"Wokeness is responsible for the Military Recruitment Crisis"

 I have a lot of "drama" going on "Meatspace", I will explain later when I have time to 'splain.  Also I am very happy with the election and I will post in a day or two on that.

I saw this on "American Spectator", and I totally agree with it.  Until recently Military service was a family affair, but now a lot of veterans are telling their kids and others, "don't bother", for several reasons.  Back when I joined, we knew that we were giving uncle Sam a blank check that he can cash up to the full amount which is our life, and we trusted our leadership not to squander "us" in bullcrap.  I trusted my Presidents, Reagan and Bush to be judicious and they were, although I blame ""Foggy Bottom for "Beirut Bombing" and the restrictive rules of engagement, and that won't be the first time that happened, it happened again in Somalia in 93 and during Obungler's time in Iraq and Afghanistan.

If our nation’s top military and civilian leaders want to understand why military recruiting in the all-volunteer force is at an all-time low, they need only look in the mirror. Few young people want to be like them. The sight of former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley waddling out into the political arena this election season is unlikely to convince many teenagers to join up.

In an insightful piece in the Wall Street Journal, Owen West and Kevin Wallsten explain how incompetent top-level leadership and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) efforts are chasing away potential recruits, as well as the military’s historically best recruiters — veterans who have encouraged their kids and grandkids to follow in their footsteps. The decline of this kind of encouragement from senior veterans almost exactly parallels the decline in recruitment rates. Historically, 80 percent of recruits had a relative who had served. Today, 80 percent of veterans say they would not recommend military service under the present circumstances. This is not a coincidence.

The Biden administration and its senior civilian and military leaders are in denial. They blame poor education, increasing juvenile drug abuse, and the sedentary lifestyle of the smartphone generation for reducing the pool of eligible recruits. The reality is that there are still plenty of high school athletes, young hunters, and farm kids out there who would otherwise join. Their parents and grandparents — I’m one of them — are either actively discouraging or just not encouraging them to enlist. Worse, the young people themselves see two decades of military failure culminating in the disgraceful rout in Kabul. They wonder if they want to be led by senior officers who spent 20 years fighting a war and not adapting their strategy to bring it to a successful conclusion. 

Joe Biden holds that diversity is essential to success on the battlefield. That is not supported by military history. The army of the Persian Empire under Darius and Xerxes was the most incredibly diverse in history, but was trounced on the battlefield by homogenous Greek armies in two decisive battles. The Persian army was made up of drafted contingents from every nation in the empire — many of whom hated each other more than they hated the Greeks. Over a century later, Alexander the Great conquered the empire with an equally homogenous professional army. Likewise, the very diverse Austro-Hungarian army was a drag on its allies throughout World War I.

In addition, DEI initiatives have made military promotions a joke. Who wants to join a military where you are likely to be passed over because a man wearing a dress, or someone less qualified but of a different ethnicity, will get promoted over you because they come from an underserved minority? In 2022, the Air Force mandated quotas based on race for officer promotions.

But the administration’s policies have also eroded military service culture. Even the Marine Corps, once considered one of the world’s elite assault forces, has adopted a passive defensive mentality that is technology dependent. The Marines are making their recruiting quotas, barely, because their recruitment goals have gotten a lot smaller under the leadership of the Biden administration and two incompetent commandants. Both have actively encouraged the downsizing. (READ MORE: The Marine Corps Has Gone Off the Rails)

The Biden administration has been laser focused on DEI at the expense of military readiness. If Kamala Harris becomes president, we can expect her administration to double down on DEI; she is, after all, the ultimate poster child for the movement. Unlike Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, she has never earned her national security chops. Potential recruits will likely not be unaware of the fact that the Biden administration has overseen an unbroken series of military and foreign policy disasters.

I desperately want to support the armed services, but I cannot, in good conscience, encourage any young man or woman to serve under the likes of Kamala Harris and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. 

Gary Anderson is a retired Marine Corps Colonel who served as a Special Advisor to the Deputy Secretary of Defense and as a civilian advisor in Iran and Afghanistan

"What are the Potential Drawbacks of eliminating the Electoral College and implementing a direct democracy for presidential elections."

 I got this question and Answer of "Quora" and it was pretty good I thought.  

A guy named "Jerry Bennett" provided the answer, so he got the props.

Still very busy at work and other things going on, once I get some more information, I will put it on here.

As they say, a picture can be worth a thousand words.

The basic rationale behind the Constitution's requirement that states elect presidents rather than the popular vote was that the framers of the Constitution favored a federation of states rather than a national ‘kingdom’ style of government. State’s rights were a guiding principle. In addition, at the time the Constitution was ratified, holding a popular vote in a timely manner was problematic (think Pony Express). So states were given the choice of how to present ‘electors’ to the election assembly (called the Electoral College) that would, in turn, cast two votes, one each for President and Vice President (no, there is no constitutional requirement that the president and vice president come from the same political party).

In our first 80 years as a nation, most state legislators, governors, and state influencers chose who the electors would be and who they would cast votes for. The number of electoral votes allowed from each state was governed by the number of state representatives in Congress (two senators + House Representatives).

This persisted until the late 1800s by which time most states adopted a ‘popular vote’ system within the state to determine the candidate the state electors would present to the college.

Tallying the popular vote within the entire country has always been a false exercise. The popular vote is only relevant within the state in which it is cast. The news media (press) invented a national popular vote and national polls—neither of which are germane to the presidential election.

In recent times, the Electoral College has been seen as a hedge against big city control of national political will. As can be seen, by the map graphic above, large US cities (predominantly Democratic in the last century) would likely control the administrative office of the federal government (Presidency) if not held in check by the Electoral process.

To go from a Federation of States to a Popular Democracy would mean the elimination of state sovereignty to some extent and a constitutional amendment that no Republican state would ratify. No Democrat has ever won the Presidency without also winning the popular vote. In contrast, Republican presidents lost the popular vote in four separate elections where they won the Presidency.

"A Crisis of Competence"

 

This was supposed to post almost a week ago, I had it in draft form, but I had a lot of stuff going on in "meatspace" and I got squirreled.

   I still think that people should have been cashiered for for that debacle that is called the "Afghanistan Withdrawal".   Back in the old days, the senior generals of the American Military would have resigned, the long gray line would have demanded it, going back in time thundering "Duty Honor Country"   I saw this somewhere and forgot where I clipped it.

Last month we marked the third anniversary of the United States’ withdrawal from Afghanistan—a poorly planned and executed retreat that capped a two decade-long policy that cost some two and a half thousand American lives, over twenty thousand American servicemen and women wounded, and an estimated $1 to $2 trillion—or between $150 million to $300 million a day for the duration of the conflict.[i]  Yet Afghanistan is but one example of the profligate expenditure of American blood and treasure post-Cold War—the wars in Iraq, Libya and Syria all failed to achieve their stated strategic objectives and cost the nation dearly.  The total price tag for the Global War on Terror post 9/11 is estimated to stand at up to $8 trillion.[ii]  The accuracy of such estimates is subject to debate, but in hindsight none of the overall goals that had been originally declared to justify the effort were achieved, nor did much of the bespoke “nation-building” or “democracy-building” we were promised come to pass.   And so, during the current election season, when debates about different strategies going forward oscillate between the “China first” and “pivot to Asia” on the one hand, and business as usual of American primacy—AKA hegemony—compete for the public’s ear, it is time we took stock of what happened during those three decades, and ensure we chart a different course going forward, one that no longer allows for the unsustainable profligacy in expending American blood and treasure.The first step to recovery is to recognize that one has a problem, and in the case of the United States foreign policy elite we seem no longer able to craft a workable strategy, operationalize and execute it to reach the proclaimed objectives. We need to ask ourselves a simple question: Why has the United States been routinely unable to win wars over the past three decades (the Desert Storm battle to dislodge Iraq from Kuwait a notable exception)—not in the sense of breaking the adversary’s military and destroying its government, but when it comes to achieving the strategic objectives we set out to accomplish?  Is it that we no longer have the resources to implement what we set out to do? Or perhaps it is that what increasingly passes for strategy is more reminiscent of a policy conversation in a self-contained echo chamber, rather than being grounded in the realities of the Darwinian ecosystem we call international relations?

 I submit that it is the latter, and here is why.The three post-Cold War decades were defined by a fundamental misreading of what the implosion of the Soviet empire meant, what caused it, and how long this strategic pause would endure. The Washington consensus was wrong that there was anything final or decisive about the decomposition of the Warsaw Pact, that Russia would somehow recognize that its path to empire had run its course, and that it would “accept its seat at the table” that we generously – so we thought – offered.  In reality, the end of the Cold War was more an end in the battle fought for the domination of the Eurasian landmass after 1945, but it was no more a period of peace than the breather between the First and the Second World Wars was anything but an armistice. American foreign policy elites celebrated the win as an existential victory, imbued with ideological meaning and “end-of-history” triumphalism when they should have understood that if anything, geopolitics were to be brought front-and-center, and that Russia’s weakness was likely to beget revanchism of the sort that seized Germany during the Weimar Republic.  In contrast to the strategists of the “Greatest Generation” who understood that caesuras in history happen only with tectonic shifts engendered by total defeats and victories, the post-Cold War leaders seemed to believe that our former adversaries would want to be “like us,” paying little attention to the extent of humiliation and anomie that defeat always brings forth.  It was this lack of strategic foresight that imbued American post-Cold War triumphalism with the crippling certitude that we could shape the world to our liking. Future historians will marvel that the United States frittered away so much power in just one generation, pursuing the chimera of “primacy” and the “unipolar moment,” instead of husbanding and preserving for as long as possible the unique power position it found itself occupying in 1991.In fairness, dramatic events also shaped our elite perceptions. The terror attacks on 9/11 were a true game-changer, as they wrecked America’s sense that it was entitled to live in a secure homeland—separated from the world by two oceans and neighboring on Canada and Mexico, two friendly countries that pose no threat.  The trauma of 9/11, and especially the failure of the George W. Bush administration at that point of dread to ask something of the nation beyond money and security measures at our airports, laid the foundation for the most breathtaking hubris in American history:  the belief that properly crafted institutions would in short order remake non-Western cultures, and that we would not be safe until we had transformed entire regions of the globe in our image.

  This folly was not so much a quest for empire as its critics posited; it was a borderline elite fixation enabled by the nation’s trauma wrought by a group of criminals who on that fateful day murdered several thousand American citizens. And so instead of capturing or killing Bin Laden and his co-conspirators to show to all that Americans may be gullible and sloppy at times, but that if you try to hurt them you will die, Washington launched on a breathtaking “transformative project” that cost trillions, exhausted the nation’s will, and in strategic terms achieved precious little.   The Kantian dream of “democratic peace,” whereby if all nations were democracies, the problem of war would be eliminated, in Washington’s rendition – Democrat and Republican – became a self-induced defeat. We have yet to fully appreciate how much damage GWOT and the attendant theories have done to American credibility, its good name, and the erstwhile belief that this country was being led by competent people who understood the harsh realities of state power and its limits in global politics.
The United States needs to rebuild its reputation as competent great power and its national credibility in a way that demonstrates to the American citizenry and to the world that we are still capable of thinking in pragmatic terms, and that the ideological normative flourishes of the GWOT and globalization eras that sapped the nation’s strength are a thing of the past.  Today Washington urgently needs to revisit the fundamentals of what constitutes a viable national strategy, one that can clearly articulate the irreducible national interests and objectives to be achieved, identifies the requisite resources to achieve them, and most importantly provides a trajectory going forward that will ensure the sustained support of Congress and the American people.  Most of all, our foreign policy establishment must demonstrate that it still has the competence to implement such a strategy, including real expertise when it comes to understanding different theaters, cultures, and polities.

If it cannot, we need to bring fresh blood into the policymaking and implementation process to ensure we never again fall prey to our ideological wishful thinking about how the world should be.  We must face head-on the realities of power and economics as they have always been and will remain going forward: a strong industrial base as the foundation of our defense industry and our military, and an economic policy that preserves and expands the opportunity and prosperity of the American nation. Then can we speak about rebuilding American credibility worldwide, restoring deterrence, and ensuring that the United States is not pulled unprepared into a wider war against our determined adversaries. Effective deterrence rests on capabilities and, most of all, on the genuine competence and will to deploy those capabilities in a way that communicates unequivocally that the nation will not go looking for the proverbial monsters to slay, but that it nonetheless remains resilient and determined to defeat decisively anyone intent on threating its security.  The clock is ticking, and to get there we need to relearn the fundamentals of great power politics that we seem to have forgotten since the end of the Cold War.

Musings and rants(yep, here we go again...)

 Well the Elections will be coming up soon and the first thing I and many of my friends are doing is...

Yep, as they say in Minnesota "You betcha".    As the election is coming up, I recall a choice 4 years ago and 75 million of us choose Trump, but "somehow the donks "Pulled 81 million votes out of the hat for that dottering vegetable"  I had posted a meme for the 2020 election...

  Well everyone has seen the results of 4 years of the "Xiden Administration" and Kamala is running to basically become Obungler 4.0

    Now we have again upon the cusp of most likely the last free election in our lifetime the 2024 election.

    There will be hard choices to be made and I hope people choose wisely.  I have told the younger voters that "if y'all buy the snake oil that Kamala is peddling, y'all are gonna pay the freight for choosing poorly, I am toward the back 40 of my life, y;all have your lives ahead of you, so choose wisely."

     There is a huge belief that if Kamala gets in, that the way that the democrats are "Legalizing illegals at warp speed to get them citizenship to allow voting in 2026 and later"  This meme was from the Obungler years, but since I consider Kamala( Obungler 4.0), it has merit.  Remember for the past several months, they have had to revise job numbers downward because the labor dept got caught "fudging numbers" and most of the jobs that did get created, the illegals got.  There is a huge fear of the "great replacement" where we as native Americans are replaced by 3rd world outsiders because they are used to doing what they are told and will toe the party line which the donks and deep statist will love.  

   Meanwhile Former GOP VEEP from the 2nd Bush administration endorsed Kamala, and the donks fell all over themselves praising Cheney for "Being Brave".  The rest of Americans consider him "dishonorable " for endorsing her especially after the treatment he got from the democrats since 2004 because he was seen as "the Warmonger" "Darth Cheney", and so forth.  

    Meanwhile The President of the Ukraine, Zelensky flew into Pennsylvania in a U.S. Airforce plane and do some politicking for the democrats 2024 tickets in a battleground state and a lot of people are crying "Its a political stunt" and the House GOP wants to investigates because it broke several laws including campaign laws.

The Israeli scored a major coup and nailed the entire leadership and middle management of Hamas and Hezbollah when their pagers literally blew up...

   Meanwhile word on the street the main mullah from both Iran and Hezbollah and Hamas are hiding in bunkers due to the success of the pager program.   and in that vein, word on the street is that the USSS you know these guys...

The guys that keep managing to bungle the protection around President Trump, word on the street is that there is a mole feeding intelligence to various kill teams and the 2nd attempt was an attempt to exploit a hole in the security net at Trumps Golf Course..A lot of people "Believe that there will be at least another assassination attempt" before November.  My honest concern is that 35% of Americans put their hopes and dreams of saving America into this man and what do you think their emotions will be if he gets capped and then the explosions of glee from the media and hollywood and the politicians and academia go "darn" and smirk and cheer and celebrate, what do you think their reaction will be?   It ain't gonna be pleasant.     And speaking of dodging..

While President Trump is dodging bullets, and assassination attempts, Kamala avoids the press unless she can find a very friendly venue that can "feed her campaign" the answers in advance so she can study up. so far it has been a mixed bag, and the pictures from the ABC debate shows what appears to be an earpiece in her ear.  Despite all that, she did *meh*, and now she is pushing for another debate on CNN again...and President Trump has already had 2 debates, and as far as he is concerned he is done, he has offered "Fox News" and it is more impartial and Kamala flat out refused because she won't get any "assistance" from that network

    Meanwhile I think the DOJ wants President Trump to Use a pager as part of his security net....you know the same DOJ that has been weaponized  to go after the "enemies of the State"

   You know...Veterans, Native Born Americans, and Legal Americans that don't like the agenda of the "elitist", whereas illegals, terrorist, and other neardowells get a pass...yeah...them. because the end state is to tear up the fabric of the country to such a state that the people will surrender their sovereignty to the state for the state to "save them" from the problems that were caused by the state to begin with.    Funny that...

   Meanwhile the Democrats are pushing the Project 2025 is President Trump's baby despite President Trump has no involvement in it, and has disavowed it, and has no interest in it.

   Funny That....

    

   And Hillary has crawled out of whatever sewer she has been residing in, I guess she is trying to make herself relevant after getting passed over on the VEEP nod from Kamala and she has been commenting about the extreme danger of President Trump being a "Danger and a Threat to Democracy" There has been talk about putting Trump supporters in camps before, especially during the covid crisis especially for the "Unvaxxed" 

     Meanwhile

All the drama has been stirred up by the DNCMedia and has scared the crap out of people, stirred up the fear and animosity of various groups of people because the donks thrive on chaos and pitting group against group.

      

       Remember the election is coming up soon, vote early in case something happens and you can't make election day voting, and stay away from large groups of people, that is where the stupidity will happen.

The 4 boxes of our Political System.

 

 I have commented repeatedly that the people that want to gut our 2nd amendment rights are perfectly happy to let the government have guns and these people whom are statist and believe that the government is all knowing and all doing and is this benevolent master, they have this parent child relationship with the government.  I and many like me view government as a necessary evil and our founders put checks and balances in the system including the 2nd amendment to prevent the government from "getting to big for their britches" to use a southernism. 

 The elitist are pushing the latest shooting to try to disarm the American people, especially the middle class, the bulwark against the elitist that would try to rule be imperial fiat.  In a lot of countries, there are the very rich and the poor, there are no middle ground.  in those countries, the rule of law is the same, there is one rule for the rich and one rule for the "great unwashed".  The middle class is a check on the unfettered desires of the 1%ers that do desire to rule because they are "our betters".    I first heard of the 4 post of our political system from a now retired talk show host by the name of Neal Boortz.  After the recent shootings, this is a reminder of what can happen if tyranny disguised as the "caring liberals" makes an appearance.

The 4 boxes of the American Political System.

  I had posted this back when I first started blogging.  I will repost since it is pertinent to today's discussions on government and overreach.   The 4 boxes of the American political system work like this:

      1.    The Soapbox :  I can stand on a soapbox and criticize the power structure and the politicians and not get thrown in jail and sent to a gulag or get asked "Where do you want your remains sent to?"

     2.  The Ballot Box:  I can vote for whomever I want without fear of being thrown into prison for supporting the "Wrong candidate" or being wrapped in a tire and set on fire.

     3.  The jury box:  I can feel confident that the rule of law will apply equally to everybody without regard to station in life. and due process isn't being asked "which ear do you want the bullet?

     4. Cartridge box:  You open the 4th one when the others are threatened and get the first 3 back.

I shamelessly clipped this argument off farcebook after after getting into it with a hippie after the 2nd assassination attempt on President Trump.  Hippies I swear, 

Liberal idiot stridently insists that the AR-15 round is uniquely powerful and terrible. I explain that muzzle energy is the commonly accepted metric for determining how powerful a round is. And that the AR-15’s .223 round has 60% less muzzle energy than the .30-06 and 30-40% less than other common deer hunting rounds.
Liberal idiot then insists that the .223 round is much deadlier because it’s much faster. I explain that the muzzle energy formula takes velocity into account and that the .223 has about the same velocity as most deer hunting rounds and is only about 10% faster than the .30-06.

Liberal idiot then insists that the .223 round is especially deadly because it’s a lighter round (!). Speechless, I start to explain that muzzle energy directly correlates to mass, so a round that’s half as heavy will have half the muzzle energy, assuming the same velocity.
Then I stop, bid him adieu and delete his messages. And hope my IQ recovers by Monday.
Folks, THIS is the degree of stupidity we’re dealing with. They literally know NOTHING about guns and aggressively refuse to learn even the most basic facts. We can’t reason with people who are intentionally and insistently uninformed. And any Republican Quisling who makes nice with these fanatics should be kicked out of the party.