NoTiedLand

For veterans planning to file a Compensation & Pension (Disability) benefit claim, these are some tips I received from an excellent VSO

Once you're a parent, yourself, you realize that your parents went through the exact experiences you're going through. They made mistakes just like you do. And, you'll figure it out, just like they did. Your father wasn't perfect, and neither are you, and your children won't be either.

I don’t often get personal here but I feel like some young guy out there needs to hear this… And I think more men will identify with my answer here than would care to admit it… A lot of us didn’t have great dads so some fear the idea of being a Dad themselves, like they don’t know what to do because it wasn’t modeled. But let me challenge that. You can be a fantastic Dad. The best even. You just learned in a unique way. We may not have had great Dads but we learned great lessons by seeing what NOT to do and what cycles NOT to repeat… This comes with pain, yes, but for some of us men, if we’re being honest, pain is a much better teacher than comfort. It sticks longterm. I suppose a good Dad can teach these lessons in certain ways but the negative experience has a way of hardening your resolve to not make the same mistakes, in a way nothing else can emulate. With the right personality, it makes you the most excellent man, husband and father you can be. In that respect, I thank my father, because, despite not being close (I didn’t even speak with him the last 14 years of his life aside from the week he died) — I wouldn’t be the man, husband and dad I am had I not learned from his mistakes. He also gave me life, despite his faults. Also, forgiveness is important. My Dad made mistakes but he had a very hard upbringing. I understand his mistakes now and it was healing for both of us that I forgave him before he died. I’m glad I did that for both our sake. So… Don’t fear being a Dad if you had a bad relationship with your Dad. Embrace it. Breaking the cycle can be your destiny. In fact, being a Dad will be your greatest life accomplishment. It’s certainly mine. There’s no greater gift or treasure you’ll find on earth.

@patrickbetdavid Time goes quickly especially when you get older

What is the biggest lesson you learned from your father growing up? Share 👇🏽

We're now seeing the harm behind Griggs vs Duke Power. So long as companies believe that they must use a college degree as a prerequisite to hiring someone, and the best paying jobs are in the white collar world, then "go to college" will be the preferred route. It's also not unreasonable to question the motives behind those advocating against college. As the job market tightens for college graduates, those with degrees will want to send others to alternative paths to preserve their own competitive position in the job market. Apprentice-type job pathways will become competitive with the college route once long term compensation exceeds that of a college graduate.

The longstanding belief that college is the only ticket to the middle class is crumbling across America. As the old consensus crumbles, @oren_cass and Bruno Manno explain how industry, unions, and schools are building the roadmap for the future of work. commonplace.org/p/building-blo…

@DaleStarkA10 Same talking point that they've been using for 30 years

Shocked, I tell you. I was reliably informed by the Lockheed funded military bloggers that the A-10 was outdated and irrelevant in modern warfare.

@Peoples_Pundit Where do the globalists/corporatists end up if the Democrats go anti-interventionist?

Yep, already happening. MAGA shrinkage went right into independents who say they "share little in common with either party". Some will go to the emergent antiwar populist left, and God help Republicans if a self-funding Perot-like figure emerges. They are going back into the pre-Trump Wilderness where the Bushes left them. Fools.

@Timcast Where do the globalists align?

There is a realignment happening Democrats will be replaced by anti-intervention instead of woke and the Republicans will be Neo Con Watch this for 2028

@ColonelTowner USAA lost its way when the stopped hiring retired military officers to run the company and went, instead, toward the corporate model run by career insurance industry insiders @bitchuneedsoap

.@USAA abuse of US workers and using H-1B workers is a kick in the teeth to US military members. Many of the laid off US employees were spouses and veterans.

@CynicalPublius This is gold and could be the basis for a good ethics seminar - real experience & a unique perspective and not academia. Business schools, War College (gulp!)

RE: Lawyerly Thoughts I have retired from the law and placed myself in “inactive status” in my two licensed jurisdictions. This finally gives me the freedom to share my unvarnished thoughts on the law and lawyers in a way I have been unable to do so before. I’m thinking of writing a series of lawyerly musings posts that I can later combine into a full length article. This is the first one. I believe I have a unique perspective on the law, having completed a successful military career before I stepped into law school. This meant that I was not wide-eyed and bushy-tailed in law school like most of my full time program (much younger) peers, and my earlier perspectives as a military decision maker made me cautious about some principles that I questioned as potentially being flawed or dangerous. So let’s talk about one: “EVERY CLIENT IS ENTITLED TO ZEALOUS LEGAL REPRESENTATION.” This is a bedrock concept of the practice of law, and one that lawyers are justifiably proud of as it is an essential component of equal justice under the law. But it has its flaws in the modern era. I remember one summer in law school I was an intern in a public defender’s office. One of our cases was a mass rapist who had been terrorizing women in local parks. This guy had blackish eyes that glowed with a sort of deep evil that seemed to come straight from the pits of Hell—it was like out of a horror film. He was as guilty as guilty could be, but we were trying to get him off on a claim of a bad search and seizure of some critical evidence. We were zealously representing a deranged rapist. The guy needed to be locked away for eternity, but we were trying to get him off. I know most lawyers are comfortable with that and consider it righteous, but for me it was the event that convinced me that I wanted nothing to do with criminal law. But that’s small potatoes to what I think is the bigger, profession-wide problem of “zealous representation.” Whether you are a litigator or a corporate lawyer (like I was), “zealous representation” means taking the facts at hand and interpreting them in the way most favorable to your client. I have found that “most favorable” means taking facts and pushing them in a client-favorable way right up to the edge of the line of lying, but not crossing it. You’re not lying, but are you really telling the objective truth? Over time that thought process of twisting facts away from what most reasonable laymen would consider as “true” changes a lawyer’s brain patterns. If you do this enough, you might stop being able to do anything else. Your brain changes, and not in a good way. I often found myself lapsing into this, but thankfully there remained a little portion of my brain that was still an Army colonel, and I think that little voice held me back. What ends up happening to too many lawyers is that every moment of their lives starts to consist of looking for angles to twist whatever facts are at hand into the manner most favorable to them. That’s a slippery slope. That’s why words like “oily” and “sleazy” are so popular when describing lawyers, and why jokes that involve lawyers at the bottom of the ocean as shark food are so popular. The problem is that as long as you never step right over the line into lying, none of this is against legal ethics. I’m not sure how to fix this exactly. Perhaps continuing legal education needs to focus on the limits of “zealous representation.” Or perhaps every lawyer needs to be on watch to not lose their soul. There are so many excellent lawyers that none of this applies to, but there are just as many who have no problem going into total sleaze-mode to win for their client. But then everything they do in life becomes sleaze-mode, and they harm themselves, their families and society as a result. It’s a large-scale problem. Think of this: “It depends of what the meaning of “is” is.” -Slick Willard

This is Fourth Turning stuff...highly disruptive to society. It will totally break the narrative of the past 50 years that going to college is the sure way to a good job and secure future. Additionally, far too many in this cohort have no other skills. For example, 50 years ago, schools had "shop" class for basic woodworking. Generally, these classes have been abolished

⚡️The professional middle is entering a slow liquidation. That is what is coming. A lot of six figure workers still think they own scarce cognition. They do not. What they actually own is a seat inside an organizational diagram that is about to be rewritten. For twenty years, companies paid armies of people to summarize, coordinate, package, analyze, report, reassure, sell, recruit, and administratively maintain complexity. AI is about to reveal how much of that layer was never true scarcity. It was overhead wearing prestige. That is why this gets dangerous. The people in that layer built expensive lives around the illusion that their salaries were durable. Big mortgages. daycare. two income households. private schools. lifestyle debt. identity fused to title. So when the compression starts, it does not feel like a normal labor shock. It feels like your class position is being revoked. A person loses the job and suddenly realizes the house was never a fortress. It was a fixed-cost trap financed by continuity. The next 12 to 18 months are likely to be ugly because companies have finally been handed a believable excuse to thin the white collar herd. They can say AI. They can say efficiency. They can say macro caution. They can say market conditions. The language does not matter. The result does. Fewer seats. Longer hiring cycles. More ghosting. Lower offers. Higher bars. More people with impressive resumes chasing jobs beneath prior status. The market will keep telling itself this is temporary. A lot of it is structural. And the cruelest part is that this probably will not arrive as one cinematic crash. It will arrive as social downgrading. The title gets softer. The comp gets cut. The search takes longer. The savings get chewed through. The role accepted is smaller than the last one. The family says it is fine. The person knows something has broken. That kind of decline is much more psychologically destructive than one violent break because it makes people live inside the decay of their own ranking. Housing is where this becomes visible. The professional class was supposed to be the stable bid under the market. If enough of them lose income security while carrying large mortgages, the house stops being optionality and becomes a restraint device. People stop moving. Listings freeze. Spending contracts. Families become geographically trapped because leaving means crystallizing loss or taking a much worse payment elsewhere. The labor shock and the housing shock start feeding each other. Society is about to discover how much of the tax base, consumption base, and institutional calm sat on a white collar class whose value was inflated by a pre-AI information economy. That class thought it had made it because it was paid well. A lot of them were just being temporarily overcompensated to keep the administrative machine running. When the machine needs fewer humans, the paycheck premium gets repriced hard. Bottom line: A lot of six figure jobs are going away. A lot of the people in them will not get equivalent replacements. The pain will concentrate in the salaried professional class with high fixed costs and no ownership cushion. The official data will lag the lived reality. The social mood will get darker long before the statistics fully admit why. The real truth is simple: The next phase is the collapse of professional security. The middle is about to learn that income is not the same thing as safety.

⚡️Vegas is a beautifully lit tax on weak positioning. That is what it really is. The whole place is built to identify moments where people are tired, impulsive, drunk, overstimulated, socially pressured, sexually charged, or too committed to leave, and then price into that weakness with surgical precision. The pizza is just one receipt from a much larger machine. Vegas figured out that gambling does not need to be the only casino. The room is a casino. The drinks are a casino. The food is a casino. The parking is a casino. The convenience is a casino. Every basic human need gets turned into a high margin trap the moment you are enclosed inside the system. They are not trying to delight you. They are trying to keep you moving while they shave you at every layer. And deep down, this is also America in concentrated form. Vegas just has the decency to make the extraction visible. The broader country has been moving the same way for years. Junk fees, service charges, dynamic pricing, app markups, subscription traps, stadium food, airport food, hospital billing, all of it. Vegas is just the purest expression because the mask is thinner there. The city says pleasure. The mechanism says capture. So what is really going on here is that whole zone has learned that once people are locked into a high stimulation environment, normal price discipline breaks down. People stop optimizing. They stop comparison shopping. They stop walking away. They start paying for momentum. That is when the machine feeds. A lot of modern leisure now works like this. It sells escape, then monetizes exhaustion. It sells fantasy, then charges you for every breath inside the fantasy. That is why people feel more resentment than the dollar amount alone should produce. They can feel the structure. They know they were farmed. So the outrage is justified. Vegas is no longer mainly selling fun. It is selling controlled vulnerability.

Still speculative. NC still has a long, long history of voting D most especially for Council of State elections and that's important for building a bench which the Republicans don't really have. Arguably, Thom Tillis is the most prominent Republican in the state. Looking at numbers, in 2020, Trump won by about 1.5 while Cooper was reelected as Governor by 4.5. In 2024, Trump won by 3.2 while a Democrat won the governor race by nearly 15% over the sitting Lt Gov. The voters don't have a problem with electing Democrats. The registrations are interesting, but also continue reflecting a trend that began decades ago when virtually everyone was a registered Democrat. Jesse Helms was regularly reelected while Democrat voter registration far, far outnumbered Republican. As for Wake & Mecklenburg Counties, those trends are heavily Democratic. Note that the largest cities in each county (Raleigh & Charlotte) had Republican mayors as recently as 2001 & 2009, respectively. Since then, the counties have moved far to the left with virtually all elected officials being Democrats. Additionally, these counties are full of (former) Republicans who are voting D even if their registration isn't D. Are the Republican registration gains coming from new arrivals or from people shifting from D or I? If it's the former, then Republicans could be more optimistic. For now, I'd still consider NC to be a purple state and even one with a D lean given that high-propensity voters have shifted to D in the past decade.

NC Voter Registration by Party since Nov. 2024 Doesn’t have it as good as FL, but GOP registration advantage for first time in state history as of February. Active advantage higher than the overall roll shown here. GOP needs to stop ignoring Mecklenburg and Wake Counties and could win the state comfortably with a little effort there. Assessment: R+5 in next presidential, vulnerable Senate seat in 2026. Better off than GA long term because of conservative white/Latino mix.

Globalization was a historical anomaly that only existed because the US Navy was willing to protect shipping across the oceans. With the US Navy no longer willing to play that role, trade is going to fracture back towards regional trade blocs.

@barnes_law When Trump was out on the campaign trail, did he believe anything he said?

You can't lose a quarter of your voters in an election you won by 1 point. Notice especially the complete collapse amongst young voters.

@TalkNats This is Millas' opportunity

Looks like Drew Millas and Keibert Ruiz make the Opening Day roster as the 2 catchers after Harry Ford and Riley Adams are both sent Triple-A. Also, Abimelec Ortiz was sent to Triple-A.

@FreightAlley Covid-ere disruptions were the warning sign of weakness in the reliance on global sourcing. We'll soon find out which companies took it seriously

The attack of civilian shipping and the end of globalization was something we have been warning of for the past 4 years. The real risks to trade wasn't tariffs and trade wars - it was kinetic conflict, where supply chains are the front lines. Supply chain execs must bring their production back to the Americas in order to protect themselves from disruptions.

@bill_allison @OleTimeHardball No question. Dick Allen over Howard

@OleTimeHardball Ryan Howard over Dick Allen? I loved Daulton, but I think Bob Boone might have been a better player (certainly more durable). Bedrosian (who played for some pretty bad Phillies teams) over Tug McGraw (who played for the best)?

Philadelphia Phillies All-Time team C Darren Daulton 1B Ryan Howard 2B Chase Utley 3B Mike Schmidt SS Jimmy Rollins OF Chuck Klein OF Ed Delahanty OF Richie Ashburn SP Steve Carlton SP Robin Robets SP Pete Alexander SP Curt Schilling RP Steve Bedrosian

Wherever possible, spend your money with local businesses. Use the plumber or electrician where you can talk to the owner. Buy from the neighborhood hardware store. Maybe they’ll cost a bit more than the big box (very often they are not more expensive). But, your dollar will directly help them feed their family and put a roof over their head whereas the big box purchase feeds the bonus of some far-away CEO.

Most people couldn’t tell you where they are on the road without their phone. That’s a problem. Teaching these boys how to use mile markers so they’re never guessing. One day, their wife and kids could depend on it.

@gabbylovesusa Also applicable to government bureaucrats who take a position in DC including those who transfer in from other areas

As someone who’s spent a decade in and out of the White House, I can tell you this plainly: These people will never take you (the American citizen) seriously. When you’re “in” the administration, the world shrinks. And you feel bigger because of it. You start to believe everything revolves around DC. That things aren’t as bad as they look. That whatever happens can be explained away… justified, reframed, managed. You begin to do it subconsciously. When I say these people are far removed from reality, I mean it. It doesn’t take long. Just one taste by being in the “in crowd” and they’re gone. I’ve seen it happen too many times to ignore. It’s just true.

@ZitoSalena Sears employed a lot of teenagers.

My first job at 14 was here where the old Sears department store was--I remember having to get a work permit to get the job. I've been working ever since.