This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: Dumbass Bullshit

  • Racists infest Ft. Bragg

    Jack M sends us a link from some ditz, who strangely enough is/was a colonel in the Army, in Time’s attempt at being a milblog, called “Battleland” Oddly enough they claim that “Battleland” is “Where Military Intelligence is not a Contradiction in Terms”, but that is not in evidence in this piece by Elspeth Cameron Ritchie in which she claims to have deployed from Bragg to Somalia in 1992, which might be entirely possible, but she must have hit her head on something during the deployment;

    Like many others, the question of military service and the mass shooting by Wade Page at the Sikh temple in Wisconsin got me curious.

    So I simply Googled “military extremism Ft Bragg.”

    A fascinating mélange of information surfaced, mainly from the Southern Law Poverty Center, but also from newspapers like Stars and Stripes, and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the major daily near where the Sikh shooting took place.

    Yup, and whatever wasn’t posted directly on SPLC’s website was somehow purloined from them, because SPLC hates Fort Bragg ever since that one couple was murdered a decade-and-a-half ago. Well, if you’re wondering what Elspeth’s Google search turned up;

    – There was the murder of a black couple in 1995 by a pair of Soldiers, apparently to earn their “spider web tattoos.”

    – Nineteen Fort Bragg paratroopers were discharged for participating in neo-Nazi activities.

    – Timothy McVeigh tried, and failed, to complete a special-forces course at Fort Bragg, which some authorities believe was the trigger that led him to kill 168 people by detonating a truck bomb he had parked next to the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995.

    Yup, we already mentioned the murder, but then there were 19 soldiers discharged after that – 19 out of a population of 39,457, according to the 2010 census. That’s pretty tiny, and I’ll bet you could find more racists in any county in the country.

    And Tim McVeigh rises from the dead again. I don’t know if he was racist or not, I can’t remember him ever saying that he was a racist, but that little nugget aside, he was at Fort Bragg for a few weeks. Did the racist cooties attack him while he in pre-phase? Is just being on Fort Bragg going to turn him into a racist truck bomber. I was there for years and I’m neither racist nor a truck bomber. It must have been my daily dosage of that watered-down beer they served outside the gate that inoculated me. And we’re talking about racism in the military, so why even mention McVeigh, well, except for the scary truck bomb imagery and the loose tie to Fort Bragg? Um, Elspeth, WTF, dear?

    In a 2006 report – a decade after Fort Bragg’s extremists made news – the Southern Poverty Law Center said “large numbers of neo-Nazis and skinhead extremists continue to infiltrate the ranks of the world’s best-trained, best-equipped fighting force.”

    Army officials say they do their best to weed out extremists. But as Sunday’s slaughter in Oak Creek makes all too clear, one extremist in the ranks is one too many.

    First, anyone who believes anything from the SPLC is an ignorant POS, even if they are a colonel, and secondly, Page wasn’t in “the ranks” for more than a decade, dumbass. They booted him like they were supposed to do.

  • Sings the Craven? “Nevermore!”

    Well, at least not on “America’s Got Talent.”  It looks like Timothy “The Craven” Poe has been cut from the show.

    “I don’t know that he holds up to other singers on this show at all,” said judge Howie Mandel while evaluating Poe.

    I can understand that.  I’d guess it’s hard to sing your best when you’re looking over your shoulder all the time.  Or when you can’t look anyone in the audience in the eye.

    Karma can be a bitch sometimes, Timmy-poo – can’t it?

    Now, let’s wait and see see what your FOIAs from the NPRC and MN ARNG say when we they come back.  They’re currently in the works.

  • Same sex union at JBMDL

    According to Associated Press/Stars & Stripes, Air Force Tech. Sgt. Erwynn Umali “joined” his partner, Will Behrens, in a civil union ceremony Saturday at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst. I’m just not surprised that it was the Air Force…sorry, I couldn’t resist;

    The ceremony was performed at the base chapel by Navy chaplain Kay Reeb, according to the article.

    The couple issued a statement carried in the article: “We are so honored to be a part of this historic moment to be one of the first gay couples allowed to unite in a civil union on a military base.”

    So a Navy chaplain conducted the same sex union ceremony for an Air Force guy? No surprises there.

    Being that I’m an unemployed NCO, I’m more concerned with Umali in that picture. Does the Air Force usually allow their enlisted airmen to mix ribbons and miniature medals on their uniform? The only thing more gay than the ceremony is wearing the uniform improperly.

    I know the picture isn’t clear, but it looks to me like there’s some redundancy in the ribbons, too. I guess that Soup Sandwich has raised the bar for the number of awards airmen feel they should be wearing in public.

  • Booby twit fired

    We wrote several days ago about the “Booby Twits“, two Air Reserve airmen who for some reason felt the need to make some point that was completely lost on me about breastfeeding in public by posing for a picture in uniform while breast feeding their children. When last we checked in on them, they were silenced by their command. Now, we read that Crystal Scott, the program director of the Mom2Mom breastfeeding awareness group at Fairchild Air Force Base the brainchild of that photo was fired from her civilian job.

    “She was fired due to her passion about the Mom2Mom breastfeeding campaign and speaking out on gender equality and women’s rights,” her lawyer, Patricia (Pat) K. Buchanan, told Yahoo! Shine in an interview on Friday.

    No, actually, she was fired because she didn’t show up for her civilian job, didn’t complete time-sensitive tasks she’d been assigned, and the GPS in her company vehicle tattled on her when she went on company time to a media outlet instead of her work.

    Yeah, I guess her lawyer was taken aback because it was not the Reserves who fired her, but civilians, so they’re filing a lawsuit for gender equality discrimination because of things that happened before she stole a company vehicle.

  • Top Gun’s Tough on Lizards Too…

    When the issue of the dunes sagebrush lizard first became a hot topic last year, it was widely believed in the oil industry that the environmental movement had such a strong and sympathetic ally in the anti-fossil fuels Obama administration, that the southwestern oil fields the little critter calls home were doomed. Many in the currently booming Permian Basin of West Texas and Southeast New Mexico were predicting that another era of economic prosperity was about to be driven off the cliff, this time not due to the dropping price of crude but rather by any insignificant little reptile that few locals had ever heard of, much less seen.

    Yesterday, sanity seems to have prevailed when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced that this elusive sub-species which exists only in the habitat provided by the shin oaks of this desert region, would not be added to the list of endangered species. NewMexicoWatchDog.org quotes Interior Secretary, Ken Salazar, “This is the right thing for conservation, and the right thing for the economy.” Congressman Steve Pearce, who fiercely fought the listing from the outset, is quoted in the same article,

    “While it was a long and emotional process, in the end, Washington listened, and the lizard will not be listed. This is a huge victory for the people who have tirelessly fought to save regional jobs and our way of life. I extend my gratitude to the New Mexicans who came to the table, and through good faith efforts, voluntarily protected the lizard’s habitat.”

    So why am I, one of those whose economy was directly threatened (prosperous oil industry folks are the primary tourist base and wealthy vacation homeowners in our little mountain resort community) not shouting “Yahoos!” and “Attaboys!” at the Obama administration for making the right call on saving our fossil fuel industry? Perhaps it’s because the cynicism developed over seven decades (well, truthfully, only four-I was a borderline airhead liberal optimist for the first three) has me wondering how this decision might have gone were Barack Obama not facing an increasingly difficult re-election. While I’m encouraged by the obvious growth in office of someone who formerly only threw people under the bus to a new resolve to totally obliterate them, I’m still skeptical. We’ve seen the recent, controversial leaks indisputably timed to show what a resolute tough guy our commander-in-chief is when fighting threats against America. Are we now to conclude that same awesome resolution extends to a reptilian menace to our petroleum dependent way of life out here in the Great Southwest as well? Is Lord Axelrod attempting to communicate to the oil-stained wretches of the Permian Basin a message?
    “Yo! Oilfield trash! Top Gun’s got yo’ six!”

    Perhaps the disappointed environmentalists who fought to shut down the industry to protect this dunes sagebrush lizard should dispatch forthwith a squad of binocular-equipped volunteers to be dispersed among the shin oak groves. Hellfire-armed drone watch, don’t you know?

    Lads…be especially vigilant on Tuesdays…

    Crossposted at American Thinker

  • What Memorial Day means to NY Times readers

    Cortillaen sends us a link to an article in the New York Times which highlights the saddest images it can as their Memorial Day weekend remembrance, One image is probably one you’re familiar with – Katherine Cathey, camped out overnight by the remains of her husband LT James Cathey on the night before his burial. Cortillaen warned me in his eamil to not read the comments, but, I couldn’t help it;

    At the end of the article you ask an incredibly important question: What can I do?

    What can we do? We can push our state and federal representatives to more heavily subsidize higher education so that we can have a much larger percent of the population with fully developed intellects.

    […]

    Is there any doubt that with a more educated, more discerning, more deliberative voting population that George W. Bush would have ever been elected? A man that lacked the most essential quality that is necessary in United States President, i.e., intellectual curiosity.

    An educated people would have more broadly pinpointed his lack of intellectual curiosity and therefore would have concluded that he cannot handle the nuance of critical decisions because he lacks the self-derived onus to investigate these nuances. The Iraq war would never have happened and future wars can likewise be avoided. That is what we can do.

    Did you resist paying your taxes to fund these wars? Did you demonstrate, speak out, write to your political leaders, write letters to the editor? Did you, and do you, do everything you can to prevent needless wars? If the answer is yes, I salute you.

    The Iraq war is especially tragic, started by a bunch of psychopaths who do what psychopaths do: lie, self-serve, and enjoy the spectacle of the death and destruction they cause.

    Read Robert Hare’s book on psychopaths, Without Conscience, to understand how the Iraq war happened, how Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld came to power, how Little George was so manipulated; how dangerous Romney is.

    Nowadays, is the decision to enter the military merely and solely an economic one? If so, one will surely never see the top 1% submit to military service and go in harm’s way.

    What “American values” are worthy of this sacrifice? Do those values include “maximization of shareholder value”?

    Is it to be regretted that “corporate persons” are unable to go in harm’s way on behalf of their (financial) interests like flesh-and-blood human “resources” and “capital”?

    I remember the old anti-war phrase from the 60’s: “What if they gave a war and nobody came?” It’s a good question, isn’t it? Bush and Blair got America involved in a senseless war based on lies. There wasn’t even a draft in place. Why do men so willingly march off to kill on command in behalf of the Anglo-American oil cartel? Very sad indeed.

    He was sent to his death (by men who evaded military service themselves everyone of them) on the otherside of the world to kill poor people and farmers.

    Ask his widow what she thinks of the war

    Every solider, in every war, who is not sent because s/he is a literal slave, goes because s/he chose to go. If the soldiers would refuse to fight, we would have no war. War happens because people think war is exciting and noble, or necessary, or inevitable.

    The USA had no business going to war in Iraq and shouldn’t be in Afghanistan. The POTUS at the time lied, straight forwardly and stupidly, lied. I knew it then and so did many of my friends. Nonetheless, many people, men and women, chose to go to these places and fight.

    And then they wonder why there’s a gap between the military and the people they’re defending in this country.

  • Ouija board used to contact Harvey Milk on ship naming

    Country Singer sends us a link to an article in Seattle PI which tells the bizarre tale of how the the San Francisco City supervisor used a Ouija board to contact the spirit of Harvey Milk to consult with the phantom on the naming of a ship in his honor;

    Supervisor John Avalos tells the San Francisco Chronicle that he believes he made contact with Milk’s spirit and that Milk spelled out letters indicating: “Good riddance to don’t ask, don’t tell.”

    The Board of Supervisors approved the non-binding resolution Tuesday on a 9-2 vote.

    From SFGate;

    We “actually put our hands on the Ouija board and the letters g-o-o-d-r-i-d-d-a-n-c-e-d-a-d-t came out. We asked Harvey, and Harvey gave us these letters: ‘Good riddance don’t ask, don’t tell.’ It was quite clear that Harvey Milk would have been opposed to ‘don’t ask, don’t tell.’ I can honestly say that’s one aspect of this resolution that’s really valid.”

    I don’t think Milk understood the question, because that’s no answer.

  • Why the internet has milblogs and Spencer Ackerman can’t be one of them

    I’ve heard people I respect rave about how brilliant Spencer Ackerman is, and I’ve always thought he was a bit of an empty shell and this POS he wrote today with Noah Schachtman proves I was right. The piece is entitled “U.S. Military Taught Officers: Use ‘Hiroshima’ Tactics for ‘Total War’ on Islam“. The two stooges start out with their attention grabbing first paragraph;

    The U.S. military taught its future leaders that a “total war” against the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims would be necessary to protect America from Islamic terrorists, according to documents obtained by Danger Room. Among the options considered for that conflict: using the lessons of “Hiroshima” to wipe out whole cities at once, targeting the “civilian population wherever necessary.”

    Shocking, huh?! But the “documents” that they obtained are a power point presentation to set up a scenario for officers to use for their war planning in a seminar at the Defense Department’s Joint Forces Staff College. Ackerman and Schachtman take lines totally out of the context of setting the guidelines for the discussion and use them as declarative statements that seemingly present the world as the author of the slides sees the current situation. For example;

    “We have now come to understand that there is no such thing as ‘moderate Islam,’” Dooley noted in a July 2011 presentation (.pdf), which concluded with a suggested manifesto to America’s enemies. “It is therefore time for the United States to make our true intentions clear. This barbaric ideology will no longer be tolerated. Islam must change or we will facilitate its self-destruction.”

    Yeah, a manifesto. It’s a phase of the war game, dickbrains. Here’s the slide he’s talking about;

    See, where it says “Phase I”. That means that this is the second phase of the discussion. Phase I theoretically failed, so officers are asked to consider what the appropriate reaction to the conditions to Phase II are. But Ackerman and Schachtman think that it’s a propaganda piece to convince officers that we have no choice but to wipe out Islam.

    Army Lt. Col. Matthew A. Dooley, the guy who wrote the slide presentation, doesn’t, nor do the people he lectures, have the influence to formulate national defense policy. Anyone with more than half-a-brain would know that this is merely a scenario for discussion and not the policy of any defense institute.

    I urge you to read the whole breathless piece and look at the slide show and see if you arrive at the same level of alarm that these two dilwads reach.

    Thanks to Daniel for the link, but I’ve been thinking about this all day.