Volunteering as tribute

Sadly dear readers, this will be my last post here for DaTechGuy. Unfortunately, it’s been a struggle to keep revenue coming in, and when Peter said he would have to start cutting writers, rather than let others deliberate over the decision, I made the choice to step down.

It’s not all a loss though. I recently retired from the military (hence the lack of “This post doesn’t represent the DoD…), so I’m starting a fresh new phase of life as a self-employed person. I started working for Peter when my daughter was in Yale’s Children Hospital. It was a good distraction from an otherwise depressing situation. She passed away right as we were house hunting, and that experience prompted me to write “To Build A House.” Had I not been regularly blogging on DaTechGuy, I don’t think I would have had the writing skills needed to finish the book, let alone the audiobook.

My last years in the military were busy, so although I have two books I want to write, I haven’t had the time to do so. Any writer out there knows that if you don’t keep writing, your skills diminish, so sometimes my weekend blogging for DaTechGuy was the only real writing exercise I could get. Peter gave me the freedom to write about whatever I wanted to, and often it was my escape from an increasingly oppressive military culture hell bent on DEI initiatives, white supremacist witch hunts, and anything else that would distract from its lack of warfighting ability.

As I leave DaTechGuy, I don’t get any less busy. I’m now working with a team of folks at Walk The Talk Foundation to try and bring some accountability to the military, particularly the flag and general officers that have run our services into the dirt. The media has missed the big story on the decline in military recruiting. It’s less about DEI and a lot more about the poor treatment of service members. Every person I know getting out has said they won’t recommend the service to their family members. Given that a large percentage of military members serve because mom/dad/grandpa did, that by far has been the biggest depressor of military recruiting. Since the GOFOs can’t bring themselves to apologize for losing Afghanistan, poorly managing our shipyards and not fixing military pay, people like me have responded in “Atlas Shrugged” fashion by shrugging off the expectation that we keep supplying the military with our sons and daughters. At some point it’ll break, and hopefully like in Atlas Shrugged, something better will rise from the ashes.

So between helping Walk the Talk, writing two more books, teaching travel classes and helping churches and non-profit organizations with their computer networks, plus raising 5 kids….yeah, I’ll be busy.

If you’ve made it this far, I’d like to ask that you consider either donating to DaTechGuy or buying one of his books on Amazon. Leftist extremists’ pour money into their fake news organizations and make it hard for those of us willing to write and publish to make a living. Buying what we write and engaging with us online helps build that support community that we need. It’s not enough to not watch CNN or stop buying coffee from Starbucks…you have to take that money and put it to good use elsewhere. Think of it as you’re helping to prop up the folks punching back against the mainstream narrative…you may not be able to do the punching yourself, but you can support those that do, and it’ll make a difference. Even better, more money for the smaller groups of individuals forces Republican lawmakers to take them more seriously. It’s a slow and imperfect process, but its far better than donating to the Republican general fund and praying for results.

My only other ask is you get out and vote this year, and seriously consider volunteering as a poll watcher. I assisted on Governor Youngkin’s campaign in a small way, and it was because many of us went door-to-door and supervised voting booths that he swept in and kept Virginia from going overboard on blue policies. Yes, it requires you to get off your couch, stop commenting on social media and start doing something useful. Your opponents are doing this in droves, and our institutions will crumble unless good people stand up to take them back.

And if you think “I’m in a red state, it can’t happen to me,” remember that your opponents aren’t content to leave you alone…they will come after you until you bend the knee…just look at the Jewish students being hunted on college campuses if you need an example.

Take care, fight the good fight, and always punch back twice as hard!

Stop being nice to female murderers

Equality before the law should mean just that: equal treatment before the law, no matter who you are. Supposedly women are equal to men, yet time and time again, women are allowed to engage in awful, illegal behavior and get lighter sentences.

Look no further than this week, where Heather Pressdee, a nurse, murdered multiple old people in different nursing homes in Pennsylvania by administering more insulin than their bodies could handle. She did this deliberately, often timing it so the person would die before being taken to a hospital in order to hide her crime. It’s outrageously despicable, yet she avoided the death penalty.

You can read the sob story of Christa Pike, who brutally murdered Colleen Slemmer in 1996. The argument is she was 18 and made a mistake. Sounds reasonable right? A quick Wikipedia search describes Christa Pike’s crimes:

On January 12, 1995, Pike, Shipp, Peterson, and Slemmer signed out of the dormitory and proceeded to the woods, where Slemmer was told they wanted to make peace by offering her some marijuana.^[5] Upon arrival at the secluded location, Slemmer was attacked by Pike and Shipp while Peterson acted as lookout. According to later court testimony, for the next thirty minutes Slemmer was taunted, beaten, and slashed; and a pentagram was carved in her chest.^[6][7] Finally, Pike smashed Slemmer’s skull with a large chunk of asphalt, killing her. Pike kept a piece of Slemmer’s skull.^[5]

Keeping a piece of her skull? Carving a pentagram on her chest? That’s not a crime of passion or an accident. While not slated for execution yet, she lost her last appeal recently.

Lastly, how about the story of Miranda Cassarez, a San Antonio woman who starved her four-year-old stepson to death? The kid was only 28 pounds when he died at the local hospital. She was completely unrepentant and attempted to push the blame to anyone but herself. She’ll get 99 years in prison. I have a 4 year old at home, and while the kid sometimes drives me crazy, I can’t bear the thought of starving him to death.

Women are literally getting away with murder. True equality means we allow people, despite their gender, to suffer equal consequences before the law.

Biden’s Title IX rules serve military-style injustice to college students

Liberal college campuses typically try to distinguish and distance themselves from the military. For the longest time, many campuses had banned or essentially banned ROTC, although that has waned in the past decade. The longtime myth was that the military was a place of last resort for people who couldn’t otherwise make it in college. Given the recent trend of college life breeding anti-semitism and people that can’t seem to perform basic activities like reading, I give the military the upper hand on this one.

College and the military now share one very dark truth when it comes to prosecuting crimes. President Biden recently changed many Trump-era Title IX regulations that required due process in dealing with sexual harassment claims. In the past, if you accused someone of sexual assault on campus, the accused person had a right to confront the accuser and demand evidence. That seems so basic, yet campuses howled in pain at being required to take seriously accusations and, you know, actually look for evidence before disciplining students.

That’s entirely gone now. You can now, quite literally, accuse a fellow student of sexual assault, not provide evidence, and if the judge is persuaded by your story, your fellow student can be kicked out of the school without ever getting the chance to provide his or her side of the story.

That sounds insane to anyone who thinks justice is important. But its exactly like another system that exists in the US Military called non-judicial punishment (NJP).

Now, the “non-judicial” title might make you think it is some sort of proceeding that will be swept under the rug and not really hurt you. That couldn’t be further from the truth. NJP can impose some harsh punishments, such as cutting half of your pay for up to 2 months as well as restricting you to a barracks room for up to two months. More importantly, any NJP action can basically end your career. The military’s high year tenure system means if you don’t advance to a certain rank after so much time, they can separate you with the stroke of a pen.

The military has been under the gun to “do something” about sexual assault, so its not uncommon anymore to see someone accused of sexual assault get punished at NJP even with a lack of evidence. That’s because NJP, like Title IX, uses the “preponderance of evidence” standard, meaning that you don’t have to prove something beyond a reasonable doubt, just that there is some evidence that might point to the person being guilty. It could simply be a statement from the accuser. It doesn’t have to be scrutinized, it just needs to be persuasive to the military officer holding NJP.

The military and college campuses can now both hold claim to being centers of injustice in America.

Oh Canadian teeth

Canada is known for a lot of things, ranging from hockey and moose to maple syrup and embarrassing dictators running the country. One thing that many uneducated Americans think Canada is good at is health care. I’ve had various Canadian friends throughout the years tell me the health care is terrible, and this past week showed me this hasn’t changed one bit.

I spent this week in Canada teaching a class. The first thing I noticed was the poor dental care. Well over half the people I interacted with had terrible teeth. Like, we’re talking “someone punched you in the mouth” levels of bad here. When I asked some of my students, all of them confirmed that Canada’s dental care is abysmal. Only 55% of Canadians have private dental insurance, and only 4% can get government insurance. Over one third of Canadians haven’t seen a dentist in the last 12 months. And its not just the poor folks either. The people I ran into working at nice hotels and nice restaurants had terrible teeth, folks that likely have at least some money, but can’t afford the care. The government can’t even afford to pay dental hygienists a good salary, despite rolling out plan after plan to do so.

It didn’t end at teeth though. Despite spending nearly a third of all government money on health care, Canada has terrible emergency room wait times. We’re talking 22 hours on average to be placed in a hospital…in Ontario. Not a small place, mind you. One of my students confirmed that most emergency rooms turn you away to stay at home unless something is absolutely life threatening. The regular care is not any better either. One student told me that his wife went in to get a referral for a dermatologist. 8 years later…yes, that is not a typo…they got a phone call for the referral, which they had forgotten about by that point.

8 years for a referral…I never thought someone could make Tricare look bad, but Canada, you take the crown!

Style vs substance in the Navy

When I reported to my first submarine, the torpedo division was responsible for the maintenance of all the small arms onboard. Despite having grown up in a hunting and shooting family, they took me to the range to show me how to shoot both pistols and shotguns in their style, since they needed small arms qualified people to stand watch. A few years later on shore detail, a group of us would regularly visit the nearby rifle range on “Warrior Wednesday” to keep our shooting skills sharp.

Since then it’s become harder and harder to find ranges where you can practice shooting, and there is less “gun culture” in the military now then even 5 to 10 years ago. That’s why this headline didn’t surprise me one bit:

My torpedomen would have never let me do this, at least not without cracking a joke at my expense. There’s even a rumor that the shell casings are photoshopped in, although at a minimum the scope and handguard are mounted incorrectly, plus he’s holding the weapon really high, like uncomfortably high, in his shoulder. Plus, why is there a hand on his shoulder? I don’t normally touch people that are firing automatic weapons.

Sadly, here’s the bigger problem: he’s probably my age. The folks like me that grew up with guns, love our country and care about being technically competent at their jobs have been run out of the Navy, replaced by those that care about climbing a corporate ladder and looking good. This picture captures this beautifully. We see a Navy DDG Commanding Officer, someone who should be technically savvy and have our respect, firing a weapon in what should be an awesome picture, but the minute we look deeper we see someone who has no clue about weapons posing for a cool photo, likely to move on to something else a few seconds later. Those that can do are replaced by those that look good doing and toe the party line.

The next time the DoD cries about money, remember this and start demanding that our Admirals get replaced by real warfighters.

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.

Not fixing our shipyard, 20 years later

I retired from the Navy yesterday after 20 years of service. My career started in the shipyard onboard a submarine. At the time, the shipyard was a miserable place to work, we were constantly fighting to stay on schedule, and it seemed like the shipyard was fighting us nearly every day. The location, Portsmouth, was miserable to: I remember we were warned about parking our cars because the locals nearby would break windows just for fun.

When I and other junior officers complained to our Commanding Officer, he threatened to send us to Afghanistan. Yes, telling people to suck it up because Afghanistan is worse was a thing long before MCPON Smith told the Sailors onboard the BUSH in 2022 the same thing. When four Sailors committed suicide in a row onboard BUSH, and Congress-people starting asking questions, Navy leadership quickly rolled out a…study…to figure out how to improve WiFi and parking.

WiFi and parking. These were issues 20 years ago in the Navy. For 20 years, Admirals gazed at the problem and did absolutely nothing to fix it, yet they found time to standdown the military for extremist training and to add nonsense books to the required reading list.

Here non-warfighting Admiral, let me fix this for you:

Pay a company to put WiFi on the berthing barges and in the barracks. Find one that does WiFi for hotels and just copy/paste the contract.
Calculate how many people work on the shipyard when all the piers are full, add 30%, and build parking structures to accommodate those vehicles.

Done. There’s your study. Someone will say it’s not perfect. I agree. We’ve had 20 years of morons in charge of the Navy. We need change now, and this is far better than our current situation. The study will take a year. You could roll out WiFi and build at least parking structures using precast concrete in one year. That would show some actual care for our Sailors and yield immediate results.

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.

Local governments will matter more in the end

The company DroneUp! made the news in 2021 when it announced that it signed a deal with Walmart to do drone delivery. Recently it announced it a new all-in-one delivery service that could be rolled out to any store and deliver packages within 30 miles and under 10 pounds, all while automatically maintaining flight safety rules. In their spare time, they also manage to release the occasional cute video, like this one, on Facebook.

With all this right around the corner from my house, and with the fact I buy a lot of things from our local Walmart, you’d think I’d have a never-ending stream of drones dropping off items on my front porch.

And you’d be wrong. Why? Because I don’t live in Virginia Beach.

See, DroneUp! approached my city about adding drone delivery, but my city insisted that every drone position be operated like an airport. Yup, that’s a thing. Essentially my city council wanted every Walmart to run under the same restrictive rules that airports do. Never mind that the FAA doesn’t insist on this. Never mind that there is more restricted airspace in Virginia Beach then my city, with the nearby Oceana and Norfolk airports contributing to plenty of civilian and military flights everyday. Nope, my city insisted on stupid antiquated rules.

So instead of drone delivery, we get nothing.

Local government elections get ignored too often. As a society we argue over national elections, but fail to show up to local elections. That’s how we get crummy school boards that push pornography in school libraries, crummy state prosecutors that let criminals run free, and crummy city councils that equate drone delivery to running an international airport. On a bigger scale, we’re seeing some states, like Florida, tackle issues like squatting head on, while other states allow criminals to kick people out of their homes and trash them. We’re seeing some states like Georgia get ahead of election security while others allow it to falter.

If we don’t pay attention to our local problems, it’ll be impossible to solve the national ones.

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.

“Squatter’s rights” will result in vigilante justice

There has been a sharp increase in squatter claims making the news. If you aren’t familiar with “squatter’s rights,” its an area legally called adverse possession, where someone can lay claim to a space after occupying it for so many years. The average person would think this is trespassing, but there is a legal distinction in that trespassers don’t claim to own the property, but squatters do. This allows someone to break into an abandoned home, act like they own it and thus become impossible to evict.

If you think this sounds crazy…that’s because it is. But we live in the world of crazy, such that someone can break into a 4.6 million dollar home near Lebron James and simply occupy it, even throwing parties and renting out spaces. Or one that allows a squatter to put a Temporary Restriction Order on the owner of a home and kick him out in Washington.

We do, seriously, live in a clown world.

Not surprisingly, because the police either can’t or won’t stop this insanity, it is spreading wildly, especially in deep blue states like New York. In every part of the world where I’ve seen private property rights degrade, the sequence goes like this:

Criminals go from individuals to gangs that are well organized
Private citizens begin offering services to counter the crime
Criminals begin to get violent
Private citizens begin to “disappear” individuals

We’re already seeing organized squatters, including a lot of illegal immigrants, targeting wealthy homes in groups. We’re also seeing other citizens develop businesses around evicting squatters, including a self-proclaimed “squatter hunter” who charges $5,000 or more to kick out squatting parties. Sadly, we’re seeing a death toll too, as two squatters beat a woman to death for simply trying to reclaim her home.

The next step is squatters will start disappearing. Contrary to popular belief, police exist to protect the guilty, especially people accused or guilty of serious crimes.

Think about it, if you thought your neighbor sexually molested your child, what would stop you from beating them to death? I mean, if your kid was abused and scarred for life, you can’t tell me you wouldn’t at least contemplate burying the culprit 6 feet underground. The police and your belief that justice is best served in a courtroom are what stops you from pursuing this.

As we remove cops and courts, mark my words, we’re going to see squatting stop, because people are just going to disappear. Squatters are going to get beaten to death by angry mobs of property owners and their bodies dumped in the street. Nobody will say anything, just like people in Italy were silent on mobster killings. Vigilante justice will fill the void, and with it will come the settling of petty disputes and rivalries at the end of a stick and a gun.

Some people are cheering this on. They are thinking “Yes, finally, I can settle my score with so and so.” To that I shake my head. We all think we’ll be the ones on top when the world shatters, but in reality, in a world of might makes right, the most despicable people rise to the top. Look to the French Revolution if you need an example.

Some states are getting ahead of this, namely Florida, which passed legislation to allow police to kick off squatters. Even New York is beginning to modify its laws, likely too late to prevent the mass exodus of businesses.

More so than politics, we need to get a handle on squatting before it turns decent people into crazed vigilantes.

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.

Using AI for homeschool

The implosion of public school during COVID created a whole new batch of homeschooling families. While this is great news, it also means more than a few families are discovering the difficulty in homeschooling children, especially when the child has difficulty in subjects the parents aren’t familiar with.

That’s why I encourage all homeschooling parents to use AI. I use CoPilot since its free, but you’re welcome to use OpenAI or any other AI. Now, we aren’t going to try and look up gender studies or DEI subjects, because parents should talk with their children about those topics. But what about math?

Let’s be honest, unless you happen to work in engineering, integrating a function is likely something you haven’t done recently. AI makes this really easy AND it explains the work.

Remember diagramming sentences? I don’t because I’m sure I slept through that portion of school. So what do you do when your kid is confused about diagramming sentences?

Problem solved! But what about foreign languages?

Too bad for CoPilot! You have to have a Microsoft account of some kind to make this work

If it can diagram sentences, it can definitely update your work too!

What about chemistry? Balancing redux equations in high school chemistry is something I haven’t touched in years.

Another great use of AI is technical help. If something doesn’t work correctly on your computer, AI makes it easy to troubleshoot. I had a lot of problems getting rid of the kid’s google accounts from my wife’s laptop. I would go to a website and their account, vice my wife’s, would load and be heavily restricted. AI helped me solve that problem.

Another great school use is Excel functions. Microsoft Excel is extremely powerful, much more so than Google Sheets, but the syntax and formatting can get messy quickly. CoPilot is especially good at taking what you want to do and spitting out a function you can copy/paste. Even something complicated like pivot tables falls to the power of AI!

I think Microsoft captured AI, especially large language learning models, with the phrase “CoPilot.” Yes, AI can generate some pretty humorous poems and the occasional rap song, plus create some very cool images, but human beings are still far better at imagining unique things. Where AI shines is rote work. How many times have you Googled different Excel formulas, or how to integrate a function, or where some setting is in PowerPoint? My kids have tons of weird questions that pop up, ranging from English and Math to Biology and Chemistry. Anything that is straightforward will easily be answered with AI.

One caution: I always encourage people to have a discussion with the AI. Just popping in a question and getting an answer is dangerous, because the AI, like human beings, can get it wrong. This happened on an English question my daughter had. The first answer didn’t make sense, and she was ready to write off AI. I had her put in a few more prompts, and then the AI (in this case, CoPilot) gave her the correct answer. Treat it like a really smart human and you’ll do great!

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. And besides the pictures, nothing else in this post was generated by AI.

DEI makes for dumb PCs

One of the biggest concerns for a Chinese invasion of Taiwan is the loss of TSMC, a huge company that makes around 80% of the world’s advanced microprocessors and chipsets and 55% of chips overall. Think about that for just one second…55% of all chips in the entire world are made by one company. In your home alone, there are chips in your computer, cars, certain HVAC components, smartphones, your wifi router, TVs, and even things like refrigerators. 55% of these chips come from one company.

That’s pretty crazy when you think about it. TSMC has facilities around the world, although the majority are located in Taiwan. Why wouldn’t it open more facilities in the US? Well, because its expensive due to all the red tape involved in making facilities in the US and because there is not enough talent in the US to make chips. If we drop the nice language, TSMC has basically said it costs too much and Americans aren’t smart enough to make these advanced chips.

Ouch. So much for all that STEM money we keep throwing at education that gets misused. Since chips are key components of most weapon systems, Congress passed the CHIPS act to subsidize and incentivize chip manufacturers in America. But guess what came along with the money? A whole lot of strings, including DEI strings:

The law contains 19 sections aimed at helping minority groups, including one creating a Chief Diversity Officer at the National Science Foundation, and several prioritizing scientific cooperation with what it calls “minority-serving institutions.” A section called “Opportunity and Inclusion” instructs the Department of Commerce to work with minority-owned businesses and make sure chipmakers “increase the participation of economically disadvantaged individuals in the semiconductor workforce.”
– The Hill

This is exactly why China and other nations can beat us at these high-end games. Americans are known for working hard and figuring things out, and until recently the advanced nature of American colleges and other education institutions was known around the world. But we’ve allowed morons (and if you support DEI, you are a moron) to write our laws and corrupt our institutions. The steady rise in costs from these morons has driven everyone away, from chip manufacturers and oil and gas production to basic tools and batteries.

We did this to ourselves. We can undo it too. Imagine a world without stupid bureaucrats running everything into the dirt. Imagine the US unleashing its potential and the hard work and smarts actually paying off, not being stifled by people insisting on laws and incentives that make no sense in the real world. A far better world, and one within our reach, if we choose to make it so.

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.