Who are all high fiving his departure.

In the XFL (eXtreme Fighting League), an OK-based regional wannabe UFC outfit.

So you know, he's a FIGHTER!!!

You do know that it is really hard to have a real conversation with someone who is 30 in points lower?

I wondered where it was from. If I ever knew I had forgotten. And it is this book:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket

Smedley Butler is one of my heros

I keep hoping there are more Smedley Butlers out there

it is what keeps me going

I knew the name sounded familiar. That I had actually heard of.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smedley_Butler

but that isn't just due to a lack of degrees. it kind of bothers me, this elitist viewpoint. lots of really good people including liberals that don't have college degrees. sorry EarlG, can't get behind this one. still love you though.

Especially not right after America has started a war bigger than anything we've seen in the last 20 years.

Speaking as someone who does not have a college degree, it just seems like common sense.

it hit me as ridiculing regular people too and I confess I may be a little oversensitive to that, but to me it plays into the latte sipping, coastal elite stereotype when we call out not attaining law degrees.
making fun of his meager life "accomplishments" and comparing home repair skills to the requirements for heading a huge agency is totally the right thing to do.

It plays into the right wing's claims that experts are useless, which has led us to the shitshow we're in now.

Markwayne Mullin has proven that he's a good plumber -- he inherited his dad's plumbing business, and he grew it and sold it for a profit. He also has an Associate's degree in construction technology.

Meanwhile, the last serious head of DHS was Alejandro Mayorkas. Here's his resume before getting the job:

aren't what makes somebody qualified. some kind of real life experience is a better indication.

my issue wasn't about this particular dipshit.

and what else are we going to get with that asshole in the whitehouse anyway? all the degrees in the world aren't going to change the fact that the only people he's going to pick are idiot ass kissers and plastic faced morons.

aren't what makes somebody qualified. some kind of real-life experience is a better indication."

^^
This is untrue for most jobs. Whether it's a law degree or the nurse drawing my blood when I go to Quest Labs. There are various levels of jobs and skills out there. Various degrees that train folks for different things. You can't just say "well, I cut my kid's hair at home, so I'm qualified to do anybody's!" No, we have cosmetology programs with a licensing component by state, so folks have some level of expertise for the service they are charging money for.

I think it is really dangerous that republicans have decided to attack education because now we have a lot of folks in this country who are not valuing education and skills at all. Make no mistake, Baron Trump was not homeschooled. He attended elite private schools and decided to do his business degree at NYU. Very wealthy people know full well that education is valuable, they just don't want our kids to have it.

I presume that would be up to the voters.

It's not elitist to expect your Doctor to have gone to school. And it's just as necessary for a position as powerful as a United States Cabinet Appointment.

yes I would prefer better qualifications for a cabinet position but the reality is there are plenty of shitty doctors out there with degrees from good schools. most any repuke in power out there is clear evidence education and degrees don't make dumb assholes into good people.

"Lincoln" bathroom. what a fugly mess they made of that.

from cool 40s art deco to 80s generic casino

https://www.axios.com/2025/10/31/shutdown-trump-white-house-lincoln-remodel-east-wing

him. BTW,that guy he wanted to fight looks like Butterbean,he would have knocked Mullin on his
ass in two minutes and out in three minutes.

I mean, his business experience is in construction... But of course, since the goal of this regime is to punish the American people and inflict as much pain onto us as possible, I'm sure he'll just take over Kristi's luuv plane and piss on us as he flies over.

...he is remotely qualified to do our "homeland security"?

Do any of these "conservatives" ever even have the thought that maybe--just maybe--they aren't qualified for the job President [REDACTED] puts them up for? (Yes, rhetorical.)

If they took one second to rub two brain cells together it might dawn on them that the reason their predecessor went down in a humiliating ball of career-ending flames was probably because they were also unqualified for the job....

But hey, if [REDACTED] can be President then you can probably figure out how to land a jumbo jet 10 minutes before arrival time.... How hard could anything be?

Because " all 77 districts voted for trump , Oklahoma loves trump" . The only reason mullens got the job was because they won't lose that seat in the Senate, period.

And if he is indeed indigenous he should be mad as hell that ICE has been targeting indigenous people.

PUNCH IT !

so it had MORE POWER and then fed a broomstick down it to demonstrate!

This is just another ignorant drooling Kluxer that needs to be driven out of power and replaced by people who actually have a) a moral compass, and b) a BRAIN and a HEART to act as its North Star.

Markwayne Mullin is completely unqualified to be the head of DHS, but not because the lack of a Bachelors degree. I don’t like this being used as a talking point as it perpetuates the myth that only those with college degrees are qualified for high paying jobs. Trump has a college degree and look where that got us.

Neither my husband nor I have a college degree. Both of us are senior level IT engineers. In fact, my husband is the one his boss calls on when there is a technical problem with a client’s application that no one else on the team can figure out. He’s the least “educated” in the group, many of who have master degrees, but he can troubleshoot the problem like no one else.

The fact that the media is making a high deal out of a lack of a college degree being a huge reason why Markwayne Mullin is not qualified adds to society’s notion everyone must have a degree to be qualified. This adds to the current pressure of our youth feeling the only path to success is a college degree, amassing massive debt in student loans. Markwayne Mullin would have his PhD and still be unqualified. Education, or lack thereof, hasn’t nothing to do with what he isn’t qualified.

If you don’t have the degree, then you cannot call yourself an engineer, only a Designer. I’ve only been able to refer to myself as an engineer because of the engineering degree. I’m not a PE, though. Just my two cents.

Last edited Fri Mar 6, 2026, 07:47 PM - Edit history (1)

I’m talking about my job category/name from my employer. They categorize the roles as Systems Tech Level 1, Systems Ops Level II, Systems Ops Level III, Systems Engineer Level III, Systems Engineer Level IV, Systems Architect. I’m a Systems Engineer Level IV which is why I “call” myself that. “You can’t call yourself an engineer”… geezus.

My point was that having a college degree doesn’t always equate to being competent. And conversely not having a college degree doesn’t equate to incompetence or less skilled. Steve Jobs, for example, dropped out of college after one semester. Michael Dell (Dell computers) dropped out of college at 19. Your focus on title, “Engineer”, sort of proves my point. There are many who never got the official “title” but ran circles around those who did.

Mikewayne Mullin could have a PhD and still be as unqualified as he is now. That was my point.

This is especially true when you are privileged enough to ascend in the real world with a slim talent set.

It is not about a “fancy” degree. I am a mediocre/failed scientist, although after pondering this deeply (and frequently miserably), I concluded recently that I am not unintelligent, spoilt and entitled as I had assumed and indeed been given to understand, but screwed over more than I could admit to myself.

I came to this conclusion on Feb 26, 2026, to be precise, when I found out that my sleazy local hospital had been acquired by Blackstone Inc in 2023..long complicated story…

But to return to the topic at hand, education taught me how not to break shit. Breaking shit casually is the worst part of the dropout culture lionized by Si Valley.

This is true both of the people who never get penalized as well as the ones who do: Bill Gates (Seattle which is not in Si Valley technically, but shares the same mindset and worldview), Zuckerberg, Elizabeth Holmes (who made the mistake of piling onto medicine with the same crap) etc.

To put it in the simplest terms: except in software engineering (minus cybersecurity and some parts of the system that handle work/health/finance data and human life in non-trivial ways), not having an education raises the odds that you break shit when you are privileged and lumber into areas that require skill, expertise and affect a lot of people.

A more well-rounded understanding of reality always helps in the non-virtual world (typically called the real world).

I myself have no use for snobbery. But education does help you give a shit when you are already privileged as all these drop-outs are.

If you are poorer and underprivileged, the odds are low on average that you would ever be in positions where you break stuff. And when you do, you are likelier to end up as the fall guy for our parasitic ruling class. We are generally horribly mean-spirited as a society to the poorer.

But these privileged dropouts have a high nuisance value. It sounds like this guy is fairly well off. He chose not to get an education.

On the flip side education alone will not reduce your nuisance value if you are like JD Vance or Lawrence Summers/most economists. They net a drain on the planet in spite of education.

But on average it can work to reduce the nuisance value of the better off people, who are responsible for a significant portion of our problems, although all humans have the potential to contribute to destruction and hellscapes. Our immense nuisance value to the planet and each other is what distinguishes us from other species.

Such blithering delusional megalomania is less common in the hard sciences outside of software engineering, which unlike hardware engineering or cybersecurity, floats along in fantasy worlds of gaming, llms/other bullshit ai, while propped up by totally inadequate, fraudulent, ossified and corrupt economic models promising eternal growth, in collusion with a corrupt tech press. I am not saying all ai/gaming etc are necessarily bad. Just that most of it is out of touch with our out of control trainwreck.

I was just reading Christopher Ketcham, one of the few sane voices in this bleak wilderness:

https://www.christopherketcham.com/

This is unrealistic..so much of the global economy by now is built on unsustainable extractive mining and without education it is harder to counter the brainwashing of the truisms this society is awash in (which people pick up by osmosis).

Including hands on. In my husband’s case he has built his own lab of sorts at home and tests out database upgrades, DR, automation, etc. He is “the guy” they put to figure out problems people on his team with far more formal education can’t figure out. There is simply no substitute for education reached by hands on.

So, yes, education is important but it can come in forms other than formal “book learning”.

I thought "break shit" meant when someone does something dumb, like corrupt a major database, which just so happened in my world today and will take 3 days to recover, lol. (Wasn't me!) But, then again, if you haven't done something dumb at one point in your IT career, then you haven't been in IT long enough.

I don't think it's necessarily anti-intellectual sentiment, because greed and lack of concern about anything but money don't seem to have anything to do with education, or lack thereof, with these tech billionaires.

It's like a disease with these tech billionaires. It becomes a game to them where they compete with each other to see who can make more money and gain more power. That's how they get their dopamine rush.

I honestly look upon them in horror. I can't imagine living a life where you are constantly scheming and hoarding, and it's never enough, ever. Meanwhile, we all pay the price for their lack of humanity.

At the SOTU address Senator Markwayne Mullin attempted to grab a sign from Congressman Al Green who is 78. The sign was a protest against the recent racist portrayal of blacks as apes. And a very aggressive Mullin rushed at Representative Green nearly assaulting him trying to snatch the sign from him. So he must have been triggered to fight him in defense of that racist meme by being so enraged at Green's protest against it. So he seems quick to favor force over rhetoric. If he becomes head of DHS, we will probably see even more people die under his watch by attacks at the hands of agents of our own country as well as acts of revenge from abroad against Trump's war. If personnel is policy, this regime is fully staffed with bad policy-- both foreign and domestic.

to "work" in the tRump administration is your shit-eating capacity. How much of tRump's "chunky" are you willing to eat, and how much will you thank him afterward for that "privilege?

TypicalTrumper2

an total idiot with an loudmouth aggressive moron. Which by the way can't keep his facts straight when he open his mouth.

I think it was a Jimmy Kimmel monologue the other night that proved that he can't speak for shit. Constantly opens his mouth not knowing what the next word will be. Then has to correct himself.

He tried to get into a fistfight with a union leader on the Senate floor. Bernie Sanders had to intervene.

He has not done anything to me personally, but he meets all criteria necessary to qualify for the classification “total douchebag”.