Once I finished laughing at myself (I was thinking of the look on my face) I said “This is important. Did he say ‘some mines” or ‘some more mines’?” The interpreter turned to the farmer and then yelled up to me “He said some more mines. But you should be OK, if you stay on the path.”
The “path” was not as wide as my size 12 boots. Putting aside the thought “this would be a really stupid way to die”, I managed to make the last 35 meters or so up the cliff-side. Why did the farmer warn me? Because some tidewater Virginians had towed an old Soviet tractor that had gotten stuck in his village.
They see me rollin’, they hatin’, patrolling
Late 2004, I was the CJTF Eagle Civil Affairs Officer, and I was with a squad of Virginia Army National Guard as they visited Ashrafkhel, in Parwan Province, Afghanistan. One of the men in the village pointed out the small cliffs near the Panjshir River and said that some suspicious people had been up there a couple of nights ago. Half the squad swarmed up the two paths nearest where the man had pointed. Thinking I was clever, I took a path over to the north of where everyone else was going up, to keep an eye on things. Halfway up, I heard the interpreter yell up to me “He says the weather may have uncovered some (unintelligible) mines.”
So I was able to avoid stomping on old Taliban or Northern Alliance mines, join the Virginians and find evidence that someone had been tinkering with things that go boom.
Well, lookie here. Somebody done been naughty.
Why did these people help us? When we rolled in to town, they looked like most of the people in the area. Thinking things like “Now what?” “These guys, again?” “Oh boy, the circus is in town!” The squad leader asked the first man we spoke to “how is the tractor doing?” The man’s face lit up and he said something to the effect of “Oh, it is you guys! The ones who helped us!” The month before, this same squad had rolled through and used their HMMWVs to pull the village’s only tractor (an old Soviet model) out of a ditch. No doors kicked in, no searches, no swaggering around acting tough and such. Just some farm boys helping out other farmers. We had a nice chat about how the old tractor was now kaputt, but they were hoping to get a new one soon. That was the point when someone joined us and mentioned where the naughty folks had been hanging out.
Some number of hours later, when my sphincter had finally unclenched, I reported everything to the Ops Officer. I even had the insight to mention how this was a nice contrast to the company of Airborne guys that had caused quite a stir booting in doors and barging through houses in a village to the north, a while back. But it took reading various police misconduct stories to make the connection here at home.
Gaining trust, when you are seen as (or actually are) outsiders, armed and seemingly unaccountable to anyone, can be difficult. It takes restraint. When faced with intransigent, maybe even sullen and uncooperative people, it can be very be very difficult to not get impatient and resort to “tell me what I want to know/comply/obey!” It also takes time. If you roll up and say “trust me”, most people are going to reflexively go on guard.
The good will many police departments had years back, was earned over a long time. It probably arose, in part, from having the same beat cops around. They got to know you, and you got to see they were not just interested in hassling you, writing citations or getting in a bust right at the end of a shift for some sweet overtime.
To rebuild the trust lost by many departments (primarily during the Drug War) from property grabbing to door busting to stop and frisk, it will take restraint and time. We need cops who help a drunk get home from the bus stop or train station, call for a wrecker for a broken down car and waits until it shows up, stop in and talk to store owners, bar tenders and other people in the neighborhood and then amiably go on their way. Rather than act like an occupying army, pull a tractor out of a ditch.
That would mean giving the adrenaline junkies some job that doesn’t involve guns, badges (and very little accountability).
Not a bad essay, Swiss!
Meh. A little scatter brained. But I think the simple thought I was trying to get across is there.
Seemed pretty concise to me. Gonna have to pass it on.
The 1958 novel The Ugly American made similar observations.
Swiss, I am retired CA myself. We might have met in Basra during the “Charge of the Knights.” Great observations and hopefully others will remember your observations if (hopefully when) cops get off this “war on the streets” nonsense.
Homple, I suggest the book and movie “A Bell for Adano” by John Hersey. The book won the Pulitzer Prize and the movie is decent. The story is a novilization of the experiences of Frank Toscani who was a military government officer in Sicily. Toscani was a NYC native who retired years later as a Colonel and was one of the officers who helped the Army transition from MG to CA.
I will email you later today.
Au contraire Swissy. The essay is clean, concise, and spoken in the voice of a guy that was actually “in the shit.”
Now granted, there are some urban war zones Stateside’s, but we are talking about a situation where all of a soldier’s adversaries are always looking for ways to get a scalp as cost effectively as possible. Stateside gang bangers generally are satisfied with simple evasion.
OT: train to downtown 2 minutes away. I’ll be there about quarter till 3
Im hanging at the end of the bar
Upstairs or down?
Upstairs.
Get a [bar] room!
You get a room!
I’ll be the schmuck lugging bags with him. Leaving the airport on the train. After all, gotta be a hypocrite about public transportation. Now where’s my Social Security check?
There is nobody at the end of the bar.
I have never signed in on my phone and had to make a new account.
Pics or it never happened
And Social Security numbers, please
(humblebrag)
STEVE SMITH FILLS MORE THAN JUST BIG SHOES!
‘Hearts and minds’ is not just an empty slogan? Whuda thunkit!
Something learned in the late 60s but somehow we felt the need to repeat the experiment.
A while back I had a bit of a row with some evangelical atheists. They swore the best way to get the religious to see the error of their ways was to kick in their doors and scream in their faces about how stupid they are. When I suggested that that strategy might put people on the defensive and cause them to close their ears to anything they had to say I was severely derided and banned from the site. It was a bunch of lefty academics…professors of various social sciences and surprisingly a few STEM people.
Good essay Swiss and you make a very important point. Unfortunately the ‘kick in the doors and crack some skulls’ types will never get it.
You will respect my authaity!
You will NEVER convince someone they are wrong about their religion. Religion by definition is faith beyond logic. You can’t use logic to convince someone out of an intrinsically illogical position. Hopefully this gets my point across without coming off as anti religious.
I don’t begrudge any religious person. If it helps them be a better person, cool by me. I don’t think it gives anyone a moral superiority either, so it all comes down to your actions at the end of the day.
I look at like that South Park episode about Mormons. OK a lot of that stuff is nonsensical, but if it helps some people live better lives, then who am I to try to argue with that?
There’s some annoying laws that are based on religion, but I’m pretty sure there are a few atheists and agnostics that want stricter liquor laws than the Baptists would accept.
Okay, I’d normally agree. I just can’t wrap my brain around the notion that a life without booze is better.
Life without booze? That is frightening.
Pretty much DOOMco. I fear more the faux righteous lefty academics SB described than I do religious people. By a country mile.
Yeeeeep. those are the people driving the progressive movement. The ones who, when pressed and think they are talking to like minded, suggest that we should have re-education camps.
The religious folks are not necessarily less logical than you, some of them just start from different cosmogical axioms.
“Hopefully this gets my point across without coming off as anti religious.”
Well, some might see it that way.
I was reasoned into my faith.
So whose definition of religion are you using?
Sure can. I’m walking proof.
Going the opposite direction would be extremely difficult, however.
The said they were atheists. Not pacifists. Huge difference.
It was a bunch of lefty academics…professors of various social sciences and surprisingly a few STEM people.
Well there’s your problem, shame has become the central tactic of the left. Shaming into conformity is supposed to be the way you pull people into your perspective, so yelling at someone about how stupid they are is, somehow, supposed to convince people. When in reality this only works on people with weak wills and equally weak beliefs. Religious people? Tend to be quite fervent in their belief.
Shame is why I never touch my peepee.
Your pet goat is named Shame?
No, my goat is named OMWC’s mom.
There’s really no reply to that. You got OWNED. By an old man.
Same here Frank, I have someone to do that for me.
When I was in college, I decided I would go to a Campus Crusade for Christ meeting for shiggles. I had a Bible with me which I had marked with passages I thought were questionable so I could ask them what they thought. 1 Peter 3:15 says Christians are supposed to be ready to defend their beliefs, so I figured I’d hold them to that standard.
However, it was not a discussion group. It was basically a church service (who could have seen *that* coming?). On top of that, the people there were very nice and were just happy to have another person in their group. I felt guilty about having come for the purpose of raining on their parade.
My only other interaction with them was filling out a survey in exchange for a fun size candy bar.
I posted on an atheist site for a couple of years. Religious discussions got boring quick since we agreed on everything for the most part. I started talking about libertarian ideas since the site was full of leftists so that was something to debate about. Well, the libertarians were badly outnumbered there and eventually the ruling clique set up a private no-libertarians-allowed section on the site and all the leftists went there. So we weren’t banned outright, but we were basically shut out from the main section of the forum.
I’ve always had very little respect for those who refuse to defend their ideas, whatever they are. If you refuse to hear criticism of your beliefs, you are admitting you lack confidence in them.
I agree that there is little point in arguing about unprovable things, but there are many aspects of religion and politics that in my view are fair game for criticism. If bad ideas are never criticized, what hope is there for intellectual progress?
It’s very hard for me to listen to dumb things and just let it slide. I guess that’s my ass burgers acting up again.
But why did you feel the need to criticize them in that venue?
Also, what part of “defend” is wrong in your book?
And do you feel the need to do the same to a group of Muslims that are members of a radical mosque? Try that and see how comfortable you feel.
Some thoughts that I hope answer your points:
A few years ago, I did a radio show at a college station because they were letting anybody try.
One day, I decided to read some nasty verses from the Bible followed by some nasty verses from the Koran. The station manager accosted me later and said basically that I’m not allowed to make fun of Islam. This was in 2010. He also required me to read a disclaimer before all future shows. He fucked up though because he let me write the disclaimer. My disclaimer was: the views on this show are my own and in no way represent Derpskatonic U, WXYZ, or the North American Man Boy Love Association. Sometimes I’d switch it up and say the Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution or the Knights of The Ku Klux Klan. The ding dong station manager did not bother me again.
When I was in Tanzania, I was talking to a teacher about the Koran he lent me. I said basically there’s some nasty stuff in there, and he sort of hushed me and told me to shut up. There were a couple Muslims nearby. Tanzania is about 1/3 Muslim.
Oh yeah- I’m active duty Army and…well, let’s just say I’m trying to put my money where my mouth is. Actually, i nearly got in trouble for comparing Christianity to Islam. One of the things I said was that the reason ISIS and the Taliban blow up ancient statues is because that’s what Mighty Mo did. When he conquered Mecca, it was a pagan temple. He ordered his followers to destroy all the idols inside.
I give Christians credit for being far more chill than members of a certain other major religion. A person who says 2 + 2 = 5 is wrong, but not as wrong as someone who says 2 + 2 = -8.
Anywho, can’t we all just get along?
Anywho, can’t we all just get along?
This almost completely contradicts the rest of your post.
“Anywho, can’t we all just get along?”
Actually, no. We cant. Nor do we want to.
If there is one stated purpose of a group, yet a number of the group enforce ideas outside that realm, is it wrong to confront that?
To what purpose though? So if I saw a Muslim out drinking a beer or a Jewish person eating shellfish would it be a good use of my time to go to a gathering of either group just to tattle on one of them or to call them a hypocrite?
I’ve got better things to do with my time than to confront people with different belief systems than mine unless it’s to confront them for personally violating my, or someone else’s, individual rights.
I said outside that realm, like a group of pagan who insist on enforcing kosher rules. In this case, it is atheists insisting on non-libertarian principals.
It’s very hard for me to listen to dumb things and just let it slide.
What part of Christianity is “dumb”? Is it the part that’s totally voluntary or the part that means one accepts things on faith…which exists in most everything you’ll come across in your life, be it religious, scientific or most things in between?
Well, for starters, the part about a guy rising from the dead is hard to believe.
I mean, if *I* told you I came back from the dead, would you believe me? No. And you can talk to me right now. You can talk to people on this site who have met me in person.
You wouldn’t believe a current story about rising from the dead, but you’ll believe one from 2,000 years ago?
Please believe that I am not trying to mock you. I am just trying to give you sense of how these beliefs appear to a skeptic*.
*little s skeptic, not Michael-Shermer-my-shit-doesn’t-stink skeptic
But why be so in-your-face about it? I’m just saying sure, confront someone that tried to convince you actively of their beliefs. Otherwise, just leave them alone. Especially if they’re minding their own business.
As for the “rising from the dead” thing: if you can tell me you have no beliefs you accept on faith, I’ll be more than happy to kiss your ass.
Yes, everybody accepts things, many things, without proof. I do not demand to see a pilot’s license before I get on a plane.
However, trusting that the guy in the pilot uniform in the cockpit knows how to fly is in a different category than trusting in something that contradicts all available evidence.
About 100 billion people have lived. Tens of millions of people die every year. As far as we know, they all stayed dead. If resurrection is possible, shouldn’t there be some confirmed, recent cases of it? For me, it’s hard to believe that it only happened a few times really long ago under mysterious circumstances and then never again. If something is possible, it happens over and over.
Like I said, I felt guilty about going to the CCC meeting looking for an argument. I have done anything like that in the 13 years since. I have gone to different churches and had many discussions with Christians.
I got mixed up with some street preachers once. In my view, if you believe something strongly enough to stand out in public and try to get people to read your pamphlet, you are fair game for a little Q&A. I asked the guy if everything requires a creator. He says yes. So then I said, OK, who or what created god? He says god is different- doesn’t need a creator. So then I said if god doesn’t need a creator, why does the universe? You believe the universe is too complex to come into being on its own, but you believe an almighty, universe-creating being can come into existence on its own? Well, at that point, he just sort of frowned and said he didn’t want to talk anymore.
The question I posed is a very old one and it’s pretty lame that after 2,000 years, Christians don’t have a better answer.
Your question assumed that God was a created entity, and the street preacher rejected the premise.
Why would they need a better answer if they accept as truth what they believe in?
And FWIW, their FAITH means that if someone’s telling them “if Jesus was resurrected, why doesn’t it happen all the time now”, they’re still going to believe that it happened. You know, unless someone proved to them that it didn’t.
You’re completely wasting your time arguing an inviolable truth to them. And all the “evidence”* in the world you can produce isn’t going to change their minds.
*assuming you can produce evidence to an event that’s over 2000 years old dosproving something.
“their FAITH means that if someone’s telling them “if Jesus was resurrected, why doesn’t it happen all the time now”, they’re still going to believe that it happened. You know, unless someone proved to them that it didn’t.”
I have to prove the resurrection *didn’t* happen?
Perhaps it’s my ass burgers acting up again, but that seems really topsy-turvy to me.
People are entitled to respect according to their conduct. Beliefs are entitled to respect according to the evidence.
So people are only allowed to believe what is observable and reproducible? I don’t think I’d want to live in a world like that.
As for “evidence,” you’re the one that said all available evidence says nobody has been raised from the dead. But there are multiple witnesses that said they saw Jesus resurrected. And other documentation that supports Lazarus being raised from the dead. And I cannot recall any contemporary writings that say “no, I was there and Jesus was chucked in the tomb and never came out” or “Lazarus never got up from his death bed.”
IOW, what “evidence” is verifiable from an event that’s over 2000 years old?
I’ll make one last statement and leave it at that (because I have to watch a tv show and then work on my business website):
As to this statement: I have to prove the resurrection *didn’t* happen?
Yes, you do. Because we are talking about an event that is open to interpretation and there is scant evidence to corroborate or sisprove with any certainty. We’re not talking about proving or disproving something g that can be reproduced, like proving 2+2 is 4. That can be done. How an event occurred millinea ago is a different animal altogether.
What part of Christianity is “dumb”?
I’d avoid using the term ‘dumb’ to describe it, but I’ll be frank with one of the criticisms I’ve had since I was a wee lad: I find it fundamentally narcissistic to assume that humanity was created in the image of a divine being. It reeks of anthropocentric self-justification and blatant psychological pandering, and I frankly see it as an insult to the concept of the divine itself.
There are a couple dozen, maybe more, Buddhist who might disagree with you on that once dead always dead thesis.
I assume you meant this for someone else. If not feel free to elaborate because I’m just confused.
“Well, the libertarians were badly outnumbered there and eventually the ruling clique set up a private no-libertarians-allowed section on the site and all the leftists went there. So we weren’t banned outright, but we were basically shut out from the main section of the forum.”
The Ancient and Mystical Order of No Homers?
So basically those athiests wanted to use the same approach wrong headed missionaries employ(ed).
Those kind of atheists used to make me embarrassed to admit to being an atheist. I was raised loosely Episcopalian and went to a Christian private school for elementary, and it just never really took. Too many doubts, too many questions that I couldn’t find answers to that made sense, and I eventually got to where I am now. Basically, I’m not ruling out the existence of the divine, but until it’s proven to me I’m going to default to skepticism. This is the approach I take to most things–hi, CAGW, pull up a seat next to “things politicians say”–so it’s sort of natural that it’s my approach to what is arguably the most important topic of human existence.
Militant atheists are as bad as militants of any religion, except they’re more plentiful and they enjoy a lot of favor in academia and some political circles. It seems silly to me. I don’t believe in God. Other people do. How does the one effect the other in any way? Why is it any of my business what people believe?
When people bitch about ‘militant atheists’ I usually pull this picture out.
https://cdn.psychologytoday.com/sites/default/files/styles/image-article_inline_full/public/blogs/55672/2011/02/55708-47021.jpg?itok=VwTd4fQC
No, they are not as bad. Not even close. No one ever blew up a bomb while screaming “THERE IS NO GOD!!!!”
Militant atheists are loud mouthed, often intellectually vapid cunts (as Mark Steyn put it: “I like atheists, but I think the quality of atheist intellectualism has been in decline since Nietzsche.”) who are usually fine with using the state to enforce their positions. But that’s all they are at present time. When militant atheists are shooting up churches or attaching themselves to other dogmatic ideologies (the classic example of course being communism) then we’ll have a problem.
Not to quibble, but… how many folks in the USSR and China were disappeared by militant atheists?
I quibble about the idea of communist ideologues being the same as the modern internet ‘militant atheist’. Communists practically engaged in Ancestor Worship, and the post-death masturbatory elevation of Lenin, Mao, Sung and the like isn’t exactly what I’d call irreligious. Militant atheists of the ‘New Atheism’ are essentially nihilists in the long run, and I generally question their commitment to ‘skepticism’ when they suddenly start fellating the state.
I was going to make this argument. State sponsored is going to be a problem no matter how you slice it.
state sponsored *anything* is what I wrote but I fucked it up of course.
Sorry, that smells of ‘no true scotsman’.. The issues isn’t is any group liable for the sins of a super-group, but whether a group has participated in a behavior.
It’s not a matter of no true scotsman, it’s a matter of distinction between ideological groups and positions. A militant atheist that articulates communist ideology can absolutely be criticized for the action of his ideological precursors, a militant atheist who’s effectively a loud-mouth secularist asshole who just wants ‘In God We Trust’ taken off the money? Little different.
I don’t expect the Catholics to be holding the bag for the Munster Rebellion just because they happen to be Christians, it’s the bloody Anabaptists who did it. Because they’re separate ideological and religious units, not one and the same.
I should add that I’m not throwing the ‘sins of a super-group’ onto them obviously, more arguing that our group distinctions in these issues tend to be arbitrary and stupid. There’s certainly atheist equivalents like the fucking Chart that just obliterates any form of nuance.
I would say that it is disingenuous to say that suicide bombing is the threshold of harm, nor that a thousand cuts can not be fatal.
I went to a few atheist meet-ups when I lived in Texas. Those guys have a real siege mentality, which is absurd. Being paranoid about Baptists in Texas is like putting on a suit of armor to do battle against a hot fudge sundae.
Anyway, at one of the meet-ups, the discussion was about a church that wanted to use a high school gym on the weekends for their youth program. The atheists were appalled.
“Why, how dare they bring their icky god-bothering nonsense into the sacred halls of a PUBLIC. SCHOOL. That’s a violation of the separation of church and state. They’ll turn on the lights and water and then they’ll be using MY tax dollars for THEIR religion. AAAAAAAGGGGGHH!!!”
The guy said he was planning to raise a stink about it at the school board meeting. I said to him “do you remember last time when we were talking about how unpopular atheists are? Yeah, what you’re planning to do is one of the reasons why.”
The look of butt-hurt on his face- it was like a sunset at the beach.
Okay, I consider myself a fairly hardcore atheist, but those guys are just tier 1 douchebags.
There was one cop who resembled that back home. He was also the high school contact or whatever. Yeah, he busted kids and whatever. But he also did help others. He knew whi he was dealing with at school, and i think he did try to do what he saw as right.
Great story! Reminds me of something I saw on a documentary. An interrogator is with a Taliban POW who is seated at a table, no restraints. The POW is offered food and water. The interrogator says nothing. For an hour or so, they just sit there staring at each other. Eventually, the POW says “if this is the worse thing you’re going to do to me, I think I’m on the wrong side.”
I’m sure I’ve told the story before, but there’s a suburb of Cleveland on the East side where the cops were still like that (at least 10-15 years ago). The “downtown” area is about three square blocks of restaurants, bars, and antique shops. On the weekend nights, starting about a half hour before the bars closed, the local cops would stand at the intersections and direct traffic to avoid the inevitable traffic jam. If they wanted to, they could have probably charged at least half the people with a DUI. Instead, they seemed to understand that they could probably pull that off once, and then that neighborhood would be dead a month later.
What ever happened to lazy cops, anyway? I mean the guy who’d drive you home because it was easier than booking you and filling out a report. How do we get those guys back?
Their orientees said “No way let’s fuck this guy up. It’s the law”
Get rid of their unions and abolish the POBOR, qualified immunity and their ability to watch video before formulating a statement on what happened when they are involved in a stop that is disputed.
That’s a start anyway.
*swoon*
It is hard to overstate how much damage pubsec unions have done to the country.
It’s a dangerous topic at family gatherings, as my brother-in-law is a firefighter, and staunch defender of their union. Several years back, he was actually asking for information regarding police misconduct… I directed him towards Radley Balko.
It’s a start.
Ask your brother-in-law to thank you for your generosity in paying ever-increasing taxes until age 65 or 70 so he can retire at 40-something.
I’ll save the really hammering him on it until he retires, I do like him, and he’s done right by my sister and niece. It is also entertaining to hear about the rivalry between cops and firefighters… there was a story where some cops stopped by the station house and were shocked that the firefighters were eating food that people had dropped off. The firefighters simply responded, “People like it when we show up, they actually call for us and we respond quickly.”
One of the things that has happened is the computerization of law enforcement.
Everyone wants reports and wants to measure “progress”. So they bring in a bunch of computer geeks who try to quantify things that really can’t be measured.
My father was a probation officer and he will rant about the fact that at the end of his career they would count home and work visits made by a PO. Then a report would come out and if a PO hadn’t done x number of home visits for each parolee they would get flagged in some report.
To him this was incredibly stupid because after doing the job for 30+ years he knows that a certain level of his case load is farm boys who fucked up once and will never fuck up again. Why bother visiting them? Instead he was going to visit the career crook more times.
As a computer geek, I tried to explain to him that there is no way you could quantify his subjective judgement and generate a report. It is the problem of looking for your lost keys over by the street lamp not in the dark alley where you lost them because the light is better.
A lot of the regular cops have the same thing. You stopped your car and had your lights on. Why didn’t you write a ticket? It is now easier to write that ticket than to try to justify why you used discretion.
I was thinking that very thing. That combined with a lot more shit being illegal…
More oversite of shittier laws.
As a computer geek, I hate shit like that. You only report on things that you can quantify. If you can’t quantify it, then there’s no reason to write a report to generate data that isn’t actionable.
More than that – only report on the things you’ll act on. WHOGAS if the data aren’t used?
Nevermind that if you measure and report on it it will change behaviors in ways you don’t want.
Anybody remember getting rewarded for the number of software bugs you find?
It gets worse then that at my current employer. The people running the reports are sending out garbage data. Even after we pointed out that the info they were sending out was wrong, they said it was: “Good enough.”
There’s a reason I’m looking for a new job.
As one of the geeks that implements systems like that, I’ve made it a personal crusade to try and get managers to understand proper use of metrics. Don’t measure the process, measure results. I don’t give a flying fuck how many times a PO visits every parolee. I care about the recidivism rate amongst their case load. That’s the important part.
Problem is, that is harder to do and requires the managers to actually attempt to manage, rather than just come up with a process and enforce it on everything regardless of how appropriate it is.
OT: The Legend Continues
http://www.campusreform.org/?ID=8974
When you are dead, you do not know it.
It is only hard for other people.
It is the same way when you are stupid.
So the people that issue cop of the year awards also issue the teacher of the year awards? Makes sense
The IQ of a panel or committee is calculated as follows: Calculate the mean IQ of the committee’s members, then divide it by the number of members.
Do they at least let you keep the toolbox when you graduate?
file under: Dear Leader
It appears that various govt offices are very uncomfortable with putting up a Trump portrait.
Do the portraits also need to be filled out in triplicate, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, and buried in soft peat for 3 months before they can be posted?
I drove past an opulent looking building the other day. Turns out it was a Social Security Administration office. Gotta let those grey-faced bureaucrats feel the power.
Politicians and bureaucrats should not be celebrities.
The building I work in used to have a Social Security office. The building is an absolute dump, and they moved out years ago. I have no idea where the new office is.
Every post office, DMV, and even court building I’ve been in was a dump. The court buildings in e.g. NYC are opulent on the outside of course but inside you can tell they gave up decades ago.
The county office building is a 70s (I think) metal monstrosity. Some of the departments are in what used to be former retail space, I think. Or maybe it was office space. If memory serves, the building used to have an off-trace betting parlor in it.
Around here those are the nicest buildings. Towns that dont have a pot to piss in will have milliin dollar courthouses
Look up Las Cruces, New Mexico. That place, like most of NM, is a dilapidated shit hole.. except for their brand fucking new government buildings. They look like something out of Austin Powers.
*looks at calendar*
Must be the same place appointments come from.
*prolonged ovation*
Ugh. One of the several things I don’t miss about the Army– the photo lineup of the chain of command (and the chain of support) next to the orderly rooms and other places. I suppose it’s good to have familiarity with what the brigade CSM looks like in advance, but still unnerving.
I was talking to a friend who is still in the Army. In his office there was no picture of DT for over a month when the Sergeant Major noticed and said to fix that right away. My friend went to the White House site (.gov and not .com), downloaded and printed the photo and put on the Chain of Command board. The next day the SGM told him to knock the crap off and put up the right photo. He said he did and he was not believed until he showed the SGM the picture on the website. If you have seen the photo you will understand the confusion since it looks like a parody. He is the POTUS and can choose the photo, but all the current photo is missing is a Bald Eagle with a “Murica, Fuck Yeah!” banner.
Is it the one where’s he’s scowling in front of the white house with a flag over his shoulder?
Is it this one? LOL
That is correct. It is the official portrait, fuck yeah.
Needz moar MAGA PRIME.
Nice! He looks like he is holding back an epic shart…or just let one go.
Spend my grade-school year in a project in West Oakland. The cops knew all our names (and we knew theirs). They’d roll through regularly and chat. The real punks in projects knew not to mess with anyone “local”. All the gang shit took place somewhere else. The project itself was perfectly safe.
‘cept for the time some punks chased us little kids with roman candles and one us got a bad burn. Several of the dads went and beat the shit out of the punks and that was the end of that.
Great moments in non-sequiturs
I, for one, look forward with great interest to the learned pronouncements of Sheikh Chris al Hayes. I’m sure he knows *far* more about Islam, Arabic, and the Middle East than anyone else.
from his official bio: “Chris grew up in the Bronx and graduated from Brown University in 2001 with a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy.”
Huh. Well, I’m sure his point about Indonesia is very solid.
Legal monotheism, religious identity cards and blasphemy laws? Why, it’s a regular secular paradise!
At least he didn’t ask how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. That’s progress, right?
[2] The Indonesian Constitution guarantees freedom of religion.
[3] The government recognises only six official religions (Islam, Protestantism, Catholicism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Confucianism)
Ummm…
“freedom of religion” … provided you are a member of one of the 6 protected religions.
And the way that ‘freedom’ is defended is by the state punishing anyone for blasphemy (against any one of the other)
It makes sense from a Prog point of view. Where “Freedom” means being protected from criticism, etc.
there are about 245 non-official religions in Indonesia
Even if the government doesn’t recognize your religion, if you can still practice it, is that not freedom of religion?
although citizens may be able to leave that section blank
religious identity cards that you can leave blank aren’t really religious identity cards.
I am not saying anything about Indonesia, I admittedly know nothing of Indonesia, except where it is on a map, and that it’s capitol is Jakarta. It just seems that you fellows seem to be choosing to highlight only certain points.
Oh, ok. This is like that thing where there are technically several political parties in China but they’re only allowed to exist provided they go along with the CCP’s lead.
Why are they so big on Indonesia-is-the-biggest-Muslim-country-yada-yada? Yeah, I know it’s because it’s not on The List. And there’s like totally no terrorism there.
actually, as touted as it is for being less terroristy, there is still quite a bit of strife
I think the simplest explanation for ‘why’ they are the outlier is sort of like the same thing as to “why socialist-ish policies are successful in scandinavia”
e.g. Social-Welfare works in Scandidavia because of Scandinavians / Political Islam works in Indonesia because of Indonesians (or maybe better put = “they’re Not Arabs/Pakistanis”)
progs want to pretend that the relative-success of Indonesia proves there’s nothing at all wrong with Islam; in fact, it really just proves that they are successful *despite* Islamic political influence
I was joking. Of course there is terrorism there.
Every time some bomb goes off, an angel gets its wings.
I appreciate this take on trust.
That is key to erasing animosity.
Same with communication. One of the worst aspects of the cost-centric public health system in Canada is the long wait times not just to see a doctor but while waiting to get services in a clinic or hospital. You go hours and hours without a single person keeping you informed about how things are going. You just sit there. At first, you’re civil and just accept it because – insert reason here. Then when you reach the end of that line, your patience wears thin. So you begin to ask questions but you may as well as talk to the walls because the staff won’t help you. In fact, they’ve taken to putting up ‘we will not tolerate’ sings. Gee, I wonder fucken why.
I would always tell the nurse or the doctor or whomever all you need to do is just keep people informed. Put out a message on the intercom. Send a volunteer to speak to people. Anything. They would always give me a look as if I just fucked Scooby-Doo in front of them. It never occurred to them that SERVICE and RESPECT is a two-way street. Hence, they wouldn’t need to put up those stupid signs.
Same with the cops. In the small town where I own my place, the cops do nothing but give out tickets all day long. Behind their backs, people don’t respect that (for the most part, the cops I’ve interacted with have been professional, courteous and polite but that’s not the point) because it’s clearly a way to score money off citizens. Instead, why not walk around, which is very feasible around here, or give out warnings? Build the respect and trust.
They have no incentive to do this so they don’t.
Just like sitting trapped in a subway for half an hour with no explanation, which is a frequent topic of conversation around here – it hasn’t happened to me personally but apparently it happens often enough that the public raised a big enough stink about it to begin to make a difference.
I doubt that would translate to cop behavior though. The transit agency is always a target of people’s ire while the cops are the object of their slobbering affection no matter how much they shit on us.
My favorite NYC subway story like Rhywun describes is just after they enacted the no moving cars between rule. An uptown green line sub partially entered Union Square when the light turned red for no apparent reason. The operator stopped dead about halfway into the station and wouldn’t open the car doors. After a few minutes the people trapped inside were acting like NYers and were screaming at her. She was screaming back that she couldn’t open the doors because people would pass between the cars and since this wasn’t an emergency theier was no passing between cars so doors had to remain shut. Of course, both sides were being more “earthy” in their language.
The situation was still at an impasse when a local green pulled up and I jumped on that instead.
Huh, I’m not aware of such a rule. The doors aren’t locked on any numbered trains that I’ve been on – it possible I don’t know about it because I very rarely ride the numbered trains. The lettered trains have a different configuration that doesn’t allow moving between cars anyway (the driver’s cabin is in the way).
If there is one missing rule, it is a rule against eating and drinking. There is no rule against this, unlike pretty much anywhere else. If you want to know why the cars are often so disgusting, that’s one reason. Sitting next to someone breathing corn nuts in your face isn’t pleasant either. /rant
The rule is there but it is enforced like the no crossing against the light rule. If you actually enforced the rule the city would jam to a halt.
The NYC “electric sewer” can be pretty bad smelling in the summer, especially on cars where the AC has died. But at least NYC is plastic and steel. DC’s Metro with the fabric seats can be horrible in summer. After one incident in DC where a homeless woman soiled herself and then got off the car dropping feces on the way to the door, my eyes rained tears from the stench and I longed to get home to NYC’s problem.
Rant on/ I get it tourists. You are standing there admiring the true capital of the USA. But get out of the middle of the god dammed sidewalk because I have places to go!/Rant off
*Reads comment*
*Throws up*
Ugh… thank you for that… I didn’t actually want to digest my lunch today.
I wonder how thoroughly they wash those things after such incidences.
The NYC subway is a rose garden compared to SF buses. There’s about a 1 in 3 chance the bus you get on will be inhabited by a bum who has been ripening for a decade or more.
Weirdly, the NYC buses are spotless – the cleanest I have ever seen anywhere. I don’t know why that is.
The government recognises only six official religions (Islam, Protestantism, Catholicism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Confucianism)
—–
Indonesia does not recognise agnosticism or atheism, and blasphemy is illegal.
Pick a side, you cowards.
The month before, this same squad had rolled through and used their HMMWVs to pull the village’s only tractor (an old Soviet model) out of a ditch.
Misallocation of Resources. Waste, fraud and abuse!
I really wish there were a photoshop plug-in which could take photos like this and…
…retexture them / alter some of the background so they looked more like this
Excellent article.
Cops have a lot of work to do to raise people’s opinions of them. Actual opinions not dunphy bullshit. I don’t see them doing what is required.
BLM doesn’t help matters any. Someone else said it: if you wanted to shut down police reform, a group like BLM is the way to do it.
by “NYC”, i presume they mean “Will someone in DeBlasio’s office force this on the rest of the city via some regulatory fiat”
“Everyone knows what the bull is supposed to represent, but lets quote two foreigners who have no clue so we can prove how important this is!”
Bullshit. It was part of marketing campaign for some bank. Ask the sculptor of the bull, who didn’t appreciate the effort.
Oh, it’s in the article. Most people probably won’t get that far, though.
I apologize for the diversion, but this thought probably won’t survive the night.
So, primed from a public radio program related to the moral equivalency of the OT, NT and Koran: I wonder if its exclaimers are inclined to use the same standard when evaluating the more recent positions of their own parties..
The media, like a kindergarten teacher, doesn’t care *who* started it!
“Violence erupted at a Make America Great Again rally in Huntington Beach on Saturday after a protester opposed to President Trump allegedly doused a female organizer of the event with pepper spray, sparking a brawl that ended with several arrests.
“A group of flag-waving Trump supporters tackled the man with the pepper spray, who was wearing a black mask, and started punching and kicking him, according to witnesses. Several other fights also broke out between demonstrators.”
Well, pepper spraying some one’s wife, this could get you a trip to the hospital even in the most polite of society. Or worse. The left’s idea to use violence when they can’t win fairly is such a wrong idea, I don’t even know where to start. Someone is going to get killed soon enough.
The WaPo one was by far the best (meaning worst)
Actual headline: “A Pro-Trump rally ended up with a man getting beaten with a ‘Make America Great Again’ sign.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2017/03/26/a-pro-trump-rally-ended-up-with-a-man-getting-beaten-with-a-make-america-great-again-sign/?utm_term=.ec4d5c433eaf
Never mind the fact that they guy ‘getting beaten’ was an antifag that just maced a random woman in the face. Just gloss right over that one, guys.
And here’s the hook from the very first 2 lines of the article:
Yes, they saw the antifags and just FLEW INTO A FUCKING PATRIOTIC RAGE! How is this not libel?
Antifags? Vhyrus is Mike M?
I didn’t realize someone else used that term. Oh well so much for my originality.
Mike M referred to the previous president as “Block Insane Yomomma”. So there’s tendency to refer to Mike M. any time nonsense naming like “Antifags” shows up.
See above photo (#17)
I am becoming convinced that the AntiFa people are out to start violence on a wide scale. They think they want a revolution. When the real violence starts, when people start reacting to their mere presence with violence, they will try to hang it on the non-left. I think by then no one will care.
This is Soros’s doing. Anyone want to guess who else had a political movement that was propelled by provoking violence? Maybe even someone Soros had a hand in their movement?
Anti-Fascist my fucking ass.
Off topic, but going back to a topic from last night. Any PC gamer who wants to try MEA, you can join Origin Access for one month, download the game and play for 10 hours for free. Ok, well, for $5. I’m dong so right now. The game is 50G, so may take a little time to download, depending on your intertoobz speed. Drink a couple beers or 3 and you should be good to go.
I’m realizing that I’m now an old PC gamer, and I’m more then willing to wait for the sales. I just picked up DA:I for $12 a couple of weeks ago, and I still have a Steam library with over 350 incomplete games to work through.
DAI is a good game, I don’t care what anyone says. It gets quite challenging at times, but it’s a damn good game. I love the pausable real time combat of that game series, it’s especially visually amazing on DAI.
I’ve only played it for about 35 hours so far, but my complaints about it is that it’s not a gripping story. It runs into the issue of some RPG’s where I’m the savior of the world, but if I could spend my time picking flowers and mining rocks, things will be made better for me. Isn’t that the point of being the leader of an army? That I have people to send out to pick flowers, mine rocks, and do the menial tasks?
I feel that both of the DA:O sequels miss out on not having the introduction to the character that Origins did. I enjoyed being able to make choice for my character in their youth that had an effect on the story later, and I really disliked that that got jettisoned for all of the sequels. Maybe part of my complaint is that DA:I is just another game where I’m supposed to be the chosen savior of the world. I think that’s why Fallout 2 and Fallout NV are my favorite RPG games to date. In both of them, I’m just a guy, trying to get by, while the world goes to crazy around me. It makes sense that I have to acquire everything myself, because I’m just a nobody.
Patriarchy Strikes Again! = Yoga-“pants”-edition
Is this the same Shannon Watts of Moms Demand Action, or is there another useful idiot named Shannon Watts out there?
According to the Reuters version, you are correct
Someone on twitter is outraged! Film@11
I’m confusing. How is covering up your ass in public “sexualizing”…?
*confused
I would argue your original post is not entirely inaccurate…
What was she doing in Denver? Giving Hickenlooper the BJ she promised for sucking Bloomberg’s ass last election?
“they were traveling under an employee travel pass that includes a dress code”
So, this was a private employer’s rule and we’re to blame the airline?
good point.
as i said the other day, it becomes clear and clearer to me every day that the “stories” the press chooses to highlight are all usually in the service of the same selected narratives they’re trying to pump. “someone somewhere has to put pants on” isn’t really something that would normally be considered newsworthy, but the implication here seems to be “Sexist Airlines”
Well it isn’t like they have any credibility left, so there’s really nothing for them to lose.
It sounds like the employer was the airline.
So the airline has a dress code for their employees traveling with an employee pass?, but were not holding the public to that code? Sounds the same to me. I can’t go to some of my client’s offices wearing speedos and rubber flippers with a boot on my head. Should I be outraged by that?
maybe their employees kids; the people in question were a teenager/10yr old
Then again, I’m not sure exactly what ‘leggings’ means here. The article says ‘teens’. I mean a well built 17 year old girl wearing nothing but basically pantyhose might be just a tad distracting.
Hell yeah!
No, and neither should anyone in the article. I think we’re agreeing.
The outrage machine does not concur. But I think we need pics of these legging clad lasses before we can make the proper moral stand.
Um… My understanding is that they are… not of age.
*My* thoughts on this issue are more objective and therefore more valid 🙂
“…wearing speedos and rubber flippers with a boot on my head. ”
We demand pics.
Well, you know, because they don’t allow that, there are no pics. (;
Oh yeah. I forgot.
A shame. I am sure in no time the pics posted around here would make an interesting album.
Warty has them framed in his rape dungeon.
My aunt worked for an airline and got a lot of free travel. She said they were very strict about how employees dressed when flying free.
“You’re killing the outrage buzz!”
You see, this is why capitalism is bad. People who pay you to do stuff can tell you what to do! It’s outrageous!
“not allowed onto the morning flight because they were traveling under an employee travel pass that includes a dress code, ”
That is as far as I needed to read.
Facts don’t matter, only feels.
What a horrible message to teach the children.
And not in this case yet, but the other related horrible message too many of these stories teach the children is, if somebody does something you don’t like, it’s virtuous to use the power of the state to bully them into doing what you want.
Unc unc unc
Grandfather, father, brother all marines. Grandfather was an FDR democrat. Father an LBJ democrat. Brother a Bush Sr/Jr republican. Law and order supporters when it came to domestic policy, realpolitik believers in foreign policy. The schizophrenia always drives me nuts. I liked this piece, Swiss, because it puts a human face on what I’ve been thinking about for a while. Putting good kids in shitty situations for dubious political situations is the hallmark of a corrupt government.
*dubious political reasons.
How do your Nihonjin neighbors/coworkers feel about your family Straffin?
When I was working in Tokyo in the late 90’s I realized on Pearl Harbor day that just 50 years earlier, all the wonderful guys I was working with and I would have been engaged in some crazy vicious fighting.
From their point of view they were way more appalled at my hunting (especially squirrels) than my having once been part of Uncle Sam’s Misguided Children.
Just got back in and here is a nothing story. I wandered around in the woods for an hour or so looking for beehives. I had a cup of coffee with me and a machete and I had put bug spray on to keep the chiggers off. I only had to swing the machete a few times. I got back to the house and kept feeling a tickle on the back of my head or neck, was hard to tell. When I would reach back I kept encountering what I thought was a spider web. No big deal I just kept trying to get it all off.
a few minutes ago I felt it again. Goddammit enough. I whacked the back of my neck hard with my open hand.
Turns out it was one of these guys:
http://www.myarklamiss.com/news/stinging-caterpillars-coming-soon-to-south-louisiana/154097739
Imagine someone putting a cigarette out on the back of your neck.
Imagine someone putting a cigarette out on the back of your neck.
Some people would pay for that.
I hope you don’t have deer ticks down there. They’re not nearly the threat you’d think as long as you use common sense, since if you’re not black you can see them easily enough and it takes hours before they bite you and more hours before they’ve drawn enough blood to possibly transmit any diseases. But the “public” health types sure like to use deer ticks to try to instill terror in people.
From someone who got the disease while never finding any evidence from the cause: blow me.
We have them in abundance and have since the mid-sixties.
As someone who has engaged in a loud yelling match with a doctor because I only had one symptom of Lyme’s disease and he wanted me to wait until I got a few more before he prescribed me any antibiotics*, let me say “Fuck you. Lyme disease is real and shitty”
* He was worried that we prescribe too many antibiotics in the US. I pointed out that I hadn’t had a prescription for antibiotics for more than 5 years and I’d rather stamp out Lyme’s disease early instead of waiting for more symptoms to show up.
Minocycline works well and to date no bugs have developed immunity to it despite long term use, well, there was that one form of dysentery in Madagascar in the late sixties….but other than that, no. Also, no real side effects other than hypermelanism if you get too much sun.
Lyme is pretty bad, basically a form of Rheumatoid Arthritis. Debilitating and without treatment, fatal.
Also Ted. I was once bitten by a deer tick and developed a tingly, itchy, burn with the classic bullseye site within half an hour. I was already taking minocycline so nothing came of it but I was amazed at how quickly it happened. I would have been fucked if not for the antibiotics I was already on.
That’s what happens when you violate the NAP.
^winning response^
Ugh… nature. I’ve heard enough stories about Florida to convince me that the South is little different from Australia fauna-wise.
I enjoyed the hunting in NC. The deer season was months long and you could take 6 animals per year (2 buck limit) With the heavy foliage it was a great hunt for a .54 caliber Hawkens Plains Rifle. (Round ball with cap lock or flintlock) I just skipped going out the first two weekends on general rifle and therefore largely had the hunt to myself. With the season stretching from October to sunset January 1st you had to change your hunting tactics from green and warm to noisy leaves and nice to bare trees and cool. If you needed additional meat, go get free doe tags from one of the military airfields. The spring turkey was decent hunting even though you only got one week.
The only downside was no hunting on Sunday. I asked a warden why and he told me “that is church day.” When he saw my look he cut me off saying “I know and agree but good luck getting the legislature to changing the law.”
I thought you were going to say it was a catalpa caterpillar. Then I was going to start thinking about all the fun times I had catching bream in the early spring in Memphis with them as bait.
Then I stare out the window at the shitty landscape here in Minnesoda (all brown and grey) and wonder why I am living here.
My catalpa trees are pretty far along in budding out. I see webbing already. Too damned bad nothing will touch the black cherry caterpillars. there are zillions of those bastards already.
I haven’t seen any evidence of them yet thisbyear, but last year, I had bag worms something fierce. I sprayed and burned my trees several times before finally killing them all. A lot of my neighbors didn’t try as hard and lost good trees to them.
I had a large catalpa tree in my back yard. The worms it them are the absolute best fish bait in have ever used.
It died this past summer and I had to cut it down, thus is my first spring in many years that I don’t have a ready supply of catalpa worms on hand.
Perusing the comments on the WaPo article Vhyrus posted above. That is one disturbing, impenetrable wall of useful idiots. I dont see this ending well.
The lefties seem absolutely convinced that anyone opposing them politically is outright evil and the time for violence has come. They seem to believe that anyone at all that initiates violence is a paid alt-right false flag despite numerous incidents of their own activists publicly calling for violence and their pundits justifying it. They make little or no distinction between nazis (hard left), KKK (militant democrats), confederates(?), anyone who voted for Trump, or anyone they consider conservative.
Either you are a marxist/communist or you deserve to be punched in the face.
And the media are watching all of this with their Jon Stewart mug-shrug.
They are egging it on.
Police/citizen relations could be greatly improved if the police arrested *actual criminals instead of acting as revenue generators for the state.
I can read through the arrest reports in my local paper every week and % 80 of the arrests are for failure to pay fines, public intox, etc. There’s plenty of theifs around, but it’s rare anyone is ever arrested for that or people belongings are found and returned. There’s no money in catching thiefs, the money is in writing tickets.
*thieves, murderers, rapists, people that are causing actual harm to society.
Late to the party, but great anecdote/ life lesson/ sensible policing thoughts.
I’ve had about 10-15 police interactions and only twice got a break in that they could have fucked with me but didn’t.