and squealing, coming in late in the day, staggering drunk on hard apple cider.

    Did the farmer object to it? Not at all. Pigs are used in France to sniff out truffles embedded at the roots of oak trees. A pig with a very sensitive snout is highly prized. This particular pig was less likely to become a matured ham than to have a prolonged life hunting truffles in the forests of Provence, and getting tanked on hard apple cider.

    That’s a pig I can respect.

     

     

     

  • 3 More Get Their Punishment

    Three more Navy personnel have been indicted in the ongoing Fat Leonard case.

    https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2018/08/19/feds-indict-three-more-in-ongoing-fat-leonard-scandal/

    From the article:

    A federal grand jury in San Diego on Friday charged three retired sailors — a captain and two senior enlisted personnel — in the ongoing Fat Leonard corruption scandal.

    Unsealed indictments allege that Capt. David Williams Haas, 50, took at least $145,000 in bribes from Leonard Glenn “Fat Leonard” Francis, the Malaysian tycoon and defense contractor who since his late 2013 arrest in a San Diego sting has ratted out a string of corrupt sailors who steered ships to his port services.

    The portly Francis plied commanders and other key figures with cash, “Thai SEAL team” prostitutes, luxury resort rooms and other perks in order to bilk $35 million from American taxpayers.

    Prosecutors have charged 32 defendants and 20 have pleaded guilty to public corruption charges over the past five years.

    Separate indictments released Friday targeted retired Master Chief Petty Officer Ricarte Icmat David, 61, and retired Chief Petty Officer Brooks Alonzo Parks for allegedly taking other perks from Francis.

    Thanks to AW1Ed for the heads up on this.

  • Newsroom Commando Ralph Peters Cashiers Himself

    This is from Poetrooper. As spenorty as it is, I think he’s getting his game back in spades.

    Cashiering is a historical military ritual in which an officer who has betrayed his oath or failed in his duty is required to stand before the assembled troops and have all symbols of rank and service stripped from his uniform, to demonstrate most forcefully the disgrace he has brought upon himself and possibly them.  His cap is knocked off and crushed underfoot; epaulettes or shoulder boards are ripped from his tunic; brass buttons are cut away; all medals, awards, and symbols of rank and past service are torn off and dropped in the dirt; and finally, his formal sword is broken over the knee of a fellow officer, with the two pieces scornfully cast at the disgraced officer’s feet.  It is a rite of personal and professional degradation, purposely intended to convey as much contempt and evoke as much shame as possible, to deter other officers from bringing such dishonor upon themselves and their services.

    This weekend, retired Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Peters went on CNN’s dubiously titled Reliable Sources and, in the presence of the show’s serially unreliable host, Brian Stelter, and all those unfortunate souls in airport waiting areas across the nation being force-fed this liberal Sunday-morning drivel, cashiered himself.  It appears that fulminating Trump Derangement Syndrome brought this former Fox News military analyst to perform this sad ceremony.

    To his credit, he did a bang-up job of it.

    First, Peters said:

    Well, the most dreadful part is that we have a president who does not respect our system of government, does not understand our government, who is not interested in understanding our government, who believes that the Constitution is a menu from which he can choose only the most delectable items, who disdains career bureaucrats, who doesn’t respect the Constitution.

    Whap!  There went Peters’s headgear.  Then this self-anointed Russia expert proceeded to do one of those Russian kick dances on his fallen headdress while ripping away his shoulder boards with this:

    But the twin – the evil twin of that is that I believe, as a former Russia analyst for most of my career, and having worked directly with Russian intelligence services, I am convinced that the president of the United States is enthralled to Vladimir Putin.  There is no other way to explain his behavior.  And he perfectly fits the profile of the kind of people the Russians target.

    Poor Peters continued this ritual of self-abasement by ripping away his buttons and medals with this:

    I left Fox because as a former military officer who took an oath to the Constitution, I could not be part of a channel that to me was assaulting the Constitution, the constitutional order, the rule of law.  But that said, Fox isn’t immoral, it’s amoral.  It was opportunistic.  Trump was a gift to Fox and Fox in turn is a gift to Trump.  As you observed earlier, it’s a closed loop and so people that only listen to Fox have an utterly skewed view of reality.

    Peter’s sword-breaking was reserved for this observation:

    [P]eople supporting Trump are radicals.  These … couch potato anarchists … don’t have a program to make America great again, and by the way America is great right now, rather, they’re destructive.  They want to tear things down.  They want vengeance.  And Trump is brilliant at that.  He’s done what autocrats and charlatans and false messiahs throughout history have done. He’s told core supporters, you’re not to blame for the mistakes you made. You’re not to blame for your failures. It’s them, it’s the minorities, it’s the immigrants, it’s fake news, it’s the deep state.

    As a combat veteran, which Peters is not, I have to wonder if this sneering, whiny-voiced news show commando has a clue as to how many millions of his military family he has just branded as destructive, vengeful, racist couch-potato anarchists, followers of a false messiah and derelict in our oaths to the Constitution.  It is a fact that a substantial majority of military personnel, whether active-duty, retirees, or veterans, are conservative in their politics, so Peters had to know he was spitting in the faces of millions of his former comrades.  While not enamored of some of Trump’s antics, many of us see him as something of a political Patton – a bit headstrong, perhaps, and sometimes crude in his language, but nonetheless an effective, hard charging leader who knows who and where America’s antagonists are and takes the battle to them with whatever weapons are called for.  And wins.  We, and I suspect our enemies as well, find it hard to imagine this president drawing a bright red line for an adversary and then turning tail when it is defied, leaving America to be mocked by some pissant potentate as it was under his presidential predecessor.

    Except for a few former senior officers fearful of losing their monetized security clearances with the cushy sinecures in corporate boardrooms and network greenrooms those bring, this loose-lipped, self-cashiered light colonel is most likely going to find his newly chosen political parade ground a lonely place indeed.  As Peters’s disloyal diatribe gets around the military community he has so scurrilously slandered, he soon may wish that he had performed an additional historical military ritual: seppuku, the Japanese face-saving rite of self-disembowelment.

  • Things You Can Say to Your Kids

    Things you can say to your kids /grandkids to bring order out of chaos:

    Chocolate chips are meant for cookies. If you want chocolate chip cookies, I will help you make them.

    There is more than one peanut butter and jam (or banana) sandwich in the world.

    I told you that you were smart enough to do that arithmetic problem by yourself on paper.

    No, sharing does not mean letting the dog/cat eat off your plate at the dinner table.

    Popcorn is not a major food group. Make a better choice.

    Of course I’ll let you make those cookies by yourself. I still want to be in the kitchen when you do that, because you always have questions.

    I’m proud of everything you do, even if it’s silly.

    One day a week without a (name the device) is like a vacation from school, isn’t it?

    Well, if you spilled it, then you know how to clean it up, right? Come and tell me when you get it cleaned up.

    You can always tell me the truth. I will still love you.

  • Anger Management Works If Done Properly

    N.B.: Someone passed this story on to me some time ago, and I thought I would relay it to you now. If you’ve heard it before, even better. I ran across it while cleaning out my files, dumping unneeded stuff, and when I read it, I thought of Mikey Whinestein… and I started laughing all over again.

    I was sitting at my desk when I remembered a phone call I’d forgotten to make. I found the number and dialed it. A man answered, saying “Hello.”

    I politely said, “This is Chris. Could I please speak with Robyn Carter?”

    Suddenly a manic voice yelled out in my ear “Get the right f***ing number!” and the phone was slammed down on me. I couldn’t believe that anyone could be so rude.

    When I tracked down Robyn’s correct number to call her, I found that I had accidentally transposed the last two digits.

    After hanging up with her, I decided to call the ‘wrong’ number again.

    When the same guy answered the phone, I yelled “You’re an asshole!” and hung up. I wrote his number down with the word ‘asshole’ next to it, and put it in my desk drawer. Every couple of weeks, when I was paying bills or had a really bad day, I’d call him up and yell, “You’re an asshole!”  It always cheered me up.

    When Caller ID was introduced, I thought my therapeutic ‘asshole’ calling would have to stop. So, I called his number and said, “Hi, this is John Smith from the telephone company. I’m calling to see if you’re familiar with our Caller ID Program?”   He yelled “NO!” and slammed down the phone. I quickly called him back and said, “That’s because you’re an asshole!” and hung up.

    One day I was at the store, getting ready to pull into a parking spot. Some guy in a black BMW cut me off and pulled into the spot I had patiently waited for. I hit the horn and yelled that I’d been waiting for that spot, but the idiot ignored me. I noticed a “For Sale” sign in his back window, so I wrote down his number.

    A couple of days later, right after calling the first asshole (I had his number on speed dial,) I thought that I’d better call the BMW asshole, too.

    I said, “Is this the man with the black BMW for sale?”

    He said, “Yes, it is.” I asked, “Can you tell me where I can see it?”

    He said, “Yes, I live at 34 Oaktree Blvd, in a yellow rambler, and the car’s parked right out in front.”

    I asked, “What’s your name?”

    He said, “My name is Don Hansen,”

    I asked, “When’s a good time to catch you, Don?”

    He said, “I’m home every evening after five.”

    I said, “Listen, Don, can I tell you something?”

    He said, “Yes?”

    I said, “Don, you’re an asshole!”

    Then I hung up, and added his number to my speed dial, too.

    Now, when I had a problem, I had two assholes to call.

    Then I came up with an idea. I called asshole #1.

    He said, “Hello.”

    I said, “You’re an asshole!” (But I didn’t hang up.)

    He asked, “Are you still there?”

    I said, “Yeah,”

    He screamed, “Stop calling me,”

    I said, “Make me,”

    He asked, “Who are you?”

    I said, “My name is Don Hansen.”

    He said, “Yeah? Where do you live?” I said, “Asshole, I live at 34 Oaktree Blvd, in Fairfax, a yellow rambler, I have a black Beamer parked in front.”

    He said, “I’m coming over right now, Don. And you had better start saying your prayers.”

    I said, “Yeah, like I’m really scared, asshole,” and hung up.

    Then I called Asshole #2.

    He said, “Hello?”

    I said, “Hello, asshole,”

    He yelled, “If I ever find out who you are…”

    I said, “You’ll what?”

    He exclaimed, “I’ll kick your ass,”

    I answered, “Well, asshole, here’s your chance. I’m coming over right now.”

    Then I hung up and immediately called the police, saying that I lived at 34 Oaktree Blvd, in Fairfax, and that I was on my way over there to kill my gay lover!

    Then I called Channel 9 News about the gang war going down on Oaktree Blvd. in Fairfax.

    I quickly got into my car and headed over to Fairfax. I got There just in time to watch two assholes beating the crap out of each other in front of six cop cars, an overhead news helicopter and surrounded by a news crew.

    NOW I feel much better. Anger management really does work.