So there I was compilation 2

 More stories.  Most of these actually happened to me.  Some of them I witnessed.  Some of them I was told by the participants.

• Being young, healthy men, we all wanted sex.  As did quite a few young women our age, who were quarantined in a distant land (one of the companies of the battalion, with their own wing of the building).  But nature... finds a way.

• One of our guys was caught screwing a girl in the chow hall dumpster one evening.  You had to be desperate to even think of that.  It's full of uneaten food.  Granted, it was winter, but still...  I hope the two weeks of extra Fire Drill was worth it.

• One of our guys was married, and had a wife smarter than average.  They had a pickup with a camper back.  Once we got to white phase, we had phone privileges every Sunday.  (This was before cell phones.  Yes, that was in my lifetime.)  The phones were on the ground floor, near the parking lot.  So every Sunday morning, he checked out to go "use the phone", and spent a happy 45 minutes with his wife in the back of their truck.  Lucky bastard.  😁

• Fire Drill.  For those not used to the military, somebody always has to be on duty.  The Army teaches young recruits this by imposing fire watch.  This used to be really important, back when we stayed in tents and used fires to heat with.  (Fires are now banned, as they draw attention and mortar fire.)  Anyways, two recruits in each platoon bay (you never do anything alone) stay up and... make sure the barracks don't float away or something.  You have shift for an hour or two (depending on your unit), and then wake up the next pair of guys to relieve you.  It's also the Fire Guards duty to be on guard, and to challenge anybody showing up in the middle of the night.  (People showing up in the middle of the day must obviously belong, right?)  Heaven help you if you don't challenge your Drill Sergeant when they try to sneak in.  And Heaven won't help you when you do, and they smoke you for not being sufficiently obsequious.

• We had a wide variety of people in my platoon.  (Yes, there were three other platoon in the company, and a total of five companies (plus headquarters) in the battalion.  So what?  They might as well have been on a different continent for all that we interacted with them most days.)  Black, White, Asian, Latino.  Our three troublemakers were white, black, and Puerto Rican.  We hated them all equally, while trying to help out all the other guys who were temporarily our brothers in adversity.

• There was one black guy who was mildly retarded.  A nice guy, but dumb as a post.  He was going to be a cook, if I remember correctly.  He got us smoked almost as much as the three troublemakers, but he never did it deliberately.  (Unlike those three assholes.)  We all eventually worked together to teach him how to do everything, from tying his boots (yes, really), to knowing which foot was his left and which hand was his right, to putting on his protective mask in 5 seconds or less.

• There were three Vietnamese guys.  They remembered escaping from South Vietnam with their parents.  One spoke not a word of English, but seemed to understand directions well enough most of the time.  He did his best, and never asked anybody for extra help.  One spoke broken English and wasn't overly bright, but he had a Bachelor degree in something or other and his daddy was a Viet general, so he was headed to Officer Candidate School right after Basic.  He wore glasses thicker than mine (and that's saying something as I was 20/800), and had buck teeth like the Japs in one of the old WWII cartoons.  The other guy spoke Californian like a native, but acted like a decent person.

• At the beginning of Basic, we all promised our drills that we would work together and not fight each other.  The point is to team up and fight everybody else, you see.  So we did nothing directly to the three assholes who went out of their way each day to make our lives more miserable than necessary.  (This was a valuable lesson that some people are evil, and some are just fuckups.)  We kept our promise, too.  We didn't beat the shit out of them with soap-in-a-sock during a blanket party (you use folded blankets to blind them, hold them down and quiet their screams) until the night after we graduated.  They fell down in the shower, you see.

• I mostly enjoyed Basic.  Marching was almost trivial and boring after three years of marching band in high school.  Basic Rifle Marksmanship was, well, boring.  (The Army makes almost everything boring.)  Except the part where I and another guy accidentally swapped rifles during sighting-in day, and I spent the next two weeks slowly and surreptitiously re-zeroing my rifle.  My drills thought I couldn't shoot at first, but then were amazed when I shot 38 out of 40 on the qualification range.  (I bought the video the unit produced of our time in Basic.  You can clearly hear me ask the previous guy in the foxhole at the shooting range if he had any spare rounds.  "If you ain't cheatin, you ain't tryin!")

• The rifle range was a 300 meter pop-up range.  They have humanish silhouettes that pop up at ranges of 50 (3 seconds, half silhouette), 100 (4 seconds, half silhouette), 150 (5 seconds), 200, 250 (6 seconds), and 300 (7 seconds) meters.  The silhouettes are olive drab. The firing range is either mud (red in South Carolina - the stains never come out) or grass (if you're lucky, mowed sometime in the previous two weeks), or overgrown bushes (that are a year or two past trimming.  You have to aim a bit low at the 50 and 100 meter head-and-shoulders targets, and aim for the shoulders at the 300 meter target.  I shot Expert every time I ever went to the range, with the sole exception of my first time using an M16A2 on a 25 meter paper target range.  They have these weird sights and a complicated zeroing system that was never explained to me.

• In Basic Training, my assigned rifle was an M16.  Not an A1.  I had the only one in the company, I think.  My rifle had a 5 digit serial number (the first digit was 1), and was made by Colt.  It didn't have a forward assist, but it did have the birdcage flash hider.  The important thing to me was that it didn't have the ledge under the dust cover, so I had a hell of a time getting my fingers under it to close it during "Inspection Arms" in drill and ceremony.
  
  (Picture from Wikipedia)
  
  

• We had a blast (literally!) on the Night Assault Course.  It's a simulation of goin over the top from the trenches, like in WWI.  It's done at night (duh), and features machine guns firing above you r heads and star shells exploding in the air an illuminating the "battlefield" as you low crawl across 100 meters or so of open ground to the objective on the other side.  There are sandbagged pits scattered about.  These contain artillery simulators, which are basically a quarter stick of dynamite that emits a shrieking, descending whistle just before they detonate.  I got pick up and thrown several feet when one went off near me.  Oh, and I got kicked in the face by the guy ahead of me, because I was a bit too close to him when we went over the top of the concrete trench wall.  My face was a bloody mess when I got to the other side of the field, and I scared the hell out of the other guys because I was grinning ear to ear.  It was great.

• When we finally go to the live fire assault course near the end, I got yelled out because I ran out of ammo just before I assaulted the final bunker.  They only gave us 60 rounds, and the team ahead of us was really going slow, so the targets just kept popping back up, so I just kept knocking them back down.  I even found a "misplaced" full magazine along the way, but I still ran out of rounds before the finish.  So when I assaulted the bunker, I just stuck the muzzle in and yelled "Bang!  Bang!  Bang!"  I was hilariously stupid.  At least I got the grenade simulator into the bunker on the first try.  (Against all odds, I was an Expert on the grenade range.  I can't throw for shit, but grenade technique is really weird, so it all evened out, I guess.)

• We didn't get to throw live grenades in Basic.  A couple days before our turn on the range, some other unit found out the hard way that we had a batch of zero second fuses.  People die in training.  It just happens.  We didn't get to use the rappelling tower, either, because of an ice storm.

So there I was compilation 1

 A friend wanted story snippets to make his upcoming novel feel more realistic.  He's welcome to use some, none, or all of these.  By the way, they're from my first enlistment, way back when Communists strode the earth with boots of nuclear steel.

So there I was...

• The low grade moron going through induction next to me was too dumb to be infantry (yes, that's a thing), and too weak (couldn't lift 40 pounds) to be anything useful.  They assigned him to be a dockworker, on the theory that he could get stronger without needing to be smart to move crates.

• During inprocessing, you basically wait around with very little to do.  So one of the idiots who would shortly become the bane of my platoon's existence decided it would be hilarious to poop in a paper bag, take it into the next bay (large, open barracks room for about 60), set it on fire, and run.

• There was another guy who went crazy during inprocessing.  I mean seriously nuts.  Screaming, crying, bouncing off the walls, tearing out his hair (this was even before the buzz cuts).  He couldn't handle the stress of, well... Waiting around with not much to do?

• We finally got assigned a task one beautiful winter's day!  Something to do!  We had to clear a bunch of old, decrepit, disgusting mattresses out of an unused bay.  This bay happened to be on the third floor, next to a passage to the next building over, which created a breezeway.  So I, the intelligent and mature one (at age 19), told them it would be easier to toss them out an open window (there was no glass in the passage) than to carry them down the stairs.  But I then said that we needed to post somebody as a guard on the sidewalk, to keep us from dropping a mold-streaked mattress onto some poor, unsuspecting, higher ranking (basically anybody) person's head.  Blank stares of incomprehension.  So I told them to wait for me to get down there, then toss down the mattresses once I said it was OK.  I hustled down the hall, down the stairs, then around to the breezeway, where of course the morons had already started tossing mattresses.  Luckily, nobody else was there.  The idiots had a great time trying to hit me with dirty mattresses.  The Lieutenant who ambled by a few minutes later was a little less enthused about the experience.

•  Basic training does weird things to people.  So many young people somehow aren't used to obeying arbitrary orders and working hard all day.  These people didn't grow up in my family.  To me, Basic was some sort of minor paradise.  Compared to life at home, I got less sleep, but I also got a lot more to eat, and the food was the best I'd ever had.  (Army chow halls are, in general, really not bad places to eat.)  I also got my own boots (two pairs!) and, for the first time in my life, I got to wear clothes that were new, not hand-me-downs!  Best of all, I got yelled at less, and the insults were hilarious!

• You're a waste of a good fuck. The better part of you ran down the crack of yo mama's ass!

• Your daddy would have been better off jacking off in the woods!

• If the Chaplain (military priest) asks, "Does you Drill Sergeant curse at you?" tell him the truth.  Look him straight in the eye, and say, "Fuck no, sir!"

• You have to pay for the buzz cut.  They take it (and several other things) out of your pay, automatically.  You aren't expected to leave a tip for it, though.

• After what felt like a year or two of inprocessing (two weeks), we finally shipped out to Basic Training.  They do this late at night, so you're tired and confused when you get there.  I remember the yellow footprints painted on the cement, and the drills yelling at everybody.  We were sorted out into platoons, given initial orders, and escorted up to our barracks.  Open, 60 man platoon bays, with little nooks for four man teams separated from each other by wall lockers.  The bunks were doubles, and being slightly taller, I got the top one.  Right under the air vent.  Which was blowing cold air.  In January.  These were the "starfish" barracks, and were new at the time.  Heat pumps may be energy efficient, but they still blow cool air at you all winter.

(Picture from icthomasson.com)

(Picture from Woolpert.com)

• We didn't have gun racks in the barracks back then.  Rifles were kept locked in the arms room.  And rounds were counted somewhat carefully.  And you weren't allowed to take your rifle into the porta-john with you, lest you shoot yourself in privacy.  Yes, the drills really did keep loaded rifles in the control towers at the range, and would shoot you if you turned around with a loaded rifle.

(Picture from pinterist.com)  (Note the line of death on the floor.  "Toes on line!")

• Basic is separated into three phases - red (drill & ceremony), white (basic rifle marksmanship), and blue (common skill training).  The color of your platoon's guidon (small, triangular flag) shows what phase you are in.  To us, the victims, it indicated a slight lessening in the hostility of the drill sergeants.  Oh, yeah, the guidon bearer is the tallest guy in the platoon.  Until he fucks up sufficiently to get fired, jsut like the recruit platoon sergeant and squad leaders.  We rotated through those fairly rapidly.  I was lucky/clever enough to never get volunteered into any of these positions.  My goal in Basic was to have a good time and be invisible.  The trick to that is to, like Forrest Gump, do whatever the drill sergeants tell you to do, when they tell you to do it, to the best of your ability.  I knew I achieved my goal when, on almost the last day of Basic, while inspecting our dress uniforms for graduation parade, my senior drill sergeant stopped in front of me, got a puzzled look, and asked me, "Who the fuck are you?"

• We had three drill sergeants - an old (38?) black Sergeant First Class, who was on his last rotation as a DI before retirement, a middle-aged (27?) white lady Staff Sergeant, and a young (22?) black Buck Sergeant.  (Buck Sergeant is slang for Sergeant (E5), to all the leftist morons looking for an excuse to unperson me.)  The Sergeant went away on TDY (temporary duty) for five weeks in the middle of basic, so we didn't see much of him.  (He came back from Master Fitness Trainer school with the most inventively unpleasant exercises, and a plethora of truly obscene Jody calls.)  The SFC spent most of his time in his office, doing paperwork or something.  He came out for mail call, special occasions, ass-chewings, and smoke sessions.  (Smoke session - physical exercise as punishment until the sweat steams off your bodies and pools on the floor under you.  Then you have to mop it up and clean the floor.)  That left our poor, miserable female SSG to handle us all day, every day, without breaks.  After the first week of that, she made some sort of deal with the other platoons of our company, and they handled us for PT and morning chow.  She didn't show up until 0800 (8:00 AM), four hours into our daily routine.  Oh, how she grew to hate us.

• Jody calls - anytime you march, you have to keep in step.  You do this by chanting (one, two three four...) or singing.  These little ditties are collectively "Jody calls".  Some of them are about Jody, the asshole back home who is driving your car and banging your girlfriend, Suzy Rottencrotch.

• Near the end of red phase, my bunkmate apparently decided that enough was enough, and went AWOL one night.  He was caught in the swamp, a quarter mile from the fence line.  He didn't have any rank to take, but the Article-15 (nonjudicial punishment, routinely done in lieu of a Court Martial) didn't leave much of his meager pay for the rest of Basic.

• Payday!  Oh, how awful it was.  We got paid cash back then, direct deposit being almost a thing.  Well, not cash, precisely.  We got paid in traveler's checks, because Basic Training is full of morons and assholes who will try to steal anything and everything.  There was a whole ceremony to this process, which we practiced, money being (of course) handled by officers.  We had to sign each check right there at the table, and then record all the check numbers and amounts to use against whatever asshole decided to try to steal some of them.

• Pay - Recruits back then really didn't get paid much, about $630 per month.  On the other hand, your total expenses for the month amounted to less than $20, so essentially all your pay was gravy (unless you were married, you poor, deluded fool).  Except that there was nothing to spend it on, not that you had time or the privilege to go shopping for anything other than soap, shampoo, and shaving gear.

• I had to be taught how to shave.  (My stepdad always used an electric razor, which I didn't have, and they don't work on me anyways.  The steel wool that grows out of my face destroys them in just a couple of weeks.)  I had no idea that a razor blade was only good for a few days.  I was still using the same disposable razor after being there and shaving every day for two months.  My face was a bloody mess every morning, and I had no idea why.  Being me, with a ridiculously heavy and fast-growing beard, my drills thought I wasn't shaving until they watched me the next morning.  That day, the Sergeant took pity on me, took me (alone!) to the shoppette while everybody else was doing something boring, helped me pick out a blade set and handle, and explained to me how to use them properly.  Wow, DIs are people!  Whoda thunkit!?

To be continued...

Is it still a conspiracy theory?

 Is it still a conspiracy theory when the conspirators wrote a book about it over 50 years ago?

Boosting the signal

You've probably seen this before, but it's worth reposting.  Note that the original was a series of tweets by Darryl Cooper.

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I think I've had discussions with enough Boomer-tier Trump supporters who believe the 2020 election was fraudulent to extract a general theory about their perspective. It is also the perspective of most of the people at the Capitol on 1/6, and probably even Trump himself. 

Most believe some or all of the theories involving midnight ballots, voting machines, etc, but what you find when you talk to them is that, while they'll defend those positions with info they got from Hannity or Breitbart or whatever, they're not particularly attached to them. 

Here are the facts - actual, confirmed facts - that shape their perspective: 1) The FBI/etc spied on the 2016 Trump campaign using evidence manufactured by the Clinton campaign. We now know that all involved knew it was fake from Day 1 (see: Brennan's July 2016 memo, etc). 

These are Tea Party people. The types who give their kids a pocket Constitution for their birthday and have Founding Fathers memes in their bios. The intel community spying on a presidential campaign using fake evidence (incl forged documents) is a big deal to them. 

Everyone involved lied about their involvement as long as they could. We only learned the DNC paid for the manufactured evidence because of a court order. Comey denied on TV knowing the DNC paid for it, when we have emails from a year earlier proving that he knew. 

This was true with everyone, from CIA Dir Brennan & Adam Schiff - who were on TV saying they'd seen clear evidence of collusion with Russia, while admitting under oath behind closed doors that they hadn't - all the way down the line. In the end we learned that it was ALL fake. 

At first, many Trump people were worried there must be some collusion, because every media & intel agency wouldn't make it up out of nothing. When it was clear that they had made it up, people expected a reckoning, and shed many illusions about their gov't when it didn't happen. 

We know as fact: a) The Steele dossier was the sole evidence used to justify spying on the Trump campaign, b) The FBI knew the Steele dossier was a DNC op, c) Steele's source told the FBI the info was unserious, d) they did not inform the court of any of this and kept spying. 

Trump supporters know the collusion case front and back. They went from worrying the collusion must be real, to suspecting it might be fake, to realizing it was a scam, then watched as every institution - agencies, the press, Congress, academia - gaslit them for another year. 

Worse, collusion was used to scare people away from working in the administration. They knew their entire lives would be investigated. Many quit because they were being bankrupted by legal fees. The DoJ, press, & gov't destroyed lives and actively subverted an elected admin. 

This is where people whose political identity was largely defined by a naive belief in what they learned in Civics class began to see the outline of a Regime that crossed all institutional boundaries. Because it had stepped out of the shadows to unite against an interloper. 

GOP propaganda still has many of them thinking in terms of partisan binaries, but A LOT of Trump supporters see that the Regime is not partisan. They all know that the same institutions would have taken opposite sides if it was a Tulsi Gabbard vs Jeb Bush election. 

It's hard to describe to people on the left (who are used to thinking of government as a conspiracy... Watergate, COINTELPRO, WMD, etc) how shocking & disillusioning this was for people who encourage their sons to enlist in the Army, and hate people who don't stand for the Anthem. 

They could have managed the shock if it only involved the government. But the behavior of the corporate press is really what radicalized them. They hate journalists more than they hate any politician or gov't official, because they feel most betrayed by them. 

The idea that the press is driven by ratings/sensationalism became untenable. If that were true, they'd be all over the Epstein story. The corporate press is the propaganda arm of the Regime they now see in outline. Nothing anyone says will ever make them unsee that, period. 

This is profoundly disorienting. Many of them don't know for certain whether ballots were faked in November 2020, but they know for absolute certain that the press, the FBI, etc would lie to them if there was. They have every reason to believe that, and it's probably true. 

They watched the press behave like animals for four years. Tens of millions of people will always see Kavanaugh as a gang rapist, based on nothing, because of CNN. And CNN seems proud of that. They led a lynch mob against a high school kid. They cheered on a summer of riots. 

They always claimed the media had liberal bias, fine, whatever. They still thought the press would admit truth if they were cornered. Now they don't. It's a different thing to watch them invent stories out of whole cloth in order to destroy regular lives and spark mass violence. 

Time Mag told us that during the 2020 riots, there were weekly conference calls involving, among others, leaders of the protests, the local officials who refused to stop them, and media people who framed them for political effect. In Ukraine we call that a color revolution. 

Throughout the summer, Democrat governors took advantage of COVID to change voting procedures. It wasn't just the mail-ins (they lowered signature matching standards, etc). After the collusion scam, the fake impeachment, Trump people expected shenanigans by now. 

Re: "fake impeachment", we now know that Trump's request for Ukraine to cooperate with the DOJ regarding Biden's financial activities in Ukraine was in support of an active investigation being pursued by the FBI and Ukraine AG at the time, and so a completely legitimate request. 

Then you get the Hunter laptop scandal. Big Tech ran a full-on censorship campaign against a major newspaper to protect a political candidate. Period. Everyone knows it, all of the Tech companies now admit it was a "mistake" - but, ya know, the election's over, so who cares? 

Goes without saying, but: If the NY Times had Don Jr's laptop, full of pics of him smoking crack and engaging in group sex, lots of lurid family drama, emails describing direct corruption and backed up by the CEO of the company they were using, the NYT wouldn't have been banned. 

Think back: Stories about Trump being pissed on by Russian prostitutes and blackmailed by Putin were promoted as fact, and the only evidence was a document paid for by his opposition and disavowed by its source. The NY Post was banned for reporting on true information. 

The reaction of Trump people to all this was not, "no fair!" That's how they felt about Romney's "binders of women" in 2012. This is different. Now they see, correctly, that every institution is captured by people who will use any means to exclude them from the political process. 

And yet they showed up in record numbers to vote. He got 13m more votes than in 2016, 10m more than Clinton got! As election night dragged on, they allowed themselves some hope. But when the four critical swing states (and only those states) went dark at midnight, they knew. 

Over the ensuing weeks, they got shuffled around by grifters and media scam artists selling them conspiracy theories. They latched onto one, then another increasingly absurd theory as they tried to put a concrete name on something very real. 

Media & Tech did everything to make things worse. Everything about the election was strange - the changes to procedure, unprecedented mail-in voting, the delays, etc. - but rather than admit that and make everything transparent, they banned discussion of it (even in Direct Messages!). 

Everyone knows that, just as Don Jr's laptop would've been the story of the century, if everything about the election dispute was the same, except the parties were reversed, suspicions about the outcome would've been Taken Very Seriously. See 2016 for proof. 

Even the courts' refusal of the case gets nowhere with them, because of how the opposition embraced mass political violence. They'll say,  with good reason: What judge will stick his neck out for Trump knowing he'll be destroyed in the media as a violent mob burns down his house? 

It's a fact, according to Time Magazine, that mass riots were planned in cities across the country if Trump won. Sure, they were "protests", but they were planned by the same people as during the summer, and everyone knows what it would have meant. Judges have families, too. 

Forget the ballot conspiracies. It's a fact that governors used COVID to unconstitutionally alter election procedures (the Constitution states that only legislatures can do so) to help Biden to make up for a massive enthusiasm gap by gaming the mail-in ballot system.

They knew it was unconstitutional, it's right there in plain English. But they knew the cases wouldn't see court until after the election. And what judge will toss millions of ballots because a governor broke the rules? The threat of mass riots wasn't implied, it was direct.

Let's do a final review:

a) The entrenched bureaucracy & security state subverted Trump from Day 1 

b) The press is part of the operation, 

c) Election rules were changed, 

d) Big Tech censors opposition,

e) Political violence is legitimized & encouraged,

f) Trump is banned from social media. 

They were led down some rabbit holes, but they are absolutely right that their government is monopolized by a Regime that believes they are beneath representation and will observe no limits to keep them from getting it. 

Trump fans should be happy he lost; it might've kept him alive. 

Capitol "Insurrection"

 A picture may be worth a thousand words, but logic is still foreign to our court system.