mods changed my name posted:

Ross Perot probably would've been another horrible capitalist piece of poo poo but I can't even be mad at him

Duzzy Funlop posted:

How many minutes has it been since Trump embarrassed his nation? It seems like a surprisingly large amount of minutes.

Hot Karl Marx posted:

They are only getting paid something around $2 a day to do that as well

FAUXTON posted:

And the training/experience fighting fires goes to waste when they get out because they won't hire ex-cons.

Immanentized posted:

isn't there some parks program specific to California that would hire these guys?

I seem to remember a poster on GiP doing something with that for a while. It sounded like a postincarceration rehab with a little vocational training thrown in

mlmp08 posted:

That is what kills me more than the under-compensated labor, which is already a thing nationwide. At least make it possible for these skills to be used in civil service jobs later.

quote:

To become a firefighter in California, the state requires certification as an emergency medical technician. But because occupational licensing laws bar felons from earning EMT licenses, ex-convicts can’t get the job.

Oxygenpoisoning posted:

Someone asked for Trump being an embarrassment today? He shows up late to Armistice Day after the guns stopped firing and the flyover concluded. Strong start to the celebration, but the day is young...

https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/trump-world-leaders-mark-100-years-since-end-of-world-war-i/

WaPo posted:

In several tweets, Trump blamed local officials in Washington, alleging without evidence that they had inflated the cost to the city of a display of the country’s armed forces that had been inspired by Trump’s visit last year to a Bastille Day parade in Paris.

“The local politicians who run Washington, D.C. (poorly) know a windfall when they see it,” Trump wrote on Twitter. “When asked to give us a price for holding a great celebratory military parade, they wanted a number so ridiculously high that I cancelled it.”

Trump said it was possible the parade could be put on next year if the cost “comes WAY DOWN,” and added that with the savings “we can buy some more jet fighters!”

He said he would go to a parade in Paris to mark Armistice Day on Nov. 11 and also attend a “big parade” at Joint Base Andrews in the District’s Maryland suburbs.

His tweets were a confirmation of what the Pentagon had signaled a day before: that the planned Nov. 10 event might be postponed amid questions about its escalating costs, which were estimated to be as high as $92 million.

Trump has been pushing for a parade publicly and privately since he visited Paris in July 2017 and was deeply impressed by the Bastille Day celebration he attended as a guest of French President Emmanuel Macron. The grandiosity of the event included uniformed French troops marching down the Champs-Elysees avenue with tanks and armored vehicles while fighter jets flew over the Arc de Triomphe.

Trump’s plan immediately ran into concerns over its potential cost and whether the streets of Washington could withstand the type of heavy military equipment that the president witnessed rolling through Paris. But Trump continued to embrace the idea, and administration officials trudged ahead with the planning in recent months.

White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly briefed Trump this week on the growing cost of the event and several logistical concerns in an effort to discourage him from holding the parade, according to a senior administration official who, like another, spoke on the condition of anonymity. Kelly also told the president that if the parade occurred in Washington in November he would not be able to attend the event in Paris with other world leaders scheduled to be held at the same time to celebrate the centennial of the end of World War I.

quote:

We’d gained our first objective hours before
While dawn broke like a face with blinking eyes,
Pallid, unshaven and thirsty, blind with smoke.
Things seemed all right at first. We held their line,
With bombers posted, Lewis guns well placed,
And clink of shovels deepening the shallow trench.
The place was rotten with dead; green clumsy legs
High-booted, sprawled and grovelled along the saps
And trunks, face downward, in the sucking mud,
Wallowed like trodden sand-bags loosely filled;
And naked sodden buttocks, mats of hair,
Bulged, clotted heads slept in the plastering slime.
And then the rain began,—the jolly old rain!

A yawning soldier knelt against the bank,
Staring across the morning blear with fog;
He wondered when the Allemands would get busy;
And then, of course, they started with five-nines
Traversing, sure as fate, and never a dud.
Mute in the clamour of shells he watched them burst
Spouting dark earth and wire with gusts from hell,
While posturing giants dissolved in drifts of smoke.
He crouched and flinched, dizzy with galloping fear,
Sick for escape,—loathing the strangled horror
And butchered, frantic gestures of the dead.

An officer came blundering down the trench:
“Stand-to and man the fire step!” On he went ...
Gasping and bawling, “Fire-step ... counter-attack!”
Then the haze lifted. Bombing on the right
Down the old sap: machine-guns on the left;
And stumbling figures looming out in front.
“O Christ, they’re coming at us!” Bullets spat,
And he remembered his rifle ... rapid fire ...
And started blazing wildly ... then a bang
Crumpled and spun him sideways, knocked him out
To grunt and wriggle: none heeded him; he choked
And fought the flapping veils of smothering gloom,
Lost in a blurred confusion of yells and groans ...
Down, and down, and down, he sank and drowned,
Bleeding to death. The counter-attack had failed.

quote:

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Vasudus posted:

Can you imagine how lovely it would be to find out you're in the parade. It took three loving days to get our BN ready for a BDE change of command because nobody remembered any drill and ceremony. Now multiply that by a factor of ten because you need a YUGE PARADE. Probably have to have dudes scrubbing vehicles with tooth brushes for a month to make sure they're ready to be televised all over the world.

Vasudus posted:

Can you imagine how lovely it would be to find out you're in the parade. It took three loving days to get our BN ready for a BDE change of command because nobody remembered any drill and ceremony. Now multiply that by a factor of ten because you need a YUGE PARADE. Probably have to have dudes scrubbing vehicles with tooth brushes for a month to make sure they're ready to be televised all over the world.

mlmp08 posted:

https://twitter.com/Halo/status/1061637421995937793

o7

Stultus Maximus posted:

Hooray patriotism and glory, 100 years!

quote:

I saw a man this morning
Who did not wish to die:
I ask, and cannot answer,
If otherwise wish I.

Fair broke the day this morning
Against the Dardanelles;
The breeze blew soft, the morn's cheeks
Were cold as cold sea-shells.

But other shells are waiting
Across the Aegean Sea,
Shrapnel and high explosive,
Shells and hells for me.

O hell of ships and cities,
Hell of men like me,
Fatal second Helen,
Why must I follow thee?

Achilles came to Troyland
And I to Chersonese:
He turned from wrath to battle,
And I from three days' peace.

Was it so hard, Achilles,
So very hard to die?
Thou knowest and I know not--
So much the happier am I.

I will go back this morning
From Imbros over the sea;
Stand in the trench, Achilles,
Flame-capped, and shout for me.

quote:

So you were David’s father,
And he was your only son,
And the new-cut peats are rotting
And the work is left undone,
Because of an old man weeping,
Just an old man in pain,
For David, his son David,
That will not come again.

Oh, the letters he wrote you,
And I can see them still,
Not a word of the fighting,
But just the sheep on the hill
And how you should get the crops in
Ere the year get stormier,
And the Bosches have got his body,
And I was his officer.

You were only David’s father,
But I had fifty sons
When we went up in the evening
Under the arch of the guns,
And we came back at twilight -
O God! I heard them call
To me for help and pity
That could not help at all.

Oh, never will I forget you,
My men that trusted me,
More my sons than your fathers’,
For they could only see
The little helpless babies
And the young men in their pride.
They could not see you dying,
And hold you while you died.

Happy and young and gallant,
They saw their first-born go,
But not the strong limbs broken
And the beautiful men brought low,
The piteous writhing bodies,
They screamed “Don’t leave me, sir”,
For they were only your fathers
But I was your officer.

mlmp08 posted:

https://twitter.com/Halo/status/1061637421995937793

o7

quote:

“Good-morning, good-morning!” the General said
When we met him last week on our way to the line.
Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of 'em dead,
And we're cursing his staff for incompetent swine.
“He's a cheery old card,” grunted Harry to Jack
As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.

But he did for them both by his plan of attack.

Acebuckeye13 posted:

Oxygenpoisoning posted:

Someone asked for Trump being an embarrassment today? He shows up late to Armistice Day after the guns stopped firing and the flyover concluded. Strong start to the celebration, but the day is young...

https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/trump-world-leaders-mark-100-years-since-end-of-world-war-i/

Vasudus posted:

Can you imagine how lovely it would be to find out you're in the parade. It took three loving days to get our BN ready for a BDE change of command because nobody remembered any drill and ceremony. Now multiply that by a factor of ten because you need a YUGE PARADE. Probably have to have dudes scrubbing vehicles with tooth brushes for a month to make sure they're ready to be televised all over the world.

mlmp08 posted:

halosalute.png

Nostalgia4Infinity posted:

I want to die.

mlmp08 posted:

https://twitter.com/Halo/status/1061637421995937793

o7

EBB posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZqN1glz4JY

Stultus Maximus posted:

Hooray patriotism and glory, 100 years!

quote:

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
and builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretchèd forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.

But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.