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Had something to say today and writing was not enough so I did a livestream
Youtube doesn’t have a function for me up download my livestream so I’m going to have to wait till Rumble’s import function moves it over for now but always remember.
You can redefine things all you want but reality doesn’t care, it will still trump you.
Spoiler alert: its because we’re solving the wrong problem.
You can’t walk around on a military base without being innundated with suicide prevention materials. Walk down any hallway and there’s a poster with the hotline number. Navigate to any DoD website and there is a 24/7 military suicide chat line linked at the bottom. Heck, even if you sit down to do your business in the bathroom, you’ll see a suicide prevention poster on the inside of the door.
Granted, the suicide rate in the military is rising. The military is composed mainly of 18-25 year old men, who traditionally have the highest rate of suicide. Combined with the stress of working in a job field where people actively try to kill you while you kill them, and you’d think that would spike the suicide rate. But for the longest time, despite the many years spent in Afghanistan and Iraq, military suicide was statistically lower than average.
Look at 2005-2008 here. The rate is far below what you would expect. You can look at the crude numbers here as well.
It’s obvious though that the rate was rising. If you look at combat deaths and the news, the United States had a nasty surge in combat deaths from 2009-2011. This was when we were trying to drawdown in Iraq and surging in Afghanistan. It would be easy to blame the added stress for the rise in suicide. But I’m not so sure. After the surge, the number of combat deaths plummeted, yet the military suicide rate continued to rise. The additional stresses of combat, once removed, don’t support the hypothesis that it caused the increase in suicide.
In order to have enough troops to surge, the military, particularly the Army, waived a lot of requirements, including physical standards and prior drug use. This means that instead of selecting from the best of the crop, you get a swath of people that look more like most Americans, which means you get the suicide rate of most Americans. Notice that the suicide rate plateaus and matches the average civilian rate.
This is further confirmed by looking at the most recent suicide rates. The rate slowly began rising again from 2018 until today, despite a continued decline in combat deaths. Now its rising again. What are we doing that might cause it to rise?
If you look at my previous posts here, I’ve been complaining about the drop in standards and loss in direction for the military for a while now. The Army finally admitted it will simply be short 10,000 troops, but that it “wanted to maintain high standards” instead of recruiting more soldiers. To that I call BS, because they already lowered standards a lot in order to get to where they are at now.
Worse still, we’re cutting back on training. The Army softened its boot camp, which caused retention to go up, but likely didn’t help build soldier’s confidence. Most of the services have cut back on specialized training (the Navy in particular), so its harder for service members to feel like an expert in their field. Combine that with a refocus on things like “extremism training,” and military members can’t be faulted for feeling a bit adrift.
So we’re lowering entrance standards, which we have proof raises our sucide rate, AND we’re shortening and softening our training, making less capable military members (who, by the way, KNOW that they aren’t as capable). That’s a bad combination, and its the real reason behind the continued rise in suicide. It’s not that we lack the funding for suicide prevention programs. It’s that we’re solving the wrong problem.
Until we solve the standards problem, we can’t begin to prevent military suicide.
This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.
And if you’re thinking about suicide, put it off for a day, watch this Jordan Peterson video, and then call a friend or a hotline. We’d rather have you around.
I don’t understand the confusion about a possible Liz Cheney run for the GOP nomination for President.
But on what planet does Cheney think she would seriously have a shot at the nomination in 2024? She could obviously try to run as an independent and wind up on the back page like almost everyone else who has tried it. But to run as a Republican, she would have to win primaries in a lot of states where Donald Trump remains very popular, including her home state. Not every Republican voter is a Trump fan, it’s true. And there are still many who probably wish he would stay on the sidelines and let the party move on without the constant circus atmosphere that Trump always generates. But that doesn’t mean that they want to see him being trashed by Cheney in prime time every night on CNN.
The mistake here is the thought that she actually thinks she could win the nomination or that getting elected would be her goal.
The reality is that money would flow to from the left to her campaign, because her every appearance would be trashing Donald Trump. She would be constantly on TV not as a former congresswoman but as a former GOP presidential candidate. Furthermore those campaign funds can be used to enrich herself and or others to allow her influence.
Cheney likely has decades of life ahead of her, and apparently wants to delay her comfortable retirement as a person wealth but no influence for as long as possible. Once she is of no further use to the left she will discarded as all useful idiots are for the left who will not forgive her for opposing abortion and of course she will not be welcome on the right either.
So a 2024 Stop Trump campaign will be the best shot to delay that decent into irrelevance at least till she hits 60
John Cleese being interviewed by the Babylon Bee was good, but I have to give the Keven Downey Jr the nod for the best bit about what the left has become:
I’ve been a comedian for 33 years. I’ve seen the transformation myself. There was a time when, if conservatives didn’t like a joke, they simply wouldn’t laugh. Worst-case scenario, they’d walk out. Today, if a comedian cracks a ha-ha that the non-binary, freakshow woke brigade doesn’t like, may God protect them and their career. They’ll have you working at a car wash and then burn down the car wash for hiring you.
The dirty little secret is that is that I suspect they have actually always been the Red Guards or at least the Red Guards wanna bees but never felt safe enough to be open about it, not even to potential allies in Hollywood back in the day.
Bogart, much like his Hollywood persona, was a mercurial fellow. You didn’t backstab Bogie. Already a loose fuse, he grew redder and redder as the facts on Hollywood’s communists rolled in, and then he detonated. “You [expletive, plural] sold me out!” he yelled at Danny Kaye.
Unbelievable as it may seem, Lauren Bacall later said that as she and Bogie and the others flew to Washington, they did not know that most of the unfriendlies called to testify were secretly members of the Communist Party. “We didn’t realize until much later,” she admitted, “that we were being used to some degree by the Unfriendly Ten.” She conceded that they had been foolishly naïve, headstrong, emotional, and that they had hastily strolled into something “we knew nothing about.
Most members of the Committee for the First Amendment felt that way. The group fell silent, withered, and died.
This has been the Hollywood left’s game for decades John Cleese’s remarks concerning this stuff should be required watching
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