Happy Thanksgiving 2025!

We all have something to be thankful for.  If nothing else, that we made it to this new milestone.

Look around.  There is beauty in the world.  Enjoy it.

Don't over-complicate things.  All the best things in life are simple.

Mark 12

28 And one of the scribes came, and having heard them reasoning together, and perceiving that he had answered them well, asked him, Which is the first commandment of all?

29 And Jesus answered him, The first of all the commandments is, Hear, O Israel; The Lord our God is one Lord:

30 And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment.

31 And the second is like, namely this, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these.

32 And the scribe said unto him, Well, Master, thou hast said the truth: for there is one God; and there is none other but he:

33 And to love him with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all the soul, and with all the strength, and to love his neighbour as himself, is more than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.

34 And when Jesus saw that he answered discreetly, he said unto him, Thou art not far from the kingdom of God. And no man after that durst ask him any question.

Forwarding the signal

I ran across this at a link to the Powerline blog.  I'm copying it wholesale to spread the word.

Service memories

 The SecArmy made a great statement about mentally and emotionally supporting the troops this Christmas season. That’s terrific, well needed, and much applauded.

It’s a good start.

My son still sees a VA counselor regularly after “peace time” service at Fort Hood. The things they did to the troops during Covid bring nightmares. (The shots they got killed 2% almost immediately, and another 2-3% never came back from the hospital.) The lethal degree of institutional incompetence and apathy, open drug dealing by the officers and senior NCOs , and murder for hire (mostly by CID, invariably ruled as “suicides” despite being zip tied and shot in the back of the head) on the base didn’t help at all. Nor did finding the bodies of several victims, including a roommate. He’s lost too many friends to drugs, violence, suicide, and institutional callous disregard. In his experience, our own government is the greatest threat.

All I had in my years of service was cleaning up after suicides (please be considerate and shoot yourself outside, or at least over tile), digging up mass graves (the one with the cow on top was memorable), evaluating scenes after the fact, hunkering down through months of daily mortar and rocket attacks, and the occasional “sniper” (most attackers don’t know what the sights are for). We were generally safer while on our near-daily missions outside the base, even with the roadside bombs.

I finally broke when the local command refused to go to the aid of a convoy under attack right outside our base, and locked down the gates so we couldn’t go out to help, either. They listened to fellow American Soldiers dying and calling for help on the radio, and thought it was great entertainment. That was just before I was betrayed by my own company commander. (To say nothing of our incredibly cowardly battalion commander.) With one notable exception, every officer I interacted with in Iraq was arrogantly and blitheringly incompetent.

I stopped making new friends decades ago. Every time I tried to make a new friend, they were killed within a week. (By now we’d come to look at all replacements as dead men who temporarily had the use of the arms and legs. The came and went so fast and so regularly that sometimes we didn’t even learn their names. Truth is, after a while, we sort of avoided gettin’ to know them. - Private Zab, The Big Red One)

I don’t have a phobia about being outside, I have a minor phobia against going outside. Crowds attract explosions. I’m not fine, but I am within tolerance. (Except for this whole medical retirement thing, caused by one too many high fevers plus experimental medications that turned out to have permanent and debilitating side effects.)

Who, us, bitter, angry, and a touch paranoid? You bet your ass we are.

Weather memories

“Climate is what you expect. Weather is what you get.”

When we lived in the People’s Democratic Republic of Maryland, our home was in the first valley in the mountains, on the slopes of the Potomac just downstream from the Shenandoah. This area was gorgeous, but had an interesting climactic novelty: it existed at the intersection of three separate weather zones/patterns. So we just counted on getting the worst of everything.

Riding the train along the banks of the flooded Potomac every spring was sort of neat. The day with the massive hail and microburst downdrafts (essentially a hole-punch tornado) was interesting. The two week downpour while a hurricane parked just off the coast was memorable. Snowmageddon was deeply unpleasant. (Where do you put all the snow you have to shovel when there’s seven fricking feet everywhere?)

But at least the temperature never changed 50 degrees in an hour, it never dropped below zero, and you never had to worry about adding humidity.

A life without hope

Our young men exist in a world without hope. They don’t have children. They don’t have wives. The young women their age (the ones that haven’t been brainwashed into being gay or trans) are all crazy and “strong independent woman don’t need no man.” They can’t find jobs that pay a living wage in an era when rent for a small apartment starts at $2500 per month. (That requires a wage of more than $45 per hour!) They have been taught, every day for at least 13 years, that they are inherently defective and evil; that the world would be a better place if they all just died.

They don’t believe in anything. They’ve been told they have no culture. They have been carefully taught that Christianity is uniquely evil. They have been subject to over a decade of steady brainwashing. Every level of government, every mode of entertainment, oppresses good and elevates evil.

They trust nothing and nobody. They have been lied to about everything since they could walk. As far as they can tell, everything they’ve ever been told by every authority figure is a lie. They see through the transparent, corrosive lies they have been forced to repeat ad nauseam.

The schools and universities are full-blown Leftist indoctrination camps that can’t manage to teach basic arithmetic and reading skills. The factory jobs were sent overseas. The technology jobs were insourced to hostile foreigners who openly brag about invading our nation. The office jobs are gate-kept by the blue-haired harpies that infest HR departments. The entry level jobs (the few not given to illegal alien invaders) are filled with retirees trying to survive.

They have nothing to lose. Burning it all down would, to them, be an improvement. At least that way, they have a chance at a future. In their current world, they have none.