by Patrick ➕follow (60) ignore (2)
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The Secretary of Defense really got the Times exercised yesterday. The Gray Lady ran a story yesterday huffingly headlined, “Hegseth Mandates Uniform Fitness Standards for Combat Roles.” In other words, he’s axing the easy tests for gals.
See if you can spot the off-the-chain cuckoo contradiction in the article’s first paragraph. I won’t even highlight it— let’s see if you can spot it yourself:
The Pentagon this week ordered the elimination of lower physical
fitness standards for women in combat units, a move that is likely
to hinder the recruitment and retention of women in particularly
dangerous military jobs.
Catch it? The Times strained to complain that, if the Army yanks watered-down fitness tests —tests designed to keep soldiers alive— fewer women will qualify for, wait for it, particularly dangerous jobs.
One wonders whether the Times simply hates the military, and secretly wants soldiers to die. ...
The story suggested a Marine example. In one test, male Marines must do 3 pull-ups or 34 push-ups in two minutes. Female soldiers can open their mascara cases ten times in sixty seconds or … just kidding! The fighting ladies strain to complete one push-up or eke out 15 push-ups in two minutes.
How do you suppose the guys feel about that? That’s not just a rhetorical question. Morale is an unquantifiable but critical war-fighting factor. Double standards devastate morale in the military same as everywhere else.
The job of the US Armed Forces is not to host drag shows, to transform foreign cultures, but to spread democracy to everybody around the world at the point of a gun.--DJT on 05/24/2025 at West Point
Russia’s armed forces have suffered a surge of HIV infections during the war in Ukraine, which has been attributed to fatalistic soldiers having unprotected sex and using drugs.
The number of HIV cases in the military has shot up since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, including a fivefold increase by autumn that year.
By the end of 2023, there were 20 times more HIV diagnoses among Russian soldiers compared with before the war.
The peak came during mobilisation, according to a Military Medical Journal report from last year. The report did not include specific figures.
These high transmission rates show “HIV is not just passed on in war through wounds and their treatment”, a report in Carnegie’s Russia and Eurasia Centre said.
Unprotected sex and sharing needles to inject drugs are “thriving in a fighting army of men who live every day as if it were their last”.
Russia has long battled with high rates of HIV among the general population; it ranks among the top five countries with the highest rates of infections.
There are more than 1.1 million registered HIV cases, but some estimate the true number could exceed 1.5 million due to underdiagnosis and patchy data.
Figures from the UNAids agency show that Russia accounted for nearly 4 per cent of global HIV infections in 2021, despite having less than 2 per cent of the world’s population.
Vadim Pokrovsky, the head of Russia’s Federal Methodological Centre for HIV/Aids Prevention, said in December that about 30,000 Russians of working age died annually from HIV.
Most deaths occur among people aged 25 to 50, adding extra pressure to the country’s shrinking labour force.
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