Military mulls recruiting plan to enlist college athletes
sportico.com
sportico.com
Military would be better off pushing for soda and other junk food to be made illegal for national security reasons
Coca-Cola is a national security threat. Ten times worse than any Muslim terrorist organization, worse than China or Russia, maybe similar to China actually, no Coca-Cola more, as America spends more on obesity than DEFENSE. Chemical innovation? Treason. Fluoridating the water? Makes Americans fat and retarded.
OK this sounds VERY incendiary but I legitimately believe it's true. Freedom of speech! Maybe I'm fucked in the head--apparenty I am, well for sure I got fucked in the head (lobotomized) from what I reconstructed but that's different than...is it different? Well I speak in good faith. Whatever is left of my brain after all that chemical innovation I uh metabolized, can't testify as to how I absorbed it because there was a lunar month of roofies...but that's beside the main thrust of my comment. I have some amount of brains and I can talk (very fortunately).
I actually don't want to get flagged for saying this, I'm saying it in good faith, I can explain all these statements, but I can only answer questions once they are asked, not before. I truly believe fluoridating water makes people who drink that "water"--actually brine--fat and retarded. It retarded me, in the original sense of the word "retarded" meaning slower, Attention Deficit Disorder which is what people originally meant by "retarded" is caused by fluoridation. I can not only testify to that but quantify that to about 7 figures precision, in Hertz, with a "tempometer".
Despite being super skinny skinny I know it makes me crave water from sources outside the tap, meaning Coca-Cola. Which isn't fluoridated. I budget for other water sources. I don't see it as a waste of money, some people say it's a waste, but I have no guilt, I simply can't drink brine alone why would I?
Actually looking to get water delivered, basically what the tap is meant to do, but manually getting jugs. Tons of other SMART people around here do it (downtown Santiago). I'd rather have sea-water on tap than the flúor brine I get. Like drinking it feels like chewing rocks. It's bad for cooking, it's bad for showering in...actually thinking of using the jugs for bath water, it's just poisonous on that level.
And most people, it makes fat. Crave salt, for one, to get the right halide (chlorine) balance instead of fluorine. Sugary drinks to maintain brain function to compensate for the electronegativity and therefore activation energy of fluorine occupying the chlorine-ion channels. Sometimes both fat and retarded. Fluoride atoms are the most powerful atom by far, nothing else compares in reactivity, they react with all but three chemicals, those being three pure noble gases. A select minority of noble gases don't react with fluorine.
And they put it in everybody's water. For their teeth! The single most unreactive part of the human body, it's supposed to react with that in two known ways and literally no way with no other part of the human body! Like do I look like I'm made of helium?
Know that I actually have gotten that insincere question "are you ok" enough times to prepare my "am I okay" game...just a little bit. It's just such a trope, what's the other one, "please get help", same answer to both, gatlin, you are the answer! You can make sure I'm OK doing something, flagging the human, getting an operator on the line, a human with the right tools, like a wrench and a blowtorch but not digital that amounts to nothing with plumbing, "please get help" gatlin so that "I am okay" do your thing, I'm letting you take the floor. You need my address I take it to do my plumbing?
Dude if you can get rid of the fluoride, you can be as condescending as you want, no limit! Ask me if I'm OK after every single post with no culpability, get rid of the F atom and I'll take it with grace! I'll know it was you if you do, I can taste it it's super easy to taste! I'll thank you when your work is done.
And it is in the room with me right now as a matter of fact! It is in the tap water that's in the faucet, which will refill with more F water when I open it!
Get rid of it! Oh gatlin, I plead thee truly[1], get rid of it! It's urgent! It's been urgent my whole life! Perform reverse osmosis on the water in the faucet cuz that's what it takes, and down the pipes, and you know what, work your way down the pipes performing the most degrading work, which you've volunteered to do by asking me if I'm OK, do all that degrading work, all the way up into the headwaters of the Andes. Don't complain now! At least you didn't volunteer downstream.
Oh you think a short little comment is good for winding me up? But look at all the things I got air time to say. You think you won and I lost, I think exactly the same, with the opposite ultimate conclusion, for the same reasons applying the same logic, but additionally...Christendom. The last shall be the first! Thinking that I am good and you are bad, maybe you're conditioned to think that matters nothing but are opposite wrong. Instead of being the only thing that doesn't matter, it is the only thing that does matter, the intent. You have ill intent. Don't ask if I'm "okay" with ill intent, better ask "are you fucked up? Can I make sure that you are?". More honest.
Now that I said that, are you still volunteering to solve problems for me, gatlin? Diving down those pipes like Mario Bros? That's what I need right now, now that you ask, I need a Mario or a Luigi. Or maybe a gatlin would be even better! Are you any good for me like you said?
[1] Obviously not truly, hah, you had to read the footnote?!
Pepsi once had the sixth most powerful military.
https://www.businessinsider.com/how-pepsi-briefly-became-the...
This proposal has the military committing to paying the tuition. The student commits to playing the sport AND to military service.
Seems like this primarily benefits the university (reduced cost for scholarships) not the student.
If scholarships were unlimited, schools with money could just scholarship their entire team.
There's also the possibility that the student wouldn't be obligated to play the sport in order to get the scholarship money. Most students want to play their sport anyways.
I mean I had a keen interest in football growing up in Chile, distaste for British sports, but beyond having a little real football football myself that was impossible for any other students of my school to acquire, there was literally nothing I could do to actually play this sport. Nobody played "fútbol americano" anywhere...OK thinking back, there were some tag football games in middle school, and we got together and played real football with real tackles just for the love of this sport in high school a little bit, secretly...so fun. Fucked up tackles, spinal.
Literally zero opportunities though. Just literally none. I heard much later there were two actual teams in the city, made of who knows whom.
Baseball there was some of that, it was an American school so they had enough players for two teams, it was really fun...just fun to play an American sport, patriotism is fun! Just fun to do American things like a normal American kid, how was I supposed to know baseball was a boring sport, I had a great time! Dreaming of returning to America, the land of my birth[1]. I just dreamed of playing, never of being on a league, just actually playing. There was a lot of basketball in Chile, that I will say. There there were some opportunities.
But that's not what military training is about really. So you have to fund more obscure sports. Like track, running a two-minute 8 [hundred meter race] that's perfect, hey a platoon of that...and the thing too is it just isn't as theatrical as football or basketball, it's not good television. I've competed in more 8's than I've watched. Grit isn't glamorous.
[1] Which I did, by beating the system at college admissions. So I was never going to be a truly good student, strictly because I was too defective for that, brutal and completely untreated learning disability. But what I could do was want it more, focus on what was essential, yeah being smart ADD notwithstanding, working like FUCK just white-knuckle it, focus on giving admissions committees what they truly wanted, and sacrifice every other metric as though it were gasoline.
To this day, the NFL is still part of the war propaganda. The entire nfl even wore combat fatigues during one week last season. It's amazing the amount of war propaganda we get in the NFL. Every superbowl, we get a fly-by from the air force - stealth bombers and such.
But yeah, the military marketing is egregious. If the Chiefs weren't in their heyday right now, I'd probably stop watching football altogether.
I don't recall specifics nor can I pull up any source, but I remember seeing in the past something about the US military sometimes pays organizations to do flyovers.
I happened to join the same Ranger Battalion Tillman was in after he was killed. The ground force commander at the time of Tillman's death (and perhaps whose decisions mostly attributed to Tillman's death), Major Hodne, later came back to 2nd Ranger Battalion as its commander when I was still active. He won no respect from any of us enlisted guys. Last I heard, he was a general in charge of general infantry training in Fort Benning. Fort Benning is the home of the infantry, where most basic and advanced infantry courses for the US Army are held. The irony is thick.
Not writing this to say you're necessarily wrong. The two major GWOT wars in Iraq/Afghanistan were bullshit, and Tillman along with thousands of others were killed for nothing worthwhile. There's just more nuance to the whole debacle that I think are worth pointing out. Or maybe I'm just insecure at how pointless all that shit was and I'm writing this to validate my/others' actions, hard to tell.
he was shot from within 10 yards in the back by American weapons, which for some reason the media never talks about. The official claim was that he was killed from so far away they couldn't recognize him as American
>The following day the Associated Press reported that a doctor who examined Tillman's body after his death wrote, "The medical evidence did not match up with the scenario as described",[19] also noting that the wound entrances appeared as though he had been shot with an M16 rifle from fewer than 10 yards (9.1 m) away
There definitely was no motivation to murder him, I'm convinced of it. Armed conflict inherently breeds a general cynicism, and lack of clear goals and guidance from leadership only exacerbates that. We all said out loud, "this is fucking bullshit," more than once when we would give full-throated efforts only to be frustrated by sideways shit like innocents or friends being maimed/killed, no clear mission or point to the killing and violence in general, a commander who seemed more eager to give a teary-eyed killed in action speech over a dead Ranger than to actually lay the hammer on insurgents, etc. All that to say that Tillman's misgivings about the war were especially normal. The real conspiracy was in the outright lying done about the whole thing, and in institutional leaderships' efforts to cover everything up.
Tillman was killed because of miscoordination/incompetence. The miscoordination at the macro level was from Hodne as I mentioned earlier, in his attempted orchestration of troop movement that introduced too much chaos. The incompetence came from a few variables of the people on the ground that I won't get too much into, except to say that it wasn't out of nefarious intent but instead from confusion and bad training. The SAW gunner who pumped rounds into Tillman had a reputation after he left of a bumbling, incompetent rock farmer. Note that I never met him personally, it was just his reputation around the company.
His death wasn't taboo internally. His named was invoked pretty regularly when it came to target selection and deciding if you had enough awareness of the assault forces' positions to pull the trigger into a room or general area; you never wanted to accidentally kill your buddy. A new Ranger would be liable to get smoked[1] until fluid leaked out of his ears because he "could kill another Ranger like Tillman, you fucking moron." Externally, we were ordered to divert all questions/comments about Tillman to the SOCOM Public Affairs Office.
[1]: "Getting smoked" in the Army (military?) is a euphemism for punishment through strenuous exercise/tasks, usually accompanied with humiliation and general hazing
Was either worth the cost in lives and money? I think the ultimate answer takes decades and the enemy gets their vote.
In foresight, not just in hindsight, both these wars were utterly pointless and morally abhorrent.
If western countries want to reduce Islamist extremism, we might want to start by examining our relationship with Saudi Arabia (who seem to be the ones funding and pushing a lot of it, and who we seem happy to trade with)
They were literally being nullified in realtime when they were made.
> The two major GWOT wars in Iraq/Afghanistan were bullshit
Iraq for sure; Afghanistan was more of a mixed bag, though it became total bullshit because of Iraq (through diversion of effort, alteration of the political context, and other factors stemming from the priority of Iraq.)
It was not for nothing. America is the first democracy, and hopes/aims to spread democracy in the world. But that's not an easy task. In hindsight, it's very easy to say Saddam did not have WMD's, but at the time, we knew that he had had them and used them, both against Iran, and later against his own people. Saddam was a truly awful guy. It's quite likely that is what happens with those who have absolute power for too long (see Putin). Removing Saddam was on balance a good thing for humanity.
Aside from that, Iraq and Afghanistan taught America some lessons. Lots of lessons. Blood was shed to learn them, and one can debate if the trade-off was worth it, but for sure it was not nothing.
One of these lessons, the way I see it, is that it's much easier to help a people, if they want to be helped. See Ukraine.
In any case, thank you for your service. It was definitely not for nothing.
What did we learn in Iraq that we hadn't already learned in Vietnam? What will Ukrainians learn that Georgians, Afghans, or Hungarians couldn't have told them?
> Jones reported that members of Tillman's unit burned his body armor and uniform in an apparent attempt to hide the fact that he was killed by friendly fire.[29] His notebook, in which, according to author Jon Krakauer, Tillman had recorded some of his thoughts on Afghanistan, was also burned
Naturally you wouldn't want to put professional leagues in the lurch because their billionaire owners can't scrape up the funds to run their own farm teams.
Isn't the cognitive and emotional-regulation degradation from playing football well documented at this point?
"House: I remember you, talking about the technical sales engineers, and also Gelbach saying, we're going to go out and we're going to find those B and C grade-engineering students who were active in athletics or they were in fraternities and they had a personality. We're not going to try to hire the A students. We're going to hire the guys who had all these extracurricular activities going on."
'Intel Crush Panel' Computer History Museum
also:
DO YOUR PART! Everyone is doing their Part, are you? The War Effort needs YOUR Effort! At Home, at Work, at School in your community.
Heinlein was on the point https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QmvEbphF8c
Maybe give the Twitch channel another shot.
If you want to incentivize military service then make it mandatory and many of the best candidates will enlist in exchange for some influence over their military occupation. If the worker shortage persists, and all indications are it will, this is a probable outcome.
To @downrightmike who thought the Pat Tillman tragedy was worthy of mention in such a disrespectful way, the guy's sacrifice is awe inspiring regardless & your spin on what happened is inaccurate.
Conscription would be political suicide. The better bet is on more automation to better leverage a thinner spread of recruits.
Sorry, not saying automation is the solution. If China bombs Guam, yes, we'll need conscription.
But conscription is far from "probable." I'm simply arguing that Congress pumping godawful quantities of money into automation is more likely than POTUS enacting a draft.
The political leadership doesn't want conscription because it makes the public care a lot more about decisions to use the military.
But more importantly, there is no actual shortage of potential recruits. There is a shortage of recruits who meet the current military standards. You can very easily lower your standards and get more recruits from the pool that is currently disqualified for medical issues, criminal record, and general stupidity (that is, more stupid than the military currently is).
The reason why this isn't currently done is that the military doesn't need the bodies that badly, certainly not badly enough to justify the increased expense and frustration of increased shitbaggery.
The recruiting budget is huge, and I'm sure that the military is happy to mull this over in hopes of getting more high-quality candidates. If it doesn't work, they'll try something else.