No, we haven’t become a sports blog. We’re referring to the battle of the Welcome Home Troops parades — a battle in which Mayor Bloomberg, who most emphatically does not welcome veterans to his fair city, has unilaterally disarmed.

So in the Show-me State they rolled the floats, the vintage deuce-and-a-halfs, the veterans and the American Flag. They held the parade. In New York City they threw a SEAL in the laughing academy at Bellevue, because he claimed to be a SEAL. No parade, says the Mayor, whose can’t allow himself to be distracted from his laserlike focus on micromanaging the trans fats consumption of his subjects.

St’Louis raises the red, white and blue. Bloomberg’s flying his flag, it’s just missing the red and blue parts.

But hey, a comparison to Petain is not fair. Petain wasn’t a billionaire.

Hat tip: Jim Hoft, who has some pictures. You’re probably going to have to find these pictures in blogs

This entry was posted in Media vs. Military, SF History and Lore on by Hognose.

About Hognose

Former Special Forces 11B2S, later 18B, weapons man. (Also served in intelligence and operations jobs in SF).

2 thoughts on “St Louis beats New York

Brendan

Did you see the recent quiz that somebody put together: “Are you in a bubble?” By bubble, they meant an elitist bubble – i.e. a New York-livin’, NYT-readin’, Obama-votin’ bubble. One of the questions was “Have you ever been in a parade that wasn’t for legal abortion, “antiwar”, or pro-gay rights?” (I paraphrase.) Of course those are the only kinds of parades that take place now in New York.

Hognose Post author

That was Charles Murray, author of many interesting and provocative books on sociology. Isolation of a meritocratic intelligent elite, amplified by assortative mating, has been a theme of his for at least 25 years. Although the blogs are not clear on whether Prof. Murray himself made the quiz or inspired it, I think this guy (whom I don’t otherwise know) has it right on the purpose of the quiz.

http://ordinary-gentlemen.com/blog/2012/01/27/consensus-on-charles-murrays-quiz/

I expected, given my long service, to score very high on the quiz, but I only scored a middling-high 66. (the actual quiz is here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/77349055/Coming-Apart-by-Charles-Murray-Quiz ). So what I think is, while SF is in the army, it’s an island of exactly the sort of cognitive elite he writes about, and therefore is set apart from, say the 289th Engineer Battaliion (Heavy Equipment) or units like that, that are more representative of blue-collar America. I once served on a team with three millionaires, and in my Reserve and Guard years there were usually only a couple blue-collar workers in the ten or so guys on a team. After all, every SF guy is selected for IQ (minimum +1SD, but the guys who barely make the cutoff have a hard time passing the training), and has to master a tough specialty and function in at least one foreign language (leading an infantry company in the attack in Spanish is a very different cognitive demand from passing an undergrad SPanish III test). For another example, there are only 600k pilots in the US and only perhaps 30k living SF vets. But the intersection between the two groups, which if they were randomly selected would be vanishingly small in a land of 330 million, is actually in the hundreds or thousands.

Sp we’re way off on one end of every bell curve you can imagine, but for us that’s what’s normal.