All posts by Jim

Left HS before report cards came out. Enlisted in the Marines for four years. By the time those years were over, I was hooked - they had me for life. Spent nearly ten years as enlisted. Received a Silver Star, Bronze Star w/V, Purple Heart as a Sgt during first RVN tour. Upon returning to the State's received a combat commission to 2Lt. Retired after 36 total years as a Colonel. Book follows my career, but is more about the heroes with whom I served, the great mentors I had, and the leadership principles they instilled in me.

Toyota Warns (Again)

About Electrifying All Autos. Is Anyone Listening?

Folks, when Toyota speaks, GM had better listen before they find themselves coming to our table again asking for a bailout.  A friend of mine now retired, worked in a field where he became acquainted with several CEO’s, one of which was Alan Mullaly of Ford,  who by the way, is credited with saving Ford when GM, Chrysler et al went bust. Having lunch one day a few years ago, my friend asked Alan a hypothetical question, “Looking ahead ten years who will be the “Big Three?” Without hesitation Alan said, “Toyota, Volkswagen, and Ford.” I’ll not delve into Alan’s explanation as to why these three; let me only say, as a Economist, I agree it him.

While living in TN we belonged to an Newmar RV Klub. Someone arranged a trip for the Klub to visit the Toyota plant in Kentucky.  WOW, is all I can say. You could eat off the floor. The employees were cheerful, courteous, and happy. Several months prior the UAW came and asked to post signs around the plant announcing a meeting in a space the plant offered up to them.  This was the umpteenth time the UAW had come to them trying to get their employees to unionize. The plant was always courteous and offered space and time for the meeting..  The plant even allowed any employee time off to attend the meeting if it was during his/her shift. Of the then nearly 8,000 employees four showed up. If you buy Toyota, or Lexus, you are buying American; that plant now employs over 10,000 Americans.

BY BRYAN PRESTON MAR 19, 2021 12:50 PM ET

Depending on how and when you count, Japan’s Toyota is the world’s largest automaker. According to Wheels, Toyota and Volkswagen vie for the title of the world’s largest, with each taking the crown from the other as the market moves. That’s including Volkswagen’s inherent advantage of sporting 12 brands versus Toyota’s four. Audi, Lamborghini, Porsche, Bugatti, and Bentley are included in the Volkswagen brand family.

GM, America’s largest automaker, is about half Toyota’s size thanks to its 2009 bankruptcy and restructuring. Toyota is actually a major car manufacturer in the United States; in 2016 it made about 81% of the cars it sold in the U.S. right here in its nearly half a dozen American plants. If you’re driving a Tundra, RAV4, Camry, or Corolla it was probably American-made in a red state. Toyota was among the first to introduce gas-electric hybrid cars into the market, with the Prius twenty years ago. It hasn’t been afraid to change the car game.

All of this is to point out that Toyota understands both the car market and the infrastructure that supports it perhaps better than any other manufacturer on the planet. It hasn’t grown its footprint through acquisitions, as Volkswagen has, and it hasn’t undergone bankruptcy and bailout as GM has. Toyota has grown by building reliable cars for decades.

When Toyota offers an opinion on the car market, it’s probably worth listening to. This week, Toyota reiterated an opinion it has offered before. That opinion is straightforward: The world is not yet ready to support a fully electric auto fleet.

Toyota’s head of energy and environmental research Robert Wimmer testified before the Senate this week, and said: “If we are to make dramatic progress in electrification, it will require overcoming tremendous challenges, including refueling infrastructure, battery availability, consumer acceptance, and affordability.”

Wimmer’s remarks come on the heels of GM’s announcement that it will phase out all gas internal combustion engines (ICE) by 2035. Other manufacturers, including Mini, have followed suit with similar announcements.

Tellingly, both Toyota and Honda have so far declined to make any such promises. Honda is the world’s largest engine manufacturer when you take its boat, motorcycle, lawnmower, and other engines it makes outside the auto market into account. Honda competes in those markets with Briggs & Stratton and the increased electrification of lawnmowers, weed trimmers, and the like.

Wimmer noted that while manufactures have announced ambitious goals, just 2% of the world’s cars are electric at this point. For price, range, infrastructure, affordability, and other reasons, buyers continue to choose ICE over electric, and that’s even when electric engines are often subsidized with tax breaks to bring price tags down.The scale of the switch hasn’t even been introduced into the conversation in any systematic way yet. According to FinancesOnline, there are 289.5 million cars just on U.S. roads as of 2021. About 98 percent of them are gas-powered. Toyota’s RAV4 took the top spot for purchases in the U.S. market in 2019, with Honda’s CR-V in second. GM’s top seller, the Chevy Equinox, comes in at #4 behind the Nissan Rogue. This is in the U.S. market, mind. GM only has one entry in the top 15 in the U.S. Toyota and Honda dominate, with a handful each in the top 15.

Toyota warns that the grid and infrastructure simply aren’t there to support the electrification of the private car fleet. A 2017 U.S. government study found that we would need about 8,500 strategically-placed charge stations to support a fleet of just 7 million electric cars. That’s about six times the current number of electric cars but no one is talking about supporting just 7 million cars. We should be talking about powering about 300 million within the next 20 years, if all manufacturers follow GM and stop making ICE cars.

Simply put, we’re gonna need a bigger energy boat to deal with connecting all those cars to the power grids. A LOT bigger.

But instead of building a bigger boat, we may be shrinking the boat we have now. The power outages in California and Texas — the largest U.S. states by population and by car ownership — exposed issues with powering needs even at current usage levels. Increasing usage of wind and solar, neither of which can be throttled to meet demand, and both of which prove unreliable in crisis, has driven some coal and natural gas generators offline. Wind simply runs counter to needs — it generates too much power when we tend not to need it, and generates too little when we need more. The storage capacity to account for this doesn’t exist yet.

We will need much more generation capacity to power about 300 million cars if we’re all going to be forced to drive electric cars. Whether we’re charging them at home or charging them on the road, we will be charging them frequently. Every gas station you see on the roadside today will have to be wired to charge electric cars, and charge speeds will have to be greatly increased. Current technology enables charges in “as little as 30 minutes,” according to Kelly Blue Book. That best-case-scenario fast charging cannot be done on home power. It uses direct current and specialized systems. Charging at home on alternative current can take a few hours to overnight to fill the battery, and will increase the home power bill. That power, like all electricity in the United States, comes from generators using natural gas, petroleum, coal, nuclear, wind, solar, or hydroelectric power according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. I left out biomass because, despite Austin, Texas’ experiment with purchasing a biomass plant to help power the city, biomass is proving to be irrelevant in the grand energy scheme thus far. Austin didn’t even turn on its biomass plant during the recent freeze.

Half an hour is an unacceptably long time to spend at an electron pump. It’s about 5 to 10 times longer than a current trip to the gas pump tends to take when pumps can push 4 to 5 gallons into your tank per minute. That’s for consumer cars, not big rigs that have much larger tanks. Imagine the lines that would form at the pump, every day, all the time, if a single charge time isn’t reduced by 70 to 80 percent. We can expect improvements, but those won’t come without cost. Nothing does. There is no free lunch. Electrifying the auto fleet will require a massive overhaul of the power grid and an enormous increase in power generation. Elon Musk recently said we might need double the amount of power we’re currently generating if we go electric. He’s not saying this from a position of opposing electric cars. His Tesla dominates that market and he presumably wants to sell even more of them.

Toyota has publicly warned about this twice, while its smaller rival GM is pushing to go electric. GM may be virtue signaling to win favor with those in power in California and Washington and in the media. Toyota’s addressing reality and its record is evidence that it deserves to be heard.

Toyota isn’t saying none of this can be done, by the way. It’s just saying that so far, the conversation isn’t anywhere near serious enough to get things done.

Bryan Preston served as chief of staff at the Texas Railroad Commissioner. The Texas Railroad Commission regulates oil and gas production in the Lone Star State, which is the nation’s top energy-producing state. He is the author of Hubble’s Revelations: The Amazing Time Machine and Its Most Important Discoveries. He’s a veteran and a Texan.

Toyota CEO Agrees With Elon Musk: We Don’t Have Enough Electricity to Electrify All the Cars

Question is, will the others listen or think they are smarter? My bet is on the latter

Originally posted 2021-03-23 13:59:13.

COVID’s Baby Bust

Another informative and interesting article from one of my favorite contributors, Mr. Greg Maresca. He raises some interesting statistics not often talked about. Thank you sir!

By: G. Maresca

As we observe the one-year anniversary of the World Health Organization’s proclaimed COVID-19 pandemic, one gratuitous prediction failed to materialize.

The combined effects of quarantines and lockdowns were supposed to result in a pandemic baby boom. The boom fizzled out quicker than wearing your mask while showering. As a result, the Brookings Institution reported the nation will experience an 8% decline or 300,000 fewer births.

The baby bust’s prevailing wave will wash over a generation and will have a greater effect on the future than the pandemic that spawned it.

Makes you wonder what else the “experts” got wrong throughout a pandemic that has yet to break the top 20 with the Swine Flu of 2009-2010 ranked 18th, according to LiveScience.com.

The reasons are as plentiful as disposable masks. School closures and public-gathering restrictions along with parents dealing with the stress of coalescing work and supervising their children, who no longer attend school five days a week, has taken its toll. The  Institute reports 34% of women want to delay pregnancy, while a study from the IZA Institute of Labor Economics is predicting a double-digit drop in births this year.

According to a New York Times editorial, “Add these missing births to the country’s decade-long downward trend in annual births and we can expect consequential changes to our economy and society in the years to come.”

University of Southern California demographer Dowell Myers told CBS, America’s shrinking fertility rate is an economic crisis. For generations, the media and academia claimed overpopulation was wreaking havoc with the planet, taking the same line of reasoning as Ebenezer Scrooge who griped about reducing “the surplus population.”

Provided there are no people, what exactly is the planet being saved for?

Paul Ehrlich’s “The “Population Bomb” in 1970 wrongly predicted that “Sometime in the next 15 years, the end will come … an utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support humanity.” What did occur, however, was the Western world declared war on fertility and birth rates dropped below replacement.

Demographics have always been the canary in the coal mine. Low birth rates have historically resulted in a loss of population, less ingenuity and economic stagnation as the economy is fundamentally linked to the birth rate. Studies show that for every 1% increase in the unemployment rate is directly linked to a 1% drop in the birth rate. According to a study by the Federal Reserve in 2016, the decrease in fertility rates throughout the ‘60s and ‘70s was the largest factor for declining economic growth after 1980.

If the birth rate is higher than the replacement rate, a nation survives. If the birth rate is below the replacement rate, a nation is dying. The consequences of abortion, contraception, and disdain for the natural law coupled with an aging society has produced a cultural and demographic quagmire with no end in sight.

When the old outnumber the young, who will pay for Social Security and Medicare since existing workers fund those collecting? Moreover, there will be fewer in the work force to pay taxes and keep our economy growing among an aging population.

Throughout the West, governments have tried to increase birth rates through economic incentives like tax credits, paid childcare, and paid parental leave for not just the mother, but father, too. All have been met with little effect as the overall birthrate continues to decline.

Historically, we have solved many of our economic problems that derive from fewer births through immigration – a political football that politicians continue to fumble. One country can increase its demographics with immigration, but globally it remains a zero-sum game.

One of the most interesting and ironic statistics involving birth rates was the one developed country with twice the birthrate of the U.S.: Israel.

Obligation and sacrifice are both four letter words, and byproducts of our loss of religiosity. Many non-religious westerners care little about tradition and history.

Birth rates that have been precipitously dropping for two generations are now below replacement and not expected to increase. The West, having disregarded much of its Judeo-Christian footing, is not interested in reproducing itself as the command to be “fruitful and multiply” has been dismissed along with God who commands it.

Our country no longer recognizes Judeo-Christian values. God helps us.

Originally posted 2021-03-22 16:56:18.

Leftism in Today’s USMC

Received this in an email from a highly respected retired Marine Colonel friend of mine. They are his words, not mine, but I wholeheartedly agree with his assessment.

“I wonder how much longer this Marine will be tolerated by the present “leadership.” When they see he is an attorney maybe they will be careful as to how to shut him up. What’s going on is very difficult to believe.”

From an opinion piece in Newsweek, Saturday 20 March 2021

In the Marine Corps, we don’t have quotas, but we do have goals. And Marines accomplish goals,” my officer-in-charge told me and a few other brand-new second lieutenants, each of us assigned to temporary recruiting duty while awaiting orders to Quantico. The captain then told us we had to sign up a certain number of college-enrolled racial minorities and females. No need to be too strict on physical fitness or academics, he said. Just bring them in.

That was in 2009. Discrimination of this sort has been an ingrained yet lamentable part of the military’s recruitment, retention and promotion practices for many years. But my fellow officers and I couldn’t have imagined that, 12 years later, our disagreement with these policies would get us labeled “racist,” “sexist,” “bigoted” or “extremists” worthy of “eradication” and “elimination” from the USMC. Yet the Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps said as much in his February 22 “core values” memo.

I’m now a major in the Marine Corps Reserve and a member of a formerly all-male infantry battalion.* This past weekend we had our monthly drill period. A few days before drill, the command told us that all scheduled training on Sunday morning was canceled and replaced with a “stand-down to address extremism in the ranks.”

It was left-wing political programming, as direct as it sounds.

We were instructed that there is a Taliban-like threat in the United States called “domestic terrorism.” These terrorists are characterized in part by “anti-government,” “anti-authority” or “abortion-related” extremism and various “supremacist” ideas. None of these terms are defined. The Marine Corps entrusts the government’s HR department to figure that out.

Reporting requirements are key. Do you suspect someone supports an “extremist ideology?” Alert the chain of command. Have you heard a Marine express “contempt toward officials?” Notify the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. Don’t handle anything on your own. Just rat them out. After all, “service is a privilege” and it’d be a shame to lose that privilege for failing to do your part to stamp out “extremists.” One PowerPoint slide posed this imperative in stark terms: “Do you want to be a Marine or do you want to be part of an organization that sows disunity and hate. You cannot have divided loyalties.”

Where did all this come from? Soft liberalism has taken root in the military over several decades. These alarming trends are already well documented in James Hasson’s book Stand Down: How Social Justice Warriors Are Sabotaging America’s Military. But in the wake of President Joe Biden’s election—and more precipitously since the January 6 “insurrection”—bureaucratic progressivism has hardened into iron-fisted wokeism.

January 6 provided the pretext that the government, media and Democratic Party needed to drum up paranoia about white-nationalist domestic terrorism. A month later, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin issued a memo to all Pentagon leadership laying the groundwork for my unit’s Sunday morning indoctrination.

In his memo, Austin announced that the Department of Defense “will not tolerate…actions associated with extremist or dissident ideologies” and ordered all 1.4 million personnel to receive “extremism” training. And he promised it was just the beginning: the “stand-down is just the first initiative of what I believe must be a concerted effort to…eliminate the corrosive effects that extremist ideology and conduct have on the workforce.”

Acting Secretary of the Navy Thomas Harker followed with his own memo. He announced the objective for the entire Navy Department: nothing short of “eradicating extremism.” How? By rooting out “actions that betray our oaths” like promoting “ideology” or “doctrine” that challenges the “gender identity and sexual orientation” agenda or advancing efforts that allegedly “deprive individuals of their civil rights.”

In other words, advocating for the Biblical view of sex and marriage in law and policy is, according to today’s armed forces, tantamount to oath betrayal.

Then came the Marine Corps’ turn to mouth the right things about “extremism.” In late February, the highest-ranking enlisted Marine issued a memo to all hands condemning our institutional failure to “completely eliminate,” “eradicate,” and “conquer” all “racists, bigots, homophobes, and bullies.” Those people “are not welcome” in the military. “It is impossible,” the memo says, “to be both a good Marine and be any one of those things at the same time.” Again, specifics of “those things” are undefined. The author of the memo and the four-star Commandant leave that to the military’s Diversity and Inclusion Task Force.

Finally, on March 5, the Marine Corps released an official directive: no later than April 2, all “commanders and supervisors at all levels will conduct and document a leadership stand-down in order to address issues of extremism in the ranks.” The commandant included a video with the directive, saying, “We must continuously strive to eliminate any division in our ranks.”

We all know what that means: any dissension on any issue that Biden-appointed top brass says is racist, sexist or homophobic will not be tolerated.

There is no doubt as to where all this is headed. The Pentagon’s swift and coordinated “smiting” of Tucker Carlson, who had the gall to “diss” the idea of sending pregnant women to war—an obviously absurd idea to all but the most politically correct officers grasping for a promotion—makes it very clear.

How did we get here? The truth is that today’s military is running on the fumes of our vastly superior forefathers and the ever-shrinking proportion of each branch that still does truly heroic work and accomplishes truly extraordinary feats. The rest is a bloated military-industrial complex given over to Fortune 500-style corporate progressivism.

And if it’s bad in the Marine Corps, imagine how much worse it is in the other services.

America’s enemies are laughing at us. Frankly, we deserve it. But it doesn’t need to be this way. To get back on top, our military must reject “extremism” training, reverse all the progressive policies enacted over the past several years, return to a true meritocracy and focus exclusively on the only thing that matters: winning wars.

We need a military fit for real warriors—not the social justice kind.

Aaron Reitz is a Major in the USMC Reserve, an Afghanistan War veteran and the Texas Deputy Attorney General for Legal Strategy.

* I prepared this article off-duty and in my personal capacity. The views I express here are solely mine and do not reflect those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy or the Office of the Attorney General of Texas.

For the life of me I cannot understand how a dedicated hard charging Marine, Enlisted or Officer could stay in a Marine Corps such as this?

I agree with my friend’s comments in that I also wonder how the leftist leaders in our once great Corps will handle this Major. Bravo Zulu for him speaking out. Get em’ Major.

Originally posted 2021-03-20 16:25:07.

The General’s Son

I know not what years my readers served our once great Corps, but I am of the vintage of the writer of the article below. He and I have history that goes back to 1966-67 and carried forward to the late 1980’s. 

Our first tour together was in Vietnam in 2/1. I “think” he was a lieutenant, but I could be wrong. As a  lowly sergeant in Echo company I know not his assignment; I seem to recall he was a company XO? I attempted to research his assignment in several places, but his all Bio’s aren’t that specific.

The next time was in 9th Marines on Okinawa 1977-78. I was a captain serving as the regimentals Asst OPSO, and he was a major serving as the OPSO with 2/9. That was the start of my feelings concerning this officer. It’s all in the book should you desire more information.

The next time I was a colonel serving as the Training Director at LFTCLant in Norfolk. He was a frocked BG serving as the Asst CG of 2d Marine Division at CLNC. An incident during this tour solidified my opinion of him that still carries on today.

I did see him again a few years ago at a Naples MCL Birthday Ball. I approached him to simply say hello and he did not recognize me. Guess I never made much of an impression on him.  He developed the nick name of “Chuckie Cheese Krulak” by some Marines, including me!

To flush out some memory cells, the one accomplishment he enjoys boasting about was he takes credit for establishing the “crucible” in recruit training.

His daddy was Lieutenant General Victor Krulak (aka “The Brute”). In 1964 he was assigned as the Commanding General of all Marine Forces in the Pacific theater (CG FMF Pac), which of course, included the war in Vietnam. Rumor had it he was looking forward to becoming CMC, but in 1967, LBJ choose Leonard F. Chapman instead — a wise choice in my view. The next year Daddy retired.

Now if you think Daddy did not have something to do with the son becoming CMC, you live under a rock. Seriously!

The disproportionate share of insurrectionists at the US Capitol with a military background are not representative of the armed forces as a whole. Nonetheless, as the divide between the military and US civilian society grows, even more attention will need to be paid to weeding out extremists.

BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA – Revelations that the insurrection at the US Capitol included many former and current members of America’s armed forces have been met with alarm. And yet, as a 35-year veteran and retired commandant of the US Marine Corps, I saw the events of January 6 as the predictable culmination of a growing disconnect between the US military and civilian society.

Once home, many veterans joined organizations like the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the American Legion, where they were surrounded by like-minded people who had served, suffered, and sacrificed together. Jobs were plentiful, and Americans took pride in their country and their military.

Similarly, in the Korean War less than a decade later, though America was never “all in,” it nonetheless had clear strategic goals. As in WWII, US servicemen and women did a remarkable job and came home to an appreciative country.

But then came Vietnam, where most Americans never really knew what their country was fighting for. When the conflict finally came to its ignominious end in April 1975, there was no victory to celebrate (and it certainly was not fireworks that flew from the roof of the US embassy in Saigon). Unlike previous generations, those who fought in Vietnam were not honored for their service and sacrifice. Equally important, the public backlash against the war led to the end of military conscription, which fundamentally transformed the relationship between the military and the American people. The rift created by the shift to an all-volunteer military has grown wider ever since.

After Vietnam, America’s next major war was Desert Storm, in 1990. Again, clear strategic goals were met in a dramatic fashion, and US servicemen and women returned to a proud country – on the cusp of becoming the world’s only remaining superpower with the collapse of the Soviet Union the following year.

Yet by the end of the Gulf War, globalization and technological change had already begun to reshape American society. Old-line industries were being upended, and many manufacturing jobs were disappearing. Although immigration had only a minor effect on the big economic picture, it became a hot-button political issue for those who found themselves out of work. At the same time, a new wave of social-justice issues also started gaining momentum during this period. As a microcosm of America, the US military was not immune to these political dynamics.

It was against this political, social, and economic backdrop that America embarked on its “long war.” Much like Vietnam, the “War on Terror” lacks clear strategic goals and has lost public buy-in over time. Many of those who have fought it subscribe to the apocryphal refrain that while the military was at war, America was at Walmart. After serving multiple tours in Iraq or Afghanistan, servicemen and women who sacrificed years of their lives have received little recognition.

In his 1973 book, The American Way of War, the historian Russell F. Weigley quoted US General George C. Marshall as saying, “a democracy cannot fight a Seven Years’ War,” because any protracted conflict eventually will lose the support of the electorate. The longer a war runs – particularly when it becomes cross-generational – the greater the disconnect between the typical citizen and the soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines who serve.

he War on Terror is an abiding case in point, helping to shed light on the unrest and extremism that burst into public view at the Capitol. A small minority of alienated former and active service members have concluded that something is wrong in the America for which they fought and sacrificed. The past two presidential elections have fueled this discontent and convinced some that they have a duty to confront perceived domestic “enemies.” Political leaders, meanwhile, have exploited these sentiments for their own advantage.

The COVID-19 pandemic also contributed to a perfect storm. As the economy shed jobs – particularly at the lower end of the income distribution – face-to-face interactions were no longer possible. With deepening social atomization, it has become more difficult to experience solidarity. Angst or boredom have afflicted many, and some have found refuge in online communities espousing extremist ideologies. The 2020 presidential election brought the situation to a boiling point. A sitting commander-in-chief openly sought to overturn a free and fair election with lies and intimidation, and a small minority of his acolytes answered his call to action. Really?

But Americans should have faith. Notwithstanding a few outliers, the US military is unwavering in its support of, and dedication to, the US Constitution. Those in its ranks who harbor extremist views will be discovered and dealt with appropriately. Looking ahead, recruitment methods will be strengthened to weed out extremists. Recruiters will have to look not only at candidates’ social-media activity but also at their “body paint” (tattoos) and other potential indicators of extremist or racist sympathies. Interviews will need to be more pointed, and education for active members improved.

While the troubling trajectory of US military-civil relations has created fertile ground for some members to be radicalized, it is important to remember that the insurrectionists represent an exception. The US military has defended American democracy for centuries and will continue to do so, in keeping with our noblest traditions. Yes, I agree general, you can bet on it!

Charles C. Krulak

CHARLES C. KRULAK

Writing for PS since 2020
4 Commentaries

In sum, I categorize this fellow in the same company as Mattis, Allen, and all the other Kool Aid drinking generals viewing the military through their woke eyes and ears. Krulak says the recruiters will take care of this supposed problem. LOL What does he know about recruiting — Nothing!

Originally posted 2021-03-19 10:19:10.

Dear Mom

Taking a break from the Swamp Creatures today. So much going on with that group of scum suckers, it’s difficult to keep up with them without raising my blood pressure dramatically. So, here’s one that if you have teenagers as children, grandchildren, or even as great grandchildren show them this video. Maybe. just maybe, they may get something from it that could change their lifestyle? Most of the teenagers today were just like us, we knew it all; Mom was old and out of date. NOT!

http://viewpure.com/7EyniGvsVg8?start=0&end =0

Originally posted 2021-03-18 12:35:44.