northshorebamaman

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Well, truth be told, in a way I’m grateful WWI happened for a simple, and wholly selfish reason…

No WWI, no WWII

No WWII, my grandmother doesn’t meet my grandfather
(They met at a dance for soldiers about to ship off to the war)

No meeting of my grandparents, I never exist.

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I think we have discussed this exact point before, because my paternal grandparents met the same way. Change the war and they almost certainly never meet, which means I never exist.

No World War I gives us an altogether different world. World War I created the conditions for World War II. World War II created the Cold War order, which produced Vietnam, the Soviet-Afghan War and many of the forces that eventually converged in 9/11. That led directly to Afghanistan and Iraq and helped shape the political world we still get fricked by to this very day. And besides that, billions of individual marriages, migrations, births and deaths like the ones that produced you and me, our parents, children, and siblings.

For sheer downstream influence on human events, Gavrilo Princip is on an extremely short list alongside guys with names like Jesus. He fired two shots in an alley in Sarajevo and the shockwave is still expanding and reverberating more than a century later.

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We didn’t join WWII to save the Jews like a lot of people think.

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I have never in my life encountered this belief. :lol:

I live in a tourist destination packed with people and endless ways to waste money, so my vacation from it consisted of spending $500 on a cabin deep in the woods where I could sit by myself for a few days. It cost maybe $10 in gas to get there. I don’t count food as part of the vacation budget because I would have had to buy it at home anyway.

So maybe $520.

Kids are grown.

Wife done r-u-n-n-o-f-t.

frick yeah.

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The answer for me would have been bonuses

A certain amount of money would have gotten me to reenlist

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Sure, and cash bonuses are already available Army-wide. This battalion commander has no control over them because those incentives are established at the Department of the Army level. The four-day pass is not being offered instead of a bonus. It is simply a local commander throwing in an extra perk on top of whatever reenlistment incentives the soldier already qualifies for.

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The founding fathers didn't choose Democracy. The United States is not a Democracy!

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They didn't? Alexander Hamilton didn't explicitly call the proposed government “a representative democracy?” James Wilson never called it “purely democratical” in principle? James Madison didn't call it a “democratic form of government,” and Jefferson never wrote Americans were “constitutionally and conscientiously democratic?”

Democracy: a system of government in which political authority derives from the people and is exercised either directly or through elected representatives.

How is the United States not one? I assume you’re going with the usual “muh constitutional republic” routine, which is like insisting that you don’t own a Labrador, you own a dog. “Constitutional,” “republic,” and “democracy” are not antonyms. They describe different characteristics of the same government.

“Constitutional” means the government operates under a constitution that establishes its institutions, distributes their powers, limits what they may do, and protects certain rights from ordinary political majorities.

“Republic” means the country is a public political entity rather than the personal possession of a monarch. Public offices are filled under law rather than inherited through a royal bloodline.

“Democracy” describes where legitimate political authority originates: the people. Citizens choose the officials who govern them and can remove those officials through elections.

“Representative” explains how our democracy functions. We generally do not vote directly on every law or policy. We elect representatives to make those decisions for us. That makes the United States a representative democracy, not a direct democracy. Direct democracy is one form of democracy, not the definition of democracy itself.

“Federal” describes how power is divided between the national government and the states. That also does not contradict democracy or republican government.

So the United States is simultaneously constitutional, federal, republican, representative, and democratic. Those classifications answer different questions about limits on power, distribution of power, institutional structure, and the source of political legitimacy.

I challenge you to explain how the United States is not a democracy without defining “democracy” exclusively as direct democracy, which we are not and which no serious definition treats as its only form.

Honestly, I suspect much of this recent talking point comes from idiots making a childish word association: “republic” sounds like Republican, so it must be good, while “democracy” sounds like Democrat, so it must be bad. Political party names are not definitions of systems of government. You do not become more loyal to the Constitution by pretending one of its foundational principles belongs to the opposing party.

Roll a joint using only his left hand (he was right-handed) while driving through city traffic. I'm not condoning it but I have to admit it was impressive.

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Most restaurants (especially breakfast ones) are serving pre-made or reheated junk.

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It depends on the restaurant and what you mean by “pre-made.” Yes, plenty of chains like Applebee’s serve mostly factory-prepared food that is reheated or finished on-site. Since chains probably outsell independent restaurants by sheer volume, you are likely correct in a strict mathematical sense, although some chains still operate scratch kitchens.

But ordinary prep is not the same thing as serving reheated junk. Good independent kitchens prepare food in advance because service would be impossible otherwise. Salmon is portioned and marinated, trout is portioned and breaded, burger patties are pressed, garlic is chopped, sauces are made, pastas are boiled, and vegetables are broken down and blanched before the doors open. That isn’t cutting corners, it’s just the work required to serve freshly cooked food in fifteen minutes instead of making you wait two hours for soup and a sandwich.

There is still plenty of real cooking going on in restaurants. You just have to get out of the major chains to eat most of it.

Your premise falls apart immediately because you’re treating the modern West Coast as though it were a genetically isolated population descended almost entirely from Oregon Trail pioneers. It isn’t.

California and the Pacific Northwest have been transformed repeatedly by domestic migration and immigration. Especially after the 1960s, they attracted millions of transplants, particularly counterculture, while California also developed enormous Latino and Asian populations. Seattle, Portland, San Francisco and Los Angeles are not collections of pioneer descendants who somehow lost the family “striving gene.”

That is also what posters here miss when they complain about Californians moving elsewhere and “bringing their politics with them.” A huge percentage of those Californians were never from California in the first place. They moved there from Texas, Ohio, Alabama or wherever, stayed for a few years, and then returned home or moved somewhere cheaper.

So chances are those California “freaks” supposedly invading your state are just your freaks returning home, or another state’s freaks making their next stop. I’m a sixth-generation Californian. My four-times-great-grandmother pulled a handcart across the plains with an infant after her husband died only a week into the journey, so I can claim as much pioneer stock as anyone. Having watched entire communities of native-born Californians get priced out while the people replacing them enacted one crazy policy after another, I say good riddance. Keep them this time. We don’t want them back.

It was even worse than that. In 2004, 2ID, 2nd Brigade was already in Korea, where its soldiers were serving 12-month unaccompanied tours. Many were near DEROS when the Army hit them with stop-loss and stop-move orders and sent them directly from Korea to Ramadi and Fallujah for another year.

These were soldiers who had already spent a year separated from their families, only to be involuntarily held past their rotation dates and sent straight from one forward-deployed area into combat in another.

Soldiers went more than two years before reuniting with their families. I knew one guy that went three. His son was just starting to walk when he left and getting ready for kindergarten when he finally came home.


In short, some guys left home expecting a one-year Korea tour and, just as it was supposed to end, got stop-lossed into a full year of combat in Iraq.

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For me, Machine Head by Bush. I doubt many will agree, but I have always loved that song.

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I don’t really have anything against Bush now, but my main memory of them is sailing that CD right out the fricking window and off a bridge at 70 mph coming home from my girlfriend's house after spending a week with her playing “Glycerine” on endless repeat. I finally confessed to her last year what happened to her CD.

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It doesn't matter. I've never, at any point, had space in my life to elevate any person that would be associated with shite like that.

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You talk like a fig and your shite's all retarded. :lol: