Husband, Father, Christian, Super-Nerd
The Midwest, USA
Joined July 2024
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Finished the ramp and railing yesterday. Here is was when there was still light in the day and I still had sone work to do, my other pictures are too dark to look like any fun. 😁
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Also making a cameo is my $350 Lie-Neilsen #5 jack plane, who was probably very upset to be used on rough carpentry and pressure-treated wood instead of cherry and oak. 😆
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The Lisp Machine retweeted
On this year's Marine Corps Birthday, I'd like to write an elegy for the last outpost of female-segregated military training. The now-shuttered 4th Battallion.
I earned the right to call myself a Marine at Parris Island, Papa Company, 4th Recruit Training Battalion, Platoon 4034, from August to October of 1999. Every year on November 10th, I think about what that place made me, and this year I find myself thinking less about the birthday and more about the fact that 4th Battalion no longer exists.
For 74 years, every enlisted woman who became a Marine did it through the female training battalion at Parris Island. Over the decades the unit changed names, but the mission never changed. On November 1, 1986, it became 4th Recruit Training Battalion, and that’s the name it carried until the day it was deactivated in June of 2023.
Somehow I missed that news. I didn't realize it until I saw footage circulating here on X of a female SDI welcoming a new platoon... with a male DI standing behind her. What fuckery is this, I asked.
In 2020, Congress mandated gender-integrated training in the National Defense Authorization Act, and the Corps complied. Male recruits started training in 4th Battalion as early as 2019. By 2022, all recruit training at Parris Island was gender-integrated at the company level, and the battalion that had produced every female Marine was declared “unnecessary.”
On June 15, 2023, they folded the colors in a ceremony packed with women Marines and veterans who traveled from all over the country to say goodbye to something they knew couldn’t be replaced.
And though I found out late, I found myself so desperately sad.
There is no other environment in American life that is simultaneously all-female, physically punishing, aggressively perfectionist, and organized around strict formal hierarchy. I’ve looked. I’ve been out of the Corps for 25 years now and I have never once found another institution that combines those things. That combination is what made 4th Battalion work, because it produced women who could compete with anyone while understanding (and never once apologizing for) the fact that we are physiologically, psychologically different from men.
Women react to extreme physical stress differently than men do, and anyone who’s been on a training hike with both sexes knows it. I cried from exhaustion on a ten-mile hump, and I was far from the only one who did. Why do we do that? I genuinely have no idea. But we do, and men generally don’t, and in a co-ed training environment that moment of tears confirms every assumption the men around you already hold. It follows you. It becomes the thing they remember about you.
In 4th Battalion, nobody laughed. My drill instructors and my platoon mates didn’t coddle me or tell me it was okay to stop. They kept my eye on the task: go ahead and cry, but you’re finishing this hike on your feet, not in the duty vehicle. That’s what sex-segregated training actually looked like. The women running that battalion held every recruit to the same standards as any other battalion on the island, and they understood that the path to making a female Marine wasn’t identical to the path for making a male one, even though the destination was exactly the same.
The Marine Corps’ own leadership said this for years. They said segregated initial training gave women the chance to build confidence with female drill instructors as role models, that it minimized distractions and harassment, and that it better prepared women to compete once training later integrated. They were right. And then they gave it up because feminists in Congress who never served (and would never allow their daughters to serve) said so.
Women make up roughly 9% of the Marine Corps, a number that has barely moved in decades. Integration has not changed that. Shutting down the one institution purpose-built to turn women into successful Marines did not, as it turns out, produce more female Marines.
I joined specifically The Marine Corps specifically because training was segregated. Unlike the Air Force, which both of my parents had served in. I wanted to learn to be a Marine without men screaming at me or watching me fail at something I’d never done before. I wanted to get physically and mentally hard in an environment that understood my body and my psychology without requiring me to pretend they were something they aren’t. 4th Battalion gave me exactly that, as well as every other woman walked those catwalks for 74 years. Now it’s gone, making it just that much harder for women to serve their country AS WOMEN, not smaller, less capable men.
The Marine Corps is now and always has been very much its own thing, and I'm proud to have been part of it. Proud to have served with the men and women I met along the way. And yeah, proud to be gifted a box of crayons from my Navy and Air Force friends. As far as I'm concerned, there's no higher honor.
Happy birthday, Marines.
The Lisp Machine retweeted
Nah man. I’m not gonna let this go unchecked. As a GWOT veteran I can’t.
I listened to Massie drone through his articles of impeachment against Pete Hegseth and I recognized the sickness immediately.
We fought under this ridiculous worldview during GWOT, and it cost us dearly.
Massie is merely an acolyte of the bloodless bureaucratic religion that puts the lawyer in the center of the kill chain, treats every American use of force like a moral emergency, and somehow always finds more sympathy for the enemy being hunted than for the American sent to hunt him.
His whole speech I began wondering who he actually was speaking for, and that’s not good.
GWOT vets know EXACTLY where that road leads. Another approval. Another review. Another JAG opinion. Another commander afraid to make a decision because one bad headline will destroy his career faster than losing the fight ever could.
We were lectured for years about “courageous restraint.” We were told that killing one enemy might create ten more. We were taught to fear our own lethality while the enemy studied our hesitation.
And then we spent twenty years bleeding into the fucking sand.
So spare me the sermon about how dangerous it is to remove lawyers who think their job is to become a veto point over command. Spare me the sudden reverence for process from people who watched Afghanistan collapse, watched thirteen Americans die at Abbey Gate, watched the Taliban retake Kabul, and somehow found no constitutional apocalypse worthy of impeachment then.
Now the outrage is that the machine is actually being used. That commanders are expected to command. And that enemies are being treated like…. actual enemies for once.
That civilian leadership is telling the bureaucracy to get the hell out of the way of lawful military action.
From where I sit, the betrayal isn’t that Washington finally found some aggression for a chang. The realest betrayal is that men like Massie still think the lesson of the GWOT was that we needed more hesitation.
No. WE NEEDED MORE VICTORY.
And I’m done pretending those are the same thing. We’re all done with it. Massie is dead wrong here, he knows it, you know it, and I know it.
Sincerely,
-A seriously disgruntled GWOT vet who knows Hegseth is the cure to what ails our military here.
Breaking News: Congressman Thomas Massie is reading Articles of Impeachment against @SecWar Pete Hegseth on the House floor now.
Watch here: youtube.com/live/3EmwC0QQ8f8…
The wise warrior ensures he is fully fuelled for the battles ahead.
White potion of power, grant me strength!
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The Lisp Machine retweeted
OK let’s imagine that! $500M would fund Medicare for exactly 4 hours. Hospital closed by lunch.
Medicare costs us $1.2T a year. Thats $2.7B per day. You people literally have no clue how anything works. You elect people who are financially illiterate, and everything gets worse.
The Lisp Machine retweeted
Every GOP strategist, consultant, and candidate should be forced to participate in a role-playing exercise this morning.
Your name is Bob. You’re a 49-year-old blue-collar worker in Ohio. You’ve always struggled to make ends meet. The good jobs were all shipped to China and the few remaining pay a pittance wage, undercut by endless illegal labor.
You’re a 3x Trump voter because you believed he would finally make America great again.
You put your son through Ohio State. He graduated cum laude in computer science. You couldn’t have been prouder. After months searching, he landed an entry-level job at Microsoft. Beneath his qualifications, but a good start for a smart kid.
Then he got laid off. That same month, Microsoft applied for 150,000 more H-1B visas because it can’t find qualified Americans.
Your son has spent six months back in his childhood bedroom, sending hundreds of applications without landing an interview.
On TV, Trump boasts about the greatest economy in history and how many women and minorities are finding jobs.
You decide a father-son steak night might cheer him up.
Gas is $4.50 a gallon. Filling your truck costs over $100. At Kroger, ribeyes are $30/lb. You settle for hamburger, even though 70/30 ground beef still costs $10+.
At checkout, a fat black woman is screaming at the cashier because her EBT will only cover most of the filet mignon and lobster in her cart.
You think to yourself how the Iran war has made everything expensive, but at least we’re stopping their nuclear bomb. You weren’t even sure where Iran was before you googled it after we first bombed them in March.
After dinner, you take your son to the county fair. Half the people aren’t speaking English. Virtually none of the crowd looks like you. You’re forced to leave early after a “teen takeover” turns violent. A foreign born judge pledges none of them will go to jail.
Back home, you turn on the TV. Vivek Ramaswamy is lecturing the crowd about American mediocrity and why Ohio needs more foreign talent.
Your son grows upset. You change the channel.
Now a Republican surrogate, the daughter of a governor or wife of an elderly billionaire, explains that young White men are the REAL welfare queens. They’d rather play videogames in their parents’ basements than work.
Your son says nothing. He just goes back to his childhood bedroom. You turn off the TV.
Then your neighbor starts blasting reggaeton and cracking open Modelos. He brought his cousin’s family from Mexico to help with all the minority-business contracts his construction firm keeps winning. Tonight they’re celebrating his nephew’s birth, the family’s first birthright American citizen.
You sit alone in your living room.
You worked hard, paid taxes, obeyed the law, and raised your son to do everything right. You voted Republican again and again because you believed somebody in Washington would finally fight for you.
Instead, your wages are stagnant. Groceries are unaffordable. Your community is unrecognizable. Your country is fighting another foreign war.
And upstairs, the son you sacrificed everything for is lying awake in the bedroom he slept in at twelve, wondering what the heck he’s even supposed to do with his life now.
Every time you turn on the TV, the Republicans you elected are either congratulating themselves or explaining why you and your son are the problem.
For ten years, they told you America’s future depended on your vote. Now you aren’t even sure America has a future worth defending.
The Republican Party needs to answer one simple question this morning:
You’ve spent a decade demanding Bob’s loyalty. You’ve given him stagnant wages, unaffordable groceries, another foreign war, and a son who did everything right but can’t find work.
And when they complain, you call them lazy, entitled, and racist.
What possible reason have you given Bob and his son to vote Republican? Do you honestly think you deserve their vote?
The Lisp Machine retweeted
The level of ignorance most negro people have regarding just how universally we are despised in the East would be shocking if it wasn’t typical.
Even crazier from my perspective is that there are Black people all across the West who will look around—and with a straight face—say that the West made no meaningful contribution toward racial tolerance within their own nations while cruelty and hatred to this degree is perpetrated in the East against Africans and the diaspora to this day.
I’d like to point out that the Chinese look at the West and the dynamics between Black and White people and can only laugh at the entire premise. “Look at what you get when you treat niggers like people,” make no mistake, is the normal interpretation of how they understand our multicultural societies. Strife, violence, resource redistribution via social programs, and unending contempt for past grievances.
On that note, I’m certain Arabs in Muslim nations are grateful to their ancestors for sparing them the generational strife that would have undoubtedly plagued them to this day by having the foresight to castrate almost every male slave as a matter of policy over the course of 1300 years.
To put that another way: The cruelty and barbarism perpetrated by Muslims against enslaved Africans was so thorough that by the time Christianity had done the work of reforming the barbarism out of its own nations and those nations finally put a stop to slavery globally, the Middle East had barely any African descendants within their region.
No diaspora, no need for segregation, no reason to change minds and hearts, no contention between abolishing slavery and gradual reform. No Civil War. No need for activism (no one to do it). No need or desire to see the other as human. The only reason Muslims stopped slave trading (openly) is because the West went to great lengths to make the occupation of slaver a very hazardous one.
None of the legwork—treasure or blood—spent in the name of removing the institution of slavery as an accepted and expected form of the human condition came from outside the West.
In conclusion. It is a very realistic view to assume that just about everything outside the West would likely revert to factory settings the moment the West turns its guns away from the world (or worse, points them inward).
The Lisp Machine retweeted
A rant.
The more I see of Abolitionists Rising’s activism and movement, the more blindingly apparent is has become that the proponents of abortion are a hodgepodge of deficiencies across multiple dimensions of the debate with unimaginably vast gaps in knowledge and comprehension the origins of which could only conceivably be explained by deliberately deceptive summation of the issue and why it is contentious.
In nearly every domain pertinent to the conversation be it definitional, terminological, philosophical, legal, and (especially) theological; they have almost no grasp of what is being claimed and why, and constantly muddle the conversation with categorical errors reliably.
Through their work (and projects like it) we are being shown in real time that the primary unifying factor between them (REGARDLESS OF AGE OR EDUCATION) generally is that they hold unexamined beliefs propped up by what I can only recognize as ideological conformity and an aggressively dogmatic zealotry in opposition to dissenting voices.
A recurring theme in just about all of the content I’ve seen involving this “debate” is that it’s a conversation between a rational Christian activist who is willing to change minds with calm debate and conversation (as opposed to the leftist variety who primarily “communicates” through sheer loud and repetitive obnoxiousness; by that I mean chanting, screeching, blocking traffic both pedestrian and vehicular, and mindless sloganeering where the only “conversation” being had are call-and-response style chanting) and a mix of people trying to discuss the topic or morons acting like either children or would be bullies attempting to obstruct it (Blocking cameras, blasting music, calling the police, screeching if not just outright shouting vitriol).
If they do attempt to speak, the conversation is almost impossible to be had when your opposition espouses beliefs devoid of reason, as in logical, articulable and rationally grounded positions.
When you say “Abortion is murder.” And the response is “Do you support the death penalty? If so then I find you in a contradiction.” There’s a problem, and it’s with the person responding.
Common sense knowledge for most conservatives capable of engaging in the conversation is having a clear understanding of fundamental principles underlying the practical application of morality to law.
Most can tell you what homicide means. Then articulate the different categories underneath it, the distinctions between them, why the distinctions exist, the moral implications of those distinctions, the merits for why the categories exist at all and how that manifested contextually throughout history.
When the liberal (leftwinger capable of at the very least asking a leading question instead of immediately swearing and chimping out) response with “male masturbation is murder then? (For the 100,000th time since this debate has been being had over the last 50 or so years) they out themselves as someone too stupid (ignorant) to even bother talking to.
It’s at around this point that rational people begin to doubt the validity of democracy on its face.
End.
In the basement working with my 14yo, she is painting minis while I work on cleaning up the shields to go on them after. She forces me to listen to K-pop.
Korean pop music, homies.
Truly the love of a father is infinite.
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The Lisp Machine retweeted
A bit of advice, gents: don't ever let this be you.
This quoted post is unavailable.
Mrs. Lisp's favorite movie of all time is Disney's Beauty and the Beast. That movie colored her taste in men forever after, I'm something of a large, hairy, grumpy beast of a man myself, it was what attracted her to me.
Her thought for the day was that all the women her age who are deep into the Romantasy, alpha wolf, BDSM smutty books today were probably also raised on that movie as little girls.
This is your insight for the day, direct from Mrs. Lisp.
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