Category: Dumbass Bullshit

Last week, the folks at the “occupation” of the wildlife refuge in Oregon asked for people to send them snacks and socks. Instead, people sent them dildos and former Marine truck driver, Jon Ritzheimer, is pretty angry.

It’s sad that there are people who would spend this kind of money on this rather than spending it to do good in the world. I’m done living in fear of an oppressing force. I’m going to uphold my oath to the Constitution and sleep great at night knowing that I did everything in my power to ensure what our founding fathers did for us will not be lost.
To my family, I love you very much and I am sorry I can’t be there with you. Please look at this as a deployment, only this time I’m actually serving my country rather than being sent over seas to line the pockets of corrupt politicians. It is our sacrifice as a family that will make this country great again, not some election. And we are not alone. I am among some of the most honorable, and selfless people I have ever met. People who are dedicated to making the same sacrifice for this country.
Read the constitution people. Get educated and don’t let your rights be taken. If your a Patriot and you feel the calling in your heart then all I can say is follow your heart. Don’t let the fear consume you. We all have lives but if we don’t make the sacrifice what kind of country are we leaving for our children. The status quo can’t go on any longer. We either take a stand against tyranny or we fail. Come be a part of history. And I am so proud that our country has become civilized enough that we can bring about change and right this wrong without any bloodshed. America is blessed.

Yeah, this is a “deployment”. You should read a book, or the Constitution or something.

Our buddy, Nate Thayer wrote about the “Patriots” at the Wildlife Refuge in Oregon. He talked to another buddy, Mary Schantag, about them;

“These guys don’t question one another because they would expose each other as the frauds and liars they are,” said Mary Schantag , chairwoman of the POWNetwork.org. “The real veterans would leave as soon as they heard these guys ridiculous stories.” Schantag runs an organization of military veterans devoted to exposing frauds and perpetrators of “Stolen Valor”.

We saw that when we exposed many of the leadership of the Iraq Veterans Against the War who weren’t actually veterans of Iraq. The real veterans abandoned them at light speed. I suspect the same thing will happen as the real veterans at Oregon start looking at their compatriots.

Nate brings up a good point about Jon Ritzheimer. He is always complaining about how some Marine Corps sergeant major tossed him out because of his tattoos. I’m sure Ritzheimer hoped that people listening to that tale would think of the recent discussion about “sleeve” tattoos, but at the time he left the Marine Corps Reserve, the policy was against racist and sexist tattoos. Nate recounts the policy;

U.S. Marine Corps Tattoo policy includes: “Any tattoos that are racist, sexist, drug-related, vulgar, anti-American or are associated with any extremist group or gang are already not permitted on Marines. Tattoos/Brands that are sexist (express nudity), racist, eccentric or offensive in nature, express an association with conduct or substances prohibited by the Marine Corps drug policy and the uniform code of military justice (UCMJ), to include tattoos associated with illegal drugs, drug usage, or paraphernalia, are prohibited.”

Given Ritzheimer’s recent behavior is seems reasonable to me that is the kind of tattoos that got him tossed, not the innocuous reason he’d have us believe.

A few days ago, I read the Veterans on Patrol Facebook page and they determined that they were going to kidnap Ritzheimer and bring him back to Arizona to protect him from himself. The Tucson Daily Star reports that they got there yesterday and it didn’t go as well as they thought it would;

The Oregonian newspaper reported a fight broke out between Meyer’s group [Veterans on Patrol] and militant group member Blaine Cooper, whose Facebook page says he lives in Humboldt, Arizona.

Meyer said Cooper punched him in the back of the head; Phoenix resident Jon Ritzheimer said Meyer’s group shoved a guard, causing the guard to bloody his hand.

In a Facebook message Cooper said Meyer and two men entered the refuge Wednesday night and assaulted a disabled Vietnam veteran. They then “stormed into the refuge” and assaulted Cooper.

“I do believe Lewis (Meyer) [Veterans on Patrol] is a Paid Provocateur by the Fed’s (sic) to divide and destroy,” Cooper wrote in the post.

Meyer told the Oregonian he went to the compound to get a friend, but the friend decided to stay. Meyer then tried to get women and children in the compound to leave, but was stopped by militia members.

Yeah, who would have thought that kidnapping during daylight hours would be so difficult.

According to OregonLive the III%ers of Utah arrived at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge to relieve the Joe Rice-led Pacific Patriots Network. I guess the PPN was disappointed that their plea for socks and snacks went unheeded. I predicted last week that Joe Rice, the phony POW and Purple Heart recipient wouldn’t be able to stay away from Burns.

Joseph Rice, a spokesman for the [Pacific Patriots Network], told reporters that his group presented occupation leader Ammon Bundy and other protesters with “articles of resolution.”

He didn’t say what was in the document, but noted that his group wants to move the sides to an end to the standoff.

Then network members got into most of the cars and trucks they’d parked nearby and started heading out of the reserve.

Rice didn’t address whether his group would return, saying only: “We are moving on to present them (the articles of resolution) to other government agencies.”

There have been rumors flying around the internet that the folks who we exposed last weekend as the liars and pretenders that they are, have been holed up in a nearby motel drinking themselves into a stupor daily. Including Brian Cavalier who left soon after he was exposed by the Daily Mail as a phony Marine. Of course, who wants to hang around a protest when there is a shortage of snacks and socks? Pogue bait shortages have brought empires to their ruin. Piss-poor planning, I guess. A real veteran would have showed up with enough Twizzlers and Gummy Bears to last for weeks.

The PPN posted their proposals for resolution of the standoff last night on the website;

According to Your Basin News, there’s a fellow by the name of Art Leal who is handing out these cards to business owners when he sees someone carrying a weapon openly in their establishment in Odessa, Texas;

It says that Art is a combat veteran who suffers from PTS and that he won’t be back to the business to spend his pennies because the sight of a gun triggers his PTS. I’m sure that the business owners are relieved that he won’t be back in Art Leal’s case. See Art is a Democrat politician who clearly has an agenda – to pander to the anti-gun nuts. I’m guessing that there are a few of those in Texas.

I was going to do a FOIA on Art, but there’s really no justification for that. He claims that he was a tank mechanic on an M-88 tank-recovery vehicle in the 24th Division during Desert Storm and that he’s 30% disabled. It would surprise me if someone lied about that and then made the blatantly disingenuous claim that the sight of a handgun triggering the PTS. In the article, a therapist takes up for Art;

“The mental scars and the mental recognition people have from that traumatic event the battle field and can go on for years and years,” [Dr. Sudip Bose] said.

Those scars are the reason why Leal’s passes out small cards to businesses allowing open carry. He wants to remind them and gun owners he suffers from PTSD and open carry could be a trigger for him or others with the condition.

I dispute that. It seems to me that Leal is just being a Drama Queen. Yes, he’s a combat veteran, in a very remote sense, but using that for his own political purposes doesn’t help the rest of us when he uses it to be a big crybaby. These guys are as bad as vegans who use their dietary choices as the first topic of conversations with new acquaintances. I’m not a big advocate of “open carry”, but bed-wetting Art Leal and his phony microagression doesn’t do anything useful for anyone except advance his own name-recognition and not in a good way.

ADDED: This triggers my rage;

This beret triggers my rage:

This triggers my rage;

I’ve been fairly busy this morning taking calls and emails from the media on this standoff just south of Burns, Oregon. Of course, the media wants to talk about Ryan Payne, Blaine Cooper, Jon Ritzheimer. I’m more than happy to help the media get the story right, and, as many of you already know, I have a real hard-on for these Oathkeeper and militia types. They are rife with phonies and they generally present an image of veterans that is not at all flattering.

But, see here’s the thing – where was the media’s concern in regards to all of the Occupy Wall Street phonies that we busted? Like Jay Polk the “retired Special Forces Master Sergeant” that fooled the media and the occupiers into believing that he’d been killed on a secret mission to Syria. I spent weeks trying to get the local San Diego medias attention, not even a nibble.

I’ll tell you a secret – I think the Hammonds got a raw deal from the government. I don’t think they should be in prison. However, I am loathe to associate myself with those clowns who took over the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge building. If anything, they’re forcing the prosecutor and the judicial system to enforce the Hammonds’ imprisonment. If they were considering any leniency, that possibility has evaporated lest the prosecutors look like the militias are having an impact on their decision.

It doesn’t help that many residents of Burns don’t want them there, including the Hammonds. Especially when you have people like Ammon Bundy making proclamations about how they’re willing to die and to kill federal officers to remain on Federal land. When you have people like felon Blaine Cooper in the wings, you’re not doing yourselves any favors, either. I haven’t seen any of the guys from Josephine County Oathkeepers like Joe Rice there yet, but I’m sure they’re around there somewhere – too much media in the area for them to ignore it.

Honestly, I hope this turns out better for the Hammonds that it looks like it will right now. But as long as these phonies in their multi-cam intimidation suits and their low drag gear are hanging on to the issue, I don’t think it will help the Hammonds much at all.

Some of our old phony friends are stinking up a Federal Building in Burns, Oregon in protest of the return to jail of Dwight and Steven Hammond, father and son ranchers, accused of setting a forest fire more than a decade ago. The Hammonds are scheduled to report for their incarceration tomorrow. The approximately 300 members of the militia who have showed up for protest are led by the sons of Cliven Bundy, whose ranch was the site of a protest nearly two years ago in Nevada. They’ve occupied a Bureau of Land Management building on the Malheur Wildlife Refuge.

[Ryan Bundy] said many would be willing to fight — and die, if necessary — to defend what they see as constitutionally protected rights for states, counties and individuals to manage local lands.

“The best possible outcome is that the ranchers that have been kicked out of the area, then they will come back and reclaim their land, and the wildlife refuge will be shut down forever and the federal government will relinquish such control,” he said. “What we’re doing is not rebellious. What we’re doing is in accordance with the Constitution, which is the supreme law of the land.”

Government sources told The Oregonian/OregonLive that the militia also was planning to occupy a closed wildland fire station near the town of Frenchglen. The U.S. Bureau of Land Management posts crews there during the fire season.

I noticed that a couple of our old phony friends are there, too.

Ryan Payne, one of the leaders from the Bundy stand-off who claimed that he was a Ranger is there. Payne was not a Ranger by any measure of the word, but, I guess militia folks don’t care about veracity.

Also, Blaine Cooper, the fellow who ditched his Delayed Entry Program enlistment for the Marine Corps is there. He couldn’t find the time to honor his enlistment in the Marines, but he sure can find the money to wear all of the military finery;

Are those knee pads, Blaine? What would you need those for? Me, personally, I’d find a warmer hat to wear, although the bush hat is cooler-looking than a pile cap. I can’t shake the feeling that these protests are nothing more than an opportunity for these folks to wear their Ranger Joe purchases in public and to strut around openly carrying their firearms.

Chock Block sends us a link to an essay by Jennifer Mittelstadt, a pointy-headed associate professor at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. Apparently she wrote a book entitled “The Rise of the Military Welfare State” that just came out recently, and she bolsters her supposition that the benefits members of the military receive in exchange for their youth, their health, their families is some sort of “government social welfare”. In fact, if you downloaded the text of this piece, removed every instance of the phrase “military welfare state”, it would only be a few hundred words. The phrase appears in nearly every sentence.

The US military has always performed social welfare of some kind or another. Over its long history, it provided daily support to its conscripts – food, shelter, clothing and medical care – and more elaborate benefits such as homes, family support and clubs for the career force and officers. The military also rewarded citizen conscripts for their faithful service during wartime. During the Revolutionary War, the Continental Army offered veterans land or a cash bounty. After the Civil War, the military offered veterans pensions. And after the Second World War, millions of former service personnel were guaranteed unprecedented education, training and housing subsidies.

Military leaders embarked on a new and more ambitious social welfare programme after 1973. That year, President Richard Nixon and Congress ended the draft and mandated an all-volunteer force. Military leaders could no longer force citizens to join – they had to convince them. And one of their most vital tools was social welfare benefits.

And there’s the rub. Military service, in many instances is difficult and demanding. The Pentagon needs to retain experienced troops, troops who are smart enough to be conduits for their institutional knowledge between the generations so that the military doesn’t have to relearn the basics of war fighting every time they go to fight our nation’s battles, that “continuation of politics by other means” thing.

Unlike European countries that provided nearly universal social welfare to all citizens, the US had only a patchwork social welfare system consisting of various public and private safety nets. Military leaders stepped into the gaps between them. They decided, in the words of the army motto, ‘to take care of their own’. They expanded the benefits traditionally reserved for the relatively few members of the career force and officers to every single member of the volunteer force and his or her family.

I guess that the associate professor is letting her covetousness show through, because she doesn’t get the same “safety net” that mere soldiers get because of their career choice.

The modern military welfare state of the post-1973 era never stimulated social welfare for the populace. Quite the opposite. As a smaller number and narrower cross-section of Americans volunteered for military service in the late 20th century, the divide between the military and civilians grew. So, too, did the divide between the new military welfare state and the existing civilian one. From the 1970s to the early ’90s, while many civilian welfare programmes contracted, public and private unions declined, and employers cut private employment benefits, the military expanded its welfare functions.

How did this happen?

She claims that the military pursued a “politics of separation” from the civilian world, as well they should. Look at the relative crime-free environments of military installations where military policemen still pull people over for “rolling stops” through stop signs and number of other minor infractions compared to what happens outside the gates of those installations.

Despite what many Leftists claim, folks in the military are the “best and brightest” who have myriad opportunities for employment in the civilian world and the military needs to attract them to a job where sacrifice is a daily occurrence and part of the job description. Not only do they need to attract folks to the military, they need to retain those people even after they’re aware of the sacrifice.

If the military welfare system is so down right good, why aren’t inner city youths beating down the doors at recruiters’ office to take advantage of it. I remember advising an unemployed young inner city man to visit his local military recruiter. His response was that “It’s not the 1950s”.

Reagan did more than bankroll the military welfare state. He leveraged his support of military welfare to attack the civilian welfare state. The most obvious example concerned the revival and reinvention of the GI Bill. Though previously used as an education programme to reward veterans for service, Reagan brandished the new GI Bill as a weapon against higher-education assistance for civilians – the student loans and grants so many Americans had come to depend on. Reagan and his team cast these programmes as ‘benefits [given] to those who were not serving their country’, and thus undeserved.

I’d like to see links to those quotes by President Reagan. But, even if he did say those things, he had a point. In the 70s, I couldn’t afford college because the grants and the loans didn’t exist (lucky for me, it turns out) like they exist now. If you look at the problems that those loans and grants have created in recent years, and now the entitlement attitude of college students these days, maybe Reagan was right, they don’t deserve government subsidized educations at the advanced level.

I’d remind Ms. Mittelstadt that the pay and the benefits of people in the military had been severely eroded by inflation and inattention during the Nixon, Ford and Carter years. I remember getting a pay raise of $22/month when I was promoted from E-4 to Sergeant in 1978. And, oh, yeah, Carter tried to bribe us with a 25% pay raise the month before the election in 1980, so it wasn’t just Reagan. Before that, Carter paid us pay raises with a colorful bed spread and wooden beds and wall lockers. No one was reenlisting for that benefit package.

But, if Ms. Mittelstadt is so envious of the benefits that the members of the military provides, why isn’t she at the recruiters’ desk putting her signature on the dotted line for the job security and medical benefits? Clearly she’s not getting that at Rutgers.