Author: navygrade36bureaucrat

Cancel culture comes for beer

Armed Forces Brewing Company Tap Room, from their website

I don’t think too much about Civic Leagues, since the one for my neighborhood isn’t very active. I’ve spoken at some before in nearby neighborhoods, and most seem pretty tame, simply trying to connect people with their local officials and help the cops keep better track of crime.

Then there is Norfolk. Because Norfolk always seems to do something stupid, and in this case it was to not recommend that Armed Forces Brewing Company open a taproom in their city.

Was it because AFBC was bringing alcohol to a residential neighborhood? Nope. The location previously hosted O’Connors Brewing.

Was it because AFBC tried to use bad paperwork, bribes and other tactics to flout the rules? Nope. None of those shenanigans seemed to take place.

Civic League people were mad about statements made by AFBC spokesman Rob O’Neill. According to Joe Hamm, the vice president of the League, these were really bad!!!

“So a business that comes in and has insinuations of threats and violence, intimidation through guns in their marketing, does not align with our vision for having a healthy neighborhood and healthy city,” Hamm said.

Threats and Violence!! And using guns in their marketing!?! Better not tell the US Navy to use any guns in its marketing…but I digress. What did Rob say that was so bad?

Well, he was mean to drag queens. From X:

Alright. The U.S. Navy is now using an enlisted sailor Drag Queen as a recruiter. I’m done. China is going to destroy us. YOU GOT THIS NAVY. I can’t believe I fought for this bullshit.

Uhm….sure, you may disagree with his statement, but is it violent? I don’t see Rob calling on people to kill anyone, certainly not any drag queens. I scrolled through Rob’s feed, and while he’s brash and swears a bunch, I didn’t see him once suggesting someone be killed.

Meanwhile, supporting Palestinians and BLM supporters that ACTUALLY hurt and/or killed people is totally fine.

Did people grow up to become huge wimps, or are they calling “violence” on purpose whenever they hear someone say something they don’t like?

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.

Star Wars deserves better: an Ahsoka Analysis

Note: I haven’t watched the Season 1 finale yet.

The latest Star Wars movies and TV shows suck. I watched Episode 7 with my son on opening night, and while I gasped along with everyone when Han Solo died, I was left wanting. At the time, I said “Man, Rey seems a bit overpowered and kinda dull.”

Well, she only got more overpowered and dull as the series went on. The Ahsoka TV series is, sadly, the same way. Now I should mention I love the character of Ahsoka that was built up in the Clone Wars animated series. She started off as a kinda-snotty little kid, and I didn’t care for her attitude, but when she lost a bunch of clone troopers by not following orders, as a military officer, I felt very much in her shoes. She grew on me as the seasons went on, becoming a more interesting character that worked hard to overcome her flaws. When she went on trial and was kicked out of the Jedi Temple, only to be found innocent and eventually offered to be readmitted, I shed a tear when she rejected the offer and walked away. She was a cool character with believable motivations and a character arc I enjoyed following.

I liked her so much I purchased her light saber set while at Disney, and they hang up in my office. So when Disney announced an Ahsoka series, I was thrilled, and quite willing to give it the benefit of the doubt.

And sadly, I wasn’t happy.

Ahsoka is nowhere near as interesting in the TV series as the Clone Wars. By far the best character is Baylan Shen, with Ahsoka a distant second, and almost everyone else far from that.

So I wondered, why is Ahsoka, a character I’m already primed to like, so bad? I think it boils down to two things:

  1. People taking dumb actions
  2. No consequences for the “good guys”
  3. Weak bad guys with poor motivations

Let’s start with dumb actions. The season opens with two dark jedi, Baylan Shen and Shin Hati, requesting to come aboard a New Republic jail vessel. The ships commander thinks their transmitter is fraudulent, so he personally plans to meet the ship with a security detachment and arrest them. Obviously, this goes horribly wrong, and Baylan and Shin lay waste to everyone and rescue a prisoner on the ship.

How many ways is this wrong? First, if you suspect a ship has ill intentions, why don’t you BLOW IT AWAY AT A DISTANCE??? Nobody, and I mean nobody, in the military wants to get close to the enemy if they have a safe way of killing them at a distance. This decision makes no sense and we’re only 10 minutes into the episode.

Then the captain brings a security detail with no armor and light weapons, which they don’t even have pointed at the ship. Baylan walks right up and gets within arms length of the captain, and nobody thinks this is a bad idea?? If you were to walk up to a military gate looking even remotely suspicious, you’d have at least one pistol trained on you. How are the guards not nervous and on-edge? Why would they let a potentially dangerous person, or at least a person that they don’t know anything about, get within choking distance of their captain?

None of this makes sense. It’s totally illogical and used to drive the plot forward. It would be more believable if Baylan snuck onboard, or boarded stealthily, or hired a band of pirates to hijack the ship. You’d still get a cool fight scene, and it would make far more sense. We get illogical decisions all throughout Ahsoka: stormtroopers don’t shoot at Ezra on site, robots trying to steal a map decide to try and blow it up instead, etc. etc. etc. None of these actions make sense, and it makes the show feel cheap.

There are never consequences for the good guys. Sabine runs off with the mystical map and eventually takes a lightsaber to the gut, but then she’s fine at the beginning of the next episode. Somehow a magic laser sword that CUTS THROUGH HARDENED STEEL only leave a tiny mark when its rammed into your stomach. Like, really? I don’t believe that at all.

Protagonists have to suffer consequences or else the audience doesn’t get invested in them. Look at Tony Stark in Iron Man. He’s a playboy millionaire in the beginning of the movie, banging hot chicks while riding around in limousines. And then in the first half hour of the movie, he gets captured, tortured, hooked up to a battery, and has to build his way out of a mess. Along the way, he loses a friend that is a far more ethical and moral person than him, all because Tony wasn’t strong or fast enough to save him. It’s heart wrenching. We got from thinking Tony’s a total loser to rooting for the guy to punch terrorists on his way out of a cave.

More importantly, consequences have to be permanent. Tony Stark has metal shards that must be held outside of his heart. He turns this otherwise bad turn of events into a power source for a suit to do good. He uses his bad consequences to grow and become a better person in the end. But Sabine, Ahsoka and Ezra never do. Nothing is permanent. Lightsaber gut stabs, isolation in another galaxy, getting knocked off a cliff…nothing permanently damages our heroes. They are never in danger, and thus they never need a reason to grow.

Lastly, our bad guys are weak. Grand Admiral Thrawn in the Timothy Zahn books is amazing. He’s cunning and smart. He takes over planets through trickery. He rebuilds the Empire. He defeats enemies by studying their art and understanding them as a person. Thrawn always has a plan B. He’s like Bismark, always scheming, always taking advantage of the situation, always one step ahead.

Thrawn in Ahsoka? Not imposing at all. Why even be scared of him? He lays mines for space whales…that fail. He uses some mystical Night Sister magic to try and ambush Ahsoka…which fails. He sends his troops to kill Sabine Wren and Ezra…fails (why didn’t he kill Ezra earlier, btw??). He’s not imposing. None of this plans come off.

In less than 15 minutes in Star Wars: A New Hope, Darth Vader lifts a dude in the air and chokes him to death. He is imposing and downright frightening. He never loses his cool, and he ALWAYS wins, right up till his last fight with Luke and the Emperor. He’s imposing, intimidating, and when he is finally defeated, we all sigh in relief at how HARD he was.

Thrawn in Ahsoka? Or even Thrawn in Rebels? Lame. It’s not significant when our heroes beat him because he’s just not imposing.

I wish Disney would stop focusing on “ooooo oooo we’ve got a female character!!” and instead build us cool protagonists and scary villains that interact in a cool setting with an intriguing story. That’s what we need now more than ever.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.

Navy leadership…always ready with misinformation

There was a time I truly believed that the Admirals in the Navy cared about Sailors and were smart enough to run the Navy efficiently and effectively. Early in my career I worked in an Admiral’s office, for a person who I grew to admire and felt could effectively fight our adversaries and win.

Nowadays, I can’t find a single Admiral that I would want to follow into battle. None. I’ve seen firsthand how our current Admirals obsess over minute details on PowerPoints that don’t matter, refuse to hold civilian employees accountable, and grossly abuse the military justice system. These so-called leaders got away with this gross mismanagement by running the infrastructure built up by previous generations into the ground. Well, that infrastructure is finally crumbling, with Navy buildings and ships rusting and rotting away, and the young people that once manned those buildings and ships leaving in droves. The Navy will miss its recruiting goals by 7,000, and you would think that would cause Navy leadership to think about all the surveys in the past that pointed to straightforward ways to improve the Navy.

Let’s be honest, you, dear reader, already know what’s coming next:

According to Franchetti, it will take “years” for the Navy to recover from these promotion delays, which have resulted in acting commanders leading Naval Surface Forces, Naval Air Forces, the U.S. Naval Academy, among other commands.

“As we look right now, our Navy is facing challenges all around the globe, threats from our adversaries,” she said. “We want to have the right people with the right level of experience in those positions. And as we continue to not have the confirmed people that we’ve nominated with that experience, we’re going to continue to see an erosion of readiness.”

It’s going to take “years” to recover from promotion delays? You mean delaying promotions of all the people that screwed up the Navy so far? That caused us to decommission ships from 2016? That broke our shipyards and crews? That continue to IA Sailors even today, so that they don’t get a shore duty break from arduous sea duty?

Never mind that the SOLE REASON for the hold on nominations was the DoD pushing commands to spend travel money (your taxpayer dollars) on abortion. ADM Franchetti fails to address that issue, and instead makes blatantly false statements about the effects of delaying promotions.

Which, BTW, aren’t delayed. The Senate could proceed and vote on each one individually, but that would open these people up to questioning about their past records…something most of them don’t want to do. Pesky Senators might ask “Hey Admiral, why did you run our shipyard into the ground?” or “Why did you make openly racist statements in the name of DEI policy?” These questions are pertinent, relevant, and totally undesired by today’s Admirals.

If you can, please write to your elected federal officials and tell them you aren’t happy with how the existing Defense Department Generals and Admirals ran our military, and ask them to do a bit of house cleaning. The media spins these stories totally one-sided. Much of the mediocrity in today’s military leadership cuts across party lines, so its an issue that both Republican and Democrat Senators and Representatives need to solve. Unless you write, and write a lot, its going to be swept under the rug.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency. According to those agencies, everything is fine, and the Defense Department is doing a great job! Nothing to see here, move along now peasant!

I’m tired of polishing turds in the Navy

When I first joined the Navy, I served onboard the USS HAMPTON, a nuclear fast-attack submarine. You would think that would be super cool. My non-Navy friends were certainly impressed. But the sad reality was that being on a submarine sucked.

I started in the shipyard, which was an absolute hell-hole of a place to work. Our submarine was torn apart, and we had to always be ready for the shipyard workers to stop by to begin working. Instead of scheduling a time, they would often come down early, and if we weren’t ready, would then tell their boss it was our fault they couldn’t work. They did this to score overtime work on the weekends or after hours, while making us stay late. My days started at around 5:30 am and didn’t end until 6 pm. That didn’t include the drive time either.

At least I wasn’t a woman…some of my fellow female officers would get constantly cat-called and risked sexual assault walking into some shipyard environments. We’re talking legitimate, in-your-face sexism, not the made-up stuff of college students at Harvard. On top of that, if you didn’t leave before the sun went down, you risked your car’s windshield getting smashed in. Good-ole’ Portsmouth, Virginia! Thieves would smash in your windshield just for fun and not even steal anything, and the shipyard and Portsmouth police did nothing.

If you wonder why I wasn’t surprised that Sailors committed suicide in Newport News shipyard…well, now you know.

That whole time, I was told to suck it up and make the best of it. The situation is a big, fat turd, and my job was to polish it and make it shine. The smart people above me, the Captains and Admirals of the world, assured me they were doing their best to make it better. I couldn’t possibly question them!

Image generated by Bing AI

So polish I did! And I made it work.

During my flying tour, I spent 10-11 hours in a plane that had no working toilet. They had a toilet, but the Navy wouldn’t send the equipment to pump it out, so we pooped in a bag and pissed in a tall cylinder that we hand-carried out and dumped in the grass. Even the ladies peed in the tall cylinder (and I have no idea how they did it). The Navy HAD pumping equipment, but the powers that be said we didn’t need it, so we never got any. Now, next to us was an Air Force plane that had pumping equipment and didn’t hand carry out their piss in a giant cylinder after every flight. We were flying out of Greece, so it’s not like the plane landed in a hard-to-resupply area.

Polish that turd, I was told, by the supposedly smarter Captains and Admirals. So polish I did!

At a large staff, I put up with a tyrant Captain who seemed to simply enjoy screaming at us over nothing. He played favorites with the staff and pitted people against each other until he was finally fired. You would think that would make it better, but it didn’t, because then I had to help restructure and fix everything he broke.

Polish that turd, I was told, and I did, a bit begrudgingly this time.

Later in my career, I ran a small detachment of Sailors and worked to fix their aging building. The basement ceiling would literally shake when we operated machinery, and the base’s engineering team simply added some scaffolding to hold up the ceiling.

Yup, scaffolding. “It’s a bad situation, that’s the best we can do. You’ll just have to polish that turd.”

Well, I challenged that notion. I worked an engineering study and eventually secured the $6.6 million to fix the building, despite the obstinate objections of the base engineering team. That’s when I realized I’d been polishing turds for no reason. The Navy HAD most of the resources to fix these issues, but they spent them on fancy Admiral events, attended by the smartest Captains, who smoozed up to Senators and Representatives to get their pet projects funded. Whether it was the Littoral Combat Ship, the F-35, or a host of poorly designed boxes whose primary job was to send money into the pockets of Lockheed Martin while claiming Sailors were too stupid to operate them, it was all the same: wasted money that would be better spent elsewhere. This is the same Navy that was happy to use command travel money to pay for travel expenses for Sailors to get an abortion, but couldn’t find the money to fix barracks room issues at the shipyard.

So now I’m at my last command. My hope was to do something useful on my way out the door. Instead I found myself being stuck with all the crappy jobs nobody wants to do, then getting told I’m an idiot by a Captain that definitely acts like he’s smarter than everyone in the room. “You’ll need to polish that turd” he told me the other day.

I didn’t join the Navy to polish turds. I’ve been constantly told to make other, stupid ideas work while the “smart” people get fancy offices and plenty of resources. I’m not alone in this either. All of the officers I looked up to, the one’s I would willingly go into battle with, are all leaving in droves. They tell me they are tired of putting up with mediocre leadership that won’t put in the time to build real solutions, but instead look for “quick wins” (oh how I hate that term!).

Nobody joins the Navy to polish turds. We should stop asking our Sailors to polish poop and actually put resources where they belong.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.

AI will only steal your job if you’re an office drone

There seems to be a lot of angst about Artificial Intelligence stealing people’s jobs. Already there are reports of journalists and reporters being laid off and AI used to produce click-bait headlines and bland content. The Screen Actors Guild is still on strike, something I get constantly reminded of while I browse YouTube, and its partially over AI-created content. Even the anti-work subreddit has posts about ChatGPT affecting workers.

As someone getting ready to leave the military, I’ve been asked if I think AI will make it hard for me to find a job.

My answer is a resounding NO.

First, as an author, I’ve used ChatGPT 4.0 to generate content for an upcoming training book. While ChatGPT is great at condensing materials and giving me a good starting point for technical books, it doesn’t produce interesting content. I still have to tweak what it outputs to turn things into compelling stories that people want to actually read. If you’re an author that cranks out multiple crappy books, then yes, ChatGPT is going to replace you. But if you write compelling stories that are interesting to human beings, then its unlikely you’ll lose your fan base.

BTW, shameless plug for you to buy my book, or the audio version if you need something to listen to in the car on your way to work.

Second, as a guy that installs networks and WiFi in my spare time, AI is no-where close to doing the renovation work I do. There are some robots like Spot that can perform some functions, but these excel at things that are repetitive and mundane. Problem solving work, like figuring out how to run an ethernet wire from one end of a historic church to another, still needs a human being to both figure out the solution and manually put it in.

The same goes for plumbing, electrical, locksmiths, and even painters. Those jobs that the laptop class looked down on because they don’t require four-year degrees are still very much in demand and won’t be replaced by AI anytime soon. Funny enough, the same people thumbing their noses at Joe the Plumber and telling them to learn to code are now being replaced by AI. Perhaps they should learn to work with their hands instead of getting expensive manicures?

In the military, AI could replace the hoards of worthless Admirals and Generals we have. Hey, maybe Senator Tuberville should propose cutting 50% of our flag officers and replacing them with a multi-license copy of ChatGPT 4? If we add the PowerPoint integration, we’ll get better products in less time and are far more effective!

You think I’m kidding, but you haven’t seen the idiocy that hides behind the stars on the collars of our top “leaders.” Trust me, I’d welcome my new robot overlords over most of our current flag officers.

Your job will get replaced by AI if what you do is repetitive and monotonous, or if you are supposed to be creative but only generate junk, like say most of the so-called journalists. AI tools are incredibly powerful, and I use them to enhance what I do, but so far they are still well behind true human ingenuity.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, Skynet, or any other government agency.

Yet another reason veterans will hide mental health issues

As a military member, reporting mental health problems is a Catch-22. On one hand, everyone is encouraging you to speak up when you need help, but then you tend to get punished when you do.

For example, it used to be if you claimed any sort of mental health problem, from depression and anxiety to even trauma due to a sexual assault, it would cause your clearance to be suspended. Thankfully, that isn’t true anymore, and on my last security clearance questions, I noticed that the interviewer only asked if I had schizophrenia or other delusional-type illnesses.

The stigma is still very real, and most vets won’t seek treatment because they think something bad will happen to them. And for those that are pilots, another shoe dropped. From the Washington Post:

Federal authorities have been investigating nearly5,000 pilots suspected of falsifying their medical records to conceal that they were receiving benefits for mental health disorders and other serious conditions that could make them unfit to fly, documents and interviews show.

The pilots under scrutiny are military veterans who told the Federal Aviation Administration that they are healthy enough to fly, yet failed to report — as required by law — that they were also collecting veterans benefits for disabilities that could bar them from the cockpit.

Sounds bad right? So what sorts of disabilities did they find pilots not reporting?

“If they’re going to shine a light on veterans, they need to shine a light everywhere,” said Rick Mangini, 52, a former Army pilot who has been grounded from his job flying for a cargo company since his medical certificate was not renewed last month. The FAA notified him in May that he was under review for failing to disclose sleep apnea, for which he receives VA disability benefits, Mangini said. Although he checked the box on his application that asked if he receives any government disability benefits, Mangini, who lives in Killeen, Tex., said he was not aware he had to provide specifics.

Sleep apnea. Yup. They also look for depression and anxiety, but its not an automatic grounding if you have those:

Pilots who have been diagnosed with depression, anxiety or other mental health conditions are not automatically prohibited from flying. But the FAA requires them to be closely monitored because their conditions and medications can affect their ability to safely handle an aircraft.

Now, you would think given the size of the investigation that we have lots of suicidal pilots out there, but according to the article, we haven’t lost a passenger plane since 2009, and while the article indicated there is suspicion that some pilots may have deliberately crashed in other countries, its not 100% confirmed.

So what’s going to happen? Well:

  1. Military pilots will stop reporting mental health problems, and will not get the help they need.
  2. These guys and gals will pay a lot of money to people that specialize in VA claims that will get them benefits without having to be reported.
  3. At some point, a veteran pilot is going to commit suicide and leave a note that says he was afraid of getting help because he wouldn’t be employable anymore.

There is already a stigma that being in the military causes mental health problems, and this is going to further push people away from joining.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.

Lying about women’s health

As a man, my doctor never talks to me about women’s health. Maybe that’s because my doctors don’t ask me my preferred pronouns, maybe it’s because I just don’t bring it up, or maybe because we just don’t talk with married men about sex…who knows? I sure don’t.

Recently this changed a bit, because my wife asked me to accompany her on one of her doctor visits. Easy enough, I sat and mostly just listened. But while we were waiting, I noticed an interesting poster on the back of the patient room’s door.

Well, isn’t that interesting, I thought. Because my wife and I use the Marquette Method of Natural Family Planning, I already knew that the “Fertility Awareness” stats were bogus. A quick DuckDuckGo search will show the following:

So how do they get 88% effectiveness? Well, if you roll in a bunch of not-as-effective methods, such as temperature and calendar methods, it brings the numbers down. I confirmed this at Planned Parenthood’s website and at ContraceptionChoices.org. Interestingly, none of them referenced Creighton or Marquette. Why would that be? Wouldn’t you want to “Follow the science” and give women choices that don’t involve chemicals?

When you view the medical establishment as a bureaucracy interested in making money, this becomes a much more interesting chart. Everything in the “Works Best” and “Works Pretty Well” category requires a doctor and is covered by insurance. Why would a doctor want to prescribe the Creighton or Marquette methods when they won’t get any money or kick-back for doing so?

Conservative men, especially lawmakers, have dropped the ball here. We’ve created a medical system that promotes pumping women full of hormones and chemicals to stop pregnancy, then promotes the same system to pump them full of hormones and chemicals when they want to get pregnant, and we make insurance companies pay for it. We then have a just-as-effective option that doesn’t involve chemicals, and we allow the medical establishment that has zero interest in promoting it to demonize and dismiss NFP as something those crazy conservative kids do that doesn’t really work all that well.

For all the men reading this, your wife and daughters are reading that poster every time they go to the doctor. They are being manipulated on every visit to the doctor. I’m guessing you don’t talk to them about it because, well, you’re a guy and we’ve allowed society to say you don’t have a voice in this discussion, and that only a doctor with a self-interest in prescribing medication can talk to your daughter about this topic.

Thinking about it, maybe that’s why my doctor never talks to me about women’s health….

Sun Tzu talked about winning without fighting, and it looks like the medical establishment is doing just that. The poster says “Your body, your choice,” but all the “good” choices push money into the system, so do you really have choices?

Conservatives need to push for laws that require insurance companies to cover natural family planning costs, such as a fertility monitor and the cost of visits to an NFP practitioner. Sure, plenty of families can afford these costs, but not everyone can, and more importantly, it puts money into a far better solution. Planned Parenthood can muster a ton of money when doctors and your insurance company are feeding them insurance dollars, so imagine a world where NFP gets similar treatment. I like that world a lot more than our current world.

On top of that, every Catholic Church should have a rolodex of NFP practitioners. Priests should be taught about the different NFP methods and should refer their parishioners to them. They should have the occasional sermon on NFP, and it should be a topic in pre-marital counseling. You know how many priests I’ve heard talk intelligently about NFP? Zero, and that’s a problem. We need to stop being squeamish about this because when we don’t talk about it, someone else fills the void.

Stop pretending men don’t have a role in reproductive health, and stop letting the establishment lie to your face about NFP.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency. BTW, Tricare covers everything but NFP as well, how about we start by changing that first?

But was anyone fired?

If you’re not already familiar with it, the US Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship is…a floating pile of garbage.

Not literally…or maybe, littorally? The Littoral Combat Ship was seen as a new, sleek, fast ship to replace the old minesweepers and patrol crafts. It could drive super fast and would be able to change out mission modules, meaning one day it could be oriented towards minesweeping, and the next day it could hunt down submarines. Even better, it would have a small crew, so the Navy would save on manpower.

If that all sounds too good to be true…it was. Many people pointed this out at the time, but were called naysayers for doing so. Yet here we are today watching the Navy retire a Littoral Combat Ship after only five years of service (compared to the 20+ years we get from Destroyers, Cruisers, and basically any other ship).

USS SIOUX CITY, decommissioned after only 5 years.

Crying about this fact gets us nowhere. What I want to do is point out the hypocrisy in the Navy in how it treats it’s flag officers. With the LCS as a raging dumpster fire, at least one of the manufacturers, Austal USA, had the good sense to make its CEO resign. Would the Navy do this? Let’s look at some of the LCS programs past leadership:

  • Rear Admiral John Neagley took over the program around 2016. He apparently wrote many of the requirements for LCS back in the day, so you’d think he could turn it around. Nope! He wasn’t fired either, instead, he retired and now works at ICI Services.
  • In 2012, Rear Admiral John Murdoch said “I am not concerned at all about any of the deficiencies…in terms of my ability to correct them before the ship leaves the Great Lakes,” concerning serious problems onboard USS FORT WORTH while it was in Lake Michigan. The FORT WORTH commissioned in 2012 and was retired in 2022 after only 10 years in service. John Murdoch retired without issue and now works at Lockheed Martin.
  • Rear Admiral Robert Nowakowski took over in 2020, and after two years…the Navy cancelled the anti-submarine mission package on LCS due to overspending. Rear Admiral Nowakowski is still in the Navy and hasn’t had anything negative happen to his career.

So the Navy has a massively failing program that wastes millions of taxpayer dollars on ships that cannot fight or even stay afloat after only a few years. Its leadership gets punished…nope. It’s leaders, because they wear stars on their shoulders, get to retire to fat pensions with no repercussions whatsoever.

None. Zip. Zilch.

Meanwhile, Sailors work themselves to death trying to maintain vessels they can’t get training on and aren’t properly sourced.

These Admirals should be ashamed of themselves and the pain they caused these Sailors, their families and the impact to our Naval Power.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency, because those agencies want you to keep thinking that everything is fine and you should just keep handing over your tax dollars like the good little sheep you are without asking hard questions.

Public Schools aligning with Satan

Satan has two interesting strategies to spread his influence among humanity. The first involves pretending that he doesn’t exist. There are many people that laugh at the idea of Satan existing at all, and who instead argue that its “bad humans” that account for the evil in the world. These people don’t even like using the word “evil” because it implies there is a “good,” and they instead argue that actions are judged based on human standards at the time, instead of any sort of absolute judgement.

While this strategy works well, it pushes Satan to stay hidden and out of site. It’s far better to operate in the open, and that seems to be the current strategy. But why would rational human beings allow the literal Prince of Darkness, who promises to enslave men and women, to openly influence them?

Easy. Satan becomes cool. He stands for libertarian ideals of free and open speech. Heck, he even has an “X” account. He even manages to get applause in Chesapeake, VA, where school board members voted to continue to allow the club to meet on school grounds. From our parish’s FlockNote:

Unfortunately, the school board voted 7-1 (with one member absent) to allow all non-exempt clubs to include the After School Satan Club to use Chesapeake Public Schools facilities. There were 40 speakers that were signed up to speak, and only five spoke against the After School Satan Club and prohibiting facility use. Most of the speakers and the attendees represented the Good News Club (the Bible club), a wrestling club, and other various clubs such as a soccer club and the girl scouts. There were also about 10 Satanists present, with several of them speaking. There were only four Catholics present by my count, and all spoke out against the After School Satan Club and non-exempt clubs using school facilities. At the end of the meeting, the room was full of applause for the board’s decision to allow non-exempt clubs to meet.

The rosary rally had good attendance, despite the heat, with around 30 people showing up to pray. Four Satanists showed up as a counter-protest at the end of our rally, and there was no interaction between the groups. Thank you to everyone who showed up and those who were unable to make it that were praying from afar. Even thought the vote did not go as we had hoped, I know our prayers are not wasted.

On a positive note, I asked Rose Bastet (the leader of the After School Satan Club and a Satanic minister) if the After School Satan Club planned to meet on the third Thursday of the month as they did during the last school year. I said that we wanted to continue praying the rosary. She said that the school district was giving them a lot of trouble, and she wasn’t sure if they were going to meet at this time. She didn’t go into detail as to what that meant exactly. The attitude of the Satanists was completely reversed from the last time the school board allowed them to meet several months ago. Several months ago they were overjoyed and cheerful at the decision. After this meeting, they did not seem happy.

The only board member who voted to get rid of all non-exempt clubs to include the After School Satan Club was Samuel Boone. The member who was absent was Brittany Walker. The members who voted to allow the clubs to meet with no changes in the policy were: Angela Swygert, Thomas Mercer, Amanda Dean, Michael Lamonea, John McCormick, Norman Pool, and Kim Scott. 

Amanda Dean tried to get a reclassification of what a non-exempt club was as she seemed to be surprised that the wrestling club would be impacted. She and Samuel Boone were the only two members who voted to reclassify, with the other members voting to not reclassify as they were wary of legal repercussions. Amanda Dean has been the most outspoken board member about getting the After School Satan Club out of schools so her vote to ultimately allow the clubs was surprising. Perhaps she voted the way she did due to the hostile crowd or realizing that the only option on the table would get rid of more clubs than she had previously realized.

Stay tuned for further details on this situation. We will plan to have rosary rallies in the future should we determine when the After School Satan Club is meeting. It is especially disheartening that the people of this city erupted into applause when all the clubs were able to meet. We need to continue to pray, do penance, and acts of reparation as it seems clear that things like wrestling are more important to the residents of this city than keeping Satan out of the public sphere.

Interestingly enough, if you go to the Facility Use rules for Chesapeake Public School, you can find this restriction:

The described use would conflict with a policy, procedure, or the mission of Chesapeake Public Schools.

Not sure when the mission of public schools aligned with Satan, but apparently they aren’t in “conflict” with the school? That doesn’t bode well for any of us going forward.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency. Pray for America and for Chesapeake today, we certainly need it.

Modern students suck

One of my jobs involves teaching classes for an internationally recognized certification exam. I teach both in-person and online, and I enjoy teaching the materials and helping people prepare to pass the exam. For me, this certification opened up a lot of doors, connected me with a great network, and in general changed my career for the better. I’m pretty passionate about it, and I try to bring that passion and care to the class.

But man, sometimes, it is hard.

Over the past few years, I’ve noticed a decline in the care level people place on education. Now, to be fair, education is always a challenge, especially if we’re talking middle or high school education. Many of those kids just don’t want to be there. I don’t measure that engagement. I teach post-secondary classes. My adult students should, theoretically, want to be in class, and place some value on it.

It shocks me how little the modern student cares. As an instructor, I’m full of knowledge about the certification exam, yet most students ask few if any questions about the exam. I’ve then had students that failed the exam say “I wish you would have covered this aspect of the exam…” only to have me send them a link to their class video where I explicitly state “This aspect is really critical and you need to memorize it for the exam.”

In college, I had an electrical engineering instructor that used to work for NASA. He was the guy that designed the carbon dioxide filter for the Apollo 13 mission. If you saw the movie and remember where they made a square filter fit a round hole…yeah, that was him.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_LD5PkV6rI

Most of the people in my class never asked him any questions. He never volunteered information about his time in NASA, and it wasn’t until the last week of class that I had the opportunity to ask him about his NASA experience. I learned so much in just that short time, and I’m glad I took that opportunity while in college.

We live in an era of information abundance, where gaining knowledge is simply a matter of applying yourself. Gone are the days where knowledge was kept under lock and key, only reserved for the powerful or rich. Yet this abundance has resulted in seemingly dumber students who are not ready to actually work. When you have mechanical engineering graduates who can’t make basic parts on a lathe, you have to wonder what that person did for 4 years in college.

I don’t think its a matter of education availability. The opportunities are there, and they’ve been there since I was a student all the way to today. But whether its laziness, lack of care, or something in the water, our modern students suck.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.