Bill Sargent

“Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” -Thucydides

[Bill Sargent @bsgt420]

@iowahawkblog

[Daniel Schwartz @danschwartz88]

Evil rarely announces itself.

Hannah Arendt didn’t warn us that the greatest danger would come from monsters.

She warned us it would come from ordinary people who stop asking questions. People who trade conscience for slogans, curiosity for certainty, and morality for obedience.

The lesson of the Holocaust was never just about one man. It was about what happens when a society decides that thinking is optional.

Every generation believes it would have stood against evil.

History keeps asking the same question:

Would you have?

Or would you have simply gone along because everyone else did?

That’s why Arendt still matters. And that’s why this conversation matters. Because the opposite of evil isn’t outrage.

It’s the courage to think for yourself.

[Freedom 250 @Freedom250]

101-year-old World War II veteran Don Graves — the last surviving flamethrower operator from his battalion, which fought on Iwo Jima — sings “God Bless America” at the National Memorial Day Parade.

[Bill Sargent @bsgt420]

@jtLOL Flight of the Conchords https://t.co/hPamJhyA3b

[Bill Sargent @bsgt420]

@upstatefederlst Pakistan enters the chat.

[The COVID-19 History Project @ThisDayinCovid]

On this day in COVID history, May 7, 2020:

Elon Musk says coronavirus pandemic is ‘practice run’ for future viruses

Source: CNBC

https://t.co/whLDkV7T8O

[Bill Sargent @bsgt420]

@shipwreckedcrew @grok More interestingly, what's the rate of crime in the general population versus J6 defendants?

[Bill Sargent @bsgt420]

@captainfish2278 @karol Ummm, what does the "S" in TSA stand for? I'd also like to know why there's no muzzle flash from the shotgun, and why nobody thought to tackle an assailant running past 3 feet away? Very bad look....

[Bill Sargent @bsgt420]

@MOSSADil

[Bill Sargent @bsgt420]

@KirstenGrind @susannecraig @IfindRetards

[Bill Sargent @bsgt420]

@emzanotti

[Bill Sargent @bsgt420]

@MorosKostas Turns out when you don't prosecute crime or plead down felonies to misdemeanors the crime rate drops. Magic!

[Bill Sargent @bsgt420]

@KurtSchlichter @IfindRetards

[Bill Sargent @bsgt420]

@MorosKostas Ya think?

[Bill Sargent @bsgt420]

@KevinKileyCA Defend your outrageous vote today re TPS status for Haitians.

[John Ʌ Konrad V @johnkonrad]

NATO is in far bigger danger than anyone realizes. And the reason has nothing to do with defense budgets.

The real danger is psychological. It’s cultural.

Europeans didn’t just free-ride on American security for 80 years. They built an entire identity around the idea that they evolved past the Americans protecting them.

That identity is now the single biggest obstacle to Western survival. And the darkest irony is: we helped build it.
After World War II, Europe wasn’t just economically shattered. Its culture was in ruins. The cities, the universities, the concert halls, the museums. Rubble.

The Marshall Plan rebuilt the economy. But culture wasn’t a priority. Not at first.
Then the Iron Curtain dropped. And suddenly culture became a weapon.

American diplomats, academics, artists & scholars flooded Western Europe. We funded their universities. Supported their orchestras. Rebuilt their museums. Promoted their intellectual life.
Not because European culture needed saving for its own sake.

Because Eastern Europeans were struggling for Maslow’s mist basic needs.

We needed the view from the other side of that Wall to be intoxicating.

So America built Western Europe into a showcase of self-actualization. Art. Philosophy. Cafe culture. Long vacations. Universities where people studied literature instead of surviving.
We were manufacturing jealousy.

And it worked. The Wall came down.

But here’s what no one accounted for.

When you give a society self-actualization on someone else’s tab long enough, they forget it was a gift. They start believing it was organically theirs.

And when they look at the country that funded it all, a country busy building aircraft carriers and semiconductor fabs and shale fields instead of reaching the Maslow’s pinnacle.

An overweight American in a ball cap who can’t tell Monet from Pissarro. Who eats fast food. Who drives a truck. Who builds strip malls instead of piazzas.

And to a culture trained in aesthetics but stripped of strategic awareness, that American looks uncivilized.

So the arrogance takes root. And once a culture decides another is beneath them, they stop listening.

Americans say wars are sometimes necessary: crude.

Oil is the backbone of prosperity: unsophisticated.

Kids build companies in garages that reshape the planet: crass.

Wall Street finances the global economy: vulgar.

Europe has no world-class technology sector. No military capable of strong defense. No energy independence. No AI capacity.

What Europe has is culture. The culture we paid for at the expense of us reaching Maslow’s pinnacle.

For decades that was fine. We funded the museums, protected the sea lanes, and tolerated the sneering because the arrangement worked.

Then Europeans stopped keeping the contempt private. They started saying it to our faces. In their media. In their parliaments. At every international forum. “Americans are stupid.

Americans are violent. Americans are a threat to democracy.”

We could have moved the Louvre to NY. We could have built a Venice here. We could have stolen your best artists, designers, philosophers and more… like your conquering armies did for centuries.

Instead we funded them. And all we asked for in return was to let us visit.

You don’t have the military to defend your borders. You don’t have the technology to compete. You don’t have the energy to heat your homes without begging dictators.

What you have is an 80-year superiority complex FUNDED BY AMERICANS, protected by American soldiers, and built on the false belief that self-actualization is civilization.

It isn’t. Civilization is the ability to sustain itself. By that measure, Europe isn’t a civilization at all. It’s a dependency with better wine.

That’s not a threat. It’s a weather report.

Build a Navy. Or don’t. But stop lecturing the people who made you “better than us”

Our “crudeness” our “stunted liberal education” our “ugly strip malls” are because we sacrificed our culture to support yours.

[Caleb Hammer @sircalebhammer]

Shouldn’t it be creating… high-speed rail though?

[John Ʌ Konrad V @johnkonrad]

This is why Americans are the deadliest fighters on earth.

I met a priest yesterday who just got accepted to chaplain school in Newport. I asked him the obvious question: Marines or Navy?

Navy, he said. His face fell a little. He told me he could never be a Marine because every Marine is a rifleman, and as a priest he can’t carry a weapon.

He’s hoping to get assigned to a Marine unit anyway. All chaplains are Navy officers, so that’s the only door in.

I laughed. I feel a little bad about that.

Then I explained to him what “Devil Doc” means. The Marine Corps doesn’t have medics. They use Navy Corpsmen.

I told him: when you get out to the fleet, find a Marine sergeant with a couple of Purple Hearts and tell him Devil Docs “aren’t real Marines.”

Be prepared to duck.

Marines are violently particular about who gets to wear their uniform. Navy Corpsmen and Navy chaplains who have eaten dirt alongside them in combat qualify. Full stop.

My dad was Air Force. Not even Navy. I remember going to VFW halls with him as a kid. Someone would ask him what service, he’d say Air Force, and the room would chuckle a little. Then they’d find out he was a medic, and the air in the room changed. Something close to reverence.

Dad hated being honored. He had one line he used to deflect it:

“I didn’t do much. Save your praise for my cousin the PJ.”

That always broke the ice.

PJs are the Air Force special operators who go into hell to pull downed pilots out.

They will take casualties and are prepared to die to rescue a single pilot or crewman.

The math doesn’t math out. Why would any combat force take multiple casualties to rescue one air force jet jockey?

What the padre is about to learn is that the military has a hierarchy that has nothing to do with rank, and nothing to do with the service stitched on your chest.

Have you deployed?

Have you seen combat?

In every firefight there are men who move toward the guns and men who hang back. And when the guy at the tip of the spear is pinned down, bleeding, with rounds cracking past his head, there is exactly one word he screams into the radio.

“Medic.”

Here is the catch, and it is the whole reason America fights the way America fights.

That Marine is willing to push forward into fire BECAUSE he knows the Corpsman is coming. He knows the medevac birds will land in the hot LZ.

He knows the Devil Doc will drag him out by his plate carrier if it comes to that.

And, if the medic can’t help, if he has what Dad called “injuries incompatible with life,” he knows that chaplain will crawl on his belly to administer last rights and deliver him to heaven.

The F-15 pilot punching out over enemy territory knows the same thing. He knows the PJs will move heaven and earth to reach him, and turn whatever is shooting at him into a smoking crater of hell on earth on the way in.

This is the quiet math underneath American violence.

Our warriors are the fiercest on earth not because they are more aggressive, not just because they are better trained, or better equipped, though they are all of those things. They are the fiercest because they know, in their bones, that when they key the mic and call for help, help is coming in hot.

Take that away, and you don’t have the U.S. military anymore. You have a security force.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Robert is thirty-six years old. In 1247, this is not young. Robert knows this. His knees know this. His back has known this since approximately 1239.

Robert lives in a village in Worcestershire with his wife Agnes, three surviving children, and two chickens he is not allowed to eat because the chickens produce eggs and the eggs matter more than the chickens.

Today is a Tuesday in March. Robert will describe it as a Tuesday in March. The concept of a 'week' as a unit of leisure is not yet something Robert has access to.

5:00am - Up. Pottage on the fire. The pottage is oats, leeks, and some dried parsnip from the autumn store. There is a small piece of salted pork in it, approximately the size of Robert's thumb. It is mostly flavouring. Robert eats around it for as long as possible, then eats it, then thinks about it for the rest of the morning.

6:00am - Field. Robert works the lord's strip first, then his own. The ground is still cold. His boots have a hole. He has had the hole since October. He has packed it with rags. The rags are wet. They will remain wet until June.

Robert is technically eating a plant-based diet. He is not doing this by choice. He is doing this because meat belongs to the lord, the deer belong to the king's forest, and the last man in this village who was caught with an unlicensed rabbit spent a period in the stocks that his family still doesn't fully discuss.

10:00am - Brief rest. Rye bread, hard. A small onion. Robert thinks about the pig that was slaughtered in November. He thinks about this often. The memory of fat is a specific and enduring thing when you don't have much of it.

1:00pm - Back to the field. Robert's average daily calorie intake is somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 calories, the majority from grain. He is doing agricultural labour that modern exercise scientists would classify as extremely high intensity. He is, measurably, running on insufficient fuel. He is aware of this in the way that you are aware of things that cannot be changed: completely, and without drama.

4:00pm - Home. Agnes has made more pottage. It is similar to this morning's pottage. Robert eats it. Robert's teeth hurt. They have hurt for two years. There is no dentist. There is a barber-surgeon in the market town seven miles away. Robert cannot afford the barber-surgeon and cannot take the day from the fields. His teeth continue to hurt.

7:00pm - Sleep. Robert will be awake again at five. He is thirty-six. He will probably not see forty. The leading cause of death for men in his position is a combination of infection, injury, and the slow arithmetic of malnutrition across a lifetime.

Somewhere, eight hundred years from now, someone will describe Robert's diet as "ancestral," "plant-forward," and "aligned with the earth."

Robert would have a great deal to say about this.

Robert does not have the energy.

[Bill Sargent @bsgt420]

@shipwreckedcrew In other words, the process is the punishment. But in the case of TSA we all get punished. I've been through airport screening all over the world, including inbound to the US. TSA screening is not any better than private security screening, just more onerous.