You’ve heard of the samurai, but you probably don’t know what made them among the most lethally amazing warrior classes in history. The samurai were aristocratic warriors of the noble class followed the seven virtues of the Bushido code and were known for wielding the daishō, the long katana blade and the short wakizashi sword. Samurai were beholden to their masters, and those who refused to follow their masters became ronin warriors (a very common occurrence in the Edo period). Some believe that the ronin were responsible for founding the modern criminal organization, the yakuza.
If you’re a suburban mom in Iowa, your PT is a Cruiser.
And this is what your husband does to unwind. Check out his award-winning ride. (Photo via Flickr,
Rex Gray, CC BY 2.0)
If you’re a tumbler in the circus, your PT is a Barnum.
And your work wife is an elephant. And your carpool is full of clowns.
And if you’re an aspiring Industrial Age robber baron played by Daniel Day Lewis, your PT is an Anderson.
And your metaphor is a milkshake. And you’re drinkin’ it up!
But if you served in the military, your PT is an acronym, meaning Physical Training. And your PT comes with a silent F, which might officially stand for “fitness,” but back on testing days, probably stood for an f-word you used frequently to grumble and bitch.
In the service, PT sucks. That goes without saying. And yet, as a civilian, you’re still doing it. Nowadays, you do PT voluntarily and brag about your preferred brand to anyone who will listen. You pay $100/month for a nice, clean place (close to work!) to do it in. You pay someone extra to play your drill instructor, someone who’s motivational but not too mean. Let’s face it. You have become
enmired in hypocrisy
And there’s only one man who can pull you free.
That man is Max. (Go90
Max Your Body screenshot)
Max doesn’t do PT, he is PT. He’s Physically Titanic, Proactively Tactical, Pyrotechnically Triumphant, and Proudly Terse. He’s a Prehensile Tyrannosaurus with Possible Telekinesis and a full Power Train warranty. Also, he will Put a Trace on your phone if you try to weasel out of this workout.
In this episode, Max is sending you back to PT. No frills. No gym. No equipment. No excuses. Just minute after minute of good old fashioned body weight conditioning drills stacked up in supersets for you to grovel and bitch your way through .
Welcome back to Performance Testing, Puddy Tat.
Watch as Max casually bats aside your nonsense, in the video embedded at the top.
Military recruiters are trained to convince young adults to sign up for service, but many prospects need a more than just a smooth talker to get them to enlist.
We’ve all seen the Air Force recruiting posters of high-spirited airmen, standing tall that make us think about how cool it’d be to become a combat controller. And while those posters are nice, having an epic recruiting video in your arsenal is what might put the final touches on someone’s decision to join.
So, check out six of the best Air Force recruiting commercials, ranked based on how freaking motivating they are.
6. “I Knew One Day”
As kids, we all have dreams of personal success and we all strive to be great. This Air Force recruiting ad showcases how serving will push airmen to and beyond those dreams.
Many of us in college aren’t sure what we want to do after graduation. This epic ad helps guide those newly graduated students into a career in the Air Force.
In this episode of “3 Vets Walk Into A Bar . . .” host Ken Harbaugh talks to guests Mark Harper and Tristan Dyer about what solutions there might be to military suicides.
The P-51 Mustang had a long combat career – seeing action in the Soccer War between El Salvador and Honduras over two decades after the end of World War II. In fact, the Mustang was serving with the Dominican Republic well into the 1980s.
But it nearly made a comeback with the United States Air Force – long after it was retired and sold off after the Korean War. Not for the air superiority role it held in World War II, but as a counter-insurgency plane.
PA-48 Enforcer during Air Force trials in the 1980s. (USAF photo)
But in the years after World War II, the Mustang underwent a metamorphosis of sorts. Aviation historian Joe Baugher noted that the P-51 line was sold by North American to a company known as Cavalier Aircraft Corporation. That company turned the one-time air-superiority fighter into a fighter-bomber, giving the plane eight hardpoints, with a usual warload of six five-inch rockets and two 1,000-pound bombs.
But the design could be pushed further, and Cavalier soon sold the Mustang to Piper Aviation. That company decided to try putting a turboprop engine in the Mustang airframe. That and other modifications lead to the PA-48 Enforcer. By the time they were done, the Enforcer had some Mustang lineage, but was ready for modern counter-insurgency work. It had GPU-5 gun pods – in essence, the Mustang would have two guns delivering BRRRRRT!
The PA-48 at the National Museum of the United States Air Force. (USAF photo)
The Air Force kicked the tires around the Vietnam War, but didn’t buy any. Not that you could blame ’em – there were plenty of A-1 Skyraiders around.
But in 1981, Congress pushed the Air Force into ordering two prototypes. After some testing in 1983, the Air Force decided to pass. One Enforcer found its way to the National Museum of the United States Air Force at Wright-Patterson AFB. The other is at Edwards Air Force Base.
In our post for Part 1 of the MRE season finale, we explored how the task of bringing the Israelis and Palestinians together might, in fact, be facilitated by mutual concern over food — specifically the production of olive oil.
Middle Eastern oil, the happy kind. (Go90
Meals Ready To Eat screenshot)
Host August Dannehl toured a Palestinian-owned olive farm in the West Bank that was being guided by consultants from the
Near East Foundation and USAID’s Olive Oil Without Borders project. Similar aid was being offered to neighboring Israeli olive farmers and, far from begrudging the competition, the Arab farmers seemed relieved just to be able to get on with their livelihoods and happy to wish their Jewish counterparts the same.
In Part 2, Dannehl dives deeper into Israeli military, farm, and food culture, meeting with an Arab gourmet chef who helms a cutting edge restaurant in Tel Aviv, talking to young Israeli Defence Force soldiers about how they view their nation’s foes and learning from diners of both nationalities the frank similarities between Israeli and Palestinian cuisine.
“We’re kind of the same people, you know? We love hummus, they love hummus…” (Go90
Meals Ready To Eat screenshot)
Finally, he returns to West Bank olive country, to the farm of Israeli olive oil maker Ayala Meir in order to attend a traditional kibbutz dinner, joined this time by Meir’s family and a number of their Palestinian friends from across the border wall.
Olive oil is culture. It brings people together. This is now the season that Jewish and Arabs and Muslims and Christians meet together. We all love this product. And it’s a way to know our neighbors. Actually an ancient olive tree is many individuals living in the same house. Every branch has a different root system. —Ayala Noy Meir
A toast to friends and neighbors. (Go90
Meals Ready To Eat screenshot)
The recent success of efforts like Olive Oil Without Borders, not to mention the more live-and-let-live worldview that can be found among younger citizens of both nations, gives the world a glimmer of hope that this, one of the thorniest conflicts in human history, may one day be no more than a story neighbors reminisce about around a communal dinner table.
Magic hour in occupied territory. (Go90
Meals Ready To Eat screenshot)
We sent our “Vet On The Street,” U.S. Marine Corps veteran and comic James P. Connolly to Santa Monica, California, to find out if your average civilian knows how to give a military salute. (Spoiler alert: they don’t . . .)
Nobody likes making his or her bed. For triple-amputee veteran Bryan Anderson, it’s an opportunity to connect with his passion for gymnastics #BryanStyle.
As an artist, Jim Morrison was obsessed with the barriers that exist in our own minds between what we know and the mysteries hidden just beyond. By means of artistic expression, philosophical musing, and a wide variety of mind-altering drugs, he spent his short, bright tenure as a rockstar searching for the breach points in those barriers: the famous “Doors of Perception.”
And that is why The Doors are called The Doors and not The San Fran Drug Lovin’ Band. True story.
As a veteran trainer and WATM in-house ruckstar, Max Philisaire is likewise obsessed with the Doors of Perception, but rather than approaching the breaching issue as a question of which weed strain to choose, Max would prefer that you simply squat so hard that the doors implode.
For the record, Max is only squatting hard enough here to ruffle the drapes. (Go90
Max Your Body screenshot)
Because this is Max. Max’s front door doesn’t have a mat, it has a moat. Max’s doorbell is a grip test. His mail slot is a bazooka. Max hopes Weakness tries knocking, so he can breach his own door outward and sick himself on the whole Weakness sales force.
In this episode, Max is out to rock the socks right off your under-developed legs. Breaching doors is a key skill in modern urban combat and Max wants your quads, hamstrings and glutes to be up to the task. You will proceed through a progression of squat drills designed to send your legs a message, a message that reads: Ten hut, ham hocks!”
**1-up** Boop boop bee do do do. (Go90
Max Your Body screenshot)
Oh. But if you’re thinking of knocking on Max’s door to thank him?
Clear eyesight, pinpoint accuracy, and having overwhelming patience are just some of the key factors of being an effective sniper in the battlefield.
Nine days after Britain declared war on Germany, Francis Pegahmagabow of the Shawanaga First Nation enlisted in the Algonquin Regiment of the Canadian Army, and shortly after left for basic training in Valcartier, Quebec.
Within just a few months, Francis and his unit were transported to the trenches of WWI and began enduring the war’s hardships, including exposure to the first of many German gas attacks.
During his first few engagements, Francis began making a productive name for himself serving as an effective sniper and taking missions alone into “no man’s land,” surprising his commanders.
Climbing in rank and earning respect amongst his peers, Francis found himself in the vital role of the battalion sniper, collecting a variety of intel like enemy machine gun posts, patrol routes, and defensive position locations.
Francis would even sneak his way through enemy lines and cut souvenirs off of German uniforms while they slept, which eventually earned him a promotion to corporal. In 1916, he reverted back to the rank of private at his own petition.
He was wounded in the leg and later caught a case of pneumonia, but hit the ground running upon his return to the front lines, racking up medals for bravery by improving his kill count numbers and running messages back and forth to Allied troop units.
Francis Pegahmagabow in June 1945, (Canadian Museum of History/CBC/Screenshot)
Francis Pegahmagabow passed away on Aug. 5, 1952, but was credited with 378 kills and aiding in the capture of approximately 300 enemy combatants — making him the deadliest sniper of the Great War.
Check out The Great War‘s channel for a more in-depth look at Canada’s most prized sniper of WWI.
We sent our “Vet On The Street,” Marine Corps veteran and comic James P. Connolly, to Santa Monica, California, to find out if your average civilian knows the term for someone who lies about their service (aka “stolen valor”). They have some good ideas … or not.
Let’s be honest – the War on Terror hasn’t seen a lot of air-to-air combat.
In fact, since the start of the millennium, the U.S. military has a grand total of two air-to-air kills — both were UAVs, and one was an Air Force MQ-9 Reaper that went rogue.
Peruvian Air Force AT-29 Tucano. (Photo from Wikimedia Commons)
But the real air-to-air action is taking place south of the border. In Central and South America, the Air Combat Information Group noted at least five planes have been shot out of the sky. In a June, 2016 report, WarIsBoring.com claimed that Venezuela had shot down 30 drug flights in 2015 alone.
An A-37 with the Illinois Air National Guard. Similar planes have scored air-to-air kills over South America – targeting drug smugglers. (DOD photo)
That’s right, folks – the A-37 and AT-27 have over twice the kill total that the U.S. Air Force has notched since Desert Storm. Here’s a video showing one of the shoot downs in South America.
