Bad consequences from the medical profession’s panic/lies over COVID continue to build

The results of COVID policy decisions of our medical community
The results of COVID policy decisions
for our medical community

Several stories in the past week illustrate how the medical community dug itself a deep hole with its dishonest panic and over-reaction to COVID and its response to it.

First the background from 2020: Rather than follow past very successful policies involving new epidemics, whereby only the sick and aged were quarantined while everyone else went about their normal lives, intentionally spreading the new respiratory virus to those with which it was relatively harmless so that the entire population could quickly get herd immunity and thus quickly choke the virus out, our modern medical community, in conjunction with government health officials who had political motives, chose to quarantine everyone, destroying the economy and the livelihoods of millions while actually allowing the disease time to spread to the aged and sick, killing many more than were necessary.

Numerous studies have confirmed the failure of the lockdown and mandate policies during COVID. Sweden for example essentially followed those traditional policies, never locking down or mandating masks or shots. It was blasted for that decision, with many in the health community predicting massive deaths from COVID. Instead, studies have now proven that Sweden had the lowest mortality in Europe from 2020–2022.

That’s the background. The new stories this week illustrate the consequences. First, a recent peer-reviewed study found that trust in doctors has crashed since 2020. The numbers are quite shocking:
» Read more

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A new study, commissioned by NASA, endorses giving NASA more power and money, even as NASA becomes more irrelevant

NASA logo
It’s all about power and control.

Surprise, surprise! A just released report from the National Academies and paid for by NASA has concluded that the agency suffers from insufficient political and financial support, and that the agency’s recent shift to relying on private enterprise should be de-emphasized in order to grow NASA instead.

Two quotes from the report’s executive summary tells us everything we really need to know about its purpose and political goals:

NASA’s shift to milestone-based purchase-of-service contracts for first-of-a-kind, low-technology-readiness-level mission work can, if misused, erode the agency’s in-house capabilities, degrade the agency’s ability to provide creative and experienced insight and oversight of programs, and put the agency and the United States at increased risk of program failure.

In plain English, NASA’s transition to relying on the private sector for the development of rockets, spacecraft, and even planetary missions “erodes” the ability of the agency to grow. That those private companies are actually building and launching things and doing so for far less money, compared to NASA’s half century of relatively little achievement since the 1960s while spending billions, is something the report finds utterly irrelevant. If anything, that success by the private sector should recommend that NASA should shrink, not grow.

The second quote from this NASA-commissioned report underlines its effort to lobby for NASA:
» Read more

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Why would anyone who wants a good college education ever go to Harvard?

Harvard: where you get can get a shoddy education centered on hate and bigotry
Harvard: where you can spend a lot of money
getting a shoddy education

Two stories last week proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that Harvard is at this moment in time the worst American college in the nation, its faculty and staff clearly having no interest in teaching critical thinking. Instead, they are more focused on suppressing dissenting views while making their prime task indoctrinating students into the Marxist and queer agenda that is divorced from reality but eager to discriminate against whites and Jews.

First the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and the College Pulse published their fifth annual College Free Speech Rankings, surveying almost 60,000 students across more than 250 universities. Guess which university ranked at the very bottom of the list, for the second year in a row?

Harvard University retained its position as the lowest-ranked institution for free speech for the second consecutive year. Harvard, Columbia University, New York University all received an “Abysmal” rating for their speech climates. The University of Pennsylvania and Barnard College round out the bottom five. These schools not only have low levels of administrative support for free speech. They also have low levels of student comfort in expressing their views on controversial political topics and a strong bias in favor of allowing liberal speakers on campus over conservative ones.

Next, to prove this ranking was well deserved, it appears that Harvard’s administration has refused to cooperate with the local district attorney and the police in investigating the pro-Hamas rioters who attacked Jewish students during the violence that occurred on campus in October 2023, violence committed in support of the rape, torture, and murder of innocent men, women, and children near Gaza that same month.
» Read more

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Today’s blacklisted American: Democrats demand Elon Musk be censored and arrested simply for disagreeing with them

Robert Reich
Robert Reich, labor secretary under Bill Clinton

They’re coming for you next: Based on the behavior of loyal Democrats in the past five years, no on should be surprised by this story. Several big name Democratic Party supporters have now called for the complete censorship and imprisonment of Elon Musk for the horrible crime of disagreeing with them and campaigning for their opposition.

First we have Robert Reich, that petty dictator who was once secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton and teaches public policy at — you guessed it — the University of California in Berkeley. In an op-ed for the leftist British newspaper The Guardian, Reich claims Musk is “out of control” and for this crime he must be squelched. First he calls for a global boycott of Tesla and X but then tops this demand with some decidedly tyrannical desires:
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A former Democratic Party majority leader in California sees the light

The Democratic Party today
The Democratic Party today

If she of all people can do this, why can’t so many other ordinary Democrats? Gloria Romero, former Democratic Party majority leader in the California state senate from 2005 to 2008, announced publicly yesterday that she has dumped her lifelong allegiance to that party, switched her registration to the Republican Party, and furthermore enthusiastically endorsed Donald Trump for president. From her statement:

“Today I say ‘goodbye, adios,’ I’ve had enough. I am now another near-lifelong Democrat who is joining the growing number of people, including key groups like Latinos, who are leaving the Democratic Party. This is not the Democratic Party that I once championed. I do not recognize it anymore, and I cannot continue. I changed my voting registration today as the sun was rising to Republican, which has, under Donald Trump, become the champion of working people, the big tent. And indeed, I will vote for Donald Trump this fall.”

She proceeded to list the many tyrannical actions taken by the Democratic Party recently that led her to this decision, including its backroom deals that blocked any others from running against Joe Biden during the presidential primaries and then dumped him for Kamala Harris. She also cited that party’s support for the queer agenda, for “locking people up for free speech,” for supporting “endless war” everywhere, and for allowing an invasion of illegal immigrants, including violent felons.

Above all she cited the Democratic Party’s failed school policies, from favoring the school unions that do not educate kids but funnel money into the party’s campaign coffers to encouraging anti-Semitism at universities. “The Democratic party thrives off of this failure shamefully … even as our children fall farther and farther behind in reading, writing and the ability to compete internationally.”

None of her criticisms of the Democratic Party are wrong. » Read more

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Sunspot update: The Sun continues to boom!

It is time for my monthly sunspot update, taking NOAA’s most recent update of its monthly graph tracking the number of sunspots on the Sun’s Earth-facing hemisphere and adding my own analysis as well as some additional details to provide the larger context.

During August the Sun continued to confound the experts, with the number of sunspots not only greater than July’s high count. the August count exceeded the numbers from December 2001 (215.5 vs 213.4), the last time the Sun was this active.

None of the predictions by anyone in the solar science community had predicted this level of activity.
» Read more

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Launch of Jared Isaacman’s second spaceflight scheduled for tonight

The real rocket behind tonight's launch
The real rocket behind tonight’s launch

UPDATE: The launch tonight was scrubbed due to a helium leak in a “ground side umbilical disconnect.” SpaceX is now targeting Wednesday, August 28 at 3:38 AM (Eastern) for the next launch attempt.
Original post:
———————–
At 3:38 am (Eastern) tonight, SpaceX’s will attempt the launch of the Polaris Dawn mission carrying billionaire Jared Isaacman (on his second spaceflight) and three other private passengers (two of which are SpaceX employees), its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida carrying the Resilience capsule on its third flight.

I have embedded a live stream of the launch below. SpaceX says it will begin 3.5 hours before launch. For those on the west coast the timing is reasonable. East coasters will have to do without sleep tonight if they wish to watch.

The mission’s main engineering goal during its five-day duration is to complete the first all private spacewalk using EVA suits developed by SpaceX. Two of the crew will exit the capsule, but all four will be in the suits because the capsule has no airlock and will be entirely vented of air during the spacewalk. The mission’s secondary goal (which it actually will do first) will be to raise the orbit to about 870 miles, the highest orbit for a manned flight since the Apollo missions in the 1970s. During that high orbit the crew will do radiation research, which they will continue after the orbit is lowered. More information about the mission goals can be read here.

The mission’s real goal however has nothing to do with engineering and everything to do with freedom and the American dream. This is an entirely private mission. The rocket is privately built. The capsule is privately built. The launchpad is privately built. The launch crew is privately employed. The astronauts are all private citizens, with one paying the way for the entire flight and two flying as employees of SpaceX to test the operation of its capsule in orbit.

No government money is involved. The government had little or no say on what will happen. The mission will illustrate in very stark terms what the American dream is all about, since it has been conceived, paid for, and created entirely by private citizens following their own dreams and goals.

Hail to freedom! May the bell of liberty always ring.
» Read more

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The fall of DEI accelerates

Are Americans finally waking up and emulating their country's founders?

Fight! Fight! Fight! In the past two months it has become very clear that if Americans are willing to stand up to the left and its Marxist bigoted agenda, Americans will win.

Since late June, five different university systems have shut down their Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion offices. Each is listed below, in chronological order:

And this list does not include the University of Florida, which in March shut down its own DEI office because the state legislature not only banned such offices, it cut the budgets of them.

Though it is true these states are all solidly conservative with legislatures largely controlled by Republicans, this fact on its face proves that voting can make a difference, with Florida the biggest proof. Unlike the other states, Florida had for decades been a swing state between the Democrats and Republicans. Voters however changed that in the past decade, so that today the state legisilature is solidly Republican. The result has been a definitive policy shift acting to eliminate these racist Marxist programs from state-financed universities.

There is no reason similar changes cannot be forced in other battleground states. Nor should we consider it impossible in the coastal states (California, Oregon, Washington, New York, Massachusetts, etc) where Democrats maintain full control. DEI concepts are inherently racist and divisive, and serve only to encourage anger, resentment, and hate across all ethnic groups. Ordinary voters recognize this routinely, when they make the effort to look.

Nor are things changing solely in the unversities because of the willingness of voters to force change. The boycott of Bud Light because of its endorsement of the queer agenda last year is having profound impact on corporate culture. In just the last few months a number of major companies have announced the elimination of their own DEI departments and programs, also listed below in chronological order:

The first three stories are from NPR and CNN, which explains the effort of the headlines to blame the evil “pouncing” of conservatives for this action (thus also implying that conservatives are bigots) . In truth, what these leftist news outlets refuse to recognize is that DEI programs are bigoted by their very nature, designed to favor some races over others merely because of skin color. These programs thus violate numerous civil rights laws, not to mention basic human morality and fair treatment. In addition, it appears the customers of all these companies, not simply conservatives, made it clear they would stop buying these products if company management did not take action to shut down these DEI policies.

Faced with a public backlash and the real threat of lawsuits and legal action against them, these companies are now recognizing that it makes no sense legally, financially, and morally to promote such things.

Trump defiant after being shot
Trump defiant

Increasingly, Americans are no longer willing to make believe that DEI and Marxism has a rightful place on the intellectual landscape. These ideas are garbage and downright evil, and it is a great tragedy that American academia allowed them to flourish on campuses for the past half century. The public is now beginning to make it clear that such ideas need to be sent to the ash heap of history, and legislators, academic administrations, and corporate managements are being forced to listen.

The trend is very obvious. If people actually pay attention and make it clear they will no longer tolerate the imposition of these bigoted leftist policies, those policies can be canceled and eliminated. One simply has to have the courage to fight, as Donald Trump said with such defiance immediately after getting shot.

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Trump indirectly tells us the swamp WILL be drained if he is re-elected

Trump defiant after being shot
Trump defiant

Today I saw a short clip of Donald Trump answering a question about whether he is getting the normal intelligence briefings traditionally given to all presidential candidates. His answer was startling:

Well I could [get them] if I wanted them, but I don’t want them. … They come in, they give you a briefing and then two days later they leak it and then they say you leaked it. The only way to solve that problem is not to take them.

On its face Trump is simply telling us he is now being careful with whom in the government he deals with. On a deeper level, he is showing us that he is no longer the naive businessman he was in 2016. At that time he wanted very much to reform Washington, but he thought he had the good will of the people in Washington to help him do it. (Remember, for most of his life he was a dedicated Democrat with many friends on the left.)

Instead, he found himself stymied and back-stabbed and attacked on all levels. » Read more

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The continuing stalemate in the Ukraine War

In the past few months the situation in the war between Russia and the Ukraine has had some significant battlefield events that suggested the situation is becoming unstable. First, Russia began an offensive campaign along the northern border of the Ukraine near the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, pushing back into the same territory it had abandoned during its major retreat and defeats in the fall of 2022.

This offensive, combined with the gains Russia has made in the past few months in eastern Ukraine, suggested that it had completely recovered from those 2022 defeats, and was now moving forward in its effort to conquer the Ukraine in its entirety. At least, that’s how it seemed from a cursory outsider’s view.

Then, last month, the Ukraine launched its own offensive across the border into Russia’s Kursk region, the first time any Russian territory had been invaded since Russia’s unprovoked invasion of the Ukraine in February 2022. That same cursory view suggested that the situation was becoming unstable, and that Russia now faced a serious problem of its own.

To me, the only way to find out how serious these changes are since my last Ukraine War update six months ago, in February 2024, is to do another, and to compare the territorial changes on a map, as I have done every time previously.

Not surprisingly, a look at the map brings clarity to the situation.
» Read more

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Let’s take a look at the college teachers and students who support Hamas and the torture and murder of little children

Hamas vs Israel
Apparently too many college students and teachers
support Hamas despite these very obvious facts.
Courtesy of Doug Ross.

Fight! Fight! Fight! At the website Campus Reform one of its reporters, Michael Duke, has been doing magnificent work in identifying in detail college by college the students and professors who rioted this spring on numerous university campuses in support of the terrorist organization Hamas and its October 7, 2023 massacre of more than 1200 people, including the rape, torture, and murder of men, women, children, and babies.

I thought it was time to do the public a service and provide a link to all of Duke’s reports, so that future employees will have a handy place to go to find out whether the future college prospect before them thinks it is acceptable to kill babies in support of an ideology. Duke’s work has only begun, but it appears he is trying to identify every single pro-Hamas rioter this year who was arrested. His list so far:
» Read more

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More bad journalism, this time about a hypothesized “underground ocean” on Mars

How today's journalists analyze potential stories
How today’s journalists analyze potential stories

Today’s example of modern bad journalism from our dismal mainstream press concerns a paper published yesterday in the journal of the National Academy of Sciences describing the possibility of liquid water in the Martian “mid-crust,” based on InSight seismological data and computer modeling.

I read the paper yesterday and decided that there really wasn’t much there. While the data suggests a lot of liquid water might be saturated within the fractured rocks of this deep underground crustal layer six to twelve miles down, the paper was based on many assumptions and had many uncertainties. It is also not confirmed by other researchers, and remains nothing more than educated speculation at this point.

Not surprisingly, our ignorant mainstream press today has immediately declared the discovery of a vast underground ocean on Mars, ready for the taking and possibly harboring life!
» Read more

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Trump to sue Justice Department over Mar-a-Lago raid and subsequent indictments

Trump defiant after being shot
Trump defiant

Fight! Fight! Fight! According to a report today by Fox News, Trump’s lawyers are about to sue the Justice Department for $100 million, claiming the Mar-a-Lago raid and subsequent now-dismissed indictments by Jack Smith (who the courts have ruled was appointed illegally) were done with the “clear intent to engage in political persecution.”

Trump attorney Daniel Epstein filed the notice to sue the Justice Department. The Justice Department has 180 days from the date of receipt to respond to Epstein’s notice and come to a resolution. If no resolution is made, Trump’s case will move to federal court in the Southern District of Florida.

…Epstein argued that the DOJ violated Florida law, intrusion upon seclusion, which is recognized as a form of invasion of privacy. Intrusion upon seclusion includes “an intentional intrusion, physically or otherwise, into the private quarters of another person” and the intrusion “must occur in a manner that a reasonable person would find highly offensive.”
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Florida proves that too many professors at public colleges might be better employed as dish washers

Most of all beware this boy.’
As noted by the Spirit of Christmas Present in Dickens’ The Christmas
Carol
, “This boy is ignorance, this girl is want. Beware them both,
but most of all beware this boy.” It appears Florida has taken this
warning to heart. Click for movie.

Last year the Republican-controlled state government in Florida passed legislation requiring its public universities to do what are called “post-tenure reviews” on all their tenured professors every five years, as part of an effort to eliminate what Governor Ron DeSantis called “deadweight” and “unproductive tenured faculty.” The bill not only limited the ability of professors to protest termination decisions, it was also aimed at eliminating “diversity, equity, and inclusion” programs across the board.

At the University of Florida the first round of tenure review has now produced some startling numbers, literally proving DeSantis’ claims.

The report said that, out of 262 professors up for review, 31 “either retired, entered retirement agreements or resigned during the review period.” A further 34 didn’t meet expectations and five were dubbed unsatisfactory. Add those categories up, and it’s 27 percent.

In other words, when faced with a real review of their qualifications, more than a quarter of the professors either quit or were removed. Though it is unclear whether those who quit did so because they knew they’d be fired anyway, that conclusion is a reasonable one to make. By resigning, they avoid having a stain on their record and thus increase their chances of getting work elsewhere.
» Read more

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Thank you to all who donated to Behind the Black in July

Scroll down for the most recent posts. See also this post about the new print edition of Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8.

My July fund-raising campaign for Behind the Black, celebrating its 14th anniversary, is now over. Thank you to everyone who donated or subscribed. And that includes those who contributed $2 to those who contributed hundreds. I always find it impossible to find the words to express my gratitude for this support, especially since no one has to pay me anything to read my work.

Thank you again! I will leave this announcement at the top of the page through the end of this week.

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Sunspot update: In July the Sun produced the most sunspots in almost a quarter century

Every month since this website began fourteen years ago, when NOAA posts its update of its monthly graph tracking the number of sunspots on the Sun’s Earth-facing hemisphere, I post my own analysis, adding some details to provide the larger context.

Of all those updates — numbering about 168 — this month’s is possibly the most significant. Since around 2008, the Sun began a long period where it was unusually quiet, with the solar maximum that occurred in 2014 possibly the weakest in two hundred years. Before that weak maximum begun, half the solar science community predicted it would be a very powerful maximum, while half predicted a weak maximum. Both got it wrong, though the weak prediction was closer though still too high.

When it came time to predict the next solar maximum, expected around 2025, that same solar science community was once again in disagreement. Most approved a NOAA science panel prediction in April 2020 calling for another weak minimum, similar to the one in 2014. A few dissented, however, and instead predicted in June 2020 that the maximum would be one of the strongest ever. In April 2023 however those dissenters chickened out, and revised their prediction downward, still forecasting a peak higher than the NOAA prediction but no longer anywhere as intense.

Based on what happened on the Sun in July, they should have had more faith in their earlier prediction.
» Read more

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Charges against pro-Hamas rioters have routinely been dropped nationwide

The instruction manual of the left
The instruction manual of the left

According to an excellent report today at the website Campus Reform, charges against more than 300 pro-Hamas rioters that illegally occupied and damaged campuses at eleven different universities nationwide have been dropped by prosecutors.

The list is discouraging, to put it mildly:

  • School of the Art Institute of Chicago: 80 criminal charges were dropped
  • University of Texas at Austin: 79 criminal charges were dropped
  • Indiana University: 56 criminal charges were dropped
  • Columbia University: 31 criminal charges have been dropped
  • California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt: 27 criminal charges have been dropped
  • University of Minnesota: 9 criminal charges have been dropped
  • University of New Hampshire: 8 criminal charges have been dropped
  • The City University of New York: 7 criminal charges have been dropped
  • Northwestern University: 4 criminal charges have been dropped

The reasons why prosecutors have dropped these charges are manifold. In some cases (such as in California, Illinois, and New York), the prosecutors were partisan Democrats who approved of the riots, and thus acted to protect the rioters by dropping the charges. In several cases however the prosecutors expressed extreme unhappiness with their own action, stating that they did so reluctantly because they did not think they could win in court.
» Read more

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My heart bleeds: The new head of the Secret Service is hurt because his people are “hurting”

New Secret Service head Robert Rowe testifying before the Senate
New Secret Service head Robert Rowe
testifying before the Senate

During testimony earlier this week before a Senate committee, the new head of the Secret Service, Robert Rowe, was asked by Senator Marsha Blackburn (R.-Tennessee) to comment on the whistleblower email that claimed the only interest of the agency’s top five supervisors was to cover their ass, not fix the incompetence that allowed a sniper to kill one innocent bystander and injure three others, including presidential canddate Donald Trump.

Rowe’s response summed up his misplaced priorities perfectly, and showed the utter truth of the whistleblower’s accusations.

Blackburn: I want to know how you feel about the fact that employees in your agency are worried about covering their behind. And not worried about protecting a former president.

Rowe: Thank you, Senator. So, I am hurt by that email, but not in the way you think I’m saying it. I’m hurt because my people are hurting right now. … My agency is hurting. Um, Emotions are raw.

How horrible. People at the Secret Service are “hurting!”
» Read more

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Unlike the white community, a real politcal conversation is finally happening among blacks

The moment on Anton Daniels podcast when things changed
Click for full video.

Earlier this week a short clip was posted on a lot of conservative media from a zoom podcast that I think was organized by black podcaster Anton Daniels. In that short clip, one of the participants, a black woman going by the label “Page” said that she planned to vote for Kamala Harris solely because “She is a black woman.” She felt it important to do so to finally have a black woman as president.

The image to the right captures the reaction of the other participants, almost all of whom immediately showed either disgust or contempt or amusement by her words. Their verbal response began with several noting repeatedly that Harris isn’t even black, but then Anton Daniels broke in to note that this is irrelevant and beside the point. He then gave a short but very educated lesson on the failures of identity politics, the Democratic Party, and Kamala Harris. I have transcribed the full exchange below, highlighting what I consider the most important thing said during the entire exchange, because it tells us something very very profound. And you will need to look close, because that thing is almost certainly not what you expect it to be.
» Read more

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Secret Service agent reveals the edifice of incompetency and stupidity that permeates the entire federal government

You would have to live under a rock, or rely entirely on mainstream media news sources, to not know that in the past twenty years the work of most federal government agencies had almost always been incompetent and badly managed, resulting in failed projects and vast amounts of money spent to get nothing accomplished. Only two recent examples come to mind immediately:

The second story is an even more egregious failure. After three years the program has so far failed to provide any American internet service. In that same time period SpaceX’s Starlink service, by itself, provided millions service worldwide, and did it for far less.

Letter of condemnation by secret service sniper
Letter of condemnation by secret service sniper. Click for original.

This reality of governmental failure was driven home even more harshly today when it was revealed that a Secret Service agent has sent out an agency-wide email [enhanced screen capture to the right], condemning the entire supervisor leadership at that agency, and insisting that he will continue to speak up publicly “… until 5 high-level supervisors (1 down) are either fired or removed from their current positions.” He went on to note that

I have conveyed these thoughts to not only supervisors (to include the current Captain of CS [Counter Snipers], but those responsible for training us (SOTS/CS). Only to be brushed off as those with less experience somehow knew more than me.”

» Read more

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