Jack Skellington

Father of 3 young men. Husband of a woman with a lot of patience. Enjoys horror movies, college sports, movies. Centrist of sorts. memes.

[End Wokeness @EndWokeness]

Mayor Mamdani is building a 200 bed all-male homeless shelter right near a black school

Turns out, elections have consequences

[Sir Doge of the Coin ⚔️ @dogeofficialceo]

My wife just asked how my day was. Nice try, Beijing.

[MayoMonkey2: ElectricBoogaloo 🐰 @MayoMonkey]

Follow me for more kitchen hacks!

[Car and Driver @CARandDRIVER]

Toyota is relaunching the Scion brand, and its first product is the KEI-01, a tiny truck with a 660-cc engine. The KEI-01 is basically a rebadged Daihatsu Hijet Jumbo, but will be assembled in Princeton, Indiana. Initial sales will be via a fleet-focused trial program, but limited retail sales could come if there is strong enough demand.

[Polymarket @Polymarket]

JUST IN: IBM announces it will end visa & green card sponsorship for most roles in its largest division, IBM Consulting.

[Jack Skellington @Jack_Bone_Daddy]

@VeryToxicZoomer My middle son is a welder and making good money. Youngest son is in college for consecutive engineering and likely to make close to six figures out of college. While not a trade, it's adjacent. Not all jobs suck and are like this.

[Kristin McTiernan @Kristin_Fiction]

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.

[Jack Skellington @Jack_Bone_Daddy]

Some days off. Told co-worker a task needs completed. He decided to not read the email and didn't do it. I log on last night, not done. Now he wants my help while I'm on PTO. I lined him up with someone that can help all along. As soon as I can retire I'm done.

[Joe Shmo @Joe_Shmo]

When the CCP discovers that both Sam Altman AND Peter Thiel are gay

[Jack Skellington @Jack_Bone_Daddy]

Between tires and other services about to pay $1.5k at the dealership. This for a car with 100k miles. Ugh.

[Vince Langman @LangmanVince]

OMG, they were rooting for their fellow corgi like it was the Super Bowl.🤣❤️

[Jack Skellington @Jack_Bone_Daddy]

Not all heros wear capes

[Jack Skellington @Jack_Bone_Daddy]

Canadian health care does seem to have benefits

[Daily Mail US @Daily_MailUS]

Nurse took man's blood pressure then asked him if he wanted to have sex with her and told him it would be good for his health, complaint alleges

[Hater Report @HaterReport]

Josh Allen is a high IQ player.

Hands clearly visible, eyes straight ahead, shoulders upright, no smiling.

Veteran move, a true student of the game

😂😂😂

[Jack Skellington @Jack_Bone_Daddy]

@hilarvszn @Loth_brok_ Banger

[AltAzn @Alt_Azn]

This picture represents everything Democrats want for America.

[Keith Crabb @KCrabbII]

@Polymarket Vanderbilt cyber is somehow weaker than their defensive line @VandyFootball

[vas @vasuman]

It’s not just NVIDIA. Sources confirm Google's Gemini team was also leaking confidential information to China.

China is reportedly asking them to stop.

[Dominic Alvieri @AlvieriD]

Texas Health and Human Sevices has allegedly been breached by BYOD.

Data of 2,000,000 Texans is at risk.

@TexasTribune @tedcruz @TexasHHSC

[Jack Skellington @Jack_Bone_Daddy]

Have seen this several times in the business world. Scammed stock up systems and require payment in crypto. Insurance pays for much of it but premiums skyrocket.

[Dominic Alvieri @AlvieriD]

Vanderbilt University currently is alleged to have all of their computer systems locked and over 1,000,000 students and employees have had their personal details stolen by threat group BYOD.

Developing situation @VanderbiltU