McChuck: Uniform & boots, helmet & body armor (this was back in 2004 before they made them smaller and lighter), rifle + 8 magazines, pistol + 3 magazines, multitool, folding knife, ID lanyard, keys, pocket lint… I also had my own personal body armor (best life insurance policy I ever bought) that I wore under my uniform. Very handy when your job is to go into town and talk to people in their shops and homes. Taking off the helmet and bulky issue armor shows trust when you all sit down to...
James James: I had a schoolteacher who spent some time in the Soviet Union; he personally attested the windscreen wiper shortage and removal to prevent theft. I had a colleague who refused to let me update some templates to fix the envelope address window issue. I fixed them and she changed them back and admonished me. Because she was an idiot.
Isegoria: Sixty-five pounds isn’t light, and that’s without a pack, water, radio, batteries, or extra ammo? Good grief! Body armor and a helmet aren’t light, but what’s the other half?
McChuck: On our last day in Iraq, we had to weigh ourselves with our gear. (This is for the benefit of the Air Force load masters.) My “walking around the base” load was 65 pounds. No pack. No water. No radio. No batteries. No extra ammo. 65 pounds.
McChuck: Absolutely. Senior officers are conditioned to think of the men beneath them as unfeeling, unthinking automatons.
McChuck: And how, precisely, did Western European leaders, who are at war with Russia, obtain samples of the dead man’s blood?
Adept: “There were once white races like this. The Polynesians rank among the last great warrior races.” lol. lmao, even. The Polynesians were conquered relatively quickly wherever they were encountered, and the New Zealand Wars of the mid-19th century were as lopsided and as indolent as such things get. The “great warrior races” label is one that the English habitually bestow upon races they’ve conquered and subjugated, as a sort of face-saving measure or consolation prize. (And in the...
Handle: I have strong doubts about this claim. I think Putin had the guy killed, but also that the European foreign ministers are just making up the bit about conclusive identification of the lethal compound. What’s the explanation for use of the compound? It isn’t to demonstrate that Russia has it: the total synthesis is well within the capability of good organic chemists in most countries, and Russia has a deep bench of excellent chemists. It isn’t to say, “we can reach out and...
Wanweilin: Yep, lack of impulse control. Guaranteed failure.
Jim: There were once white races like this. The Polynesians rank among the last great warrior races.
Bruce G. Charlton: These studies need to (but almost never do) control for innate psychological attributes that are known to have a strong and causal effect on earnings: specifically IQ and the personality trait of Conscientiousness. It is IMO almost certain that if IQ and Intelligence were used as controls, there would be no significant effect on earnings of extra years of schooling. In other words, there’s a substantial literature to suggest that most of the differences in earnings that are not...
Phileas Frogg: Jim, You’re right. I was speaking off the cuff about its colloquial use by Marxist, not it’s original formulation, which was poorly articulated on my part. Good catch.
Jim: Phileas Frogg: Adam Smith and David Ricardo’s labor theory of value is not ordinarily understood to posit that, if the same amount of labor is done in double the time, that, therefore, a commodity is worth twice as much, but rather that the value of commodities is based on the quantity of abstract labor embedded in their production. More crudely, a good or service must sell for at least its cost of production or be a loser.
Phileas Frogg: Dan, Next thing you know you’ll be telling me there are elite international p3do rings operating at the highest levels of society, and that the governments of the western world are running cover and interference for them. Of course Nukes are real. And so is Neo-Darwinian macro-evolution.
Dan Kurt: RE: “We have enjoyed sixty years without nuclear weapons exploded in anger.” Possible reason: explosive nuclear weapons are a hoax.
Phileas Frogg: It’s the Labor theory of value, applied to education. “I increased the amount of time I spent on my education, THUS IT MUST BE WORTH MORE.” They think that by saying horseshit theories with different words, that it makes the spell work better this time. They can’t escape the prison of their Marxist canards. There’s nothing new under the sun.
Bob Sykes: This needs to be done by discipline. I suspect engineering, prelaw, et al. show good ROIs, whereas fakes like gender studies show strongly negative ROIs at every year of study.
T. Beholder: Trump is a guy who largely agrees with leftist critiques of the mythos of American power as a force for good in the world That’s not quite «A-anyone who does not accept Franklin Delano Roosevelt as their Lord and Saviour is a leftist!», but not very far. The space between neocon choir kids and tumblrinas never was a wide uncrossable chasm both of these pretend it is.
T. Beholder: (That the Geneva Protocol of 1925 outlawed chemical agents in war and was signed by all the European participants in World War II does not itself explain the non-use of gas; it only provided an agreement that both sides could keep if they chose to, under pain of reciprocity.) Not only. Past the very start, there were simple practical limitations. Chemical weapons in conventional warfare as understood at the time were both very limited and very circumstantial. 1. The point of using chemical...
A cutie!
I wonder what the secondary overlap will be if we continue with standard and add magenta? And who’ll represent it?
The platypus always holds the center.