Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

There are consequences to being an arrogant, sullen prick.

FFS people, this was a good thing. take the win.

An unpunished coup is a training exercise.

Republicans don’t want a speaker to lead them; they want a hostage.

Never forget that he train is barreling down on Trump, even as he dances on the tracks.

Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.

Russia bombs Ukraine’s maternity hospitals; Republicans in the House can’t sort out supporting Ukraine.

They were going to turn on one another at some point. It was inevitable.

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

That’s my take and I am available for criticism at this time.

So many bastards, so little time.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

Motto for the House: Flip 5 and lose none.

I didn’t have alien invasion on my 2023 BINGO card.

“The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.”

Conservatism: there are people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

I am pretty sure Katy Tur wasn’t always such a bootlicking sycophant.

You cannot shame the shameless.

If you thought you’d already seen people saying the stupidest things possible on the internet, prepare yourselves.

But frankly mr. cole, I’ll be happier when you get back to telling us to go fuck ourselves.

Consistently wrong since 2002

Speaker Mike Johnson is a vile traitor to the House and the Constitution.

Come on, man.

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Open Thread

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Working on a couple posts that I will put up later, but here is an open thread for now.

BTW- sometime in the last couple of days marks four months since I quit drinking. Not keeping count or track and the only reason I know is because my insurance finally took care of all their part and I got my bill today. Not bad- only about 2k over all. I’m cool with that. Cheaper than drinking, that’s for damned sure.

Reader Interactions

117Comments

  2. 2.

    wmd

    Keeping track is worth something. I know several recovering alcoholics that enjoy the 100 day, etc anniversaries as times to reflect on the commitment that has kept them off the juice.

  3. 3.

    raven

    I kept close track for a couple of years. Nothing wrong with it at all but it was fun, after about ten years, having to sit and figure it out based on other awful shit that happened to me when I got straight. Keep on truckin man.

  4. 4.

    shortstop

    High of 75 in Chicago today. Yes, yes, yes.

    Now if only I could get this [actual name of work product censored] whipped into shape. It won’t stop fighting me.

  6. 6.

    srv

    Congrats. You should do yoga.

    Obama is OK imprisoning the troops:

    U.S. soldiers returning from Liberia are being placed in isolation in Vicenza, Italy out of concern for the Ebola virus, CBS News national security correspondent David Martin reports.
    …
    They apparently were met by Carabinieri in full hazmat suits. If the policy remains in effect, everyone returning from Liberia – several hundred – will be placed in isolation for 21 days. Thirty are expected in today, Martin reports.
    …
    A Pentagon spokesman calls it “enhanced monitoring.”

    Jesus on a pogo stick, there’s that “enhanced” again. Right out of the Yoo/Christie playbook.

  7. 7.

    Professor

    Do you know that your shadow can get the Ebola virus and infect you without you being aware? This process occurs when your shadow goes gallivanting whilst you are asleep. Please advise our RWNJ friends so that they guard against this happening to them.

  8. 8.

    Tree With Water

    I notice the Bush clan making noise about Jeb in 2016. Sure didn’t take long after reports surfaced of him criticizing FOX “news”. It tells me he’s running.

  12. 12.

    ellennellee

    congrats, john; shows courage and grit.

    also too, your productivity is so great now, both in content and volume.

    kudos!!

  16. 16.

    patrick II

    John,
    Just wondering how you felt about your senator Joe Manchin endorsing Lamar Alexander, Susan Collins, and Lindsey Graham on Meet the Press yesterday.

  18. 18.

    srv

    @aimai:

    Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel will decide whether to make isolation apply to members of all services returning from Liberia.

    Or we can just assume Italians are imprisoning American troops? Can’t wait for that meme to ramp up.

  19. 19.

    beltane

    My husband just sold our minivan for about 20% of blue book value. I am seriously considering taking up drinking right now.

  22. 22.

    greennotGreen

    Congratulations, Cole! Now if you could just share some of that commitment with me so I would start eating right and get in shape…

    Meanwhile, I was just over at Charlie Pierce’s place, and a commenter pointed out that a great way to strike back at the irrational, but politically expedient, response to Ebola on the part of some is to donate to Doctors without Borders which I have just done.

  23. 23.

    Kevin

    Congrats man! I’ve seen my brothers marriage disintegrate due to alcohol, and am glad that you’ve been able to kick it for this long. At the very least you didn’t drag anyone down with you like my former sister in law, which is a benefit of being a bachelor I suppose!

    Keep it up.

  24. 24.

    SFAW

    Cheaper than drinking, that’s for damned sure.

    Well, it wouldn’t have been, if you didn’t insist on buying all that Glenfiddich 1937.

    Seriously, John, congrats, and keep up the great work.

  25. 25.

    Belafon

    @srv: Question: What exactly are the US troops doing in Africa to support the Ebola effort? Is it more than building hospitals? Specifically, are they handling patients and are they getting training on how to deal with them? Are the going through the training that Doctors Without Borders puts their volunteers through?

    I suspect not. The difference, therefore, between these people and the nurses and doctors who are back here is that the medical people know what they should be monitoring for.

    Also, according to your article, they are being placed in a building. That’s a big difference compared to what the nurse in New Jersey got until she complained.

  27. 27.

    Jim

    Stay healthy, John. Sounds like you have good local support, as well as those of us who wish you well through this blog.

    I live next door to a church that hosts a couple of meetings each week. One is AA, but I’m not sure what the other one is. The smokers, of course, hang out in back during breaks, and I sometimes stop to talk with them when walking the dog. One of them once asked if their being there bothered me. I said no, that the ones I worried about were the ones who weren’t there, but should be.

  28. 28.

    El Caganer

    Congratulations, Mr. Cole. I’ve been off the sauce about the same amount of time. In my case, though, it wasn’t the desire for sobriety (unfortunately, I like being a drunk), it was the fact that alcohol and warfarin don’t mix well. One end result that’s the same in both instances: lots of $$ saved.

  29. 29.

    shelley

    Four months already? Wow, congrats, John. I remember reading about all the crap you had to go thru in the beginning just to get some help.

  30. 30.

    greennotGreen

    Warning! I was just at the Doctors without Borders website and made the mistake of reading an article about the Ebola outbreak in Liberia, and now I am in tears. God damn to hell the politicians who misuse this tragedy to their advantage!

  31. 31.

    low-tech cyclist

    @shortstop: I don’t buy that Jeb or Mitt will be the GOP nominee in 2016. Unlike as recently as 2009, the crazies run the party now. In 2012, they grudgingly accepted Mitt (as long as he said “how high?” every time they said “jump”) only because their freak show of possible candidates (Trump, Bachmann, Cain, Newt, Santorum, etc.) made Ted Cruz look statesmanlike by comparison.

    This time, they’re not going to settle for an establishment figure, no matter how much the establishment figure promises to do everything they say. They want one of their own, and this time it will happen.

  32. 32.

    The Main Gauche of Mild Reason

    Sounds like John is in the Chris Hardwick camp: *drinking problem* but not necessarily a huge addict. Good to hear

  33. 33.

    Mike E

    @srv: Forced to spend 3 weeks in Italy is like a vacation, amirite?!

    Heh, my parents met in an Italian refugee camp at the end of WWII…

  34. 34.

    Gin & Tonic

    @greennotGreen: You can do monthly recurring donations with them, if you’re so inclined, which I have done. I increased the amount after the two-asshole quarantine fiasco.

  39. 39.

    catclub

    @aimai: I suspect they are being isolated on a US/Nato base in Vicenza. But what do I know — except what I learn on BJ.

  40. 40.

    Tim C.

    @low-tech cyclist: Agree completely. It’s the endgame for the freak-show caucus. Big-Bidness is the tail and not the dog anymore, and it will be whoever can unite the Tea-Party economic caucus with the fundamentalist right.

  41. 41.

    srv

    @Belafon: They get a tyvek suit, gloves and a few hours of training:

    Their mission downrange will focus almost entirely on construction of 17 new Ebola treatment facilities and educating local health workers, DeSantis said.

    @Mike E: I’m sure the Italian nurses in Tyvek are hot!

  42. 42.

    Bob In Portland

    This.

    At the height of the Cold War in the 1950s, law enforcement and intelligence leaders like J. Edgar Hoover at the F.B.I. and Allen Dulles at the C.I.A. aggressively recruited onetime Nazis of all ranks as secret, anti-Soviet “assets,” declassified records show. They believed the ex-Nazis’ intelligence value against the Russians outweighed what one official called “moral lapses” in their service to the Third Reich.

    The agency hired one former SS officer as a spy in the 1950s, for instance, even after concluding he was probably guilty of “minor war crimes.”

    And in 1994, a lawyer with the C.I.A. pressured prosecutors to drop an investigation into an ex-spy outside Boston implicated in the Nazis’ massacre of tens of thousands of Jews in Lithuania, according to a government official.

    Not sure what the news value is of this, but we all knew this before, right? Maybe when the swastika is fully rehabilitated we’ll find out about the other ten thousand Nazis. By the way, von Bolschwing had lots of friends in the Republican Party.

  43. 43.

    Amir Khalid

    I saw Fury today. There’s no plot, really, no special mission that Brad Pitt’s crew gets sent on; just a tank crew in April 1945 making slow, grinding progress towards Berlin. It’s a war movie like those from the 1950s or 1960s, except for its frankness about the brutality and capriciousness of war. Think Saving Private Ryan‘s Omaha beach sequence taking up most of the movie. (And marvel, as I did, at the two boys in the row in front of me: for many of the battle scenes they were on on their smartphones, reading and sending text messages.) Not the most original cast of characters ever seen in a war movie, but the cast did pretty well. Pitt gets a peach of a line: ‘Ideals are peaceful, history is violent.”

  45. 45.

    Karen in GA

    @The Main Gauche of Mild Reason: I can’t speak to the exact nature of John’s problem. I will say, though, that when I was drinking a lot in my 20s and people were starting to worry, my therapist offered a good rule of thumb: if you can remember the date you last had a drink, you’re in trouble.

    (Meaning, if the fact that you haven’t had a drink in exactly X number of days is noteworthy enough for you to keep track, it’s way too important to you.)

  46. 46.

    catclub

    @big ole hound: I think Cruz has a good chance of getting the nom, because I think he is locking up the far right crazies, who could not settle on one guy while they still hated McCain and Romney. Other people think I am wrong – who knew?

    Anyway, if the US ends up actually electing Cruz, that would be a scary place to live. I believe we would not do it, but realize how crazy he is. Only the future will tell.

  52. 52.

    Gin & Tonic

    @Bob In Portland: Hey, Bob, long time.

    Those election results yesterday in Ukraine sure proved you out, hey, right? Pravy Sektor with less than 2%, Svoboda not reaching the 5% threshold? Those damned fascists are clever, though, so I’m sure there’s another explanation for their getting the short end of the stick.

  53. 53.

    aimai

    @catclub: I don’t know anything about this but srv is usually wrong about whatever he posts. I’d also like to point out that given the crazed way local politicians and communities are handling the threat of Ebola in *this* country the military would be crazy to directly repatriate anyone who is known to have been in contact with anything even a smidgen African because the liklihood of their being fucked over once they come back to the US is high. If I were US military personel and admin I’d want to do my “quarantine” on an army base far from home so that when I got home I wouldn’t be attacked and isolated like the Nurse in New Jersey.

  54. 54.

    Amir Khalid

    @catclub:
    From what I’ve seen of American politics since Obama’s election, locking up the far-right crazies would be a good idea, but no one wants to try it.

    Or maybe you meant that Ted Cruz has become the darling of the right-wing crazies. In which case, I seem to recall that that’s a good way to win a Republican nomination, but not quite a sure thing for winning an election.

  55. 55.

    The Other Chuck

    @Karen in GA: Or you just drink infrequently and are good at remembering dates. Honestly, it sounds like a really lousy rule of thumb. Now if you’re repeatedly thinking about the last time you had a drink, that might indicate a problem, but again, thinking about it in reply to a question doesn’t count (it’s a “don’t think of a purple zebra” sort of thing)

  57. 57.

    Jay C

    @catclub:

    Yep, your sources (even if just BJ) were right: the returning Army troops (the only Service doing this so far) is keeping the returning troops at the base in Vicenza. – the accommodations are probably short of Ritz-Carlton standards, to be sure: but it hardly sounds like Stalag 86, either….

    According to the military official, the soldiers are in a building near the base that includes a dining tent, a gym and other facilities. The building has 56 four-person rooms, 24 single rooms and three VIP rooms.

    As it should be, really: after all, we don’t want Our Troops to have sleep outside in tents, or anything…..

  58. 58.

    AliceBlue

    @Karen in GA:
    I’m reminded of a story told by one of the British “bad boy” actors from the 1960s–can’t remember which one. Anyway one minute he was drinking in a bar in London, next thing he’s getting off a plane on a Caribbean island. The time in between was a complete blackout. He quit drinking.

    Also, good on you John.

  60. 60.

    Paul in KY

    @Amir Khalid: Did anybody in movie call a Sherman tank ‘a Ronson lighter’? That’s what their nickname was. The tank’s major flaw was that it used gasoline, vice diesel.

  63. 63.

    Linda Featheringill

    @Amir Khalid:
    War is a bitch.

    Everybody loses. Even the victors lose.

    I’ve been trying for decades to understand why humans so enthusiastically engage in war. It’s been a futile effort.

  65. 65.

    WaterGirl

    @Karen in GA: Such a great photo!! Perfect that you didn’t write a whole story and let ” Attica!” and the photo speak volumes.

    I love the reddish color on the bottom of Iggy’s paw – the one that’s rattling the cage. My cocker spaniel had a couple patches of that same same color on his paw. So sweet, it reminds me of my boy. (now gone for 3 years)

    Not much time left in the joint for you guys; I’m sure it can’t come quickly enough.

  66. 66.

    Amir Khalid

    @Paul in KY:
    No, not that I recall, although a few of them catch fire rather quickly. The movie does point out quite early on that the Shermans were generally inferior to the Germans’ Tiger tanks.

  67. 67.

    John Cole +0

    @Jay C: Actually, I bet the building is pretty nice by Army standards. We’ve had a long standing base in Vicenza housing the 173rd Airborne. I actually crossed paths with those guys a couple times while I was on active on different training missions. Because of their location, they are out and about a good deal. One of their CO’s got himself court martialed a while back.

  68. 68.

    elmo

    $2K over four months? Yep, that’s way cheaper than drinking, at least the way I drink.

    And seconding those who said, “remember the last day you had a drink” as a lousy metric. Since having a glass of wine with dinner isn’t anyone’s idea of alcoholism, and since I can generally remember “yesterday,” I’d say I can just about always remember the last day I had a drink without having a problem.

    My main problem with drinking is that it’s making me fat.

  69. 69.

    Ruckus

    @Karen in GA:
    Remembering may be one thing that keeps some people from starting back up. “I’ve been sober/straight this long, I’m not going to ruin a good thing.” I remember, if not the day, the month/yr that I lit up my last high. And that’s going on 31 yrs.
    It was a good thing that I stopped, I want to remember that.
    Now I can see a therapists point if you still have a desire to ingest your poison of choice, your remembering is about something you’ve lost, not something you’ve gained. John has gained something he desired, sobriety. Someone losing something they liked probably doesn’t want to be reminded of that regularly.

  72. 72.

    Another Holocene Human

    This Jian Ghomeshi thing is really weirding me out. He was so violent and weird with so many people it’s kind of amazing that it took so long for this to come out.

    So I’m wondering what it is about our culture that makes it impossible to call this stuff out.

    Heck, I saw my coworker hanging out with a woman who, er, has a problem. Let’s just say her last husband LEFT TOWN and got a new job just to get away from her (and says the money he spent on that divorce was the best money he ever spent). I was going to say something to him. Then I figured he’d blow it off because of who it was coming from or it was inappropriate because we aren’t in the same job classification. Maybe he knows who she is and figures he can handle it. I mean how does he know I don’t have some sort of weird motive, right?

    It seems like serial abusers have lots of prey because their victims are auto-silenced. So they do it over and over and over. I just … how do we fix this?

  76. 76.

    catclub

    @Amir Khalid:

    but not quite a sure thing for winning an election.

    We both hope you are right about this. It has been pointed out that once said crazy person has gotten the GOP nom, something crazy could happen and they could be elected.
    This is a reason to worry that Cruz does get the nom, even if it seems obvious that he would have no chance in the general.

    In contrast to all those people who did not get the nom and have zero chance of being elected.

  77. 77.

    Another Holocene Human

    Hey, if you’re finding that day after day 500 cups of coffee don’t wake you up…

    I’m not having memory problems at least not major ones and I’m not having “ack, can’t breathe” episodes. Although all these shift changes are fucking with my sleep. I am dreaming before waking again which seems to indicate I got my deep sleep in.

    So what else could it be?

    I’m occupationally at risk of thyroid problems but … non-medical people screamed “thyroid!” before but everything was normal and I bounced back, so …

    Help?

  79. 79.

    Citizen_X

    OT: You know that drunken homophobe racist thug (okay, redundant) that got tackled at DFW the other day? You know who was smack in the middle of the whole scrum? Paul freaking Rudd!

    And on topic: Congrats, John. Keep up the good work!

  84. 84.

    Jay C

    @John Cole +0:

    Oh, and

    Actually, I bet the building is pretty nice by Army standards

    You’d probably win: the US Army base at Vicenza has been significantly expanded in recent years (scroll to p 14 of the pdf) – they seem to have plenty of space, now…

    PS: Caserma Ederle seems to have been picked for expansion in main part because it is the HQ for US Army Africa (USARAF) – is there some reason why the HQ for whatever forces we may have deployed in Africa is located in Italy, rather than, y’know, Africa? Or is “It’s The Army!” explanation enough?

  86. 86.

    Amir Khalid

    Help! I just lost that dropdown menu in Firefox that gives quick access to Wikipedia, Google, etc. How do I get it back?

  88. 88.

    Mike E

    @Another Holocene Human: For people with personality disorders, it is so much “Can we fix” as it is a “Will s/he fix” dilemma… our responsibility is to identify those with this disorder cluster; what is it about you/me that attracts said people; and, do the necessary work to extricate ourselves from this situation.

    Blows, but little else can be done about it esp. since they invariably will choose self-ruin before taking responsibility for their ailment.

  89. 89.

    Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN)

    @Paul in KY: The Sherman was not “completely inferior” to the Tiger; it was designed with a completely different purpose in mind, at which it was significantly better than the Tiger. U.S. Army doctrine was that tanks were supposed to be used as infantry support, not dueling with other tanks. That job was reserved for the tank destroyers (hence the name), such as the M10 Wolverine.

    U.S. doctrine turned out to be reasonably effective. Tank destroyer battalions operated with large recon components which allowed them to break up German armored attacks pretty well. And the “except for the speed” part is missing the point, because tactical speed was a key element of that.

    As for the Sherman, the various models equipped with the short barrelled 75mm were very effective in infantry support; the medium velocity guns they carried were better for firing HE than the long barrelled, higher velocity guns. That’s the reason the Germans made a lot of Pz IIIs and Pz IVs with lower velocity guns, too.

    When the Sherman was specifically gunned for fighting armor, as with the M4A3E8 with the 76mm gun or the British Firefly variant with the 17 pdr gun and APDS ammunition, it was also effective. One on one it couldn’t fight a Tiger with a high probability of success but that’s a ridiculous comparison; the Sherman was a medium tank (about 30 tons in weight) and the Tiger was a heavy tank (about 60 tons). A much better comparison is to the Pz IV (27 tons), and the Sherman comes out looking fairly good.

    The main disadvantage of the Sherman was it’s height (about 10 inches taller than the Pz IV, with the difference being primarily in the hull), which limited it’s ability to take cover. It also had slightly thinner armor that had less slope to it, giving the Pz IV a greater effective armor thickness. It also had a noted tendency to catch fire when hit, though this had less to do with using gasoline than it did the method of ammo storage; the fires were primarily caused by ammo ignition, not fuel ignition. (There were many cases of finding a burned out Sherman inside which was a completely intact fuel tank.)

    The advantages of the Sherman were a lot less sexy than the disadvantages but probably more important. It was extremely reliable mechanically and easy to repair, so it was not only much cheaper to produce than German tanks of similar size, but a much higher percentage of them could stay in the field. The Pz IV, like all German tank designs, were full of precision German engineering that made them really expensive in the first place and often resulted in breakdowns that required sending the thing back to the factory. And, since the Sherman faced one test that the Pz IV never did (namely, the need to put every one of them built onto a boat before it could be used) that was a crucial advantage.

    The Sherman takes a lot of shit that it doesn’t deserve. It was a fine tank, as long as you remember what it was and make the right comparisons with it.

  90. 90.

    GHayduke (formerly lojasmo)

    With both my wife’s insurance and mine, my $50K treatment bill ended up costing me $500 OOP.

    That was about a month’s worth of wine for me. I drank cheap wine.

  94. 94.

    soonergrunt (mobile)

    @Jay C: respecting cultural differences, more Tham anything else.
    AFRICOM doesn’t have any combat forces permanently assigned, but rather forces based elsewhere are aligned regionally. Most African countries, having been victimized by colonialism, are VERY roxy about the prospect of hosting significant forces from a country that many people in the region consider only one step removed from their colonial oppressors of the past.
    For a long time, Africa was under EUCOM for command and control purposes because events in Africa weren’t realty on the radar of US policy-makers.

  100. 100.

    soonergrunt (mobile)

    And John, congratulations. I hope that you ate as proud of this accomplishment as you should be.

  102. 102.

    Another Holocene Human

    @Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism: I do have some sort of anemia, it’s hereditary, and I have been feeling really weird the last few days. Maybe I will take some B12.

    I’ve been avoiding eating meat lately* and now I have this round the clock hunger feeling that won’t go away. Damn.

    *-not for religious reasons, just cause I wasn’t feeling it

  103. 103.

    Another Holocene Human

    @Mike E: No, “we” can’t fix a personality disorder but we can cause them to inhibit their behavior by convincing them that they’re not going to get away with it.

    They pick on people who are vulnerable, often they are vulnerable because of being raised in a dysfunctional environment or sometimes, by being raised in a loving, trusting bubble where they never imagine that someone close to them could hurt them. Yeah, I think there’s a problem in how we socialize people that they don’t learn until it’s too late what boundary-testing consists of, and so on.

    People on B axis with violent fantasies go on and on and on because they don’t get stopped by anyone.

  105. 105.

    Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN)

    @raven: Actually, it’s a crappy piece. The Panther is also a weak comparable to the Sherman, given that it weighed in at 45 tons; it was really a hybrid between a medium and a heavy tank.

    As I said before, the better comparison is to the Pz IV, and it’s here that the article’s inconsistencies really show up. At one point it says, “At the time they fared well against the German equivalent tank, the Panzer IV.” Two paragraphs later, it says, “Sherman tanks were not nearly as efficient or as armored as the primary German tank, the Panzer IV. This was a fact even before the upgrading of Panzer gun barrels and armor in 1943.” So, which is it? Did it fare well against the Pz IV or was it not nearly as efficient? And it adds that last sentence without accounting for the fact that later models of the Sherman were also upgunned and uparmored.

    The paragraph about the loss rates is extremely misleading. All tank forces suffered huge losses and the Germans were no exception. Even when they were winning it was common for Panzer divisions to be down to single digit operating tanks after a few weeks of heavy campaigning. This is something you didn’t see with the Sherman, precisely because it was so easy to return them to battle.

    There are a number of other problems with it, but the biggest is, again, that it’s without going into the differing tank doctrines you can’t explain why the Sherman was more effective than it might seem at first glance.

  106. 106.

    gelfling545

    @Another Holocene Human: You might ask your health care people about B12 by injection. Oral B12 does nothing for me, but the monthly injection helps enormously. I can self-administer so no doctor visit needed. My anemia was also a hereditary deal which eventually led to transfusions & a year of iron injections (iron pills make me puke – can’t even take multi vitamins with iron). Also, I was advised that, barring religious/moral objections, beef 2x weekly would be a good idea. It has been helpful.

    Forgot to add: hearty congratulations to our genial host & best wishes for continuing along a healthy path.

  109. 109.

    Ruckus

    @gelfling545:
    And oral B12 has been fantastic for me. I think it’s amazing how much we are all supposed to be the same and yet on a micro level we can have pretty drastic differences.
    OK that was meant medically/chemically different, not different in how we should be valued as human beings.
    My sister, a practicing vegan, took to eating meat when she had cancer, she needed more iron than she could get otherwise.

  110. 110.

    Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN)

    @Raven: The problem is the same as every time you rely on anecdotal data. In this case, soldiers are always going to gripe endlessly about the perceived deficiencies of their own equipment. That’s what gets their attention. They’re less likely to go on about the things that are advantageous in their gear and they’re usually completely unaware of the deficiencies of what the other guy is using. The average American tanker never stepped into a Panther tank and they certainly didn’t know anything about the production and maintenance problems with German tanks.

    If you’re going to compare American to German tanks, an interview with someone who was there, in the sense of having actually been a tanker, is almost worthless.

  111. 111.

    SWMBO

    @Another Holocene Human: Have your D3 checked as well. If you don’t have enough you won’t process calcium and other basic stuff as well as you should. Potassium, magnesium and iron need certain basic trace items to get into the cells properly.

  113. 113.

    WaterGirl

    @raven: raven, are you posting from two different devices (one as raven and the other as Raven) or are there two of you?

  116. 116.

    Barry

    Congratulations! And you’d have probably spent way more than $2k on alcohol (and if you’d had a DUI or accident……….).

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